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Delirium of the Lunar Horseman

It is as if there were a hiatus now, a rupture between my great ideas of then and my twisted ideas of now. They twist like the curls of my hair, which I learned to like. And then I began writing about writing, not for the lack of what to say, but to take care that my ideas are expressed entirely and not through suffocated whispers of a dark night.

I rescue the stellar aesthetics and lose myself in crazy and disoriented admiration. It's part of a return to art for art's sake that sometimes permeates my writing and only brings with it beauty. And that beauty is pleasing and sweet. And it's nice to stay in that sweetness like chocolate. It feels good to taste the chocolate, live the pink nature of art and get lost in the unquestionable carbon of the words.

Pardon the monotony of this discussion, but it is impossible to retire reflections over the vapid nature of words. I can't live without them, even if they are meaningless and empty. And without someone to put them in order, they don't have a reason to exist. They exist to be used, and while used construct what they shouldn't, take away the power of the speaker and run free to cirscumscribe everything and beauty and art. And so they enslave us, and freedom only comes through more words that are even more cruel. And there's no way to escape it. And so to write is to enclose worlds, avoid the rain, darken the light in attempts to be enlightened.

I live my days during the night to be alone. And solitude makes me more vulnerable. The words attack more brutally, suffocate the mind, hold the tongue hostage. Each muscle contracts in a syllable, and each accent is a reflex punctured by the pain of the impossibility of correction. And so I fall into the trap of language, and nothing rescues me besides the silence that arrives too late, already corroded by the hunger for expression. I come back incomplete each time I fall obliquely and ingenuously into the tangles of this language. A piece of thought always remains somewhere near the moon, and it is swallowed by the spiders of the sky that disappear in the constellations.

I want to encounter the brilliance of silence. Perhaps it lies somewhere in rainwater, in the wind, on the moon, in a naked sky. That brilliance is a fleeting knight. He trots speedily to say everything without a single word, to impress with the impeccable nature of his attire. His sword speaks through direct blows of silence that extinguish the sins of the words. And the moon can smile with the death of the white spiders. Without words, the webs come undone.

"The sky was kissed by the sea and mist breathlessly." - J. Lawrence

I continue to watch the moon through the glass walls of my blue room. The rain falls heavy and constant, without much brilliance, but sonorous. And my gaze gets lost in the cold of an autumn night that tastes like apples and cinnamon. The beauty of the moment is as constant as the rain and the transparency of the glasses, which are receptacles of stars and dew.

Jazzy escapade

I want always to write on pink sheets. The color of the roses awake in me feelings and desires long forgotten. And when I see looks of pink, I feel happier and less worried. The pink allows me to break away from the moments of gray that pile up in life.

I must live through pink sheets so that my world doesn't suddenly become dark and gray, so that my reason for writing about things that are beautiful and thus worthwhile does not become lost.

And I have decided to always live between the pink of a relief and the blues of happiness that cover me in the ocean and enchant me in the sky. And I have decided that I will paint all the parts of my life in blue and will write on pink sheets that awaken my dreams.
And jazz surrounds everything in a curtain of fantastic realism and stunning silver contours. The power of this music lies in the rings of percussion, the desperate breaths and insane chords of this hallucinating rhythm. This mellodic delirium lives in the slides of voices that only wish to wrap in perfection that sea of imperfect improvisation. And it is beautiful as a shroud of incredible reality, of desires and passions in the jungles of concrete and metal.

I want to live in Chet Baker, reside in Billie Holiday and dream Ella Fitzgerald in this infinitely happier world of Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Cole Porter. It's something out of the ordinary, difficult to understand.

For a few moments, I stopped following the news in order to live a little. Now the war is over, journalists were assassinated and a country starts being reconstructed by another country aloof to the history that there took place over millennia.

I didn't see the fall of the dictator's statue nor the massacred civilians because I was in my blue room listening to jazz, drinking tea and writing about the war that took place inside me then. Now I capture a collage of what happened through news fragments that I'll someday write as well.

