(CALIATH)

(Droplet) making life, or not quite that.

I tend to write too much. Recently, I’ve perscrutated some of my older documents, hundreds of pages of unfinished poems and texts, unnamed corpses with maggots glowing with auroral colours, some contained beautiful ideas done poorly, others were armed with beautiful constructions enveloping poor ideas, and I only gained a real sense of how much I write when I saw at them, all those fragile creatures and growing things. I seem to write nearly out of habit, like everything spoke to me with some unbearable silence that I’m encumbered with deciphering.
Poetry was never forefront in my productions, and I started composing for the bounds and restrictions; the parsimonious quality words attain, that bug of shortening and condensing, it helps me quiet down. What I want, still, is to write a novel, but I find it to be a tortuous exercise at times: I write walls, I water every minute aspect of my realms, and I can’t truly shake the sensation that I write too extensively, too strenuously, almost too delicately, thus, I never truly started a novel, despite my monumental amount of inklings here and there, small blossoms of lemon thyme. I’ve never given up on training, though, if I might someday take hand at a task I’m likely to fail at, I must at least take solace in my trials, in my tiny evolutions. I’ve been looming three separate documents for a while: Echolocations, so I can train on shortening and sharpening my descriptions of places, mostly exteriors (interiors are rather easy to pen, since personal items carry symbols, they are purposeful, they can be calculated); Melisma, where I practice my precision on collective events or passages with movement and vibrancy, mostly describing isolated scenes that require further aid; and Restoration of a River, a small narrative development where I further my creation of characters.

This latter one, however, proves to be the most arduous, for a great dichotomy plagues it like a pestilential locust: human beings are beautifully woven, fluid and frail things, and one can’t help painting them with as much brushes as it lays possible; we, as their creators, see them so sharply and care for them so limpidly, it feels criminal to let them go misunderstood, but, being misunderstood is one of the humanest things we all experience, and we rob them of their humanity if we rob them of that. A conundrum indeed, and in ambiguous instances like these, where I must weigh the exact measure of my control, are the ones where I often lose it entirely.

“Grant, which had not ignored the look completely, found it too fatuous to warrant intervention, but that sensation of idleness circled his thoughts and held them captive. «Maybe I should have said something,», he thought, both infuriated that he didn’t and regretful that the chance had escaped his grip, «but surely, if I paint him correctly as someone who does and says for score, another opportunity shall arise for me to muzzle him» and with this thought, he entombed that haunting sensation. Grant was more of a yew than a human; incredibly tall and wide, if one was to stand as close as a metre, he would nearly fill horizon to horizon; this physical attribute, coupled with a pointed sense of his surroundings and those who occupied them, coadunated into a form of distant sentinel, and one couldn’t help but feel as immensely aware of him as he was of everything. His eye, for how incisive it tended to be, often led him into the wildest hunts of imagination, and after leaving with Louisa and Payne in search of his stick, his thoughts slithered into the knots of every trunk, the silky lips of the rivulet whispering the spirit of mint, an odd cawing here and there of a bird he couldn’t quite identify but that reminded him of his sylvan childhood, how green things seemed back then; and then his mother, her pallid skin so similar to the birch bark, and a smile which, much like him, seemed to fill horizon to horizon whenever he arrived home, and so he kept busy with details, never idle and never restless, but a median of dream he came to master.“

Restoration of a River

Harder still than ebbing between the voice we allow them and the voice we take from them is perhaps the osmosis of interaction. In our quotidian, it is rather easy to spot how often we abnegate shards of our expression so others can express, how often we judge how much to abnegate in order to enrich our relationships, enrich our own expressions and projections of selves; how much of us exists in this world tends to consist mostly of what of ourselves is contained in others, and applying those mechanisms and dynamics into the parsonages, crafting individual devices of abnegation and judgement for each of them in a way that they fit one another almost inextricably, proves to be more than a bit demanding. I don’t want to merely generate a lazy narrative force that drives characters forward in a particular path, but instead, people that are driven beneath and beyond that force, characters that are able to be moved without the magnitude of villains and mysteries and tragedies and dalliances, because very few of us are driven by those things. We are driven by what we are into what we become. And that element of being proves hardest to replicate, although certainly not impossible, as many did it in the past.

