ArtBrazil

I can't give you anything but love

2012-02-11T11:30:00.001-02:00

to our world ad infinitum

veta

Sarah Vaughan, "Tenderly" | http://youtu.be/kUjf5pPNmiI

I would have written this, and wished I could make my words dance to you like this, irrespective of how not-so-beautifully they would seem due to their inability to measure up to all the delicacy of these words-not-so-mine I bring you today… So I would have expressed you this all if I could… But I can’t. And I don’t even feel that I should. I am not a poet. Nevertheless, I catch myself letting poetry course through my veins, loving it all not only in such materialized forms but also, or especially, as a vast, astounding realm in which you find so much beauty ready to be appreciated, contemplated, touched with hands and eyes and skins – wholly experienced. Amongst a universe of poems I have ever entered in this frantic yet sweet existence of mine, of all us, these lines [by a Bulgarian poetess who remains unknown and not as honored as she really deserves] express better-ad infinitum what I deep-down would like to for now. Elisaveta’s wondrous poems, like this one herein, are a little out of the so-called [and, most of the time, unreasonable] literary canon… and unfortunately, because she is one of the most gifted artists I have ever touched with all my senses – and that’s what I would really like to share with you… In front of her poems, I feel in a complete state of wonder!

Poetry | Elisaveta Bagirana

If my glance were not blest–
with you, inside. Open-eyed to penetrate the darkness,
and to make it fly and dance for me,
grafting wings to it,
to teach it how to see the flower,
to see the future fruit in the a branch still bare,
and to land with an interstellar craft
on a star that twinkles there–
how could my eyes, deprived of such joy last,
if you did not exist?

If you had not pitched my ear–
so that in stillness I can hear
those words, someone whispers to enlist for me
words, that bring both care and cheer,
with nearby or distant voice,
from outer space or next door’s fence,
that reach me when full of remorse–
all that powerful richness of sense
my life would miss,
if you did not exist.

If you had not possessed my heart
from youth until this very hour,
poured all your song and thought in me–
so I might feel my sister’s hand
when I was helpless and alone,
so that your furnace could transmute
sorrow to a spark, into joyous-tones.

In: Penelope of the Twentieth Century. Translated by Brenda Walker, with Valentine Borrisov and Belin Tonchev. Forest Books, 1993.

acrimony

2012-02-04T21:45:00.001-02:00

[or le goût des choses]

acrimony

to Verónica Ch.

Kindness glides about my house.

Dame Kindness, she is so nice!

The blue and red jewels of her

rings smoke

In the windows, the mirrors

Are filling with smiles.

What is so real as the cry of

a child? […]

Its crystals a little poultice.

O kindness, kindness

Sweetly picking up pieces!...

Sylvia Plath, “Kindness”

Girl Sitting on a Bench (1935)

by Dorothea Lange

that little boy, flustered, sitting on the stairways of any house-maybe-mine, no lucky dawns, empty hands, tormented mouth that tongues but a hollowness of victories he never took for granted; so that hopeless boy, wild feet to reach the very cold outside, perhaps deluding himself – like a fucked-up needleworker who does not have any key to anything less stern in life – into zigzagging a mélange of absurdness and failure, and trying to puzzle over something unbecoming; so he, that little lost, whose eyes were as clumsy as pensive, shouldering such a pain made of a mixture of nothings and tos and fros, he was arrestingly looking into his nails – painted blue… his eyes, [a little fixed, a little tottery], were also – blue; his legs grew in a very unbelievable blue note either, as if he was entirely – blue… and then, when I came closer and asked whys and hows, his nails shining through everything around, [they were really visible, rather than anything else in his frail inexistence], he, that dying-away-for-something boy, he, with some glazing-over eyes, and lips that seemed to touch the asphalt [foreigner-like] scent, he just murmured, as if in secret: “I painted my nails blue to not forget the very color I have inside; my grey body is as usual what makes me wear my sunglasses, colored blue such as my nails, every single time I need to face people and respond to their quests anywhere I stroll in; I still refuse to paint myself without, never mind… this whole solitude and acrimony I’m stuck with… there may be something smiling to me and just saying you the lost, but you alike, you mine…”

anastrophe

2012-01-27T17:45:00.003-02:00

or dwelling [-creatures-] in hers

or dwelling [-creatures-] in hers

to Audrey Alexander

insipid sound I

a dust to, there’s ever

enough to smear out

any connection with . . .

I trap into – [by

dropping in misadventures to screw

pouring other ingredients out

to toss myself up, and then] –

admitting that houses

are but a tiling

concept detailed to . . .

ups [-into-] and downs

Image by Erwin Blumenfeld

there's a devil waiting outside your door [how much long?]

2012-01-22T15:40:00.002-02:00

there's a devil

to Ana Cristina, Eabha, Imen, Setty and Trian

… in front of the evanescence of a rainbow, imaginary or simultaneously under a petty [bed]room’s light, nightmares being rekindled by him, the Hobbler, leaned over a tree, embroiled by this-or-that cloistered realm – oniric? or simply clear sighted...

… a conviction, here turns out a haughty conviction over his whole misadjusted, proparoxytone route and for something he can neither reaffirm nor take on, while one of that sooth is ineluctably distressed over his own zigzags in life as if he has naturally stumbled into faces he unlikely put up with or could no longer wear…

… springing from his long-standing, erratic “ain’t know what do to”, and blowing up in his no or many guises all those “what is said and what is cursed by”, here is he, the Misfit Man, and his overwhelming traces – bandit hands to put a spell on, twisted eyes to follow up but impossibilities, tripping legs to make him flute even when he only appears to fuck off [and further, much further from – his dreams?]…

… machine hands , picking up nausea from the ashes he clacks along day by day, usually talk to uncomfortable pockets, which have been promptly designed from above to dance him, the Erratic, and all his other equals to the end of [cries?]…

… dazed eyes , leading to nowhere but that same magic door he steps into, in complete despair, for not being lunatic that much so this all – reality along with its misanthrope cars – makes too much sense and then fetches him by luring him into too much crude bagatelles…

… corrupted legs , tired of walking ahead of himself without, at least for a trap, letting him do what he is supposed to want much more closely – to stroll in the dawn of his own misfortunes…

… there , in that silent realm, lie the stories he intends to unwrap… they are waiting to be written, paralyzed but not in despair , fresh and untouched , alone but close – to his dazed hands, his machine legs, his tired eyes…

from a tender explosion to a delicate dance

2011-12-22T23:57:00.004-02:00

the music-box of tunes made out of flints in Karime Limon's Hologram

Karime's Hologram

Those love poems

you keep hidden

from the world

in a dark drawer,

will be

the ones

to give you

immortality.

“Dearest Poet,”

Hologram

“I dwell in Possibility… Of Chambers as the Cedars – / Impregnable of Eye – And for an Everlasting Roof / The Gambrels of the Sky” – wrote Emily Dickinson, spreading under the guise of poetry that this is a house with numerous doors and windows open for access, for a variety of perspectives and interpretations, and whose fresh wind can travel across distant lands, as there will never be a limit to its motion except the endless sky.

Sat in the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out the stars, and after I had heard all day long those tactile footsteps clacking along that whitish, rotten mélange of concreteness and crudeness gathered on a road stuffed of sweat and tears like any other in the world, I was invited to step into a hall of words and to open up its several doors-after-windows towards something both fresh and plural by the name of Hologram – a collection of Bright Lights being reflected by a gifted voice and blown through a very peculiar expression of love for poetry.

Like Emily Dickinson, Karime Limon seems to dwell in Possibility. Her poetical voice points to a great number of possible entrances and exits behind the lines – the doors of wonderment, the windows of interpretation – as if reflecting all the freedom available in poetry. She brings out a book of poems in which the words range from their state of dictionary, or their so-called concrete-flint form, to a multiple scenario of metaphors and tunes outside of the closet where they claim to be freed up from their quietness. Karime’s verses are, in this sense, a tender explosion since they meant to be read as a soft yet violent call for humanity, for the whole challenge encased both in the wind and its materialization in words, and for love after all.

Soft because of the poetess’ generosity at looking at reality without pretending its unit, or some synchronized rhythm, as a condition to its beauty. Violent because of her sensibility and accuracy in responding artistically, without acquiescence, to any singular attempt to imprison people, or to instill in them stereotyped sets of values and prompt responses to reality, to their own deep-down demands in life. The Soul – says the poetess – claims to be free even to “get lost in a dark tangled forest”.[1]

“In a constant state of wonder”,[2] the lyrical voice coming from Karime’s poems is generous of our own Smallness in front of the fact that life is short and for the most part embroils all us in a tormented tick-tack route with its “no escaping” or “closing” doors. To this she firstly responds by offering “fluttering wings”[3] which do not resent what a crude reality gets to impose us; even if dressed in black, like “a worm out in the light”[4] aware of its dark and misery, the poetess does not decline to search for a less “crashing-down”[5] path – not to show resignation, not to give up from a critical view on human’s sufferance, but “to give in to love”.[6] The sublimation of pain, as well as other powerful emotions, is indeed a way in to “recycle the good and the bad and make something wondrous”.[7] The poetess converts, thus, flints into tunes of wonderment and love, into something ready to “flow around, inside and out, down legs and feet” that can lead to the very state of hope,[8] in a sublime yet still concrete life’s forward motion that attempts all the time to escape from nausea and “plant some flowers”,[9] and in a tender reply to the Universe by letting it speak to her.[10] Like Emily Dickinson’s, Karime’s poems mirror a bird in a constant struggle to never let themselves be beaten down by life and their wings, broken or unable to embrace the power to hope – inasmuch as it rests in human’s soul the way a bird rests on its perch.[11]

Of course gloominess also exists in life and then blurs the boundaries between generosity and non-acceptance, which really disgusts. But when it happens to come out, when there may be no significant change in sight but “the same whisper, the same smell and sound”,[12] even when you feel “tiny, alone, and frightened”[13] – like a lost person – it may be time to “wait to hear a sound”,[14] to fly away to a new hope, and to start over.

What praises us the most in Karime’s poems, by the way, is the poetess’ sensitiveness to penetrate deftly the kingdom of unsayable experiences, a space that few words have ever entered, where “lie the poems that wait to be written, paralyzed but not in despair”,[15] and then, by the power of silence and in the power of language, to “come closer and contemplate the words”[16] with their thousand secret faces – that is the best to do in order to rescue them from their state of dictionary and let them fly over the coldest, even saddest pages until they can be sparked. Writing poetry, in this sense, matches on “being stuck / between a title / and a blank page / of a poem”,[17] the only one in the position not to be behold but to look itself at the word-culling/coining person “and sneers” yet pokes their eyes, enriches their vision to gets them involved in the poetic movement of contemplating, waiting, and letting the words emerge – through a tender explosion of lyricism and impetus, as soft and violent at the same time, and with no despair but patiently looking forward to being touched: “It is in the air / in the water, / in every atom, / it can be right here / in my hand / and on your shoulder / at the same time.”[18]

The way Karime subtly traces down a line between poetry and music chimes in with a delicate dance she also invites the reader to. Through a (non-ruled) rhyme scheme, metaphors, allusions, assonances and alliterations suggesting that the poem is up to be considered as a music-box open for access, the lyrical I is immersed in a process that tastes like a mélange of words and sounds, or just like Tango as a poetic motion into life: a “voice that strikes you, hard like the high tide waves” but that as well pours its lightness, its perfume, “and pulverizes you”.[19]

There are, of course, recurrent images that allow us to think of a cycle of flints ready to be lapidated and transformed into tunes by the hands of a poet. This is, actually, when Karime’s poems grow in beauty and substance: to give the poem a foundation it is necessary to accept that it is, as all the other things in life, and just like people themselves, an organic matter at first. This is, to my knowledge, where lies Karime Limon’s deepest sensibility: to conceive of the very process of writing poetry on the way to lyricism but without neglecting its material, touchable condition. That is, indeed, what makes people similar to each other but different at the same time; what makes anybody and any body “as all the others / in the ground, / in the air” but “Uniquely / Irreplaceable”, such an organic matter that “cannot be recycled” since it remains unique as well as one of the same; as in relation to a vast whole as reduced to its essence like a minute particle, that “dissolve[s] into the soil / and nurture[s] / new life”.[20]

