Intimate Stranger

ON USING THE NOTEBOOK

When you wake you may still have echoing in the deep ear a last shout of the night’s trip. Immediately the images fade, coherence crumples as in a photo negative turning glasse-yed and glossy with whiteness in the fire of exposure. That whiteness which is totally dark. Similarly, when slipping into sleep, the jumble of images coagulate, cohere, rising from an exposed negative being dipped in the acid bath of what you always knew without knowing it. And you dream away.

This is why your notebook is important. It is a portable keyboard for exercising the fingers of the eye, ear and nose. You jot down the impressions, note the riffs, run the words until you can see the sinews and the curve of muscles oiling the light. You draw instant portraits. You encapsulate a whole novel in one clear vision of fifty words; it will be obscure by the time you re-read it. A notebook is not a place of drafts, but of draughts. It is a seedbed. Of course, many seeds just die and others are eaten by birds, but birds are not bad at being dream messengers with night-colored wings. You could do worse. (You could be an Afghani waiting for the terrible birds of destruction to rain over your land at night. .)

The notebook is a word-camera. You move through the city and gather the pickings of the senses. Extremes come together on a page. A pavement of fugacious feet has inscribed in the cement a timeless relic of love in the shape of crude initials carving up (and caving) a heart. Or you see inscribed in one such stone: I love Chicago. This is New York. You will become aware not only of the visual collage of impressions but also the auditory, all those throwaway phrases of raw indiscretion on the wind. The tiny and the extravagant blend: your eye tries to spell the infinitesimal squashed insects pretending to be numbers on a phone card, and you look up to have skyscraper-high electronic Times Square letters in blaring colors smash your retinas. In Mulberry Street, a discarded door on a rubble pile has scrawled over it: So long, Scheck, you won’t be missed. A young lady pushes her fully clothed cello before her down the street. From time to time she stops to wait patiently, holding the bloated-bellied instrument now sagging over its one small wheel. Then she bends down to carefully collect the droppings in a plastic bag. As you cross her path you hear the cavernous groans; she must have a bag full of dark notes by now. When it is the annual festival of San Gennaro you will wend your way through the dense crowd of sausage-gobbling bulky humans and off the main thoroughfare find a side-show proposing the smallest woman in the world, Little Lena, twenty-nine inches high with hands barely two inches across and wearing size two shoes, and a billboard announcing: West Indies cultural export. Don’t you see there’s a miniaturized world to be peeped at in there? In the Metropolitan the Ingres drawings are an afternoon’s worth of eternity scribbles snared in one sitting. On Union Square market where one can buy a minuscule tot of snake-green cat grass juice guaranteed to make you meow, you see a hand-scribbled note: If you get to it and you can’t do it — there you jolly well are! Lord Buckley. In a run-down rotting area of the ‘Loaisaida’ an outer lives with all his junk in a battered ‘Oldsmobooger’ splattered with stickers: Never play leapfrog with a Unicorn; We don’t give a damn how you did it up north; Out of my way! My kids need to pee; A clear conscience is nothing else than poor memory; If you’re not calling Dr. Kevordian, keep smiling. .

Writing is life in progress. And your notebook is there to remember it.