Friday, December 30, 2016

Bellocchio &/or Eye of (Dreadful) Beauty

Wall Art












Ipupiara with Cactus, mixed media drawing by A/Z available with other drawings and photographs at Fine Art America; 
Scenes from Fai bei Sogni (Marco Bellocchio, 2016), and Belphégor ou le Fantôme du Louvre (Claude Barma, 1965);
Caravaggio, Madonna Palafrenieri (1606) [image taken from the Internet];
Egon Schiele, Madonna (1908), Dead Mother (1910) [images taken from Simon Wilson's Egon Schiele (London, Phaidon, 1980)];
A Monster Calls (Juan Antonio Bayona, 2016);
El Orfanato (Juan Antonio Bayona, 2007);
Edgard Varèse's Nocturnal (Youtube); 
Giacinto Scelsi's Okanagon (1968, Youtube);  
Giacinto Scelsi's Four illustrations: IV, Krishna-Avatara; 
Giacinto Scelsi's Come un cri traverse un cerveau (Youtube); 
Galina Ustvolskaya - Sonata No. 6 (Alexei Lubimov, 1988, Youtube);

"La force créatrice échappe à toute dénomination... capable de nous ébranler jusqu'au tréfonds... Elle est probablement matière elle-même, une forme de matière qui n'est pas perceptible aux mêmes sens que les autres espèces connues de matière..." 
Paul Klee (traduction par Pierre-Henri Gonthier)
"On comprend donc que le théâtre, dans la mesure même où il demeure enfermé dans son langage, où il reste en corrélation avec lui, doit rompre avec l'actualité, que son objet n'est pas de résoudre des conflits sociaux ou psychologiques, de servir de champ de bataille à des passions morales, mais d'exprimer objectivement des vérités secrètes, de faire venir au jour par des gestes actifs cette part de vérité enfouie sous les formes dans leurs rencontres avec le Devenir."
A. Artaud ((Théâtre oriental et théâtre occidental)

"... l'amour qui nous lia, ma mère et moi, etait de l'autre monde..."
Pierre Angelici
"Pour autant, tout ce qui concerne Hans reste dans une osbcurité troublante..."
Julia Kristeva, Le génie féminin 2
“Do you know why the Devil is afraid of me? Because I’m uglier than he is.”
"Wer stellt einen Deutschen neben Leopardi z.B.?"
Nietzsche (Nachgelassene Fragmente Frühling-Sommer 1875)
"Who said love will save kids?"
Tommy Cash

"La nomination à laquelle se réfère Françoise Dolto, quand elle dit comment le langage humanise les sons dans lesquels vit l'enfant et qui peuvent l'inquiéter, est un autre problème. Elle consiste non seulement à identifier et à nommer la cause (ce que tu entends, c'est l'aspirateur, c'est la chasse d'eau), mais aussi à permettre de comprendre et de lever l'inquiétude que ces sons peuvent susciter. Nommer les sons en ce sens, les 'mamaïser', comme dit Françoise Dolto, n'est donc bien sûr pas les décrire en eux-mêmes. C'est à cette 'humanisation' des bruits par la parole que fait allusion le poète Rilke, lorsque dans sa Troisième élégie, il s'adresse à une mère, et fait l'éloge de la façon dont elle a rendu pour son enfant le monde 'amical', et la nuit moins inquiétant."
Michel Chion (Le Son)
************************************************************

Passages from Schelling's Die Weltalter, translated by Frederick de Wolfe Bolman Jr:
"… philosophy, which would explain everything… had to accept as explanation precisely this incomprehensibility, this active opposition toward all thought, this dynamic darkness, this positive inclination to obscurity. But it would have preferred to do away altogether with the inconvenient, to dissolve the unintelligible entirely into reason or (like Leibniz) into representation."
"Since there thus is an incessant urge ["Drang"] to be, and that primal essence nevertheless cannot be, it remains in a state of perpetual desire ["Begierde"], as an incessant seeking, an eternal, never quieted passion ["Sucht"] to be. Hence the old expression is valid: Nature seeks itself and does not find itself (quaerit se natura, non invenit)."
"Since that first potency therefore unites in itself opposing powers, of which the one always longs for the outside, the other presses back toward the inside, hence its life is also a life of vexation ["Widerwartigkeit"] and dread ["Angst"], since it does not know which way to turn and so falls into an involuntary, revolving motion."
"The past a weighty concept, known to all and yet understood by few… Only the man who has the power to tear himself loose from himself (from what is subordinate in his nature), is capable of creating a past for himself. This same man alone enjoys a true present..."
"True eternity is not that which excludes all time, but that which contains time (eternal time) subjected to itself. Real eternity is the overcoming of time, as the significant Hebrew language expresses victory (which it places among the first attributes of God) and eternity by one word (naezach)."
"The power of understanding is exhibited not when madness is absent but when it is mastered."
"... then it becomes clear what a terrible thing, about which we had no perception during life, was suppressed by this magic spell of life. And what was but now the object of reverence or love, becomes an object of fear and the most terrible horror. When the abysses of the human heart open up in evil, and those terrible thoughts come forth which should be eternally buried in night and darkness, only then do we know what lies in man with reference to possibility, and how his nature in itself or left to itself is really constituted."
"Everything depends upon comprehending that unity in God which is at the same time duality, or, conversely, the duality which is at the same time unity…. But the concept of that unity, which, because it is a voluntary one, just on that account encloses a duality, is completely foreign to our era."
"... this point of transfiguration often lies almost sensuously perceptible in the most corporeal things."
"Here, too, the creative power can ascend only from the lower to the higher, until it gradually has raised up the very innermost and most hidden power of darkness from the depths. Such [powers] are then the purest, keenest, and most godlike spirits."
"All that comes to be can only do so in discontent; and as dread is the basic feeling of each living creature, so is everything that lives conceived and born only in violent conflict. Who could believe that nature could have created, in rest and peace, or otherwise than in the most violent antagonism of powers, so many kinds of strange products in this terrible external confusion and chaotic inner mixture, where it is hard to find anything just by itself, but all are interpenetrated and ingrown with other things? Are not most products of inorganic nature visibly children of dread, of terror, even of despair?"
"... the nature existing in this conflict struggles as in heavy dreams which, because they are from [mere] being, arise from the past. With growing conflict, those nocturnal births soon pass like wild phantasies through that nature's interior, and in them for the first time it experiences all the horrors of its own nature. The predominant feeling that expresses the conflict of tendencies in being, when there is no knowing which way to turn, is that of dread [Angst]."
"[There is no greatness] without a continual solicitation to madness which, while it must be overcome, must never be completely lacking."
"... a world which is nothing but an image, indeed, an image of an image, a nought of nought, a shadow of a shadow; men who are also only images, only dreams of shadows..."
************************************************************

Passages from Heidegger's Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, translated by Joan Stambaugh:
"Being in general, must be more primordially conceived in order for evil to be comprehensible in its own being and thus introduced into the system, thus making a system of freedom possible…"
"As a lack, it is true that a lack is a not-being-present. Nevertheless, this absence is not nothing. The blind man who has lost his sight will argue vigorously against the statement that blindness is nothing existent and nothing depressing and nothing burdensome. Thus, nothingness is not nugatory; but, rather, something tremendous, the most tremendous element in the nature of Being."
"Nature now does not yet mean what we alone experience immediately as nature, but signifies a metaphysical determination of beings in general and means what belongs to beings as their foundation, but is that which does not really enter the being of the self. Rather, it always remains what is distinguished from the self."
"God's becoming cannot be serialized in individual segments in the succession of ordinary time. Rather, in this becoming every thing is simultaneous."
"In the concept of manence (manere), of remaining, the idea o f mere objective presence, of rigid presence, is contained if no other determination is added to transform it. Immanence thus leads to the idea of things being lifelessly contained in God, just as the skirt hangs in the closet. Rather, the only concept appropriate to the being of things is that of becoming."
"... the not-yet remains. There remains in God the eternal past of himself in his ground. The afterwards and soon are to be unders tood here in an eternal sense. The whole boldness of Schelling's thinking comes into play here. But it is not the vacuous play of thoughts of a manic hermit, it is only the continuation of an attitude of thinking which begins with Meister Eckhart and is uniquely developed in Jacob Boehme."
"This primal longing moves in anticipation like a surging, billowing sea, similar to the matter of Plato, following some dark, uncertain law, incapable in i tself of forming anything that can endure."
"This interpretation of thinghood, however, is also a presupposition for correctly understanding what Schelling is trying to say in the statement that the being of things is a becoming. He does not mean that platitude that all things are continuously changing. Nor does he mean that external ascertainment that there is nowhere at all in the world a state of rest and things really do not have being."
"But the (real) Word, pronounced, exists only in the unity of light and darkness..."
"We find such prefigurations in nature: the strange and chance element of organic formations and deformations, what incites horror, the fact that everything alive is approaching dissolution. Here something appears which has been driven out into selfish exaggeration and is at the same time impotent and repulsive."
"A golden mountain is possible, but this kind of possibility has no real being-possible in the sense that it inclines forward to the making possible of the possible and thus is already on the way to realization. Where evil is possible, it is also already operative in the sense of a throroughgoing attraction of the ground in all beings."
"And even in the terror of evil an essential revelation occurs. For in its craving for self-consumption, the self-craving of malice mirrors that original ground in God, before all existence as it is for i tself completely s triving back into itself, and this is the terrible in God."See also:

