William Henry Hunt, Primroses and Bird's Nest - c. 1840

Por sugestão de D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, cap. 11, onde se pode ler: "so in the lumber room there were bad Sir Edwin Landseers and pathetic William Henry Hunt byrds' nests".

Edwin Landseers, The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner -1837

a racionalidade e o cepticismo

Os seres humanos são animais sociais. Queremos a pertença. A vida, por outro lado, pode ser, de facto, uma fria experiência. Só compreendendo como é que aqueles que procuram o poder tentam influenciar-nos e o quanto, muitas vezes, participamos activamente na nossa própria manipulação, poderemos finalmente compreender os perigos que corremos se pusermos de lado a racionalidade e o cepticismo e, em troca, colocarmos a nossa fé num líder com carisma.

                Laurence Rees, The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler, Ebury Press, 2013, p.5                           

Bobby McFerrin - Everytime - with Esperanza Spalding

Narciso

"É, talvez, o mais típico representante do indivíduo "ultracontemporâneo": exibicionista e espectador de exibicionismos, em perpétua contemplação de si próprio - como se estivesse "enfim só" com a sua imagem - mas desesperado, porque não pode fundir-se nela. Apaixonado pela sua imagem: a preocupação por si próprio (mas despojada da sua componente essencial, que era, para Sócrates, a preocupação pelo outro) invadiu  a vida íntima de cada um provocando imediatamente esta geral depressão que supomos poder apaziguar com substâncias diversas ou outorgando-nos uma quantidade de direitos totalmente novos e aparentemente sem limites: para se "realizar", o "ultracontemporâneo" tem direito a tudo e o direito de tudo. Mas, uma vez adquirido, esse novo direito de ser "ele próprio" deixa-o insatisfeito e ansioso por nova "realização".

Françoise Parot, Cem palavras para conhecer a Psicologia, (tr. M.R.) Teorema, 2004, p.162.                   

Ken Robinson: Como escapar ao Vale da Morte educacional

Sócrates, Roberto Rossellini

Bill Callahan: Tiny Desk Concert

Frank Sinatra - Drinking Water

Na caverna

Walls! Always walls! Yet one needed them in this wind.

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover.

 Uma ilha é uma prisão. Um hospital é uma prisão. O trabalho pode ser uma prisão. Até um continente pode ser uma prisão quando não se tem os meios to go abroad. Mas que se tenha tornado a escola numa prisão com redes à volta é lamentável. À nascença, ou a partir dos 3 anos, está-se condenado a uma sentença de um mínimo de 15 anos, extensível a 20, consoante o comportamento. As idas aos pátios estão vigiadas e o tempo  de estadia no exterior é limitado. O acesso aos espaços verdes/relvados é reservado. Passa-se o tempo na caverna. E as crianças detestam a escola. Que prisioneiro gosta do seu cárcere?  Como seria bom uma escola sem paredes! 

Miles Davis - Sketches of Spain

Bartók, Quarteto de cordas nº4

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, (1928)

OURS IS ESSENTIALLY A tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habits, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

 Loc. 550-51 

...

In fact everything was a little ridiculous, or very ridiculous: certainly everything connected with authority, whether it were in the army or the government or the universities, was ridiculous to a degree. And as far as the governing class made any pretensions to govern, they were ridiculous too.

Loc. 636-38

...

Well, there it was: fated like the rest of things! It was rather awful, but why kick? You couldn’t kick it away. It just went on. Life, like all the rest! On the low dark ceiling of cloud at night red blotches burned and quavered, dappling and swelling and contracting, like burns that give pain. It was the furnaces. At first they fascinated Connie with a sort of horror; she felt she was living underground. Then she got used to them. And in the morning it rained.

Loc. 692-95 

...

What the eye doesn’t see and the mind doesn’t know, doesn’t exist.

Loc. 778-79

...

The bitch-goddess, as she is called, of Success, roamed, snarling and protective, round the half-humble, half-defiant Michaelis’ heels, and intimidated Clifford completely: for he wanted to prostitute himself to the bitch-goddess Success.

Loc. 836-38

...

Oh, you’re quite right, you’re quite right! The life of the mind needs a comfortable house and decent cooking. You’re quite right. It even needs posterity. But it all hinges on the instinct for success. That is the pivot on which all things turn.” 

Loc. 1032-34 

...

The only thing that is a unit, non-organic, composed of many different, and equally essential parts, is the machine. Each man a machine-part, and the driving power of the machine, hate ... hate of the bourgeois. That, to me, is Bolshevism.”

Loc. 1143-45

...

Perhaps the human soul needs excursions, and must not be denied them. But the point of an excursion is that you come home again.

Loc. 1256-57

...

How could one say Yes? For years and years? The little yes, gone on a breath! Why should one be pinned down by that butterfly word? Of course it had to flutter away and be gone, to be followed by other yes’s and no’s! Like the straying of butterflies.

Loc. 1275-76

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover.                                                                                          

"A cada dia o seu próprio mal", Mateus 6:34

"Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Sufficient unto the moment is the appearance of reality."

  D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, loc.778.

Reputations: Alfred Hitchcock (Episode 1 - Hitch: Alfred The Great)

Reputations: Alfred Hitchcock (Episode 2 - Hitch: Alfred The Auteur)

E.S.T. - Fading Maid Preludium

Smog - A Guiding Light

Esbjörn Svensson Trio - I Mean You

Estados de espírito

"Qualquer um pode zangar-se, isso é fácil. Mas zangar-se com a pessoa certa, na medida certa, na hora certa, pelo motivo certo e da maneira certa não é fácil."

