The box, the fall, and the looking-glass...

It was not what I was after. What I wrote yesterday made me feel too light, too one-eyed, like a cyclop with no peripheral vision. Being funny, if I was funny at all, is easy. Or at least, it isn’t hard. But after I wrote, I felt I had betrayed something. I had condensed the experience, taken things out of the flux, out of the unordered order in which they happened, out of the context or landscape or way in which they existed when I first encountered them. I made a list, and took out the feeling out of each thing on the list. I regulated the temperature, I established one climate, and one climate only, because I’d decided it was easier that way.

I chose one side, when the truth is that I could always see two, three or more sides at once. This choosing one side made the writing sound unlike me, and more like some Lonely Planet whore, like someone who has an audience in mind.

When I write explaining things to myself, everything comes out very differently than when I write picturing a person, or several persons, reading. I am already having a dialogue, or a three-way conversation when I’m explaining things to myself. I ‘m already presenting things this way, and then that way, and then juxtaposing that other view from that third angle. But when I get outside of me and try to find a point to focus on, to make it easier for that imaginary reader, I lose all the other points.

And why, why did I look outward, write outside of me, try to make it easier for that imaginary reader? Why did I slot myself into a predictable narrative? Yes, perhaps I have a clue. Writing about what I went through, and what I’ve been going through, with no particular order, or goal, was becoming uncomfortable, it was starting to itch, and so I interrupted the unplanned, unexpected flow of things that were appearing. I created a diversion, I interrupted because it was too much. Plunging inside one self and inside the world and inside god knows what was just too heavy.

And here is, after all, finally, at last, what I felt, often, in my first few weeks here; with not much comic relief to soften the disorienting blow of culture shock. I felt: moving to Brazil: like opening a great, terrible Pandora’s box.

There was no going back, I had unleashed all the scary demons, or rather, opened the door to another world, huge, larger than everything I’d ever known, unknowable, overwhelming, ungraspable. I would try to teeter on the edge and hold on for dear life, not wanting to fall into the vortex, the whirlwind. The immensity of Brazil, of Sao Paulo. This feeling of being about to be buried alive. Tall buildings congregating around me, high above me, pressing me against the ground, the endless streets and avenues pulsating with the insect-like traffic. The multiplicity of realities, types of people, consciousnesses.

At times I realized almost with horror that it would have been easier to stay put, in London, in Europe, and not have opened up this door to this crazy world. And not just to this crazy world, but to that past that insisted on slipping away, in metamorphosing into a dream.

It was becoming clear and evident that I would be changed by my experience here, by this place. And there was a feeling of wanting to hold on to who I was, or who I had been. I did not want to be transformed. Things that I had known to be true, values and ways of being that I considered real, were discarded or discounted here. It was painful to let go of the known; the desire was to hold on for dear life, to the self and to the ways that I knew, that I was familiar with. But these so-called familiar ways… These were recent ways; I had known Brazil a long time ago, but I had lost it. I didn’t know it anymore, but perhaps I could know it again.

The truth was that stepping into Brazil felt like stepping into an adolescent world, an adolescent way of thinking. With all its intensity, and impatience, and innocence, and stubbornness, and contradictions, and lack of experience, and arrogance, and know-it-all attitude, and appalling lack of reference points and wisdom and experience. I wanted to set the clock back to my world, to the supposed adulthood of Europe.

But I was wrong to think of the country and its life as adolescent. The old world and the new world were not on the same timeline. I used to think that Brazil was merely Europe a few years or decades behind. Then it became clear that Brazil was on a different path all together, and that it would never join up with Europe’s path. They had crossed perpendicularly a long time ago, and then the whole graph had exploded and the timelines and paths had gotten sucked into a vortex, got whipped up in a tornado. And each path was stubbornly walking its own way. Could I have a foot in both of them, in both realities?

As a matter of fact, the two realities co-existed, or were the same reality on two different sides of a two-sided mirror. And I was in the mirror. No, I was the mirror itself, separating and joining and reflecting both realities.

Day 1, Month: a very dry, polluted holiday month, autumn, Brazil (2008)

My Blog Manifesto regarding writing format (or "what this will look like")

The great thing about a blog is that it allows for an infinite number of structures, forms, and models of writing.

