Ágnes Lehóczky

Geology of a Notebook
I's Notebook

I found countless manuscripts in this note-book, after all. Diverging horizons, converged at one end. One annotating the other. A close study of layers. Rocks and fossils. Frescos on medieval walls painted over old frescos. Then someone a thousand years later peels the last layer off. And finds an old god’s peeling face. The most recent graffiti sprayed on the railway wall. You see, they imagine everything is made of paper. I borrowed this notebook when he turned to page 58 with his orders. Along the margin: his petroglyphs. In a thousand years it will count as prehistoric. His figures, scraped out, added up. Subtracted. Then erased again. In the bar’s stained glass. A static horizon. Lilac. He catches it daily. With chalk on a blackboard. And wipes it off again: There isn’t a straighter line than this. Look, the skyline. Lilac again. Then it curls up and crawls inland from the sea whirling amongst pebbles against the resistance of sand grains pulled by the moon. And it’s night again. You said. I never understood. This one is mine. Through my condensed glass. I understand that. The other day you repainted the whiteboard all white. You coated inborn petroglyphs. Not pictographs. The latter is a drawing on the surface. This one is an incision into the flesh of the rock. But then in a thousand years someone will come along and peel the white coating off and find Jung in contemplation sitting on the rock. On whether it was the rock which sat on him or he who sat on the rock. Am I adding anything new to a story in the end? Or only negating what has already been ground into pigments of plants and sand? Footnotes of a stranger. I do not understand. Monday morning imaginary detours among the suction of pebbles. Carved in greaseproof notebooks. Abbreviated cul-de-sacs cramped into green bottles with souvenirs, recycled. Adding and subtracting equates to zero. I cannot tell the sky from the sea at night. Rolled up sketches of daydreaming. Damp Morse crumbs brushed off tables of a sleepy sea-side bar. Memoranda left on margins: the wall is blank. Night again. The morning. Letters pulsate if you touch them.  Palpable under the paint. The wall is white so that you remember. The wiped off scribble in the left hand side corner you forgot.  You hadn’t forgotten. En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre non quiero acordarme. Although, in the end, I never remembered to return the script. I took the barman’s see-through plastic pen and glossed the entire page with sea-blue ink.

There are a lot of cities I would like not to remember. To talk of them as if they weren’t. As if those cities had not existed before. There has to be a hole in the membrane of memory this way. Through which these places can escape into the atmosphere and spill. And refill themselves as memories of no-one and find their home in nowhere. As long as the atmosphere does not eject them. It depends on how many names I could fail to give them. The sunset is not a word, either. Only an incision. Into rocks of greaseproof paper. The sunset is a crater on a photograph. Once upon a time. I didn’t want to remember. A city with a river. This city has not got a name, and the river too, is anonymous. He or she dwelt. A town-dweller, non-significant, that could be I. It is called skinning a white wall. And painting over it again. Depriving space of space. In the end space swells up and all the edges grow together. And there isn’t a millimetre of white left on the page to fill with inky hieroglyphs. The strata of all definitions stamped on greaseproof paper. If only I forgot names. I would be back in the same cul-de-sac. What’s the point of knowing? What it was I met. I could dwell in here. It would be practical. Names overlap. The topography of memories. Reliefs of the mind, the mini-planet. Each a different colour. The earth’s unpeelable skin. They may extend over hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of its surface. And in the end no-one knows. Who I talked about. I could dig down and find the core of it. I could memorise what is not. What not to remember. The sunset is not sunrise. The concave not the convex.

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