You amass, organize, bind the pages on which, throughout several weeks and many hours of forced solitude, painful effort, and incisive doubts, you’ve been recording letters, syllables, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs saved or later discarded and conceived of again, always with effort, besieged by all kinds of uncertainty. You have waged an unequal battle with your abilities through which you have tried to find and express some sense, at least a trace of sense, to the most burning mystery of existence: How do you make a life, or, in reality, how do you undo it, pluck the leaves away, trampled, dragged by the gales of the irrevocable, tyrannical circumstances?
As the pages run through your hands, in the somewhat mechanical exercise of numbering them, you are surprised by a feeling of distance, almost of remoteness, capable of causing you a sharp uneasiness that you can’t quite explain. You even suffer a strange reaction in your skin toward the fibrous texture of the rough paper, worn down by so much handling throughout these days. You understand that now nothing, not even matter, survives the feeling of belonging, of unfolding and revelation that accompanied you the whole time you were typing with the prehistoric Underwood you inherited from your father, and later when you struck through what you had typed, noted, cursed your impotence on those same papers.
Nothing remains anymore of the acrobatic searches and the possible meetings that cornered you when you tried to turn into a recovered present the acts and thoughts of past and carried out lives of someone you baptized with the same name repeatedly. Again and again the same name, although it was another Man to whom you had granted the slippery gift of reincarnation or return or reoccurrence or just the lucky possibility of the confluence of the atavistic fragments of lives sentenced to be attracted by History’s powerful magnet, earthly powers, and the unappealable reign of time. Again and again, a being born of your obsessions, to whom you had given attitudes, precise thoughts, so close to your own real and written life in that the borders between what was created and what was lived became confused for you in a jumble of properties that at some point struck you as an unfaithful albeit innocuous replacement of which, nonetheless, you could not and did not fully want. Because its quality as a lie constitutes its saving and inalienable condition, its essence as creation, its value as possible truth, many times even more accurate than the possible truth or truths. From within yourself, you molded that historic and atemporal being. Clinging to the present, you wrote the past until you lost all notion of the limits of the permanent and the transpired. But, in the process of creation, you never lost the remaining consciousness that while you were converting the past into the present, what was written immediately became part of that same past: something irreversible, fleeting, purely irrecoverable, that ran between your fingers and that you took leave of by the magnificent fact of fixing it and later seeing it go off into the distance, like a ghost ship, an apparition whose shapes got mixed up for you as if you were watching History and time through the transparent veil of a teardrop.
You had arrived together at that point, from which each one would continue alone. That is the point of cleaving that makes you suffer the curse of the demiurge that has consumed itself, rib by rib, to cut out new postures and discovers how, in the end, it is merely an inert trunk lying in some corner of time. Although, you are almost surprised, your feet remain, and feet are the path.
It comforts you to recall, in contrast, that as you were shaping the story of the live wanderings of the character whom you decided to name Antoni Barral, the act of creation of those other lives, one and several simultaneously, had offered you a pleasant feeling of power. When writing, at the very least, you could choose, shape, save, or discard, with the power that in your real and possible life you had never been given, with the capacity to decide, in the past and the future, that you had been able to get much enjoyment from. The existences of Antoni Barral, if in reality he had them on that plane of physical and historic events that is known as reality, in his ways of manifesting himself and carrying himself perhaps had not seemed like the probable creation they now were, although you are convinced that they would have functioned under the same rules. Because nothing or almost nothing would have depended on an individual power of selection, of free will exercised freely, and less still on a conscious and voluntary construction. You know well that in the reality of the possible lives of one or several bodily Antonis, other forces, remote, powerful, and castrating, would have been the ones in charge of leading them and sculpting their real existences, if they had been real. As yours has been shaped: from above and from outside, with a perverse reduction in your freedom of decision, without any margin for error and rectification. With the overwhelming lack of space to redo what has been done and program what is to be done.
The conviction that only from writing comes the possibility of building others on the basis of what you have been and are served causes you to try to distance yourself from yourself, see yourself from the perspective that ended up being revealing, simultaneously pleasant and painful. Because your questionable imaginative capacity is informed by your lived experiences and what you’ve experienced through books, limited and recurring, and, as such, contaminated. Because of that, at the same time you move forward, you amassed pages, read, had gone perceiving this clarifying distance, because you were turning into someone else, freeing yourself from yourself and in some way, completing yourself through these others. Gaining freedom. Is that writing? Trends fading into one another? Giving up yourself in favor of what is created? Trying to recompose what has no possibility for restoration? Manipulating the clumsy spectacle of a lived life, without any possible previous design, and transforming it into a more benevolent and logical creation, in some way less human and as such, more satisfactory? Playing at being free? Even, being free?