***To raise the dead— &/or evidence for the villainous affair, the tale of family disonour, Romish church's pact with the devil (considered the greatest outrage against sense and decency, to be plagued and pestered, though solemnly ratified, à Dieu rien n'est impossible, menteur avéré, nom d'un chien):
"Although Greek names were sometimes applied to the church modes and the principle of diatonic octave scales is found in both systems, certain significant discrepancies seem to belie any direct historical connection. Most conspicuous is the different meaning attributed to the names of the Greek octave species and of the church modes. Comparing the two systems provides a plausible explanation: medieval theorists apparently assumed wrongly that the Greek octave species were named in ascending rather than descending order. The Greek octave species Dorian (E–E), Phrygian (D–D), Lydian (C–C), and Mixolydian (B–B) thus appeared in the church modes as Dorian (D–D), Phrygian (E–E), Lydian (F–F), and Mixolydian (G–G)," (from "Mode," entry in Brittanica, by Mieczyslaw Kolinski);

And also: 

Friday, December 23, 2016

Joyce in a Toadstool & the Southern Lapwing

Canvas Art




The Shadow of the Southern Lapwing, photograph by A/Z available with other photographs and drawings ad Fine Art America;
other pictures of the Southern Lapwing (taken by A/Z) and pictures of James Joyce (taken from the Internet);

"James and Margaret got up at midnight to see their mother's ghost, and Margaret thought she saw her in the brown habit in which she was buried."
Richard Ellmann
"I hear my father talking to me. I wonder where he is."
Herr Satan/Dear Cuckold (to Maria Jolas)
"Qu'est-ce qu'un expert, quand il s'agit de Joyce, voilà ma question..."
Jacques Derrida

"... mais lui il est catholique, il n'est pas pascatholique."
Hélène Cixous (Portrait de Jacques Derrida en Jeune Saint Juif) 
"No doubt the incongruity of making his good Dubliner a Jew, and one so indifferent to all religious forms as to have sampled (without accepting) both Protestantism and Catholicism, attracted him with its satirical possibilities."
Richard Ellmann
"... em Ulysses e Finnegans Wake, a epifania atingirá mecanismos da palavra e até os da letra... a técnica epifânica se incorporou na sua linguagem, Joyce não precisou mais falar nela. Não porque a repudiasse..."
Olga de Sá
"... c'est d'une parole en l'air qu'il nous a dite, d'un 'Vous devriez venir à Balbec,' que toute notre vie et notre oeuvre sont sorties."
Marcel Proust (le narrateur)

"Now, despite the jobbing of bigots and of their sectarian publishing houses, and despite the 'Fly-Fishers' and the types which they represent, and despite the unwillingness of the print-packers (a word derived from pork-packers) and the initial objections of the Dublin publishers, Mr Joyce's novel appears in book form, and intelligent readers gathering few by few will read it, and it will remain a permanent part of English literature—written by an Irishman in Trieste and first published in New York City..."
Ezra Pound (At last the novel appears)
"To begin with matters lying outside dispute I should say that Joyce has taken up the art of writing where Flaubert left it. In Dubliners and The Portrait he had not exceeded the Trois Contes or L'Education; in Ulysses he has carried on a process begun in Bouvard et Pécuchet; he has brought it to a degree of greater efficiency, of greater compactness; he has swallowed the Tentation of St. Antoine whole, it serves as comparions for single episode in Ulysses."
"Messrs Bouvard and Pécuchet are the basis of democracy; Bloom also is the basis of democracy; he is the  man in the street, the next man, the public, not our public, but Mr. Wells' public; for Mr Wells he is Hocking's public, he is l'homme moyen sensuel; he is also Shakespeare, Ulysses, The Wandering Jew, the Daily Mail  reader, the man who believes what he sees in the  papers, Everyman, and 'the goat'..."
"Joyce's characters not only  speak their own language, but they think their own language."
"Rabelais himself rests, he remains, he is too solid to be diminished by any pursuer; he was a rock against the follies of his age; against ecclesiastic theology, and more remarkably against the blind idolatry of the classics just coming into fashion. He refused the lot, lock, stock, and barrel, with a greater heave than Joyce has yet exhibited; but I can think of no other prose author whose proportional status in pan-literature is not modified by the advent of Ulysses."
Ezra Pound (Paris Letter)

"There was a lady from Philadelphia who was an authority on Buddhist art. When she found out I was interested in mushrooms, she said, 'Have you an explanation of the symbolism involved in the death of the Buddha by his eating a mushroom?' I explained that I'd never been interested in symbolism; that I preferred just taking things as themselves, not as standing for other things. But them a few days later while rambling in the woods I got to thinking. I recalled the Indian concept of the relation of life and the seasons. Spring is Creation. Summer is Preservation. Fall is Destruction. Winter is Quiescence. Mushrooms grow most vigorously in the fall, the period of destruction, and the function of many of them is to bring about the final decay of rotting material. In fact, as I read somewhere, the world would be an impassible heap of old rubbish were it not for mushrooms and their capacity to get rid of it. So I wrote to the lady in Philadelphia. I said, 'The function of mushrooms is to rid the world of old rubbish. The Buddha died a natural death.'"
John Cage (Edgard Varèse)
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About Ulysses:
"... it is Bolshevism, experimental, anti-conventional, anti-Chistian, chaotic, totally unmoral!"
"Joyce's advice to his Aunt Josephine: 'You say there is a lot of it you don't understand. I told you to read the Odyssey first... Then buy at once the Adventures of Ulysses."

Dates:
"1889... takes Aloysius as his saint's name. Given four strikes on the back of the hand with a pandybat for use of 'vulgar language'."
"1900... delivers paper defending the attention paid to mundane life in contemporary drama (especially Ibsen)."
"1902... delivers paper praising the Irish poet James Clarence Mangan and advocating literature as 'the continual affirmation of the spirit'."
"1916... writes 'A Notebook of Dreams'—'record' of Nora's dreams with James Joyce's interpretations."
"1933... Judge John M. Woolsey, US District Court, delivers opinion that Ulysses is not obscene and can be published in the USA."
"1934... Lucia under the care of Carl Jung."

Quotes:
"God, these bloody English. Bursting with money and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford... you have the real Oxford manner." (Buck Mulligan)
"What is a ghost?" (Stephen Dedalus)
"If the shrew is worsted yet there remains to her woman's invisible weapon. There is, I feel in the words, some goad of the flesh driving him into a new passion, a darker shadow of the first, darkening even his own understanding of himself. A like fate awaits him and the two rages commingle in a whirlpool." (Stephen Dedalus)
"They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls." (Stephen Dedalus)
"William, in the plays... as a painter of old Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas... What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours. A star, a daystar, a firedrake rose at his birth... the recumbent constellation which is the signature of his initial among the stars. His eyes watched it, lowlying on the horizon, eastward of the bear, as he walked by the slumberous summer fields at midnight..." (Stephen Dedalus)
"They drove his wits astray by visions of hell." (Buck Mulligan)
"Married to the greasy nose!" (Miss Douce)
"O, Miss Douce! You horrid thing!" (Miss Kennedy)
"And I belong to a race too that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant... Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs to us by right... I'm talking about injustice." (Leopold Bloom)
"... the opposite of hatred." (Leopold Bloom)
"O my! Puddeny pie! He has his bib destroyed." (Cissy Caffrey)
"Pornosophical philotheology. Metaphysics in Mecklenburg street!" (Lynch)
"They make you kaput, Leopoldleben. You watch them chaps." (Rudolf Bloom)
"Sacred Heart of Mary, where were you at all, at all?" (Ellen Bloom)
"Glory Alice, you do look a holy show!" (Mrs Breen)
"The dear dead days beyond recall." (Mrs Breen)
"I'm as staunch a Britisher as you are, sir. I fought with the colours for king and country in the absentminded war under general Gough in the park and was disabled at Spion Kop and Bloemfontein..." (Leonard Bloom)
"Are you of the unfortunate class?" (Second Watch)
"He addressed me in several handwritings with fulsome compliments as a Venus in furs and alleged profound pity for my frostbound coachman Palmer while in the same breath he expressed himself as envious of his earflaps and fleecy sheepskins and of his fortunate proximity to my person..." (Mrs Bellingham)
"You are a credit to your country, sir, that's what you are." (An Old Resident, also Woody Allen's Splendini)
"I'm a Bloomite and I glory in it." (The Veiled Sibyl)
"The hand that rocks the cradle." (Leopold Bloom)
"One two tlee: tlee tlwoe tlone." (Leopold Bloom)
"Death is the highest form of life." (The Cap)
"(Explodes in laughter) Great unjust God!" (Zoe)
"Safe arrival of Antichrist." (The Newboys)
"What?" (All)
"... in the end the world without end." (Stephen Dedalus)
"Serpents too are gluttons for woman's milk. Wind their way through miles of omnivorous forest to sucksucculent her breast dry." (Leopold Bloom)
"Instinct rules the world. In life. In death." (Leopold Bloom)
"Will some pleashe pershon not now impediment so catastrophics mit agitation of firstclass tablenumpkin?" (Virag Lipoti)
"Quack!" (Virag's Head)
"Exuberant female. Enormously I desiderate your domination. I am exhausted, abandoned, no more young." (Leopold Bloom)
"Dungdevourer!" (Bello)
"You were a nicelooking Miriam when you clipped off your backage hairs and lay swooning in the thing across the bed as Mrs Dandrade, about to be violated by Liutenant Smythe-Smythe, Mr Philip Augustus Blockwell, M. P., Signor Laci Daremo, the robust tenor, blueeyed Bert, the liftboy, Henry Fleury of Gordon Bennett fame, Sheridan, the quadroon Croesus, the varsity wetbob eight from old Trinity, Ponto, her splendid Newfoundland and Bobs, dowager duchess of Manorhamilton." (Bello)
"I cure fits or money refunded." (The Nymph)
"We grew by Poulaphouca waterfall. We gave shade on languorous summer days." (The Yews)
"Done. Prff!" (Leopold Bloom)
"Give me back that potato, will you?" (Leopold Bloom)
"I have a little private business with your wife. You understand?" (Blazes Boylan)
"(Horrorstruck) Lemur, who are you?" (Stephen Dedalus)
"The corpsechewer!" (Stephen Dedalus)
"I'll bring you all to heel!" (Stephen Dedalus)
"He expresses himself with much marked refinement of phraseology." (Biddy the Clap)
"Let my country die for me." (Stephen Dedalus)
"Introibo ad altare diaboli." (Father Malachi O'Flynn)
"Htengier Lnetopinmo Dog Drol eht rof, Aiulella!" (The Voice of all the Damned)
"Dooooooooooog!" (Adonai)
"Ute ute ute ute ute ute ute ute." (The Retriever)
"Hohohohohohoh Hohohohome! (The Horse)
"... like me, though in reality I'm not." (Leopold Bloom)
"What a pity the government did not supply our men with wonderworkers during the South African campaign! What a relief it would have been!" (Absentminded beggar)
"Who was M'Intosh?" (Leopold Bloom)
"Where was Moses when the candle went out?" (Leopold Bloom)

