o amor no asilo alguém estranho veio para dividir meu quarto na casa que era doente da cabeça, uma rapariga insana como os pássaros. encerrando a noite na porta com seu braço sua pluma na cama ela ilude a casa à prova de céu com nuvens e no entanto ela ilude ao caminhar o pesadelo do quarto de mesma imensidão que a morte ou navega o imaginado oceano do homem. ela veio possuída deixando entrar a luz iludida através das paredes, possuída pelos céus. ela dorme no estreito enquanto caminha por entre a poeira e grita à vontade por entre os cômodos do hospício que definham no andar de minhas lágrimas. apanhado pela luz em seus braços por último e até o fim - eu vou sem medo de errar sofrer a visão primeira que há de atear fogo às estrelas. Dylan Thomas

- Descobri aquela que é a maior angústia do ser humano. Não é a morte, não é a doença, não é o desemprego, não é o envelhecimento, não é a separação de quem gostamos, não é detestar o que se faz profissionalmente, não é ser comido por percevejos. A maior angústia por que um homem pode passar é ter de gerir duas relações ao mesmo tempo e às escondidas.

As pessoas crescidas

As pessoas crescidas fui-as conhecendo de baixo para cima à medida que a minha idade ia subindo em centímetros, marcados na parede pelo lápis da mãe. Primeiro eram apenas sapatos, por vezes descobertos sob a cama, enormes, sem pé dentro, e logo calçados por mim para caminhar pela casa, erguendo as pernas como um escafandrista, num estrondo imenso de solas. Depois tomei conhecimento dos joelhos cobertos de fazenda ou de meias de vidro, formando ao redor da mesa debaixo da qual eu gatinhava uma paliçada que me impedia de fugir. A seguir vieram as barrigas de onde a voz, a tosse e a autoridade saíam apesar do esforço inútil de suspensórios e de cintos. Ao chegar à altura da toalha aprendi a distinguir os adultos uns dos outros pelos remédios entre o guardanapo e o copo: as gotas da avó, os xaropes do avô, as várias cores dos comprimidos das tias, as caixinhas de prata das pastilhas dos primos, o vaporizador da asma do padrinho que ele recebia abrindo as mandíbulas numa ansiedade de cherne. Compreendi por essa época que tinham o riso desmontável: tiravam as piadas da boca e lavavam-nas, a seguir ao almoço, com uma escovinha especial. Aconteceu-me encontrá-las sob a forma de gargantilhas de dentes num estojo de gengivas cor-de-rosa escondidas por trás do despertador nas manhãs de domingo, a troçarem dos rostos que sem elas envelheciam mil anos de rugas murchas como flores de herbário devorando os lábios com as suas pregas concêntricas. Já capaz pelo meu tamanho de lhes olhar a cara, o que mais me surpreendia neles era a sua estranha indiferença perante as duas únicas coisas verdadeiramente importantes do mundo: os bichos da seda e os guarda-chuvas de chocolate. Também não gostavam de coleccionar gafanhotos, de mastigar estearina nem de dar tesouradas no cabelo, mas em contrapartida possuíam 12 a mania incompreensível dos banhos e das pastas dentífricas e quando se referiam diante de mim a uma parente loira, muito simpática, muito pintada, muito bem cheirosa e mais bonita que eles todos, desatavam a falar francês olhando-me de banda com desconfiança e apreensão. Nunca percebi quando se deixa de ser pequeno para se passar a ser crescido. Provavelmente quando a parente loira passa a ser referida, em português, como a desavergonhada da Luísa. Provavelmente quando substituímos os guarda-chuvas de chocolate por bifes tártaros. Provavelmente quando começamos a gostar de tomar duche. Provavelmente quando cessamos de ter medo do escuro. Provavelmente quando nos tornamos tristes. Mas não tenho a certeza: não sei se sou crescido. Claro que acabei o liceu, andei na faculdade, tratam- -me por senhor doutor e há séculos que ninguém se lembra de me mandar lavar os dentes. Devo ter crescido, julgo eu, porque a parente loira deixou de me sentar ao colo e de me fazer festas no cabelo provocando em mim uma comichão no nariz que me tornava lânguido e que aprendi mais tarde ser o equivalente do que chamam prazer. O prazer deles, claro, muito menor que o de mastigar estearina ou aplicar tesouradas na franja. Ou rasgar papel pela linha picotada. Ou mostrar um sapo à cozinheira e vê-la tombar de costas, de olhos revirados, derrubando as latas que anunciam Feijão, Grão e Arroz e que na realidade contêm massa, açúcar e café. Devo ter crescido. Se calhar cresci. Mas o que de facto me apetece é convidar a parente loira para jantar comigo no Gambrinus. Peço ao criado que nos traga duas doses de guarda- -chuvas de chocolate e enquanto chupamos a bengalinha de plástico mostro-lhe a minha colecção de gafanhotos numa caixa de cartão. Posso estar enganado mas pela maneira como me fazia festas no cabelo, com olhos tão jovens como os meus, quase que aposto que ela há-de gostar. António Lobo Antunes

