And yet... complicitity.

Desde pelo menos o ano passado, tenho andado a pensar nisto. A objectificação entra sempre à força na vida das mulheres, pois é de violência, e sobretudo de mulheres, que se trata. Violência disfarçada de amizade, dever, favor..., violência indisfarçada: desafio, provocação, desrespeito. Redunda sempre em repulsa, e como quase sempre acontece às mulheres, uma repulsa que não tem nunca um sentido único, que das questões de agenciamento e empoderamento o eu, claramente, nunca pode excluir-se. Não sei de quanto tempo precisamos, não faço a mais pequena ideia como mudar o olhar, mas Anne Valente pretende contribuir para isso, e só o ensejo é de valor. 

My first-ever semester of teaching a college fiction workshop eight years ago, a male student wrote a short story where a male protagonist brutalized women for pages, for the sake of brutalization. In workshop discussion, I raised my question carefully: What work can violence do in fiction? And if it’s not doing necessary work, when does violence become sensationalism? I did not use the word gaze but the student watched me regardless. After class, when every other student had filtered out of the room, he walked to the front of the class while I was erasing the board and said as close as he could to my face, I want you to know that wasn’t just a story. I want you to know that I hate women. My breath stopped but I finished erasing the board and moved to leave the classroom as quickly as possible but he beat me to it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go walk the dog. He smirked. Do you even know what that means? He meant masturbation. He meant humiliation. And he meant fear, both mine and his, that I had challenged his work and that I’d tried to teach him anything at all. That I had stepped outside of his narrative of me, that for a moment I had transcended the camera’s scope. 

Three years ago my husband was a groomsman in the wedding of a friend we’d both known since college. This friend was more my husband’s friend, and at various points had quibbled with the facts in my short stories, had suggested that his PhD in mathematics would gain him more job offers than mine in creative writing ever could, had once cornered me in a bar to tell me in explicit detail how he’d cheated on his girlfriend, and had told my husband when he was still my college boyfriend that he should fuck other women while I was abroad for six months. Nonetheless, my husband and I drove nine hours from Ohio to North Carolina for his wedding. During the reception, as he was making the rounds from table to table and my husband was in the restroom, he leaned down and whispered in my ear, You may think your last name is Valente but this is my wedding so tonight you're just Mrs. Finnell to me. My husband’s last name, what I hadn’t taken four years before when we got married. You may think. This is my wedding. You’re just. To me. The face-slap of this whisper at a wedding, people clinking silverware and toasting all around us. Celluloid. A shot out of focus. I was breathless with anger but I smiled because it was his wedding and even still my anger couldn’t keep me from being sized down to the fact of my body in a cocktail dress, from being shoved back into a camera’s lens, from being every object he intended me to be. 

And yet I am complicit. I grew up on film, which is to say, I grew up acculturated to viewing the world as object, my sense of myself and the world around me sieved through a director’s lens. I knew myself as subject, another kind of spectator beyond the male perspective I was meant comply with, but I also absorbed the inclination to view myself through a haze of projection. We learn to hate ourselves for what is objectified and punished, for what the dominant gaze tells us doesn’t belong. We learn to disavow what hurts. Three weeks after this wedding, I still invited this asshole to my first book’s launch party where he asked from the back of the room during the Q&A to explain the use of the word mathematics in my chapbook’s title, a chapbook that had already come out the year before and that I hadn’t even read from, and what could possibly be elegiac about a system of integers and objects.   

A little voice inside me: Should I delete the word asshole? Am I only making someone who has objectified me an object in turn? Is this complicity—no better? Or is the complicity the little voice itself, the voice of disavowal, the internalized self-hatred that says I was born to be nice, that I shouldn’t push beyond the allotment of my flattened screen?

O texto de Anne Valente na íntegra, aqui.

Mas terá havido quem não tenha censurado o que ela escreveu?

