Notebookery
by Andrew T. McCarter
I am striving to write a notebook that will be, in essence, an anthology of excerpts from a lifetime of deliberately unwritten literature.
I have gravitated from totality to the fragmentary: rather than try to follow the tick of a running clock, I settle in the spaces between the parts of a clock dismantled.
He began by dating the entries in his journal, then numbering them consecutively, then simply calling them “sun” or “moon.”
The writer of novels is one who tap-dances on stage; the keeper of a notebook, one who paces the floor. The latter wins my attention.
Clouds swirling over the earth like language over reality; the result, so much thunder. During storms he lies on the ground and imagines viewing from reality the underbelly of language.
The temptation to revise this notebook into five sections: notes one line in length, one to two lines in length, three to five lines in length, six to ten lines in length, and longer than ten lines.
A writer's collected literature is a petrified forest with the pretense of permanence and is visited by readers with awe. The notebook is a fresh field beckoning the reader to rush into it, then to stop and stretch himself out on a section of his own choosing to meditate, to dwell. From the seeds of his eyes looking up at the sky will grow a tree of imagination. Such is the living, invisible forest of the notebook.
The notebook is a basin of sea water, an impossible piece of sea, a consciousness which evaporates, leaving a book of crystals of salt and grains of sand.
When notebook entries touch the mind as salt touches the tongue—when they are dissolved and absorbed immediately on impact!
In the notebook there is nothing elaborated and nothing suppressed.
My entries are just that—entries, but also exits; they are seeds and coffins, and seeds don't dialogue—as roses in full bloom dialogue—seeds monologue, as coffins, sub rosa, sub terra, at various depths within the earth.
The notebook: toppled column in tall grass, unkempt cemetery.
A mind of neither architect nor mason, a mind akin to wind and wave.
A bird clings to these lines as to the bars of a cage. Sometimes it appears, from the other side of the page, when I offer it crumbs from between my lips. I often wait for it in vain, though, and am left to swallow the crumbs myself, left to vacillate on the point of which of us is inside and which of us is out.
The desire to capture, cage, record one's existence....
The notebook is a substitute for the soul.
The notebook, practically speaking, is a collection of last words.
The hope of earning a place in immortality with one's writing. To write oneself into the script of eternity. Consciousness occupying pages white as the plains of any afterlife...
Notebook entries: poems from the wrong side of the tracks: poems in black leather.
Copyright © 2003 by Andrew T. McCarter
To read the full text of Notebookery and other writing from Andrew T. McCarter's notebooks, visit: http://entriesandexits.com
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