In a situation for Blotter Art

You’ll find moments within our past that shape our vision. Experiencing my childhood photo albums, I catch a look at Anna noisy . grades, a quiet girl who, if she were still alive, will not discover how even during grade 4, she was pointing the right way to freedom of expression. There’s a lesson here that comes in handy for folks and grandparents.

I’ve often wondered if Anna’s life may have taken a different turn had she lived her early grades inside the sixties if the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed if you use ink blotters in college. Kids of the fifties, we learnt writing the tough way–with steel-nibbed pens which we drizzled with ink pots and which invariably turned the writing experience into a mud-bath. It took us months to understand the ability of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; in case you really wanted in order to save time, you would be far wiser to experience the tortoise.

But Anna had not been turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring a means to Bali once we were still stuck inside the grade 3 reader; inside the fourth grade, when those of us with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she could find nothing at all passionate than Japanese prints.

I remember Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an act of God understanding that the actual writer would find his share of godliness inside the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. Of the three, the blotter was probably the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends upon how you control the ink.” There was clearly anything else that should be controlled at the same time, as outlined by Sister Mary Michael. Reading Anna’s essay on why she liked chocolates, Sister became very still and angular. She peered down at the child, her eyes blue and difficult above her spectacles. “Too many adjectives,” she snapped. “Too many words!”

When Anna looked over her, unmoved, Sister retrieved her pen. The nib drew a fast, little difference over Anna’s script; the blotter followed; there came more red lines, more words slashed away.

I watched Anna after she returned to her desk. She began writing, dabbing the blotter after her pen in true Sister Mary Michael fashion. For a time, it seemed as if Anna had learnt her lesson. However, if I peered more closely over her shoulder, I pointed out that it had been the blotter that has been absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled an area on the top right-hand corner in the sheet; she stuck the nib down the middle of the spot and watched the darkness grow; several details using the nib along with the blotch had been a bit of chocolate, its center dissolving into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches on the absorbent paper and more dabs before the entire blotter become a kind of chocolate swiss-cheese.

From her desk came more blotter sheets. As opposed to holes, she made lines this time around, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion derived from one of corner to another; she paused just for a specified duration to thicken the very center stretch without having to break the flow before the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths along with the blotter sat on her desk like a chocolate web.

It was an early on sort of Acid Art, so distinctive it made flowing hair get up on end. But Sister Mary Michael could not quite observe that.
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