Love and Love Affairs

"In the 1920s, while I was living at the Residencia, there was a strange suicide in Madrid that fascinated me for years. In the neighborhood of Amaniel, a student and his young fiancée killed themselves in a restaurant garden. They were know to be passionately in love; their families were on excellent terms with each other; and when an autopsy was performed on the girl, she was found to be a virgin.

On the surface, then, there seem to be no obstacles; in fact, the "Amaniel lovers" were making wedding plans at the time of their deaths. So why the double suicide? I still don't have the answer, except that perhaps a truly passionate love, a sublime love that's reached a certain peak of intensity, is simple incompatible with life itself. Perhaps it's too great, too powerful. Perhaps it can exist only in death.

As a child, I felt intense love, divorced from any sexual attraction, for both boys and girls. As Lorca used to say, "Mi alma niña e niño" - I have an androgynous soul. These were purely platonic feelings; I loved as a fervent monk would love the Virgin Mary. The mere idea of thouching a woman's sex or breasts, or that I might feel her tongue against mine, repelled me.

These platonic affairs lasted until my baptism in the tradicional Saragossa brothel, but these platonic feelings never gave way interely to sexual desire. I've fallen in love with women many times, but maintained perfectly chaste relationships with them. On the other hand, from the age of fourteen until the last few years, my sexual desire remained powerful, stronger than hunger, and usually far more difficult to satisfy. No sooner would I sit down in a railway carriage, for example, than erotic images filled my mind. All I could do was succumb, only to find them still there, and sometimes even stronger, afterwards."

             Buñuel, My Last Sigh, the Autobiography of Luis Buñuel, Vintage, 2013, pp.146-147.              

The Phantom of Liberty

Emily Dickinson, Will there really be a «Morning»?

Will there really be a «Morning»?
Is there such a thing as «Day»?
Could I see it from the mountains
If I were as tall as they?

Has it feet like Water lilies?
Has it feathers like a Bird?
Is it brought from famous countries?
Of which I have never heard?

Oh some Scholar! Oh some Sailor!
Oh some Wise Man from the skies!
Please to tell a little Pilgrim
Where the place called «Morning» lies!

                

                  *

Será que a manhã virá?
Que há isso chamado Dia?
Se fosse alta como elas,
Das montanhas vê-lo-ia?

Terá pé como os Nenúfares?
E penas de Passarinho?
Virá de célebres terras
Que o nome não adivinho?

Que um Mestre, que um Marinheiro,
Um Sábio que os astros leia,
Diga a um pobre Peregrino,
Onde a manhã se recreia!

            80 Poemas de Emily Dickinson, (Tradução e apresentação de Jorge de Sena), Ediçoes 70, 1978 pp. 194-5.              

Bob Dylan, One More Cup of Coffee

Rembrandt, Bathsheba with King David Letter & Hendrickje Bathing

Por sugestão de Pedro Citati, Israel e o Islão - as Centelhas de Deus, Livros Cotovia, 2005, p. 232, onde se pode ler:

"Hannah Arendt e Heinrich Blücher percorriam, frequentemente, as ruazinhas que atravessam a place Saint-Sulpice e o Sena e iam até ao Louvre. Admiravam um quadro de Rembrandt: Betsabé com a carta de David. Blücher não tinha lido a Bíblia, ou tinha-a esquecido. Não se lembrava de que o rapidíssimo olhar e a carta de David à sua súbdita tinham arrastado consigo as mais tremendas desgraças de Israel - a morte de Uriah, marido de Betsabé, em combate, a maldição de Javé e do profeta de Javé, a morte do filho de David, a violência contra Tamar, irmã de Absalão, cometida por Amom, o assassínio deste, às mãos de Absalão, o pranto de David no monte das Oliveiras, Absalão que viola a cuncubina do pai, a derrota de Absalão na batalha, a sua morte, com os cabelos emaranhados na enorme árvore de terebinto, o seu corpo atirado para uma cova na floresta, o lamento de David: "Meu filho! Absalão, meu filho! Filho meu, Absalão! Tivesse eu morrido em teu lugar, Absalão meu filho." Não sabia quantas maldições e catástrofes tinha causado o breve e rápido coito entre David e a mulher que Blücher julgava ser Frau Rembrandt. No quadro, ele admirou apenas o corpo de Betsabé, nu, sensual, que os anos mal tinham desgastado; imaginou o seu banho de Vénus, a sua arte de amante, de deusa, de esposa fiel, de prostituta sagrada. Pensou que Betsabé era Hannah e David era ele - "o homem da luta e do sofrimento, o revolucionário" que combatia o nazismo." (p.232).

e de Michael taylor, Rembrandt's Nose - Of Flesh & Spirit in the Master's Portraits, d.a.p., 2007, p.116, onde se pode ler:

 "Given the context - Protestant Amsterdam in the mid-seventeeth century - it was a provocative work (...). Yet although it depicts a pretty young woman who has became an object of lust, and moreover depicts her with a sensuousness that would move a stone (it his hard to imagine a detail more physical than the red ribbon touching her breast or the contrast between her white thighs and the tawny shadow on her left leg), its eroticism is tragic. For the subject of the painting is Bathsheba being prepared for King David's bed. The old woman washing Bathsheba's feet is a familiar figure in seventeenth-century painting: the wrinkled procuress who acts simultaneously as a broker for a lustful transaction and as a reminder of how time ravages flesh (you might say that she sets the price on flesh and undercuts it at the same time). In Bathsheba's hand is the summons to the royal palace the crone has delivered to her, and it is not a summons she can refuse. The minute King David spied her naked as she was bathing, her body ceased to belong to her (and still less to her husband); the royal "invitation" is merely a confirmation of this. As if to underscore the notion that desire at its rawest is already a kind of possession. Rembrandt´s painting collapses together two separate episodes of the Bathsheba drama: the arousal of King David's lust and the transformation of Bathsheba into his concubine-to-be. What is more, unlike most of Rembrandt's unclothed female figures,which are simply ungainly, this nude and the related Hendrickje Bathing in London are, for all their stockiness, deeply appealing."

