The Hurricane Notebook.Indd

The Hurricane Notebook The Hurricane Notebook Three Dialogues on the Human Condition By Elizabeth M. Edited by Alexander Jech Wisdom/Works Published by Wisdom Works TomVMorris.com • W Published 2019 Copyright © 2019, Alexander Jech Printed in the United States of America ISBN: 978-0-9994813-9-4 Set in Adobe Garamond Pro Designed by Abigail Chiaramonte Cover Concept by Sara Morris Edited by Megan Fritts This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. τῷ μαθητῷ CONTENTS GNOTHI SEAUTON 3 Hyperion 4 A Conversation about Carrots 11 Diapsalmata 67 THE ANALYSTS 73 Niakani 86 Blood Brothers 133 Johnnie Walker Blue 152 The Ballad of the Matin Sea 162 Coda 192 The Black Swan 195 JOUSKA 215 Sarah 225 On the Friend 249 Joshua 276 Golden Slivers 303 Brooklyn, Once 347 THE ROSE-GARDEN 361 Macrina 364 PROVENANCE AND RECONSTRUCTION OF THE HURRICANE NOTEBOOK I. The text of this “philosophical dialogue,” “philosophical novel,” or whatever label one may set on this tragic tale is drawn from the notebook of a recent student at the University of North Caroli- na at Wilmington. The notebook was first recovered by fisherman Thomas Marian following a recent tropical storm that struck the Carolinas. Mr. Marian found the brown-covered notebook down by the fishing piers, wrapped in plastic to keep the water out, tied together with repurposed elastic cord of the sort one might find tucked about somewhere in many basements or garages. Mr. Mar- ian was the proprietor of Windswept, a small bar and restaurant on Topsail Island near Wilmington, and he added the notebook to the collection of oddities he had discovered while fishing, which he kept there. On particularly auspicious and high-spirited nights, he frequently brought out one or another of his curiosities to customers, weaving together some fantastically tall fisherman’s tale, usually improvised on the spot, to explain them. The notebook, however, was a challenge. Admittedly, it was in keeping with the spirit of the place for a notebook written by an unknown hand to suddenly appear on a Wilmington beach, which is after all also ii elizabeth m. home of the so-called “Wrightsville Beach Mailbox”—a mailbox placed on the north end of Wrightsville beach, in which there is always kept a notebook and pens, with the invitation “Leave a note.” This little mailbox has seen countless love letters, confes- sions, and reports of joy, sadness, religious conversions—in short, every type of human event and experience has been recorded in the little mailbox. Initially, Mr. Marian attempted to explain the notebook he found along those lines, as if someone had taken the notebook from the mailbox and simply had so much to say that she filled the whole thing. But this never quite made sense. Why, then, the plastic covering? Why not return the notebook to the mailbox? And of course the contents indicated that this was a private notebook, a journal or almost a diary, of some kind, and part of a long series of such notebooks. But even when he gave up trying to connect it to the Wrightsville Beach Mailbox, he found that his explanations never came out quite right. Was it a practical joke of some kind? A put- on? Its passion, the desperation of its search, seemed too earnest for that. Was it the work of some student, lost at the beach? Then where was she and why hadn’t she come for it? Had she died or even just sailed away, become a stowaway and left everything behind? But then, why couldn’t even her identity be confirmed? He tried various variations on these, looking for the story that would make sense of it all, but finally the notebook came to seem inappropriate to be made the matter of a tall tale, told for the amusement of his bar-goers. The contents also puzzled him. Some of it was written in a sort of shorthand and was altogether inde- cipherable, whereas what he could read and make out for himself he found rather ambiguous, and often too solemn for a tale of the kind he liked to regale for his customers. For example, what entertainment was there in a statement like “The veil upon reality is like the skin of a human being. What lies beneath that covering is fit only for a surgeon’s eyes, and perhaps not even for them”? the hurricane notebook iii And even if there was some humor in the oft-repeated “Everyone is guilty”—a wit will know how to extract a good amount of fun from such material—what mirth was there in a conclusion that runs “When the pattern goes down, it comes back up dark, bloody, twisted”? Even the “re-dime me” joke, which was light enough, was incapable of being retold, and wasn’t even set out in the right way in the manuscript itself to be funny to anyone but perhaps the author herself. He therefore soon took to locking it in a case away from curious eyes. It seemed to him the kind of book to be kept this way. The book’s period of solitude ended, as such things often do, by accident. I had been to Windswept a