in-between spaces and borderlines ...

“What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These 'in-between' spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood - singular or communal - that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.”

“Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation. The 'right' to signify from the periphery of authorized power and privilege does not depend on the persistence of tradition; it is resourced by the power of tradition to be reinscribed through the conditions of contingency and contradictoriness that attend upon the lives of those who are 'in the minority'. The recognition that tradition bestows is a partial form of identification. In restaging the past it introduces other, incommensurable cultural temporalities into the invention of tradition. This process estranges any immediate access to an originary identity or a 'received' tradition. The borderline engagements of cultural difference may as often be consensual as conflictual; they may confound our definitions of tradition and modernity; realign the customary boundaries between the private and the public, high and low; and challenge normative expectations of development and progress.”

“The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation. Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. The ‘past-present’ becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living.”

(Homi Bhabha, “Border Lives: The Art of the Present.” The Location of Culture.)

complex words ...

“It is possible, without contradiction, to conceive of a more vital, freer use of the revealed spoken language, in which it would lose none of its dignity. This is not true of its written form, which allegory laid claim to being. The sanctity of what is written is inextricably bound up with the idea of its strict codification. For sacred script always takes the form of certain complexes of words which ultimately constitute, or aspire to become, one single and inalterable complex. So it is that alphabetical script, as a combination of atoms of writing, is the farthest removed from the script of sacred complexes. These latter take the form of hieroglyphics. The desire to guarantee the sacred character of any script - there will always be a conflict between sacred standing and profane comprehensibility - leads to complexes, to hieroglyphics.”

(Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. “Allegory and Trauerspiel.” Trans. John Osborne. p. 175)

Nothing is possible ...

“Such is the scale of the problems, so narrow and so precarious are the paths hitherto trodden, so final the annihilation of tract after immense tract of the past, and so uncertain the bases of our speculations, that even the briefest reconnaissance on the terrain plunges the enquirer into a state of indecision, in which feelings of humble resignation fight for supremacy with moments of the insanest ambition. He knows that the essentials have gone for ever and that all he can do is to scratch the surface. Yet may he not stumble upon some indication, preserved as if by a miracle, which will shed new light upon the whole problem? Nothing is possible: everything, therefore, is possible. The darkness in which we grope our way is too intense for us to hazard any comment on it: we cannot even say that it will last for ever.”

(Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques. Trans. John Russel. p. 247-248)

wisdom in writing ...

“Similarly, as it seems to me, the wise of Egypt- whether in precise knowledge or by a prompting of nature- indicated the truth where, in their effort towards philosophical statement, they left aside the writing-forms that take in the detail of words and sentences- those characters that represent sounds and convey the propositions of reasoning- and drew pictures instead, engraving in the temple- inscriptions a separate image for every separate item: thus they exhibited the mode in which the Supreme goes forth.

For each manifestation of knowledge and wisdom is a distinct image, an object in itself, an immediate unity, not as aggregate of discursive reasoning and detailed willing. Later from this wisdom in unity there appears, in another form of being, an image, already less compact, which announces the original in an outward stage and seeks the causes by which things are such that the wonder rises how a generated world can be so excellent.

For, one who knows must declare his wonder that this Wisdom, while not itself containing the causes by which Being exists and takes such excellence, yet imparts them to the entities produced in Being's realm. This excellence whose necessity is scarcely or not at all manifest to search, exists, if we could but find it out, before all searching and reasoning.

What I say may be considered in one chief thing, and thence applied to all the particular entities:”


(Plotinus, 5th Ennead, Eighth Tractate, Section 6)

http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/plotenn/enn483.htm

mystic art ...

"Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilization began, the step from the dark into the light of the mind. The hand that filled the parchment page built a city."


(Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage. p. 48)



"Whence did the wond'rous mystic art arise,
Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes?
That we by tracing magic lines are taught,
How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?"

(William Massey)

convergences ...

“… the art of our era is one of convergences: the intersecting of times, spaces, and forms. This end of a century has also seen a return of times; we now discover what the ancients knew: history is an empty presence, a blank face. The poet and the novelist must restore the human features of this face. It is an undertaking that requires imagination, and moral courage as well. The literature we write doesn’t turn its back on history, though it rejects the simplifications of ideological art and its categorical affirmations and negations. It is not an art of certainties but one of exploration; it is not a poetry that shows the way but one that seeks it. It is an art and poetry sketching the sign that, from the beginning of time, humanity has seen in the sky: a question mark. The hands that trace this sign may be Latin American, but its meaning is universal.”

(Octavio Paz, “A Literature of Convergences.” Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature. Trans. Helen Lane. p. 226)

who's got my barack?

Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

la vida en paz ...

“—¿la vida, cuándo fue de veras nuestra?,
¿cuándo somos de veras lo que somos?,
bien mirado no somos, nunca somos
a solas sino vértigo y vacío,
muecas en el espejo, horror y vómito,
nunca la vida es nuestra, es de los otros,
la vida no es de nadie, todos somos
la vida – pan de sol para los otros,
los otros todos que nosotros somos –,
soy otro cuando soy, los actos míos
son más míos si son también de todos,
para que pueda ser he de ser otro,
salir de mí, buscarme entre los otros,
los otros que no son si yo no existo,
los otros que me dan plena existencia,
no soy, no hay yo, siempre somos nosotros,
la vida es otra, siempre allá, más lejos,
fuera de ti, de mí, siempre horizonte,
vida que nos desvive y enajena,
que nos inventa un rostro y lo desgasta,
hambre de ser, oh muerte, pan de todos”

(from Octavio Paz, Piedra de sol)

riddle-images of desire ...