O início do livro, sempre importante

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/9817505/30-great-opening-lines-in-literature.html?frame=2458291

Entrevista

http://www.blogclubedeleitores.com/2013/01/a-conversa-com-manuel-monteiro-i.html#comment-form

Sempre imaginei o cristão-socialista ideal como aquele se numa floresta uma árvore solitária sem folhas e envelhecida - a abraça não a largando. Aquele que consegue ver uma pedra triste, dar-lhe um nome e o seu sorriso até que a sua alegria não seja inferior à das outras. Que consegue ver os objectos de uma casa que são mais desfavorecidos e abandonados e revitalizá-los com o seu amor.

Carrilho, o português mais lúcido sobre as novas tecnologias

Seria cómico se não fosse trágico

January 25, 2013 WHY WE SHOULD MEMORIZE Posted by Brad Leithauser Much of our daily lives would be dizzyingly unrecognizable to people living a hundred years ago: what we wear and what we eat, how we travel, how we communicate, how we while away our leisure time. But, surely, our occasional attempts to memorize a poem would feel familiar to them—those inhabitants of a heyday of verse memorization. Little has changed. They, too, in committing a poem to memory, underwent a predictable gamut of frustrations: the pursuit of stubbornly elusive phrases, the inner hammering of rote repetition, tantalizing tip-of-the-tongue stammerings, confident forward marches that finish in an abrupt amnesiac’s cul-de-sac. Actually, if the process has altered over the years, perhaps we feel the difficulties of the task more acutely than our ancestors did. As a college professor of writing and literature, I regularly impose memorization assignments, and I’m struck by how burdensome my students typically find them. Give them a full week to memorize any Shakespeare sonnet (“Hey,” I tell them, “pick a really famous one—Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?—and you’ve already got the first line down”), and a number of them will painfully falter. They’re not used to memorizing much of anything. In what would have been my prime recitation years had I been born in an earlier era—junior high and high school—little memorization was required of me. But in early boyhood I did a fair amount of it. My mother, who had literary ambitions, paid me a penny a line to memorize poems. The first one I mastered was Tennyson’s “The Eagle” (“He clasps the crag with crooked hands”), which brought in a haul of six cents. Opportunistically, I moved on to the longer “Casey at the Bat” (“It looked extremely rocky for the Mudville nine that day”) and Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib” (whose title I mispronounced for decades), which netted me fifty-two cents and twenty-four cents respectively. Some Longfellow, some Frost. I straggled through Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and enough of his “The Ancient Mariner” to purchase a couple of candy bars. It sounds whimsical and entertaining now, but I suspect some dead-serious counsel lay behind my mother’s beaming encouragement. I think she was tacitly saying, “Stick with poetry—that’s where the money is.” It turned out to be levelheaded advice. Today, I pay my bills by talking to my students about poetry, and about stories and novels and essays—ultimately, about memorable cadences, about the music that occasionally lifts off of words carefully deployed on a page. * * * It’s tempting to sentimentalize an era in which poetry—memorized, recited poetry—held so prominent a place in the culture. But its once-substantial role turns out to be a mixed and complicated tale, as thoroughly chronicled in Catherine Robson’s new “Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem.” Reared in England, now a professor at N.Y.U., Robson compares classroom procedures in Britain and the United States during the years when recitation held a sizeable and official slot in the curriculum (roughly 1875 to 1950). The rationales for verse recitation were many and sometimes mutually contradictory: to foster a lifelong love of literature; to preserve the finest accomplishments in the language down the generations; to boost self-confidence through a mastery of elocution; to help purge the idioms and accents of lower-class speech; to strengthen the brain through exercise; and so forth. And the construction of a canon—the choice of which poems ought to be assigned to students at various grade levels—grew out of a collision of nationalistic zeal, piety, commercial enterprise (the success or failure of various competitive “readers”—what we would call textbooks), thoughtless imitation, and a fair amount of what looks like happenstance. Robson grounds her book with three “case studies.” (She occasionally takes on a dry, clinical tone.) The first is Felicia Hemans’s “Casabianca,” a poem that survives today largely as a first line (“The boy stood on the burning deck”), with a vague suspicion that what follows has often been parodied. (Poor Tom Sawyer was afflicted by it in the classroom.) The second may be the most celebrated of eighteenth-century English poems, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” The third is a poem previously unknown to me, Charles Wolfe’s charming ballad “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna.” Each poem was at one time universally embraced, both by society and by educators. “The Burial of Sir John Moore” has a likably homespun texture and offers, from a pedagogical standpoint, a salutary lesson about the triumph of courage over grandeur. (General Moore died, in 1809, in Spain, while leading his troops to a magnificent long-shot victory over the French, and his last words were, “I hope my country will do me justice.” Military exigency did not allow time for a suitable burial—a lack for which the poem seeks to indemnify him.) But the other two poems look like extremely peculiar candidates for widespread memorization. The forty-line “Casabianca,” which was put to memory by countless pre-adolescents, is grotesquely grisly: it tells the tale of a boy sailor who, while prudence is shouting at him to beat a hasty retreat, dutifully remains at his post (“he would not go / Without his Father’s word; / That father, faint in death below, / His voice no longer heard”), and, as a consequence, is blown to smithereens. As for Gray’s lovely, leisurely, dusky elegy, nothing much happens in its hundred and twenty-eight lines, and, as a result, his many scene-setting stanzas are easily confused and transposed by the would-be memorizer; to hold it all in one’s head is a somewhat perverse feat, like those jigsaw-puzzle aficionados who, finding their task insufficiently challenging, put the puzzle together face-side-down. Though “Casabianca” and “The Burial of Sir John Moore” are actually nineteenth-century poems, they partake of that misty, moss-and-granite melancholy one associates with those of Gray’s contemporaries known as the Graveyard Poets (or the Boneyard Boys). These were a pallid bunch, for whom cemeteries were what bars and brothels would be for many French poets of the nineteenth century—a comfy home away from home. They were continually reminding us that we all have one foot in the grave. It’s a weighty burden to drop on the scrawny shoulders of some ten-year-old boy or girl, standing hunched and terrified before a scowling, correction-bent teacher. * * * My late colleague Joseph Brodsky, who died in 1996, used to appall his students by requiring them to memorize something like a thousand lines each semester. He felt he was preparing them for the future; they might need such verses later in life. His own biography provided a stirring example of the virtues of mental husbandry. He’d been grateful for every scrap of poetry he had in his head during his enforced exile in the Arctic, banished there by a Soviet government that did not know what to do with his genius and that, in a symbolic embrace of a national policy of brain drain, expelled him from the country in 1972. Brodsky was a nonpareil in various ways, not least in being the only teacher I knew who continued to smoke during class as the air-purifying nineties rolled around. He loved to recite poetry. The words emerged through smoke, and a thick Russian accent, but the conviction and import were unmistakable: to take a poem to heart was to know it by heart. I’m struck by how, in the seventeen years since his death, the meaning and justifications for verse memorization have shifted. The effort in its acquisition may be the same, but we’d be naïve to suppose the necessity behind it is unaltered. Memorized poems are a sort of larder, laid up against the hungers of an extended period of solitude. But today we are far less solitary than we were even a few years ago. Anyone equipped with a smartphone—many of my friends would never step outdoors without one—commands a range of poetry that beggars anything the brain can store. Let’s say it’s a gorgeous afternoon in October. You’re walking through a park, and you wish to recall—but can’t quite summon—the opening lines of Keats’ “To Autumn.” With a quick tap-tap-tap, you have it on your screen. You’re back in the nineteenth century, but you’re also in the twenty-first, where machine memory regularly supplants and superannuates brain memory. So why undergo the laborious process of memorizing a poem these days, when—tap, tap, tap—you have it at your fingertips? Has this become another outmoded practice? When I was a Boy Scout, in the sixties, I spent some hours trying to learn Morse code and even, on a couple of overly sunny, headachey afternoons, trying to communicate by flag semaphore. Some things were meant to disappear. (And many of my students wish that assignments to memorize poems would follow them.) The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen. Robson puts the point succinctly: “If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.” After all this time, I still have every word of Tennyson’s “Eagle.” He’s a literal part of me, which perhaps accounts for his splendid supremacy in my imagination. No other bird I’ve encountered in poems since—not Keats’ nightingale, or Hardy’s thrush, or Frost’s oven bird, or Clampitt’s kingfisher—can compete with him, roosting as he does in an aerie at the top of the world. Here’s the poem in entirety: He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring’d with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls. Six cents. It was a cheap thrill, and an everlasting one. Brad Leithauser’s most recent novel is “The Art Student’s War.” His new and selected poems, “The Oldest Word for Dawn,” will appear in February. Read his pieces on “Peter Pan,” “The Turn of the Screw,” and two ways of looking at fiction. Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/01/why-we-should-memorize.html#ixzz2JIVw1CYcJanuary 25, 2013 WHY WE SHOULD MEMORIZE Posted by Brad Leithauser Much of our daily lives would be dizzyingly unrecognizable to people living a hundred years ago: what we wear and what we eat, how we travel, how we communicate, how we while away our leisure time. But, surely, our occasional attempts to memorize a poem would feel familiar to them—those inhabitants of a heyday of verse memorization. Little has changed. They, too, in committing a poem to memory, underwent a predictable gamut of frustrations: the pursuit of stubbornly elusive phrases, the inner hammering of rote repetition, tantalizing tip-of-the-tongue stammerings, confident forward marches that finish in an abrupt amnesiac’s cul-de-sac. Actually, if the process has altered over the years, perhaps we feel the difficulties of the task more acutely than our ancestors did. As a college professor of writing and literature, I regularly impose memorization assignments, and I’m struck by how burdensome my students typically find them. Give them a full week to memorize any Shakespeare sonnet (“Hey,” I tell them, “pick a really famous one—Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?—and you’ve already got the first line down”), and a number of them will painfully falter. They’re not used to memorizing much of anything. In what would have been my prime recitation years had I been born in an earlier era—junior high and high school—little memorization was required of me. But in early boyhood I did a fair amount of it. My mother, who had literary ambitions, paid me a penny a line to memorize poems. The first one I mastered was Tennyson’s “The Eagle” (“He clasps the crag with crooked hands”), which brought in a haul of six cents. Opportunistically, I moved on to the longer “Casey at the Bat” (“It looked extremely rocky for the Mudville nine that day”) and Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib” (whose title I mispronounced for decades), which netted me fifty-two cents and twenty-four cents respectively. Some Longfellow, some Frost. I straggled through Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and enough of his “The Ancient Mariner” to purchase a couple of candy bars. It sounds whimsical and entertaining now, but I suspect some dead-serious counsel lay behind my mother’s beaming encouragement. I think she was tacitly saying, “Stick with poetry—that’s where the money is.” It turned out to be levelheaded advice. Today, I pay my bills by talking to my students about poetry, and about stories and novels and essays—ultimately, about memorable cadences, about the music that occasionally lifts off of words carefully deployed on a page. * * * It’s tempting to sentimentalize an era in which poetry—memorized, recited poetry—held so prominent a place in the culture. But its once-substantial role turns out to be a mixed and complicated tale, as thoroughly chronicled in Catherine Robson’s new “Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem.” Reared in England, now a professor at N.Y.U., Robson compares classroom procedures in Britain and the United States during the years when recitation held a sizeable and official slot in the curriculum (roughly 1875 to 1950). The rationales for verse recitation were many and sometimes mutually contradictory: to foster a lifelong love of literature; to preserve the finest accomplishments in the language down the generations; to boost self-confidence through a mastery of elocution; to help purge the idioms and accents of lower-class speech; to strengthen the brain through exercise; and so forth. And the construction of a canon—the choice of which poems ought to be assigned to students at various grade levels—grew out of a collision of nationalistic zeal, piety, commercial enterprise (the success or failure of various competitive “readers”—what we would call textbooks), thoughtless imitation, and a fair amount of what looks like happenstance. Robson grounds her book with three “case studies.” (She occasionally takes on a dry, clinical tone.) The first is Felicia Hemans’s “Casabianca,” a poem that survives today largely as a first line (“The boy stood on the burning deck”), with a vague suspicion that what follows has often been parodied. (Poor Tom Sawyer was afflicted by it in the classroom.) The second may be the most celebrated of eighteenth-century English poems, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” The third is a poem previously unknown to me, Charles Wolfe’s charming ballad “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna.” Each poem was at one time universally embraced, both by society and by educators. “The Burial of Sir John Moore” has a likably homespun texture and offers, from a pedagogical standpoint, a salutary lesson about the triumph of courage over grandeur. (General Moore died, in 1809, in Spain, while leading his troops to a