Bookstores don't provide
a remote control for Proust,
you can't switch
to a soccer match,
or a quiz show, win a Cadillac.
We live longer
but less precisely
and in shorter sentences.
We travel faster, farther, more often,
but bring back slides instead of memories.
Here I am with some guy.
There I guess that's my ex.
Here's everyone naked
so this must be a beach.
Seven volumes - mercy.
Couldn't it be cut or summarized,
or better yet put into pictures.
There was that series called "The Doll,"
but my sister-in-law says that's some other P.
And by the way, who was he anyway.
They say he wrote in bed for years on end.
Page after page
at a snail's pace.
But we're still going in fifth gear
and, knock on wood, never better.
- Wisława Szymborska, from 'Here' (2009).
Her Nobel Lecture (1996) also makes for an interesting read, a plea for a "questing" outlook on life.
Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."
The most cinematically rewarding film seen so far at the International Film Festival Rotterdam is the Tiger nominated 'Sudoeste' ('Southwest'), directed by Eduardo Nunes. Shot in extreme widescreen (cinemascope) and gorgeous black and white, this poetic and magical-realist film from Brazil might be imagined as Andrei Tarkovsky filming a story by Gabriel García Márquez.
A fairytale for grownups, 'Sudoeste' takes place in a sleepy, tropical village on the shores of an inland sea, where salt is the local industry. Its slow-moving story revolves around a young girl, Clarice, who in the course of one day grows into a woman, grows old and dies. She spends time with a family who have lost a daughter, also named Clarice, and there are hints that what we are witnessing is history repeating itself.
Further interpreting the enigmatic and dreamlike narrative, there appears to be a dark and horrific secret at the heart of this film. But this is wisely left implicit - something to be felt rather than spelled out - and draped in the beautifully composed cinematography and sound design. For instance, the scene when the little girl dozes off in the midday heat, with the local band's hypnotic rhythm playing in the background, and wakes up a woman is a stunning piece of filmmaking.
In a Q&A after the screening on Wednesday, Nunes explained how the initial idea for his film was to have two different paces of time coexist in one story. This became Clarice's time and the 'normal' time of the village. "Or actually," he added, "there are three forms of time. The third is the projection time."
Indeed, the film repeatedly draws attention to itself as a sensual object, made of sight and sound as well as vividly evoking the textures and smells of its magical world. In another scene, Clarice is heard in voice-over saying, "Close your eyes. Listen to the sound of rain." As the screen turns dark to let the audience experience the sound of the first drops of a tropical downpour, one of the most memorable moments of this film is made purely of sound.
'Sudoeste' might well win a Tiger Award later this week. If you have a chance, see this widescreen gem in the cinema. As the director commented in a Daily Tiger interview, "It's so difficult to show it on DVD. I joke that when you show it on a laptop you have to use two and put them together to watch the film!"
Update: If you're wondering about the title, 'Southwest', this in-depth review (mind the spoilers) offers an interesting interpretation:
Brazil, as a country, is generally divided into five regions: the North, the Northeast, the Central-West, the Southeast, and the South. So when director Eduardo Nunes names his first feature Southwest, it must be assumed that we are entering a place more of the imagination than of representation.
I'd like the reading of this book to leave you with the impression that you've traversed a sensual nightmare.
One of the great masterpieces of modernist literature, Fernando Pessoa's 'The Book of Disquiet' ('Livro do Desassossego') is impossible to read in its entirety. Not because of the book's incomplete state (the manuscript was found posthumously in Pessoa's famous literary trunk, unfinished, on loose leaves stuffed in an envelope), but because its fragmentary and dreamlike nature prevent the reader from ever surveying it as a whole.
This is the kind of reasoning that Pessoa, or rather his heteronym Bernardo Soares, revels in - a labyrinthine introspection reminiscent of Borges, always shifting between metalevels of his argument and delighting in paradoxes, oxymorons and non-sequiturs.
Worked on throughout Pessoa's adult life, the book has no beginning or end, its narrator has no past or future, there is only an eternal mazelike present made of thoughts, scenes, aphorisms, literary theory and metaphysical irony. As in a dream, there is only a very tenuous, haphazard link between one fragment and the next, nor is there any way of turning back - the book is truly nonlinear, almost random, and easy to get lost in.
This is my morality, or metaphysics, or me: passer-by of everything, even of my own soul, I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing - just an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a fallen sentient mirror reflecting the world's diversity. I don't know if I'm happy this way. Nor do I care.
