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Guy Rose, Marguerite, 1918. 

Nothing left to dream about

"We hardly dream at all any more," said John Ford. “And when we do have a dream, we forget it. We talk about everything, so there’s nothing left to dream about." 

 Peter Handke, Short Letter, Long Farewell.

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Lucas Cranach, o Velho, a partir de Bosch, O Julgamento Final, (Pormenor), 1524.

Mary Oliver (1935-2019)

Mary was, I think, a fundamentally American poet. There was a view in her poems and in her person of an America that was both beautiful and profoundly lonely. She was not blind to the country’s unthinkably cruel and violent past; nor did she imagine the natural world that she loved so much as an empty Eden. She saw it, very clearly, as a treasure stolen from someone else. 

She tried to nudge me toward the bigness of the world while also never showing disrespect to the relatively small things that troubled me. As she well knew, the big and the small weigh the same. When I got my heart broken my sophomore year, she let me cry in her warm office that smelled of wood and old radiators as the rain fell outside, before gently suggesting that the best thing to do was to just get back to work. She felt the thinness of this world pressing itself through the reeds her whole life. Death like an owl. Death like a bridegroom. Death like a dark cabin, a curiosity, a thief, a hungry bear, a silence. Death like a stranger passing you with her dogs in a field of tall grass, just before dawn, who will one day turn to you and say, perhaps kindly, hello. 

Summer Brennan, Passing Mary at Dawn.

Pregar aos peixes

Por outro lado, acho que aquilo que me interessa quase não interessa a mais ninguém. Por isso, a minha intervenção seria como estar a pregar aos peixes ou a atirar-me contra a parede. Acho que os políticos deveriam ter uma atitude didáctica. Não deveria existir propaganda de qualquer espécie para as eleições. Para quê, essa tentativa de se apoderarem da consciência das pessoas?

Sophia, matéria de capa da Visão desta semana.

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Johan Patricny, Woman Reading, s/d.

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Laura Knight, On the Cliff, 1917.

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François Boucher, La sultanesse, c.1746,  

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Vincent Van Gogh, The corner of the park, 1888.

A pós-verdade

Our current moment tends to misunderstand the Enlightenment, which challenged a world governed by epistemic dogma, handed down by religion and royalty, that held truth as something frozen, complete, and beyond debate. The Enlightenment was an effort to treat truth as something that wasn’t a given but needed to be worked on, and could be failed at. The experience of the Enlightenment was and remains itself a crisis of reality.  

Epistemic uncertainty isn’t something we are newly experiencing. It has, again, lingered through modernity. The modern rise of science and democracy, the industrial revolutions, globalization, the furthering of transportation, urbanism, and mass media all multiply that uncertainty by providing access to other cultures, ideas, and ways of knowing. Technology warps what we think is real faster than we can cope, which continues to bring both possibility and despair. Truth’s contestability means that the meaning of your life, or anyone else’s, is a question that is possible to ask, and possible to get wrong. You can fail to become the person you’re supposed to be. Truth, in short, was and continues to be radically contested. That was always the point.

 (...)

 So many journalists and pundits have failed to describe our world accurately, and the inability to outline a coherent account of our reality can be felt as the impossibility of coherence at all. But the world isn’t really as blurry as their cloudy vision. Maybe we’d prefer if current political conditions were all a cruel joke or surreal dream, but the motives that shape our world are sincere and their effects are abundantly clear. Rather than ascribe Trump’s victory to postmodern bogeymen, it seems more accurate to point out that he won because he is openly racist and that stance has been popular enough. Perhaps “post-truth” is the condition of being wrong multiplied by your own sense of expertise.

Nathan Jurgenson, Faked out. Vale a pena ler na íntegra. 

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Santiago Roussiñol, Girona, c.1907-15.