Vos te imaginaste un día una historia. La historia, o más bien su incepción, surgió de repente. Y vos la viste pasar. Volar.
Se encendió una conexión neuronal nueva. Y en esa conexión algo extraño sucedió. Una imagen que sólo en tu cabeza existió se planteó como realidad alternativa. Como posibilidad.
De ahí se tiró una línea argumental que funcionó de manera autónoma con un único espectador: vos.
Y desde ahí viste desvelarse una historia extraordinaria que lo arreglaba todo en su sitio. Aquello que habías querido decir en el contexto de la cosa que más te ha ocupado el tiempo mental. El sentido de tu ser. La cuestión con la que querés cambiar el mundo. De pronto está ahí, desanudando el porvenir. Didacticamente.
De pronto te parás y despertás. Ya no estás en el campo en el que la idea trabaja autonomamente. El resto de tus funciones vitales encendieron toda la maquinaria de la vigilia y los trabadores de la fábrica volvieron a sus puestos, todavía adormilados, pero generando un ruido ensordecedor para aquella brillante idea onírica que lo resolvía todo.
Si no corrés a apuntarlo en algún sitio, la clarividencia se esfuma. Y el aire se lleva consigo la ilusión. Al rato ni te acordás. Ni te preocupa. Otra cosa ocupa tu cabeza. Y no hay nada más que hacer. Quizás volver a dormir. Y soñar. Seguir.
What to do when you have to do something else. Procastinate. That’s my life. I come here when I should be elsewhere, doing I don’t even remember what. So instead, I keep myself busy trying to figure out the time to get to the point. In the mean time, this.
It’s not an excuse. It’s rather a way out. Or a way in. What else should I be worried about if not something else trully more meaningful to me. I should be addressing my pressing concerns. And delivering the perfomance I aim to have if I get to the point right away. Something that leads to something else. I’m willing to take the stand. I’m leaping already.
It’s a gamechanging time. All the time. Everywhere. And I’m just getting started. But the ball is moving so fast I don’t seem to have the timing right. The ball has passed and I’ve lost the magic… unless the magic is there, still, and I’m just a few adjustements off, a few more drills away, to conquer back the state of mind needed for this performance to endure.
I’m ready to rock. Still, I need to do something else. I’ll get back to this when that’s done. But I wanted to make sure to give me this sigh.
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.
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.
«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.
