Activity

I like the idea of the pencil, and the beauty being it’s limited life filled with endless possibilities. It also strikes me that it is a life of service and self- sacrifice, both can be beautiful as well. Which makes me inclined to think the viewpoint of the pencil would be more important than that of the person writing or of some other object that might be in the scene.

What is being written could be significant to aid in the pencil’s beauty – perhaps… If it is used to write lovely, beautiful, good things… On the other hand, we could possibly emphasize the theme of beauty in ordinary things if the pencil writes ordinary things that have beauty, too. Such as a family recipe, diary entries, maybe even marking a child’s height on the wall through the years. Pencils aren’t used for just one project, usually, so what is being written could be a sort of unintentional life story of a person or family. Perhaps the dramatic setting we could use could be the different snippets of life recorded by the pencil, throughout its life, alongside its own personal story (at the very least, noting it’s own life passing with each fresh sharpening, perhaps commenting on its thoughts of its own life – hopes, fears, dreams, acceptance of reality, etc.)

I think I’m envisioning a sort of diary, or thought log, of the pencil. Something that tells the pencil’s life story but in small snippets of what it is writing (the only way it knows what is happening in the world; the pencil has no eyes, and only knows things through the act of writing (or drawing, but it might have trouble understanding how the strokes relate into something since it can’t see or read the user’s mind) or physical touch (like, if it is being chewed it could react to the indignity, or surmise the user is nervous about something, etc.) and its own thoughts. In the process, it tells a fairly ordinary life story (perhaps during the 20’s – 50’s; giving lot of good material for the family’s story to be full of drama and yet be ordinary).