The husk of things

There is a recurring time of the month when things seem to harden. The day appears to have a metallic edge to it. The view from my window is more two-dimensional, it loses its depth. Everything seems to lose its depth. And every detail of reality seems very far away from me, as if I were looking at my surroundings through binoculars. It´s as if I were watching a film, or unrolling a roll of negatives.

Or, sometimes it feels as if I were traversing the day hanging on to the walls of my reality. Someone I know had a brain infection, which causes her to frequently lose her balance: she walks, but needs to steady herself with her two hands on the wall. When the dizziness strikes, she quickly grips the wall. She looks focused and confused at the same time. Her eyes go vacant, she is concentrating so hard. She seems only intent on putting one foot after the other, and all that is occuring around her seems to recede into an irrelevant dimension. One step, and then another. One-two, one-two... She is an image of myself in one of those depth-less days.

This happens to me more frequently than I would like to admit. Too many of my days are spent trying to survive them. When I am trying to survive them instead of live them, is when I start to focus on extreme details to narrate the day to myself as it happens. That is when I pay too much attention to: the subtle hues of a polluted sky, an elderly woman´s varicose veins, the types of mustard on display at the supermarket, the seven different smells of organic shampoos at the drugstore. I gasp and try to grip the aesthetic as one would reach out for a buoy in the midst of a dark, undefined turbulent sea.

I think that when I cannot penetrate into the depth of life and fall into its mystery blindly, confidently, because of fear, because of a recurring anxiety, I let myself be drawn into its surface. I observe, and register, compulsively, objects, things that populate the world. I catalogue everything: foods, shopfronts, what people are wearing. And pretty soon this obsession with the visual, the things, the objects, becomes an compulsive need to buy, or to possess, part of the world. Or it becomes a need to describe, to define and to label. It´s an addiction to THINGS, and to ascribing my own unique meaning to them. It´s my own personal type of fetishism.

Where does this come from, or what is it about? It´s feeling only the husk of things. A casca da coisa. La peau des choses. Feeling outside them, or touching their boundaries. Where their inside ceases to be, where the outside begins. I grasp, and hang on to their form instead of their content. It´s a survival mechanism.

The other aspect of this process is the comparisons between things that I constantly need to make. I have started to become more aware of how much I compare people and objects from different times of my life. I compare this apartment to another one in Geneva. This landscape to that one. This experience to that one. This person to that one.

Why do I do this? Because of the lack of continuity to anything in my life. Except for my very early childhood, I have never stayed in any one place more than five years. I need to find a thread that links the present me to the past me. But the markers, the signs get scrambled, or go missing sometimes.

I create connections, I don´t just see, but construct relationships between seemingly unrelated things in order to make sense out of disorder, out of chaos. This is why I look at a physical structure, a building, a house, a street in Brazil, and compare it to another one I know in another country. I am building real-life metaphors. The Liberdade bridge = the rail-bridge behind Jonction in Geneva. The loudness of traffic outside my Brazilian apartment = the unbearable loudness of traffic in Stoke Newington, London. This last one is a particularly relevant image. Because it describes the relationship between inside and outside using the image of home. I distinctly remember the physical discomfort of sleeping in a bedroom assaulted by so much street noise that it was as if the room were in the middle of the street. It´s a leaking of sound from one field of being to another. A dripping of sound from the public to the private, from the world to the person, from the them into the I. This loudness outside invading the quiet inside now has a very real and physical and aesthetic expression in my mind now: the street/the room.

It´s as if I can only make sense of life and experience by expressing thoughts through metaphors that use the visual structure of the world. I need objects to express Me, place to express identity.

These comparisons, these similes, these metaphors: they are also desperate acts of translation. They express the need to connect different realities, to connect-the-dots, to find a path between two, three or more islands of experience. They are islands because they have distinct place and time boundaries. But as we know, no translation is ever equivalent. Something of the meaning or context is lost. There are no real equivalences. These are just strategies to interpret the chaos, and therefore strategies for survival.

The problem is that I don´t want to stay on the surface of things anymore. I don´t want to experience them the way we look at a beautiful starry sky: from a distance, with much admiration, but from a distance. I want to penetrate things. I want to feel their depth. I want to stay with them long enough to know them more than just aesthetically, or for cataloguing or comparison purposes. I want to fall so deep into them that they become new and unique, a new marker, a new sign, a new reference, instead of an image, a copy, a translation of something I already know.