Quem escreve assim não é gago!

 "There, old vicary, congratulate my refuge, the saneside outside sheltering the insane inside: to present the static sane side outside to another outside saneside, to be esteemed for that outsane side while all the while the insaneside attacks your outsane side as though we weren't both playing the same game, and gone dowm Summer Street (singing unchristian songs) the inane sinside, pocketing a cool million wearing the shoutside outside and the doubtside inside, the vileside inside and the violinside outside skipping dancing and foretelling things too come all ye faithful, of thine own give we back to thee."

William Gaddis, The Recognitions [pg 399]

citando

— Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest.
William Gaddis, The Recognitions [252]

— Never interrupt people when they're telling you more than they know they are, no matter how mad they make you.
William Gaddis, The Recognitions [253]

Fakery and Stony Truths

"Mr. Gaddis knows almost everything: not only how the world works - the pragmatic cynical business-machine that we call worldliness - but also how myth flies into being out of the primeval clouds of art and death and money."

"Mr. Gaddis has become famous for not being famous enough."

Aqui

Recognitions / repetition / resonations

"As fantasias sempre estão ao serviço de algo, de uma posição que desejamos manter. Não somos objectos. Somos sujeitos que organizam as próprias fantasias. A situação em que me encontro é a situação na qual eu me coloco".
Jacques Sedat

William Gaddis by William Gaddis

Hans Memling - Portrait of Barbara van Vlaendenbergh, c. 1480

"... I guess it's both the force and the flaw of those paintings, the thoroughness with which they recreate the atmosphere, and the, I mean a painter like Memling who isn't long on suggestion and inferences but piles up perfection layer by layer. But, well it's like a writer who can't help devoting as much care to a moment as to an hour".
The Recogntions, by William Gaddis [pg 124]

There was a man of double deed...

And Also The Trees - There Was a Man of Double Deed

Also see The Recognitions (William Gaddis, page 98/99)

There was a man of double deed,

Who sowed his garden full of seed;

When the seed began to grow,

'Twas like a garden full of snow;

When the snow began to melt,

'Twas like a ship without a belt;

When the ship began to sail,

'Twas like a bird without a tail;

When the bird began to fly,

'Twas like an eagle in the sky;

When the sky began to roar,

'Twas like a lion at my door;

When my door began to crack,

'Twas like a stick across my back;

When my back began to smart,

'Twas like a penknife in my heart;

And when my heart began to bleed,

'Twas death, and death, and death indeed.

[anonymous]

The words to say it

William Gaddis consegue materializar, em palavras, aquilo que nos escapa quando comunicamos com os outros (expressões faciais, movimentos corporais, subtilezas...).
Usando as palavras, de forma exímia, ele fixa, no tempo, gestos, atitudes e comportamentos, que o inconsciente deixa escapar.
Tem uma sofisticada habilidade para reter, para fixar no tempo, para sempre, o efémero da linguagem não falada.

"He puts his hand there, his right hand to his forehead and draws it down with feverish application, as though in this to pull away the features so long forming, revaluing for this moment; but above his hand, his face comes back into shape, the forehead quickly rises and recovers its lines, then the brows, and the eyes vividly devious permit nothing to enter".

"Esther watched him now, standing in the middle of the room, drawing his hand down over his face as though, again, to wipe out some past, how long ago, or how recent, or all of it?".

The Recognitions, William Gaddis [pg. 93]

Uma imagem vale mil palavras

"Esther liked books out where everyone could see them, a sort of graphic index to the intricate labyrinth of her mind arrayed to impress the most casual guest, a system of immediate introduction which she had found to obtain in a number of grimy intellectual households in Greenwich Village. Her husband, on the other hand, did not seem to care where his books were, so long as they were where he put them."
The Recognitions, William Gaddis [pg 83]

:) A hot Sunday in Paris

"It was the dead heat of Paris summer, when Paris cats go to sleep on Paris windowsills, and ledges high up, and fall off, and plunge through the glass roof of the lavabo. The center of the city was empty. A sight-seeing bus set off from the Place de l'Opéra. A truck and a Citroën smashed before the Galeries Lafayette. At the Pont d'Auteuil, a man's body was dragged out of the Seine with a bicycle tied to it. Among the fixtures, tiled and marbled shapes remindful of a large outdoor bathroom, in the cemetery at Montrouge a widower argued with his dead wive's lover over who had the right to place flowers on her grave. In front of the Bourse, a deaf-mute soccer team carried on conversation in obstreperous silence. On the Quai du Pont Neuf, a Frenchman sat picking his nose. Then he put his arm around his girl and kissed her. Then he picked his nose. It was Sunday in Paris, and very quiet."
The Recognitions, William Gaddis, pg 74

Flow

"In Thomas Mann's preface to The Short Novels of Dostoevsky, he writes that Nietzsche felt "all intelectual isolation and alienation from civil norm, all mental autonomy and ruthlessness, are related to the criminal's mode of life and afford an experiential insight into it. It seems to me that we can go on for ever farther and say that all creative originality, all artistry in the widest sense of the word, does just that. The French painter and sculpture Degas once made the remark that the artist must approach his work in the same frame of mind in which the criminal commits his deed." (Dial Press, 1945, p. xii). [Keith McMullen]

Taken from here.

Carpet patterns named after artists

Konya 18th century carpet with Memling gul design.

