Rafael Alonso — Sair do próprio caminho e deixar o mundo entrar
1. Fragments for Rafael
to take care of time, this will take some time.
how to rid oneself of one's own desire if it is a repetitive animal?
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dry the socks, grind the coffee beans, water the sink, cut the nails, take out the bags, wash the feet, the dirt of the mind, the president. today's daylight in some country. here. those who wanted me, those who didn't, the head spinning, turn on the shower, let it run, the fantasies, dry the socks
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why aren't the existing square meters enough?
outstretched arms, long strides,
how to look at the clock
at the same numbers and think of nothing
how to withdraw from the idea of luck
how to withdraw from all ideas
how to simply hover
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my god, so many identities and not a single one
where do you want to go
a person is a Russian doll
crying comes in waves
hablas español?
draw a beautiful bull with a red cape
be a beautiful bull
run toward what I want
knock down everything in my path
say trajectory instead of path
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I examine a floor plan and say with certainty, pointing at the paper, we should go that way. that is definitely the best route.
like the captains of old, only here in the living room.
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yesterday I dreamed of a plant that no longer fit in its pot.
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something is expected to turn to dust. the gates of houses, the balconies, the buildings, the bakeries, the glass, something will turn to dust.
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there was no boredom in the Stone Age, nor in the Bronze Age. that concept only came after the invention of electricity, the city, the locomotive. before that, everything was slow. nature was an image out of focus, everything peripheral and simultaneous. there is no object, not even the concept of attention. it is more like a kind of synchronicity. man's own finger is part of the landscape, and as landscape, it does not think.
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I walk around the house picking up fragments of tasks, accumulated things left undone. I talk to ghosts. there is a book by Ali Smith called Artful, in which she talks to her dead husband while wandering through the apartment, finding relics, memories, wreckage. she is saddened to realize that her 60-inch television outlived the man she loved.
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I feel like examining the fossil, but my mind is slow, as though some heavy slime were preventing me from typing one letter after another. my head begs the heavens to let me see even a hand's breadth ahead, whatever the heavens might choose to reveal. the sky reveals light and shadow, things that fly and walk, things that shine. things that blow in the wind. the sky is never still.
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I even feel like writing: the water is wet, the bottle is sweating a few drops of wet water. I feel like writing as someone making an observational drawing, feeling their way in the dark toward the best way to describe a bottle, actually, in the light. there are no secrets between the bottle and me, there is the mystery of the thousand choices I can make to describe it.
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he gazed at the last light of day coming through the window with a reflective air, as though he were absent and only his flesh occupied his place in the house, which really did feel square. trapped in the tableaux of the days. in their poses. I think there were four main positions for having sex or positioning oneself in the living room. perhaps there were more than four.
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I hadn't realized that the capsule that landed on Mars is called Perseverance.
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I look out the window and
other people's houses look like museums without emergency exits
a permanent exhibition of things, some you no longer want
an old melody plays in the background
was it Chopin? it was Nocturne
now I know the name of a classical piece or two
moonlight sonata pathetique noturne
someone told me about a social network exclusively for classical music and my armpit hair has grown enormous
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If there is any substitute for love, that substitute is memory. Too bad I've forgotten who said that.
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today it's the tip of my left finger that's cut.
I jot down goals for the year: abandon the deserts.
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I try to escape what I ought to encounter, but I am still missing a word to set today in motion, a day that seems just like all the others. there is already construction work outside, the plants are photosynthesizing, the day began clear and sunny and now it is gray. autumn is coming.
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Simone Weil gave her notebooks to a priest and asked him to give them shape, to turn them into something.
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I write, lost like a bottle in the ocean carrying a message no one has read.
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I was prodded all night long by the idea of writing. I recall from memory: write about air. and an image of air taking some kind of shape in my head.
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my diary is not entirely faithful to events.
2. More Fragments for Rafael
I drink my cold coffee and accept the imperfection of my days. The life I carve like an impatient artist, eager to see some shape emerge.
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Before, it was like this: nothing, and then came the swallows, the fables and farces and everything in between. Before before, there was the tiniest bit of nothing, until little seagulls flew across the shadowy courtyard like fossils of light.
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I see the green of the shimmering trees through the window frame. It reminds me of a film by the Lumière brothers. The vibration of the leaves in the slow wind. The breathing of the trees captured in a fixed frame.
Even though the film is in black and white, the harsh sunlight on the plants seems more real than reality itself.
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I stare at the collection of useless objects, some chosen, others that found their way (mysteriously) here.
I continue my serious observation, or whatever it is that starts the engine. Everything seems disorganized, but it isn't.
They are figures, bodies that, one way or another, manage to maintain their balance.
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A collector claimed that his collections were attempts to control life. But he hadn't considered that it is the objects that propose the game.
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Walter Benjamin wrote that the collector removes an object from its function.
Collecting is an exercise in eliminating practical categories. Diverting the object from its intended path.
Like a way of narrating oneself and reconfiguring a past that is now unknown.
Collected objects become a constellation.
He also said that collecting is a way of saving something from disappearance.
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How much of the artist's work consists simply of getting out of one's own way and letting the world in.
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I leaf through the dictionary of symbols. I stop at the garden:
The garden is the symbol of earthly paradise.
There are many things we do not know, but we do know that Adam cultivated the garden.
It has been said of the gardens of ancient Rome that they were reminders of a lost paradise.
Gardens are images and summaries of the world.
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The street continues, crooked and funny as a pea. The cold has dried out some trees and turned others yellow, but where I live there is always the guarantee of a few magnificent, vibrant plants that endure. These trees draw my eyes outward and make me believe in something. In what?
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Etymologies
The crown, the upper, spreading part of a tree. Derived from the Latin cupa, meaning "cup or large vessel," because of the similarity in shape.
And at the tips and along the branches or boughs, we have the leaves, from the Latin folium, which was first used to designate a part of a plant and later also acquired the meaning of "a sheet of paper for writing."
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Thinking about the guy who told me there is no right or wrong way to live, only beautiful and ugly ways, and that we should therefore always choose the beautiful path.
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I am here. Watering the red earth, looking at the moon. I don't know what to do, or I tell myself I don't know what to do. I am afraid of sinking into the mire of oblivion, as though I myself could forget who I am. Going underground. I stay here to look, to remember what happened and to imagine what I do not know.
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To believe in the world is to bring events into being. To build the ground on which to set one's foot. I wasn't the one who said it, it was Deleuze.
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Better not pull away from the keyboard, better, above everything and nothing, not to pull away from the keyboard, from the notes and keys, from the years of the deaths of virgins victims otters and bedbugs better not neglect the hair the skin the back the torso of the horse.
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When we remain, things change state.
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I lament, I cry, and the mountain remains green and indifferent.
I fantasize, and fantasizing is my craft.
Luna Grimberg
