L'étranger

Chaque génération, sans doute, se croit vouée à refaire le monde. La mienne sait pourtant qu'elle ne le refera pas. Mais sa tâche est peut-être plus grande. Elle consiste à empêcher que le monde se défasse. Héritière d'une histoire corrompue où se mêlent les révolutions déchues, les techniques devenues folles, les dieux morts et les idéologies exténuées, où de médiocres pouvoirs peuvent aujourd'hui tout détruire mais ne savent plus convaincre, où l'intelligence s'est abaissée jusqu'à se faire la servante de la haine et de l'oppression, cette génération a dû, en elle-même et autour d'elle, restaurer, à partir de ses seules négations, un peu de ce qui fait la dignité de vivre et de mourir. Devant un monde menacé de désintégration, où nos grands inquisiteurs risquent d'établir pour toujours les royaumes de la mort, elle sait qu'elle devrait, dans une sorte de course folle contre la montre, restaurer entre les nations une paix qui ne soit pas celle de la servitude, réconcilier à nouveau travail et culture, et refaire avec tous les hommes une arche d'alliance. Il n'est pas sûr qu'elle puisse jamais accomplir cette tâche immense, mais il est sûr que partout dans le monde, elle tient déjà son double pari de vérité et de liberté, et, à l'occasion, sait mourir sans haine pour lui. C'est elle qui mérite d'être saluée et encouragée partout où elle se trouve, et surtout là où elle se sacrifie. C'est sur elle, en tout cas, que, certain de votre accord profond, je voudrais reporter l'honneur que vous venez de me faire.
Albert Camus discours de reception du Prix Nobel de littérature

Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself. Heir to a corrupt history, in which are mingled fallen revolutions, technology gone mad, dead gods, and worn-out ideologies, where mediocre powers can destroy all yet no longer know how to convince, where intelligence has debased itself to become the servant of hatred and oppression, this generation starting from its own negations has had to re-establish, both within and without, a little of that which constitutes the dignity of life and death. In a world threatened by disintegration, in which our grand inquisitors run the risk of establishing forever the kingdom of death, it knows that it should, in an insane race against the clock, restore among the nations a peace that is not servitude, reconcile anew labour and culture, and remake with all men the Ark of the Covenant. It is not certain that this generation will ever be able to accomplish this immense task, but already it is rising everywhere in the world to the double challenge of truth and liberty and, if necessary, knows how to die for it without hate. Wherever it is found, it deserves to be saluted and encouraged, particularly where it is sacrificing itself. In any event, certain of your complete approval, it is to this generation that I should like to pass on the honour that you have just given me.
Albert Camus' speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1957

I'm glad

Accentuate the positive

Um novo ano vem aí - acentuemos o positivo e eliminemos o negativo e não nos deixemos enganar pelas meias tintas !

A new year is at the door - let's accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative and don't mess with the in between !

L'air du temps

Simone Weil ou l'éloge de l'inconfort

Enfin une révolutionnaire qui ne s'abîme pas dans la guimauve fraternitaire !

