An experimental transcript

Note. The editor has had the good fortune of finding a whole box of handwritten index cards and various folded papers (from printed screenshots to boarding passes) in the storage of an institute. Upon closer investigation, it has become evident that the mixed contents of the box make up one single document. Difficult to decipher because of a messy handwriting, the manuscript poses further challenges to the reader also because it lacks a pre-established order of its fragments. Simply uploading here high-quality facsimile images of the box contents would not have solved the problems of legibility and coherence. As an intermediary solution, the editor has opted to introduce below a selection of scanned images and transcribed text from the found box. The transcript is intended to be read as a document sample, as well as an attempt at manuscript reconstruction, following the original in the author's hand as closely as possible: penciled in words in the otherwise black ink text are transcribed in brackets, whereas curly braces signal erasures, peculiar marks or illegible parts on the index cards. Despite shifts in handwriting styles, whereby letters appear sometimes extremely rushed and distorted in multiple idiosyncratic ways, the experts consulted unanimously declared that the manuscript was most likely authored by one and the same person. To date, the author remains unknown. Finally, capital letters used in random order as headings for clusters of images and transcribed text remind the reader of the the eclectic character of the manuscript and of the subjectivity at work in this transcript: the fragments selected and thus ordered follow the editor's best choice. The reader, as wiki user, is invited to sensibly re-organize the fragments and in so doing to contribute to a possible future electronic edition of the whole box.

q

I've been running with a word in my mouth, running with this burning untitled shape and I just can't spit it out. Spit it with phlegm from a balcony, kiss it in a mirror, brush it away one morning. I've been running with a word in my mouth, running...

… it must have been only last month that I began half-chanting-half-mumbling this looped sequence of sentences on the staircase I regularly take down to work and back up to dream, yet it feels as if it were half a century ago. Tunneling through my memory, my tongue begins burning again and so I recollect that the subject matter was an agonizing, unutterable obsession I needed to sort out things with most urgently. Back then I knew no better way than to keep bringing it up obliquely until it would have chemically dissolved itself into my blood or evaporated through my skin pores. To whisper the obsession away, I thought not entirely so naïvely, following a peculiar kind of vengeful logic, by emptying words of their pocket contents on a spiraling staircase. An anti-incantation, a verbal overdose, a semantic dilution or reduction – for the first time, I was ready to inflict harm on words! [And I am sure, the thought has crossed other lucid minds, too.]

n

During the first several days, as I was rushing up and down the stairs like a Tasmanian devil, swirling those same sentences in my expunction ritual, little did I notice that the brown marbled staircase had a ravenous appetite for all my sound making and fuss: it cushioned the clump of my footsteps, it absorbed the vibrations of my vocal chords and of my fingers drumming on the handrail. All this unusual business must have carried on untroubled for some time until that Wed. [?] morning when I tried approaching the employee at the reception desk in the hideously large building where I live with a question about elevator safety. I may take the elevator once in a blue moon, but I could not ignore the new disquieting note I had been reading on all elevator doors that week:

m a k e s u r e t h e e l e v a t o r c a r i s s t a t i o n e d o n y o u r f l o o r b e f o r e s t e p p i n g i n

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                           / one gorgeous whale \
                        my memory's biomorphic shadow
                   can anyone write in woodworm language?
               how to teach the Cyrillic alphabet to woodworms?
            how many hypotheses to /re-stabilize\ one's situation?   
       how many pyramids one on top of the other to the \coma/ surface?
 the denser the pyramid net, the more confusing the situation. true/false\fiction

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...

--Ospal (talk) 09:27, 19 November 2015 (CET) Here is where the transcript ENDS, where the black text lines dribble back into the box. For information on document location or transcription method, kindly contact the editor.