magnificent long-shot victory over the French, and his last words were, “I hope my country will do me justice.” Military exigency did not allow time for a suitable burial—a lack for which the poem seeks to indemnify him.) But the other two poems look like extremely peculiar candidates for widespread memorization. The forty-line “Casabianca,” which was put to memory by countless pre-adolescents, is grotesquely grisly: it tells the tale of a boy sailor who, while prudence is shouting at him to beat a hasty retreat, dutifully remains at his post (“he would not go / Without his Father’s word; / That father, faint in death below, / His voice no longer heard”), and, as a consequence, is blown to smithereens. As for Gray’s lovely, leisurely, dusky elegy, nothing much happens in its hundred and twenty-eight lines, and, as a result, his many scene-setting stanzas are easily confused and transposed by the would-be memorizer; to hold it all in one’s head is a somewhat perverse feat, like those jigsaw-puzzle aficionados who, finding their task insufficiently challenging, put the puzzle together face-side-down. Though “Casabianca” and “The Burial of Sir John Moore” are actually nineteenth-century poems, they partake of that misty, moss-and-granite melancholy one associates with those of Gray’s contemporaries known as the Graveyard Poets (or the Boneyard Boys). These were a pallid bunch, for whom cemeteries were what bars and brothels would be for many French poets of the nineteenth century—a comfy home away from home. They were continually reminding us that we all have one foot in the grave. It’s a weighty burden to drop on the scrawny shoulders of some ten-year-old boy or girl, standing hunched and terrified before a scowling, correction-bent teacher. * * * My late colleague Joseph Brodsky, who died in 1996, used to appall his students by requiring them to memorize something like a thousand lines each semester. He felt he was preparing them for the future; they might need such verses later in life. His own biography provided a stirring example of the virtues of mental husbandry. He’d been grateful for every scrap of poetry he had in his head during his enforced exile in the Arctic, banished there by a Soviet government that did not know what to do with his genius and that, in a symbolic embrace of a national policy of brain drain, expelled him from the country in 1972. Brodsky was a nonpareil in various ways, not least in being the only teacher I knew who continued to smoke during class as the air-purifying nineties rolled around. He loved to recite poetry. The words emerged through smoke, and a thick Russian accent, but the conviction and import were unmistakable: to take a poem to heart was to know it by heart. I’m struck by how, in the seventeen years since his death, the meaning and justifications for verse memorization have shifted. The effort in its acquisition may be the same, but we’d be naïve to suppose the necessity behind it is unaltered. Memorized poems are a sort of larder, laid up against the hungers of an extended period of solitude. But today we are far less solitary than we were even a few years ago. Anyone equipped with a smartphone—many of my friends would never step outdoors without one—commands a range of poetry that beggars anything the brain can store. Let’s say it’s a gorgeous afternoon in October. You’re walking through a park, and you wish to recall—but can’t quite summon—the opening lines of Keats’ “To Autumn.” With a quick tap-tap-tap, you have it on your screen. You’re back in the nineteenth century, but you’re also in the twenty-first, where machine memory regularly supplants and superannuates brain memory. So why undergo the laborious process of memorizing a poem these days, when—tap, tap, tap—you have it at your fingertips? Has this become another outmoded practice? When I was a Boy Scout, in the sixties, I spent some hours trying to learn Morse code and even, on a couple of overly sunny, headachey afternoons, trying to communicate by flag semaphore. Some things were meant to disappear. (And many of my students wish that assignments to memorize poems would follow them.) The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen. Robson puts the point succinctly: “If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.” After all this time, I still have every word of Tennyson’s “Eagle.” He’s a literal part of me, which perhaps accounts for his splendid supremacy in my imagination. No other bird I’ve encountered in poems since—not Keats’ nightingale, or Hardy’s thrush, or Frost’s oven bird, or Clampitt’s kingfisher—can compete with him, roosting as he does in an aerie at the top of the world. Here’s the poem in entirety: He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring’d with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls. Six cents. It was a cheap thrill, and an everlasting one. Brad Leithauser’s most recent novel is “The Art Student’s War.” His new and selected poems, “The Oldest Word for Dawn,” will appear in February. Read his pieces on “Peter Pan,” “The Turn of the Screw,” and two ways of looking at fiction. Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/01/why-we-should-memorize.html#ixzz2JIVw1CYc