Noël est, jusqu'à la nausée, la fête du trop-plein : satiété de la bouffe, des bons sentiments, du potlatch et du cocon familial. Bonne occasion, à titre d'antidote pour l'âme et pour l'esprit, de parler de Simone Weil, dont un nouveau volume des oeuvres complètes vient de paraître (1). Simone Weil ou le parti pris du vide. De l'absence. De la nuit de tous les sens. De la «décréation», de la volonté de ne pas être. «E ne faut pas être moi. Mais il faut encore moins être nous», dit cette sublime apôtre de l'anarcho-syndicalisme. Enfin une révolutionnaire qui ne s'abîme pas dans la guimauve fraternitaire. Enfin une quasi- chrétienne qui nous délivre du Petit Jésus et de l'ange gardien. «La chrétienté, dit-elle encore dans ses «Carnets», est devenue totalitaire, conquérante, exterminatrice, parce qu'elle n'a pas développé la notion de l'absence et delà non-action de Dieu ici-bas.»
Il faut savoir lire celle que Camus nommait «le seul grand esprit de notre temps», dans son jaillissement provocateur, parce qu'elle nous libère du plus féroce instinct qui se tapit au coeur de l'homme, je veux dire l'instinct de propriété. Propriété qui n'est pas seulement celle de l'argent et des choses matérielles, mais propriété du moi, propriété de nos vertus, de Dieu, de l'immortalité. C'est là toute la pesanteur qui obstrue les canaux de la grâce. Puisque, par l'incarnation, Dieu renonce en quelque sorte à sa toute-puissance, pourquoi l'homme ne renoncerait-il pas à son tour à sa toute faiblesse ? Vertigineuse fascination pour la forme la plus haute de l'amour absolu, à savoir l'anéantissement de soi.
Ah ! Ce n'est pas un chemin facile que celui de Simone Weil, qui pense comme Chesterton, comme Kierkegaard, comme Bernanos, comme Dostoïevski, que le climat spirituel propre au christianisme est celui de l'inconfort, de la révolte permanente et de la contradiction. Au vrai, Simone Weil se situe délibérément à la limite de l'espèce humaine, pour laquelle elle témoigne, sans tout à fait lui appartenir entièrement...
Que retenir de ce volume ? Comment parler d'elle sans la trahir ? De ce livre foisonnant, je ne veux évoquer que deux thèmes.
D'abord, l'articulation de la pensée grecque avec le christianisme. Grande lectrice et profonde connaisseuse de Platon, commentatrice du «Timée», Simone Weil, sans faire de lui un chrétien qui s'ignore, souligne ce qui dans le platonisme constitue, selon le titre de son éditeur, le père Perrin, des «intuitions pré-chrétiennes». Ce voyage à travers Platon n'était que le fragment d'une grande enquête projetée sur d'autres similitudes avec le bouddhisme, le taoïsme et la religion de l'Egypte ancienne. En privilégiant ce type de filiation, Simone Weil s'inscrit en faux contre la liaison univoque Ancien-Nouveau Testament, autrement dit contre le «judéo-christianisme». Car elle ne parvient pas à concevoir que le Dieu de l'Ancien ait quelque chose à voir avec celui du Nouveau. Moi non plus d'ailleurs.
L'autre grand thème platonicien qui se dégage de l'oeuvre est celui du «gros animal», celui-là même que Platon décrit au livre VI de «la République». Entendez par là la société, ou plus précisément l'opinion publique. C'est à lui que les sophistes et les politiciens font une cour assidue et exclusive : «Ce qui fait plaisir à l'animal, ils le nomment bon, ce qui répugne à l'animal, ils le nomment mauvais, et il n'y a pas d'autre critère.» Qr les opinions du gros animal se forment sans aucun rapport avec le vrai. Et l'éducation ne fait que reproduire les opinions et les préjugés du gros animal.
A rapprocher de l'impitoyable «Note sur la suppression générale des partis politiques» (2), admirée par André Breton, où Simone Weil montre que les partis sont conçus exclusivement pour exercer une pression sur la pensée de chaque être humain et pour fabriquer artificiellement de la passion collective. Quand l'esprit de la démocratie se métamorphose ainsi en pure et simple adoration du gros animal, alors la pesanteur l'emporte sur la grâce et la tyrannie n est plus très loin.

(1)«Ecrits de Marseille, 1941-1942 Grèce, Inde, Occitanie», oeuvres complètes, tome IV, vol. 2, Gallimard.
(2) Flammarion, coll. "Climats", 2006.


Jacques Julliard
Le Nouvel Observateur

Ainadamar

Another day, another word...