Estados de espírito

AMOR DA VIRTUDE

  "A cotovia é uma ave da qual se diz que, sendo levada à presença de um enfermo, se o dito enfermo deve morrer esta ave volta a cabeça para o lado contrário e nunca o olha; e se esse enfermo deve salvar-se, a ave nunca o abandona de vista, o que aliás é causa de lhe passar toda a doença.

   Analogamente, o amor da virtude não olha nunca coisa vil nem triste, e em contrapartida fixa-se sempre em coisas honestas e virtuosas, retorna sempre ao coração gentil, à semelhança dos pássaros nas verdes selvas por cima dos floridos ramos; isto demonstra mais o amor na adversidade do que na prosperidade, fazendo como a luz, que mais resplandece onde encontra mais tenebroso sítio."

                     Leonardo da Vinci, Bestiário, Fábulas e Outros Escritos, Assírio e Alvim, p. 15.                  

o mundo dos meus olhos

Não fora a tinta para o cabelo, e o mundo seria muito diferente!

"há tanto tempo que precisamos de um demónio"

"... tudo o que é possível produz-se, e só é possível o que se produz, diz K., o grande, o triste, o sábio, que já sabia rigorosamente, ao observar as vidas particulares, o que aí vinha, quando loucos  criminosos olhassem racionalmente para o mundo, e se, por seu lado, o mundo os olhasse racionalmente, isto é, que ele lhes obedeceria. E não digam, pude dizer, provavelmente, que esta explicação não passa de uma explicação tautológica dos factos pelos factos, porque sim, é uma explicação, mesmo se, sei, vos é difícil aceitar que vulgares malfeitores nos governem, difícil, ainda, se os tratais como vulgares malfeitores e sabeis que o são, e, todavia, a a partir do momento em que um louco criminoso acomete qualquer coisa, não num asilo de doidos ou num estabelecimento prisional, mas numa chancelaria ou num qualquer quartel-general, já vos preocupais em sondar nele o que tem de interessante, a originalidade, o extraordinário, não vos arriscais a dizê-lo, mas, no fundo, é isso: procurais a grandeza para não vos sentirdes tão pequenos, para não verdes tão absurda a vossa história universal, pude dizer, provavelmente, sim, para se poder continuar a lançar um olhar racional sobre o mundo e que o mundo lance também sobre vós um olhar racional. E é perfeitamente compreensível, mais, perfeitamente respeitável, que a vossa diligência não seja ««científica», nem «objectiva», como gostaríeis de acreditar, mas não: é puro lirismo de moralista, na medida em que se deseja restabelecer uma ordem do mundo racional, isto é, que se possa viver, e, por estas pequenas e grandes portas, os proscritos do mundo insinuam-se, de novo, no mundo, pelo menos aqueles que o desejam e que acreditam que o mundo será, de futuro, um lugar construído pelos homens, mas isso é outra história, pude dizer, provavelmente, mas o problema é que é assim que nascem as lendas, esse género de obras líricas «objectivas», esse género de romances «negros» científicos que nos ensinam, por exemplo, que esses grandes homens tinham um sentido táctico excepcional, não é?, como se todos os paranóicos e todos os maníacos não induzissem em erro e não semeassem a dúvida no espírito de quem os rodeia e dos seus médicos com o seu sentido táctico excepcional, e, depois, que a situação social era assim, que a política internacional era assado, que a filosofia, a música e outras larachas artísticas corromperam a maneira de pensar das pessoas, mas, sobretudo, e bem vistas as coisas, o grande homem, diga-se claramente o que é, era um grande homem, havia nele qualquer coisa de sedutor, de cativante, para sermos breves e concisos: qualquer coisa de demoníaco, aí está, um traço demoníaco ao qual não se pode, iniludivelmente, resistir, e mais, não se lhe quer resistir, porque nós vamos à procura, justamente, de um demónio, há tanto tempo que precisamos de um demónio para os nossos negócios sujos, para satisfazer os nossos desejos sujos, mas um demónio, que levaria às costas tudo o que há de demoníaco em nós, como um Anticristo a Cruz de ferro, e que não nos deslizaria descaradamente entre as garras para se enforcar prematuramente, como Stavroguine. Sim, divinizais aqueles que considerais uns loucos criminosos vulgares, mal açabarcam o ceptro e o globo, divinizai-los mesmo amaldiçoando-os, enumerais as circunstâncias objectivas, dizeis em que é que eles tinham objectivamente razão em que é que, pelo contrário, não tinham subjectivamente razão, o que se pode compreender objectivamente, e não se pode compreender subjectivamente, que intrigas aconteciam nos bastidores, que interesses entravam em jogo, e sois incansáveis em explicações, somente para salvar as vossas almas e tudo o que se possa salvar, para ver a uma luz grandiosa e teatral dos acontecimentos mundiais o banditismo vulgar, o crime e a exploração, em que todos participamos ou participámos, de uma maneira ou de outra, pude dizer, provavelmente todos os que estamos aqui, sim, para recuperar farrapos do grande naufrágio no qual tudo se quebrou, sim, só para não ver os séculos que por todo o lado pasmam à vossa volta, à vossa frente, atrás, por baixo, o nada, o vazio, isto é, a nossa situação real, para não ver que servis, e a natureza do poder, a natureza particular de cada poder particular, o qual poder não é necessário nem supérfluo, mas somente uma decisão, uma decisão tomada, ou não, nas vidas particulares, que nem é diabólico, nem sofisticado, e não tem essa grande e subtil classe do fascínio, não, é simplesmente vulgar, ignóbil, criminoso, estúpido e hipócrita, e, inclusive no momento das suas maiores realizações, limita-se a ser organizado, pude dizer, provavelmente, sim, fundamentalmente, nada sério, porque, depois que as oficinas da morte abriram aqui e ali, e em tantos lugares, desde então, acabou, e há já um bom pedaço de tempo que não se pode levar seriamente nada a sério, pelo menos no que respeita à imagem do poder, de não importa que poder. E deixai, enfim, de repetir, pude dizer, provavelmente, que Auschwitz não se explica, que Auschwitz é fruto de forças irracionais, inconcebíveis para a razão, porque o mal tem sempre uma explicação racional, pode bem acontecer que Satã em pessoa, tal como Iago, seja irracional, mas as suas criaturas, sim, são seres perfeitamente racionais, podemos deduzir todos os seus actos, qual uma fórmula matemática, podem-se explicar por qualquer coisa, pelo interesse, cupidez, preguiça, vontade de poder, concupiscência, cobardia, esta ou aquelas satisfação dos instintos, ou, em última instância, em desespero de causa, uma qualquer loucura - paranóia, mania depressiva, piromania, sadismo, masoquismo, megalomania demiúrgica ou de outra espécie, necrofilia, que sei eu, por numerosas perversões, e talvez todas de uma só vez; em contrapartida, pude dizer, provavelmente, agora, ouvi-me bem, o que é realmente irracional e não tem verdadeiramente explicação, não é o mal, pelo contrário, é o bem."

