He's a writer, you know. Text of the earth is what composes him. It's his being, his all. Without his words he means nothing; he has no definition, and that would be the end of him.

It started when he was a little boy. His mother, a sharp brazen woman, taught him how to read out of sheer necessity. She never encouraged active writing. He did it anyway. Fearing that if he did not allow the little characters lying dormant, sleeping, inside his small mind to free themselves from their non-textual cage, he wrote them onto paper. He made them live, and he did it well. So well in fact, that at the age of 15 he was able to get himself published, his first novelette.

His face, his person, is of little significance to the essential points of this story. What matters are the words, and so he is only recognized by the reading world as Goldafi. That name, the arrangement of letters, an act for which he is now renowned, is synonymous with the written word. No one can read a book and not think of the great literature of Goldafi. Anything written is in itself a true thing, can exist on the page, and as soon as the page ends that thing, if not real in life, will cease to exist. Goldafi knew this, and that is why he was always relentlessly writing, forever writing. He was not so cruel as to deny his characters life. To stop writing was to stop living, and so his characters poured forth unceasingly from his literary brain. To say it consumed him is not enough; he was his own work.

However, one day, the unthinkable happened. What, may you ask, could have happened to an old man like Goldafi who spends his days writing?

Like any man in text or real life, Goldafi had need of food almost as much as he had need of text to live, and this was what forced him from his house atop a mountain one day. It does not want explaining how he came down the mountain, or how long it took him'some narratives do not bother with trifling matters'but when Goldafi reached the mill to buy some grain, he made the mistake of entering the factory floor and lost both hands in the process.

He recovered quickly for an old man, but his hands were gone. He was disintegrating without his writing, and he knew it. Yet atop that lonely mountain in his little house, Goldafi did not ask for anyone's help. His work was his and his alone, and the influence of someone else would make him less than he was, never truly the artist and never again his own writer, or his own being.

And so he struggled on for endless days, trying to write a beginning with his two stumps but never quite succeeding, the panic rising in his chest as he began to realise that it was useless, that without his hands he could not transfer thought to text, and without his words he would die in an end starved of happiness.

I am a great follower of Goldafi's work, and I understand his persistent belief that all form of life has a textual and tangible beginning and end, that words on the page and the beings in those words can exist as fully as any real, living creature. I did not want Goldafi to be lost, to disintegrate under the weight of a lack of words

As long as word exists, the author exists. The power of this has been well utilized over many centuries, but it has been used secretively, not being truly acknowledged as a method by which many authors live, solely in their work.

Every story has a beginning, middle, and end, just as Goldafi does. His birth was as a little boy with a sharp brazen mother who taught him how to read out of sheer necessity. His middle was a brilliant career as a master of literature, bearing a name synonymous with the written word and his involvement in it, his life existing only through the power of words. And his end is now, at the end of this text, as Goldafi, who, had he been a person in real life, living and breathing, would have been ended on paper.

Goldafi ends here, being given the honour of text ending just as his life ends. His disintegration is quick and painless, because that is what is written, his life the length of a page and a half. If I had eyes in my text I am sure I could almost see him now, the power of writing taken from him, the power to exist lost, and disintegrating in the rising wind atop his mountain home, if, we, but, and, the, breaking away from his dying figure, a written image composed of endless compilations of letters, and whisked away to the pen of another new writer eager to capture the magic of a mixture of words, the essence of writing. He unravels like knitted wool before my textual eyes, and I seize a few escaping words, weave them together into my own legible story, and fly away on my carefully linked magic carpet of

Text, existence
Goldafi, ends,
Begins, disintegrates,
Sharp, brazen,
Master, literature,
Stumps, words,
Knitted, wool,
Fly, away, carpet

to make my way back home.

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