Make noise

The play's centerpiece is a deception scene in which two men manipulate Elektra with lies to a point of near hysteria. She is an adult but unmarried female in the house of a mother who hates her and she has neither social function nor emotional context. She seems to squat on the doorstep of the house rather than live inside. Her sister calls her a maniac and waves her ideas away. Her brother treats her as superflous to his plans - he finds her wild, emotional, depressing. She is a woman stranded at doorways and passivity is killing her. 

There is only one thing she can do.

Make noise.

Anne Carson sobre Electra in Sophokles, "Elektra", An Oresteia, Faber & Faber, 2009.

Pepe Mujica, Rio 2012

Júlio & Cat

"F for Fake" de Orson Welles, 1973

A sudden Unspeakable Sweat Floweth Down my Skin

He gazes, perhaps he blames

Sweat. It's just sweat. But I do like to look at them.
Youth is a dream where I go every night
and wake with just this little jumping bunch of arteries in my hand
Hard, darling, to be sent behind their borders.
Carrying a stone in each eye.

Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, Vintage Books, 1995

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The Lass of Aughrim

  The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live. 

 Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling. 

 A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

 
James Joyce, Dubliners.

"Fahrenheit 451" de François Truffaut, 1966

Scotlandwell

All summer long, I waited for the night

to drive out in the unexpected gold

of beech woods, and those  lighted homesteads, set

like kindling in the crease-lines of the dark,

catching a glimpse, from the road, or hudlled dogs

and sleepless cattle, mustered in a yard

as one flesh, heads 

like lanterns, swaying, full of muddled light;

light from the houses television blue,

a constant flicker, like the run of thought

that keeps us from ourselves, although it seems

to kindle us, and make us plausible,

creatures of habit, ready to click 

into motion. All summer long,

I knew it had something to do

with looking again, how something behind the light

had gone unnoticed; how the bloom on things

is always visible, a muddled patina

of age and colour, twinned with light or shade

and hiding the source of itself, in its drowned familiar.

John Burnside, The Hunt in the Forrest, Cape Poetry, 2009 

À Bout de Souffle

Someone might call it either, but for you
the light at the end of the tunnel is never quite air,

and breath is a shape that sails out over rootops
into the lights off the quay and tethered yawls.

Awake all night, as the lovers are awake
in that Godard film where everyone runs forever,

I think of you as fog, or phosphorescence
vanishing into the weft of the hospital linen,
b.p. and oxygen falling, like notes on a scale,

less song, than resonance, less cry, than chime:
a leyline in a field of iron filings
or how a lost room settles in the bone,

pale as the fire in those cradles of horsehair and tallow
we used to burn out at the saltpans on wet afternoons,

coorying like ghosts to the gold of the flame
and finding a home there - delicate; incomplete;

and perfect, like the grayscale in this film
that sifts out your future and seals it, in cirrus, then stone.

John Burnside, The Hunt in the Forest, Cape Poetry, 2009

Em Setembro

"Crimes and Misdemeanors" de Woody Allen, 1989

Shadows

And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.

And if, as weeks go round, in the dark of the moon
my spirit darkens and goes out, and soft strange gloom
pervades my movements and my thoughts and words
then I shall know that I am walking still
with God, we are close together now the moon's in shadow.

And if, as autumn deepens and darkens
I feel the pain of falling leaves, and stems that break in storms
and trouble and dissolution and distress
and then the softness of deep shadows folding,
folding around my soul and spirit, around my lips
so sweet, like a swoon, or more like the drowse of a low, sad song
singing darker than the nightingale, on, on to the solstice
and the silence of short days, the silence of the year, the shadow,
then I shall know that my life is moving still
with the dark earth, and drenched
with the deep oblivion of earth's lapse and renewal.

