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'