Imre Kertész, Kaddish para uma criança que não vai nascer, (tr. E. R.), Presença, 2004, pp. 37 a 40.

Anthony Braxton - (840M)-Realize-44M 44M

From the Album:"3 Compositions of New Jazz"

Personnel:

Anthony Braxton: alto saxophone, soprano saxophone, clarinet, flute, oboe musette, accordion, bells, snare drum, mixer.

Leroy Jenkins: violin, viola, harmonica, bass drum, recorder, cymbals, slide whistle,

Wadada Leo Smith: trumpet, mellophone, xylophone, kazoo.

Porto Judeu

"«O ódio mortal e indiscreto que nesses tempos menos ilustrados tinham desenvolvido contra os desta Nação, faria dar a qualquer objecto menos agradável o epíteto de Judeu, e parece que neste dia o deu a este porto: como quer que se desse o facto, é certo que o apelido ficou ao lugar, hoje uma grande freguesia...» Segundo as melhores tradições, Jácome de Bruges, capitão Donatário da Ilha, teria desembarcado no dia 1º de Janeiro de 1451, numa pequena baía, «à qual deu o nome de Porto Judeu em razão de estar ali o mar revolto, e não porque viesse algum desta família»."

                      Pedro de Merelim, Os Hebraicos na Ilha Terceira, 1995, p. 39.                                

Lester Young & Harry Edison Sextet - That's All

"Os Judeus de Ostrowiec são levados, de noite, para as câmaras de gás. Resistem."

"(...)
A 10 de Dezembro, estacionava na estação um comboio de judeus de Ostrowiec e o comandante do campo foi informado de que, na manhã seguinte, chegaria a Treblinka um novo transporte. O comandante ordenou que levassem, de noite, os judeus de Ostrowiec para a câmara de gás. Assim se fez. Nós estavamos fechados nos barracões e nada vimos. Só tínhamos ouvido os gritos habituais. Mas quando fomos para o trabalho na manhã seguinte, descobrimos vestígios dos acontecimentos da noite. Os rampiajes abriram as portas das câmaras de gás e começaram a tirar os cadáveres. Os carregadores transportaram-nos até às valas. Desta vez, os carregadores e encarregados da limpeza da coluna chamada do Schlauch tiveram que realizar uma tarefa inédita.

O corredor do edifício que albergava as três câmaras de gás pequenas estava juncado de cadáveres. Havia sangue coagulado até à altura dos tornozelos. Soubemos o que se tinha passado pelos ucranianos. Um grupo de algumas dezenas de homens tinha-se recusado a entrar na câmara de gás. Resistiram e, inteiramente nus, tinham usado os punhos para lutar e não se deixaram encerrar. Os SS tinham então aberto, fogo, com as suas espingardas automáticas, no corredor e abatido ali mesmo os resistentes.

Os carregadores retiraram os cadáveres, a equipa de limpeza lavou o corredor. Como de costume, os pintores deram uma mão de cal nas paredes manchadas com o sangue e a massa encefálica dos suplicados. O edifício ficou outra vez pronto para acolher novas vítimas.

O comandante Mathias veio então ver-nos, aos dentistas, e disse ao Dr. zimerman, o nosso chefe de grupo:«Doutor, estes tipos tentaram fazer batota!»

Mathias estava verdadeiramente magoado e ainda em choque. Não conseguia compreender porque é que aqueles judeus não se tinham deixado matar pacatamente, achava aquilo anormal.

Esse dia foi particularmente difícil. Chegou logo outro comboio e quis o acaso que houvesse muitos dentes postiços e coroas para extrair."

    Chil Rajchman, Sou o último judeu - Treblinka (1942-1943), Teorema, (tr. T.C.), 2009, pp. 93-94.   

"O meu silêncio nunca significará que isto corre mal."

"Há dois anos, descobri por acaso numa livraria junto aos cais do Sena a última carta de

um homem que partiu no comboio de 22 de Junho (...).

A carta estava à venda, como qualquer autógrafo, o que significava que o destinatário dela e os seus parentes tinham desaparecido igualmente. Um fino quadrado de papel recoberto por uma escrita minúscula de ambos os lados. Fora remetida do Campo de Drancy por um certo Robert Tartakovsky. (...) Copio a sua carta, nesta quarta-feira 29 de Janeiro de 1997, cinquenta e cinco anos mais tarde.

(...)

Foi anteontem que me designaram para a partida. Estava moralmente pronto desde há bastante tempo. As pessoas aqui do campo andam assustadas, muitas choram, têm medo. A única coisa que me aborrece é que várias das roupas que pedi já há algum tempo nunca chegaram às minhas mãos. Enviei uma senha de encomenda de vestuário: ainda receberei a tempo aquilo por que espero? Gostaria que a minha mãe não se afligisse, nem ela nem ninguém. Farei o possível por regressar são e salvo. (...)

Gostava que não se atormentassem muito. Quero que a Marthe vá de férias. O meu silêncio nunca significará que isto corre mal. (...) Somos perto de um milhar os que vamos partir. Há também arianos no campo. Obrigam-nos a usar a insígnia judaica. Ontem o capitão alemão Doncker veio ao campo e houve uma debandada geral. Recomendar a todos os amigos que, se puderem, vão apanhar ar noutro lado, pois aqui temos de abandonar toda a esperança. Não sei se nos encaminharão para Compiègne antes da grande abalada. Não envio roupa, lavá-la-ei aqui. A cobardia da maior parte arrepia-me. Pergunto a mim mesmo o que acontecerá quando estivermos lá longe. (...) Devolverei provavelmente os livros de Arte que muito vos agradeço. Deverei sem dúvida resistir ao Inverno, estou pronto, não se inquietem. (...) O pior é que rapam o cabelo muito rente a todos os deportados e isto ainda os identifica mais do que a insígnia. (...)

Não sei, mas receio uma partida precipitada. Hoje devem cortar-me o cabelo rente. Logo à noite, os que vão partir serão sem dúvida fechados num corpo do edifício especial e vigiados de perto, até mesmo acompanhados aos WC por um gerdarme. Uma atmosfera sinistra paira sobre o campo. (...) Sosseguem, ter-vos-ei sempre no pensamento. (...) O que me desola é ser obrigado a separar-me da caneta e não ter o direito de possuir papel (um pensamento ridículo atravessa-me o espírito: as facas estão proibidas e não disponho de um simples abre-latas). Não me armo em valentão, não tenho feitio para isso; eis a atmosfera: doentes e enfermos em grande número também foram designados para a partida. (...) Julgo que talvez seja inútil tirar agora livros de minha casa, façam o que acharem melhor. Contanto que tenhamos bom tempo para a viagem! (...) Obrigado de todo o coração aos que me permitiram «passar o Inverno». Vou deixar esta carta em suspenso. Preciso de preparar o saco. Até logo! (...) esta nota é para o caso de eu não poder continuar. Mãe adorada, e vós, minhas queridas, beijo-vos com emoção. Sejam corajosas. Até logo, são 7 horas."

            Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder, (tr. Cascais Franco), Edições Asa, 2000, pp.104-109.               

Albert Speer: The Nazi who said Sorry

O eu

O AMOR

"AMOR - O que é o amor? Um grande coração que dói
 E nervosas mãos; e silêncio; e longo desespero.
 Vida - O que é a vida? Um pântano deserto
 Onde chega o amor e de onde parte o amor."

                 R. L. Stevenson, Poemas, (Tr. José Agostinho Baptista) Assírio e Alvim, 2006, p.11.          

Madeleine Peyroux - Hey sweet man

Só vento

"- Que faz por aqui?

- Nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada - respondeu-me ele, com um sorriso de bem-aventurança.

- Que é que lhe dá assim tanta alegria?

- O quê? Nada! É precisamente isso: "Nada"! Pois, é um calembur, eh... É esse "nada" que me diverte, está o meu excelentíssimo senhor, o meu distinto companheiro de aventuras a ver? porque é "nada" o que se leva toda a vida a fazer. Um pobre diabo levanta-se, senta-se, fala, escreve... e nada. Um pobre diabo compra, vende, casa-se, ou não se casa, e nada. E aqui está um pobre diabo sentado em cima dum tronco de árvore, e nada. Só vento."

Gombrowicz, Cosmos, (TR. Luísa Neto Jorge), Vega, 1995, p.107.

Encontro com Gonçalo M. Tavares, José Tolentino Mendonça e Pedro Mexia

Os Poetas

"OS POETAS, numa enorme fila que ultrapassa já a esquina do quarteirão seguinte, aproveitam o momento de espera para preencherem cuidadosamente o formulário."

Gonçalo M. Tavares, O Senhor Brecht.

Em nome da razão - Um filme sobre os porões da loucura (D: Helvécio Ratton)

Cowspiracy - excertos

O estado social somos nós

A guide to Happiness -Socrates on Self-confidence

duplex

René Marie, Bolero / Suzanne

"people don't really sit down and think very hard" - Interview with David Malouf

because we have lived through this day with him.

"Shukhov has no reason in the world to be happy. The conditions of his life constitute the most terrible form we can imagine of modern misery: a prisoner of the state in the wastes of Siberia with no rights of any kind; reduced to a number in a camp; freezing, half-starved and with little hope of seeing out his sentence. But as we see him at the end of his day, settling down to sleep and preparing for the next of his three thousand, six hundred and fifty-three days of forced labour, he is happy and he tells us so. For all the conditions that have been created - deliberately, officially - to break his spirit and keep him miserable, he is 'content,' as so many of us who enjoy the good life and ought to be are not.

Unlikely as it may seem, Shukhov is our perfect example of the happy man. And we understand his state, and believe him when he tells us he is happy, because we have lived through this day with him.

Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.

Shukhov is not happy because he has solved the problem of 'how to live' - the life he lives is too provisional, to makeshift for that. Or because, as the classical schools would have put it, he has achived self-contaiment, self-sufficiency. Quite the opposite.

What he achives, briefly, intermittently, is moments of self-fulfilment, something different and more accessible, more democratic we might call it, than self-containment. But he achives it only at moments.

He is happy now - who can know what tomorrow or the day after will do to him? He his happy within limits - and this may be a clue to what makes happiness possible for him, or for any of us."

 David Malouf, The Happy Life - The Search for Contentment in the Modern World, Chatto & Windus, 2011, pp.92-94)

 (Para a Daniela!)

Le cyclope Polypheme, de Annibale Carracci

Por sugestão de Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, onde se pode ler:  

"... the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency."