Federico García Lorca(5 June 1898 – 19 August 1936)

"Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears"
Jeremiah 9:1





The Sound of Wounded Freedom

by Desirée Mays
Ainadamar celebrates the lives of three extraordinary Spanish patriots: Mariana Pineda, a young woman who died for the cause of freedom and for her lover, Pedro de Sotomayer; the Catalan actress Margarita Xirgu, who went into self-exile at the death of Federico García Lorca and who kept his dreams and work alive in South America; and the iconic Lorca himself, one of Spain’s greatest poets and playwrights, who fell victim to the Fascists at the start of the Spanish Civil War. The opera Ainadamar tightly weaves the stories of these three people together, focusing on Xirgu as she stands in the wings of a Montevideo theatre in 1969 waiting to play, one last time, the role she had played for 42 years: that of Mariana Pineda, a role Lorca wrote for her. Lorca grew up in Granada with his family in a house that bordered the square where Mariana Pineda’s statue stood. The boy Lorca was fascinated by her story, by her courage and sacrifice, her fight for freedom and love of her cousin. Mariana Pineda personified his own youth and passion in terms of his need for love and longing for liberty. Lorca never found true freedom in love because of his homosexuality, which always had to be hidden. He little knew at the time that in writing of the death of Mariana he would be describing his own death at the hands of a cruel régime. In telling Mariana’s story, Lorca gave voice to the fatalism of the Spanish psyche.
Margarita Xirgu, a leading actress with her own company in Madrid in the years before Franco, first produced Mariana Pineda, taking some risk because the play discussed the ideological values of artists, a banned subject at the time, but the play was a major success and Xirgu became a social icon and a powerful symbol of democratic aspirations.

Lorca and Xirgu shared an intense love of theatre in their belief that theatre has a role to play in a nation’s social and political life. They toured Spain, Cuba, and South America in the 1920s and early ’30s. The last year of Lorca’s life, 1936, the political climate of Spain became increasingly threatening. Xirgu begged him to go with her company to South America but Lorca refused, saying in lines from the libretto: “I want to sing amidst the explosions. I want to sing an immense song. Spain is a bull burning alive, a river of mourning, a people draped in a black veil. I will stay here with my singing and my weeping.”

Lorca returned to his family in Granada that summer; the city fell to the fascist Falangists under General Franco on July 18. A month later, they came for Lorca. They imprisoned him at the government headquarters accusing him for his Leftist views, for being a subversive writer, a homosexual, and a communist (unjustifiably). On August 18 he, a lame school teacher and two bullfighters were taken to the village of Viznar, north of Granada, and shot. They fell near La Fuente de Ainadamar, the Fountain of Ainadamar or Fountain of Tears so named by the Moors who ruled the region in the 11th century. The bodies were buried in a mass grave at the site. Lorca had uncannily predicted his own death in the lines of his play Mariana Pineda: “By the edge of the fountain, when no-one was watching, my hope came to nothing.” Lorca was 38 years of age and one of the first to be executed in the Spanish Civil War.

Margarita Xirgu, on tour in South America at his death, kept the flame of Lorca’s life and work alive until her own death at age 81 in 1969. The opera, Ainadamar, tells Lorca’s story from Xirgu’s point of view. We stand with her in the wings as she waits to go on, one last time, to play Mariana Pineda. Her favorite student Nuria stands by her side as Xirgu’s tortured memories of the past pour out.

Osvaldo Golijov, a leading composer of our time, comes to opera with a rich background of many cultural influences: of Russia and Romania from his Jewish grandparents; of the tangos and rumbas of Argentina, the land of his birth; of Gypsy and flamenco rhythms, all of which can be heard in his many compositions. His fascination with Lorca began in childhood; he loved Lorca’s sensuality, his rhythm, his immensity as an artist. “Lorca died so young,” Golijov explained: “He was much more than I was able to capture. There were so many sides to him. Ainadamar presents only one Lorca: the lyrical, the pure child, joyous but with sudden premonitions of death, a gift to humankind. Fate made a myth of Lorca. I always envisioned the opera as a floating pomegranate, bleeding melodies that are Arab, Christian, and Jewish, the three civilizations that once co-existed in Spain. Lorca said that the greatest error in Spanish history was the expulsion of the Jews and the Muslims. For saying that, he paid with his life. As to the drama, the opera is, on my part, an attempt to distill a dark lyricism. All folk art forces us to eliminate props and needless pedantry, to reduce ourselves to essentials: pure line and rhythm. Lorca learned that from the Gypsies of Granada and I learned it from him. Lorca all his life was plagued by a deep, inner sadness and could be chronically depressed, but according to people who knew him, he was also a joyous presence, charismatic, with a resonant laugh and gleaming eyes.”

