Vivaldi Redivivus

Breve história da (re-)descoberta de Vivaldi no século XX (mais sobre a qual se pode ler também na página da Accademia Chigiana) a partir das suas óperas, com análises de várias delas assim como das respectivas gravações existentes.

Aqui.

Nelly vista por Vânia

        Tinha eu acabado de me interrogar desta maneira quando vi Nelly de repente, a poucos passos de mim, na Ponte V … Estava debaixo de um lampião e não me viu. Quis logo correr para junto dela, mas contive-me: «O que estará a fazer ali?», pensei, perplexo, e, com a certeza de que já não a perderia de vista, resolvi aguardar e observá-la. Durante dez minutos ela continuou ali parada, a olhar para os transeuntes. Por fim, passando um velho bem vestido perto dela, Nelly dirigiu-se a ele; o velho, sem parar, tirou qualquer coisa do bolso e deu-lha. Nelly fez-lhe uma vénia. Sou incapaz de exprimir o que senti nesse momento, a não ser um aperto doloroso no coração, a sensação de que tinha sido coberta de vergonha e profanada aos meus olhos qualquer coisa querida que eu amava e de que cuidava com ternura; e logo me jorraram as lágrimas dos olhos.        

        Sim, chorava pela pobre Nelly, embora sentisse também uma indignação incontrolável: não era por necessidade que a miúda mendigava; não tinha sido abandonada ao seu destino; não fugira de opressores cruéis mas sim de amigos que a amavam e que a tratavam bem. Nelly parecia querer provocar ou assustar alguém com a sua conduta, parecia fanfarronar! Porém, algo de oculto amadurecia na alma dela… Sim, o velho tinha razão: ela fora ofendida e insultada, a sua ferida não sarava, e ela, propositadamente, tentava avivá-la com este secretismo, com esta desconfiança em relação a todos nós; como se estivesse a deliciar-se com a sua dor, com o egoísmo do sofrimento, se me é permitida a expressão. Este desejo de avivar a dor e de se deliciar com ela era compreensível para mim: é o prazer de muitos ofendidos e humilhados, oprimidos pelo destino e com a consciência da sua injustiça.

Fiódor Dostoiévski, Humilhados e Ofendidos, Editorial Presença, 2008.

Fifty shades of something completely different

Provided it isn't conceived only as an exchange of mutual favors, or isn't calculated way in advance as a profitable investment, love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the perspective of difference. In this respect it has universal implications: it is an individual experience of potencial universality, and is thus central to philosophy, as Plato was the first to intuit. 

Alain Badiou (with Nicolas Truong), In Praise of Love, Serpents Tail, 2012.

Príncipe Valkóvski

Mas vou dizer-lhe o seguinte: se fosse possível a cada um de nós revelar todos os seus segredos (uma coisa, aliás, que a natureza humana torna impossível), enfim, se fosse possível uma coisa dessas, de maneira a que expressássemos não só aquilo de que temos medo e nunca diremos aos outros, não só aquilo que temos medo de confessar aos melhores amigos, mas também aquilo que por vezes temos medo de confessar a nós próprios, então o mundo encher-se-ia de um fedor tal que morreríamos todos sufocados. É por isso, falando entre parênteses, que o nosso convencionalismo e o nosso decoro mundanos são muito bons. Está contida neles uma ideia profunda, não diria moral, mas simplesmente protectora, confortável, o que é ainda melhor, obviamente, porque a moral, na sua essência, é o conforto, ou seja, foi inventada unicamente para o conforto. 

Fiódor Dostoiévski, Humilhados e Ofendidos, Editorial Presença, 2008. 

Sex, Lies and Videotape, Steven Soderbergh (1989)

Presenças Reais. Scholia.

The [Poetics of Aristotle] contains very few arguments, and the few it does contain are, on the face of them, incomplete and untenable. The celebrated doctrines of the Poetics are for the most part peremptoyy dicta of a few lines, and not theories that Aristotle tries to establish with care. The tone is as authoritative as the dicta are terse; and instead of contradicting Aristotle's claims it eventually became fashionable to reinterpret them, like Scripture. The existence of generations of commentators cows potential critics. At many points it is far easier to disagree with Aristotle; but the price of dissent is the understandable suspicion that one does not know the literature with all its recondite interpretations. The weight of tradition breeds scholasticism.

Walter Kaufmann.  Tragedy and Philosophy. Princeton University Press (1968).

That's my notion

"I do not think getting married is worth while. I would rather you went on living with your father, so that I could walk over and see you once, or maybe twice a week, as people go to church, and then we should both be all the happier between whiles. That's my notion. But I'll marry you if you will," he added.

Stevenson, Will o' the Mill

Maslobóiev

– Agora, amigo, mais uma coisa – continuou ele. – Ouvi como, de início, a tua fama trovejou; depois, li várias críticas ao teu livro (palavra de honra que li, achas que já não leio nada?); depois já te encontrava de botas gastas, a andares pela lama sem galochas, com o chapéu partido… e adivinhei certas coisas. Agora ganhas o teu pão nos jornais?

– Sim, Maslobóiev.