Publication of a complete edition of Plath’s letters has been long overdue. Until now, apart from fleeting quotations in biographies and critical studies of Plath, the only letters available to readers outside of archives appear in Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 (1975). Edited by Plath’s mother as a corrective to the negative portrayal of the mother-daughter relationship in The Bell Jar(U.S. publication 1971), Letters Home is terribly flawed. Consisting primarily of letters from Plath to her mother, the book offers fascinating glimpses of Plath’s daily life but a cartoonish view of her as a person. Ellipses pepper every page, and, as comparison to the originals in The Letters of Sylvia Plath shows, Aurelia Plath made extreme cuts throughout, rarely reprinting full versions of anything but postcards (and she often severely redacted those, too). The book perplexed readers, for neither the letters, in which Plath strives to maintain a pose of peppy optimism, nor Aurelia Plath’s often defensive editorial commentary, reflected the Plath readers thought they knew from the poetry and fiction. Gone were the barbed emotions, the volatile wit, the interior darkness. Instead, Plath appears as the ambitious Smith “all-around” girl, rewarded for her hard work with prizes, publications, and a dream-come-true marriage—with only a few negative blips along the way to mar her fighting spirit and positive attitude, even after her marriage crumbles. 

Accurately foreseeing the book’s mixed reviews, Ted Hughes wrote to Aurelia after reading the manuscript and urged her to rethink her approach, not for the sake of protecting him, he claimed, but because “all these letters exist within a single relationship, and this entails, eventually, beyond a certain critical mass of text, a feeling of monotony and narrowness,” which he attributed to Plath’s “constant and growing and very understandable need to reassure you that the life she had chosen was not a mistake, that writing was succeeding financially etc.” He also suggested cutting “the repetitiousness of mood and response” in Plath’s depiction of life at Smith, and the overabundance of enthusiasm throughout the letters that, he warned, while characteristic of Plath, so suffuses them that “the book begins to produce the opposite effect to what I’m sure you must have hoped. So even much of this evidence of her good spirits must be cut” (16 July 1974, Selected Letters of Ted Hughes). 

It’s hard to know how much of this advice Mrs. Plath took. But the points Hughes makes about Letters Home also ring true for large swathes of The Letters of Sylvia Plath. Reading through the letters to her mother, which Plath wrote at great length and with great frequency, is a slog, due to the monotony of cheerful affect and the obsessive recount­ing of what she did when, where, and how. Frank O’Hara’s wry appraisal of his poetry—“I do this, I do that”—applies equally well here—except that O’Hara’s poems are inherently interesting because they happen in New York City, whereas Plath’s letters, until she moves to Cambridge, England, reflect her teen and collegiate life in suburban America. But the difference in reading Letters Home and The Letters of Sylvia Plath, whose first half is dominated by letters to mom, is that the unabridged versions reveal not only how Aurelia’s editing flattens Plath into a caricature of the “all-American girl,” but also how Plath herself carefully curated her experiences to pose as such a girl in order to please her mother. 

Some readers may question Steinberg and Kukil’s decision to publish all extant letters. Although Plath kept journals from age eleven onward, The Unabridged Journals (also edited by Kukil) begins the summer before Plath matriculated at Smith. And, whereas Letters Home starts with Plath’s first letter from college, The Letters of Sylvia Plath takes 172 pages to get there. The pre-high school letters, many sent from Girl Scout camp, are especially tedious. Yet they reveal aspects of Plath’s character and style that carry over into adulthood: her healthy appetite (and sensuous interest in food and cooking), her love of nature (and skill in describing it), and her hyper-organization (evident early on in letters about her stamp collection, and remarkably present throughout the volume in the editors’ footnotes referencing her calendar to corroborate activities she mentions). Plath begins enclosing poems in letters at age ten, and by thirteen is already coolly ranking them, a habit she would continue into adulthood when compiling book manuscripts. In November 1945, she confides to a friend, “speaking of poetry I just began a notebook of my poems and already have about 5 real ones, and have about 5 medium and 5 jingles.” She also sketched throughout her life and liberally illustrated her letters with drawings. The editors reproduce a few illustrated letters as plates and take care in the text to describe any drawings Plath added to letters or envelopes. The book opens with gaily decorated letters to her parents and concludes, in the penultimate letter, with news she sends to Aurelia that the Christian Science Monitor has published her article, with four pen-and-ink sketches, about Benidorm, Spain, where she honeymooned with Hughes. 

