In a situation for Blotter Art

You’ll find moments in your past that shape our vision. Experiencing my childhood photo albums, I catch a look at Anna in the early grades, an abandoned girl who, if she were still alive, doesn’t recognize how during grade 4, she was pointing the best way to freedom of expression. There is a lesson here which comes in handy for parents and grandparents.

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

But Anna wasn’t any turtle. Her mind moved faster than light; she was figuring a way to Bali once we were still stuck in the grade 3 reader; in the fourth grade, when individuals with older siblings were all agog over Elvis, she may 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 action of God understanding that the actual writer would find his share of godliness in the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. Of the three, the blotter was the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing is dependent upon the method that you control a lot of it.” There were anything else that needed to be controlled as well, based on Sister Mary Michael. Reading Anna’s essay on why she liked chocolates, Sister became very still and angular. She peered down in the child, her eyes blue and difficult above her spectacles. “Too many adjectives,” she snapped. “Too many words!”

When Anna looked at 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. However when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I realized that it absolutely was the blotter that was absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a spot on the top right-hand corner in the sheet; she stuck the nib in the heart of the location and watched the darkness grow; several details together with the nib as well as the blotch has been a little bit of chocolate, its center dissolving right into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches about the absorbent paper plus much more dabs before the entire blotter changed into a type of chocolate swiss-cheese.

Away from her desk came more blotter sheets. Rather than holes, she made lines on this occasion, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from corner to another; she paused just of sufficient length to thicken the very center stretch acquiring to break the flow before the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths as well as the blotter sat to be with her desk just like a chocolate web.

It had been a young sort of Blotter Art Company, so distinctive it made nice hair stand on end. But Sister Mary Michael cannot quite note that.
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