Swift, Thomas Mann, Panofsky, Gombrich

On Moo Pak

Reading material from a reading source. Books that lead you to books. Writing about reading. Thought from another time, still present, still meaningful, still new. Ideas that go beyond the state of affairs, that turn out to be travelling fast nowadays. As always, in accordance with the feeling of each time, magnified by the disruption of sources of meaningless distractions. All the time. Everywhere.

Tuns out I have to read more. More sources. More books. Other cultures. It’s not new. It’s an old assignment. And I still have a to read list that tends to infinity. And yet, somehow, sometimes, I get in the zone, and accumulate a winning streak. I’m reading just about the amount of books I could handle. And still, sometimes, it feels like it’s not enough.

Johnathan Swift

You look at a writer’s picture and wonder. In this case, a painting. That’s the person. Under his skin, there’s the story. How did it come to mind at first? How did it evolve into the final draft of the finished print? How many people got involved in this process?

The writer is the lone creator on it own. It requires no one else to pitch in, while sometimes relevant feedback may help to assist the point. A good friends ear. An editor’s advice. A publisher desire to risk the chances of people caring. At that point, there are more people involved. We are now talking about the industry. About the market, and no longer about the writing in itself. But what’s good writing without readers. Just thoughts. Lonely ones. Aspirations. Melancholy.

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was the man. Cigarrete lit, winter gloves of a gentle-man. Carefully shaped and tendered mustage. Four button suit. Stern wooden chair. Glancing eyes.

Jonh and Tom enter a room. They came together. The room turns and judges the two charecters. Something is on. Everybody knows. They still keep their cool, as the spell has been bound, and the action is just waiting to reveal itself. It will take some time. It’s not loud. Not yet. It’s only intriguing. And sparkling. Nobody else has that chill. Yet the party has been transformed. In an unexpected way. A good way.

That’s how you differentiate writers. The ones that can enter the room and light up the space. And the ones that only do that when they enter into their world. Where everything, every card, every sense of joy, every precision, every spirit, every meaning, spells itself out into the page, while leaving nothing left in real life, but the empty container of curious mind without social skills. As writers, they both trascend, as it’s in reading where you build the immaculate communion of two minds, and evolve into the possibilities of creating yet another story, yet another tale, yet another creative outburst.

Van Dyke según Panofsky

You can write about anything. Stories, however, represent a different kind of writting. Everyone writes in their own terms. Art too can be narrated. Text lives beyond literature, and it may be printed on any given matter, in any given surface, for any given purpose.

Ernst Gombrich, Art historian

The Story of Art. Gombrich has influence the narrative of art. Up to the point in which the character of Moo Pak understood that these four characters were bound to be mentioned in a stream of thought, at any given time, to transfer a profound reference to something condensed in tiny hint. Context provides the first field of action. If you are outside of it, the sense of it slips by. And you go on. And so does the inintial intention of that given thought. So going back to capture them, is a matter of being able to rewind time. To back up. To read again. To read. For the first time. An author you don’t know, but now have a purpose to pursue.

ALLS

Monday… once again

It’s a wheel turning. A day in, a day out. And what for? That’s the real issue. The focus on something worth be-ing. And that is achieved in a long process of questioning yourself. Questioning the learnings in your education, in the system, in society. And still, there is no right answer.

Things are tough. And we are dealing with stuff in our very own personal circumstances. The things within our heads. The voices that speak just to us. And the deamons.

But somehow, the struggle within is just a one man show. Or an insider’s job. There is something of us in every conspiracy. And the opposite two. The white angel and the red devil that inhabit our elbows. The duality starts right there. And you are stuck in the middle.

There is no clear alternative but to go on. And find the inspiration in every step along the way. Every step with the confidence that it is taking you places. Places you need to attend to. To show up. And deliver a good version of yourself. Maybe so by inspiring trust. Or building it. Or recovering it. It’s still a massive effort to get out and do your thing. Unless you’re in the zone. But that takes work. And time. And effort.

I’m close to that feeling. The zone is close by. And I’m ready to make that final sprint.

Or this initial drive.

Let’s start the week with this first step: Monday.

ALLS

Ain’t no script for you in Hollywood

Denial letters will keep you going

When am you going to write a script? You think all the script you’ll get for you are going to be as good as «Boys N the Hood»? Hollywood ain’t got no scripts for you. Unless you wanna do bullshit. You can write songs like you write, you can write a movie.

