“As
the end approaches,” wrote Cartaphilus*, “there are no longer any
images from memory – there are only words.” Words, words taken out of
place and mutilated, words from other men – those were the alms left him
by the hours and the centuries.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Immortal
“So
many egoists call themselves artists,” Rimbaud wrote to Paul Demeny on
May 15, 1871. Even though that is not always obvious, ‘I’, the first
person, is the most unknown person, a mystery that is constantly moving
towards the other two, the second and third persons, a series of
unfoldings and smatterings that eventually gelled as ‘Je est un autre’.
That is why ‘apocryphal’ is a literarily irrelevant concept and ‘pseudo’
a symptom, the very proof that life, writing, is made up of echoes,
which means that intrusions and thefts (Borges also discusses them) will
always be the daily bread of those who write.
Words from others, words taken out of place and mutilated: here are the alms of time, that squanderer’s sole kindness. And so many others, mostly others who wrote, and many other pages, all of them apocryphal, all of them echoes, reflections. All this flows together into—two centuries before Borges wrote the words quoted above—the last words a dying man recites without knowing the language in which he is saying them, without ever having known what they meant.
In one of their conversations, Goethe tells Eckermann the story of a man who, lying on his death-bed and no longer able to recognise faces, amazed everyone by reciting a number of Greek maxims, though he had never learned that language. Someone remembered then that, in his youth, the man had been hired to help a young and lazy noble in his studies. His contract demanded him, in order to inspire his charge to learn Greek, to memorize a series of Greek maxims which he himself did not understand, and never would. More than mutilated, inaccessible, these words from others were committed to memory but never truly learned by heart, forever incommunicable and recited at the final moment, a scream, a plea, a laugh, a whole life in those pitiful sounds before the breath ceased.
Words are human things; a great obscurity saturates them while they are meaninglessly uttered on the death-bed, after the images of memory have faded; while they are being recited, much lucidity remains unexplained.
Regarding the concepts of strange and strangeness, many approaches could be taken. But, since the treasure of partiality must be protected, I have limited myself to one, perhaps two, and tried to make their musicality heard: a strange story told by Goethe has, it seems, helped me understand a few strange lines by Jorge Luis Borges.
* Joseph Cartaphilus is the name of the Smyrna antiquary who in 1929 offered a six-volume edition of Pope’s Iliad to the Princess of Lucinge. A few months later, he died at sea while returning home. He was buried on the island of Ios (a possible birthplace of Homer). The sixth volume contained the manuscript we read when we read Borges’ The Immortal.
https://www.diaphanes.com/titel/the-alms-of-time-5568
Filomena Molder has her own way of speaking, an enchanting cadence for those who listen to her. It starts from herself, from her own experience, from the condition of one who observes and thinks, but as a collective act, insofar as her reading of the world is polyphonic. In it, her chosen authors intersect and dialogue, those she always pursues or those who pursue her, those she discovers or those with whom she encounters. And in this network of constellations, not as Sibyl, but as Ariadne, she demonstrated the inexhaustible possibilities of approaching the theme that had been proposed for the closing of the Space, Writing, and Thinking cycle: The space of the image.
Chaining together different points of view, Filomena Molder was drawing, forming, suggesting, determining, expanding, and diluting the physical, mental, and affective space of those who followed her dazzling and continuous unfolding last Saturday at the Fundação Marques da Silva. It was a vertiginous torrent of images where the voices of artists, philosophers, poets, historians, anthropologists, or even psychologists and pediatricians echoed. And it is enough to mention just a few of these names. Yes, Kant, Goethe, Wittgenstein and Benjamin were there, but also St. Augustine, Johann Georg von Hamann and Hermann Broch. And because the body, which occupies and transforms the space, was the starting point for a stimulating game of reflection and questioning, Ushio Amagatsu and Herberto Helder were consulted, as well as Dante's rhyme, Italo Calvino and the choruses of the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. With his conscience awake to the importance of the foot in the liberation of the hand and the gaze, that is, in the availability for imagination, defending the inherent mystery of learning language, he evoked the condition of community and the temporal conditions where our individual and human life develops, bringing out the voices of Óssip Mandelstam, Michel de Certeau or André Leroi-Dourhan, and the most unexpected voice of Julianna Vamos. Moving from gravity to depth, because space, as Bob Dylan would say, "contains multitudes", she explored the relations of space with art and returned to Eduardo Chillida and Alberto Giacometti, remembering Rembrandt and the territory of the Muses. Filomena Molder spoke, in short, of the inevitability of the image, of the impossibility of escaping from a game that is also the story of our lives, that of the images that surround us, those that our language creates, the founding images, that is, those of the theater of our lives, with the house occupying the most intimate place. Dialectical images and from which the present cannot be taken away, since it is in the present that one lives. That is why he also left images for space, that of the "labyrinth", "bridge", and "well", houses, after all, of the Game of Glory.
This cycle, which counted with the support of the Marques da Silva Foundation and the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, was an initiative of Gonçalo Furtado and António Oliveira, who ensured the moderation of the 4 sessions that constituted it.
My life now is less inland than marine
on a hill with cork trees,
clean girdled,
hand harvested.
Here where terrace lavender
dies from too much,
mine thrives on less,
prefers poverty.
Squash seeds,
and a persimmon calyx
traces of my former life
are arranged on a shelf
in the studio.
Columbine pods
also lie there
beside a clay ocarina
I've made
but have yet to play.
mata kon do ne?
next time, OK?
next time, OK?
a fork
a dog
a book or log
chips abroad, a boat
night flight with fish
words floating
through dream
currents
currently
indecipherable
an undertone
cantigos
pulses
purses
curses
troubadour
a bracelet
of graces
sung in one
set
yet
unforgettable
Unidentified
when
50 percent
unlit -
a geranium
I've spent a lifetime
longing to love