Some Purple Notebook Moments

It's a very warm and sunny day in Dublin, like a day at the height of summer. It's reminded me of some "purple notebook moments".

Anyone who isn't familiar with my purple notebook can read about it here.

The introduction to my saints book (which you can buy here!)  is pretty much based around a purple notebook moment. I'm not sure if my purple notebook is pure navel-gazing, or whether it might have some public value. Jung's Red Book has public value, it would seem. Why should not my purple notebook? (I'm not suggesting it has public value in itself, but perhaps its entries can serve as inspirations for me to produce works of public value.)

The first purple notebook moment I'm put in mind of is a hot summer's day on my aunt's farm in Limerick. Me, my brother, and my mother were sitting outside on the grass, reading. My mother was sitting on a chair and me and my brother were sitting on a rug. This was a complete novelty to me, since we lived in an apartment, and the idea of sitting on the grass in Ballymun was ludicrous-- you'd be likely to attract unwanted attention and derision, if not a kicking.

I've always been much more a winter man than a summer man. I like the cold and I dislike the heat. Summer (in my view) exists to be the counterweight of winter. But that alone makes it very important.

I was at a funeral recently. (I attended the wrong cremation, but that's another story. And it wasn't just me, but me and three of my friends.) The reading from Ecclesiastes was chosen, as it almost invariably is now: "Unto everything there is a season..."

I think this must be one of the most powerful flights of lyricism ever written. The idea of seasonality is, in itself, inherently poetic. Take these lines from Lewis Carroll, which come from a humorous poem but which I've always considered to be drenched with pathos:

In winter, when the fields are white,
I sing this song for your delight -

In spring, when woods are getting green,
I'll try and tell you what I mean.

In summer, when the days are long,
Perhaps you'll understand the song:

In autumn, when the leaves are brown,
Take pen and ink, and write it down.

Summer has always seemed a bittersweet concept to me-- or rather, a concept tinged with melancholy. A picture taken on a bright summer's day is almost impossible to look at except through a layer of wistfulness. "Summer's lease hath all too short a date", indeed. I am reminded once gain of Burke's description of the life of man, sundered from tradition, as "little more than the flies of summer".

And yet, lurking within this sad transience, there is another idea-- the idea of a never-ending summer, an eternal summer. A photograph taken on a summer's day partakes of this atmosphere, since the picture itself is timeless, a framed eternity of its own. And, even without being captured in a photograph, a memory of a summer's day is just the same. It's timeless...sort of.

The idea of eternity, also, is the idea of a summer's day without end. I think we are all drawn to this idea, in one way or another. We are all trying to hit the jackpot, in one way or another. We are all looking for the gift that never stops giving, whether that is a life-long romantic love, the creation of an imperishable work of art, or undying devotion to some cause. An endless summer's day...that is the dream. Even for people who prefer winter, summer seems to serve this metaphor (even if it's an unconscious metaphor) better. It's the anticipation we all remember from the beginning of the school holidays, captured perfectly in the French phrase "les grandes vacances".

Have you ever noticed that coming-of-age stories are nearly always set in summer?

Well, to return to myself and my brother and my mother, sitting on the grass. I remember the moment so well because I was so aware of it as a moment-- the sun seemed to be performing a role, creating a vignette for our sake. I felt as though it was engraved on a medallion.

The second vignette is from the summer after I left secondary school. I thought I had messed up my school-leaving exams, and that I wouldn't be going to college. I heard an interview on the radio in which a composer of some sort was talking about his life story, the development of his musical taste. The conversation turned to some particular composer, and the interviewee said: "I became a big fan of him in college...well, everybody becomes a big fan of him in college..."

I felt a sense of desolation at that moment, because I was worried I'd missed out on the whole college experience-- which, romantically, I saw as an intellectual odyssey. Of course, when I went to college, I was thoroughly disillusioned in this regard, but it's still a pleasant idyll....doubtless it is true for some people...

This particular memory, however, lingers pleasantly in my mind, long after that sense of desolation became irrelevant. (This is a fairly common phenomenon when it comes to purple notebook moments.) It pleased me immensely to think of a course that people's musical education usually takes-- that there are particular composers which appeal to music lovers at particular moments of their lives, or at particular ages. The same applies to lovers of books, philosophy, or any other subject. Somehow, this idea greatly assuaged my existential loneliness, my fear that life was simply an empty space, a random flux, with no particular up or down, left or right, in our out.

This is why I take tremendous pleasure, always (or nearly always), in listening to enthusiasts of a particular art-form, or writer, or field of interest, talking to each other. It is the furthest thing from the awkward small-talk prevalent in so much of everyday life. Everything they say to each other drips with significance. They recognize each other's experiences-- often, even the mention of a particular name or incident will make them break out into a sudden and shared smile.

The final summer memory is one of the oldest items in my purple notebook-- I think it's a memory, but I can't remember it exactly. I have the image of a yellowed sheet from a newspaper (yellowed, but not very old), which I think was lying at the bottom of a drawer, being used as lining. It featured a photo of a glamorous woman wearing a bikini, perhaps on a beach, beneath the headline: "Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer."

I had never heard this phrase before. I thought it was the most poetic phrase ever, and it set my imagination on fire.

I tried to write an essay on this image many years ago-- in fact, when I was still in college. So that's at least eighteen year ago. I never finished the essay, and even now, I'm not sure I can convey this image's significance to you.

And also...I'm all written out. But I suspect what I have written already goes a long way to explaining why that moment made my purple notebook.