Saturday, July 15, 2017

How to build a time machine...

First, you need some basic stuff like old letters and pictures from yourself and friends. The older they are the better in order to accomplish the journey back in time. Photographs from teenage girlfriends might have been a touchy subject in the beginning of a current relationship, but after 23 years of being together and rearing up two kids- those memories should not hurt anybody; on the contrary, it could be an interesting topic of conversation.




most of these people won't surely remember me after so many years!


I still keep some of old pictures from friends, but none of one particularly sweetheart, I believe she looks exactly like Hillary  Swarts, so why not, one of this actress' picture will do the trick. You can follow suit.



Of course it is dangerous to get stuck in the past, so make sure you also include more modern material, personal or public, the reasons to come back home and keep going looking ahead, pictures from your recent accomplisments, kids, present partner, job, movies just watched...



In addition to this, there is a myriad of other components that can be included to suit each other's personal needs: drawings, water colors, posters from theatre plays, concerts and singers of oldies goldies, lyrics from songs, advertisments, fragments from comics and newspapers, maps from significant places, stationary of different types and textures, napkins, table sheets of paper from restaurants, wrapping papers for gifts, chocolates and candies, etc...

Recycling is very convenient because it estimulates the imagination and saves money. This paper bag from a Natura store are for sure strong enough to be used as end pages.



Do not hurry up to gather all this information, take your time, try to find a symbolism behind  your selected pictures that somehow reflect the learning you acquired in a a lifetime of experiences. For example, in Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon (1983) one of the leading characters and wise woman is trying to advise someone else with these words:


Look carefully into your life and find out those crossroads that you encountered again and again, the very same conflict, the very similar circumstances that repeat themselves along your path because in that recurrent situation lies the lesson you came to learn in this lifetime, on this planet.

 Have you spotted those recurrent conflicts in your life? Have you understood the lesson you need to learn?. 



I have done my own personal research to determine those repeated  circumstances -that  recurrent conflict- and I found this picture very suggestive,  it is only a poster pulled off from the walls on the street many times, a masked woman, and i have inserted it again and again, here and there, to reflect my inner struggle and lesson learnt -I hope!  and there it is, I know what it stands for, what it means, nobody else does.




Also make sure you end up your bulk of memories with a possitive perspective, a big THANK YOU LIFE! should be enough. In this case, a poster from a revival concert with a child in an Elvis Presley costume will do the trick, it was so funny that i thought it could transmit the idea of renewal, of a new start, of success, and a lesson learnt.



Well, once all these memories have been collected and inner work has been done, we need to put them all together in some sort of bookbinding. There are two methods to follow:

A. Simply pile up all those sheets of paper and use an electrical drill to make four or five holes on the left side of the bulk, then tie them up together with a thread or string and paste a cover on both ending pages;

B. Divide those memories in groups of 16 pages; then, pick up the first and the last page, join them together by means of a long narrow piece of paper glued to the back left side of page one and the right front (or back) right side of last page.



Put them apart, pick up second page and previous to the last page, and do the same thing, This way, you'll end up with  a conventional signature of 8 doble pages.




Proceed like this until you finish with all sheets of paper; then, pile up all signatures one on top of the other to form a bulk. At this point, clamps should be used to preasure all singatures and perform some cuts on the edge of the signatures to sew them together, like in the example.


















We'll follow this last method, and this is the result:




At this point, we'll select a piece of leather to make the covers and paste them to the end pages of the bulk.




This piece of leather was purchased at Els Encants flea market of Barcelona, at a Morroc store.



Well, actually, instead of leather, we found this special fabrique made of corck in Portugal, and found it so appealing that wetried i out.

And this is how it looks like,



You see?  past and present are tied up together in the same volume, it takes a second to go from the time you were born to today, in this case, fifty ears of a lifetime compressed in a few letters and pictures, fifty years that look like the blink of an eye, I believe it is instumental to dwell on this thought and accept it as you read through pages recalling forgotten details between lines.

If you engage on this activity for a couple of days, if you relax and meditate before or after your reading, sure enough your dreams will take you back to whatever past times you need to re-visit so you can fully understand the scope of your wakening days, your sleepless nights, your unconscious craves, Sometimes, the scenes from your life rewatched in dreams will be obvious, you already knew that! But some other times, Moprheo will take you to places and times beyond your imagination, because we are all connected, the atoms in our individual bodies were once all pressed together just before the Big Bang.

Lucid dreams are powerful enough to change one's perspective of oneself, but power plants can help warriors in their quest  of their souls. The process is the same, build up your interest, your motivation to learn from your unconscious and you'll get there.

You'll come back ready to leave your past behind and look ahead for new experiences.



This is my cork collection of bookbindings, three of the six are mine,


My leather collection, all mine except the one on the bottom.