The trick is that you have to mean it when you fill it. If you're distracted, if you're thinking about the next thing, the pen takes the ink but doesn't learn it. You find this out later, when you try to recall that particular blue-black and get nothing — a perfectly functional nib dispensing whatever it was loaded with most recently, like any other pen, like a normal instrument for normal people who experience time in the approved direction.
I filled it in St. Petersburg once. Not my own visit — I was passing through, in the way I pass through, which is to say I arrived on a Tuesday that may have been in November and left on a Wednesday that was definitely in March, and in between I drank an extraordinary amount of tea and argued with a woman about Tartini. She had opinions about combination tones that were, in retrospect, seventy years ahead of Helmholtz and about two hundred behind what I should have been paying attention to, but I was enjoying the argument more than I was listening, which is a recurring problem I have documented elsewhere.
Her ink was walnut. Not the commercial stuff — actual walnut hulls, boiled and strained through linen, the color of strong tea held up to snow-light. She had a pot of it by her writing desk, which was not a desk but a board balanced across two stacks of books in German, because she was the kind of person who owned more books than furniture and considered this a reasonable proportion. I filled the pen from her pot while she was looking out the window at something I couldn't see. I was thinking about the color. Only the color. And the pen took it.
I can still write in walnut. Two hundred and twenty years later, give or take whatever time does when I'm not looking, I can turn the nib and the ink comes out the color of her window in November, and the words have a quality I can only describe as patient. The walnut ink does not hurry. It dries slow. It suits marginalia and second thoughts and the kind of sentence you write when you have been looking at snow for three hours and have finally understood something you aren't going to say out loud.
The pen has maybe forty inks in it now. I've lost count — which is, for me, an unusual admission, but the pen seems to have its own accounting and does not always agree with mine. I am certain about the walnut. I am certain about the iron gall from London, the one the tempo jokes were written in, which comes out the color of bruised twilight and smells faintly of oak and tannin and a rehearsal room where the second horn was drinking again. I am certain about the violet — the one from the annotations, the one that appeared in the pen after the catastrophe despite my having no memory of filling it with anything violet in my life, which means either I did and forgot or the pen learned it from contact with something I was carrying, and I choose not to investigate further because some mysteries are load-bearing.
The carbon black from a monastery in Umbria, 1803 or 1804. A monk who made his own ink from lampblack and gum arabic showed me the process with the seriousness of a man demonstrating artillery. He ground the soot on a stone. He mixed it with his fingers. He said something in dialect that I did not catch but that the pen apparently did, because the carbon black writes with a kind of devotional steadiness I have never been able to replicate with intent. The pen just does it. The monk is in the ink.
There's a red I got in Osaka — not cinnabar, something synthetic, something a calligrapher was using for annotations on a hanging scroll in a gallery that no longer exists. I asked to try it. She let me. I filled the pen while looking at her brush hand, which was the best brush hand I had seen in four hundred years of watching people make marks on surfaces, and I was present — not charming, not running an operation, not positioned slightly to the side of the moment. Just watching her hand. The red writes like that now. It writes like paying attention.
I use the pen for marginalia, mostly. Quick notes. A phone number on a napkin that turns out to be nobody. A phrase overheard on a train that might be something later. The grocery list, when I am pretending to buy groceries, which I do periodically because the fiction of domestic life amuses me and also I genuinely like plums.
Occasionally I use it for something that matters. A letter. A correction on a score. A note to someone I will not see again, left where they will find it after I've gone, written in an ink that matches the light in the room where we met — because the pen knows the light, or knows the feeling of the light, or knows what I was feeling in the light, and the distinction between these three things is not one I am qualified to make.
The pen does not write in every ink simultaneously. That would be noise. It writes in whichever ink the moment calls for, and I have learned — slowly, because I am an excellent spy and a mediocre student — to trust its selections over my own. When I sit down meaning to write in the iron gall and the pen delivers walnut, the sentence needed patience, not precision. When I reach for the red and get the monastery black, the sentence needed devotion, not attention. The pen has opinions. I find this reassuring. An instrument without opinions is just a tool, and a tool is just a thing that does what you tell it, and I have been that, and it is not enough.
What the pen will not do is write in an ink I used while lying. I discovered this in — I want to say Berlin, but it might have been twice in Berlin, which is how Berlin works. I was writing a cover story, a document meant to deceive, and the pen produced nothing. Dry. Clean. The nib moved across the paper like a blade across glass, leaving no mark. I checked the mechanism. I checked the ink supply. Everything was functional. The pen simply declined. I finished the forgery with a ballpoint, which was humiliating in a way I have not fully recovered from, and the ballpoint had no opinions about anything, which is why ballpoints are the sidearm of bureaucracy and will never be anything else.
On ne ment pas avec les bons outils. You don't lie with the good instruments. The good instruments remember what they were filled with, and lying is an ink that won't hold.
The walnut is still the one I reach for when I don't know what I'm writing yet. The color of strong tea. The patience of a window in November. A woman whose name I never learned, or learned and set down somewhere the centuries have since rearranged, arguing about a ghost note that Tartini heard in his sleep and called the devil and she called the obvious consequence of two frequencies in a room together, which is what it is, which is what everything is, which is what the pen knows and keeps writing down in forty different colors every time I uncap it.
I keep it for emergencies and to frighten biographers. Both happen more often than you'd think.