Langi

O Langi faleceu hoje de manhã. Deixo aqui então um texto que lhe escrevi em 2011:

Ah, este amor-cão!...

Entraste na minha vida com medo
e eu na tua por atracção.
Apenas um de nós sairá vivo
desta animalesca relação.

Ensinaste-me a fertilidade da merda,
e que o odor exige habituação.
Ensinei-te que da liberdade a perda
nem sempre será um senão.

Lembro-me das ondas, quando as viste
entre forte temor e admiração.
Deslumbraste-te de areia e sentiste
que trincar líquidos o é em vão.

Esta rima tão parva não é um acaso;
é a que melhor serve de ilustração
a um sentimento tão bem animado:
amor-cão, amor-cão, amor-cão!

E quando não rimamos, ouço-te
ladrar bem alto: estou vivo, uivo,
sou feroz, e matreiro,
mordo tudo: sapato, rabo e rato.
Mas no teu silêncio o olho diz-te:
Dá-me comida, por compaixão.

Is Life Short?

Salvador Dalí's "The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory"

It’s almost daily that we hear someone—including ourselves—saying something similar to “Life is short.” And it is. Or is it not? Perhaps it’s both at the same time.

Let's imagine we're thirty years old and that we have the ability to remember each passing second of our lives in between ages five and twenty-five. By the time we'd finish recollecting all those moments, we’d be fifty years old (30+20): That is, twenty years late for dinner. We'd probably also be very angry at the enormous waste of time devoted to thinking about our past.

Luckily and instead, our brains pick up just a few highlights out of all the time we lived, and present them to our conscious self as the past. That extremely edited version of our lives is much less time consuming. No wonder then that it seems to us that time passed so fast, and that “Life is short” is such an adequate phrase for what we've just experienced brain-wise.

It’s a tradeoff in the end. Life seems to be shorter than it really was, time seems to have passed faster than it actually did, yet and thanks to that trait we can stop from time to time and evoke our past without ageing too much in that very process.

Thank you, brain! You dearest traitor...

A ordem natural

Na ordem natural, em desordem a vida.
O cão torna-se velho e morre em espelho;
a mãe, ela segue mas numa via paralela;
dos sobrinhos temos margem de sobra;
e no trilho deles todo o filho. Ou adopte-se.

Dos amantes, dormimos com todo o amante
e eles com todo o nosso, sem beijo ou osso
trocado (o osso) e acariciado (o beijo), 
mas toma lá um postal vírico no verso:
“Poderíamos ter sido nós; não foi”
assim, sem pontuação final ou diagnóstico.

E do juízo, julgamos que o siso nos cresce
a cada menos um dente. Ardendo a madeira
da memória, no fumo diferente a de cada,
em cada, a floresta lida ou, nela, uma sesta,
e cinzas na cadeia do pensamento próprio.

International Kissing Day, 2015

Gustave Klimt's The Kiss

Yes, today's international kissing day. For the rest of the year, only hugs are allowed. And a lot of killing.

My studies in linguistics remind me that first we've to deal with ambiguity here. Is this a day for international kissing, or a kissing day for more than one nation? I chose the first meaning, but you're free to kiss only persons who were born inside the same abstract, controversial, and man made borders as yours. 

Borders that are now being used as safe havens to withhold cash from your economy, extracting cash from your pockets (which has a dire effect on the amount of kissing you may get or are willing to engage in) through higher taxes to those who cannot evade them. Borders that in some cases are likely to be linked with devastation in many forms. And therefore having to do more with killing than with kissing. 

In some instances, however, the absence of borders is what makes conflict more likely, as in the cases of Kurdistan or Euskal Herria (Basque Country), which are single cultures divided by borders not of their own. People there can on occasion be forced to international kissing even if they don't want to. 

I'd be even more of a fool if I forgot to mention that in Eastern Ukraine the majority wants to kiss Russian men on the lips while in Western Ukraine kissing Germans tends to be more trendy. 

The apparently steady rise of nationalism in Europe will most likely hinder international kissing. In Hungary, the extreme right is gaining ground as we saw by the outcome in the last elections, while, in France, Marine Le Pen doesn't want her dose of fatherly kissing any more. 

And if you're still in doubt that kissing is related to borders, here's one last argument: inserting the tongue in your partner's mouth is a question of establishing a bridge in between two different bodies' limits (borders). And if there were no borders at all it wouldn't be called French kissing. 

So wherever you are, whichever is your gender of the six (heterosexual, bisexual, gay, lesbian, transsexual, or asexual), there are no limits to this international kiss of mine. I particularly nourish the thought of ISIS (Daesh) men French kissing each other today. They are indeed fighting to establish borders where there were none, and their origin is international. Set up the example, boys! And stop fooling around with more borders.