The librettist with whom Golijov collaborated is David Henry Hwang, best known for his play M. Butterfly. They worked closely together, Hwang writing in English that Golijov translated into Spanish, the language of the score. Golijov said of Hwang: “I am in awe of his imagination, his power to synthesize, his “musical” mind—he thinks his developments in counterpoint. The trajectories of all his characters are always kept in motion and converge beautifully at climactic points—as Bach’s lines do.”

The score is supplemented with pre-recorded sounds such as water dripping from Ainadamar’s springs; furious galloping patterns suggest violent hoofbeats that haunted the poet in his nightmares; gunshots point to the magnitude and injustice of Lorca’s execution, gunshots that are miraculously transformed to the rhythms of flamenco. There is even a section from a real clip of the Falange radio of the 1930s inciting the people to rise. Offsetting the rhythms of Spain, Golijov interjects exquisite passages of lyrical trios for the three women: Xirgu (Dawn Upshaw), Lorca (Kelley O’Connor), and Nuria (Jessica Rivera), in near-Straussian moments of heartfelt tenderness.

Golijov’s exciting opera is perhaps best described in Lorca’s own definition of Cante Hondo (Deep Song): “The melody begins, an undulant, endless melody. It loses itself horizontally, escapes from our hands as we see it withdraw from us toward a point of common longing and perfect passion.”

Desirée Mays is an international speaker on opera, the resident lecturer for The Santa Fe Opera, and author of the Opera Unveiled series.

Athena

Os politicos gregos aldrabaram as contas públicas para que o país pudesse entrar no Euro. Mantiveram o embuste para ganhar eleições e mascarar a corrupção que os enriquecia.
A Grécia, ou seja todos os gregos, vai passar anos de aperto para reganhar a confiança internacional e reequilibrar as contas nacionais. Onde andavam as agências internacionais enquanto isto acontecia ?
Nesses anos, decerto as agências de rating, continuaram a classificar a divida grega, ou não ?

É muito estranho o planeta da finança.

Facts

Found this letter to the editor on The Economist special Christmas edition - I think it's worth reading...

Facts to digest at Christmas
SIR – One important aspect that was omitted in your leader on food security is that food availability can be significantly increased, at minimal cost, by simply reducing agricultural waste (“How to feed the world”, November 21st). As an engineer, I regularly travel to sort out post-harvest problems and I am convinced that there is little benefit to be gained from merely increasing farm production without making considerable improvements to post-harvest systems and facilities.

The majority of grain and vegetable stores in east Europe date back to the 1930s, in design if not in construction, and they are truly and hopelessly insufficient, amounting to losses of some 15m-25m tonnes of grain annually. India loses 40m tonnes of fruits and vegetables as well as 21m tonnes of wheat a year because of inadequate storage and distribution. To put that in perspective, India’s wheat wastage each year is almost equal to Australia’s entire production of wheat.

In South-East Asia 37% of rice is lost between field and table; in China the figure is up to 45% and in Vietnam it can be as high as 80%. This loss of 150m tonnes of rice each year represents a waste of resources on a truly massive and unsustainable scale.

In America and Britain the buying habits of the big supermarkets actually encourage waste. They impose draconian penalties on suppliers for failing to deliver agreed quantities of fresh fruits and vegetables during the year, which force farmers to grow a much bigger crop than they need as a form of insurance against poor weather and other factors that may reduce their yield.

Even worse, 30% of what is harvested never reaches the supermarket shelf owing to trimming, quality selection, etc. Of the food that does reach the supermarket, up to half is thrown away by the consumer.

