Ink

...breathing it in

This is about ink. Black inky ink.

Not tatoos, though. Not the answer to a three-letter “tatoo” clue in a contemporary crossword puzzle.

Last evening we watched the Netflix documentary on The New Yorker’s first century: The New Yorker at 100.

Extraordinary personalities loom large from the very beginning in the film, but the images that are sticking with me today are the short clips of the presses running as a new edition of the magazine is being printed. All that extraordinary editorial work, week after week, turned into ink.

The words I am writing right here, however, are not made of ink.

They are…what?

They were never wet and they never were applied to paper that came off of massive rolls that were delivered by giant trucks.

And they don’t smell inky.

It is that smell that seems elegiac to me.

Who knows the smell of ink? I mean the old ink, before safer soy. Something about aromatics, something about toluene, xylene, benzene. Something about freedom, community, people sitting in armchairs reading the paper before dinner, before turning on the TV to watch Archie Bunker, before turning on the TV to watch Walter Cronkite. Everybody on your residential street doing the same thing, everybody maybe washing their hands before dinner, washing off the inkiness.

I cannot describe it in words but I remember the rumble of the presses starting up at about one in the afternoon and the chemical-y ink smell drifting through The Ann Arbor News in the Albert Kahn-designed building where the News was once was a real, live daily newspaper.

It was the smell of words made into stories. It was the smell of headlines. It was the smell of everything happening in our world that we’d managed to capture on the page that day. It was the smell of newspapering.

There must be people around the world still smelling ink. Paper newspapers and paper magazines have not yet quite gone away. Surely the pressmen everywhere are smelling the ink.

But remembering the smell of that ethereal, invisible, formless inkiness and all it symbolized for us dedicated small-town journalists feels like trying to capture times lost, words lost.

There was something about breathing in the physicality of that wet ink that was like breathing in the oxygen of the truth, the oxygen of the facts, the oxygen of daily life that people trusted us to know and to tell others, that we were all better for knowing.

Struggling as we find ourselves now doing in an effort to know what the edges of human consciousness look like, what’s real and true because we can see that it’s real and true, what’s real and true because we can know that it’s real and true, what’s real and true because we feel it inside our deepest inner selves after we’ve tested it against the silence, against our memories, well, maybe remembering the inkiness can make us bold, can make us brave. I just know that every day, breathing it in, I always felt that the power of the next good word was on its way.