"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

think (k)not

think the unthinkable thought,
then unthink the thought --
the unthinkable, then, unthought,
think the thinkable unthought

Copyright © 2008 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

Poetry X Madness ...

“At the other end of the cultural area … the poet is he who, beneath the named, constantly expected differences, rediscovers the buried kinships between things, their scattered resemblances. Beneath the established signs, and in spite of them, he hears another, deeper, discourse, which recalls the time when words glittered in the universal resemblance of things; in the language of the poet, the Sovereignty of the Same, so difficult to express, eclipses, the distinction existing between signs.”

“This accounts, no doubt, for the confrontation of poetry and madness in modern Western culture …. It is the mark of a new experience of language and things. At the fringes of the knowledge that separates beings, signs, and similitudes, and as though to limit its power, the madman fulfils the function of homosemanticism: he groups all signs together and leads them with a resemblance that never ceases to proliferate. The poet fulfils the opposite function: his is the allegorical role; beneath the language of signs and beneath the interplay of their precisely delineated distinctions, he strains his ears to catch that ‘other language’, the language, without words or discourse, of resemblance. The poet brings similitude to the signs that speak it, whereas the madman loads all signs with a resemblance that ultimately erases them. They share, then, on the outer edge of our culture and at the point nearest to its essential divisions, that ‘frontier’ situation – a marginal position and a profoundly archaic silhouette – where their words unceasingly renew the power of their strangeness and the strength of their contestation.”


(Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. p. 49-50)

Absence of the Writer ...

“Absence of the writer too. For to write is to draw back. Not to retire into one’s tent, in order to write, but to draw back from one’s writing itself. To be grounded far away from one’s language, to emancipate it or lose one’s hold on it, to let it make its way alone and unarmed. To leave speech. To let it speak alone, which it can do only in its written form. To leave writing is to be there only in order to provide its passageway, to be the diaphanous element of its going forth: everything and nothing. For the work, the writer is at once everything and nothing. Like God …” (p. 70)

(Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass)

Bound to Freedom ...

“The poet, in the very experience of his freedom, finds himself both bound to language and delivered from it by a speech whose master, nonetheless, he himself is.” (p. 65)

“The wisdom of the poet thus culminates its freedom in the passion of translating obedience to the law of the word into autonomy. Without which, and if passion becomes subjection, the poet is mad.” (p. 66)

(Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass)

Cinéma de jeu ...

Letter to my Friends to Learn How to Make Films Together

– Jean-Luc Godard / gringocarioca

I play. You play. We play. Cinema. You think there are. Rules of the game. Because you are a child. Who still doesn’t know. What a game is. And what is. Reserved for grown-ups. Which you already are. Because you forgot. That it is a game for children. Of what does it consist? There are several definitions. To look at oneself. In the mirror of others. To forget and to know. Quickly and slowly. The world. To think and to speak. Odd game. That’s life.

Carta aos meus amigos para aprenderem a fazer cinema juntos

Eu jogo. Você joga. Nós jogamos. Cinema. Você pensa que há. Uma regra do jogo. Porque você é uma criança. Que ainda não sabe. O que é um jogo. E o que é. Reservado à gente grande. Do que você já faz parte. Porque você esqueceu. Que é um jogo para crianças. Em que consiste-o? Há várias definicões. Se olhar. No espelho dos outros. Esquecer e saber. Rápida e lentamente. O mundo. E si mesmo. Pensar e falar. Jogo esquisito. É a vida.

Lettre à mes amis pour apprendre à faire du cinéma ensemble

« Je joue. Tu joues. Nous jouons. Au cinéma. Tu crois qu’il y a. Une règle du jeu. Parce que tu es un enfant. Qui ne sait pas encore. Que c’est un jeu. Et qu’il est. Réservé aux grandes personnes. Dont tu fais déjà partie. Parce que tu as oublié. Que c’est un jeu d’enfants. En quoi consiste-t-il? Il y a plusieurs définitions. Se regarder. Dans le miroir des autres. Oublier et savoir. Vite et lentement. Le monde. Et soi-même. Penser et parler. Drôle de jeu. C’est la vie.»

(Jean-Luc Godard, in L’Avant-scène cinema – mai 1967)

empty pain / vazio agudo

empty pain
i feel full of it
once again

– Paulo Leminski / gringocarioca



vazio agudo
ando meio
cheio de tudo

– Paulo Leminski (Winterverno)

WHY?

