Selected Cronicas

BRAINSTORM

Oh, if I had only known. I would never have been born, oh, if I had only known, I would never have been born. Madness borders on the most humiliating wisdom. By absorbing madness, I became quietly hallucinated. The glass ring you gave me shattered into pieces but love did not end there. It was replaced by the hatred of those who love. For me, the chair is an object. Useless so long as I am looking at it. What is the time, please, so that I may know if I am living this moment? Creativity stems from some origin but today it eludes me and all I have is this incipient madness which is in itself a valid creation. I have no further interest in valid things. I am liberated or lost. I shall let you into a secret: life is mortal. We conveniently suppress this secret otherwise we should make each instant mortal. Ibrahim Sued claimed to be an unrobed member of the French Academy. As an object, the chair has always interested me. This one in the Empire style is an antique bought from an antique dealer in Berne. It would be difficult to envisage simpler lines, in contrast with the red upholstery. I love objects in so far as they do not love me. If I do not know what I am talking about, I am not to blame. I must talk because talking can be one’s salvation. Yet I do not have a single word to say. The words already spoken have sealed my lips. What does one person say to another? Apart from ‘How are you?’ If people were suddenly to start being frank, what might they say to each other? Not to mention what they might say to themselves. But it would mean salvation, even though frankness is determined at a conscious level, and any horror of frankness comes from the part it plays in this vast unconsciousness which binds us to the world and to the world’s creative unconsciousness. Tonight there will be stars in the sky: as promised by this sad evening which could be saved by a human voice. The most awful blindness is that of people who do not know they are blind. I open my eyes wide but it is useless: I can only see. But I neither see nor feel what is secret. The gramophone is broken, it is costly to mend, and to live without music is to betray the human condition which is surrounded by music. Besides, music is an abstraction of thought, I refer to the music of Bach, Vivaldi and Handel. That Sweet Embrace, how that song gets on my nerves with its cloying words of affection. I can only write if I am free, and free of criticism, otherwise I give up. I look at the chair in the Empire style but this time I fancy it has been watching me. The future is mine so long as I am living. In future, there will be more time for living, and haphazardly for writing. In future, one will say: If I had known, I would never have been born. Marly de Oliveira, I scarcely ever write to you because I only know how to be intimate. I only know how to be intimate, whatever the circumstances: therefore I tend to be silent. Will we one day achieve all the things we have never done? Future technology threatens to destroy all that is human in man, but technology cannot touch madness: and so that is where all that is human in man can take refuge. I see flowers in a vase: they are wild flowers and were planted by no one. They are yellow and beautiful. But all my cook could say was: What ugly flowers. Simply because it is difficult to understand and appreciate anything which is spontaneous and austere. To understand complicated things is no advantage, but to love things which invite love is to progress up the human ladder. I am forced into telling so many lies. But I refuse to be obliged to lie to myself. For what would that leave me? Truth is the residue of all things and in my unconscious lurks the world’s truth. The moon, as Paul Eluard once described it, is éclatante de silence. Who knows if we shall see the moon tonight for it is already late and there is nothing to be seen in the sky. I once accompanied my father to a spa in Minas Gerais. I looked up at the night sky, turning my head as I looked upwards, and the sight of all those stars made me feel quite dizzy. For there in the open countryside the sky is clear. If one thinks about it, there is no logic in the perfectly balanced illogicality of nature. And the same is true of human nature. What would become of the world or the universe if man did not exist? If I could always write as I am writing now, I would be in that mental turmoil people call a brainstorm. Who could have invented the chair? Someone who cared for himself. So he invented something for his greater comfort. The centuries passed and no one took any more notice of the chair which people take for granted. It takes courage to have a brainstorm: one can never tell what might turn up and give us a fright. The sacred monster died and in its place a little girl was born who lost her mother. I really must break off at this point not because words fail me, but because these are things, not to mention the ones I only thought about, which I never put into words. And things one does not publish in newspapers.