the child within

*

My glance is clear like a sunflower.

I usually take to the roads,

Looking to my right and to my left,

And now and then looking behind me...

And what I see each moment

Is something I'd never seen before,

And I'm good at noticing such things...

I know how to feel the same essential wonder

That an infant feels if, on being born,

He could note he'd really been born...

I feel that I am being born each moment

Into the eternal newness of the World...

I believe in the World as in a Daisy

Because I see it. But I don't think about it

Because thinking is not understanding...

The World was not made for us to think about

(To think is to be eye-sick)

But for us to look at and be in tune with...

I have no philosophy: I have senses...

If I speak of Nature, it's not because I know what Nature is

But because I love it, and that's why I love it,

For a lover never knows what he loves,

Why he loves or what love is...

Loving is eternal innocence,

And the only innocence is not to think...

*

Alberto Caeiro

O preço a pagar

*

Erasmus Darwin [avô de Charles] acreditava que "existem três grandes objectos de desejo, os quais alteraram a forma de muitos animais através dos seus esforços para os satisfazerem: a fome, a segurança e a luxúria". Principalmente a luxúria. O melodioso refrão da sua última obra, The Temple of Nature: or The Origin of Society, era "E vivam AS DIVINDADES DO AMOR SEXUAL". O uso de maiúsculas é dele. Noutro lado salientava que o veado desenvolveu armações para lutar com outros machos pela "posse exclusiva da fêmea". Não há dúvidas de que andava na mira de algo. A sua, porém, era uma espécie de originalidade desordenada, um talento que não podia ser incomodado pela pesquisa metódica. A ciência cobra uma jóia substancial de esforço e tédio em troca das suas revelações. Erasmus não estava disposto a pagar.

Sombras de Antepassados Esquecidos,

Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan

*

Peniche

*

Já me disseram que a gente que nasce e vive ao pé do mar é mais pura. Penso que o mar dá uma qualidade especial à fantasia, ao desejo e à confiança. É uma propriedade misteriosa do espírito, e por ela se aprende a nada esperar, a não desesperar de nada. Talvez isso seja a inocência. Talvez só no mar nos seja concedido morrer verdadeiramente, morrer como nenhum homem pode.

*

Os Comboios Que Vão Para Antuérpia

in Os Passos em Volta,

Herberto Helder

*

And how long do you think you’ll go on writing? the boy who worked in the soap factory asked again. I could have said anything, but opted for simplicity. I don’t know, I said. What about you? I started writing because poetry sets me free, sir, and I’m never going to stop, he said, with a smile that barely hid his pride and determination. As an answer, it was too vague and declamatory to be convincing, yet somehow it gave me a glimpse of the factory worker’s life, not as it was then but as it had been when he was fifteen, or maybe twelve. I saw him running or walking through the outskirts of Gómez Palacio, under a sky that looked like a rockslide. I saw his friends and wondered how they could possibly survive. Yet, one way or another, they probably had.

*

'Gómez Palacio', by Roberto Bolaño

read / listen 

...entre o sono e a persistência do olhar

E quem diz a performance diz tudo o resto

*

A performance não é a transmissão do saber ou do respirar do artista ao espectador. É antes essa terceira coisa de que nenhum deles é proprietário, da qual nenhum deles possui o sentido, essa terceira coisa que se mantém entre os dois, retirando ao idêntico toda e qualquer possibilidade de transmissão, afastando qualquer identidade entre causa e efeito.

*

O Espectador Emancipado
(aqui completo),

Jacques Rancière

Sempre a um passo de ser*

*

Best Society


When I was a child, I thought,
Casually, that solitude
Never needed to be sought.
Something everybody had,
Like nakedness, it lay at hand,
Not specially right or specially wrong,
A plentiful and obvious thing
Not at all hard to understand.


Then, after twenty, it became
At once more difficult to get
And more desired - though all the same
More undesirable; for what
You are alone has, to achieve
The rank of fact, to be expressed
In terms of others, or it's just
A compensating make-believe.


Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on - in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It's clear you're not the virtuous sort.


Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

Philip Larkin

*

*e talvez seja essa a beleza do meu poema.

