Betraying Gestures #7
jet-lagged gestures
M told me she felt Betraying Gestures #6 was sad. S told me she could start to recognize a style in the newsletter. Sitting by the canal, I heard on my earphones a song that went, “was betrayed but never betrayed”. I have been paying attention to every betrayal I find. I begin to worry whether Betraying Gestures collects betrayals rather than commits them. A side of Betrayal Gestures says that writing, publishing, and translating are betrayals. But there are real betrayals that affect people and the world and are not only a conceptual gimmick. I found a webpage that gives tips on writing saucy betrayals. "1) Set up the betrayal in a way that isn’t obvious; 2) Make your readers invested in your characters. If the reader doesn’t care about the protagonist or about the betrayer, they won’t feel anything when the big deception happens; 3) The betrayer needs motivation; 4) It has to have an effect on your protagonist. Usually, the betrayer is someone close to the protagonist, so when they are deceived, it hurts like crap; 5) Do some research on the craft of lying. Google some real-life betrayals in history or famous literature/movies; 6) Betrayal isn’t black and white. I don’t think betrayal is as simple as good and bad… it can get muddy. For example, what if the betrayer is being blackmailed? Mind controlled? Manipulated?” I have a list of betrayals for Betraying Gestures' newsletter: 1) write a newsletter in a language that isn’t English; 2) invite someone else to write the newsletter; 3) not post anything; 4) abandon the newsletter completely; 5) post on a different day of the week; 6) post a newsletter that entirely changes the format identified by S as a style. I’m on vacation, so I thought this could be a good week to invite someone else to write this week’s newsletter—but I didn't. I believe I have to have something more solid, so a betrayal has an effect. Vacation reminds me of when I was in an amusement park in Berlin and a woman passed by me running, jumping, and screaming “urlaub” repeatedly. I wrote about it in a text I wrote with A, Sleepy and Sad (happyberry). I read it aloud with D two weeks ago for a work we are doing together. “I needed a vacation. I had urlaub in mind. I went to a travel agency and said I had two hundred units
of currency and I wanted to go somewhere far. Where can you take me? I want to see rocks, and I want to be around rocks. I want to hear the ocean. I want to put my face in the sea and splash water on the back of my neck.” I was studying German. I had just learned the previous week that urlaub meant vacation; I also learned the words strand, meer, see, berg, flughafen, and koffer—travel vocabulary. Another word I learned in the German classes was langweilig. In the amusement park a woman passed by me screaming “urlaub”, I went on a ride where I was spun and spun. While I was getting off the gondola that had centrifuged me for a long-lasting 10 minutes, completely dizzy, the guy who worked at the ride asked me, as a joke, if the ride had been “langweilig”. I knew what it meant—it means boring; it was one of the few times I felt the classes were actually helping me learn German. My list of betrayals for the newsletter is boring. Last week, coming back from a trip, I had an awful night on the train. The seat was hard, and any position in which I wasn't sitting properly was extremely uncomfortable. "This is a train for people to travel elegantly," I told my sister, who was travelling with me. The back pain and sleepiness I felt when I got home made me think of Jet-Lagged, a poem by Waly Salomão. I roughly translate the first stanza from Portuguese to English: “Travel, where and why, / if we become more unhappy / when we return? Unhappy / and empty, situations and places / gone down the drain, / confused rivers and streets, walls, chapels, / panoplies, landscapes, paintings, / duties free, and shopping malls… ” The stanza that the sleepiness and tiredness (and Betraying Gestures) made me think of, I also translate recklessly: “Asleep? Awake? Sleepwalking? / Diambulist or noctambulist? / Like an arrow, tear the lap of the mother / tongue. / Like an arrow: multilingualism is the target.” I wrote last week's newsletter on the bus—I resisted mentioning that in the letter, but I can’t keep myself from doing it now. If you’ve been reading Betraying Gestures every week, by now you must be aware of my taste for means of transportation. It turned out sad, according to M (it was sad; I wanted it to be sad), but it indicated a style, according to S. I thought it had more style than the others, maybe because it was written on the bus and on my cell phone. I sent Jet-Lagged to J. He responded with a quote from the poem itself: “The rare wine that exploded inside the suitcase / and dyed red the white and expensive shirt from the brand / Comme des Garçons.” J was on a plane that was about to take off when I sent Jet-Lagged to him. In his words, as he didn’t have internet access or the patience to read, he decided to write me. He wrote me a long WhatsApp message about a betrayal—I received it as soon as he landed, but I only read it the following day. I replied, quoting a sentence from his own message: "A certain amount of vulgarity suits you". People now share betrayals with me. Betrayals in their most varied forms. I fear (even though I said in Betraying Gestures #6 that fear isn't something I want to think about or model Betraying Gestures on) that Betraying Gestures becomes a receptacle for betrayals rather than the one committing them. Yesterday, I told a friend of a friend about Betraying Gestures. I love when someone with absolutely no knowledge of art or what an artist does is genuinely interested in understanding it. She thought I had to have been trained as a painter to be an artist. I tried explaining that I work with publishing, am a writer, and have a few publishing projects. She insisted on my training and questioned me about what I had to do to be a writer and work with publishing, asking if I had read a lot of books. “Oh, I read a lot of books,” I answered. In a book I read last year called Written in Invisible Ink by Hervé Guibert, I read that secrets are meant to circulate. I was sitting at a table when secrets became the subject of the conversation. One person defended the idea that if you tell a secret to anyone, it is no longer a secret. I could accept Betraying Gestures as a receptacle for betrayals and make asking people what their biggest betrayal is a project. Betrayals are often kept as secrets. According to my friend's friend, they would no longer be secrets if they were shared with me. My project, according to my friend’s friend, would betray secrets. According to Hervé Guibert, however, to betray a secret, secrets should not be shared. It’s funny; I hadn’t thought of Heman Chong for years, but Betraying Gestures makes me think of him. I already mentioned him in Betraying Gestures #4. The idea of a project where people tell me their biggest betrayals and I keep them only as a memory reminded me of a work by Chong where he invites people to memorize a short story he wrote and tell it back to him without any mistakes. He then promises to never publish this story again, and the only way to access the text is through the person who memorized it. I will introduce a new friend; I’ll use the letter I to refer to her, which may get a bit confusing when I say, for instance, I and I went travelling together. We bought two disposable cameras and photographed our two-day vacation at the beach. She developed the pictures and is now editing them in a publication. Walkway Talks is the name of the project. Betraying Gestures was still a vague idea when we went on this trip, and I told I about it. I told her Betraying Gestures was a project for writing a publisher. She understood what I was proposing with Betraying Gestures as publisher. She didn’t think, though, that formulating it as “writing a publisher” was the best way to phrase it. I agreed. It wasn’t the first time I tried to “write a publisher”, and the last time it didn’t work. What I want, by saying I am “writing a publisher”, is to ask what writing is. D formulated what I wanted “writing a publisher” in a better way, in a question I’ve already mentioned in the newsletter, a question we mentioned in a proposal we wrote today to participate in an independent art book fair: “To write is to live, Vinícius?”. What do the betrayals I called conceptual gimmicks achieve? The last stanza of Waly Salomão’s Jet-Lagged poem gives me a breath to keep writing and inspiring betrayals, even if they are gimmicky: “To write is to get revenge”. And it continues, also addressing the loss brought by Elizabeth Bishop’s poem in Betraying Gestures #6, especially because my reckless translation doesn’t work for this part, but here it is anyway, translated word-by-word: “From loss? / Loss? / Away? In good time.