I don't know if this escape was led by an aversion to politics or a deception with journalism. But this momentary escapade gave me so much pleasure I'm not guilty. I'm back to being informed by the illogical nature of unconfirmed information and uncertain last minute reports. I return a bit reluctantly from that escapade to my condition of journalist that seems to run in my veins. I was only covering issues of higher proximity, more related to the core of who I am that has been a bit shaken.

Recognizing my intrinsic duality, or perhaps plurality, I return to what is known as normal. I began to read newspapers again and filter newscasts.

With that return, my nights of tea, jazz and pink sheets become rare. They're rare but not nonexistent. Behind every journalist there must lie a guiding passion that always returns to the rhythm of jazz.

As did Frida

I want to seek refuge in a blue room like Frida. I need to isolate myself to see if I can reorganize myself. I search for a place where I can live with my own fragments and put together all the pieces of my thoughts, my soul, my words and my body that begins to fall apart little by little out of worry and inner storms.

Frida lived with the disintegration of her mind, her spirit and her body, while fighting against a passion that enslaved her. I also feel victimized by my unlimited desires that fly free toward unknown destinations. I feel that my ideas and thoughts have considered fleeing from me, angry at the tempest of fragments that has fractioned the meaning behind who I am.

I seek to avoid solitude, the precocious death of my feelings and the absolute madness that would come with the loss of myself.

And like Frida, I am a victim that escapes rejection, forgetfulness and madness through a passion that moves me and drives me to a greater organization of dreams and desires. Frida painted her life. I write mine amidst all that happens to me. I try to swallow all that darkens the lights and bright colors that I wish would be my most absolute representation.

And I refuse to allow my world to fall apart. I fight to maintain each piece in its place, even if I must come apart to accomplish that. We must say goodbye to the caprices of the heart.

And the delirious guitar of Frida Kahlo's colors enchants me, just like the kisses she gave in life and the desire to be an artist until the very last moment.

Letter to myself and to whom I love

I like to see you, feel your presence, look at you when you´re not looking, feel your hand touch mine, get lost in your wandering gaze. I have only the silence that translates what goes on inside my head and heart to tell you.

And I think that all my life I suffered from something quite serious. I don´t know how to, I can´t and never could express myself. Perhaps not even the refuge of ink and paper works as a canvas for my words to transit without distortion.

What I need more than anything is to be believed, to have my words heard and have others realize that they have their own weight and mean something. Perhaps there was a time in my life when I really could say what I wanted to say and accomplish something with that. But that time, along with that distant self, has already disappeared, and I have no way of finding him. I also wonder if I need to find him.

It´s a matter of digging back up the lost substance of my words, and I need to be this archeologist whose discovery is essential to the wellness of my species of being and living. I endangered myself by getting lost in the middle of everything, by forgetting yesterday and tomorrow.

And for living today only today, my tomorrow dissolves itself into a constant and absolute nothing. My fixation for the immediate extinguished the possibilities of my tomorrow, and once again I´ve enclosed myself in my own world. And this world is beautiful, intriguing and completely false and misleading, built on a foundation of who is not me nor anybody. I created myself and now, as the sculptor of myself, hate the final result. Too much shapelessness remains around me and I just don´t know how to sculpt anymore.

Through this disconnected and lost self, I´m living a great lie that never ends. My dialogues are predictable and repetitive. I´m tired of watching the same scene so many times, of watching myself make the same mistakes so many times. This compulsive simulation of my projected self is killing my inner self and there does not seem to be anything I can do to avoid that. There is nothing because I need words of iron and looks of lead to make anything happen. All my speech is dispersed and undone around brilliant, vivid and false contours.

And I´m living through fruitless declarations, declarations that only perpetuate my solitude by distancing in thousands of miles the object of my desire. The words of my projected self have sabotaged and prevented the realization of all the plans of my inner self. And I want control, just control. And I fear I may have lost it forever. There are no ways to avoid my falling in this abyss of recurring mistakes that torment me. There isn´t even an escape valve that might lead me to relief. My decline is imminent and I need to save myself. I must change the words that orchestrate my life before it´s too late. Perhaps it´s time to suffocate myself again, and I begin to lose myself in layers and layers of a dark shroud.

