An incident for Blotter Art

You can find moments within our past that shape our vision. Dealing with my childhood photo albums, I catch a peek at Anna during the early grades, a basic girl who, if she remained as alive, doesn’t know how even just in grade 4, she was pointing the best way to freedom of expression. There’s a lesson here that comes in handy for folks and grandparents.


We have often wondered if Anna’s life might have taken a different turn had she lived her early grades in the sixties if the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed if you use 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 find out ale compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; in case you really wanted to save time, selecting far wiser to experience the tortoise.

But Anna wasn’t any turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring ways to Bali once we remained as stuck in the grade 3 reader; in the fourth grade, when those of us with older siblings were all 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 knowning that the writer would find his share of godliness in the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. Of the three, the blotter was essentially the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing is determined by how we control the ink.” There is anything more that should be controlled at the same time, in accordance with 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 viewed 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 a time, it seemed like Anna had learnt her lesson. However when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I remarked that it had been the blotter which was absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a location at the top right-hand corner from the sheet; she stuck the nib in the center of the spot and watched the darkness grow; a few details with all the nib along with the blotch has been a little bit of chocolate, its center dissolving right into a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches on the absorbent paper plus more dabs until the entire blotter changed into a sort of chocolate swiss-cheese.

Beyond her desk came more blotter sheets. As an alternative to holes, she made lines on this occasion, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from one corner to a higher; she paused just for a specified duration to thicken the guts stretch without having to break the flow until the entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths along with the blotter sat to be with her desk being a chocolate web.

It had been an early on type of Acid Art, so distinctive it made flowing hair climb onto end. But Sister Mary Michael cannot quite see that.
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