I don't exist

Brian McMullen, Unusual Greeting-Card Sentiment #1

in Greetings from the Ocean's Sweaty Face: 

100 McSweeney's Postcards

You're my starry sky.

*

Every time you look up at the stars, it's like opening a door. You could be anyone, anywhere. You could be yourself at any moment in your life. You open that door and you realize you're the same person under the same stars. Camping out in the backyard with your best friend, eleven years old. Sixteen, driving alone, stopping at the edge of the city, looking up at the same stars. Walking a wooded path, kissing in the moonlight, look up and you're eleven again. Chasing cats in a tiny town, you're eleven again, you're sixteen again. You're in a rowboat. You're staring out the back of a car. Out here where the world begins and ends, it's like nothing ever stops happening.

*

Lost at Sea,

Bryan Lee O'Malley

P.S.: Ontem andei pelo Narcisicamente noite fora a investigar as esquinas de uma pessoa que eu deixei de ser. Entre mim e este meu canto criou-se um espaço que não havia. Adormeci a Verdade e a urgência de chegar, distraí-me com o Facebook e o Twitter, introverti e deixei o blog andar à deriva, passei a escrever em inglês e deixei de dizer.

Em contrapartida tornei-me no que passei aqui anos a lamentar não conseguir: hoje sou alguém com mãos na vida. Não sei através de que processo, mas sei que Londres fez isso por mim. Ou talvez tenha sido a distância de casa. Ou o tempo. 

Obrigada a todos os que sobreviveram a este hiato e continuam a insistir em vir ver se eu ressuscitei. É oficial, os trabalhos recomeçam neste. preciso. momento. 

The declaration of LOVE

*

FOUNTAIN


II
On the mother's mad smiles the raindrops
patter down. On their beloved
mad faces the lanterns tap
their yellow fingers.
Swaying. Pure.
Pure raindrops and lanterns. And the mothers
draw near, blowing on their cold fingers,
moving their bodies
through filial bones, tendons,
submerged organs.
And the intrinsic mothers calmly sit down
inside filial heads.
They sit there in slow and urgent silence,
seeing everything
and burning the images, fuelling the images,
while love keeps getting stronger.
Showering them in the face. Tender love.
Fierce love.
And the mothers are ever more beautiful.
Think the sons whom the mothers levitate.
Violent flowers strike their eyelids.
Above and below they breathe
in silence,
theirs faces gleaming in the spray
of raindrops,
around the lanterns. In the continuous
pourring down of sons.
Mothers are the loftiest things
created by sons, since they dwell
in their sons' deflagration, since
sons are like dandelion invaders
in their mothers' terrain.
And mothers are oil wells in the speech of their sons,
spurting through them
from out of the earth.
And the sons dive, in rubber suits, into the depths
of myriad waters
with the mothers wrapped like octopi around their hands
and around their tenderest nerves.
And the son sits with his mother at the head of the table.
Through him the mother fiddles
with the teacups and the forks,
and through her he thinks
no dead is possible, and the waters
are connected
through his hand touching the mad face
of his mother who can sense his touch
and through love, in love, until it's only possible
to love everything
and it's possible to rediscover everything through love.

Herberto Helder,

translated by Richard Zenith

*

Charles Hamilton - Saskatoon, A Love Letter.

Straight into the darkness of my childhood

Figures in the Distance, Jamaica Kincaid, read by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for the New Yorker Podcast.

Attempting

*

TRIGORIN - (...) Here I am talking to you and getting quite excited, yet can't forget for a second that I've an unfinished novel waiting for me. Or I see a cloud over there like a grand piano. So I think it must go in a story. 'A cloud like a grand piano sailed past.' Or I smell heliotrope, and make a quick mental note. 'Sickly scent. Flour. Sombre hue. Mention in description of summer evening.' I try to catch every sentence, every word you and I say and quickly lock all these sentences and words away in my literary storehouse because they might come in handy. When I finish work, I rush off to the theatre or go fishing. That would be the time to relax and forget, but not a bit of it. I already have another great weight on my mind: a new plot. I feel I must go to my desk - hurry up and start writing, writing, writing all over again. This sort of thing goes on all the time, I can never relax, and I feel I'm waisting my life.

