On writing from the top of your head

Study on Moo Pak, by Gabriel Josipovici

By Golman

«Only the last paragraph can tell you whether you’ve got the first paragraph right, he said, only the last word can make sense of the first.»

Gabriel Josipovici, Moo Pak

I was handed this book yesterday by Ferran Ràfols, who’s the translator of the book to catalan. The book is signed, and while he thought he had another copy of the book, he didn’t so he made sure to clear things up: «Ei, when you send me that message yesterday, and from the talk we had the other day, I remember I told you about this book. But, bear in mind that I thought I had too copies, but I don’t, so I want I will need it back».

Fair enough. Clarity is very relevant to build trust among people. Besides, I told him that this sort of thing would inspire me to see how to extract from this reading my own personal notes given the circumstances where I will not be able to mark the pages, and doodle the margins with those sactions of my thoughts that populate my persona library, and that are there quitely waiting for me to back to them, and make something out of them.

This way, I’ll be forced to do something else. And this text is what I’ve figured out to produce in order to extract the knowledge from this recomendation, in a time where I’m trying to find myself the vehicle to kick start a narrative with my name on the cover.

So here we are, a couple of pages in, and already get anxious from leaving stuff behind that I wish I would have made a note on. The fact is that the conversation that the narrator is having in the very first page of the book binds me to the idea that I will encounter a place where I will be drawing some lines that connect my mind with both the characters and the author. And I will be pursuing the reverse engineering of a creative process that expells my own demons towards the pages of voices that reasemble the structure of my desired tales. This long battle within.

So I stumbled upon this quote, and I thought about using this format. Other format would have been to make an ilustration, like all those that are stacked within the pages of my notebooks. That’s certainly a way to go about it, but I’m going to take this path of writting it directly in my page, as the narrative is exposing just the opposite of my own process, in at least two ways.

First, the narrator explains that he has given up writing by hand. I actually, a few year back, did the reverse move: I went to handwriting in order to find the expression and tension of my caligraphy, and to be bound to measure of the page, the spaces between the top of the page, the size of my lettering, and the purity of my stroke. While the character gave up writting in order to explore type writting. That is to use a classic Olivetti that could allow him to se the words coming out the page, but also be limited by the capacity of blank sheet of paper. The written printed words out there. From the very beginning. It’s clearly an appealing feature to write and get it right. So he goes about the way in which in order to do so, he has the capacity to keep going, until he gets to the end. And once printed, or once he’s found the mistaken word, sentence of paragraph, starting over from the top of the page provides a second exercise of getting close to the truth. As you copy your own words, but now out of the printed version, the formality and decisiveness of that text no longer presents the doubts those same words bare when they were being thrown into the page. And that’s a beaufiful step forward that I need to revisit as in my personal struggle I need to jump into a new phase: re-reading my own texts and editing them to finally get the worked out version of what I really want to share with the world.

So while his friends insist that the new thing would be to use text processor, from an Apple or a Mackintosh (that provides a clue as to when the character is dealing with this issue), he rather stays within the realm of the typewritter structure, that allows him to go page by page.

At some point I took that detour too. I stopped using word documents to shift-up towards the publishing bit of an online wordpress format. More like the friends of the narrator, I was propelled of the word document to try to get something out there, and the word files were pilling within the folders of oblivion.

So this too is a tension point between Josipovici’s approach and my own. And this how I will intend to find the common links and bridges from my own mindset to his own. And I am using a relevant messenger to transpose these two worlds: Ferran’s advice to do so.

And I’ve made up my mind just now: instead of going on and on, I’ll stop here and work out a single text, as short as around nine paragraphs would allow, to extract a written effect from a quote from Moo Pak. This is my new format. This exercise will allow me to unleash from my own gatekeepers.

ALLS