Thoughts/Visions:
"Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood..." (Stephen Dedalus) 
"Ghostly light on the tortured face." (Stephen Dedalus)
"An elderly man shot up near the spur of rock a blowing red face. He scrambled up by the stones, water glistening on his pate and on its garland of grey hair, water rilling over his chest and paunch and spilling jets out of his black sagging loincloth."
"... and in my mind's darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scally folds." (Stephen Dedalus)
"... and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped." (Stephen Dedalus)
"Around the slabbed tables the tangle of wined breaths and grumbling gorges. His breath hangs over our saucestained plates, the green fairy's fang thrusting between his lips." (Stephen Dedalus)
"A bloated carcase of a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack. Before him the gunwale of a boat, sunk in sand. Un coche ensablé, Louis Veuillot called Gautier's prose. These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here." (Stephen Dedalus)
"Behold the handmaid of the Moon. In sleep the west sign calls her hour, bids her rise. Bridebed, childbed, bed of death, ghostcandled. Omnis caro ad te veniet. He comes, pale vampire, through storms his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth's kiss." (Stephen Dedalus)
"Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languily and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds... they are weary." (Stephen Dedalus)
"The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr." (Leopold Bloom)
"Out it rushes: blue. One whiff of that and you're a goner." (Leopold Bloom)
"Love among the tombstones. Romeo. Spice of pleasure. In the midst of death we are in life. Both ends meet." (Leopold Bloom)
"Chinese cemeteries with giant poppies growing produce the best opium..." (Leopold Bloom)
"Gentle sweet air blew round the bared heads in a whisper. Whisper. The boy by the gravehead held his wreath with both hands staring quietly in the black open space." (Leopold Bloom &/or the Narrator/Arranger)
"An obese grey rat toddled along the side of the crypt, moving the pebbles." (Leopold Bloom)
"Pyramids in sand. Built in bread and onions." (Leopold Bloom)
"There he is: the brother. Image of him. Haunting face. Now that's a coincidence. Course hundreds of times you think of a person and don't meet him. Like a man walking in his sleep." (Leopold Bloom)
"Coming events cast their shadows before." (Leopold Bloom)
"Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft, warm, sticky gumjelly lips. Flower her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat." (Leopold Bloom)
"... woman's breasts full in her blouse of nun's veiling, fat nipples upright..." (Leopold Bloom)
"Stuck, the flies buzzed." (Leopold Bloom)
"Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing be." (Stephen Dedalus)
"She dances in a foul gloom where gum burns with garlic. A sailorman, rustbearded, sips from a beaker rum and eyes her. A long and seafed silent rut. She dances, capers, wagging her sowish hauches and her hips, on her grow belly flapping a ruby egg." (Stephen Dedalus)
"She will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my hear, my soul. Salt green death." (Stephen Dedalus)
"His face got all grey instead of being red like it was and there was a fly walking over it up to his eye." (Master Dignam)
"Chords dark. Lugugugubrious. Low. In a cave of the dark middle earth. Embedded ore. Lumpmusic." (Leopold Bloom)
"Body of white woman, a flute alive. Blow gentle. Loud. Three holes all..." (Leopold Bloom)
"The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead." (Arranger)
"He was eying her as a snake eyes its prey." (Gerty MacDowell)
"Edy had her own quiet way of saying things like that she knew would wound like the confounded little cat she was." (Gerty MacDowell)
"... a bat flew forth from the ivied belfry through the dusk, hither, thither, with a tiny lost cry." (Gerty MacDowell)
"Back of everything magnetism." (Leopold Bloom)
"Hanging by his heels in the odour of sanctity." (Leopold Bloom)
"Howth settled for slumber tired of long days, of yumyum rhododendrons (he was old) and felt gladly the night breeze lift, ruffle his fell of ferns. He lay but opened a red eye unsleeping, deep and slowly breathing, slumberous but awake." (Leopold Bloom &/or arranger)
"Bottle with story of a treasure in it thrown from a wreck." (Leopold Bloom)
"The adiaphane in the noon of life is an Egypt's plague which in the nights of prenativity and postmortemity is their most proper ubi and quomodo." (Stephen Dedalus)
"In terror the poor girl flees away through the murk. She is the bride of darkness, a daughter of night... There is none now to be for Leopold, what Leopold was for Rudolph. (Leopold Bloom &/or arranger)
"Parallax stalks behind and goads them, the lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions." (Leopold Bloom/ Stephen Dedalus &/or arranger)
"She leads him towards the steps, drawing him by the odour of her armpits, the vice of her painted eyes, the rustle of her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the lion reek of all the male brutes that have possessed her." (Arranger &/or Leopold Bloom)
"Round and round a moth flies, colliding, escaping." (Arranger &/or Leopold Bloom)
"And a prettier, daintier head of winsome curls was never seen on a whore's shoulders." (Arranger &/or Stephen Dedalus/ Leopold Bloom)
"Bello grabs her hair violently and drags her forward." (Arranger &/or Leopold Bloom/ Stephen Dedalus)
"Mute inhuman faces throng forward, leering, vanishing, gibbering, Booloohoom." (Arranger &/or Leopold Bloom/ Stephen Dedalus)
"Whispered kisses are heard in all the wood. Faces of hamadryads peep out from the boles and among the leaves and break blossoming into bloom." (Arranger &/or Leopold Bloom/ Stephen Dedalus)
"She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word." (Stephen Dedalus)
"A green crab with malignant red eyes sitcks deep its grinning claws in Stephen's heart." (Stephen Dedalus)
"Time's livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry." (Stephen Dedalus)
"A violent erection of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his death clothes on to the cobblestones." (Stephen Dedalus/ Leopold Bloom &/or arranger)
"Old Gummy Granny in sugarloaf hat appears seated on a toadstool, the deathflower of the potato blight on her breast." (Stephen Dedalus/ Leopold Bloom &/or arranger)
"Pandemonium... The midnight sun is darkened... Laughing witches in red cutty sarks ride through the air on broomsticks.... It rains dragon's teeth." (Stephen Dedalus/ Leopold Bloom &/or arranger)
"The Reverend Mr Haines Love raises high behind the celebrant's petticoats, revealing his grey bare hairy buttocks between which a carrot is stuck." (Stephen Dedalus/ Leopold Bloom &/or arranger)
"Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing hte page." (Leopold Bloom)
"... as she also was Spanish or half so, types that wouldn't do things by halves, passionate abandon of the south, casting every shred of decency to the winds." (Leopold Bloom)
"... from existence to nonexistence gone he would be by all as none perceived." (Arranger &/or Leopold Bloom)
"To knock or not to knock." (Arranger &/or Leopold Bloom)
"Unsmiling, he heard and saw with wonder a jew's daughter, all dressed in green." (Arranger &/or Leopold Bloom)
"... theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you..." (Molly Bloom)
"... he was very handsome at that time trying to look like lord Byron I said I liked though he was too beautiful for a man..." (Molly Bloom)
"... I hate an unlucky man..." (Molly Bloom)
"... you cant get on in this world without style..." (Molly Bloom)
"... when I came to page 50 the part about where she hangs him up out of a hook with a cord flagellate sure theres nothing for a woman in that all invention made up about he drinking the champagne out of her slipper..." (Molly Bloom)
"... titties he calls them I had to laugh yes..." (Molly Bloom)
"... I don't like books with a Molly in them..." (Molly Bloom)
"... I wish somebody would write me a loveletter... true or not it fills up your whole day..." (Molly Bloom)
"... after I tried with the Banana but I was afraid it might break and get lost up in me somewhere..." (Molly Bloom)
"... I tortured the life out of him... his eyes shut and a bird flying below us..." (Molly Bloom)
"... my mother whoever she was might have given me a nicer name the Lord knows after the lovely one she had Lunita Laredo..." (Molly Bloom)
"... I wouldn't mind being a man and get up on a lovely woman..." (Molly Bloom)
"... theyve money of course so theyre all right I wouldnt marry him not if he was the last man in the world besides theres something queer about their children always smelling around..." (Molly Bloom)
"... for the one thing he slept on the floor half the night naked the way the jews used when somebody dies belonged to them..." (Molly Bloom)
"... and Fanny M Coys husband white head of cabbage skinny thing with a turn in her eye trying to sing my songs shed want to be born all over again and her old green dress..." (Molly Bloom)
"... her window weeds wont improve her appearance..." (Molly Bloom)
"... he insisted hed go into mourning for the cat..." (Molly Bloom)
"... those fine young men I could see down in Margate strand bathing place from the side of the rock standing up in the sun naked like a God or something and then plunging into the sea with them why arent all men like that thered be some consolation for a woman..." (Molly Bloom)
"... there so simple I wouldnt mind taking him in my mouth if nobody was looking..." (Molly Bloom)
"... when do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every penny they have... a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop..." (Molly Bloom)
"... no wonder they treat us the way they do we are a dreadful lot of bitches..." (Molly Bloom)
"... that his wife is fucked yes and damn well fucked too up to my neck..." (Molly Bloom)
***All quotations here come from the Ulysses the 1922 text, edited by Jeri Johnson (Oxford, 1993).

