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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 in the early grades, a quiet girl who, if she were alive, doesn’t discover how even during grade 4, she was pointing the way to freedom of expression. There is a lesson here links in handy for moms and dads and grandparents.


We have 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 in college. Kids of the fifties, we learnt writing hard way–with steel-nibbed pens which we drizzled with ink pots and which invariably turned the writing experience in to a mud-bath. It took us months to understand ale compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; in the event you wanted to avoid wasting time, you’d be far wiser to experience the tortoise.

But Anna was not turtle. Her mind moved quicker than light; she was figuring a way to Bali if we were stuck from the grade 3 reader; from the fourth grade, when individuals with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she can 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 knowning that the writer would find his share of godliness from the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. With the three, the blotter was the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends upon how we control some of it.” There was clearly much else that should be controlled too, 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 looked over 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 quite a while, it seemed that Anna had learnt her lesson. However, if I peered more closely over her shoulder, I remarked that it was the blotter that has been absorbing her interest. She’d dribbled a location at the top right-hand corner from the sheet; she stuck the nib during the spot and watched the darkness grow; a couple of details using the nib and also the blotch was a part of chocolate, its center dissolving in to a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches for the absorbent paper and much more dabs until the entire blotter changed into a sort of chocolate swiss-cheese.

Out of her desk came more blotter sheets. As an alternative to holes, she made lines this time, dark molasses lines dribbled and dripped almost spider fashion from 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 also the blotter sat on her desk just like a chocolate web.

It had been an early sort of Acid Art, so distinctive it made nice hair ascend to end. But Sister Mary Michael could not quite note that.
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