Categoría: Ferran Ràfols

Walking and talking.

That’s been kind of my thing for a while. Instead of walking with someone, I’ve done an isolation exercise to talk to myself, while also assuming to be talking to the world. That’s right, the world is a big place, I know, but I’m really talking to myself to project something about that walk that is completely ethernal. A simple description, or a most profound insight that’s just poped into my head. And bum, like that, it’s out in the world.

Of course if I was only intending to put out the word into the open I’d just need to speak the word, and forget about it. Then it’d be like an oblivious wisper. And that would be fine. I still have moments like that, I quite enjoy them myself. I let them pass. And begone. But the obsession of a writer is to catch those moments, and that’s why you see suspicious people writting little notes in notebooks all over the place, nowadays. They are the strange remainings of a cult of people who are unsatisfied about their whereabouts, and still get the desire to create an alternative world. Through art. And it all starts with that unsual idea. That unimagined thought, that somehow, who knows really how, came to you. And you didn’t let it go. You caught it. And secured it.

I’m the slower reader of Moo Pak. I average two pages every time I sit. Cause there’s something in each page that jumps up and bits me. And I don’t get to scribble at the edges of the printed page, as it happens to be a borrowed book.

I know I could just keep going. I could just keep reading. And that would be fine too. Like letting an idea fly by. But I’m in catchy mood. Specially about a book so decisive to me, as I’ve let to believe that this book will be. I’ve placed my faith upon a reading exercise that could turn my idea catching into an actual writting of my own. It’s an ownership exercise. And a style flagrant stealing. Or rather a inspiration. A tribute. Ain’t it all the same thing?

But this did not come by itself. I was lead to this book. I was introduce to this reading exercise by the recomendation, and lending, of a book someone else thought of when he read a notebook of mine. Ferran Ràfols is Anagrama’s go to guy when translating a complex and profound text published in English or in French. He’s Foster Wallace in Catalan. Or Amelie Nothom every year. But most importantly, he’s Gabriel Josipovici in Moo Pak. So he’s not just a pasionate reader, but a gifted translator, and a prominent writer, as all translators must be, he’s also kind enough to read my unpublished notebook. He provided me with not just notes, but references, and honest feedback on what he kept reading through, without exactly knowing what was there, and not just made it through, but pointed me to two references that I’m now reading to prepare the launch of my very own formal writting aspirations in the literary realm, what ever that means.

So every page I read, I need to get hooked in Moo Pak’s tide, as a surfer who’s spot the right wave to catch. And in every attempt, the same result: a perfect drop and yet another writing spur to ignate the fire of my own literary treat. It’s the topics of that conversation. And the electric current in a continuos motion that will never stop. Our own concious mind, linking back and forth the previous thought that is build into words, in a convesation worth having, with a good friend to walk with.

Now I know I speak too much. I’m a chaterbox. I must confess. But you would have already guessed if you are still staring at my face. And I know it’s rude. That’s why I don’t do it public anymore. It steals people’s time. They have rather more important and relevant things to do. They have their own opinion. And they don’t want to listen. Just listen. So I don’t speak in public anymore. I rather listen. And write. But for my own pleasure. For my own futher understanding. To cope with me. I too myself get tired of this chaterbox. But it doesn’t stop. And I’ve learn to love what bugs me. As I often see it as a way forward. As an inevitability. The dark side of moon. Even if we never see it. If we only get, in that one case, just one face. You know the other exists. But we don’t get to experience it. Does that mean that the moon does not rotate in its own axis?

Bookshops. That’s the thing that stroke me about Moo Pak on this given page I got stuck with. Bookshops in London, Paris or Lisbon. Bookshops sell books. Readers go to bookshops to read. There is a transaction, both economically, socially and transformationally. But it takes sometime to feel the groove for bookshops. And why one should go. And how book people mingle there, wether working, wether planning the next master move to grow inside the complex spider web of cultural and intellectual show. Because it’s a great show. With lights, with debates, with aristocracy, with labor, with unbelievable out of blue success stories from nobodies that made themselves up, by becoming a writer… and actually making that connection with readers who got hooked in to a narrative. In itself, every writer is looking to express himself in made-up stories that either hide him, or reveal her.