Rodin's Riders

Auguste Rodin's "Centaur"

To ride with and be ridden simultaneously;
pure, coeval, ride and rider:
the very stuff of synchronicity.  

Abandoning self-control, sweaty, 
animal and anima together, 
the longer they trot the more
their minds bloom away disarmingly, 

Then they gallop:

road, dirt;
orchards, colours;
stones, moons;
town, church;
hilltop, silence;
beach, breeze;

Halt! A break: 

a verdant picnic ensues, new smells,
sight scanning the surroundings,
a radar which will bleep only once 
to tell love to home in on the lover
thus beginning their face à face,
coeur à coeur: il faut courir.  

Newark

for Jennifer


In Newark, a bird landed,
of skies weary, merry its eyes.

An entire continent of humanity
had been under its wings,
incontinent prattle by its side.

Yet, when we move up close,
birds that so gracefully soared
are the embodiment of anxiety.

Mostly so in Spring, nesting,
collecting twig and straw
out of the best tree and field
that while soaring they saw.

Drinking from a nearby pond,
they cool down for a new round
until down the sun goes,
their chirp piercing the dusk
before the tranquil night.

Half the work being done,
soon our bird will fully rest
its bright plumage and breast
amidst the fruit of its toil.

And then, seen from the soil,
secure, a work of much art,
its nest will become a new ark.

To choose is to eliminate

“No no no no no no no no no no no no,” a cute toddler sang without a hint of punctuation. “She’s in love with the word ‘no’,” her grandmother explained.

Perhaps there is simply too much of everything around us, and we have to choose. Or the choice is not even solely dependent on our will. And any choice is a process of elimination of everything else. Or are there superwomen and supermen, these Übermenschen, who can take it all in? Human blackholes, what would become of the information compactly stored within them? Would it be reused in dreams, or lost in faulty synapsing? Would it remerge unexpectedly, uncalled for, to help in the creation of a new work of art? 

“No no no no no no no.”

“Thou shalt not pass!”

Different Walks of Life

The freedom to punch

Pope Francis in an airplane, and Dr. Gasbarri laughing at the prospect of being punched on the face by the former... because he's too weak by now?

«It's true that we can't react violently, but, for example if Dr. Gasbarri here, a great friend of mine, says a curse word against my mother, then a punch awaits him. It’s normal… It’s normal… One cannot provoke, one cannot insult other people's faith, one cannot make fun of faith. There is a limit. Every religion has its dignity ... In freedom of expression there are limits.»

Those were the heightened, heavenly words of Pope Francis, specially so for he proffered them while flying in an airplane. Most likely even God Herself overheard him—he was that close to Her. 

Landing a fist on a friend’s face because the latter said something offensive about our mother is not the same as killing a dozen persons because our deceased and supposed Father was offended. So Francis’ argument seems not to take off right from the beginning.

But let’s imagine, for two minutes or a couple of thousand of years, that Francis' argument was valid, which is something we usually have to do anyway when the likes of Popes are talking. 

My father, who, like Muḥammad, is deceased, was a huge defender of the freedom of speech and of respect towards our intellectual opponents’ viewpoints. He even had the nerve to tell his progeny that he wasn't religious, but if any one of us five wanted to be baptized and follow a creed that he would hold nothing against us. 

Setting up limits to “freedom of expression,” as Pope Francis wishes, is no easy task. For instance, who would set those limits? And why those persons and not others?  And what about defining the limits themselves? Is the limit set to when someone is offended or feel that their beliefs are being made fun of? We’re always offending someone: reading the comments that Internet trolls leave on almost every website might help you reach that conclusion. So the complexity of setting any kind of limits to the freedom of speech is huge not to say insurmountable.  And what could the solution to it be? We can always try not to offend people, or accept the fact that our beliefs (and not only) will be offended, as that’s the way of the world, never forgetting that our beliefs are not us, and that beliefs can very well change. 

What I think is that Pope Francis, unless he apologizes for having said that there are limits, offended my father by not respecting his idea of no limits to the freedom of speech, and insulted my belief that religion—like any thing else, I repeat, like any thing else—has no dignity attached to it per se unless demonstrated, item by item. Francis also offended God for She's been thought to be a male for far too long.

And therefore, Pope Francis, according to his own reasoning, should be the first one to admit that I have the natural right to punch him in on the face. As I'm kind, I'll be happy if he just offers me one cheek to slap. Only one.  Only once.

Intimacy - a maturing tendril

for Jennifer


Intimacy is time plus its tempo entwined,
rooted deeply into a soil as black as fertile, 
under which water rushes—

mineral urges—and undermines
all that is past, and turns it into a paste 
by the time and tempo intimacy's vivified.    






_______

photo by backyardnature.com