I’m a time traveller, but I can only go forward

A letter to Thiago Ambrosio Lage

Since a while ago, I’ve been part of a Telegram group of Brazilian newsletter writers. This year they decided to do a kind o Secret Santa in which each participant would write a special newsletter in response to someone else’s — picked in a draw.

This is my letter to

Thiago Ambrósio Lage

. I hope you enjoy it.

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Thiago, we’re not unknown to each other. We’ve been orbiting the same group of friends for a good time and participating in the same projects. This (news)letter is about something you wrote a while ago — for one of these shared endeavours, the

O Texto & o Tempo

weekend.

Time as a symbol

I’ve got three clocks tattooed on my chest and an hourglass on a finger. I will still tattoo more time-keeping contraptions in the future and continue to call myself a chronophobic — you know my handle in social media is the Brazilian Portuguese version of this: cronofobico.

I cope with the fear of time passing by being methodic. I have a strict daily schedule that counts from when I wake up to when I’m ready for work. I also have a daily event to remind me when I have to be in bed or when I should take a break to have lunch. This is called the “zero-base calendar”, an organisation technique. I hope I can still write about it someday — even though I doubt my readers have much interest in these ramblings. That’s why we are in so many groups. To encourage each other.

This might look extreme, but it’s how I live. I think it’s imperative to understand what kind of music makes you dance, and this is my beat: controlling these variables gives me more strength and confidence.

Time as a tool

Reading is time travelling — sometimes the whole day is over, and we want to read just another chapter. We can go forward in time and read the ending before experiencing the start, or come back and start over — resurrecting characters, undoing love promises, inverting agreements. Readers can make the story go as fast as they want — some read one book a year, and others eat pages for breakfast.

Writing is also time travelling. As you said in your article “The texts and the times”, which I loosely translated from the original Portuguese so that my English-speaking readers can also partake:

Before the first word is written, it exists at an earlier time in the mind of the writer. Whether as an idea, inspiration, fragment, whisper of the muse. It is there that it develops and takes shape, even if it is the form of a seed that will only sprout on paper.

Each one has their own method, some ruminate the text for days, months, others prefer not to go much beyond the first spark and let everything take shape outside the body.

Os textos e os tempos

First: I love your infographics. I relate a lot with what you wrote there: how a story is born by the author's work, how it’s shaped into a living organism that, when released to the world, changes and unfolds.

I’m sorry I can’t reproduce your article for my English-reading readers. It’s beautifully written, far away from my meagre English skills. You speak about how the author perceives text, how it changes from conception to publishing, and how it changes again in the reader's mind.

This reminds me of three things I’d like to share with you.

The day I told “your work sucks” to Lourenço Mutarelli.

I did four or five workshops with Brazillian writer, illustrator and actor Lourenço Mutarelli. The time I spent listening to him was precious to my growth as an artist and understanding as a writer and publisher.

At the first workshop, “writing for non-writers”, he spoke about his workflow and how his books had completely different writing methods. His first was finished after a week of delusions, sweat and psychological medicine. Others demanded travelling, waiting, and patience. He cited his work “A Arte de Produzir Efeito Sem Causa”, and I commented about my experience with the book.

I told him I read it when I was 19, in college, and thought it was pure and absolute shit. I said, “Everyone told me to read a Mutarelli book, and when I read it, I thought it sucked”.

He smiled, looked at the class and said, “it takes a lot of courage to say that straight to the face of an author”, and everyone laughed.

I couldn’t understand the character’s ambitions, why they would suffer that much without doing anything, and why there wasn’t a better, more satisfactory ending. I felt the book was dark and pessimistic, and whatever happened was not believable. Reading it was a waste of time.

“The story does not end there”, I said. “A few weeks ago, after choosing what bill I’d be able to pay and which ones I’d need to leave accumulating interest, looking at my life and thinking why the fuck I’m still working on something I hate… it dawned on me. Like words from God, I remembered the whole book, and it just… clicked. Every line of dialogue, every moment of anxious suffering and depressive inaction… the book was far from shit; it was a work of a genius”.

He dismissed my compliment but thanked this clear example of how time is valuable, how sometimes we read something we dislike, and we need to visit that again over the years to see if this new “us” can understand it better now.

Our mind also evolves, changes and unfolds with time. It travels through time.

Did you ever be that brutally honest — and stupidly naive — with an author you like?

Photo by Jake Blucker on Unsplash

Memory is not trustworthy.

I believe Mutarelli’s work is good — but not quite “genial”, as I told him. My memory played tricks on me, and at that moment, it made his work grow more than it was in reality. We all know our memory is not the best source of truth; it gets things mixed up, creates memories from experiences not lived, and changes.

