‘kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness', Pessoa, Poe, Baudelaire, Borges, Voltaire (preserved citrons and pistachio nuts)

parte de um excelente artigo por André Darlington.

"Baudelaire could have been talking about Pessoa when he calls such a man a ‘kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness.” One thinks of Edgar Allen Poe’s Man of the Crowd, and in fact, Pessoa translated Poe– as well as O. Henry and Walt Whitman– into Portuguese.

In Poe’s short story, the narrator becomes obsessed with an old man he sees while sitting at a café, and proceeds to follow him through the streets of London, doggedly, overnight until the next day. It is a story of pursuing uniqueness within a teeming and anonymous modern city. But it is also the start of a Chinese box, or a Russian doll: the narrator of Poe’s story is, in effect, pursuing another story.

In The Thousand and One Nights, the Persian sultan Shahyrar is so disillusioned with the infidelity of women that he marries a virgin every day and then executes her in the morning. But when he marries Scheherazade, the Grand Vizier’s daughter, she begins to tell a story every night so suspenseful that the Sultan desires to hear its completion. Each night she begins a new story after telling the old one, such that every story always leads to yet more stories, with stories emerging from within one another, ad infinitum.

The collection that became The Thousand and One Nights was drawn together over centuries from multiple Asian and Middle Eastern sources. The book’s impact on European letters after it was first published in France in 1704 has been enormous. It was particularly pivotal for Marcel Proust, for instance, who mentions it as inspiration for the multiple intersecting stories found in his sprawling work, A Remembrance of Things Past.

But the book was also foundational for the Argentinian writer of accumulating and intertwining stories, Jorge Luis Borges. Borges is a master of multiplication, of stories in which unreality threatens reality through a sheer blizzard of narratives–so many interlocking that the reader experiences vertigo.

With a Portuguese great-grandfather on his paternal side, Borges played the part of a flaneur as a youth on the streets of the Italian-Portuguese neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. Characters often speak Portuguese in his stories, and he has been honored with a monolith by Federico Brook in the Arco do Cego garden in Lisbon.

In 1977 the blind author, who committed entire passages of the world’s literature to memory, discussed The Thousand and One Nights in a lecture he delivered at the Teatro Coliseo. In it, he recalls a note by the Orientalist Baron von Hammer-Purstall describing the confabulatores nocturne, men paid to tell stories during the night. He relates that as late as 1850, such storytellers were still common in Cairo. It was professional storytellers such as these that gathered the folktales and fables found in The Thousand and One Nights, and embellished them over the ages.

Curiously, it was in the district of Alfama in Lisbon where Fado first appeared as a full-fledged art form sometime in the 1820 and 30s. Although its origins are a mystery, Fado is thought to have begun in this port area as a night dance among the laborers and sailors. It has Moorish roots, and Alfama was once the Moorish quarter. The name Alfama comes from the Arabic Al-hamma, meaning fountains, or baths.
Fado singers are Lisbon’s confabulatores nocturne, singing songs of fate, of longing, of what the Portuguese call saudade—the emotional result of irrecoverable loss.

Pessoa and Borges never met, although they were both in Lisbon at the same time twice during their lives. Once, in 1914 when Borges’s family was passing through on their way to Geneva. Borges was fourteen and Pessoa would have been twenty-six.

It is difficult to accept that they did not meet the second time, in 1923, when Borges spent forty-five days in Lisbon and both men were by then authors and Anglophiles with many similarities. There is even reason to believe that Borges drank coffee at Pessoa’s café, A Brasileira, which still exists.

But they did not meet, nor did they ever write.

After Lisbon, Voltaire’s picaresque tale continues on to the New World, to Borges’ home of Buenos Aires, and then returns from across the Atlantic to England, to come to rest finally on the Ottoman coast. There, Candide receives the words of wisdom from an old Turk that free him from Leibniz’s optimism. He has the epiphany that rather than philosophize, ‘we must cultivate our garden.”

With that pronouncement, Voltaire’s little book marked the end of a world of transcendental good and evil, and the birth of a far more earthly and practical one. The disillusionment found in Candide signaled a profound shift in ethics and epistemology, making way for the storming of the Bastille thirty years later.
And that is how, for we moderns, the story of the earthquake in Lisbon, the city of stories, is, like a tale told by Scheherazade, the beginning of our own.

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walk

depois de Walk, lembro outros caminhantes. Rousseau e Thoreau. o flâneur de Baudelaire, Sebald. um universo limitado, por agora. a poesia de Pasolini é caminhante também. um grande número de personagens caminha. os anos cinquenta e sobretudo os sessenta deram velocidade ao fugir da paisagem. Perec escreveu um livro sem 'e' (foi ele? foi); assim fujo aos acentos que a máquina infernal ignora.

a caleche de Gogol fica a meio caminho: entre o solitário caminhante e a 'road trip'.

photo paint

as relações entre ambas, ou as ligações entre ambas em Paris de William Eggleston.

here.

