It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
I still have no words of my own.
Sarajevo, Blagaj and Mostar (April, 2017)
Category: Life
So much for escapism
After lunch I went to check Andrey Konchalovsky”s Paradise. This is an incredibly beautiful and intelligent movie about confronting extreme evil and dangerous ideas of a paradise that only exists at the expense of someone else’s living hell.
I walked to my car and Brahms is still echoing in my mind. It takes me a minute or so to realize that the back window was smashed. Nothing stolen. Just petty vandalism or someone got interrupted. And this is, of course, nothing. But, it did work in bringing me down to earth and reality does have a way of making me feel extremely upset.
Now I’m home trying to convince myself I need to start packaging for Sarajevo and this is a place I have never been and the TV memories it evokes, make Konchalosky’s words about his own movie all the more important and, unfortunately, also inconsequential.
‘History is full of great tragedies, most of which remain in our minds as ancient misdeeds that couldn’t possibly be replicated in the present day. One of the most terrifying moments of our generation’s history was the rise of the Nazi party and the extermination of millions of Jews and others who did not fit into the Nazi ideal of a ‘perfect’ German ‘paradise’. These atrocities exposed the depths of mankind’s capabilities for evil and although these events happened in the past, the same kind of radical and hateful thinking is apparent today and threatening the lives and safety of many around the world.
‘Paradise’ reflects on a twentieth century filled with great illusions buried in ruins, the dangers of hateful rhetoric and the need for mankind to use the power of love to triumph over evil.
‘That which has happened is a warning. It must be continually remembered. It was possible for this to happen, and it remains possible for it to happen again at any minute. Only in knowledge can it be prevented. The danger here is in the unwillingness to know, the urge to forget, and the disbelief that all of this actually happened…’ The words of German philosopher Karl Jaspers are tied strongly to the central theme of ‘Paradise’, which urges us not to forget the truths of history, no matter how horrifying or inconvenient, so that we do not repeat them’.
At home
POEMA A UN GATO
No son más silenciosos los espejos
Ni más furtiva el alba aventurera;
Eres, bajo la luna, esa pantera
Que nos es dado divisar de lejos.
Por obra indescifrable de un decreto
Divino, te buscamos vanamente;
Más remoto que el Ganges y el poniente,
Tuya es la soledad, tuyo el secreto.
Tu lomo condesciende a la morosa
Caricia de mi mano.
Has admitido,
Desde esa eternidad que ya es olvido,
El amor de la mano recelosa.
En otro tiempo estás.
Eres el dueño
De un ámbito cerrado como un sueño.
Jorge Luis Borges, El oro de los tigres, 1972
To a cat
Mirrors are not more wrapt in silences
nor the arriving dawn more secretive;
you, in the moonlight, are that panther figure
which we can only spy at from a distance.
By the mysterious functioning of some
divine decree, we seek you out in vain;
remoter than the Ganges or the sunset,
yours is the solitude, yours is the secret.
Your back allows the tentative caress
my hand extends. And you have condescended
since that forever, now oblivion,
to take love from a flattering human hand.
You live in other time, lord of your realm —
a world as closed and separate as dream.
Jorge Luis Borges (translated by Alastair Reid, 1977)
Inside history
Two weeks ago I ordered a few used books from AwesomeBooks and inside A History of Fashion by J. Anderson Black & Madge Garland I found four letters from 1992. This was not one of those amazing discoveries that sometimes happens in the wonderful world of second-hand books. They are letters written to Gemma by friends that seem to have met her during a summer course in France while sharing a dorm and, most probably, a few giggling nights in a chatêau. I remember this kind of experience when I was a teenager sharing a room with Monica from Cugat del Valles at Cathy and Howard’s house in Cheltenham. In our minds, our friendship was forever. We also wrote letters to each other planning visits and other adventures. They never happened and we never met each other again. I wonder if Gemma and her friends kept in touch.
