a realidade num piscar de olhos

stevem - did you ever know jeff buckley? your music and his have very similar effects on me - good ones that is!

elliott smith
i met him one time - long enough to ask him if he was okay.

Em 1947!

A fim de se completar a imagem outonal desta família na sua cave cheia de água, convém, com efeito, não esquecermos de lhe acrescentar um certo jornalista que, aproximando-se com prudência, em equilíbrio sobre umas quantas tábuas também elas em equilíbrio, vem entrevistar os membros dessa família acerca das suas opiniões quanto à recentíssima democracia alemã, e os interroga sobre as suas esperanças e as suas ilusões - perguntando-lhes, sobretudo, se no tempo de Hitler viviam melhor. A resposta que o visitante recolhe quanto a este último ponto leva-o a sair rapidamente às arrecuas de um quarto nauseabundo, após uma reverência de raiva, de nojo e de desprezo, e a meter-se no seu automóvel inglês ou no seu jipe norte-americano de aluguer, a fim de ir redigir, meia hora depois, à mesa dum bar de hotel reservado à imprensa, diante dum uísque ou dum copo de cerveja alemã autêntica, um artigo sobre o tema «O Nazismo continua na Alemanha». 

Uma tal imagem do estado de espírito que reinava na Alemanha neste terceiro outono e que o jornalista em questão e muitos outros, ou de maneira mais geral os visitantes estrangeiros, foram propalando pelo mundo fora, contribuindo assim para a tornar sua, é evidentemente exacta à maneira dela. Perguntavam aos alemães que moravam em caves se viviam melhor no tempo de Hitler, e estes alemães respondiam que sim. É perguntar a alguém que se esteja a afogar se se sentia melhor quando estava em terra; a resposta há-de ser que sim. 

Stig Dagerman, Outono Alemão, Antígona, (trad. Júlio Henriques), 1998.

Burgundy

Elegy

Too proud to die; broken and blind he died
The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride

On that darkest day, Oh, forever may
He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow

Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost
Or still all the numberless days of his death, though
Above all he longed for his mother's breast

Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground
The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.
Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,

I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,
In the muted house, one minute before
Noon, and night, and light. the rivers of the dead

Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw
Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.
(An old tormented man three-quarters blind,

I am not too proud to cry that He and he
Will never never go out of my mind.
All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,

Being innocent, he dreaded that he died
Hating his God, but what he was was plain:
An old kind man brave in his burning pride.

The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.
Even as a baby he had never cried;
Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.

Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.
Here among the liught of the lording sky
An old man is with me where I go

Walking in the meadows of his son's eye
On whom a world of ills came down like snow.
He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres'

Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
And caught between two nights, blindness and death.

O deepest wound of all that he should die
On that darkest day. oh, he could hide
The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.

Until I die he will not leave my side.) 

Dylan Thomas, Selected Poems, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1974. 

B.

Mas eu acredito na escrita. Em mais nada, unicamente na escrita. O homem vive como um verme, mas escreve como os deuses. Antigamente, conheciam este segredo; hoje, está esquecido: o mundo compõe-se de pedaços estilhaçados, é desconexo, é um caos escuro, que tão-somente pela escrita se mantém à tona. Se tens alguma ideia acerca do mundo, se ainda não esqueceste tudo o que te aconteceu, facto é que, pelo menos, tens o teu mundo: tudo isso foi para ti criado pela escrita e continua a criá-lo, incessantemente, é o fio da aranha que mantém coesa a nossa vida, é o logos. Há uma antiga palavra bíblica: o escriba. Caiu há muito em desuso. O escriba é diverso do talentoso, o escriba é diverso do bom escritor. Não é filósofo, não é linguista e não é estilista. Mesmo gaguejando, mesmo se não o compreendes logo: reconheces de imediato o escriba. B. era um escriba. 

Imre Kertész, Aniquilação, Ulisseia (trad. Ernesto Rodrigues), 2003.