I long for the day I´m able to say that it´s the last day that I´m using words. To say that they´ve gone out and lost their meaning. To say that they don´t function anymore and so tell the truth.

"These words I write to keep myself from madness." - Bukowski

And I keep trying to be what is organic, what is on the inside, that always wants to be and continues to be and doesn't stop being because it's what is on the inside, behind, underneath, at the heart deep down.

I concluded that intertwining of our bodies is nothing more than a physical coming together of ideas, feelings and yearning. We touch each other feverishly because behind each touch lies an ideological ecstasy, a spontaneous happiness for knowing we are in tune. These platonic contacts dismiss the need for any carnal approximation at the moment.

I have never been so naked, so free of the layers and layers of disguises that suffocate me. I decided to undress myself completely, throw everything away and turn on the light. I never thought the glow of that light could be so heavy, cut so deep and expose my remotest hiding places. But now the rain is over, and the sun with its rays shines on each part of who I was and who I am.

And he has the key to everything, the key that opens all the gates of my existence. His eyes, in their unlimited access, give me signs that the lurking monsters have gone and that perhaps I may not need all this darkness to hid the traces of farces, lies and sadness that built imponent and everlasting castles inside myself. And each smile demolishes the lairs of the ghosts.

"Don´t change a hair for me, not if you care for me. Stay, little valentine. Stay." - Chet Baker

I don't know where I will find myself. I know I need to find myself. There is a set of ideals I try to reach and, lately, I have searched for signs of them in all corners of my existence.

I also don't know if when I write, or try to get a feeling across, those who read my words see that world in the moment I saw it and portrayed it. I have had engraved in my memory for some time now the lights of São Paulo's skyscrapers - infinite squares of light that multiply across the distance and get lost amidst the stars of the São Paulo night. And I watched them several times, trying to contain my fear of getting closer and my desire to throw myself down from the fifteenth floor. Heights scare me.

I saw treasures in São João da Boa Vista. Posters, photographs, the shadows of a past between fame and anonymity - my grandfather's past. He was a film projector in Aguaí's old cinema and still keeps mementos of those times stored in boxes of endless content. He doesn't speak English and has never been to the United States, but speaks of Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth and Marlene Dietrich as if he knew them personally. He still keeps photographs from the times James Dean was still a fashion standard. In my grandfather's past and his present as an artist on occasion, I found a bit of myself. Those boxes from the past seem to hold so much I want for the future.

I try to rescue the fragments of myself that got lost. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and see that threatening sky. And then I miss him. The blue of the sky reminds me of the blue of his eyes and the drizzle that falls at afternoon's end reminds me of the thousands of tears I shed cried over him. How many times had I wanted to be like him, to live his life? When I feel sad, it may be just the light in the room and sometimes it's the certainty that he's no longer a part of my life. And crying is useless. All I have are my memories. It was with him I discovered that it's normal to appreciate rainy days, appreciate lonely moments that bring us closer to ourselves, appreciate the juxtaposing of paradoxes, appreciate the confusion that precedes a more complete understanding of everything. He is a permanent part of my character.

My attitude now is one of indifference. I have allowed my beliefs and convictions to merge with what I've always despised. I don't see why my worlds can't be reconciled. I am a junction of all there is, the black and the white, the blue and the red. Smiles can turn into tears just like despair leads to relief. I discover more and more that nothing is permanent and what seems to be is only going through a slower and less perceptible transition. Now I think I'm just like water.

It's always a return, a return to a time of voices almost erased from my memory, colors that were able to perpetuate themselves through the years and people marked by the evanescence and ephemerity of a moment that in the end is static, immutable.

The twisted branches of the acerola tree grow in the redness of the purple earth and end in the freshness of a cutting green, where those red fruits turn opaque the blue of the sky.

Sometimes the birds drop the fruits on the red earth, where the dog with lustrous black fur searches for something to eat. It's my aunt Gisa's garden, where the roses are eternal like at my grandmother's house, where there once was a guava tree and my arms could hardly reach the first branch.

