Moleskine notebooks and the failure of reality

I have a new large, ruled Moleskine notebook. The other one is nearly full. It is also falling apart. The pages have become detached from the oilcloth bound cover. It’s good that the attached elastic band holds them together, otherwise it would be difficult to carry. Also, the spine of the cover has split. I use shiny grey duct tape to secure it.

However, I am yet to write in the new one. I don’t want to leave unused pages at the back of the old one, even if this means inflicting more damage on it as I carry it around with me. And I carry it everywhere, if I have a bag.

Much as I like the notebook, I’ve never been able to use it in the way I’d hoped. There are nearly 190 pages of writing: short comments about a current project, quotations, ideas for blog entries, incomprehensible remarks from nowhere, even inadequate recollections of dreams. But nowhere are the flights of creativity imagined in the reverie of purchase. The most useful pages are those following the progress of close readings of, for example, Benjamin’s The Storyteller and Maurice Blanchot’s How is Literature Possible? Otherwise, I shall probably put the notebook on a shelf somewhere and never consult it again.

For some, Moleskine notebooks are a fetish. Perhaps they are still pursuing that reverie, or maybe the notebooks do actually engender work! To meet and fuel demand, Moleskine is producing ever new designs to appeal to specialities: the latest that I’ve noticed is a storyboard notebook - much to my despair, in fact, as storyboarding is part of my money-work and the reminder weighs me down.

Elsewhere, discussions abound with tips for maximum utilisation of their organisational potential. It’s fascinating. However, I notice that nobody mentions that most gel pen ink seeps through the silky pages and often stains the facing page too. This led me to use only pencil and ballpoint pens and to slip in a piece of kitchen towel to soak up wet ink.

Ooo, I just felt it then: the sensuous specifics of practical action! It is this perhaps that makes fancy notebook usage so contagious. There is the aura of getting things done.

For writers, this aura is a siren. The draw of the notebook is the idea that the accumulation of arcana might form part of the way toward a literary work; the achievement that opposes the insignificance and temporality the writer’s life.

We know, however, that it is not. It is a means of resisting the work of literature.

So what is that work?

Last week I became frustrated with Craig Raine for perpetuating the mythic opposition of word and thing, even if he argued that language is equal to the task of encompassing reality. Once again, the work of literature is seen at best as a means of keeping up with a dominant partner and, at worst, a flight from reality.

It would be more revealing to investigate how literature forms reality, and how we turn away from literature because it generates new worlds; that is, becomes the reality from which we seek truth and succour. Here, literature’s failure would be its terrible success – one we have yet to fathom.

Hence, perhaps, the attraction of a notebook. It keeps writing within the confines of humdrum life, and enables the writer to maintain in writing a relationship with himself, the dying animal, all the while alluding to that time of death, which never arrives.

This is too glib; the sort of thing I write in a notebook. A blog. It stops me writing, you know.