"Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport,
art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and
mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it."
Camille Paglia, “Alice in Muscle Land”
sexta-feira, fevereiro 27, 2004
Sunny Day
Went to the City, got a check; then bank; drugstore and home. A bright day outdoors and civilized 25ºC here in my room.
Lost my bank card; cancelled it, changed the password and commanded a new one without having to speak to any human being. Someway, I sometimes do prefer to deal with machines than with human beings. They don't ask questions, never embarrass us.
So, in my post-paranoid phase, I'm revealing to be clearly schizoid. To an averagely attentive reader I gave already full demonstrations of my obsessive-compulsive components. But -- the psychologist speaks -- the so called mental health is exactly this: the flexible and varied use of *many*, diversified defense mechanisms. It is when our stock of defenses get poor, when they get fixed, stereotyped, and don't fit anymore to changing situations that we are mentally ill.
So I sprach, in the end of a bright February day in Rio de Janeiro.
And finally, by convoluted ways, you gained your definitive place in my heart & mind: again just a friend, a precious one, about whom I'll always care . (I had foretold this, but *I* did not make it happen.)
You enjoy a steady position: my basic feeling for you does not depent on your response anymore.
I went to the dictionary to see what "poisonwood" could be. No. The image I have of you is not similar to that. It corresponds rather to a sunflower. Why? I don't know -- that was simply the plant that came to my mind when I turned my thoughts to the botanic realm looking for a similar to you.
(As a sunflower true to yourself, you turn away from my lunar, somber side.)
Yes. All in all, for me, if you were a plant, you'd be a flower -- a sunflower. You brought me more joy than sorrow. Much more. You helped me in a very difficult moment. After three years closed in this house, I suddenly saw myself in Paris. And life had taste.
As a friend, I feel perfectly safe by your side.
A regret: I should have learnt to cook a little bit with you. I'm ignorant as always. But I began to enjoy preparing myself marvelous salads. They look like watercolors. After half a century I discovered that beets don't need to be cooked. Now they go raw into my raw salad, and taste and look splendidly, in a magnificent contrast with the pale and dark green leaves. (Carrots, cucumbers, celeries, green apples, little bits of orange, and whatever else I happen to have at home can also contribute to add color to the mixture. Small bits of nuts can be spilt over the top of everything.)
The simple sauce I use: lemon (instead of vinegar), extra-virgin olive oil (good cholesterol), a little bit of mustard and salt. I vary the quantities, and mix everything very well before pouring the sauce on the brilliant raw things.
Golly, is it Tuesday already? I confess to being totally absorbed in my dream-world, and not attentive to what goes on under my nose. Here I sit in AMERICA, the LAND of OPPORTUNITY, and I have only myself to blame for my inability to share in its riches. All the same, the absence of useful work is driving me to distraction.
Don't smack yourself for being rude, if anything I am a touch of poisonwood in your life and you would be safe if only you didn't care. The obviousness of the fact that you do care is most touching, and I thank you for it.
As to the monitor, did you ever send me the login name? I've clicked the button and tried every combination of name and password that comes to mind, but I never have been able to get in.
My nervous frenzy continued on into today, even through a drive down to the library. What finally settled me down, oddly enough, was the preparation of dinner. Following a new recipe, I cooked up a stuffing of onions and prunes - spiced with rosemary and thyme and freshly grated orange rind - that was sewn into a pork loin and roasted. Somehow, that little effort left me at peace.
I see that your last post was done (or made?) on Saturday. Today is only Tuesday and I am already crying.
One possible excuse for me: I am working so, so much that ages seem to have gone by since Saturday.
____________________________
I'll tell you a secret. One that would shock many Brazilians: I do not love Clarice Lispector. She is enormously gifted, a born-writer. Some bits, in fact many excerpts or her prose (ficction or not) do please me. But, all in all, I don't like her. The more personal and true to herself she becomes, the less she pleases me. It is the woman herself who repels me. Her photos have the same effect. Her correspondences only confirm my feeling.
And now my work forces me to swallow her, the complete work, com casca e tudo.
Ser mulher, brasileira, e não gostar de Clarice Lispector -- aliás, não gostar de nenhuma escritora brasileira com que já tenha topado. Terei perdão?
Não gosto de Rachel de Queiroz.
Não gosto de Lígia Fagundes Telles.
Não gosto de quem mais, meu Deus? Os nomes delas nem me vêm à cabeça. Ah, sim, definitivamente não gosto de Nelida Piñon.
Nem de Marina Colasanti.