“The novel associations of images that the poet, the artist, the scholar bring forth are comparable in that they take some grid of a particular texture, whether this texture be concretely that of a decrepit wall, of a cloud, or of anything else: some prolonged and vague sound carries this melody that we needed to hear, excluding any other. What is most striking is that an activity of this kind which, in order to be, requires the unconditional acceptance of a more or less lasting passivity, far from limiting itself to the world of the senses, has been able to attain, in depth, the moral world. The luck, the fortune of the scholar or the artist when they find can only be thought of as a particular case of human luck; it cannot be distinguished from that in its essence. A person will know how to proceed when, like the painter, he consents to reproduce, without any change, what an appropriate grid tells him in advance of his own acts. This grid exists. Every life contains these homogenous patterns of facts, whose surface is cracked or cloudy. Each person has only to stare at them fixedly in order to read his own future. Let him enter the whirlwind; let him retrace the events which have seemed to him fleeting and obscure among all others, which have torn him apart. There-if his questioning was worth it-all the logical principles, having been routed, will bring him the strength of that objective chance which makes a mockery of what would have seemed most probable. Everything humans might want to know is written upon this grid in phosphorescent letters, in letters of desire.”

“Real objects do not exist just as they are: looking at the lines that make up the most common among them, you see surging forth – without even having to blink – a remarkable riddle-image which is identical with it and which speaks to us, without any possible mistake, of the only real object, the actual one of our desire. Needless to say, what is true of the complementary graphic image in question is no less true of a certain verbal image upon which any poetry worthy of the name has never ceased to call.”


(André Breton, Mad Love. Trans. Mary Ann Caws. p. 86-88)

Só lido

Boa noite,
Solidão.

Bom dia,
Sol.

Boa tarde,
Só.


Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

la règle du jeu

the rules of the game
are not to win or lose
but to draw (or choose)
the rules of the game


Copyright © 2008 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

viva a poesia vivida!

no teatro da floresta de signos,
ao pôr do sol no morro das capelas,
um poeta submerso em fumo e palavras,
um estranho escalando um muro de pedras,
ambos ambivalentes à ambição,
no meio do caminho ao destino.

Copyright © 2008 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

on form ...

"Form is the base brought to the surface."

(Victor Hugo)

What's new under the sun ?!?

“The artist is a living contradiction: he tries to imitate and he invents, he tries to invent and he copies. If contemporary artists sincerely seek to be original, unique, and new, they should begin by disregarding the notions of originality, individuality, and innovation: they are the clichés of our time.”

(Octavio Paz, “Invention, Underdevelopment, Modernity.” Alternating Current. Trans. Helen R. Lane. p. 19)

"Form and Meaning"

“The real ideas of a poem are not those that occur to the poet before he writes his poem, but rather those that appear in his work afterward, whether by design or by accident. Content stems from form, and not vice versa. Every form produces its own idea, its own vision of the world. Form has meaning; and, what is more, in the realm of art only form possesses meaning. The meaning of a poem does not lie in what the poet wanted to say, but in what the poem actually says. What we think we are saying and what we are really saying are two quite different things.”

(Octavio Paz, “Form and Meaning.” Alternating Current. Trans. Helen R. Lane)

on genius ...

“In fact it is not even true of the most individual artistic disciplines that genius is free and always self-dependent. And what is genius anyway if not a certain combination of unquestionably personal talents, a gift from the fairies, and a moment in history? Genius is an H-bomb. The fission of uranium triggers off the fusion of hydrogen pulp. But a sun cannot be born from the disintegration of an individual alone unless this disintegration has repercussions on the art that surrounds it …. Generally, the rhythm of this combustion in the cycles of great art is usually greater than the lifespan of a man. Literature’s step is measured in centuries. It will be said that genius foreshadows that which comes after it. This is true, but only dialectically. For one could also say that every age has the geniuses it needs in order to define, repudiate and transcend itself.”

(André Bazin, “On the politique des auteurs.” Trans. Peter Graham)

a poet said ...

"Poesia é a arte da linguagem. Uma forma de organizar o caos ou caotizar a ordem. Um passaporte para outros estados de percepção e para um maior entendimento do mundo."

-- Rodrigo Garcia Lopes


["Poetry is the art of language. A form of organizing chaos or chaoticizing order. A passport to other states of perception and to a greater understanding of the world."]

CDGO

Copyright © 2008 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

the watcher ...

“This trouvaille, whether it be artistic, scientific, philosophic, or as useless as anything, is enough to undo the beauty of everything beside it. In it alone can we recognize the marvelous precipitate of desire. It alone can enlarge the universe, causing it to relinquish some of its opacity, letting us discover its extraordinary capacities for reserve, proportionate to the innumerable needs of the spirit. Daily life abounds, moreover, in just this type of small discovery, where there is frequently an element of apparent gratuitousness, very probably a function of our provisional incomprehension, discoveries that seem to me not in the least unimportant. I am profoundly persuaded that any perception registered in the most involuntary way … bears in itself the solution, symbolic or other, of a problem you have with yourself. You only have to know how to get along in the labyrinth. Interpretive delirium begins only when man, ill-prepared, is taken by a sudden fear in the forest of symbols. But I maintain that for anyone, watchfulness would do anything rather than pay a second’s notice to whatever remains exterior to his desire.” (p. 14-15)

“I would like my life to leave after it no other murmur than that of a watchman’s song, of a song to while away the waiting. Independent of what happens and what does not happen, the wait itself is magnificent.” (p. 25)

(André Breton, L’Amour fou [Mad Love]. Trans. Mary Ann Caws.)

save jesus ...

Copyright © 2008 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira