"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?

por fim não restava ninguém a não seres tu.

"Chegaras tão longe à tua própria custa, e por isso tinhas essa confiança sem limites nas tuas opiniões. Em criança não ficava tão fascinado com isso como quando comecei a entrar na adolescência. Tu governavas o mundo a partir da tua poltrona. A tua opinião era a única correcta, todas as outras eram absurdas, exageradas, bizarras, anormais. E a confiança que tinhas em ti era tão grande quem nem sequer precisavas de ser coerente, mas nunca deixavas de ter razão. Acontecia até não teres opinião sobre um assunto, e consequentemente considerares liminarmente falsas todas as opiniões possíveis sobre ele. Eras capaz de dizer mal dos Checos, depois dos Alemães e depois dos Judeus, não escolhendo este ou aquele aspecto, mas todos, de tal modo que por fim não restava ninguém a não seres tu. Vejo em ti o enigma próprio de todos os tiranos, cuja razão se fundamente na sua pessoa, e não no pensamento. Pelo menos, foi o que me pareceu."

                            Franz Kafka, Carta ao Pai, (tr. João Barrento), Quasi edições, 2008, p.17.              

Frankenstein (D: J. Searle Dawley)

O eu

Improvisation (written, narrated and directed by Norman Granz)

Cannonball Adderley - Somethin' Else

Cannonball Adderley — alto saxophone

Miles Davis — trumpet

Hank Jones — piano

Sam Jones — bass

Art Blakey — drums

lucky to live in an orderly country

 Death to the Jews.

"In Western Europe, anti-Semitism was generally thought to be most virulent in France. For nearly a century, French jews had enjoyed the libertarian legacy of the 1789 revolution. In the mid-1890s, however, republican France was suddenly infected with the racial hatred generated by the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jew on the general staff of the french army. Dreyfus, a wealthy Alsatian, was accused of spying on behalf of Germany and in 1894 was tried for treason. The eponymous affair institutionalized anti-Semitism in France in a manner thought unlikely in Germany. A cabal od soldiers, clericalists, aristocrats, politicians, frustrated monarchists, and pseudoscientific savants (...) agitated against Dreyfus and the community to which he belonged. Outside the courtroom where he was tried, the mob growled, "Death to the Jews". In the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire, where he was publicly stripped of his rank before being incarcerated on Devil's Island in French Guiana, he continued to proclaim his innocence. Most French Jews were cowed and passive. (...).
The Dreyfus Affair convulsed France for more than a decade. The growing evidence that Dreyfus had been convicted on trumped-up charges seemed to poison the atmosphere even more: Jews were accused of being a pro-German fifth column, responsible for France's defeat in the war of 1870. (...) Public disorder reached such a pitch that for a while it looked as if the army would rise up against the government to prevent a retrial and put an end to the republic. The violent upheavel reconfirmed German Jews, in their patriotic fervor. They considered themselves lucky to live in an orderly country under a relatively benign regime."

                                    Amos Elon, The Pity Of It All - A portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743 -1933, Picador, 2002, pp. 249-250.                              

Yip Harburg - Over The Rainbow

to be cured or uplifted through communion, hearfelt prayer, song, and dance.

 The young Martin Buber, in 1902

"At the turn of the century,  a young philosopher, a graduate of the University of Vienna equally at home in German letters and traditional Eastern European Jewish folk culture, suggested an alternative response to the "Jewish question", neither conversion nor traditional separatism but rather a conscious embrace of Jewish history as part of one's German culture. The young man, Martin Buber, postulated nothing less than a "renaissance" of Jewish secular and literary identity through folktale amd myth. Buber introduced Hasidism - a conterculture of pietistic and ecstatic mysticism outside "official" Judaism, widespread since the eighteenth century in Poland, Hungary, and the Ukraine - to enlightened Jewish and non-Jewish germans, popularizing it as no one in the West had done before.  Hasidism resembled other Eastern European traditions of ecstasy and worship of charismatic, miracle-working saints. Although Hasidism's "wonder rabbis" were often not learned Talmudic scholars, they were widely regarded to be men of great wisdom and experience, linked to the divine through mystic contemplation: some were also healers, working with magic formulas, amulets, and spells. Their concern for the poor and downtrodden attracted thousands to their "courts" to be cured or uplifted through communion, hearfelt prayer, song, and dance. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hasidism was still alive in Eastern Europe but, like cabala, was overlooked or derogated in the West as mere superstition and primitive belief. A story was told of the great German Jewish bibliphile Moritz Steinschneider, the father of modern Jewish bibliography. One day as he was proudly showing a young scholar through his vast library, the visitor pointed to a room full of obscure Hebrew texts on Hasidism and remarked, awestruck: "And you Herr Professor, have studied them all!" "Certainly not, young man," Steinschneider responded. "You don't expect me to read that nonsense."

It was just such emphatic insistence on dry rationalism that Buber opposed, hailing instead the creative "lefe-giving" force of Hasidism. (...)

In trying to bridge the old gulf between German and East European Jews, Buber hoped to expand and enrich the possibilities of German Jewish identity. His vivid and colorful interpretation of Hasidic tales and homilies appealed all the more young Germans - Jews and Gentilles - as it coincided with an upsurge in Germany of interest in spirituality and the "exotic" cultures of Asia and Africa. Buber called on secular young German Jews to seek, as he put it, a genuine Erlebnis - an "inner experience" - of the popular "soul" of Judaism, a Judaism beyond the restrictions and injunctions of Talmudic law, which most German Jews, including Buber, no longer observed. Though ridiculed by some as a pretentious neo-Romantic affectation, his message was taken up by a new generation.

Hasidism came to be hailed (especially be secular Jews) as a vital force, more genuine and robust than fossilized orthodoxy or secularized reform. After watching a troupe of Yiddish actors perform in Prague's café Savoy, Kafka concluded that here was a genuine folk spirit, warmer and more humane than the stiffness and self-denial of Western Jews. "

                           Amos Elon, The Pity Of It All - A portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743 -1933, Picador, 2002, pp. 237-239.                                   

John Searle: Our shared condition -- consciousness

Tintoretto, Galileo Galilei, 1605-1607

 

O começo da física. Por sugestão de Jorge Calado, Haja Luz.

Arnold Schoenberg: A Survivor from Warsaw (cond. Simon Rattle)

her heart's blood was contained in every envelope

Rahel Levin Varnhagen, by William Hensel, July 7, 1822 (185x149 cm).

"The most famous salon and probably the liveliest and most influencial, however, was lauched in 1791 by Rahel Levin, an unmarried twenty-year-old. (...)

The poet Jean Paul wrote that scholars, Jews, officers, Prussian bureaucrats, noblemen, and all others who elsewhere "were at one another's throats" contrived to be "friendly at [Rahel Levin's] tea table." Even Goethe paid a visit. (...)

Rahel - she was widely known by her given name alone - was an early feminist, a willfully independent woman who set out to build her life on her own terms. She had many lovers, some of whom, like Friedrich von gentz, remained enchanted with her into old age. (...)

More than just a renowned socialite, Rahel was also the most important German woman of letters of the nineteenth century; Gentz called her the very first Romantic. Entirely self-taught, she left no conventional oeuvre but was an astonishingly prolific letter writer. Intensely personal and introspective, her correspondence (more than six thousand letters survive of an estimated ten thousand) reveals her impatience with the superficialities and hypocrisies of the elegant world in which she lived. She had a rare ability to portray herself with utmost sincerity; it was said that her heart's blood was contained in every envelope she posted. Since her handwriting was difficult to read, her friends had her letters copied so they could pass them around. the letters touch on all aspects of literature and art; remarkably, politics and the extraordinary historical events of her lifetime (the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars) are rarely ever mentioned. The cult of Innerlichkeit (intense introspection) so dear to the Romantics predominates.

A thoroughly assimilated Jew, Rahel was credited with having inaugurated the so-called symbiosis between Germans and Jews. (...) Rahel was not interested in Jewish reform; she yearned for integration into the German world. She was revolted - the word is not too strong - by her observant relatives.  Mendelssohn's version of judaism hardly appealed to her more; it was too dry and sterile in its rationality. She worshiped feeling, not reason. Her religiosity was of the heart and, like that of other romantics, couched in the mystical imagery of christianity; Christ's Passion and the Mother of God. (...)

Rahel's rejection went beyond religiosity. She hated her Jewish background and was convinced it had poisoned her life. For much of her adult life she was what would later be called self-hating. (...) And in 1814, after her mother's death, she converted. But her origins continued to haunt her even on her deathbed.

Rahel supreme desire was to live life as though it were "a work of art". Such a life demanded a "great love." And indeed, she gave herself to love unreservedly. (...)"

                                   Amos Elon, The Pity Of It All - A portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743 -1933, Picador, 2002, pp. 77-80.                             

Playing for Time (D: Daniel Mann)

Pat Metheny Unity Group - Rise Up

)

He sabotages me and I sabotage him.

“Yes, it’s all one big chess game. All my life I have been afraid of death, but now that I’m on the threshold of the grave I’ve stopped being afraid. It’s clear, my partner wants to play a slow game. He’ll go on taking my pieces one by one. First he removed my appeal as an actor and turned me into a so-called writer. He’d no sooner done that than he provided me with writer’s cramp. His next move was to deprive me of my potency. Yet I know he’s far from checkmate, and this gives me strength. It’s cold in my room—let it be cold. I have no supper—I won’t die without it. He sabotages me and I sabotage him. Some time ago, I was returning home late at night. The frost burned outside, and suddenly I realized that I had lost my key. I woke up the janitor, but he had no spare key. He stank of vodka, and his dog bit my foot. In former years I would have been desperate, but this time I said to my opponent, ‘If you want me to catch pneumonia, it’s all right with me.’ I left the house and decided to go to the Vienna station. The wind almost carried me away. I would have had to wait at least three-quarters of an hour for the streetcar at that time of night. I passed by the actors’ union and saw a light in a window. I decided to go in. Perhaps I could spend the night there. On the steps I hit something with my shoe and heard a ringing sound. I bent down and picked up a key. It was mine! The chance of finding a key on the dark stairs of this building is one in a billion, but it seems that my opponent was afraid I might give up the ghost before he was ready. Fatalism? Call it fatalism if you like.”

              "A Friend of Kafka", in The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Loc. 5758-63.           

and Kafka began to speak about the golem

"We came to Prague to make some money and found a genius waiting for us—Homo sapiens in his highest degree of self-torture. Kafka wanted to be a Jew, but he didn’t know how. He wanted to live, but he didn’t know this, either. ‘Franz,’ I said to him once, ‘you are a young man. Do what we all do.’ There was a brother I knew in Prague, and I persuaded him to go there with me. He was still a virgin. I’d rather not speak about the girl he was engaged to. He was sunk to the neck in the bourgeois swamp. The Jews of his circle had one ideal—to become Gentiles, and not Czech Gentiles but German Gentiles. To make it short, I talked him into the adventure. I took him to a dark alley in the former ghetto and there was the brothel. We went up the crooked steps. I opened the door and it looked like a stage set: the whores, the pimps, the guests, the madam. I will never forget that moment. Kafka began to shake, and pulled at my sleeve. Then he turned and ran down the steps so quickly I was afraid he would break a leg. Once on the street, he stopped and vomited like a schoolboy. On the way back, we passed an old synagogue, and Kafka began to speak about the golem. Kafka believed in the golem, and even that the future might well bring another one. There must be magic words that can turn a piece of clay into a living being. Did not God, according to the Cabala, create the world by uttering holy words? In the beginning was the Logos."

              "A Friend of Kafka", in The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer,Loc. 5724-35.             

Tord Gustavsen trio - Colours of Mercy

)

In the dark, Kant’s categories no longer apply.

“Didn’t you once ask what makes me go on, or do I imagine that you did? What gives me the strength to bear poverty, sickness, and, worst of all, hopelessness? That’s a good question, my young friend. I asked the same question when I first read the Book of Job. Why did Job continue to live and suffer? So that in the end he would have more daughters, more donkeys, more camels? No. The answer is that it was for the game itself. We all play chess with Fate as partner. He makes a move; we make a move. He tries to checkmate us in three moves; we try to prevent it. We know we can’t win, but we’re driven to give him a good fight. My opponent is a tough angel. He fights Jacques Kohn with every trick in his bag. It’s winter now; it’s cold even with the stove on, but my stove hasn’t worked for months and the landlord refuses to fix it. Besides, I wouldn’t have the money to buy coal. It’s as cold inside my room as it is outdoors. If you haven’t lived in an attic, you don’t know the strength of the wind. My windowpanes rattle even in the summer-time. Sometimes a tomcat climbs up on the roof near my window and wails all night like a woman in labor. I lie there freezing under my blankets and he yowls for a cat, though it may be he’s merely hungry. I might give him a morsel of food to quiet him, or chase him away, but in order not to freeze to death I wrap myself in all the rags I possess, even old newspapers—the slightest move and the whole works comes apart. “Still, if you play chess, my dear friend, it’s better to play with a worthy adversary than with a botcher. I admire my opponent. Sometimes I’m enchanted with his ingenuity. He sits up there in an office in the third or seventh heaven, in that department of Providence that rules our little planet, and has just one job—to trap Jacques Kohn. His orders are ‘Break the keg, but don’t let the wine run out.’ He’s done exactly that. How he manages to keep me alive is a miracle. I’m ashamed to tell you how much medicine I take, how many pills I swallow. I have a friend who is a druggist, or I could never afford it. Before I go to bed, I gulp down one after another—dry. If I drink, I have to urinate. I have prostate trouble, and as it is I must get up several times during the night. In the dark, Kant’s categories no longer apply. Time ceases to be time and space is no space. You hold something in your hand and suddenly it isn’t there. To light my gas lamp is not a simple matter. My matches are always vanishing. My attic teems with demons. Occasionally, I address one of them: ‘Hey, you, Vinegar, son of Wine, how about stopping your nasty tricks!’"

==========

              "A Friend of Kafka", in The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer,  Loc. 5670-71.       

Tord Gustavsen trio - Graceful Touch

Salome

Bobo Stenson Trio - El Mayor

God revealed the whole history of mankind to him.

"Like all creatures formed on the six days of creation, Adam came from the hands of the Creator fully and completely developed. He was not like a child, but like a man of twenty years of age. The dimensions of his body were gigantic, reaching from heaven to earth, or, what amounts to the same, from east to west. Among later generations of men, there were but few who in a measure resembled Adam in his extraordinary size and physical perfections. Samson possessed his strength, Saul his neck, Absalom his hair, Asahel his fleetness of foot, Uzziah his forehead, Josiah his nostrils, Zedekiah his eyes, and Zerubbabel his voice. History shows that these physical excellencies were no blessings to many of their possessors; they invited the ruin of almost all. Samson's extraordinary strength caused his death; Saul killed himself by cutting his neck with his own sword; while speeding swiftly, Asahel was pierced by Abner's spear; Absalom was caught up by his hair in an oak, and thus suspended met his death; Uzziah was smitten with leprosy upon his forehead; the darts that killed Josiah entered through his nostrils, and Zedekiah's eyes were blinded. The generality of men inherited as little of the beauty as of the portentous size of their first father. The fairest women compared with Sarah are as apes compared with a human being. Sarah's relation to Eve is the same, and, again, Eve was but as an ape compared with Adam. His person was so handsome that the very sole of his foot obscured the splendor of the sun. His spiritual qualities kept pace with his personal charm, for God had fashioned his soul with particular care. She is the image of God, and as God fills the world, so the soul fills the human body; as God sees all things, and is seen by none, so the soul sees, but cannot be seen; as God guides the world, so the soul guides the body; as God in His holiness is pure, so is the soul; and as God dwells in secret, so doth the soul. When God was about to put a soul into Adam's clod-like body, He said: "At which point shall I breathe the soul into him? Into the mouth? Nay, for he will use it to speak ill of his fellow-man. Into the eyes? With them he will wink lustfully. Into the ears? They will hearken to slander and blasphemy. I will breathe her into his nostrils; as they discern the unclean and reject it, and take in the fragrant, so the pious will shun sin, and will cleave to the words of the Torah" The perfections of Adam's soul showed themselves as soon as he received her, indeed, while he was still without life. In the hour that intervened between breathing a soul into the first man and his becoming alive, God revealed the whole history of mankind to him. He showed him each generation and its leaders; each generation and its prophets; each generation and its teachers; each generation and its scholars; each generation and its statesmen; each generation and its judges; each generation and its pious members; each generation and its average, commonplace members; and each generation and its impious members. The tale of their years, the number of their days, the reckoning of their hours, and the measure of their steps, all were made known unto him."

             "A Friend of Kafka", in The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Loc. 5608-26.        

Morreu ontem, aos 110 anos, a mais velha sobrevivente do holocausto

"Sofre duma espécie de derramamento da lucidez"

"O que é a educação para Kafka? Em primeiro lugar, é um pacto secreto com o destino; o destino ao qual se oferece toda a espécie de iguarias, como a do talento bem aproveitado.  A inteligência é, para Kafka, uma maneira de ser poupado por essa terrível força que sacode e destrói tudo quanto é vivo. A voz do pai, incluída no tremendo ruído do mundo em acção, é parte dessa força que é preciso adular, convencer, talvez iludir. A educação é uma arte de demorar a morte, de a tornar convencional em vez de fatal.

Kafka é um homem educado; o personagem central  de O Processo é um homem educado. Vejamos como ele procede: «Ainda fatigado dos seus cuidados precedentes e já lasso daqueles que viriam, ele levantou-se para receber o primeiro dos seus visitantes.» Kafka sabe quanto é importante a mesura. Ela aplaca a cólera que se traduz pelo mais fugaz dos gestos humanos. Ele sabe imensamente dessa rede obscura em que se debatem os pensamentos reservados e que não é possível domesticar. Então a inteligência desponta, cresce, cobre o horizonte humano, não como uma luz brilhante, mas com um véu prodigioso. A inteligência desconcerta o destino; não sabemos se, de certa maneira o provoca."

                                        Agustina Bessa-Luís, Kafkiana, Babel, 2012, p. 50-51                           

Ron Carter - Saguaro

a Wandervolk driven from place to place

"By far the worst off were the Betteljuden (beggar Jews). Since they had no money to buy any kind of "protection", they were homeless or vagrant. Religious strictures did not permit them to become  mercenaries, as did the poorest runaways serfs. As one observer noted in 1783, these Jews had no alternatives but to "roam through life as beggars or be rogues."  Many were lifelong nomads, descended apparently from several generations of beggars. Born on the road, they depended on theft or charity. Accompanied by their ragged families, they traveled the contryside in swarms, a Wandervolk driven from place to place and, like the Gypsies, regarded as outlaws, or Gauner, that is, scamps, parasites, rogues, and thieves. in 1712, a traveler reported: "The begging hordes at times make the highways disgusting, particularly when one reaches their encampments where they are sunning themselves in a wood or behind a fence." A rare document from 1773 concerns a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl named Frommet who had been sold by her vagrant parents as a housemaid. She was standing trial in Frankfurt for murdering her employer with a hatchet. The plea submitted in her "defense" stated: "Who does not remember seeing such a horde of wretched creatures, vagrant Landjuden [country Jews] with their children, carrying their entire possessions on their humps? And seeing them pass by, who has not promptly noticed the scant difference between them and cattle?"

The cities usually denied the vagrants access; some were admitted for one night only but required to stay in poorhouses maintained by a local Jewish community. Jewish almsgiving afforded some material help. Hospitality was occasionally made available to the needy, especially on the Sabbath. The tradition of solidarity was deeply ingrained among Jews, but the huge increase in homelessness and vagrancy during the eighteenth century was bringing about its collapse."

   

                               Amos Elon, The Pity Of It All - A portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743 -1933, Picador, 2002, pp. 29-30.                                    

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - criatividade, realização e Fluir