David Williams
Warwick, Warwickshire

(Obrigado, Sr. Williams)

Hope despair

Hope in a Prison of Despair, allegorical, pre-raphaelite painting by Evelyn De Morgan (30 August 1855-2 May 1919)

Belomor

I came across this word, in a french magazine article about a book on eating properly on stalinist USSR ("Le livre de la bonne et saine nourriture ” par Ljiljana Avirovic). The sound of the word attracted me, it sounds nice, rhymes with amor, splendour, all nice things...


Then I remembered this Alexander Rodchenko photo, I've seen in an exhibit in Barcelona - the question it arose about artists fate and atitudes during Stalin's regime...how your whole life hanged from the favors of the ditactor...
So I investigated a little further, what this nice word Belomor really meant.





The Belomor Canal gave the Soviet Union a shipping canal from the White Sea to the Baltic, at a cost of at least 11,000 lives and the use of the forced labor of over 100,000 political prisoners. Even though the canal is narrow, shallow, and seasonal, it is still in use, especially for the transport of oil. The contemporary pro-Soviet accounts of the building of the canal, and responses to those events, are also part of the story. Although the Soviets held out the labor camps as a means of "rehabilitation" this was, essentially, slavery.
Taken from here






“The Belomor Canal labor force numbered about 300,000 at its peak, not counting the almost equally large number who died of overwork, mistreatment, undernourishment, or camp-induced disease, and were replaced as fast as they fell. The death rate was 700 per day; but new prisoners came in to the camps in the Belomor Canal area at the rate of 1,500 per day. Average survival time was two years… D.P. Vitkovsky, a Solovetsky prisoner himself who was a work supervisor on the canal, describes with calm and deadly precision the working conditions and their results, even for those who were not labor camp inmates:

‘At the end of the workday there were corpses left on the work site. The snow powdered their faces. One of them was hunched over beneath an overturned wheelbarrow; he had hidden his hands in his sleeves and frozen to death in that position. Someone had frozen with his head bent down between his knees. Two were frozen back to back leaning against each other. They were peasant lads and the best workers one could possibly imagine. They were sent to the canal in tens of thousands at a time, and the authorities tried to work things out so no one got to the same subcamp as his father; they tried to break up families. And right off they gave them norms of shingle and boulders that you’d be unable to fulfill even in summer. No one was able to teach them anything, to warn them; and in their village simplicity they gave all their strength to their work and weakened very swiftly and froze to death, embracing in pairs. At night the sledges went out and collected them. The drivers threw the corpses onto the sledges with a dull clonk.

And in the summer bones remained from corpses which had not been removed in time, and together with the shingle they got into the concrete mixer.” (Warren H. Carroll, The Rise and Fall of the Communist Revolution, pp. 248-249)

Simple

Alberto Caeiro, do Guardador de rebanhos

V - Há Metafísica Bastante em Não Pensar em Nada

Há metafísica bastante em não pensar em nada.

O que penso eu do mundo?
Sei lá o que penso do mundo!
Se eu adoecesse pensaria nisso.

Que idéia tenho eu das cousas?
Que opinião tenho sobre as causas e os efeitos?
Que tenho eu meditado sobre Deus e a alma
E sobre a criação do Mundo?

Não sei. Para mim pensar nisso é fechar os olhos
E não pensar. É correr as cortinas
Da minha janela (mas ela não tem cortinas).

O mistério das cousas? Sei lá o que é mistério!
O único mistério é haver quem pense no mistério.
Quem está ao sol e fecha os olhos,
Começa a não saber o que é o sol
E a pensar muitas cousas cheias de calor.
Mas abre os olhos e vê o sol,
E já não pode pensar em nada,
Porque a luz do sol vale mais que os pensamentos
De todos os filósofos e de todos os poetas.
A luz do sol não sabe o que faz
E por isso não erra e é comum e boa.

Metafísica? Que metafísica têm aquelas árvores?
A de serem verdes e copadas e de terem ramos
E a de dar fruto na sua hora, o que não nos faz pensar,
A nós, que não sabemos dar por elas.
Mas que melhor metafísica que a delas,
Que é a de não saber para que vivem
Nem saber que o não sabem?

