Ink, String, Paper, and Glue

52-and-change years ago,  a hard-puffing, sweating, red-faced encyclopedia salesman gave me this phrase: "All you're paying for is ink, string, paper and glue."

Poor guy, he must that known he'd hit a dwelling where nobody was going to buy his books, but he said it over and over again, probably his  bring-it-home selling point with every potential buyer. We gave him an hour's attention, a glass of water, and a chair in which he could smoke a cigarette and take a load off his feet, but an upstairs two-room apartment of newly-weds ?  No sale.

He had books with plastic pages layering the human body in its component parts, books with pictures and maps, books with potential knowledge--all of which appealed to me in our virtually book-free apartment.  For a lot of reasons, including sympathy for the exhausted salesman, I probably would have signed on the dotted line for seven dollars a month, but those were the days when seven dollars a month wasn't easy to come by.

It wasn't the content of all those books that interested him or the cumulative effort of writers.  He wasn't particularly interested in the content, but in the parts that made the physical books--ink, string, paper and glue.

Today--in my current state of making things--I have all those things in spades.  It's my indulgence in possibility--much the way amateur photographers buy expensive camera equipment.  If you have it, maybe the artful will come.

For ink, I have every color of paint--which can be mixed to make even more shades and hues. I have markers--alcohol and water-based. Crayons and brushes and powders.

For string, I have ribbons, jute and threads.

For paper, I have cardstock, Yupo, Japanese papers, handmade papers, printed papers from the scrapbooking aisle of crafts stores, tracing paper, vellum.

For glue, I have tacky glue, double-sided tape, Washi tape, glue sticks, matte medium,....You name it, I've got it.  I can connect things til the end of time.

I've sometimes wondered if I will live long enough to use up all these inks and strings and paper and glue.  (I've resolved to live a long time so as not to waste anything!) But it doesn't matter.  It's important to have what it takes to indulge in possibilities.

Robert Motherwell said, "Art is an experience, not an object."

Albert Einstein said, "Creativity is intelligence having fun."