Friday, August 28, 2009

Porque ...

Escrevo sem saber o que falar,
Falo sem saber o que dizer,
Digo que não sei falar do que escrevo
Quando começa a ser.

Acordo de manhã cedo e volto a sonhar.
Sonho que acordo e jamais volto a dormir;
Mas durmo, no escuro, durmo
Sem acordar do meu sonhar.

O sol me levanta ao amanhecer;
Eu não quero mais cair
Mas caio, só caio
Na solidão de ser só.

Sou o quê, afinal?
Não chego a saber.
Mas chega a hora de sair –
Saio sem chegar a lugar nenhum.

Vou, então, para onde vou
Sem saber para onde ir,
Onde vou a lugar nenhum
Para chegar a algum lugar.

E a vida vai assim
Até que me pergunto:
Por que?

E daí tudo pára e me responde
Apenas o meu eco sonoro:
Porque.

Vem a resposta da pergunta
Sem responder o que pergunto,
E respondo sem perguntar
Por que.

Respondo com o meu silêncio
Sem refletir no que se espelha
Diante da reflexão:
Porque!

Por isso escrevo o que não sei falar,
Falo o que não sei dizer,
Digo que nunca falo do que escrevo
Quando acaba de ser.



Copyright © 2005 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

paz

uma vela acesa
na favela

um rapaz reza
pela paz



Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

cannibal logic ...

“Só a Antropofagia nos une. Socialmente. Economicamente. Filosoficamente.”

“Só me interessa o que não é meu. Lei do homem. Lei do antropófago.”

“Tínhamos a justiça codificação da vingança. A ciência codificação da Magia. Antropofagia. A transformação permanente do Tabu em totem.”

“Morte e vida das hipóteses. Da equação eu parte do Kosmos ao axioma Kosmos parte do eu. Subsistência. Conhecimento. Antropofagia.”

“A transfiguração do Tabu em totem. Antropofagia.”

“A luta entre o que se chamaria Incriado e a Criatura – ilustrada pela contradição permanente do homem e o seu Tabu. O amor quotidiano e o modus vivendi capitalista. Antropofagia. Absorção do inimigo sacro. Para transformá-lo em totem. A humana aventura. A terrena finalidade. Porém, só as puras elites conseguiram realizar a antropofagia carnal, que traz em si o mais alto sentido da vida e evita todos os males ... catequistas. O que se dá não é uma sublimação .... É a escala termométrica do instinto antropofágico. De carnal, ele se torna eletivo e cria a amizade. Afetivo, o amor. Especulativo, a ciência. Desvia-se e transfere-se. Chegamos ao aviltamento. A baixa antropofagia aglomerada nos pecados do catecismo – a inveja, a usura, a calúnia, o assassinato. Peste dos chamados povos cultos e cristianizados, é contra ela que estamos agindo. Antropófagos.”


(Oswald de Andrade, “Manifesto Antropófago”)



"Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically."

"I am only interested in what is not mine. Law of man. Law of the anthropophagus."

"We had justice as codification of vengeance. Science as codification of Magic. Anthropophagy. The permanent transformation of Taboo into totem."

"Death and life of hypotheses. From the self-equation part of the Kosmos to the Kosmos-axiom part of the self. Subsistence. Knowledge. Anthropophagy."

"The transfiguration of Taboo into totem. Anthropophagy."

"The struggle between what one might call Uncreated and the Creature – illustrated by the permanent contradiction of man and his Taboo. Daily love and capitalist modus vivendi. Anthropophagy. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To turn him into totem. The human adventure. The earthly finality. However, only the pure elites managed to realize carnal anthropophagy, which carries inside the highest meaning of life and averts all the ills ...of catechism. What happens is not a sublimation .... It is the thermometric scale of anthropophagic instinct. Once carnal, it turns elective and creates friendship. If affective, love. If speculative, science. It deviates, it transfers itself. We reach vilification. The base anthropophagy merged into the sins of catechism – envy, usury, calumny, murder. Plague of the so-called cultured and Christianized nations, that is what we are acting against. Anthropophagi."


(Oswald de Andrade, "Anthropophagic Manifesto." Trans. Maria do Carmo Zanini)

Monday, August 24, 2009

the Book ...

“... all earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book.”

“What, then, will the work itself be? I answer: a hymn, all harmony and joy; an immaculate grouping of universal relationships come together for some miraculous and glittering occasion.”

“The foldings of a book … have an almost religious significance. But an even greater significance lies in their thickness when they are piled together; for then they form a tomb in miniature for our souls.”

