Uma mistura de leveza e gravidade

«
Já em Lisboa, para além de “gostar de andar de forma descontraída, sem destino, olhar em volta, perder-me e sentar-me no parque”, revê-se nas pessoas que foi conhecendo. E tenta explicar. “Sei que é um lugar-comum mas aqui sinto que existe uma ligação com uma série de dimensões emocionais que partilho. Por exemplo, a melancolia. Aqui percebem que a melancolia não é sinónimo de tristeza, mas sim de contacto com as nossas emoções no sentido mais profundo. Acho os portugueses emocionalmente inteligentes e satisfaz-me que possam transmitir-me que a minha música tem qualquer coisa dessa melancolia. Uma melancolia, digamos assim, feliz.”
»

Mike Milosh (Rhye), entrevista por Vítor Belanciano. In Ípsilon: https://www.publico.pt/2018/01/26/culturaipsilon/entrevista/rhye-acho-os-portugueses-emocionalmente-inteligentes-1800579

Black Spring

«
As a human being walking around at twilight, at dawn, at strange hours, unearthly hours, the sense of being alone and unique fortifies me to such a degree that when I walk with the multitude and seem no longer to be a human being but a mere speck, a gob of spit, I begin to think of myself alone in space, a single being surrounded by the most magnificent empty streets, a human biped walking between the skyscrapers when all the inhabitants have fled and I am alone walking, singing, commanding the earth. I do not have to look in my vest pocket to find my soul; it is there all the time, bumping against my ribs, swelling, inflated with song. If i just left a gathering where it was agreed that all is dead, now as I walk the streets, alone and identical with God, I know that this is a lie.
(…)
The dreamers dream from the neck up, their bodies securely strapped to the electric chair. To imagine a new world is to live it daily, each thought, each glance, each step, each gesture killing and re-creating, death always a step in advance. To spit on the past is not enough. To proclaim the future is not enough. One must act as if the past were dead and the future unrealizable. One must act as if the next step were the last, which it is. Each step forward is the last, and with it a world dies, one’s self included. We are here of the earth never to end, the past never ceasing, the future never beginning, the present never ending.
»

Henry Miller, “I am Chancre, the Crab – Black Spring”. In Thomas H. Moore (ed.) “Henry Miller on Writing”. New York: New Directions, 1964, p.89.

What happens when social comparison becomes a drug?

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The idea of a facebook induces social comparison. And social comparison is a powerful drug, because it promises superiority. Perhaps that was not its original intent — but that is its effect. And that lets us answers the question: why do people compulsively use a thing, like Facebook, that makes them miserable? Well, because social comparison stretched too far is something like a drug. And so just as with a drug, people have grown addicted. The fix that once produced a shimmering, glorious high now only produces a sense of dull relief, and even that barely lasts a few seconds — after which there is deflation and despair.
(…)
In this way, we are becoming prisoners of our social appetites — slaves to me versus you interactions, through which we perform free, futile emotional labour that profits capitalism, but can only make us unhappier. Because everybody is trying to compare themselves to everyone else, which is to say rise to the top, no one is able to relate, and the paradoxical outcome is that no one’s need for belonging can be satisfied at all. It is a mass Prisoners’ Dilemma of human sociality. What is the opportunity cost? Well, when we are trapped performing social comparison, building hierarchies, and evaluating people adversarially, we cannot really do precisely the opposite of these three things: open ourselves, appreciate others, and be intimate with them. But that is what it takes to form genuine relationships.
»

Umair Haque, “Can Facebook Redeem Itself? (Part 2) Or, What Happens When Social Comparison Becomes a Drug?”. In Medium: https://eand.co/can-facebook-redeem-itself-part-2-3b5624c81ead

Some time ago

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We always look at first times with excessive indulgence. Even if by their nature they’re founded on inexperience, and so as a rule are not very successful, we recall them with sympathy, with regret. They’re swallowed up by all the times that have followed, by their transformation into habit, and yet we attribute to them the power of the unrepeatable.
Precisely because of this innate contradiction, my project began to sink right away and shipwrecked conclusively when I tried to describe my first love truthfully.
»

Elena Ferrante, “I loved that boy to the point where I felt close to fainting”. In The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/20/elena-ferrante-loved-that-boy-first-love

Creation

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Why do lovely faces haunt us so? Do extraordinary flowers have evil roots?
Studying her morsel by morsel, feet, hands, hair, lips, ears, breasts, traveling from navel to mouth and from mouth to eyes, the woman I fell upon, clawed, bit, suffocated with kisses, the woman who had been Mara and was now Mona, who had been and would be other names, other persons, other assemblages of appendages, was no more accessible, penetrable, than a cool statue in a forgotten garden of a lost continent. At nine or earlier, with a revolver that was never intended to go off, she might have pressed a swooning trigger and fallen like a dead swan from the heights of her dream. It might well have been that way, for in the flesh she was dispersed, in the mind she was as dust blown hither and thither. In her heart a bell tolled, but what it signified no one knew. Her image corresponded to nothing that I had formed in my heart. She had intruded it, slipped it like thinnest gauze between the crevices of the brain in a moment of lesion. And when the wound closed the imprint had remained, like a frail leaf traced upon a stone.
»

Henry Miller, “Sexus”. In Thomas H. Moore (ed.) “Henry Miller on Writing”. New York: New Directions, 1964, p.30.

South Platte

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…the sight of sky and willows and the weaving net of water murmuring a little in the shallows on its way to the Gulf stirred me, parched as I was with miles of walking, with a new idea: I was going to float. I was going to undergo a tremendous adventure. (…) I lay back in the floating position that left my face to the sky, and shoved off (…) I drifted by stranded timber (…) I slid over shallows that had buried the broken axles of prairie shooners and the mired bones of mammoth. I was streaming alive through the hot and working ferment of the sun, or oozing secretively through shady thickets. I was water.
»

Loren Eisely, “The Immense Journey”. New York: Random House, 1957, p.19-20.