As with most of Pessoa's work, 'The Book of Disquiet' is ostensibly written by a heteronym. In this case Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in Lisbon, was described by Pessoa as a semi-heteronym, "because his personality, although my own, doesn't differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it". The book contains a preface by Pessoa describing how he met Soares in a Lisbon restaurant and ended up receiving the manuscript from him, subtitled 'A Factless Autobiography'. In reality, the book wasn't published in Portuguese until 1982, and in English in 1991 - over half a century after Pessoa's death. Needless to say there is no such thing as a definitive edition. (The quotes here are from the translation/edition by Richard Zenith.)
In an Observer review, George Steiner also wondered how to characterize this strange and unique book:
What is this Livro do Desassossego? Neither 'commonplace book', nor 'sketchbook', nor 'florilegium' will do. Imagine a fusion of Coleridge's notebooks and marginalia, of Valery's philosophic diary and of Robert Musil's voluminous journal. Yet even such a hybrid does not correspond to the singularity of Pessoa's chronicle.
Without aspirations or illusions, living and working in Lisbon's Rua dos Douradores, Bernardo Soares treats life as "fundamentally a mental state" and prefers to live in his dreams - or rather to "interexist" in that half-conscious state where dreams are real and the world is strange. Thus he escapes from the tedium of existence, formulating a philosophy of inaction and of failure - a theme Samuel Beckett would develop further (though without the possibility of dreaming).
Taking nothing seriously and recognizing our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge there, exploring them like large unknown countries. And if we apply ourselves diligently not only to aesthetic contemplation but also to the expression of its methods and results, it's because the poetry or prose we write - devoid of any desire to move anyone's will or to mould anyone's understanding - is merely like when a reader reads out loud to fully objectify the subjective pleasure of reading.
A quintessentially modernist work, 'The Book of Disquiet' is a kind of exploded novel - plotless and fragmentary, and with a narrator who realizes his own incoherence. As such it contains fascinating insights into Pessoa's obsession with his literary personas. (Apart from his most famous ones, Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis, he reportedly used dozens of other alter egos.) Soares writes:
I've created various personalities within. I constantly create personalities. Each of my dreams, as soon as I start dreaming it, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then the one dreaming it, and not I.
To create, I've destroyed myself. I've so externalized myself on the inside that I don't exist there except externally. I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.
Here Soares' melancholy escapism threatens to turn into nihilism, the modernist narrator almost disappearing in his various personas. Usually Soares will solve this by just switching to a different dream level, from where he can watch the stage of his own self like a spectator. On another level, by making himself an unflinchingly self-aware literary character, Soares really has found the perfect escape from his tedious life. With Pessoa, fiction became an endlessly layered and kaleidoscopic concept.
To be sure, with its heady style and plotless philosophizing, 'The Book of Disquiet' is best read in moderation. But this doesn't mean it's all literary abstraction. Pessoa has a wry and self-mocking humor, as when he describes the soul as a dark well full of "subjective snot". And once in a while he'll throw in a perfect aphorism:
Reductio ad absurdum is one of my favourite drinks.
Here's one more excerpt from this infinitely quotable book, a short vignette (fragment 101) showing a hint of moody romanticism in Soares. (Or is "we" just him and his various personalities?)
If our life were an eternal standing by the window, if we could remain there forever, like hovering smoke, with the same moment of twilight forever paining the curve of the hills... If we could remain that way for beyond for ever! If at least on this side of the impossible we could thus continue, without committing an action, without our pallid lips sinning another word!
Look how it's getting dark!... The positive quietude of everything fills me with rage, with something that's a bitterness in the air I breathe. My soul aches... A slow wisp of smoke rises and dissipates in the distance... A restless tedium makes me think no more of you...
All so superfluous! We and the world and the mystery of both.
See also the Site of Disquietude, an interesting experiment to turn 'The Book of Disquiet' into a hypertextual, audiovisual experience.
Cabo de São Vicente is the very south-western tip of Portugal (and Europe), and the cliff of the Promontorium Sacrum, as the Romans called it, was the last land the Portuguese Navigators saw before setting course for the open Atlantic in the 15th century - an amazing leap of faith which they may well have expected to be a one-way journey.
The cape takes its name from Saint Vincent of Saragossa, patron saint of both sailors and of Lisbon. Legend has it that the martyred saint's body was buried on the cape, and his grave was guarded by ravens. His remains were later relocated to Lisbon, again accompanied by ravens. This scene is depicted on Lisbon's coat of arms. (Of course there are other, parallel stories. He is also venerated in Valencia, for instance.)
St. Vincent's memorial day, by the way, is next week: 22 January.
