On weight and necessity – typewriter love

Its weight is the first thing you notice. It’s not ashamed of it. Not looking to be sleek or refined. It’s a workhorse, full of metal and grit, and the typewriter knows it. You wouldn’t want it any other way.

Like a boulder tumbling through the river of time, your typewriter is a reminder of necessity’s keen mind, when anything built and sold carried weight and therefore had meaning. There’s nothing plastic here, nothing disposable, only solid ability.

Spheres of influence count for nothing here. With a typewriter there is only the physical act. Connectivity, social, and mobile spheres hit the metal bars like waves smashing against concrete pillars. The lifeforms they breed return to their fluid realm, unable to find influence here.

Fingers caress the keys, circling their edges and indentations, and find conductivity. There the words will spill forth, from organic matter to solid machine. This holy union bridges the mind to a single purpose, channeling energy into action, strategically aimed, to a single outcome of universal possibilities. Here you’ll find no mental noise to interrupt that purpose, nothing to distract the union, and nothing to sway your attention. There is noise, talking to be had with your typewriter, but you know it cannot, will not, chirp, beep or tweet at you.

The sound chatters. It clunks, it grinds and zips and scrolls. It’s the sound of ribbon, of paper, of metal and spirit. It’s the solitary sound of your will, your intention, and nothing more.

(Piece written for Digital Gentry: the Social Media Museum Experiment’s Facebook page where I am guest curating for the month of January)