O Suave e o Negro 5

http://www.blogclubedeleitores.com/2013/01/homenagem-f-scott-fitzgerald.html

Que palavra

irresistibilíssimo

Os Três Mal-Amados de João Cabral de Melo Neto

Joaquim: O amor comeu meu nome, minha identidade, meu retrato. O amor comeu minha certidão de idade, minha genealogia, meu endereço. O amor comeu meus cartões de visita. O amor veio e comeu todos os papéis onde eu escrevera meu nome. O amor comeu minhas roupas, meus lenços, minhas camisas. O amor comeu metros e metros de gravatas. O amor comeu a medida de meus ternos, o número de meus sapatos, o tamanho de meus chapéus. O amor comeu minha altura, meu peso, a cor de meus olhos e de meus cabelos. O amor comeu meus remédios, minhas receitas médicas, minhas dietas. Comeu minhas aspirinas, minhas ondas-curtas, meus raios-X. Comeu meus testes mentais, meus exames de urina. O amor comeu na estante todos os meus livros de poesia. Comeu em meus livros de prosa as citações em verso. Comeu no dicionário as palavras que poderiam se juntar em versos. Faminto, o amor devorou os utensílios de meu uso: pente, navalha, escovas, tesouras de unhas, canivete. Faminto ainda, o amor devorou o uso de meus utensílios: meus banhos frios, a ópera cantada no banheiro, o aquecedor de água de fogo morto mas que parecia uma usina. O amor comeu as frutas postas sobre a mesa. Bebeu a água dos copos e das quartinhas. Comeu o pão de propósito escondido. Bebeu as lágrimas dos olhos que, ninguém o sabia, estavam cheios de água. O amor voltou para comer os papéis onde irrefletidamente eu tornara a escrever meu nome. O amor roeu minha infância, de dedos sujos de tinta, cabelo caindo nos olhos, botinas nunca engraxadas. O amor roeu o menino esquivo, sempre nos cantos, e que riscava os livros, mordia o lápis, andava na rua chutando pedras. Roeu as conversas, junto à bomba de gasolina do largo, com os primos que tudo sabiam sobre passarinhos, sobre uma mulher, sobre marcas de automóvel. O amor comeu meu Estado e minha cidade. Drenou a água morta dos mangues, aboliu a maré. Comeu os mangues crespos e de folhas duras, comeu o verde ácido das plantas de cana cobrindo os morros regulares, cortados pelas barreiras vermelhas, pelo trenzinho preto, pelas chaminés. Comeu o cheiro de cana cortada e o cheiro de maresia. Comeu até essas coisas de que eu desesperava por não saber falar delas em verso. O amor comeu até os dias ainda não anunciados nas folhinhas. Comeu os minutos de adiantamento de meu relógio, os anos que as linhas de minha mão asseguravam. Comeu o futuro grande atleta, o futuro grande poeta. Comeu as futuras viagens em volta da terra, as futuras estantes em volta da sala. O amor comeu minha paz e minha guerra. Meu dia e minha noite. Meu inverno e meu verão. Comeu meu silêncio, minha dor de cabeça, meu medo da morte