Gosto das Brontë; gosto imensamente de Jane Austen (embora não de tudo que escreveu); não me lembro de que mulheres mais me convencem como escritoras. Deve haver algumas.
Salva pelo gongo: há uma brasileirinha (morta há muito tempo) cuja escrita adoro. Pseudônimo: Helena Morley. Minha vida de menina é um dos livros de que mais gostei na vida, quando li menina. Continuo gostando agora. Tem boa tradução inglesa, da Elizabeth Bishop, que li, por curiosidade de tradutora.
I wonder... Since 20 february I've been talking about a "sitemeter" I did install and is visible in the bottom of this page (extreme left) and, as it seems, he does not read me. I don't believe he would see the little device and not show any curiosity. Mark is curious. Thanks God.
He can only gain access to the data the "sitemeter" can furnish if I give him, again, username and password.
I read "Let it Snow!" very carefully. I loved your considerations on the winter drawbacks, and, above all, paid close attention to the paragraph about a possible change.
To leave your cradle among the mountains to brave the wild opennesss somewhere does seem a promising shift. At least to me, who look to you from a remote sea level.
Luckily, we don't have a true Summer this year. The sky is never so aggressively blue as it uses to be in February. Temperatures keep in a civilized range. Rains are plentiful. Cloudy, soft days are frequent. A soft breeze is almost always blowing. It looks rather what we call Spring or Autumn here in the Tropics, which are almost the same, meaning nothing but a milder weather.
Sunday is not the day to go to the beach in Rio. It's generally too crowded, even the border of the sea can be crowded. But not today. The water was cold, but not too much -- just invigorating --, thought not as clean as I would like.
About me I had kindred children marveling on jellyfish: Pedro (with his nine months and big blue eyes), six-years old Manuela, two years old Igor. It was refreshing to be among them.
[And here I am seeing an intuition of mine confirmed: in letters (snail or e-mail), I don't like it very much when people wander instead of answering to my questions. But this space seems to be, by its own structure, a very peculiar one.
This seems to be a space for free communication, where even monologues are welcome. A space where we can wander if we feel like to, or to communicate very objectively, if we want.]
And to communicate very objectively now: Mark, did you see the little square at the extreme left bottom of this MusclePower? It's another free toy I contrived for us. Until now it tells me we're in utter privacy here, where we publish ourselves for the whole planet. We are as safe as naked people walking by some street in the center of London. Nobody gives us any look, any attention.
It seems we found the better possible hiding-place in any space, be it real or virtual. As if we were looking for a hiding-place. Were we?
If you want access to the little toy informations, tell me.
Sadly, the character of the snowpack this year in Massachusetts has been a major disappointment. It falls and melts and freezes again, leaving sheets of ice that I find unpleasant when showshoeing and treacherous when driving.
Why, just this afternoon I spent an hour and a half digging my car out of the snowbank on the downhill side of the driveway. dig and shift, dig and shift, get all hot and cold and sweaty, and even then I needed a tow from Dad's truck to pop the thing back onto the road. This kind of winter wonderland, I can do without.
Now that I have made contact with that employer in the west desert of Utah, I am considering a radical change in my life: pull up stakes and drive out to Salt Lake City. Perhaps I can hang out with Mike a bit, put my visiting professorship to use at the library and computer center, and keep my head above water with some temporary job in the big city. My life needs to change, desperately, but it's not going to happen while I have myself locked away here in my beloved mountains.
About the word that is not a word, "by indirections, directions may be found out".
Besides which, I enjoy the way I can taste a word on my tongue - before I remember exactly what the word might be. Memory is funny that way, intimately connected with the senses.
... a word fishing for what is not a word. When that non-word -- the whatever's between the line -- bites the bait, something has been writeen. Once the between the lines has been hooked, you can trhow the word away with relief.
CL
We can sleep in peace, minMark, I had a spy-watcher, or spy-counter, installed.
Until now I detected ONE uninvited visitor. But, to my relief, he spent exact 0 seconds in our page.
More relaxed now, just playing, my Antarctica opened.
I was perusing these archives and came to what I wrote about Mike (presumably Michael) Johnson and... muscles! A sudden laugh -- who our hypothetical reader would think I was talking about?
A Michael Johnson who asked too much from his muscles... have you already heard of some one who fits like a glove to this description? So, me, am I the Olympic athlete counselor?
This idea amuses me: to read us from the point of view of someone who ignores who we are and is trying to "decode" us through our writings. If you have patience enough, go to our first posts and come back, from the standpoint of a stranger. It can be really funny. In particular because, in this case, our hypothetical reader is much more a real possibility than when we exchanged e-mails, in spite of all your paranoia.
