Caveat

What should be mankind greatest dream? What should have been the greatest human reverie?

It’s always a hard thing to think or talk about human dreams, and a herculean job to even dream about an answer to humanity biggest dreams. But one thing I can say, with certainty, about the dream world: we stop dreaming, and that was more than 20 years ago. Since when we got stuck in the speed of this new globalized world, where you can solve problems and communicate in fraction of seconds, we lose the pleasure of dreaming. We lost the pleasure of stopping. The world does not allow us to stop anymore. Much less in order to dream. We lost in the day-to-day confusion the sense of admiring, observing the little things in life, the world no longer presents that choice to its residents. We cannot stop, we were denied of that birthright. Velocity and readiness are the main qualities in these past years, the era of disposable, everything related to these two last decades was marked by giddy beginnings and disappearances equally fast.

Going one step back in time, in the 60s was when man conquered space, The Beatles appeared, the Pill, Martin Luther King, mini-skirts, pop-art, Che and apparently a prosperous and feasible socialism. In the Brazilian scene we had Chico, Caetano, Brazil two times world champion, Glauber Rocha, Bossa-Nova exporting the Brazilian way of life, we were, with all modesty, the future. The policy of 50 years in 5 predicted in the previous decade was still in place and those who were young back in those days come to believe that every year something amazing would emerge and change once and for all the previous world order. Then came the 70s: Military dictators, Vietnam War, Beatles setting apart, Transamazonica abandoned and definitely the world become less promising. In the following decade socialism fell and with it the last great dream. Not that I’m a Marxist, I just like to think, like most of the world’s inhabitants, that two poles were viable, two antagonistic currents of thought, ideologies and the most important thing that there was a different option. With the end of socialism we cannot even differ of political opinion. Unless you truly believe that China is a socialist country or that the Labor’s Party is a leftist government. And again the argument is not trying to prove that socialism is a better option, but just exacerbating that it is a different option. Our heroes, favorite bands, events, great inventions and ideologies were buried in the last two decades.

In a world that promises speed and greater interaction in order to take advantage of diversity and thus choosing a better option our options are becoming increasingly scarce. And our ability to dream more understated. The great plague of the 90s and 2000s is the lack of ideologies, the birth of a man who does not fight, does not have opinion, does not care, just live and let life passes by, and life mercilessly goes by without giving extra chances. And these ordinary people fruit of the last two decades are not worst human beings, but rather a consequence of a time without significant.

Will still be possible to dream? Would the lack of a moral compass with which we were accustomed to be guided for so long divert us so faraway from our path?

In sum of everything seems that all significant revolutions stopped in the XX: Its difficult to imagine that a new Picasso will emerge, or a new Beatles, theories, ideologies even in new ways-out of ordinary problems, everything appear to be entangled in these conciliatory neo-liberalism, in these great emptiness that the world has become. All that for a single reason: We stopped dreaming.





"Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." Robert Frost





Listening to Thelonious Monk - "Pannonica"

Gnothe Seauton

Balada del Ausente

"Entonces no me des un motivo por favor
No le des conciencia a la nostalgia,
La desesperación y el juego.
Pensarte y no verte
Sufrir en ti y no alzar mi grito
Rumiar a solas, gracias a ti, por mi culpa,
En lo único que puede ser
Enteramente pensado
Llamar sin voz porque Dios dispuso
Que si Él tiene compromisos
Si Dios mismo le impide contestar
Con dos dedos el saludo
Cotidiano, nocturno, inevitable
Es necesario aceptar la soledad,
Confortarse hermanado
Con el olor a perro, en esos días húmedos del sur,
En cualquier regreso
En cualquier hora cambiable del crepúsculo
Tu silencio
Y el paso indiferente de Dios que no ve ni saluda
Que no responde al sombrero enlutado
Golpeando las rodillas
Que teme a Dios y se preocupa
Por lo que opine, condene, rezongue, imponga.
No me des conciencia, grito, necesidad ni orden.
Estoy desnudo y lejos, lo que me dejaron
Giro hacia el mundo y su secreto de musgo,
Hacia la claridad dolorosa del mundo,
Desnudo, sólo, desarmado
bamboleo mi cuerpo enmagrecido
Tropiezo y avanzo
Me acerco tal vez a una frontera
A un odio inútil, a su creciente miseria
Y tampoco es consuelo
Esa dulce ilusión de paz y de combate
Porque la lejanía
No es ya, se disuelve en la espera
Graciosa, incomprensible, de ayudarme
A vivir y esperar.
Ningún otro país y para siempre.
Mi pie izquierdo en la barra de bronce
Fundido con ella.
El mozo que comprende, ayuda a esperar, cree lo que ignora.
Se aceptan todas las apuestas:
Eternidad, infierno, aventura, estupidez
Pero soy mayor
Ya ni siquiera creo,
En romper espejos
En la noche
Y lamerme la sangre de los dedos
Como si la hubiera traído desde allí
Como si la salobre mentira se espesara
Como si la sangre, pequeño dolor filoso,
Me aproximara a lo que resta vivo, blando y ágil.
Muerto por la distancia y el tiempo
Y yo la, lo pierdo, doy mi vida,
A cambio de vejeces y ambiciones ajenas
Cada día más antiguas, suciamente deseosas y extrañas.
Volver y no lo haré, dejar y no puedo.
Apoyar el zapato en el barrote de bronce
Y esperar sin prisa su vejez, su ajenidad, su diminuto no ser.
La paz y después, dichosamente, en seguida, nada.
Ahí estaré. El tiempo no tocará mi pelo, no inventará arrugas, no me inflará las mejillas
Ahí estaré esperando una cita imposible, un encuentro que no se cumplirá."