Queen Esther (1878), de Edwin Long

Francis A. & Edward K.- Frank Sinatra, Sunny

Simão da Fonseca

Another rabbi of the community was Isaac Aboab da Fonseca (1605–93), and it was he who had been most directly and deeply imbued with the spirit of Lurianic kabbalah, which he transmitted to the young men who studied with him, so that a significant number of them also claimed themselves as disciples of the esoteric tradition. The rabbi had been baptized Simão da Fonseca in Castro Daire, Portugal, and the family had fled when he was a child, first to France and then to Amsterdam. He was a disciple of the only kabbalist to have written in Spanish, Abraham Herrera (c. 1570–1635), who was also of a Marrano family and born in Portugal. Herrera’s studies of Neoplatonism, as it was taught in the Florentine Academy, together with his studies of Lurianic kabbalah (which also, as was pointed out above, has a strong Neoplatonic cast, inherited from the original kabbalists of Gerona), resulted in his own synthesis. Aboab translated into Hebrew such works of Herrera’s as his Puerta del cielo (Gates of Heaven), and these translations were in Spinoza’s library at his death, presenting once again the tantalizing suggestion that Spinoza’s own strongly Platonic orientation, most especially the focus on salvation, which sets him apart from his rationalist confreres Descartes and Leibniz, might have been transmitted to him by way of the kabbalist influence. Interestingly, Herrera also wrote a treatise on logic, Epítome y compendio de la lógica o dialéctica, which was his only published work.

(...)
Aboab left Amsterdam, accepting the invitation to become the rabbi of the prosperous community of Recife, Brazil, which was then under the rule of the Dutch, making him the first American rabbi. His departure might very well have been a result of the fracas regarding the afterlife. He remained in Brazil from 1642 until the reconquest of Recife by the Portuguese in 1654, when all the Jews were forced to leave. Twenty-three of the refugees—men, women, and children—ended up in Dutch New Amsterdam after their ship was attacked by a Spanish privateer who deprived them of their possessions. Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch colonial governor, was ill-disposed toward Jews and disinclined to allow these particular Jews—now indigent—to stay. Their former Jewish neighbors back in Holland interceded on their behalf with the Dutch West India Company, which directed Stuyvesant to tolerate their presence, so long as they proved no burden to the community. In this way these twenty-three from Recife became the first Jewish New Yorkers—even before there was a New York.

     Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza:The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, p.147 e 157   

The Soft Machine - Ce Soir On Danse

Jordi Savall, Montserrat Figueras, "El Moro de Antequera" (Sephardic Jewish music from Rhodes)

Dante, Inferno VIII:31-51

So, rushing forwards on that lifeless slick,
there jerked up, fronting me, one brimming slime
who spoke: 'so who - you come too soon! - are you?'
And my riposte: 'I come, perhaps; I'll not rermain.
But who might you be, brutishly befouled?'
His answer was: 'Just look at me. I'm one
who weeps.' And I to him: 'Weep on. In grief,
may you remain, you spirit of damnation!
I know who you are, filth as you may be.'
And then he stretched both hands towards our gunwales.
My teacher, though - alert - soon drove him back,
saying: 'get down! Be off with all that dog pack!'
And then he ringed both arms around my neck.
He kissed my face, then said: 'You wrathful soul!
Blessed the one that held you in her womb.
That man, alive, flaunted his arrogance,
and nothing  good adorns his memory.
So here his shadow is possessed with rage.
How many, in the word above, pose there
as kings but here lie like pigs in muck,
leaving behind them horrible dispraise.'


(tr. Robin kirkpatrick)

Eugene Delacroix, Dante et Virgile aux enfers (1822)

Daqui

Benny Carter, My One And Only Love

Billie Holiday, Lady sings The Blues

RUBENS, The Fur ("Het Pelsken") 1630s

Por sugestão de Howard Jacobson, aqui.

Gerry Mulligan - I'm Gonna Go Fishin'

Chet Baker - You and the Night and the Music

Mission Blue

Mission Blue

Sylvia Earle - Proteger os oceanos

"Uriel da Costa

 had been baptized Gabriel, born in Oporto, Portugal. His father was a devout Catholic, but his mother came from a converso family and, as the work of recent historians has unearthed, most likely observed some of the secret rites of Marranism. Gabriel studied canon law at the University of Coimbra and was a church treasurer. Da Costa described himself as having become disillusioned with Christianity. In studying and comparing the New Testament with the Five Books of Moses, he found contradictions and reached the conclusion that Judaism, from which Christianity had sprung, presented the authentic experience, with Christianity a corruption of it. He also confessed that Christianity’s emphasis on hell’s damnation terrified him. Soon both he and his five brothers were inwardly identifying themselves as Jewish. After the death of their Catholic father, the six boys, together with their mother, Banca, determined to leave Portugal.

He presents himself as having voluntarily left Portugal for the freedom to practice Judaism openly, but the historian Israel Révah, researching the records of the Oporto Inquisition, found that, unsurprisingly, the converso had attracted the attention of the office of the Inquisition, which was preparing a devastating case against him, so his emigration was most likely not simply a spiritual journey but an attempt to escape with his life.

Once in Amsterdam, da Costa found that the Judaism being practiced there did not live up to his expectations. The departures from the pristine ancient religion of Moses were, in his eyes, unjustifiable extensions of God’s direct revelations. The accretions of rabbinical ordinances and Talmudic rulings, the codification of the so-called Oral Law, offended da Costa’s construction of what Judaism ought to be. The organized hierarchical religion of the rabbis was as much a corruption of the original Mosaic Code as was Catholicism, and da Costa set about single-handedly to reform it, to purify it of all its post-Mosaic content. As the historian Yirmiyahu Yovel points out, we must read Examplar with several grains of salt. It is highly dubious that da Costa believed that “the religion of Moses had been petrified for over two millennia, waiting for Uriel da Costa to perform an unhistorical leap into it. However vaguely and unwillingly, da Costa was aware that post-biblical Judaism was different from the original model. But he hoped and believed that the fluid New Jewish situation offered a historical opportunity to remedy this. … Da Costa expected that (unlike the Catholicism of which he had despaired) Judaism could lend itself to a purifying reform in the original direction of the Bible, especially within the New Jewish communities where, out of a minimal and shattered basis, former Marranos were trying to reconstruct a Jewish life for themselves. Since these New Jews were already engaged in an effort to recapture their lost essence, they may as well have regressed further back to their origins and restored the purer biblical Judaism that elsewhere had been obliterated.”

Needless to say, his efforts did not find favor with the rabbis of Amsterdam, who were charged with the task of transporting the former Marranos back to the halakhic Judaism from which history had separated them.

Da Costa reacted with fury to the intransigence of the religious authorities of the community, and in search of a more authentic Judaism left Amsterdam for the Sephardic community of Hamburg, which did not respond any more favorably to his reforming ideas than Amsterdam had. In 1616 he composed a set of eleven theses attacking what he called “the vanity and invalidity of the traditions and ordinances of the Pharisees.” He claimed that the rabbis, in equating Talmudic interpretations with the Torah, “make the word of man equal to that of God.”

On August 14, 1618, da Costa was put in kherem by the chief rabbi of Venice, Rabbi Leon de Medina, who was the teacher of the chief rabbi of Amsterdam, Rabbi Morteira. He was also put under a ban in Hamburg, and returned to Amsterdam, still fighting. He committed his protest to writing, publishing in 1624 his feisty Exame das tradições phariseas (Examination of the Pharisaic Traditions), which objects to such laws as male circumcision, the laying on of tefillin, or phylacteries, and also vehemently protests the extrabiblical inclusion of the doctrine of immortality and divine retribution. This doctrine, he confesses, was precisely what had driven him from Catholicism. “In truth, the most distressful and wretched time in my life was when I believed that eternal bliss or misery awaited man and that according to his works he would earn that bliss or that misery.” He was terrified by the eschatological metaphysics and found peace only when he realized the absurdity of the claim that the soul might survive the death of the body, since the soul is only an aspect of the body, the vital source that animates it and also accounts for rationality.

(...)

But the community was under rabbinical orders to regard the religious renegade as a pariah. Da Costa writes in the Examplar that even children mocked him on the streets and threw stones at his windows. Nevertheless, da Costa did not absent himself from the community. Of course, he was already under kherem in Venice and Hamburg, and he must have reasoned that wherever he went Jewish communities would find him intolerable. But interestingly, even though he had reached the intellectual conclusion that Judaism, like Christianity, was but a man-made system arising out of man’s needs, and that the true religion was deism—the belief, based solely on reason and not revelation, in a God who created the universe and then left it to its own devices, assuming no control over life and never intervening in the course of history or of natural phenomena—still, on an emotional level, da Costa seemed incapable of taking leave of Judaism, or at least of the Jewish community. He lived among the Amsterdam Sephardim as a despised individual, clinging to the margins of a world that had become for him an open narcissistic wound. Yet he did not simply pick himself up and quit Jewish life decisively. Though the Jews had excommunicated him he was not prepared to excommunicate the Jews. His disinclination to think of himself as outside the religious community is telling and casts a dramatic contrast with Spinoza. "

   Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza:The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, p.133-137.   

The obsession with the questions of who is a Jew

In the 1630s there were again a rash of accusations in Portugal that the conversos were crypto-Judaizers, and that they were trying to convert Old Christians, particularly their Christian servants. The inquisitor of Llerena wrote in 1628 or soon thereafter, “From the moment of its conception, every fetus permanently carries with it the moral attributes—in the case of the Marranos, the moral depravity—of its parents.” This was not a new idea in Portugal. The sermons preached on the occasion of autos-da-fé throughout the fifteenth century often stressed the immutability of the Jews, a moral trait passed on from generation to generation.

The former conversos who came to Amsterdam brought with them the interwoven preoccupations with Jewish identity and personal identity that the Inquisition had forced on them. While the rash of accusations were going on in Portugal, conversos kept arriving, leaving relatives and friends behind.

In the relative freedom of Protestant Amsterdam, the former Marranos set about organizing themselves into the kind of community required for the full performance of the halakha from which they had been severed. At first, rabbis had to be imported to instruct them, though they soon started producing their own; a model school was organized; an elaborate hierarchical system was erected for guidance as well as for chastisement. 

But the old painful dilemmas would not so easily be laid to rest; how could they possibly be when the trauma had gone so deep and those who walked the streets of the Vlooienburg and the Breestraat had New Christian friends and relatives in Portugal still kept under the ever watchful eye of the Inquisition? The Jews of Amsterdam—especially those whose unorthodoxy brought them into conflict with the rabbis— were themselves still objects of pointed interest to the Church, and inquisitorial spies walked among the Dutch Sephardim. 

In fact, we owe what scant knowledge we have of Spinoza himself during the period that had been known as his “lost years”—the four years between his excommunication and his known fraternization with various dissenting Christians, known collectively as the Collegiants—to investigative diggings in the records of the Inquisition by the historian Israel Révah. Révah discovered reports on the young Spinoza from two different sources. One was a Latin-American Augustinian monk, Friar Tomás Solanao y Robles, who had visited Amsterdam in late 1658 and voluntarily reported to the Madrid Inquisition upon his return. He volunteered the information to clear himself of any suspicion he may have attracted by traveling in non-Catholic lands. And then on the following day, a report was filed, this time upon request, by a Spanish soldier, Captain Miguel Pérez de Maltranilla3 Spinoza’s surfacing to light from out of the medieval murk of the inquisitorial files of the Church—which still, apparently, considered his soul of their concern, since he was the offspring of conversos, and so, in its eyes, still Christian— underscores the anachronistic audacity of Spinoza’s choice: to define his life on his terms, not as a heterodox Jew or Christian. But it underscores, as well, how vividly present the powerful and hidden forces of the Inquisition remained in the lives of the community—even in the life of the banished of the community, in a heretic Jew like Spinoza. 