Aristóteles

coisas a reler

o professor deve ser um burocrata triste

'Prefácio a: Höss Commandant at Auschwitz'

"De forma simples, Höss não percebeu nada, nunca ultrapassou o seu passado, não está curado. Quando diz (e diz muitas vezes) 'agora percebo... Agora compreendo que ...' está a mentir descaradamente, tal como hoje todos os políticos arrependidos (pentiti) estão mentir, do mesmo modo estão todos aqueles que expressam o seu arrependimento, não com acções, mas com palavras. Porque mente ele? Talvez para deixar uma melhor imagem de si; talvez, simplesmente, porque os seus juízes, que são os seus novos superiores, lhe tenham dito que as opiniões correctas já não são as de antes, mas diferentes."

Primo Levi, The Black Hole of Auschwitz, Polity Press, 2005, p.87 (tr. lfb)  

Sendo professor nos Açores, porque faço greve?

Com a greve às reuniões de avaliação pairou no ar a sensação de que havia uma união, não só entre sindicatos de professores mas, sobretudo, entre os professores - mesmo os que no passado afirmavam que a greve era inútil, desta vez estavam mais acordados - no sentido de evidenciar a constante degradação e instabilidade da vida docente. Mas tal sensação, se era real, foi quebrada, na sexta-feira passada, pelas declarações dos sindicatos de professores dos Açores que, congratulando-se, se desvincularam da greve nacional.

O que receberam em troca desse recuo foi pouco ou nada. O governo regional declarou que, enquanto não houver excedentários, não haverá despedimentos (em novilíngua mobilidade especial) nas escolas açorianas - esperem pela ordem do ministério das finanças e vão ver os excedentários a aparecer - e comprometeu-se a não aplicar medidas piores do que as que serão aplicadas nas escolas do continente. É muito mau o que se vai passar nas escolas do continente. Logo, aqui também será, pois o compromisso não é o de que será melhor!

A pequenez intelectual de sindicalistas e governantes fê-los cair no filme da vitória política dividida por todos. Agora, vitoriosos, podem ir à almoçarada.

O facto é que -  depois de Carlos César ter assinado* a submissão dos Açores, por 10 anos, à política do ministério das finanças - a capacidade de legislar autonomamente sobre o que quer que seja  se tornou muito difícil. Então para que queremos um governo regional tão volumoso? É preciso? E até quando?

Como mostra o nosso passado recente, aquilo que os políticos dizem não se escreve. Os despedimentos podem não acontecer, para já, mas a destruição do que resta da dignidade do trabalho público continua: a perda de direitos sociais (por exemplo, acompanhar um pai incapacitado a um exame médico ou adoecer por poucos dias implica perda total de vencimento); uma avaliação fantoche - um dos muitos exemplos em que a educação nos Açores é pior - que já só serve para a humilhação constante dos professores contratados que todos os anos estão obrigados a aulas assistidas e, só para dar mais um exemplo, a inexistência  de uma carreia decente. Nos últimos anos o que tem acontecido é uma inversão do percurso normal de um professor:  à medida que se fica mais velho, com mais qualificações, trabalha-se mais horas e ganha-se menos.

Uma trivialidade democrática: as greves são feitas para, por questões de justiça, ou falta dela, mostrar a força de uma das partes. E, por isso, prejudicam as pessoas. Uma das consequências da greve aos exames é prejudicar aqueles que vão fazer exames. Queriam greve num dia em que os grevistas não fossem necessários? Para além do mais, fazer greve às aulas é, objectivamente, muito pior do que fazer greve a reuniões e a exames. Estes acabarão por se fazer, enquanto aula que não é dada é aula eternamente perdida. Por essa razão, não percebo muito bem os que vêm, em nome dos alunos, afirmar que é inadmissível fazer greve aos exames. Estejam descansados, os alunos irão realizar os exames, mais dia menos dia. E quem estuda sabe, logo está preparado para fazer o exame seja ele feito no dia em que está marcado, ou alguns dias depois.

O problema é que, no passado, se marcaram muitas greves sem consequências negativas (em novilíngua: greves simbólicas). Pelo contrário, muita vezes os alunos dedicavam-se a interrogar os professores,  na ante-véspera, para descobrir quem iria faltar para, com essa informação,  equacionarem a possibilidade de não ir à escola.

Esta greve, não fora a saída dos sindicatos regionais, teria sido uma grande oportunidade para marcar, não uma vitória agora, porque essa sabemo-la difícil, mas um sinal de força e de união para o que há-de vir. Os que assim não quiseram mostraram, mais uma vez, a sua fraqueza.

Para se perceber que a coisa não é de agora, leia-se o que eu pensava em 2005!

*Compromisso assumido à socapa e pouco antes de sair do governo dos Açores, não sem antes desfilar na feira quinhentista da Ribeira Grande. Veja o desplante aqui. César é agora presidente honorário vitalício do PS Açores numa eleição em que foi o único candidato ao cargo que ele próprio criou. Um verdadeiro imperador!

Acrescento, em 25 de Junho de 2013:
Os comentários fizeram-me bem.
A todos, incluindo as pessoas com quem debati  e bebi previamente o assunto, fico muito agradecido. Bem hajam!
Quando se lê: "comentário foi removido pelo autor", entenda-se removido pelo autor do comentário, e não por mim.

Esbjörn Svensson Trio : Viaticum

Cat Power, Wild is the wind

Pomegranates - John Singer Sargent, 1908

Bill Evans - If You Could See Me Now

Bobo Stenson Trio - Send In The Clowns

MONET, Poppy Field in a Hollow near Giverny (1885)

Por sugestão das salas de espera do IPO.

