Reconstituição das páginas da edição angolana do primeiro caderno do semanário Sol de 12 de Fevereiro de 2010 que por cá andam esquivas, segundo afamado especialista estrangeiro em arqueologia industrial (que pediu anonimato: diz que não gosta de chocos com tinta)
A PARÁBOLA DO JUIZ E DA JORNALISTA
- A JORNALISTA O sôtor não acha que o primeiro valor de uma sociedade democrática é a liberdade de expressão?
- O JUIZ (do Norte) Não.
- A JORNALISTA ... a liberdade de pensamento?
- O JUIZ (do Norte) Não.
- A JORNALISTA ...a liberdade de opinião?
- O JUIZ (do Norte)
Não. Não. O primeiro valor é o direito à vida. E deixemo-nos de coisas, porque eu já ouvi dizer... que é... O único valor, o primeiro valor, o único valor que não tem limitações, em algumas sociedades, porque tem, por exemplo, nos sítios onde há pena de morte, é o direito à vida e à integridade física...
No país dos sacanas, ser sacana e meio? Não, ó Jorge, que cena, então não sabias? Ser-se Luiz Pacheco. (Como imperativo moral). E o gajo morreu na mesma. A quem aproveitará? Já tanto faz. Tanto nos faz.
Alguém tem o contacto do dealer do Benjamin? (O do Baudelaire também serve)
Dwain Esper, Marihuana (1936)
After long hesitation, took hashish at 7 o'clock in the evening. During the day I had been in Aix. I am taking down notes of what possibly follows only to determine whether it will take effect, as my solitariness hardly allows for any other supervision. Next to me a small child is crying, who disturbs me. I think that three quarters of an hour have already elapsed. And yet it has actually been only half an hour. Thus... apart from a very mild absent-mindedness, nothing's happening. I lay upon the bed, read and smoked. All the while opposite me this glimpse of the ventre of Marseilles. (Now the images begin to take hold of me.) The street that I'd so often seen is like an incision cut by a knife.
Certain pages in Steppenwolf , which I read early this morning, were a final impetus to take hashish.
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), On Hashish (1927-34), Protocol IV: 29 September 1928. Saturday. Marseilles. [Translated by Scott J. Thompson, copyright March 25, 1997]
(Cuidado com a pequena criminalidade: começam no graffiti, passam aos charros e acabam a urrar macacadas com os pretos do jazz e a tomar banho nuas com as outras fufas. Veja-se o caso do Walter Benjamin: morreu novo, aos 48 anos - parece que o ar puro dos Pirinéus foi demais para ele. Bem haja, senhor Giuliani!)
Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Painting, 1946, óleo sobre tela, 198cm × 132 cm cm, Museum of Modern Art
IT IS a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors, crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags and importuning every passenger for an alms. These mothers, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time in strolling to beg sustenance for their helpless infants: who as they grow up either turn thieves for want of work, or leave their dear native country to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell themselves to the Barbadoes.
I think it is agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of children in the arms, or on the backs, or at the heels of their mothers, and frequently of their fathers, is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom a very great additional grievance; and, therefore, whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these children sound, useful members of the commonwealth, would deserve so well of the public as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation.
But my intention is very far from being confined to provide only for the children of professed beggars; it is of a much greater extent, and shall take in the whole number of infants at a certain age who are born of parents in effect as little able to support them as those who demand our charity in the streets.
(...)
I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.
I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration that of the hundred and twenty thousand children already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one-fourth part to be males; which is more than we allow to sheep, black cattle or swine; and my reason is, that these children are seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not much regarded by our savages, therefore one male will be sufficient to serve four females. That the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in the sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom; always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.
I have reckoned upon a medium that a child just born will weigh 12 pounds, and in a solar year, if tolerably nursed, increaseth to 28 pounds.
I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.
Matthias Grünewald (1470/80 - 1528), Isenheim Altarpiece, The Crucifixion (detail), c. 1515, oil on wood, 269 x 307 cm, Musée d'Unterlinden, Colmar
The killing of Christ injures the being of God. It looks as if creatures couldn't communicate with their Creator except through a wound that lacerates integrity. The wound is intended and desired by God. The humans who did this are not less guilty. On the other hand, �and this is not the least strange,� the guilt is a wound lacerating the integrity of every guilty being. In this way God (wounded by human guilt) and human beings (wounded by their own guilt with respect to God), find, if painfully, a unity that seems to be their purpose. If human beings had kept their own integrity and hadn't sinned, God on one hand and human beings on the other would have persevered in their respective isolation. A night of death wherein Creator and creatures bled together and lacerated each other and on all sides, were challenged at the extreme limits of shame: that is what was required for their communion.