Not by chance, the real Hologram being produced and reflected by the poetess does not look like something made of a “halting voice”; quite the contrary, Karime’s forward motion into poetry is full of concreteness – this is the realm she penetrates, captures her Bright Lights, and give them back (to the reader), as if telling us, off-handedly yet subtly, that reality is also to poetry, and that she is somewhat “sick of limited lyricism, of flirting lyricism, of all lyricism which surrenders to anything which is not its true self”.[21]

Her night feels like a “hot cup of coffee” and has the “smell of a cigar”.[22] Words like “ground”[23] and “hand(s)”[24] are used to suggest that her Hologram, in the sense of a metalanguage for the very act of making poetry, is full of an imagery leading us to understand the balance between the flint and the tune, the wing and the flight.[25]

As Karime seems to be highly interested in Freedom (not only as a concept but especially as a matter for her poetry) and in Hope (as an eternal and everywhere-gift that should exist for all of us), Love is a theme that she returns to repeatedly. It feels, smells and sounds like “this everything” that cuts across all our realities, minimizes the pain and differences to immediately spark the process of discovering and displaying Oneself and the Other, irrespective of how silent, secret or unknown they may be; and regardless of some criticism a gesture of dismantling sacred concepts of the Beautiful and the Misfit may bring to someone: even the “weeds are beautiful and strong”; “They want to soften up the hard streets for our feet”, “Poor weeds, / they are not the enemy…”[26]

Of course there is a logic behind it: “finding love, over and over again”,[27] or “just Loving”,[28] even in front of the Unknown or the (apparently) Ugly/Dangerous, is the only way to not quiet “the calling of [our] Soul”,[29] the Freedom of our own demand for life, this one we cannot command over with one-sided lessons, or set limits to because it is beyond us.

After being lapidated by the language as a diamond-flint, the highest flight the lyrical I could get into is what mostly seems to give rise to Karime’s poetical motion: she returns to the same theme of Love again and again, from different perspectives, with different metaphors, and coming to different conclusions. From the pure light of Love to its concrete expression in life, it is absolutely impressive the way it happens to equal the most powerful bridge tra il sogno e il dolore, between the human and the divine search for Humanity – where one appears to be linked to another.

With generous words of Love she finishes her Hologram, by the way; and in large scale pointing to this strong connection between the drop and the ocean, from one human to another: “At times / I wonder if / We will meet some day, / but then I realize, / We are always together.”[30]

And then, as a visitor, feeling like poetry’s limitlessness is not just useful for the poet own growth, edification, and exploration, but also for the sake of those – like me – who read the poetry, I draw some conclusions by highlighting the state of wonder I was in after my visitation of Karime Limon’s Hologram: both the poet and the reader are equally welcome in this magical environment, this House of Poetry.

Karime's Hologram is available on Lulu.

[1] “Moving Worlds”, p. 44.

[2] “Boredom is a bad word”, p. 17.

[3] “A Prayer”, p. 21.

[4] “In the Dark, Moist Soil”, p. 28.

[5] “Helping Others”, p. 13.

[6] “Abandon”, p. 14.

[7] “Renewable Resource”, p. 30.

[8] “A Prayer”, op. cit.

[9] “Dirt”, p. 24.

[10] “A Prayer”, op. cit.

[11] Emily Dickinson, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers”.

[12] “Renewable Resource”, op. cit.

[13] “Lost little Girl”, p. 22.

[14] Idem.

[15] A reference to “Search for Poetry”, by the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

[16] Idem.

[17] “As things should be”, p. 23.

[18] “1,818 Miles away”, p. 34.

[19] “Tastes like Tango”, p. 31.

[20] “Anybody, Any Body”, p. 10.

[21] A reference to “Poetics”, by the Brazilian poet Manuel Bandeira.

[22] “The Night”, p. 9.

[23] “Anybody, Any Body” (op. cit.); “The Big Head” (p. 11); “Fate” (p. 37).

[24] “For the Poet Who Lives on Kerlerec Street” (p. 15); “Wired” (p. 18); “A Prayer” (op. cit.); “As things should be” (op. cit.); “Instructions” (p. 29); “1,818 Miles away” (op. cit.); “Dream Guy” (p. 36); “I want to be your cat” (p. 40).

[25] There are also sets of words and expressions that point to a concrete approach for the very act of living and, then, writing poetry: “wallet”, “dollar”, “a homeless man”, “purse”, “streets”, “grass”, “in a rush”, “coffee”, “scent”, “teeth”, “bed”, “breakfast”, “hair and skin”, amongst many others.

[26] “Ode to Weeds”, p. 42.

[27] “Renewable Resource”, op. cit.

[28] “Soul Mate”, p. 45.

[29] “Soul Mate”, op. cit.

[30] “Untitled”, p. 47.

the mirror [or the sentiment of dwelling in dying away]

2011-12-03T14:06:00.001-02:00

the mirror

http://youtu.be/EXMOriLyBW8

To Eabha Rose, with a very tum-tum, tum-tum feeling of belonging. With love.

Somebody wakes up at [cloistered] o’clocks today – a little later, endurance is in short supply. A character – dot. [Creature within creatures that vomit up – some mines?] A person–a. Whose confined unreadable transparency I look in – a limit to, there’s a limit to, a limit, there’s a limit. What my hands may not hear out is exactly what her eyes relinquish to – touch. Nothing to trace down but a blank made of blanks, yet stuffed. Of non-power. Impossible it is to unburden herself of that package of [mis]ongoings – to the eyes of. Or overdressed whoops – due to fright within. Acrimonious, this is excessively [or apparently] encased in such a box of […]-many-other-life periods linked to non-said sentences over time-less-time that may have drawn her wonderment away from her envisage into –. Where’s the focus? Overrated. I stumble along this path – it’s already mine.

She has skipped out after failing to get into that stuff. Missteps – springing from pages of cutdowns, shown to have been the result of years of outcries. In silence. Hospitals serve as cages that she shouldn’t make her encounters with. In despair. Jails keep her bleeding when the one-and-only $$$-plin-plin has just slain her. “A foreigner here like everywhere else.”

No apparent surprise to this plot. You are what you don’t. She is what she hasn’t. I am but those I can’t. We – what we won’t.

Across the morning of this crushing into being into holes, it’s not like forgetting the words to your unfashionable song, or unpleasant suit. Uncurious [or unavailing], impossible it is to encapsulate the story of a tear-after-tear marks-against in a single one-page shot. Nothing on it could turn out to be purely retrospective, purely inward-looking as a form of wordless striving to please. Or to screw up overmuch.

But it sucks. It bangs into her ears. And it sucks. Sitting in this chair in front of some slippery-obstinance screen, looking at fifty-one demons of deceit leading her to distrust blatant-forged oncoming lights, the spotlight itself may come up, and the claps seem so close. They want her to smarm her way into a – way of noways for her. And then she rolls over – the printing surface of mistakes considered to be committed all along the way, and after all they’re brought about. By this aching-very act of capturing-then-feeling-then-expelling. All this frantic motion – resting in solitude, made of inner-self ruins. Which have been built and rekindled over tick-tack tormented beats, even whispers, to make her – tear down all the imaginary yet cute cuddly-looking vividness she used to keep inside.

Is there any less sinuous route to her – to chime in with nothing but nothing-nothing? Ok, she often mislays her umbrella. Eyeglasses, idem. And look: the moon is ever so bright today, she couldn’t have misplaced anything. These are ones – events on everything, opposite of all the nothings she would be much delighted at lauding, or silently applauding, or just telling you as hers. Newspapers-and-magazines chain-corporate men and women lure her into – oh, they and everyone else appear to lure her into the everythings. That’s the way it goes. That’s what makes her come out and vanish. Plin-plin they are the most – these “yellows” [or “noirs”] that create her. And box her. And put her – into those desirable spotlights she does not want, she does not need to. But intoned they are for the latest victim[s] of…

And then she feels misfit. Actually, I am – I equal those unadjusted rates of anything else-anything… Where’s the fucking route? Where is it? Where? The fucking – the route…

I wake up today at 7 o’dawn in the clock – a little in lump, delirium is in long supply. A character – dot-dot-dot. [My own mislayers within mislayers I need to vomit up – some hers?] My person–a. A fictionism whose spread-out evanescence I abide by – a block to, there’s a block to, a block, there’s a block. What her eyes may not taste is exactly what my mouth hears out – whimpers. Everything to tell apart, and a fullness made of fullnesses, yet empty. Of control over –. Thoughtful it is to let her pour her heart out to me. As if her myriads of packages but my own myriads of everythings stuffed of ongoings – for the sake of my own invisibility. Or overdosed cries and whispers – due to quelque chose d’absent et d’étranger et d’inconstant within. All this prays me away the fucking desirable route. In a double motion, however, it also puts me into. Her envisage into –. My sight on. Where’s the focus? Lost at any vain attempt in the middle of the way. She stumbles along this path – it’s already mine.

And it is full of. Walkings down. Cryings out. Eatings. Lookings. Gettings married. Beings fucked-up. Clappings out. Writings down. Workings out. Givings up. Buyings stuff. Dancings. Copings with. Goings back on. Losings senses. Wakings up. Stoppings. Distressings over. Startings out. A limit, there’s a limit to. There’s a block to. A block, a block, a…

And the nausea – still here-anywhere, dancing on the everyday, concrete-pavement-floor streets, viaducts and avenues… When she gets to see it, as I feel shattered to engorge it day by day, this itself, the nausea itself, it sucks. It really sucks. But it also brings some lucidity to enrich – the vision that makes me and her, right now, persons or personas to plots or concretes, we after all also see that beautiful daisy and its struggle to bloom in the asphalt.

I won't tell a soul

2011-10-16T13:22:00.001-02:00

I won't tell a soul

Van Gogh's Three Hands, Two Holding Forks (1884)

… if you just quit, or roll over in angst, and decide that it’s time to raise your hand against in a gesture of crime, or if you have things to opt out being afraid that you need first to pour your heart out to that stranger, a less or more confident voice, strolling insanely in the night – but after all, like you and me and anyone else, a fire, like you and that guy, a person(a)-like extant in this or that weird, twisted life

… that for you things appear to be as clumsy or as heavy as the way you had no more intention to trust they could be retrievable, at all the first and last sights

… every single time you came over to my empty place, asked for both my look and my good-natured listening only to mutter that you feel yourself less hurt or your soul more flowing, protected from crudeness or threatened by a world made of vain, so that you might

… whether you, my partner, shoulder and are no more up to bear up against the whole desperation out of your way, and your own way through the cash-like crowd

l’(é)invitation à la légèreté 2 [ou le temps... qui tue, le temps... qui reste]

2011-10-12T19:25:00.001-03:00

Mosaïque Urbaine 1

MoMosaïque Urbaine #1, dans le Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/6007344

le temps –

un coeur

un trait

qui passent

mon danse –

un rêve

qui palpite

qui laisse

mes veins –

un temps

de la fraction

qui passe

une sûreté

mon temps

d’une âme

qui lègue

... et comme ça...

... mon coeur...

... est fou, il tombe

... il délire, il pulse...

... comme une danse...

... du vain...

... mon rêve…

you – a fictionism for saying... I was still there?

2011-09-15T17:47:00.001-03:00

a fictionism for...

Paul Cézanne, Harlequin, 1888-1890

I knew every single time

you unlocked my window

and entered my bedroom –

my harlequin,

my real and immediately my creature,

my double, and my path –

that you would be the one

I accepted you to be,

the one you decided yourself

to dress up, to then arise –

being that strange girl,

who appeared to be another lover,

an extent of mine, a double,

but just one of the same?

A creature – you!

that wanted to become a creator as well, huh?

Yes, you – a real man I asked once

to take me away from my own face…

Yes, you – that young woman, just like me,

as a double, who I allowed to penetrate my realm…

Dressed in blue eyes, in that beautiful unknown face,

and fictionized as someone out of patterns, you…

through a myriad of qualities and vests and titles

you never had

you would never wear and be…

I always knew

you were not who you appeared to be

but I have never closed the door upon you

I have never taken back the key

I had given you, remember?