Collie, now near Sandra, kept his eyes coiled to the ground whenever he felt she might turn to him, locking the air with a breeze of timid silence, shrouding his hands within the side-pockets of his coat. A mist rolled with the softness of a first snowfall, and their breath condensated in a brisk show of glimmer whenever it encountered small rays of the wintry low-hovering sun. Sandra, a bit disheartened with the disruption of her solitude, despised appearing icy, as that resulted in others taking her for a bland character, something she assured herself often that she was not, thus she shattered the ice before it even formed:
— Collie, right? I went to school with your brother, or at least I think he was your brother. What was it? Liam? — she said, manufacturing some sense of doubt not to appear overly cognisant of the lives of others.
— Yes, Liam!, he’s my elder brother. Was he your friend? — Collie replied, exulted that she had taken notice, but somewhat laden in his speech, as if a cold boulder sat on his throat.
— Not friends, no. I merely knew him from sight. How’s he doing? I haven’t seen him in a good count of years, feels like. — Sandra said, raising the weight of her taciturn eyes to a point that her face seemed suffused with the features of a solemn and torpid lake, distantly removed, tightly hidden atop some remote mountain. This was an instrument she made use of, but she wasn’t aware of why nor what purpose it meant to achieve, she simply did it as one simply eats or simply bathes.
— Yeah, I suppose he wasn’t much of a friendly type, it was a silly question. He moved near the coast, to study. He doesn’t visit nor call much. My father insists that Liam feels we can no longer understand his profound and modern forms of communication, but that he will return when he needs to. «They always do», he says, because «when they are in need to be understood, they very rarely don’t find the words», as words only evade us when they detect our insincerity. And when we feel we can bend them to our liking, they tend to bend us instead. — Collie prattled, and then widened his eyes, falling into a chasm of quietude as soon as he realised how much he had just spoken. These meagre embarrassments of youth seem to hold so much gravity to us at the time, but with age, they become fundamental habits of our self-distinction and almost definitive elements of our personalities. Sandra found the splurge of information tenderly effusing; it allowed her greater times of silence, bigger windows of invisibility, and the way she lovingly held each word he uttered (as it represented another word she wouldn’t have to utter) was shown clearly in her expression: the lake began to lower calmly, undetectable, her skin was more visible as her face angled upwards, a tone of olive sheen befell it and she almost appeared to be a feminine bronze statue foregrounding a Mediterranean dawn, still graced with the dew of a humid night, glimmering and exurgent. This shift wasn’t noticed by Collie, who was still submerged in his own infantile discomfiture.

Restoration of a River

Both fragments of the document represent a tiny amount of what I’ve written on it, but they are among the weakest parts of the text; they showcase well the measure of my shortcomings and, in some strange sense, I prefer to exhibit these instead of the stronger ones. Perhaps one day I will feel ready, but being aware of my inadequacies seems the best way to inch closer to that readiness, however long it may take. And thank you, if you’ve made it this far along. I write far too much.

João-Maria.

*Tokyo, by Nikki Lake.*
*(Her pictures remind me a lot of my perspective of spaces when I was a child, for some reason)*

catkins (english|portuguese poetry)

CATKINS

AMENTILHOS

Again, not quite as potent as I would have it; writing compositions over days (or, at times, weeks) allows for a more refined method of writing, but some assaulting sensations end up becoming elements of works where they don’t necessarily belong, which makes the process muddy. Sieving said sensations, percolating them, becomes a bit of an exercise in taste more than anything else. If only this had a science (it wouldn’t be half as interesting if it did).
I also realise that merely saying these are translations doesn’t do much without access to the original texts, so, I’ve provided it here. If you do happen to know Portuguese (olá), and would like to offer translation feedback, I would be immensely grateful of such, since my translation skills are rather primal.

Thank you much for reading,
João-Maria.

(Droplet) the waves of creation.

Virginia Woolf, July 1902. Photo by George C. Beresford.

«‘But Bernard goes on talking. Up they bubble — images. “Like a camel,” . . . “a vulture.” The camel is a vulture; the vulture a camel; for Bernard is a dangling wire, loose, but seductive. Yes, for when he talks, when he makes his foolish comparisons, a lightness comes over one. One floats, too, as if one were that bubble; one is freed; I have escaped, one feels. Even the chubby little boys (Dalton, Larpent and Baker) feel the same abandonment. They like this better than the cricket. They catch the phrases as they bubble. They let the feathery grasses tickle their noses. And then we all feel Percival lying heavy among us. His curious guffaw seems to sanction our laughter. But now he has rolled himself over in the long grass. He is, I think, chewing a stalk between his teeth. He feels bored; I too feel bored. Bernard at once perceives that we are bored. I detect a certain effort, an extravagance in his phrase, as if he said “Look!” but Percival says “No.” For he is always the first to detect insincerity; and is brutal in the extreme. The sentence tails off feebly. Yes, the appalling moment has come when Bernard’s power fails him and there is no longer any sequence and he sags and twiddles a bit of string and falls silent, gaping as if about to burst into tears. Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then — our friends are not able to finish their stories.’»
Virginia Woolf, The Waves.

Along my inclement journey with literature, towards which I’m always shackled into a sentiment of certain rain-shadow, no book entreats more envy to me than The Waves, despite not even being my most favoured book. That writing, itself suffusing in one’s mind like luminous vermillion ink thrown at the solid shadows of a nightly sea, manages to collect the summonings of a graceful elm whose leaves command delicate beams of light that lick the hairs of ancient Gods, and whose roots silhouette skeletons quivering and thrilling with allegories of forgotten heroes. I would readily give much of what I have — which isn’t much at all — if I could write with her convex descriptions and concave emotional realisms. Virginia dawned lives inside herself so ravelled and ornate, one should only feel the perpetual shame of inhabiting a world in which a soul as hers could ever meet a fate so ruthless. But I lean against my stile to find the watery-eyed posture of loss trailing my memories of her, serenely laden against her own, looking at the threaded colours diluted in the glass, conjuring the whirlpools of vivid sorrow that I and so many others readers have been entranced by, and I’m happy to fit silently into her designs. Extremely happy with the chance of doing so, at least.