Evident also from early on are Plath’s all-out efforts to please mom. Describing piano practice, she writes with pride to Aurelia, “I kept saying to myself, ‘This is what mother would want me to do’” (January 1943). Hyperbole abounds—“Today in my opinion is the most beautiful day I spent at camp” (8 July 1945); in subsequent letters, summer after summer, year after year, new “most wonderful” days replace the old. The happiness reverberates through high school and crescendos during Plath’s first three undergraduate years. Thus, a summer job at the shore as a mother’s helper (doing nonstop cooking, laundry, housecleaning and watching three children) sounds like summer camp: “Yesterday was just about the most wonderful yet. . . . Nauset is the most beautiful place on the Cape. . . . I don’t know when I’ve had such a wonderful time in all my life. . . . I left her [fiction writer Val Gendron] at 12:30 after 5 of the most wonderful hours I have ever spent” (19–21 August 1952). Three days later, the wonder never ceases: “I don’t know when I’ve had so much work and fun combined! Really, I feel so much richer, older, and wiser after this summer. Never have I gotten along so well with such an amazing diversity of people!” (24 August 1952). Such exuberant over-insistence is hard to tolerate in either edition of Plath’s letters. The problem with Letters Home, however, is that it proposes—or, really, insists—that this saccharine version reflects the “real” Sylvia Plath. 

The Letters of Sylvia Plath, in contrast, complicates Plath through showing how meticulously she designed letters—and different versions of herself—for a diversity of recipients. The correspondence with Aurelia so weights the book’s first half that letters to others arise as welcome relief: sudden flarings of a different Plath, more thoughtful and often more caustic, than the happy “Sivvy” of the letters home. In letters to women friends, Plath unleashes her snark about social double standards and the tedium of playing nice girl. For example, after enduring a bad date, she quips, “[he] was supposedly the best-looking boy in his dorm—& he was attractive in a weak-dark hair-tonic sort of way. He was one of those fool Americans who thinks of girls as a clotheshorse with convenient openings and curved structures for their own naïve pleasure” (3 February 1951). She also casts a cold eye on her era’s reverence for female propriety: “After Class Day it was a two hour tea at the headmaster’s house, and I got so damn sick of making small talk with mothers of boys and fiancées and young wives that I thought my sweet girlish smile had frozen to my face. I felt like drowning myself in the iced tea bowl, in a flurry of mint leaves” (12 June 1951). Along with mockery of social conventions, the letters to friends also record her left-leaning, humanistic politics. Her exchanges, beginning in high school with a German pen pal, register Plath’s pacifism, her curiosity about postwar life in Germany, and consciousness of how their generation bears the existential burden of growing up in the atomic age. Occasionally, in letters to Aurelia, Plath breaks good-girl character and gets sarcastic or political—sometimes simultaneously, “No news may be good news from Warren [Plath’s brother], but that doesn’t mean that no news means I’m on my deathbed. If I were, I’d at least have time to drop you a postcard.” Busy with midterms, Plath had last written to mom only two days earlier. She concludes, “It is lovely weather and I am as yet fine. If I live till after March 12 I can face the atombomb with complete equanimity” (3 March 1951). Aurelia did not reprint this postcard in Letters Home, nor did she reprint the passionate, articulate paragraphs from Fall 1952 letters in which Plath opposes McCarthyism, advocates for Civil Rights, and longs to be old enough to vote for Adlai Stevenson (Aurelia supported Eisenhower). In its inclusion of letters to friends, as well as to family, and in restoring all of the passages Aurelia suppressed in Letters Home, The Letters of Sylvia Plath resuscitates Plath’s political consciousness and her snark, including her capacity for self-satire.

