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.
[Edit.- 29 Oct, 2025: the following parts, to be translated soon]
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