handful of times before, but on this occasion the waitress carded me. When I showed her my ID, it so happened that Mr. Marian was looking my way. The waitress walked away, and a moment later Mr. Marian wished to speak with me. He had seen my University of North Carolina identifi- cation—at the time, I did work there—and he said he had found something that belonged to a UNC student, but didn’t know what to make of it, and University privacy rules had so far prevented him from getting any answers from the University itself. I agreed to look at the notebook more out of good nature than genuine enthusiasm, not thinking to find more than a curiosity. When he happened to read a bit from it, I became intrigued by the author’s rather dark reflections on the nature of human life and the arguments over the human condition she portrayed herself as partici- pating in. The notebook seems to contain records of three lengthy philosophical discussions, as well as the author’s private reflections on various matters. I was on the verge of trying to convince him to allow me to take the notebook for examination, but was prevented by Mr. Marian, who rather suddenly decided, for his own reasons, that he wanted “the Hurricane’s notebook” out of his hands and told me I must take it and return it to the student if possible, but in any case, take the notebook somewhere it could better be kept iv elizabeth m. than his bar of curiosities. And so, bemused, I found myself in possession of the notebook hardly having uttered even a word. II. The author identifies herself only as “Elizabeth M.” The notebook had suffered minor water damage from the storm and from subsequent handling and storage on the fishing boat, but large portions remain legible. The pages of the notebook were filled with notes written in a small, neat hand, along with items taped or pasted into its pages at various points. A substantial amount of the notebook, however, had been written in an idiosyncratic shorthand developed from notae Tironianae, or Tironian Notes—a system of symbols adapted for rapid writing developed in the late Roman Republic by Cicero’s secretary, Marcus Tullius Tiro, and popular throughout much of the following millennium—which she had adapted to encompass English phonemes and common English words and phrases. This shorthand tested the ingenuity of my editorial assistant, Megan Fritts, who identified the shorthand and whose work was essential for unraveling and reconstructing these mysterious sections of the text, particularly when Elizabeth wished to write of Sarah or Joshua. According to the internal dat- ing of the notebook, its contents were written between August 28 and September 9, but it has not been easy to pinpoint the cor- rect year, which she lists only as “The year she died.” The forms and genres employed vary from day to day, and yet the notebook maintains the unity of a single, overarching mood, and the earnest attempt to resolve a single, gradually articulated problem—“a record, a letter, and a poem, each of which confounds me, and somehow constitute the answer to the knotted, undanceable problem of my life”—a problem which, however, it is not clear she wholly resolves. What is clear, however, is that Elizabeth herself is changed in the process of confronting this problem, and that this change is reflected in the notebook. The cramped, dense, and detached the hurricane notebook v —even cruel—writing of “Gnothi Seauton” flowers in the more expansive prose of “The Analysts” and the freer, more fully nat- ural style, of “Jouska,” mirroring the author’s own change from the isolated, self-embittered individual of the notebook’s first pages into the open but broken author of its final words, “I want to live.” Yet, though accurate enough, it would also be deceptive to trace Elizabeth’s own development strictly in parallel with the notebook’s development; the notebook begins, as notebooks do, in media res: to tell her story, one would have to begin, not with notebook’s opening, chance remarks about declining an invitation from someone named Sammy to go to the Outer Banks, but with events much earlier—with the summer when Sarah tumbled into the treehouse where Elizabeth was teaching herself Latin, with the sisters’ many adventures in the Outer Banks, or even with Eliza- beth’s discovery (or was it “invention”?) of the “Sacrum Arcanum.” Surely that moment, when she stood in front of the two walls of mirrors covered with her own words spread out before her in dry- erase marker, her two assumptions—“the ideal is articulable” and “the individual is sufficient for her relation to the ideal”— hovering over everything, surely this was the necessary preface to the events and arguments recorded in the present notebook, the first step on a way of life that would lead to the tragedy and disaster that pre- occupies Elizabeth from the notebook’s first to its last words.

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