On Nationalism:
"Nationality (if this is not really a useful fiction like many others which the scalpels of the present-day scientists have put paid to) must find its basic reason for being in something that surpasses, that transcends and that informs changeable entities such as blood or human speech. The mystic theologian who assumed the pseudonym of Dionysius the Areopagite said somewhere that ‘God has arranged the limits of the nations according to his angels’ and this is probably not purely a mystic concept. In Ireland we can see how the Danes, the Firbolgs, the Milesians from Spain, the Norman invaders, the Anglo-Saxon colonists and the Huguenots came together to form a new entity, under the influence of a local god, one might say."
"I find a bit naïve to heap insults on the Englishmen for his misdeeds in Ireland. A conqueror cannot be amateurish, and what England did in Ireland over the centuries is no different from what the Belgians are doing today in the Congo Free State..."
James Joyce, "Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages."
"All the Anglo-Saxon soul is in Crusoe: virile independence, unthinking cruelty, persistence, slow yet effective intelligence, sexual apathy, practical and well-balanced religiosity, calculating dourness."
James Joyce, "Realism and Idealism in English Literature."

On Oscar Wilde:
"Anyone who follows closely the life and language of men, whether in a soldier’s barracks or in a large office of commerce, will hesitate to believe that all those who cast stones at Wilde were themselves without blemish. In fact, everyone feels reluctant in speaking with others on this subject fearing that his listener might know more about it than himself."
"Wilde assimilation of other natures alien to his own, such as those of the delinquent and the humble... is the true inherent in the spirit of Catholicism: that men cannot reach the divine heart except across that sense of separation and loss that is called sin."
James Joyce, "Oscar Wilde: The Poet of Salomé."

On Blake:
"Blake, like many other man of great genius, was not attracted by cultivated and refined woman. Either he preferred simple women with sensual and nebulous mind… or the demon hidden in a cloud."
"Elementary beings and the spirits of deceased great men would often enter the poet’s room at night to speak to him about art and the imagination… Ought we to be amazed that the symbolic beings Los, Urizen, Vala, Tiriel, and Enitharmon and the shades of Homer and Milton should come from their ideal world into a poor room in London, or that the incense that greeted their coming was the smell of Indian tea and eggs fried in lard?"
"If we were to lay a charge of madness against every great genius who does not share the science undergraduate’s fatuous belief in headlong materialism now held in such high regard, little would remain of world art and history."
James Joyce, "Realism and Idealism in English Literature."

On Mangan:
"Mangan obtained a position as assistant librarian in the huge library of Trinity College Dublin… Mangan passed his days studying in this library, becoming a reasonably accomplished linguist. He was well familiar with the Italian, Spanish, French and German languages and literatures, besides those of Ireland and England and, it would seem, had some knowledge of oriental languages, probably Sanskrit and Arabic."
"I understand that pathologists deny the possibility of combining the delights of alcohol and opium, and it seems that Mangan was soon convinced of this fact, for he dedicated himself unremittingly to filling himself with narcotics. Mitchel tell us how Mangan looked like a living skeleton towards the end of his life. His face was fleshless, barely covered by a translucent skin, like fine porcelain, his body wasted. His eyes, behind which shone rare glimmers which seemed to hide the horrendous, voluptuous memory of his visions, were dreaming, large and staring; his voice was drawling, faint and sepulchral… So lived and died the man who I consider the most distinguished poet of the modern Celtic world and one of the most inspired poets of any country ever to make use of the lyric form."
James Joyce, "James Clarence Mangan."

***To raise the dead— &/or evidence for the villainous affair, the tale of family disonour, Romish church's pact with the devil (considered the greatest outrage against sense and decency, to be plagued and pestered, though solemnly ratified, à Dieu rien n'est impossible, menteur avéré, nom d'un chien):
"Although Greek names were sometimes applied to the church modes and the principle of diatonic octave scales is found in both systems, certain significant discrepancies seem to belie any direct historical connection. Most conspicuous is the different meaning attributed to the names of the Greek octave species and of the church modes. Comparing the two systems provides a plausible explanation: medieval theorists apparently assumed wrongly that the Greek octave species were named in ascending rather than descending order. The Greek octave species Dorian (E–E), Phrygian (D–D), Lydian (C–C), and Mixolydian (B–B) thus appeared in the church modes as Dorian (D–D), Phrygian (E–E), Lydian (F–F), and Mixolydian (G–G)," (from "Mode," entry in Brittanica, by Mieczyslaw Kolinski);

See also:
And also:

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Icons of Romanticism (Brazil)



"'Sos de un romanticismo inaguantable'"
(se pensaba) Oliveira & Julio Cortázar
"Joyce took pleasure in undercutting romanticism, so when Budgen happened to speak of the 'heart,' Joyce commented, 'The seat of the affections is lower down, I think."
Richard Ellmann

"The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in the glass." 
Oscar Wild & Buck Mulligan
"Hat Jemand, Ende des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, einen deutlichen Begriff davon, was Dichter starker Zeitalter Inspirationnannten? Im andren Falle will ich’s beschreiben..."
Nietzsche (Ecce Homo)
"The vehement yearning for violence, so characteristic of some of the best modern creative artists, thinkers, scholars, and craftsmen, is a natural reaction of those whom society has tried to cheat of their strength..."
Hanna Arendt

Em Álvares de Azevedo "havia uma certa razão de consanguinidade com Byron e uma íntima convivência com os poetas do norte da Europa". 
"... uma verdadeira sensibilidade. A melancolia de Azevedo era sincera."
"Como poeta humorístico, Azevedo ocupa um lugar muito distinto. A viveza, a originalidade, o chiste, o humor dos versos deste gênero são notáveis."
- Machado de Assis, "Lira dos Vintes Anos".

"Quem souber apreciar a cristalina, abstrata e rigorosa arquitetura dodecafônica, quase geométrica, de sua 'Suíte para piano'opus 25 ou de seu 'Quinteto de sopros', jamais poderá imaginar que a frase que se segue foi dita por Arnold Schönberg: 'Aquele que não possuir o romantismo em seu coração é um ser humano decrépito."
"Schönberg soube entender e mesmo exercitar muito bem o pathos wagneriano, mas, em vez de tentar espichá-lo ou 'modernizá-lo', como o fez Richard Strauss, ele provocou a sua imposão. Ao contrário de Debussy, que assumiu um radical distanciamento daquele estilo e técnicas composicionais, tecendo por fora e lentamente a sua contribuição renovadora, Schönberg provocou um envenenamento na engrenagem das formas, levando-as ao superlativo da expressividade, ao conflito, a uma neurótica impulsiva subjetividade onde o indivíduo situava-se como centro absoluto, intérprete e juiz do universo. A evolução desse comportamento espiritual, que veio desembocar em nosso século no expressionismo; que contou com figuras como Nolde, Kokoschka, Kandinsky, Chagal e Roualt na pintura; Wedekind, Werfel e Kafka na literatura; Wiene, Lang, Pabst, Dreyer e Murnau, no cinema, teve, em música, na obra de Arnold Schönberg, o seu carro-chefe."
Júlio Medaglia (Música Impopular)

