square white world

- back row (left to right): Arnaldo Baptista, Caetano Veloso (holding portrait of bossa nova & MPB singer, Nara Leão), Rita Lee, Sérgio Dias and Tom Zé
- front row (right to left): Torquato Nelo (lyricist-poet), Gal Costa (born Maria da Graça Costa Penna Burgos, somewhat resentfully renamed by Caetano Veloso), Gilberto Gil (holding portrait of José Carlos Capinan (songwriter, poet, writer, advertising agent, doctor), Rogério Duprat (composer & arranger, holding a potty, & producer, in-studio-sound-sculptor - in a George Martin sense)

(if you click on the above image it will take you to the production company working on the Os Mutantes documentary, Bread & Circuses, for which the trailer appears at the bottom of this post)

Sérgio Dias of Os Mutantes (the original backing band to the whole Tropicália resistance movement, which comprised him, his brother, Arnaldo Baptista, and Rita Lee) was interviewed for the sleeve notes for Tropicália: é proibido proibir. [Soul Jazz Records, SJR CD 118, 2005] Asked when the dictatorship ended in Brazil, Sérgio answered:

It didn’t end. Who said it ended?

[laughs] This is bullshit. I met with Ted Kennedy in 1984 in the United States. I was playing there. He invited me to go to his boat and we were in Nantucket. And I though, ‘God, if I’m going to be patriotic, it’s now or never.’ So, I told the guy, I said, ‘Listen, you have to do something about Brazil.’

He got so sober immediately and then, this is 1984, he told me about Lula … He knew the name! ‘This guy, the guy who’s out there, Lula, he will never make it.’

They were watching us! And this guy that is there now, Lula, is not the same Lula that, that I used to know - he’s compromised. And what’s the best way of destroying a people? Give them the power, then show the corruption - which is happening now and it’s destroying Brazilian government top to bottom.

It’s ridiculous. So, that’s very bad. We’re in a very bad situation. But it’s good because it is like this, you know: Something is going to come out of it.

to denounce the Big Lie that encased our lives like the thin shell of an egg … As you touched it, the membrane burst, and you suddenly found yourself alone and helpless, at the mercy of a whip wielded by authority. … The Big Lie, like a new placenta, prevented us from both dying and being born. One imprudent gesture and the filmy membrane exploded. You had to hold your breath and check yourself constantly, so that your mouth, choked with lies big and small, did not let out, involuntarily, the breath of air that could have shattered the protective cocoon. In fact, we were constantly wrapping the eggshell in other coverings, one inside another, like a nest of Russian dolls. So, what was this blessed Big Lie? … The membrane of lies had become, for many, a thick protective coating, dense, indestructible, resistant to cracking. … the penal colony of the Big Lie - the prisoners were condemned to compulsory happiness.

I did not puncture that filmy membrane. … I ignored, as well as I could, the shell under which I went about my business. …

- Norman Manea, The Hooligan’s Return, trans. Angela Jianu, pp. 196-197

… the publisher … wrote: “You were an eyewitness, and as a writer you must react.” Publicly decoding his life, writing a personal memoir? Cioran had warned about it: “A cinder bath, a good exercise in self-incineration.” It would be like peeling away one’s skin, layer after layer, in competition with the tell-all confessions of television talk shows or the self-revelations of group therapy.

…

“I am in favour of forced migration,” Ion Antonescu, Marshal of Romania, army commander, and leader of the Romanian state, declared in the summer of 1941. “I do not care whether we shall go down in history as barbarians. The Roman Empire committed many barbaric acts and yet it was the greatest political establishment the world has ever seen.” The noble barbarian [cf. Cioran] did not want to miss the opportunity afforded him of at last eradicating the national pest. “Our nation has not known a more favourable moment in its history. If need be, shoot,” Hitler’s ally declared.

- Ibid., p. 224

Nothing was more important than survival, Mother kept saying … The logic on which my father had built his life was now useless. … He could accept death, but not humiliation. Risking everything, he recoiled in disgust from the grim truth of his present reality. He did not become servile and hypocritical, as was demanded of the slaves; he would not surrender his dignity. His wife didn’t care about such idiocies, but he did. The black market in sentiment, not only in aspirin or bread, that prevailed in the camps, disgusted him, and so did the barbarity of victims determined to save themselves at any cost from the barbarity the oppressors. Monster-executioners breed monster-victims, he used to repeat in his soft but determined voice.

