“Who are our nomads today?”

"It is true that, at the center, the rural communities are absorbed by the despot's bureaucratic machine, which includes its scribes, its priests, its functionaries. But on the periphery, these communities commence a sort of adventure. They enter into another kind of unit, this time a nomadic association, a nomadic war machine, and they begin to decodify instead of allowing themselves to become overcodified. Whole groups depart; they become nomads. Archaeologists have led us to conceive of this nomadism not as a primary state, but as an adventure suddenly embarked upon by sedentary groups impelled by the attraction of movement, of what lies outside."

"It is common knowledge that nomads fare miserably under our kinds of regime: we will go to any lengths in order to settle them, and they barely have enough to subsist on …. But the nomad is not necessarily one who moves: some voyages take place in situ, are trips in intensity. Even historically, nomads are not necessarily those who move about like migrants. On the contrary, they do not move; nomads, they nevertheless stay in the same place and continually evade the codes of settled people. We also know that the problem for revolutionaries today is to unite within the purpose of the particular struggle without falling into the despotic and bureaucratic organisation of the party or state apparatus. We seek a kind of war-machine that will not re-create a state apparatus, a nomadic unit related to the outside that will not revive an internal despotic unity."

"And even if the journey is a motionless one, even if it occurs on the spot, imperceptible, unexpected, and subterranean, we must ask ourselves, 'Who are our nomads today …?'"

(Gilles Deleuze, "Nomad Thought")

la calle / the street ...

La calle

Es una calle larga y silenciosa.

Ando en tinieblas y tropiezo y caigo

y me levanto y piso con pies ciegos

las piedras mudas y las hojas secas

y alguien detrás de mí también las pisa:

si me detengo, se detiene;

si corro, corre. Vuelvo el rostro: nadie.

Todo está oscuro y sin salida,

y doy vueltas y vueltas en esquinas

que dan siempre a la calle

donde nadie me espera ni me sigue,

donde yo sigo a un hombre que tropieza

y se levanta y dice al verme: nadie.

– Octavio Paz

The Street

A long and silent street.

I walk in blackness and I stumble and fall

and rise, and I walk blind, my feet

stepping on silent stones and dry leaves.

Someone behind me also stepping on stones, leaves:

if I slow down, he slows;

if I run, he runs. I turn: nobody.

Everything dark and doorless.

Turning and turning among these corners

which lead forever to the street,

where nobody waits for, nobody follows me,

where I pursue a man who stumbles

and rises and says when he sees me: nobody

– Octavio Paz (Trans. Muriel Rukeyser)

aguardo

aguardo

sem guarda-chuva

nem anjo da guarda

Copyright © 2010 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

identicalities 4

Copyright © 2010 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

(sur)real freedom ...

"the idea that freedom, acquired here on earth at the price of a thousand – and the most difficult – renunciations, must be enjoyed as unrestrictedly as it is granted, without pragmatic considerations of any sort, and this because human emancipation – conceived finally in its simplest revolutionary form, which is no less than human emancipation in every respect, by which I mean according to the means at every man's disposal – remains the only cause worth serving. Nadja was born to serve it, if only by demonstrating that around himself each individual must foment a private conspiracy, which exists not only in his imagination – of which, it would be best, from the standpoint of knowledge alone, to take account – but also – and much more dangerously--by thrusting one's head, then an arm, out of the jail – thus shattered – of logic, that is, out of the most hateful of prisons."

(André Breton, Nadja. Transl. Richard Howard)

re-vê-la

Copyright © 2010 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

foda

e agora,

como é que pode?

você me fode,

e vai embora ...

a minha revolta,

é ato de desespero!

de fato eu espero

a sua volta ...

Copyright © 2010 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

A Red, Red Rose

(For my love …)

O my Luve 's like a red, red rose

That 's newly sprung in June:

O my Luve 's like the melodie

That's sweetly play'd in tune!

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, 5

So deep in luve am I:

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

Till a' the seas gang dry:

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,

And the rocks melt wi' the sun; 10

I will luve thee still, my dear,

While the sands o' life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only Luve,

And fare thee weel a while!

