On their own, they are nothing more than loose pages, with loose sentences, written in different colours of ink.
Slowly, as I read them, I realise that they transport me to different times and places, where there are different people.
I realise that they don't form a coherent whole, but they can almost be read as a novel. I can clearly identify the narrator, I can see him grow, jike a flower slowly opening.
At the end, I look back and realise that it's not one narrator, but several and the same, because it's grown out of a single matrix.
The pages of my notebook are not a diary, nor was I worried that they would become one.
They are snippets of my life, small pieces of reality that I have tried to capture and incorporate into my view of the world. I didn't write them down to remember them later, but because I wanted to keep them, because I was afraid they would escape me forever and get lost in the vastness of the universe.
I think words have a life of their own. We're the ones who have to know how to free them from where they're hiding.
I wanted to hold on to them the way I used to hold on to my favourite toy or teddy bear when I was a child.
The pages of my notebook don't form a coherent whole. The moments of reality I've captured don't need to be coherent, because I'm also becoming others, although I'm still myself.
I, and you who read these words, are several selves, and now that we've read them, we've become a different, renewed, more conscious self, a self to which another small instant of reality has been added.
The pages of my notebook aren't like a straight line, they don't form a coherent whole, nor are they like some kind of chaos.
Perhaps if I could see them from a distance, from the distance of the stars, I could see small points of light that would resemble something with logic. Perhaps you could call them constellations.
I wonder:
Can we inhabit different places and times without leaving where we are?
To answer that question, I'm going to flick randomly through one of my notebooks.
The old notebook opens onto a page.
It contains two sketches that I have labelled "Melancholy".
They are not dated, but an effort of memory takes me back to 2007, when I was attending a specialisation course in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. I was working on Freud's text "Mourning and Melancholia". It's interesting to realise how quickly I was able to go back 17 years in time, and now that I've mentioned it, you've probably also gone back to a time that you imagine was 2007, where there were other people and you were probably someone else, although at this distance you recognise yourself as the same.
A different and the same person, at a different time and place.
On the next page I wrote in Portuguese the following about Melancholy:
“É aqui, neste lugar,
que observo,
e observando a miséria dos outros,
É também aqui, que me reservo.
Vejo as pessoas sozinhas,
que na sua solidão,
agarram-se com força a algo,
que seja da sua devoção.
Observo uma tristeza,
um poço de frustração,
deve ser profundo esse poço,
talvez mesmo nem tenha fundo,
Cabem lá o vazio, a tristeza,
e também o desespero,
deve ser um local escuro
de certeza!”
I'll translate it for you
"It's here, in this place,
that I observe,
and observing the misery of others,
It is also here that I reserve myself.
I see people alone,
who, in their solitude,
cling tightly to something
of their devotion.
I see sadness,
a well of frustration,
this well must be deep,
perhaps it doesn't even have a bottom,
and there lives emptiness, sadness,
and also despair,
it must be a dark place
for sure!"
When I read these words, I felt that melancholy. It's a feeling, but it physically hurts, it can hurt at different times and places in our lives and now that we've read about it we also feel that pain, a pain that mutilates and transforms, that unites, and at the same time, separates us.
On another page, I come across a poem I've called "The contamination of normality".
I'll share a small part of it with you:
How lucky the sea is, no force can conquer him, and even the rain that fell yesterday, were pieces of sea that you seemed to feel and see
I continue my process of randomly opening my notebook, and I discover a note, dated 2009, which I've labelled "Reclusion":
“What thought is for,
in times of suffering?
Is it just the cold and empty
influence of reason?
Or just a way to prevent pain?
When you think about suffering,
it hurts,
When you suffer with your thoughts,
it hurts
What's the point of thinking?
what's the point of suffering?
One day it will end."
As I read the loose pages of my notebook, I'm already beginning to recognise the matrix of who I am.
I know that when I wrote these notes, many years ago, I was someone else, in another time and place. There were other people in my life and some, the most important ones, remained. Others were added.
I find my matrix in these notes, now that I'm reading them, in another time. As I read them, I exist simultaneously in different times. This is the invisible work of memory, that incredible machine that allows us to travel through time without leaving the present.
That's why the answer to the question of whether we can inhabit different places and times without leaving where we are, is YES.
Then I find a note from 2010 that says:
"Now there are other me's,
remnants of my dreams,
that are no longer here,
but which will belong forever
to me"
Continuing my research in an attempt to discover the narrator of my story, I find a more recent note, dated 2023, which reads as follows:
"There is a wind blowing inside me,
that drives my thoughts
in the sense of these words.
It blows, invisible,
But I can feel it,
It doesn't blow from the front,
nor from the back,
It's a wind that comes out of me"
I clearly recognise that I was the one who wrote all the hundreds of notes in my notebook.
They don't always have the coherence of a diary, or a straight line, or points that connect over time.
Now that I've reread them, I recognise in them all the different I's that wrote them, in completely different places and times.
But in all of them there is Rolando, his curiosity and observant spirit, his interest in people, in what moves them, in the hidden silences that give meaning to words, his love of giving voice to thought and the need to transform that voice into words.
The last note I wrote is dated today,
I'll translate it for you
The night, Silent, Black and deep, enormous, Predatory beast of happiness. Everything sleeps, Except me, the night, And my memory Of your face And your name
Rolando Andrade
I agree Rolando, we can travel to a different time without ever leaving our chair. Thank you for sharing these gorgeous pieces of your soul❤
From the sample seen "outside the therapy room", I believe that you can lead those who attend the therapy room to knowledge and conclusions about themselves that would fill many notebooks... and help organize internal scrapbooks...
Continue to fill many spaces, physical, psychological and temporal, and continue to share pieces of life with us... As far as I'm concerned, it brings me a feeling of original normality (or author's normality, to give a more intellectual tone to the thing 🤭 )
Thanks for sharing.
Take care.