For Your Inconvenience
Lets get clunky... typewriters, traditional stories and grumpy men.
Today is my 39th birthday. To mark the occasion I fulfilled one of my long time dreams and bought myself a typewriter, which I used to write the first draft of this essay.
The typewriter is definitely less convenient to write on than my mac. Even this "portable" typewriter weighs as much as 10 laptops - so it's not very portable by todays standards. As I type I need to get used to a completely different way of typing. I can physically feel my brain rewiring itself as I type. A physical and mental workout as I learn and unlearn.
I have to punch the letters rather than glide over the keyboard. It's noisy, clunky, like getting into an old car without power steering. Each time I miss out a letter, make a typo, want to reorder a sentence, I reach for the delete button. There is no delete button, so I go on. There is no squiggly red line. What appears on the page, stays on the page, in all its imperfection.
To edit it, I need to type it again and finally, write it up on a computer so that I can post it.
Everything about the typewriter is inconvenient.
It's great.
For with all of the inconvenience, it brings something magical. There are no tempting tabs to open, no pausing to correct and revise. It may take a little more time, but the restrictions push you towards imperfection allowing creativity to flow within its boundaries unhindered.
We are creatures of convenience, always looking for shortcuts. It is part of what makes us human. But what is the cost when convenience becomes everything? What does 'convenience' really mean?
When convenience means buying from Tesco rather than your local growers cooperative, or growing your own? Scrolling through posts rather than reading a book? Jumping in the car rather than getting on your bike?
What happens when convenience has been completely coopted by corporations and capitalism?
Of course, the world we live in is a world of convenience. It has been marketed and pushed on us for so long that even if we want to break free from the cycle it is almost impossible, we don’t know where to look or are financially backed into a corner. Not many of us are going to forgo our washing machines and take our clothes down to the river to wash by hand. But to question convenience feels right. To pick, or at least try and work out, which conveniences are necessary to exist, and which conveniences only really exist to serve someone else.
This is one of the things that appeals to me so deeply about storytelling.
Storytelling is inconvenient.
It doesn't fit in with todays fast fix culture.
Stories take their time. They sprawl out and refuse to be contained. They encrypt and drip feed answers, while delivering a mountain of questions. They exists only in the moment. They change each time they are spoken. They don't like to be recorded. They are clunky. They don't have a delete button or a squiggly red line. What arises in the moment, arises in the moment, in all its imperfection.
In another time, a time beyond our memories, stories would have held the attention of the household and the community. Even longer ago, the bards wandered from town to town, village to village, with epics on their tongue.
Today, long form is a rare species. We have quickly forgotten the art of taking our time. Our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.
But stories resist this. They are counter cultural. Even the shortest of stories are long compared to what they stand against.
They are medicine.
Buying this typewriter might just be the midlife crisis of a grumpy man who has no aspirations to own a bright red Ferrari, but instead dreams of spending the weekend taking his mustard yellow 1970s Brother Deluxe 250TR out for a spin. But for me it feels like the continuation of something bigger, something wider. A continuation of the scythe my wife gave me for my birthday last year, or the screenless camera I take with me everywhere now, or the stories that percolate within me waiting to be told.
All of these things take a bit more time, but give you a richer experience of that time.
Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself, as I clunk away on this outdated machine, one no doubt devised to make our lives more convenient. But for me, growing a few more vegetables this year in the garden, inviting more friends over for tea, telling more stories and plonking away on the keys of my trusty mustard Brother are all a small, and delightfully inconvenient step in the right direction.