A Case for Blotter Art
There are moments in 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 remained alive, won’t know how even just in grade 4, she was pointing the best way to freedom of expression. There’s a lesson here links 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 from the sixties when the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed by using ink blotters at school. 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 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, choosing far wiser to try out the tortoise.
But Anna was no turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring a method to Bali whenever we remained stuck from the grade 3 reader; from the fourth grade, when folks with older siblings were all agog over Elvis, she can find anything passionate than Japanese prints.
From the Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an act of God which the true writer would find his share of godliness from the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. With the three, the blotter was probably the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing is determined by how you control a lot of it.” There were anything else that would have to be controlled as well, according to 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 looked over her, unmoved, Sister retrieved her pen. The nib drew an easy, thin line 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 some time, it seemed that Anna had learnt her lesson. When I peered more closely over her shoulder, I pointed out that it turned out the blotter that has been absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a place on the top right-hand corner of the sheet; she stuck the nib in the heart of the location and watched the darkness grow; a number of details with the nib as well as the blotch was a bit of chocolate, its center dissolving into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches about the absorbent paper plus more dabs before the entire blotter converted into a type of chocolate swiss-cheese.
Out of her desk came more blotter sheets. Instead of holes, she made lines now, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from one corner to a higher; 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 on her desk as being a chocolate web.
It turned out an earlier form of Blotter Art, so distinctive it made flowing hair get up on end. But Sister Mary Michael couldn’t quite notice that.
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