June 23, 2013
Ah, what is more beautiful to lay eyes upon first thing in the morning than my beloved? The Kolibri Groma, mahogany enamel, low slung, with a thick heavy sound of the keys. This machine has gone on innumerable fieldwork excursions with me, and each time Groma and I have set up in a remote corner of Germany it doesn’t take long for someone to come up and begin conversation about their own memories of the Groma, or of typewriters.
In my carry-on baggage in customs in Amsterdam, my gear elicited confusion and then delight from three young officers who were perhaps in their early 20s and felt that my suitcase was a time capsule…an assortment of old fountain pens, old typewriters, old cameras, old lenses… I put the suitcase at the end of my gear so that I could be standing on the other side of the xray machine and see their faces as they scanned it.
An odd juxtaposition, really, to have a late 1940s typewriter going through a very 21st century security device. It is such a non-sinister apparatus, and yet it’s not, when one thinks that what it records are words. We can say anything, we can write anything, although we rarely choose to do so. And the body scanner machine at the airport, in which we can say nothing…only our bodies speak, whether or not we wish them to.
In the United States in recent weeks, it’s of course been impossible to type anything on any kind of device without being aware that it’s being scanned by big data and state agencies of enigmatic intent. And yet here sits on my desk in the candle factory a machine that cannot be surveilled in this day and age. Anything I write is so private. And yet in the Groma’s earliest days, imagine not wanting someone to hear the noise of writing (now a largely silent act). The pounding of it. Some folks might remember the Groma from the film “The Lives of Others,” about East German artists during Communism. The Groma was featured because she is only about two inches tall, and she could easily be hidden beneath the floorboards.
What we hide, what we reveal….
