My first Essay

In São Paulo city, every year we have the 'Virada Cultural': a 24 hours event with art installations in several different points of the city. There are concerts, plays, dance presentations, cinema, and many other cultural activities. In 2018 we were honoring a great Brazilian writer from the last century: Hilda Hilst.

Facade of Mario de Andrade Library - by Wilfredor - Obra do próprio, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57044901

I had not heard of Hilda Hilst - the majority of writers from my literature class were men. My friend invited me to go to the Mario de Andrade library which had an installation about Hilda. We walked through the city in the night and it was a pleasant surprise to see that majestic facade out of nowhere. I felt so small passing through the door. I felt I was going inside a sacred place. I walked in, carefully observing the walls and ceiling, and then I see a series of posters with poems from Hilda hanging from above. Among all the lines I could have read, I saw these two lines: "Os que estão perto de mim\ não me veem… Estende a tua mão" (which I would translate as "The ones near me\ don't see me... Give me your hand"). And this was the first contact I had with her work.

Hilda Hilst in 1954, photo taken by Fernando Lemos. The photo was available at https://artebrasileiros.com.br/cultura/hilda-hilst-uma-feminista-nata-nos-anos-50/

I haven't read many books. I love reading, but I don't read. Reading is exhausting for me. Everything provokes a stream of thoughts and each thought leads to a series of others. Each one connects to other memories in my brain. It is overwhelming. So I end up avoiding reading.

I also avoided writing. I used to think that writing was too slow in comparison to the speed at which my thoughts arrive. It was frustrating to have so many thoughts and my hands being too slow to capture. Now I am trying to see it as a way to practice patience and mindfulness. I sit to write and appreciate the beauty of ideas unfolding in front of me. The beauty of the evolution of concepts.

Those two lines from Hilda meant a lot to me. I felt understood. When I walk in the world it seems that I feel too much, I think too much. Every time I tried to express myself, it felt people didn't quite connect. I felt misplaced. And then I saw that amazing woman saying she was not being seen, she wanted a hand, she wanted company. And that is what I want. I want company while I experience and discover the world. And I want to experience the world through other people's lenses as well.

I never thought I could write. I thought I had not studied enough nor read enough to be able to write. I also feel insecure about presenting my ideas to a wider audience, because I feel smarter people - the ones who read many books, the people who lived a lot of experiences, the people who know complicated words - will present a lot of arguments and ideas of thinkers that I don't know, they will connect the ideas to art pieces that I haven't seen. They will see my limited vocabulary or think my thoughts are shallow, and I won't be listened to. I will be dismissed.

Hilda Hilst said once that the writers (but I think it applies to all artists) are different from most people because they are more attentive, they are able to captivate things and emotional states that others cannot see nor feel. She also said that the literary work is a search for expressing what was felt and learned. And in 1978, when she was 48 years old, she said, "for 27 years I read, meditate, think about human beings, death, hate, etc" (all of this can be found in the introduction of the book "Fico besta quando me entendem" by Cristiano Diniz about Hilda Hilst). I identify a lot with her views. It does feel that artists pay attention, feel, reflect, transform and produce an output in the form of an art piece and they give it to us. And I think is a beautiful job to spend time connecting, transforming, and sharing concepts.

Hilda used to see the writer as someone with a duty to stimulate the minds of people, even if the people didn't quite understand, the stimulus was given, and that already counted for something. She also mentioned that she felt some kind of need to communicate, she had a deep desire to "discover the secret of things" and that the writer is a "fragile being, insecure, anxious, that looks for answers of all the mysteries of life". I think I fit her description. I feel a lot, I think a lot, I question a lot and it seems that I do it because I want to discover the world. My desire to communicate comes precisely because I am living and investigating and I want to share and discover, but I can only see the world from one point of view, that is why I need other people, to show me more, to help me discover more. And that is why I am here. Because I want to communicate. And I am starting now.

São Paulo, 04:09 pm, Jan 05, 2022 Brenda