The Broken Mirror

And so, you learn to let yourself go. And so, you see these monstrous teeth once again. You remember the world is an incredibly lonely place, and your memories no longer seem like a safe harbour, a place of truth. All it remains is the violence, and the blood stains all over the floor, walls and ceiling.

“The broken mirror disfigures every face”

I’ve came to realize the grand narrative of life has always been about transformation. You learn you have to change or perish. There are never promises of a better tomorrow or justice for all the misdeeds. You learn to read the patterns, you know this or that will be your undoing, but you pursue it aniway, fully aware of the door you are opening, of the crows and killers that are coming through it. You trust, you hope.

And yet, there is no escape from fate. You will be let to the crows in the open field, but it is your choice to arise as something different. You can’t change who you are on the deep down, that which makes you what you are, but you can arise as something else. It is this something else, this painful labour, that is the sum of the story, it is the final turn of the key.

“Truth everlasts”, i’ve heard once. What is real finds its way from the gutter to the stars.

If I could say anything else is: always remember you live in a world of living beings who feel. It is not about what you have lived together or gone through, not even about the fact that things aren’t made to last despite our best efforts (no one should live in a gilded cage, after all), it is about the way it sums up in the nearing end. It is only then that you see if the sum of all these years of trust will grant you a caring goodbye.

Night Battles

Yes, I have been sick for the last few days, and my internet provider cutted down my bandwidth to a point I couldn’t even download a document for the test I have today (on a subject I’m almost oblivious regarding possible test questions). It’s likely any efforts on studying will be hopeless.

As for my day, I’ve woke up and strided for an hour or two, watched a part of a Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” movie adaptation (I pretend to write a post on Beckett soon aniway, so more on it later), sunbathed with a blanket and a thermometer on my balcony, tried to study, slept for ages, and now I’m surfing the internet looking for anything interesting worth blogging.

I’ve came about a Carlo Ginzsburg’s Book on witchcraft and agrarian cults on the sixteenth and seventeenth century called “The night battles : witchcraft and agrarian cults on the sixteenth and seventeenth century” (a proper name for the subject). I’ve had Ginzburg’s “Cheese and Worms” lent for the best part of the last year, and even though I failed to finish it or pay the due attention it requires, I really enjoyed the brief reading I had of it. “The Night Battles” doesn’t strike me as a famous book by Ginzburg like “Cheese and Worms” (I’m not a historian so I wouldn’t know) but it also touches on the theme of Medieval Heresy  “Cults”, or at least what the church made of the local’s folklore. Ginzburg found that, in the Friuli district(Italy), there was a widespread belief that certain men and women were marked at birth as defenders against witches and demons, these being regarded mainly as the enemies of the people, their livestock, and their crops. The chosen defenders, the “Benandanti,” or “good walkers,” ventured forth in their dreams to do battle with the forces of evil. Those born with the mark of the Benandanti regarded themselves as good Christians, the allies of the Church. To those outside the local culture, this position was clearly nonsense; unauthorized and unsanctified supernatural power could only be Satanic in origin, and those who claimed to exercise it were, at best, dangerously deluded.

Should make an interesting reading on the near future.

And now, back to the studies..

Magick

“You have to choose magic. If you don’t want magic, you’ll never see it again, you’ll live in a rational world in which everything can be explained. But if you choose it, well, it’s like stepping off the sidewalk into the street. The world still looks the same on the surface, but you can be hit by a truck at any second. That’s magic.”

Custom and habit sometimes makes us oblivious to old certainties, but we never truly forget the craft. It’s in ‘our’ blood and breath.

Wavering Radiant

I normally write music reviews on my last.fm journal (you can check it on my profile page on the right panel), but there is a reason I’m writing this here instead. I’m not planning on writing a music review, but merely to state how wondrous the new ISIS record is.

ISIS has always been on my top list for post metal bands, but I admit I haven’t been listening to their stuff for a while. I got the new album without much of a feeling of antecipation, but this one surprised me. The growls and vocals are much more present and they are really developed in this record. The song structures are much less repetitive than they used to be, and it doesn’t feel like they’re dragging you. It’s probably ISIS most accessible album to this date (accessible for post metal standards), and I must add, their best one.

Be sure to check this record, and pay a close attention to the last song “Threshold of Transformation”. The way it merges sheer brutality with melancholy and beauty is unparalelled.

dead city centres

I had the weirdest dream today, so I thought I should record it while I still can:

I was out photographing in some abandoned city. The streets were empty, the buildings were made of red bricks and were one floor high, like a small city in the U.S.. The store windows were blocked by wood from the inside or broken, and amidst the buildings were white marble sculptures of people like the ones you’d see in a cemetery, covered by vines.