"... como um poema que cismei numa semana de febre — uma aberração dos princípios da ciência."
"Conhaque! Não te ama quem não te entende!"
"E eis-te aí vazia, minha garrafa! Vazia como mulher bela que morreu!"
"Fumais? Perguntais de que serve o tinteiro sem tinta..."
Algumas mulheres "em falta de cabelos na cabeça os têm no coração".
"A meretriz é um cadáver. Vale-nos ao menos que sobre seu peito não se morre de frio!"
"A maior desgraça deste mundo é ser Fausto sem Mefistófeles..."
"... o que é tudo no mundo senão vapor?"
"Dizem que se a rabeca de Paganini dava sons tão humanos, tão melodiosos, é que ele fizera passar a alma de sua mãe pelas cordas de seu instrumento."
"Não há melhor túmulo para a dor que uma taça cheia de vinho ou uns olhos negros cheios de languidez."
"Não maldigas a voz rouca do corvo: ele canta na impureza um poema desconhecido."
"... nos mangues e nas águas do Amazonas e do Orenoco há mais mosquitos e sezões do que inspiração."
"... o ateísmo como na Rainha Mab de Shelley."
"A filosofia é uma cripta escura onde se esbarra na treva."
"Fausto é Werther que envelheceu."
- Alvares de Azevedo, Macário.
"Aqui dissipa-se o mundo visionário e platônico."
"A poesia é um defeito no cérebro."
"Se Adão pecou em estado de inocência, que muito é que nos dias da impureza peque o mísero Puff?"
"Este demônio de um poeta como eu nem vale um murro!"
"Ora, façam ideia que ternuras terá essa lagarta posta a fresco!"
"... como cala o vento do trópico na podre calmaria."
- Alvares de Azevedo, segunda e terceira parte da Lira dos Vinte Anos.
"A noite escura é negra como um túmulo. Durmamos."
- Alvares de Azevedo, "Gloria Moribunda".

Alvares de Azevedo “foi o primeiro, quase o único antes do Modernismo, a dar categoria poética ao prosaísmo cotidiano, à roupa suja, ao cachimbo sarrento; não só por exigência da personalidade contraditória, mas como execução de um programa conscientemente traçado”.
- Antônio Cândido, “Alvarez de Azevedo, ou Ariel e Caliban”, Formação.

See also:
Pour une littérature mineur: Mário Quintana as I see him;
Pau Brasil (Oswald de Andrade);
Mario de Andrade, tel que je l'imagine (bricolage & fragments);
Noite Morta (Manuel Bandeira, 1921);
Favorite Drummond (with translation);
Podem ficar com a realidade (Leminski);
Poème du retour: Paulo Leminski et l'éternel moustache de Nietzsche;
Two invisible phanopoeias & a silence (by Arnaldo Antunes) + Alice Ruiz;

Excerpts from a Michèle Lamy & GAIKA interview (Dazed, March 2018): 
"I always want to explore ‘radical luxury’ – I mean, I like radical more than I like luxury, and it’s very nice to be able to combine art and the commercial, but it’s one thing to say something, but you need to demonstrate it with the theme. And so we have the collection upstairs and this here (the boxing studio)." 
"For me it’s about equality, it’s about honesty. It’s about all these things where I can’t accept the alternative. Like some of the things we just seem to accept in the world as normal. Misogyny, racism, intolerance, you know, we have conversations surrounding these things in the media all the time, but nothing’s changing. And when you think about it, it’s pretty abhorrent. You know, you have to tell men not to rape people, like, including people who supposedly run the world, they have to be told not to rape…"
"I think boxing is a good metaphor for the fight we face and how we should be fighting it. You know, boxing is one-on-one. You look your opponent in the eyes and there are a lot of rules and and there is a lot of respect, traditionally. You know, it brings in a lot of different people; you take people off the street, and kids, and people from all different walks of life, and you see people realise themselves and their potential in the boxing ring. Instead of taking a gun and shooting 20 people in anger, you can be measured and see how to be strong and how to stand for yourself as an individual here."
"The world’s changing and I think the power in the world is shifting and changing. It’s shifting away from the West, it’s shifting away from men, and you’ve got one of two reactions: accept the world is changing and be part of it, or build walls, physically or metaphorically to stop it and to block it out... Yeah, to be like Trump and his wall, you know, in the White House cowering thinking ‘we are the last supreme white beings’, sitting there with his finger on the nuclear button... So extreme. You know, I think that it (Trump’s appointment) made a lot of people wake up..."
"You know, it never really made sense to me – the massive amount of inequality in the world just seems unnecessary. It just doesn’t seem like an efficient way to keep the world turning if you think of it as a machine or a structure. It’s purely about ego as far as I can tell, it’s not even just about the material side of things or money, it’s about dominance."
"... since the dawn of the internet, and people being constantly connected to these violent images every minute, every second, it’s important that the press change too. The media should be analysing themselves and changing the way they do things. I want to see unbiased opinions, I don’t want to see left-wing newspapers or right-wing newspapers. I want to see a tribune that covers it all in a fair way..." Michèle Lamy and GAIKA go head to head on the fight for the future (Dazed, 2018);

Monday, December 12, 2016

Godard's Sympathy for the Devil, British Sounds & Prénom Carmen








Spectres de Marx (Jacques Derrida, 1993);
Andy Warhol about Godard;
Gang of Four (Damaged Goods);
Red Hot Chili Peppers (Coffe Shop);
Code Morel & One Hundred Forty-Nine Inches;
Devenir Musician (for more A/Z videos, see here);

"Andy Gill and Jon King [from Gang of Four] ran Leeds University's student film society, so they'd have been familiar with Godard's work: the deliberately exposed means of production (like the clapper board that flashes into view every so often in La Chinoise); the disjointedness (continuity lapses, incorrect eye line matches, jump cuts, lack of congruence between images and sound)..."
"Rather than cozily dividing the world into a righteous 'us' versus a corrupt 'them', Gang of Four's songs implicated listeners (and themselves) in the very processes being critiqued. But that didn't mean there weren't sides worth taking or enemies worth fighting. In spring 1979, Gang of Four participated in Rock Against Racism..."
"Over the last twenty-five years, countless bands have seized on aspects of the Gang of Four style, finding inspiration in the possibility the Leeds group opened up for a new form of rock that's aggressive and violent without being oppressively macho—Pylonm the B-52s, Romeo Void, Red Hot Chilli Peppers (who enlisted Gill to produce their debut album)..."
Simon Reynolds

"And what's more important: we must be aware of the so called friend who in the end is the enemy."
"Peace is the language of the integrationists: but there can be no peace... until the black people of the world are free." 
Godard/ Sympathy for the Devil
"Sometimes the class struggle is also the struggle of one image against another image, of one sound against another sound. In a film the struggle is between images and sounds."
"Is the Marxist concept of surplus value the best weapon with which to unmask the bourgeois concept of presentation? The first task of the anti-imperialist cinema is to answer that question."
"There are neither self-evident images nor images that speak for themselves in the way the Russian revisionist films and the mass circulation magazines in the West pretend."
"Seizing the revolution with one hand and production with the other. What does that mean for militant film makers? It doesn't mean bringing films to the people, but making films from and through the people." 
Godard/ British Sounds

"A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking."
Andy Warhol
"O rock com sua redundância assumida, como diz Cage, é atravessado por uma torrente de energia que arrasta tudo... cetelha que espalha, no campo das músicas dançante, a novidade do pulso-ruído."
José Miguel Wisnik

***To raise the dead— &/or evidence for the villainous affair, the tale of family disonour, Romish church's pact with the devil (considered the greatest outrage against sense and decency, to be plagued and pestered, though solemnly ratified, à Dieu rien n'est impossible, menteur avéré, nom d'un chien):
"Although Greek names were sometimes applied to the church modes and the principle of diatonic octave scales is found in both systems, certain significant discrepancies seem to belie any direct historical connection. Most conspicuous is the different meaning attributed to the names of the Greek octave species and of the church modes. Comparing the two systems provides a plausible explanation: medieval theorists apparently assumed wrongly that the Greek octave species were named in ascending rather than descending order. The Greek octave species Dorian (E–E), Phrygian (D–D), Lydian (C–C), and Mixolydian (B–B) thus appeared in the church modes as Dorian (D–D), Phrygian (E–E), Lydian (F–F), and Mixolydian (G–G)," (from "Mode," entry in Brittanica, by Mieczyslaw Kolinski);

***See also:
God Save the Queen (Blake's Palace of Wisdom);

Concretos &/ou Brazilian Inteligentsia PLUS Zumthor (medieval poetry) & villancicos...







