An incident for Blotter Art

You can find moments inside our past that shape our vision. Dealing with my childhood photo albums, I catch a look at Anna in the early grades, a nice girl who, if she were still alive, will not understand how even just in grade 4, she was pointing the best way to freedom of expression. There’s a lesson here which comes in handy for fogeys and grandparents.

We’ve often wondered if Anna’s life probably have taken another turn had she lived her early grades inside the sixties in the event the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed with the use of ink blotters in class. Children 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 master the ability of compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; should you wanted to save lots of time, you would be far wiser to experience the tortoise.

But Anna was no turtle. Her mind moved faster than light; she was figuring a method to Bali once we were still stuck inside the grade 3 reader; inside the fourth grade, when individuals with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she can find nothing at all passionate than Japanese prints.

From the Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an action 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 essentially the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends upon how we control the ink.” There was clearly anything else that would have to be controlled too, 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 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 timely, 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 like Anna had learnt her lesson. However when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I remarked that it turned out the blotter which was absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled an area at the top right-hand corner from the sheet; she stuck the nib in the heart of the spot and watched the darkness grow; several details with the nib along with the blotch was a little bit of chocolate, its center dissolving into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches about the absorbent paper and more dabs before entire blotter changed into some sort of chocolate swiss-cheese.

Beyond her desk came more blotter sheets. Instead of holes, she made lines on this occasion, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from one corner to another location; she paused just good enough to thicken the middle stretch without breaking the flow before entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths along with the blotter sat for my child desk like a chocolate web.

It was an early type of Acid Art, so distinctive it made your hair ascend to end. But Sister Mary Michael couldn’t quite observe that.
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