"You look at me, you look at me closely, each time closer and then we play cyclops, we look at each other closer each time and our eyes grow, they grow closer, they overlap and the cyclops look at each other, breathing confusion, their mouths find each other and fight warmly, biting with their lips, resting their tongues lightly on their teeth, playing in their caverns where the heavy air comes and goes with the scent of an old perfume and silence. Then my hands want to hide in your hair, slowly stroke the depth of your hair while we kiss with mouths full of flowers or fish, of living movements, of dark fragrance. And if we bite each other, the pain is sweet, and if we drown in a short and terrible surge of breath, that instant death is beauty. And there is a single saliva and a single flavour of ripe fruit, and I can feel you shiver against me like a moon on the water."

"Com nuanças diferentes, percebemos a influência contínua, progressiva, tirânica que exerce a sociedade sobre nós; adivinhamos a parte do nosso ser que ela conquistou, as deformações que ela impôs a nosso eu; palpitamos por ser absorvidos pelo meio humano que nos cerca e saboreamos a voluptuosidade estranha que nos causa esta espécie de aniquilamento. Livres, apesar de nós, corpo e alma na cidade, passamos do arrebatamento à revolta. O abandono de si mesmo, que faz o encanto do amor, faz também o encanto da vida social."

"Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."

"citizens of the world
I renounce you.

I have
long ago.
but this is a formal
notice.
me against
you.
a restraining
order.

fuck off.
dry up.
vanish.

don't come to
my door
with pizza
pussy
or offers of
peace.

it's too late.

the music has
frozen in the
air
castrated by the
absence of your
presence."

"We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs."

e eles vivem com medo de sentirem algo real. medo de se perder, perder a racionalidade talvez.

e no se perder está o essencial.

"La rutina es el habito de renunciar a pensar."

"A linguagem é uma pele: esfrego minha linguagem no outro.É como se eu tivesse palavras ao invés de dedos, ou dedos nas pontas das palavras. Minha linguagem treme de desejo com a emoção de um duplo contato: de um lado, toda uma atividade do discurso vem discretamente, indiretamente,colocar em evidência um significado único que é: "eu te desejo" e liberá-lo, alimentá-lo, ramificá-lo,fazê-lo explodir; por outro lado, envolvo o outro nas minhas palavras, eu o acaricio,o roço, prolongo esse roçar e me esforço em fazer durar o comentário ao qual submeto a relação."

"Ao longo das horas, dos dias, das semanas, das estações, você se desprende de tudo, desliga-se de tudo. Descobre, às vezes, quase com uma espécie de embriaguez, que você é livre, que nada lhe pesa, nada lhe agrada nem desagrada.

(...)

Encontra-se, nesta vida, sem usura e sem outro estremecimento além dos instantes suspensos provocados pelas cartas ou certos ruídos, certos espetáculos que você concede a si mesmo, uma felicidade quase perfeita, fascinante, às vezes cheia de emoções novas. Você experimenta um repouso total, e constantemente poupado, protegido. Vive numa bem-aventurada digressão, num vazio cheio de promessas e do qual você nada espera.

(...)

Você é invisível, límpido, transparente. Você não existe mais: a sucessão das horas, dos dias, a mudança das estações, o escoamento do tempo, você sobrevive, sem alegrias e sem tristeza, sem futuro e sem passado, assim, simplesmente, evidentemente, como uma gota d’água que pinga na torneira de um patamar, como seis pés de meia de molho numa bacia de matéria plástica rosa, como uma mosca ou como uma ostra, como uma vaca, como um caracol, como uma criança ou como um velho, como um rato."

da ficção, há noites insones em diárias incessantes de hotéis estéreis.

do real, os fragmentos aleatórios e escassos de poros pouco acessíveis.

viver ilhado pode ser escolha, necessidade de desprendimento. porém toda ilha converte ao desmoronamento.

"This is the story of a man, marked by an image from his childhood. The violent scene that upset him, and whose meaning he was to grasp only years later, happened on the main jetty at Orly, the Paris airport, sometime before the outbreak of World War III.