– Portanto, és cavalo da posta?

– Coisa do género.

– Pois então, digo-te o seguinte: beber é melhor! Eu, por exemplo, embebedo-me, deito-me nas calmas no divã (o meu divã é maravilhoso, é de molas) e imagino que sou, digamos, um Homero ou um Dante, ou ainda o Frederico Barba-Roxa… É que é possível imaginarmos tudo. Ora, para ti é impossível imaginares que és Dante ou Frederico Barba-Roxa, em primeiro lugar porque queres ser tu próprio, em segundo porque, como cavalo da posta, te está proibido teres desejos. Para mim, a imaginação; para ti, a realidade.

Fiódor Dostoiévski, Humilhados e Ofendidos, Editorial Presença, 2008.

Mais aqui.

he says it's the only kind, babe

Maria Bandini

     Beneath layers of linen and curtains that his mother was saving until 'we get a better house', beneath ribbons and baby clothes once worn by himself and his brothers, he found the picture. Ah, man! He held it up and stared at the wonder of that lovely face: here was the mother he had always dreamed about, this girl, no more than twenty, whose eyes he knew resembled his own. Not that weary woman in the other part of the house, she with the thin tortured face, the long bony hands. To have known her then, to have remembered everything from the beginning, to have felt the cradle of that beautiful womb, to have lived remembering from the beginning, and yet he remembered nothing of that time, and always she had been as she was now, weary and with that wistfulness of pain, the great eyes those of someone else, the mouth softer as if from much crying. He traced with his finger the line of her face, kissing it, sighing and murmuring of a past he had never known. 

Jonh Fante, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, Ecco, 2002.

XVII

In your dream we are separated by war
and after untold business somehow make our way
to the café where they keep that bright Sancerre.

It has taken half a lifetime. You in a windows eat
writing a letter, me at the window unable to make out
who it's for. You smile and sip your wine: Pouilly Fumé.

I have fifty blacks to hand which are really black
with a bit of this, if you look, and a bit of that.
I am saving the darkest dark for such a day.

David Harsent, Marriage, Faber & Faber, 2002.

lugares habitados

Each fence post measured a dream, enclosing it for fulfillment with each new Spring. Beyond that pile of stones, between those two tall cottonwoods, was the graveyard of their dogs and Suzie, a cat who had hated the dogs but lay now beside them. Prince, killed by an automobile; Jerry, who ate the poison meat; Pancho the fighter, who crawled off and died after his last fight. Here they had killed snakes, shot birds, speared frogs, scalped Indians, robbed banks, completed wars, reveled in peace. But in that twilight their father rode with Effie Hildegarde, and the silent white sweep of the pasture land was only a place for walking on a strange road to home.

Jonh Fante, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, Ecco, 2002.

Light is calling

L'indépendance et la fantaisie de leur pensée

Nous sommes deux races sur la terre. Ceux qui ont besoin des autres, que les autres distraient, occupent, reposent, et que la solicitude harasse, épuise, anéantit, comme l'ascension d'un terrible glacier ou la traversée du désert, et ceux que les autres, au contraire, lassent, ennuient, génent, courbaturent, tandis que l'isolement les calme, les baigne de repos dans l'indépendance et la fantaisie de leur pensée.

Guy de Maupassant, Qui sait?

Error-Rome

Although he was losing his sight, he spent many days in archives, making endless notes – on the events in Gunzenhausen, for instance, on that Palm Sunday of 1934, years before what became known as the Kristallnacht, when the windows of Jewish homes were smashed and the Jews themselves were hauled out of their hiding places in cellars and dragged through the streets. What horrified Paul was not only the coarse offences and the violence of those Palm Sunday incidents in Gunzenhausen, not only the death of seventy-five-year-old Ahron Rosenfeld, who was stabbed, or of thirty-five-year-old Siegfried Rosenau, who was hanged from a railing; it was not only these things, said Mme Landau, that horrified Paul, but also, nearly as deeply, a newspaper article he came across, reporting with Schaudenfreunde that the schoolchildren of Gunzenhausen had helped themselves to a free bazar in the town the following morning, taking several week's supply of hair slides, chocolate cigarettes, coloured pencils, fizz powder and many other things from the wrecked shops.

W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, Michael Hulse (tr.), Vintage Books, London, 2002

The Supplicant

prays for birds
before an ancient icon—
a stray cat.
The inbred need
to pray
is what makes God
necessary,
and not, she says,
the other way
around;
beyond that
it’s all mystery,
so don’t question
why Man creates gods
that demand
sacrifice,
condemning mortals
to spend their lives
trying to praise
godhead into mercy.
Better instead
to ask the frog
to bless the fly,
and, once the cheese
is in the trap,
to beg forgiveness
from the rat.

Stuart Dybek in Poetry, Junho de 2012.

Funambulismo

The more the poet comes to believe in the heroes and gods whose images fill his mind, the nearer he approaches the priest. However, he totally succumbs to the enchantment only when he either makes sacrifices, or indeed sacrifices himself, to the god who is the subject of his poetry. 

 Edgar Wind. The Eloquence of Symbols. OUP (1983).