Tag: notebook

[Update] Lost Notebook is Found

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

I evidently left it in a break room at work. Maybe people read it, maybe not? There’s something to say for having messy handwriting, that only the most determined will try to wade through a slew of retrograde cursive…

So, was it so important? Yes, to me it was.

Maybe an excerpt:

In a cave she walked after turning away, and the old man followed, walking his dog whose snout skimmed the wet sand and the rolling cold wash of the sea. The cove was set away from the beach proper, where large glacial erratics had been rolled into place to form a getty that stretched out about one-quarter mile into the sea.

As she strolled, her bare thighs wet with the splash of waves that deliciously licked them, her toes touched her shadows. Her feet were stark white under the sun. She did not look back. She knew already that he would follow abidingly, as readily as the dog. By the time she reached the getty, she began her ascent over the stones.

The old man stopped, unwilling at first to climb, but to stand and watch her lift her long tawny legs over the wet-dark boulders. The sea rolled around the old man’s shins and then his knees. The dog moved further away. He dropped the leash. The dog walked several feet away and sat squarely on its wet haunches shivering.

On the highest stone she stood looking at the sun, her neck craned and cheek tilted, feeling warm fingers trace the fineries of her hot skin. She closes her eyes listening to the sea. The bubbling gurgle between the rocks and the slapping hiss of the incoming tide began to sweep over the furthest reach of the getty.

For several minutes she stayed that way, as if in adoration or invocation to a god or some such pagan idolatry. Her hands unfastened the first of her garments. The straps of a thin top slipped off and dropped in a heap on the rock, her small breasts leaning into the hand of the hot sun. A strange thrill of union to her grand lineage, of legions of others like her stretched to the ancients in blind obedience to the equinox, thrilled her.

The whiteness of her face, like fire illuminating parchment, and eyes shining with no fixed color, but of all colors, and then lids rapturously closed as she sat with knees drawn like Venus in her grove, fixed to her supine posture, breasts upthrusted and sprayed of shining droplets from hand-tossed Atlantis waves, she slowly emptied a sigh into the unerring wind.

There was no mother, father, man or woman, but only the elements desirous of her as if all of it served in slavish devotion to her and her alone…”

Thanks for reading…

On a Lost/Stolen Notebook

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ 1 Comment

In August 2017, I began a new notebook, handwriting in concentrated spates of a few hours at a time, all of the writing clusters having in common the character of Violet Sweet, her mother, a dying neighbor among several others. It was a journey of a pure being deriving much from Jungian traits (Aspects of the Feminine & The Sacred Prostitute). There were also items quoted at length from these 2 books and The Golden Bough, and heightened drawings of perception… alas, one day it was just no longer in my satchel bag, or in our apartment, the car, or at work. It had utterly vanished.

It made me wonder: I always have notebooks, most times they are blank as I compose directly into my laptop, eschewing the notebook as only placing effort into something that I would have to do twice (not counting drafts).

I had considered putting my name inside the notebook, with my address and its reward, should it be found, “your conscience.” However, since I place no faith on human values, I left it blank and so the work I wrote is now tossed to the dustbin of humanity in all of its glorious anonymity.

After days of frantic searching. I gave up looking for it, like a sailor lost at sea, surrendering my hopes to my memory of what it was I wrote (much of it done trance-like). Erring on the side of the power of imagination, I have a new notebook to begin the novel anew.

Maybe, as they say, ‘it was meant to be.’

I’ll shall see.