I got to the city square and it had a stage in the middle, like the ones which held executions in the past, and lots of people were around it while a black dressed woman sprinkled blood from a bucket in the adulating crowd. As soon as they saw me it was like I was already in the middle of them. A girl had a potato bag in her face and walked with a piece of wood, one man was dressed like an american pilgrim of old, with a black hat and beard and everything. They were all being very nice to me and wanted me to have some of the blood sprinkled on my face too. I had the idea that once it happened I would be one of them. I tried to be nice and walk away, but they pushed me to it and I couldnt avoid having some blood drops falling in my forehead and hair. They never tried to harm me though, and in the end we all went to an abandoned country club and staged a play on Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.

It was kinda weird and fun at the same time.

the kindly ones

Have you even been in love? Horrible, isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…

You give them a piece of you. They don’t ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like “maybe we should just be friends” or “how very perceptive” turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.

the myth of sysiphus

Yesterday a friend of mine appeared on a television newscast as part of a christian church for alternative kids. I was aware of his participation in this group/congregation/whatever it’s called for some time already, but I found him a real gentleman not to try and drag his friends in, which ultimately led me to leave the issue alone.. But I have a blog now, which kind of changes things a bit, now I can actually speak what’s in my mind.

Regarding religion, I have the utmost respect for most of them. I look back at the legacy of christianity with some respect for having preserved centuries of art which would otherwise be lost and inspiring lots of new ones. Im convinced though, that if the western world decided to worship the flying spaghetti monster instead of jesus in those ancient times we would still have great art. The human spirit is really something to behold.

Having said that, I find that neither religion nor science and rationality succeeded in their attempts to explain the world.  The reason for this is that ‘real meaning’ is a cultural product. Men, in the course of their lives, romanticize existence and elect paragons and systems to explain the universe around them. We find it quite difficult to face existence without reference points. Men devise systems, we can even accept the idea of the absurd, but we can’t live it, we are stripped of the capacity to live in waylesness.

My favorite thinker in that regard is Albert Camus. I could freely quote Niezstche or Derrida, but I believe Niesztche kind of got carried away in his analysis, being overly metaphorical in times, and attracted much unwanted (or not) animosity. I once joked with a friend of mine that Niezstche would be the guy in school to drop the christian boy’s lunch on the floor and then ask him where his God was, and then send him to cry in the back alley. As for Derrida, I kind of think, although I’m not sure, that he believes men can live and cope with the waylesness and lack of meaning consciently, which Im not really sure for myself. Camus on the other hand, is the guy with the simple words and straightforward ideas that everybody likes. He really seemed to be a nice guy, and his points are not very difficult to understand. He used to write novels, which are easy ways to send a deep message through. And he had this little essay called “The myth of Sysiphus” which summarizes his ideas:

Who’s Sysiphus? You might be asking yourself: Sysiphus is a figure of Greek Mythology who was condemned by the Gods to repeat forever (for all eternity, mind you) the same meaningless task of pushing a rock up a mountain, only to see it roll down again. Camus sides Sysiphus’s task with our own lives. Men’s futile search for meaning, unity and clarity in the face of an unintelligible world devoid of God and eternal truths or values

It is not the world that is absurd, nor human thought: the absurd arises when the human need to understand meets the unreasonableness of the world, when “my appetite for the absolute and for unity” meets “the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle.”Taking the absurd seriously means acknowledging the contradiction between the desire of human reason and the unreasonable world. Suicide, then, also must be rejected: without man, the absurd cannot exist. The contradiction must be lived; reason and its limits must be acknowledged, without hope.To embrace the absurd implies embracing all that the unreasonable world has to offer. Without a meaning in life, there is no scale of values. “What counts is not the best living but the most living.”

(italic text is sic. wikipedia, thoroughly edited to fit this post, but the choice of words was appropriate in a way I couldn’t put better)

Camus is there with Derrida and maybe with Niezstche on the belief that men can live free of the constraints of meaning. I tend to go only at this point, as I remarked earlier. Even Sartre, iconnoclast as he was, died admitting to believe in God, saying that he couldn’t live otherwise. God is not necessarily the white bearded dude on the clouds. God is meaning, a north star. We may very well elect it to be rationality, or love, or even nihilism. In my point of view men is not a creature capable of living in waylesness, for we are believers. Even Descartes, who refuted almost everything, didn’t refute his cogito.

So, in the end it is okay to believe in what you will, as long as it respects the space of the other. If only more people realized that we could start being straightforward and kill for oil without feeling ashamed for it.

things that suck

1. to realize the course you’re into for the last 4 or so years is not really into your area of expertise ( i really hope i don’t starve to death).
2. to be questioned on the reason for having a personal blog being written in english and if I have problems with my mother language (not really, only a little). Sometimes it really sucks to be able to quote most of the classic authors on the english language and not knowing much about brazilian writers, I really should start working on that – if only they sucked less..

On the bright side of the day, it was kinda fun to be stopped by the cops on the way home while they searched my car for any sign of drugs or weapons.  Also, my father came back from rainland and brought me an overshrunkened version of the bullfinch’s guide to mythology, which was cool and thoughtful.