And I will come again, my Luve, 15

Tho' it were ten thousand mile.

– Robert Burns

a sharp, sharp thorn

my love's like a red, red rose

your love's like a sharp, sharp thorn

Copyright © 2010 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

dream within a dream ...

"Ese múltiple dios le reveló que su nombre terrenal era Fuego, que en ese templo circular (y en otros iguales) le habían rendido sacrificios y culto y que mágicamente animaría al fantasma soñado, de suerte que todas las criaturas, excepto el Fuego mismo y el soñador, lo pensaran un hombre de carne y hueso. Le ordenó que una vez instruido en los ritos, lo enviaría al otro templo despedazado cuyas pirámides persisten aguas abajo, para que alguna voz lo glorificara en aquel edificio desierto. En el sueño del hombre que soñaba, el soñado se despertó."

(Jorge Luis Borges, "Las ruínas circulares." Ficciones.)

"The manifold god revealed to the man that its earthly name was Fire, and that in that circular temple (and others like it) men had made sacrifices and worshipped it, and that it would magically bring to life the phantasm the man had dreamed – so fully bring him to life that every creature, save Fire itself and the man who dreamed him, would take him for a man of flesh and blood. Fire ordered the dreamer to send the youth, once instructed in the rites, to that other ruined temple whose pyramids still stood downriver, so that a voice might glorify the god in that deserted place. In the dreaming man's dream, the dreamed man awoke."

(Jorge Luis Borges, "The Circular Ruins." Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley)

on revolution ...

"Revolution is war. Of all the wars known in history, it is the only lawful, rightful, just, and truly great war."

(Vladimir Lenin, quoted in Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin)

reflection(s) on art ...

"Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible."

– Paul Klee, "Creative Credo." (Trans. Norbert Guterman)

"Art is not a reflection of reality. It's the reality of a reflection."

– Jean-Luc Godard, La chinoise

master vs. slave ...

"Two equals struggle each for recognition by the other: the one is willing to sacrifice life for this supreme value. The other, a heroic coward in the … sense of loving the body and the material world too well, gives in, in order to continue life. The Master – now the fulfillment of a baleful and inhuman feudal-aristocratic disdain for life without honor – proceeds to enjoy the benefits of his recognition by the other, now become his humble serf or slave. But at this point two distinct and dialectically ironic reversals take place: only the Master is now genuinely human, so that 'recognition' by this henceforth sub-human form of life which is the slave evaporates at the moment of its attainment and offers no genuine satisfaction. 'The truth of the Master,' Hegel observes grimly, 'is the Slave; while the truth of the Slave, on the other hand, is the Master.' But a second reversal is in process as well: for the slave is called upon to labor for the master and to furnish him with all the material benefits befitting his supremacy. But this means that, in the end, only the slave knows what reality and the resistance of matter really are; only the slave can attain some true materialistic consciousness of his situation, since it is precisely to that that he is condemned. The Master, however, is condemned to idealism – to the luxury of a placeless freedom in which any consciousness of his own concrete situation flees like a dream, like a word unremembered on the tip of the tongue, a nagging doubt which the puzzled mind is unable to formulate."

(Fredric Jameson, "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism")

América es real maravillosa ...

"Pero es que muchos se olvidan, con disfrazarse de magos a poco costo, que lo maravilloso comienza a serlo de manera inequívoca cuando surge de una inesperada alteración de la realidad (el milagro), de una revelación privilegiada de la realidad, de una iluminación inhabitual o singularmente favorecedora de las inadvertidas riquezas de la realidad, de una ampliación de las escalas y categorías de la realidad, percibidas con particular intensidad en virtud de una exaltación del espíritu que lo conduce a un modo de 'estado límite'".

...

"¿Pero qué es la historia de América toda sino una crónica de lo real maravilloso?"

 

(Alejo Carpentier, Prólogo a El reino de este mundo)

 

http://www.lajiribilla.cubaweb.cu/2001/n32_diciembre/859_32.html

identicalities 3

Copyright © 2010 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

La poesía es fantástica ...

