Domingo no mundo (68)

Alfredo Roque Gameiro, Retrato de Sua Mãe, 1904.

Silêncio:
na ravina inacessível
o prado em flor.

José Tolentino de Mendonça, A Papoila e o Monge.

Domingo no mundo (67)

Paul César Helleu, num verão de outro século.

Vice-versa

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery. 

Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners — Occasional Prose.

Ideas are dangerous

A few years ago I discovered that my friend Tom was a white supremacist. This put me in a strange position: I am a Muslim and the daughter of immigrants. I am a member of one of the so-called invading groups that Tom fears and resents. He broadcasts his views from his social media accounts, which are a catalogue of aggrieved far-Right anger. One post warns ‘the Muslim invaders to keep their filthy hands off our women’. Another features a montage of black faces above the headline: ‘This is the white race after “diversity”.’ Underpinning this is a desperate resentment of ‘liberal Leftie attempts to control free speech’. 

Tom has never mentioned any of these ideas to me; on the contrary, in person he is consistently warm and friendly. He vents his convictions only online, and it seems unlikely that he would ever translate them into violent actions. And yet much the same was once said of Thomas Mair, the 52-year-old from Birstall, a village in northern England, who spent time helping elderly neighbours tend to their gardens, and who in 2016 murdered the pro-immigration MP Jo Cox, while shouting: ‘This is for Britain!’ His actions were found to have been inspired by white supremacist ideology. 

James Baldwin was right to say that ideas are dangerous. Ideas force people to confront the gap between their ideals and their manifestation in the world, prompting action. Ideas can prompt change for better or for worse – and often both at the same time. But attempts to create change are always charged with danger: to act in new ways is to erode old limits on our behaviour. In the forging of new territory – and the sense of danger that accompanies it – actions that might once have been deemed excessive can come to seem not merely necessary but normal. 

(...) 

‘Loneliness is the common ground of terror’ – and not just the terror of totalitarian governments, of which Hannah Arendt was thinking when she wrote those words in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). It also generates the sort of psychic terror that can creep up on a perfectly ordinary individual, cloaking everything in a mist of urgent fear and uncertainty. 

By ‘loneliness’ Arendt did not simply mean solitude, in which – as she points out – you have your own self for consolation. In the solitude of our minds, we engage in an internal dialogue. We speak in two voices. It is this internal dialogue that allows us to achieve independent and creative thought – to weigh strong competing imperatives against each other. You engage in it every time you grapple with a moral dilemma. Every clash of interests, every instance of human difference evokes it. True thought, for Arendt, involved the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. True loneliness, therefore, was the opposite. It involved the abrupt halting of this internal dialogue: ‘the loss of one’s own self’ – or rather, the loss of trust in oneself as the partner of one’s thoughts. True loneliness means being cut off from a sense of human commonality and therefore conscience. You are left adrift in a sea of insecurity and ambiguity, with no way of navigating the storms.

Obrigatório ler Nabeelah Jaffer, In extremis.

Domingo no mundo (66)

Alfred Sisley, Margens do Sena em Argenteuil, 1876.

Uma laranja p'la manhã

With or without jet-lag, I do like to start the day listening to Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (usually played by Andras Schiff). It provides an orderliness and deep calm which is a good basis from which to start a day which will almost certainly lack those qualities.

O violoncelista Steven Isserlis, no Twitter.

Domingo no mundo (65)

Vincent Van Gogh, Interior de um restaurante, Junho-Julho de 1887.

Domingo no mundo (64)

Henri Fantin-Latour, Iris and Hyacinths, with cherries and almonds on the table, 1871.

Not Caring Is A Political Art Form

(...)

Or that you have nothing in common with them. Or that they are not real. Or that they are evil. That you owe nothing to them. The right has a terrible fear of obligation they address by denying it and celebrating its opposite, the laissez-faire social-darwinist every-man-for-himself and devil-take-the-hindmost scramble.* This ideology denies how we are connected, ecologically, economically, socially, emotionally. This is an art of disassociation—literally, in the psychological sense of disconnecting from one’s own feelings. A therapist I know talks about how hollow the young men of the alt right sound, how they’re trying out a fun way to not have to care, not have to connect, not have to be responsible (you can see Incels trying out another version in their screeds in which women are in essence not human and not possessed of genuine rights or feelings.). On August 12 of last year, a man drove a car straight into a crowd of people because he disagrees with their politics and Heather Heyer dies of blunt-force injury to the chest. Another young man shoots up a school; many young men shoot up schools; an old man shoots down 51 and injures nearly 900. These bloodbaths, in which strangers are killed, are also exercises in not feeling and not connecting; they arise from disconnection and they celebrate it as a power to do whatever the hell you want, including killing people at random. The fact that guns and bullets are critical to shooting people is widely denied, and porn or “too many exits and entryways” or any other thing is blamed in the disconnection of cause and effect so that guns can continue to express the great disconnection.  

But it’s also political disassociation: I owe you nothing; I have no connection to you or much of anything; my heart is a gated community; my ideology is a border patrol. It’s even a philosophical disassociation: my acts should have no consequences; cause is unhitched from effect; we will not look at how what we did impacts how they live, whether it’s emissions and the climate or foreign policy and refugees or wealth distribution via federal policy and poverty. It’s what I called the ideology of isolation a couple of years ago.

Rebecca Solnit sobre a polémica do momento, aqui. 

Lugares onde a verdade mora

Portable altar, temporary lab-in-the-field, mobile court – each travelling truth-spot did its job to make people believe. Certain shared understandings acquired legitimacy as they emerged from ordinary places provisionally made special by the momentary unpacking of transformative stuff – Aztecs get aligned with the tenets of Catholic missionaries; scientific data from Antarctic ice convince US Congress to ban lead from gasoline; disputatious neighbours in a remote Chinese village reach an agreeable legal settlement. But lasting churches still get built, and so do brick-and-mortar laboratories and courthouses – often at great expense, and in locations strategically chosen to accentuate their persuasive powers.

Thomas Gieryn, Truth is also a place.

Domingo no mundo (63)

Cuno Amiet, Stilleben mit Blumenstrauss in grüner Vase, 1957.