The obsession with the questions of who is a Jew, what is a Jew, can a person be un-Judaized, re-Judaized—all of these questions intertwined with the Marrano preoccupation with redemptive possibilities—would have been, one imagines, like an incessant nervous murmur registering just below audibility, a constant discordant accompaniment to conversations in homes and streets and synagogues, as well as in the inner recesses of unquiet minds. Sometimes the murmur would break out into painfully articulated communal conflicts and contretemps, ripping apart whatever façade of placid Dutch burghers they might have been trying to assume."

   Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza:The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, p.130-133.   

Plano do Inferno

Se não houver fruto, a árvore será esquecida.

"A ficção e a não-ficção não podem dividir-se assim tão facilmente. A ficção talvez não seja real, mas é verdadeira; vai além da colectânea de factos para chegar a verdades emocionais e psicológicas. Quanto à não ficção, à história, pode ser real, mas a sua verdade é escorregadia, de difícil acesso, sem um significado indelevelmente associado. Se a história não se transformar em estória, morre para todos excepto para o historiador. A arte é a mala da história, na qual se transporta o que é essencial. A arte é a bóia de salvação da história. A arte é semente, a arte é memória, a arte é vacina. - Pressentindo que o historiador se preparava para o interromper, Henry apressou-se a prosseguir incoerentemente: - Com o Holocausto, temos uma árvore com enormes raízes históricas e apenas alguns escassos e minúsculos frutos ficcionais. mas é no fruto que está a semente! É o fruto que as pessoas escolhem. Se não houver fruto, a árvore será esquecida. Cada um de nós é como um flip book - continuou Henry, embora não houvesse uma progressão lógica entre essa ideia e o que acabara de dizer. Cada um de nós é uma mistura de facto e ficção, um tecido feito de histórias que vive no nosso corpo real. Não é assim?"

                          Yann Martel, Beatriz e Virgílio, Editorial Presença, 2010, pp.17-18.                          

Bill Evans - Alone (Again)

Last Supper

Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz - A doctor´s Eyewitness Account, Arcade, pp.177-178.

"A Jew is a Jew is a Jew.

  The Marranos were enmeshed in some of the same identity-metaphysics as were their persecutors. For them, too, there was an inviolable fact of the matter concerning true Jewish identity that remained untouched by all outer performance. They may have gone through formal Christian conversions, taken the sacrament, and gone every week to confession, but within the confessional of their inner being they, too, continued to insist on their essential Jewishness.

A Sephardic friend tells me his grandfather used to tell him a joke that perhaps goes back to Marrano times. A Jew has undergone a conversion process, in the course of which the priest has put his hands on the Jew’s head and repeated several times, “You were a Jew, now you’re Christian, you were a Jew, now you’re Christian.” A few weeks pass and the priest comes on a Friday to see how his converso is getting on. The priest finds, to his shock and dismay, that the New Christian is not eating fish for his Friday night dinner, as he ought to as a good Catholic, but rather a roasted chicken. The Jew, ordered to account for himself, explains that he had simply put his hand on the chicken’s head and repeated several times, “You were a chicken, now you’re fish, you were a chicken, now you’re fish.

Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza:The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, p.127.

Meeting John Berger (D: Jos de Putter)

Pentti Sammallahti

Por sugestão de John Berger, Why Look at Animals?, (Penguin books, 2009, p.8-9) onde se pode ler:

"Early this morning, when I was still in bed, a swallow flew in, circled the room, saw its error and flew out through the window past the plum trees to alight on the telephone wire. I relate this small incident because it seems to me to have something to do with Pentti Sammallahti's photographs. They too, like the swallow, are aberrant.

I have some of his photographs in the house now for two years. I often take them out of their folder to show to friends who pass. They usually gasp at first, and them peer closer, smiling. They look at the places shown for a longer than usual with a photograph. Perhaps they ask whether I know the photographer, Pentti Sammallahti, personally? Or they ask what part of Russia were they taken in? In what year? They never try to put their evident pleasure into words, for is a secret one. They simply look closer and remember. What?"

John Coltrane - Coltrane Plays The Blues

Dante, A Divina Comédia, inferno I:55-57

E qual è quei che voluntieri acquista,
  e giugne 'l tempo che perder lo face,
  che 'ntittu suoi pensier piange e s'attrista;

                             ...

E como quem os ganhos que conquista,
  chegado o tempo que a perder o abala
  em seu pensar só chora e se contrista.

                       (tradução de Vasco Graça Moura)

                            ...

We all so willingly record our gains,

   until the hour that leads us into loss.

   Then every single thought is tears and sadness.

                       (tradução de Robin Kirkpatrick)

                           

Gerry (D: Gus Van Sant)

Bill Evans, Goodbye

Bill Evans (p), 

Monty Budwig (b), 

Shelly Manne (ds)

Fumio Hayasaka, Seven Samurai

Smog, the desert

Birth of a golem (D: Amos Gitai)

In the Desert

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, “Is it good, friend?”

“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it

“Because it is bitter,

“And because it is my heart.”

Stephen Crane, Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2004)

O EU

Shelly Manne & His Men at the Black Hawk - Summertime

Théodore Monod

Benny Golson - Staccato Swing & Yesterdays

por sugestão de: "o grande mestre Benny Golson"

Shelly Manne, Hava Nagila (Come let's be happy) & Bokrei Lachish

Shelly Manne - Speak Low

: para o Alfredo :

Caetano Veloso - Come As You Are

The longest Day

O Eu

Society was subordinate to the state which was controlled by party which in practice was ruled by a few people.

"When the cataclysm of war finally ended in eastern Europe in 1921, Lenin and his revolutionaries had to regroup and think. Deprived by the Poles of their European triumph, the Bolsheviks had no choice but to douse the revolutionary conflagration and build some sort of socialist state. Lenin and his followers took for granted that they should hold power; indeed, the failure of the European revolution became their justification for extraordinary aspirations to political control. Power had to be centralized so that the revolution could be completed, and so that it could be defended from its capitalist enemies. They quickly banned other political parties and terrorized political rivals, dismissing them as reactionary. They lost the only competitive elections that they held, and so held no others. The Red Army, though defeated in Poland, was more than sufficient to defeat all armed rivals on the territory of the old empire. The Bolsheviks’ secret service, known as the Cheka, killed thousands of people in the service of the consolidation of the new Soviet state.

