I’ll write my ideas on every page

So proclaimed a three-year-old girl as her mother was being rung up for a pocket-sized notebook at the art supply store downtown by the art college.

Writing ideas on every page has been a theme among my friends lately. One carries a new notebook of ideas to beat forgetfulness; another, who is wild about notebooks for purposes practical and impractical, bought a miniature graph paper pad for a third; a fourth is a notebook artist who fills spiral-bound notebooks with bars of neon color in every other ruled space.

Last Friday, on harrowing drive through the Berkshires, I had Hilary take dictation as I vocalized the few language-shaped thoughts that emerged involuntarily out of my white-knuckled concentration as I attempted to keep my car, purportedly “Made by Trolls in Trollhättan” but woefully unsuited to wintry conditions, on the road. Either the snow or the extreme topographical dynamism of the mountain pass would have been nerve-wracking enough on its own, but the combination elicited fight-or-flight nonsense repetitions, mantras related or unrelated to my alpine drive, placeholders to block the flow of propositional thought and to allow the brain’s deep predictive algorithms of physical nature to guide the hand without mediation.

Other notes of Hilary’s, factual/descriptive in nature, allow me to reconstruct sight-seeing highlights of the drive: the town in which Brigham Young was born, which, you can see why Utah landscapes might have had a certain appeal; Lill Tugan, a sort of depot or trading post whose name recalls “Grande Tuge,” a corruption of Beethoven’s “Große Fuge,” a supremely mind-boggling set of sounds of which a contemporary noise musician would be proud, had he or she composed it, especially while deaf; a housing development aptly named “Alpenwald”; LOGGING TRUCKS ENTERING; STEEP GRADES SHARP CURVES; BEAR XING; the town of Charlemont; “Hail to the Sunrise”, the name of, or an imperative issuing from, a sort of park of bungalows built around a sculpture of a green Mohawk Indian with his arms up, presumably hailing to the sunrise.