Thus "communication," without which nothing exists for us, is guaranteed by crime. "Communication" is love, and love taints those whom it unites.
In the elevation upon a cross, humankind attains a summit of evil. But it's exactly from having attained it that humanity ceases being separate from God. So clearly the "communication" of human beings is guaranteed by evil. Without evil, human existence would turn in upon itself, would be enclosed as a zone of independence: And indeed an absence of "communication"� empty loneliness �would certainly be the greater evil.
Rosalie et moi, traînées par ces deux scélérats, nous regagnons les appartements ; les portes se ferment. La malheureuse fille de Rodin est attachée aux colonnes d'un lit, et toute la rage de ces furieux se tourne contre moi ; je suis accablée des plus dures invectives, et les plus effrayants arrêts se prononcent ; il ne s'agit de rien moins que de me disséquer toute vive, pour examiner les battements de mon cœur, et faire sur cette partie des observations impraticables sur un cadavre. Pendant ce temps on me déshabille, et je deviens la proie des attouchements les plus impudiques. - Avant tout, dit Rombeau, je suis d'avis d'attaquer fortement la forteresse que tes bons procédés respectèrent... C'est qu'elle est superbe ! admire donc le velouté, la blancheur de ses deux demi-lunes qui en défendent l'entrée jamais vierge ne fut plus fraîche. - Vierge ! mais elle l'est presque, dit Rodin. Une seule fois, malgré elle, on l'a violée, et pas la moindre chose depuis. Cède-moi le poste un instant...
Putas, paneleiros, mulherengos, anarquistas e soldados para África, em Braga, a Idolátrica, ainda antes das brasileiras alugarem a cona em Bragança
E esta que fingiu nunca dar por mim, quando o carro arranca e me deixa esquecido, diz:
- Adeus, meu senhor .
Como quem diz: estavas aí e me viste e me desejaste, e quiseste o meu cono, e fui tua. Nunca mais me verás, fantasma de blusão negro e óculos grossos cara aparvalhada, fica-te, tarrenego!, sei lá quem tu és - não sou para ti.
E eu que era para ela. Outra qualquer. Dentro e fora da memória, fantasma para fantasmas.Vou para a cama. O vinho pesa-me na cabeça. Bebo água fria para desenjoar a gorja. Durmo como um bendito. Acordo no escuro, cedo, 6 ou 5 horas, há um grupo na Pensão que se está a levantar, batem portas. Estou excitadíssimo. O meu homem virá ao encontro? Onde o hei-de meter? Nestes quartos ouve-se tudo.
Abjecção. Remorsos. Decido não ir. Misturo a Deolinda com o António e sem mexer na picha estou quase a vir-me. De repente, tudo é tão violento que tenho de bater uma punheta.
Como a Natureza previu todas as nossas fraquezas e ausências, dotou-nos também com outro caralho para o cu detrás. Meto o dedo (médio?) todo no cu, bato a punheta. E a ejaculação, forte porque há dias que estou sem deitar nada cá para fora, dá-me contracções no esfincter. Gozozíssimas. Venho-me imenso. Estou cada vez mais excitado. Cada passo na escada parece julgo que é o António que vem e me penetra e me obriga a chupar-lhe o delicioso caralho que não vi. Escândalo. Tribunal Militar.Vergonha. Filhos a saberem tudo. Loucura. Suicídio. Tomo meio Calmax. A pouco e pouco a corda vai-se aligeirando, estou melhor. Mas que vontade de ter pecado. De pecar. Como assim: de viver. Descubro que o êxito e o fracasso são uma e a mesma cadeia e em tudo. O êxito para cima, o fracasso para baixo, e quando digo baixo digo baixo: sujidões, dívidas, vergonhas, podridão, loucura. Mas o que toma tudo igual é que ambas as cadeias se encontram, nada a fazer, meus caros, daqui a cem anos ninguém se lembra.
It is the primary obligation of the [israeli] government to protect Jewish lives. Israel is first and foremost a JEWISH democratic State. It is NOT a non-sectarian, democratic country like the United States. As such, it is absurd for anyone other than Jews to be citizens in the first place! That is why Israel MUST revamp its Constitution making Israel unequivocally a JEWISH State… with NO possibility that any other group will ever become the majority. It is insane to have enemies of the Jewish people living anywhere within its boundaries. So how does Israel put a stop to the explosive Israeli Arab population growth? The same way one puts a stop to a growing cancer… REMOVE IT.
We, members of the People's Council, representatives of the Jewish Community of Eretz-Israel and of the Zionist Movement, are here assembled on the day of the termination of the British Mandate over Eretz-Israel and, by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.
Retrato de Ethel Hatch, com 9 anos, pelo Reverendo Charles Dodgson (1832-1898)
"Her admirers - middle-aged men and clergymen - respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body"...
Wee Willie Winkie
The owners of a child star are like leaseholders - their property diminishes in value every year. Time's chariot is at their back; before them acres of anonymity. What is Jackie Coogan now but a matrimonialsquabble? Miss Shirley Temple's case, though, has peculiar interest: infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece (real childhood, I think, went out after "The Littlest Rebel"). In "Captain January" she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance; her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in "Wee Willie Winkie," wearing short kilts, she is completely totsy. Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square; hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant's palm is raised; watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep. It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers - middle-aged men and clergymen - respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire. 'Why are you making Mummy cry?' - what could be purer than that? And the scene when dressed in a white nightdress she begs grandpa to take Mummy to a dance - what could be more virginal? On those lines her new picture, made by John Ford, who directed "The Informer," is horrifyingly competent. It isn't hard to stay to the last prattle and the last sob. The story - about an Afghan robber converted by "Wee Willie Winkie" to the British Raj - is a long way after Kipling. But we needn't be sour about that. Both stories are awful, but on the whole Hollywood's is the better.
Graham Greene (1904-1991), "Wee Willie Winkie", Night and Day, 28 October 1937
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
The night in prison was novel and interesting enough. The prisoners in their shirt-sleeves were enjoying a chat and the evening air in the doorway, when I entered. But the jailer said, "Come, boys, it is time to lock up"; and so they dispersed, and I heard the sound of their steps returning into the hollow apartments. My room-mate was introduced to me by the jailer as "a first-rate fellow and a clever man." When the door was locked, he showed me where to hang my hat, and how he managed matters there. The rooms were whitewashed once a month; and this one, at least, was the whitest, most simply furnished, and probably the neatest apartment in the town. He naturally wanted to know where I came from, and what brought me there; and, when I had told him, I asked him in my turn how he came there, presuming him to be an honest man, of course; and, as the world goes, I believe he was. "Why," said he, "they accuse me of burning a barn; but I never did it." As near as I could discover, he had probably gone to bed in a barn when drunk, and smoked his pipe there; and so a barn was burnt. He had the reputation of being a clever man, had been there some three months waiting for his trial to come on, and would have to wait as much longer; but he was quite domesticated and contented, since he got his board for nothing, and thought that he was well treated.
He occupied one window, and I the other; and I saw that if one stayed there long, his principal business would be to look out the window. I had soon read all the tracts that were left there, and examined where former prisoners had broken out, and where a grate had been sawed off, and heard the history of the various occupants of that room; for I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.
I pumped my fellow-prisoner as dry as I could, for fear I should never see him again; but at length he showed me which was my bed, and left me to blow out the lamp.
It was like travelling into a far country, such as I had never expected to behold, to lie there for one night. It seemed to me that I never had heard the town-clock strike before, nor the evening sounds of the village; for we slept with the windows open, which were inside the grating. It was to see my native village in the light of the Middle Ages, and our Concord was turned into a Rhine stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me. They were the voices of old burghers that I heard in the streets. I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village-inn — a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I never had seen its institutions before. This is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is a shire town.(1) I began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about.
In the morning, our breakfasts were put through the hole in the door, in small oblong-square tin pans, made to fit, and holding a pint of chocolate, with brown bread, and an iron spoon. When they called for the vessels again, I was green enough to return what bread I had left; but my comrade seized it, and said that I should lay that up for lunch or dinner. Soon after he was let out to work at haying in a neighboring field, whither he went every day, and would not be back till noon; so he bade me good-day, saying that he doubted if he should see me again.
When I came out of prison — for some one interfered, and paid that tax — I did not perceive that great changes had taken place on the common, such as he observed who went in a youth and emerged a tottering and gray-headed man; and yet a change had to my eyes come over the scene — the town, and State, and country — greater than any that mere time could effect. I saw yet more distinctly the State in which I lived. I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their friendship was for summer weather only; that they did not greatly propose to do right; that they were a distinct race from me by their prejudices and superstitions, as the Chinamen and Malays are; that in their sacrifices to humanity, they ran no risks, not even to their property; that after all they were not so noble but they treated the thief as he had treated them, and hoped, by a certain outward observance and a few prayers, and by walking in a particular straight though useless path from time to time, to save their souls. This may be to judge my neighbors harshly; for I believe that many of them are not aware that they have such an institution as the jail in their village.
It was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtor came out of jail, for his acquaintances to salute him, looking through their fingers, which were crossed to represent the grating of a jail window, "How do ye do?" My neighbors did not thus salute me, but first looked at me, and then at one another, as if I had returned from a long journey. I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour — for the horse was soon tackled — was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.