bridge-tarp...

2011-12-13T10:38:00.000-08:00

Porto Alegre - Primavera\Lisboa - Outono 2011

2011-07-07T19:17:00.000-07:00

Blue Valentine... unpretentious, and beautiful, and ending with picky T. W. Adorno's Feuerworks!!!... Not that it doesn't weight a little too much before the end... Derek Cianfrance straight's Gus van Sant ("nas veias", alas in Brazil the title was terribly translated, "Lovers to the End...").

A movie that passes by without most people noticing it.

2011-04-05T06:14:00.001-07:00

A vitória de Bellocchio, no cinema

Alessandro Zir (1)

Dos grandes e velhos diretores italianos — Antonioni, Fellini, Pasolini, Visconti — Marco Bellocchio é o mais intenso, e o mestre da ambiguidade. Desde I pugni in tasca (1965), expõe as contradições de toda a suposta boa intenção política, quando passa do discurso à ação. Um exemplo mais recente, ainda na memória do público, é Buongiorno notte (2003).

Mas Vincere é mais ousado em termos da poética visual e sonora: enormes contrastes de luz e sombra, sussurros e explosões, utilizados para criar uma atmosfera de intimidade, difícil de encontrar em outros diretores. Sem que o narrador precise de uma voz, na cabeceira da cama, nos conta, antes de dormir, uma história de terror proibida para criancas.

Mussolini aparece, fascinante e sedutor, além do maniqueísmo. E isso não apenas às mulheres, aos pequenos burgueses e às massas, mas também a artistas e intelectuais (o exemplo mais célebre nesse sentido, além do movimento de vanguarda futurista, é o caso de Ezra Pound).

Em Porto Alegre, numa sala de cinema lotada, foi possível sentir fisicamente o constrangimento do público, quando, no final da sessão, o título “Vincere” era exibido novamente na tela. Ninguém mais é fascista hoje em dia, mas sempre se quer “ganhar” alguma coisa, a qualquer custo, nem que seja o valor pago pelo ingresso, restituído em alguma forma de mensagem minimamente edificante. De fato, muitos esperavam que o “vincere” fosse a terça maior do “passione” que vêe na TV. Perturbados com o trítono, deixaram a sala assim que puderam!

(1) Escritor com publicações no Brasil, Canada, Chile, Portugal, incluindo capítulos de livros, artigos, traduções e ficção. Membro do GIFHC (Grupo Interdisciplinar em Filosofia e História das Ciências), do ILEA (Instituto Latino-Americano de Estudos Avançados da UFRGS). Tem apresentado trabalhos em simpósios internacionais em instituições como o Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Berlim, Alemanha), a Biblioteca Municipal de Evora (Portugal), e a Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Braga, Portugal). Foi bolsista da Capes de doutorado pleno no exterior, tendo obtido o título de doutor pelo Interdisciplinary PhD Program da Dalhousie University (Halifax, Canada), em julho de 2009.

2010-11-25T18:59:00.000-08:00

Refining the concepts of power, desire and seduction — interview with J. Baudrillard’ smile (1929-2007), by C. Aires (182-?-19--?)

Alessandro Zir (Editor)***

Warning: what we are going to publish is not unrelated to the well-known “seven notebooks”, “manuscripts with very stiff cover”, etc. If the last of them (Esaú e Jacó) carried the title the last, what follows carries the title transfini. It is indeed funny that the text comes out three years after the death of the famous French sociologist, or philosopher, interviewed by the author of the notebooks. We are not going to deny here the alleged affinity of some of our previous works with murky and supernatural speculations. In order to avoid that such ado badly affects the credibility of a document we are merely making available to the public, it is necessary to state explicitly that we have no reason to date this interview as after March 2007. The interview was found together with the unpublished photograph of Baudrillard we are also publicizing.

C. A. – Foucault’s conception of power is supposed to be an improvement in relation to older conceptions. It is certainly different from any classical understanding of power. You have maintained, however, that the concrete result of Foucault’s original and rigorous analyses is to devoid the concept of power of any meaning by developing its logic to the most. Do you believe this should be taken as a compliment?
J. B. S. – Yes. I believe so. First of all, because this deflationary movement would be true of any original and rigorous analysis of any concept whatsoever. You see that my own position, if taken as outright criticism, would be devoid of any meaning in the same way, and this is why you asked your question. It has been said that if I would like to forget him, he would not even bother to remember me. And I take this comment as a compliment as well.

C. A. – Accordingly you relate to him symbolically?
J. B. S. – Yes. I believe so. He might have taken my comments as something rather outrageous. Indeed I accused him of sticking with the concept (of power) when he should not. But to keep spinning around an empty centre, like a vortex, might be the best way to point towards what I call seduction. Foucault would not bother to remember me because he had already forgotten himself. We did not relate consciously, we did not actually talk to each other, but while disappearing we connected symbolically, quite independently from what we said.

C. A. – How seduction is supposed to be different from desire?
J. B. S. – If you desire something you are got into a movement. Desire is not the movement itself. The movement is what structure desire. It (the movement) might be called, again, power, or even law. Of course, power and law must be understood not merely as what represses. They are rather productive forces; they are what enable things to become visible. They enable one to see x as different from y, and to desire x as such. In order to desire and to be desired you need power and law. Not only you, but everything. And seduction would be something like following this movement (of power and law) utterly spread. It would be something like short-circuiting all its paths. It would be the culmination and cancelation of the many desires (instituted by power and law), and perhaps their realization, but in a way we are not able to imagine.

C. A. – Do you believe seduction ever really happens? Is it cyclical?
J. B. S. – It might be happening right now, when you ask me this question, when you listen to my answer, when a reader read this interview, but we would not notice. We should not be able to notice if it really happens. And it might happen many times indeed, but we wouldn’t be able to say if it is always the same or something different. This is a mistake I made in some of my books. I said seduction was cyclical, but we have no means to know that.

C. A. – How to lie through your teeth relate to seduction?
J. B. S. – Seduction is rather lying through someone else’s teeth. You make the utmost effort to become someone else, something else, and at the same time to say something. It should not be something strictly false. It does not have to be something false. Actually this point is not really important. What is at issue is that what you say emerges from yourself, but faraway dislocated. Opened in all its voids, that is, from nowhere, utterly spread. It is not what, not even how you say it, but from where you say it. It is a lie only because and to the extent that you say it from a place that is impossible to locate, and you really say it. Space becomes intimate.

C. A. – Are you not speaking through your own teeth?
J. B. S. – (J. B. makes a smile, then explains…) The fatal mistake of most if not all people intending to improve or radically transform society, help minorities or conserve majorities, etc. is that they take Cheshire to be a quite extraordinary character. It is not. In any case, it should not be. Not in real life. I would like to put you a question myself: who was the father of Nativity’s twins? The extinguished or the future person? In a sense both persons are. It is something tricky, because excess per se can not be conveyed, no matter if it happens, and even if it happens.

C. A. – What is the relation between excess and violence? Isn’t your position unethical?
J. B. S. – Now it is you who must be speaking through someone else’s teeth. Like journalists or politicians, when they pretend to speak for the public. What they intend is rather to move people around. I accept the challenge, however, because there is no other way to face the situation and because I believe in Cheshire and excess. Violence is more like myopia than excess. But the same can be said about anti-violence. Both have to do with short-sightedness. It is not simply myopia, it is rather little endurance, a quite overspread if not healthy condition. The best way to answer to the problem (of violence, anti-violence and little endurance) is not by outright opposition. I’m not saying you should not do anything. You should find a way to get smaller, disappear, wait for deflection, as when you feel any pain. Women, gay, old people, Susan Boyle, rats and cockroach — the earth —must have always been there like men, as men, Nicole Kidman, in a noisy silence, ages before they got emancipated. If you want people to produce less garbage you must first realize that everything is garbage from the beginning. Plastic is Nature’s inner nature revealed, that is, perennial expense (dépense). As any revelation, as anything emancipated, it is also little endurance, and violent. What is not violent, without being anti-violent as well, is excess in its invisible, little deflected, intimacy.

***This was firstly published as part of the very celebrated collection “Unpeerable Pieces” or “Warun Ich so…” Alessandro Zir is a writer and philosopher, with publications in Brazil, Canada, Chile and Portugal, including chapters of books, papers, translations, and fiction. Member of the GIFHC (Interdisciplinary Group in Philosophy and History of Science), ILEA/ UFRGS – Brazil, he has participated in international symposiums in institutions such as the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Berlim, Alemanha), and the Biblioteca Municipal de Evora (Portugal). He is a Capes scholarship holder (Ministry of Education, Brazil), and received his PhD by the Interdisciplinary PhD Program at Dalhousie University (Halifax, Canada) in July of 2009.
E-mail: azir@dal.ca

2010-10-20T10:27:00.000-07:00

"Do mais lúcido irmão que não me conhecia — a ele (II)

Alessandro Zir (1)

“Uma verdade contada pela metade é pior do que qualquer mentira que se possa inventar”, diz Gustavo Flávio, no final de Bufo & Spallanzane (Fonseca 1993 [1986]: 233). Mas como é que se pode contar certas verdades senão inventando? Atenção, entretanto. Não se trata de simples invenção ou deliberada mentira.

Desmentindo, ele mente: o escritor relata incidentes que não presencia e desvenda sentimentos que podem até ser teoricamente secretos mas que são também tão óbvios que qualquer pessoa poderia imaginá-los sem precisar dispor da visão onisciente do ficcionista. Como é bela a natureza! Escrever é muito fácil. Mentindo, diz a verdade: a mente de um escritor era uma coisa difícil de penetrar. O que ele diz é aquilo que não é dito. Ele sabe que aquilo que diz é aquilo que não é. E para um escritor a palavra escrita é a realidade, inimiga do caos e também da ordem, para além da utilidade ou nocividade, e até mesmo da compreensibilidade:

— Bati com a picareta, com toda a força, em sua cabeça. Ela caiu no chão com o rosto cheio de sangue.

Quelle lourde machine à construire...

(fragmentário e pernóstico = prognóstico, que indica alguma coisa)

* * * * *

Assim escreveu Tolstoi, em Guerra e Paz (Segundo Epílogo, Capítulo VIII): “A pior forma de autoridade, a mais arrogante e dissimulada, é a do artista. A difusão de material impresso, a mais poderosa arma da ignorância”. Mas quero mantê-lo vivo, em meu coração e em minha mente, e por isso agora inscrevo seus três primeiros romances num processo narrativo de disjunção lógica:

Vilela/ Paul Morel
Mandrake/Lima Prado
Guedes/ Gustavo Flávio

No primeiro caso, a função de autoria é distribuída entre Vilela e Paul Morel (2). Diferentemente, no segundo caso, ela é assumida explicitamente por Mandrake, embora somente mais para o final da narrativa (Fonseca, 1983: 311). No terceiro caso, ela será assumida explicitamente por Gustavo Flávio, já desde o início. De qualquer forma, nos três casos, é impossível inferir da narrativa uma univocidade de sentido, e até mesmo uma unidade formal, porque ela precisa ser como que distribuída entre elementos heterogêneos, esquizofrênicos. No caso em que se poderia atribuí-la a um único autor, a onisciência desse narrador/autor em contrapartida cresce, de forma a tornar-se o próprio índice do seu possível delírio e alucinação. Como é que ele poderia saber tão bem o que se passa na cabeça dos outros, o que fazem sem ninguém ver, o que ocorre em locais em que nenhum outro esteve? Não que não haja limite para o delírio. Por exemplo, o capanga de Lima Prado não tem mãe, enquanto que Paul Morel ou Gustavo Flávio nem capangas têm. Paul Morel, entretanto, é obrigado a admitir:

— À medida que chego perto vai ficando mais difícil. Pensei que poderia escrever sobre as coisas que aconteceram comigo, mas agora, chegando perto... Na minha cabeça, como num filme em câmera lenta, eu chutava o rosto dela.

— Me mostra que você está aqui do meu lado. Eu me sinto morta, mas se você me matar eu estou viva. Anda, vem. Me arrebenta...

Falei em esquizofrenia. Fala-se com freqüência de espelhamento de uma realidade social. Mas a violência tem importância, sobretudo, como algo que atravessa personagens (incluindo narradores/autores) a ponto de preservá-los, para além do que eles são, naquilo mesmo que os destrói. Nesse sentido, trata-se de uma paz colossal, cosmológica, e não de fenômeno psicossociológico. Tudo que se escreve, escreveu ou escreverá era para chegar aqui, neste parágrafo.

Por isso, o verdadeiro escritor nada tem a dizer.
Tem uma maneira de dizer nada.
Nada temos a temer.
Exceto as Palavras.

* * * * *

A crítica de arte é tão supérflua quanto a própria arte. E a virtude maior de um ser humano é ter consciência da própria crueldade (Fonseca, 2000: 35). Por isso quero mantê-lo vivo, em meu coração e em minha mente. Continuo:

Vastas emoções e pensamentos imperfeitos ousou expor a escrita numa espécie de nudez essencial, sem imagem nem som. O resultado foi o de que as palavras constituíam cenários, possivelmente todos falsos, desconexos, de sonhos.

Se tais cenários desaparecessem, agora tudo se teria a temer. É o que finalmente ocorre em agosto — mês dos espíritos baixarem — quando o narrador aplaina, do início ao fim do livro, em terceira pessoa. Impressionista, as coisas todas se tornam o que elas são, sua essência colapsa na superfície: diretamente, o pesadelo, de que nunca são como são, mas sendo. O automatismo insistente do disco na vitrola, indiferente à morte do que o escuta. Mattos, versão mais sombria do antigo Vilela, trazia guardado no bolso o dente de ouro de Morel (Fonseca, 2006 [1990]: 106; cf. Fonseca, 1995 [1973]: 42).

* * * * *

“Não sei como me tornei um escritor de contos e não um cineasta”, disse meu irmão em uma entrevista (Fonseca, 1990 [1988]: 39). Depois daquele mês maldito, virá ainda a escrever um texto básico, um roteiro. Torna-se definitivamente aquilo que não era, quer dizer, sobrevive inteiramente na voz própria delirante — falar a milhões, sem os enganar, quer dizer, agradando-os.

Ser sério: quelle lourde machine à construire...

Não se trata de simples mentira (ver o que diz Verdi sobre o Guaraní, e é melhor ser escravo do que mendigo: Fonseca, 1994: 74, 169). Parte do rosto da mulher começa a aparecer. Lança sangue pela boca, sem parar, e diz:

— Foi Maneco Músico, teu pai. Estava com muito ódio.

— Parecia um sonho... Fechei os olhos, não ia acordar nunca mais. Como era bom dormir. Sou um marquês de ilustre estirpe, da melhor nobreza, mas não sou escritor, apenas um leitor constante de bons autores.

Sai Nicolas-Gabriel de La Reynie.

* * * * *

Entra o diplomata Aires.

No Uruguai, ao descobrir seus papéis, meu irmão em princípio o achou diferente de si. A escrita de Aires era transparentemente lúcida, como a linha invisível que equilibra todas as divergências, de Esaú a Jacó. Justamente, mas assim esvaziava de conteúdo, desaparecia, aproximando-se da de meu irmão. Além disso, sabemos que a escrita é de Aires (3), mas ela se desdobra para além dele, como espelho, que o reduz a personagem de si. Foi quando no ápice da história de perder o fôlego, não se disse:

— Levantei a ponta do véu e quase me entrei na alma, mais fundo que ela própria.

— Foi a realidade... Abri os olhos, não quis fechá-los mais. Como era bom entender. Tudo serão modas neste mundo, exceto as estrelas e eu. Perdono a tutti.

É como se pode contar a contradição. A frivolidade do memorial — “nem pachorra nem habilidade”, “dizer o que se pensa e o que se vê, quando se não vê nem pensa nada” (Assis, 1952b: 7, 102) — entregando seu despropósito comum. Do meu irmão, a ele. Ser real, mas não sendo, o narrar pelo narrar, mesmo despreocupado da trama, mas atento à delícia do fel (“o amargo do mel”, Assis, 1952b: 220-1).

Estava eu diante da pessoa futura, e era a pessoa extinta, uma só criatura.

Ele acabou pedindo, de pessoa estranha, o abraço.

Dei-lho apertado.

(1) Alessandro Zir é escritor e professor universitário. Doutorado pelo Interdisciplinary Program da Dalhousie University (Halifax, Canada). E-mail: azir@dal.ca

(2) Isso é um pouco mais complexo, na verdade, porque Vilela não narra na primeira pessoa.

(3) Ora, meu irmão mesmo o diz: “era o ultimo dos sete cadernos (de Aires), com a particularidade de ser o mais grosso” (Assis, 1952: 5). E o próprio Aires se revela, escorrendo pela pena: “Foi por achá-lo em mim que lhe dei crédito... Ninguém me constrangia. Todos os temperamentos iam comigo; poucas divergências tive, e perdi só uma ou duas amizades, tão pacificamente aliás, que os amigos perdidos não deixaram de me tirar o chapéu. Um deles pediu-me perdão no testamento” (Assis, 1952: 417).

Assis, M. de. Esaú e Jacó. Rio de Janeiro: W. M. Jackson Inc., 1952a
Assis, M. de. Memorial de Aires. Rio de Janeiro: W. M. Jackson Inc., 1952b
Fonseca, R. O Caso Morel. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995 [1973]
Fonseca, R. A Grande Arte. São Paulo: Círculo do Livro, 1983
Fonseca, R. Buffo & Spallanzane. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1993 [1986]
Fonseca, R. Vastas Emoções e Pensamentos Imperfeitos. São Paulo: Círculo do Livro, 1990 [1988]
Fonseca, R. Agosto. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2006 [1990]
Fonseca, R. O Selvagem da Ópera. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994
Fonseca, R. O Doente Molière. São Paulo: Editora Schwarcz, 2000

2010-07-10T04:32:00.000-07:00

Improving on St. Peter: Woody Allen as impossible Cassandra

Alessandro Zir[1]

Abstract: This review focus on Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream (2007) in order to raise philosophical issues that are common to all the four movies Woddy Allen directed in Europe and released from 2005 to 2008. A detailed analysis is presented of the whole narrative of Cassandra’s Dream, as well as of parts of the other movies in question (Match Point, 2005; Scoop, 2006; Vicky Cristina Barcelona, 2008). Misdirection and fidelity to the straight lines of his jokes are understood as the key elements contributing to the veracity of Woody Allen’s stories, and to the cogency of his characters. The veracity and cogency in question convey a very detached and negative assessment of reality which is common to all these movies, and explains Woody Allen’s allusion to Cassandra as a paradox of an impossibility of transcendence.

Woody Allen always invited a dose of nihilism, disguised in the very laugh of the audience. A sadism directed to nobody but he himself, who people identified with his characters. Whatever is the truth concerning his older movies, in the last ones, the audience finally discovers him at his best, maturated from all abject humility. Being or not in the movie, he now accompanies it, and accompanies the public, as this Splendini of Scoop (2006): a false father, awkward, lonely, skeptical, of the “narcissistic persuasion”, but in the same way disarmed, caring, reliable, if clumsy. For sure, he is not going to hurt you. He fails, of course, when it comes to save you, but he will die trying. He is the loquacious quintessence, almost a spirit of séance, of the gentle nitwit, in the best tradition of Chaplin.
Cassandra’s Dream (2007) is one of Woody Allen’s four last movies (all made in Europe), besides Scoop, Match Point (2005), and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). They have many points in common, but did not receive the same attention from the critics and the public. Both Cassandra’s Dream and Match Point are thrillers, and far away from being merely entertaining. They revolve around the same existentialist conundrum made of crime, impunity and chance. Match Point, however, brought Woody Allen a wide recognition, while Cassandra’s Dream failed to attain the same success. Cassandra’s Dream is, nonetheless, much worthier of a critical analysis. Its characters are not so naturally constructed as the ones of Match Point. They have an imbalance, they are burlesque. But exactly because of this, Cassandra’s Dream vividly exposes issues involved in all the other three movies, including Match Point. It has a key to an understanding of the jocose and apparently inane allegories about death that appear in a light hearted comedy such as Scoop. It illuminates what is opaque, irresolute and even frustrating in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, this more dark comedy.
It is known that much of Woody Allen’s charm comes from his mastering of the technique of misdirection. He throws the audience off in some apparently familiar direction only to surprise it completely, on the other side of the road, where he had always been waiting for it. During the supposed walk, what happened was that the entire scenario turned 180o degrees. This is patent in Cassandra’s Dream. Things begin with this line of the mother, which everyone has heard: “in the end, all you have in this life that you can count on is family”. As the story goes on, one is going to realize not exactly that the line is simply wrong, but that matters are more complex than they appear. Dorothy, the mother, who says the line, is first of all a very unhappy and resentful wife. She constantly deprecates her husband in front of their sons, Terry and Ian, the big and the “small stakes player”. When they finally abandon the father with his small bankrupted restaurant, she stays, however, at his side and is supportive: “don’t worry... I can help you if you need”. Ian and Terry move under the aegis of their uncle, an internationally successful plastic surgeon who reinforces the mother’s initial line by saying to all: “you are my family”. He is coming from China, and willing to help everybody financially. His apparent goodwill is nothing but the last heavy cloud in a fat storm to break out in the middle of the movie. As family, uncle Howard is the most helpful, but because he also needs you to do something he could ask nobody else. He wants, for compensation, that you get rid of one of his business partners who “knows too much”. “What have you done?” — asks a bemused Terry. And the uncle raving explosion in view of such a reckless question is as fair as it is hilarious. The unveiling of Allen’s misdirection inverts upside down the surface thrust of the plot. There is something of a Melinda and Melinda (Allen, 2004) here, in which the tragic turns out to be comic and vice-versa. Terry finally reflects: “family is one thing, but there are limits”. But what limits? Well, “to make a big step up in life”, answers Ian. It is in relation to this imperative, that there is actually no family, no God, no crossing line, “it’s [just] now; it’s always now”. In the end of the movie, apostasy cannot be bolder. Cassandra will not prophesize, and she will not prophesize not even about the future, what wouldn’t apparently have any sense, but about the past. No one is going ever to solve the crime, and moreover, the unlikely but real villain, uncle Howard, will be completely freed. The conscientious brother, Terry, will take the blame for the wicked one, Ian. As in Match Point, there is not even a “small sign of justice”. It would certainly be preposterous to attribute to Allen any kind of faith, even a negative one, and yet…
Could tragedy make any sense at all without the gods? Could there really be a tragedy when the sacrifice of the hero is not in the name of anything superior, not even family — or cynically said, blood? In Cassandra’s Dream there is no hero, it’s just people acting out of blind egocentric impulses and compulsion to survive. And the strength of the movie consists exactly in mirroring this absolute void. It works from what it doesn’t show, and cannot show, because talk about values inevitably sounds like advertising, like trying, once more, “to make a big step up in life”. And Woody Allen is faithful not to success, but to the veracity of the story he is telling, and to the cogency of its characters. There is no reason why one should take Allen’s void to be more than Anything else (Allen, 2003), although in Cassandra’s Dream there isn’t Billie Holiday’s Easy to Love anymore, and one cannot help feeling troubled. The two explicit references to the classic Bonnie and Clyde (1967) are misguiding. In Arthur Penn’s movie, Clyde is a hero, not a villain. There is the constant feeling that “nobody gets Clyde, never”, even if the couple of charming robbers are caught in the end, that is, if their dead bodies shake under an absurd burn of excessively wasted ammunition, and they go on, towards the credits. Bonnie and Clyde is more a Puritan movie than an existentialist one. They are robbers, but not debased, neither what connects them is egoistical. Clyde doesn’t want to get in Bonnie’s pants, and she stays with him because she is not interested in marrying a rich man. They are not there for the money at all.
It is known that, besides mastering misdirection, Allen shows a Spartan fidelity to the straight lines upon which he accommodates his punch ones. “The joke needs a true straight line… You can only go where the straight line honestly enables you to go…” (Lax, 2007: 101). Is this really what happens in Cassandra’s dream? Perhaps the plot eventually forces too much against this pedestrian truism stated by the character of the opera writer in Melinda and Melinda: “life is short and not about anything, but one thing I do know is that we were not put on this Earth to be dragged all the time.” Or against the other one in Scoop: “not everything in this world is sinister, just practically everything”. But Allen as a director is bolder than any of his characters. Even aestheticism is deluded by him. In Deconstructing Harry (Allen, 1997), for instance, the movie could end in the scene where the writer — someone who jokingly is made to feel he is not the worse person in the world, because we have, of course, Hitler — finally got outrun by his own characters who reemerge together to save him from himself, as if in a dream, but real, and then, this is just another pun in the brain of the writer. Reality cannot be acquitted by fiction. The conundrum made of crime, impunity and chance is irremediable.
The movie that immediately followed Cassandra’s Dream, that is, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, has again, as its key ingredients, sleight of hand (misdirection) and Spartan fidelity to the veracity of the plot and characters. No character here is what it appears to be, and this is why they are so true and convincing. There is always something opaque, frustrating, but nonetheless vital in each of them. Take the two businessmen, Mark and Dough. In the beginning, they look very cheap and vulgar, the opposite of the figure of the swell aristocratic father in Match Point. Mark makes harsh, coarse if funny comments. In relation to Cristina’s short movie about the difficulty of defining love, he says, cuttingly: “That's a mighty big subject to handle in 12 minutes.” In relation to Vicky’s Master’s in Catalan identity, he questions: “What do you plan on doing with that?” But as the story develops, Mark ends being the only one to be really interested in the painting given by the bohemian artist Juan Antonio and Cristina to Vicky and Dough as a wedding gift. Mark’s wife, who is far from being depicted as stupid, thinks Mark is great, and she cannot leave him. The other businessman, Dough, is this husband to be, who plays golf with his boss, and has the inane idea of getting married in Barcelona, something which “dad’s contacts in the Embassy” will make “really easy”, something “great to tell the kids” in the future. Arriving in Barcelona, however, Dough turns out to be indeed quite lovely, and Vicky ends marrying him. The bohemian artists, on the other hand, look like much more cultivated people, but they are also pretty uncultivated. Juan Antonio slips just too easily in the flat role of a ladies’ man. He has a father who is a poet, but the point is that his father doesn’t publish… Or would it be, rather, that Juan Antonio just made up the whole history in order to seduce Vicky? Later he will tell Cristina that till now, he didn’t want to make love in the bedroom he used to share with his ex-wife. He changes his mind, rather quickly, when Cristina enters with him in the room. In another scene, he rubs a foot of the wrong woman under the table. The other bohemian artist, Maria Helena, has fits that, as in the scene outside in the prostitutes’ street, exposes her as being even pretentious, a bit of a cliché, unhappy self-destructive person, and vulgar. She is nonetheless the real genius of the story, the true outstanding personality. The most capable of affirming life besides everything, in a genuinely Bataillean, it should be pointed out, not Sartrean way. And then we have the two main characters, Vicky and Cristina. First of all, there is the ambiguity of Cristina’s eyes, blue or green, and perhaps blue and green. She is not bourgeois, but she is also not a bohemian artist. She experiment with things, movies, photography, poetry, a Scriabin piano sonata — not that she could play it. Scarlett Johansson here still reminds the funny stubby finger from Scoop. Vicky, on the other hand, was the one who knew that flying to Oviedo with Juan Antonio would be a terrible mistake. But she went there anyway, and it is she who will first have sex with him. Cristina was so cool, but then she has an ulcer and can’t keep her food down. She will make sex to both Juan Antonio and Maria Helena, and be the missing ingredient, the tint, the salt in their relationship, not however without first suggesting that the latter should undergone psychiatric treatment. As was so drastically explicit in Cassandra’s Dream, while Vicky and Cristina go down in the airport escalation to leave Barcelona, one cannot prophesize their future. The conundrum of their lives, even if it is not made of crime, impunity and chance, remains as well irremediable.
The Ariadne’s thread connecting and leading away from these riddles couldn’t be found anywhere if it were not for the allegorical figure of the boat, in the light hearted Scoop. It is the irremediable pungency of Cassandra’s Dream that still explains why the figure is, necessarily, allegorical. In all Allen’s movies, violence and sex are always off cam. In Cassandra’s Dream, not even a shot sand bag was shown. The boat of Scoop shows death itself, but not literally. It is a death that you can try to bribe, and question — not, of course, that the dark knight steering the boat will give you any answer. Nobody is ever revealed where he or she is heading. Everything remains the same, and yet it’s not. After the trespass, people will keep using the same clothes, will keep having the same mundane curiosity, as when the deceased reporter says, after hearing the thrilling gossip: “what a story, this will be a dynamite scoop and I got it first!” And there is a place for the joke that “yeah, unfortunately, where you’re headed, there is no first, only last…” After the ultimate storm, the creaking of the boat moving calmly under the mist instills the feeling of boredom and eternal waiting: the eternity for a card trick. As if back-mirroring the central scene of Cassandra’s Dream, under the trees and the flood, where dramatic seriousness exploded into huge laugh, now light hearted comedy peers into an abyss. In both cases, one faces something rather thrilling than solemn, and black humored. As family, afterlife can only be real by embodying the vital obsessions living people are compelled to pursue even from the grave. And obsession here means something frivolous. One would have to have preserved, for instance, his right to sleep in his own bed in the end of the day. Justice is fundamental, but a legitimate solution for the puzzling conundrums of life would have to measure up to life’s frivolity as well.
In Scoop, Splendini declares he was of the Jewish persuasion, and then turned to the narcissistic one. Are not these persuasions, actually, related? Is not frivolity at the bottom of the negative kind of mysticism that is so characteristic of the Jewish faith? The long for an entirely different world that would, nonetheless, be an appropriate answer to what has always been promised here, and that we have childishly awaited? Vicky Cristina Barcelona has, on the other hand, this permanent reference to Gaudí. It is widely recognized that the works of Gaudí were motivated rather by his religious concerns than by a faith in the idea of progress, more typical of other Modern architects such as Le Corbusier. Gaudí was entirely dedicated to the task of building his Sagrada Familia, and ended his life in isolation pursuing this aim. His peculiar ideas are known to be based in Medieval conceptions of a unity between ornamentation and construction in architecture. Gaudí’s respect for the organic autonomy of architectural works has affinity with Allen’s respect for the internal “needs of the creation of [a] piece of fiction” (Lax, 2007: 123). Gaudí had never been a Jew, he was always a Christian. And he also believed that the greatest artistic cultures were to be developed somewhat exclusively in the Mediterranean. He was, nonetheless, very fond of an expression of St. Peter which embodies negative longings, even if making them more positive. These are Gaudí’s words: “… St. Peter says that glory is the vision of God… Vision is immensity – I can see what is there and what is not there” (Crippa, 2002: 105). Woody Allen, as impossible Cassandra, enables his audience to see what is not there, even if we are all almost sure that what is not there simply doesn’t exist. Or would it?

References:
Allen, Woody. Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)
Allen, Woody. Cassandra’s Dream (2007)
Allen, Woody. Scoop (2006)
Allen, Woody. Match Point (2005)
Allen, Woody. Melinda and Melinda (2004)
Allen, Woody. Anything else (2003)
Allen, Woody. Deconstructing Harry (1997)
Arthur Penn, Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Las, Eric. Conversations with Woody Allen, NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007
Crippa, M. A. Living Gaudí, The Architect’s Complete Vision. New York, Rizzoli, 2002
[1] Journalist and philosopher, with publications in Brazil, Chile and Portugal, including chapters of books, papers, translations, and fiction. Member of the GIFHC (Interdisciplinary Group in Philosophy and History of Science), ILEA/ UFRGS – Brazil, he has participated in international symposiums in institutions such as the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Berlim, Alemanha), and the Biblioteca Municipal de Evora (Portugal). He is a Capes scholarship holder (Ministry of Education, Brazil), and received his PhD by the Interdisciplinary PhD Program at Dalhousie University (Halifax, Canada) in July of 2009.
E-mail: azir@dal.ca

2010-07-10T04:25:00.001-07:00

The blindness of Meirelles

Alessandro Zir[1]

Abstract: The main idea implied in this essay is that any successful translation of an artistic masterwork must in someway rescue the whole poiesis that sustains the original work as an aesthetic phenomenon. If the translation does not succeed in doing this, it simply fails. What has to be translated is, first of all, not some content, ideas, the story, or even formal characteristics, but the tension bringing all elements together. This is especially visible when the translation is done from one medium to another, such as when a literary masterpiece is brought to the cinema. Fernando Meirelles’ adaptation of José Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira was a failure in this sense.

The movie begins: an extreme close-up into the pinstriped and reflective traffic lights oscillates with another close into blurry cars driving by. This is enough to prove the possibility of expressing visually the texture of an oppressive — if white and symbolic — blindness. Even after the frame opens, the angles are still a little slanted, jammed. The cars keep crossing in front of the camera, out of focus, cutting between the scene and the spectators, almost knocking them down. It is a very good start. Unfortunately, the tension generated by a discerning use of a subtle selection of cinematographic resources does not withstand till the end of the movie. It is outstripped by the narrative, or worse: by the content of the narrative, by what the director wants to say, by the heaviness of a message. The narrative collapses in the exact measure that it looses the opportunity of revealing itself in the same way in which the title of the movie is announced: diverged in a milky reflection that gets unfolded by being reverted, inverted in a slanted, moving surface of glasses and mirrors. And in this context, the original cinematographic resources collapse as well. The bright light that in some passages of Constant Gardener (Meirelles, 2005) smelled of marketing cliché by superficially embellishing the hardly convincing intimacy of love moments, is extremely effective to express here a blindness that is the excess of vision. The problem is that the tension generated by all the technical resources is insufficient to sustain a narrative that pedagogically and didactically deforms itself in something that the director seems to be condescendingly and horribly forced to say at its expense. The director is betrayed, possibly by himself.
To come back to the pertinence of the resources, there is the audible besides the visual ones, as this ingenious mix of tire’s screeches, car horn’s toots, and an electronic-chromatic rustling that tracks the unbalanced, helpless spinning of the first blind — wide opened arms over a vertiginous pedestrian crossing, still in the beginning of the movie. Minutes later, there is the scuffing and whispering unfolding of an iris cleared away in a tactile, plicate mechanism of an unseen peephole. Also unfolded and cleared away, muffled, are the set of curious bells that play along with the husky countertenor voice of the maiden with sunglasses, when she walks towards a love transaction in the hotel room, before she gets blind. There are triangles and buzzers, crackles and swishes. Already in the middle of the movie, the scene in which a table erased and redrawn — another example of outstanding visual resource — unexpectedly resurges pushing the boy with a thump is a masterly example of an insightful and discerning combination of the director’s audible and visual creativity. This is what can be said about the audible effects, but the use of music is entirely different. It does nothing more than punctuate certain points already too much formulaic in the narrative, exaggerating their cliché-like character and collapsing into a total nonsensical slush. An example would be the melodious and sighed reunion of the first blind with his wife, as soon as she arrives at the hospital. Another example would be the condescending musical moment when the jewels are collected. The actors are also weakly directed, what makes some dialogues hardly convincing, not to speak about crying scenes. The first example, and perhaps the most glaring, occurs in the clinic of the physician, when sentences such as “do you think I’m lying?”, and “I know how to get to the hospital” result pathetic for a lack of inner rhythm. The performances of Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Alice Braga are potent, but they do not stand the implausibility of their own characters, the predictable linearity of the script.
All weakness of the movie becomes patent when it is confronted to Saramago’s book. The point, however, is not that Saramago’s book is aesthetically superior, but that a deficient approach to the text, to Saramago’s story, undermines the constitutive elements of the movie itself. The movie comes apart independently of any comparison. There are elements and gaps in the movie the alchemy of which is unfortunate in terms of its fictional plausibility, while in the case of the book, on the contrary, such alchemy was extremely effective. The movie does not succeed in attaining that minimal dimension of autonomy in relation to actuality that would be able to constitute it as something in itself. The movie does not emerge as a work. It would be always possible to opt for a poetical construction completely different from the one exhibited in the book. But the criticism that is made here is that, different or not, the problem is that the chosen construction doesn’t work, and perhaps exactly because the movie remains too much attached to the book, but in a terribly ineffective way in what matters its own construction. And this is all independently from the ingenuity and richness of the resources contrived.
What subverts the movie is an immaculate didacticism in a setting in which people will, more and more, continually, step on their own shit and on deceased people. In relation to this point, Fernando Meirelles shows indeed he is not only creative and discerning but has guts. The movie has passages undeniably disgusting in the best sense. One does not have to be entirely satisfied, however, since Saramago’s book in what matters stools, deceased people, vomits, snot and all sort of bad smells and viscosities could give occasion to a myriad of Pasolinian Salós (1975). Of the five senses, vision and even its absence are not what prevails, but the sense of smell, permanently oppressed by all sort of stenches. Maybe one cannot see, but it is impossible not to smell that diffused in such a reeked and genuine miasma any linear, mean well, pedagogic solution is fated to self-putrefaction. No matter if Blindness, in terms of dirtiness, seems to favor smut over secretions. It is rather Children of Men (Cuarón, 2006) than giornate di Sodoma.
The concept of white blindness as something underlying some sort of benign illumination has a basis on Saramago’s book. It can be inferred, for instance, from the passage in which it is described the outbreak of blindness in the man who initially helps and then steals the car of the first blind. Eyes, turned to inside, as mirrors, are able to “explicitly show what we were trying to deny with the mouth”. They are “a consciousness with teeth ready to bite” (: 26).[2] Or, as it is said later, the blindness is “a luminous glory” (: 94). And however, especially in this latter expression suggested by the narrator, there is a caustic irony. The luminous glory is also the stool, because “light and brightness” smell to the physician exactly as shit, when he cannot even clean himself, because there is no paper in the toilet towards which he had crawled groping over a sticky floor (: 96-7). It is actually a “hideous white tide” (: 115), of “a frightened horse, a horse with eyes wanting to jump out of their sockets” (: 131). It is “the eye that refuses to recognize its own absence” (: 129). It is as well the possibility of returning to a thing-like state, a kind of remission, an eschatological regression that transfigures the symbolic by a process of thing-like specification: “to cross the visible skin of things passing into their inner side, into their glowing and irremediable blindness” (: 65) — this is the desire of the physician’s wife.
The movie lacks this ambiguity, and the irony and coldness that articulate and sustain the story in the book, as in the passage in which the narrator confesses that “the grotesque of the spectacle would have made the most sobering observer to laugh his head off, it was hilarious, many blinds crawling forward, their faces close to the floor as swine” (: 105). It is this detachment of the narrator that gives to the book the undertone of a parody of itself without which the story proposed by Saramago would become empty. Is it really possible to make a movie out of it? How to create in cinematographic terms the gibe of a narrator who, knowing that the physician’s wife is not blind, treat her as an exemplary model of blindness with “frontal vision” (: 87)? How to create in cinematographic terms the cynicism of a narrator who jocosely ally himself with the food thieves characterizing them as “the hand… which feeds” (: 162). Or who says about the blinds making noise in order to distract the attention of the gang of rapists: they “were like lady mourners in a trance” (: 202). Or who says about the blinds who turn back to see the nude breasts of the physician’s wife, that they do so too late, because she had already covered herself with a coat (: 228). Or who makes the following comment about the panic unleashed by the discovery that the saint images inside the church were also blindfold: “one has to be really kind not to burst out laughing in view of this grotesque entanglement of bodies searching arms to release them and legs to run away” (: 303). But no kindness can forgive the director for not realizing that without this lampoon of the narrative in relation to the narrative itself — of the narrator in relation to the spectacle that he himself depicts —, whatever could be saved from the story would be, in the end, implausible, as a Dracula performed by a toothless actor. Such a lampoon could be saved with resources not too much complicated as the introduction of a narrator, as it has been done in some classics of Robert Bresson, and in Plata Quemada (Piñeyro, 2000). Meirelles procrastinates the use of this resource till the last minutes of the movie, when he avails himself of the voice of the blindfolded old man, but it is then too late.
A glowing example of nonsensical immaculate didacticism is the speech made by the physician, when he says that he would not matter prostituting his own wife since they were all fated to starve to death. The movie gives here the mistaken impression that the disarray of the whole situation would derive from the dissatisfaction of some fundamental or basic necessity, which could have been previously and predictably attended. Meirelles does no other thing than to repeat literally what is written in the correspondent passage of Saramago’s book, and however, the departure from Saramago’s book understood as a whole, of its spirit, of the marrow of its text and poiesis, couldn’t be larger. In an essay published in the newspaper El Pais eight days after the twin towers attack, Saramago says that, differently from Nietzsche (for whom the fact that God does not exist would imply that everything is possible), for him, Saramago, it is rather the case that God apparently existing in his name all atrocities can be justified. What is actually common to both Saramago and Nietzsche is the indictment of the nihilism in which one falls when everything becomes possible — be it by God, or by the lack of God. Their malaise comes from a liquidation of all values. It could be said that this is exactly one of the main roots of Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira. In the name of survival, everything becomes possible? When the only thing that remains is to survive, we attain the ground of a fundamental necessity, or rather we dissolve the very status apparently fundamental of such a necessity, in the name of which it is perpetrated a general dissolution of all possible values, exactly because in view of such a necessity everything would become justifiable? The most pressing problem is not simply starving to death, as it would be possible to infer in a hurried reading — not that starving to death is not a problem, but, against any simplistic pedagogy, to be able to satisfy people’s hunger and other few basic necessities is not the solution for the blindness at issue here, especially if one does so at the expense of everything else.
What truly horrifies does not come from something concrete, palpable. And when the maiden with sunglasses says, in the movie, “it is not easy knowing that we have killed someone, like I did”, this is just another example of immaculate nonsensical didacticism, occasioned by a literal but myopic repetition of the words in the book. The genuine problem is not simply to kill (no matter if this is done with scissors) as the viewer might wrongly conclude, to leave the cinema only edified by the natural goodness of us all (or of some few, among which he certainly includes, besides the maiden with sunglasses, the physician’s wife and probably he himself). In the book, when she is reflecting over the fact that she had killed the king of ward one with a scissor, the physician’s wife ends considering that “it is necessary to kill… when what is still alive is already dead” (: 189). That is, the genuine drama, the tragedy of consciousness does not come from any original purity, from any humanitarian moral atrophy of the ability to kill. Much on the contrary, tragedy comes from the discovery of a possible state of fuzziness between the alive and the dead, this state of living death, which not only justifies assassination but demands it, as a necessity. One must conclude that what is legitimately pressing here is not the discovery of a natural ground, but the instauration of values, of distinctions and divisions, as the ones between living and dead beings. In the end of the book, the same woman will defend the importance of an order “that wants the dead in their place of the dead and the living in their place of the living, while hens and rabbits feed ones and are feed by the others” (: 288). It is the minimal recognition that not everything must be possible, and that things must not be taken as equal (even if we are starving to death). And there is no lack of irony in this formulation, mentioning hens and rabbits, to warn about the ambiguity and the transitory character of values, but nothing could be more “fundamental” than the contraposition, concretized in time, of these reversible differences. The movie fails in conveying all this, it fails in conveying the complexity of matters at issue, and we are left with nothing more than the self-edification of the good and pathetic viewer in the armchair of the cinema, an unsuspected specimen of Alex from Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, 1971), confident in his hunger and natural inability to kill.
When, differently, the director was bold enough to create, to invent a dialogue that was not originally in the book, the outcome is effective: “may I suck on your nipples? Just a little bit. Here you go”. These expressions uttered in falsetto, among the guttural roars of a dark brown blurry orgy constitute one of the most genuine scenes in the movie. Another example of convincing originality emerging only in the movie is the character of the king of ward one, the clownish amoralism of whom is consummately captured by Gael García Bernal. It would be mean but fair to consider that the character profited from being killed still in the first half of the movie. All the other actors are forced to sustain, from the beginning to the end of the movie, a continuous idealization, that at least in the case of the character performed by Bernal would have been a priori impossible. In the book, both the physician and his wife have defects and ambiguities. For instance, they retreat every time they have the opportunity of taking a more daring attitude that could revert the unbearable situation inside the hospital. Very quickly they accept the ruse of having to pay for the food expropriated by the blinds of the other ward, and when the physician has the chance of taking hold of the firearm of the thief, he fails, and regrets (: 147). The excuse, in this case, is that any abrupt reaction against the thieves could bring the whole situation to an even worse denouement. Or at least it is this that the character says to himself, in the book. And it is not much more that the movie is capable of conveying to the viewer. However, there are in the book other sings that the things a character says to himself — and this applies to the case of the physician as well, and his wife — are to a great measure defensive rationalizations, resulting less from an excellence of reasoning and moral purity than from passivity and even laziness. The movie does not explore these ambiguities, and because of this omission it undermines the main characters, the ones who have to maintain intact, from the beginning to the end, their sizeable dose of goodness. It is true that, even in the book, the passivity of the physician’s wife is not a mere defect, but it is not idealized, no matter if it is somewhat heroic. It is “an infinite fatigue, a will to curl around oneself, the eyes… turned to inside… till they were able to reach and observe the interior of the brain itself, there where the difference between seeing and not seeing is invisible to the simple view” (: 157-8). There is no didacticism here. There is no easy pedagogy and edifying solace. Passivity is as well the possibility already mentioned of salvation as an eschatological retreat, the transfiguration of the symbolic in a thing-like state. Intentionally or not, Saramago flirted here with some kind of Judaic mysticism that is known to be rooted in Portuguese culture since the late middle ages. The concrete essence of things as being something impossible to denominate, as says the maiden with sunglasses: “inside us there is something that has no name, this thing is what we are” (: 262).
The escape from the quarantine hospital, after the fire, with the disappearing of the guards, and the unavoidably lampooned, and thus excellent, “we are free” propels the movie beyond the collapse that all the time one yearns that would finely assail it. This expression, “we are free”, does not sound as a simple cliché, but rather as a hyper cliché, not merely implausible, but completely nonsensical in that world of nuts, and accordingly plausible. It is only this hyper cliché what enables the narrative to recover its breath and go on towards an end that is, unfortunately, more and more broken. In this effective scene of the “we are free”, the camera once more moves from the perspective of a claustrophobic frame — a crack —, opening to the city’s wreckage, remindful, among other things, of the lampooned and apocalyptical atmosphere of classics such as Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). In this freed scenario, the “eat something”, said to the physician by his wife, after the struggle to save the grocery bags in the store, stops being the easy sign of some basic necessity that would be possible to predictably satisfy, and becomes something concrete in the categorical poverty of what one meagerly owns, in a positive void of meaning in which the word “necessity” dismantle as a piece of salami wrested, or as half of a cereal bar coming apart between one’s teeth. It is a scene strong enough to capture all the irony lacking the others — a perfect if not superior version in film of the written joke that it is possible to “heighten” the “perfume of a tough bread loaf” to the state of “the very essence of life” (: 227).
It is not bread, however, but water that gains primacy in the end of the narrative. Including in the book, it has even an explicit religious character, as when the three women washing are presented as “three graces”, and the narrator speaks of “soul” and “God” (: 265-7). Here indeed it appears that something lyric is demanded, maybe even something basic, and definitely fundamental, but that would only be bailed by all the accumulated dirtiness, till them impossible to eliminate. According to the book, there is no water in the piping, it is impossible to get clean. One can change dirty clothes by clean ones, but there is no way to wash, except when the rain comes. We are in the opposite situation in relation to the one at hospital, in which one would do anything, plunge into the most ignoble and stinking dough, just for a loaf of bread. This water is not a necessity that compels, but something that frees one from everything that he or she was forced to stand in the name of an alleged necessity. In this sense, water is really a grace. It is also, one should not forget, cold water, water that makes one tremble, and which one cannot stand very long. In the movie, however, independently from its temperature, all grace is lost, because there is beneath it the romantic imperative (in a Rousseaunian sense) that there are fundamental necessities that would linearly crown the lyric core of some kind of noble humanism, which would be necessary to rescue by all means, even when the paid price does not make up for what is lost. We are then cheered with whispers, a Bach’s cantata melody, and “this is your home now too”, “there is nothing like clean water”, “human family and a dog”… It would be possible to respond to the toast by complaining, among other things, that the terrier of the movie, no matter its wire hair, does not convey any ambiguity as does the one in the book: “a harsh and intractable dog when it has not to wipe out tears” (: 230). One could as well be nostalgic of hyenas “with shrunken rumps”, and hens “crazily happy” eating (possibly human) meat (: 237). To be entirely fair, one has to admit that in this final deception of the narrative, the creator of which lacked non-seeing eyes, another great insight occurred, proving that we are still before the director of Cidade de Deus (2002), a masterpiece. Saramago was able to include, in the last pages of his story, and in an almost paradoxical way, the writer himself, balancing in a subtle asymmetry between writing and reading. Exactly the same paradox is reproduced in the movie, when the physician takes pictures, and in a way that is even more in accordance with this blindness that, after all, seemed to be the subject of them both.
[1] Journalist and philosopher, with publications in Brazil, Chile and Portugal, including chapters of books, papers, translations, and fiction. Member of the GIFHC (Interdisciplinary Group in Philosophy and History of Science), ILEA/ UFRGS – Brazil, he has participated in international symposiums in institutions such as the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Berlim, Alemanha), and the Biblioteca Municipal de Evora (Portugal). He is a Capes scholarship holder (Ministry of Education, Brazil), and received his PhD by the Interdisciplinary PhD Program at Dalhousie University (Halifax, Canada) in July of 2009.
E-mail: azir@dal.ca

[2] All the page references are to Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996. The translations are mine.

2009-11-09T03:03:00.000-08:00

Untitled (to M. B.)

He couldn’t forget that black eyes’ look. It was an intriguing, almost offensive look. He grew uncomfortable to the point of disliking her. But he was thrilled as well, and couldn’t avoid looking back. He looked back many times, although he knew that he shouldn’t. That woman was putting a hex on him, attracting his sight.
He couldn’t stand her though, feeling something he couldn’t explain— a sort of sick sweetness. Talking to her, he felt he hated her, as if she was an insect. The thought of making her suffer gave him the most exquisite pleasure.
He was always uncommitted, he never stayed. However, when she turned to the other side, he saw the flesh of her neck, he wanted to stick his teeth into it.
How old was she anyways? He looked at her swimming style. There was something peculiar about it, like salty water. He felt as if softened and completely sad.
Ann was not like that woman.
At night, he felt lazy. An enourmous pillar inclining and coming down, smashing everything bellow. The thoughts would remain anyways on his mind, his brain, his body. Not only at night. He dreamt about a bull and infinite ants. A metallic fish jumping out of a crack. Wet lips.
He got seek for a week. A fever made him to sweat, and blinded him with a brightness of hot, unknown regions.
What was it that he felt? Everything to go away in eternal repetition, one day after the other, always the same.

2009-10-26T12:46:00.000-07:00

To M. B.

(collected)

In you I fondly hoped to clasp
… a friend whom death alone could sever;
Till envy, with malignant grasp,
… detached you from my breast for ever.

True, she has forced you from my breast,
… yet in my heart you keeps your seat;
There, there your image still must rest,
… until that heart shall cease to bet.

And when the grave restores her dead,
… when life again to dust is given,
On your dear breast I’ll lay my head —
… without you where would be my heave?

* * *

Oh! might I kiss those eyes of fire,
A million scarce would quench desire:
Still would I steep my lips in bliss,
And dwell an age on every kiss:
Nor then should be sated my soul;
Still would I kiss and cling to you:
Nor should my kiss from your dissever;
Still would we kiss and kiss forever;
Even though the numbers did exceed
The yellow harvest’s countless seed.
To part would be a vain endeavour:
Could I desist? — ah! never — never!

* * *

When I dream that you love me, you’ll surely forgive;
Extend not your anger to sleep;
For in visions alone your affection can live, —
I rise, and it leaves me to weep.

Then, Morpheus! Envelope my faculties fast,
Shed over me your languor benign;
Should the dream of tonight but resemble the last,
What rapture celestial is mine!

They tell us that slumber, the sister of death,
Mortality’s emblem is given;
To fate how I long to resign my frail breath,
If this be a foretaste of heaven!

2009-07-15T13:05:00.000-07:00

Magnetic Mirror (to M.B.)

once I saw a lion,
or I thought I saw one,
or was he the one who saw me?

I jumped into his mouth,
and felt the glint of his tooth,
perhaps the tooth of a tiger

hot as the sun’s surface,
a pool full of gold,
in which I tried vainly to write

and he burned me swimming,
erased me reading:
a lion, a tiger, the sun

nobody could have them,
one rising above the other,
letting each other behind

their hoar, however, was besides the most silent:
the steel-blue reflex of a single, intelligent eye,
in the fiery brightness of which many worlds yearned to disappear

2009-06-28T00:06:00.000-07:00

Sleepwalker (to M. B.)

I slept waiting but calm
rocked by your smile,
and the words that you would come,
next time? for sure!

and I dreamt of many things,
they were all happy,
under the horizon of your mouth,
caressed by your teeth

and I almost wished forever
to lie down on this tongue,
to be kept by your word,
always suspended on your breath

even if you swallowed me up,
and perhaps you already did,
what was this cave,
the whirlpool that preceded it?

next time for sure!
which was dark, and silent,
but only a cold came from the window,
and the sheets of my bed all felt apart

was it now,
or was now it too late?
I couldn’t figure out,
I was dreaming I was awake

I woke sleeping but anxious,
as if you had just bitten your tongue,
next to a smile a smirk,
and every word just polite

rock me, rock me, please
only then can I happily dream or wake,
promise always one more next time,
let it never be too late!

2009-05-31T08:48:00.000-07:00

The Throb (to M.B.)

this is just a throb,
you don’t have to listen;
don’t listen to it

it is an impertinent throb!
trying to pulsate through you!

but, please, don’t get angry;
let the throb throb,
it will get tired

not because of your lack of time
not because you are too busy
but it will go away

even if someone saw it;
smiled back;
and even came to say something;

since it isn’t enough
or it is, perhaps, too much
the throb will get afraid

it is just that if it doesn’t throb,
it feels horrible;
and then it throbs again,
and feels worse;

as when you read this,
and get tired;
if you read this,
the more you read

and perhaps now you smile!
you quickly feel it!
isn’t is passing?
finally going away?

miserable impertinent,
she thought she was pulsating through your smile!
this is why she was getting so quiet
this is why everything suddenly seemed so tranquil

please, don’t move;
don’t get angry;
let it get tired,
she will go away;

2007-06-12T11:10:00.000-07:00

2006-08-24T12:16:00.000-07:00