hollow

the love song (2)

the love song

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
T.S. Eliot

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
. . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

- - -

uma vez dei isto a um amigo. era da Colecção Gato Maltês e a minha intenção era velada.

"Before Spring" de Luís Tinoco

Um pouco injustamente na sombra de Olga Roriz e da Sagração, cada uma já com o seu público próprio, apresentou-se ainda a OrchestrUtopica sob a direcção de Cesário Costa. Numa colaboração que já tem algum tempo, a orquestra interpretou em estreia absoluta a obra de Luís Tinoco encomendada para este espectáculo "Before Spring". Gostei da sonoridade (particularmente a percussão) que é tudo o que Luís Tinoco afirma no programa, bem escrito e que gostaria de colar aqui. Nunca tinha ouvido a Orquestra, mas penso repetir.

o site de Luís Tinoco com muita música online, para ouvir.

o de Olga Roriz.

e o da OrchestrUtopica.

A Sagração da Primavera

numa versão de romance para cinema educativo, mas dá para ver a ideia.



sem o barulho, a coreografia de Nijinsky.



a de Maurice Béjart.



a de Pina Bausch.



e um pouco da de Olga Roriz, que vi hoje, acompanhada pela Orquestra Metropolitana na versão Sinfónica, com os alunos da sua escola superior.



"Duas são, à partida e penso que à chegada, as minhas âncoras nesta peça que, inesperadamente, me proponho, predisponho ou imponho agora criar.

Digo inesperadamente porque ao longo de todo o meu percurso como coreógrafa, e já lá vão 32 anos, a única peça que decididamente nunca quereria coreografar era precisamente “A Sagração da Primavera”.. As razões, até há 3 anos atrás, eram todas elas tão óbvias que nem por um momento me preocupei ou lamentei com essa minha decisão.

E agora aqui estou perante a obra recusada. Perante essa obra assustadoramente maior. No entanto tenho de confessar, talvez com alguma arrogância ou inconsciência, que pouco a pouco me deixa de assustar.

Talvez porque me estou a apaixonar ou já me apaixonei e quando isso me acontece sou imparável e só me tranquilizo quando consumo totalmente esse objecto desejado."

do site do CCB.

s/n

na esplanada minúsculos insectos acompanham, na sua janela de existência. apesar do branco em excesso a entrada no rio deve ter sido agradável, eu a vê-los sem ser vista. pela avenida ilha da Madeira, grupos de famílias de tshirt muito verde subiam a custo.

Easy Rider

œil malade

Porto Leixões

Chegamos tarde e é domingo

O Porto é um rio enfurecido

Os pobres emigrantes que esperam que as autoridades

venham a bordo são fortemente sacudidos nas pobres

barcas que sobem umas sobre as outras sem se afundar

O porto tem um olho doente e o outro vazado

E uma enorme grua inclina-se como um canhão de longo alcance.

Blaise Cendrars em Folhas de Viagem.

a sombra da fome em Portugal

e isto. desligar a informação por um tempo. ver blockbusters e comprar a fatiota do mundial.

chiado (a olhar)

antes que me esqueça: Pão de Bispo na superlativa Kaffeehaus da Rua da Anchieta, quase ao lado da Vida Portuguesa e a um passo do S. Carlos. se morasse ali, talvez lá caísse todos os dias. para a Linzer Torte não houve lugar: vergonha pura da hora mesmo antes do almoço.

"Chiado After Work"

gostámos e trouxemos um hula hoop.

elevador

The Station Agent, de Thomas McCarthy

no final de uma killer-week, calhou bem esta Estação, no nome português, comprado por um euro e meio na papelaria. bate a Fnac aos pontos. prémio do público em Sundance e outros tantos festivais, o reconhecimento para o actor principal e para a Patricia Clarkson, que bonita. ficou esquecido Bobby Cannavale embora num papel que lhe devem assentar regularmente, o de latino. ou o que se pode fazer com baixo orçamento, dois ou três actores desconhecidos, meia dúzia de locais para filmar, nada de espectacular, uma estação de comboios abandonada. à primeira vista cruzei-o com Mystery Train (três ou dez furos acima no cinto imaginário) e com a estação de Kusturica em Life is a Miracle, mas o cinema tem tantas estações e apeadeiros. esta, escrita e realizada por um dos três escritores do filme Up, é uma história simples sem o génio da Straight Story. à partida, a história de um homem que é anão e que herda, do seu amigo e patrão, uma velha estação de comboio abandonada em Jersey. reformado, como ele diz, muda-se com pouca bagagem para o pequeníssimo edifício de madeira que foi estação para se dedicar à sua paixão solitária de observador e estudioso de comboios. podia ser a história de um deficiente e do seu 'coitadismo' e resistência e coragem, mas não é. Fin (Peter Dinklage) é apenas uma das personagens que estão sós e que lutam com um sofrimento do passado -ou todos nós. as chamadas "pontes" e a amizade são inevitáveis para um desenrolar feliz, como se precisava, mas tanto, no final de uma semana assassina como esta.