Deep down I still remember the blackness of Albertina's jabuticabas. Those black and brilliant spheres gave flavor to autumn afternoons when I was still a child.

And everything here is colors, the green of Albertina's parrot, the chocolate of my grandmother's cakes, the red of the roses, the earth, the floor, the treacherous ants, the white and yellow of the butterflies, the gold of the corn, the colorful brilliance of Carnaval and the tones of the endless winter festivities.

Even deeper, I see the live red of abuelito's watermellons and the pretty green of the kiwis he would cut for dessert at the restaurant. It was the time of Easter eggs hidden behind the sewing machine with its spider webs. It was the time of the lights at Christmas, the opulence of a table without caviar and imported champagne but covered in grapes, mangoes and oranges in great bowls. I remember how my eyes would just shine. It was all smiles, laughter and childish joking, like the charcoal drawings on the walls of the farmhouse now abandoned to the ants red as the earth.

Last night was a small break after long days of intense heat that makes clothes cling to the body and the mind lose its speed. Finally the sky melted in rain and lightning and refreshed the dry, parched earth.

I saw the storms of wind and water in the distance as they were pointed from the car by my grandmother, all that purple blueness of the storm over the green fields of flowering orange trees.

I visited the city where, forty-three years ago, my father was born, Limeira. It was a day of suffocating heat, typical of January in the region. Sometimes, brief showers would quench the thirst of that dryness, but the relief was always insufficient.

My mother and I searched for my father's birth certificate, given to us at a registrar's office by a skinny black boy who explained the routine and mechanisms of registering everything in those great huge books of names and dates.

On the way back, another one of the boys of Brazil. He walked along the highway with his back exposed to the sun, in a slow pace. He was a boy almost man, red like the earth, straight hair and eyes that seemed rather light colored. He looked at the car for a moment and then followed along. He's a part of that anonymous mass that is the synthesis of Brazil.

We walk to the sea dying of thirst. And the lost at sea dies alone in the vastness of the water, swallowed slowly. This blue infinite is cruel and misleading.

It isn't like that on the shore. I remember when I was before the ocean with my grandmother, who then saw it for the very first time. Her eyes opened wide, black and brilliant, standing out from the contours time had traced on her skin. She drank avidly with her eyes all that vastness.

She had walked in fear and hesitation along the sand to the point where the water began. Her steps were timid, reticent. It was troubling for her to keep moving, and when she got to the foot of the waves, she was scared by the last sigh of each one of them, the thousands of small and salty explosions that covered the sand.

Her wondrous surprise with all that she saw, with all that sea, is still vivid in my memory. It is as if it were only a few seconds ago that she fiercely clung to my arm in fear of being swallowed by the water. I remember her loose, spontaneous laughter as she entered the sea. I remember how then the breeze kissed us lightly and how her shawl traced crazy spirals of happiness in the air, like the strands of her hair. Though she had already lived so long and so accumulated lines and lines on her skin, the loss of the blackness of her hair and the spring in her step, that smile then was that of a girl's, a little child. It was as if the waves and the breeze had restored to her the splendor of past years. And she lost her fear and stood there contemplating the ocean.

And that sudden transformation amazed me. Perhaps it amazed me more than the sea had amazed her, perhaps because seeing someone discover the immensity of the world for the first time is an undecipherable and unique experience. She then realized that the reports of how great the world is and how small each person is were not rumors.

And standing there before the sea, we die of thirst, a thirst never satiated, the thirst of understanding that testament to infinitude that unrolls before our eyes, the thirst of speaking, knowing and thinking. And I'm sure that grandma realized how salty reality is, visible by the slight sway that took her body when she saw, for the first time, the birth and death of the waves and imagined the greatness of the machine behind the sea of reality.

The shipwrecked is destined to die of thirst like those who get lost on the sands of the beach. And that immense blueness wears something so beautiful it is impossible to unclothe that beauty, and thus we all drown in this shroud of stars and murmurs of past shipwrecks that echo among the sailors.