A choice of words sometimes defines you. And you get to speak your mind. To get close to the actual shake-up. You are actually struggling to say what you must, without saying too much, or going outside of the stream of conciousness, because you know yourself too well. There is not time for all this blabery. Too much bla, bla, bla as Greta has expressed beautifly. ¿Thunberg or Gerwig?

All of the sudden I don’t know which one of the three I want to be. You noticed that the choices could grow from two to three without a sweat. No guilt either. I can do whatever I want within the realm of my stream of writting. Wether that’s meaningful, or not, only the reader who bears me will go through. The rest will go back to their no-reader bit, or to their confort author. And that’s fine. I don’t blame him/her/you. We all have choices to make. References to climb, to then let go.

But my life could very well be a rotating act among these three Gretas: Thunberg, Gerwig or Garbo. I might be mix of the three, but I can’t play my mixedtape role all the time. I have to focus like the did to get their legacy across. To speak your mind against the greater social challenges and threats as collaborative action becomes crucial. To write your own stories, and direct them. To interpret them. That’s me entering the show business. There’s no business like show business. It’s all still just a show.

«In Paris, as in Milan and Munich, he said, everything has turned into fashion, there are fashions in books and fashions in food, fashions in plays, fashions in clothes»

Jack Toledano – Moo Pak

This was written back in 1994. Fashionably things to do have turned into a megatrend that keeps rotating faster than we can imagine. But the thing is, when we talk about books we are also talking about the intellectual and cultural significance of those really relevant books. Not just the trends. And that has been shaken up. But look at the clarity of Josipovici when he pointed his character’s intuition towards this direction: «All this frightful tide of polluted water, this torrent of cliché and fashionable posturings must be avoided, he said, in England and in France, in Germany and in Italy if we are to live at all. Otherwise the dehumanization of the working in life by factory repetition and to the dehumanization of children’s life by video games will be added the dehumanization of intellectual life».

We might be there already, but at this point what stroke me the most is the actual interaction that those four European countries, and specifically, those four European cities, have in my current scenario as a new-commer to this old world. A reference to these countries, Germany, Italy, France and England, have a resonance my very own personal moment, in what I’d like to see it as insider perspective from within the European Union. At first, 24 years ago, when I first arrived to live in Europe, as an illegal alien, I didn’t quite grasp the entirety of the global political scene that the EU represented. I was lucky enough to have a roomate who was not only a firm Eurpean believer, he’d also done his economics master’s thesis on it, having lived in London, and having attended the prestigeous London School of Economics. This sort of formal knowledge of the EU, what it represented as a political instrument, was quite relevant to me in order to understand some early clues on the matter. Yet, as Jorge had the experience first hand, I was only experiencing the idea from an outsider perspective, comming from a Latinamerican scenery that could aknowledge a common cultural ground, and a rather diverse, unequal, polarized, contradictory. So in a way, my un understanding and disbelief had already been trained to understand the complexity of the EU, the aspirational dream, and the realpolitik involved.

After 24 years being «one of you», I can confirm that I am already a grown local foreigner. And just in time to step in. I was cautious enough to keep my ears open as I learned along the path to understand the context and surrounding of what was happening. It’s a joyride at first, if you are lucky enough to get the good toss of the coin. The lotary in this case favoured a good first 12 year lesson, with the necessary ups-downs-ups-downs, enough to know what’s the outmost feeling of love, acomplishment, and collective collaborative belonging; and also enough to know the cold hard ground you land on, face first, when you are dropped from the higher grounds and experience that journey to inner hell of your own dismantled humanity.

It’s a harsh learning curve. And we all get a piece of it. We’ve been through a global pandemic and still we are able to manage to leverage enough missinformation to have a blury clear understanding of what’s going on. Or we think we do. Lately, it’s been more transparently put, but all these years since I first came to this «old» world, with my NEW naif mentality.

But the most relevant element Josipovici, or rather Jack Toledano, left me on this page is this: «But it’s already too late, he said. It has already happened. The horror is already upon us and the only way we can fight it is to retreat to the fortress of ourselves prepare and prepare for a long siege.» That’s what I did. Ever since I started building my art, defining my format, aknowledging the words. When I did fall all the way down, the only way to build myself up was through my desire to come out of there. The rebuilding of myself, as a act of collective aknowledgment, with a vision of a personal quest, that could only be expressed by looking inside, in each piece a time, while bootstrapping my own NEW narrative.

ALLS