The Metamorphosis Over Time (On the Passage of Time VII, Part I)

Denying what we are while our metamorphosis is happening is to deny ourselves in time. But forget it and let's start from the beginning: only with language as a burden; which is already very heavy.

Essay on Writing

The story that traverses this essay is the story of a poetess who wrote verses to no one. This Poetess always knew the outcome: that denied, she would remain; alone, writing verses to no one. If it poured, let it flood; let whatever stood in her way be destroyed. If she was cursed, it would be an attributed curse, not her own.

Note.- This is a complex and enormous text; and this is just the first part. It is also a continuation of “On the Passage of Time”. The idea is to get lost during its reading and within its paintings, because the meaning is strangely intertwined to our combined perception of them. And it is necessary to get lost.

Note 2.- I think and believe in every paragraph written, this is not a disjointed text, perhaps it is very dense and a jungle to be explored, even by me. And it is inspired by several theories that I have read in other jungles.

How to make a language die?

Today—on December 2024—I was going to retake the pencils after two months of neglecting them. Then I decided to go out and get some cigarettes—I'm that distracted and I know it's not my fault—. On the way, I thought about dead languages and how they would become their own oblivion; their own death. Night had already fallen and the moon was shining brightly over the zenith, and I had to struggle to look at it, realizing, I don't know why and for what reason, that the next full moon was coming soon. Instantly, I remembered a romantic letter of mine written a few months ago; there, the moon was a symbol in which a lover suggested to his beloved that if she looked at it, if only she had done so, he would know that she was thinking of him.

Months flew by, and each month I would mention it, the moon, fool of me, realizing that it was a periodic Kafkaesque letter that would happen for thousands of years, but with no two, half the message would be lost periodically ad aeternum in a communication that was not reciprocal. In the next supermoon, I invoked it again, believing that «writing replicates itself because it echoes the message and that, perhaps—I say perhaps because this is still unfolding—as the full moons succeed one another in time, the author becomes foreign after acquire the ability to observe his own past: his oblivion».

By remembering the letter and giving it another interpretation, both, the new interpretation and the letter, will remain with me; but no, that’s not how a language dies: it dies when the moon remains and its symbol mutates or is forgotten; or expressed in its hybrid: it mutates in its oblivion. 

It was after—the after is important here—when the author decided to modify his work, and without changing or adding a single character, it mutated. And, finally, she looked at the moon, seizing the meaning of his letters.

This watercolor no longer exists; its purpose was to burn

So, what are symbols? Or, what are words? And how do we create meaning?

Symbols

If I apply a lemma—to write—to itself, I will begin to create new paths that describe the trace of what is not yet written. That is, writing as auto-essay;

 If the journey were made 

by walking, 

                                      I’d already be walking away

                                             to write it down. 

 If it rains; it rains

                          —and its symbol 

pours down

Poem.- Rain of meaning

The Word, the Symbol, and Their Journey

Words do not vanish; rather, they will beat over time. They face the contingency of their past and their future as words, where they will remain populated with life. They can be static in their past and yet they will revive over and over again in time—with temporal arrow forward—being the life of what was dead—static—. Stories that beat over time, and not beneath the sun, can’t get back to our time without ceasing to beat. It is like saying that what is written has no return, that it never will, but it can continue to be, leaving open its possible return during its rereading.

From our perspective, it is during the transfiguration of the path where we create meaning. The path, its composition; in a no-destination that rewrites itself on other paths. It is our desire to...

“...want to create a bridge, invent its parts, and hold it up so you can cross the pillars of your hell to find yourself.

That's what words are.

—Cross me—then the bridge would say to you. And you'd invent a thousand reasons to go around it and around yourself, because what's on the other side is you.

—I would dare—you'd answer—if I were also there, because it is language that emulates words.”

—Dialogue: Words

We need more than words to imagine a landscape, but once you have it, you can throw words over it. Time is the posterior where its anterior endures. And also one more word thrown over our horizon. The fact that something «makes sense» is a very human representation, because everything is woven into that landscape, even what is not or does not make sense.

With semantics, we define new abstractions, and through abstraction, we define new semantics, without limit in its recursion; where we will weave layer upon layer; «reality» over «reality», and these can be of different natures which we can compose over and mix/merge over them—and isn't this what I'm already doing?

Furthermore, from this framework we can ask ourselves where the possibilities emerge. Let's say yes, let's start with the no.

“Let a kiss be, also what it is and what is not: those are two words. The only way to demonstrate it’s by giving it, while everything else is its abstraction or its semantics of whatever we can imagine, without the need to demonstrate it, being, also its non-words, not necessarily real, but possible.”

Parable.- The no

So, let's continue this journey of the transfiguration of symbols.

brushes temperas from the sky drops over painting from rain blossoms fire Poem.- Conflagration The Pause

Writing about time also implies our interpretation of pause. However, time never stops, it lacks of pause, yet the pause exists—what sense does that make?