"A revengeful God has given ear to the prayers of this multitude. Daguerre was his Messiah. And now the faithful says to himself: 'Since Photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools!), then Photography and Art are the same thing.", Baudelaire em The Painter of Modern Life. em ironia sobre a necessidade da representação realista. de tanta coisa, guardei esta (e ainda they really believe that, hilariante). as crianças que não sejam contrariadas por professores eficazes arrastarão consigo, ao longo da vida, a crença neste aspecto: desenhar é fazer igual a -. (eu não consigo fazer uma casa direita! queres fazer uma casa direita para quê? tira uma foto- faz antes uma casa com sono. disso não podes tirar uma foto..) ainda não é altura de dizer que, se calhar, também pode.

sister arts (4)

"Os fotógrafos são poetas: os grandes são todos poetas. A maioria interessa-se por poesia. E sentem que existe alguma afinidade entre aquilo que fazem e aquilo que um poeta faz. Sou grande devoto de Baudelaire, por causa da forma como ele pegou na reportagem e a transformou em poesia. Os poetas franceses desse período até aos surrealistas, passando por Proust, fizeram algo de assinalável, único, e que alguém que esteja seriamente interessado em arte moderna tem de apreciar.", Jeff Wall na Ípsilon.

love (4)

anti-naturalismo, as mulheres, o artista-criança, love: "it is sad but only too true that without the money and the leisure, love is incapable of rising above a grocer's orgy or the accomplishment of a conjugal duty. Instead of being a passionate or poetical caprice, it becomes a repulsive utility.", Baudelaire em The Painter of Modern Life.

e dandyismo: "Dandyism is a sunset; like the declining daystar, it is glorious, without heat and full of melancholy. But alas, the rising tide of democracy, which invades and levels everything, is daily overwhelming these last representatives of human pride and pouring floods of oblivion upon the footprints of these stupendous warriors."
(desintoxicação rápida, vá)

"For many art historians, Manet was Baudelaire’s “Painter of Modern Life;” but the poet, who died in 1867, did not live to see his friend become successful or at least renowned. Nevertheless, it was Manet who began to capture the essence of modernité, a quality the critic called “the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present day life…” La vie moderne was based in the city, the heart of darkness of the century, a place of anomie and indifference. Wiped clean of anecdote and symbolism and of meaning, Manet’s art becomes a synedoche, a slice of life but a very particular kind of life. Like his friend, Edgar Degas, Manet was a man about town who knew well the pleasures of the boulevards and brothels and cafés and cabarets and bars. Life in Paris had a duality and a hypocrisy: a bourgeoisie respectability on one hand and an underground, Baudelaire’s “floating existences,” of marginalized people living on the fringes of respectability or far beyond social redemption. In Manet’s art, as in Courbet’s later works, women were the main commodities of the era. Forced into prostitution by economic conditions beyond their control, women were bought and sold, everywhere available to the highest male bidder. Women, or to be more precise, the “fallen woman,” became the visual images upon which the Second Empire depicted itself as the all-consuming bourgeois male in power." (daqui)

Griselda Pollock - VICARIOUS EXCITEMENT S

revisão.

painter of manners

"..the genius of the painter of manners is of a mixed nature, by which I mean that it contains a strong literary element. Observer, philosopher, flâneur - call him what you will; but whatever words you use in trying to define this kind of artist, you will certainly be led to bestow upon him some objective which you could not apply to the painter of eternal, or at least more lasting things, of heroic or religious subjects. Sometimes he is a poet; more often he comes closer to the novelist or the moralist; he is the painter of the passing moment and of all the suggestions of eternity that it contains." Baudelaire em The Painter of Modern Life.

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Daumier e Gavarni.
tão longe.
hoje apanhamos agulhas de pinheiro, cascas de tronco, folhas de eucalipto e talvez musgo ervas ou areia. depois povoamos esta colina com moinhos, igrejas, poços e pontes por onde possam passar o moleiro os pastores e um rebanho. gostava de ter uma padeira. para introduzir algum naturalismo nisto.

little poems

Spleen de Paris.



ou, a "botanist of the sidewalk".