Accompanying your work, I believe you also like fantasy books. I might be wrong — we’re in a mix of people that write crazy different stuff. In the Mistborn series, Brandon Sanderson introduces a type of magic called “Feruchemy” — I won’t get into details. Read the series; it’s fantastic. One of the uses of feruchemy is using metal accessories — the copperminds — to store memories inside them. The feruchemist wears the items, consciously chooses what they want to keep and, poof, they are gone. Forgotten.

Like when I drink a little more than usual, the feruchemist has a cloudy idea of his memory, but the factual information is lost. Unlike my hangovers, though, the memory is stored in the artefacts and does not “decay”; it does not change.

While I think this practice is fantastic — I’d love to have had copperminds in my college time — I'm afraid I have to disagree with Sanderson's term: “decay”. Yes, memory fades over time, but it also evolves. Memory must be in the brain to interact with everything around us and become new ideas. Isolating it in an external media shields it from these interactions but also limits our creativity.

You, for instance, start your article by saying your education is in “exact sciences” — readers, we separate knowledge fields into “exacts”, “human”, and “biologic” in Brazil — and add that you have some knowledge of “biologic” sciences as well. For me, it sounds like an apology — “I’m sorry, I’m going to make mathematical or biological analogies in some stuff that’s far from them” — but it’s actually self-compliment. It’s excellent that your education is different from the usual! What fantastic mix-and-match your mind might do, what crazy abstractions and absurd analogies can be possible!

Memories from years ago can become better or worse with time, and we can luckily resignify them. Memories also travel through time.

Do you have any memory you know, for sure, has decayed? Changed, messed up, or even wholly unreal? I have a few — and I like them this new way.

Photo by Laura Fuhrman on Unsplash

Umberto Eco’s Open Work

My friends are sick of me talking about this concept, as I repeat it tirelessly. With your broad knowledge base, I don’t know if you had access to Umberto Eco’s work. You might know him: a philosopher, linguist, semioticist, writer of “The Name Of The Rose”, and more. He wrote the “Open Work” book in 1962, which talks about how the relationship between the artist, work of art, and reader, requires “openness”. There needs to be space for interpretation, philosophy, and understanding.

Eco cites the Mona Lisa as an example of “closed” work. Since its painting, the Mona Lisa has been analysed, reviewed, explained, pulled apart, put together, x-rayed, repainted, used in advertising, exposed, and questioned. So many people have answered the questions that Mona Lisa asked that now it’s no longer possible to reach an original answer. All the angles have been visited, and every opening is closed.

When you talk about the lifecycle of text, it reminds me of Eco’s Open Work. There is a gap between the author, the text, and the reader, which is essential. In this gap, new meanings are formed, some that the author never knew existed, and the work grows beyond our control. Then, with this further information, the author can revisit his work as a reader and get even more meaning — something the regular readers couldn’t. The text becomes a never-ending fountain of reflection.

There’s only one way to make art grow: to expose it. If we keep our work in a safe closet — or if a feruchemist stores their memories in a coppermind — we close the door to interaction. Like a plant devoid of sun and water, nothing will grow. With time, it might even wither — detaching itself from the reality outside, becoming outdated and irrelevant.

Like a living organism — the last of your abstractions — art grows differently depending on its environment. It can become bigger or smaller, divide into multiple parts, attach itself to others and become something new.

By being able to be transformed by these interactions, art also travels through time.

Some of my art has travelled well, evolving into something else. I hope no one ever finds out about some others. Do you have any art that refuses to die or even that aged better than you expected?

Photo by russn_fckr on Unsplash

Words are terrifying.

I like this excerpt from your article:

Thinking this way, the author's role may be very small, it may be the job of just recording something larger that he perceives through the keyhole in his mind. The author's work can be very large, to translate an entity of five (or more) dimensions into the world of two-dimensional letters. The more I think about it, the more I understand writers for whom words fail. Is the author's relationship to the text a personal cosmic horror?

In the path to take the words from the back of the mind to the front, more conscient mind, there’s an opportunity to change. When moving the ideas to paper, there’s an opportunity to change. When exposing art to the world, there’s an opportunity to change.

Evolution has made us prefer stability: a simple schedule, no surprises, and expectations being met without hassle. When we open ourselves to many possibilities for change, we invite fear. As Frank Herbert said in Dune, “Fear is the mind killer”.

But fear itself won’t go through changes if I close it in my mind locker. I need to take it out, beat it up, expose it to other ideas, and turn it into something else. Even though my relationship with text is my cosmic horror — writing reminds me of how insignificant I am — I am proud of doing it as an exercise of growth.

You and I cannot travel through time. Shall we create things that can?