I .- March, 2024
For weeks I’ve been thinking about how to represent the passage of time, our life,
and
those potential stories that didn’t happen, but yes the ones we have become. There are movies that portray it
perfectly, like Legends of the Fall, where Brad Pitt, in a surreal moment, decides to disappear for years
abandoning
an idyllic romance that wouldn’t wait for him. He didn’t want to. She did. Then the story reverses, and then
reverses again, returning to its original state.
But no. I’m not talking about stories, but about the passage of time and that
instant
of collision between two stories that had already diverged long ago. I mean just, I insist, just, just that
instant.
Remember it at the end of the text.
There are stories we don’t understand today, that we reject in favor of others,
stifling their development. And no, we don’t always coincide again with a story from the past; our years fly and
we
forget them; except, sometimes, they return in the form of «what we might have been, but projected onto someone
else’s life»; and it is at that instant that ambivalent emotions cut through you, as if you were living inside
an
unreal dream. And no, it makes no sense to miss what never took place. But you feel it, and nothing is more real
than that.
Not every past story belongs to the romantic genre, yet that doesn’t mean they’re
made
of different material. Every decision we make is a new branching of our present story; and every decision we
abandon
is a story that could return to confront us with our ambivalences.
We are what we live. We are our memories. And we are more complex than all of the
above: What are memories if not stories? What are stories if not decisions? And what are decisions if not
branches
of a story? And I don’t forget that we are more feeling than memories.
Everything comes, everything passes, and almost everything returns. That’s what I
wanted to write today, not about stories, but what we are through time. Never before. About the story that we
are
and, at the same time, never were.
There’s an anachronistic touch in the text: the key is the collision, crucial to
understanding this piece. Only through time, and knowing how to navigate it, will the story end up looking
you
in the eye—but it will be too late.
Bye.
P.S. To close, this Lindsey Stirling song represents the passage of time. In it, a
teenage Lindsey meets different future Lindseys, the selves from each hit in her actual past. I confess I hadn’t
listened to her in years because she’d become overly childish, but here she’s back at her best. I believe that,
at a
certain age, we all ask the same questions and we have the same concerns.
I don’t believe in writing unless it’s driven by
impulse. That’s what inspiration is, or so I feel it: a state both emotional and transcendent, a rush to say it
now, before what you feel and think slips away between your hands, yes, like sand that filters through your
fingers as you try to hold it. It’s now or never. You either take it or you don’t. And it often comes in
handfuls, one after another, at a dizzying pace.
Do you know that moment when you forget your phone
is even a thing? That moment when you’re doing something you’re so, so passionate about, that the insubstantial
no longer matters; you ignore what doesn’t last, like messaging apps or Twitter, and only the work in your hands
matters.
But it’s not easy to reach that state. There are
inspiring triggers, and everyone has their own. Mine:
- That woman who drives me crazy (a.k.a. muse).
- Violin.
- A stimulating conversation.
- Reading Julio Cortázar.
- Finding painters to fall in love with.
I’ll leave it here, because I don’t want to write a
manual of my weaknesses. Anything that doesn’t arise from impulse isn’t worth it to me, and I can’t turn it into
a text that evokes what I felt, precisely, because I felt nothing, or not enough to write it. And, for the
record, I’m writing this text from the absolute void... perhaps that’s why it’s worth keeping it as the
exception.
Today I was looking at art, I found a work I liked,
and I realized I already knew the artist by her signature and name. The trouble came after.
I’d already looked into her months ago; she seemed
genuine, and I thought she worked in oil or watercolor. The truth is, she doesn’t. And what a disappointment.
She’s a digital artist who works with AI and Photoshop, while posting a “piece” every day on her Instagram.
Nothing in her feed shows either progress or mistakes, nor any story worthy of evoking an impulse: there is no
lover, no mother, nor a child or grandfather who has given her enough to move her into the artistic state I’ve
been describing. There’s no canvas she might regret tomorrow. These artists do it because they sell “paintings”
in bulk on online stores. Period. And I don’t think it’s wrong, if you can make a fortune doing it, just do it.
The problem is on me, where I once saw art, I now
see “click, click, click,” with a productivity of one piece a day that doesn’t move me anymore.
So why write in this emotional state something that
doesn’t meet my own aesthetic-literary standards?
For the insight: an artist is their
progress. I believe that’s the only real thing that will let us judge post-AI art.
III .- June, 2024
Thirty-one days without writing; exactly one month. For that reason, it deserves to be noted in this text that
explores “the passage of time”. May has been a difficult month, to accept, definitively, that what couldn’t
happen
won’t steal my sleep in June. I don’t like to lie either: emotionally, May has been horrible, atypical; I
survived
it and it didn’t survive me, and it was the full stop and the break I desperately needed.