In the passage above quoted, Louis catches Bernard be betrayed by his own oneirism and enchanting absurdity for the first time; this laceration is one that any wordsmith is far-too privy to, when we feel our phrases with such intensity yet they become miserable attempts at flight once they leave their tidy homes within our minds. This heartbreak is inexorable, and, as children, we are lured into it as the carps of a pond whose surface ripples with breadcrumbs; the world, as in others, as in natures, as in images, cannot resist the prestidigitation of padding our hearts full of prismatic lights only to fracture it with one stealthy strike. Percival delivered that strike to Bernard, but I do not have any literary account of who delivered that strike onto me, but rather, a series of blows along the coastal remains of my life in shape of dense black spots in a beach brimming with whiteness. They grow; they grow once remembered, once any is added, some coalesce and obscure further hideouts of my youth, some are so intimately cruel that they seethe with a purple, purulent aroma, and those I cannot ever approach, as they hold the tyranny of possibilities.

Once, at a swift nightly escapade with my friends in the dusk of Lisbon, I broke down in a self-liturgy pulled from my own sense of decay. Those friends, some actors of considerable talent, some writers containing what, to me, were the greatest possible stories, all of them liegemen to the Arts which I, due to cowardice, so vehemently denied to ever stand a chance of creating anything worthy of the inheritance those Arts so severely cast upon their creators, these friends stand both as the Atlantean pillars of my dreams and those black and grim holes of memory; constant reminders of my timid and inept attempts at existing half-formed in a world that seduced and daunted me in equal magnitudes. I broke down as Bernard did, fervently portending my own doomed reality in which my story would never be finished, but scattered among others; I was to die as a liegeman to them and not to the Arts they served; a pathetic being in a frail cocoon that I, frailest still, couldn’t shatter. And that was a task and fate that disappointed me, but did not dissatisfy me, as holding that would elevate holding nothing.

In more ways that those I’m able to count, perhaps like specks of obsidian dusk pairing above a stream, both dark and brilliant, the creation of this website allowed my continued survival. I do not write for posterity or immortality, as those things are uninteresting to me, and it does not bother me that I will be forgotten. I write, now, for interaction, my interaction with both the Art I love and with those who love it as much as I, to exist in a cordon of souls representing both aspects of Virginia’s Percival, those who receive my words as to allow them their chance of flight, their chance of surviving my despotic and cruel rule, and those who are bored by them, because those are the ones who inspire poetry.

João-Maria

seven poems of Japanese aesthetics (english poetry)

I’m always on the prowl for ambient sounds apt for concentration, quest which led me to some of the most endeared songs of my library. Recently, I came across Ensō, by Fort Nowhere, followed by my procurement of what Ensō meant, the discovery of that Japanese spiritual practice, along with Japanese aesthetics, which I explored through various sources until I came upon this article, which features a series of Japanese aesthetic principles along with an Ensō ( which completed a full circle in my quest, interestingly).
Inspired by the various principles presented in the article, I attempted to create seven compositions related to how those principles interact (although at times a bit loosely) with my own ontological views. I paired each principle with a material or substance, to have both a thematic and a cosmetic focus for each poem. They are simple, very simple poems, some plangent, some more delicate, all of them written in the same style but independent of one-another, which means you may read only the one you feel most drawn to, or read all in the hope that you might like at least one of them. They are ordered as follows:

— Fukinsei, Clay;
— Seijaku, Incense;
— Kanso, Plastic;
— Shizen, Leaf;
— Datsuzoku, Skin;
— Shibumi, Bristle;
— Yugen, Water.

Fukinsei, clay

SEIJAKU, incense

KANSO, PLASTIC

SHIZEN, LEAF

DATSUZOKU, SKIN

SHIBUMI, BRISTLE

YUGEN, WATER

Needless to say, they are more modernistic than oriental in tonality and form, but my primary attempt was to coalesce the two in my own style. I don’t feel that I was fully successful, but I decided to heed to my most oriental principle: just to let them be. I produced them in two hours, in Portuguese, and did not edit them.
I still hope you managed to extract something valuable or, at least, be entertained.
Thank you much for reading,
João-Maria.

paladin, 17 (english poetry)

Writing poems has, slowly, become a ritualistic exercise of hindering the velocity of my mind-dialectic, give it a shape, try to understand what it is I’m trying to reach. I rarely ever reach it. Various elements go missing, and I end up scouring a wreckage more-so than exploring an inner architecture. That is the thing, though, things don’t often come out as they are, and less often come out as they should, but it’s still important that they do.

The “you” element is not something I ordinarily use in English poetry, I don’t always like the form it takes in English, as it feels more dual than I believe it should. This poem, however, as all of those I’ve recently published, is translated from its Portuguese original. Don’t judge it too harshly, he is not from here, you see…

Endless gratitude for reading
João-Maria.

unfading Suzanne.

My photos aren’t as magical as yours, Suzanne, but since this post is about you, I felt I had to use my own.

With some obliquitous regularity, any graphomaniac, any dilettante under the school of words, is bound to think about which space within that school lies vacant for occupancy; what position can we inhabit in order to be visible — not just to others — but also visible to ourselves. When I think of WordPress and how it managed to collect such a magnificently diverse constellation of poets, it is complicated to dispense the thought that WordPress is not a book or a publication, nor is it an amphitheater, nor similar to anything previously responsible for disseminating the Art of Poetry; however, inasmuch as our mediums were shaped by the Art conveyed, so was the Art modified by the mediums it made use of.