- -

NYT Critic's Pick (resignation with loneliness)

e mais

no Guardian

- - -

Joe Oramas: It's the librarian fantasy, man. Glasses off, hair down, books flying.
Finbar McBride: She doesn't wear glasses.
Olivia Harris: Well, buy her some, it's worth it.

"un phare attendri comme une madone géante"

Corunha

Um farol enternecido como uma madona gigante

Do exterior é uma linda cidadezinha espanhola

Em terra é um monte de lixo

Crescem por ali dois três arranha-céus

Blaise Cendrars no livro Folhas de Viagem da Assírio e Alvim que comprei a meio preço não sem antes ter espreitado da varanda do seu primeiro andar para a Rua do Carmo, há quanto tempo desde os UHF, mas onde ainda espirra fado a espécie de furgoneta verde lá estacionada há anos. das traseiras entre-prédios para lá chegar fica só uma atracção de voltar voltar, passar a correr pelas portas Nespresso não vá cair o piano antes de chegar aos livros da Assírio. no ar, de um lado o Elevador, do outro o topo dos grandes armazéns do Grandella, saudades da casa de chá onde me sentava para o lanche com a avó materna, descendo os degraus de madeira do espaço comercial. balcões grandes e corridos onde se cortava tecido, mas se calhar engano-me. no Natal as montras mexiam, era uma festa. sobre a Corunha nem por isso, achei bonitas as janelinhas e as gaivotas no céu cinzento.

o que gostei

destes aquários, foi sem palavras.

o meu Célio

não tinha já pai, a mãe era muito nova, tão nova que me pareceu colega na foto. e duas irmãs. ele tinha dez anos, quase da mesma idade da irmã mais velha. a outra era bebé, em 2008. o meu afilhado em Xai Xai. a mãe do Célio morreu hoje.

luminous

"language ceases to exercise control over a fluid and elusive reality and comes to lie like a thick crust over his imagination; ceases to be a luminous vehicle for self-expression and turns into something like an oppressive super-ego; ceases to be a means of communication and becomes an opaque and impenetrable wall." na p. 328 de Modernism.

ou fique calado

as opções são sempre várias.

chegando à pós-modernidade

prefiro Beckett, mas há quem fique com Burroughs ou Ginsberg. embora cronologicamente alinhadas, as últimas leituras têm fugido por todo o lado. entre Beckett, a Terra sem Vida -páginas descoladas e capa a perder o branco- e uma sombra de oceano, vejo passar dez anos."Thoughts, no, not thoughts. Profounds of mind. Buried in who knows what profounds of mind. Of mindlessness."

Oiseaux Exotiques, Messiaen

com program notes do concerto com o mesmo Pierre-Laurent Aimard mas com o maestro Leonard Slatkin no Kennedy Center.

