A Martinha

Uma pessoa que, como eu, não tenha televisão está protegida de muita coisa. Uma pessoa que tenha Facebook e procure informar-se pelos canais que considera mais fidedignos na internet, está protegida de muita coisa. O meu feed do Facebook, por exemplo, é uma caixa de ressonância daquilo que eu penso; as plataformas que uso para obter informação respondem às minhas perguntas de um modo que eu considero razoável e satisfatório. Mas o país e o mundo não é a minha rede de amigos no Facebook, nem a Atlantic, nem a New Yorker, nem o New York Review of Books. 

O país detesta a Ministra, uma mulher sem filhos, racional e competente, e o mundo não entende o confinamento do povo, mas não dos políticos. O país está revoltado porque a, b e c foram à Assembleia celebrar o 25 de Abril e x, y e z ao Parque Eduardo VII para o 1.º de Maio, mas o povo não pode passar os filhos para a alçada dos avós, os shoppings e os restaurantes não podem abrir, os médicos não podem ganhar mais, ainda não pode haver uma vacina, e nada poderá ser como era antes. A culpa é da Martinha. Foi a Martinha que decidiu, a Martinha que avaliou, a Martinha que não quer pagar, a Martinha que não faz uma vénia e se ajoelha em directo perante todos os profissionais que fazem o que a profissionais compete.

Já pensei que a culpa fosse da Escola - tendemos sempre a colocar o problema na nossa área -, que a Escola ensina pouca estatística, não propõe estudos de caso, não implementa o método científico, não se presta à interpretação das nuances, desvaloriza o peso da mais pequena dissonância na vida... Depois concluí que o problema é social, cultural, mas sobretudo pessoal. E está na perda do hábito da leitura. A gente não lê, os estímulos do meio envolvente não ajudam, é-se incapaz de empatia, não se sabe analisar uma situação complexa; em suma, pensa-se pouco e mal. É assim que estamos todos entregues ao perigo maior que é a ignorância boçal activa. 

Fica aqui o melhor artigo que li para explicar por que é tão complicado comunicar, prevenir, tratar, viver e sobreviver ao momento actual.

Da influência improvável

David Hockney está a braços com o estudo da perspectiva, interessa-lhe sobretudo a possibilidade da perspectiva reversa. Um colaborador vai à net, esse mundo de quando em vez admirável, e a busca leva-o a um pequeno ensaio de um padre moscovita, com obra até em crítica de arte. 

Florensky, born in 1882 in Azerbaijan the scion of secular Westernizing parents (his father a Russian railway engineer, his mother the cultured product of ancient Armenian nobility), proved a mathematical prodigy from his earliest years and went on to do pathbreaking work in non-Euclidean mathematics while also pouring himself into wider scientific studies more generally. But apparently, after a visit to Tolstoy in 1899, Florensky fell into a growing spiritual crisis in which he came to doubt the primacy of the scientific positivism that had guided his studies thus far. Following graduation from Moscow State University in 1904, he declined the offer of a teaching position in mathematics, instead repairing to the nearby holy city of Sergiev Posad (site of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, the most important monastery in the Russian Orthodox Church), where his theological studies culminated in his being ordained as a priest in 1911 (though he married and would have five children). Although he wrote widely on philosophy and theology (his essays on the idea of the Divine Sophia would later become central to the concerns of feminist theologians), he nevertheless continued his equally far-flung scientific investigations, all the while trying to meld the two vocations. Following the Bolshevik Revolution, and even though the Communists shut down many of his most beloved Orthodox institutions, he threw himself into technical work, particularly on behalf of the electrification of rural Soviets, under the sponsorship of Trotsky himself (notwithstanding his insistence on wearing clerical robes all the while). By 1932, however, Trotsky was gone, and Stalin, finding the charismatic and querulous cleric an increasing nuisance, had him exiled to Siberia, where he launched into investigations on the nature and properties of permafrost, further path-breaking research that has become increasingly relevant in recent years with the rise of global warming. Meanwhile, in 1937, at the height of his Red Terror, Stalin had Florensky brought back to St. Petersburg and, following a brief trial, summarily executed—that being the very year, as it happens, of the birth of David Hockney in Bradford, England. 

(...) His reverse perspective essay, in particular, dates from a moment in 1920 when Bolsheviks were busily imputing the value of the medieval Orthodox icons they were tearing off the walls of museums and monasteries, dismissing them as hopelessly primitive for their allegedly clumsy handling of modeling and perspective (the way, for instance, a nose might be seen to be going one direction while the lips went another and the eyes a third—not in any way, at any rate, as in real life). But Florensky fired back, marshaling tremendous erudition to argue that if, as far back as Babylonian and Egyptian times, artists and craftsmen continually made similar errors, it was not because they didn’t know about rigorous one-point perspective (they would have had to call on such knowledge to be able to build pyramids and the like) but because they sensed there was something wrong with its practice when it actually came to the depiction of real life in all its timely and timeless vivacity—and they chose not to use it. Florensky showed how conventionally one-point perspectival tricks first began being deployed on theater sets in ancient Greece and Rome with the express intent of deceiving audiences, such illusionistic effects being likewise prized on the walls of decadent villas, say, in Pompeii, even though they really only registered as accurate from one specific location, completely falling apart from any other point of viewing. Over and over again, Florensky marshaled arguments that Hockney himself would start deploying more than sixty years later (...)

E tudo ganha forma e perspectiva. Pode ler-se na íntegra aqui.