Hmmm... That was both a novel by Walker Percy and a song by the Police.
Why is it that ( some ) college experiences turn out to be so intensely memorable? I still have dreams, you know, where I find myself back at Harvard; usually, the scenery is quite devoid of people although quite often I am looking for someone.
( Looking for myself, I have to think, for I misplaced myself back then in a fit of absentmindedness and I haven't seen him since. ) Often - of course, for dreams of this sort are allegedly as common as dreams about losing teeth - I find myself sitting for an examination for which I have not studied. Hmmm... sometimes I even find myself back in high school, which usually ends in a shouting match of "I have a PhD, why should I waste my time in high school again?" Good question, that.
I'm back. I don't know how you will like to use this space of ours. For me, it will be also a journal -- I'll even write things I know you can't read, in a language you don't know (yet). See what I wrote earlier about the-letter-in-a-bottle.
But it is a wonderful kind of journal, in which you can intrude whenever you want, to say whatever you want. And in which I can address you directly, as I am doing now.
The space is ours. Everything is signed by MarkeMaria, a nonexistent entity. Only we know who we are, when Maria speaks, when Mark speaks, and what we are talking about. (Of course the much better quality of your English would betray you to an hypothetical attentive reader... But would him materialize some day?)
I think this blog won't evoke curiosity in Brazilians. We are in an American site, and writing maybe mainly in English. Here I am having the curious sensation of writing sometimes to myself in English. Though I intend to write lots of Portuguese too: reflections, copies (I love copies, you know), plans, comments.
When I write in Portuguese I am not addressing you. When I write in English I may be addressing you or not. You will find this out in a glimpse.
Look at your right. Now we have just one set of archives.
When you used a line-editor you could not "edit" the last line. Besides, till two days ago, we could never "edit" any e-mail, once it was sent. What we have now is a very new situation. This is formally public but probably private, and we can go back to any past message and change it as we fancy.
Aa Nej! What's up with this new look? You know how I fear change...
When will you stop to nurse your fears, Mark?
Do you remember the Hermenuetics debate from 1998? Back in those days I wrote letters from a line-editor-based SMTP program that came with my Silicon Graphics box; once was pressed, mistakes could be noticed but not corrected - which led to numerous apologies and some pretty odd-looking posts.
It is hemeneutics, min Mark!
I am finding my response to the blog format to be similar. It's a bit like our old email conversation, but somehow less intimate - even though I fully expect no one to read this page but us. Go figure! What would Niel Postman think, may he rest in peace...
By the by, I was thinking the other day about Dom Casimir - even I don't know why the memory of that book, among all others, came flooding out from the past.
A galinha é um grande sono. -- A galinha sofre de um mal desconhecido. O mal desconhecido da galinha é o ovo. -- Ela mesma não sabe explicar: "sei que o erro está em mim mesma", ela chama de erro a sua vida, "não sei mais o que sinto", etc.
"Etc., etc., etc," é o que cacareja o dia inteiro a galinha. A galinha tem muita vida interior. Para falar a verdade a galinha só tem mesmo é vida interior. A nossa visão de sua vida interior é que nós chamamos de "galinha".
[....]
Qualquer ameaça e ela grita em escândalo feito uma doida. tudo isso para que o ovo não se quebre dentro dela. . . ."
Clarice Lispector, "O ovo e a galinha" -- copiado caractere por caractere
1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that [it was] good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
I wonder what Mike Johnson would think if he knew that *I* contrived a blog called MusclePower. And if he knew that I use actually to spend many of my mornings in a gym, lifting weighs. For years I warned him about the enormous *danger* of these pursuits. Now, it is when I am at my machines, lifting weighs, that I feel safest. In this city where danger is everywhere, it certainly *is not*particularly at the gym, a small dose of good sense being kept.
MusclePower has plenty of methaphorical senses here. I hope to exploit them in due time. But for me it does have a very literal one too. Last year I found out that I have a good skeleton (no osteoporosis). The literal and the methaphorical meanings of this were very pleasant to me. If bipolarity is unavoidable, a good skeleton can be helpful. Now I want strong literal & methaphorical muscles. Again, the unavoidable bipolarity will be thahkful.
(Subtle, not conspicuous muscles, of course. I'm a Lady, not a Madonna.)
Body is psyche; psyche is body, in spite all Descartes may have said or implied. I'm reinventing the wheel, of course, since the ancient Romans used already to proclaim this common-place. Till now, I'm afraid, I just reinvented ideas. Never had a brand new one. (Hope never dies.)
And back I go to my last translation round of the day.
