"The school library is also a detention hall. A narrow cement staircase next to the nurse's office leads far below the earth, like the public toilets in an old train station. The librarian is the math teacher, who, since she has diabetes, teaches only part-time and spends a few hours on guard duty. She is wide, she spans the width of the table in the little entryway, and her face is full of warts. The children barely have room to pass the barbarian idol who blocks the entrance. On her rough wood desk covered in red ink doodles, she keeps a jar of cloudy liquid. Inside are her algae. She uses them to treat not only her diabetes but also her vision, bladder, bowel movements, ovarian cysts, memory, snoring, warts, indigestion, and boredom. Her algae are the panacea humanity has been waiting for, the revelation of a Russian scientist named Naumov. They appeared in the school a few months ago, introduced by Mrs. Bernini, the music teacher. Her mystical jar shone in the sun like the holy grail. There were a few palid, translucent creatures inside, with delicate internal anatomies, floating in a hyaline liquid that resembled sperm. [...] The library has no books. There were at one time hundreds of children's books, but the damp underground air has covered them with mold. The covers are now rotten, stained green, and smelling like penicillin, and their pages teem with minuscule scorpions that have no stingers. Most of the old books lie, piled with dust, on rotting shelves."
Era uma vez uma mulher com muitas palavras dentro da sua cabeça.
"In a universe that is many billions of years old, with star systems separated as much by time as by space, civilizations might emerge and develop and burn themselves up simply too fast to ever find one another."
Varro tudo!
"De Portugal a São Petersburgo, temos cafés, lugares onde podemos instalar-nos de manhã, pedir um café ou um copo de vinho, passar o dia a ler jornais de todo o mundo, jogar xadrez e a escrever. A lista dos livros magníficos que foram escritos em cafés é enorme. Há pessoas que sempre escreveram nesses lugares e preferem essa forma de vida. Não há cafés em Moscovo, uma cidade que faz fronteira com a Ásia. Há uma fronteira clara: Odessa assinala o limite do café. Eu sou uma criatura do café, não do pub. O pub inglês é um animal muito diferente e o bar americano é outro animal completamente distinto também. Sinto-me em casa em qualquer sítio da Europa porque logo que chego me dirijo a um café, ou desafio alguém para um jogo de xadrez, ou peço que me tragam os jornais naquelas estruturas de madeira antigas onde são enrolados. É a sociedade mais igualitária do mundo porque, pelo preço de um café ou de um copo de vinho, se pode ficar o dia inteiro à mesa, a escrever ou a fazer outra coisa. [...] É aí que a vida inteira fervilha."
Interessa-me o tácito...
"Então foi a Chicago?
O seu dialecto era tal, que deambulava num registo que lhe permitia flutuar acima de todos, oferecendo-lhe a ilusão de superioridade. Um escudo contra os seus fantasmas.
A new study claims networks of observers are responsible for determining physical reality.
Ai senhor das furnasQue escuro vai dentro de nós
... a ghost story competition between Polidori, Byron and Percy and Mary Shelley, took place...
more here
"... Yet it can happen, suddenly, unexpectedly, and most frequently in half-light-of-glimpses, that we catch sight of another visible order which intersects with ours and has nothing to do with it."
John berger
Errante
As amarras do tempo sugam-nos para o registo embebido nesse tempo, do qual somos fruto e produto.
Esse registo, como uma marca de água, condiciona e influencia cada percurso de vida, e revela-se nos comportamentos, mais ou menos reactivos, ou mais ou menos complacentes, com o status quo.
Os eternos inadaptados, que sofrem as dores causadas pelas amarras do seu tempo, pagarão com a solidão ou com a deriva compulsiva.
Nadarão em águas diversas numa eterna busca do familiar subjectivo, desse espelho que devolva o absoluto reconhecível.
Deriva compulsiva à procura do íntimo subjectivo.
Águas de diferentes temperaturas, sinestesias... Cenários diversos passarão e roçarão essa existência flutuante, deixando sensações, reconhecimentos fugazes – retalhos de um espelho em construção.
[Escritos, 06/2023]
"Seja o que te rodeia o canto de um candeeiro, a voz da tempestade, a respiração do entardecer ou o gemido do mar - atrás de ti está sempre vigilante uma vasta melodia, tecida de milhares de vozes, na qual o teu solo só tem lugar aqui e ali. Saber quando deves fazer a tua entrada, eis o segredo da tua solidão: tal como a arte do verdadeiro relacionamento é: do alto das palavras deixar-se cair na melodia una e comum.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
“Perhaps the only thing that can be confidently said about treating psychosis is that there has to be a fit between the patient’s metaphor for the illness and the method used. For Frieda and Joanne, the treatment was a quest, a search for the answer to a tangled problem that could be revealed only by collaborative work. For Mary Barnes, who regressed almost to the point of infancy because she was convinced she had to “go down and come back up again,” living in Kingsley Hall, a Laingian therapeutic community, was the only way to get better. As Greenberg once remarked, “Her metaphor was not mine. But it worked for her. For other people, the metaphor is that it’s chemical, and therefore you’re absolved… You don’t have to have any part in the process. … Some people say, ‘I don’t want to weave my own rope, I want it done for me. I want doctors to do it for me the way they did my appendix and my hernia.’ “
"The power of the survivor is the power of the presence in contradiction of what was possible."
"Struggling to articulate the experience of her psychotic patients — "the history of the lonely ones" — Frieda was painfully aware of the obstacles that faced her: "People who are in the grip of severe degrees of loneliness cannot talk about it; and people who have at some time in the past had such an experience can seldom do so either, for it is so frightening and uncanny in character that they try to dissociate the memory of what it was like, and even the fear of it." Psychiatrists, she admitted, "must resign themselves to describing [loneliness] in terms of peoples defenses against it," like physicists portraying invisible particles in terms of the residual trace of their movements. Actually, Frieda noted, it was worse than this: defenses didn't appear until the "all-engulfing intensity" of the feeling decreased; the "naked horror" of real loneliness, "beyond anxiety and tension," made even defenses "seem out of reach."
Faced with the irony of trying to write about something that, by her own admission, couldn't be described, Frieda did the best she could, relying on accounts by polar explorers, shipwrecked sailors, inmates in solitary confinement, and subjects in sensory deprivation experiments. In each of these situations, she noted, psychotic disintegration occurred if relationships weren't reinstated.
(Frieda argued that many of the phenomena categorized as "anxiety" (e.g., separation anxiety) were better described as loneliness or the fear of it. She saw psychiatrists as being so overwhelmingly focused on anxiety as to neglect the systematic study of the important emotional states, including grief, hope, pain, and envy, as well as the loneliness to which her own attention was drawn)."