The first letter to Gemma was written on December 26. Her friend, whose birthday was December 2, got clothes, chocolate, a “very nice new desk” and soft toys, for her collection, as Christmas gifts. Maybe Gemma got A History of Fashion as a seasonal token of affection. In another letter, another friend writes about her mother who is a teacher and even though she looks like one, she is actually not that boring. But she swears quite a lot at home. In public, she assumes a “pompous” persona. Her dad is a vicar described in short and rather unpleasant words. She really hopes Gemma won’t be “put off” by her family. The other two letters are about boys. There’s Tristan, the knight in shining armour, with whom the girl is so smitten that she even talked to her mother about him. She didn’t tell her mum everything… There’s also Bob, fancied by another one of Gemma’s friends. Bob doesn’t seem very interested in going out with her. Maybe they could have one of those “open relationships, as they say”.
After the first excitement of finding these letters ( I do love all kinds of surprises and most especially if they are of the written kind), it took me a week to decide whether I should read them or not. I suppose the answer to this would always have to be no. These are, after all, personal stories traveling between Lincolnshire and Essex and I still read them. And even decided to share what I’ve read.
I remember C. telling me that he wished he would have the time to get rid of all his notes and letters before he died so no one would get to invade what was only his. We had this conversation again a few weeks ago. He has now given up on that sort of absolute control. Maybe it doesn’t make much sense to fight for privacy anymore. It does, however still bother me that I did not resist the temptation to invade someone’s else’s life.
There’s a full name and address (I didn’t Google them) on the envelopes; maybe you could just return them, J. suggests. What’s the chance that Gemma is still living in the same place? What’s the chance that twenty-five years later she is actually interested in getting some loose pieces of her life back? Would you want your adolescence to come back to you?
From afar
Natália
AUTORRETRATO
Espáduas brancas palpitantes:
asas no exílio dum corpo.
Os braços calhas cintilantes
para o comboio da alma.
E os olhos emigrantes
no navio da pálpebra
encalhado em renúncia ou cobardia.
Por vezes fêmea . Por vezes monja.
Conforme a noite. Conforme o dia.
Molusco. Esponja
embebida num filtro de magia.
Aranha de ouro
presa na teia dos seus ardis.
E aos pés um coração de louça
quebrado em jogos infantis.
Again I wish I could translate poetry without committing some kind of murder. I can’t.
This is the self-portrait of a bird in exile, whose arms know that they are wings trapped in a human body. Whose eyes migrate but never leave. A ship stranded by cowardice and abjuration. A Woman. Sometimes a female, sometimes a nun.
From night to day.
Strong, fragile, beautiful, talented and contradictory. They said. Very dark and very tender. A force of nature is the appropriate cliché. Unjust for someone who lived like a true original. In full. Strident in controversy, provocative and original, strong, excessive and forceful. Witch and Lark of the abolition of opposites.
My words could never come close
a heart of china
broken in childish games
Era uma mulher inigualável. Nos caprichos, nos excessos, nas iras, nas premonições, nos exibicionismos, na sedução, na coragem, na esperança. Cantava, dançava, declamava, improvisava, discursava, polemizava como poucos entre nós alguma vez o fizeram, o somaram.
Fernando Dacosta
She was an unrivaled woman. In whims, in excesses, in anger, in premonitions, in exhibitionism, in seduction, in courage, in hope. She sang, danced, recited, improvised, discoursed, polemicized as few among us ever did and ever added.
Acho que a missão da mulher é assombrar, espantar. Se a mulher não espanta… De resto, não é só a mulher, todos os seres humanos têm que deslumbrar os seus semelhantes para serem um acontecimento. Temos que ser um acontecimento uns para os outros. Então a pessoa tem que fazer o possível para deslumbrar o seu semelhante, para que a vida seja um motivo de deslumbramento. Se chama a isso sedução, cumpri aquilo que me era forçoso fazer.
Natália Correia, in Entrevista (1983)
I think a woman’s mission is to haunt, to amaze. If a woman does not amaze … Besides, it is not only the woman, all human beings have to dazzle their peers, they have to be an event. We have to be a momentous event for each other. So one has to do one’s best to dazzle one’s fellow human, so that life can be a cause of wonder. If this is called seduction, I accomplished what I had to.
References
One too many
Eyes blinded by the fog of things
cannot see truth.
Ears deafened by the din of things
cannot hear truth.
Brains bewildered by the whirl of things
cannot think truth.