O texto integral sobre a publicação recente do primeiro volume das Cartas de Sylvia Plath está aqui. 

Desde pelo menos Simone Weil

Lady Bird (2017)

Contra a concepção instrumental do próximo

Vivemos numa época em que os pecados sociais adquiriram especial relevo e gravidade, porque são os que nos afectam. E o mais grave de todos eles é a transformação dos homens de fins em meios, essa concepção instrumental do próximo que é a coisa mais anticristã que se inventou. Como gostaríamos nós, cristãos, que os senhores pregassem contra ela e deixassem para o confessionário os pecados de alcova, tão monótonos, tão invariáveis, iguais hoje aos que cometia o rei David, nem mais nem menos, e tão frequentes hoje como em qualquer tempo passado! Além disso, são difíceis de evitar pelas leis do mundo, ao passo que os outros, se se criasse uma consciência colectiva adequada, poderiam ser evitados.

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Memória de um Inconformista, daqui.

The fury of frightened people

Popular opinion has it that people who react as stubbornly as I’ve trained myself to have real courage, which consists precisely in overcoming fear. But I don’t agree. We fearful-belligerents place at the top of all our fears the fear of losing self-respect. We value ourselves very highly, and in order not to have to face our own humiliation, we are capable of anything. In other words, we drive away our fears not out of altruism but out of egotism. 

(...) I’m learning, like a character in Conrad, to accept fear, even to exhibit it with self-mockery. I began to do this when I realised that my daughters got scared if I defended them from dangers – small, large or imaginary – with excessive ardour. What perhaps should be feared most is the fury of frightened people.

Elena Ferrante, aqui.

We are the way we are

We are the way we are, we’re framed by our parents and the particular set of anxieties – social, political, and others that we have – so that one begins to feel we’re all carrying around a very fixed inheritance; as if there’s a bottle that’s filled up, or half filled up, or a quarter filled up at our birth and that level never changes, which is a terrible thing. That can’t be true, can it?

James Wood, aqui. 

Ser mulher

Ser mulher é hoje menos determinante do que há setenta anos, mas estamos longe de ter atingido um nível aceitável de igualdade. Quando nasci, a preferência dos pais por um rapaz era evidente. Veja-se o que a minha mãe escreveu, a 2 de Agosto de 1943, tinha eu sete meses, no livro intitulado História do Bebé: "Enquanto estava à espera dela, pedia a Deus que o meu filho - nessa altura queria um rapaz - tivesse saúde, inteligência, carácter e vontade e que, se fosse uma menina, também gostaria que fosse bonita." Era assim o mundo em que fui criada.

Maria Filomena Mónica, Bilhete de Identidade.

The sky is not blue. We see it in a blue way.

"(...) color is not reducible to visual experience or properties of objects or lights; rather, Palmer writes, “Color is more accurately understood as the result of complex interactions between physical light in the environment and our visual nervous systems.”"

Está tudo aqui. A realidade da cor é perceptual.

Coisas da vida

Respondi-lhe pouco depois, como sempre fazia, agradecendo a lembrança mas declinando o convite. Atualizei a minha morada e número de telefone, por solicitação sua, mas já não pertencia ao seu mundo nem ela ao meu. Era-me estranha. Não tinha saudades nem alimentava curiosidade sobre aquilo em que se tornara. Passara-me tudo, completamente. Não previ que, a partir do momento em que lhe facultasse os meus contactos, pudesse recomeçar a ser alvo da sua constante solicitação, sobretudo via telefone. Não tinha vontade de a ouvir falar sobre o que não me interessava e não havia nada que desejasse contar-lhe. Como é que a Tony não compreendia, nem que fosse pelas minhas pausas e silêncios telefónicos, que tínhamos desenvolvido interesses e vidas completamente diferentes?! Que estávamos acabadas uma para a outra?! Pus a mamã a atender, alegando que eu não estava em casa. Foi fácil. A mamã não viu na minha atitude nada de estranho, porque não acreditava em amigas.
A Tony tentou a via da correspondência. Passei a receber cartas pejadas de informação e fotos tiradas aqui e ali, sempre maravilhosa. Continuava a querer incluir-me na sua vida à força. Eu ia lendo as cartas de viés, respondendo pouco e mal ou ignorando. A certa altura deixei de responder. Não estava para fazer mais fretes.

