Paper p0rn (english)

There's one thing I particularly like about Firewatch, which I replayed recently, and which I was keen to get back to after replaying Dishonored too: the manuscripts and printed matter scattered all over the place.

The omnipresence of paper and the written word.

Books. Filing cabinets. Personal letters and notes.

The visible, material, primary presence of information.

What could be more beautiful than a map annotated and expanded over the years and by contributors?

What could be more exciting than a binder full of secret information about things and people, as if life were a spy movie?

Quoi de plus cool qu'un bureau chargé en notes, en schémas, en lettres manuscrites ou tapées à la machine, où l'on a, sans médiation, sans besoin d'aucune machine, sa pensée sous les yeux ?

*

I had my "Moleskine notebook" period 15 years ago, when I rediscovered the pleasure of scribbling, drawing, taking notes as I went along... Many of my notes on interactive fiction, music, literary texts and personal life decisions can be found there.

Nevertheless, since the early 2000s, we've moved into the world of e-mail, Google docs, Evernote and so on, for good and for ill.

I'd love to exchange letters, notes, sketches, annotated documents, with a few friends, about anything, no matter what, just for the pleasure of getting back to the written word for a while, to that thing that defines the human being almost as much as articulated language: the act of tracing signs by hand, understandable by others.

Nevertheless, I have to face the facts: it's all dead. A few weeks ago I started writing a letter, on paper, to a friend who runs a music label, with whom I chat regularly on Messenger and Telegram, and who shares – it's generational – my nostalgia for the good old days of letters and flyers, catalogs and paper in general. And I found myself, after two pages of disserting on the very meaning of sending letters to each other, plunged into an unbelievable depression that I only got rid of by tearing it all up and resolving to continue writing him e-mails or DMs.

*

On the other hand, it's possible for me to live out these paper fantasies in my private artistic life, to call it that; I already have a few filing cabinets at home, where I keep old notes, drawings, memos, scribbled addresses, photocopies of this or that - whether it concerns my musical life, the I.F. or anything else.

In the same way, I have a Filofax where I record the masses I pay for this or that deceased person, this or that intention, and where I have as exaustive a listing as possible of all the people or groups of people I've come into contact with in my life, likely to be the subject of intentions for mass, prayer or fasting in their favor. I like to see a sheet of paper with names, dates and little boxes to tick. There's definitely something of a bureaucrat about me. I might as well put this aspect of my personality to good use in my spiritual and artistic life. Because life is both a game and a serious struggle, requiring method and documentation.