- Ibid, p. 228

“You won’t believe it, but I finally gave in and signed. There was no choice. They also gave me a code name, ‘Alin.’”

The name the policemen had chosen for him was the very pen name their new informant used for the poetry and theatre reviews he published in literary magazines. Let this be a lesson for him; both vocations, poet and informant, after all, probe the mystery in which we all hide.

- Ibid., p. 230

Would Comrade Doctor allow himself to be psychoanalysed by a patient obsessed with the comedy of double roles? Could the poet find the lyric correlative of duplicitous chaos, conducted on the surface by the masked men of power and perpetuated, underground, by the venom of resentment?

The patient’s questions quickly rebounded back to himself, as though he had borrowed the doctor’s mannerisms and was able to read the theme of the psychiatric session with closed eyes: the Initiation after the Initiation. Or should it be called adaptation? And what exactly did the survivor adapt to? A familiar question. Over a decade later, it would also be asked by an American psychiatrist. The answer was familiar, too: The patient adapted to life, as simple as that. Indeed, it is to life that all survivors adapt, whether they are survivors of black, green, or red dictatorships. They do so with that impertinence of normality which is life itself. This was how I summarised my own biography on the eve of exile, an experiment no less educational than the preceding ones.

How can one be a writer if one has no freedom was the dilemma posed by the American psychiatrist, an expert in the psychoses of freedom in the New World. The question would have sounded like a bad joke if uttered by his East European counterpart, but an exchange of expertise between the specialist in the pathology of constraint and the analyst of freedom’s traumas would not have been useless. The psychiatrists of these two very different worlds would have discovered many surprising resemblances alongside the differences.

The freedom of the New Man meant accepting necessity - this was what doctor and patient had learned from the Marxist dialecticians of a party that became less Marxist every day: necessity, hence adaptation; adaptation, hence pragmatism: hence, accepted necessity. Adaptation to life, Doctor, this was the task facing the apprentice in the banality served pedagogically by daily life. Life, that was all. In the East, in the West, in the cosmos.

- Ibid., p. 238

More time has now passed. You have learned the joys and the maladies of liberty. You have accepted the honour of exile. … “The return to the homeland is but a return to the mother’s grave” …

…

You were, you told yourself, in the living present, not in the ever-present past.

- Ibid., p. 247

“The place of our truth is here. We are writers, we have no other solution,” she had said. I was familiar with such banalities. I myself had once been a victim of misery’s pride, it had often fed my despair.

- Ibid., p. 259

“Maybe you should wander around America a bit,” he said. But that advice was followed, thank God, not by a list of places to visit but by another prolonged silence.

“You can’t have better lessons in solitude anywhere else.”

- Ibid., p. 309

The wall behind the bed is cold in the blackness of the night.

- Ibid., 373

“Poetry, the lie detector prone to burst into tears.” The shadows and the clowns take off their masks, their prostheses, leave aside their crutches, and line up into a neat row of phosphorescent letters: “Florin Mugur - Poet - 1932-1991.” I am alive, still alive, for yet another living moment, leaning against the gravestone of Florin Mugur …

- Ibid., p. 377

- Augusto Boal

Excerpts from Tom Magill’s interview with Augusto Boal [full text here]:

Communitage:

The word community, communitage in Portuguese, we use to define sometimes a region of the city, e.g., a slum. In this state there is a communitage within that slum. Sometimes we can talk about also the communitage of psychiatric hospitals or we can talk about the communitage of a trade union for instance, so the word communitage / community has not the same meaning as it has in English, and of course they don’t have theatre inside those communities.

a community having the same interests without specialities:

In slums there is no theatre, only one slum which is an area called Digegow, in Rio, has a community and curiously, Cicerly Berry, who is the great teacher of voice of the Royal Shakespeare Company, when she went to Brazil twice she went to that community in the slums to teach the people how to pronounce better, how to free their voices. And so community means that. It means a group of people who can be located geographically or because they have the same interests and they don’t have specialities so there is not a difference between that community theatre and the other forms because they don’t have other forms. And then we worked with those communities to make them produce theatre.

