Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Welcome my new notebook

Welcome, my new notebook, and apologies too, that your pages should suffer the burden of my thoughts, unhappy and strange as they are. Your predecessor, you may be aware, left in unfortunate circumstances.


first entry Posted by Hello

I notice that in choosing you, my heart has already betrayed me. There were a variety of notebooks to choose from, their covers printed with many great works of art. I considered a Japanese painting of a lion, signifying a fierce and combative me, or Da Vinci's Universal Man, to feign a cool scientific attitude to the world. Instead I settled, most uncharacteristically and surprising myself in the process, on a painting of two young women picnicking in a garden (Gauguin apparently). As I was walking away from the shop, in search of a place to sit and write, it occurs to me what is wrong, and why this painting had the pull it did. The light brown skin of the young woman, her dark straight hair, those expressive eyes, they are reminiscent of her. My conscious torments me unceasingly with her memory anyway, now my subconscious admits to also thinking of little else. And you, who should have helped distract me with other thoughts, you too will serve to remind me of her. And one who would have been my confidante also becomes my oppressor.

There is a Ghalib couplet which is a variation of this. More on that later.