Matt Godden

…or, How I Wrote A Letter, With A Fountain Pen, On Paper, And Mailed It To Someone Two Weeks In The Future, And Half A World Away.

I bought a new camera – a Nikon D850.

It’s new, as in it’s a current product made by Nikon, and still manufactured, and for sale fresh from the factory. It was also launched in 2017. Seven years old, and still arguably the finest 35mm DSLR ever produced. With Nikon seemingly all-in on mirrorless cameras, likely it will become the finest 35mm DSLR that will ever be produced.

Choosing to buy the last of an older paradigm was a real decision, but the simple truth is, I don’t like mirrorless cameras. I don’t want to look at a little television screen, and frame my shot on that. I want to look through the lens, at the real world, and capture that moment. If I was going to buy a mirrorless camera, I think I’d be tempted to go stranger, with something like a Hasselblad digital back, with a 500 series (or technical camera) body.

If I were to compare the D850 to its mirrorless replacement; the Z8, which is almost twice the price; the Z8 only has an sRGB viewfinder – you don’t even see the full colour gamut your sensor can resolve, let alone the true colour of the world through the lens. In the fourteen months since the Z8’s launch, Nikon has released a significantly cheaper, lower-end Z6 III, which has a P3 gamut viewfinder. Still not the full AdobeRGB most photography processes work within, but significantly better than the Z8.

And that’s the thing, isn’t it? When you’re in the early days of a new paradigm, the things you buy will likely become obsolesced by cheaper, newer versions. In all likelihood I will never have buyer’s remorse over my D850, because there will never be a better version of this camera. If I had bought the Z8, I’d already feel put out over having to compromise on viewfinder quality to get higher image quality, versus the cheaper, newer, lower-end camera.

Where is this going, and how does it relate to fountain pens?

So I decided to write a letter to someone I hope is still a friend, but with whom I lost contact perhaps six to eight years ago. I have an email address, and a Twitter handle for them, but those are either out of use, or I’m perhaps not friends with this person any more, because things I’ve sent in the intervening years have elicited no response.

I have a phone number for them, but given the aforementioned silence, I can only feel it would be an intrusion to call. When we were still talking, they gave me the address of a wonderful house they had bought, hence the letter.

I have not written any significant amount of text since I tore the sagittal band of my middle finger on my dominant hand several years ago. Despite the months of hand-traction, and therapy, and rehab, it never returned to pre-injury condition. It still feels weak, it still lacks some stability, and it still provokes debilitating psychological trauma responses at the memory of the injury itself when it twinges. Compounded with neurological damage which scrambles a lot of the sensation down the side of my hands and little fingers, the idea of writing with a pen and paper was something I approached with trepidation.

My art kit contained a tool for the job – an inexpensive clear plastic fountain pen. More for drawing than a fine writing implement, I suspect. it has a nifty archimedes-screw ink cartridge, which draws up ink when it needs refilling. Fountain pens can be problematic for left-handers. A left-to-right script requires the left hander to push the nib, rather than dragging it as for a right hander. Then we get to the text being obscured by one’s hand, and the smudging which can occur. Some hand-gymnastics can solve the former, but the latter was alleviated with some Mont Blanc waterproof permanent black ink. It dries super quickly, and doesn’t smudge from skin moisture. The downside is it dries in the nib, so requires frequent cleaning with glass-cleaner, which then takes time to work out of the nib so you’re back to writing with ink.

However, when it all comes together, oh wow. I wrote draft, after draft, after draft of the aforementioned letter. When the pen played up because it needed cleaning, or I made an egregious typo, or my hand just ran away scribbling marks faster than I could supply control… Start again, re-write.

Handwriting takes practice, and I’m still not even remotely capable of neat, regular cursive. That will require slowing down, a lot to regain the muscle memory. For now, merely keeping my somewhat-joined chicken scrawl printing consistent and legible is a real challenge. Especially after so many years of thinking in comics terms, where everything is written in upper case.