I could write an essay on how WordPress changed the modern scope of poetic expression, how the intricate osmosis between various readily-accessible and social poets facilitates a type of distillation of symbols which provides such a rich soundscape, a visual and guttural interactivity reminiscent of older literary circles without the strain of exclusivity. How it manages to contrast so well with some of the corralled, anchorite poetry of yore. But I’m no good at essays, so I shall provide example:

«I often write things
that I fear are not worth reading
so, I tuck them neatly away
fragile thoughts folded in upon themselves
the words fade and the pages yellow
as a memory floats into view.»
Suzanne, Tucked Away

Suzanne is, in my earnest vision, one of the maximum exponents in regards to blog-formed poetry; her diary-shaped thoughts, intimate and percolated through filters of naturalism and sentimental realism, act as a spatter of light over large sheets of luminous blue taffeta; her poems, thronged with both unbridled lyricism and the closeness of a tryst with emotions, exist as imponent bridges between the I living and the I creating, and fit the medium of WordPress so meticulously that I truly couldn’t imagine them anywhere else, feeling almost carved from the stone itself from which this community was made. She exists as a siren of fortitude, a wondrous being that does not resist the churning and turning of days, but slithers through them, collecting what in them means most, and touches most.

«One needn’t have an hourglass
To forever turn
And so command the moments
Within your heart to always burn
*
As the minutes and the hours fall
Joy and sorrow, both therein
We seek to collect them each around us
In a vain attempt to hold too many all at once
It is a fearful thing, this holding
And we begin to suffer from the force of it»
Suzanne, If You Have a Heart To Love.

There is an immense talent in creating denotation without it feeling overly astringent, Art which I’m yet to master and often couldn’t feel more distant of doing so. Suzanne, however, manages not only that, but also a verse structure that unfurls extemporaneously, with a tune unchained of truisms but still intimately open, so that all of us can drink from it without muddying the pool. Still, it fiddles with the perennial depths of human experience, it does not shy from agonic draws, it does not shy from pain or the cruel beauty of that pain. It is not deceptively positive or stylistically negative, it’s intimate and… experienced, truthful to a point of combustion, a signature of gentility inconceivable to the isolated, selves-within-themselves type of creators such as I, but one I’m endlessly grateful for having discovered, and I urge you strenuously to do the same, if you have not.

«Time doesn’t stand still for questions or answers. They are worth wondering over though. There are places and people who do make a difference, even when they don’t know that they do. A single bowl of soup may not feed the world. But, it may open someone’s heart to a lifetime of wondering.»
Suzanne, Live Your Story

Thank you, Suzanne,
you’ve been such a beautiful element of my journey,
João-Maria.

(Droplet) shortsock.

***Daniel Lebedev,*** *no apparent title, but I loved how it feels like visual oneiric decay.*

I have few conversations which lay vivid in my mind, very few, in fact. I’m one for the dead particulates of experience, objects that don’t move nor breathe, still things, oblivious details, a sort of hyperesthesia which only serves to coif the saturnine adepts of purple prose. And my predilection for «things» is not given by an inflated sense of grandiosity or any specific disillusionment with people, but rather, the fact that I have a sensorial perspicacity about me, I see people as sounds at times, some are colours or tastes, because although those things are as volatile as people, they are volatile in predicable manners, in opposite to people. Thus, I tend to cling to my own clarities, my own bitter domains within, where any disappointment is only my own.

Yet, one particular conversation clenches firmly, often removing me from my self-centred dalliances; it was a prolonged and especially strained dialogue between one of my clients and I. He, an elderly man likely in the block of seventy and a few; a small and frumpy man who, despite wielding a stern, taciturn conduct, appeared fervently keen of talking once any given body presented itself for the role of listening. Shortsock (which is a direct translation of his Portuguese name) had served shortly in the Ultramarine War at the earliest years of Portugal’s most extensive dictatorship, and upon return he came to be a carpenter much to the likes of my father — with whom he shares many years of friendship — and ceased his working activities as a public servant, profession he only did for a bout. Our conversation began from an interjection, a rhyming couplet he slung towards my sister apropos some awfully unspecific newsreel back-grounding the administrative room, afterwards quickly proclaiming it as his own. A short «do you write?» from my sister, sounding mildly uninterested, led to an answer in the affirmative and a successive «my brother loves to read», a type of statement typically harrowing to anyone as timorous as I, especially when it alights certain aspects of self which one rarely likes to exhibit, if not only for the sense of property they are often dignified with. I proceeded a bit protectively, opting to ask which authors he found most approximated his liking, a question that he dismissed with celerity in favour of maundering how civilisation was so vile and mordant, being that both the reason why he wrote as well as his most versed subject. I asseverated a tad frigidly that political poetry, much in the threads of anything general and distant, failed to captivate my attention entirely, and that I strongly preferred the unique and indelible quality of experience, of humanity in its minute and mercurial essence, experiences which, if not taken to Art and replicated through that instrument, couldn’t possibly endure, such was their particularity; things that I couldn’t have written, things that I couldn’t have lived. Human things, specific, away from the portends of civilisation or the pallor of absolutes. Things that I can’t yet write because I do not know the apposite forms and words necessary to bring them forth.

