Nosferatu (1922), dir. F. W. Murnau, with organist Jason Roberts, Maison Symphonique, 29 October 2026

Please permit me an introductory note on style.

A writer friend of mine once shared with me a rule she always abided by: if her writing sounded overwritten, she rewrote it. Prose, she believed, should read naturally and not appear as if the writer had poured over every word with a dictionary, thesaurus, and the Chicago Manual of Style at hand.

I, however, am of another mind. I believe that writing should sound written. Just as music should sound musical, the voice of an author should be front and centre, frictionlessness be damned. I’m a fan of plume traces and baroque flourishes. Writing that sounds written signifies that the writer has a unique identity, that their intelligence is not artificial.

Therefore, my personal motto is, if it doesn’t sound written enough, overwrite it.

Martha Langford, Lectures After Dark, Pub L’Île Noire, 20 October 2026

“If I distrust my memory — neurotics, as we know, do so to a remarkable extent, but normal people have every reason for doing so as well — I am able to supplement and guarantee its working by making a note in writing.”
—Sigmund Freud, “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’ (1925)”

All media are essentially writing devices. This is evidenced by the names that their inventors gave early image and audio reproduction devices: the photograph and phonautograph, for instance.

The suffix -graphy has two meanings in English. It denotes the study of a subject — geography, for example, as the discipline that maps the earth’s surfaces. Or it denotes representation in writing. Our personal signatures are called autographs — auto- meaning self, and -graph, meaning writing. They are understood universally as individual and irreplicable.

Writing is also historically considered to be the most reliable and authoritative form of communication. Oral traditions are subject to accidental or deliberate alteration. Our memories are fallible and malleable and open to suggestion and distortion. Events moving further away in time tend to lose contour and detail. Writing in all its forms helps to supplement faulty memory.

Except now, when memories can simply be erased without a trace. Freud, writing a century ago, described an early Etch A Sketch-type device that allowed writing and erasure multiple times upon the same surface — the Mystic Writing Pad. A wax tablet was covered with a cellophane-like top sheet that the writer could lift up, making the writing disappear. The top sheet Freud likened to a “protective shield against stimuli” that alternately preserved and effaced writing and thus memory.

What is implied in Freud’s analysis is that the indelible marks left upon the wax layer below acted as accumulators of every lived experience, written upon and overwritten, over and over again. I suggest that the Mystic Writing Pad’s underlying wax tablet is analogous to the subconscious. It preserves that which our faculties of immediate perception tend to gloss over or erase. It keeps in memory layer upon layer of autography — traumas and joys — with an air of indifferent equivalence.

Molinari and Mondrian: Musical Inspirations, Salle Bourgie, 27 October 2026

When a traumatic event occurs in a place, we might associate that place with the traumatic event. This leads us to repress traumatic memories through avoidance. A public park, perhaps, might be the site of a miserable breakup or a phone call bearing bad news, and remembering these occurrences makes us less prone to visit the places associated with them, regardless of how beloved or beautiful they once might have seemed.

But that which we repress always returns — in neuroses and other unpleasant unconscious symptoms. So, another course of action might be to overwrite bad memories with better ones, to consciously manifest more enjoyable experiences in places with which we held negative associations. For a while, both trauma and pleasure might uncomfortably coexist in these spaces. But gradually, we begin to overwrite our distresses, cultivating new and improved associations.

Judith Fliedl, Ultraviolin, Église Sainte-Hilda, 30 October 2026

“A racehorse is more different from a workhorse than a workhorse is from an ox.”
—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

In categorizing common phenomena, we make arbitrary and contingent distinctions that are less about what a thing is than what a thing does. Visit any hardware store and observe how items are arranged: screws are commonly stocked next to nails and not screwdrivers.

Leonidas Kavakos with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 21 October 2026

“The written word is a lie.”
—Public Image Ltd, “Rise”

All writing is rewriting. I can’t remember who wrote this first. But it doesn’t matter since inevitably someone wrote it before. All writing is also overwriting. Because every apparently pristine writing surface retains at least some trace of some precedent. Even the blank document begins with a blinking cursor that appears and disappears as we start to write.

But back for a moment to Freud. Freud believed that the temporal space between experience and memory is what constitutes time. This is significant for our age because events seem to become memories more rapidly than they once did.

By way of example, when 35mm film cameras were the standard mode of preserving images, we might have waited a week for our photos to be developed and then spend several days arranging those photos into a photo album. And only then would they enter into the realm of memory.

Then, Polaroids came along and increased the speed with which the past image appeared as a memory. But still, this technology took a few minutes to render an image as a commemoration.

Now, we routinely snap dozens if not hundreds of images per day with the cameras built into our phones. And their operating systems automatically catalogue and arrange these images into albums and folders for immediate retrieval in memory.

Nowadays, we are never not looking instantaneously into the past. And according to Freud’s century-old logic, the mechanism of time has sped up because the temporal space between experience and experience becoming memory has effectively disappeared. Everything that has ever happened, including what is happening right now, is being overwritten simultaneously in experience and in memory.

There is no sense now in asking what happened to the time. Because when it comes down to it, there is no time like the present.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Photographed for NicheMTL.}