Kurdt Coebane's Kurdt Alone Ornamented (original picture from Brett Morgen's Montage of Heck, 2015) plus transcriated quotations from Nelson Leirner, Agusto de Campus Blonde & dance (A/Z Instagram post); 
Haroldo de Campos reading Galáxias in Júlio Bressane's Sermões (1989);
Haroldo de Campos, imagem em Hi Fi (Ivan Cardoso, 1999);
Cademar (Tom Zé/Youtube); 
George Antheil's Violin Sonata n. 2 (Vahid Khadem-Missagh and Gottlieb Wallisch, 2015,Youtube); 

"Eu honestamente achava que Haroldo tivesse feito um pacto com Mefistófeles."
"Como pode Haroldo de Campos ter morrido praticamente na pobreza?"
Gerald Thomas, Entre Duas Fileiras

"BRASIL é o maior corta-barato que existe; um copo de leite, corta qualquer onda, menos a nossa é claro. Nunca vi tanta burrice e vulgaridade, por isso prefiro pensar em você e amá-la e fascinar-me com tudo o que você é e que nada tem a ver com aquilo: EXEMPLO DA EXCEÇÃO! E cada vez menos gente contacto por lá: IRMÃOS CAMPOS são dos poucos e de nível que sabemos e escrevi longamente sobre você e tudo o que me veio com sua carta, sopro vital, tão diferente da morna complacência brasileira de banho de bidê; dá-me arrepios sequer pensar naquilo tudo."
Hélio Oiticica (cara à Lygia Clark)

"Saussure, anagramas, o diabo no texto. Proporei aqui uma equação à maneira de ex-libris: Saussure (anagrama) está para Peirce (diagrama) como ambos para Fenellosa/Pound (ideograma). Homologias fônicas, homologias sintáticas (coreografia logopaica), homologias visuais. Dessa conjunção irradiante pode decorrer toda uma Ars Poetica."
Haroldo de Campos (Nota Prévia/A Reoperação do Texto)
"Eis, no plano fônico, o preceito mallarmeano, mais geral, das 'subdivisões prismáticas da Ideia', que inspirou a explícita configuração em partitura (horizontal/vertical) do Lance de Dados (1897), e que vai instigar depois o simultaneísmo futurista e dadaísta... No poema 'Lygia fingers', da série Poeta-menos (1953), de Augusto de Campos, inspirado na técnica da 'Klangfarbenmelodie' (melodia dos timbres) do compositor Anton Webern, há, por exemplo, uma verdadeira anagramatização progressiva do nome-tema, a percorrer toda a peça... Starobinski termina sua primeira apresentação dos trabalhos saussurianos com uma suspensão de julgamento. Para Saussure, a poesia clássica seria uma arte combinatória; mas toda linguagem é combinação. O campo está assim livre para os decifradores, sejam cabalistas ou foneticistas."
Haroldo de Campos (Diábolos no Texto/A Reoperação do Texto)

"E aqui deve ser indicado que Pound, entre 1913 e 1914, passou a explicar o imagismo 'em termos que envolviam o ideograma... Realmente, se tivermos presentes as observações de Fenellosa sobre a estrutura do ideograma (kanji, para o japonês), ou seja, que 'neste processo de compor, duas coisas conjugadas não produzem uma terceira, mas sugerem alguma relação fundamental entre ambas', compreenderemos que um ideograma isolado pode ser, em si próprio, pela alta voltagem obtida com a justaposição direta dos elementos, um verdadeiro poema completo... James Joyce, sistematizando a 'palavra-valise' de Lewis Carrol (galumph, p. ex.: gallop + triumph), tem citações como silvamoonlake... Na verdade, a 'palavra-valise' é quase que uma contraparte verbal do ideograma... já não mais secciona, mas incorpora em um 'continuum' os vários elementos da ação ou da visão. Nela se procura preservar aquela 'qualidade de uma contínua pintura em movimento', de desenrolar cinematográfico... Donde se poder, também, lembrar, com Eisenstein, que a montagem cinematográfica pode ser descrita em termos de ideograma..."
Haroldo de Campos (Haicai: Homenagem à síntese/A Arte no Horizonte do Provável)
"... procurei demonstrar a significação pioneira do contributo do criador da arte 'merz' para a poesia nova, em termos de correlação com as pesquisas da música mais recente, sobretudo no campo da experimentação vocal, cujo ponto culminante está na peça Gesang der Jüngling, de Karlheinz Stockhausen, escrita entre 1955-56. Schwitters compôs, entre 1921-23, uma 'Sonata Primoridal' ou 'Sonata Pré-Silábica' (Ursonate), a mais radical e consequente das quantas experimentações se fizeram até hoje no campo da poesia fonética (sonorista), diante da qual empalidece tudo o que posteriormente intentaram os 'letristas' franceses, comandados por Isidore Isou... Stockhausenn, de sua parte, no 'Canto dos Adolescentes, outra coisa não fez senão fragmentar e remontar 18 linhas extraídas de um salmo bíblico do Livro de Daniel, de modo que as palavras, engastadas no bojo de uma composição eletrônica, transitem do estado de ruído a-semântico (desprovido de significado) ao de inteligibilidade (alguns vocábulos ou sintagmas vão-se deixando coagular semanticamente..."
Haroldo de Campos (Poesia de Vanguarda Brasileira e Alemã/A Arte no Horizonte do Provável)

"A poesia nunca se mediu pela quantidade de papel impresso. Toda a obra poética de Mallarmé cabe num pequeno volume. De Arnaut Daniel só nos restam dezoito poemas. Alguns sonetos constituem a glória de Gérard de Nerval. Rimbaud cabe num livro de bolso."
Augusto de  Campos (Sem Palavras)
"Contrariamente ao que imaginam certas mentes redutoras e mesquinhas da nossa crítica comparatista, por vezes alambicadas de eruditismos, mas notoriamente incompetentes para aferir valores artísticos, nem sempre a influência desqualifica a criatividade e a invenção... Transformar o tabu em totem. Antropofagia: de Quevedo e Gôngora por Gregório; de Sterne por Machado; de Cendrars por Oswald. Por mais que assuste aos papiloscopistas de plantão de nossa subcrítica acadêmica..."
Augusto de Campos (O Enigma Ernani Rosas)
"The figures in the ISCM and the League were not powerful aesthetically, but powerful only politically."
John Cage (History of Experimental Music in the United States)

"Nosso trabalho sobre a obra de Sousândrade se iniciou com quatro longos ensaios publicados de 18 de dezembro de 1960 a 29 de janeiro de 1961... Empreendidos de uma perspectiva sincrônica e atuante por seus autores, e não de uma ótica diacrônico-acadêmica, analisavam detalhadamente a modernidade da linguagem e da temática da sua poesia, até então desprezada pelo mainstream canônico brasileiro, que sempre o considerou um romântico menor... Foram eles o embrião da ReVisão de Sousândrade e da seletânea de sua obra, que organizamos, com ênfase no "Inferno de Wall Street". O livro foi publicado sob o risco de apreensão, em plena vigência do golpe militar de 1964, e sob a franca hostilidade da maioria dos integrantes do mundo acadêmico e universitário."
Augusto de Campos (Re-www-Visão: Gil-Engendra em Gil-Rouxinol)

"O contato com Cage começou, via epistolar, em 1973, quando terminei a primeira revisão da versão de Rogério Duprat [de A Year from Monday] e buscava autorização pra a edição brasileira. O poeta e músico Dick Higgins, que eu conhecera em 1968, forneceu-me o endereço. Higgins dirigia a editora de vanguarda Something Else Press, que publicou, em belíssimas impressões, livros de Gertrude Stein, Merce Cunningham e Cage, assim como a Anthology of Concrete Poetry, com ampla representação dos concretos brasileiros. Mandei a Cage também alguns livros, como a Antologia Noigandres, Poetamenos e, mais tarde, Caixa Preta e Peomóbiles. Trocamos algumas cartas. Depois, em 1977, ele enviou para uma exposição do MAC um dos seus trabalhos visuais, feito com o auxílio do artista gráfico Calvin Sumsion... numa carta ao diretor do museu, pediu que, terminada a exposição o seu poema-objeto me fosse entregue. Quando fui para a Europa em fins de 77, pensei em voltar por Nova York. Haroldo já estava em Yale. Escrevi ao Cage para tentar um possível encontro e ele, generosamente, se dispôs a nos receber, entre viagens, nos primeiros dias de março de 78 — 'I would be glad to make dinner for you and your brother and wife (or wives"?)'. Numa noite de inverno, no dia 3, lá estivemos, todos, mais Regina Vater e Alfredo Portillos. Um memorabilíssimo jantar, feito pelo próprio Cage, muita bebida, muito papo... Ele fez questão de fazer até o café, num coador de pano... Um homem de grande sabedoria, humor e modéstia, que não falava sobre sua obra a não ser quando frontalmente perguntado e sempre com um pouco de blague. Sabendo que ele tinha composto música sobre textos de Cummings, e que este também morara em Greenwich Village, indaguei se tinha conhecido o poeta. Ele disse que sim, e que havia mostrado suas composições a Cummings, mas que est não se interessara muito por elas e que, na verdade, só conseguira fazer um pouco de amizade com Marion, mulher do poeta. Nenhuma pretensão. Ao sairmos, na noite fria, à procura de um táxi, tropeçando na neve, ele caminhava lépido à nossa frente, com um gorro engraçado, que tinha algo de cogumelo..."
"No começo dos anos 50, Koellreutter estava, certamente, muito bem informado, especialmente sobre as novas correntes europeias... e nós frequentamos, nessa época, com muito proveito, a Escola Livre de Música... por outro lado, a nossa prática poética, muito avançada para a época, nos fez realmente chegar mais rápido, muitas vezes, à informação nova. Fizemos, por exemplo, com Boulez, quando ele aqui esteve em 1954, um contato que não foi feito, no mesmo grau, por nenhum músico daqui. Ao sairmos de uma conferência que ele fez na Escola Livre, nós o levamos para um papo no apartamento de Waldemar Cordeiro, e, entre outras coisas, o questionamos sobre o Lance de Dados de Mallarmé... fizemos, para ele, uma leitura a quatro vozes de lygia fingers. Depois, Décio conviveu com ele em Paris, inclusive nas refregas da estreia de Déserts, de Varèse, 1954-55. E conheceu pessoalmente Cage, também em Paris. Haroldo se encontrou, antes do que qualquer compositor brasileiro, com Stockhausen, em Colônia. Eu talvez tenha sido o primeiro brasileiro a escrever sobre Charles Ives... Não esquecer que foi nas páginas da revista Invenção que foi lançado o manifesto 'Musica Nova', em 1963. Eu, particularmente, em meu trabalho, encontro muitas vezes mais afinidade com músicos e artistas visuais do que com literatos."
Augusto de Campos (Música de Invenção)