I am hoping that this format will be totally suitable to the fragmentary nature of my writing, that is, that it will offer a solution to my perpetual procrastination, tendency to write random thoughts and descriptions on napkins, receipts and utility bills (all of which are easily lost), inability to finish short stories, intermitant devotion to journal writing, and comfortableness in writing disconnected paragraphs.

I like to tell myself that it is just an "anti-linear thinking" guerrilla tactic, but honestly, sometimes I think it just has to do with the rather unfocused, tired, and slightly unhappy state of mind I've had lately (to be precise, in the last few years)...


*It'd be great if I could just turn my hand to the writing of aphorisms, but even this notion appears to paralyze me. Something along the lines of Adorno's "Minima Moralia", but written by a blond, thirty-something noughties chick who can't seem to settle in any country (or career for that matter). You know, clinically accurate yet hilarious observations on the pros and cons of working in a bookstore versus doing silver dining in a boutique hotel, versus working in show business accompanying insane Mexican pop stars on tour etc.

**I may appear messy (and rather nonchalant about it) to people who look at my room and the inside of my handbag, but really, I'm a total obssessive-compulsive when it comes to organising the inside of my brain.
EXAMPLE: I am a compulsive list-maker ( I make lists of places I've been, shoes and bags bought over one year, men I've spent the night with, favorite people, authors read, things that a guy said to me that would lead me to believe he wants to be my boyfriend, toiletries I'm going to take on my next trip, possible glamorous and artsy careers I would choose had I the talent or were I given a chance, favorite recipes, cities in Asia I've visited, bands I used to listen to when I was 14, etc etc.)

So here's my first list, just so you get cosy with this format...

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Types of writing I do:
- I am well-versed in the art of college paper --essay-- writing (lots of sources, quotes, footnotes etc). This is the only type of writing which I seem to have no problem starting and finishing within a short period of time.
-Sorry, let me correct that. I enjoy writing press releases as long as they are culture-related. In this case, my timing is not so bad, since we usually have short deadlines.
- I have written journalistic articles, but, according to my old journalism teacher, I seem to love the research part a little too much.
-I get particular pleasure out of writing reviews. Especially if they're about Japanese writers, Japanese film, Japanese fashion, and so on.
-I used to write good, laborious (but boring) letters to my Oma (my grandmother- my mother's mother). Nowadays I just talk to her on the phone.
-Some emails to ex-lovers and friends overseas can be fairly interesting, and appear to be a mix of travel log, boring rant and once again, journal.
-I've written about a dozen short stories, but none of them are finished. I expect to finish them and turn them into a short-story collection sometime before my sixty-fourth birthday.
-I once wrote poems, perhaps a dozen (pretty good ones if I may say so), but I gave them all to my ex-boyfriend, who never suggested giving them back to me once we broke up. I've thought about contacting him just to ask for them, but really, I'm still procrastinating...
-I've been writing journals (or diaries, if you prefer) since I was 15. There are boxes and boxes of papers and notebooks, most of them stored at my friend Neelam's house in London. I hate not having access to them as the act of rereading them is great for purposes of reminiscing, entertainment, list-making, self-pitying, self-aggrandizement, etc.
- I wrote my high-school graduating speech, and delivered it in such an already nostalgic state of mind, that I started crying half-way through. People in the audience started clapping, and crying as well. I'm sure they thought it was a pre-planned gimmick to make the whole sentimental ceremony even more memorably mushy. Honestly, it hadn't been planned. Same thing happened when I gave a speech at the office for a departing co-worker. As a matter of fact, for me, writing and giving a speech= crying in public. I am just extremely prone to saudades, I think it's in my DNA. (come to think of it, my dad was also one to cry at the drop of a hat at any important occasion involving recollection of a *lost* past).
-... and so on

(Notice I made this list without any numbers, just dashes, thus making it non-hierarchical. There's no meaning to the order in which I cited the types of writing.)

I propose exploring all the types of writing cited above, plus one I haven't mentioned yet: collage. No, this is not a form of plagiarism. I'm just giving myself the license to "cut and paste" a piece of writing I like, that I find relevant, all the while quoting the source. My next entry will be an example of exactly that... All this in the hopes of coming to my concerns, themes, stories, and anxieties from all possible angles.