The Pen is Mightier Than the Sword Presuming You Can Find One

There were a few movies on and interspersed between them the channel that hosted them took an especial pride in showing commercials that urged you to hand over your gold for cash or to gain a short term loan simply in exchange for the title of your car.

The people involved certainly looked happy enough after they had either done the gold or the car title thing, which made me think it’s something to look into some day.

In the first movie we have a gentleman, the hero, a loner type given to long ambiguous looks towards the horizon whenever anyone asked him something of a direct nature, handsome enough in a rough way, taciturn, rangy in build, attired in dark clothing, who in this one particular scene had taken himself to a seaport.

He has snuck onto the port property and placed himself among the large ships moored there and goes from shadow to shadow, keeping out of the light cast by the security lighting, gaining cover via the fog rolling in.

We have the clang of buoys, the calls of various sea fowls, the creak of timbers, and other port stuff.

He seems to be looking for one boat in particular, and sure enough, there it is, The Dominion, or The Victor, or The Inimitable.

On the decks of this boat – and here is where it gets interesting – there are stacks of wooden crating, each stamped with a serial number on its side. This is what the fellow is after it seems, these serial numbers.

Taking a penlight between his teeth, he pulls out a notebook from one pocket, a pen from another, and carefully tilting his head to shine the light on the paper he is writing upon, he writes down the serial numbers.

We have finished with this movie for the time being, but keep its important plot elements in mind if you would.

Later in the evening, after twenty more gold-into-cash commercials, the viewer comes upon another movie, with another hero.

You must not worry that because you join this movie halfway through you have missed something, because the elements are entirely familiar.

He too, this hero this time, is a bit of a loner, is handsome enough in a rough sort of way, is of a rangy or maybe this time a wiry build, and he is dressed entirely in dark clothing. Black is a color that suits him, and it serves as fine camouflage on the dark street where he has staked out a certain apartment.

To this apartment comes a number of cars that park in front while a passenger carries something up to the front door, knocks softly three times, then tears back to the car and away down the street. 

Now, it is the driver’s plates of these cars that our man is most interested in, and in a manner now familiar to us, he puts a penlight between his teeth, pulls out and opens a notebook from one pocket, pulls out and clicks a pen from another, and takes careful notes on these license plates.

As before, we are now done with this movie for the time being.

A full 43 car title loan commercials later, a new movie still comes on.

You wouldn’t think there were so many ways for different men to look lonerish/roughly handsome/rangily or wirily built/given to long pauses/dressed so as not to be seen, but there are, there are, and this fellow is here to prove it.

We shall skip the preliminary or qualifying rounds of description and simply say here that he’s sneaking around inside the headquarters of an evil old corporation and has stumbled upon their secret research facility which he gains entry to, and once within the secured lab which turns out to be not so secured after all, he manipulates the computer screen therein so that it pulls up a string of code numbers.

These, it seems, are what he is after.

Out comes the penlight, the notebook, the pen, and the man gets down to the business that we all know so well now.

This is where I would like to stop.

This is where I would like to take a breath and just think this through.

For me these plots fall down in terms of simple believability.

The viewer possessing an ordinary amount of goodwill grants the screenwriter his seagoing harbor and his secret lab and his clandestine drop-offs at that apartment on that dark street.

I am prepared to go even further.

If in that secret lab they are brewing some hellish bug that will lay the population low if it ever gets out and then this mean old corporation intends to sell the antidote to the desperate population, I shall grant them that as well.

Same with whatever plot devices ensue from that seaport and that apartment on that dark street. It is a hard old world and shadowy people are up to all sorts of foul things. This I concede.

What I can’t believe is that these fellows find a pen each time they look.

Or if they find one, that it works.

This goes against common sense and the accumulated evidence of the centuries. It lacks alignment with reality.

Along with the laws of gravity, the conservation of energy, and the Pythagorean Theorem, the fact that a working pen is never within reach is inviolable.

The underpinnings of nature would be shaken to the core if an ordinary man, sitting in a chair, say, or walking by a kitchen counter, should reach for a pen and find one. Or by chance — for after all, there is a lot of blind brute chance in this crazy world — he finds a pen, he finds that it works.

If it hasn’t been tested I’m sure it can be, to show that out of every thousand times that a man reaches for a pen, he will find one an average of ten times out of that thousand, and of that ten that he finds, only one of them will work. This working hypothesis provides us with a one in a thousand chance that things are going to work out pen-wise for your average human being.

One in a thousand, my friend! Slim I’d have to call those odds. I doubt that you could get a Las Vegas odds-setter to even take it on.

Certain laws of nature are built into the structural underpinnings of the universe and this is one of them. In fact, you mess with them at your own risk. As we know from our movie education, meddling with eternal laws result in the kind of endings of the giant cockroach or monster locust variety.

It is best to take an example from real life I have always found. This brings the lesson home for the student.

If you load yourself down with ten pens at home on your way out the door, by the time you get to your first sales call and reach for one of them to jot down which level of the parking garage you have parked on, you will find that not a one survived the journey.

Not one.