"Hoy mi playa se viste de amargura,
porque tu barca tiene que partir.
Al cruzar otros mares de locura,
cuida que no naufragues tu vivir."
- La Barca

Sometimes the sounds of the streets remind me of the roar of the sea, and I realize that I'm in the city that never stops, that's always navigating. Waves conduct the orchestra of lights of the capital, that oscillate from skyscraper to skyscraper in a rhythm disconnected from time.

I write moments after the first missiles fell over Baghdad. The city wakes up from its peaceful slumber amidst the flashes and explosions of the bombings. Baghdad is deserted and journalists sweep over it with their lenses.

Panic gives way to a cold analysis of the aspects of this conflict, the technical details of the bombings and war plans. Reporters predict an even greater death toll and threateningly describe the increases in American defense spending.

"As bombas caíram antes que as palavras." - William Waack

The president of the United States, George W. Bush, after trying out worried expressions before the cameras and fixing his hair, has just addressed the world to announce the beginning of the war. Empty discourse was predominant, the discourse that praises American benevolence in its efforts for the liberation of the Iraqi people. That way the United States has sealed the fate of the world, one supported by lies and uncertainties.

This isn't a war of good against evil, much less a conflict between democracy and tyranny. It is, in the end, a personal battle, a quarrel between two despotic politicians: Bush and Saddam Hussein. The first has the benefit of a seductive fake democracy that is the United States in this Republican administration. The other is known for his cruelty and has always been known for it. It just so happens that when that cruelty became disadvantageous to the United States, and only then, did it become a matter of concern to the world, because the United States and Great Britain so made it be.

Euphemistically declaring that "Iraq had begun to disarm itself," the White House announced the beginning of the war. The explosions continue in Baghdad and the United States has taken over their radio transmissions. The country is held hostage. The Middle East wakes up to the terrible reality of war in a morning that seemed so placid.

It is troubling to imagine the future of a world where personal problems between heads of state and the thirst for control of natural resources will be supported by preventive attacks more and more frequent. And preventive attacks soon become full scale wars.

Economists already look over charts and graphics, busy with calculations of the costs of this war. The United Nations prepares to deal with the chaos after Bush and Blair's destruction. Wall Street accountants seem to suffer similar blows as the residents of Baghdad. Americans will pay a price for the political reorganization of the Middle East, but little does it matter. More than ever before, the occupant of the Oval Office wants to tell the world that he owns it and will rule over it as he pleases. Hand in hand with the Texan is Tony Blair and reluctant Great Britain. Lives become gamepieces on the board of global politics, where the sacrifice of a piece or two is worthwhile for the satisfaction of more influential players.

And the world will watch every moment of this conflict through its lucrative sale to CNN. It was the manner found by the empire's journalism to broadcast all the atrocities of the war without commercial interruptions that could take away from the sick pleasure of witnessing the instantaneous destruction of lives. The press won't allow the world to disregard this conflict for one second, for better or worse.

The Iraqis, until now under Hussein's virulent regime, will live days of successive catastrophes sponsored by American good intentions. Bush will free them from Hussein: on their deathbeds it'll be difficult to demonstrate opposition to any political administraion. The debilitated survivors will blindly accept anything proposed by the United States. They will, of course, lose brothers, friends and relatives, but they'll gain the sought after American way of life.

Meanwhile, without knowing exactly why, soldiers prepare to lose their lives out of devotion to the masked tyranny of the United States' good intentions. They'll soon realize that the "American dream" is nothing more than a nightmare cross-dressed as a fairy tale. And bold displays of courage will be nothing more than futile deaths to fulfill shallow political caprices.

The UN prepares to redeem itself with Iraq's reconstruction. The bombs haven't reached downtown Baghdad yet. I fear going to sleep today and waking up tomorrow in a world from which the birthplace of civilization has been eliminated.

Dance of the Sea and the Roses / Disconnected Poetry

My nights are ill slept words and my days ill spoken ones that pile up in a sea of endless reticences.

Just as Caetano likes to feel his tongue rub against Camões' and Adriana Calcanhoto wants to eat Caetano, I want to eat words, chew them, crush them with my teeth, feel them on my tongue, become stupefied by fantastic tastes, feel their different connotations, swallow the sex of the signals, and thus take in all the knowledge.