JUAN CARLOS ONETTI





"All things truly wicked start from innocence." - Ernest Hemingway





Listening to Madeleine Peyroux - "Bare Bones"

Omnes una manet nox

As I followed the less traveled road I reached a great old mansion. I knocked at the gate of lost time, nobody answered. I knocked a second time and kept knocking again and again. No response. No sounds. The house of lost time has ivy covering half of it, and ashes of a vanished past laying over the rest. Is a house where no body lives, and I kept rattling and calling, calling just to feel the pain of not being heard. Simply a lonely beat. The echo returns my urges to half-open these ice palaces of mine own. And in the end, night and day are mingled and confused by my hope, hope of waiting for the knocking to produce an echo or a reply…

The lost time certainly does not exist. Is just an empty condemned house…





"Illusion is the first of all pleasures." - Oscar Wilde





Listening to "Skeletons" - Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Fabas indulcet fames

It started to thrill me every time I begun speaking about friends. Must be age, people say that as years pass by we get more sentimental, or a constant feeling of movement, as if life was in a eternal shape shifting mode for me. But the fact is: when I think about my personal achievements and valuable belongs, friends are on equal footing with my family. And when I hear people saying that friend, real friends, we have no more than two or three, I can proudly hit my chest and say that I have way more than two or three. They are a bunch. It is not my privilege, anyone could have as many friends, but who is willing to commit? Who is willing to be engaged? People often say that John Doe is my friend, or Marie is my friend. Lie. You know them. They are people that we greeted on the street, talked quickly at a party, and we may even hear something about them, but friends? Not even close. Some actually were, but not anymore due to lack of care from both parties. Friendship is way more than just mere empathy, is a constant harvest, dedication and an eternal process of commitment. It takes time and willingness. And its most important feature is that the love involve do not need, or should not need, any reason. People often talk or commingle in Birthdays, Christmas or to ask for favors. There are always hidden motives behind it. And is that exactly paradox that can show us the factual difference between a casual and a true friend, just take the reason of the scene. I don’t need a reason. Just to miss that particular person. And, by being together, fell treated well. Hard to exemplify that feeling of being treated well. If you are in the presence of true friendship you don’t even need to put anything into words, the companion and the walk, side by side, in silence are sufficient. No need to constant praise each other, you may even pick on the other from time to time, gently. Also no need for endless demonstration of affection, and harsh truths can be said, sometimes they are needed. But the bottom line is that there is something sublime in the air between two friends. Perhaps respect is the corner stone. Affection, indeed required. Complicity? No, something greater. Tuning? No, I think is love. Only by loving you will be able to trust another person with your own personal hell. And also not to envy the battles won by the other side. For love you can share, lend, commingle and enjoy your time, you are honest in your answers, take care not to offend, embrace causes that are not yours, go into adventures, divide experiences and accept some disappearances, but reach out when that disappearance is exaggerated. All of this is dealing with friendship. If a friend like this comes into your life, do not let him go away. However, generally, people do not just let it slip from their fingers, as they contribute so they can evaporate. They ignore the mechanisms of maintenance. People think that friendship is something done, that its nature is to be constant, and we do not have to give it a helping hand. That sentiment continues up until the day that they open their little hands and are not able to count even two friends. And they start arguing that loneliness is a symptom of the modern days, so full of emergency, so individualistic. No. Loneliness is just a symptom of our negligence.





"Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies." - Aristotle




Listening to Hoodoo Gurus - "Come Anytime"

Amat victoria curam

Maybe the world is not small after all, not even life is a consummated act. I want to invent my own kind of sin and end my good life with my particular medicine.

I need, once and for all, to loose your head. My mind needs to get rid of your senses.

Facing the every day, restructuring loose pieces, tying loose ends, that’s how we walk on, everything can be re-experienced, even death.

