I am in love. In love I say!
What with a woman?! You say
Poo-poo I say!
Ha! You no not what love is I say
A woman? What is she? I say: A bait to stir the fidgety groins of men! The bulbous, restless, hot-blooded loins of men.
No, let me tell you what true love is. It is this. This close friend that accompanies me wherever I go. It sits snugly next to my breast on the London Underground. It is in the overhead luggage compartment of my flight to Tibet (safely tucked away in my rucksack). It sits atop the cabinet next to my bed in Kathmandu (what to do - what to do). It rests on my lap on a bumpy raucous bus as we journey through dusty pot-marked jungle terrain. It is sitting here today. Next to the coffee, with a copy of Milton's Paradise Lost for company. I am sitting next to a tall window so the fine gauzy morning sunshine meets my Moleskine paper - they greet each other on the page, smile - the clouds appear, and then they wave goodbye. Under the sunlight my writing looks as if spiders have dipped their feet in a bottle of black ink and trampled all over the page. Yes I am weaving a web. A web of something!
I can share with my Moleskine notebook my darkest secrets! There is no friend in the world quite like it. It is Like.No.Other. I trust it wholeheartedly with my life. It will never betray me. Nor will it judge me harshly through the scope of piety. It even; through some strange mechanism I don't fully understand, imparts me with advice. I come back to it many months yonder to read things I have told it in the past - and - when I read - the voice somehow seems different. It can be a shock to the system to read something you wrote a while back and then exclaim:
'Good heavens! Did I really write that? Was that me?'
'Me', 'I', what is that? Am I a fleeting ghost? Am 'I' a constantly shifting mirage always on the move - like those wide-angle velds of Africa where the sun flits over a patch amidst a partially clouded scene - moving across the fields like ripples in a pond. The 'I' is not fixed. There is a robust core to me sure - but, to this core is lightly attached, like breadcrumbs on a drumstick (poor analogy!), what I am thinking and feeling at a particular moment. My real voice is that which echoes back to me through my Moleskines.
I have a collection of these notebooks: bulging with things glued in, stapled, bits collected, memoranda, photographs, poems, pithy aphorisms - each one of these obese Moleskines is a distilled (I love that word!) shot of my consciousness.
Each one of these bulging notebooks is rich in tasty pickings. Maybe I'll publish them one day? I could call it my 'stream of consciousness oeuvre'. When your car has a blockage the mechanic recommends you to press the throttle and wash out the congestion - right? Well, my 'stream of consciousness' writing provides a medicine for blockages of the mind. When at first you had an unclear, smelly miasma of gunk - after, you will be left with a clear refreshing gently-a-sparkling liquid. The thing to do is to start on a fresh page. Make a mark with your pen, open the floodgates of your mind, and see where it leads! You'll be surprised where the pen will lead you. A stray thought pops into existence out of thin air, like a soap bubble it floats about a little looking to attach itself to something, and then it sees your pen and as soon as it has attached itself...it's like a rocket shooting off into Space! You look back and the earth is a tiny leeeetle thing waaaaay of in the distance, and you are floating a-freely - lost in space. Lost in thought.
But aren't we all really lost in a way? We think we know where we are - but that's only because of friends, family, familiar places that serve to keep us tethered and provide a relative frame of reference. But as a whole - as a unit - humanity as a whole - we are lost. You can feel something of this when you go off to a foreign country on your own. You arrive and you know nothing! No familiar faces - no familiar places. You're lost. But on a grander scale we all live on a blue-green planet that is hurtling at tremendous speeds around a nuclear fireball called the sun, in a galaxy of billions upon billions of such suns - in a universe that could be a part of a multiverse of many. If we are not lost then what are we!
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