Nadja à Paris, E. Rohmer

J'habite à la cité universitaire, maison de l'Allemagne. Je suis américaine et yougoslave, né à Belgrade, et américaine d'adoption. La cité me rappelle les collèges des États-Unis. C’est la même atmosphère détendue. Autre différence : il y a ici des gens de toutes les parties du monde. Les pelouses ne sont pas interdites, ce qui est rare en France. On peut y marcher et s'y asseoir. Le parc est vaste et des places sont été réservées aux terrains de jeu et aux courts de tennis. Moi, je ne pratique aucun sport sauf la course. Enfin, je cours. Le danger, c’est qu’on est si bien, qu’on n’a plus envie de sortir. Toutes les choses dont j’ai besoin dans mon travail ou mes loisirs se trouvent à ma portée. Les distractions sont nombreuses, concerts, cinémas. Chaque maison possède une troupe de théâtre. Celle-ci répète une pièce de Lope de Vega.
Une ligne de métro me conduit en 5 minutes au quartier Latin. Je prépare une thèse sur Proust. C'est la raison officielle de mon séjour en France. Mais ce genre de travail me laisse une très grande liberté dans l’organisation de mon temps. En fait, mes visites à la Sorbonne sont brèves et espacés. Avant de retourner à la cité, j’aime flâner dans les vieilles rues de la rive gauche, pleines de boutiques d’antiquaires et librairies. Ce qui me frappe en France, ce sont les étalages des livres à l’extérieur. On peut les feuilleter et même lire les pages entières en toute tranquillité. Puis je vais m’asseoir à une terrasse de café. Les français aiment rester des heures. Moi, non. Mais tout de même, un certains temps. Je n’ai aucun but précis. Je m’assois comme ça. Je n’attends personne. J’ai simplement envie d’être là. Je ne lis pas. Je regarde. Je regarde la rue, la manière dont marchent les gens, la manière dont ils regardent.
Je connais bien Saint-Germain-des-Prés. C’est même le quartier de Paris qui m’attirait le premier lorsque je suis arrivée en France. Je suppose qu’il s’est beaucoup embourgeoisé depuis l’époque de Gréco. Mais on y trouve une collection de visages intéressants. Je suis plus à l’aise à Montparnasse. Le site est banal, mais la foule est sympathique. On vient là pour parler et non pour poser. Une sorte d’intimité se forme tout de suite. C’est ainsi que je me suis fait un grand nombre d’amis, parmi les bohèmes, peintres, écrivains, parisiens ou étrangers. On peut passer des nuits entières à bavarder. Les gens que je fréquente sont en général plus âgés que moi et détachés des petites préoccupations de la vie étudiante. Ce sont ceux qui m’ont initiée à l’art modern. (...)



- - -





em The Flâneur, de Keith Tester.

engraçado como não há muita gente a falar deste filme.

e porque não: Modernity and the Flâneur. From Flâneur to Web Surfer.

Páteo do Linhó (1)

Foi um dia ganho, uma semana ganha, no momento em que entrei pela primeira vez na charcuteria francesa Páteo do Linhó que fica precisamente no Linhó. Queijos, vinhos, charcuteria, pastelaria e bolos de morrer incluindo uns excelentes macarons, comida a peso onde vi toda a espécie de salsichas feitas na casa, choucroute, quiches verdadeiras, vieiras, champagne, um mundo de total perdição do pecado mais profundo de que me posso lembrar. à entrada, gaspacho. um fascínio.

aqui, uma opinião com talvez menos paixão. (ou não: "Xavier le maître d’œuvre nous titille les papilles."). aqui uma visita de estudantes que deixa entrever a cozinha. aqui, desgraçadamente o que tenho andado a perder.

lista. e outra coisa.

que vou fazer de relações sem sequência, ao nível do charco, e talvez isso me diga alguma coisa. sei que não, está tudo listado e das mesmas coisas não devo tirar ordenamentos muito diferentes. indo desta maneira, a escavar como um cão com as patas.

e o pós-pós-modernismo, três noites e três formas, a ultrapassar o segundo deles

-"metaphysical skepticism or nihilism towards a “grand narrative” of Western culture". The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond. Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure our Culture. Altermodernity. Performatism. e cheguei a casa. no mesmo dia em que soube que a Nova se passou totalmente (diz que tem um pombal do melhor) e que a Aberta alterou o currículo de cursos. 'inda bem que venho da Alameda da Universidade, mas não digo nada que as memórias não são fantásticas. (aposto que o choucroute lhes era em tudo superior). e o corrector a insistir que quer chouriceiro em vez de choucroute, uma maçada.

para levar na mala

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins."

deception

The Mark On The Wall
by Virginia Woolf

PERHAPS IT WAS the middle of January in the present year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have been the winter time, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it.... If that mark was made by a nail, it can't have been for a picture, it must have been for a miniature the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way an old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they were very interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.

But as for that mark, I'm not sure about it; I don't believe it was made by a nail after all; it's too big, too round, for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn't be able to say for certain; because once a thing's done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard....