This absoluteness is important. That’s how powerful these universal laws are. This clean sweep is part of the phenomena.

They have vanished, perhaps into an alternate universe about which we don’t know much but about which we can say that they are well stocked with pens over there, perhaps into a black hole of some sort that has developed a craving for the things.

If it were me on that dock, I believe I would handle the matter of the notebook and the penlight with elan, if that is my word, with a certain calm assurance. The penlight thing looks easy enough, and I’ve never lost a notebook in my life.

By contrast, I’ve never found a pen that I was looking for across these oh so many years. This is what would have me worried.

While the buoys clanged and the seafowls cawed, there would be a moment of dawning and horrified realization, and I would pat first my shirt pocket, then my right front pants pocket, then my left front pants pocket. Finding nothing there in the pen family, I would wonder if I had placed one or several in one of my back pockets – where they certainly are not – or in some hidden inside pocket of this dark coat. All of these pockets, in fact all of the pockets in pocketdom, have this one common characteristic: they are entirely penless.

This brings forth strong emotions of self-pity, which are fun enough, but which don’t do much to solve the situation.

But this is a well-planned operation, and is not without backup protocol. I might at this point use the penlight to send a preordained signal to my confederate on shore. Using a form of Morse code known only to us, the signals would be exchanged as follows:

Me: Say, there. It’s me.

Confederate on Shore:  Of course it’s you, no one else knows this code. What is it?

Me: I hate to bother you…

Confederate on Shore: Do you have the serial numbers?

Me: Well, that’s what I was going to talk to you about.

Confederate on Shore: What’s the problem?

Me: You don’t happen to have a pen on you, do you?

Confederate on Shore: Pen?

Me: Yes, pen.

Confederate on Shore: You set off on the most important spy mission of the war without a pen?

Me: Must have left it in my other pants pocket.

Confederate on Shore: Of all the dimwitted….

Me: Oh, happens every day I would imagine. Easy to picture the scene: you’re getting dressed, your mind is on this or that mortal danger, you wonder if the hat looks better pulled down to the left or to the right, those are occasions when things naturally slip your mind. So, back to my point, do you think you can lend me your pen?

Confederate on Shore:  (Long silence.)

Me: Still there, my friend?

Confederate on Shore: I don’t have one either.

Me: I didn’t quite catch that. Could you repeat? Over?

Confederate on Shore: I said I don’t have one either.

Me: Funny business. And here you’re the one who’s being mean because I did a simple thing like misplace a pen. ‘Mr. Do Everything Right’ I would have thought they called you. Hmmm.

Confederate on Shore: You’re the one who said it could happen to anyone.

Me: Yes, that is true. I’m glad you see that now. I want you to pay attention to how I handle this. You might learn something. Do you see me in this situation ladling on the blame? No. Do you see me issuing the harsh statement, the accusatory putdown? No. No, not at all. I understand that we are all human. Here, I know what, let me ask this nice man in uniform over here, the one with the machine gun. Maybe he has a pen. I’ll be right back with you.

Well, past that I haven’t much developed this little piece of the scenario, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.

This example from the popular arts only goes to show what is true in our everyday lives. If you were to express it algebraically, it would go a little something like this:

P (1/N) = A

Which boils down to saying that a pen is available in inverse proportion to how badly you need it.

Our knowledge of the world is incomplete, our understanding of the forces that drive us is insufficient, our wisdom and kindness and humility fall short with absolutely predictability. The accrued lessons of the ages, impressive as they, take us far, but only so far. They leave entire continents of the human terrain unexplored, unmapped.

I’m perfectly happy to put this down to the lack of a pen at the right time.

You may pick your ancient scientist or philosopher, your founder of the world’s great religions, your establishers of this or that theory of the motion of the planets or the attraction of bodies, we understand them only partly, I propose, because right at the moment when things were getting good, someone at the back of the room said, “dang, my quill just broke. Mike, or Bill, or Mary, you don’t have a pen on you, do you? Dang it! This is his best stuff and it’s just rushing by me. I must try to remember it.”

As to this remembering, it’s a chancy thing, my friend, a chancy thing indeed.

Sometimes of a night on the town out with capital fellows, when the conversation is flowing freely and the words come ready-made to the tongue, I have had the thought ‘you know, I really ought to be getting this down on paper.’ So rich is the conversation, so droll the observations of human nature, so freshly worded the version of an ancient truth, so deft the braiding of plainspoken words into something new and fresh a…why, it really should be caught for posterity.’ 

These are the types of rollicking evenings that make you pat your pockets for a pen – which of course you don’t find – and which prompts you to say to yourself at the time, “oh, no matter, this talk is so lively and so vivid, I’ll surely remember all in the morning.”

Which is a rock solid guarantee that you won’t.

But consider, the pendulum swings both ways. It might be said that under certain circumstances, the lack of a pen at just the right time might be your friend.

Absent that pen and your hastily scribbled notes you scrawl with it, absent that record or transcript, you never have to determine from the evidence before your eyes in the cold light of the next morning whether you and all of your boon companions are after all geniuses now and again, or if you are only talking through your hats in the ordinary way..

Which at least leaves the question open.