In the beginning there is a huge canister of ink — ink that will find its way, by industry, to great fields of pens and be injected into them so that they are tall and ready and full. This is the ink before it is drawn out in delicate strands, in fine loops, in blots and stains. This is the ink cleaving unto the inkiness of itself, imperturbably blue, deep, and resonant. What desperations it will represent, every undulation of its being woven into finely worded anguishes, crude notes, and desperate letters. It will be neat rows of mathematics or strung out like paper dolls in signature — a thousand times the same name till one more column has run from its reed like water. Ink is almost like human promise in its untainted depths — it is a haze of possibility, a genetic ocean that all the rivers in letters run to and from — the blue loops of nonsense, the exact demands of separated husbands. Ink will stain the poet’s chequebook and the eager ledgers of business with its azure abandon, running into preset forms, filling them with meaning and loss. I envy ink the transformations it will undergo — all the things it may be or represent — yet I wonder sometimes if all its curlicue adventures are terrors to it — long circuitous days that will waste it away with drudgery, leaching its life into meaningless syllables and useless words. Perhaps in such a state ink remembers and longs for its origins in the canisters of industry just as we, separate and adventurous, remember sometimes our unity in light, before we were bodies, souls, and egos. The days when we were all of a piece, caught up in each other like mutual bodies — the days when we were dark and thick and full and didn’t mean a thing.