"The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.", Sontag, On Photography.

para ver, Le Spleen de Paris, Shifting Perspectives.

num pequeno desvio de The Painter of Modern Life. e nem de propósito para o tema do flaneur, street photographer: a NY de Stanley Kubrick. o 'flanerismo' com nova-já velha explosão virtual e tecnológica. a massificação de Baudelaire, como o museu imaginário de Malraux, não podiam antever a dimensão de tudo isto.

flores (1)

Les phares

Rubens, fleuve d'oubli, jardin de la paresse,
Oreiller de chair fraîche où l'on ne peut aimer,
Mais où la vie afflue et s'agite sans cesse,
Comme l'air dans le ciel et la mer dans la mer ;

Léonard de Vinci, miroir profond et sombre,
Où des anges charmants, avec un doux souris
Tout chargé de mystère, apparaissent à l'ombre
Des glaciers et des pins qui ferment leur pays,

Rembrandt, triste hôpital tout rempli de murmures,
Et d'un grand crucifix décoré seulement,
Où la prière en pleurs s'exhale des ordures,
Et d'un rayon d'hiver traversé brusquement ;

Michel-Ange, lieu vague où l'on voit des Hercules
Se mêler à des Christs, et se lever tout droits
Des fantômes puissants qui dans les crépuscules
Déchirent leur suaire en étirant leurs doigts ;

Colères de boxeur, impudences de faune,
Toi qui sus ramasser la beauté des goujats,
Grand coeur gonflé d'orgueil, homme débile et jaune,
Puget, mélancolique empereur des forçats,

Watteau, ce carnaval où bien des coeurs illustres,
Comme des papillons, errent en flamboyant,
Décors frais et légers éclairés par des lustres
Qui versent la folie à ce bal tournoyant ;

Goya, cauchemar plein de choses inconnues,
De foetus qu'on fait cuire au milieu des sabbats,
De vieilles au miroir et d'enfants toutes nues,
Pour tenter les démons ajustant bien leurs bas ;

Delacroix, lac de sang hanté des mauvais anges,
Ombragé par un bois de sapins toujours vert,
Où, sous un ciel chagrin, des fanfares étranges
Passent, comme un soupir étouffé de Weber ;

Ces malédictions, ces blasphèmes, ces plaintes,
Ces extases, ces cris, ces pleurs, ces Te Deum,
Sont un écho redit par mille labyrinthes ;
C'est pour les coeurs mortels un divin opium !

C'est un cri répété par mille sentinelles,
Un ordre renvoyé par mille porte-voix ;
C'est un phare allumé sur mille citadelles,
Un appel de chasseurs perdus dans les grands bois !

Car c'est vraiment, Seigneur, le meilleur témoignage
Que nous puissions donner de notre dignité
Que cet ardent sanglot qui roule d'âge en âge
Et vient mourir au bord de votre éternité !

- -

Beacons

Rubens, great river of oblivion,
garden of ease, cool flesh no lovers crave,
but where the floods of life unceasing run,
like wind on wind or wave on ocean wave;

Da Vinci — deep and sombre looking-glass
enchanting angels haunt, with subtle smile
all mystery-charged, while shadows dark amass
and pines and ice-cliffs bound their prison-isle;

Rembrandt — a piteous murmuring hospital
where ordure streams in tears and orisons,
stripped to the crucifix on one bare wall
illumed by one chill dart from wintry suns;

vast desert void, — o Michael Angelo!
— where TItans mix with Christs, and twilight clouds
where mighty spectres rise up stark and slow
— whose opening fingers rend their mouldered shrouds;

the rage of boxers and the satyrs' lust
— thou who hast found a grace in toiling knaves,
great heart, in a poor bilious body thrust
— Puget, the gloomy king of galley-slaves;

Watteau — bright carnival, where courtly pairs,
like butterflies in satin, flit about;
flaming in misty groves 'neath resin-flares
which pour their madness on the whirling rout;

Goya, who in a nightmare-horde unfurls
hags boiling foetuses in witches' milk,
beldames before the glass and naked girls
for demon-lovers tightening hose of silk;

and Delacroix — dark lake of blood forlorn
'mid fadeless firs, where evil angels fare,
a sullen sky wherefrom a faery horn
floats, faint as Oberon's horn through muffling air;

these curses, blasphemies and these laments,
these ecstasies, cries, tears, hossanas from
a thousand caverns, form one echo, whence
— death-doomed, we draw a heavenly opium!

theirs is a blast a thousand sentinels
pass on with their trumpets in a thousand moods;
a torch upon a thousand citadels,
a hail from hunters lost in pathless woods!

for truly, 'tis the mightiest voice our souls
command, o Lord, to prove their worth to Thee:
this ardent sob which down the ages rolls
and dies against Thy verge, Eternity!

tradução de Lewis Piaget Shanks.

no site de Fleurs du Mal.

museum goers

quase a dar ali um saltinho.

