Flapping in the wind

There you are, just where I left you--on the steps of city hall.  Pulled out of my pocket as I sat on the steps to eat lunch, you, my notebook, were put down, and then forgotten in the conversation that sprang up with colleagues who had joined me.

Later, where are you?  Among these papers? in my pocket? in a corner of my bag? still not in my pocket?  Did I throw you away inadvertently when I finished lunch? Are you outside in a trash container? I rushed down to the street, reached in and rooted around till I found my debris: nothing. Then at the corner of my eye, there on the steps, something white and flapping like a little banner...

You're not a journal; no publishable secrets; an absence of gossip. Simply a place I keep thoughts and work through arguments, copy interesting passages from my reading, sketch things that seem interesting, paste in pictures or poems: a gallimaufry. Each notebook is dated and its pages numbered. By the end of the three or four weeks it takes me to fill one I grow quite attached, not so much to the book as to what has collected in it: a month's worth of mental life. But then, replaced, it joins the dozens of other such once treasured ones, each of which I would have gone through garbage to rescue.

You're just paper, of course, but handled as much as you are in the month of our collaboration, you become like a secretary taking the minutes of my mind. In the notebooks of yore, these minutes seem like the deliberations of diplomats concerning wars long ago fought and finished. But each one of the now dusty 6x4 inch pocket-sized notebooks was the fire line where I was struggling urgently to make grasp something slippery--even though the victories have since been superseded.

The current now is so compelling. Yet former nows were just as much once, and when this notebook is used up, the ones which will capture nows yet to come will be no less significant, though for reasons I can't predict. Maybe these notebooks, past and future, slim and empty at the beginning of their month, thick and crumpled and marked up at the end, are in a way the standard under which my querying moves forward. This is a flag I'm happy, indeed proud, to march under.