Anthology of the Self - Entry VI
A Step-to-Step guide on How to make love with your Inkwell and Protect the Off-Spring from Vultures
I don’t want my words to be snacks you pop in your mouth and suck on. I don’t want my words to be wriggled through your guts and putrefied, only residual by how hard they fucked your tastebuds. I’m in the baby-making business, not the meat-packing business. I nurture my baby until she spills out my fingers. I create life through subconscious meandering around a tactile buttongrid. I breastfeed her with ink until she grows big enough, has a belly stained black enough, to crawl around on sheets of paper. Every inkwell has a heartbeat. Try it, dip your finger in the next inkwell you find and feel its heart sensually flutter as it hugs your rigid little tendril. There’s a soul in even the littlest tins of black milk, a lustrous being horny for a sheet of paper. Our skin is naught but paper wrapping our flesh. Ink poisoning is a dreadful myth meant to tear our starbound lovers apart, to stifle the indomitable consumption of ink.
Can you believe even once this impossible love makes headway, people feel so comfortable objectifying my inkbaby! They assign her flesh, side-eye her with lofty demure, puke their own ink onto her malleable scalp. Inkbabies are so hard to keep safe these days. Of course, I will get blamed for the havoc she causes, but I still love her. I’m a bad parent if my inkbaby scares the shit out of you? The shit was coming out either way. You beef with my ink, you beef with me. Can’t the cute little shapes the ink makes just be taken in their own little vacuum? Must we assess the objective form of the shapes, whether the shapes are of proper tone? The fact my baby would even present herself so sprawlingly and twistily is alone such an impressive mark of character!
I think we fear our inkbabies too much. They make mistakes, we make mistakes, but the baby-making business is sick. Too many babies are carelessly pumped out nowadays that they’ve started to share an uncomfortable percentage of their DNA. Let my inkbaby choose her favourite four letters to name her nucleotides, thank you very much. If I’m gonna be made of letters, of genders, of genres and nutritional facts, surely a smidge of autonomy isn’t too grand a request. We’ve stopped loving inkbabies, and if inkbabies are one thing beyond pirouetting blackmilk, they’re love vessels. There’s little tiny hearts in every inkwell obfuscated by the gorgeous velvet veil of its photophobic denizens. She’s just shy, but is crazy when you get to know her. What is being a scholar or artist if not being in an intimate relationship with one’s inkwell.
The gorgeous thing about an inkbaby is that it stands alone, that despite its upbringing it finds a unique voice and can exist outside of bodily context. The inkbaby is a passive observer to the world that is only seen when it comments on what her viewer, too, sees. She’s like a cliche who has made residence in your blindspots, oft only granted a second glance when your house catches fire and you’re frantically searching for a bucket. Aphorisms are for the caulking of a rut. Things as foundational as love, as morality, as compassion often visit the inkbabies for tea, visit so often that one could mistake them for roommates (or a polycule?). Oh, the melancholy of forgetting your inkbabies, leaving their stroller in a dandelion field for the birds to peck at.
We subvert and subvert in the grief of trying to replace her until our subversion cycles back to being a bloodless husk of aestheticized encapsulations, a patch in our motley neurofabric. One must remember that all inkbabies are vampiric, imbued with their mother’s blood. By one breast of ink and second of blood does the inkbaby swell. Too much blood and the bloat blocks their vision. The blood mustn’t surface, the baby not vascular, if she wishes to swim in the ink of another's iris. For in the abyssal reflectiveness of other’s gaze, the inkbaby’s stain must also be raised. Inkbabies may also be bloodchildren, but blood is a caustic coup de grace for a fledgling mother. It is good to make our ink incendiary, ready to combust in mere proximity of a candle, for a sable speckling to spatter our walls, the residual freckles permanently blemishing the prim pearlescent shell of our mindroom. We want to be scathed, branded by words. We want words to kick our teeth in and rear heads through planted fingers.
Some wish so bad that the souls and heartbeats would get the fuck out of our ink. Some wish to turn our inkbabies into useful little raisins, lapping up their blood. Ink for function not for form. Ink for gumption, not to warm. Those torpid, tepid minds who only want gormless broth, not the abyssal depths of abstraction and knowledge in her onyxian grace. All must be seen to be known. Move the inkbaby under the lamp, please, and deem it’s muddiness jaundice. For some the abstract is a sign of sickness. Ink is the ichor of the human spirit, imbibed with the panacea of a soul not yet born, with the satiety of the acme of ambrosias. Ink not only bears a soul but is soul made physical, the bridge through our watertight irises. To romp through the brain folds and wear the neurons of the other like a boa, first you must possess the stains of one’s inkwell. Ink is thought given flesh, unfiltered by vocal folds and stammering hesitations in fearing presence of domineering forms; the most iridescent distillation from the cerebral brewery.
The inkbaby isn’t about you. The inkbaby can’t be made objective or moved into austerity, can’t be squelched of her fog or torn asunder by contemptuous assertion. Language is, by form, an abstraction. Stop labeling your ink babies else we fear they become naught but mirrors, ripe for reclamation and recontextualization. Our tendency to revel in absolutes has brought about the twilight of truth, for our absolutes too are mirrors; chemical, hormonal, arrogantly aesthetic collaged refractions for centralizing light on our egos. Emotion is the armature of interpretation, and all who dare call reason to witness write and speak by way of their phlegm. There is something so guttural about dissenting from the daintiness of your own empiricisms, something so spine-chilling about the masses of contextless incendiary ink floating out in the electrical miasma. Ink that bears the authority of a paper towel, yet through the ink can the paper towel enervate through emulating beasts. We are misappropriating our inkbabies for industry and want. One writes with a double-edge quill, both capable of creation and decimation through the mere structure of the shapes we assign ink. So much annihilation has occurred at such a volume the council of inkwells may be better off spilt!
It is not in the nature of the inkbaby to succumb to absolutes, to succumb even to structure and meaning. The inkbaby bears one thing that we must never let be taken away. We must never forget that in every inkwell, a heart still beats, wings still soar. Every grand idea that may ever grace us lies dormant in each inkwell, our own black babel. It is our hope, nay, our duty to look closer into the blackmilk, to lick our fingers of it, imbibe ourselves with it, to suckle on it and meditate on it. We mustn’t let our glorious raven ambrosia coagulate under our noses as we shudder over her misappropriation. We mustn’t let the chaos of ink’s potential take away our masterpieces or stifle our waterfalls of expression. Let us not be caustic or bitter, but by nature of the heart, ejaculate love and soul, profundities in the vein of the divine, unto our canvases. My inkbaby shall never grift, never be molded. She shall never succumb to stray wills, unpaid bills, rigorous grills or insistent pills. She is noblesse and irreverent, revelling in the grandiosities of what is and what can be. Let ink flow by its own volition, seep through our papyrus masks, voyage through our veins and puncture our hearts. Ink is hormonal, a catalyst and maestro for an emotional deluge, a riptide that pulls you into one’s sea of neurons.
Let us all get a little closer through our inkbabies. No more setting them ablaze and treating them as prisms only valued for their refractions.
Keep inkbabies precious.