Isabela Figueiredo, A Gorda.

António Damásio dixit

"Sem educação, os homens matar-se-ão uns aos outros."

(...)

"Depois da linguagem verbal, há qualquer coisa muito maior que é a grande epopeia cultural que estamos a construir há cem mil anos".

(...) 

"Os sentimentos, aquilo que sentimos, são o resultado de ver uma pessoa que se ama, ou ouvir uma peça musical ou ter um magnífico repasto num restaurante. Todas essas coisas nos provocam emoções e sentimentos. Essa vida emocional e sentimental que temos como pano de fundo da nossa vida são as provocadoras da nossa cultura". 

(...)

"O problema é ter mais emoções negativas do que positivas, não é ter emoções".

To learn how to walk is to walk

In Democracy for Realists, for instance, the authors criticise what they call the ‘folk theory’ of democracy. This maintains that elected representatives should translate their constituents’ preferences into public policy. The problem, according to these political scientists, is that most voters lack the time, energy or ability to immerse themselves in the technicalities of public policy. Instead, people tend to vote based on group identification, or an impulse to align with one political faction rather than another.

In a memorable chapter of their book, Achen and Bartels show that politicians often suffer electoral defeat for events beyond their control. In the summer of 1916, for example, New Jersey’s beachgoers experienced a series of shark attacks. In that November’s election, the beach towns gave President Woodrow Wilson fewer votes than New Jersey’s non-beach towns. The voters, it seems, were punishing Wilson for the shark attacks. According to Achen and Bartels, voters’ ability ‘to make sensible judgments regarding credit and blame is highly circumscribed’. This is a polite way of saying that most voters are not smart enough to realise that presidents are not responsible for shark attacks. (...)

The remedy for our democracy deficit is to devolve as much power as possible to the local level. Many problems can be addressed only on the state, federal and international level, but the idea is that participating in local politics teaches citizens how to speak in public, negotiate with others, research policy issues, and learn about their community and the larger circles in which it is embedded. Like any other skill, the way to become a better citizen is to practise citizenship.

Nicholas Tampio, Treat people as citizens.

Mudar

O afecto. José António Pinto nunca teve medo dele. No seu "manual para a intervenção social emancipatória" - livro "para qualquer gajo que queira ser um assistente revolucionário" que gostava de escrever um dia - teria de compor um capítulo sobre isso. "Criar afecto, o primeiro passo." É um capital demorado e em permanente construção: ouvir, valorizar, acreditar, lutar. Para depois informar, esclarecer, capacitar, consciencializar, politizar. Mudar.

Mariana Correia Pinto, Porto, última estação.

Do declínio contemporâneo da poesia

There are at least two reasons why the situation of poetry matters to the entire intellectual community. The first involves the role of language in a free society. Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate, and understand the power of language will become the slaves of those who retain it--be they politicians, preachers, copywriters, or newscasters. The public responsibility of poetry has been pointed out repeatedly by modern writers. Even the archsymbolist Stephane Mallarme praised the poet's central mission to "purify the words of the tribe."

De leitura obrigatória, este longo mas brilhante ensaio de Dana Gioia.

