30/08/2024 — One of the oddest aspects of trying to write or speak in another language is that you feel like you’re another person. A simpler, more shallow, and perhaps more ridiculous one. Still, it’s an opportunity to experiment with this tool we call language in a more mindful, childlike, and refreshed way. Reflecting on language like this makes me wonder if I’m not exactly this way also in Portuguese, my native language. After all, most of what I say consists of ready-made formulas that come automatically and effortlessly to me. But because there are so many flexible formulas, I get the illusion that rearranging them amounts to me thinking for myself.
*
12/09/2024 — The past of 2024 is already larger than its future. Six months have passed since the trip to Southeast Asia. The places we visited, the experiences we lived, are now memories, and I’m not sure how much — if at all — they have changed me. It's 9:32 AM here, 7:32 PM in sweltering Bangkok, which I just glimpsed through a live camera on Sukhumvit Road. Vietnam is now facing typhoons, landslides, and floods. Brazil is burning, with fires destroying the Pantanal and preservation areas in the southeast, north, and northeast. The smoke has reached here, where the sun, behind a dreadful veil, is an ominous neon-orange ball.
Life, according to Joseph Brodsky, is monotony and repetition. And it’s the fear of this monotony, of being trapped in a certain way of living — which we cleverly mask with tasks whose urgency we invent — that makes me think of change. The questions I asked myself before the trip, about whether I’d return changed in some way, and the expectation that I would, still make me wonder. Perhaps tourism — consumed as an entertainment experience, a product — doesn’t change anyone. But why change at all, I also ask. Well, to rid oneself of the sense of passivity, of lost time, of being trapped in a way of being that is apathetic, selfish, cowardly — a way of being not deliberately chosen but one we fell into through life’s contingencies. ‘You must change your life,’ writes Rilke. But where does the strength to do so come from? The strength to impose your will on human fiction, which slowly crushes us until we are as thin as paper, docile and receptive to whatever is imposed on us? The impulse to change from within is much harder to manifest; one must be exceptional — and few are. So we usually depend on external events, something shocking, disorienting, that scrapes away the mold that’s settled over the years, preventing us from seeing reality more clearly. Deep grief, a child, unemployment. Surely, there are people who, instinctively knowing themselves to be weak — without fully understanding why — provoke external events to force change. It’s a desperate act, not always recognized by those who commit it. But even then, it’s not guaranteed. Change that results from an external event (grief, a child) can be quickly reversed, depending on how crushed and docile you already are. You might see clearly for a time, understand all the problems of your previous way of living, and yet, out of fear or comfort, surrender to it again.
*
15/09/2024
— I
show a piece of literary text I wrote to a friend. He messages me from Naples,
saying, among other things, he misses a bit of politics in the piece. He also
says that every good writer is left-wing. His words kind of get under my skin. So, breaking my stay-offline-on-Sundays rule, I decide to write him a — somewhat
unnecessary, somewhat untimely, somewhat serious — response, but something I've
been meaning to say to him for a while:
My dear friend, I don't mean to be rude, but it seems we see art from slightly different angles. I'm not looking for art to reaffirm my political beliefs. I'm after something else: complexity, discomfort, friction, and sometimes even a sense of disturbance.
You see,
literature that sets out to sell political ideas is nothing more than shallow
propaganda. Literature (and art in general) is about ambiguity. It’s precisely
about challenging stereotypes like the idea that “every good writer must be
left-wing” by showing the complexity of human beings (how a criminal can have
good in them, how a good person can have bad in them). In other words, it’s
about the complexity and ambiguity of reality.
Literature becomes political by expanding
consciousness and sensitivities, by awakening the imagination. This can be done
through 20 pages of descriptions of a tree, for instance, showing the richness
of reality and broadening the limits of what the reader can see in the world,
making them see the invisible (in other words, making them see more and thus
enabling reflection on the absurdity of existence and the way we live). All
this without directly talking about politics.
That’s what I
believe when it comes to art and literature.
