On Writing

Jorge Luis Borges

Every page you add to the notebook in which you write
is one that you take away from the secrets of your soul.

Now that I have reached the first terminus of my stories about Asia, I would like to write two lines of reflection.

If only for the coincidence that, a few days ago, August 24 was the 112th anniversary of the birthday of Jorge Luis Borges, one of the literary myths of my life, from the early years in which I devoured pages. And also, I think, for all those who love to read.

Borges remains a legendary character, who became blind by dint of consuming his eyes on the pages read and written.

It was 1941, in the Mar del Plata, when he wrote one of his most famous stories, that “Library of Babel”, in which he imagined the whole world as an immense Library that exists ab aeterno, in the figure of the eternity of the world and in which man is an imperfect librarian.

It's not easy to delve into the philosophical mind and high style of the Argentinian writer, but once you have read a page you never leave again.

 

I believed for a long time in the power of the written word, then there was a void, and Photography came to fill that silence.

I was amazed, myself, at the pleasure it gave me to invent these stories, a pleasure I had forgotten.

The invention, in fact.

Photography is a deep passion in which I found the best way to express my feelings, especially thanks to the color.

Photography is not so far from writing, and not only for an etymological factor – it's no coincidence that there is “story-telling”.

But, I admit, I've always been lacking in this.

For me, Photography remains a unique and unrepeatable act.

Everything is resolved in the instant in which the diaphragm opens and engulfs the world and then closes again and falls back into total darkness.

I would never be able to shoot without the shutter sound, because it reminds me every time that gate opens and closes and everything is no longer the same.

 

But all this is the real world with which I relate and I look for its shape, color, composition, feeling.

Writing, on the other hand, is pure invention. Everything is created by me.

But if with photography I try to write my feelings, with writing I try to show my imagination.

Everyone who has read my stories agreed on the visual character of my style, and I'm happy with that.

After all, it's inevitable, I am and will always be a photographer, and whoever is does not stop being one for a moment: even when we walk, eat or sit in front of the sea.

It's not the camera that makes us photographers but the desire and the ability, more or less, to see in a certain way.

I think that each of us constantly imagines photographic; which is one of the greatest gifts given to us by Photography: giving meaning to what we see, an order, a beauty.

As the philosopher Merleau-Ponty said, “the vision is the immediate presence of the world”, in our perception the miracle of the visible and the invisible is realized.

The fiction (like the title of one of Borges' most famous collections of short stories) of writing are instead the open door to my unconscious; just in the way they are born, after days and days in which I think and rethink the joints of the story and collect information, and then almost vomit on the page, word after word, the whole story from the beginning to the last sentence.

It's fascinating.

This is why I love the details, as if they were photographs, to make those filaments of the unconscious real.

I have no particular secrets nor am I a writing genius, but when friends ask me for advice I always try to focus on the sensuality of the story, understood as the ability to use every possible sense.

It's like saying that in a good photo of a market you should be able to smell the perfumes, the hum of people, the tactility of the surfaces.

I am convinced that a good story should do the same: the reader must be able to “see”, “hear” the sounds, “touch” with his own hand.

A sort of third dimension of the word as was the perspective for painting.

This is the greatest pleasure I get from writing fictional stories, unlike articles or essays.

These few lines of mine just want to pay the respect that is due to writing because, like any form of art, with it, we tell ourselves to the world, in the hope of being understood and loved.

But this was expressed in a sublime way by dear Borges in one of his most beautiful poems for me: “The poetic art”.

“Sometimes in the evenings a face
looks at us from the bottom of a mirror;
art must be like that mirror
that reveals to us our own face.”

And now I am waiting. Let's see where the current leads; I certainly don't want to get off the boat. Write again, looking in the mirror who I am... for better or for worse.

Italian version