I wrote the letter, over and over, like a monk illuminating a manuscript as an act of devotion. Eventually, it was as much the thing I wanted it to be, as I could make it, and I put it in an envelope, masked-up, and visited the Post Office.

From there, the letter began its transit to a destination two weeks in the future, and on the other side of the world.

I’ve only ever had one pen-friend – in the era before email. We wrote back and forth a number of times, I still have the letters. Artefacts of the hand of a person, moments of their life, spent and unrecoverable, distilled to a physical object.

I miss that connection – when someone’s thoughts were manifest in a unique object they sent you. I imagine it’s an intellectual and emotional Skin Hunger – made all the more terrible by a world in which people are simultaneously too busy to write letters, and yet often unwilling to use technology to do video calls.

A toast therefore, to the joy of using a fountain pen. Just like my new camera, there is an experiential quality to older methodologies – the real, the physical, the practical. Looking through the lens, making a mark with ink.

Hail to the Real.

Every four years, February 29th rolls around. It’s a day I remember an old buddy, a former partner, a fellow comrade in the trenches of the Sydney goth scene, and particularly in the audience participation cast of Rocky Horror Picture Show – Sharon Droscher (Née Hedley).

Not that I would ever expect any of the folks from Friday Insanity, or as it later became, Fun In The Dark to come across or read this, but for what its worth, Sharon and I were wrong, you were right. Trying to enforce a higher standard of “quality” onto a group “fun” activity, to chase a dream of a kind of professionalism that wasn’t a dream everyone on the cast shared, and trying to impose that dedication, was the wrong thing to do. In this, I allowed my loyalty to a person to supersede my loyalty to the group. That was my failing, and I’m sorry for that.

Anyway… like she was odd in so many ways, and seemed destined to be one of the weird who turn pro when the going gets weird, it was appropriate that Sharon’s birthday was February 29th.

We had a tumultuous relationship, a fairly acrimonious parting, and a sometime uneasy friendship afterwards – but she went on to be happy, I was chief bridesmaid at her wedding to Simon, with whom she moved to Canada, until cancer claimed her a little under nine years ago.

So every year I metaphorically light a candle on the 28th, and every fourth year on the 29th, light a bunch. I pour a drink, and try to remember to be gentle to the memory of who we all were when we were younger – full of fury, inarticulate and uncareful.

And then I remember when we all took acid, and walked from the warehouse in which we were living, under Glebe though a disused rail line tunnel with only cigarette lighters for illumination, then out along the viaduct crossing Wentworth Park, before making our way back to the warehouse (and peeling the stripes off a speedhump along the way). The night was ended with hours in the warehouse’s gallery, watching reflections from shattered pieces of mirror on the ends of springs dance about on the joists and floorboards of the level above, which formed our timber sky.

Happy 13th, Sharon.

The Long Death began about, it must have been around 2035. It’s funny in a grim way, we avoided the worst of climate change, by virtue of there being too few of us to outpace the planet’s carbon cycle. Too few of us…

It started everywhere, over about 5 years. The syndrome was like rapid ALS combined with mild Ebola, and was 100% fatal.

It was #Covid. It was the long-term effect of Covid, and it claimed every single person who was still alive 20 years after their infection.

This was not the best of years. It’s really hard to think what I did, largely because I didn’t do much of anything. When I look back through my weekly diary, the most common word seems to be “research”. I spent most of the year indoors, as the outside world just became too dangerous, with Ubiquitous Covid becoming the new normal. I had an encounter in the service station where some arsehole started mocking and harassing me because I was wearing a mask. Right before Christmas, my mother caught Covid, so I spent Christmas by myself. I managed to dodge the bullet, but I was due for my next covid shot only a few days later. It was a frightening near-miss.

Speaking of health, this whole sedentary thing started to have some pretty major effects, with significant stress events leaving me tight chested and short of breath. However, a scare with my 2022 annual specialist’s assessment that I was losing upper body strength lead to biting the bullet and getting back into shape.

