So it's Saturday night, a tranquil and cold evening, one in which I have had a few hours to sit and consider a few things. Mostly I considered them while watching a special on how the Phoenicians could have landed in New Hampshire just before finding India, so it was easy to lose myself in thought.

Take, for example, Herberto Helder and his ideas on love. Perkins talks about the feminine subject and how its intercalations into his poetic restructuring of the intimate place from which Helder writes also fuses together various other epistemological processes at work in his verses. I particularly like the way Perkins puts these seemingly contradictory notions together. As such I would like to propose putting a few more together by leaving the single-author ideal of literary studies altogether.

When José Hierro speaks of the impediments to communication with those immediately around him in "Mambo," he does so with a somewhat Platonic ideal in mind - the recognition of the sublime in a world of shadows. His job -should- be to show the rest of us what fools we are not to look just slightly off center and see the truth of our mundane and colorful, but still very fake, world. Twenty years later we take the idea of revealing the relative as an axiom (although the poet can no longer be the iconic figure of yesteryear, oh no, that won't work at all - anyone seen that novel I was reading?)

So let's put these together. Helder writes in rebellion to the purely social bent of the Neo-Realists and later to the "Távola" group. We can also see his work as partly a construct to spite a social realm, a different focus and all that while Hierro, well, does something really similar, he just incorporates elements of the social more accessibly than Helder. I've discussed this before, and hope at least one or two readers of this blog will have read this from me, as well.

Now I would like to take this back to the moment in which I began re-pondering it, in the hopes that you will also ponder along with me. I was watching Disney channel with my daughter, then switched the station to a Star Trek episode when she went to have lunch (I had already eaten, but she and her mother were enjoying some time together and so I decided not to bother them). The former was about friendship, and the latter, about covering up truths. Each reflected on similar themes: the illusion of reality and the way we mask it from ourselves with convenient acceptance of what others tell us. Since I have gotten used to the formulaic nature of the one, and I had only a minute to watch a scene from the other before a certain pequerrucha noticed, the whole formula hadn't occurred to me then. It took only some observations on the Phoenicians to put it all (back) together (or maybe, really, for the first time).

As a token of my gratitude, I leave you with the following verses of mine to read and (hopefully, if you can read Portuguese) enjoy:

Azul:

Recentes investigações demonstram

Que, embora o céu seja azul, e a

Terra seja castanha e verde onde houver

Relvado, as árvores não vão permitir

Que as cidades se apoderem do reflexo

Que o mar faz no céu, pois, é por isso

Que o céu que todos nós vemos é azul. 

Assim, a manifestação vai decorrer

 No dia 23 de Dezembro de 2.012,

Às oito da tarde, após o anoitecer,

Enquanto todos nós estivermos a dormir,

E então, as mais ou menos corajosas

Árvores todas vão deixar de respirar. 

E, quando já tiverem morrido, e mortos

Nos acharmos, podemos consolar-nos

Com o facto da causa ter sido

Uma simples questão de cores. 

7/IX/2010

Acworth, GA

Boa Noite a todos / Buenas noches a todos / Good Night to all!