‘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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ah os meus melhores livros

deste ano são tantos: Pamuk neste final de ano, valeu a pena esperar perante o enorme abismo e seguir em queda livre; Candide de Voltaire; Walk. depois: Au Japon (bem sei, a sequência é estranha) e O Velho que lia Romances de Amor. em meados de Abril, na Patagónia. no Inverno passado foi Gogol. que ano estrondoso.

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estes são alguns dos melhores do público mas listas não faltam na net. positivamente vendo: ter entrado para o goodreads pela mão do Armando (thanks!)

devolução

está a chegar ao seu termo o meu breve período de posse de Candide (ou dito de outro modo: o prazo para devolução à biblioteca termina hoje), não poderei guardar cartas de amor e ódio por entre as suas páginas. o rasto físico do momento limita-se ao meu nome na lista de requisitantes na última página em branco antes da capa. o que não é físico, esse não o posso julgar.

acabemos no jardim, Voltaire, o jardim do princípio do mundo.


"There is a concatenation of all events in the best of possible worlds; for, in short, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for the love of Miss Cunegund; had you not been put into the Inquisition; had you not traveled over America on foot; had you not run the Baron through the body; and had you not lost all your sheep, which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, you would not have been here to eat preserved citrons and pistachio nuts."

"Excellently observed," answered Candide; "but let us cultivate our garden."

Voltaire em Candide.

s/n

- 'But to what end was this world created, then? said Candide. -'To make us mad,' replied Martin.
Voltaire em Candide.

'Candide'

falar sobre isto em serviço público. serviço quê? sim, sim, público.

no primeiro dia da terceira classe. agora é ano. grade, o terceiro.
optimismo do mais puro.

ainda ali:
BBC Radio4
The Written World
1 How making signs on clay, wood or parchment enabled the development of human culture
2 The impact of the invention of the book
3 How the invention of writing influenced the spread of religion
4 Literature - How the written word, originally used for accountancy, gave rise to human literature [is there inhuman lit?]
5 How the invention of writing made the scientific revolution of the Enlightment possible

baklava

"A baklava não é da Palestina, é do Iraque, replicou ele, desculpa, mas é do Iraque, isto sem ofensa. Do Iraque uma ova, respondeu o rapaz, essa é boa.", Tabucchi em O Tempo Envelhece Depressa. a minha foi do Quartier Latin por onde tinha passado mas sem tempo para a provar e onde voltei por ela. lá havia uns quadrados de pistácio que gostava de saber fazer, como os pequenos bolos de pinhão que me parecem tão parecidos com as pinhoadas do Alentejo. todos os doces do mediterrâneo sul. camadas da fina filo, frutos secos e mel, criada nas cozinhas imperiais do palácio Topkapi, em Istambul, a morada do sultão reinante. a maior cozinha do império otomano, em que 800 pessoas cozinhavam 4000 refeições, por vezes 6000, por vezes na preciosa loiça azul e branca chinesa, transportada pelo caminho da rota da seda.

parece-me que Candide é mais empolgante do que a maior parte dos livros que já li. o que coloca este problema: que pessoa se é quando se tira prazer daquele tipo de narrativa.

hoje lia o Candide como há anos atrás li a travessia de Aníbal, circunstâncias que tornam os livros inesquecíveis. tenho tomada a dose vitalícia de loucura a atravessar-me a porta. agora será só sensibilidade e bom senso.

havendo orçamento, retomo os almoços temáticos. o primeiro será em vénia ao laranja quente do Mohamed, por quem soube que a travessia Málaga - Melila custa trinta euros para pessoa só, 120 para um carro. prefiro Tarifa - Tânger onde, estou certa, encontraria muito mais do que uma baklava.

Voltaire's 'Candide'

na New York Public Library.

lisboa

"After the earthquake, which had destroyed three-quarters of Lisbon, the sages of that country could think of  no more effective means of averting further destruction that to give the people a fine auto-da-fé, it having been decided by the University of Coimbra that the spectacle of a few individuals being ceremonially roasted over a slow fire was the infallible secret recipe for preventing the earth from quaking."
Voltaide em Candide.