If I’d to believe in everything that I think of, I would be insane by now…





"A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free." - Nikos Kazantzakis





Listening to Porcupine Tree - "Collapse the Light into Earth"

Liberate te ex inferis

For those who lived a good and eternal love…
Two life’s that were instantly set apart,
By the awful misleads of the naïve heart,
Can never end the motion, like a deep light...
They are like little morning shinning stars,
Running through the infinity of the sky…
Now, in different but common directions,
Following their once routed path of happiness
But never losing each other eyes from sight…

It’s like keeping an inner secret from ourselves,
From a heart that just spread its wings and flew…
It is an old alive affection that was left in our veins,
From a heart that could not left its present owner…
It’s the constant certainty of an eternal presence…

From all life that was…
From all life that will…

It is longing for that good feeling,
Happy, Singing…





"A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream." - William Faulkner





Listening to Stan Getz - "When Your Lover Has Gone"

Mens agitat molem

Following one reverie that I always wonder about since my childhood, I came up with a quite interesting question on my demented mind: What if a person with “Capgras Delusion” entered an eternal house of mirrors? What would happen to that person’s sense of being? Would that person starts to ask himself about the veracity of himself? That question always hunted me… Like a demon in a world without candles…

“Capgras Delusion” is a rare mental illness, or disorder according to more political psychiatrists, in which the “haunted” one holds a deep belief that other people, or people that are around them are in a certain manner impostors, or more commonly have being replaced by an identical-looking impostors. In general cases, the syndrome is related to a paranoid nature where the delusional person truly believes in its dementia.

But returning to our main topic, image a poor haunted soul entering a place where even the best cognitive system would be putted at test. Someone that is doubtful of his closest friends is faced with its most inner self. As a grain of sand drops, the soul that once questioned the veracity of his own family now starts to look inside itself, and as Nietzsche would probably say: The abyss gazed back into him.

Suddenly all that was inside that needy soul gets released, like a inner Pandora box, all his villains, fears, sensations, emotions, memories, sins, knowledge and information converted into one and many person as his ego, id and superego were liberated to participate in his walk through the valley of mirrors. Now he is not alone anymore, there are several “me’s”, formed through the mix of his ego, id, superego in a never ending dance as they shape-shift from one reflection into the other as the haunted soul just stares through the looking glass trying to get familiar with all this “new” impostors that have being replaced, and now surrounds him.

As the person starts to walk deep inside the maze of mirrors delusion and beliefs regarding him are at clash. Every time he looks at a different mirror the reflection shows itself as a new “him”, or more properly said the reflection brings light into a new side of his personality that was up to now in a deep shadow. Every single stare at the mirrors is a window to his haunted soul, and so as the reflections are replaced by impostors, id, ego and superego take turns or commingle in a venture to expose its truly identity. As the journey continues, I can only imagine that questions regarding the “true me” start to pop into his head. As Id, ego and superego starts to make the mirrors become more and more alive and one starts to ask himself whether the reflection is the real self and the flesh and blood is an impostor. And in this exact moment is where the subject is faced with probably one of the most difficult choices during his walk into the self-awareness: “Who am I?”

Sartre would probably argue that deep down this appeal to a transcendental ego, or a true me, conceals a conscious flight from freedom. Our pour soul quest into knowing the veracity regarding himself is truly a search for authenticity, as it is the true virtue, in a society marked or defined by oppression and exploitation. The foundation remarking our subject quest, again, is the basic ambiguity of human reality that in the darkest hours “is what it is not” and “is not what it is”, an eternal motor of internal negation. Sartre would say that authenticity, or in our case the search for it, is fundamentally a condition where the human kind remains in a deep sleep state dreaming about the basic ambiguity that states that one is never identical with one’s current state but remains responsible for sustaining it. And in that way, the claim “who I am” would be tantamount to a manner of self-deception or bad faith as would all forms of determinism, since both instances involve lying to oneself regarding the fact that one’s nonself-coincidence and the concomitant responsibility for “choosing” to remain as one self.

Given the essential division of the human condition into factice and transcendence, bad faith or in-authenticity can assume two principal forms: one that denies the freedom or transcendence component and the other that ignores the fatidic dimension of every situation. Sartre talks as if any choice could be authentic so long as it is lived with a clear awareness of its contingency and responsibility. But his considered opinion excludes choices that oppress or consciously exploit others. In other words, authenticity is not entirely style; there is a general content and that content is freedom.

So as the “Capgras Holder” ventures into the jungle of self’s, realities, choices and thoughts translate as impostors reflected in every single mirror, deep down his journey into reveling its truly form turns into a quest for freedom. A quest for learning how to live with his choices. As certain as he is about a particular decision he becomes aware that no other alternative is possible, when a particular decision is made a new path is set. And since each path is full of possibilities, it seems that he cannot accept the responsibility for his choices, the responsibility of letting others paths go, or more likely of not exploring every single path possible.

And as a Salomonical curse, the feeling and memories of missed paths and opportunities will eternally hunt the “Capgras Holder” and all his inner self-reflections seen as impostors, but truly representing all dreams, emotions and sensations stored deep down at the holders id, ego and superego that were not properly followed…




"In all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny." - John Stuart Mill




Listening to "Dr Jackle" - Miles Davis feat. Milt Jackson Quintet