"Constituição íntima das cousas"...
"Sentido íntimo do Universo"...
Tudo isto é falso, tudo isto não quer dizer nada.
É incrível que se possa pensar em cousas dessas.
É como pensar em razões e fins
Quando o começo da manhã está raiando, e pelos lados das árvores
Um vago ouro lustroso vai perdendo a escuridão.

Pensar no sentido íntimo das cousas
É acrescentado, como pensar na saúde
Ou levar um copo à água das fontes.

O único sentido íntimo das cousas
É elas não terem sentido íntimo nenhum.
Não acredito em Deus porque nunca o vi.
Se ele quisesse que eu acreditasse nele,
Sem dúvida que viria falar comigo
E entraria pela minha porta dentro
Dizendo-me, Aqui estou!

(Isto é talvez ridículo aos ouvidos
De quem, por não saber o que é olhar para as cousas,
Não compreende quem fala delas
Com o modo de falar que reparar para elas ensina.)

Mas se Deus é as flores e as árvores
E os montes e sol e o luar,
Então acredito nele,
Então acredito nele a toda a hora,
E a minha vida é toda uma oração e uma missa,
E uma comunhão com os olhos e pelos ouvidos.

Mas se Deus é as árvores e as flores
E os montes e o luar e o sol,
Para que lhe chamo eu Deus?
Chamo-lhe flores e árvores e montes e sol e luar;
Porque, se ele se fez, para eu o ver,
Sol e luar e flores e árvores e montes,
Se ele me aparece como sendo árvores e montes
E luar e sol e flores,
É que ele quer que eu o conheça
Como árvores e montes e flores e luar e sol.

E por isso eu obedeço-lhe,
(Que mais sei eu de Deus que Deus de si próprio?).
Obedeço-lhe a viver, espontaneamente,
Como quem abre os olhos e vê,
E chamo-lhe luar e sol e flores e árvores e montes,
E amo-o sem pensar nele,
E penso-o vendo e ouvindo,
E ando com ele a toda a hora.

Grand hiver

Cuno Amiet (1868-1961)
Paysage de neige, dit aussi Grand hiver
1904
Huile sur toile
H. 178 ; L. 235 cm
Paris, musée d'Orsay

A natureza é sempre grande quando assumimos a nossa verdadeira dimensão. Os nossos artefactos tornam-nos maiores do que somos, projectam-nos para longe e para fora.
Voltemos a nós.

Nature is always very big when we assume our true dimenson. Our artifacts make us bigger than we are, project us far and away.
Let's get back to us.

deus menino

Caravaggio's Madonna dei Palafrenieri, first exhibited in Saint Peter's Basilica in 1606.

Gosto de uma religião que adora um deus menino.
Um deus que nem se deu ao trabalho de chegar a velho e ostentar as expectáveis barbas brancas, um deus que preferiu morrer novo, entre criminosos.
Gosto de um deus que prega o Amor, que anuncia o divino que existe em todos nós. Um deus assim só pode servir para a Paz, para a Harmonia.
Ele esteve no meio de nós e foi como nós, acho que a mensagem é que todos podemos ser como ele.

I like this religion who worships a god child.
A god who didn’t even care to grow old, to show off the expectable white beards, a god who chose to die young in the company of criminals.
I like a god who teaches Love, a god that announces the divine that exists in everyone. This god serves Peace and Harmony.
He was among us, he was one of us, I think the message is that we all can be like him.



(Some people have other opinions and you can read them here)

Lillywhite lillith

A new year is coming and we're still out of paradise...

Vem aí um novo ano e continuamos longe do paraíso...

Disputa

Let us have diferent opinions...

an idea (tango)

I was stuck, stuck in an idea, not a good one -
I think . It seemed alright when it first arose
In my head.
For a moment it shined,
shined like a shooting star does,
I tried to follow the trajectory of its fall,
through the darks of my mind.

Now that it is dropped I don’t know anymore
What attracted me to it, it was just an idea,
A shooting star, something I didn’t manage
To grasp. I’m now getting unstuck.
Unwound.

Lisboa