JUST PAPER AND INK

Just Paper and Ink
By Rick Kurtis

            Paper; a product of wood pulp, crushed, bleached, stained, press rolled and cut into pieces. Now it is ready for a multitude of uses from origami, to school work, to burn, wrap or display whatever the mind can dream up. It is made in different shapes, sizes, colors and thicknesses, to increase the infinite possibilities of its use. It holds its shape when folded or bent and when wet, it can be layered together for different shapes, many sizes for display.
 

         Ink; dating back to 2500 BC, ink started with berries, mixed with carbon particles and pitch, formed into a liquid to be used in an array of many colors such as red, blue, green, black and purples. It splashes, stains or dis-colors anything it touches. Through the ages, it is been refined by using petroleum naphtha resins mixed with cool tar solvents, along with tallow wax and pigment. It is then put into a tiny tube, placed inside of a holder with a teeny little rollerball that controls the flow and it is called a pen.
            Now with some imagination, a person could put the two together scratches on a page that form lines, markings that make up what we call pictures, numbers, doodles or letters. A picture or doodle can convey a thousand interpretations. But letters put into the right sequence could make up words and words in the right order could make up a coherent sentence that could form an action, direction or story. These making of marks on white space in a neat and orderly fashion, row after row, shares a man’s thoughts with the world.
            Some marks can make no sense at all. But yet others can line up in such a fashion to make musical notes on a paper for people to enjoy the sound from an artist such as Mozart, Chopin, Tchaikovsky and thousands of other great talents.
            Other scribbles could produce beautiful sonnets, poems, plays, thriller movies or love stories. The inspiration of great minds like Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway and even Elbert Einstein live on today because of paper and ink.
            Paper and ink together can inform people about laws, news or how to do things. It records history, memories or the wildest imagination of fantasy or our deepest emotions, expressions and dreams. It holds expressions and the marks have displayed ideas and inventions through the annals of time, dating back past the days of Aristotle, Caesar or Nostradamus.
            We teach our children at an early age about paper and ink, so they too can express themselves in ways of blockages and colors much like Rembrandt, Picasso and Van Gogh, who all started with paper and ink. These paintings have spanned the age of time, like our generation can spanned the age of the future.
            Paper and ink will never cease to exist. It will be a part of history made throughout time, past, present and future. It will last until mankind has run his course and his reign has come to an end. The letters may stop but still years after man has gone, paper and ink will still remain, etched down on our planet for others to find. Paper and ink will reveal our triumphs and our failures, our passion and our distain, so those others can learn from our mistakes or laugh about them.
            Paper and ink is a way that we humans can communicate and retain knowledge. Throughout the ages of time, the symbols may change and be translated over and over for thousands of years still to come, but it is still just, Paper and Ink.