Invisible Ink and the Secret Decoder Ring

Notebooks are interesting. We surround them with airs of privacy. We lock them up. We stash them away. Blogs, at least, are more honest: open to the world, commanding "read my thoughts".

I always entertain the fantasy of a youngish grand-daughter, or a great grand-daughter, opening a wooden box in the attic of her parent's house to find all of my notebooks. To get to know me, a forgotten ancestor, as a real person, a poet, with failed dreams, realized hopes, weaknesses and terrible handwriting. It's this hope that keeps the privacy alive: if we write as though we wish no one to read, then what we write is for once honest and flawed, truly worthy and ready to be read.


There's one notebook that stands out in this fantasy. It's red and its small and its simple and the paper is perfect--It's my journal about my experiences as a student in New York a few September elevenths ago. I wont write anything about it here. I cannot finish the journal. I wanted to get it all down. to chronicle the day and the days that followed, and the weeks that followed, and the months sliding into war. I didn't want to lose any of it.

It took four or five years to get to the morning after. As I go, the narrative slowly starts to sputter and stop. Nietzsche once wrote something about the absolute necessity of forgetfulness in human relations. And no matter how I try to save that terrible day, a greater more primitive portion of my brain pushes it under, pushes the book aside and keeps its thick pages blank.

When she opens that book, my great-great-grand-daughter, what kind of truths will she find in that flaw? What kind of history will write with ghostly ink on my empty pages? What words will she have for my inexplicable speechlessness?