But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things, that one won't be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour dim pinks and blues which will, as time goes on, become more definite, become I don't know what....

And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some round black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not being a very vigilant housekeeper look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say, buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots utterly refusing annihilation, as one can believe.

The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane.... I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes.... Shakespeare.... Well, he will do as well as another. A man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the fire, so A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through the open door, for this scene is supposed to take place on a summer's evening But how dull this is, this historical fiction! It doesn't interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself; that is the beauty of them; they are thoughts like this:

"And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how I'd seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign of Charles the First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First?" I asked (but I don't remember the answer). Tall flowers with purple tassels to them perhaps. And so it goes on. All the time I'm dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-protection. Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious after all? It is a matter of great importance. Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps but these generalizations are very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers a whole class of things indeed which as a child one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing, from which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless damnation. Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder, those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker's Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and women, which soon, one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom if freedom exists....

In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs or camps. Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English people, and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf.... There must be some book about it. Some antiquary must have dug up those bones and given them a name.... What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired Colonels for the most part, I daresay, leading parties of aged labourers to the top here, examining clods of earth and stone, and getting into correspondence with the neighbouring clergy, which, being opened at breakfast time, gives them a feeling of importance, and the comparison of arrow-heads necessitates cross-country journeys to the county towns, an agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives, who wish to make plum jam or to clean out the study, and have every reason for keeping that great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension, while the Colonel himself feels agreeably philosophic in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question. It is true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp; and, being opposed, indites a pamphlet which he is about to read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke lays him low, and his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp and that arrowhead there, which is now in the case at the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the wine-glass that Nelson drank out of proving I really don't know what.

No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really what shall we say? the head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago, which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should I gain? Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars? And the less we honour them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases.... Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with one's thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water-lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs.... How peaceful it is down here, rooted in the centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light, and their reflections if it were not for Whitaker's Almanack if it were not for the Table of Precedency!

I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is a nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?

Here is nature once more at her old game of self-preservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker's Table of Precedency? The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging you; and if you can't be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the wall.

I understand Nature's game her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action men, we assume, who don't think. Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.

Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that I have grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of.... Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don't know how they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in meadows, in forests, and by the side of rivers all things one likes to think about. The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green that when a moorhen dives one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and of water-beetles slowly raising domes of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think of the tree itself: first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter's nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all night long. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with diamond-cut red eyes.... One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth, then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so, life isn't done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately but something is getting in the way.... Where was I? What has it all been about? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitaker's Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I can't remember a thing. Everything's moving, falling, slipping, vanishing.... There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying

"I'm going out to buy a newspaper."

"Yes?"

"Though it's no good buying newspapers.... Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war!... All the same, I don't see why we should have a snail on our wall."

Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.

-- -

o que por agora gostei, o que por agora fez sentido com o lido antes e o lido depois. o vivido antes e depois e por enquanto.

isto

não era isto.

Jia Aili

The Dead

de John Houston.

animated poetry de Billy Collins

curta (2)

"Our Assessment: B : interesting linguistic games and points of view."

o assessment é sobre Gertrude Stein e os seus objectos. ora aí está, tenho problema com contas e números estatísticas. uso-os em jogos de lógica e conclusões práticas, da vida prática, mas estão fora deste jogo da linguagem. e mais ainda do estranho não-jogo das químicas corporais e infinitamente outras. dar notas deve ser das coisas mais limitadoras limitadas que se pode tentar, uma auto-cinta, auto-aprisionamento. (gosto de 'mais ainda', a sensação de crescendo)

- - -
A BLUE COAT.

A blue coat is guided guided away, guided and guided away, that is the particular color that is used for that length and not any width not even more than a shadow.

Gertrude Stein em Tender Buttons. and FOOD. para quem gosta.

The Work of Gertrude Stein por William Carlos Williams (onde entra Tristam Shandy)

The Work of Gertrude Stein
William Carlos Williams

By locating traces of Tristram Shandy in Stein’s Geography and Plays, Williams identifies an entire tradition of literature that is concerned foremost with language rather than logic, with "the words."

Would I have seen a white bear!
(for how can I imagine it?)

Let it be granted that whatever is new in literature the germ of it will be found somewhere in the writings of other times; only the modern emphasis gives work a present distinction.