And if, in the changing phases of man’s life
I fall in sickness and in misery
my wrists seem broken and my heart seems dead
and strength is gone, and my life
is only the leavings of a life:

and still, among it all, snatches of lovely oblivion, and snatches of renewal
odd, wintry flowers upon the withered stem, yet new, strange flowers
such as my life has not brought forth before, new blossoms of me

then I must know that still
I am in the hands of the unknown God,
he is breaking me down to his own oblivion
to send me forth on a new morning, a new man.

D. H. Lawrence

Meltdown!

Not just odd

A successful novelist can, with luck, make a bundle, as can a memoir writer (if he or she is fortunate to have had a mother who murders the author’s father in front of his or her eyes), and a third-rate painter can do quite well if a hotel chain or a bank starts fancying his seascapes and sunflowers, but few poets ever made a living from poetry. In past centuries, they could hope for a dinner invitation from some noblemen holed up in his castle to entertain his drunken guests, or even receive a piece of land from the king after writing a paean to his various conquests and massacres. But in modern times, except in the Soviet Union under Stalin, the possibility that poets might toady up to the high and mighty and live thereafter in clover has been foreclosed. Even Robert Frost, who was immensely popular and widely read during his lifetime, had to get a teaching job to support himself. As for the rest of our great poets, going back to Whitman and Dickinson, their combined income from poetry, if it were known, would make them even more incomprehensible in the eyes of many Americans than they already are.

In a country that now regards money as the highest good, doing something for the love of it is not just odd, but downright perverse. Imagine the horror and anger felt by parents of a son or daughter who was destined for the Harvard Business School and a career in finance but discovered an interest in poetry instead. Imagine their enticing descriptions of the future riches and power awaiting their child while trying to make him or her reconsider the decision. “Who has recognized you as a poet? Who has enrolled you in the ranks of poets?,” the trial judge shouted at the Russian poet Josef Brodsky, before sentencing him to five years of hard labor. “No one,” Brodsky replied. He could have been speaking for all the sons and daughters who had to face their parents’ wrath.

Charles Simic, aqui.

"Cronaca Familiare" de Valerio Zurlini, 1962

Parece ser somente à luz da doutrina cristã da Encarnação do Filho de Deus que a filosofia pode conceber-se como uma leitura dos sinais dos tempos, sem se reduzir a um puro registo passivo do curso do tempo. “À luz da encarnação” constitui assim de novo uma expressão que tenta apreender uma relação cuja dimensão problemática não resolvida constitui o próprio núcleo da experiência da eventualidade: a Encarnação de Deus de que aqui se trata não é só uma maneira de exprimir de maneira mítica aquilo que a filosofia acaba por descobrir como resultado de uma investigação racional. A Encarnação também não é a verdade última dos enunciados filosóficos, desmistificada e reconduzida ao seu sentido próprio. Como já comprovámos de diferentes maneiras nos desenvolvimentos anteriores, esta relação problemática entre filosofia e Revelação religiosa é o próprio sentido da Encarnação. Por outras palavras, Deus incarna, revela-se antes de mais na anunciação bíblica que, por fim, “dá lugar” ao pensamento pós-metafísico da eventualidade do ser. É apenas na medida em que redescobre a sua própria proveniência neotestamentária que este pensamento pós-metafísico pode representar-se como um pensamento da eventualidade do ser, não se reduzindo à pura aceitação do existente, ao puro relativismo histórico e cultural. Noutros termos, é a Encarnação que confere à história o sentido de uma revelação redentora e não só o de uma acumulação confusa de acontecimentos que perturbam o carácter puramente estrutural do verdadeiro ser. Que a história tenha também, ou justamente, um sentido redentor (ou em linguagem filosófica, emancipador), sendo ao mesmo tempo a história de anunciações e de respostas, de interpretações e não de “descobertas” ou de presenças “verdadeiras” que se impõem, é algo que só se torna pensável à luz da doutrina da Encarnação.

Gianni Vattimo, O rasto do rasto in A Religião, Miguel Serras Pereira (trad.), Relógio D'Água, 1997.

Babylon