Ah, I don't expect anybody -- not even you, Mark -- to read all my
babble here! Why do I write? I don't know for sure.
(If it were *just* for me I would not be publishing my writing. Perhaps to write makes more sense for me when it is like a letter-in-a-bottle-thrown-at-the-sea.)
In time: Mark, of course we are not bound to display our language skills or to talk about languages. We can talk about everything, can't we? What about an exchange of ideas about your Bush and our José Dirceu? Do you know about Dirceu? It's a kind of Lula's Richelieu, or of a tropical Rasputin. Or a super-prime-minister in our presidentialist system.
This is just to open our scope. To tell you the truth, right now I don't feel like neither talking about José Dirceu nor listening about Bush. (To each one his/her cross... this is a Portuguese saying -- does it make any sense to you?)
I hope, though, that a large specter of subjects will be brought to these
Monteiro Lobato pergunta a Agripino Grieco:
-- Já leste minha última tradução?
Responde Agripino:
-- Ainda não. E tu, já a leste?
Pano rápido.
A história é triste porque Monteiro Lobato é desde sempre um meu ídolo, um meu amor, sobretudo, quase exclusivamente, por seus livros para crianças. Mas quando comecei a olhar de perto suas traduções, tive de discutir minha relação com ele. Algumas eram deliciosas, outras nem tanto, mas descobri que em geral o homem não traduzia, inventava. (E às vezes, parece, assinava traduções de outras lavras.)
Quem conta a historinha lá em cima é o Ivo Barroso, no prefácio a À margem das traduções de Agenor Soares dos Santos.
ASS foi o tradutor da obra que me parece a mais bem traduzida até hoje no Brasil: a trilogia José do Thomas Mann. Finalmente Thomas Mann em bom português! Soube pelo Ivo que estou em boa companhia, foi esse também o julgamento do Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (i.e. a tradução de José era ao ver dele a melhor já feita até então no país). Digo finalmente, porque, embora a tradução do ASS seja antiga, só dei com ela depois de engolir muito sapo tentando ler Thomas Mann.
E ASS, não bastasse ser um tradutor de mão cheia, foi um amigo verdadeiro do tradutor: deixou um livro inteiro sobre os cognatos traiçoeiros, esses falsos amigos em que volta e meia tropeçamos todos: actually, eventually, character, e tantos, tantos outros (enchem 500 páginas do livro dele). Além de uma coluna de jornal criticando traduções, mas isso é uma outra história, a que voltarei.
And now, back to work. Estou às voltas com três obras, mais diferentes entre si não poderiam ser: uma trata da raça humana, outra de Clarice Lispector, outra ainda de noites de Paris.
Mark, why don't you try to understand what I say in Portuguese? This was the way I acquired the English I happen to know: braving the text.
Mark finally made his entrée (after a short presentation yesterday), both to my exhilaration and relief, since I had announced (to whom?) a dialogue and this was getting a sad look of a fool's monologue.
Since long Mark didn't make me laugh as today. His most hilarious words, to my ears, were: "I am not nearly so good at language as Maria" -- well, I simply would not be able to build this sentence itself.
My English is just a babble, but since it was babbling that I learnt Portuguese, I insist in babbling in English.
Tento diariamente ser uma tradutora. Tarefa impossível, e inglória.
As will become obvious, I am not nearly so good at language as Maria. What I can throw into the soup is a taste of the teutonic: not only was I raised as Kaiser Mark, with the noble blood of Prussia in my veins, but I spent seven years living and working in Denmark.
So right off the bat I have to make it clear, Denmark is not Germany! Those of you familiar with Austria will know exactly what I mean - the places are adjacent on the map but radically different in tone and attitude. By the same token, danish is not german; in fact, 'danses es como marciano'. It has five major dialects among its five million speakers, the spoken word bears practically no correspondence to the written, and the sounds are evolving at an alarming rate away from the central core. Swedish, by contrast, is straight-forward to learn and easy on the ear.
I asked Blogger to send you a formal invitation to participate
in this humble blog.
If it does not arrive, let us go on being both Maria
(you were not supposed to publicize my name! forget it -
here I am just Maria anybody). In the end, which is the
difference between being Mark and Maria?
I suppose the differences exist, and are even obvious,
but would they be so obvios to mere spectators?
(After adding a post, I think you should press the bottom
Post & Publish.; and don't forget to sign out. There'a little
X on the top for you to click and do so.)
Hello, everybody. This would be Mark, getting his feet wet in this blogging business. For the moment I have entered the system as Maria Redactata, simply because that way works.
It would seem that lesson number one will be "what is the difference, between posting and publishing?"