How careless of an approach, I must have thought immediately. Shortsock transported a grimace of shattering the likes of which I was oddly familiar with, and volleyed me with verbal arrows: «that is because you are young, you do not know what it is like to be in a war-zone, to have children and naught to succour them with, you have not lived this world as I lived, and it is yet to break your heart as it did mine», utterances that did not fail in showering me with silence. It is true, I do not know, and had I been perspicacious of people, something that I’m naturally not, I could have sensed beforehand that he wasn’t disappointed with either the world nor civilisation, he was disappointed with his world, not mine, even in spite of his generalist poems with the purported objective of weaving a better future by diminishing anything current. He did not want a better future inasmuch as he didn’t care much for the current, but simply, to change everything hitherto. His past fumbled him, it was tortuous and insurmountably cruel. While my life satisfied me, I was afforded the vanity of living shards of other lives through Art, if only to compound my own or enrich my experiences, but he was simply never afforded vanities of the like, and I was terribly ice-veined within the first step — a true testament to why I dodge as many interactions as I can — and the innermost fissure that stood between us wasn’t merely a differing focusing lens on matters, or even on what matters, as I initially assumed, but more-so the nature of our memory, that delicate «seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.¹», and to me, those thousands of disconnected fragments were mostly joyous and bathed in the rosy lights of dawn, memories of baubles or hazy fields lathered in the green tinkle of emeralds, large tiled walls and the scent of uprooted plants. His were replete with people, the dirges and metallic chimes, pernicious seasons and hunger, lack, dereliction, fury, all bobbing and dipping, pecking his innards, tirelessly demanding. Things are rarely cruel, but people so often are; the former can contain small mythologies, symbols and beauties of perfumed shapes, but only the latter can reach the highest peaks of substance, the most intricately rewarding forms of beauty, especially when it interacts with our own. But things are much more durable than we, «whose frail warmth cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.»²

We talked further about specifics, I engaged in a political discussion in which I was merely the receptacle of information, supporting a manufactured rapt, as I felt indebted to do so, and we soon came upon common grounds, since his daughter had recently ended her own life due to relentless abuse from her former partner, and I had many mental health issues of my own. These morphologies of emotion, often reduced or occulted, often diminished to the farthest extremes of our vulnerabilities, are simultaneously our humanest traits, the ones which carry most force, that are most limpid in our memory. Shortsock wasn’t particularly keen on vulnerability, he was raised by a regime whose greatest weapon was the effacing of expression and sentimentality, but grief is among the hardest sentiments to conceal; he assumed a wounded front, the likes of being stricken by some unstinting bodily pain, and his hands extended like parachutes trying to collect his soul while it disassembled, a comportment I’ve only ever noticed in myself before, when I lost the dearest person in my life as a child. This interaction, which followed one embossing my social inadequacy, was exactly the type of interaction that displays that pith of human experience, that solemn existence, idiosyncratic and inscrutable. The inter-connectivity of our pains, the symbiosis of our joys, the elements that make the cruelty of the title of person not only bearable, but romantically worthwhile. And, strangely, I hold great gratitude to my initial error; it provided such a valuable discovery.

¹ Orlando, Virginia Woolf;
² And Yet The Books, Czesław Miłosz.

dusk (english poetry)

DUSK

I haven’t been writing poetry quite as much, often opting instead for prose or even the marvelous lassitude of notes and aphorisms, and that is mostly due to this strange bout of ineffective thought. I contain the outlines, the emboss and image of a poem, but my mind is rather accelerated and disperse thereafter, it creates these arabesque and disjointed blocks of paltry expression. I’m sure this poem ought to mean something, and I could make a case for what that might be, it is the form that seems oddly disconcerting, an etiolated flower, the white patch of a limestone shatter.
I’m hopeful it is one of those problems that fixes itself, a phase of sorts. Otherwise, I might need to invest in writing novels.

Thank you so much for reading, if you’ve done so,
— joão-maria.

(Droplet) neuro-dialectics (english|português)

**Woods the Walls and Wells**, *Goseong Choi*

While tinkering with some experimental forms in a poetic manuscript in Portuguese and listening to Henosis by Joep Beving (which is a terrific album for writing), I came across his track “Noumenon“, which involves a rather minimalist piano piece, some synthetic organ elements, and the voice of a man in the background with drowned speech that can’t, at any point, be understood. With that, I was inspired to try my hand at creating two rather hollow characters who, in between compositions, would hold disjointed conversations — some more sensible than others — which, in time, spun a willingness in me to dialogue with myself recurrently, often about nothing, often about everything, sometimes in extensive monologues and others in short, sharp sentences. I’m sure this is not unique nor is it particularly exceptional, but I’m quite enjoying the folly of it, so I felt compelled to share. The first, in form of a dense poetic-prose unified speech, and the other, a banter succeeding a somewhat disenchanted love-poem:

(Varieties of Ultramarine)