“The key to my heart”,

to my dreams and wild imagination…

I only reiterated that motion of love

when you came to me rekindled in those blue eyes –

Oh, and how strongly and deeply

and delicately I loved

your blue eyes, my harlequin…

Not because they were blue

not even because they were much prettier

but because they were always your eyes…

In reality, I always knew you were that real

man I intended to cuddle

since the very beginning –

and dance with, and pour out to,

and share with and get a hold on…

I have never neglected your presence, my harlequin,

never ever let you in dark or absence

when you seemed to want

more and more, or just exactly in a fair way

from my words to my feelings…

And then, for any reason,

you decided to stop being that enchanted man

to start over by being an enchanted mask

I have never closed my window upon

You – rekindled but one of the same, yes?

Dressed in blue eyes, with all those imaginary

qualities and titles and thoughts and gifts…

but the same man, that same real, no?

I knew by advance that you could be being an attachment,

that same man for whom I had professed a miracle –

a miracle of love, of sharing, of living together –

Not even from that on,

when you asked for my love once again,

I closed my door for you, did I?

Not even when you came to me

as that unknown person dressed in uncertainty

with a fake voice and another discourse –

maybe to impress me, or just to hurt me –

not even then I said to you:

“Back off, you are not allowed to enter here as a persona

because what I want is a person,

you as that same person.”

I had ever told you that for me

love passed like acceptance

forgiveness, and movement…

I have always showed you that for me

it was not important that you were a genius,

someone with their abundance of $$$ kabooms,

or just fucked up, off course, some kind…

I admired you and wanted you just as you,

my long-standing harlequin,

wanted to come up with

as if you – an architect

as if you – a physicist

as if you – anyone up to love me…

But then, being the same person,

this or that persona as well,

you seemed to forge a kingdom of masks

designed to hurt me deeply

as if paying me back

for something I never did to you…

If I decided to let you

go on in your deviations, my harlequin,

it was because I wanted you to just know:

“My love is not tuned to a vest

to a sheet of paper, to the color of your eyes

or skin or trips around the world you told me about…

Not even to your mom and dad

extremely powerful and wealthy…”

No, my love was that time bigger and generous –

didn’t you realize? –

at which point I was willing to let you be

whoever you wanted to –

didn’t you understand this hint?

I did it, and you know that,

Mr. Pray in my close language number one…

I expected you not to disclose your blue-eyed fictionism

I wanted you not to tell me whatever

that you were in the position

to pay back some disaffection you believed

some day coming from me

back in the day,

and as you deliriously trusted that time…

I expected you to at least recognize that we fall,

we break down, we love,

we stumble into a myriad of

failure and masks and torments in life

but we are as well up to overlook,

to forgive, to wish a start-over –

why not? –

What I did was to subtly try to say to you:

“No reason to despair, I am here love, don’t you see?”

“I know you are that same young and magic man”

“Why do you believe so strongly that I did not recognize you?”

Weren’t you up to sense that I was actually

giving us another chance? –

dressed in blue eyes, just like you wanted to?

who cared? I really didn’t!

Why did you never tell me the truth

if I always attempted to say

even if it was extremely subtly –

to not disclose your secret

to not tear you down

to not bring you much more pain –

that I would accept you in my life

irrespective of how real

or how fictionized you were?

Why, Mr. Love?

Why did you close the door upon me then?

Didn’t I chime in with

the creature you designed to

embrace me one more time?

Didn’t I take part in your game

without dismantling

that incredible, beautiful blue-eyed persona

you manufactured to be in touch with me?

What we doubly lived, Mr. Love of Mine,

was but a miracle itself, no?

In front of the pictures of Diana Nohelová [a multiple beyond-the-lens]

2011-09-11T15:38:00.001-03:00

Diana

“The person, the place, the object

are exposed and hidden
simultaneous under the light,
and two eyes are not enough
to capture what is hidden
in a quick gesture.

It is necessary that the magic lens
enrich the human vision
and the truth of each thing
a better and drier truth extracts
to allow us to penetrate deeply
into the pure enigma of the pictures...”

In front of the Pictures of Evandro Teixeira
by poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Diana’s picture: Close your eyes till I'm gone

A crystal of time on paper. Photography, weapon of…

Desperately walking. Alone. Down somewhere less frantic or passerby. No light. But a limit to. Your walk? It’s a cherry or some kind far, that red vivid seed you decline to tear down. [Un]Fortunately? A path. Your route. Off most of the time. But within. And made of… Black-and-white, hmmm. Nausea? Dreams? Failures? Man after man, and you – alone? What about? And ahead. What… Lead you through the streets? These empty streets?

Where are those reminiscences you drew so carefully and kept close back in the day? Those drawers stuffed of non-power but with so many reminiscences forward you captured from The final hiding place, a red road encapsulated in yet apart from your miserable transitory life?

Dangerously speaking any nonsense through many cross-roads. You – voiceless. The streets – most of them empty at first sight. But full of forged colors and phrased-words towards insane messages. To break you down. No flowers budding from the same concrete pavement. No red eyes to embroil you in such a mystery. Only that. This empty place. You – into your Mute fairytale…

To that point then… Here and there, for some reason, ranging from shock to wonder, you grow stronger. The more you…, the more yours… There are flowers. Nausea but flowers around your desperate dizzy path. Dance yourself to the end of shine – why not? What you see is this same beating-chord End of the road?

Dedicated to photographer Diana Nohelová, whose pictures not only depict but also smell, sound, and shine. Photography – a weapon of love! Thank you so much, Diana, for giving me permission to cull my words on your intriguing, terrific images. I’m honored!

http://miss-nefer.deviantart.com

simply dot [what has conked out within?]

2011-09-02T20:35:00.000-03:00

dot

dot the same dot step into a hall of t(r)ick-tack dot tuck-torments dot in sane opps from dot any any any where and dot dot – what’s the name? this dot making you be dot decked out with dot your own dot mishap dot misanthropy dot misplace and finally dot you dot again dawn upon dot such-like counterfeited pictures at dot despair dot no resolution-deceit dot and dot you – wow! how dot you so much, dot? sound you! no then dot? dot go – why not? ha you and dot me after all dot ha my tricks dot your distorted dot image – ours dot ha your dot red herring and my dot dot dot no dot from dot you? dot along a dot fictionist? to pretend that one – dot picks up dot stuff-dot-long stem dot-roses while you or dot they? you dot after dot stones in the middle of the dot way dot and a scent – grisly environment – dot dot dot all those kennels of limit to a dot behind me dot and you ahead and dot? you and me – sorry? how to cope with dot our dot crudeness-dot? my imagination dot it can’t dot but pours out flowers – dot? blooms of nausea dot of exasperation and where’s? the bagman? the drummer? dot you dot dot I dot – why we dot? have to put up with this nonsense?

dot the same dot

step into a hall of t(r)ick-

tack dot tuck-

torments dot in

sane opps from dot

any any any

where and dot dot –

what’s the name?

this dot

making you be dot decked out with dot

your own dot

mishap dot

misanthropy dot

misplace

and finally dot

you dot again

dawn upon dot such-like

counterfeited pictures at dot

despair dot

no resolution-

deceit dot

and dot you – wow!

how dot you so much, dot?

sound you! no then dot?

dot go – why not?

ha you and dot me after all dot

ha my tricks dot your

distorted dot image – ours

dot

ha your dot red herring

and my dot dot dot

no dot

from dot you?

dot along a dot fictionist?

to pretend that one – dot

picks up dot stuff-dot-

long stem dot-roses

while you or dot they?

you dot after dot stones

in the middle of

the dot way dot

and a scent –

grisly environment – dot dot dot

all those kennels of limit to a dot

behind me dot and you ahead and dot?

you and me – sorry?

how to cope with dot

our dot crudeness-

dot?

my imagination dot it can’t dot

but pours out flowers – dot?

blooms of nausea dot of

exasperation and where’s?

the bagman? the drummer?

dot you dot

dot I dot – why we dot?

have to put up with this nonsense?

Image credits: Jackson’s Pollock “Number One” [or How Can We Be Abandoned and Accurate at the Same Time?], 1948.

word-culling hands

2011-08-21T23:00:00.001-03:00

word-culling hands

… the hand no longer trembles

nor is it disconcerted…

the hand no longer consumes

so much paper; nor does it limit

itself to the minutely drawn letter

with which to channel its explosion…

poet João Cabral de Melo Neto, Autograph

a hand, what is a hand

but a gesture, a hit

an endearment, or a crime?

at first lonely, hidden

in the pocket of my shock, our sin

inert but at full blast

a hand is above all

some open-and-shut kick-around,

about to arise from sleep –

necessary it is to move in on

an important task

from those who leave behind

the clamber of some secret –

and then to cuddle, keep off

store, feel for

or just silence

my hand is today… floating

it is weeping but hopping

as usual groaning but fluting

that I wish you could turn it into

something less secret, less private

such an unbearable flinch

to reach a low, even a low

canary flight

as all many others’ branches

my hand is today… dirty

not dirt of grass, of crap, of sex

not weariness to marvel, or to strain

no sweat, no bitter drop

an impossibility, maybe

to touch something

bigger and wiser or sharper

than this way back in many nights

where you can only hold and lift to your lips

a pure – a transparent – motion of delicacy

or some lie, one another crime

and fasten itself within

just to… stuff like that you always bite

my hand keeps still in its corner

and what to do when you feel torn down

or just absent, maybe étranger

to rise your hand and make it dance? –

as if culling beans, and tossing out the chaff

the scathing kernels, the heavy seeds –

and then it lasts the lead

the echo, the scream …

yes, like hearts or mouths

hands cry out, they parley

by drawing their own particular route

they stroll in days and nights

and they live, they catch

they break down, they breathe

they dance even when silencing

and jump out from obscure

or free-from-cloudiness pages

to make your words, your least or most vivid seed

lure you into this or that risk

my hand endured blue

today it is a bit more chummy

a little lost, cut, disguised –

as if in no-motion to anything

or to be carried away with –

but aware of its non-place

to penetrate deftly the kingdom of words –

where lie rabbits and birds

waiting to be freed from their state of dictionary

paralyzed, alone and dumb

but in no despair, as dwelled on time –

is to accept that a hand is alive

much more than synchronized

to hold its temper and come closer

to a thousand of secret faces

and then – still humid, even saturated with sleep –

to answer the question, “have you brought the key?

my hands, oh! my poor hands

are but a dream inside a no-entrance castle

where I am only impossible myself

not to touch, not to sense

nor to flute, nor even to dream

maybe to dance, or to cull that bean

into a land of crowded streets

a word delicate dance on our sins

I never feel myself alone when not only my hands but my eyes and lips begin to cull the beans, and gather them – careful or impetuously – leading the kernels to some invisibility a rabbit and less often a bird will chime in with. There are always special voices with and within me to whom I dedicate this zigzag verses.

Karime Limon – I cannot communicate poetry, my dear, but if I could, at least in a spark, if I could poeticize the world I would stand up in front of you, humble and fascinated, ask you to hold my hands, and let yours carry myself on to that delicate song from the woods your verses make us blown away with.

Isabelle Bonzom – dont les mains nous font sentir les choses vivement et différemment, parce qu’elles nous amènent à goûter l’art en étant dégustés par l’art.

Setty Lepida – and her hands, her voice, her sweet and bright whisper that multiply the pure feeling of being alive.

Francesca Stimolo – chi scolpisce una belleza così dolce e delicata riempiendo la mia vita di tenerezza e grazia.

Paula Friedman – rescue words, sweet hands, as if offering a generous look at those who need to “shout their toddler into silence to keep a home”, while their souls turn down the violence of being torn away …

Véa Xiradakis – d’écritures et digigraphies et kaledogrammes et tableau vivant toujours artistiques, palpitants, ça c’est un travail avec l’art qui n’est qu’au-delà de quelque chose d’ordinaire, mais d’inconstant et pourtant d’immense qui approuve aux yeux sensibles, comme les couleurs, les mouvements, les yeux et les mains très sensibles de l’artiste elle-même.