Orly, Sunday. Parents used to take their children there to watch the departing planes.

On this particular Sunday, the child whose story we are telling was bound to remember the frozen sun, the setting at the end of the jetty, and a woman's face.

Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. Later on they do claim remembrance when they show their scars. That face he had seen was to be the only peacetime image to survive the war. Had he really seen it? Or had he invented that tender moment to prop up the madness to come?

The sudden roar, the woman's gesture, the crumpling body, and the cries of the crowd on the jetty blurred by fear.

Later, he knew he had seen a man die.

And sometime after came the destruction of Paris.

Many died. Some believed themselves to be victors. Others were taken prisoner. The survivors settled beneath Chaillot, in an underground network of galleries.

Above ground, Paris, as most of the world, was uninhabitable, riddled with radioactivity.

The victors stood guard over an empire of rats.

The prisoners were subjected to experiments, apparently of great concern to those who conducted them.

The outcome was a disappointment for some - death for others - and for others yet, madness.

One day they came to select a new guinea pig from among the prisoners.

He was the man whose story we are telling.

He was frightened. He had heard about the Head Experimenter. He was prepared to meet Dr. Frankenstein, or the Mad Scientist. Instead, he met a reasonable man who explained calmly that the human race was doomed. Space was off-limits. The only hope for survival lay in Time. A loophole in Time, and then maybe it would be possible to reach food, medicine, sources of energy.

This was the aim of the experiments: to send emissaries into Time, to summon the Past and Future to the aid of the Present.

But the human mind balked at the idea. To wake up in another age meant to be born again as an adult. The shock would be too great.

Having only sent lifeless or insentient bodies through different zones of Time, the inventors where now concentrating on men given to very strong mental images. If they were able to conceive or dream another time, perhaps they would be able to live in it.

The camp police spied even on dreams.

This man was selected from among a thousand for his obsession with an image from the past. Nothing else, at first, put stripping out the present, and its racks.

They begin again.

The man doesn't die, nor does he go mad. He suffers.

They continue.

On the tenth day, images begin to ooze, like confessions.

A peacetime morning. A peacetime bedroom, a real bedroom. Real children. Real birds. Real cats. Real graves.

On the sixteenth day he is on the jetty at Orly. Empty.

Sometimes he recaptures a day of happiness, though different.

A face of happiness, though different.

Ruins.

A girl who could be the one he seeks. He passes her on the jetty. She smiles at him from an automobile. Other images appear, merge, in that museum, which is perhaps that of his memory.

On the thirtieth day, the meeting takes place. Now he is sure he recognizes her. In fact, it is the only thing he is sure of, in the middle of this dateless world that at first stuns him with its affluence. Around him, only fabulous materials: glass, plastic, terry cloth. When he recovers from his trance, the woman has gone.

The experimenters tighten their control. They send him back out on the trail. Time rolls back again, the moment returns.

This time he is close to her, he speaks to her. She welcomes him without surprise. They are without memories, without plans. Time builds itself painlessly around them. Their only landmarks are the flavor of the moment they are living and the markings on the walls.

Later on, they are in a garden. He remembers there were gardens.

She asks him about his necklace, the combat necklace he wore at the start of the war that is yet to come. He invents an explanation.

They walk. They look at the trunk of a redwood tree covered with historical dates. She pronounces an English name he doesn't understand. As in a dream, he shows her a point beyond the tree, hears himself say, "This is where I come from ..." - and falls back, exhausted. Then another wave of Time washes over him. The result of another injection perhaps.

Now she is asleep in the sun. He knows that in this world to which he has just returned for a while, only to be sent back to her, she is dead. She wakes up. He speaks again. Of a truth too fantastic to be believed he retains the essential: an unreachable country, a long way to go. She listens. She doesn't laugh.

Is it the same day? He doesn't know. They shall go on like this, on countless walks in which an unspoken trust, an unadulterated trust will grow between them, without memories or plans. Up to the moment where he feels - ahead of them - a barrier.

And this was the end of the first experiment.