“No one came out of there.”
“No one?
“No one.
“One?
“No.
“Yes! But when I came by, there was one standing there.
“At the door?
“At the door. He stretched out his arms.
“Yes! Because he doesn’t want to let anyone in.
“No one came in there?
“No one.
“The one who stretched out his arms, was he there?
“Inside?
“Yes. Inside.
“I don’t know. He just stretches out his arms so no one can get in.
“Was he sent there so No One can get in? The one who stretches out his arms?
“No. He came and stood there himself and stretched out his arms.
“And No One, No One, No One came out?
“No One, No One.”

(From Sounds, by Wassily Kandinsky. Trans. Elizabeth R. Napier)

the incertitude of the void ...

“Why would a recurrent frustration the more depress him?

Because at the critical turningpoint of human existence he desired to amend many social conditions, the product of inequality and avarice and international animosity.


He believed then that human life was infinitely perfectible, eliminating these conditions?

There remained the generic conditions imposed by natural, as distinct from human law, as integral parts of the human whole: the necessity of destruction to procure alimentary sustenance: the painful character of the ultimate functions of separate existence, the agonies of birth and death: the monotonous menstruation of simian and (particularly) human females extending from the age of puberty to the menopause: inevitable accidents at sea, in mines and factories: certain very painful maladies and their resultant surgical operations, innate lunacy and congenital criminality, decimating epidemics: catastrophic cataclysms which make terror the basis of human mentality: seismic upheavals the epicentres of which are located in densely populated regions: the fact of vital growth, through convulsions of metamorphosis from infancy through maturity to decay.


Why did he desist from speculation?

Because it was a task for a superior intelligence to substitute other more acceptable phenomena in place of the less acceptable phenomena to be removed.


Did Stephen participate in his dejection?

He affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational reagent between a micro- and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void.


Was this affirmation apprehended by Bloom?

Not verbally. Substantially.


What comforted his misapprehension?

That as a competent keyless citizen he had proceeded energetically from the unknown to the known through the incertitude of the void.”


(James Joyce, Ulysses.)


P.S.

“His (Bloom's) logical conclusion, having weighed the matter and allowing for possible error?

... That it was a Utopia, there being no known method from the known to the unknown: an infinity, renderable equally finite by the suppositions probable apposition of one or more bodies equally of the same and of different magnitudes: a mobility of illusory forms immobilised in space, remobilised in air: a past which possibly had ceased to exist as a present before its future spectators had entered actual present existence.”

the grand Spider & the broken hieroglyphics of the stars

“Everything around us becomes part of us, infiltrates us in our carnal or vital sensation, and the web of the grand Spider subtly ties us to whatever is at hand, binding us in a light bed of slow death, where we rock in the wind. Everything is ourselves and we are everything, but of what use is it, if everything is nothing? A ray of sunlight, a cloud that a sudden shadow says is passing, a breeze that rises, the silence that continues when the breeze stops, one face or another, sometimes the unintentional laughter among women talking, and later the night where the broken hieroglyphics of the stars appear without any meaning.” (p. 49)

(Bernardo Soares / Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet. Trans. Alfred Mac Adam)

slave to freedom ...

“Slavery is the law of life, and there is no other law, because this law must be obeyed. No revolt is possible, nor is any refuge to be found from it. Some are born slaves, others become slaves, and to others slavery is given. Our cowardly love of freedom – which, if we did have it, would frighten us because of its strangeness and cause us to repudiate it – is the true sign of the weight of our slavery.” (p. 48)

(Bernardo Soares / Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet. Trans. Alfred Mac Adam)

the monotony of everything ...

“I’m having a day in which the monotony of everything weighs on me like going to jail. The monotony of everything is, nevertheless, nothing more than the monotony in me. Every face, even if it’s one we saw yesterday, is different today, since today is not yesterday. Every day is the day it is, and there was never another exactly the same in the world. Identity exists only in our soul – identity felt even if it is false with itself – for which reason everything resembles everything and becomes simple.” (p. 48)

(Bernardo Soares / Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet. Trans. Alfred Mac Adam)

on genius and wisdom ...

“The principal error of the literary imagination is to suppose that other people are like us and that they should feel as we do. But happily for humanity, every person is only who he is. To genius alone has been given the ability to be others.”

“If he had real wisdom, a man could enjoy the spectacle of the entire world from an easy chair, without knowing how to read, without speaking with anyone, not knowing how to be sad, merely by using his senses and his soul.” (p. 42)


(Bernardo Soares / Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet. Trans. Alfred Mac Adam)

(too) much learning ...

"Much learning means frequent exhaustion.
That's not so good as holding on to the mean."

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 5. Trans. Robert G Henricks)

a flaw is a flaw is a flaw ...

“To know you don’t know is best.
Not to know you don’t know is a flaw.
Therefore the Sage’s not being flawed
Stems from his recognizing a flaw as a flaw.
Therefore, he is flawless.”

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 71. Trans. Robert G Henricks)