Between the 45th and the 47th president

This is an era of disruptive mechanisms to establish who shouts the loudests, and who used the IA tools in the best way to drive transformation and change in our society. It’s not clear. It’s not entirely out there, but the capacity of minorities to drive some doubtful and unproven evidence to the mainstream has turn the seek for truth in a distorted gullible everchanging scene.

It’s like a morphing meme.

Life has taken a turn. And we are riding a wave we don’t control. So the hidden forces has taken a stand and have looked for mechanisms to empower what they believe is most holly. To try to make it happen… for them. A new collective of desperate middle class has erupted with anger and dispear and has taken the lead and command in following the natural-born NEW leader.

This distopic scenario has been also the same sort of thing I’ve been dealing with along the path to understand we are at in this ever-changing world. And the character of that crazy candidate that comes from the raging force of societal cry against the machine used to be a feeling of some people, artist, dreamers, who were fighting to say something that was going against the flow of tides. And from that erupts an emergent field and force. And this takes over. For good.

That seems to have happened with the scenario of Don J. Trumb (like J. as Homer J. Simpson, if we must find a valid reference… everyman) comming back to the number one job at the top of the power ladder in the social scene that has been established in the risk board game we are all watching unfold. The regular players are sitting on the table. The forgotten ones are listening in, without a voice. There might be eight players in there, and their alliances, their similarities, their sinergies, their strategic partnerships, their codepencies, their histories, their commonwealth, their trade relationships, their common ancestors, the common culture, the common law, the kinds of governance, the royal families, the paradoxes. But there lies a ninth seat empty at the table. This is the only space left for us to take a stand. And I wasn’t ready for it, until now.

I’m not going to watch the American entretainment that this NEW american campaign has unleashed, one more time, for us to witness without a vote. The relationship of that executive body will lead to many experimental scenarios where those new people in charge will deal with the way in which the oldest democratic experiment is put to the test of withstanding a balancing act of checks and ballances that are to be ruled by a holy emperor who’s been send by God, according to his fellowship of whisperers and ballot validators.

Will the USA institutional system withstand after four more years of the Trump era. The setting the scene for a radical act is already going to happen as yet another entertainment show that is going to unleash the deamons that have some interconnection with the movilizing of resources and funds that come from highest debt generator since the gold-backed system turn the world around the printing money scheme that supports the modern economic theory of the last 60-80 years. Keynes vs Friedman. But the new set of people in charge are not that kind of theoriest. They are the Bannon-era of Cambridge analytica turn into the perfect gathering machine of a massive movement. This exercise, as Bannon intended yet back in the day, is intended to find the allies in external systems, in order to influence elections and restore leaderships. Something in the line of Russia’s hackers introducing fake-news in other peoples elections. It’s now mainstreamed. And people are already raging on it. Russia is already made a move in fueling the war economy to shaken the options of enemies and allies in terms of a response. This fuels the war economy and those who benefit from it, and also puts presure on the energy business, creating yet even greater havoc into people lives: everthing becomes more expensive.

So we are about to witness some geopolitical movements that will reshape some frontiers and some priorities in how we defend ourselves (always military budgets going up). De-escalation of violence is going to take yet another act of threat: we’ll take piece along the promise of some sort of giving up. Renouncination time. Some of our liberties and hopes. And we are going to move our red lines as well as our values as well as our frontiers. The enemy is always close by. The scape goat. The alibi.

If the world is going to move somewhere in the following four years, my guess is that it should move ortogonally in the direction where the given dimentions of our collective understanding have allowed up to now. The revolts in MAGA, the far right movements, the Arab Spring, Indigandos, the Catalan independentist, the Occupy Wall street, the 8M,… name any given sudden burst of revolution, is not nearly enough to find the common ground for an understanding. Now the situation is not equitable in each case. The actors and history. The violence is not equally distributed. The war on terror somehow shifted the scene into the new wars after COVID: Israel genocide in Gaza, and Russia invasion in Ukraine. The starting point are in the results from the WWII, a NEW state, a balancing act on how to repair the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the holocaust, and sionist dream of coming back home, as stated in an ancient tale. Because God said so. The ever-present man.

Where are thou?

Hear my son.

Here.

ALLS

Starting point

You are where you are. Life has brought you here. That’s the kind of thing everyone, anyone realle, a coach, an influencer, your spouse, your guru, your spiritual leader, your priest, your own private phisopher, your third eye, … would tell you: focus on the moment.

Now is the time.

There’s no other time.

You know about the past, about the future, how they don’t really exist. And then you are stuck with the moment. And the moment is gone. It just shifted. Like these words apearing in front of me.

Reading; writting.

It’s an act of connecting the fingers (in case you are typing), your mind, and the «paper». Or the screen, really. In this new version of the narrative scene.

Short and without derivatives.

I often speak too much. And loose the audience. Not really my thing to be concise and to the point. I don’t just play short and to the foot. I like risk. I elaborate plans. And then execute them. But if you don’t have your team with you. It’s worthless. You are on your own. And nobody is listening. You are just playing for a lame vacuum in your narrow limited story you tell yourself. That’s not the game. It’s your obsession.

Order and adventure

Aparently on day Jorge Luis Borges said that literature was order and adventure. Later, Cesar Luis Menotti repurpuse the idea and said that football was exactly that: order and aventure. Too much order, nothing happens. To much adventure, chaos.

A third derivative of that concept could be apply to impact-driven innovation adoption. What does that mean? Well intaking innovation that actually help to transform the system in a way that represents a higher value for the common good. I know, I know, I’ve lost you a bit. Bear with me. I believe that tha these type of innovation is also oder and adventure.

  • Too much order is not disruptive enough, not quick enough, not meaningful enough. Systems resist to change, if there is still a reward for the ones holding the cards. They would have no desire to move from that position.
  • Too much adventure, it just becomes a messy «I must jump into this bandwagon» by all means, regardless of the value or the direction I want to go to. You then generate some movement, but might jus be spinning in circles. Not quite moving.

So to drive truly meaningful transformational societal change, we must first share a vision of where all these things should be going. And to that, we are often faced with a bigger scale above within our role, as humans or as part of any given institution, that is being played in higher hierarchy. A higher dimention. So too much order is just helping the resistance to change to back up the status quo, while too much adventure is just helping the noise level to rise. How may impact-driven innovation then flourish among these two counter forces: with a proper mix of order and adventure.

This is true for the entrepeneur world and for the the demand-side actors who are willing to make an attempt to drive transformational change to their innovation ecosystem. With demand-driven innovation (pull), these two worlds end up meeting halfway. Conversely, business-driven innovation (push) may also find its way to undertand this as yet another meaningful arena to drive their impact as well as their ROI.

This is the starting point.

NAW is the time.

Let’s start a NEW journey.

Let’s implement our very own theory of change.

ALLS

Humour is my nation… or rather my identity

«The trouble with Nietzsche, he says, which is also the trouble with Benjamin, is that deep down they are so very German».

Moo Pak, Gabriel Josipovici.

Jack Toledano excuses himself right away with a disclaimer: «I can say that, he says, because my favourite artists are German, or nearly all». It’s always risky to go after a generalization like that. It’s a dangerous game to play. The more risk you take, the higher the stakes. Specially when you are ready to digg deep into other peoples cultures, which is always complex if you have not made the effort to understand them to some degree. What I’m trying to say is that for one person to take that road, they either have an alaby, a hidden as under the sleeve, that allow those very words to be spoken without sparking a big battle. Nationalisms are fire crackers with a bunch of teenage matches trying to proove themselves in the fulfillment of the mass.

Jack Toledano, and Josipovici himself, are well read and knowledgable about which authors and artist from the German culture they would like to take a laugh with. And explicitely mentiones that what makes them so German is their lack of humour. Or the lack of putting themselves in the center of the joke, to be joked about by the rest of the gang. The sense of cultural formality, that each of us brings from our own personal experience, from home, schooling, and our own consumption of our very own little culture, and nothing else. That’s the raw cultural element of self-fullfiled individual. My culture is all I need. And the rest, well…

But it’s not the case here. Some names a dropped: Klee, while Swiss, he’s from the German culture. However, he’s been excused himself, not for being Swiss, which made be as well classified in the same «dullness», but rather because he’s said to have a lightness of touch, a sense of humour, and the ability to see his own absurdity. This was not the case of Nietzsche nor Benjamin, and even less of Goethe or Thomas Mann.

So you see: in order to take a chance of categorizing other culture, you must at least require to understand how to catalogue the expressions of art and culture from his own representative voices. This means to have read them. Probably, if you truly would like your joke to slip by as an insider’s wise crack, you need to speak and read the language. Of course, you may intend to mimick those who have such cultura leverage to address their own wittiness, but that would be a fool’s choice as you would be rapidly disarmed and bare naked in front of mob of people taking a poke at your very own national hero’s, in the best case scenario, intelectually, and in the worst one, with some masculine physicality and the same sort of arrogance your initial pulse helped to set lamest kind of mood.

But at the end, we’re somehow condemened by our own cultura biases. And we have not all drank from the same fountains.

Moo Pak considers the characters to bring to the table a little bit of the witty sense of humour that still represents the English vis a vis it’s American cousins. And this trait represent a difference with Germans, or even the Spaniards. And all of them could be linked with the sort of moral structure derived from the religion. Our cultura heritage. Our own personal cross.

«Today the English still pride themselves on their sense of humour, he says, but in truth there are now few more humourless and sentimental people than the English. Their Puritan legacy weighs heavily upon them, he says, as the Protestant legacy lays heavily on the Germans and thier Catholic legacy weighs heavily on the Austrians and the Spaniards».

The legacy of Puratanism and Protestants as central common legacy to the American Colonies NEW culture, as compared to the Catholic legacy in NEW spain, back in the day, as an instrument embeded into the colonialist expansions of these cultures in the XV-XX centuries. It’s there, and it’s also there in terms that go beyond the sense of humour, or lack of it of. It’s complicated, we know. But this expression of cultural segmentation brings us to the capacity to analyse ourselves taking into consideration our own personal and collective limitations. «By and large, he says, peoples are a disaster and only individuals are worth thingking about».

That’s the thing. Not just the prejudice and judgment of peoples will always lead us into slipery soil, but it will always reconstruct some sort of stereotypical face of our collectives that might reflect something about our legacy, but that does not represent entirely who we are. This individual disparities and peculiarities are the liberating stories on how we’ve come to read Socrates, nowadays, as if by a sort of miracle, and that each of these cultural legacies have provided some literature that has been able to represent the teaching that through books, stories, narratives, are able to express the global interconection among people, among cultures, among our selves.

From here or there, I reading and understanding of cultural references as: in the Protestant team, Goethe, Milton, Kant, Hegel, George Eliot, and van Gogh. Catholics, such Dante, Langlands, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark. Sophocles, Aristophanes or Socrates. Donne, Stevens.

Still we find the notion of what’s behind these voices in the capacity to find the common link from their human perspective, as close to what we have intended to liver our lives. And this where humour plays a role. We want to laugh with people that we can walk with, and expand the joke to the best possible scenario for an everlasting laugh. This to me is what we are driven towards.

Humour, and laughter. As a choice. As an instinct. As cultural legacy. It’s still there to shine through. It remains a trait for the future. A holy grail to chase. Just because you may also go by life a little lighter if you may squeeze a giggle here and there.

About a thought

«Whenever we thing of thought, he says, we have before our eyes the image of Rodin’s Thinker, sitting immense and solitary with his great wise head in his great wise hand and gazing deep into himself.»

Moo Pak, Gabriel Josipovici

It’s certainly relevant. A thought. It’s as good as it gets. The inception of new idea. The consolidation of an inspiring new thought, there passing by for the first time in our human experience. And somehow magical.

But Moo Pak nails it, whether the narrator of the writer, or the universal connection between them, and us, plain readers of someone else’s thought. «It does not need Gilbert Ryle, he says, to show us that this image ins only and image of what those who have never had a thought in thier lives imagine the process of thinking to be».

That’s it. It’s not that at all. It’s not really there. Not the precise image, but rather what we hav socially simplify of what should be a very natural development for any human being.

«There is no such a thing as a pure thought, he says, there is only a sudden sharp intuition, a stirring of the blood, which you have to coax into shape, into words».

Precisely. It’s a scavenger hunt that you have not been prepared for. But you have trained yourself to capture them. To coax them into words. As a matter of life or death. The death of deepness in that thought, that if you are not able to recover, it will never be. It’s a dark road filled with intention and failure. «Most of the time you do not succeed. Either you cannot find the words or you find the words but they are not the right words for the feeling you have had».

But he idea is that sometimes when you are hit with one of those moments and actually nail it down to words, the feeling becomes complete: bigger than itself, as well as than yourself.

Such clarity to define the robust and simply nature of a thought. But from a precise persepctive. It’s not that the image of thought of the Thinker is vague, or that he goes out for a walk with a fried to thinkg. Or to come up with thoughts. He does it to talk. To talk and walk. And that has some rules on its own. A common set of rules that you share with the person you walk with, and his own context, problems, and circumstances. No script. No landmark. Just walk. Street. Life. What’s in your head. What’s become of you. What’s in the air?

And that links the two spaces in one. I mean Moo Pak. The idea of thought, as it emerges. But rather the relevance of walking with a friend, talking. That’s the deal. But not only. It’s when you go back to your desk, and you find yourself once again in the solitude of the alchemist producing the mixture of words to define the text that pursues the clarity, the brevity, the spotonness of the ideas, that now, become vividly connected with where we were before that walk. We need to be in places that await for us to link them with their sense of higher being. The final destination. The essence of a thought.

Walk, talk and desk. It’s about the written experience of that solitude, once you’ve done the letting go, the active listening, the silence-sharing, and the harmonizing beats of every step along the ride. And it’s also about aknowledging those places. About nourishing the spirits. Searching for the time to meet, to walk. And talk. In a sensible way friends fill in the time to let you be. And to listen. And to build from there. Whatever fulfills us. Whatever help we need. It’s all there.

Yet, the homework awaits.

You must come back.

A find the place. The time. The desk. And write.

Like this.

Like that.

ALLS

I’m one of those fools

«We have all known instances of would-be writers who spend all their time talking and produce nothing»

Moo Pak, Gabriel Josipovici

I’ve beginning to wonder where this is going to take me. Every sentence I read, every sentence that blows me away. And one more time: guilty as charged. That’s exactly what I am: a would-be writer.

Nobody had ever defined me with such clarity. Except maybe Milena Busquets. She once told me the story of another would-be writer who never ended up writing anything. Nothing. Nothing at all. Even though everybody expected him to write something magnificent. Aparently he spoke all the ideas out loud in clever conversations that fade away into the night. And nobody picked them up. His name: Clotas.

He did build himself a reputation as one of Jorge Herralde’s close circle of judges who would give away every year the famous Anagrama Award. Or the Herralde award. Either one, he was always one of the readers who would decide. So he was deep into the literary world, but just never with his own set of words. Clotas is my kind of man: the ultimate would-be writer.

Ever since Milena describe him/me I know I’m one of those. I thought of looking him up and get to ask him if he had any regrets from his would-be writing ideas. Maybe there would be some that would still find its way to a reader. Maybe a documentary of that kind would make me less of a would-be writer, and more of a would-be documentalist. Another trait of mine.

Nowadays it’s not fine to try to be a Renaissance man. In fact, it does not qualify as anything as heteropatriarchy is failing all us, no matter our upbringing. It’s all a big trap, and we’re already stuck at the spider web. It’s a matter of dimentions. And a matter of time. Time’s ticking, and my would-be creations are rotting away in pages of notebooks that will never see the light.

Unless I begin to explore them, and make something out of them.

This is what I need: to become a would-be editor of my own expectations.

Golman, would-be futbolartist.

ALLS

Renacer un día como hoy

Hoy vuelvo a nacer. Otra vuelta al sol.

Desde hace tiempo llevo dándole vueltas a lo que implica cada ciclo vital. Y estamos llenos de cíclos por todos lados, así como también estamos rodeados de trampas en el solitario que nos quitan la atención de lo que verdaderamente requiere nuestra ateción. Y así cada día.

Lo que vivimos colectivamente como una apertura a una sociedad interconectada nos ha cambiado a todos, de una manera global, sin que tengamos dispuesto un sistema que amortice lo que dicha transición implica. Las transiciones energética, digital, demográfica, migratoria, capitalista, extractiva, individualista… todas al mismo tiempo. Y nosotros, sin saber muy bien si nos toca opinar, declinar, dejarse llevar o renunciar.

El estado de ánimo particular se asemeja al estado de ánimo colectivo. Y a pesar de todo, lo que lleva a los adolescentes a tener una perspectiva más esperanzadora es seguir a los que les va bien, según lo pueden legitimar ellos mismos con los mensajes optimistas de los «ganadores» que tienen delante. El juego del dinero y de la vida que se despliega delante de sus ojos según los pocos mandamientos que les plantean los influencers a una sociedad pegada a un espectáculo en continuo movimiento.

Esto quizás era de esperar. Quizás llevamos ya tiempo en esta rueda de ratón. Yo especialmente. Y debo conseguir salir de una ve por todas para voltear de nuevo hacia otra destinación. Este es el estímulo de lo que considero necesario aportar a mi rutina. El llamado más allá de cumplir con un horario y con unas tareas que justifican el que me hayan contratado para el trabajo que realizo. Pero ¿a quién beneficia lo que hago? Esta es una de las cosas que siempre he tenido claro, y que nunca he sabido trasladar del todo, a aquellos por los que mi voluntad de romper con los dogmas preestablecidos se obsesiona con conjurar a un llamado colectivo: Tico Commons.

El Tico Commons es mi anillo, mi elixir de la juventud, el gran grial, el tesoro, la tierra prometida. Es un concepto repetido en la narrativa mitológica y literaria, que ha descrito mil veces la gesta de un héroe, generalmente un hombre, a romper con todo para llegar a la transformación del sistema en el que se encontraba sumido. Y sí, esta vez, inevitablemente por una involuntaria subjetividad, el héroe me lo guardo para el intérprete que quiero representar yo en la película que finalmente abra las puertas de este apocalipsis.

Mi viaje ha tenido varias complicaciones, varios niveles de aprendizaje y varias formulaciones fallidas. Están dispuestas delante de mi como un ejemplo a seguir para revertir aquello que no funcionó y reflejar aquello que en cambio dio algún fruto. El éxito de la cometida está también en la obsesión de seguir un camino que hace tiempo que tracé para mí: el futbolarte.

El futbolarte no es otra cosa que la fusión de dos mundos que aparentemente no tienen nada que ver. Y también es la formulación de una manera de asistir a una narrativa que me permite ponerme en el centro de una tensión literaria a la que nadie nunca ha prestado la atención que le doy yo al nombrarla. No se trata de una extravagancia simplemente para tener un momento en foco de su atenta lectura, sino más bien la noción de que debemos llevar a nuestro terreno la historia que nos hace irrepetibles. Y esta, con toda humildad, es la mía.

No es fácil salir del cascarón, pero esta vez ya no hay vuelta atrás. O más bien, por llevarme la contraria (que es uno de mis ejercicios favoritos), irá justamente hacia atrás. Cambiaré la dirección del tiempo y me refugiaré en los sitios y remilgos que en su día escribí para que un futuro yo recuperara, elaborara, y diera sentido a lo que es su momento, en el instante de la creación, dio luz a un despertar sin igual. El lector designado para ese trabajo soy yo. Quizás usted considerará que es una simple relectura, pero es que usted no ha visto mis libretas, ni leído mis metaestructuras Perecnianas, ni mi soliloquios al estilo de una caminata de Moo Pak.

Hasta ahora, que yo mismo doy el paso a la relectura. Hasta que por fin doy el salto a la edición de mis escritos. A la conclusión de algo que empezó en su momento, y que hasta ahora pretendo cerrar. Se acabó la búsqueda. Comienza el bootstraping.

Walking and talking

An introduction to the walking podcast

Talking the walk and walking the talk

«At the same time, he says, unlike the strolls you are reduced to taking in a city like Paris or New York, you can walk at a decent pace in the London parks and on the London heaths, at the sort of pace that gets the blood flowing and there is nothing more conducive to good talk thatn the healthy flowing of the bood in the veins and a decent walking rhythm»

Moo Pak, Gabriel Josipovici

For quite some time, I’ve made walking a relevant aspect of my routine. Moreover, these walks have represented a way in which I could also improve the mental thought that pops up in any given walk you take. But explicity so, I’ve made a format that includes recording a podcast as the ultimate conversation within yourself, as an exploration to dedicate this thought to align the elements that converge between my current internal journey, my external interaction with society, as I walk to places where I’m suppose to go.

So when I go to work, in the time it takes me to go from my home to the bus stop, which is around 9 to 15 minutes, I launch another session of the Walking Podcast. «Hello, this is Golman, and welcome to another episode of the Walking Podcast. Talking the walk and walking the talk.» That’s my entry line in every episode. Then there’s nothing but the string of thought that comes with the day. This is no other that an immediate connection with the moment. Each step at a time. It’s a certain way to address that I am here, alive, and in this simple gesture, I will align myself with my inner forces to make of this day one that counts.

So that’s what I do. And they all turn out to be versions of the same conspiracy: what if we all could be actors of revelation of NEW collective framework that enables us to become active actors or a greater, fairer, gentler version of our humanity? What will it take for a collective instruments and mechanisms to bring out this emergent structure to reflect on change, impact and tranformation of our global ecosystem?

Yet, Jack Toledano talks about another type of walk. One you make with another person, to strike a conversation. I agree. That’s the most sympathetic way of striking a mood for the direct interaction between two people. The way in which you connect with other, by interacting with what’s in stake, whatever subject pops ups, that requires the immediacy of a response, and the pause and attention of a good listener, and the iteration of evolving feedback.

I’ve practiced those walks. I’ve been exploring the transit of my city, Barcelona, in order to understand the unfolding of each journey and pathways that interconnect the diversity of borroughs, as I understand that walking here is as rich as walking through London parks. It’s not a walking competition, but I’ve managed to do so by allowing myself to be doing those walks as an exploration of my surroundings, at first, and then as a possibility to show others that journey, with the sense of discovery and companionship, that one gets by simply breaking down through unchartered territories. And there, in those walks, the talks and conversations gain a new dimention.

Nietzsche perhaps overdid it, he says, as he overdid everything, in his insistence that the only thoughts worth preserving are those that come to one on walks and in his conviction that what was wrong with Descartes and Kant was that they refused ever to get off their backsides.

While Jack Toledano has something clear: «I personally, Jack says, don’t know what it means to think, either walking or sitting, but I know that the only way I can make anything that will cause other to think is sitting at my typewriter at my desk and the only way I can talk is walking.

The walking podcast

Letting go to find the literature within your head

«Writing, he says, is a means of escape from the self as well as a means for discovery»

About Jack Toledano way of writting. Moo Pak, Gabriel Josipovici.

Writting. That’s the act. If one writes something is expressed. Good, bad, who cares. Writting takes you places. You may not know where it will end. But it triggers something that you don’t realise until it’s been written. And there’s no other way. It needs to come out a stream of conscious tought that is being spilled somewhere. That kind of freedom is what Jack Toledano is talking about when whe says this to the narrator of Moo Pak. And I couldn’t agree more with it.

Nevertheless, he goes on to rant against handwritting or using word processors in a way that he describes asn inhibitors of this freedom to let go. It cannot be done, he says. Or at least he exposes that it’s not availbe to him. As the little humming noise on the electronic typewritter and continuos glow of the red light that turned on to signal acusssingly his pauses when he stayed still for a moment to think between each moment of clear writing impulses.

Format and working mechanisms are for each to shape into our own way of delivering what it is we want to do. The creative process, in a broader sense than just writing could allow many other formats to produce some sort of spell that represents the artistic form and shape of the piece that encapsulates the profound meaning of our art. While I have explored many formats, I respect the people that find the clear pathway of a specific format that produces the results they are satisfied with. And I’ve also encouraged the transition from different formats to force myself to deliver the equivalent liberation at different wavelenghts of my own developement as a creator. This to me has represented new pathways to find myself in unexpected places I would have not imagined to reach if I had not turn to that spell, with those new tools, rules and mecanisms to follow through.

And eventualy, too, to break.

Jack Toledano says you can’t let go with a pen or a word-procesor. I believe you could. But then he also talks about a little conforence in London with Borges, where Q&A were addressed in written form for him to be read, so that he could say which one he would answer. Why don’t you write about women? If it was because he didn’t think of them. He said that’s why he writes, so he wouldn’t be thinking about them all the time. And that’s were jack Toledano finds the reason and importance of writting: escaping from a daily nimeous routines: «That is why a pean or a word-processor is no use, Jack Toledano said that day on Hampstead Heath, with a pen or a pencil you cannot escape yourself and your fantasies and why else does one write if it is not to escape from the prision-house of the self and its banalities?«

«Pens are for Victorian novelist, he said, and word-processors are playful post-modernists»

I guess I would be the in between of all those fools…

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

Starting at the top of the page

When I write I just let go of myself. I see the stuff coming out of the screen as if it is something that’s just been produced by an electric interaction among the components of my brain. And in a way, that’s what’s happening. But in a more deeper way, what’s going on here is a connection of the immediacy that occurs among the fingertips of my hands, working like a pianist composes, to come out with a sentence, a word, or an entire paragraph, that somehow tells my story.

I’ve just encounter a way to move forward by showing up to places and interacting with people that could allow me to produce a further essence of the next step in my creative process. I need to force the entry to the places I know I have to show up to. And they are not going to come to me if I don’t knock out the walls that I’ve paved so close around my confort zone that my moving out towards the place of action is not quite occuring by yet another pause. Action takes a move. Even if it’s a slow move, but in the right direction, that could be all I need. Day by day.

I’ve had this force driven me before. Like in any given moment in which I’ve set out myself to define a campaign of any kind. I’ve worked around my own personal campaign. For any given election. For any given «selling point». For any given project. And there is too much noise already in the surroundings to pay attention to yet another fool. But that’s the case for all of us. That’s the cas for any given soul, who’s trying to come out of the shell, and cry out to the world: «listen to this«.

It’s not listen to me.

It’s this.

It’s the form of you tought. The complexity or simplicity of the way in which the story is being exposed. The ancient art of showing up. With something worth reading. Something worth digging. Something that builds up a wish-to-go-somewhere-else.

I’m constantly moving. And hiding. I’ve been hiding from myself, my pathway, and my inevitable fall. I’ve been delaying the confrontation with that other moment of dealing with the reactions towards my expression: doubt, fear, anger, joy, laughter, pity, ressonance, dispear, anxiety, revolution, meh,…

It’s a game of reflections, shadows, mirrors and deceit. And among all those different spectrums, there is something laying thin among the substance of how it’s all interconnected. It’s that complex framework, the lines that connect the different aparently unrelated states what moves me to continue to explore. I’ve been exploring for so long, and now I need to convince myself to reinterpret the time and the things that I’ve written, expressed, doodled, in so many as 999 places, where the essence of myself was able to break the lock that kept me hid. It’s this second time around the one that counts. It’s this time, through this effort, where I will find the balance of my field. The nature of this NEW me.

NEW us.

NEWUS.

NEWME.

NEWI.

NEWAI.

I’ve been playing along in a different dimention. I’m ready to connect back with my previous self. And go beyond both places, to an orthogonal direction: NEW.