Tatiana Carlotti – aquela que, com seus urbanos atalhos, doçura em escrita, me faz sempre acreditar que é possível acabar o dia, madrugada adentro e começar a noite com deliciura incrivelmente dela, literatura incrivelmente tudo.

Isabela Escher – versos que sempre pulsantes, que sempre intensos, que sempre cá sempre.

Margaret Kargbo – hands that heal, arms that support, and presence that always makes me believe in the redemptive power of words being used to open hearts, to neglect pain, and to spread love.

Kathy McConaghie – hands being joined, arms always ready, ears that comfort and stay beyond, feet walking away from devastation, and a special, brave voice arising from the very in-depth feeling to struggle against cruelty and cowardice.

Ralph Thomas – who made me float by bringing me his delicate whisper, resounding that it is possible to be fluting all day long, even in dark.

And Stephen Jackson – whose hands, voice, and words make me feel like I am coming home.

hate and rage, cruelty and cowardice: where’s the very violence, Ms.?

2011-07-31T20:18:00.005-03:00

new

This brief, unimportant note I had the intention to leave onto a particular realm, with tenderness and regard. Once I am not allowed to, here you are, my respectful considerations on “the name of things”. What a horrid habit most of us have to place considerable importance on “naming”. Maybe yes, we have indeed. Maybe not, who knows…

In few words, to what extent are these so-human feelings – hate and rage – meant to be read as their "common-sense" opposite – love and compassion – or as two sides of the same coin and not separated by passion and sincerity, or cruelty and cowardice? Once they are all human possible feelings, you easily figure out that there are too many things between earth and heaven and inside these words, so that you will be barely able to understand their actual meanings and forward motion in life. You can hate when something feels very bad, or harsh, to be accepted. You rage, for example, when you are assaulted on your basic rights… But there are so many other variations, of course…

All-in-all, I come today just to quest. No hate, no rage within – it’s important to point it out by advance. Sometimes it is just difficult to understand why someone who appears to be one person, and insists that they are indeed like that, is just another for any reason (the most obvious one: we are all fragmented and multiple at the same time) and feels offended when invocated by the name of anyone else’s, even if they mirror this “someone else” living anywhere particularly different, with some other face and/or profile, but at the same time just posing a claim that, “no, I am this and dot, exactly this one I appear to be, this one I insist that I am indeed”. In the end, you can be whomever you want, it has no need to be this or that exact model; you are in fact one and another, surrounded by a variety of dresses – the "social functions" world imposes you to perform... If you think over the virtual instance or the very realm of fiction, well, so this "inference" is much more wide-open, evident, patent… Let’s put it this way: you are a persona, almost never a person in our contemporary virtual times, huh?

I do not give a S--- if you, or she, or he, or they are Ms. Bean or Bird, or some kind. Names are useful to name things and persons but never to provide "adequate" ground for competence, talent, sensitiveness,cruelty, cowardice etc; never to attest a word (in respect, of love, about madness or sanity, and yada-yada-yada) about them… So for it I cannot understand why a person may be offended when named equally or differently (for a case in point, it does not matter) from their "indeed or not genuine name" since their identity and/or personality rely on a variety of options in front a variety of persons and events in life…What is the problem when someone reverberates here and there that they have a “name” that does not actually correspond to their real one? I, for example, met yesterday a very kind girl who likes to be called by the name of Angelica rather than D----. The problem begins when people insist to be aggressive toward the other by using this stuff (the names of persons, or things) to shut off people, to prejudice them, to expose or violate their intimacy, to neutralize their choices and rights (one of them is, in fact, the will to remain in some circumstances just anonym), and to gracelessly unveil this or that feature/reason/personality/option/name etc. without permission or wish from the other – this is something harsh, violent and inelegant I never did, and will never do…

Well, the fact is that there is a real violence, too, at brushing aside someone’s behavior (even if provided by hate and rage) and doing immediately the same, for the same motifs, by the same coward gesture: the gesture of hiding yourself behind masks (which everyone can do, by the way; I do not see any problem on it, once I do it here and there, for example, when I “vomit up my fictionisms” – why not?) yet exposing the other and breaking their privacy by publically "naming" them as “coward, cruel”, and so forth, just because this other expressed themselves with honesty and sincerity, even if in anger, or stuff like that. Who is in the very position to say that acting with hate and rage is something censurable? Or crude? Or nefarious? These adjectives are much more complex than what they may appear to be, and for sure they need to work well in this or that context. Who gets to say what passes as weirdness or something merely refusable, and what is eligible, acceptable? Whether love reads as hate, or vice-versa? By saying this is something by "the name of love", or "hate", and dot? Is someone in the position to typify persons and things only by naming them, and believing that doing it they are defining them?

In the end? Names, names, names… What the! Oh my! Much more importantly than naming things and persons and their attitudes is that great gesture of feeling/knowing them out of their “dictionary condition”, far beyond those occasions they appear to be requested in (documents, at most). But this is something really rare nowadays, huh? It feels like we are yet deeply instilled in (and baffled by) the importance of naming… persons and things, and (which is worse) of trusting that this is something singular to define… ourselves and the Other…

Are you Ms. Justice, Mr. Truth? Good for you! Is she Ms. Wealthy? Good for her! For me, what’s really important in this weird, absent, almost always gloomy, transitory and lonely life is to not decline to be alive and make as much as you can your environment just like that: alive, less crude, more generous (and, in my case and most of my friends', more artistic). Difficult, almost impossible task… I know…

Let us think over what really deserves our attention, preoccupation and reaction in this world. I can assure anyone that this is something that really counts nowadays, very urgent, actually. No time to waste in this sense: attempting to make the world a better place to live (by art, generosity, communication, love, non-acceptance, and whatsoever). Difficult task, I know… But that’s it – in the end, with or without names to label our own misfortunate misery of being nothing but a S---! Or not…

new

the misfi(c)t(ionist) [or five elements making you stumble into face and expel]

2011-07-29T22:15:00.000-03:00

misfictionist

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction (Lord Byron)

[WHERE ¾ THE SETTING ¾ COMING INTO AND MOVING AWAY FROM YOUR EYES AS IF IN OSCILLATION] You sometimes just look around, with such an impetuous uncertainty or (mis)appropriate feeling of unease, and ask yourself why it would be wrong if you decided ¾ at least for a moment ¾ to cross frantically the streets of your devoid and dark reminiscences, beckon over the whole far-fetched absence coming from the best-case scenario of all those twisted words you were so compelled to say but did not back in the day, and just break down? It feels like you only exist to… fictionize. But oh, and opps ¾ two eyes are not enough to capture your and anybody else’s essence, their ghosts, their doubles! In this context, how to draw a line that signifies what passes for living and being alive? And then you wake up today ever so Kafkaesque. Cast in the same reality or into the very realm of your misfit fictionisms? And then you are ready to be so distressed over a conjuncture of stumbles, or just to… die away…

[HOW ¾ THE POINT OF VIEW ¾ YOUR VOICELESS INTONATION TO EXPRESS] Words, words… They mean the world for you, especially into a transitory existence which appears to be yours, fully permeated by them, the words ¾ said in moments of glory, temptation, delirium, fraud, everyday tasks, at work, for obvious reasons, or just for nothing…

[WHY ¾ THE THEME ¾ YOUR pusillanimity OR shrewdness, YOUR HIDDEN PAIN OR NEED TO JUST SAY] It is not so hard to accept that words do not mean, so that the silence, not even its “materialization”, but the silence itself cuts across this everything almost everybody takes by the name of… “life” ¾ an instance within the universe of strangeness and solitude and struggles with anything that means “being alive”, one way or another. Words do not capture this (beautiful or unpleasant) movement you live in ¾ as a person(a) or a fictionist? They embroil you in a cloistered environment of enchantment or delusion ¾ as a realm resulting from the interplay between the real world and the virtual, fictional one. As mediated by networks of sensors and actuators, your own plot ¾ a mélange of both worlds complete unto themselves and merged into one another ¾ is enriched by your words are inept to exert yourself to try out being less absent, étranger, or just existent… And then you keep writing to become invisible…

[WHO ¾ A PROTAGONIST ¾ YOUR MISFIT PATH INTO ONE’S FAILURE] Is it possible that you step into a hall of mirrors, look at your clean or distorted image, and just move away from your purest part in life, this one so willing to be received, accepted, and kept like a gem on one’s path? Why does one leave you in dark and shade when the only touching gesture requested is but the opposite of a painful silence for days and days, months and years? How to not freak out in front of a tormented underground of sorrow and many shocks against the wall? Wondering round and round, alone, nowhere to go or just attempting (brave or deliriously) to bear up well against?

[WHAT ¾ THE PLOT ¾ YOUR EVERYDAY VERY ACT OF LOOKING] By your very turn, your feelings do not show; they are but a scream you have when flying ¾ over and over… A dream but a spleen but a sense: and all this, like a permanent link, as intertwined and strong as frail and destroyable, blows up in your face as if this, the dream, or the scream, or the fear for having dreams, was but a ghost, or a clear-cut idea on your own/else’s misadventures into… life? May be, may be not, who knows…

**THE END PRODUCT [CREATURES INTO THEIR CREATOR], that which can be shared or consumed, is unlikely to “inner sanctum” or outwardly resemble the forms of… a fictionism? Is this life itself or are you living in a simulation? Just stranger than fiction? Why not?

cismando criaturas-v – parte II [que é pra te dizer que deliciura que é você]

2011-07-20T16:52:00.002-03:00

oferenda

oh, eu tenho esquadrões

de dor

batalhões, exércitos de

dor

continentes de dor

há, há, há

tenho você

Vou dizer hoje de novo assim de você. Pudera! Você, ora que! Um pouco menos, talvez de mais, que é pra te deixar pois que pensando: “Sim, eu de quem”.

Mãos suas puseram em vida de um possível indigesto-caminho meu aquela doçura em colorido fazendo escapulir pra bem longe náusea, e que foi sendo pra ela não cismar aparecer reluzente em asfalto onde a gente pisa cruzando as desilusões inevitáveis – muitas quase todas elas dia-após. Olhos de você que me fazem ver o longe pr’além de um tique em taque-dissabor. E boca sua, sim, feita de algodão-doce, com ditos do mais encantável que eu até com gotinhas em canto invisível de janela d’alma quando me imagino, e de novo, e sempre, num compartilhando sonhos, e rasgos, e noites, e tudo o mais que a gente nesse tempo todo, nessa vida toda – e pra muito além de anos ou quadriculações dessas que se marcam em ponteiros, sabe?

Olhos, boca, sobrancelhas, dedinhos de tocar ponta do céu amarelo que com a gente, pés que delineiam caminhada linda de lado seu, queixo de uma ternura incalculável, nariz feito delicado pra sempre em aroma flor-de-laranjeira, como cê adora, eu sei – sabemos. Cabelos, que um dia eu mesma quis fazendo um pouquinho encaracolados, que foi de embirração-brincadeira, mas que escorrem na lisura do caráter e da sensibilidade de você, na lindeza toda que eu fui cismando, e você gostando, e você deixando, e você sendo sempre – a deliciura mais delícia da minha vida, que é mesmo só podendo, e eu querendo, que você.

A vontade de redizer você hoje, em parte dois, é pra te lembrar de um sempre, meu amor em criatura-elefante, saindo às ruas e me levando junto, me ensinando a aprender e a compreender crueza toda esta que às vezes fazem com a gente nós-todos. Me mostrando que a gente dá, sim, volta enorme nisso tudo quando a gente amor, né? Então que é só pra isso mesmo, pra não te deixar esquecer que pra mais de trinta-e-um eu quero mesmo muitas centenas, mas muitas outras tantas infinitando a gente, tá?

Há, há, há – eu tenho você!

Créditos do vídeo: Itamar Assumpção cantando “Oferenda” (do disco Intercontinental). A epígrafe: versos de Charles Bukowski.

Raymundo Colares revisited [a syncopated rhythm matches up with Brazilian industrial society in the 60-70s]

2011-06-22T22:31:00.003-03:00

Just impressive! Both the artist and his work represent a landmark for Brazilian art scene in the late 1960s ¾ it is out of question! But, for all the obvious reasons, including that incredible ¾ yet “weird” ¾ way the major public tends to discredit, even play down, those works which lure you into another sense of “order” and its new mysterious vortex, Raymundo Colares’ artwork is until today less valued than it really deserves to be.

Painter and draughtsman, Colares brought together in his works a remarkable relationship between Constructivism and Pop Art, which can be, for instance, as well observed in some Hélio Oiticica’s innovative neo-concrete works. However, much more than other artists of the period in Brazil, the way Raymundo Colares depicted the interpenetration of people and vehicles at speed, prompted by new technology artifacts cutting across the metropolis’ syncopated motion, related to visual rhythms considered to be the best-case scenario for a new class of (emergent) consumers, was practically unprecedented in Brazilian contemporary art.

Born in the State of Minas Gerais (Grão Mogol, 1944), he studied, in 1966, at the School of Fine Arts of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where he had the opportunity to make friends with important Brazilian visual artists like Oiticica, Ivan Serpa, and Antonio Dias ¾ at whose invitation Colares took part in such “over-the-top” exhibition (at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro) by the name of The New Brazilian Objectivity.

From the late 60s onwards, he began to produce what would be considered to be one of his major artworks: book-objects, in which he explored the multiplicity and a mélange of colors and folds of the paper ¾ pieces which had to be handled and manipulated by the spectator; along with his book-objects (the so-called “gibis”), and much more preponderantly, the artist began to create a new instance of paints (canvases and collages) by using metallic materials as hallmarks of an industrial society he deeply intended to highlight (and shrug off in some way, even without debunking).

The creator and his creatures ¾ the impact of an ongoing (over)industrial society

Linked to photography, cinema, graphic design, and advertising, Raymundo Colares’ images are associated with many “indiscreet scenes” essentially rooted in a Capitalist society touched by a rapid progress of production and consumption. The fascinating frame coming from most of his works is exactly the way he brilliantly extracted the every-day object form from its normal, daily content to convert it into a symbolic, but not exceptional, icon of this frantic society in its blatant ongoing dissemination.

Buses, ads, numbers, approximating geometry, graphic cards, panels, traffic lights, people crossing frantically the streets, movement, horns, and trends ¾ all this the spectator seems to bring into mind when in front of Calares’ artworks. Deploying a variety of alternative sequences of colors in strong tones and objects in multiple forms, the artist emerged in a process of creation where, as a result, the spectator could feel the impact of speed and fragmentation as if the art product itself appeared to be as a manufactured product in a factory…

Tick-tack, tick-tack ¾ man after man, women, children, man, man, man. Lights, no limits, buses, horns, outdoors, cars, cars, cars ¾ the frantic speed of a metropolis. Objects, brands, voices, noises, screams, horns, horns, man after man after you after me, clashes, ads, cold asphalt, lights, movement, movement, movement ¾ the rhythm of consumption, of an industrial society made up of concrete pavement, objects, autos, and frantic people running for buying their goods are all depicted and come out with sensitiveness, multiplicity and diligence by an admirable artist, who would end up his life like a beggar, pauper but wealthy in his frank non-acceptance, even if verging on "the fringes of civilization" he knew, like few contemporary artists, how to depict in its movement, vigor, and disparities prompted by such machine's forward motion…

All-in-all? It is just impressive the way his works make us turn around, even after 3 decades, and feel a syncopated rhythm which is much powered nowadays, by the way… Feeling or “looking into” this frantic motion ¾ much more frantic today, of course ¾ is worth for many “artistic reasons”; the most important one, perhaps, are those which make us believe, once and for all, that we (are?) could be being also “products” from this very “automatized scheme”…

Raymundo Colares ¾ a talented artist whose works we, for sure, have to be more impressed by, and “take the hat off”!

in front of a tapir-sensor only a "right C." is not wrong

2011-06-04T15:45:00.003-03:00

jkfld

Dedicated to three special women who had been doing their utmost to make our crude and automatized reality a better place to live; where we, brothers and sisters, could still believe in the redemptive power of art and generosity, at least to dare to hope that everyone (next or a little far away from us) will free up themselves from any kind of slavery some day. Margaret Kargbo (Margo), Miki Turner, and Laurel Holloman ¾ with their remarkable steps into resistance and non-acceptance, they show us by their art and praxis that it is still possible to dream about what writer Bernard Shaw said once: if “without art the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable”, without generosity, and the very act of looking at and supporting the other (weaker and so for it shattered like glass by the whole hideous corporation motion), our route will be nothing but a trap. This is that precious and priceless “drop in the ocean” these three special women just admirably catch up with and overtake. Three artists: a writer, a photographer, a painter whose work I get delighted with and, for sure, will always reverberate.

He went down the stairs of the Hall of Condemned Slaves, out to the nearly deserted street, at 7:52 am. Cold for the heat of the room itself, absently seeking some pallid face of such invalid person somewhat similar to him, that screwed-up man envisioned nothing but his (mis)printed fate. Over there, the ground appeared to be strange to him, floating in front of that “in-the-flesh person” as well as emerging like a machinery pillow ready to overcoat his face, or any wishtrick reputedly coming from his heart ¾ never mind, the march would set out by him.

The street-basis surface made of that gross concrete pavement as if dancing to the same tune of his dark; or in the best-case scenario, claiming against that whole push-me-pull-you path from someone distressed over their piloted blindness to death, to the gallows execution by the most sophisticated method of people’s fading out and slacking off ¾ he (thick or leniently) felt like having missed out on the route of such overall need for brightness, even without passing up the condition for an existence outweighed by a foot-by-foot strolling in his broken journey. Beggaring tacks, trampling upon ticks, going under $$$ agenda, tick-tack, tick-tack everyone’s failure ¾ and over there, his everyday-life torments, or just a way back into his sentence of imprisonment. A Failed C. ¾ his very value, his code, his alias, and the preponderant motif.

He ¾ a Slave-Man Server. No limits, no worth. His crime ¾ a mélange of misdemeanor lightness and synchronized handicap (his inaptitude to C.). So clapped-out, so suitable. His punishment ¾ a day-by-day walk back into a horrid-insect crime. His steps out the hall of slave prisoners ¾ nothing but steps into the underground of commitment he had been inept to juggle with slyness. A weaker consent, or such last-but-not-least form of life guidance ¾ even if delirious or boxed in ¾ than none at all. The rules had been clear: you ought to C.

In procession, that was how all the attendees were compelled to act out. The scenario: a piquet ahead, the one responsible for synchronizing the bank-note multitude and their expected reaction: everybody wished the condemned slave a crude execution ¾ he had after all broken the C.-Law. This first soldier was followed by a trumpeter, who titillated and spread out the defendant’s sentence over the street corners ¾ it was indispensable that everyone was once again well informed about (and well indoctrinated in) what legislators ruled and judges used to apply to blatant cases of rule violations like that.

After the Police of People’s Identity and Actions, the transgressor came out between men and women (and children with their puppets) to give rise to the announced spectacle: his execution by hanging. All-in-all? Nothing to struggle against or complain about: “Justice had been served” without any baffles in the process ¾ this, the way it always goes when someone breaks the Law No. $$$-813/72A (the so-called C.-Law).

Anyway, the march had to go on. Foot after foot, all the attendees paced with no stupefaction, no fellow-feeling, and no resistance. The present authorities paced as well, in such automatized motion. And the condemned, dressed in white, as desperately trying to figure out a way to free up himself from that next insurmountable groove was also forced to march to the gallows. Foot after foot, hopelessness after others’ idiocy and lack of mercy, disgrace after his unnumbered voiceless cries. The slave marched, and marched. As walking his chalks, the only thing available to him was that desperate far-fetched walk to his deadline.

No one appeared to be stunned. No one gave a damn. No one tried to put a stop to that absurd. Everybody knew, everybody sensed, but there was not even a person to shrug off, or to hold out against. Over there, along with that procession, people were just supposed to be ready… to toe the line, to dance to the music of the Major Department of Executions of the Special Court Tribunal for Failed-Cs’ guidelines. That was the rule: if you are not able to C., you are not able to L. (C. and L. were, in that case, and for any context, conceived as the highest intertwined values).

Around-the-clock interest, everyone marched. When all those people, including the slave prisoner, reached the right place (The High Justice Square) where he would be hung, the soldiers and all the authorities made a circle inside of which the slave and his butcher were invited to take their glorious positions. The execution would begin. Behind, beside and at the helm of both men into the circle, people clap their hands, they intoned the Hymn of the Progress, everyone was excited by that incredible spectacle. Three huge loudspeakers announced: it was the right moment for the public performance ¾ the so expected gallows execution.

The defendant, who had been voiceless and inert during his months-ago judgment, over there, surrounded by the audience and authorities and all those ostentatious interested in progress, over there that poor condemned slave trembled. He was not the same man. Even silently groaning all his deep-down objection to that death sentence, he did not invoked the Heaven, he did not begged for mercy, he did not even cried out. He just closed his eyes and waited the execution.

And then, as expected, the butcher tied the rope around the slave’s neck. It was 8:25 am. After that, the judge simply drew up the legal document, and waited for the hung man’s casket arrival to proceed to his 30-seconds burying.

Just like that: cold, hideous, and technocratic. That was how one among others millions of condemned slaves ended up their ordinary existence. And would be like that for many and many years yet… Until… Actually, this hope is but a dream. Is it?

One important note: I got stunned by a book I have been recently reading (No meio das galinhas as baratas não têm razão / Among chickens, the cockroaches are wrong). That’s what this current text (my today “fictionism”) is all about. Based upon a law ruled by judges in Brazil in 1835 (The Law of Death Penalty for Slaves), historian João Luiz Ribeiro wrote a precise and precious analysis on all those subdued people who were sentenced to death for raising their hands and voice against slavery and the whole crudeness prompted by their “lords”. Into this book, there was an excerpt dedicated to narrate one, among countless others, slave’s walk into his execution by hanging in 1836. My today ficcionism, originally brought out in Portuguese on paginacultural, is then dedicated to redo this moment by trying to think about it in terms of our new “sophisticated” methods of slavery and condemnation… what I call C. herein (the corporation motion based upon Consumption, the Consumerism)…

drowning by brands (part one)

2011-05-30T01:13:00.000-03:00

Melinda gets up at five o’clock in the morning, day after day. Before unfolding her eyes, she is already an invisible person, crushed by the hideous dominated-industry scheme, verging on torment and intermittent deliriums. When my protagonist wakes from troubled dreams, she does not get out of a comfortable LAGUNA queen platform bed advertised on WALMART noticeboard — it is not up to her; money is always in short supply.

Making an effort to let her senses begin more distinctly, and declining to remember her last disturbing day, she realizes that her daily overload is starting, once again. No time to yawn. Or to stretch out. Only to leap forward, to breathe the severely polluted air, to turn on the PHILIPS light while her own lighted-guidance feels dreadfully parsimonious, and to subtly complain about her long-standing backache — unfortunately, she does not have that splendid AMERICANFLEX pure gold mattress. In the end, there is no escaping — she needs to start her excruciating journey.

Straight to the bathroom! Melinda looks at her bad reflection in the GUARDIAN mirror — no sweet dreams would have resonated down the years, those sweet dreams tasted for over a decade, so she savors the awful facts of her own disappointments, as unpalatable as they feel in reality, and with innocence losing ground, Melinda turns on the LORENZETTI faucet and washes her face with LUX light soap to cool off. Cleans her teeth with a toothbrush and a toothpaste, both by COLGATE-PALMOLIVE INC., while she dreams of taking a hot shower, being almost sure that it will not relieve her everyday pain.

And so she does the pressing needs: she turns on the FAME super douche, washes body and hair with a CASHMERE BOUQUET liquid soap, and finally dries herself with a soft TEKA towel. No pleasure. No whim. No redemption.

drowning by brands (part two)

2011-05-29T10:46:00.000-03:00

Time to get dressed: MARISA cotton panties and bra, HERING T-shirt, fake ZOOMP jeans, SPEEDY pair of socks and ALL STAR (Conversed Red). She is very lucky whether she is able to buy new clothes once a year — and with what pleasure she usually does it, one of the rarest things from which she obtains actual relief… The real sting of it lays in the fact that Melinda forgets, for a moment, stories and dramas which are just about to blow up in her face with embarrassing consequences.

Even so, she still has thousands of such reminiscences of her personal misfortune, and at times some one stands out from the thousand and oppresses her, such as that despicable petit bourgeois — her boss — she needs to be in familiar terms everyday. When it happens, she avoids talking, and buries herself in holes.

Now straight to the kitchen! As Melinda does not have that too expensive BLACK & DECKER electric kettle, she takes her red ARNO thermos, the MELITTA paper strainer, and while the water is boiling in a ELECTROLUX stove, the poor girl adds UNIÃO sugar and OURO NEGRO coffee.

Then she eats her CORN FLAKES morning cereal with PARMALAT milk, and a very delicious WICK BOLD loaf of sliced bread with BUNGE butter and BASS LAKE packer backer curds she earned last month from her boss. Not forgetting her favorite strawberry NESTLÉ yoghurt. Eating is the only thing this colonized girl does with special satisfaction, as though she could recognize, for a moment, and with a more intense pulsation, a vestige of humanity often taken away from her.

Crossing the living room, and ready to go out, Melinda looks at her old-fashioned SAMSUNG television set and promises herself that she will have a SANYO 50” HDTV with a full SKY cable TV, at least with FOX, HBO and WARNER — with what intensity she deserves it! Her CREATIVE mp4 with PHILIPS earphone are prepared to provide her some satisfaction during the day, first while the MERCEDES BENS (or GENERAL MOTORS?) subway car is bound for downtown. The song? Tom Zé’s The Hips of Tradition (copyright recordings owned by TRAMA) will be a very special companion.

drowning by brands (part three)

2011-05-28T19:07:00.001-03:00

Outside: the progress of backward societies, in terms of industrial modernization even of a given peripheral country as Brazil provides this contemporary scene full of innovations and tempter offers. That is to say, the sphere of production and consumption where the large capital expands itself is, in fact, everywhere, and an overfilled image surrounded by advertisements imposes to Melinda its everyday “fine” products, brands, services. COLCCI, LACOSTE, NIKE, AREZZO, WALMART, CARREFOUR, MCDONALD’S, PIZZA HUT, BURGER KING, SUBWAY, PANASONIC, MICROSOFT, HEWLETT-PACKARD, NOKIA — those she will never have any access to.

Invisible is she, as a horrid insect. And those who have been turning her into it look at her now, absurdly scatterbrained or indifferent. But blind aren’t both the insect, who naturally accepts its invisibility, and the observer, who naturally converts people like my protagonist into invisible vermin? Maybe! Or not! It might be only a powerful way to make people pulse in synchrony, as though they always share the same beliefs or have the same interests.

Reaching the streets, Melinda is immediately in contact with FIAT, FORD, VOLKSWAGEN, CHEVROLET, and TOYOTA — these are the fashionable cars only to be delighted with, those she will live her whole life without.

So she takes the GENERAL MOTORS subway car. From Insect Disgusting Land (her peripheral area) to downtown: on the way to Hopeless Avenue (her workplace), nothing to appreciate but lots of rubbish overall, the chilliness of her city’s deeply-shadowed streets where all houses are immoderately badly arranged, alleys inhaling the odor of their thousand beggars, ill-fated and mysterious men and women crossing the street full of its deterring brothels, nights of usual gloom, the old Cult Cine... Melinda’s city is a frenzied metropolis such as New York or Los Angeles — there are only streets, viaducts and avenues; from the deep down, the unevenness between cosmopolitan opulence and striking penury.

After a long trip, she finally gets to work. Her day is going to be tiring. Apparently? Melinda is cleaning up, and washing, and sweeping, and swallowing her pride, and getting lost among bewildering feelings and things. AJAX cleaner, BOLT past wax, SCOTCH-BRITE sponges, SURF detergent, 3M brooms and squeegees.

Crouching down, standing up, three-four-five-six-nine times, and once again, once again, tick-tack, tick-tack, tick-tick, tack-tack, back and forth, singing, sweating, crouching down, working, cleaning, washing, and once again, one more time.

Being up to day with her moral obligation bond. Bad mood to pick up or randomize a better route to follow through. Despair. That book she would love reading to the end. Debts. Supermarket.

A friend she intends to meet whenever. The streets. Cars. Luggage. The subway. A glass of pure water, please?

E-mails. HOTMAIL. GMAIL. YAHOOMAIL… The overload. No dialogue.

The darkness and directness of her failed requests. Those big exhibitions (Duchamp) opening, and galleries stretching out amazing shows, both only in her deepest dreams. Shopping. Books. Television. Movies. Entertainment. Chat rooms. Despair. Violence. The bus stop. Corruption. A man walking down the streets. One killing another, one prevailing over another. Screams. One of the same. Passengers in masses. Brands.

Products. Services. Men and women misplaced. Fear.

drowning by brands (part four)

2011-05-27T19:02:00.003-03:00

Lunch around midday: on time. VASCONCELOS rice and bean. BRIDGFORD beef. Lettuce, carrot, potato. Seeds being altered by top engineering techniques; that powerful rondup herbicide; powerful and satisfactory (or “necessary”?) weed control by MONSANTO, anywhere in this big world with its GEOS or GMOS, the transgenic...

Melinda’s snack at four o’clock in the afternoon — an abundance of top brands once again. And this cycle exists to be restored, day after day.

Sleeping. Getting out of bed. Stepping. Having shower or breakfast. Getting to work. Crossing the streets. Wandering round and round nowhere to go. Dropping some friend a line. Enjoying a day off. Resting. Peeing. Waiting anxiously to get her pay. Visiting an art gallery. Studying. Reading. Writing. Expelling demons of deceit. Weeping. Planning. Meeting. Coming back home. Watching TV. Eating and drinking. Even throwing up. Cleaning the house. Looking for a route. Screwing things up. Laughing. Talking. Refusing. Kissing. Travelling. Making love. Looking at. Sending or receiving…

Almost giving up — as you notice, Melinda only exists by giving rise to some social functions operated by a devious everyday cycle (actually, a “push-you” and “pull-you” game) prompted by a mechanical reproduction. Of marketing. Feelings. Behaviors. Contemplation. Participation. Manipulation. Consent. Orders. Hard work. Long trips. Unattainable routes. Unachievable desires. Many ups and downs. Dreams not accomplished. Men and women misplaced. Exhaustion.

Existence, enforcement, endurance. Products, products and products. Objects. Plastic, metal, glass, wood — materials. Food and drink. Computers, sofas, writing desks, books, screens, magazines, chairs, boxes, wardrobes, ventilators, tables, digital or alarm clocks, pencils, staplers, cameras, notebooks, calculators, printers, cell phones, cupboards.

"Man after man, woman, child, man, clothes, cigarette, hat, clothes, clothes, clothes, man, man, woman, clothes, man”. Our times! Objects exist for death. The quantity points to the constant renewal of the old. But all this innovation is to attest that we are risking defeat. Loss of identity? Or an excess of traces leading us to a vacuum existence? Both?

If objects exist for supply, we exist for consumption — is that the reasoning, the compelling moral principle behind everything? As objects involve us in a too attractive way of life, our plea of both unconsciousness and ignorance — who decides? — of these devious rules in extenuation of our own agreed answers and consent is covered up. And the individual viewer disappears inside the vast “audience” in different places. Therefore, the process of “reading the world” is distorted. But not only this. We are distorted either.

So let us redo our preamble in terms of a naive provocation: can't we reach the inside portion from our outside’s, which is corrupted by an abyss of excessive concreteness — the objects? From this perspective, we miss even that immediate reflection of a single representative image of ourselves. In front of a mirror, there is nothing to recognize but our own double-multi-faceted “invisibilities” — both external and internal.

time to repost the "guttersnipe"

2011-05-25T18:57:00.000-03:00

he scares you… his gun’s powerful enough to shoot you down… and his words, slashing to tear down whatever… he spends his time just hanging out at his stuff… his shit… and bucks… he could blow chunks right here… you’d clean his floor… you work for him… it’s sucking all your energy… but you’re just one of the pack to be burned out… no way to blow off some steam… that’s his great deal… to turn you a basket case… you could get bonkers about his condition of a fat cat… ain’t no good nohow… but you don’t, you’ll just put the case on the back burner… he’s in the position to kick your ass… and so he does… all the time, he kicks your ass… you, and all the fucked-up ones around him, are always about to crash… there’s no way to jump ship ‘cause this is the deal… to kick your ass… and to laugh off your worries, your losses, your own stuff… damn it… he just bears down on you from behind… or from all sides?

he doesn’t scare you… his power is not a strength… he’s weak… when he opens up his chair next to you, you have the guts to unveil him… he’s a goofy… a fraud, squandered in trivialities… a jerk, he’s a turd… but powerful… a no-brainer reasoning… the cycle of power… just common if you nailed him screwing up a riffraff… it’s so his scene… left and right, so his scene… and you are told to not give a damn ‘bout it… that’s the big deal… to not give a fucking rat’s ass ‘bout it… that’s the big deal, but not for you… you mustn’t dig it… it’s not fine and dandy with you… time to get cracking? he’s just always trying to hide that you’re in a bind… your kaput… and yada-yada-yada… will you kick the bucket? you — the loser? me — the nutcase? even though, I’m not a space cadet, don’t wanna be like that… we’re being lied to… and ripped-off… not in money… not in land… but in the right to dream…

se olho [então choro] [mas ainda rogo]

2011-05-15T17:28:00.006-03:00

Magia, de Cecilio Bastos*

“Sobre as antas poderosas, ávidas de matar o sonho alheio... Derrama sobre elas o teu olhar mais impiedoso, Deus, e afia a tua espada...” (Caio Fernando Abreu, Zero Grau de Libra)

“Eram bichos brancos e sujos [...] e eu não conseguia evitar de ver e sentir atrás e além dos sujos bichos brancos” (Caio Fernando Abreu, Uma história de borboletas)

Quando Ana percebeu, [também] estava olhando pras pessoas como se delas soubesse coisas que nem elas mesmas... Em variação [quase] monossilábica – as tais gentes. Que, em cenário modernoso, proparoxítono, pareciam desestranhar o de mais que via então a moça, e achando tudo muito suspeitoso – era de se notar.

Badalejavam os anúncios e rosnavam algumas feras, aturdidas pelo que de engolir sentindo muito gosto. Ou não – coisa de que a gente duvida no caso das tais feras. Ali mesmo, esquina com a dinâmica Avenida das Borboletas [cidade: não informada], no desaviso da circunstância de ter acabado de perder o rumo de casa [motivo: não vem ao caso], a protagonista de seu próprio desafortunado viramundo, sentada de frente pra grande e encardida janela do Café Boa Ventura, aonde por vezes ia depositar suas calculadas moedas em troca do líquido, Ana, com algum inquisitivo interesse pela multidão, ou talvez apenas entornando os últimos acontecimentos de sua embriaguez-ponto, foi no tino de engrossar [às avessas de] uma quase epifania: um desajuízo, cruzcredo! – este de olhar pra um e conseguir ver um outro em algum-mesmo! Mas ela via. Estava vendo. Era conta dos óculos envergados já? Que desatino era aquele?

Desencardiu, como pôde, as lentes. Não adiantava pensar que isso ou aquiloutro em virtude de alguma estreita, ou distorcida, visão de sua parte. Não era miragem. Nem ela precisava já conhecer o olhado, ou a olhada, fosse qualquer um, pra então... adivinhar. Deduzia? Isso, não. Em lucidez, diria alguém: “coisa que só louco!” Mas ela não era doi... [Pausa Propositada: Ana desgostava do termo, e pois que jamais pronunciava ele, que era pra não atrair sandices]. Do que ela precisava mesmo era buscar comprovação pro feito. Pra sua aletria e hermenêutica – de origem ainda desconhecida.

Olhou, de início, e sem calcular a escolha, um dos passantes. Zás! Moço de vinte e nove altíssimos desejos e dois reais em caráter. Nascido em dia santo, morreria como assassino de oitocentas e oitenta e duas performances, sequer seria visto como culpado. Saía daquele prédio central, acumulado em notas, como quem dali pra um luxuosíssimo carro misantropo e então pronto pra sujar as mãos, e de novo [num de sempre], com qualquer daqueles que. [Primeira Pausa Caio F.] – Daqueles que sobrevivem a cada dia ao naufrágio de uma a uma das ilusões.

A segunda. Uma mulher em certa magreza-venturança combinando com a robustez-desafeto. Ivanilde Seboso [ou Iranilde Alcunha] [ou ainda Dinada Perigo]. Nesse momento, Ana tinha ficado confusa. Que contradicência! Como podia aquilo? Refez a vista e viu que se tratava de três de uma única. E foi percebendo que coisas assim também acontecem – de determinada pessoa ser tão idêntica a outras que então parecendo a mesma. Tanto mais que ficha delas muitíssimo semelhante. A tal Ivanilde-em-triplicado. Infeliz. Casada. Marido: um abusado. Aspecto preponderante: humanidade tanto quanto se vê numa mesa. Profissão: derramar a sua feiúra, se imaginando ar-superioridade, sobre os que sangram todos os dias sem desistir [esta foi a Segunda Pausa Caio F.]. Projeto de vida: desejar a morte da irmã querida pra passar a mão em seus suados pertences [uma casa e uma rechonchuda conta bancária], ainda que durante o padecimento da qual irmã não tenha sido a tal triplicada a lhe dedicar todas as horas do dia em algum, mesmo que miúdo, cuidado-amor. Último crime cometido: ter ameaçado a quase-filha da irmã [agora já mesmo morrida] com uma conversinha mole de que entraria na Justiça, a tal moça que não duvidasse!, pra abocanhar a herança toda [Pausa Informativa: nem precisou porque a quase-filha, que gostava mesmo e tinha cuidado da tal “irmã querida” da outra-triplicada, nunca que ia brigar por conta daquilo que nem de longe tinha feito ela cuidar da adoentada, e então Ivanilde-Iranilde-Dinada mandou virem de Copacabana cem quilos de fogos de artifício – é que tinha ficado felicíssima com a integridade da moça]. Detalhe importante a ser mencionado: tem adoração por um dos mais sem palavra filhinhos, este tal que vinha dedicando a vida a fazer a sua mais nova aplicação de botox [provável que pra ficarem menos escancaradas suas muitas últimas malvadezas].

Ana prosseguia a investigação. Olhava pra um e – zás: via tudo, a ponto de quase desacreditar do que ia sabendo, de tão feia quase sempre a envergadura da pessoa olhada. Botava os olhos em outro e – novamente zás. Foi sendo assim a tarde toda. Tinham posto alguma dinamite em cabeça dela? Não que fosse. Talvez por conta de algum enviesado que tivesse sido implantado no olho dela, por que não?, hoje em dia tem gente que até põe chip dentro do corpo pra não ser perdido de vista, e então os seus pertencimentos-$$$... Saber explicar em tim-tim esta sua mais nova habilidade – Ana não sabia. E então só enxergava.

Quando veio a noite, ainda ali sentada no tal Café Boa Ventura, Ana pôs o olho num senhor. Destoava todo ele da multidão. E por quê? Num de basicamente: ela não via nada além do que pra qualquer um notar. Que o tal homem devia ter os seus setenta e poucos anos. Era magro. Não parecia gostar de muita prosa. Como dizem: era carrancudo. Nos dizeres de algum douto em vaidade besta de falar mais difícil: era ensimesmado. Nos de um mais sensível: era reservado. Tanto fazia. Ana tão-só isso enxergava. Ficou cabreira. “Mas como?, se eu conseguia antes ver tudo?, que é que tem nesse homem de tão infiltrável?” Uma complicadura – no de fato!

Resolveu então seguir o homem. Varou a madrugada atrás dele, e nada: o homem andava, andava, de tanto que parecia até ter percorrido a cidade inteira, e de novo, como que praticamente em círculos [Outra Pausa Importante: também não vem ao caso reproduzir aqui o trajeto, mas foi longo, e é o que de importante precisa ser titilado].

Recapitulando: o homem não tinha parado pra conversar com ninguém, nem pra comer, nem pra acenar a quem quer que fosse. Seguia sozinho. E concentrado. Às vezes dando a entender que olhava pra baixo. Parecia – era miragem? Ana por certo que podia estar ficando – a tal palavra com d. Será? Não, isso não. Ou era?

O velho a tal ou qual altura estancou. E ficou detido num vazio que até dava um certo dó na gente. Olhava ele era pra quê? Não se sab(er)ia. Ana cismou então que tinha que perguntar. E foi-se juntando ao homem. Chegou até muito perto. E mais. De costa, ele parecia qualquer um, sem estranheza, sem complexidade. A moça medrou ali olhar de frente. Tinha o direito de querer saber de alguém que talvez nem ele mesmo soubesse, como ela vinha fazendo a tarde toda? Ter – não tinha. Mas queria.

Um susto! Ao olhar fixamente pro rosto do velho, não ficou absorvida, não cogitou interromper a perseguição, tampouco descobriu que ali – “eis gênio de algum crime profundo”. Era uma criança. Oto – o nome imaginado dele. E podia isso? Uma criança em corpo de velho? De frente pra Ana, o menininho trazia nas mãos uma vela. Olhava detidamente pra ela. Tinha andado a noite toda ao encontro de uma procissão. Cenário este – pois ali era. Sumiram-se os postes. Avenidas abarrotadas – também já inexistentes. Carros misantropos – todos desaparecidos. Não se disseram palavra – Ana e Oto. Mas ela entendeu dele o que podia: “eis o retrato de mim daqui a setenta anos”. Como? Sem nota alguma de dólar-$$$ pra comprovar tal despropósito, se verdade ou pelo menos verossímil, e tendo o menino afirmado ser ali o que daqui a setenta anos, ela teve que consentir. Jeito melhor não havia. E, sem tardar, ele prosseguiu solenemente com a sua jaculatória silenciosa:

– Deus, concede aos de vista ainda curta um olhar imenso pra que ninguém lhes faça o todo mal que então ontem e hoje. Afia, Deus, a tua espada. Derrama sobre essas todas antas poderosas o teu olhar mais impiedoso. Mas, pros que sobrevivem sem mãos sujas de miséria alheia, envia a tua luminescência e abençoa o nosso ainda amoroso atordoamento-vida.

Pra Helena Frenzel. Uma moça com quem eu sempre vou ter em espaço dela pra um de ficar matutando as palavras – dela. Mas que muito da gente também. Nunca nos coincidimos, senão nisso de palavras nossas, lidas em reciprocidade, ainda que em país outro – eu e ela. Enquanto na escritura deste texto, recebi, com nem sei ainda definir sentimento qual, um recado da Helena. Por aqui mesmo, no blogue. Foi um susto [no sentido mais alto da palavra, minha querida, e sem nenhum quadradinho de desgosto que costumam dar pro “susto”... ao contrário]: “Coisas da vida, assim diferentes, assim...”. Foi o que li lá no blogue da Helena que eu visito de há muito. Pra dizer algo assim, em multiplicando a minha alegria sincera pelas palavras dela hoje pra mim, nossa! – isso eu não saberia mesmo! É que... sem explicação menos ou mais coerente, como costumo dizer, tão-só digo então: agraciada muito, Helena – menina-moça-mulher que eu também não conheço num de pessoalmente, mas de cujas palavras me vem sempre o desatino bom de uma querência-imaginatura muito querência mesmo... Obrigada pela leitura. Pelo texto. Pela vinda sempre cá, a espaço meu-nosso. Pelas palavras suas todas que vou sempre buscar no Bluemaedel. Se um dia a gente assim, em banco de praça, ou canto outro qualquer da vida, e num de frente uma pra outra, eu queria muito era te dizer assim: você o que eu queria imagem de nós todos humanidade, mesmo sabendo que talvez nunca podendo, mas sempre pra daqui um sempre. Letras e sons e imagens e sensações de você que eu já muito entranhando tudo, num de sincero, você sabe: tudo isso faz a gente lembrar, Helena querida, que é possível ter olhos, sim, acurados pra tentar minimizar a dor de viver às vezes sem se dar conta e de seguir, ainda que sofrendo, ainda que andando-andando-só, sem sujar mãos nossas, pois que, mesmo em algum momento em tentação danada, a gente não precisa, né? Agraciada, encantada, honrada eu com texto seu tão generoso sobre mim. Que nos processem a ambas, então, porque a você eu toda sempre fazendo coro...

* Eis um dos meus mais queridos – o Cecilio. Lentes sensíveis as deste moço, encantável em suas imaginaturas desvendando o mundo tão às vezes maculado em dor pra gente. Ou ele mesmo, fotografando pra um de talvez ficar cego e assim podendo nos guiar, como diz o Tom Zé, o certo é que o Cecílio me emociona sempre com suas imagens. Que não tão-só pra gente ver, mas pra tocar com a ponta dos dedos, pra apreciar, pra reverberar e, num de sobretudo, pra sentir. A este grande fotógrafo nosso, o meu enorme agradecimento (agraciada eu em enormidades) por ter-nos cá cedido a bela imagem. Não deixemos, pois de acompanhá-las, as deliciuras todas dele, no ceciliobastos.blogspot.com. Convite meu mais do que feito, aqui posto em fábula – e ata].

toc-toc-toc

2011-05-14T18:26:00.001-03:00

E quando a gente se sente assim... com vontade muita de agradecer, mas não tão-só ir num de retribuir mostrando-se grata? Faz o que a gente então? Agradece? É que, neste caso, fica sendo pouco da parte nossa – eis a complicadura! Que nem tanto. Pois que se a gente pensa que nada de contradicência tem mesmo nisso – sentir tal coisa e às vezes escassear palavreio para... Triplicando As, em circunstância esta. Se pra agradecer, eu diria que isso apenas se: Ademais, Afora, Além (disso) num de propriamente – a tal querência de... agradecer.

Tomo então emprestado o dito de uma muitíssimo querida – a Tatiana Carlotti. Agraciada! Foi como aprendi com ela a dizer quando isso de a gente se sentir... agraciada, pois ora! Em lisonja sincera. Honrada – num de fato. Como mesmo eu me senti. E daqui pra frente um muito mais.

Se agraciada, a querência toda minha no de agora é esta mesma – a de agraciar. Fazia tempo em bastantes que eu vinha, mineirice de fato minha, lendo e gostando muito e desfazendo pra refazer dentro e ouvindo e sentindo um lugar-virtualidade, que nunca que tão-só, mas muito desses a que a gente vai quando pra ler intrigamentos e apreciar um bocado mais de deliciuras por lá.

O meu agraciamento é, pois, o de agora estar mais perto, mesmo que antes também, mas agora perto e lá propriamente perto daqueles cujos muitotudos eu já de há muito vinha... apreciando e ressoando e... deixando desvairadas cá as delícias todas dacolá. Que agora em muito mais cá.

Agraciada eu, Página Cultural, por terem-me recebido com tanta generosidade. A mim e aos meus coelhinhos – ficcionismos nossos. Se em lisonja, é mesmo que num de sincero... mesmo! Vocês também de cá, meus queridos... zás pra lá, muito mais até que por aqui. Textos da Página muito interessantes. Uma deliciura! Conto-os todos, muitos sei de sabedura entranhada desse jeito mesmo na gente, sabem? Mas... Psiu! Que nada! Melhor vocês mesmos por lá, conferindo e apreciando, como eu.

Escrevo agora pra Página triplamente-mês. Ficcionismos. Vomitando por ali também os meus tais coelhinhos. E eles cismam, já me segredaram, que todos prenhes de novíssimos contornos. Senão vejamos...

Acho que sim – agora! Não? A vocês da Página Cultural redigo que eu cá... agraciada! Vamos então todos lá?

http://paginacultural.com.br

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2011-05-10T11:40:00.002-03:00

Writing fiction has a disadvantage, which is even a curse. Sometimes you feel unprepared to touch the immateriality all the words carry beyond their appearance, or their “dictionary condition”. There is always this risk: an interspace letting the words emerge, but yet hidden, as if feeling threatened by a misalignment or a misapprehension. A place few persons are allowed to enter. And then not even the most delicate gesture, not even the most precise synonym or connotation will be able to capture and hold any movement of that unknown portion a word may have inside, even if claiming for explosion (its signification, its abstraction, its perception). Connotation: the inferred overtone of a word rather than any limited literal use of its materiality. A tenuous limit between an intent and the very gesture of comprehension… to immediately express. This complex motion… The silence and the whisper. The whisper and the utterance. The availability and the unavailability to mean and be meant, to express and to be expressed. Therefore, and one more time, the words: with their signifier (le significant) and their signified (le signifié). Semiotics, nude and crude? No, definitely not. Not a linguistic cloistered environment leading you to understand and explain the words. But the difficulty a fictionist has sometimes to go silently into the realm of words, with no alarm clocks, no uncertainties, no indelicacy in holding them so much loosely or tightly in hands, to reach them in their profound expression of a delicate dance.

Today, I’m afraid that I had an encounter with my own deep-down truth as a supposed fictionist. What I am not, indeed. And then I felt misfit. Much more preponderantly: as if this path being a delusion. And then I felt lost.

I woke up in the early morning. Birds were coming over to my imaginary misguidance. They were supposed to come to say their morning hello by singing me a melody. A pleasant routine. But today they passed off my garden, didn’t stop for a subtle conversation with me. They just flied away. Didn’t even blow any secret to my ears, nor even to my heart. And then I felt gloomy. There was one of them, however, that lovely said to me, as if feeling the solitude of my absence: “We are always between an absolute realm pendent from expectation and a significance only in relation to something else”, which mirrors the unexpected, the collapse, the preclusion, and the intangibility of being nothing but incapable to be comprehended. These words are until titillating within me. Words, words, mere words… My insanity today discredited me to capture the connotation of these so beautiful words. And then I still feel disconcerted. At the very beginning, my birds’ absence carried myself again on to some vacancy. A cycle. Their crude yet wise words on to my misguidance. This one on to my inability to cope with such that silence. This one on to imaginary words carrying myself on to the truth I just figured out in my early morning: it is still titillating, still feels like I have missed the way to home. Where could you find the right words? How could you make your match on fiction?

In the middle of the road there is a stone, there is a stone in the middle of the road, there is a stone, in the middle of the road there is a stone. You were right, Drummond. I also feel my fatigued retinas. That see nothing but the sad motion of my thoughts and the empty reason of my words. My fictionisms today feel so incapable to make me reach the words. These ones seem to be unachievable, intangible. Their motifs, verging on insanity or just on non-adjusted paths. And then I sincerely tend to feel like the rabbits had moved out and away from me.

o espelho que imagina... a gente

2011-05-08T17:24:00.002-03:00

kfldsa

Sempre as tais... dualidades.

The pit and the pendulum. Pralá e pracolá. Os sinos batem – e sino lá bate senão o bang de um fazer estranhezas toc-tum... dentro? Di...na...miiiiiiiiiiiiiii...te... kaboom! Wilsons amontoados pra então desdobrando chapéus e capotes, ali mesmo, à nossa frente, tempo nublado ou aparecendo sem vergonha o sol, pois que na tentativa cabreira, ou cabisbaixa, que seja!, pra um de internação, ou expulsão... que... da gente.

Os então espelhos exalando maledicências e benfazeções. Não seriam... multiplicaduras inclassificáveis da gente e dos Outros-quais-então com... a gente? Que, em caminhos tortos ou camadas uma-depois-a-outra em dias [intransigentes], nós-todos, comprando ou entregando, mãos abertas ou fechadinhas, assim... a gente?

Ela... pessoa comum. Trinta e quase um ano – a idade. Profissão: perigando coisa ou outra. Distração: qualquer uma que não a obrigue a coisas indesejáveis demais. Escolaridade: sempre o embaraço de não saber dizer de si o que nem ela tendo tido, mesmo que em intenção dia desses. Vício: o de então vinha sendo esquecer, por a + b, que tinha com o que ser feliz sem se perder em madrugadas adentro, de frente pra uma frieza em tela, resquício de um desagrado muito marcante de meses antes – que ela cismava... não devia esquecer. Ou devia?

Acordava hoje em disponibilidade pra... quê-querendo, ou desgostando de... um certo propósito-atitude, que portanto talvez cintilante. Vontade de. Descomplicar lançando uma-alguma iluminatura corajosa pra dizer tão-só um desdito que ainda. Mas era preciso. A manhã foi intensamente vazia de afazeres com que nos pretendem insanos, ou dedicados, aos olhos dos... homens e mulheres, distintos ambos, e a gente, não, porque levando o porrete, mesmo que silencioso-pliiiinnn, pelos crimes todos que se cometem em nome... deles mesmos, mas atribuídos sempre... à gente.

Relembrou, de frente pro espelho brilhoso do banheiro de azulejos amarelecidos com o tempo por um vapor baratíssimo escorrendo do chuveiro sempre esfriando, que é pra gastar menos energia elétrica [oh-claro!], ficou então calculando a sua sina do dia: pentear os cabelos e não esquecer o gel superpoderoso que dá lustre ao que de há muito ofuscado pela fumaça das ruas e avenidas com que [os alguéns que a gente não conhece, mas pressente] faziam do seu cotidiano-dela um semblante daquilo que ela só queria, ainda que não tivesse com o que. Depois, ali mesmo saindo do cômodo de aprontamentos higiênicos, em face e corpo ensimesmados de algum contorno, talvez fosse isso mesmo, ela desembaraçou a fita verde que não mais no cabelo, por certo que nunca a tenha tido, pelo menos não se lembrava, e rumou pra cozinha, que é onde se faz o café pra ser engolido muito raramente com algumas bolachinhas compradas em quadradinhos pacotes de manter ali os conservantes todos que os tais alguéns querem muito comidos... pela gente.

O semáforo estava esperando na entrada do prédio. Sempre assim. Ela e ele andam juntos, um olhando pro outro – mas só quando é possível corredeira com dedicação a verificar um pro olho piscante do outro. Quando não, o pisar asfalto pavimentado e esburacado das ruas conta com a sorte. Ou com a má-fortuna de um esbarrão-carro, misantropos quase todos eles mesmos e amassando, se pouco, a pontinha dos sapatos da gente.

Hoje o dia seria o mais importante da vida dela... torta. Estelar – foi como ela aprendendo, no correr dos tiques e taques, a permanecer contando os segundos pro de agora... dia. Não compraria nada. Nem se meteria a bestidões corriqueiras de cumprir o horário certinho de ponto em emprego meio-salário, o único que tinha conseguido pra ir dobrando jornada em vias de acertar mais de prontidão-sentença os tais talões mensais.

Tinha até umas poucas bagatelas pra vender e ir-se arranjando pedacinhos de cobre pra somar e comparecer à casa dos $$$ quitando isso ou outro do mesmo-aquilo... mensal. Mas hoje, naquele extraordinário dia, não era pra vender coisa qualquer que ela saía... às ruas. Nem mesmo pra tomar o sorvete de casquinha, anunciado sempre e fermentadinho de umas leitosas matanças de destinos alheios, explorados até gota última em extração do líquido, ou penúltima [nunca se sabe]. Não. Ela não tomaria o tal sorvete nem cogitaria comer o seu preferido pão-de-quê servido no armazém do seu Nicomedes Alves dos Santos. Tampouco ela, que nunca tinha se metido a comprar à vista mercadoria qualquer-uma, saía então de casa às oito e vinte sete da manhã, um pouco atrasada, pra pesquisar o preço em promoção limpa-estoque.

Faria o que, então? Se não isso nem aquilo, era o quê? Estudar – não estudava mais. Só rasgava os muitos conhecimentos acumulados nos embates do dia a dia-trabalho dela. Quando muito, permanecia bestamente de frente pra tela sem saber sequer o que via... Trabalho ali seu feito bastante em exatidão. Ou quem sabe ela nem enxergasse no embaralhamento de letras com que se consomem vidas às vezes não se dando conta. Não compraria. Não beberia. Comer estava fora de resolução. Também não se encontraria com amigos ou parentada pra dizer como vinha difícil a vida. Nem mesmo pra receber o ordenado era que aquilo-dela tinha decidido na manhã de então sincronizar partida assim tão esperada prum de... fazer o que na rua? E hora daquela mesma se não pra...?

Era um mistério. Isso pois? Ela queria sair às escondidas sem dar notícias do que... faria? Mas se nem pra ninguém mesmo ela tinha pra quem relatar episódio qualquer... Fosse outra coisa – isso é que não... seria.

Não planejava cantar. Sequer passaria na porta do Cine Malvadeza pra ver o cartaz do dia. Ora que nunca também é que procuraria nova terceirização dos suores todos chamados por uns – a mão-de-obra... da gente. Não saía a passeio – luxo que a ela, ah! não cabia. Tampouco faria qualquer coisa que alguém em normal estado de mentalidade, como dizem, conseguiria ali, ou noutro canto qualquer, imaginar.

Faria, portanto, o quê? Uma pessoa comum – ela. Expropriada e corrompida, torta e desencontrada de caminho um qualquer... Como os muitos-quase-todos... perdidos.

Daí que, hora pra outra, desandou a atravessar a rua correndo muito, que era pra poupar... tempo. Talvez. Quase nove da manhã. A cidade a essa altura já buzina inteira na gente. Foi entrando na loja. Que era até um algo... chique. De espelhos – inteirinha, a loja. Escolheu um enorme pra ir rumando em sentido. Ou na contradicência mesma... dele. Esperava ela, e de braços meio abertos, uma moça. Bonita. Quase que o oposto dela – era o que se notava. Ela então, tendo saído de casa pra mais de trinta e três minutos antes, foi-se aproximando... da Outra. Ambas se olharam detidamente. De início, uma algo desconfiada da outra. Mas que, no fim das contas, parecendo uma pra outra.

Sem nenhum movimento abrupto, mas com receio de talvez espantar aquela que ali de braços ainda meio abertos, ela tirou do bolso um papelzinho pardo, que foi onde anotou, durante dias, pra não esquecer uma palavrinha sequer, tudo o que planejou ali dizer... pra Outra.

– Por não ter te escutado quando deveria. Pelas horas infindáveis diante de um vazio, que me afastava da nossa imaginatura-muito-nossa. Por ter tido olhos agigantados pruma tão imensa brutalidade que te direcionei, quando poderia ter vindo aqui simplesmente e te dito “não é isso, é mais mesmo que fiquei perdida por conta de não saber lidar com a estranheza de me ver desarranjada em desconexões contigo”. Por todas as madrugadas em que te expulsei de mim pra me dedicar a um fantasma de mim mesma – ou de você, sabe-se lá. Pelas lágrimas que esqueci de chorar contigo, em solidariedade à tua dor. Por ter-te abandonado naquele momento doído em que perdemos ambas o eixo pela ida de uma nossa intimamente linda. E por todos os dias em que fui leviana acreditando que eu, quimera pura, poderia me desgarrar de imagem esta que eu agora vejo eternamente entranhada em mim, compartilhada contigo, vida inteira como tínhamos planejado... Daí que eu me curvo diante dos todos crimes de mim pra mim, estendidos e talvez um dia compreendidos por você... Não fiz por maldade simples, mas por ter perdido o sentido pro que de mais em mim, no correr desses dias tantos perturbados e consagrados com coroa entristecendo o que de muito vivaz na gente...

Parece que se reconciliar(i)am... E foi ela, já tendo feito o que precisava e queria, tomar o coletivo de volta pro apartamento-casca dela mesma... morada. O trânsito estava, como sempre, frenético. As pessoas, descabidas. E ela agora, se refazendo duplamente ela de novo...

O espelhando-tela é de Paul Delvaux, Le Miroir (1936)