And she writes verses like someone who lives, someone who loves. Intensely. She lingers over endless pages in order to live through words her dreams and disencounters, tying and untying life. I want to bring her roses from where the sea is deepest and the redness shouts the loudest. Red petals that swim through the prism of her eyes as she draws in for a kiss. Red roses, red lips where the sea is bluest, deepest, far from the sand.

She has something of Hemingway in her spirit, like me; a certain devotion to the infinitude of the sea and a crazy desire to count and decipher the waves, make them in their impermanence the most perfect model for our thoughts that are storms. Everything is oceans. And what I want now is to come undone in tears of happiness, turn into water and come back in a wave clinging to each grain of sand to remain under the stars just a few more seconds before being swallowed again and sinking amongst sweet collapses of uncertainty that allow me to only catch my breath in a struggle amidst the lucid moments of thunder. Everything is rain and brilliance.

"Um pequenino grão de areia / que era um pobre sonhador / olhando o céu viu uma estrela / imaginou coisas de amor..."

"Lá se vai mais um dia assim, e a vontade que não tenha fim, este sol. É viver, ver chegar ao fim essa onda que cresceu, morreu aos seus pés. E olhar pra o céu que é tão bonito, e olhar pra esse olhar perdido nesse mar azul..."
- Renata's notebook

She's not afraid to show me how she looks without make-up. And she says:

"Eu só quero às vezes essa gota ácida de dúvida sempre sobre meu paladar." - Renata

Now she'll vomit stars to Sofia, without knowing exactly whether or not they are the stars that should have been and weren't. And that proves that nothing is ever certain, everything returns to the acidness of that doubt that may never be absent, whose absence offuscates the sweetness of life and turns everything into salt and bitterness. Doubt is the challenge whose purpose is to give meaning to life, to existence.

David and Sonya went out to see the stars this evening. And here I missed the stars in these lines of writing. But I told them I was going to live a beautiful life, because I finally seem to have found a way to fuse my thoughts to my experience, and the words, though fleeting, don't seem as hard to catch, like Santiago's fish. Now I just have to keep the sharks away.

And for a long time I wanted to drink up that world, eat up the aesthetics of that world, its vibrant colors, its sights and sounds. I have yet not come to a conclusion about what he meant for me, what his presence in my life signified. Each time I seem closer to getting to the bottom of it, getting somewhere sensible, I seem to come back up to the surface. And it was on the surface of who he was that I think I lingered forever. False were my beliefs that I’d gotten to his inside, to where he was himself. Perhaps at moments that was really the case, but those moments went from everyday to being extremely rare. It only happened when we were alone, and at those times I wanted to merge myself with him. I wanted to stop being a guest in his world to become a permanent part of it.

And his world was so beautiful, so perfect. It seemed as though everything tasted good, everything was wonderful, everything was love and no time was ever wasted. Moments in his world were bliss, sailing on calm waters.

I don’t know what happened, but then he wanted me out of his world, and it hurt. I wasn’t ready to leave it. It was so much better than mine. In his world, words took on deeper meanings, music sounded better, books were more inviting. Everything was passion and longing, desires always fulfilled. My world was dry and insipid, fruitless and bland. My skies were gray and his, no matter how bleak at times, had a brilliance that never faded. His nights were starry, mine were black and lifeless. I was ready to renounce who I was to be who he was. I wanted to seize his world and make it mine. I wanted to merge our worlds together and swallow everything because it would have been so beautiful.

I redefined beauty with him and learned the power of a look, the weight of the words. If everything seemed heavier it was actually lighter, because we were together. He became the remedy for my woes until I became his greatest woe, and our worlds crumbled, they fell apart before the gaze of an audience that stood perplexed all throughout our spectacle. It was the intoxication of friendship, of companionship. It all came undone, and I was left without his ideals, without the world I wanted to possess. And I became something else, something new.

I became a new person, and he disappeared.

“Stars, hide your fires. Let not light see my black and deep desires.” - William Shakespeare

Obsession had met devotion.