There are moments in your past that shape our vision. Going through my childhood photo albums, I catch a glimpse of Anna in the early grades, a nice girl who, if she were alive, does not discover how even during grade 4, she was pointing the way to freedom of expression. There is a lesson here that comes in handy for parents and grandparents.
We have often wondered if Anna’s life could have taken a different turn had she lived her early grades in the sixties in the event the ballpoint pen, replacing the fountain pen, dispensed by using ink blotters in college. Children 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 a mud-bath. It took us months to master ale compromise: speed meant accidental globs and splotches; if you really wanted to save time, you’d be far wiser to learn the tortoise.
But Anna was no turtle. Her mind moved faster than light; she was figuring a way to Bali whenever we were stuck in the grade 3 reader; in the fourth grade, when folks with older siblings counseled me agog over Elvis, she can find no more passionate than Japanese prints.
I recall Sister Mary Michael, the composition teacher in grade 4, who told us that writing was an act of God knowning that the actual writer would find his share of godliness in the holy trinity of pen, paper and blotter. In the three, the blotter was essentially the most indispensable. “Why?” we asked. “Good writing depends upon the method that you control the ink.” There was anything else that should be controlled at the same time, according to 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 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 quite a while, it seemed that Anna had learnt her lesson. But when I peered more closely over her shoulder, I realized that it absolutely was the blotter that has been absorbing her interest. She had dribbled a location on the top right-hand corner in the sheet; she stuck the nib in the center of lots of and watched the darkness grow; a few details with all the nib and the blotch has been a little bit of chocolate, its center dissolving in a hole. Fascinated, I watched her work more blotches on the absorbent paper plus much more dabs before entire blotter become a type of chocolate swiss-cheese.
From her desk came more blotter sheets. Instead of 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 middle stretch without having to break the flow before entire sheet became criss-crossed with tubes of varying lengths and widths and the blotter sat on her behalf desk as being a chocolate web.
It was an earlier sort of Acid Art, so distinctive it made nice hair get up on end. But Sister Mary Michael can’t quite notice that.
For more details about Acid Art check out this useful net page: here