After this literary crisis, and much more than literary, I confess, today I see myself as Pizarnik boy, I’ve
reconsidered my ideas about risk-taking, I’ve written a few poems, and all of this without having found that music that would hold me to my usual temperament. It’s been a month of falling, of learning, of losing my way and not knowing how to escape the “without you” cyclone.
El viento y la lluvia me borraron
como a un fuego, como a un poema
escrito en un muro. - Alejandra Pizarnik
The wind and the rain erased me
as would a fire, as would a poem
written on a wall. - Alejandra Pizarnik
However, today I come back “with me”, wiser, more well-versed, and knowing my weaknesses much better. This
isn’t a heroic text, quite the opposite. it’s a text about who I have been for thirty days “with nothing” to
say, desertic, with no ink in my veins, words caught in my throat, and coming to understand those women
writers with the supernatural, innate ability of turning strong emotions into text: equivalent to stabbing
your own heart with cruelty. I haven’t been able to, and I don’t think I ever will... never.
I still don’t know—and I don’t want to know—though I accepted. I’m left with the fact that I kept growing through a month that could have undone me that easily have been shelved in the Regressions—not mathematical—section of a
bookstore devoted to adolescent loves and crises.
The “other sides of a story” will always be missing. As for me, I think I couldn’t have given more, or been any
better than I was. And I don’t like to play the victim, or crying because I didn’t reach what was, perhaps, an
impossible dream. Only she knows her story; mine goes on, here and now.
May is now concluded and, with it, six months of thrilling mistakes. How could I regret it? When life is full of
new and beautiful mistakes. Besides, I’m bringing with me another great lesson: writers bleed too; it was simply
a matter of impossibilities and hearts that are unattainable. Only then, do you
bleed.
Y yo no diré mi poema y yo he de decirlo. Aún si el poema (aquí, ahora) no tiene sentido, no tiene destino. - Alejandra Pizarnik
And I won’t say my poem and yet I have to say it. Even if the poem (here, now) has no sense, has no destiny. - Alejandra Pizarnik
IV .- September, 2024
It’s going to be more profound than I’d like—warning—but it won’t be long; I think I’m learning to make peace
with writing when it looks for me but I can’t reach it.
Cutting a flower is to announce its death - ℵ
Three months without writing, and once more the question emerges in me: what is time? It is its passing,
its “you through it” but its story through you. Time extinguishes us and remains with us through memories
until we forget them. So, what is oblivion if not the extension of a memory?
In my last writing, in June 2024, I referred to a love that never was and swore it would no longer
steal my sleep. Today I can synthesize it from a cold distance, without needing to stab my own heart
the way those great women writers I already mentioned did. I’ll call it “the preamble to emotions”:
its rise, zenith, and fall; because I can describe them through “the extension of a memory”, that
is, through their growth and decline, with a inverted ending I can never fully understand.
- During the pre-during: you don’t fall in love in an instant.
- The instant: when it reaches its peak, but you don’t know it yet.
- The post-during of the during: you don’t fall out of love in an instant, yet you already recognize that “instant” for what it was.
- The memory: you never forget while you still remember, and you keep living, accepting that “it no longer is, nor will it be.”
- The Forgetting: you never truly forget, yet you begin to; however, memory extends itself, shifts forgetting, and in doing so extends it as well.
- The Dead: Once you’re dead, only a testament can put words to it for you: “I never forgot you; forgetting (in the present) no longer belongs to me, but know this: fuck you”.
It’s the “preamble” to emotions because it precedes the narration, what comes after, the recognition of
the emotion before being able to identify it; It’s a “preamble” because it’s a prior essay for the
posterior error, which is, also, an essay. And to bring closure to this ocean of depths, I would
synthesize the post-preamble to emotions as the place where we become observers of emotion, which will
sail us through time, mutating us into its story (or, in this case, my case, its romance).
From here on, everything is poetic and closure.
For every lesson, a rose to cut.
From every cut, another calyx will die.
From every stem, she will be reborn from the rosebush.
From every spring, in a spiral, new, she will emerge.
ℵ
We synchronized only to desynchronize. Love is synchrony; unlove its desynchrony; time its executor, its
executioner and, also, inexorable in itself. We are time’s residue, and this its end: of that romance.
‘Lips of amoral precipices,
yet so kissable,
like two warm flowers
that after freezing,
stilled their dance.
Where is the amoral in two beings
who no longer feel (each other)?
if they no longer leave the bed unmade (anymore).
ℵ
[Edit.- 3 March, 2026: the following parts, to be translated soon]
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