LEAR: Ptydepe, as you know, is a synthetic language, built on a strictly scientific basis. Its grammar is constructed with maximum rationality, its vocabulary is unsually broad. It is a thoroughly exact language, capable of expressing with far greater precision than any current natural tongue all the minutest nuances in the fomulation of important office documents. The result of this precision is of course the exceptional complexity and difficulty of Ptydepe.
(...)
And now, let us turn briefly to some of the basic principles of Ptydepe. The natural languages originated, as we know, spontaneously, uncontrollably, in other words, unscientifically, and their structure is thus, in a certain sense, dilettantish. As far as official communications are concerned, the most serious deficiency of the natural languages is their utter unreliability, which results from the fact that their basic structural units - words - are highly equivocal and interchangeable.
(...)
The significant aim of Ptydepe is to guarantee to every statement, by purposefully limiting all similarities between individual words, a degree of precision, reliability and lack of equivocation, quite unattainable in any natural language. To achieve this, Ptydepe makes use of the following postulation: if similarities between any two words [are] to be minimized, the words must be formed by the least probable combination of letters. This means that the creation of words must be based on such principles as would lead to the greatest possible redundancy of language.
(...)
How does, in fact, Ptydepe achieve its high redundancy? By a consistent use of the so-called principle of a sixty per cent dissimilarity; which means that any Ptydepe words must differ by at least sixty per cent of its letters from any other Ptydepe word of the same length. (...) Thus, for example, out of all the possible five-letter combinations of the 26 letters of our alphabet - and these are 11,881,376 - only 432 combinations can be found which differ from each other by three letters, i.e., by sixty per cent of the total. From these 432 combinations only 17 fulfill the other requirements as well and thus have become Ptydepe words. Hence it is clear that in Ptydepe there often occur words which are very long indeed.
(...)
But at the same time the length of a word - as indeed everything in Ptydepe - is not left to chance. You see, the vocabulary of Ptydepe is built according to an entirely logical principle: the more common the meaning, the shorter the word. Thus, for example, the most commonly used term so far known - that is the word "whatever" - is rendered in Ptydepe by the word "gh". As you can see, it is a word consisting of only two letters. There exists, however, an even shorter word - that is "f" - but this word does not yet carry any meaning. I wonder if any of you can tell me why. Well?
(Only THUMB raises his hand.)
LEAR: Well, Mr. Thumb?
THUMB (gets up): It's being held in reserve in case science should discover a term even more commonly used than the term "whatever."
LEAR: Correct, Mr. Thumb. You get an A.
- Václav Havel, from his play 'The Memorandum' (1966).
In Havel's bureaucratic hell, Franz Kafka meets Stefan Themerson when a new language is introduced which nobody understands but all except the main character, Gross, seem to support. Gross makes a humanist stand but is too much of an intellectual doubter to hold out. However, as Ptydepe is used, it starts to assume the "emotional overtones" and ambiguities of a natural language, and the bureaucrats soon realize that this will defeat its purpose. By that point we've been treated to some hilarious scenes, including a discussion of the different complicated ways to say "boo" in Ptydepe.
At the end of the play a new and better synthetic language is introduced, called Chorukor, which is based on an opposite principle: "the more similar the words, the closer their meaning; so that a possible error in the text represents only a slight deviation from its sense." (Ponder the ramifications of that one!)
Of course 'The Memorandum' must be seen in the context of the Communist turmoil in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s. But its insight in the use of language in the dehumanization of bureaucracies - and by the same token, the essential force of language in any humanist project - is just as valid today.
Tom Stoppard characterized the bureaucracy depicted in 'The Memorandum' as "absurdities pushed to absurdity compounded by absurdity and yet saved from mere nonsense by their internal logic." It's not hard to find contemporary examples of such language-aided absurdities...
Update: UbuWeb has the BBC radio play of 'The Memorandum'.
They seem to be rare these days, Loesje posters in the wild. This one, spotted in Rotterdam, is an archetypical example of her linguistic wit and anti-authoritarian satire, which in this case nicely self-mocks the recalcitrant Dutch as well: "De wet - Ik laat me liever een gedicht voorschrijven." ("The law - I'd rather be prescribed a poem.")
Spotted in Amsterdam, one of the saner responses to the financial crisis... "Geld bestaat niet" ("Money doesn't exist").
Found via 'Insitu', one of sculpture artist Isaac Cordal's 'Cement Eclipses', described as "small interventions in the big city". This one is titled 'Climate Change Expedition' (2010). See more of his London work.