Mónica e o desejo/"Sommaren med Monika" (1953 - 92m) .

Dinah Washington - All of Me

Darumá

Por sugestão de Wenceslau de Moraes, O culto do chá,  BI/Relógio D'Água, p.11, onde se pode ler: 

"[Hokusai] pintando um famoso Darumá sobre uma folha de papel de cerca de duzentos metros quadrados de grandeza, empregando oitenta litros de tinta no desenho e servindo-se de cinco vassouras à laia de pincéis; estendida a tela sobre o campo, no telhado de um templo a turba admirava a obra e aplaudia o mestre."

A versão original de O Culto do Chá, de onde o Darumá foi retirado, pode ser lida aqui.

cantankerous and solitary philosopher, Jean Améry.

"The appalling episode of the 'Temple of the people', the collective suicide of 900 followers of a mystic-satanic sect, is today still incomprehensible, and perhaps will always be so, if by 'to comprehend' se mean to identify a motive. And anyway, each and every human action contains a kernel of incomprehensibility. If this were not the case, we would be in a position to foresee what our neighbour is going to do. Clearly we cannot do this, and perhaps it is just as well that we cannot. It is particularly difficult to understand why a person kills himself, since generally speaking the suicide himself is not fully aware, or else he supplies both himself and others with motives that are consciously or unconsciously altered.

News of the massacre at Georgetown appeared in the papers alongside another less clamorous item: the suicide of a cantankerous and solitary philosopher, Jean Améry. This event is, in the contrary, absolutely comprehensible, and has much to teach us. (...)

Améry wrote: '"Hear, Israel" is of no interest to me: only "Hear, world", only this warning could I offer with passionate anger'. But also: 'As a jew, I go round the world like a sick man afflicted with one of those illnesses which do not cause great suffering but which lead inevitably to death.' And finally, like an epitaph: '' The man who has been tortured remains tortured ... Whoever has suffered torment will no longer be able to find his way clearly in the world, the abomination of annihilation will never be extinguished. Trust in humanity, already fractured by the first slap in the face and then demolished by torture, can never be regained.'

No, the death of Jean Améry is not a surprise, and it is sad to think that torture, which had disappeared from Europe some centuries ago, made ita reappearance in our century, and is gaining ground in a number of countries, 'for the right reasons', as if suffering deliberately inflicted can give birth to anything good. It is unbearable to think that while the torture Améry suffered weighed down on him right to his death, indeed was for him an interminable death, it is more than likely that his torturers are sitting down in an office or enjoying their retirement. And if they were interrogated (but who his there to interrogate them?) they would give the same old answer with a clear conscience: they were only following ordens."

                   Levi, The Black Hole of Auschwitz, Polity, (tr.) 2005, pp. 48-50.                                                

Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers with Thelonious Monk - Blue Monk

Clint Mansell - The Last Man

Jonestown: Vida e Morte no Templo do Povo

Miles Davis - Birth of the Cool

Jack Johnson (music by Miles Davis)

Miles Davis Story

Miles Davis, Kind Of Blue

Esperanza Spalding - "Wild Is The Wind"

Ballads, John Coltrane Quartet.

Richard Strauss - Metamorphosen - O. Klemperer, Philarmonia Orchestra

"In the summer of 1944, Strauss began to plan a large-scale piece for string ensemble in the nature of a funeral oration or lamentation. (...) The new piece would be called Metamorphosen - another homage to Ovid. Strauss had in mind the process by which souls revert from one state to another - though (...) the transformation may be a negative one, in which things devolve to their primordial state. The composer also took inspiration from a a short poem by Goethe, whose complete works he read from beguinning to end in his last years:

No one can know himself,
Detached from his self,
Yet he tries to become every day
What is finally clear from the outside,
What he is and what he was,
What he can and what he may.

Strauss finished Metamorphosen on April 12, 1945. Franklin Delano Roosevelt died the same day. (...) That afternoon in the ruins of Berlin, the Berlin Philarmonic presented an impeccably Hitlerish program that included Beethoven's Violin Concerto, Bruckner's Romantic Symphony, and the Immolation Scene from Götterdämmerung. After the concert, members of the Hitler Youth distributed cyanide capsules to the audience, or so the rumor went. Hitler marked his fifty-sixth birthday on April 20. Ten days later, he shot himself in the mouth. in accordance with his final instructions, the body was incinerated alongside that of Eva Braun.

Hitler possilby envisaged his immolation as a reprise of that final scene of the Ring, in which Brünnhilde builds a pyre for Siegfried and rides into the flames. Or he may have hoped to reenact the love-death of Tristan - whose music, he once told his secretary, he wished to hear as he died. Walther Funk thought that Hitler had modeled the scorched-earth policy of the regime's last phase on Wagner´s grand finale: "Everything had to go down in ruins with Hitler himself, as a sort of false Götterdämmerung." Such an extravagant gesture would have fufilled the prophecy of Walter Benjamin, who wrote that fascist humanity would "experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure."

 But there is no evidence that the drug-addled Führer was thinking about Wagner or listening to music in the last days and hours of his life. Eyewitness reports suggest that the grim ceremony in the bombed-out Chancellery garden - two gasoline-soaked corpses burning fitfully, the one intact, the other with its skull caved in - was something other than a work of art.

Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise - Listening to the Twentieth century, Harper Perennial, 2009, pp. 367-370

Leonor Fini, L'Homme aux masques (1949)

Astor Piazzolla -- Loving - Kronos Quartet - Leonor Fini.

Roy Eldridge, I Can't Get Started

a quimera da felicidade

"Então o homem, flagelado e rebelde, corria diante da fatalidade das coisas, atrás de uma figura nebulosa e esquiva, feita de retalhos, um retalho de impalpável, outro de improvável, outro de invisível, cosidos todos a ponto precário, com a agulha da imaginação; e essa figura, — nada menos que a quimera da felicidade, — ou lhe fugia perpetuamente, ou deixava-se apanhar pela fralda, e o homem a cingia ao peito, e então ela ria, como um escárnio, e sumia-se, como uma ilusão."

 Machado de Assis, Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, Loc. 195-99.

comparison of the English boarding school to a totalitarian regime.

"I think it was that last point which impressed itself upon me most, and which made me shudder with recognition when I read Auden’s otherwise overwrought comparison of the English boarding school to a totalitarian regime. The conventional word that is employed to describe tyranny is “systematic.” The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not. (The only rule of thumb was: whatever is not compulsory is forbidden.) Thus, the ruled can always be found to be in the wrong. The ability to run such a “system” is among the greatest pleasures of arbitrary authority, and I count myself lucky, if that’s the word, to have worked this out by the time I was ten. Later in life I came up with the term “micro-megalomaniac” to describe those who are content to maintain absolute domination of a small sphere. I know what the germ of the idea was, all right. “Hitchens, take that look off your face!” Near-instant panic. I hadn’t realized I was wearing a “look.” (Face-crime!) “Hitchens, report yourself at once to the study!” “Report myself for what, sir?” “Don’t make it worse for yourself, Hitchens, you know perfectly well.” But I didn’t. And then: “Hitchens, it’s not just that you have let the whole school down. You have let yourself down.” To myself I was frantically muttering: Now what? It turned out to be some dormitory sex-game from which—though the fools in charge didn’t know it—I had in fact been excluded. But a protestation of my innocence would have been, as in any inquisition, an additional proof of guilt.

(...)

There were other manifestations, too. There was nowhere to hide. The lavatory doors sometimes had no bolts. One was always subject to invigilation, waking and sleeping. Collective punishment was something I learned about swiftly: “Until the offender confesses in public,” a giant voice would intone, “all your ‘privileges’ will be withdrawn.” There were curfews, where we were kept at our desks or in our dormitories under a cloud of threats while officialdom prowled the corridors in search of unspecified crimes and criminals. Again I stress the matter of sheer scale: the teachers were enormous compared to us and this lent a Brobdingnagian aspect to the scene.

 In seeming contrast, but in fact as reinforcement, there would be long and “jolly” periods where masters and boys would join in scenes of compulsory enthusiasm—usually over the achievements of a sports team—and would celebrate great moments of victory over lesser and smaller schools. I remember years later reading about Stalin that the intimates of his inner circle were always at their most nervous when he was in a “good” mood, and understanding instantly what was meant by that. And yet it still wasn’t fascism, and the men and women who ran this bizarre microcosm were dedicated in their own weird way. The school was on the edge of Dartmoor—the site of the famously grim prison in Waugh’s Decline and Fall—and haggard, despairing escaped convicts were more than once recaptured after hiding in the sheds on our cricket grounds. Yet the natural beauty of the region was astonishing, and our teachers were on hand all day and at weekends, many of them conveying their enthusiasm for birds and animals and trees. We were all of us compelled to sit through lessons in the sinister fairy tales of Christianity as well, and nature was sometimes enlisted as illustrating god’s design, but I can’t pretend that I hated singing the hymns or learning the psalms, and I enjoyed being in the choir and was honored when asked to read from the lectern on Sundays."

Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir, Loc. 934-60

Worse still

"It is a terrible thing to feel sorry for one’s mother or indeed father. And it’s an additionally awful thing to feel this and to know the impotence of the adolescent to do anything at all about it. Worse still, perhaps, is the selfish consolation that it isn’t really one’s job to rear one’s parents."

Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir, Loc. 296-98

contingency, absurdity, and horror

"Cogito: In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy you criticize the attempts of Aristotle to found morality on human nature, and of Kant to found it on the nature of reason itself. But if all the big theories have indeed failed, and if there is no prospect of a successor, what is left of moral philosophy?

Williams: I think an awful lot is left of it. People are always asking, ‘What would you put in its place?’ If they mean, ‘What item(s) of the same sort would I put in its place?’, the answer is none. There is a great deal of difference between, on the one hand, theoretical structures that enable us to think about the relation of ethics to the world and, on the other hand, moral or ethical theories that are supposed to tell us how to decide what to do. The removal of the latter, which is the main focus of my book, seems to me to remove very little at the moral level. Take, for example, the ethics of Aristotle. Not everyone who is a good agent, on Aristotle’s view, needs to be armed with Aristotelian theory. In fact, one of the things he says in his book is that you won’t be able to understand it unless you are already a good agent. I simply do not believe that what keeps most people going through their ethical lives is something in the form of a theory; and I don’t think that what is needed to sustain moral life is philosophers’ producing more theories. I do accept that there are images and conceptions which help people to organize their experience, and may thus be useful at the political level. I have in mind images of what societies are—whether they are organic, or based on a contract, or whatever. Such images may help us to think about our relation to the State, what the powers of the State should be, and so on. Some sort of conceptual apparatus for thinking about these issues is especially important in modern society, where such things as open discussion and transparency are both particularly important and particularly vulnerable. And of course these political conceptions will have consequences and implications for ethics. On my view, it is a mistake to start with the theories of ethics and then ask what we are to do if they are all discredited. Rather, we should say, ‘Look, we find ourselves living under certain kinds of pressures to make the world sensible to ourselves. How much and what kind of theory do we need?’ Then we’ll see how ‘theoretical’ the structures will need to be to serve their purpose.

(...)

We also have to accept, in my view, that human affairs are largely shaped by luck, contingency, and even absurdity. People sometimes do find themselves in situations that seem to them to be absurdly, even surreally horrible. There is therefore a tension here. Ethical thought is bound to address itself to the usual—that’s almost a matter of necessity. But we live in a world in which the usual is constantly subverted by contingency, absurdity, and horror. How can we reconcile those two things? It may help to distinguish here, not between the fantastic and the real, but between extraordinary and ordinary cases. Having made this distinction, I think there are two things we can say about the use of extraordinary examples. The first is that the extraordinary should be represented in realistic terms. If we draw our extraordinary examples from science fiction, or from wildly counterfactual stories, the effect can be very misleading. It insulates you from their horror, for one thing. Also, it confuses the difference between the fantastic and the extraordinary because, by being contrary to the laws of nature, such examples make us think that the extraordinary belongs to another world. And it’s very important that it doesn’t. So we should take realistic examples of the extraordinary. Some of the torture and threat cases are relevant here, e.g. those that turn on the sorts of threat that actual terrorists do use. Take, for example, being in a room with twenty innocent people, where the terrorists take one out of the room every hour and shoot them. Questions about what you should do in cases like that are, I think, perfectly proper in moral philosophy. The second consideration which is very important here is whether the extraordinary case is one from which anything can be learned. One of the troubles about the method of principle and counter-example in moral philosophy is that it always assumes that the case is one from which you can learn something of a general kind, that is, that you can modify your principle. Now some cases are of this kind: what you may learn is that a certain kind of extraordinary case is continually coming up, so you’d better be prepared for it. But consider, on the other hand, the sort of extraordinary case that comes up in tragic drama. Such cases may teach us something about moral psychology, but nothing about general questions of moral principle. Some moral philosophers seem to think that the whole of the moral world can be tamed by principle, and if your current principles aren’t serving too well, you should get yourself some more complicated ones. But not every form of extreme situation should be reacted to in that way.

(...)

I suppose I was also dimly aware of something that Nietzsche reminds us of, which is that the material conditions for the production of things of value, including morality itself, often rest on the violation of morality. I’ve always been impressed by the thought that if you took morality absolutely as seriously as it demands, almost nothing that we value would exist. It seems to me that this conflict requires us to rethink entirely the balance between rules and constraints, on the one hand, and various sorts of creativity on the other.

(...)

Cogito: In 1979 the Williams Report was published, the report of a committee you chaired on pornography. In view of your rather modest conception of the competence of moral philosophy, what role do you think philosophers can and should play in the formation of public policy on such matters?

Williams: I don’t have modest views about the competence of moral philosophy. Or rather, I have modest views about one thing in particular: its supposed authority as based on theory. It seems to me that a lot of the pretensions of moral philosophy to contribute to public policy are based on a false view of its authority as based on theory. The idea seems to be that someone will turn up on a Royal Commission, or a hospital board, and claim to have an authoritative voice because they have taken a degree in moral philosophy, or have a PhD in applied ethics, or whatever, I really do think that, taken at face value, this is just nonsense. You can get an academic qualification without having any practical judgement whatever; and how can we expect that someone who hasn’t got any judgement in other matters will be competent to make good decisions in, say, medical ethics? However, I don’t underestimate the powers of moral philosophy— particularly if it’s historically informed—to serve a number of valuable roles in relation to public policy. For one thing, it’s helpful in sorting out one argument from another. I am strongly opposed to the claim that analytic expertise is a monopoly of philosophers—that, I think, is an insult to other people who think clearly about anything—but there is a certain level of abstraction that philosophers, in virtue of their analytic training, may help with.

(...)

Second, some expertise in moral philosophy may help you to get some hold on aspirations and ideals that are rather ill-defined, and to focus them onto a particular case. They may help you to see that a certain dispute is a species of a more general kind of argument, or resembles an argument that is going on in another area. If you are lucky and approach the matter in the right way, you may be able to unite ethical ideas from apparently very different domains. So I don’t think that moral philosophy is all that limited in relation to public policy; I think its limitation is only in respect of a false model of its authority as based upon theory. A further point about the pornography case is that you have to remember that the report was a public policy document of a very special kind, namely, a legislative proposal within a given state. As such, it is a public document, and one that must couch itself in terms of the discourse of that politics and that legislature. For instance, suppose that my colleagues on that commission and I had felt that the constitution of the USA was much better in this respect than that of England, because it founds pornography legislation on the First Amendment, on a right of free speech of a very unqualified kind. It would have been no good our saying, ‘Everyone has an absolute right to free speech, as expressed in the First Amendment to the US Constitution’, because that is not part of the political tradition in which we were operating. You have to start from the law, and the understanding of the law, that are already in place. This produces a particular kind of political discourse. It’s not necessarily conservative, but it has to be continuous, i.e. it must address itself to the ideas that are expressed in existing institutions and practices. Moral philosophy may help here because it may help you to see what is essential and what is not. But of course it isn’t sufficient, because you still have to have the political judgement to determine what is practicable.

(...)

Cogito: Campaigners for a ban on pornography have traditionally cast their argument in causal terms—porn is sometimes defined as material that will ‘deprave and corrupt’. Now according to conventional views about causality, causal claims involve us in counterfactual conditionals, i.e. claims about what would have happened if… But claims about what would have been the case raise notorious problems for philosophers interested in their truthconditions. Do you think such propositions have definite truth-conditions? And if so, could we hope to know them? Or is this an area in which ideological bias will always prevail on either side? 

Williams: I don’t think that the metaphysical issues about the truth of counterfactuals are relevant here, because there are clearly acceptable counterfactuals about public matters. For example, we may all agree that if certain events hadn’t happened at Chernobyl, there would not have been an explosion; or that if a lot of people hadn’t started smoking, the incidence of lung cancer would be much lower. So I’m not worried about that. There is, however, another feature of counterfactuals which is clearly relevant to public policy debates. In philosophers’ jargon, counterfactuals are not monotonic—that is, you can’t get from ‘if p then q’ to ‘if p and r, then q’. This is of course the whole basis of David Lewis’ theory of counterfactuals, which relies on the similarity of possible worlds.

Cogito: Your most recent book is entitled Shame and Necessity. Can you give our readers, in a few words, some idea of its contents? 

Williams: It’s a study, in good part a historical study, of ethical ideas found in the earliest ancient Greek literature, particularly Homer and the tragedians. I’m concerned mainly with literature that was written before Socrates and Plato, although there is some discussion of Aristotle. Its negative aim is to combat a certain view of our relation to those ethical ideas, a view that I label ‘progressivism’. On this view, the ancient Greeks had certain primitive, elementary, pre-modern (even pre-moral) ethical ideas on such matters as moral responsibility, guilt, and so on. That progressivist view is associated with celebrating what all of us will regard as improvements: the abolition of chattel slavery, an improved respect for the equality of women, and so on. My thesis in brief is, firstly, that the ethical ideas of ancient Greece have been misunderstood; secondly, that we have much more in common with the ancient Greeks than we believe. A lot of the ideas that actually ‘keep us going’ are fundamentally the same, I argue, as those of that world; and in so far as ours are different in some respects, they may even be worse. We have fooled ourselves into believing that we have a more purified notion of moral responsibility than we have. This belief is thus a form of illusion. To the extent that our situation represents progress or an improvement over theirs, understanding that progress requires the ancient ideas rather than our modern ones. Put another way, the degree of self-understanding of post-Enlightenment ethics is rather poor. I don’t want to take the archaising, reactionary view and say, ‘The Enlightenment has been a terrible disaster— back to the Greeks!’ If you were to go all the way back to the ancient Greeks, you’d get a very black picture indeed. Of course there has been some progress: our ethical situation is not theirs, because the modern world isn’t the ancient world. But there is more in common, ethically, than people think, and we actually mislead ourselves when we suppose otherwise.

"Bernard Williams" in, Andrew Pyle, Key Philosophers Conversation, Loc. 2759-76, 2910-24.

Once corroded, it is virtually impossible to restore.

"The absence of trust is clearly inimical to a well-run society. The great Jane Jacobs noted as much with respect to the very practical business of urban life and the maintenance of cleanliness and civility on city streets. If we don’t trust each other, our towns will look horrible and be nasty places to live. Moreover, she observed, you cannot institutionalize trust. Once corroded, it is virtually impossible to restore. And it needs care and nurturing by the community—the collectivity—since with the best of intentions no one person can make others trust him and be trusted in return."

Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land, Highlight Loc. 689-93.

One person steadies the ladder, another climbs. Why?

"All collective undertakings require trust. From the games that children play to complex social institutions, humans cannot work together unless they suspend their suspicion of one another. One person holds the rope, another jumps. One person steadies the ladder, another climbs. Why? In part because we hope for reciprocity, but in part from what is clearly a natural propensity to work in cooperation to collective advantage. Taxation is a revealing illustration of this truth. When we pay taxes, we make quite a lot of assumptions about our fellow citizens. In the first instance, we assume that they will pay their taxes too, or else we would feel unfairly burdened and would in due course withhold our own contributions. Secondly, we trust those we have placed in temporary authority over us to collect and spend the cash responsibly. After all, by the time we discover that they have embezzled or wasted it, we shall have lost a lot of money. Thirdly, most taxation goes towards either paying off past debt or investing in future expenditures. Accordingly, there is an implicit relationship of trust and mutuality between past taxpayers and present beneficiaries, present taxpayers and past and future recipients—and of course future taxpayers who will cover the cost of our outlays today. We are thus condemned to trust not only people we don’t know today, but people we could never have known and people we shall never know, with all of whom we have a complicated relationship of mutual interest. 
(...) But who is ‘we’? Whom exactly do we trust?"

Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land,  Highlight Loc. 654-65; 670.

Eastern Sounds - Yusef Lateef

Para o Carlos - O grande Imediato!

Wystan Hugh Auden - As I Walked Out One Evening

W. H. Auden - Tell Me The Truth About Love

Philip Larkin - High Windows

High Windows
by Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives —
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Philip Larkin: Love and Death in Hull

Tears from the Children - Modern Jazz Quartet

&

Digging, Seamus Heaney

Like someone in love, Paul Bley

Jorge de Sena, Entrevista em Moçambique, julho de 1972

Jorge de Sena "Poemas seleccionados e ditos pelo autor" (1974)

The Scarlet Letter (1926, Victor Sjöström)

Black Narcissus (1947 -Michael Powell)

Lamento Della Ninfa

God on Trial (D: Andy de Emmony)

Lament - Dylan Thomas

Lament

When I was a windy boy and a bit
And the black spit of the chapel fold,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),
I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,
The rude owl cried like a tell-tale tit,
I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled
Nine-pin down on donkey's common,
And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed
Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,
The whole of the moon I could love and leave
All the green leaved little weddings' wives
In the coal black bush and let them grieve.

When I was a gusty man and a half
And the black beast of the beetles' pews
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of bitches),
Not a boy and a bit in the wick-
Dipping moon and drunk as a new dropped calf,
I whistled all night in the twisted flues,
Midwives grew in the midnight ditches,
And the sizzling sheets of the town cried, Quick!-
Whenever I dove in a breast high shoal,
Wherever I ramped in the clover quilts,
Whatsoever I did in the coal-
Black night, I left my quivering prints.

When I was a man you could call a man
And the black cross of the holy house,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of welcome),
Brandy and ripe in my bright, bass prime,
No springtailed tom in the red hot town
With every simmering woman his mouse
But a hillocky bull in the swelter
Of summer come in his great good time
To the sultry, biding herds, I said,
Oh, time enough when the blood runs cold,
And I lie down but to sleep in bed,
For my sulking, skulking, coal black soul!

When I was half the man I was
And serve me right as the preachers warn,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of downfall),
No flailing calf or cat in a flame
Or hickory bull in milky grass
But a black sheep with a crumpled horn,
At last the soul from its foul mousehole
Slunk pouting out when the limp time came;
And I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye,
Gristle and rind, and a roarers' life,
And I shoved it into the coal black sky
To find a woman's soul for a wife.

Now I am a man no more no more
And a black reward for a roaring life,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of strangers),
Tidy and cursed in my dove cooed room
I lie down thin and hear the good bells jaw--
For, oh, my soul found a sunday wife
In the coal black sky and she bore angels!
Harpies around me out of her womb!
Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death!

Let my children hear music - Charles Mingus

Out To Lunch! - Eric Dolphy

The Red Shoes, Michael Powell

Sestina: Altaforte - Ezra Pound

Loquitur: En Bertrans de Born.
Dante Alighieri put this man in hell for that he was a
stirrer-up of strife.
Eccovi!
Judge ye!
Have I dug him up again?
The scene in at his castle, Altaforte. "Papiols" is his jongleur.
"The Leopard," the device of Richard (Cúur de Lion).

I

Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace.
You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let's to music!
I have no life save when the swords clash.
But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing
And the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,
Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.

II

In hot summer have I great rejoicing
When the tempests kill the earth's foul peace,
And the lightnings from black heav'n flash crimson,
And the fierce thunders roar me their music
And the winds shriek through the clouds mad, opposing,
And through all the riven skies God's swords clash.

III

Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!
And the shrill neighs of destriers in battle rejoicing,
Spiked breast to spiked breast opposing!
Better one hour's stour than a year's peace
With fat boards, bawds, wine and frail music!
Bah! there's no wine like the blood's crimson!

IV

And I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson.
And I watch his spears through the dark clash
And it fills all my heart with rejoicing
And pries wide my mouth with fast music
When I see him so scorn and defy peace,
His lone might 'gainst all darkness opposing.

V

The man who fears war and squats opposing
My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson
But is fit only to rot in womanish peace
Far from where worth's won and the swords clash
For the death of such sluts I go rejoicing;
Yea, I fill all the air with my music.

VI

Papiols, Papiols, to the music!
There's no sound like to swords swords opposing,
No cry like the battle's rejoicing
When our elbows and swords drip the crimson
And our charges 'gainst "The Leopard's" rush clash.
May God damn for ever all who cry "Peace!"

VII

And let the music of the swords make them crimson!
Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!
Hell blot black for always the thought "Peace!"

next to of course god america i, e. e. cummings

Autogénese - Natália Correia

Amalia/Vinicius

Andrew Hill - Judgment !

Wittgenstein - Sea of Faith - BBC documentary (Part 1 of 2)

Wittgenstein - Sea of Faith - BBC documentary (Part 2 of 2)

William Carlos Williams - Spring And All

El ángel exterminador, Luis Buñuel

The Waste Land, read by T. S. Eliot (whole poem with notes)

José Afonso - De não saber o que me espera

Aprender a pensar com sobriedade - As sementes e germes da liberdade

"Germany was neither a geographic nor even a clear-cut linguistic entity. There were large, cohesive German-speaking communities in distant Russia, on the banks of the Volga and on the shores of the Black Sea in what are today Ukraine, Moldavia, and Romania. There was as yet no hint of a national consciousness anywhere to unite the speakers of more than a dozen dialects (...)

Jews were by no means newcomers to these regions. No one knows exactly when they first arrived. They seem to have reached the Rhineland and the Danube valley in the wake of Roman legions, long before the establishment of Christianity. In some parts they may have settled earlier than the (later Germanized) Celts, Balts, and Slavs. Long before there were Saxons, Bavarians, or Prussians, Jews lived in what was later known as the Germans lands. A literate community of ancient renown, in the early Middle Ages they constituted an early urban middle class of traders, surgeons, apothecaries, and crafsmen in gold, silver, and precious stones. The earliest written record testifying to their presence in the Rhineland is the text of a decree of A.D. 321 by the emperor Constantine (...). It instructs the Roman magistrate of Cologne on relations with the local rabbi.

