TRIBUTO A ANA HADDAD
Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). Programa de Estudos Pós-Graduados em História da Ciência (Instituição-sede da última proposta de pesquisa) . Brasil
Education and Readings:
a walk through the loneliness of Marco Lucchesi’s stars
Preliminary warnings
Lineu, forgive me! The authors of all the classification tables that have emerged throughout the vast history of humanity, please I am sorry. I would like to propose a pretentious classification reagarding to readers. I think it could help, even if from a distance, the famous “reading portraits” (subtle, cunning, liars, complexes) that appear in the context of statistics on the subject. Not only in Brazil. But, in the world.
Given the above, I suggest the following table: (undeniably, with echoes by Charles Sanders Peirce)
A Occasional readers
Occasional readers are those who love to buy trendy books. The best sellers. Especially if the books are imported from imperialist countries or if they come with express recommendations from the New York Times. Such books are displayed, to the delight of bookstores, on ‘attractive’ and ‘seductive’ shelves. Occasional readers look at the works by the number of its sales. They don’t handle the book. They buy them. They admire the cover and the comments on the back cover. They arrive home and leaf through the book. In general they read until the fourth or eleventh page and abandon the book. On social media they display it and pretend they have read it. After all, the book is fashion and it is one of the best sellers. How to stay out of the dizzying wave of social media rhythm? Not at all. After a few years (or months) the books will be sold or donated to needy bookstores and libraries. Almost intact. Furthermore, that such types of readers are unconditional fans of releases. Especially if the pseudo authors (to be more clear-acid-exact those who have ‘literary and poetic intentions’) are television artists, celebrities, politicians, adventurers or something of the same sort. After all, who can’t write a book? Contemporary publishing facilities, faithful allies of capitalism, shamelessly expose publishing projects that reach, as a hit between the eyes, Narciso’s innumerable disciples. From the most visible to the so-called ‘invisible’. It is noteworthy that occasional readers, in other times, had large libraries in which they accumulated books, untouched, to display them to friends and visitors of their home. However, as is generally known, the reduction and redefinition of living spaces demanded them to subtract into libraries. Books! Why?
B School readers
School readers are those who read because they are demanded to. Teachers, of all grades of education, ususually, ask to read books that will be asked on tests (usually these teachers have a fixed prescription of works indicated as classic) and aim, in particular, at entrance exams, as well such as the so-called selection processes due to more competitive school institutions (public or private).
Such readers arrive avid in bookstores. They read the books to get to know by heart the characters’ names, psychological profile, space where the narrative takes place, indexes that mark verses of poems, contextual elements, dates. Before the tests, in a cold and rational way, they possibly read the summaries of what they wrote down to pass the tests. The book (content) is treated as a fragment that will be archived to a merely informative repertoire. Months or weeks after the selective exams, the ‘already read’ books fall into deep wells of voluntary forgetfulness. Maybe one day the involuntary memory, for some mystery, bring back some parts of what was stored. Who knows? Nothing is impossible in this universe populated by chance, tea with madeleines and the very fashionable (in terms of treats) affective memory.
C Captured readers
Captured readers are those who see the reading of a book as an opening or scape route, (to remember Deleuze), irreversible. They know, even intuitively, that reading is not a habit. Reading is a necessity. Reading is searching. Deep Inexhaustible. Vital There was a time in their lives, no matter what age, when reading a book (no matter what textual typology) captured them for eternity. Such types of readers are not concerned with whether the books they read have been awarded or won some kind of contest. They don’t care if the book is ten or a thousand pages long. What matters for them is the endless plunge that only real literature can offer. Captured readers have already realized that a good book offers untapped horizons that captivate the imagination. The dreams The future. They know that literary signs are composed of an immaterial part, from those who create it, which includes a great degree of subjectivity. They know that good literature is the best companion for the inescapable moments of individual and cosmic loneliness to which the human condition is condemned. They know that human freedom can be exercised together with the plots of a well-constructed language.
Given the above, I certainly present some books by which I was captured:
1 Marco Lucchesi. Domínios da insônia (Domains of Insomnia) [1]
Heraclitus, Goethe, Bergson, Deleuze, Marguerite Yourcenar and many others have already thought deeply about the mysteries that involve the time. How do we deal with time? To what extent does the present continue what we were in the past? How to live an absolute present without the circularity and movement of a time that is already gone? Almost unanswerable questions. The truth is that when it comes to literature, each writer exposes his relations, under different perspectives, so to speak, with temporalities. The work itself, intrinsically, and its scope, as well as its posture at the time of life. In their own existences. Explaining better: it is widely known that Octavio Paz, for example, always in the process of continuity, reviewed his poetry, as well as his essays or books in poetic prose. He enlarged certain poetry. He subtracted others. Borges, as is known, was no different. Marguerite Yourcenar remade most of her works (perhaps Adriano’s Memory is an exception). A terrible intolerance of what that has already been published. The rewriting of many works by the author barely reached levels beyond reasonable.
Insomnia domains: new poems gathered, by Marco Lucchesi, [Insomnia and its remnants: / sleeping pills, crumbs / Collapse the Phoenicians / the dreams and the walls], it is everyone’s meeting (maybe. .. almost) the poems, in different books, reviewed by the author. Some rewritten. Other unpublished. Some subtracted from its poetic journey.
Marco Lucchesi could be compared, at first, even considering the serious risk of comparisons, with Giacometti through Sartre’s eyes. That is: the indomitable search for perfection. By the purest expression. The perfection unfolded by the abyss of the aesthetic or the understanding that the incompleteness, within itself that screams all the time, must and must be attenuated. Marco Lucchesi, for his journey, struggles with the imperfections that drown us and from which we never escape. [ The deepest secret / of what we are / and of the things that surround us]. And with that he seeks escape routs (to remember Deleuze once more) in an attempt to synchronize work, life. present, past, future.
it runs on the surface
of water
impermanence
and it comes back lonely
to the heart.
from Gods
It runs on the surface
and in the abyss of things
to sow the shapes
of an unfinished time
It run in the skies
in the valleys and mountains
scouring ruins
of scorched afternoons where it is burnt
streams and currents that do not follow
to the sea
Lucchesi wants the stars, at all costs, closer to him (and consequently to his readers). He dialogues with them but this does not fully satisfy him:
The night is cold
and the Stars
shine in the distance
It is necessary to suffer
the vastness
as who surrenders
to the sacrifice of a god
I went from insomnia
dark
to swetness
of the Milky Way.
There are so many and so diverse
the ways
to probe the beauty
the Canis Major
the Sirius Star
the brightest of all
Firmament
Antares
Rival
of Mars being another
its red almost
so strong and lively
It also seeks the perfection of concepts (remember Bachelard in his famous study notebooks), such as: “A moonless night, a desert of darkness, life, and then there is the sparkle of nothingness”. Or: “Inseparable walk good and evil. Honey is also sprinkled by bitterness “. And also “Medicine for life is unborn”. Everything indicates, through the crossing that we make of the book as a whole, that Marco Lucchesi unborns, in his unfathomable silences, to reborn. The attentive and sensitive reader clearly perceives a certain search for himself that is transferred as a kind of perfect alert for humanity in its usual inertia for fear of responsibilities and cowardice when faced with indeterminations, usually labyrinthine, that the choices make possible. He even realizes that cosmic loneliness, sometimes underlying, now explicit, requires freedom. It is known or we should know: eternal construction (let’s remember Sartre again: freedom, both for the author and the reader, is never given, the writer is stuck).
Domains of Insomnia is a book of almost 700 pages. In it, as can be expected, many chronological phases of Marco Lucchesi manifest. But surely the unity among all the poems resides in the poet’s precocious and rare scholarship. Undeniable fact. Objectively, for those who know the works, not yet assembled, of the author, all prefaces, posts and flaps (from critics, artists, researchers, professors, poets) never left aside the writer’s repertoire, including, not only in dialogue with classic and non-classic works by the great ones that mark universal literature as can be seen, just to be left with an example, in the following poem:
Dreamed
levels of love
as higher
as
many more
verses
complained about me to me
In Dante
the pure spring
of my conflicts
the telemaquia with which
I struggled
life in search of Ulysses.
Marco Lucchesi was born, so to speak, interdisciplinary. He dialogues with philosophy, music, astronomy, physics, chemistry, alchemy, mathematics. He travels around Babel with the tranquility of the great sages (he has more than twenty languages). However, he never ceased to invent his own language, that is, Laputar (Rudimentos da Língua Laputar (Rudiments of Laputar Language) / Editora Dragão).
If we consider the speech almost utopian, either due to the lack of arguments, the absence of political will, or the intentional inertia of power relations systems, when thinking about an interdisciplinary education project, Domains of Insomnia would be the ideal work, in every way, to support the interdisciplinary (and little put into practice) dreamed. Let’s remember with seriousness and honesty: why the education projects that drafted interdisciplinary projects are barely sustainable? As a rule, because the professionals involved do not have the minimum preparation and compile for this. And the fundamental argument: there are few literatures that can sustain such a project. It is important to remember that literature is one of the only paths to a truly interdisciplinary project.
Domains of Insomnia dialogues with mathematics:
Prime are lost {venerating numbers}
when a grove in the middle of the night
under the shimmering lyre of Orpheus
starts to dance, bravest and most dispersed
The imaginary
{cloud thought grove}:
crystalline math shortcut
Merleau-Ponty claimed that things, in their most general sense, were not neutral, even fewer simple objects that we contemplate around us. To that extent, we can meet someone, the most, by the objects evoked around this person. In other words: according to someone’s evoked objects, we know a lot about their character and, above all, about their intentions.
They cross the domains of insomnia:
I’m looking for the center of the circle
and the deep dimensions of its dawn,
whose rays shine iridescence
from the acid mystery that devours
the circle of its ambivalence:
not moved engine, sunset and dawn,
cause without cause – pure diffluence
from the lonely height which it takes longer.
And the invisible ends of the compass
they surround our rude understanding,
marking the sovereign mismatch
of such a prodigious rise:
the never being able to see this tiredness
abyss of bitterness and affliction.
What to say, minimally, about the ‘objects summoned’ by the poet?
The unfathomable Syrian writer Marie-Joulie Chamie asserted, (in her memories and diaries), that the deviations caused by our dissatisfaction with the perpetual inconclusions could never be completely filled and that any authentic poetic expression would be the only way to a certain conformity in the relationship author and work. Because the present passes and it cannot be eternalized. Because the eternalization of the present is a delusion. Marco Lucchesi understands, above all, that contemporaneity requires, for better or worse, the awareness of the unfinished and the complexity of ambiguity. Again, in reading Merleau-Ponty, we must remember that we have to live in accordance with the unfinished. To what extent can we realize ourselves?
Surely, in most of the poetic syntheses proposed by the book, true invitations to think about: to what extent destiny or fatality or the determined (cultural and biological) can prevent our options? To what extent do we have the decisive keys to presiding over our almost never won freedom? What would be the nature of the freedom and destiny dialectic? Of course, there are no answers. But one thing is certain: when we read Domains of Insomnia which also unmistakably, through spatiality, we are crossed by silences and rhythms of depths on an infinite scale. We conclude that the poet makes each reader feel unique, loved, irreplaceable in the long climb of this universe which although is given (this includes the fissures of the undetermined) is open to solidarity, to love. Above all, it warns us that poetry is a safe way for us to contemplate and think about the various manifestations of temporalities whose function, among others, is the synthesis of movements, musicalities and concerns.
2 Marco Luchessi. [2]A Flauta e a Lua (The Flute and the Moon):
While, to general unhappiness, different media instigate, (those who feed on shattered souls), the nefarious opposition between West-East and vice versa, there are vigorous poets who are aware of the powers of poetic language. Because the true writer, first of all, has the rare ability to abstract the power of a language. Such poets, in the most natural and free way possible, go in search of bridges. From bold crossings. Of the challenges. Of affections. Of Justice From Peace among men! Compassionately and passionately. Marco Lucchesi is widely known for building engaging writings in favor of peace. For dialogue between peoples. For the possible communion of authentically human values.
The Flute and the Moon: poems by Rûmî is the example, among so many that we could mention from the author, not only of a bridge between peoples and cultures, but also of a very unique kind of hypertext, as we remember Pierre Lévy. This book allows the conceptual freedom (non-linearity and non-sequential) that so characterize the new and modern reading supports. This cannot go unnoticed: the masters of literature had already advanced, also the hypertext. Marco Lucchesi is among them. So, we can start reading the Flute and the Moon wherever we want. Structural and content freedom.
We can, for example, choose to read the beautiful essays, a kind of afterword by Faustino Teixeira or Leonardo Boff. Or by reading the non-verbal. The images that sharpen the poetic. But if we want, we can start reading by Rûmî: diary of a translator. In this part, let’s say, the author records his struggle to abstract the soul of a language, such as: “12.11.2006 / I fetch ethmologies. And I look for to “unarabic” my pronunciation of Persian. There are moments of despair in the early stages of language learning. A feeling of loneliness and incommunicability. Consonances are slow to arrive. Each word being an irreducible island “. Marco Lucchesi continues: “16.12.2006 / When I study a language – even if instrumentally, as is the case with Persian – I advance for long journeys, which take my sleep away, as if I wandered in the limbo of undeciphered silences”. Through a diary, nothing sequential, the author shares his inner afflictions regarding the learning of a new language: “18.01.2001 / I bring other mountains on my horizon: Popocatépetl, in Mexico City, and Illimani, in La Paz. And so I confuse these mountains of the East and the West “. Just as it confuses the reader. It destabilizes us. And also: “20.03.2007 / I observe the subtle transition from concept to metaphor. The circulation of poetics-thought, from the most volatile adjectives to the depths of thought. The fringe of the untranslatable. Tangent concept and image … “.
The diary runs from 2006 to 2007, 2001 and covers different periods. Temporality ‘layers’ that meet. (The great sages say that the restlessness of time must be observed with eyes on the named things. Because names, above all, are temporal and this has a profound relationship with knowledge. Distinction is sister-ally to lucidity. Distinguish: to be and to know.) At the same time, an unusual way of approaching the translator’s tortuous trails. Here is an important warning from those (very rare) who understand translation as an intense and serious operation to understand: what is it to translate?
The answer lies, objectively, in the author’s translations of Afghan poetry Jalâl ad-Dîn Rûmî (1207-1273). The preface explains, in detail, partnerships, collations and transits. Pleasantly.
Worthy of fascination are the notes, on poems, written by Marco Lucchesi. If it were a common book we would have the famous sickening footnotes. Most of the time, boring. Unattractive. In general, notes that seek to praise, in a pseudo-erudite way, the mechanisms of translation + a good portion of uninteresting linguistic doses. Not in this case! The notes are extensions-continuities of the poems. Of a beauty and density outside any sphere: “Stuck in the body, the soul. And death, bearer of life. The essence of men lingers beyond prison. Light, trapped in the substance. It is necessary to release it, like the Sun and the Moon “. And so many other notes that create endless overlays of readings. A Heavenly dialogue.