A “community theatre” is a special place in New Zealand, or, in the Boal’s example, the US:

… it is only for that region or whatever you know. It’s not in our case, our poor communities or workers’ communities. They don’t have theatre at all and then what they make is not creative theatre. But to help them make theatre, wherever, in any place, but not a special place, that is our task.

On building bulwarks:

all the barriers have been collapsing already and now what I think we should reinforce are some barriers instead of collapsing them. Building new walls against racism which is one of the horrible things that exist in the world. A wall against intolerance which is not accepting and is a form of racism, not accepting the existence of the other one. The wall against sexism which enslaves half of humanity - women. A wall against globalisation which makes all of us become clones of ourselves to become robots, so now is the moment to build barriers, to build walls and to fight against intolerance, against racism, sexism and globalisation, to fight vigorously against that.

On political and theatrical representation:

Democracy is a very beautiful system but has this inconvenience. You have extreme power in your hands and when you vote you lose that power. It’s a paradoxical reality and then you’re going to get power again, 2, 4, 8 years later to vote again and to lose your power the moment you exert your power. You use your power you lose it, and then we thought during this time how can we make the citizen be aware of what’s going on? To delegate power to the other ones is so horrible. When you delegate power you lose your power and then you become a spectator of that person. You may have confidence in the person, you may trust them, but it is something that when you speak with your voice and something else when someone speaks in your place. When someone speaks in your place, even if it’s an honest person, intelligent person, creative person, but that person will never translate correctly what you want to say.

On participation including both amateur and professional:

if everyone did theatre the professional theatre would be full every day because they would like to see what the other ones are doing. So sometimes professional theatre is not so interesting to the population because the population does not practice theatre. If you do theatre all of the time then you want to see a play done by others. The more you develop theatre inside the population in general, the more you create conditions for having bigger audiences, a more interested audience, more participation from the audience.

On copying methodologies:

I think that the bad results can come from an automatic, a mechanical transposition forcing a method that is flexible and not stratified, so if it serves as an inspiration it is good.

On the invention of theatre from rebellion - jumping out of not into the chorus:

If I think about the Ancient Greeks, the one who influenced me very much was Thespis. Why Thespis? Because he was the first person who was in a chorus in the dithyrambic chorus singing all disciplined the song that the poet had written and dancing the movements of the choreographer and saying what was the acceptable official story so he jumped out of that and refused to be inside the chorus and said what he really thought. So this act of rebellion, he invented the theatre with this act of rebellion when he went out and said I don’t agree with it, the chorus singing in poetry and he answering, replicating in prose. So this act of rebellion for me is extraordinary. A man invented the theatre. In this act of rebellion he jumped out of the chorus.

On funding:

I am a professional, we should have our money from the government because art in most cases is not self sufficient, you need sponsorship. But, we should have a balance, popular art should be developed for its own benefit and for the benefit of art in general.

(Augusto Boal was nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.

It was awarded to Martti Ahtisaari.)

Augusto Boal was arrested in 1972 after the publication of Theatre of the Oppressed. Following a brief outbreak of democracy, Brazil had been returned to a military dictatorship - by coup - in 1964. Censorship was most intense over the period 1968-73.

Boal was imprisoned, suffered various types of torture, over a four month period, until he was eventually, like Caetano Veloso, deported.

He returned to Brazil in 1986 and has since then worked in Brazil and throughout the world on / in the theatre of the oppressed. Turning sixty-five in 1996, he was refused his pension on the grounds that he remained classified as a ‘menace to the state.’

International pressure on the Brazilian government to grant Boal the pension increased when it became widely known in 2005 that this classification still had not been revoked.

Is Boal still an unpensioned enemy of the state?

