On acquiring a Rotring Isograph Pen

Ah, at last a Rotring pen that worked. I had read about Rotring pens being the pen used by Robert Crumb and so I wanted to use one. What is that about? Why copy the tools used by an artist you admire? I had been desperate to own (well, fairly darn keen) a Ricoh GR1 film camera when I read that Daido Moriyama used one (later I discovered that many of his earlier photos were taken with different cameras). I wanted a Leica like the one used by Cartier Bresson and Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand. When I took up painting I found out the kind of paint used by Van Gogh (you can still buy his favourite brand) and Philip Guston. It is the oldest kind of superstition. It’s kid’s stuff. And it never works, not really.

Often the practitioner has arrived at that particular piece of kit by accident or by a process that is less about seeking perfection and more about settling for what works and doesn’t break. In the long run the best car is the one that starts every morning. The fact is, when you are good at some art you can force a good performance out of most tools- think of Keith Jarrett and his Cologne concert played on a knackered grand piano.

When I think of the one job I really SHOULD know about- writing- my own piece of kit- a reconditioned Mac Laptop has been arrived at by a process of elimination. I was recommended to buy a Mac in 1991 (which I did- a five year old one- for a $1000!) and then in 1995 I bought another used one because by then it was obvious Macs were way more user friendly than PCs and I’ve continued ever since- bar one short book written on an IBM laptop- a right pain that was too.

I don’t think Macs are very special or even helpful, they just don’t get in the way of my writing. I imagine Moriyama feels in a similar way about his camera (which he was borrowed I think at first).

Which makes me think: borrowed or hired kit often become kit of choice. Because it’s the first thing you use, it works, so you like it. Kind of like ducklings ‘imprinting’ on the first thing they see – be it human or duck- as ‘mother’.

But why does the superstitious need persist even when it seems quite obvious? I am not superstitious: I touch wood even though I know it cannot possibly influence events. I do it because in my mind I have rationalised that ‘touching wood’ brings the subject to mind and means I may, just may, pay a bit more attention when I do something and therefore not have an accident. But I’m still touching wood. I could abandon touching wood and not walking under ladders (some rationale here too, danger of things dropping etc) but I don’t want to. I want SOME superstition in my life but not too much. To completely eliminate all superstition would be cold, boring and scary.

If touching wood really worked in some causative way our entire picture of the way the universe worked would be wrong. Explaining that view to others (a world controlled by subjective impulse) would bring me into conflict with others and of course many times it would be plain wrong. If I tried to ‘touchwood’ my way into a lottery win then it would fail. But that’s when the finetuning starts, which is what the naysayers don’t understand. And the model here is Pre-Copernican navigation. Keep that in mind.

In Ptolemeic navigation the earth is the centre and the sun moves round the earth. This means its central modelling principle is 100% wrong. It’s like having a map with North at the bottom but calling it South. But when you have such an egregious error the workarounds are quite easy. Which is why the egregious error persists for so long by the way. By going from observable data (in this case star positions) to your map and back again using maths bolt-ons to account for anomalies in planetary movement and so on, the Precopernican system was MORE ACCURATE at predicting astral conditions than the 100 times more correct Copernican model.

The wrong map in the right hands is better than the right map in the wrong hands.

Therein lies the whole mystery of scientific revolutions, paradigm thinking, maths modelling and, why not, climate change too!

The map is not the main thing- but our culture says it is. I once navigated across Bristol using a map from 1972- a map over 40 years out of date. And I was more successful at getting us to where we wanted to go than my friend Chris who was using his Iphone google map. Why? Because I had more context, I was viewing the whole city on my map whereas he was viewing just the few blocks around us and when he made a mistake there was no way for him to understand it was IMPOSSIBLE what the phone was saying. He had to rely on the answer the machine gave.

I have navigated across parts of the Sahara using a blank section of map – 100 square miles with nothing in it AT ALL. I could have used blank paper. But it was enough because of all the context you bring to a map when you use it.

Just as the Pre-Copernican navigators brought a whole mass of lived experience to the use of the wrong map- and therefore made it work.

And just as the subjective impulse view of the universe may be wrong, with enough workarounds I can actually live more efficiently or shall we say ‘better’ than someone who insists the world is a random place where shit happens and that’s that.

Or maybe, and this has just occurred to me, the rationalist-darwinian view of the world is what is wrong, and yet we all have enough workarounds to make it seem pretty good, actually more accurate than the sloppy actions of the magician who lives according to a belief in a subjectively controllable universe. Or maybe both models are wrong and what looks like subjective control is really interconnectivity mixed with a permanent present.

The map is not the issue. It’s who is using the map that counts.

Probably I should end on that portentous note, but I thought maybe the conventional trick of bringing it back to the beginning might have a place too. Crumb used a .30 version of this pen and when I got mine I LOVED it. The line is thin, but not so thin that the nib digs in. One charge of ink lasts WAY LONGER than any other pen I have ever used. If you store it upright it never dries out- unlike the cartridge based versions of the Rotring. The pen is so nice to use you can just let it lead you into doodling over an entire page. There is almost nothing wrong with this pen.

But I still use the old disposable plastic Sakura when I am doing an illustration. Why? Probably because it was the first pen I used and I retreat to that as some kind of certainty seeking guard against complete failure, eviction from the nest, from the trail, left, deserted, alone, humiliated. Face that with only a pen in your hand: you’ll wish it was a sword.