— I would have enjoyed playing in the Schönhausen palace, or have exulted a body with a pungent waltz collapsing over a soundscape, an imploded building; that is it, the profligacy, extensive, sharp disgraces, to be vulgar but stricken by an extreme energy to dive into the most profound aromas. It saddens me, you know? There are things… Well; the solar cycles of flesh, various shouts and lamentations, to have seen the physical aspects of this domain perish, await the rains, observe the age of birds, the spark of sylvan wings, the solitude and silence, and… Who knows? Not quite so much. Things aren’t as they are, they are something else entirely, that and that, but never this. Do you remember being as small as a bean?, receive the pillars of light supporting the hours, scour the fabric of everything only to find image, the paltry gleam of pearls, those scarab-green silks used by elderly women to obscure their haggard neck, they almost appeared to be moving birch trees!, and those ornaments, miscellaneous objects, superfluous events, ashtrays of glass or steel, calendars, the frightful villain of night and darkness, that today, at a loss of self, appears to us as an absolute white. All these small constituents, baubles of sort, dust prisons sustaining the vice of inner occupation, of imagining this and that and hold it close, take it as ours, all these things which are only ours, as only we notice them — no longer is there space for any of this. The plangency of remembrance…, my breast constricts once certain portals are crossed, it closes, colours drop like acids, my contact with the shiver of the earth is erased, I acquire a lightness able to capture the tail-flame of meteors; a reduction to atoms and waves, conclusion, gelation, agony, I abandon touch, matter labours to restore my gravity. See, I do not say this just because of longing, but for the very nature of volition; at times, I see myself as an apocryphal text, or one of those commonplace engravings, a nearby landscape: a withy in a gradient of death, rough-stones, a partially hidden poplar, an imperious crow, an imperative sky, and I cogitate under a snooze spun from my fear of disappointing dramatism, what is the peremptory truth which blooms from this weak reality? No, I do not search for the meaning of all, or of life, nor any of those fatuous borrowing pretensions; neither am I concerned with whys, or magnetised by the spiritual abuse of philosophies. I just wanted a place, a pallid place, a home within my own self, to sit beneath a veil of dense warmth, convene with my own humble purposes, feel the lemon-skin come near, cover my eyes, ears and nose so I could say, distant from myself yet impossibly near, that this is this, that is that. I want the shelter of certainty, of solidity, that through the years configured more and more intangible. Ah!, pathetic, who, in wholesome control of their faculties, would want such thing? Volatility permeates beauty, and all is as beautiful as it is perpetual; the metronome fuels the serfdom of Men to the expressions of change, and in which form can we exist if not this one? The sunset is not a promise, the substrate is not a promise, nothing promises, nothing promises, and I’m privy to what you may think, that is the tacit worth of everything simple; I agree, I’m merely tired… It is time to play on the Schönhausen palace. It has to be time. The trees of Iðunn shan’t bear more apples for me, and I’m tired.

(lichen)

— Back in my land, it is said that love is the acquisition of shadows.
— We all love in a bellicose mutism of sorts.
— A hall of mirrors as an instrument of inner torture…

— Have you seen the spark of Spring, that distillation
of rays refracted in the atmosphere particles, the cough
of the peaceful mallards? That limpid green…
I thought love would be similar to that pure scenery.
— Our Springs were very short, at home. Time
was like a large iron anvil held by cambric strings,
as those one normally sees in childish cartoons.

— You never had anyone, I suppose.
— I didn’t think it possible.
— The true surprise, that
which throws you into the centrifugation of clouds
with distant outcrops, fragile white daisies,
is when someone truly likes you.
— If that is how you feel.
— Do you feel it differently?
— I don’t like myself…, you see? If by chance
anyone did, it wouldn’t be someone I could have liked,
I do not trust anyone that likes who I do not like.
— I understand.
— It isn’t hard.
— Not for me.

Português

— Gostava de ter tocado no palácio de Schönhausen, de exultar um corpo numa valsa pungente quedando sobre uma construção de sons, um edifício implodido; é isso, a devassidão, vergonhas extensas e acutilantes, ser-se vulgar mas acometido duma energia extrema para mergulhar nos aromas mais profundos. Entristece-me, sabe? Há coisas… Pronto; os ciclos solares na carne, tessituras e lamentações várias, ver os materiais físicos deste domínio a colapsar, esperar pelas chuvas, observar a época dos pássaros, o rútilo das asas silvestres, da solidão e do silêncio, e… Quem sabe. Não tanto. As coisas não são como elas são, são outras e outras, aquilo e aquilo, mas nunca isto. Lembra-se de ser pequeno como um feijão?, receber os pilares de luz que sustentam as horas, perscrutar o tecido das coisas e encontrar apenas a imagem, o pequeno tilitar das pérolas, aquelas sedas verde-escaravelho que as transuentes mais velhas usavam para obscurar o pescoço gasto, chegavam a parecer grandes bétulas movediças!, e aqueles ornamentos, objectos vários, eventos supérfluos, cinzeiros de vidro ou aço, calendários, o terrível vilipêndio da noite e do escuro, que hoje, perdidos, é-nos quase como um branco absoluto. Todos estes pequenos elementos constituintes, frioleiras, prisões de pó sustentando o vício da ocupação interior, de imaginar isto e aquilo e tê-lo perto, tomá-lo por nosso, todos estes elementos só nossos, pois só nós damos conta deles — já não há espaço para nada disto. A plangência de rememorar…, o peito abstem-se quando se atravessam certos portais, fecha-se, as cores pingam como ácidos, o contacto com a tremor da terra cessa, adquirimos uma leveza que captura o fogo dos meteoros; a redução em átomos e ondas, conclusão, congelamento, agonia, parece que abandonamos o tacto, e a matéria labora para nos restaurar a gravidade. Veja, não digo isto apenas por saudade, mas a própria natureza da volição; por vezes, dou-me como um texto apócrifo, ou uma daquelas iluminuras comuns, uma paisagem próxima: ervas em gradientes de morte, pedras-toscas, um álamo parcialmente gravado, um corvo imperioso, um céu impreterível, e cogito na modorra que apenas tenho porque temo a desilusão da peça, qual será a verdade peremptória que floresce desta fraca realidade? Não, não procuro o significado das coisas, ou da vida, ou nenhuma dessas pretensões fátuas sensabor; tampouco me ocupo do porquê, nem sou magnetizado pela sevícia espiritual das filosofias; queria apenas um sítio, um espaço pálido, uma casa dentro de mim próprio, sentar-me sob um véu de calor denso, reunir-me dos meus propósitos humildes, sentir a pele de limão aproximar-se, cobrir-me os olhos, os ouvidos, o nariz, e poder dizer, longe de mim e no entanto impossivelmente perto, que isto é isto, que aquilo é aquilo. Quero o abrigo da certeza, da solidez, que ao passo dos anos se configurou mais e mais intangível. Ah!, patético, quem, em total controlo das suas faculdades, desejaria tal coisa? A volatilidade permeia a beleza, e tudo é belo por ser perpétuo, o metrómono abastesse a servidão do homem às expressões da mudança, e de que forma existir senão nessa? A poente não é uma promessa, o substrato não é uma promessa, nada promete, nada promete, e eu sei o que pensa, pensa que é esse o valor tácito das coisas mais simples; eu concordo, estou só cansado… É tempo de tocar no palácio de Schönhausen. Tem de ser tempo. As árvores de Iðunn já não me darão mais maçãs, e estou cansado.