I saw her again in the week before my return to Romania. We were walking together in the streets of Bucharest. She was talking to me about Mihai Eminescu, the national poet, and tell me how dearly he would have liked to be with me again. She was animated, focusing on matters that seemed to give her pleasure, but that were mainly intended to please me, when suddenly she fell into a deep trench along the edge of the sidewalk, a kind of shaft where workers were repairing the sewage system. It happened in an instant, leaving me no time to catch her. But she had held on to my arm, and her old, heavy body was hanging suspended over the pit, while I lay flat on the sidewalk, gripping her with my left hand, so that she would not drop into the abyss. With my right hand I clutched the edge of the sidewalk, while my left hand gripped her bony fingers. I could feel myself slipping, I couldn’t hold on to the burden of her body swinging desperately above the void, her thin pale legs thrashing helplessly in the air.

There were men working in the bottom of the hole below. I could see their white helmets, but they could not see me or hear my vain cries for help. I was screaming as loud as I could, but I didn’t produced a single sound. I was suffocating, I could feel my strength draining. I was being pulled down by the bony clasp of the old hand into the black void. I was slipping toward the edge of the sidewalk, ready either to let go of the burden or to let myself be dragged into the bottomless depth, over which my mother was writhing. I had just found her again, I had been talking to her, and I could not bear to lose her again.

- Norman Manea, The Hooligan’s Return: A Memoir, trans. Angela Jianu, p. 55

- photo by Joseph Gallus Rittenberg, Heiner Müller, 1982 [Heiner Müller appears here for no reason as somebody's mother escaping via manhole]

Is there a form of social conflict which is not terrorism and not capable of being delayed and repeated - represented - and which does not exemplify, provide a situation, a theatre for operations - with the suffering of people serving as backdrop to an ‘empty space,’ from which bursts of monologue?

And this is not to ask again whether terrorist acts serve as backdrop to capitalism, seen as some kind of homogeneous system of the world, in the theatrum mundi … but to get at what Simon Biggs called ‘complicity.’

Media work in what Deleuze called a theatre of repetition, reliant on recognition, the habit of the first passive synthesis. Acts / encounters which aim to break the deadlock, rock the status quo, engender thought, lose / have lost particularity in what used to be the anodyne of media commentary and is now the acid bath. They are habitual and become general. Virilio’s image, his analogon, is that they are total, turning the mirror on the work of art, on aesthesis, to give us the full immersion media-experience of their Ganzfeld virtuality. This gaze is pitiless.

Where I mean to draw attention to a ‘complicity’ is not only with the Image of thought-as-representation, rather than Deleuze’s thought-of-thought, of the media and its (re)mediation of spectacular terrorism, but also with art - as a disctinction-without-difference. I mean that the Crisis of Representation has left us with this legacy on the one hand and that on the other we have the past-futurity, the futurism, of a global Crisis of Values, which rests on the complicity of art, capital and terror, to the power of a ‘triplicity,’ and is that show in which this triunity is spectacularly confirmed.

In the circle of repetition of the selfsame there is no drama because it consists in what Neal Stephenson called a ‘consensus cluster.’ Conflict resolves before it arises: and its resolution is High Definition. The Society of the Spectacle … is also this … is also that … terror / capital … art / terror … art / capital … in endless combination, at rates of oscillation and substitution (exemplification) invisible to the naked eye …

- João Magueijo, cosmologist

… another sense is needed, beyond the habitual five, or six - the sixth being death, in which the creative act shall have no dominion - in answer to the problem of light which is faster than light.

- photo by Max Pam, South India 03 Journal, 2004

Late in 1969 I was over at the Student Union watching an anti Vietnam War demonstration when a friend drew my attention to a message on the notice board: ASTROPHYSICIST REQUIRES HELP TO DRIVE V.W. BUG FROM CALCUTTA TO LONDON. I applied and got the job because I was the only person in the university ready to just pack up and go. The idea drew me like a magnet. By February 1970 we had driven into Nepal. Three months later, we were in Istanbul. I studied photography for one year in London, yet I was never comfortable. All the time Asia was calling me back.

