blog_ 7x7
Tuca Pinheiro e André Masseno X Wagner Schwartz = I CAN’T FEEL ANGER ANYMORE; I EXHAUSTED MY STRENGTHS IN TONIGHT’S OUTING; IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WOODS, IN THE LACK OF TIME TO WRITE
to TUCANDRÉ
by Wagner Schwartz around O Confete da India (Confetti from India), by André Masseno
I would need an epigraph to begin this text, but I still don’t know where it could come from. Maybe it will turn up before the end of this paragraph, whose length I haven’t yet decided on either. I listen to music, it comes from the loudspeakers on the shelf in my room, behind me; its pace doesn’t relate to this text, it works on the opposite sense of what I need to write. It has short notes. It happens in repetition times that are so small they create a kind of anxiety net in the head; only the power of an exercise can expand this perception – that of thinking. I walked into the middle of a composition, in its larger extension; almost impossible to see all that on the scene; but I saw it, the thing was there and the more it moved, the more it fell apart. The thing was guided by the strength coming up from the ground. It was as if I listened, for long hours, to a person deep down a well, screaming, howling, flailing about; not to be saved, but to be restrained, suffocated, poorly digested, knowing that (s)he wouldn’t rot, (s)he wasn’t forgotten, (s)he was with her/himself and whoever could listen. Yes, it was the body of a thing that knows what it wants to do and its space has this dimension – that of knowing what it wants to do. Sparing examples for those who need, because people rarely exist by its side; the radius between one and the others is infinite and diagonal. A few too many people run away from this syntony, they imagine it’s so distant that only those who believe in God could have something to hold on to, to pray for, to meditate upon, to incorporate within, to psychograph about or whatever it is and standing on both feet. Only this way the absence that was once called stranger could make itself at home. But it will never make itself at home because it doesn’t matter, because that thing’s life doesn’t need the meaning of comfort. To the thing, the idea of comfort calls out the thing that hurts in the thing till it’s out of the conversation, disappearing in some beating, in a breath, in a spit, in the sex made vulgar, in the informality of a penetration. This is how it may disappear and still remain as an everlasting question, because the thing wants more, it wants to avoid deals and nostalgic chats about what doesn’t exist, about the lack of whatever it is, because the thing is complete in its scream, in its way of walking and looking into those who look at it, without a blink, without getting moved (if you get emotional close to it you lose respect or what has been invented about it). The thing lives without perversity, in its inaugural way of living which is to live as it is, without comparisons, without looking for too long into rearview mirrors, unintendedly. Those who look at the thing refrain from looking within, they forget and absorb themselves with what could be done; maybe they would like it, would go round it, would avoid it, would go to hell to question the extension of their freedom. Those who look at it from here don’t have time to visualize what its body is, can’t enter its small space, its joint, more or less, full of love. Those who observe it get lost or bored. Those who get bored go away; but the thing hounds their idea of relief, in the same direction, on the course of those who withdraw, full of themselves, of those who think they quit, of those who picture themselves far from what is around there, for giving other forms of life an importance of inferiority. The thing doesn’t get tired, it doesn’t search references or vacations. It’s plenty, ubiquitous, diffuse, it avoids irritating the movement that you and I sometimes learn about death. It goes through the entities of suffering, bored by a sonority that amplifies the density of emotion, its volume. The extension of its body always goes a little further than it can picture itself. It ends and restarts itself; thus, the paradox. If it restarts it can’t be said that there was an end, neither that it was brief. The thing is in itself. Full of a thousand other things that from another thousand things made more thousands of other things beyond their own things. If it screams it can’t be itself anymore, but the echo of what went beyond. It’s from there that it never came from and it’s there that it will never go, because the thing is here, in its maternity, dismetaphorized, naked, intricate. Exercising its wisdom on managing the materials that escape petrification, it applies itself outwards, out of this universe that forced itself to become a body, integrating other signals in the extension of its skin, to make visible what, without their presences, would be forgotten, mystified. The thing is, beyond itself, its thinking. It has a life filled with desires; sometimes they are turned into emotions, in a level of complexity out of the updated knowledge. It changes itself inside the most sordid states of the songs and events through which civilization navigates and bends itself over, for or against, in and out, this and that, in a way or another, no way, like this or like that. It creates the lightning rod fundament, freezing cold or on the dry. With no time for lukewarm things that in the old testament were said to make one puke, in this case, it doesn’t make an effort, these things don’t make sense for those who live out in the streets day and night. It doesn’t fool itself, but it may trick those who believe they understand a bit of everything and make this a reason to drink, to go out and invade the space of others with tenderness. The thing doesn’t need an epigraph or an epitaph. It’s out there.
Wagner Schwartz [www.wagnerschwartz.com]
Works with contemporary art, dance and literature between São Paulo and Paris.
His projects problematize the artistic relations and their course.
Translation Portuguese-English: writer and poet Chris Ritchie, M.A.