There is a certain illusion, almost on the verge of conceptual naivety, of believing that humanity was once happy. No restrictions. There have always been, the various records confirm, spaces for lovelessness and desert airs. The Flute and the Moon gives the attentive, sensitive and demanding reader the necessary liberating interval from violence, at all levels, that permeates us. Above all, it leads us to an existential exercise. In other words, love is and must be a constellation that comprises several dimensions. An invitation to the pessimists who insist, in their misreadings, when affirming that there are no more paths for the future. Good poets, eternal masters of truth, wisely point out that poetry is a possible path for subtracting anxieties. The Flute and the Moon: immersing itself in the sweetness surrounding a poetic-crossing towards the unfathomable. Rûmî: a garden under the moonlight.
3 Rudimentos da Lìngua Laputar (Rudiments of the Laputar Language).[3]
Great and reliable thinkers, in one way or another, realized that certain times have emptyness. Silences. Breaks. One of the possible explanations: there would be nothing to be said. But here comes Rudiments of the Laputar Language. For real: ‘The book to come’ announced by Blanchot. In other words: an extraordinarily unclassifiable work. Insubordinate to any typology. It may, apparently, be a grammar. Poem Romance Essay Document I dare to say: Rudiments of the Laputar Language is a trap. Readers, be prepared!
The highly provocative title. What language would be the laputar? And there is no other way than to seek the origin of the word in other sources. For those who have not read and also for those who have read, we are taken to the fascinating Gulliver’s Travels. Laputa was one of the imaginary islands visited by Swift. A floating and flying island. Just the beginning of a challenging journey through Lucchesi’s work. On the flying island the inhabitants were concerned with the mathematical, musical language. Everything had geometric shapes and referred to calculations. However, nothing was uniform. Mathematical calculations were of no use in practice. Also, the inhabitants of Laputa lived distracted and into themselves. Always out of the present time. They forgot about themselves. Semi-demoralized beings.
Lucchesi warns: “It was a hard work to recover the old documents, which addressed, although in a fragmented way, the strange language used by the mythical inhabitants of the island of Laputa […] I am the first one to recognize its insufficiency, based on a strong set of gaps [reader, make no mistake … “each language holds a truth in itself that cannot be translated,” said Guimarães Rosa]. And yet, I am proud to have fixed certain points of syntax and laputaral morphology. To which is added a brief glossary extracted from uncertain and disparate documents. ” From the author’s warning, the beginning of an apparent (condensed) grammar of the laputar language. He presents us with vowels and consonants. The genders. According to the author, there is no definite article. And here I think: a language in which indefinitions prevails? Remember that the island is floating!
Interjections are powerful indices in this work to know about some feelings that the islanders felt. Those established by Lucchesi are: Deç; amazement; Kusa: admiration; Heum: pain; Alas: disbelief; Fu: disgust; Susp: courage. The author’s archaeological work translates, among other things, into the search for linguistic elements from the most varied languages in the world. In use or disused.
Among so many other things that the reading of this work makes possible, one of the essential points: the dimensions of memory. Through the glossary we can have part of the history of what the inhabitants felt and used to do. Notable expression: Deniz: inland sea. What a spectacular consistency! The inhabitants of the island were absent, immersed in thoughts, immersed, in fact, in internal seas. Memories, temporalities, subjectivities. Another dimension: the author’s temporal games. The glossary calls attention to nouns that are not from the island’s age, such as: radio transmitter, wristwatch, film, computer. There are many others that refer to the future.
The attentive reader cannot escape Lucchesi’s cunning net: how did the people of the flying island live? What did they do? And from that, (unavoidable condition), he builds his stories. The glossary instigates to imagine novels, short stories, chronicles, poems. It challenges all degrees of imagination. Pure poeticity. Arranged in columns, it allows the crossing (all due to the reader’s imagination) of the words and indefinite constructions of poetry.
But the exercise of thought-language-time-memory proposed by the author does not grant: the imaginary bibliography refers to the future. The books allegedly used for making the laputar language are from 2070, 2067, 2045 and other future dates. The subtle genius of this work: the author confesses that he wrote it thirty years ago. He reviewed it in July 2015 and then published it. To that extent, it brings a stratum of his memory to compose an absolute simultaneity of temporalities – memories. It makes it possible to think about the eternal and the timeless, as Borges would say. (Remember … existential condemnation seriously postulated by Bergson and Deleuze: the past is granted to us from the perspective of the present).
Only the grandeur of an artistic work has sparkling temporalities. The graphic design of the work completes the author’s intention: everything that is to be written is written in blue. An undefined blue, flowing and floating. The blue seas that separate the continents at the same time that unites them by the Rudiments of the Laputar Language. To paraphrase Stefan Zweig: none of the mysteries of the universe is deeper than that of creation-artistic-literary. Alec, Alétheia.
4. Nove cartas sobre a Divina Comédia: navegações pela obra clássica de Dante. (Nine letters about the Divine Comedy: navigations through Dante’s classical work) [4]
According to the most prestigious scholars of Greek culture, Olympus has its laws. They say that there is a routine there, by the way, not easy. Zeus and other inhabitants have obligations. Unavoidable. In an atmosphere of unsustainable lightness there was, (unusual fact), a real fight between nine daughters of Mnemosyne. The Muses disputed, among themselves, who, really, would have transported to the discreet-secret paths to the Fountain of Forgetness and the famous frozen waters of Memory, a certain poet. We remember that Zeus’s divine universe is contradictory, ambiguous, enigmatic. Sometimes paradoxical.
Several goddesses, (silent gods), intervened in the discussion of the nine extenders of Memory. So we imagine, by far, what happened when Marco Lucchesi finished Nine letters on Divine comedy: navigating Dante’s classic work. Work that exudes perceptions. Fascinating. Sweeping It contradicts all so-called textual classifications. Ezra Pound redesigned ‘his typology’. Blanchot would not be surprised. Thomas Bernhard would mitigate the usual pessimism. Goethe would smile in his conversations with Eckermann. Dalí would subtract arrogance. Cesar Leal, homesick, would repeat at constellations: “subtle eternal interior”.
But let’s go back to the Olympus fight: who would have ‘guided’ the poet? According to Hesiod, Homer and other poets, the nine Muses are known to preside over functions. Clio: history, Calliope: eloquence, Euterpe: poetry. Each would have a primary function. In the fight Euterpe claims his position. But the other Muses are not silent. Athena wisely seeks a conciliatory basis. It makes the nine Muses believe that, united-together, they led the poet to the portals of Memory (sources of the past-future and the truth).
Nine letters about the Divine comedy is a plural gift (loving fullness) that Marco Lucchesi gives to humanity. Exploding, when we open the book, images, sinuous rhythms, colors, plans, depths, musicalities. The sublime from Kant and Goethe permeate the whole. Impossible, at the begining, to start reading the letters. The editorial project calls upon the reader’s senses to first leaf through the book in its various dimensions. After taking the initial breath, the one who eternalizes instants, hasty-fearful with what is announced, we hear, intimately, voices (voices, velvet, voices) that gently present the structure of Dante’s work. Inviting waves of water, sometimes calm, sometimes almost unavoidable: “Dear Reader, I would like you to accept these letters, as a gesture of friendship, attracted as we are by Divine comedy. I preferred not to make an introduction, with a start, middle and an end. It is a declaration of love and therefore requires an epistolary form. ” And the author, subtly and lovingly, takes readers on a vertiginous journey through Divina Comédia.
Each card is exquisite. Richly mirrored! Since the illustrations interpose between the letters. Majestically. There is a letter that presents itself with the “philosophy of love”. And then there is the perfect dialogue with Plato and other sources, not only philosophical, but also historical. The peak of this letter: “what is love?” Lucchesi takes us to Saint Augustine and: “Dear friend: I like to remember the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, when he asks what lovers are looking for. He replies that those who love are not sure what they are looking for. They miss each other when separated. And even together, an indefinite lack does not cease, which brings them together when distant and keeps them apart when they are close. The mystery of beauty calls lovers to a dimension that surpasses them. ” And here, explains the author, one of the great enigmas of love, that is, one loves more intensely when the lovers are separated. But presence does not satisfy incompleteness. The absence tortures. Letter after letter are invitations to visit or, mandatorily, to revisit Dante’s work: “… you must not lose sight of the fact that Dante’s Paradise celebrates the altitude, physical and metaphysical, of the Empirical, from God and from the Beloved . That its numinosity depends, above all, on altitude and transcendence, whose poetry promotes openness without end, lending to each verse the feeling of the infinite, the passion of heights and a diffuse nostalgia of “more”. ” Lucchesi instigates not only of Dante’s readings! There are other voices (of authors and works) that were and are part of his intellectual journey.
However, even so, the lightness and poetic intensity, always pursued by the breadth of the silences of good literature, allow those who never had access to Divina Comédiato get involved with it. With soft and whispering mediations to unknown spaces, in the begining, full of mists. However, dissolved, gradually, as the poeticity of the author, mixed with the authors he cites, leads us, under his crystalline and pure gaze, to the universe of the author himself: “Everyone seeks a port in the infinite sea of being”. In addition, Lucchesi presents readers with the five chapters of mystical theology and an iconography (divine images) of Divine Comedy . This work is literal proof that the poetic word leads man to a reconciliation with himself and that poetry has the power of distancing. It gives us back the capacity-freedom to be what we really are, as stated by Octavio Paz. If we think of the vertical-plural thickness that governs the Deleuzian concept of becoming, Nine Letters on the Divine Comedy is: Becoming-humanity. Becoming-sublime. Becoming-archeology of the senses. Becoming-timelessness. That is why the fight between nine Muses is justified.
5 Carteiro Imaterial (Immaterial Postman).[5]
If we think about the famous questions that involve receiving the readings, that is, to what extent are people reading? Did you read more than today? Why do people read so little? We will see that practically all times are ‘equivalent’. It only takes a serious study and a more keen research to know that reading has always competed with other activities. Moreover, competition has always been unfair. The nostalgic of an idealized past, and often without the slightest historical basis, decree, with idiotic pleasure, that no one else reads. The grounds are laughable-ridiculous. Among them, for example, that television and the internet ended reading. Easily deductible that has never been read as much as today. In fact the question has always been, is and will be: how to measure the qualitative? (Bachelard say it!). A beautiful tale of recognized poetic quality is better than a ‘literacy’ of three hundred pages!
Immaterial Postman by Marco Lucchesi is a book of essays. One of the material proofs that good literature remains more alive than ever. Erudition that does not humiliate. It translates into invitations through the author’s paths, dialoguing with thinkers, writers. Lucchesi knows that the paths of literature, (in the most diverse dimensions), were never free.
Carteiro Immaterial is, like all Lucchesi’s books, a book of essays that particularizes and destabilizes the reader. Both for its plurality and for its usual poeticity. Let’s go to the title! Postman sweetly remembers messenger. The expecting for a letter. For a book. Or for the unexpected. What a delight when a book sent by a friend surprises! Immaterial? Among other possible readings, the immateriality of the work in question lies, precisely, in the emission of the poetic signs that integrate one of the unity threads of Immaterial Postman. It is known: poetic signs are those that are dematerialized because they were born from a sensitivity. They are the famous spiritual signs. The true messengers of effective communication. Poetic signs. Those responsible for real intersubjectivities. To that extent, the Postman unfolds in letters and essays in the strictest sense. Preceded by a summary composed of true icons (according to Peirce), in which they point out, for each part, what they will offer to readers. We highlight from the ‘first part’, entitled by Lucchesi de Immaterial Postman, Tragedy in Syria, a text of denunciation. Heart touching. The text is the proof that the writer never disconnects from life. Literature-Life. The necessary interlacing. “It is necessary to review the initial idea that was configured about the EI, to face it with clear parameters, in an ambiguous terrain, in which one can no longer avoid, in the face of two simultaneous wars: the physical and the virtual. Only time will be able to tell which of the two wars has caused the most victims “. And throughout this essay, a heart touching dialogue with his Jesuit friend Paolo Dall’Oglio. Disappeared in the midst of courageous attempts to restore peace in the East.
The intelligent playfulness, dissolution of sadness, is also present in a sensational letter that Lucchesi addresses to the grammarian Evanildo Bechara.
The traps surrounding the translation are thought in the book. “Translation is forever an incomplete gesture, a horizon that moves away, the closer it is shown to the observer. It does not have an absolute center, capable of legislating on what goes away and the distance, nor does it have a code that decides on the limits between counterfeiting and the original “. And on the subject, Lucchesi has plenty of experience. He transits, even in the work in question, easily, through the Tower of Babel. Arabic, Persian, Romanian, Italian, Greek and a dozen other languages. To live up to Immaterial Postman just by reading it.
Any presentation of a rich work is incomplete, unfair and inconclusive. The poetic signs emanated from this work denounce the essence of the author: originality-generosity-humanity. And, also, the courageous attitude of true poets who believe in the ebb and flow of influences responsible for transformations. The postman answers, in an underlying way, an old question and very dear to readers, thinkers, poets. That is, to what extent can poetry be reflective and provide answers to intellectual questions? Or: to what extent does a poet need the essay for questioning? What would be the boundaries between a literary essay and poetry? To that extent, we have in The Postman a poetry that thinks for itself. The real dimension of how much poetry can tell more truths than philosophy, just as the essay does not have a language of evidence, as many poets have already said, and poetry, among other things, is the language of evidence. Finally, the boundaries between essay and poetry are blurred and unstable. Literary prose without poetry is a mere document or fossilized narrative. Nothing else.
6 Literatura e Matemática (Literature and Mathematics) [6]
What is an author? How to define or map a set of works by a certain author? Here is one of the concerns, still current and intriguing, proposed by Michel Foucault, at a famous conference held in Paris. Foucault’s provocation raises, among others, the question: “What is a work? What does this curious unit consist of? What elements make it up? Isn’t a work written by someone who calls himself an author? We see difficulties arise. If an individual were not an author, what he wrote or said, what he left in his papers, what he inherited from him, could he be called a work? ” [7]. To what extent, continues the French philosopher, should drafts, projects in progress and other records left by an author be considered?
Marco Lucchesi has a vast set of records and typologies that define, from a certain angle, his legacy. A plural set. Composed of poetry, novels, essays, translations, aphorisms and, above all, experimental books, (those whose transgressions shake the classifications imposed by typologies, as a rule, reductionists). In addition, texts published in newspapers and magazines, not only in Brazil, but in dozens of foreign countries (West-East). His poetry and essays, in particular, have already been translated into more than ten languages. It has recorded and published speeches in the most varied records (formal and less formal), in addition to innumerable interviews. That are now published, for the time being, recorded by the most varied media. That is, digital and others. Prefaces, posts, letters, presentations of works, national or foreign, must be included in his set of records.
In this way, one can observe an aspect of his works. In other words: the quantitative. What is striking when faced with Marco Lucchesi’s literature is, above all, the qualitative aspect. Therefore, they are not occasional and windblown works. Whatever the record. The quality of his plural ensemble is largely translated by its commitment to literature and, consequently, to humanity. It is easy to notice, when faced with his works, a marked degree of perfectionism and always in search of an apprehension (of the real? Of the truth?), Almost impossible, of what worries him most deeply. Since always. He writes: “I would not know which side to start the gathering of pieces able to compose a small part of the anthology that constitutes me. I immediately confess that I dissipate in the things I gather. (…) I am not a museum guard and I am not an addict of the future either: I reinvent myself, dialoguing with yesterday and tomorrow, trapped in the intangible now, from whose source my lips are thirsty. I am not the son of yet, I love loneliness and its first rays: the silence and the distance. (…) I love the short forms, but I don’t despise the logic of excess. I keep the flock of books, which I reach in the languages from the four continents. Today there are more than twenty. I dream of the Tower of Babel and its endless stairs. I go up and down those steps with amazement and fearlessness. (…) I was born bilingual and I translate poetry since I was a teenager. (…) I travel the world. My treauser is full of names and faces. I don’t like delays and I trim the edges of my fury with Bellini’s arias and Scarlatti’s sonatas. (…) I suffered in the grip of mathematics, which then seemed to me like a ferocious tiger. Overcoming fear, today I teach poetry and mathematics ” [8].
It should be noted that the search for a writer like Marco Lucchesi is, without hierarchies of preferences or “crossings”, translated by a tireless and constant struggle with language. Comparable with the works of Blanchot, Bataille, Octavio Paz and many other exponents of literature. There is a process of creation and inner, underground inventiveness that makes him unique. As Peter Handke would say: “Something about him qualified him, moreover, to discover or see almost all the extraordinary appearances (…) in general uniformity, made so perhaps by daily habit, from an early age he had had a look at the contradictory, different, strange way, and he was also suddenly attacked by another color, the accentuated, the eccentric, the displaced hue, the opposite geometry, the clearly feathered amidst uniform confusion, the clearly spotted, the print in the absence of prints ” [9].
To that extent, his works are unique, among other reasons that could be mentioned, because they propose true immersions in the most varied areas of knowledge. Marco Lucchesi’s literature goes deeply into conceptual issues of Philosophy, History, Literature itself, Music, Linguistics, Astronomy, Physics, Mathematics. For this and other reasons, he is considered by critics, in general, as much as he can and should be suspicious of critics, (for remembering Macedonio Fernandez), as a great thinker. Crossing various fields of knowledge, properly, requires courage and, above all, not to be afraid of the most intense challenges. Moreover: the understanding that one must pursue the truth, but without ever leaving aside the irrevocable human condition of the eternal commitment to the continuous construction of freedom that, in the end, would lose its meaning if it were not presided over by peace and solidarity. Anchors, both, from the most coveted dreams by those who wish, in practice, a new humanity.
But a fundamental point that must be highlighted is to establish the difference between a simple dialogue with other areas of knowledge with deep immersion. What should be understood as deep immersion? Be aware of the invariant and constant structures that delimit and circumscribe the areas of knowledge in their respective and possible methodologies. And this is explicit in the different typologies that circumscribe Marco Lucchesi’s records.
However, the unity of the author’s set of works is in his aesthetic [10]. Aesthetics is understood here, in addition to the very welcome contributions of Kant, Peirce and others, as a concept, which, as such, involves multiplicities, if we think with Deleuze. From this perspective, Lucchesi’s aesthetics are rare and labyrinthine – imagine a labyrinth (there are no constant and constant) – without a definite shape. Oscillating, since it induces, leads and seduces conceptual, vertiginous transports, beauty, intense passions, delicacies, generosity and, above all, variables that meander in movements that are sometimes slow, sometimes faster. Such variables can be compared to a kind of “syntactic line, since the syntax is constituted by the curvatures, the rings, the turns, the deviations from that dynamic line, as it passes through some positions, from the double point of view of the disjunctions and of connections ” [11].
The extreme point of Lucchesi’s aesthetic is made up of blocks of intensities: “The words paint and sing, but at the end of the path they draw, they divide and compose. The words are silent. (…) When the tongue is thus tensioned, the language suffers pressure that returns it to silence ” [12]. Blocks of timeless-demoralized intensities. Autonomous Fragments whose ‘authorship’ is anonymous to infinity. And a becoming driven to the contemporary.
7 Os olhos do deserto (The eyes of the desert).[13]
There are several types of travel. You can take a car and aimlessly walk indefinitely. The spaces are occupied by our eyes. They stick to what we select. You can travel by plane. Near the clouds, we often look down and everything passes slowly. The real speed of the plane is subtracted from our senses. Rivers, valleys, green or burnt surfaces, below, beckon in the distance. You can travel by train. The landscapes, slippery, pass horizontally. People, stations, oxen, plants, cities, villages. And the flowers. So. There are many ways of traveling and the world has never been more nomadic. There have never been so many displacements. You can travel in small boats by rivers. The sweet waters of liquid times (dear Bauman) splashing on our bodies. Trees and plants They stare at us, suspiciously. Desperate.
But, perhaps, the best trip is the one provided by a beautiful book. Again: the eternal fascination of words. The eternal charm of plots drawn by seductive literature. Fine fabrics of a sensitivity projected by strata of temporalities.
Certainly, it is the case of the book The eyes of the desert by Marco Lucchesi. The perfect trip. Travel within travel! Just imagine! The author travels, in fact, through the Orient. But his writing is also a journey through the plots of his images! I remember our good and old Deleuze who hated travel in itself. He said he was not a nomad. But that the readings made it possible for him to make real trips. But, I insist, the journey of this book is a two-way street!
In the author’s words: Sand storms Agitation The space that does not cease; the time that does not goes away. The dunes move, static. Powerful redness. Sands that generate calm and despair. Berbers are harps played by the wind. Death-life wish Weigh the kidneys Weigh the lungs. They weigh due to the sand. These spots know no middle ground. They kill or redeem. ” This is one of the best images that Marco Lucchesi offers the reader for the immensity of the desert. The immobility carried by the winds that raise lazy and, perhaps, solitary sands, in proportion to the author’s loneliness.
But the entire work takes us to desert landscapes. Lebanon Syria Places inhabited by landscapes under observation (look first) + senses (awaken) + repertoire (perfect mastery of language mechanisms) of a true poet who captures the most seductive in the amazing depths of a space, very different, from that to the which we are most used to. They inhabit the author and even they inhabit the stars: “Stars insist on the clear night. My heart insists. And the desert. Always the desert. The desert as a refuge and promise. Shadow prefaces. Who watch me, who save me. ”
The author, character of this trip to the deserts of souls and spaces visited by him, still offers the reader concepts of language. He masters Arabic. And with that he approaches culture (fatalism) as in the following fragment: “Arabic is one of the most beautiful languages. One of the doors to the sacred. “Primal Fire” Strong time. Mythical time. For Massignon, Arabic does not suffer from the anemia of modern languages. Its strategy is different. It does not use broad and hierarchical periods. Subordinates of Subordinates. Gradual conjunctions. The Arabic language coagulates and condenses, with the strength of iron and the brilliance of the crystal, the idea that emerges from the Sacred. ” A real lesson, through the tortuous paths of sensitivity, of linguistic mechanisms. This is literature. The language, in this work, unfolds in the most unusual and original forms possible. Times excerpts from prose-poem, times excerpts from poem-prose. What is not lacking in this fascinating book is poetry immortalized by expressive literary resources, such as: “and the letters are vassals of revelation”; “the desert has its vertigo”; “tonight’s insomnia is deadly. With the power of a thousand serpents that stir within me. And finally, there is a historic trip, to the past, that will never be taken by anyone. The Orient visited by Marco Lucchesi no longer exists. Damascus and other places in Syria visited by the writer have been subtracted. Debris Destruction Refuge of the soulless. The cities of Syria are moving towards integrating themelves, in a monstrous way, with the deserts that permeate them in the name of wars. Mainly in the name of the opportunistic imperialists who, Olympic and hypocritically, applaud the destruction of what was one of the greatest treasures of memories (in every sense) of humanity. And, once again, our poet bequeaths us a memory that can be contemplated by our eyes, by our soul. Octavio Paz used to say that there were people without prose. But there have never been people without poetry. It can be said that there are spaces that, within themselves, no matter how deserted, will never be overlooked as long as there is the prospective and sensitive look of anyone who knows how to make literature. The best argument, in every way, again: Deleuze: becoming-desert. In other words: to feel like the soul of a desert. Eternalize the desert. To be the eyes of the desert.
8 Caligrafia silenciosa (Silent calligraphy). [14]
Nowadays, nobody doubts, so computerized, globalized … does is increasingly speak languages that are practically not understood? Why? Because the media is not enough. It is not enough to have the so-called ‘access to information’ (what a horror … more worn out buzzword). It is necessary that humanity, once and for all, understand each other. Minimally. Babel should have been minimized by now. And, paradoxically, it wasn’t! The good and old Deleuze had already warned: “there is only artistic intersubjectivity”. According to one of the most tender philosophers we had, only artistic signs (and among them verbal ones) since immaterial and sensitive, could mitigate the famous incompleteness (always unfathomable gaps) between subjectivities.
But, suddenly the poetic word stubbornly rises. Silent Calligraphy, George Popescu, thanks to the translation by Marco Lucchesi, comes to the Brazilian public. And amaze! The translator does not hide the original text. The work is bilingual. Lucchesi is not one of those translators who spend almost half the work to justify his ‘translation methods’. Lucchesi’s great method and merit is sensitivity + repertoire. The ability to overcome his limits of objectivity and reach subjectivities. Human temporality. This is the best method of translation. This is admirable. After all … as you know, Lucchesi is a poet. Poet’s soul. Poet’s look. And it changes everything.
The introduction of the work is simply fascinating. In Popescu’s words: “Poetry should not change the world or improve the human condition, nor be an alternative, but simply a natural medicine, an exit from the impossible circle of destiny. Poetry destroys the illusory scale of values dictated by fashion, inverts the inside out through the return of tradition, refuses the dangerous game of dice and takes only a single risk: a halo through which the light of the Word is filtered, when it incarnates within a verse that touches the divine. ”
Poetry and literature have never changed the world. Saramago, in moments of great bitterness in the face of human miseries (remember Les Miserables by Victor Hugo), declared that if he or other writers had never existed the world would be the same. Between us: man is an invention that never worked. (I can hardly remember that if the few holders of an unlimited fortune gave up just four or five percent of their assets, there would be, in practice, no more miserable people on this planet. How bitter!) And here, Popescu:
In the dense and silent darkness like the night
of a wasted love
not even a word
only the nose raised towards an invisible sky
zygoma tight in this image
that falls into your womb like a dog
hurt on the threshold of its last will
to become a man.
However, poetry points to the probability of another world. Possibilities of other paths with which we can, at least, dream on. Rave! And poetic raves stroke and drown our deepest hurts.
Again Popescu answers us:
but it is not like that – I answer-
with the deep gaze of memory
if you dig into that archeology
that transparency also makes yours
you will discover – just as you wish –
just that you can still want
you will rediscover all the poor existences
which served me as a shield and defense wall
in the magical time of a single piety.
Silent Calligraphy. In the translator’s words: “it is a window of the present, open to the creation of the poetics of the four corners of the globe, in the dialogue between peoples and in the culture of peace. Not the world, but its representation. Not the image, but the uncertain mirror, in which the difference shines, the beauty of the face, in the voices of a new world, under construction. ” These words, in a sublime way, translate (including) the best of literature: the desperate struggle to appease differences. The struggle to give meaning to anonymous existences. The meaning and the great changes can only be realized through thought. And thought can only be translated by language. Ezra Pound, habitually, angry, on his nerves, outraged, nonconformist, said that when humanity was almost ‘failing’ … literature was summoned. In the fall of thought the writer is always remembered and poetics finally triumphs!
11 Cultura da paz (Peace Culture) [15]
From the silence of the stars to the reflections of a possible historical consciousness
Nulla res singularis in rerum natura datur, qua potentior et fortior non detur alia. Sed quacumque data datur alia potentior, which illa data potest destrui. Benedictus de Spinoza [16]
Sagittarius, its symbol, beloved Marco, expresses the link between earth and heavenly poetry. The violent tension of the arc impulse is an intense and dangerous movement. To divide the tension between the extremes would perhaps be healthy. But if the fascination of sky-poetry is irresistible, distension will be inevitable. Accept your beautiful destiny. Nise da Silveira [17]
As we browse the pages of Cultura da paz, we readers, as always, are surprised by yet another work by Marco Lucchesi. This one, above all, excels not only for erudition, but also for deep solidarity, typical of those who have a silent, radiant glow. In other words: he feels authentic pain in the face of the countless human dramas that subtract the right to full existence. A poet who exudes satisfaction, very generous, in emphasizing the values of writers, thinkers, artists, refugees, prisoners. Without geographical, historical, hierarchical and temporal boundaries. Marco Lucchesi has humanity before him. Surrenders, loves and let himself to be loved by every being who has the privilege of meeting or knowing him. Up close or at a distance.
The work in question was designed by the distribution of titles that guide the essays. Independent from each other but governed by delicate threads. These who insist on invisibility. However, they demand our attention in all spheres. It’s important to enphasize that each essay has the ‘accuracy’, (naturally we are not disregarding Bergson’s theories regarding memory), of facts, meetings, dates, only applicable and compatible with the memory of Funnes, the memorable!
Cultura da paz can and should be read as a true aesthetic education. Marco Lucchesi’s texts, (as always), are demanding. Very demanding. They even reinforce an important position of our master Deleuze, that is, that true literature is not made only with literary intentions. They ask the reader for a repertoire not only focused on literature. But for painting, history, geography, science in general, philosophy, music, politics, theology. Remember Goethe: “The advent of a genius who appropriates what exists today, thus exceeding everything else, is necessary. The means are all there, the paths indicated and flattened (…) Now, as I said, a great talent is missing, and this is yet to come, I hope so ” [18]. Without exaggeration. One of the geniuses dreamed by the author of Afinidades Eletivas is the author of Nove Cartas sore a Divina Comédia. Warning: we are always on the lookout for the echoes of Narcissus and his usual followers (how to forget Diary of a genius by Dalí?). This is definitely not the case!
Marco Lucchesi challenges, once again, the ability to confront the usual shortcomings that have always troubled those who really think. When we finishe reading the essays, contained in this book, immediately, we need to retake them. Perhaps discontinuously. Each essay is a synthesis in a high degree of excellence. Syntheses that capture and materialize, if we want to think in Pierce’s perspective , the unanalysable, the icons, quali-signs in their infinite unfolding. Again Goethe: “There are excellent creatures that can do nothing without reflection and improvisation, and whose nature requires that all matters be deeply meditated in peace. In general, these talents make us impatient because we rarely get what we currently want from them. However, it is in this way that the culminations are reached “[19] .
Imagine Dante, Goethe, Borges, Einstein, (just to be with a few), there in Olympus, in dialogue, savoring the famous nectars, under the eyes of Clio, and, at the same time, happy (attentive) to challenges that Lucchesi makes possible. The greatest of them goes back, without a doubt, to the ideal of great thinkers! How to build a unique book that contains all the others? What does it really mean to think? How to embrace all languages, all times, past, present, future, in one work? How to retain the infinite? How to bring together all artistic, scientific, philosophical, historical voices and expressions? A challenge that the author places, in part, in the text of this book, Grafite Luminoso (Luminous graphite). Remember Einstein: “I’m never tire of contemplating the mystery of the eternity of life. I have an intuition of the extraordinary construction of being ” [20]. And also: “What, exactly, is the thought? When, in the perception of sensory impressions, figures of memory emerge, this is not yet ‘thinking’. And when these pictures form sequences, each member creating the other, this is also not yet ‘thinking’. However, when a certain figure appears in several sequences, in this case – precisely because of this recurrence – it becomes an organizing element for such sequences, in the sense of uniting sequences by themselves they are not related to each other. This element becomes an instrument, a concept. I believe that the transition from free association or ‘dream’ to thinking is characterized by the more or less important role played by the concept. It is in no way necessary for the concept to be linked to a sign that can be recognized and reproduced by the senses (word), but, when this happens, the thought becomes capable of being communicated ” [21].
Culture and Peace moves, largely, from the perspective of Einstein’s concept of thought. Lucchesi gives no rest. A kind of “secret complexity”, as Borges would say. See, for example, in the essay Dante 750 , ruled, surely, by an unprecedented visual-conceptual-temporal-spatial synthesis. Observe the fury that overflows under the signs of elegance, erudition, provocation, irony. The author materializes, with the uneasiness of those who still retain the capacity for indignation, a denunciation only comparable to the unforgettable J’accuse (published on 13/01/1898). Painful denunciation made by our beloved and courageous Émile Zola when, wisely, he understands the injustice of Dreyfus prison and defies the pillars of the French authorities.
But it is exactly in the essay Livros Fantasmas (Gosths Books) that Lucchesi, above all, calls us, as an exercise of thought, conceptually, strangeness. Why? Because we face, in a high degree, the unexpected. He also calls us to the ‘undated’ (as we remember Derrida). Something new is happening in our own thinking that does not allow us to cross our old layers of meaning. Remember, once again with Derrida, that if we recognize something, when it comes to literature, the recognized cannot be new. In the new, everything escapes like unmemorial-indomitable horses.
Which again meets another statement by Einstein: “I have no doubt that our thinking takes place, most of the time, without the use of signs (words) and, moreover, largely unconsciously. If this were not the case, how would it be possible to ‘remember strangely’ and spontaneously a particular experience? This ‘inquisitive remembrance’ can occur when the experience is in conflict with well-established concepts in our mind ” [22].
Cultura da Paz (Culture of peace) transits, thinking about the work as a whole, through an architecture that provokes, even if implicity, a resumption of our concepts, often crowded and dusty. It implicitly dialogues with the dimensions of historical consciousness, to remember Aron. At the same time, in most essays, there is an underlying invitation by Lucchesi to contemplate the beautiful and live it in practice. As he lives. The author’s poetic language is extraordinarily unsubmitted to determinisms. Not to mention the whispering voices of memories that emerge in different parts of his life. To that extent, they stimulate encounters with our own memories. Cultura da Paz is simply real proof of solidarity lessons. The only possible way, just to remember Bauman and Negri, so that human existence can survive in a less miserable way.
Cultura da Paz… a true aesthetic maze of suspended times. Such is the quality of textual involvement that we are kindly and lovingly seduced.
10 Mal de amor (Love Sickness) [23]
Love, in its boundless complexity, blurs boundaries. It does not know the laws of reason. Suspends the morale. It intensifies the senses and, ironically, puts us in colossal abysses. Never imagined.
Mal de amor (Love sickness) by Marco Lucchesi collapses. It dissolves. It involves: It seduces. It reduces any pre-made concept about love. Lucchesi is cunning. He exposes, with kidness and the same lightness of subtle caresses, the possibility of an alleged linear reading that falls apart in proportion to the density of its highly sophisticated metaphors, as well as testing our insufficiencies in capturing the ever-present, when it comes to of the literature of the great teachers of truth, as in the following fragment: “Your dream, liquid abyss, an insomniac constellation, in searching for I don’t know what strange orbits. (…) Leave the dissonance, Oh you who get in. In the eighth heaven of the castaway building, I no longer notice drastic rumors. ”
The book must be read in its entirety. From the cover that seeks, not without despair, the cadence of the silences contained in the poetics of the work, to the insinuating contours of the illustrations. These, agents of the suspensions necessary for the readers to recover their breath from an intense crossing. Syntheses that overwhelm our perceptions and almost drown us in seas of dissolution of balance, since they destabilize meanings that we supposedly had as an anchor. Toggle spaces. Shades. Hazes Foams Maritime memories, blue in different gradations, permeate under the blue seas of Seferis and Lúcio Cardoso (swallowed-drunk by his loneliness).
For those who read the author’s collection of works, he recognizes, once again, that Marco Lucchesi surprises. Why? Because he never repeats himself. Each work of the poet is different. Singular The eyes of the desert do not submit to missing the paradise and the immaterial correspondence of the fictions (of an office?) Attributed to Memoirs of Ulysses.
The more general atmosphere of the work is covered with silences in which the rhythm and the murmur of the waves of the sea are often clear. One can capture the eternalization of instants. (Digression: To poets, to watches. This is what Muses, especially Clio, should delegate to the masters of truth). The imponderable attempt to stop time because of the absence only (and always) remains what can be said of every presence that has gone. In other words: she can’t be touched, you can’t look at her, and even less give her a git. The presence escapes and with this, above all, the unsustainable lightness of being (to remember Kundera) ‘materializes’ when it comes to love: “I barely recognize the sea that dawns. A fisherman’s boat (mute and still) does not detach the ruined pier. Serene sea, like a lion lying in a cage, denouncing the storm. The blond bicycle leans against the wall. The clock stopped at five in the morning. Lustful trees are bare. A cross-eyed cat knows (but doesn’t say). (…) I walk on circular shapes, in the refractory areas of silence. Towards the unavoidable harbinger of geraniums. I keep a fearless beauty song “.
The discontinuities of the work are highly iconic. It gives us a very close perspective, not without bitterness and pain, of how fully matched love is a human impossibility. In other words, the fullness of our love is never accomplished. Love, whatever the dimensions, is demanding. Impatient Punctuated by needles, penetrating, by dissatisfactions that are denuded by the sounds, high, from our deepest screams. The suppression of differences is an unattainable dream. Let us to be lucid: we will never be able to cross the abyss, ironically smiling, distressing, that separates us from the other. But, exactly, wouldn’t that be the real Love sickness (or Mal de amor)? By nature, of degree and meaning, we never achieve communion, with the other, which we aspire to. The desire, even if satisfied, is nothing more than a damp shadow that dissolves under more seductive urgencies. Desire is punctual. Ephemeral It transits, dangerously, because we remember Bataille, among the deviations of the delivery. Desire: Smile of chaos that coats itself in burning-thirsty-teeth: “Elusive waters on the surface of the skin. Lunar lids, like a fire on the banks of the West. A fleeting bird, abandoning darkness and goodbyes “.
We learn and relearn from Bataille that nothing is more contrary to love than to interrogate, tremble and pretend to exclude what disadvantages it. Nothing can be more exhausting and in vain. We can only (will we?) Achieve love when in a kind of bewitched indifference: “I feel trapped in a dissolving sphere. As if there was no more distance, beyond the scarce domain of the skin. Dense fog within which I decompose. How do I charge from you the parts that hurt and cross? ” In fact, love, a possible horizon for the satisfaction of our incompleteness, carries, conceptually, the suffering of uncertainties, insecurities, possession and jealousy (camouflaged or not).
When we read and reread, (obligatorily), Love Sickness we are trained to review our principles of complicity. The same that exists between the flute and the moon.
11 Hinos Matemáticos (Mathematical Anthem).[24]
Is a dialogue between literature and mathematics possible in practice?
Literature (there is no literature without poetry) and mathematics (remember that geometry is one of the tentacles of mathematics) have never been antagonistic. Specializations, which are increasingly reduced, especially since the 19th century, are largely to blame for one of the worst damages that could be caused to humanity. That is, each field of knowledge isolated from its context and disconnected from other fields of knowledge. Fragmented knowledges. Nothing poorer. Nothing more harmful, including, for education as a whole. The absence of effective dialogues between disciplines, at all levels, causes strangeness coupled with an unprecedented dryness to students and teachers. In which meanings? In several. Most of the teachers are discouraged when they realize that the contents imposed, in most cases, by higher bases, become empty in the verification of the little meaning they produce in the students’ lives. In turn, students (how many!) Fail to realize the usefulness, in varying degrees, of what they are supposed to be “learning”. This is one of the greatest dramas of education and a challenge not only for Brazilian education. But one of the biggest educational challenges is the possible dialogue between the so-called exact sciences and the humanities. More precisely: mathematics and literature.
In the words of the great Brazilian writer Marco Lucchesi: “Overcoming the fear of mathematics, the fear of its voracious, dangerous tentacles: this is a constant concern inside and outside schools, which unfolds in the fields of didactics, music, narrative and poetry, to face the monster, to make it palatable. And little by little the demon gives way to the spell. There is a large attractive and fun library, in all languages and quadrants, in an amount that exceeds the expectations of parents and teachers, of humanizing mathematics, as if it were a friend of children’s games ” [25].
The possible dialogue between literature and mathematics can be established when we are faced with certain works, which expand the concepts of an abstract and empty mathematics, such as the following poem:
Square [26]
Each of your sides
In others are contemplated.
And which side do you prefer?
The contact side
Or that frontier side?
I forgot the angles
Where the outside gets angry
About to rob you
The doubts come back.
Contrary to what is supposed, there are several openings that can favor the effective and plural dialogue between mathematics and poetry. The first step would undoubtedly be the solid training of teachers. What can we understand by that? That we must put aside blind specializations and which target only one area. In other words: the formation of a teacher must be concerned, from the beginning, with several areas of knowledge. It is necessary, once and for all, to set aside certain untruths. Suppose literature and mathematics from opposite sides. The great thinkers and teachers of humanity were able to move deeply through different fields of knowledge. Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) was an excellent teacher and was able to move smoothly through mathematics, chemistry, philosophy, psychology and, above all, poetry. When he worked in the teaching profession, he was an advocate of intensive dialogue between all disciplines.
Teachers in all areas should have a plural background so that they could, in fact, understand the possible dialogue, in this case, between mathematics and poetry. Mathematics carries a poeticity in itself. What is a differential? It represents the main part of the variation of a function. But it can be:
Differential [27]
A dizzying web of numbers
unsubstantiated and that does not yield
to the exacerbated horizon of silence
Spark that shines
in the eyes of the future
And everything that doesn’t say
it’s like saying
What is an ellipse? It can be a style resource in literature that omits some expression but must be understood in context. It can be a flat geometric figure or set of points. In the words of Lucchesi: “From the family of flat curves, inbred to the hyperbola and the parabola. It has two distinct focuses, which are ignored or hated, unlike the circle, in which both are confused – harmonious – in the same point ” [28]. What is a tangent? Lucchesi says: “Play without cutting. With the delicacy of a unique event. It can be evoked more than once in the memory palace. Difference and Repetition. A lonely life, tamed only by the secant trajectory ” [29]. For Lucchesi what would a pyramid be? “Solid geometric figure, with stability at the base and sharp lines, which connect to the vertex. Parallels with the Egyptian world, from the natural elements, the floods of the Nile and the winds of the Sahara, under the patience of millennia. A living dream and the primordial vocation of the figures, simplify the world ” [30].
The language of mathematics, in itself, is deeply poetic. However, it is necessary to know how to perceive it. And for that, a repertoire is necessary so that a dialogue can be made. It is important to remember that it is not any literature that can dialogue with mathematics. When a writer dialogues with other areas, it must be committed to the concepts he presents literarily. Countless writers reveal this: Ernesto Sabato, Primo Levi, Jorge Luis Borges, Fernando Pessoa, Goethe, and certainly Marco Lucchesi.
The 9 concentric circles that structure Divina Comédia (Divine Comedy) constitute the real proof that Dante calculated (+ -: x) the {infinite} labyrinths derived from poetry and mathematics. The rest is silence … just to remember Érico Veríssimo!
1 Marco Lucchesi. Domínios da Insônia: novos poemas reunidos, São Paulo: Patuá, 2019.
2 Marco Lucchesi. A Flauta e a Lua: poemas de Rûmî.Rio de Janeiro: Bazar do Tempo, 2016.
3 Marco Lucchesi. Rudimentos da Língua Laputar, Rio de Janeiro: Dragão, 2015.
4 Marco Lucchesi. Nove cartas sobre a Divina Comédia: navegações pela obra clássica de Dante. Casa da Palavra, 2013. Fundação BIBLIOTECA NACIONAL
5 Marco Lucchesi. Carteiro Imaterial, Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 2016.
6 Marco Lucchesi. Literatura e Matemática [work organized by Ricardo de Souza]. Belo Horizonte Tesseractum, 2021.
7 Michel Foucault. O que é uma obra? Translation by António Fernando Cascais. Lisbon: Nova Vega, 2006. pp 37-38.
8 Marco Lucchesi. Carteiro Imaterial. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 2016. pp 175-176.
[9] Peter Handke. Ensaio sobre o louco por cogumelos. Translation by Augusto Rodrigues. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2006.
[10] More detailed references, regarding the concept, in the work Estética do Labirinto: a poética de Marco Lucchesi. São Paulo: Editora Patuá, 2018.
11 Gilles Deleuze Crítica e Clínica. Translation by Peter Pál Pelbart. São Paulo: Publisher 34, 1997. p. 127.
12 Same as, p. 128.
13 Marco Lucchesi. Os olhos do deserto. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2000.
14 George Popescu. Caligrafia silenciosa. Organized and translated by Marco Lucchesi. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco Jovens Leitores, 2015.
15 Marco Lucchesi Raquel: 2020.
[16] Benedictus Spinoza. ETHICA . Belo Horizonte Autentica Editora, 2013. p. 269.
17 LUCCHESI, Marco. Viagem a Florença: Cartas de Nise da Silveira a Marco Lucchesi. Rio de Janeiro, 2003. p. 29.
[18] Eckermann. Conversações com Goethe . Translation by Marina Leivas Bastian Pinto. Belo Horizonte Itatiaia, [sd]. p.67.
20 EINSTEIN, Albert. Como eu vejo o mundo. Translation by H.P. de Almeida. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2016. p. 12.
21 Albert Einstein. Notas autobiográficas. Translation by Aulyde Soares Rodrigues. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1982.p. 17
23 Marco Lucchesi. Mal de Amor. São Paulo: Patuá, 2018.
24 Marco Lucchesi. Hinos Matemáticos. Rio de Janeiro: Dragão, 2015.
[25] Guillevic. Euclidianas. Translation, introduction and notes by Marco Lucchesi. São Paulo: Berlendis & Vertecchia, 2013.
[26] Euclidianas, p. 23.
[27] Marco Lucchesi. Hinos Matemáticos, p. 32.
[28] Euclidianas, p. 121.
30 Same as, p. 128.