I quit college in 1971 and hitchhiked back to India. Just inside the Yugoslavian frontier I was given a lift by some English people driving a purple Transit Van, all six of whom looked like extras from the remake of Sinbad’s Rough Night In Cairo. Getting in the van was like flying inside a giant purple tab of L.S.D. They were intent on heading for Athens to finance their trip further East by selling drugs. I sold two litres of blood in Kavala for $12 and was picked up on the road outside Istanbul by an even larger busload of hippies. I stayed with them through Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, until the old bus blew up in Kabul. I had a Hasselblad camera with me. At some stage going east that year I had become a photographer.

Thirty five years later and I am still travelling. Last week I flew back from working on my new book project in Rome. The work is a compression of old world (Europe), new world (Australia) culture dysfunction. I leave Rome, the eternal city of 2.500 years of history, frying in mid summer heat and surrounded by 400 million Europeans. Twenty-two hours later I land at Perth on the Western edge of planet Australia. It is mid-winter, Perth is 120 years old and is the most isolated capital city in the world. There are 1.25 million people living in Western Australia and it has a surface area larger than Europe. This is why I still travel.
- quoted from Roving Eye Exhibition online catalogue, here

If I could articulate it, the thesis of the proposed dissertation on Deleuze and theatre, it would include my frustration at not being able to make the work I want to, to work with the people I want to and to command the resources, at a global level if you want, I need to do so. It would be a complaint, in the old sense. The thesis would howl. And it would bay at the moon who remains out of reach.

I must come back to Constantine Cavafy’s ‘The Windows:’

In these dark rooms where I live out empty days,
I wander round and round trying to find the windows.
But the windows are not to be found -
or at least I can’t find them. And perhaps
it is better that way.
Perhaps the light will prove another tyranny.
Who knows what new things it will expose?

- photos by Duane Michals of the actor Joel Grey, a friend of the photographer, playing the poet, inspired by the writings of Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933)

- Arthur Boyd, Figure supporting back legs and Interior with black rabbit, 1973-4

the image is from Arthur Boyd’s ‘caged painter’ series, commenced in 1971 upon his return to Australia after over a decade in England. The year he left Caetano Veloso was recording his own record of exile, ‘A Little More Blue.’

Norman Manea repeats the mantra he learnt from Franz Kafka: in the confrontation between oneself and the world, take the side of the world.

Jorge Luis Borges is a poet of the pathos of time. He writes of Citizen Kane that it links the Koheleth to the memory of another nihilist, Franz Kafka. [Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weingberger, Viking, New York, 1999, p. 259]

Emptiness, emptiness, says Koheleth, emptiness, all is empty.
…
So I came to hate life, since everything that was done here under the sun was a trouble to me; for all is emptiness and chasing the wind.
…
I considered all the acts of oppression here under the sun; I saw the tears of the oppressed, and I saw that there was no one to comfort them.
…
Woe betide the land when a slave has become its king, and its princes feast in the morning.
…
Whatever has already existed has been given a name, its nature is known, a man cannot contend with what is stronger than he. The more words one uses the greater is the emptiness of it all; and where is the advantage to a man?

and the Koheleth, said to be a sage whose sayings were recorded in the second century BC and collected in Ecclesiastes, also wrote the song which goes … a time to be born and a time to die, and so on.

There is an empty thing found on earth: when the just man gets what is due to the unjust, and the unjust what is due to the just. I maintain that this too is emptiness. So I commend enjoyment, since there is nothing good for a man to do here under the sun but to eat and drink and enjoy himself; this is all that will remain with him to reward his toil throughout the span of life.

… and I bethought myself of all the fury and hatred I had to bring against the world and its illusions and because the door opened a crack I heard the engine pounding, its hammers beating. I wondered if this was the engine, the war-machine with which I was to assail the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze; albeit that its hammers were butterfly wings shamanically grafted onto it and that its beating was only theatrical: the apocalypse is achieved with a backlit gauze on a proscenium arch stage. It is sheer melodrama.

Nothing is more terrifying writes Borges than a labyrinth without a centre.

And if for every step the thread was cut?

- Arthur Boyd in the early 1970s

- Recorded during his exile in London by Caetano Veloso. Veloso was jailed in Brazil for his participation in the cultural movement of protest, which was called Tropicalia, against the military regime. Let this music, from the album A Little More Blue, serve as soundtrack for the posts to follow.