Um pescador saiu para apanhar um peixe durante quatrocentos dias. É o que sinto ao insistir em ler Miguel Esteves Cardoso. Um peixe tão bom em cada quatrocentas crónicas, que me faz pensar que vale a pena lê-lo todos os dias. Sem falhar. O último peixe: Tenho lido os “poemas mudados para português” por Herberto Helder [HH] no livro a que chamou O Bebedor Nocturno. Logo no “mudados para português” se vê que está bem escrito, acima das velhas desculpas e falsas modéstias das traduções e das traições. É uma obra maior, que ensina que não se pode aprender a escrever. Mas ver escrever bem já é bem suficiente. Nos Quinze Haikus Japoneses que mudou para português, HH escolheu um de Kikaku que Bashô depois corrigiu. Kikaku escreveu: “Libélula vermelha./Tira-lhe as asas:/um pimentão.” Segue-se a “Correcção de Bashô”: “Pimentão vermelho./Põe-lhe umas asas:/Libélula.” A correcção é gigante. O original pega numa coisa bonita (a libélula) e tira-lhe um acessório (as asas) para mostrar que é parecida com uma coisa feia (um pimentão). Bashô e HH mostram que é melhor transformar uma coisa banal (pimentão) numa coisa mágica (libélula), dando-lhe asas. É melhor acrescentar do que remover, fazer pensar do que fazer troça. A libélula não precisa de ser vermelha ou de adjectivo sequer – é das cores do arco-íris. Já o pimentão tem de ser vermelho, porque há verdes e amarelos. Depois, é melhor a indefinição de “umas asas” (quaisquer) do que “as asas” (daquela única libélula). Como voa mais a maiúscula da única palavra da terceira linha (“Libélula.”) do que as minúsculas de “um pimentão”. A nossa língua renasceu.

I´ve learned that to be with those I like is enough. Walt Whitman

E se Keats não tivesse morrido aos 25 anos? E se Sá-Carneiro não tivesse morrido aos 26 anos? Talvez Deus os tenha colhido porque a sua escrita se tornaria tão encandeante, que faiscaria o leitor que se dissiparia ante um clarão que nenhum mortal poderia suportar.

Não gosto de pessoas rápidas. Pessoas que passam pela experiências sem o paladar se lhes demorar - sem lhes guardar o sabor. Não gosto de pessoas rápidas. Pessoas que não se sentam a contemplar o ocaso do Sol. Pessoas que não se demoram a ver o mar. Pessoas que não são capazes de estar em casa a ouvir o rugir do vento, o som da chuva, sorrindo no sofá, deitando-se na cama. Pessoas que não sorriem e não falam às flores. Não gosto de pessoas rápidas. Pessoas que estão sempre a fazer qualquer coisa da vida prática e que sentem as coisas importantes da vida como perda de tempo. Não gosto de pessoas rápidas. Dificilmente, cultivarão o afecto. Não gosto de pessoas rápidas. Pessoas que tentam despachar a comunicação pelas novas tecnologias e que vêem as conversas e as pessoas como assuntos a despachar na agenda tendo em vista um determinado fim de interesse pessoal. Não gosto de pessoas rápidas. Pessoas que no fim-de-semana utilizam o despertador. Não gosto de pessoas rápidas. Pessoas que se dispersam em múltiplos estímulos, em nada mergulhando até às profundezas. Não gosto de pessoas rápidas. Pessoas que não conseguem ter momentos em que a alma se recolhe. Não gosto de pessoas rápidas. Pessoas que não têm consciência da morte. Não gosto de pessoas rápidas. Pessoas que não meditam seriamente. Pessoas sem metafísica. Sem poesia. (Dons que só se cultivam com tempo.) Não gosto de pessoas rápidas. Que não têm conversas longas, demoradas, profundas, íntimas - aquelas que fazem a vida valer a pena. Não gosto de pessoas rápidas. Que não escutam o Outro, que não desenvolvem e aprimoram a sensibilidade para com os problemas do Outro. Pessoas que não sabem o que é o ofício da paciência. Não gosto de pessoas rápidas. Que não conseguem estar sozinhas no centro do quarto consigo mesmas. Que não sonham.

Um amigo meu que conhece o Herberto Helder (escritor que ponho nos píncaros!) diz que ele recusa prémios não por integridade, mas por vaidade. Luiz Pacheco disse o mesmo. Até que ponto uma autopreservação de uma imagem de integridade não pode ser derivada de um culto da vaidade? É complicado julgar. Como disse o Lobo Antunes: quanto mais compreendo, menos julgo. Mas pergunto-me se um prémio ou a publicação de um livro não são a mesma coisa. Conseguir publicar é ser escolhido entre muitos. Tentar ser publicado é no fundo tentar ser premiado.

Não se pode falar de democracia se a democracia não abrange, não aceita, se expulsa os que pugnam contra ela - se exclui os antidemocracia. Também a ditadura acolhe no seu seio aqueles que a defendem e expulsa aqueles que propugnam por ela. Como as distinguir então?

Ler para crer

http://www.meionorte.com/noticias/internacional/egito-liberara-que-maridos-facam-sexo-com-esposas-mortas-ate-6-horas-depois-de-morte-164093.html