With a fountain pen

I have written with a pen for a long time, starting in late high school. I remember ordering letterhead at the time. I created my motto with the help of an English teacher who knew Latin. Semper ipse ero. I will always be myself. Or the same? That doesn’t equals. At the time, I probably didn’t understand the difference. Today, I still think about it. I was transported by a dancing writing that took as many paths as the mind could map.

They say that disciplining yourself to write well can cure or protect you from all illnesses. I probably wanted this when I wrote the first drafts of my first five published texts. Afterwards, I transposed them to the computer. I would have to speak of six texts because the first one, Le Triomphe des Eaux, was a long litany of outpourings following a short but incisive first love horror story.

When one is young at heart, everything is beautifully a drama. Of this text, only a few lines remained in La Vie dure.

Writing by hand can be compared to walking carefully through a labyrinth to find the way out. The words take time to form and look like so many hieroglyphs propelled by the unconscious motivation of creativity. And then there is the wrist fatigue that sets in, forcing you to slow down or pause the pace.

Since I’m left-handed, my hand sometimes absorbs ink that has yet to dry. I wonder if Arabic-speaking left-handers are not cleaner... although the left hand, in their case, it seems... at least in the Muslims. I mix everything up, confined to biases that spontaneous writing does not prevent.

In my university days, I wrote long letters to a friend, long, passionate outpourings in which my desire for him was invariably lost in waves destined to crash against an unclimbable cliff.

I didn’t reread it because, in any case, I could only cross out something if I started a new page.

I have always been more spontaneous than that. The computer usually allows me this patience, but not for the texts of these Promenades.

I must now transpose, transform, knead or plow this text in its electronic form even if there is nothing left, will be nothing left of all these texts thrown to my friend, and all these letters I wrote to a cousin, all these novels, and even these words hung here for a while in the eternal of the Internet.

I am and will be only myself. If my soul survives me, I cannot know where it will end up. If it exists only for this moment, it is because it is an unfathomable dream as fragile as the paper on which it is poured.