On I go, trying to write about uninteresting things, perhaps heralding a new era of boredom as a literary movement. Today I started out with very big writing, which after just two lines has already reduced considerably in size. Why was that? Because I began thinking about how to finish my sentence, wanting to be sure it made sense. Conclusion: I’m incapable of paying attention—what little attention I have—to more than one thing at a time. Here, the priority is the handwriting and not the prose, which means that making no sense is perfectly acceptable. So stop worrying and start forming those letters, boy: nose to the grindstone. It’s not easy to get used to the idea of not making sense. Although, really, sense is nothing but a complicated social construct. I suspect that last sentence is entirely untrue, but I can’t let myself start philosophizing now, about that or anything else. I have to concentrate on my handwriting; that’s the point of all this. I have to let my inner self change and grow under the magical influence of graphology. Big writing, big me. Small writing, small me. Beautiful writing, beautiful me.

November 2

It’s been a few days since I last did these graphological exercises, but there are good reasons for that: whether because of circumstances or because the exercises are working, lately I’ve been feeling motivated to do other things. The most important of these things, at least in my eyes, is the half-dreaming, half-waking, and almost subterranean task of trying to revive my imaginative abilities and therefore my writing. In practice, this has simply meant making the final revisions to a short story I wrote some years ago, putting it in an envelope, and sending it off to see if anyone wants to publish it. I’ve also been busy in the field of international relations, catching up with some correspondents abroad, and this involved the far-from-easy (in Colonia) task of getting ahold of some good-quality photocopies. What would have been wrapped up within a couple of hours in a civilized place, here required three days.

My handwriting’s terrible today, more of an agitated scrawl. It’s intelligible, however, and many of the features I’ve been trying to improve are now there without my having to think about them. Some need more work, though. That’s why I have to keep writing slowly about uninteresting things: so that through patient repetition my writing develops the characteristics I think it needs in order to be completely legible again, and so that, in parallel, my behavior develops the characteristics this new, hypothetically acceptable handwriting would reveal in a graphological examination. And then I could declare myself “the artist of my own destiny.” This may be a rather grandiose ambition, but sometimes it’s no bad thing to aim high, especially in a field where everything colludes to make you aim low, and where mediocrity is what really impresses people.