The necessity for this modern focus and the meaning of the changes involved are, however, another matter, the everlasting stumbling block to criticism. Here is a theme worth development in the case of Gertrude Stein—yet signally neglected.

Why in fact have we not heard more generally from American scholars upon the writings of Miss Stein? Is it lack of heart or ability or just that theirs is an enthusiasm which fades rapidly of its own nature before the risks of today? Now I quote from Sterne:

The verbs auxiliary we are concerned in here, continued my father, are am; was; have; had; do; did; could; owe; make; made; suffer; shall; should; will; would; can; ought; used; or is wont . . . —or with these questions added to them;—Is it? Was it? Will it be? . . . Or affirmatively . . . —Or chronologically . . . —Or hypothetically . . . —If it was? If it was not? What would follow?—If the French beat the English? If the Sun should go out of the Zodiac?
Now, by the right use and application of these, continued my father, in which a child’s memory should be exercised, there is no one idea can enter the brain how barren soever, but a magazine of conceptions and conclusions may be drawn forth from it.—Didst thou ever see a white bear? Cried my father, turning his head round to Trim, who stood at the back of his chair.—No, an’ please your honour, replied the corporal.—But thou couldst discourse about one, Trim, said my father, in case of need?—How is it possible, brother, quoth my Uncle Toby, if the corporal never saw one?—’Tis the fact I want, replied my father,—and the possibility of it as follows.

A white bear! Very well, Have I ever seen one? Might I ever have seen one? Am I ever to see one? Ought I ever to have seen one? Or can I ever see one?

Would I had seen a white bear! (for how can I imagine it?)

If I should see a white bear, what should I say? If I should never see a white bear, what then?

If I never have, can, must, or shall see a white bear alive; have I ever seen the skin of one? Did I ever see one painted?—described? Have I never dreamed of one?

Note how the words alive, skin, painted, described, dreamed come into the design of these sentences. The feeling is of words themselves, a curious immediate quality quite apart from their meaning, much as in music different notes are dropped, so to speak, into a repeated chord one at a time, one after another—for itself alone. Compare this with the same effects common in all that Stein does. See Geography and Plays, "They were both gay there." To continue—

Did my father, mother, uncle, aunt, brothers or sisters, ever see a white bear? What would they give? . . . How would they behave? How would the white bear have behaved? Is he wild? Tame? Terrible? Rough? Smooth?
Note the play upon rough and smooth (though it is not certain that this was intended), rough seeming to apply to the bear’s deportment, smooth to surface, presumably the bear’s coat. In any case the effect is that of a comparison relating primarily not to any qualities of the bear himself but to the words rough and smooth. And so to finish—

Is the white bear worth seeing?
Is there any sin in it?

Is it better than a black one?

In this manner ends Chapter 43 of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. The handling of the words and to some extent the imaginative quality of the sentence is a direct forerunner of that which Gertrude Stein has woven today into a synthesis of its own. It will be plain, in fact, on close attention, that Sterne exercises not only the play (or music) of sight, sense and sound contrast among the words themselves which Stein uses, but their grammatical play also—i.e. for, how, can I imagine it; did my . . . , what would, how would, compare Stein’s "to have rivers; to halve rivers," etc. It would not be too much to say that Stein’s development over a lifetime is anticipated completely with regard to subject matter, sense and grammar—in Sterne.

Starting from scratch we get, possibly, thatch; just as they have always done in poetry.

Then they would try to connect it up by something like—The mice scratch, beneath the thatch.

Miss Stein does away with all that. The free-versists on the contrary used nothing else. They saved—The mice, under the . . . ,

It is simply the skeleton, the "formal" parts of writing, those that make form, that she has to do with, apart from the "burden" which they carry. The skeleton, important to acknowledge where confusion of all knowledge of the "soft parts" reigns as at the present day in all intellectual fields.

Stein’s theme is writing. But in such a way as to be writing envisioned as the first concern of the moment, dragging behind it a dead weight of logical burdens, among them a dead criticism which broken through might be a gap by which endless other enterprises of the understanding should issue—for refreshment.

It is a revolution of some proportions that is contemplated, the exact nature of which may be no more than sketched here but whose basis is humanity in a relationship with literature hitherto little contemplated.

And at the same time it is a general attack on the scholastic viewpoint, that medieval remnant with whose effects from generation to generation literature has been infested to its lasting detriment. It is a break-away from that paralyzing vulgarity of logic for which the habits of science and philosophy coming over into literature (where they do not belong) are to blame.

It is this logicality as a basis for literary action which in Stein’s case, for better or worse, has been wholly transcended.

She explains her own development in connection with Tender Buttons (1914). "It was my first conscious struggle with the problem of correlating sight, sound and sense, and eliminating rhythm;—now I am trying grammar and eliminating sight and sound" (transition No. 14, Fall 1928).

Having taken the words to her choice, to emphasize further what she has in mind she has completely unlinked them (in her most recent work) from their former relationships in the sentence. This was absolutely essential and unescapable. Each under the new arrangement has a quality of its own, but not conjoined to carry the burden science, philosophy and every higgledy-piggledy figment of law and order have been laying upon them in the past. They are like a crowd at Coney Island, let us say, seen from an airplane.

Whatever the value of Miss Stein’s work may turn out finally to be, she has at least accomplished her purpose of getting down on paper this much that is decipherable. She has placed writing on a plane where it may deal unhampered with its own affairs, unburdened with scientific and philosopic lumber.

For after all, science and philosophy are today, in their effect upon the mind, little more than fetishes of unspeakable abhorrence. And it is through a subversion of the art of writing that their grip upon us has assumed its steel-like temper.

What are philosophers, scientists, religionists, they that have filled up literature with their pap? Writers, of a kind. Stein simply erases their stories, turns them off and does without them, their logic (founded merely on the limits of the perceptions) which is supposed to transcend the words, along with them. Stein denies it. The words, in writing, she discloses, transcend everything.

Movement (for which in a petty way logic is taken), the so-called search for truth and beauty, is for us the effect of a breakdown of the attention. But movement must not be confused with what we attach to it but, for the rescuing of the intelligence, must always be considered aimless, without progess.

This is the essence of all knowledge.

Bach might be an illustration of movement not suborned by a freight of purposed design, loaded upon it as in almost all later musical works; statement unmusical and unnecessary, Stein’s "They lived very gay then" has much of the same quality of movement to be found in Bach—the composition of the words determining not the logic, not the "story," not the theme even, but the movement itself. As it happens, "They were both gay there" is as good as some of Bach’s shorter figures.

Music could easily have a statement attached to each note in the manner of words, so that C natural might mean the sun, etc., and completely dull treatises be played—and even sciences finally expounded in tunes.

Either, we have been taught to think, the mind moves in a logical sequence to a definite end which is its goal, or it will embrace movement without goal other than movement itself for an end and hail "transition" only as supreme.

Take your choice, both resorts are an improper description of the mind in fullest play.

If the attention could envision the whole of writing, let us say, at one time, moving over it in swift and accurate pursuit of the modern imperative at the instant when it is most to the fore, something of what actually takes place under an optimum of intelligence could be observed. It is an alertness not to let go of a possibility of movement in our fearful bedazzlement with some concrete and fixed present. The goal is to keep a beleaguered line of understanding which has movement from breaking down and becoming a hole into which we sink decoratively to rest.

The goal has nothing to do with the silly function which logic, natural or otherwise, enforces. Yet it is a goal. It moves as the sense wearies, remains fresh, living. One is concerned with it as with anything pursued and not with the rush of air or the guts of the horse one is riding—save to a very minor degree.

Writing, like everything else, is much a question of refreshed interest. It is directed, not idly, but as most often happens (though not necessarily so) toward that point not to be predetermined where movement is blocked (by the end of logic perhaps). It is about these parts, if I am not mistaken, that Gertrude Stein will be found.

There remains to be explained the bewildering volume of what Miss Stein has written, the quantity of her work, its very apparent repetitiousness, its iteration, what I prefer to call its extension, the final clue to her meaning.

It is, of course, a progression (not a progress) beginning, conveniently, with "Melanchtha" from Three Lives, and coming up to today.

How in a democracy, such as the United States, can writing which has to compete with excellence elsewhere and in other times remain in the field and be at once objective (true to fact), intellectually searching, subtle and instinct with powerful additions to our lives? It is impossible, without invention of some sort, for the very good reason that observation about us engenders the very opposite of what we seek: triviality, crassness and intellectual bankruptcy. And yet what we do see can in no way be excluded. Satire and flight are two possibilities but Miss Stein has chosen otherwise.

But if one remain in a place and reject satire, what then? To be democratic, local (in the sense of being attached with integrity to actual experience) Stein, or any other artist, must for subtlety ascend to a plane of almost abstract design to keep alive. To writing, then, as an art in itself. Yet what actually impinges on the senses must be rendered as it appears, by use of which, only, and under which, untouched, the significance has to be disclosed. It is one of the major problems of the artist.

"Melanctha" is a thrilling clinical record of the life of a colored woman in the present-day United States, told with directness and truth. It is without question one of the best bits of characterization produced in America. It is universally admired. This is where Stein began. But for Stein to tell a story of that sort, even with the utmost genius, was not enough under the conditions in which we live, since by the very nature of its composition such a story does violence to the larger scene which would be portrayed.

True, a certain way of delineating the scene is to take an individual like Melanctha and draw her carefully. But this is what happens. The more carefully the drawing is made, the greater the genius involved and the greater the interest that attaches, therefore, to the character as an individual, the more exceptional that character becomes in the mind of the reader and the less typical of the scene.

It was no use for Stein to go on with Three Lives. There that phase of the work had to end. See Useful Knowledge, the parts on the U.S.A.

Stein’s pages have become like the United States viewed from an airplane—the same senseless repetitions, the endless multiplications of toneless words, with these she had to work.

No use for Stein to fly to Paris and forget it. The thing, the United States, the unmitigated stupidity, the drab tediousness of the democracy, the overwhelming number of the offensively ignorant, the dull nerve—is there in the artist’s mind and cannot be escaped by taking a ship. She must resolve it if she can, if she is to be.

That must be the artist’s articulation with existence.

Truly, the world is full of emotion—more or less—but it is caught in bewilderment to a far more important degree. And the purpose of art, so far as it has any, is not at least to copy that, but lies in the resolution of difficulties to its own comprehensive organization of materials. And by so doing, in this case, rather than by copying, it takes its place as most human.

To deal with Melanctha, with characters of whomever it may be, the modern Dickens, is not therefore human. To write like that is not, in the artist, to be human at all, since nothing is resolved, nothing is done to resolve the bewilderment which makes of emotion an inanity: That, is to overlook the gross instigation and with all subtlety to examine the object minutely for "the truth"—which if there is anything more commonly practiced or more stupid, I have yet to come upon it.

To be most useful to humanity, or to anything else for that matter, an art, writing, must stay art, not seeking to be science, philosophy, history, the humanities, or anything else it has been made to carry in the past. It is this enforcement which underlies Gertrude Stein’s extension and progression to date.


- - -
tudo daqui.

'genius'

chegou para me dar horas da mais pura solidão e prazer.

"Information technology may transform the relations between writer and reader, but can have little effect upon the question of genius. If you contemplate the wide span from Homer to Samuel Beckett, what leaps out at you is how minimal the changes have been in the qualities that sustain the identity of genius."

Harold Bloom em Genius. a ler o capítulo sobre Eça, salta à vista: o elefante Salomão de Saramago está no mesmo caminho da Relíquia. no tom, no riso, até na venda dos pequenos sagrados.

s/n

ants

Sartre antes de Sartre, "This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual--nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent. It is, perhaps, plausible that a man in this situation, impressed with the unconcern of the universe, should see the innumerable flaws of his life, and have them taste wickedly in his mind and wish for another chance. A distinction between right and wrong seems absurdly clear to him, then, in this new ignorance of the grave-edge, and he understands that if he were given another opportunity he would mend his conduct and his words, and be better and brighter during an introduction or at a tea." em Open Boat. se era perante a indiferença natural, é agora a anónima multidão, presente sempre em todo o lado. os sociólogos devem andar orgásticos. Saramago mesmo assim continua nobel, casando António Vieira com os movimentos humanos, blank-random. embora o mestre lhes veja padrões e salvação.

para a malta que gosta de dormir e/ou que tem preguiça de gravar

Johnny Guitar
Nicholas Ray



título numa clara alusão à programação televisiva que remete os acontecimentos cinematográficos da semana, os dois filmes de sábado à noite, para horas de morcego, incompatíveis com o estilo de vida de quem tem uma vida dita "normal". prática que não é novidade nenhuma, enfim.

visto do céu

Malmö

ontem