Playing with words
playing with worlds
It is very hard to quantify how much we work when a lot of the work takes place inside your head. Sometimes, it’s even hard to remember the work you did when you look around and can’t find any remaining proof of the progress. All you see is the stuff usually distracting you from the work, pulling you towards the mundane existence of the physical things and the physical shores. The eyes are the filters from where your days go through to land on your memory. You try to capture your thoughts, scribbling out loose sentences on notebooks or text files, sketching lines and brush strokes trying to put something down on paper for when you try, and mostly fail, to recount to yourself how your days went down and how much work you’ve done.
You’ve accomplished so much, and yet it often feels it’s not enough.
The play
In this virtual Social Media World we live in, I get confused about where I said what, mixing it up and assuming everybody saw all the outlets, all the sources, and know everything I’ve said and done. This impression that the World is always connected, twenty four seven, should be facilitating our interaction with one another, but it’s making us forget how to reach out, how to open up and how to connect. I forget to send emails (which were actual letters or phone calls in the beginning) to invite my friends to my public events, assuming they saw it posted on Facebook, on twitter or on Instagram. By the same logic, I post something in Portuguese for my Brazilian readers and I forget that I haven’t talked about that anywhere in English or any other language for my international audience. This, of course, is the point where I wanted to arrive. I don’t think I have mentioned here, in English, about the play.
What play?
Bá and I wrote a play that was performed for almost the entire second half of 2008, called Os 3 Mundos (the 3 Worlds).
That’s not it. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned that in another newsletter, probably at the time. I’m really proud of the spectacle the production put on, and as I brought a lot of my friends to see it, I was pleased how much discussion it inspired.
But.
I’m thinking about this new story, one character in particular being the starting point, so I’m trying to come up with a story to put this character in, and at some point a few months back while reading a non-fiction book about a particular time in history, I remember this other play I wrote back in 2006, which was hidden inside a sketchbook, and I decide to dig up this sketchbook and check this play again.
I’m thinking there might be something on this play that might work with this character I want to use on the story I want to do.
I found the right sketchbook. I re-read that script, saw that it had one of two sketches of one of the characters (I remember sketching other characters, so I must have done that on a separate paper or on another sketchbook), and decided to type the script, to have a digital copy and put the sketchbook safely back into the box with the other ghosts of sketchbook past.
I think I was right after all. There is something in this play I can use now. I might have to change it a little, update it, maybe expand it on some areas to fit the setting of the story, but it might work.
So I turn on the printer and I print out this script.
If I don’t have a physical copy of it, to scribble, to write, add and sketch on the margins, it is very hard to quantify how much I work when a lot of the work takes place inside my head.
Be safe. Be kind. Be curious
Pa-ZOW!
Fábio Moon
Moon Base, São Paulo
October 25th, 2021