Hearts deadened by the weight of things
cannot feel truth.
Throats choked by the dust of things
cannot speak truth.
Harold Bell Wright, The Uncrowned King
And yet, there is no amount of self help books, “keep it simple” formulas or declutter instructions that will tame the maximalist in me.
A euphemism for self-indulgence most probably.
Listening
10.06 am Train 122 to Lisbon
The woman wearing a green polyester dress and a fake fur jacket is a lawyer. She needs a plumber because the faucet in her bathroom is leaking. She hang up that call and is now talking to her friend Ritinha about her marriage and how taking confession at the Vatican with a Spanish priest has helped to cope and forgive even though she is still hurt. Maybe he cheated on her. She has decided to start her master’s degree. Maybe she will get to be a judge. She needs to work on her resume and then move to do a Doctorate, something on tax and fiscal law. Her friend has a better resume, it seems. Anyway, she wants to base her studies in practical cases so she doesn’t feel the pressure of the doctrine. Her son, Francisquinho stayed with her mother-in-law. Her husband António stayed in Porto. She doesn’t like to be alone. She is going to Coimbra to fix her diploma, the silver seal and the ribbons are missing. She had the diploma framed the minute she got it. She couldn’t resist. She hangs up. Her friend is probably busy.
12.30 pm
We have arrived at Santa Apolónia Station. The smart looking old gentleman seating across the corridor has a beautiful engraved cane. I offer to take his bag down. He tells me that the only good thing about growing old is the young people who are willing to help. He reassures me that he was young once.
1 pm blue line subway train
The lady wearing a tropical print maxi skirt is on the phone explaining she is late and that she has forgotten her check book. She will have to pay the deposit in cash.
1.20 pm Calouste Gulbenkian Museum
I register for the conference and buy the ticket to see the Almada Negreiros exhibition. I stop listening. Chance encounters and unexpected company bring out the chatterbox in me.
4 pm international congress on Fernando Pessoa
The session is on “Fernando Pessoa the classicist”. I seem to not really be listening to most of it. Athena magazine and the supreme art form. Inferior art is meant to please, average art should elevate you and the superior art sets you free. It makes your soul rise above everything that is narrow in life, by freeing you it goes beyond elevation which can only occur outside oneself. The supreme art frees you from within. Ricardo Reis and the classic form, syntactic analyses of five odes to a boy who is dead. Homoerotic poetry or simply a lyrical lament for the person that was and is no longer. Questions from the audience in academic conferences always tend to be transformed into frustrated presentations.
The beautiful blonde lady with flawless skin seating next to me comes to the conclusion that the more she searches for knowledge, the more she realizes that there’s just too much to be learnt.
5.30 pm coffee break
I run back to the exhibition room.I forgot to write down the references for some of the paintings. In a dark room Eros and Psyche shine from a rectangular stained glass panel. On the way out there’s a painting called “Family”. I have a replica bought at a jail art fair. It’s not very good, I just find it moving that it was painted by someone serving time in prison.
6 pm back at the conference hall
This is the session that made me travel today. Intellectual giants are still my superheroes.
Professor Eduardo Lourenço is 93. He is here, he says, as a ghost of himself. There is a new generation of experts who have the most admirable of qualities, they are alive and he had, for quite some time now, abdicated of giving presentations at events such as this one. But he came as “one of the victims of the fulgurating passage of that star, that absolute vampire who was Fernando Pessoa (…) because once the Pessoan Galaxy hits you, you are forever transfigured, blood and soul sucked out of you by the celestial vampire who bragged that he could be everything in every way”. And that makes him extraordinary and baffling. How can, Professor Gil, asks, one live with a shattered self? How is it that this person never sought to unify but could clearly understand himself and the world as parts without a whole, infinitely multiple. And the risk of madness, the divine folly of wanting to continuously devour everything, of becoming the interlocutor of everything by transforming even the most insignificant experience into an universal reaching reading of ourselves.
To feel everything in every way.
To feel everything excessively
7.50 pm the train will leave in 10 minutes
The man in scruffy blue overalls is telling the girl wearing a jersey in earthy tones that people now are very much attached to their pets because they know other people are going to be a disappointment. That is what’s wrong with the world. We are becoming irrational because of our egos and because of greed. We are losing our values, he says, we are losing our love for each other. And what happens when there’s no love? We live in terror, we loose ourselves. He has to go but before he does, he apologizes for his impassioned speech, “I can be a bit of a pain sometimes”.
10 pm we just left Coimbra. There’s never much talking in night trains, specially on a Friday.
Photo: Untitled, Almada Negreiros (1921) Watercolour on paper
This is not solitude, ’tis but to hold
To sit on rocks, to muse o’er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest’s shady scene,
Where things that own not man’s dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne’er or rarely been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;
Alone o’er steeps and foaming falls to lean;
This is not solitude, ‘tis but to hold
Converse with Nature’s charms, and view her stores unrolled.
But midst the crowd, the hurry, the shock of men,
To hear, to see, to feel and to possess,
And roam alone, the world’s tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless;
Minions of splendour shrinking from distress!
None that, with kindred consciousness endued,
If we were not, would seem to smile the less
Of all the flattered, followed, sought and sued;
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude!
George Gordon Byron
Photo: Flying to Poznan, June 2016
First ballet shoes
The pink of the leather turned out to be a lighter shade than I’d hoped, it looked like the underside of a kitten, and the sole was a dirty grey cat’s tongue, and there were no long pink satin ribbons to criss-cross over the ankles, no only a sad elastic strap (…)
Zadie Smith, Swing Time
I remember my first ballet shoes. After being accepted to the dance school, my mum took me to Porfirios in Rua Santa Catarina to buy the light blue leotard and skirt and that same kind of faded ballet pink leather shoes. I don’t actually remember the details but I remember the smell of those very first ballet slippers.
Scent is, in a way, charged with history (…) the sense of smell is, as McLuhan stresses,” iconic”. In the same perspective, we could also say that it is the narrative epic sense. It brings together, weaves and condenses historic happenings into an image, into a narrative composition.
Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time
Scent gives us back who we are by conferring some kind of stability to our own narrative, allowing us to make sense of ourselves by composing some sort of self-portrait. My childhood smells like new ballet shoes. This is a scent I have tried in vain to reencounter. New ballet shoes don’t have that exact smell anymore. In October last year, I bought new shoes. I prefer canvas to leather now and split soles and pre-sewn elastics. I haven’t been to ballet class yet. Life or some other excuse has been in the way.
It was also the aroma of possibilities, once they’re gone, they’re gone.
The Wharton School – a critical house tour
Pictures representing life and action often grow tiresome when looked at over and over again, day after day.
There are but two ways of dealing with a room which is fundamentally ugly: one is to accept it, and the other is courageously to correct its ugliness.
Where much pattern is used, it must be as monotonous as possible or it will become unbearable.
Plain shelves filled with good editions in good bindings are more truly decorative than ornate bookcases lined with tawdry books.
Not only do mediocre ornaments become tiresome when seen day after day, but the mere crowding of furniture and gimcracks into a small room intended for work and repose will soon be found fatiguing.
The money spent on a china “ornament” in the shape of a yellow leghorn hat with a kitten climbing out of it would probably purchase a good reproduction of one of the Tanagra statuettes or a plaster cast of some French or Italian bust.
That cheap originality which finds expression in putting things to uses for which they were not intended is often confounded with individuality; whereas the latter consists not in an attempt to be different from other people at the cost of comfort, but in the desire to be comfortable in one’s own way, even though it be the way of a monotonously large majority.
It is one of the misfortunes of the present time that the most preposterouly bad things often possess the powerful allurement of being expensive.
Wharton rallied against the “black art” and “dubious eclecticism” that was the house decoration of her day. Thick curtains, dinner tables covered in velvet, bric-a-brac of the era, and “a great deal of gilding” were, in the mind of Wharton, totally out.
I still haven’t found the perfect velvet curtains for the living room.
References
Restarting
Recomeça….
Se puderes
Sem angústia
E sem pressa.
E os passos que deres,
Nesse caminho duro
Do futuro
Dá-os em liberdade.
Enquanto não alcances
Não descanses.
De nenhum fruto queiras só metade.
E, nunca saciado,
Vai colhendo ilusões sucessivas no pomar.
Sempre a sonhar e vendo
O logro da aventura.
És homem, não te esqueças!
Só é tua a loucura
Onde, com lucidez, te reconheças…
Miguel Torga
I can’t, unfortunately, translate poetry without murdering it. This is how I feel I want my year to be after not celebrating anything and going to bed before 12 last night. No anguish, no hurries. Free. Whole and never enough.
Photo via Pinterest
“No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.”
bty
J.P.Gaultier robe gaine 1985
Christian Dior Bar Suit (1947; reproduction)
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In Retrospective, a cinematographic year without the scent of time. I have accomplished nothing. I kept zapping.
References
Haruki Murakami, After the Quake
Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time
So this was Christmas
Last year Christmas was at my parents’ and I showed up extremely overdressed in a 70s brocade hostess dress. That was the movie in my head.
Since my grandmother and my great-aunt died, Christmas was put on suspension until it somewhat became unimportant and almost meaningless.
This year, my parents decided to go on holiday so for me there was no family dinner, no dressing up. It was grand.
On the morning of the 24th I followed the Butcher’s Brass Band through downtown Porto.
Butcher’s Brass band from Stella on Vimeo.
In the afternoon I visited a friend who ended up spending her Christmas in hospital. I don’t think she actually wanted to see people.
I only managed to meet by best friend for coffee after 5 p.m. We had to go to the train station, everything else was already closed. There’s a nice franchise place pretending to be real where you can have all sorts of complicated caffeinated beverages. There’s a lady with a little blonde girl sitting at the table next to ours. The little girl smiles at me and I smile back. She gives me a raisin. I thank her in French and her grandmother is happy she can ask for help with the tickets. Our French is not good but seems to work. I give the little girl a tissue printed with cats. She looks happy and tells us she has kittens at home. They’re from Belgium and are traveling to Aveiro to spend Christmas with the little girl’s uncle and his family. They leave.
We go out to check the fancy Alumia project “created to bring a new light into the Historic Centre of Porto and celebrate its 20th anniversary as World Heritage.” It looks much better on the website. At least the installations we managed to see. You can never believe what you see in photos.
This is the one I was looking forward to see because I do spend a considerable amount of time looking for walls that make a statement. By artist Tiago Casanova the tiled wall stands where the ” Fernandina Wall” used to stand, by creating a visual barrier, it “evokes reflection over freedom and timeless building of social and economic walls.” I spent most of the year looking for walls with statements.
Still, it’s nice to walk on empty streets.
We had dinner at home. Not the traditional Christmas dinner, just nice and only for two. I watch old Hitchcock Presents episodes. Only one is about Christmas. I’m waiting for midnight to open my presents but I remember that when I was a kid at my grandparents we used to wait until Christmas morning. I decide to do that instead.
The coffee shop by us was opened, we have coffee and go for a drive. The day is sunny and bright and the sea has a beautiful silver reflection. We drive the long way to get to my brother’s for lunch. Everyone is paying attention to their phones and Whatsapp family group to have news of the baby waiting to be born. Poor kid, having a birthday at Christmas. It will never be about him.Conversations jump from being in labor to newborns to faith and DNA and genetic manipulation.
Back at home, the marathon of classic movies is still on, Gilda, The King and I, Casablanca, 8 1/2.
The Washington Post news alert tells me, at 11.31 p.m., that George Michael has died. I look at the screen in disbelief. Yes, I’m sure that 1914 and 1939 were much worse than 2016 but this year just seems to be wiping out history as I knew it, taking talent away, leaving a selfish sense that yes, no matter how much you pray for time, you just see your youth disappearing.
I remember the first brand new car I ever got, a dark blue Wolkswagen Polo with a CD player that eventually got stolen. The guy at the car dealer gave me “Listen withouth prejudice” so I could drive away with music.
The new baby held on until 5.30 this morning. I guess he just wanted his own day.
This was Christmas. It’s over. We don’t do Boxing Day in Portugal
It’s not courage, it’s elegance
The only thing I like about the month of December is the circus at Coliseu.
Not the clowns. But the confirmation that we are meant to fly.
References
António Lobo Antunes
Stories from A Closet of Errors 