It was the starting point for a whole series of tests, in which he would meet her at different times. Sometimes he finds her in front of their markings. She welcomes him in a simple way. She calls him her Ghost.

One day she seems frightened. One day she leans toward him. As for him, he never knows whether he moves toward her, whether he is driven, whether he has made it up, or whether he is only dreaming.

Around the fiftieth day, they meet in a museum filled with timeless animals. Now the aim is perfectly adjusted. Thrown at the right moment, he may stay there and move without effort.

She too seems tamed. She accepts as a natural phenomenon the ways of this visitor who comes and goes, who exists, talks, laughs with her, stops talking, listens to her, then disappears.

Once back in the experiment room, he knew something was different. The camp leader was there. From the conversation around him, he gathered that after the brilliant results of the tests in the Past, they now meant to ship him into the Future. His excitement made him forget for a moment that the meeting at the museum had been the last.

The Future was better protected than the Past. After more, painful tries, he eventually caught some waves of the world to come. He went through a brand new planet, Paris rebuilt, ten thousand incomprehensible avenues. Others were waiting for him. It was a brief encounter. Obviously, they rejected these scoriae of another time.

He recited his lesson: because humanity had survived, it could not refuse to its own past the means of its survival. This sophism was taken for Fate in disguise.

They gave him a power unit strong enough to put all human industry back into motion, and again the gates of the Future were closed.

Sometime after his return, he was transferred to another part of the camp. He knew that his jailers would not spare him. He had been a tool in their hands, his childhood image had been used as bait to condition him, he had lived up to their expectations, he had played his part. Now he only waited to be liquidated with, somewhere inside him, the memory of a twice-lived fragment of time.

And deep in this limbo, he received a message from the people of the world to come. They too traveled through Time, and more easily. Now they were there, ready to accept him as one of their own. But he had a different request: rather than this pacified future, he wanted to be returned to the world of his childhood, and to this woman who was perhaps waiting for him.

Once again the main jetty at Orly, in the middle of this warm pre-war Sunday afternoon where he could not stay, he though in a confused way that the child he had been was due to be there too, watching the planes.

But first of all he looked for the woman's face, at the end of the jetty. He ran toward her. And when he recognized the man who had trailed him since the underground camp, he understood there was no way to escape Time, and that this moment he had been granted to watch as a child, which had never ceased to obsess him, was the moment of his own death."

"It is rare that the feeling of absurdity is not followed by the feeling of necessity … it is rare that the feeling of necessity is not followed by the feeling of absurdity."

“Imagine: the mind exists isolated in a chaotic wasteland; four white walls, an even whiter ceiling and a floor that has no color surround it. It is this limitation that protects it from the harsh weather of insignificance that lies outside. Over time these walls slowly close in towards the center and when they meet they vanish along with everything else.”

"Why worry about terms and classifications. If surrealism comes naturally, from inside yourself, and you stay innocent, then it´s fine. A forced, affected surrealism would be horrible."

"Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we should never speak of our memory, for it is anything but ours; it works on its own terms, it assists us while deceiving us or perhaps deceives up to assist us."

"A compreensão humana não é um exame desinteressado, mas recebe infusões da vontade e dos afetos; disso se originam ciências que podem ser chamadas ciências conforme a nossa vontade. Pois um homem acredita mais facilmente no que gostaria que fosse verdade. Assim, ele rejeita coisas difíceis pela impaciência de pesquisar; coisas sensatas, porque diminuem a esperança; as coisas mais profundas da natureza, por superstição; a luz da experiência, por arrogância e orgulho; coisas que não são comumente aceitas, por deferência à opinião do vulgo. Em suma, inúmeras são as maneiras, e às vezes imperceptíveis, pelas quais os afetos colorem e contaminam o entendimento."