Transforming time

into non-time;

in its magnanimous resistance:

its pause; its story.

An sandglass,

absent of it, [sand]

would lose its function

without trembling its meaning.

Poem.- Always and Never

The Story/History (ἱστορία)

Some stories must be written over time before they encounter their collision, whether internal or external. Only then, they will be ruins or pillars. The latter is written in the present tense, but in the future sense. Whoever writes what he thinks, feels or reasons creates the possibility of studying oneself. Whoever creates, also evolves and auto-writes himself, because he is «inventing» his own story.

We have to live part of and then move away from it, reinterpreting it in another time, different from the one in which we have experienced it. Only after we will begin to build or narrate it. It's as if we have to live two stories—the previous and the following—to compose them. I'm not trying to look for an explanation, because it is something that seems to be a symptom of the act of writing. And, yes, as I write this text, I'm already navigating the next story.

Look; as we write, we're already exploring future decisions: the Possibility. When something novel emerges, the act of imagining its future story unfolds its possible contingencies. We are while we will be our future contender. This is why past stories end up looking us in the eyes, because we were previously foreigners visiting them. It is our interest that draws us away from our customs and brings us closer to new worlds: the more interest, the further from home and the more foreign we become. And if «writing» was the foreigner visiting other customs; and if during its rereading—only possible for those who write and read—we find ourselves visiting stories with new perceptions; then it might be that we would always be foreigners as long as we do not describe what we barely scratch when we still do not know it.

“They were there, the poets, versing about love, about kisses and about tenderness when she knew she was a foreigner; and when they saw her, they felt foreign.”
Introduction I, The Untamed Poetess

Definition of History: is the one which holds the property of transforming—or capturing if its arrow of time points backwards, even if it transforms forwards—. That “something” has properties that also belong to us. It's never about how its history ends, but how continues. And, more interestingly, with whom it decides to share or merge during its (re)composition, whether local (in its space) or temporal.

“How to know if a story is gravitational? By placing yourself on its center, its heart (core of cold, heat, life and death) and detonating it; now its parts will be attracted from its past to its next center; with its new N parts and its M gravitational centers. And only afterwards, after their afterwards, they will fall towards them.”
Prologue, The Untamed Poetess

What happens or will happen if we kill her time? It's a big question, question that can be written. Although I lie, it's what would happen to her. So, let her be a poetess; this is and will be her story: the sky of a star.

“This is me, the one who moves through the medium, in the middle of, and within it; not knowing me. I am poetry of nobody and you don't see me because I don't belong (to you). I fly here, I desire, and I am no blackbird, but a woman making this landscape into which I let myself fall to fly over it. And I rise above you. Smiling and unmaking time into pieces that will vanish behind me: in this 'here where I never find myself' and where you are neither.”

Introduction II, The Untamed Poetess

That which acquires the capacity to replicate itself can dispense of time—its time—because already unfolds over it. Perhaps there are two Times: the one in which we replicate ourselves and the one upon which we compose. Perhaps there are always two stories, with the latter in motion, where all its future chapters would be blank; with their epigraphs—and contents—eventually rewritable or disposable.

A work is written and not conquered, except in its final moment, when you let it go and stops to belong to you. The story of our poetess is the denouement of «destroying a story to dance over it»; it is to cut its thread to let it fall—or to let oneself fall into—. At the end of the journey, she will be alone, dancing like no one, like herself.

The Meta-History

Imagine a destiny that is unfolding from the future to our instant, as if the future were writing to the present—or writing over it. The pen and the ink are the bridge that would capture that echo. Each word would rebel and reveal against the sense of time; being the future who will claim it as its own history, but no forgetting that it is our memory.

We are architects and witnesses of the future; we are time—present—over another time—future—because we are ink and bridge between two times.

—Story over story I build my future—its meta-story would say.
—A good story has a soul—the meta-narrator would say,—or N souls, and it's hell to pretend to master each of its N-1 damned arts.
—Only a story that has been lived can reverse its time. It must be lived and it must have N+1 souls; meta-narrator.
Dialogue: The metaverse of a story.

Decomposing the memory of a story (story of a story) can lead you to an origin of multiple initial stories. Recomposing them too. And reaching the same conclusions from different ‘stories’ in the same era is the definition of being contemporary. And I'm not certain about this. But it's written here, just in case.

If we were able to write the legacy before the new began to be an emergent property, and its own, it would not be its legacy; rather it is the old, surviving and delaying its inevitability, but rewriting itself as it self-improves and self-corrects. These are two—or multiple—stories in motion.

“Little poetry have witnessed your eyes if you speak only one emotion; poet.”

Introduction III, The Untamed Poetess