i can sense a revolution

Writing is serious business. We live in a world where so few men have letters and all the others have a soul… what should we do to this heavenly gift which we have been given? Well, it is necessary to understand the mysteries behind the act of writing. For from the hands of the one who writes drip drops of truth – of his truth, the truth he invented in his strange head of writing man, the one he diligently forged in his backyard – and it is necessary to acknowledge that, without the outstanding figure of the one who composes, all the showiest speeches would have stayed asleep in the mind’s rear, and nothing was made that was made. But that is not all. It is necessary to understand that, when a man writes, he puts himself bare. And neither should it surprise that letters are indeed this thing of reprobate name, rejected in every corner, and that people would cross over the street if they caught sight of a(n) – impious – writer coming towards them. It is that sometimes the scripture hurts customs – though there are some who innocently attribute the origin of all conventions to the word. But when one writes, when he decides to undress himself from his good apparel so as to bathe in ink, when he translates the fresh signs of the soul (he does not own) to cast them over the paper, anything shakes between the worlds. It is enough that any careless reader be willing to read him… And then it is a cataclysm. A vertiginous torrent of words, ideas, symbols, voices violently comes upon him and assaults his ears, his eyes, leaps from the books and grabs the lips of the one who recites, the mature lips that in a cold and dark corner of any library pulsate, fidget uttering, prophesying, greedily searching for meaning, weaving that very meaning, and etching by fire in his senses the message that he will carry on his fresh flesh as a sign of belonging. And when finally the reader finds himself to be equally undressed from head to foot, taken by the same contented shame that led the writer to write, he, possessed by staggering hatred, will avenge on the world that had put such cruel a trap on his path, he will hatch the most macabre plan in his reader’s mind, he will finally replace the book back to its dusty place hoping that likewise someone else find it, open it, and share the same pains, that eventually someone equally drinks from this same cup.

In May 14^th, 2011.

Translated and adapted to English language by Mateus Matias Pinheiro, in May 16^th, 2011.