During the Christianization of Western Europe, they were the only people who retained their religious faith, sometimes at a high price. The first centuries of Christian rule were, by and large, relatively tolerant. For long periods Jews and Germans coexisted peacefully. Prior to the Crusades, Jews were free to own property and practice all trades and professions. Later, their lives were made miserable by the brutality and superstition of the mob, the greed of princes, and the growing intolerance of the Church. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries they had become mostly rag dealers, pawnbrokers, money changers, peddlers, and vagrants. The remarkable thing about them was that the poorest men (and some of the women) were often literate, though in Hebrew only."

                           Amos Elon, The Pity Of It All - A portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743 -1933, Picador, 2002, pp. 20-21                                          

Octavio Paz - Mi casa, mi gente, mi tierra.

José Afonso - Como Se Faz Um Canalha

José Afonso - Saudadinha

revolução e poesia

"revolución y poesía son tentativas por destruir este tiempo de ahora, el tiempo de la história que es el de la historia dela desigualdad, para instaurar otro tiempo. Pero el tiempo de la poesía no es el de la revolución, el tiempo fechado de la razón crítica, el futuro de las utopias: es el tiempo de antes del tiempo, el de la «vida interior» que reaparece en la mirada del niño, el tiempo sin fechas."

Octavio Paz, Los hijos del limo,  Biblioteca de Bolsillo, p.71.

Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human

Bill Evans Trio - How My Heart Sings

La souriante madame Beudet - (Germaine Dulac, 1923)

Deceptive Practices: Ricky Jay

via the Browser

Bill Evans Loose Blues

Uprising - (Jon Avnet, 2001)

"Freedom" by Anthony Hamilton & Elayna Boynton

desafio e rebelião

"It is a necessity… an imperative, due to the historical truth and the legacy that our generation will bequeath to those who will come after us, to speak not only of the loss… but also to reveal, in its fullest scope, the heroic struggle of the people, the community and the individual, during the days of massacre and at the very epicenters of destruction."

Thus wrote Yitzhak (Antek) Zuckerman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in the early 1950s. Today his words remain a guiding principle as we mark the 70th anniversary of the uprising.

The notions of "defiance" and "rebellion" are fundamentally important to any discussion concerning the Holocaust – and rightly so. In the ghettos and camps, indeed in every place with a Jewish populace and Jewish life, there was some form of protest or resistance to the plot to obliterate the Jewish nation. From flight to hiding, mutual help efforts to educational and creative activities as well as the observance of Jewish rites – even with the scarcest of means and in the most unthinkable conditions – all these acts embodied the relentless struggle of Jewish individuals and communities to counteract the restrictions and dangers raining down upon them – and against all odds, sometimes, to live to see the day of victory.

The most notable armed uprising that took place in the ghettos broke out in Warsaw on the first night of Pesach 5703 (19 April 1943). The revolt took place in reaction to the entry by German troops into the ghetto and on the heels of armed resistance that had been offered the previous January by the ghetto underground. In April, it was apparent that the Germans’ goal was the liquidation of the largest ghetto in occupied Europe as a birthday present for Adolf Hitler. Young Jews, condemned to death by the occupying Germans, organized into two underground networks (the Jewish Combat Organization and the Jewish Military Union) with little means and no outside support. Along with members of the undergrounds, all of the surviving Jews in the ghetto resisted the enemy in order to defy their murderers, although they knew they had little chance of survival. These 50,000 Jews, left in the ghetto following mass death by disease and starvation and the deportation of 265,000 men, women and children to Treblinka, took to defense in the bunkers, and fought with utmost courage and resolve. They put up the bravest of resistance for almost a month, until they were brutally suppressed.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the first large-scale urban civilian rebellion, predating similar non-Jewish underground activity and uprisings in Europe, and strengthening and uniting Jewish youth in other places. There were some acts of Jewish armed resistance before Warsaw and some preparations that only came to fruition afterwards. When it became clear in the latter half of 1942 that the smaller ghettos in Nesvizh and Lachva (Belorussia) and Tuczyn in Volhynia were to be liquidated, members of the underground and other ghetto inmates acted as one organized force, setting fire to their houses and breaching the fence in an attempt to reach the surrounding forests. In Vilna and Kovno in Lithuania, and in Bialystok, Częstochowa and Będzin in Poland, underground resistance forces trained with all their might and extremely meager resources for future battles that broke out after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In Krakow, the underground even sent combat units outside the ghetto to the "Aryan" part of the city to stage successful attacks on German military personnel. Finally, tens of thousands of Jews from across Europe made their way into the forests, swamps and mountains to join the partisans, fighting bravely behind enemy lines, and earning numerous military awards for their courage, but rarely surviving their ordeal.

Beside the uprisings in the ghettos, resistance of varied kinds took place at forced labor and concentration camps, at death pits and mass murder sites, and even at three extermination camps: with armed uprisings at Treblinka and Sobibor in the summer of 1943, and at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the fall of 1944. The fact that only a handful of inmates managed to break out of the camps and survive did not overshadow the boldness of the endeavors, which took place in the very places in which human cruelty had reached its deepest depths.

Ultimately, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising became a universal symbol of the heroic struggle by a handful of people in impossible conditions against genocidal oppression. It would later inspire extensive scholarly research and numerous works of literature and the arts – and become a source of pride for the survivors and the entire Jewish nation.

Prof. Dina Porat.

The author is Yad Vashem's Chief Historian.

Copiado daqui. 

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 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 ficccionais. 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, p.18                            

Keith Jarrett & Charlie Haden- One Day I ll Fly Away

"  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 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 ficccionais. 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, p.18                            

I'll Remember April - Dinah Washington (voc.)

Bill Evans Trio Sunday at the Village Vanguard

Quem é o nosso Deus?