— Lá nas terras, dizia-se que amar é o exercicio de adquirir sombras.
— Todos amamos num mutismo bélico.
— Um corredor de espelhos como um instrumento de tortura interior.

— Já viu o encandeamento duma Primavera, aquela destilação
dos raios refractados nas particulas da atmosfera, o tossicar
lânguido dos patos-reais? Aquele verde límpido…
Eu achei que amar seria esse cenário puro.
— As Primaveras eram muito curtas, por lá. O tempo
parecia uma bigorna de ferro segura por fios de cambraia,
como se vê nos desenhos das crianças.

— Nunca teve ninguém, suponho.
— Acho que não teria sido possível.
— A verdadeira surpresa, aquela
que nos lança à centrifugação das nuvens
com aflorismos distantes, margaridas brancas,
é quando alguém gosta de nós.
— Se é isso que sente.
— Sentiu-o doutra forma?
— Não gosto de mim…, entende? Se porventura
alguém gostou, não seria alguém de quem poderia gostar,
não confio em ninguém que goste de quem eu não gosto.
— Entendo.
— Não é díficil.
— Não para mim.

Thank you,
João-Maria.

(Droplet) home. (english|português)

An author is a company to the nothingness, indigent because it is company to nothing, and possesses that nothingness, imperious, impermissible, obedient to the reasons of things, bled-out in the salts of colours while assuming itself king and progenitor of them. It is a whimsy, being an author, authorise the creation of nothingness and gift it the vehemence of being; if I was prohibited of writing as soon as the following dawn, I would not see it as an act of injustice. I would simply say that I have nothing to write, that the particles of water scintillating in my breath exist as towers, as trees, streams, which collect within me in murderous stance yet refusing to kill me (being that the ultimate trick), constituting nothing more than the nothingness I accompany, otherwise written there, in lithology, where earth whispers with impenetrable force, or there, in walls made goldener with the torpor of times, or there, in a book, in any book written, in any book unwritten. It is a nothingness which is unique only while it is nothingness — because nothing is unique — and soon collapses within the banality of conveyance. One who writes of nothingness has nothing else to write about, and is, truly, creatively hindered, for it only receives a casuistry in assemblages of casuistries laid upon an arid ground; we are of philosophies while we rehearse interrogations, of cement in the architectures of fiction, of soundly banisters in poetry (and only of banisters), and we inflate nothingness with leagues of meanings, of personal mythologies, images of dragonflies in the thawing boughs, pine-cones floating over the equatorial seas, the lugubrious quality of facts which soon cease to be facts under the gravity of other facts, and noble horses, beaten, hungers and terrors and pestiferous qualities of loving, of what we intend to love, of what we intend to understand in the qualities of loving, all laid as flagstones to be danced upon as a divine coalescence of what is because it is and what it is because we generate it being so by measure of feeling it. Enumerations, many, all within the same nothingness, an infinite parenthesis that fits perfectly in the spiralled-hole made by a closed fist; but let me revise what-is, if truth is creative and dream its destruction, let me revise the subterranean of things, because all of them bubble with the meaning of everything, seethe as a compass of light in an interminable condensation of phenomenon, and not seeing the crushing dimension of everything but only the replica of a constant reductive exercise — a simulation of essence — is a wound extended to the horizon, because we are fragile, our bones cinders easily turned to dust, and because all which contains meaning is perfidious in that meaning, and that ash penetrates our lungs, within nothingness, within all, within meaning which is nothingness of all, a panic, a neurological tuberculosis, a paralysis.
And then, there is a destruction which isn’t reduction, olive oil over the sting of a bee, the youth and the regeneration which takes itself in such an unstinting and clear meaning, which is akin to the glisten of a tear in immense darkness. We return home. The world regains sense, and is absent of meaning and nothingness and everything, resistant to such adornments, and we are made-whole by the levity of the air itself, the stark colours of florets, and all light resounding in shaded walls. There is, perhaps, a mother and a father, siblings, or the limpid memory of them, of where they stood, where they observed this domain with endless complexities which not even dream purports to understand. There is a dog, perhaps a cat, a canary, and their phlegmatic enthusiasm bleeding from their spirited eyes. There is that foolish night and the ill-starred end of that antiquity, which I did not see pass, because I never stopped being anything that I was, and I shall never not be anything that I was.