“The world — and even the world of artists — is full of people who can go to the Louvre, walk rapidly, without so much as a glance, past rows of very interesting, though secondary, pictures, to come to a rapturous halt in front of a Titian or a Raphael — one of those that have been most popularized by the engraver’s art; then they will go home happy, not a few saying to themselves, ‘I know my museum. Just as there are people who, having once read Bossuet and Racine, fancy that they have mastered the history of literature.", Baudelaire em The Painter of Modern Life.

não está longe de ‎"os do metro percebem de autocarros?", como perguntava a apresentadora no programa de discussão pública da tv. Portugal é um país cheio de especialistas, onde me incluo, com as várias mudanças de carreira e salada de interesses. não, não percebem.



também aqui, com interesse, Art in theory, 1815-1900: an anthology of changing ideas, de Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, Jason Gaiger. (episteme- paradigma)

transcrevo: "Among the most enduring of these are the notion of beauty as a kind of dialectical product, composed both of the eternal and of the transitory, and thus necessarily associated with modernity; the idea of the artist as a type in whom the wordly and the childlike are combined; the appeals to dandyism and to artifice in the face of a tedious Naturalism; and the characterization of the prostitute as an inescapable figure in the imagery of modern society." levar isto como motto, agora, é como fazê-lo com Jesus Cristo, mas cada qual carrega as velas da sua escolha.

recupero, eufemismo para a repetição, este The abuse of beauty: aesthetics and the concept of art, de Arthur Coleman Danto.

women and prostitutes

apenas uma secção de The painter of Modern Life and Other Essays de Baudelaire, em .pdf.

duas ou três coisas

2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle, Jean-Luc Godard (1967)



de 1967, ou seja, tem menos dois anos do que eu. quarenta e três anos é a idade mínima, nesse caso, das ideias de Film Socialisme (número um na Lumière 4, via C.). mas desconfio que tenham meio século, que valida já um não-te-disse.

"The famous cosmos in a coffee cup sequence is the most remarkable scene in the film and a perfect example of Godard’s methodology. As a café patron stirs cream in his coffee, the camera captures a close-up which reveals an image resembling the universe in motion. The overlapping dialogue during this shot is a direct expression of Godard’s current state of mind regarding the world and the disappointment of his own cinema to achieve its lofty goals:

“But since social relations are always ambiguous, since thought divides as much as it unites, since words unite or isolate by what they express or omit, since an immense gulf separates my subjective awareness from the objective truth I represent for other, since I constantly blame myself, though I feel innocent, since every event transforms my daily life, since I constantly fail to communicate, since each failure makes me aware of solitude, since I cannot escape crushing objectivity or isolating subjectivity, since I cannot rise to the state of being, or fall into nothingness, I must listen, I must look around more than ever, The world, my kin, my twin.”
daqui, Cinematic Reflections

mon semblable, mon frère.

na Criterion. na Strictly Film School.

"Language is the house man lives in." diz Juliette-Marina.
"Language does a lot of other things other than just create meaning, or what we call meaning." diz Laurie.

beauty (2)

e provavelmente existirão muitas outras beauties nos próximos meses. ainda deste The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, esta citação de uma senador conservador dos anos da guerra fria: "Modern Art is communistic because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful contry, our cheerful and smiling people, and our material progress. Art which does not beautify our country in plain simple terms that everyone can understand breeds dissatisfaction. It is therefore opposed to our government and those who create and promote it are our enemies". para além do fantástico smiling people, lembro-me da estação Centrale de Milão, claramente beautifying e sendo facilmente entendida por todos com os seus leões alados e as colossais colunas.

beauty

criticism

(Daumier e Gavarni)

s/n

comecei a Invenção da Modernidade pela 'Mulher', um modo de engolir as espinhas em primeiro lugar.

primeiro dia da segunda classe, classe como se dizia quando a fiz, para mim o primeiro dia numa nova escola,  e que diferentes as segundas classes. vai embora, mãe, podes ir. este ano é mais divertido do que todos os outros.

no ferry tinha entrado um casal de meia-idade que se sentou ao meu lado, do outro lado do corredor. o homem não se calava, semi-curvado sobre a mulher que não estava satisfeita de estar sentada na última fila. dali não via para fora da janela. não satisfeita mas calada e ele esbracejava um pouco, a falar. insistia que ela fosse para onde quisesse que ele ficava ali. depois de luta unilateral a mulher levantou-se enfim e sentou-se lá à frente, na segunda fila, à janela. do seu lugar, o homem deixou de a ver. fingiu-se desinteressado durante algum tempo. depois agitou-se. ao fim de uns quinze minutos não se conteve e pôs-se de pé, tentando vê-la. quando a reconheceu, foi sentar-se no lugar vago ao seu lado. o que me chamou a atenção, para além da familiar curva em meia-lua que desenham as costas de quem persegue alguém, foi o total silêncio dela durante toda a troca de argumentos.