Ink

Ink

Ink obscures its nature. Let's focus on the substance itself, rather than the marks it makes. Ink can be blue or black, or any color, even white. It can be eked out of a pen nib, or sprayed onto a moving page by tiny, precise nozzles. People or their machines have compacted it into plastic cartridges, or stuffed it down into a bottle, or scraped it from a solid wedge onto a stone and then moistened it. The first act of calligraphy is the writer's rhythmic rubbing of the dry ink across a rough surface. The writer begins by calming the hand, preparing it for its exertions.

A story could begin, "They took me into a room and beat me." The story could go on, "On another occasion I was forced to lie down while MPs jumped onto my back and legs." It might continue, "In the foregoing parts of this memorandum we have demonstrated . . ." and from there, we could stop.

The inexpert writer may have mixed her ink too thin, and her composition will show weak streaks and drips. If she has not thoroughly and patiently prepared, uneven glops will show up in her writing like underlinings or exclamation points, clumsy emphasis. Typewriter ribbons, soaked in ink and then dried like noodles, rotate around their spools. They give of their essence, transferring dark blots onto the page behind them. It can go on this way for months, until they are used up by the repeated strikes of tiny metal mallets.

The Material

A story could begin, "They took me into a room and beat me." The story could go on, "They started to hit me on my broken leg several times with a solid plastic stick."

The writer has been working with this material for quite some time. What astonishes her is the way it lies around, available to any of us. Despite the protracted fight to keep these documents and photos out of the public record, some small percentage of them made their way into newspapers and onto websites years ago. The idea of a nation's dark secrets lying buried has been totally transformed, into a new metaphor of an unlocked warehouse. Anyone can walk around in it, dazed by the glare of the sulfurous floodlights. A baton here, a pool of urine there, a transcript of a medical exam, pictures and captions. The writer has to make an effort to close her eyes, or to squint briefly at some intervening object, or to find a negative pattern in the interstices between these appalling records, as there's no art to simply revealing what's already there.

Or so I said to myself maybe five or six years ago.

Ink

The ink maker begins in the woods, cutting hawthorn. The hawthorn branches are next peeled and the bark soaked in water. This water is boiled down until it blackens, then is mixed with wine. The maker of ink may be making wine simultaneously, in another vessel. Alternatively, ink can be made from the galls that swell on oaks when certain wasps lay eggs in them. The wasp's hormones provoke the oak into blistering, and this round protrusion protects the wasp family as the larvae grow. Their home shelters and feeds them, until at last the larvae change form. They were worms, bound to one spot, and now they fly around in the open, graceful bodies ending with a pen-like point.

Or this—men and women study extensively in universities and then are hired by tech companies. There they conspire to illuminate different-colored capsules, some black, some white, in an imitation of paper and the words written on it. The human eye can't see these individual capsules without magnification. They hover beneath the surface of the glass book, turning and rising, then dropping away in a complex pattern choreographed by the alphabet. Words, sentences, whole book-length memoranda command these capsules to bob and sink. Maybe one minuscule white one was for a brief moment next to a black one within the letter r within the word room within a translated and transcribed interview...