the guest house
Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, or Rumi, is a 13th-century Islamic scholar, theologian, Sufi mystic and poet. He's worth knowing – his poetry and musings are great – but this is only going to be tangentially about him.
Instead, I'm going to tell part of the story of my grandmother's typewriter:
About a year ago, I rescued my grandmother's dusty underwood TYPEMASTER from my grandfather's house. As soon as I laid eyes on it, all of these memories came rushing back at me: listening to my grandmother type; the smell of the white out she used to fix mistakes; mashing the keys so that the teeth got stuck when she left it unsupervised; and then, getting them unstuck and back to normal before she returned. It was a bummer to see such a stout object lying unused for years, going to seed.
So I carried it back to Pittsburgh from Central Pennsylvania. Lugging it around is not easy: it's thick, weighing about 25 pounds. I found the name and number of a person in a depressed steel town outside of Pittsburgh who still cleans and repairs old typewriters. I rumbled to the top of a cobblestone road overlooking the Mon Valley and dropped it off at his house. A week later, I picked it up. He had cleaned it, replaced the ribbon, and only charged me a pittance.
Since it's been back in my house and in working condition, I've struggled to think of what to type on it. Mostly I lug it upstairs when I'm feeling whimsical: adding text to a watercolor or typing up one of my haikus and just looking at it. There's something so satisfying and so final about typing something on a typewriter. If you make one mistake, you have to start over – or grab the white out, which I do not have on hand. The sound it makes as I clack away on it transports me back to the times I watched my grandmother type on this device. It's one of those things for me, an unlocker memories. (Note: Unlocker is definitely not a word.)
This week, I decided to mash together two things I enjoy, typing on Audrey's typewriter and revisiting my favorite Rumi poem: The Guest House. (I've been given this poem when I was going through a hard time and I have also shared this poem with others when they were.) So, on a dark night in early March, I sat down and typed it out. As I typed, I reflected on how my fingers were pressing the same keys that Audrey's once did. The picture at the top is the result of my efforts. And I only had to type it four times to get a clean draft!
Below is an audio file you can play to hear what it sounded like while I typed it. Press play and scroll back up to the top and listen while you read aloud. Maybe the poem or the sound of the typewriter – or both – will unlock something for you...
There's a good chance that the story of my grandmother's typewriter doesn't interest you. If that's the case, hopefully you at least got a Rumi poem that was new to you out of the journey.
indoor animal is curated by a human: Tim Papciak. On Mondays, he shares one link to one music video to help spark creativity in himself and in other creative types. On Thursdays, he recommends a book, movie, show, art piece, or link to some dusty corner of the internet that he believes either 1.) adds to the human experience, or 2.) serves as a coping mechanism in the year 2025. Note: this is not, and never will be, self-help content.