Addicted

I’ve thought often about whether or not I have addictions, as everyone should do. I also believe we’re all addicted to something. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, you know; it all depends on what the addictions are, how many we have, and how strong they are. Can we have them and still function? That’s a hard question to answer. Anyway, here are some of my thoughts on the matter:

Addictions are often thought of as related to obsessions. We say we’re addicted to something when what we really mean is we’re obsessed with it. That can be applied to a person, like when we say we’re obsessed with an actor or singer. We can also be referring to a passion we feel. See how complex things are and how the definitions we use for our needs, good or not, can muddy the waters? And I’m not even going to include terms like fetish here. Let’s keep it simple. And safe. I don’t have a single addiction.

My obsessions are many, however:

Peanut butter.

Cheese.

Potatoes.

Salt.

Lettuce.

Broccoli raab.

Rivers.

Stones.

Cats and other animals.

Letters and diaries (the kind people used to write).

Tree branches (here, I’m getting closer to the big obsession).

Ivy (getting closer).

Lichens (getting hotter, as the children’s game says).

Medieval things.

Bagpipes.

Tombs of certain types.

Vintage anything.

The list is much longer, but I want to talk about my biggest obsession, which sometimes, over the years, I thought was words, but that’s not quite it. That’s too simplistic. Maybe it was books? Or paper? Or stories? None of these is really accurate, and none is all that unique. Something is behind these things, and it took me forever to get to the bottom of the matter. Once I did, my feelings were finally clear:

I love, adore, live for… ink. Sometimes, because it comes in a bottle, it reminds me of the story by Robert Louis Stevenson from 1891, “The Bottle Imp,” even though there’s no mention of there being any liquid inside the container. The story might have a connection to the Brothers Grimm or to the genie in the bottle from The One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Maybe it’s tied to the story of Faust and selling one’s soul to the Devil. The bottle is able to seduce people into acquiring it, despite the peril that poses to owners. To those not familiar with Stevenson’s tale, the owner of the bottle must sell it for less than he or she paid or else his (her) soul will go to eternal hell.

I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, because a bottle of ink of the type that is my obsession has absolutely no connection to the Devil nor to any sort of imp. My bottles of ink are very different, despite the fact that they contain something that moves about, sloshing color on the sides of the glass, that something is not an imp, nor is it a genie. I think of it as a sea of words yet to be born. Just as important is the fact that those words can be born in any color, and the colors can fit any mood, any topic.

Maybe your ink - if you have any, since many people don’t, nor have they ever owned any - is black or dark blue. Maybe you never used peacock blue liquid to write to pen pals and maybe you don’t still have a girlhood journal written in still-adolescent scrawls in violet ink, but that is your misfortune. Maybe you only wrote with ballpoint pens after outgrowing the fat pencils of elementary schools. If so, I feel sorry for you. Worse yet, maybe you don’t even own a Bic because typing your words onto a cold screen is all you’ve ever done. I really pity you if that’s your experience. You’ve never known and will most likely never know the feel of a pen nib that drags gently over a paper surface with fibers that catch and caress it. The nib bleeds painlessly, and nowadays - one of the few modern things I actually like - it can do so in a myriad of colors. Typing on a keyboard can never compare to creating a poem about a northern Atlantic beach in ‘rotten seaweed’. Nor does it compare to completing your best short story, written in flow, using ‘writer’s blood’.

Maybe ink was born black, around 2500 BCE, which is fascinating in itself. I’d give anything to meet the genius who accomplished that, to learn why and how they did it. Were the Egyptians or the Chinese the originators? I’ve read at least a dozen books on the history and will gladly read another dozen, but that’s just me. It’s also not enough, because I must learn about how the colors that followed the original black were created.

There is a company that produces new shades constantly, and if I were looking for a new career I’d beg them to hire me. The job of making up names to baptize new hues would be the most perfect job in the world. I too could invent shades called glasswing butterfly twinkle, gumball, bonsai, hydrothermal spring, Ohio River, washed lavender… oh, my mouth is watering and I’m truly about to burst into tears. Writing - cursive, of course - with those inks is about the happiest thing I can imagine doing.

Sitting here typing on a flat, slippery screen is as close to soulless as it gets. The words appear, but they’re no more than marks that block my line of sight. Inked lines say so much more, even as I make mistakes and scratch things out. Right now my collection of bottles - with impish ink, if you will - is very small. I have about fifty in a box and on the side shelf of my desk. Another twenty or thirty are in my studio, plus another dozen are scattered in other rooms of my house. Another ten ir twenty or thirty are squirreled away in my car, a couple of closets, maybe even under the porch where the raccoons can’t get at them.

Christmas is coming, and nobody will give me any new ink because say I have too many already. How do they know that? How dare they think that? How can they understand that, even as I write this, I’m planning new ways to use ink. Maybe I can paint the frame around my bathroom mirror. Or give myself a tattoo. Maybe one of my cats needs to be a different color. Maybe I should purchase more fountain pens in colors I don’t already have, so I could get more ink to match those pens.

I won’t go on, but you should know my love for the writing substance has led me to rescue bottles of dried up ink in the flea market, some from the 1940s, just so I can reconstitute the hardened block and use it. As I write this, my thirst grows, and I must stop soon so I can check online for new editions of ink to order. Also, I need to compare recipes for making ink from chestnuts and other plant materials. If I end up with too large a supply - hardly likely - I’ll see about using some of the colors to dye wool or give a nice tint to the driveway. Maybe the kitchen curtains need a sprucing up, or my garden could use more color.

Still, and this is my last thought, I can’t bear to use up all of my bottles of ink, because they’re my life blood and without them, well, you know…