"Ya no sé quién dijo, una vez, hablando de la posible definición de la poesía, que la poesía es eso que se queda afuera, cuando hemos terminado de definir la poesía. Creo que esa misma definición podría aplicarse a lo fantástico, de modo que, en vez de buscar una definición preceptiva de lo que es lo fantástico, en la literatura o fuera de ella, yo pienso que es mejor que cada uno de ustedes, como lo hago yo mismo, consulte su propio mundo interior, sus propias vivencias, y se plantee personalmente el problema de esas situaciones, de esas irrupciones, de esas llamadas coincidencias en que de golpe nuestra inteligencia y nuestra sensibilidad tienen la impresión de que las leyes, a que obedecemos habitualmente, no se cumplen del todo o se están cumpliendo de una manera parcial, o están dando su lugar a una excepción."

(Julio Cortázar, "El sentimiento de lo fantástico")

http://www.ciudadseva.com/textos/teoria/opin/cortaz5.htm

(i)legal

Copyright © 2010 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

On (Third) World Intellectuals ...

"All of which slowly brings us to the question of the writer himself in the third world, and to what must be called the function of the intellectual, it being understood that in the third-world situation the intellectual is always in one way or another a political intellectual. No third-world lesson is more timely or more urgent for us today, among whom the very term 'intellectual' has withered away, as though it were the name for an extinct species."

…

"We have allowed ourselves, as first-world cultural intellectuals, to restrict our consciousness of our life's work to the narrowest professional or bureaucratic terms, thereby encouraging in ourselves a special sense of subalternity and guilt, which only reinforces the vicious circle. That a literary article could be a political act, with real consequences, is for most of us little more than a curiosity of … literary history."

(Fredric Jameson, "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism")

poor trait of an artist

ripples on the sea of time,
waves upon the shore,
once upon an ever after,
once forever more

the sun projects a shadow,
I suspect it might be mine,
on a path towards the horizon,
where the heavens draw the line

a portrait of reflection
in the mirror of my eye,
as I answer with a question:
why not ask not why?

I walk along ahead against
the current moment past
the dunes of never ever
doomed to beg again,
to begin again,
to beg to begin again
at last ...

Copyright © 2010 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

Danger Mouth …

"I would have preferred to be enveloped in words, borne way beyond all possible beginnings. At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon me. There would have been no beginnings: instead, speech would proceed from me, while I stood in its path—a slender gap—the point of its possible disappearance.

…

A good many people, I imagine, harbour a similar desire to be freed from the obligation to begin, a similar desire to find themselves, right from the outside, on the other side of discourse, without having to stand outside it, pondering its particular, fearsome, and even devilish features. To this all too common feeling, institutions have an ironic reply, for they solemnize beginnings, surrounding them with a circle of silent attention; in order that they can be distinguished from far off, they impose ritual forms upon them.

Inclination speaks out: 'I don't want to have to enter this risky world of discourse; I want nothing to do with it insofar as it is decisive and final; I would like to feel it all around me, calm and transparent, profound, infinitely open, with others responding to my expectations, and truth emerging, one by one. All I want is to allow myself to be borne along, within it, and by it, a happy wreck.' Institutions reply: 'But you have nothing to fear from launching out; we're here to show you discourse is within the established order of things, that we've waited a long time for its arrival, that a place has been set aside for it - a place that both honours and disarms it; and if it should have a certain power, then it is we, and we alone, who give it that power.'

Yet, maybe this institution and this inclination are but two converse responses to the same anxiety: anxiety as to just what discourse is, when it is manifested materially, as a written or spoken object; but also, uncertainty faced with a transitory existence, destined for oblivion—at any rate, not belonging to us; uncertainty at the suggestion of barely imaginable powers and dangers behind this activity, however humdrum and grey it may seem; uncertainty when we suspect the conflicts, triumphs, injuries, dominations and enslavements that lie behind these words, even when long use has chipped away their rough edges.

What is so perilous, then, in the fact that people speak, and that their speech proliferates? Where is the danger in that?"

(Michel Foucault, "The Discourse on Language." Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith)