TAUTOLOGIA

Ao domingo à tarde, a rádio passava o Nelson Ned cantando Domingo à Tarde.

Isabela Figueiredo, Caderno de Memórias Coloniais.

Domingo no mundo (95)

Édouard Vuillard, Rosas numa Jarra de Vidro, 1919.

O poder da raiva

That her lifelong, most fundamental positions were consistently construed as their opposites was no doubt demoralizing. But Dworkin did not cater to hostile readers, pleading with them to understand. Instead, she played the long game, refusing to leave behind a legacy of compromise. As she would later reflect: 

My only chance to be believed is to find a way of writing bolder and stronger than woman hating itself—smarter, deeper, colder. This might mean that I would have to write a prose more terrifying than rape, more abject than torture, more insistent and destabilizing than battery, more desolate than prostitution, more invasive than incest, more filled with threat and aggression than pornography. How would the innocent bystander be able to distinguish it, tell it apart from the tales of rapists themselves if it were so nightmarish and impolite? There are no innocent bystanders. 

“Nightmarish and impolite” might be the only descriptions of her work that Dworkin and her critics could agree on. And yet, as grim as her outlook was, just as it was her curse to see the seed of genocide in everything—the calamity waiting in every expression and symbol of inequality, however small or private—it was her gift to see in everything an opportunity to resist.

Sobre a vida e a recepção da obra de Andrea Dworkin, aqui.

Domingo no mundo (94)

Constant Montand, Ninfas nas margens do lago, c. 1900.

Morneza

Ao falar não tenho a certeza de procurar a palavra certa; tento antes evitar a palavra tola. Mas, como sinto remorsos por renunciar cedo de mais à verdade, fico-me pela palavra média. 

Roland Barthes por Roland Barthes; trad. de Jorge Constante Pereira.

Domingo no mundo (93)

Filipo Indoni, Pensiere d'Amore (Pormenor), séc. XX.

Domingo no mundo (92)

Childe Hassam, Woman Reading, 1885.

Great Expectations

Ainda posso recordar os meus vinte anos sem ressentimento. Talvez por ainda não ter conseguido o que então me propunha e por não ter perdido a esperança de o conseguir. A juventude, no fim de contas, não é mais do que uma grande esperança.

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Memória de um Inconformista; trd. António Gonçalves.

Domingo no mundo (91)

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.

Domingo no mundo (90)

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.