Música

As a hedgehog

[Geoffrey] Hill was breathtakingly shy, nearly as shy as a hedgehog—formality and bluster were his protections against the world. We attended three or four of his lectures, which were grave, learned, delivered as if composed of death notices—they were also ponderously slow. (By the end of a series of lectures, only a few true believers were left in the hall.) His method, which did not endear him to students, revealed the pressure of learning within, while tending to hide the grace. Indeed, that seemed part of the poet’s character—he was not an example of grace under pressure, but of pressure under grace.

William Logan, in "Remembering the Courtly Jester", aqui.

the hand that signed the paper

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;

Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,

Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;

These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,

The finger joints are cramped with chalk;

A goose’s quill has put an end to murder

That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,

And famine grew, and locusts came;

Great is the hand that holds dominion over

Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften

The crusted wound nor stroke the brow;

A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;

Hands have no tears to flow.

Dylan Thomas, Selected Poems, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1974.

The same stages as my life

My poetry has passed through the same stages as my life; from a solitary childhood and an adolescence cornered in distant, isolated countries, I set out to make myself a part of the great human multitude. My life matured, and that is all. It was in the style of the last century for poets to be tormented melancholiacs. But there can be poets who know life, who know its problems, and who survive by crossing through the currents. And who pass through sadness to plenitude.

Pablo Neruda em entrevista à Paris Review.

Being but Men

Being but men, we walked into the trees
Afraid, letting our syllables be soft
For fear of waking the rooks,
For fear of coming
Noiselessly into a world of wings and cries.

If we were children we might climb,
Catch the rooks sleeping, and break no twig,
And, after the soft ascent,
Thrust out our heads above the branches
To wonder at the unfailing stars.

Out of confusion, as the way is,
And the wonder, that man knows,
Out of the chaos would come bliss.

That, then, is loveliness, we said,
Children in wonder watching the stars,
Is the aim and the end.

Being but men, we walked into the trees.

Dylan Thomas, Selected Poems, J. M. Dent & Sons, 1974.

"Caravaggio" de Derek Jarman, 1986

Trovador

I confess I have no great notion of the use of books

"I, sir," continued the Curate, "am a recluse, a student, a creature of ink and bottles and patristic folios. A recent event has brought my folly vividly before my eyes, and I desire to instruct myself in life. By life", he added, "I do not mean Thackeray's novels; but the crimes and secret possibilities of our society, and the principles of wise conduct among exceptional events. I am a patient reader; can the thing be learnt in books?"

"You put me in a difficulty," said the stranger. "I confess I have no great notion of the use of books, except to amuse a railway journey; although, I believe, there are some very exact treatises on astronomy, the use of globes, agriculture, and the art of making paper flowers. Upon the less apparent provinces of life I fear you will find nothing truthful. Yet stay," he added, "have you read Gaboriau?"

Robert Louis Stevenson, "The Rajah's Diamond", in New Arabian Nights (1882)

and now for something completely different

"Tabu" de Miguel Gomes, 2012

Exibição do filme «Sebastiane» de Derek Jarman. É já na quarta.

A noite pede música (3)

"Suna no onna" de Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964

Any book

As for reading, he [Montaigne] could hardly read any book for more than an hour at a time, and his memory was so bad that he forgot what was in his mind as he walked from one room to another. Book learning is nothing to be proud of, and as for the achievements of science, what do they amount to? He had always mixed with clever men, and his father had a positive veneration for them, but he had observed that, though they have their fine moments, their rhapsodies, their visions, the cleverest tremble on the verge of folly. Observe yourself: one moment you are exalted, next a broken glass puts your nerves on edge. All extremes are dangerous. It is best to keep in the middle of the road, in the common ruts, however muddy. In writing choose the common words; avoid rhapsody and eloquence - yet it is true, poetry is delicious, the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Virginia Woolf, "Montaigne", The Common Reader, vol. I, Vintage Classics, 2003 (publicado pela primeira vez em 1925, edição revista publicada pela Hogarth Press em 1984).

Of saying

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself. This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite of what other people say.

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, vol. I, Vintage Classics, 2003 (publicado pela primeira vez em 1925, edição revista publicada pela Hogarth Press em 1984).