Lament For a Lost Notebook

I left my notebook on the U-Bahn from Rosenheimer Platz to Garching Forschungszentrum! My beloved black book who travelled with me to Toronto and Cuba, who lay open on god knows how many beer stained bar tables in Munich while I scribbled out my alcoholic anguish. And no-one returned it, even though I had filled in the Moleskine cover page, In case of loss, please return to… just like Bruce Chatwin! Was it because I offered $0 as reward? Did someone keep it to mock my self-pity, my literary delusions, my dreadful handwriting? Were they hoarding it for the inevitable greatness of my name, convinced by one glance at my lapidary prose (enough chit-Chatwin!) that my notebooks would one day cost their weight in gems? Or was it (the horror!) simply thrown in the bin, along with the copies of Suddeutsche Zeitung and bare-titted Bild left on the seats, by the subnormal-looking man who shuffled through the carriage with a bin bag and plastic tongs after the last stop? How could anyone be so callous! It was a little death in my family, budgie found stiff and songless on the bottom of the cage, goldfish floating upside down. I kept thinking, that paragraph I wrote, about seeing Toronto from a cloudy sky on my flight back from Cuba, I'd love to read that ag… That line about diving through the clouds from the jet window, feeling the icy vapour freeze the hairs on my skin, where did I… Like the little stab of sadness when you knock on your parent's door and realise you're waiting for a dead dog's bark. But words aren't the same as people or pets. They can be resurrected. They never really die. So here goes…

I'm on a plane — an almost empty plane. Our first flight on this route, said the pretty stewardess. Only three passengers, you'll get an attendant all to yourself (stewardess smile). My imagination rioted! The blue skies of the Caribbean have given way to mid November northern gloom. I spy some houses bathed in golden afternoon sun, courtesy of a theological rift in the clouds. I scrawl something about human emotions, how absurd they would look from above, one man tapdancing in his puddle of sunshine, another bent double by the grey mass of misery balanced on his head. (Is that the best I can do? Can I only write vaguely about what I wrote? Is it impossible to rewrite it? The words came so fluidly, meant so much. All the grey cities I've lived in, all the Edinburghs and Londons and Leamington Spas; and all the grey moods I've lived through, that whole farce of elation and despair. Ah well. Experience tells me that the words I choose now won't be so different from the ones Jibrīl relayed to me then. Words are like streams, they cut channels through the mud of your mind, your thoughts flow along them again and again.) As we near Toronto my eyes trace the layout of a suburban estate, the geometric curves and crossings of an architect's model made life size — made into lives, whole normal childhoods closed in those circles — then made a model again by the amphitheatre-of-the-gods perspective of the plane. Was it sunny or cloudy? I forget. And I forget what I wrote. Something about a Celtic sigil, a rune stamped into Ontario's fields. Was I being ironic? This is hopeless, a history written from a secondary source, a hand manoeuvred in a mirror. I need to see the pattern, the exact pattern, of those streets through the rounded plane window spotted with dirt; I need to feel its afterimage coursing through my brain, crossing and curving through neurons and synapses, trailing memories moods images associations in its electrochemical wake.

One thing's for sure: I only miss the sketches, the recorded moments. I couldn't care less about the rest of my notebook, the dear diary mithering, the endless, agonising construction of stories, same paragraphs started over and over, same themes chewed forever and never digested, bricks and poles scattered on the grass where my towers were supposed to soar. There might be a lesson in that…