*

Anton Chekhov,

The Seagull

translated by Ronald Hingley,

Oxford World's Classics.

A cat's meow

*

I don’t like books

as much

as Mallarmé seems

to have liked them

I’m not a book

and when people say

I really like your books

I wish I could say

like the poet Cesariny

listen

what I’d really like

is for you to like me

books aren’t made

of flesh and blood

and when I feel

like crying

it doesn’t help

to open a book

I need a hug

but thank God

the world isn’t a book

and chance doesn’t exist

still and all I really like

books

and believe in the Resurrection

of books

and believe that in Heaven

there are libraries

and reading and writing

*

Adília Lopes

translated by Richard Zenith

The lesson you don't want to have to learn

*

(...) the intrinsic, indefinable value of human activity - the various satisfactions to be drawn from work and intimate relationships - is too often swamped by the drive to win at all costs. Quantity appears to outweigh quality every time.

*

Daniel Rosenthal 

in the Commentary to David Mamet's

 Oleanna, Methuen Drama Student Editions

Note to self: Must quit facebook. Must quit sleeping.

Dave Franco - Do you enjoy like sitting around and doing nothing at all and 

                     just watching Tv?

James Franco - Watching what?

Dave Franco - I don't know, when was the last time you sat down doing
                     nothing?

James Franco - I don't know what that means...

You must watch Dave Franco kind of interviewing James Franco! Here!

And here's Just Before the Black, James Franco's short story that was published in Esquire.

On love

*

She could only wait, wait and moan in spirit as she felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and contracting, coming to the terrible moment when he would slip out of her and be gone.

*

D. H. Lawrence

Lady Chatterley's Lover

On my back

*

Portugal

If only, Portugal, you were just three syllables,

a beautiful view of the sea,

the green Minho, the whitewashed Algarve,

a tiny, tranquil donkey

trotting along the mountain ridge,

a mill swinging its arms at a wind as stubborn

as a bull but with padded horns and after all friendly,

if only you were just salt, sun, the south,

the shrewd sparrow,

the meek colloquial ox,

the sizzling sardine,

the waddling fishwife,

the scribbler bundled up in pretty adjectives,

the silent, almondish complaint

of sharp eyes with black lashes,

if only you were just the buzzing of summer, the buzz of fashion,

the decrepit asthmatic dog of beaches,

the caged cricket, the cagey customer,

the calendar on the wall, the pin on a lapel,

if only, Portugal, you were just three syllables

made of plastic, which would be cheaper!

*

Confectioners of Amarante, potters from Barcelos,

lace-makers of Viana, bullfighters from Golegã,

your celebrated sweets don’t hit my fancy,

no clay cock sings in color on my shelf,

no lacy whiteness trims my daydreams,

and no banderilla adorns my neck.

Portugal: an ongoing discussion with myself,

a soreness to the bone, an unrelenting hunger,

an attentive bloodhound with no nose and no ducks,

a spruced-up nag,

a dingy fair,

my regret,

my regret for us all . . .

*

Alexandre O'Neill

translated by Richard Zenith

(...)

When I'm faced with a new PowerPoint, I don't think about what my manager is expecting. I think about Shakespeare. I think about that feather at the beginning of Forrest Gump. I think about Marlon Brando's monologue in Apocalypse Now. I wonder how Scorsese would judge my section dividers. I think about how Homer would break the Odyssey down into slides.

(...)

I Am The Orson Welles of Power Point, by Oyl Miller

 @ McSweeney's

Lisboa*

*

Syrinx, a Pastoral Fiction (I)




I’m going to put a dirty ad in the newspaper
asking for fresh, not especially athletic meat
and noble feelings of passion.
I want a – how shall I put it? – human
being who’ll discover my mouth
and who, like me, has split hooves,
a blue bifid tongue and a rude
manner of singing under water.
I want someone who’ll love me and leave me
with equally tranquil concision
and who’ll record our encounter in a report
or a poem for inclusion in the syllabi
of the schools beyond the bridges.
And I wait by the phone to find out
if I’m happy, real, or just a foam
of ashes passing through sundry hands.

*

António Franco Alexandre

(translated by Richard Zenith)

*or The past is the past.