'Everything leads us to believe that there exists a certain point in the mind at which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low, construction and destruction, cease to be perceived in terms of contradiction. Surrealist activity, therefore, would be searched in vain for any other motive than the hope of determining this point '

"Às vezes me reprovam — injustamente, eu creio — por fazer filmes difíceis. Agora eu vou fazer um de fato. Aos que se aborrecem por não conseguir entender todas as insinuações, ou que admitem até mesmo não ter nenhuma idéia do que pretendo, eu apenas respondo que eles deveriam culpar sua própria esterilidade e falta de educação em vez de meus métodos; desperdiçaram o tempo deles na faculdade, compraram fragmentos estropiados de conhecimentos de segunda-mão"

"(...) People do belong to each other, because that's the only chance anybody's got for real happiness. You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing. You're terrified somebody's going to stick you in a cage. Well, baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded by Tulip, Texas or Somaliland. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself."

"I just feel like all I do, all day long, is just manage myself, try to fuckin' connect with people. But it's like, no matter how much energy you pour into getting to the station on time, or getting on the right train, there's still no fuckin' guarantee that anybody's gonna be there for you to pick you up when you get there."

"Cada cinema de rua que fecha é o mesmo que uma biblioteca desativada ou uma praça pública depredada. Seja em São Paulo, ou pior ainda no interior, equivale a necrose da artéria da vida social da aldeia. Não vejo paliativos para 'salvar' patrimônios culturais enfermos e/ou ameaçados; a solução será sempre extrema. Tombamento já!"

"show li(v)es"

"De certa forma, medo é a filha de Deus, redimida na noite de sexta-feira santa. Ela não é bela, é zombada, amaldiçoada e renegada por todos. Mas não entenda mal, ela cuida de toda agonia mortal, ela intercede pela humanidade.

Pois há uma regra e uma exceção. Cultura é a regra. E arte a exceção. Todos falam a regra: cigarro, computador, camisetas, TV, turismo, guerra. Ninguém fala a exceção. Ela não é dita, é escrita: Flaubert, Dostoyevski. É composta: Gershwin, Mozart. É pintada: Cézanne, Vermeer. É filmada: Antonioni, Vigo. Ou é vivida, e se torna a arte de viver: Srebenica, Mostar, Sarajevo. A regra quer a morte da exceção. Então a regra para a Europa Cultural é organizar a morte da arte de viver, que ainda floresce.

Quando for hora de fechar o livro, Eu não terei arrependimentos. Eu vi tantos viverem tão mal, e tantos morrerem tão bem."

"That's what real love amounts to - letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending - perfoming. You get to love your pretense. It's true, we're locked in an image, an act - and the sad thing is, people get so used to their image, they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are."

"A photograph is nothing but a lie. The space is cut off, the time, manipulated. They are two uncontrollably false appearances of an image condemned to choose between hypocrisy ­ and good conscience ­ and being fake. The language used is often one of class: dominator but alienated, unaware of the actual matter at hand: appearance, ambiguity, the imaginary."

"... and the need to photograph it all, not so much the perceived act but more like a simple exposure to common and even extreme experiences… It is an inseparable part of photographic practice, in a certain sense, to grasp at existence or risk, desire, the unconsciousness and chance, all of which continue to be essential elements. No moral posturing, no judgement, simply the principle of affirmation, necessary to explore certain universes, to go deep inside, without any care."

"The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism."

"Remembering and forgetting are part of the same mental process. To write down one detail of an event is to not write down another (unless you keep writing forever). To remember one thing is to let another slip from remembrance (unless you keep recalling forever). There is ethical as well as violent forgetting. We can’t hold on to everything we’ve known so far. So the question is not whether we forget but what, or whom, we forget."

"o ser humano sente-se um estrangeiro no seu próprio habitat, porque é incapaz de compreender a existência e de se adaptar aos absurdos do viver social. o drama de joseph k., que é um pouco o drama de todo o homem lúcido, reside na consciência de que não pode viver só e não consegue intimamente conviver com os outros."

"acho que nós somos que nem corações cheios de sangue, iguais a copos de uísque cheios de sangue, loucos para serem bebidos. mas ninguém quer beber nosso sangue, só querem beber uísque. eu também bebi uísque porque não sabia que existiam copos de sangue, corações, para se beber, ou não queria acreditar"