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?
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
What does it take to get a drink in this place?
Two conflicting images stand out in my recollection of today: the assertion, on a friend's couch, that there is no such thing as enough travel, and the sweat collecting on the back of my neck as I sat in traffic on Route 17 North.
An old friend once told me that the thing about the world is that for all their differences, people all over the world are the same: same issues, same vices, same needs and wants and faiths. Four years steeped in the post-modern academy, and I have to say I've never felt it to be more true.
This weekend, I returned to my academy, sought out old girlfriends, old professors and others, and made what peace there was to be made. In a few weekends, I travel southward to a current girlfriend. I've come to realize that home is not places, home is people. And I feel that the process of growing older is the process of adding to the things that count as home.
That this should keep me inside my small volvo, darting about such that I am kept for great lengths of time from that place which is "home", the physical location that has such a connection that I cannot help but write about it... well, I'm not yet old enough to tell whether or not that's apt.
An old friend once told me that the thing about the world is that for all their differences, people all over the world are the same: same issues, same vices, same needs and wants and faiths. Four years steeped in the post-modern academy, and I have to say I've never felt it to be more true.
This weekend, I returned to my academy, sought out old girlfriends, old professors and others, and made what peace there was to be made. In a few weekends, I travel southward to a current girlfriend. I've come to realize that home is not places, home is people. And I feel that the process of growing older is the process of adding to the things that count as home.
That this should keep me inside my small volvo, darting about such that I am kept for great lengths of time from that place which is "home", the physical location that has such a connection that I cannot help but write about it... well, I'm not yet old enough to tell whether or not that's apt.
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