“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)
.bmp)
Friday, February 20, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
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
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
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
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)
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)
Sunday, February 01, 2009
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)
(Octavio Paz, “A Literature of Convergences.” Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature. Trans. Helen Lane. p. 226)
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Sunday, January 18, 2009
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)
¿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)
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
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)
“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)
Monday, January 05, 2009
Monday, December 29, 2008
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
are not to win or lose
but to draw (or choose)
the rules of the game
Copyright © 2008 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira
Sunday, December 28, 2008
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
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
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
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)
(Octavio Paz, “Invention, Underdevelopment, Modernity.” Alternating Current. Trans. Helen R. Lane. p. 19)
Monday, November 17, 2008
"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)
(Octavio Paz, “Form and Meaning.” Alternating Current. Trans. Helen R. Lane)
Friday, November 07, 2008
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)
(André Bazin, “On the politique des auteurs.” Trans. Peter Graham)
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
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."]
-- 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."]
Friday, October 17, 2008
Sunday, October 05, 2008
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.)
Thursday, October 02, 2008
Friday, September 19, 2008
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
then unthink the thought --
the unthinkable, then, unthought,
think the thinkable unthought
Copyright © 2008 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira
Thursday, September 18, 2008
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)
“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)
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