"Me chamaram de nacionalista em todos os tons... Mas sou obrigado a lhe confessar, por mais que isto lhe penalize, que eu não tenho nenhuma noção do que seja pátria política, uma porção de terra fechada pertencente a um povo ou raça. Tenho horror das fronteiras de qualquer espécie, e não encontro em mim nenhum pudor patriótico que me faça amar mais, ou preferir, um brasileiro a um hotentote ou francês."
Mário de Andrade (Carta a Sousa da Silveira, 1935)
"... the movement with the wind of the Orient and the movement against the wind of the Occident meet in America and produce a movement upwards into the air..."
John Cage (Lecture on Something)
"A operação metafísica que se liga ao rito antropofágico é a da transformação do tabu em totem."
O. A. (A Crise da Filosofia Messiânica)

"Passei Piratas do sexo voltam a matar, Amor & Tara, Nosferato no Brasil para Décio Pignatari e Haroldo de Campos, em sessão privada em São Paulo. Os concretos são as pessoas mais importantes, lúcidas e inteligentes deste país." Torquato Neto, Torquatália: Geléia Geral (Rocco, 2004, p. 346).
"... a piadinha sobre o fim da poesia concreta, se não foi piadinha mesmo, e das mais nojentas, é porforice no duro." Torquato Neto, Torquatália: Geléia Geral (Rocco, 2004, p. 348).
"Como pode alguém criticar Haroldo, se nem escrever sabe? Ridiculous!" Hélio Oiticica in Torquatália: Geléia Geral (Rocco, 2004, p. 367).
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Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari are best known as poets. But they have also written insightful and challenging theoretical works whose relevance is far away from being merely academic or parochial. They dealt with literary and cultural issues (not only Brazilian) in a truly cosmopolitan and sophisticated perspective, in books such as the following: 
- Augusto de Campos, poesia antipoesia antropofagia & cia. (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2015).
- Augusto de Campos, Verso Reverso Controverso (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2009). 
- Haroldo de Campos, Deus e o Diabo no Fausto de Goethe (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2008).
- Haroldo de Campos, Metalinguagem & Outras Metas. (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2013).
- Décio Pignatari, Semiótica & Literatura (Cotia: Ateliê Editorial, 2004).
- Décio Pignatari, Semiótica da Arte e da Arquitetura (Cotia: Ateliê Editorial, 2004).

These books constitute an antidote to a shallow kind of sociological and historical reductionism that besieges Brazilian literary criticism. As a random example of this kind of reductionism, take the following sentences in an otherwise good critical edition of Alvares de Azevedo's Lira dos Vinte Anos"como se sabe [sic], o pessimismo reinante na segunda geração do romantismo se constitui num contraponto ao naufrágio dos ideais revolucionários que caracterizaram a escola no seu nascedouro"; "chegamos aqui ao coração do problema, ou seja, a posição de classe do poeta"; "o eu-empírico, o eu-autoral, o eu-poético e o eu-transcendental são funções da história" (Ateliê Editorial, 2014, p. 47, 51, 54). 
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"À son époque la plus ancienne, la poésie médiévale de langue vulgaire ressemble, de loin, au nô japonais, où tous les éléments du texte, depuis le brit des instruments jusqu'au ton de la voix et au début du discours, participent à et de la stylisation. Toutefois, jamais le Moyen Age occidental n'atteignit cette perfection de totalité formelle."
"Un lien, difficile à définir, mais dont l'existence ne peut être niée, attache à la 'Renaissance carolingienne' l'émergence des premiers textes de langue vulgaire, sinon la prise de conscience de cette langue même. La décadence du Xe siècle n'est apparemment pas sans rapports avec la préhistoire de la poésie romane."
"Les doctes du XIIIe siècle considèrent de haut la poésie: fruit de l'imagination, l'une des plus basses facultés de l'âme, elles est classée par Thomas d'Aquin parmi les branches inférieures de la logique. D'où, peut-être, comme une création de défense, cette persuasion affichée par les poètes, que les secrets de leur art leur donnent accès aux sens cachés."
"On n'a pas ici le découpage d'un discours selon un patron rythmique ou métrique, mais constitution d'une forme nouvelle, à la fois discours et rythme. Le vers selon lequel, quelles que soient ses 'règles' particulières, est chanté ou lu le poème médiéval, introduit dans la chaîne du discours des suspensions, des intervalles comparables aux blancs du poème typographique et, plus encore, à ces trous intervenant dans une communication et l'empêchant d'être parfaitement décryptable et traductible. 
"... la description du travail des jeunes prisonnières, étonnamment précise et fournissant maint détail sur la situation économique de ces malheureuses, fut apparemment inspirée à Chrétien de Troyes par le spectacle des ateliers de tissage champenois. Toutefois, il est douteux que l'on ait là plus qu'un 'effet de réel', certes très puissant, mais valorisé au niveau romanesque, non au niveau de l'expérience [?/cette dichotomie est douteuse!]. L'atelier visité par Chrétien est le comparant dont l'aventure d'Yvain est le comparé. La 'réalité' est ici la métaphore du roman... le texte est moins miroir que surface miroitante..."
"... le caractère rationnel de l'allégorie: elle extrait d'un fragment de réel un sens indiscutable; elle proclame et engendre un ordre clair, dépourvu de franges inquiétantes..."
"On sait la vogue de l'allégorie, en latin, dès la fin de l'Antiquité; très tot, elle constitua la fiction fondamentale de poèmes entiers, parfois didactiques comme le De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii de Martianus Capella."
"... énoncés faits de longues séries accumulatives mimant le boniment d'un camelot ou les cris de marchands; de fragments de sons dénués de sens, quoique soumis au rythme du vers... Ce dernier procédé, dont le Miracle de Théophile, de Rutebeuf, vers 1260, offre le plus ancien exemple, deviendra traditionnel dans le théâtre, où il 'figure' l'hébreu, le chaldéen, voire, la langue diabolique..."
"Fatrasie et resverie ont eu, comme formes autonomes, une existence assez brève: fin XIIIe, première moitié du XIVe siècle. Elles marquèrent alors, au moment où les traditions archaïques s'épuisaient, l'aboutissement convergent et la formalisation de tendances remontant à la basse Antiquité... elles furent récupérées par le théâtre du XVe siècle... sous le coq-à-l'âne du XVI... Ce n'est pas le langage en tant qu'instrument de communication que l'on dissocie... Néanmoins, un obscur dessein semble vouloir pousser le discours jusqu'au-delà de lui-même, vers le silence peut-être: il n'atteindra pas ce terme avant Rabelais."
"Le fait capital, en effet, mais aussi le moins saisissable, c'est le caractère musical de la chanson. Verbe et mélodie procèdent d'un élan unique, s'engendrent réciproquement en un rapport si étroit que toute analyse devrait porter simultanément sur l'un et l'autre. Par malheur, trop peu de textes nous sont parvenus accompagnés de leur mélodie..."
"C'est au niveau syntaxique que le système de la chanson présente peut-être la plus grande homogénéité: extrême légèreté des liens de subordination, prédominance de la parataxe, rejet dans les associations contextuelles de presque toutes les relations logiques."
"... la fine amour comme la désignent les textes, en quoi je serais porté à comprendre fine en vertu de quelque connotation alchimiques — affinée, raffinée, apurée de tout ce qui n'est pas elle, ramenée à sa quintessence. La littérature sur ce sujet est surabondante et concerne du reste davantage les troubadours que les trouvères."
"Le poème est miroir de soi. Il s'écoule et, s'il se perd en un terme, c'est en lui-même, 'de la même manière que se perdit le beau Narcisse dans la fontaine', chante Bernart de Ventandorn..."
"La 'cohérence' ainsi constatée, si on la comprend en elle-même et de manière abstraite, n'est autre que la 'convenance' que Dante attribuait à la canzone: la discretio dont parlent, sans bien la définir, certains rhétoriciens, cette concordance entre la 'gravité du sens, la noblesse du chant, la subtilité de l'harmonie et l'excellence des vocables' qu'évoque le De vulgaris eloquentia."
"... j'ai proposé l'emploi du mot de 'registre'... La chanson se rapporte au registre en vertu (il faut reprendre ce terme) d'une participation..."
"... l'object fictif du chant peut être alternativement nommé comme une personne (vous), un 'objet' (dame) ou un lieu (la). Les troubadours utilisaient un terme clé, aizimen, parfois aizi, relatif, de façon du reste obscure, à quelque lieu central de la fine amour, impossible à nommer autrement et par rapport auquel se situent le poète et les phases successives de son discours."
"... la vogue de toutes les formes de chant à refrain, caractéristique du XIIIe siècle et qui se prolongera jusqu'au XVe..."
"Les chansons d'argument religieux, dont Järström et Langfors publièrent jadis une collection, sont le plus souvent des contrafactures dont ces éditeurs ont pu identifier le modèle profane. Les chansons mariales, qui en constituent la sous-classe principale, reposent thématiquement sur une combinaison de motifs empruntés à l'hymnologie latine... Gautier de Coincy... Miracles de Notre Dame..."
"Par-delà les troubles et les déchirements du XIVe siècle, le XVe marque l'émiettement de l'image synthétique de s'était, de l'homme et du monde, fait le 'moyen age'. D'où l'extension de motifs imaginatifs jusqu'alors maintenus dans une étroite tradition cléricale et homilétique... le péché, la punition, la mort non plus métaphorique, l'enfer. Les premières Danses Macabré, qui furent sans doute des séries de devises rimées, illustrant dessins ou peintures, datent des années 1370. On en composa jusqu'au XVIe siècle, mais, en amont, leurs archétypes appartiennent à une tradition latine ancienne. La fréquence, au XVe siècle, des poèmes expliquant un dessin, une peinture, un vitrail, parfois brodés sur une étoffe ou vêtement... la fréquence des peintures dans les manuscrits contenant des collections poétiques: autant d'indices convergents d'une régression de la faculté d'abstraction... l'extension rapide et presque soudaine de toutes les formes de représentation dramatique; l'émergence des figurations démoniaques, manifestant de façon massive des traits jusqu'alors dispersés dans un folklore chrétien demeuré, pour l'essentiel, étranger à la poésie, mais qui avait été la source d'innombrables mises en forme plastiques..."
"La dissociation qui s'opère alors entre poésie et musique... Le perfectionnement des systèmes de notation musicale et le développement qu'ils permettaient de donner aux mélodies; l'action de musiciens novateurs comme Guillaume de Machaut... tout concourt, dès les années 1330-1350, à faire de la musique une technique trop hautement élaborée pour rester accessible à des non-spécialistes et au commun des poètes."
"Les combinaisons syllabiques les moins accordées à la structure de la langue française la font exploser en éclats de délire verbal, comme dans tel rondeau de vers monosyllabiques de Christine de Pisan..."
"Les chanteurs de geste firent quelques pas de plus que les auteurs de chansons de saint sur la voie qui menait vers l'autonomie du discours narratif."
"... la chanson de geste possède une cohérence formelle très forte: perceptible aux niveaux lexical et syntaxique, comme à celui des motifs et, dans une certaine mesure, propre non seulement aux textes individuels mais à leur ensemble... La notion de registre s'y applique-t-elle? On peut hésiter. Je préfère répondre négativement... l'ordre nécessaire des propositions narratives (causalité-implication) introduit dans le système une dimension temporelle dont l'absence, en revanche, caractérise la chanson lyrique."
"La croissance du facteur narratif entraîne non seulement des modifications rythmiques, mais elle transforme la syntaxe, et, à la longue, le vocabulaire même."
"L'avenir est d'ores et déjà connu par le poète, par ses auditeurs et, dans le récit, par les agents mêmes de l'action. Il est comme toute la narration, englobé dans l'éminente dignité des choses antiques... dont le nom même du fougueux cheval de Roland, dans le poème d'Oxford, constitue l'emblème: Veillantif (vieil + antif)..."
"Le poète dispose d'un grand nombre de formules, qui lui servent à exprimer divers aspects concrets d'une situation, selon les besoins du moment. Le nombre d'occurrences de chaque formule diffère beaucoup dans les diverses chansons..."
"... la chanson est conscience de soi. Elle compense la rupture survenue entre le réel et l'imaginaire. Elle exploite moins un souvenir qu'elle ne le projette en prophétie; elle assume ainsi l'idéologie diffuse d'une collectivité très dispersée géographiquement..."
"Peut-être l'ordre des causalités et des implications s'inverse-t-il: parce que Roland doit être vengé, il meurt; parce qu'il mourra, il doit être trahi. Le texte s'explique mal, ou pas du tout. La construction parataxique et les parallélismes accentuent cet effet. Juxtaposition abrupte d'assertions antithétiques, aux traits simplifiés, posées successivement comme les arguments d'une thèse..."
"Vers 1165-1170 apparaît une autre fiction dont, dans l'état de notre documentation, il semble qu'il faille faire honneur à Chrétien de Troyes: le récit dit arthurien."
"... un mouvement de l'imagination qui, projetant dans l'avenir quelque image traditionnelle, la confronte au présent vécu, et tente de l'interpréter, de lui faire rendre un sens, qui sera le sien. D'où le caractère élaboré et construit du roman; d'où ce dynamisme syntaxique qu'y discernait Auerbach, cette progression vers un après, qui s'oppose si nettement à la parataxe épique: les relations s'organisent en profondeur..."
- all quotations from Paul Zumthor's Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1972); 