Mais, aqui

The art of Fake / Confirmation Bias / Echo chambres

Van Meegeren The Forger Who Fooled the Nazis

About, Han van Meegeren
Van Meegeren, website

Abraham Bredius and Dirk Hannema looking at The Supper at Emmaus

Nothing is empty of sense...

"The Recognitions as a title I like perfectly because it implies the impossibility of escape from a (the) pattern". — William Gaddis

"Gwyon had climbed to the pines behind the town, pausing to breathe and smell the delicious freshness of manure, to realize how his senses had fallen into disuse under the abuses of cities".
[pg16]

[...]

"— Then how can you judge her crime, if you have never been so tempted?"
[pg24]

[...]

"And his father, withdrawing into his study with a deftness for absenting himself at crucial moments akin to that talent of the Lord, had become about as unattainable".
[pg35]

[...]

"Prolonged hours of wakefulness, when all he sought was sleep, might turn out to have been sleep when he waked: but most unsupportable was the sensational affair which went something like this: consciousness, it seemed, was a succession of separate particles, being carried along on the surface of the deep and steady unconscious flow of life, of time itself, and in fainting, the particles of consciousness simply stopped, and the rest flowed on, until they were restored: but this was stoppage, the entire disappearance of that deeper flow which left the particles of consciousness suspended, piling up, ready any instant to shatter with nothing to support them. Still, at such times everything was in order, of shape and color to mass and distance, of minutes accomplishing hours by accumulation just as the clock itself stayed on the table where it was if only because it had been accumulating there for so long: that was the reassurance of weight".
[pg51]

[...]

"It was done in black on a smooth gesso ground, on strong linen, a stark likeness which left its lines of completion to the eye of the beholder. It was this quality which appeared to upset Gwyon: once he'd seen it he was constantly curious, and would stand looking away from it, and back, completing it in his own mind and then looking again as though, in the momentary absence of his stare and the force of his own plastic imagination, it might have completed itself. Still each time he returned to it,it was slightly different than he remembered, intractably thwarting the completion he had managed himself.
— Why won't you finish it? he burst out finally.
  — There's something about a ... an unfinished piece of work, a ... a thing like this where ... do you see? Where perfection is still possible? Because it's there all the time, all the time you work trying to uncover it. Wyatt caught a hand before him and gripped it as his father's were gripped behind the back turned to him. — Because it's there ..., he repeated."
[pg57]

Marina, by T. S. Eliot

Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga? *

What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter.

Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning
Death
Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning
Death
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning
Death

Are become insubstantial, reduced by a wind,
A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog
By this grace dissolved in place

What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger—
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye
Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters meet.

Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.
I made this, I have forgotten
And remember.
The rigging weak and the canvas rotten
Between one June and another September.
Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.
The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.

What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.

*“What place is this, what region, what area of the world?” 

Marina, filha do rei Antiochus, na peça Péricles, de Shakespeare 

The Life Poetic || T.S Eliot || Marina

T.S Eliot - A short biography

Morning stars and fallen angels — coisas do Diabo

"— Lucifer is the morning star, he began hopefully, — Father says...
— Father says! ... her voice cut him through. — Lucifer was the archangel who refused to serve Our Lord. To sin is to falsify something in the Divine Order, and that is what Lucifer did. His name means Bringer of Light but he was not satisfied to bring the light of Our Lord to man, he tried to steal the power of Our Lord and to bring his own light to man. He tried to become original, she pronounced malignantly, shaping that word round the whole structure of damnation, repeating it, crumpling the drawing of the robin in her hand, — original, to steal Our Lord's authority, to command his own destiny, to bear his own light! That is why Satan is The Fallen Angel, for he rebelled when he tried to emulate Our Lord Jesus. And he won his own domain, didn't he. Didn't he! And his own light is the light of the fires of Hell! Is that what you want? Is that what you want?"

The Recognitions, William Gaddis [pg 34]

Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders

"— Se me vens ver, porque não me saudaste, antigo cobrador de impostos? — perguntou Woland num tom severo.

— Porque não desejo a tua saúde — respondeu insolentemente o outro.

— Mas há uma coisa com que tens de resignar-te — objectou Woland, e um sorriso irónico desenhou-se-lhe na boca. — Mal tu surgiste no telhado,  cometeste logo um absurdo, e eu digo-te onde é que está esse absurdo: está no teu tom. Dizes as palavras como se não reconhecesses a existência das sombras e do mal. Não quererás ter a bondade de pensar nesta questão: de que serviria o teu bem se não existisse o mal, e que aspecto teria a terra se dela desaparecessem as sombras? Pois as sombras são produzidas pelos objectos e pelas pessoas. Aqui está a sombra da minha espada. Mas há também as sombras das árvores e de todos os seres vivos. Não quererás tu despir todo o globo terrestre, varrendo da sua superfície todas as árvores e tudo o que é vivo, por causa da tua fantasia de te deleitares com a luz pura? És um tolo."

Margarita e o Mestre, Mikhail Bulgákov [pg 327]

Jorge de Burgos, The Name of the Rose

Boltanski on art

"Everything we do lies between the personal and the collective. [...] It's not about discovering but about recognizing. Art isn't there to make you discover things, but to make you recognize them. It's through recognition that emotion is elicited, when a person thinks, "Of course!""


"The first major death one experiences is of one's own childhood"

"I feel a thousand times closer to Kantor than to any visual artist: that's absolutely my world."

The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski [pg 78, 80, 82]