John Singleton to Ice Cube

Representation will not come to you just as mainstream drive. You need to present a case for yourself. You got to do that part of the job. It’s not going to happen just because you think it would be fair. You need to make it happen. You.

The singularity of everyone’s perspective is determined by the uniqueness of our experience, from our very own little point of view. We are the active actors of the development of our vision. And no one else is going to pave the way for you.

I know this shit from way back when. And I’ve never come out myself. I’ve held on to something else. A lame excuse that holds to my very own insecurities to avoid the stepping into the abyss drill. And I’m pretty sure this shit ain’t working, because no one has taken that step for me. As only I can.

As only I should.

Damn, it’s a hard shit.

I feel for the feeling of the underrepresented. Their voices haven’t been heard. They don’t get the chance mainstream stories are depicting. But who’s to change that. The scriptwriters write about what know. About what works. About their own little formulas. The establishement works like that because that how it got established. Something else is up for the up and coming voice within you. And if you are searching for recognition, maybe you should try searching within to find your truth, your soul, your arguments. And from there on, built the narrative that represent the stories you wish you had. The truth you would like to see on the screen. And then you have the type of shit that would look in the character you are playing, in the scenes that you are directing, or in the films you are producing.

Open the door. Assume the responsibilities. Act upon them. Write your own shit. Walk your own talk. Stop complaining to the world, and start showing up with your own voice.

Start with the first.

Start today.

ALLS

The lazily mood and moves of cats

Seldom slow pace is a trait

Nowadays everything needs to be super fast. Super quick. It’s as if we need to disregard the pace of time, the different levels of indiference, if really consider that it’s all relative, according to Eistein, even speed itself. So where are we trying to go at this pace?

Slow down, your are moving too fast, sings Paul Simon. It’s rebelious. But also a sign of trait. A kind of mood. A way of looking at life. Like cats do. Or sloths, to bring it home to a protected reference species from my own little tropical country: Costa Rica.

I used to yawn evertime I was about to compete in a track and field competition. Or right before the whistle sound in futbol game. It was a sign of concentration. It was part of an inconcious routine. This happens to cats, as described by the narrator in Woo Pak:

It moves with such confidence, he said, that the world seems to belong to it. It moves lazily, he said as we approached the ponds. It moves quietly. It is as if its whole body was nothing but an eye, an ear. Sometimes, he said, you will see it yawn, perhaps as a sign of nerves, perhaps only out of a massive indifference.

Gabriel Josipovici, Woo Pak

But it was a latter reference which really caught my attention towards cat’s attitude towards the fleeting pray. They take no pain or thought in wasting time after the prey has scaped a sudden unsuccesful attempt.

The mature cat, he said, does not waste any effort on what has not been caught or what, he realises, is not going to be caught. It is as if, the prey gone, even if he has been stalking it for a considerable length of time, he is able instantly to forget about it.

Gabriel Josipovici, Woo Pak

This is a superpower. It’s also what builds up resilience in competitive sports, and even more in the case of a 9, in futbolartistry, as it is scoring he’s supposed to be excelling at. When you’ve missed a chance, you’ll score the next one. You are sure of it. You must forget as soon as possible. Waste no time in anything realted to the past. But rather build upon the next opportunity to strike. And make it happen.

ALLS

People frightened of silence

Moo Pak ins and out

I’m walking along with this book like a walk in a park with a conversationalist. I’m steping in and out cause I need to come back to it, and then I feel the rush of comming here to write. It’s an exercise I’ve been forced to do by the fact that I cannot jot down a single scribble on the pages, as I am used to, because the book is borrowed. I need to give it back, eventually, as I got it. And it is in impecable conditions.

Nobody imposed this on me. I did. It’s always you who drive things around. In or out. It’s all in your head anyway. And you categorize the exercise. You make it happen so we understand the feeling of where this system is going. The personal system you own set of microcomponents, soul, body and shit… make up for. You are a complete social ecosystem. Yet, you still are just on your own, among the masses of an interconnected society.

So for quite some days I’ve had this urge to go back to Moo Pak to write about this. Silence. Solitude. Being with yourself. But as it turns out, the book has this beautiful constant voice that keeps talking and walking, and there is no stopping. It’s a single thread of a thought that connects logically with the next, and so on, and so forth. Sudenly, I don’t feel alone.

I do the same. This is how I write. No matter the intention. I just show up and start. And I’ve become obsessed with this. It’s time with myself. Alone. In silence. Just meeting the point of interconnectivity with my fingertips, my voice, unheard, within my head. Does anybody knows where this is going? No. And that’s no problem.

The problem is I leave map from Donosti to as a page marker. It’s a bit chunky but it does the job. It does less damage than leaving a pen, which I will avoid doing in this case, as I would like to spill ink, or some shit like that. You know that’s always a chance. Specially with a borrowed item. You are constantly on the verge of messing up. I know. We all know. It’s the pressure of staying consistant, and logical, and sane. We fool ourselves to stay on the game. And it’s there, a little bit on the edge, glancing at the scene.

In any case, what I was trying to say is that every time I go back to that point in the book where I last left my reading, I need to be able to go back to the point where Woo Pak left that last intense message I needed to come back to. To make a point. To deliver this other thought. Writers do that. I’ve heard them say it when they show up in that other state of mind you get yourself into when you are speaking for an audience. And then you are no longer a writer, but also an entertainer. Publicly addressing crowds, sometimes even larger than 9 people.

So when I go back to read I’m not in the page where the last message that signal my writing spirit erupted, so I need to go back to the last two or three pages, in order to get back in track with a stream of consciousness. So I do. And then I wonder what I was looking for. For everything turns out to be truth. Slightly more intense in places I hadn’t wondered upon. And I keep going back, maybe, to find what my past reading found that now is eluding me. And I wonder if I put then, on this second reading, the Donosti map a page earlier than the last time I read, because I’d be already signaling the place where I needed to come back to, to write, not to keep reading.

So you see, Woo Pak becomes like this pleasent conversion of time. I can move back and forth this stream, as time should allow to do, for any given timeline. But we are always so focused on going forward, we sometimes disregard the fact that time also has that negative ride: backwards.

And this also why I don’t feel alone anymore. I found a place in which I can excercise this going back. And I am enjoying myself. In this silent mode. Everytime Woo Pak kicks me out of that book, and into this one.

I keep reading back and back and get entangled with that direction of the book. And I’m already hooked. I’m back to the point that I last wrote about. About typing in a computer or typing in a typewriter. As an exercise to rewrite a single page. Over and over. Until you have cleaned it up. Something I never do. As write directly on the cloud. And almos never edit. Which is my own little purgatory.

It’s the sense of writing. The interconection with reading. How they are both there. The silences. Of the book. But also of this other time: the writing one. Even if it is closer to something you may relate to, like reading a post. Or like reading an actual book. Just to organize your time around something physical. Not just a screen. A real human interaction. I also write on paper. It nos just gives me pleasure, it also sits on a different table than writing on the computer or right into the page with an Olivetti. I used to own a typewritter. Not anymore.

The labour of scribes and editors and printers and proof-readers, [ ] Because of the work of these dedicated people, he says, we can now pick up the words of singular men and women and read them and listen to them and question them and live with them in greater intimacy than we do with our own spouses or partners. For a persona like myself, he says, with no country and no language to call his own, a life without Sophocles and Dante and Donne and Stevens would be intolerable.

Gabriel Jsopivici, Moo Pak

In fact I came into this writing exercise today to speak about the silence in books. The silence in writing. The intimacy of being alright with yourself. How writing and reading is part of it. How the author is aligned with Proust about the kind of special silence books have. And I’ve gone back too far back, to point out he craft of those who rescued the ancient voices of the past. Others burned books and libraries. Entire cultures. Washed away and mistreated by our current western ways, disregarding our infliction of damage in this bluring effect.

The most terrible thing that has happen to people today, he says, is that they have grown frightened ofsilence. Instead of seeking it as a friend and as a source of renewal they now try in every way they can to shut it out.

Gabriel Jsopivici, Moo Pak

This is has grown worst nowadays. Silence is not there anymore. Everyone’s got some source of continuos distraction in the mobile phone. It’s not even a complete song. It’s a message to keep you hooked to a short spasm of blabering. Something intense as pill, or distractful enough to catch your attention. We are switcing channels all the time. Endlessly. Which leaves no space for silence. And that’s not just a thing to miss, but also the source of being alright with yourself. No matter what. Books, silence, writting, it’s all part of the source of inmense power we have refill ourselves. We can bring it up as a routine to heal. Walks. To the mountain. Walks with a friend, with different kinds of friends, to align and talk, and to share the silences in between.

ALLS

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.