"La poesía barroca de Nueva España fue una poesía transplantada y que tenía los ojos fijos en los modelos peninsulares, sobre todo en Góngora. Aunque la influencia del poeta cordobés fue enorme y centra, no fue la única. Lope, Quevedo y los otros, sobre todo Calderón, no están ausentes."
"Irving A. Leonard dedica un divertido capítulo de su libro sobre la Nueva España a los certámenes poéticos y enumera algunas de las particularidades del verso barroco: los ecos; los acrósticos; las aliteraciones; poemas que admitían dos o tres lecturas; las poesías 'retrógradas', que se podían leer de arriba para abajo y de abajo para arriba; los centones, poemas hechos con versos ajenos, casi siempre de Góngora; las paranomasias; los jogos de palabras..."
"En los poemas de Quevedo dialogan sin cesar el alma y el culo, los huesos y el excremento."
"El soneto y la terza rima son españoles por naturalización; el romance y el villancio por nacimiento. Este último, según Navarro Tomás, viene de las cantigas de estribillo galaico-portuguesas, derivadas a su vez del zéjel mozárabe... Lorca, Gorostiza, Alberti, Gerardo Diego, Molinari y otros poetas de esa generación, en España y en América, cultivaron con brillo las formas tradicionales. Esos poetas nos enseñaron que la novedad no está reñida con la tradición."
"Los villancicos aparecieron también, intercalados, en las obras de teatro y en las novelas pastoriles. El siglo XVII es el mediodía de esta forma y algunos de los villancicos de Lope, Góngora y Valdivielso figuran figuran entre los poemas líricos más puros de nuestra lengua... A la excelencia poética corresponde la complejidad formal; la mudanza se prolonga en varias coplas asonantadas y el estribillo admite versos de distintas medidas y en combinaciones poco usadas... La característica central del villancico es la mezcla de elementos dispares. Esa mezcla produce a veces lo maravilloso y otras lo grotesco."
"... el canario y el cardador eran bailes y la ensalada aludía a la mezcla de metros y, sobre todo, de maneras de hablar de negros, moros, vizcaínos, gallegos y portugueses. En Nueva España el lugar que tenía el habla de los moros lo ocuparon los indios y su lenguaje. Tocotín se llamaba a la letra escrita en náhuatl o esmaltada de aztequismos..."
"Góngora había hecho prodigios con el habla de los moros y los negros; las fantásticas onomatopeyas de sus villancicos anuncian, y a veces van más allá, la 'poesia negra' de Palés Matos, Ballagas y Nicolás Guillén. El oído y el don verbal de sor Juana rivalizan com los de Góngora..."
"La transformación de los metros tradicionales afectó especialmente al estribillo, que de complement lírico se convirtió en la porción de mayor lucimiento."
"Hay de todo en los villancicos: versos de arte mayor, endecasílabos de gaita gallega y metros de bailes populares..."
"En esto sigue Joana muy de cerca a Calderón, que emplea conn gran maestría el mismo procedimiento. Dámaso Alonso lo ha estudiado y lo llama la 'correlación plurimembre'... La frase se bifurca como un camino o un árbol en dos, tres, cuatro brazos o ramas que Alonzo llama miembros."
"Este período primitivo —representado por un gran nombre, Gil Vicente, y por otros menores como el de Timoneda— desemboca en el gran río poético que fue el teatro de España durante la época de Lope."
"El divino Narciso es un ejemplo del arte exquisito del mosaico o, como se dice ahora, del collage literario, en el que sobresalen Eliot y Pound."
"En la segunda égloga de Garcilaso —el poema más enigmático del Renacimiento español— hay un extraño pasaje sobre el sueño..."
"Sor Juana si reflexionó sobre los límites de la razón: este es el tema de su poema y uno de los ejes de su vida interior..."
"Las Soledades son el gran poema del desengaño español... no hay afán por saber pero tampoco hay fe. Góngora responde al horror del mundo y a la nada del transmundo con un lenguaje más allá del lenguaje; quiero decir, con una palabra que ha dejado de ser comunicación para convertirse en espectáculo."
"Primero sueño gira en torno a esa paradoja que es el núcleo del poema: la revelación de la no-revelación. En este sentido Primero sueño se parece a Le Cemitière Marin y, en el ámbito hispano, a Muerte sin fin y Altazor. Se parece, sobre todo y ante todo, al poema en que se resume toda esa poesía: Un coup de dés."
- all quotations from Octavio Paz, Las trampas de la fe (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010); 

***See also:
And also: