ghost town

o capítulo 45 de Canada é admiravelmente visual e tenho vontade de o ler várias vezes, como penso que o farei, talvez com atenções diferentes a cada detalhe, como se de cada vez escolhesse um lado diferente da rua.  antes mesmo de o ler já o tinha visto inúmeras vezes no cinema e nos momentos de alguns fotógrafos.  como o personagem tivesse sido colado sobre aquelas imagens  -que percorre as ruas desertas tentando encontrar a sua própria identidade. é no vazio que a oportunidade de ser alguma coisa se apresenta, uma ideia tão americana. o métis, meio índio, meio trapper, é um facilitador.

interessante que no final deste capítulo tão descritivo o museu seja o lugar da imobilidade no espaço (a mãe era um museu, então). a vida é o fluxo.

"If my walks in Fort Royal were in pursuit of that town's difference from life I'd known, and to render myself reconciled to the new, then my inspections around Partreau, ony four miles distant, were of a museum dedicated to the defeat of civilization - one that had been swept away to flourish elsewhere, or possibly never.", na p. 250

"But when I inspected the little commercial frontages - an empty, pocket-size bank, a Masons' building of quarried stone from 1909, the Atlas shoe store with shoes scattered inside, a shadowy pool hall, a gas station with rusted, glass-top pumps, an insurance office, a beauty parlor with two silver hair dryers pushed over and broken apart, the floors littered with bricks and broken furnishings and merchandise racks, the light dead and cold, the busted back doors letting the damaging elements in, all establishments emptied of human uses - I found I always thought of the life that had gone on there, not of life cast aside. And not, as opposed to what I'd first thought, like a museum at all. I had more positive views. Which made me feel that although I hadn't been taught to assimilate, a person perhaps assimilated without knowing it. I was doing it now. You did it alone, and not with others or for them. And assimilating possibly wasn't so hard and risky and didn't need to be permanent. This state of mind conferred another freedom on me and was like starting life over, or as I've already said, becoming someone else - but someone who was not stalled but moving, which was the nature of things in the world. I could like it or hate it, but the world would change around me no matter how I felt."
na p. 253 (com uma pergunta que não é importante, uma hipótese: o que sucede primeiro, essa mudança subtil no decurso de Dell ou a criação de Partreau, o espaço vazio.) a favor da segunda hipótese, fala o próprio: “The first time and every time since then, it was sort of like being hit by lightning,” said Ford. “It just was a place that cried out to be put into language.”  desse momento até à entrada de Dell decorrem uns vinte anos, possivelmente as duas décadas que estão entre uma página e a outra.

Stephen Shore.

do you think that novels have pivotal lines?




Métis culture.

sobre as fronteiras, um dos grandes temas deste século, relembro Muntadas. ou a exposição temporária no Towner, em Eastborne (The Edge in Landscape), sobre boundaries and borders, onde gostei tanto de ver João Penalva, The Roar of Lions (aqui também). quando se passa uma fronteira, não se consegue regressar ao local de partida, diz Ford na entrevista.