An instance for Blotter Art

You will find moments in your past that shape our vision. Under-going my childhood photo albums, I catch a glimpse of Anna noisy . grades, a nice girl who, if she were still alive, will not recognize how even during grade 4, she was pointing how you can freedom of expression. There’s a lesson here links in handy for fogeys and grandparents.

I’ve often wondered if Anna’s life might have taken some other turn had she lived her early grades in the sixties once the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed if you use ink blotters in class. Kids of the fifties, we learnt writing the difficult way–with steel-nibbed pens which we drizzled with ink pots and which invariably turned the writing experience in a mud-bath. It took us months to learn the skill of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; in the event you really wanted in order to save time, selecting far wiser to learn the tortoise.

But Anna was no turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring ways to Bali when we were still stuck in the grade 3 reader; in the fourth grade, when folks with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she could find nothing more passionate than Japanese prints.

I remember Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an action of God and that the true writer would find his share of godliness in the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. With the three, the blotter was the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing is dependent upon how you control the ink.” There was clearly much else that must be controlled as well, in accordance with Sister Mary Michael. Reading Anna’s essay on why she liked chocolates, Sister became very still and angular. She peered down with the child, her eyes blue and hard above her spectacles. “Too many adjectives,” she snapped. “Too many words!”

When Anna checked out her, unmoved, Sister retrieved her pen. The nib drew a quick, 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 that Anna had learnt her lesson. When I peered more closely over her shoulder, I pointed out that it absolutely was the blotter that’s absorbing her interest. She had dribbled a place on the top right-hand corner with the sheet; she stuck the nib in the heart of the area and watched the darkness grow; a few details with the nib and the blotch had been a little bit of chocolate, its center dissolving in a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches about the absorbent paper plus more dabs until the entire blotter converted into a type of chocolate swiss-cheese.

Out of her desk came more blotter sheets. Rather than holes, she made lines now, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from one corner to another location; she paused just good enough to thicken the center stretch acquiring to break the flow until the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and the blotter sat to be with her desk as being a chocolate web.

It had been an early on sort of Blotter Art, so distinctive it made flowing hair climb onto end. But Sister Mary Michael could not quite see that.
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