A memória do lugar

Long after history’s active moment, do places retain some charge of what they witnessed, what they endured?

Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things.

Domingo no mundo (42)

Alfred Sisley, La neige à Louveciennes, 1878.

New Year’s Resolution

I ask my friend Bob what his New Year’s Resolutions are and he says, with a shrug (indicating that this is obvious or not surprising): to drink less, to lose weight…He asks me the same, but I am not ready to answer him yet. I have been studying my Zen again, in a mild way, out of desperation over the holidays, though mild desperation. A medal or a rotten tomato, it’s all the same, says the book I have been reading. After a few days of consideration, I think the most truthful answer to my friend Bob would be: My New Year’s Resolution is to learn to see myself as nothing. Is this competitive? He wants to lose some weight, I want to learn to see myself as nothing. Of course, to be competitive is not in keeping with any Buddhist philosophy. A true nothing is not competitive. But I don’t think I’m being competitive when I say it. I am feeling truly humble, at that moment. Or I think I am—in fact, can anyone be truly humble at the moment they say they want to learn to be nothing? But there is another problem, which I have been wanting to describe to Bob for a few weeks now: at last, halfway through your life, you are smart enough to see that it all amounts to nothing, even success amounts to nothing. But how does a person learn to see herself as nothing when she has already had so much trouble learning to see herself as something in the first place? It’s so confusing. You spend the first half of your life learning that you are something after all, now you have to spend the second half learning to see yourself as nothing. You have been a negative nothing, now you want to be a positive nothing. I have begun trying, in these first days of the New Year, but so far it’s pretty difficult. I’m pretty close to nothing all morning, but by late afternoon what is in me that is something starts throwing its weight around. This happens many days. By evening, I’m full of something and it’s often something nasty and pushy. So what I think at this point is that I’m aiming too high, that maybe nothing is too much, to begin with. Maybe for now I should just try, each day, to be a little less than I usually am.

Lydia Davis, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant.

Os anos

Gabriel Cualladó, Madrid, 1959.

Calembourg time

James and Charlotte there with the children and Florence (10) tells a joke, having gone out of the room in order to rehearse it.

‘There’s these three boys in the class called Zipp, Willie and Wee and they’re very badly behaved. When the teacher comes in Zipp is standing on the desk and the other two are playing about so the teacher says, “Zipp, down! Willie out! Wee in the corner!”’

There’s always a credulity threshold in a joke and in this one it’s the likelihood of there being a boy called ‘Wee’. Except, as R. says, these days he could be Chinese.

Alan  Bennett, entrada de diário de 25 de Março de 2005 (do volume Keeping On Keeping On).

Domingo no mundo (41)

Brueghel, O Velho, A adoração dos Reis, 1564.

Um prato de sopa

Esta pressa de obsoleto. Que bulimía existe em nós que não nos permite a leveza de não precisar mais?

Vasco Gato, Rusga.

Casa

Não creio que o tempo se esclareça o suficiente para arriscar um pires de caracóis com orégãos e tomilho, na esplanada de passeio, onde os há. No preciso momento em que me animava para ir ver a tarde antes que se faça noite, ribombou um relâmpago apagado pelo aguaceiro; aprecio muito estas coincidências que, por algum motivo, me retêm em casa.

Jorge Fallorca, Nem Sempre a Lápis.

Domingo no mundo (40)

James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, c.1875.

Chantarelles

Peter Ilsted, 1892.

Dezembro, depois da chuva

MULHER COM FILHA AO COLO, EM DEZEMBRO

Onde quer que esteja a mãe
debruçada sobre a filha,
o Natal pousa
e repousa.

Nos longos dedos da mãe
sobre os cabelos da filha,
o Natal mora
e demora.

Filha dormida na mãe
repetição de Belém:
o Natal feito
e perfeito.

A. M. Pires Cabral, O Livro dos Lugares e outros Poemas.

Domingo no mundo (39)

Fotograma de Um conto de Natal do Mickey, de Walt Disney, 1983.