“… of what avail is that extraordinary addition of folding (like wings in repose, ready to fly forth again) which constitute its rhythm and the chief reason for the secret contained in its pages? Of what avail the priceless silence living there, and evocative symbols following in its wake, to delight the mind which literature has totally delivered?”

“Yes, were it not for the folding of the paper and the depths thereby established, that darkness scattered about in the form of black characters could not rise and issue forth in gleams of mystery from the page to which we are about to turn.”

“The book, which is a total expansion of the letter, must find its mobility in the letter; and in its spaciousness must establish some nameless system of relationships which will embrace and strengthen fiction.”

“We, in turn, will misunderstand the true meaning of this book and the miracle inherent in its structure, if we do not knowingly imagine that a given motif has been properly placed at a certain height on the page, according to its own or to the book’s distribution of light. Let us have no more of those successive, incessant, back and forth motions of our eyes, traveling from one line to the next and beginning all over again. Otherwise, we will miss that ecstasy in which we become immortal for a brief hour, free of all reality, and raise our obsessions to the level of creation. If we do not actively create in this way (as we would music on the keyboard, turning the pages of a score), we would do better to shut our eyes and dream.”

“Thus, in reading, a lonely, quiet concert is given for our minds, and they in turn, less noisily, reach its meaning. All our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation; but, unlike music, they will be rarified, for they partake of thought. Poetry, accompanied by the Idea, is perfect Music, and cannot be anything else.”


(Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Book: A Spiritual Instrument.” Trans. Bradford Cook)

Monday, August 17, 2009

On peripheral writers ...

“... to write, especially in peripheral countries, is to occupy a space that is already occupied.”

“It is characteristic of a peripheral writer, trained in the conviction that great literature is in other countries, to be anxious to know – in addition to its own – so many others; only a writer who believes that everything has been written devotes his work to reflecting upon the the quotes of others, upon reading, translation, and plagiarism …”

(Néstor Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. p. 75)

Sunday, August 16, 2009

task of the writer ...

"All the supports of modern art – novelty, individual celebrity, signatures that seem to confer authenticity, cosmopolitanism, and nationalism – are fragile fictions .... Perhaps the task of the writer at a time when the literary is formed in the interaction of diverse societies and different classes and traditions is to reflect upon this posthumous situation of modernity .... the postmodern scene ... this vertigo generated by the rituals of cultures that are losing their borders ... this perpetual simulacrum of the world."

(Néstor Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. p. 76)

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Because !?!

Alone in a crowd. Where am I? Another self lost in a sea of desolate faces. Who am I? Emptiness within and throughout. Consummate fire of existential doubt. A blazing pillar of solitude. A foundation for the soul. Wanderer. Awkwardly traversing a path riddled with answers. Arriving exhausted, bewildered, at the question: Why?

Copyright © 2009 Marco Alexandre de Oliveira

Monday, August 10, 2009

(post)vanguard & postmodern experimentation ...

“This narcissistic exacerbation of discontinuity generates a new type of ritual, which is in truth an extreme consequence of what the vanguards came to do …. Given that the maximum aesthetic value is constant renovation, to belong to the art world one cannot repeat what has already been done – the legitimate, the shared. It is necessary to initiate noncodified forms of representation (from impressionism to surrealism), invent unforeseen structures (from fantastic to geometric art), and relate images that in reality belong to diverse semantic chains and that no one had previously associated (from collages to performances). No worse accusation can be made against a modern artist than to show repetitions in his or her work.”

“Such transcultural experimentation engendered renovations in language, design, urban forms, and youth practices. But the main fate of the vanguards and of the disenchanted rituals of the postmodernists has been the ritualization of museums and of the market. Despite the desacralization of art and the artistic world, the experimentalists accentuate their insularity. The primacy of form over function, of the form of saying over what is said, require from the spectator a more and more cultivated disposition in order to understand the meaning. Artists who inscribe in the work itself the questioning about what the work should be … exclude the spectator who is not disposed to make of his or her participation in art an equally innovative experience.”

“It is necessary to rethink the efficacy of artistic innovations and irreverences, the limits of their sacrilegious rituals. Attempts to break the illusion in the superiority and the sublime in art (insolence, destruction of one’s own work, the artist’s shit inside the museum) are, in the final analysis, according to Bourdieu, sacralizing desacralizations ‘that scandalize no one but the believers.’ Nothing demonstrates better the tendency toward the self-absorbed functioning of the artistic field than the fate of these apparently radical attempts at subversion, which ‘the most heterodox guardians of artistic orthodoxy’ finally devour.”


(Néstor Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. p. 26-27)