Mar

poetry of mourning

Other mourners too had now begun to appear, both personal and professional, so to speak; those who had a personal stake in the funeral of a friend came to spend the night in the colored marquee under the brilliant light. But there were others, the professional mourners of the surrounding villages for whom death was something like a public competition in the poetry of mourning; they came on foot, in carts, on camel-back. And as each entered the gate of the house she set up a long shivering cry, like an orgasm, that stirred the griefs of the other mourners anew, so that they responded from every corner of the house – the low sobbing notes gradually swelling into a blood-curdling and sustained tongue-trill that pierced the nerves.

Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, Mountolive, Faber & Faber, 1962

"The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/ Is the wisdom of humility"

Você parece-me - disse Fearmax - demasiado categórico. Tem, decerto razão quando diz que todos nós atravessamos vários estados, procurando pôr de parte os nossos aspectos negativos, as nossas imperfeições. Mas poderá haver um momento em que nos seja dado saber que a nossa busca terminou? A verdade é que a consciência pessoal da iluminação de que você fala não basta para nos garantir que atingimos, não sei como hei-de dizer, "O Absoluto", "Deus", o "Tao". Pelo contrário, a nossa crescente tomada de consciência impele-nos a continuar a procurar. Penso que o ser humano em que você gostaria de se transformar deverá ser mais humilde, uma atitude menos afirmativa, uma espécie de maior passividade perante o processo de tudo o que acontece, ainda que creia estar sentado em cima de uma bomba atómica. Bem vê: o sábio nada tem a dizer-nos. É do seu silêncio que deduzimos a sua existência.

Lawrence Durrell, The Dark Labyrinth, Miguel Serras Pereira (trad.), Ulisseia, 2003.

A fallen wall

It is strange how passion held in restraint bursts, so to speak, upwards into the very musculature of the human body, as if it musts at all costs exteriorise itself. The heavy rope-like muscles of Manoli's body, already swollen and contorted by rheumatism, have further tightened under the pressure of unexpressed feeling and of shock. It is as if in some old house, ruined by damp, the arterial system - the plumbing - had been revealed by a fallen wall, or the incursions of damp or snow. Yet he crouches limply, hands unclenched, gazing with a dumb and sightless longing at the boy stretched under the blanket. It as if someone had drawn a wet sponge across everything else in the world leaving only this circle of fading light and the characters which peopled it as the whole content of his thoughts.

Lawrence Durrell, Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes, Faber & Faber, 2000 (1ª ed: 1953).

In this landscape

I suddenly remembered other moments of time spent in this landscape, time printed upon real silence with all its real colours up: the faint burring os honey-bees in Agamemnon's tomb: one glittering spring day, the noise of snow melting among the meadows at Nemea: a bird singing stiffly at noon like a voice on stilts from the bushes where we had slept: the crash of a falling orange in an island: all isolated moments existing in a peculiar dense medium of their own which was like time but not of it. Each moment to itself entire, populating a whole continuum of feeling.

Lawrence Durrell, Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes, Faber & Faber, 2000 (1ª ed: 1953).

Protogenes

According to Pliny's anecdote, Demetrius asked Protogenes to present himself at his headquarters, and when he did so he asked him how he could work away at his painting while the fate of the town hung in balance. The painter replied: 'I am aware that you are making war upon people and not the arts.' There's is just the faintest flavour of flattery about it; enough at any rate to win Demetrius, who assigned the painter a special bodyguard and ordered that he was not to be molested.

Lawrence Durrell, Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes, Faber & Faber, 2000 (1953, 1ª ed.).

'perhaps the very music that the dying Antony in Cavafy's poem heard'

Here came the Rifiya dervishes, who could in their trances walk upon embers or drink molten glass or eat live scorpions – or dance the turning measure of the universe out, until reality ran down like an overwound spring and they fell gasping to the earth, dazed like birds. The banners and torches, the great openwork braziers full of burning wood, the great paper lanterns inscribed with texts,they made staggering loops and patterns of light upon the darkness of the Alexandrian night, rising and falling, and now the pitches were swollen with spectators, worrying at the procession like mastiffs, screaming and pulling; and still the flood poured on with its own wild music (perhaps the very music that the dying Antony in Cavafy's poem heard) until it engulfed the darkness of the great meidan, spreading around it the fitful contours of robes and faces and objects without context but whose colours sprang up and darkened the edges of the sky with colour. Human beings were setting fire to each others.

Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, Balthazar, Faber & Faber, 1968

Hear

You may travel round the world and colonize the ends of the earth with your lines and yet never hear the singing yourself.

Lawrence Durrell, "Clea", The Alexandria Quartet, Faber & Faber, 2009 (primeira publicação: 1960)

Goldfish

'He [James Joyce] might have been entitled to feel safe from ineffables like yourself who imagine that art is something that a good education automatically entitles you; that it is a part of a social equipment, class aptitude, like painting water-colours was for a Victorian gentlewoman! I can imagine his poor heart sinking as he studied your face, with its expression of wayward condescension - the fathomless self-esteem which one sees occasionally flit across the face of a goldfish with a hereditary title.' After this we never spoke, which was what I wanted. The art of making necessary enemies!

Lawrence Durrell, "Clea", The Alexandria Quartet, Faber & Faber, 2009 (primeira publicação: 1960)

The real obstacle is oneself

I can only tell you what I know, and it isn't much. First you have to know and understand intellectualy what you want to do - then you have to sleepwalk a little to reach it. The real obstacle is oneself. I believe that artists are composed of vanity, indolence and self-regard. Work-blocks are caused by swelling-up of the ego on one or all of these fronts. You get a bit scared about the imaginary importance of what you are doing! Mirror worship. My solution would be to slap a poultice on the inflamed parts - tell your ego to go to hell and not make a misery of what should be essentially fun, joy.

Lawrence Durrell, "Clea", The Alexandria Quartet, Faber & Faber, 2009 (primeira publicação: 1960)

I could hardly wait to be gone

The once magnificient image of my love lay now in the hollow of my arm, defenceless as a patient on an operating table, hardly breathing. It was useless even to repeat her name which once held so much fearful magic that it had the power to slow the blood in my veins. She had become a woman at last, lying there, soiled and tattered, like a dead bird in a gutter, her hands crumpled in two claws. It was as if some huge iron door had closed forever in my heart.
I could hardly wait for that slow dawn to bring me release. I could hardly wait to be gone.

E uma página antes ela tinha-lhe dito:

Perhaps our sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.


Lawrence Durrell, "Clea", The Alexandria Quartet, Faber & Faber, 2009 (primeira publicação: 1960)

De outro modo, não é uma questão moralista, para efeitos de moral, a queda de Justine. É outra coisa ainda: o ser para nós impossível o encontro com os nossos arquétipos quando somos já capazes de os ler, de os desmontar, brinquedos reduzidos ao seu tamanho real, partidos em cacos ao sol. Sobretudo se no tempo em que foram arquétipos nunca tivermos tido a intuição de que eram apenas de carne e osso (como aconteceu com Darley, o contrário para Pursewarden).

For art really

We gazed at each other for a long moment of silence, with emotion. Both knew that the silence we observed was one of pain for France, an event which symbolized all too clearly the psychic collapse of Europe itself. We were like mourners at an invisible cenotaph during the two minutes' silence which commemorates an irremediable failure of the human will. I felt in his handclasp all the shame and despair of this graceless tragedy and I thought desperately for the phrase which might console him, might reassure him that France itself could never truly die so long as artists were being born into the world. But this world of armies and battles was to intense and too concrete to make the thought seem more than of secondary importance - for art really means freedom [...]

Lawrence Durrell, "Clea", The Alexandria Quartet, Faber & Faber, 2009 (primeira publicação: 1960)

Society

The artist's work constitutes the only satisfactory relationship he can have with his fellow-men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn. That is why he can't dabble in politics, it isn't his job. He must concentrate on values rather than policies. Today it all looks to me like a silly shadow-play, for rulling is an art, not a science, just as society is an organism, not a system.

Lawrence Durrell, "Mountolive", The Alexandria Quartet, Faber & Faber, 2009

Biological memory

telling yourself it is something you have forgotten, it is in the tip of your tong, the edge of your mind. For the life of you cannot remember what it is, the name, the town, the day, the hour... the biological memory fails.

Lawrence Durrell, "Mountolive", The Alexandria Quartet, Faber & Faber, 2009

Drunken irony

Dancing again he said to her, but with drunken irony: "Mélissa, comment vous défendez vous contre la foule?" Her response, for some queer reason, cut him to the heart. She turned to him an eye replete with all the candour of experience and replied softly: "Monsieur, je ne me défends plus". The melancholy of the smiling face was completely untouched by self-pity.

Lawrence Durrell, "Mountolive", The Alexandria Quartet, Faber & Faber, 2009

Por momentos este passo lembrou-me aquele verso de Franco Alexandre, «verdade, somos iguais». Mas Pursewarden e Melissa são os dois opostos, o completamente diferente, et pourtant, encontram-se. E quando se encontram dançam.

Germinal Silence

A tremendous silence fell - the silence which follows some great perfomance by an author or orchestra - the germinal silence in which you can hear the very seeds in the human psyche stirring, trying to move towards the light of self-recognition.

Lawrence Durrell, "Mountolive", The Alexandria Quartet, Faber & Faber, 2009

Andar

They both walked about the rose-garden hearing each other's voices in a sort of dream. They felt short of breath, almost as if they were suffocating.

Lawrence Durrell, "Mountolive", The Alexandria Quartet, Faber & Faber, 2009

Em que pensavas?*

What was I thinking? Of a passage in Proclus which says that Orpheus ruled over the silver race meaning those who led a 'silver' life; on Balthazar's mantelpiece presumably among the pipe-cleaners and the Indian wood-carving of monkeys which neither saw, spoke nor heard evil, under a magic pentacle from Pythagoras. What was I thinking? The foetus in its waxen wallet, the locust squatting in the horn of the wheat, an Arab quoting a proverb which reverberated in the mind. 'The memory of man is as old as misfortune.'

Lawrence Durrell, "Balthazar", The Alexandria Quartet, Faber & Faber, 2009

*Agora é decorar isto, porque esta é a melhor resposta a dar da próxima vez que nos perguntarem em que pensávamos.

Sex

He said to her one night: "You see, Justine, I believe that Gods are men and men are Gods; they intrude on each other's lives, trying to express themselves through each other - hence such apparent confusion in our states of mind, our intimations of powers within or beyond us... And then (listen) I think that very few people realize that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this truth - a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them. But most people are stuck in the physical aspect, unaware of the poetic rapport which it so clumsily tries to teach.

Lawrence Durrell, "Balthazar", The Alexandria Quartet, Faber & Faber, 2009

Catman

O herói salva a rapariga do tubarão no último instante. É demasiado perfeito. Penso que as coisas perfeitas podem ser extraordinárias mas não nos podem tocar verdadeiramente. O que em nós é perecível simpatiza com o imperfeito. Tem de ser imperfeitamente perfeito, o que é muito mais difícil do que ser simplesmente perfeito. Exemplo: Darley, que, não sem humilhação, perde para sempre Melissa por causa de Justine que nunca o amou (ama Pursewarden) e ainda assim em Balthazar narra a história dela e de Pursewarden. Isto não pode ser perfeito, é demasiado mau, é por isso que nos sentimos tão presos, é que se já estás diante do tubarão, não inventes, o melhor é deixares-te ficar.