We return home, where world and language live in profound reciprocity, and we may contain libraries within, we may have never written anything leather-bound, we may have written twenty meticulously woven narratives, but here, we are not authors, we are not writers, we do not accompany a nothingness which is yet to be described. Here, we are that nothingness, that meaning, we are the shadow the author plies to accompany.

Long before physics and psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.
All Gall Is Divided, Emil Cioran.

PORTUGUÊS

O autor é a companhia do nada, indigente porque nada acompanha, e possui nada, imperioso, impreterível, obtemperando as razões das coisas, sangrado nos sais das cores enquanto se assume rei e progenitor das mesmas. É uma veleidade, ser-se autor, autorizar a criação do nada e dar-lhe veemência de ser; se me coibissem de escrever já na próxima manhã, não seria um desvario. Diria apenas que nada tenho a escrever, e que as particulas de água que rútilam na minha respiração existem como torres, como árvores, regados, aquilo que se colecciona em mim a poste de me matar mas que não me mata (sendo essa a sua manigância), constitui apenas um nada que acompanho, que outrora fora escrito ali, na litologia, onde a terra tuge uma força impenetrável, ou ali, nas paredes douradas na modorra dos tempos, ou ali, num livro, em qualquer livro outrora escrito, até ainda por escrever. É um nada que é único enquanto é nada — porque nada é único — e deixa de o ser quando deixa de ser nada. Quem escreve sobre o nada é o autor que nada tem sobre o que escrever, e está, deveras, criativamente estropiado, pois é-lhe dada uma casuística que coaduna com as outras casuísticas de viver num campo calvo; somos da filosofia quando ensaiamos as perguntas, do cimento nas arquitecturas das ficções, dos balústres do som nas poesias (e apenas dos balústres), e vamos entumescendo o nada com léguas de significados, de mitologias pessoais, imagens de libélulas no gelo das árvores, de pinhas flutuando sobre os mares equatoriais, a qualidade memorial dos factos que logo deixam de ser factos sobre o peso doutros factos, e cavalos nobres, espancados, ludismos, lajedos de fomes e terrores e qualidades pestíferas do que amamos, do que pretendemos amar, do que pretendemos entender na qualidade de amar, uma coalescência divina do que é porque o é e do que engendramos ser por medida de sentirmos que assim o seja. Enumerações, muitas, todas dentro do mesmo nada, num parêntise infinito que assenta perfeitamente no buraco-espiral dum punho cerrado; mas deixem-me rever o sí-mesmo, se a verdade é criativa e o sonho a sua destruição, deixem-me rever todo o subterrâneo das coisas, porque todas elas borbulham com o significado de tudo, fervem no compasso de luz numa condensação infinita de fenómenos, e é uma ferida que se estende ao horizonte de não ver a dimensão esmagadora que têm, é a réplica de um exercício redutor constante — uma simulação de essência — porque somos frágeis, os nossos ossos cinzas que se esmagam com a maior facilidade, e porque tudo o que significa é pérfido no seu significado, e essa cinza de ossos penetra-nos os pulmões, dentro de nada, dentro de tudo, dentro do significado que é um nada num todo, um pânico, uma tubérculose da mente, uma paralisia.
E depois, há uma destruição que não é redução, o azeite sobre a picada da abelha, a juventude e a regeneração que se toma por um significado tão concreto e claro, que é reflexo de lágrima numa escuridão imensa. Voltámos a casa. O mundo faz sentido, e não tem significado nem nada nem tudo, nem se resigna a tais adornos, e somos preenchidos pela leveza do próprio ar, as cores das próprias flores, e toda a luz retumbada nas paredes sombreadas. Há, talvez, uma mãe e um pai, irmãos, ou uma memória límpida deles, de onde se postavam, de onde observavam o mundo com infímas complexidades que nem um sonho suporta entender. Há um cão, talvez um gato, um canário, e o seu entusiasmo fleumático que sangra no espírito dos seus olhos. Há aquela noite estouvada e o fim malogrado dessa antiguidade, que não vi suceder, porque nunca deixei de ser nada do que outrora fui, nunca deixarei de ser nada do que já fui.

Voltámos a casa, onde o mundo e a linguagem vivem em profunda reciprocidade, e podemos conter bibliotecas cá dentro, podemos nunca ter escrito obra, podemos ter escrito vinte. Aqui, não somos autores, não somos escritores, não acompanhamos um nada ainda por descrever. Aqui, somos o nada, o significado, a sombra que o autor acompanha.