Annie Gentils Gallery

Philip Van Isacker - 28 October 2024

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You should know, Sir, that about ten years ago, I began to timidly and carefully outline everything I produced in pencil first, as a result of which the writing process inevitably acquired a creeping slowness that almost bordered on the colossal.

This pencil-first system, which went hand in hand with a relentless, quasi-bureaucratic copying system, was nothing but torturous, but this torture taught me patience, to the extent that I am now a master in the art of being patient. (…)

The whole pencil business is meaningful to me, though.

Because for the author of these lines, there was a time during which he detested the pen with a fierce, intense hatred, during which he was so wholeheartedly sick of that pen that I can hardly express it in words, during which he was overcome by dizziness the second he took up the pen, and so to liberate himself from this resentment he took to scribbling, sketching, and messing about with a pencil.

 

With a pencil as my tool instead, I could play around again, compose poetry again; it was as if my desire to write was revived. I can assure you that when

I held a pen (this first happened in Berlin), I experienced a veritable collapse of the hand, a sort of constricting cramp, from which I slowly and laboriously freed myself through the pencil technique.

 

Powerlessness, cramps, and dazedness are always physical yet simultaneously psychological ailments.

I went through a period of devastation, which manifested itself in my handwriting and the crumbling of it, as it were, but as I copied my pencil versions,

I rediscovered how to write in a youthful way.

 

 

Robert Walser in 1927