Uma bola de fogo

“Disse-me em dialecto: “Tu ainda perdes tempo com essas coisas, Lenù? Nós andamos a voar sobre uma bola de fogo. A parte que arrefeceu flutua sobre a lava. Nessa parte construímos os edifícios, as pontes e as estradas. De tempos a tempos a lava sai do Vesúvio, ou então provoca um terremoto que destrói tudo. Há micróbios por todo o lado, que nos fazem adoecer e morrer. Há guerras. Há por aí uma miséria que nos torna a todos cruéis. A cada segundo pode acontecer qualquer coisa que nos faz sofrer de tal modo, que não há lágrimas que cheguem. E tu, o que fazes? Um curso de Teologia em que te esforças para compreender o que é o Espírito Santo? Esquece isso, quem inventou o mundo foi o Diabo, e não o Pai, o Filho e o Espírito Santo. Queres ver o colar de pérolas que o Stefano me ofereceu?”

- Elena Ferrante, A Amiga Genial.

It is a dangerous error to confound truth with matter-of-fact. Our life is governed not only by facts, but by hopes; the kind of truthfulness which sees nothing but facts is a prison for the human spirit.

- Bertrand Russell, Theory of Knowledge, 1926.

Morte ao meio-dia - 2

"Esta crise sistémica, a da decadência do Estado enquanto promotor dos mínimos de igualdade, está no seu esplendor. A aceitação generalizada de que as pessoas podem – e devem – falir é a miséria do nosso tempo." 

- Ana Sá Lopes, na edição de hoje do Jornal i.

Street Haunting

"The number of books in the world is infinite, and one is forced to glimpse and nod and move on after a moment of talk, a flash of understanding, as, in the street outside, one catches a word in passing and from a chance phrase fabricates a lifetime."

 Virginia Woolf, in A London Adventure, 1927

Coisas que foram caindo em desuso - 4

''Os sentimentos muito profundos não se partilham. Não pertencem à História, não são do domínio público.''


Agustina Bessa-Luís em carta escrita na morte de Sophia de Mello Breyner

Repensar a cafeteira do café

"Repensar a cafeteira do café, de que nos servimos de manhã, e repensar uma grande parte do nosso lugar no universo. Talvez isso tenha a ver com a posição do escritor, que é uma posição universal, no lugar de Deus, acima da condição humana, a nomear as coisas para que elas existam. Para que elas possam existir… Isto tem a ver com o poeta, sobretudo, que é um demiurgo. Ou tem esse lado. Numa forma simples, essa maneira de redimensionar o mundo passa por um aspecto muito profundo, que não tem nada a ver com aquilo que existe à flor da pele. Tem a ver com uma experiência radical do mundo. Por exemplo, com aquela que eu faço de vez em quando, que é passar três dias como se fosse cego. Por mais atento que se seja, há sempre coisas que nos escapam e que só podemos conhecer de outra maneira, através dos outros sentidos, que estão menos treinados… Reconhecer a casa através de outros sentidos, como o tacto, por exemplo. Isso é outra dimensão, dá outra profundidade. E a casa é sempre o centro e o sentido do mundo. A partir daí, da casa, percebe-se tudo. Tudo. O mundo todo."

Al Berto, in LER (1989)

Moonrise

Moonrise, Edwin Church, 1889

"(...) Em Delos, Património da Humanidade, as pedras foram largadas às silvas e aos cardos, às lagartixas e aos corvos. Nasce um pinhal no meio de colunas. Grande parte da cidade está vedada porque se tornou perigosa. As cisternas estão cheias de água estagnada com mosquitos. As víboras rastejam na sombra. O teatro de Dionysos não se pode visitar. Nem as casas, a de Dionysos, a de Cléopatra, do Tridente. O museu está deserto de guardas, com alas fechadas. O Terraço dos Leões foi invadido pela natureza. A loja fechou. O Estado grego, sem dinheiro, sem funcionários, sem Ministério da Cultura, demitiu-se de Delos. As ervas daninhas e as flores silvestres, os répteis e os insetos devoram Delos. A cidade está submersa em vegetação e abandono e à guarda do tempo, esse grande escultor. Angkor Wat renasce, Delos morre. E que deixará esta civilização que rivalize com a beleza de uma estatueta de Afrodite ou uma figurinha de terracota? Um iPad."

Clara Ferreira Alves, Expresso 19-05-2012