An anachronism survives unjustly in certain avenues of higher learning. Namely dispensable, substitutable and therefore, excessive Writing. I type these words as a case against this unfortunate prevalence.
The clink and the clank of the typewriters have arrived and long left us and a newer era of recording and noting down has long since breathed its way everywhere except in our educational institutions from where these airs seem to be eternally externed. This is indeed an ageing tradition that we can no longer afford to beget, that refuses to die. One that is “eternally ancient”; that shameless Tithonus of futile toil!
What good does come of this toil that its newer, fresher alternatives offer us not? If we detain ourselves from implementing these aspects and arrest any development in this regard, we do so only at the price of preserving our academic stagnancy whose defenestration is long, long overdue. The dictum of ‘change is the only constant’ seems to have been replaced with ‘stagnancy is the sole solution’. Why this infantile insistence? Why this puerile perseverance?
Long has the age of scribes gone, we must now become persons that think and not labour ludicrously while we do so, with an ever so false sense of vintage superiority, of senseless superciliousness, of anachronistic attitudes that will not invite newer alternatives and sensible substitutes to senselessness.
Why do we not seem to understand that we do not plough with the pen; We do not yoke with it. Rather such subtle and rarely understood pleasure as writing must belong exclusively perhaps, to those that breathe with the pen, to those that know what it means to write, not only as a physical supplement of a deep, personal, intellectual and poetic thinking, but to form the stuff of thoughts and feelings too.
If this case be our incorrigible circumstance then the art of writing is wasted on us. We have then reduced it to a purely physical machinism and have succeeded in generating a mass abhorrence for it amongst its victims. Why must we reduce our glorious institutes of learning to practice – grounds of calligraphy? Why must the pen be transfigured to a scalpel post- mortem-ing our deadened didactic and learning spirit? Why must the midwife that oversaw the birth of a thousand manifestos, the instrument whose singing stroke dipped in the ruinous realities of a collective humanity that quickened fairer futures, be reduced to a pen? What is a pen? Another instrument of insignificant duplication? Only a pen?
At last a eulogy for our fingers – The health of whose has yielded more to that end of regurgitation than it does to our thoughts, to our necessary follies.
Writing is one of the highest privileges that have been bestowed upon the human mind and the human heart. A gift even! And we have assailed it to the poverty of an ununderstood necessity. A collective calumny. A cataract spit in the eye of creativity. Pain – physical and mental.
