Betraying Gestures #2

exaggerating is a gesture of readership

I’ve been paying attention to the word exaggerate. To exaggerate made me remember the attention I have paid to prefixes. The first prefix I began to underline every time I spotted it in a word was the prefix ex. The prefix of exaggerate. Exaggerate is a word with the prefix ex that I like; other words with the prefix ex that I like are: example; export; exit; exist; expedite; exotic; extent; exclamation; excelsior; excursion. It’s not hard to observe that ex is the prefix for out/out of. Another use for the prefix ex is to indicate a former title, status, profession, etc. I exercised placing it before roles I performed or was interested in. It stuck to translator, and if anyone asked me what I did/what I was, if I had to write a bio or an artist statement for an application or for an exhibition, I said/wrote I was an ex-translator. Today, it sounds silly, but at the time, it made more sense. It was a moment when an ex-judge and an ex-president were receiving a lot of media attention. And I was using that attention to create a condition for me to pay attention to what a translator who isn’t translator anymore does; what is being something I no longer am and have never been?—a translator. It is an experiment similar to saying that I am writing the biography of a poet, who I was in fact researching and reading extensively, but I wasn’t writing it or had any intention of doing so. I wanted to know what saying I did something made me do and what I did when I said I was doing it. I wanted to know about tautology. I imagine the I from that time defending fiercely that using ex and translation is using two words (one word and one prefix) to express the same meaning—a tautology. From my fascination with the prefix ex, and what this fascination deviated to, came my fascination with the prefix re. It started with the word recapitulate. I wrote a text called Lament to Recap or Recapitulatory Lament (exercising my role of ex-translator, I translate the title from Portuguese, Lamento Recapitular, into two). Re is the prefix for again. Words that I like with the prefix re are: repeat ("Pete and Repeat were sitting on a fence. Pete fell off. Who’s left?" "Repeat." "Pete and Repeat were sitting on a fence. Pete fell off. Who’s left?"); reiterate; recall; refuse; reception; represent; redact; report; reside; restart; rewrite. I remember my cousin and dear interlocutor, J, who likes redoubt. Despite what I thought, redoubt doesn’t mean to doubt again, it is a type of military fortification. J ran into the word redoubt, and now he follows Redoubt. Redoubt is a garbage collection boat that sails along the Thames River and is now followed by J, who is filming it for a video work. Ex is the prefix for running away. Re is the prefix for running into. Last year in Berlin, over a bridge in Neukölln, I ran into a poet who taught at a writing workshop I took and quit without saying goodbye. After our encounter, I wrote this poet an email about us running into each other and me running away from the workshop. In her careful reply, she wrote that a poetic life must include running away as well as running into. On Betraying Gestures #1, I wrote about my interest in ferries. I’m planning a ferry trip this summer. Last week, I read about two incidents with ferries/ships: the ferry between Norway and Denmark that was interrupted due to a collision and a cruise ship in Australia that caught fire. I also watched a documentary about the coronavirus outbreak on the Diamond Princess in Japan in 2020, a movie about the Costa Concordia accident in 2012, and a documentary series about the MS Estonia that sank in the Baltic Sea in 1994, claiming 852 lives. I’ve been running into events that indicate the danger of ferries. Running into words, a poetry teacher, meanings, and boats, I know that my desire for ferries comes from my desire to run away, to sail away. I like running away—the cowardice and the courage. On Wednesday, I saw a movie called Sorry, Wrong Number. The movie is an adaptation of a play that was aired as a radio novel. It tells the story of the bedridden daughter of a millionaire whose only contact with the external world is through a telephone. Through the phone, she overhears two men plotting the murder of a woman and has only the phone to try and prevent it from happening. If you run away by sailing away, the object you are running from appears smaller, if you run away by staying in bed it grows bigger, it comes to kill you. The protagonist of Sorry, Wrong Number discovers she herself is the intended victim of the murder. I’m convinced that it is the steadiness of the bed that makes it a fertile place to nurture feelings, meanings, and interpretations. The bed is good for exaggerating and growing things out of proportion. That is why the bed is a good place to write and cultivate solipsism, another topic J and I talk about. Solipsism in our conversations is the belief that if ferries burn or collide, it is a message for me not to travel on them because they may kill me. Solipsism is exaggerating one’s importance and significance in the world. Exaggeration originally meant to pile up, accumulate. It is no coincidence, then, that writing is a potent way of stacking material that proves a particular thing—a fantasy. Since I decided I would hide less, since the sun is bright and it is not cold outside, I have been more inserted in the world. I, in relation, believe less in my fantasies. I might still go on a ferry trip this summer. A person I met and added on Instagram, going through my Instagram feed, asked me about one post. It is a picture of an old man on an airplane. The person asked me who that was. I said it was a translator on an airplane. I love this picture. I love pictures of translators, but also writers and artists, travelling. It is an image I’m trying to produce when I travel on ferries. This week I saw a picture of Foucault in his Jaguar in Sweden (I had no idea Foucault had a Jaguar, but apparently he was known for driving it recklessly and for his hard-drinking during his time in Sweden). I was looking at pictures of Foucault because I have been reading Technologies of the Self thinking about technologies of communication, which is why I watched Sorry, Wrong Number. Last week, I read Betraying Gestures #1 again and again, projecting different readers to try to imagine how my text travels. Each time I read, I saw something else that had to be rewritten. Reading and rereading Betraying Gestures #1, I read and reread that "if I start this newsletter, I want it to have a degree of irreversibility. I cannot change things once they have been published." After I published the letter, I found out that I could edit it. I edited and rewrote it dozens of times. I take some pleasure in betraying what I wrote, in encountering a gesture of betrayal. Exaggeration is a gesture of betrayal, one that has made me think about readership. Readership is the group of readers of a publication, something I am trying to establish for Betraying Gestures. But at the end of this text, which started with prefixes, I have to resort to suffixes. To the suffix ship. Ship ship ship ship ship ship ship. The suffix ship, other than the group of readers of a publication and being another sign I should be careful about sailing away, denotes the state or condition of being something. As such, my readership is exaggerated,

and I hope yours is too.