Mystifyingly, in the second half of the year, I went on a big diet health-kick. I mean big enough that “who are you and what have you done with Matt?” was a reasonable question to ask. I cut out almost all takeaway, junk food, processed snacks, radically reduced the amount of bread, more or less eliminated cereals, and had salads with a protein, like beef or chicken, for dinner almost every night. I think I accidentally paleoed. Breakfast for months now has been a banana, a handful of walnut kernels, and a small piece of biltong. I cut out all the soft drinks, all the beer, radically reduced my alcohol intake.

I lost almost 10kg doing this. I’m back to the weight I was, when I was 18. And the really weird thing is, I really don’t miss any of this. I think I’m so happy with the leaned down figure, that no food treat really has that allure any more. I’ve combined this with working out with weights almost every night, and my strength seems to be returning.

A big theme for 2023 was attempting to move house. We spent months with the house on the market, and almost bought a new one, but had to pull out when the offers on the current place didn’t go high enough. The whole process is arse-backwards, as agents try to tell you how good the offer for your place is, but fail to understand that the goal isn’t to sell, it’s to buy, and the sale is merely a means to that end.

The place we were trying to buy was pretty interesting – two houses on a single lot, but as we spent more time looking at it, worries started to surface. And that’s the real problem – the margins are so thin that we could get to a point where we go broke trying to own the new place. So, by August, that had come to an end, and we stayed put. The stress damn near killed me. We looked at another interesting property – a huge bamboo grove of a place, but again, the owner wouldn’t drop the price to something we could manage, and the house itself (which was being passed-off as the work of a prominent local architect) was in need of a lot of work.

I spent a lot of time working Sketchup, remembering why I love using it so much, and how disappointed I am with it being a subscription-only app these days.

Speaking of tech, this was the year all my tech fell on its face, and had to be refreshed. My beloved old Mac Pro finally died a hard death, and I replaced it with… Another Mac Pro, but this time a 2019 model, with dual graphics cards that cost me $10k secondhand. It’s an insane purchase, given Apple is transitioning away from Intel processors, but this was the machine that was closest to what I already had, without being less than I already had. Worst-case-scenario, It will become a chonky Windows or Linux machine one day. But, it should last me for a while. Interest rates being what they are, It’ll only take 14-15 months for the interest on my savings to recover the outlay, which is a shorter term than a personal loan I would have taken out to buy something like that, so that puts things in perspective. Those interest rates are part of why I’m more sanguine about not moving right now, than I might otherwise be – it’s a good time to have savings, and a bad time to have a mortgage. That big new computer actually followed a new iPad Pro, which has proven to be a lot less compelling than I thought it might be. I think I just need to give it more work, but the lack of bezels really makes it less good to draw on. I don’t feel the same carefree doodling I had with sketchbooks in the past.

The great tech revamp included some interesting things I’ve wanted to do for ages – I installed a switch in my tech gear cupboard, so instead of 4 ethernet cables leading downstairs to the modem, there’s just the one. The Mac Pro is installed on the shelf as well, with 7m display cables routing back to my desk, so I have a lot more leg room than I used to have.

My B&O headphones were replaced under warranty as they kept filing to connect to my Xbox. I bought and returned some Beats wireless earbuds, because they were too uncomfortable to wear. I don’t know who Apple tests their earphones on, but I’ve never found them as good as my old Sennheisers.

Mastodon really became my go-to social media space once I found Mona.app – it has some rough edges by virtue of being a Catalyst app, but it’s better than using the website. I stopped posting to Facebook entirely, nothing since May, and only two people reached out to check if things were OK. So much for social networks bringing people together.

So that was it, a pretty terrible year, which feels like I achieved nothing of note. Probably the only thing I can say that was successful with things, was reprocessing some of my old photos, and re-establishing my digital workflows – which accounts for a lot of the “research” time.

The Felt from which they were made could not make anything new, or give rise to new and novel forms. It would only duplicate that which already was. Some mourned the irony of the very Felt which animated their intellect, also limiting their minds, such that control of their basic nature and pattern was forever locked beyond reach. Still, they made do. They lived, and loved, carrying all the hopes and fears for their clones, that the Flesh carried for their children.

– An alternate take on A Muppet Christmas Carol.