 (...)

Lenin’s state was a political holding action for an economic revolution still to come. His Soviet polity recognized nations, although Marxism promised a world without them; and his Soviet economy permitted a market, although communism promised collective ownership. When Lenin died in January 1924, debates were already underway about when and how these transitional compromises should yield to a second revolution. And it was precisely discussion, in the new Soviet order, that determined the fate of the Soviet population. From Lenin the Bolsheviks had inherited the principle of “democratic centralism,” a translation of Marxist historiosophy into bureaucratic reality. Workers represented the forward flow of history; the disciplined communist party represented the workers; the central committee represented the party; the politburo, a group of a few men, represented the central committee. Society was subordinate to the state which was controlled by party which in practice was ruled by a few people. Disputes among members of this small group were taken to represent not politics but rather history, and their outcomes were presented as its verdict."

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Basic Books, 2012,  pp. 10-11.

La Jetée (D: Chris Marker)

Timothy Snyder Discusses "Bloodlands" at The Ukrainian Museum of Modern Art

Timothy Snyder, The Origins of the Final Solution: Eastern Europe and the Holocaust

BLOODLANDS

"The Second World War was the most lethal conflict in history, and about half of the

soldiers who perished on all of its battlefields all the world over died here, in this same region, in the bloodlands. Yet not a single one of the fourteen million murdered was a soldier on active duty. Most were women, children, and the aged; none were bearing weapons; many had been stripped of their possessions, including their clothes. 

Auschwitz is the most familiar killing site of the bloodlands. Today Auschwitz stands for the Holocaust, and the Holocaust for the evil of a century. Yet the people registered as laborers at Auschwitz had a chance of surviving: thanks to the memoirs and novels written by survivors, its name is known. Far more Jews, most of them Polish Jews, were gassed in other German death factories where almost everyone died, and whose names are less often recalled: Treblinka, Chełmno, Sobibór, Bełżec. Still more Jews, Polish or Soviet or Baltic Jews, were shot over ditches and pits. Most of these Jews died near where they had lived, in occupied Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Soviet Ukraine, and Soviet Belarus. The Germans brought Jews from elsewhere to the bloodlands to be killed. Jews arrived by train to Auschwitz from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Italy, and Norway. German Jews were deported to the cities of the bloodlands, to Łódź or Kaunas or Minsk or Warsaw, before being shot or gassed. The people who lived on the block where I am writing now, in the ninth district of Vienna, were deported to Auschwitz, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Riga: all in the bloodlands.

(...)

The bloodlands were where most of Europe’s Jews lived, where Hitler and Stalin’s imperial plans overlapped, where the Wehrmacht and the Red Army fought, and where the Soviet NKVD and the German SS concentrated their forces. Most killing sites were in the bloodlands: in the political geography of the 1930s and early 1940s, this meant Poland, the Baltic States, Soviet Belarus, Soviet Ukraine, and the western fringe of Soviet Russia. Stalin’s crimes are often associated with Russia, and Hitler’s with Germany. But the deadliest part of the Soviet Union was its non-Russian periphery, and Nazis generally killed beyond Germany. The horror of the twentieth century is thought to be located in the camps. But the concentration camps are not where most of the victims of National Socialism and Stalinism died. These misunderstandings regarding the sites and methods of mass killing prevent us from perceiving the horror of the twentieth century.

 (...)

The distinction between concentration camps and killing sites cannot be made perfectly: people were executed and people were starved in camps. Yet there is a difference between a camp sentence and a death sentence, between labor and gas, between slavery and bullets. The tremendous majority of the mortal victims of both the German and the Soviet regimes never saw a concentration camp. Auschwitz was two things at once, a labor camp and a death facility, and the fate of non-Jews seized for labor and Jews selected for labor was very different from the fate of Jews selected for the gas chambers. Auschwitz thus belongs to two histories, related but distinct. Auschwitz-as-labor-camp is more representative of the experience of the large number of people who endured German (or Soviet) policies of concentration, whereas Auschwitz-as-death-facility is more typical of the fates of those who were deliberately killed. Most of the Jews who arrived at Auschwitz were simply gassed; they, like almost all of the fourteen million killed in the bloodlands, never spent time in a concentration camp.

The German and Soviet concentration camps surround the bloodlands, from both east and west, blurring the black with their shades of grey. At the end of the Second World War, American and British forces liberated German concentration camps such as Belsen and Dachau, but the western Allies liberated none of the important death facilities. The Germans carried out all of their major killing policies on lands subsequently occupied by the Soviets. The Red Army liberated Auschwitz, and it liberated the sites of Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec, Chełmno, and Majdanek as well. American and British forces reached none of the bloodlands and saw none of the major killing sites. It is not just that American and British forces saw none of the places where the Soviets killed, leaving the crimes of Stalinism to be documented after the end of the Cold War and the opening of the archives. It is that they never saw the places where the Germans killed, meaning that understanding of Hitler’s crimes has taken just as long. The photographs and films of German concentration camps were the closest that most westerners ever came to perceiving the mass killing. Horrible though these images were, they were only hints at the history of the bloodlands. They are not the whole story; sadly, they are not even an introduction."

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Basic Books, 2012,  pp. xi-xv.

AS ÁRVORES

"Pois nós somos como troncos de árvores na neve. Temos a impressão de que assentam sobre ela, e que com um pequeno empurrão seríamos capazes de os deslocar. Não, não somos capazes, porque eles estão firmemente presos à terra. Mas - quem diria? - até isso é ilusório."

Franz Kafka, Parábolas e Fragmentos, p. 49.

Rodrigo Amarante, Cavalo

Rites of Love and Math (D: Edward Frenkel, Reine Graves)

Dee Dee Bridgewater, strange fruit

Herberto Helder

Porque é que, nos filmes de cowboys, eles estão sempre a fumar?