SEU ADAMASTOR, Juiz de Fora, May 2010
AaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaRa! It was me, ME!, I was the one who sent the boy to Valadares to get that crazy quote! I'd left all my mining gear behind in Roraima, and now we needed to buy everything again: a set of sieves, a set of pans, wetsuits, and all the equipment to build at least one raft, which is expensive! In Minas Gerais, as far as I know, it's Governador Valadares or Diamantina. But Valadares is bigger, right?! So I told him: "Go on!" - Now, what the boy did there besides research the price of diesel engines, dredges, and diving equipment, I can't say. He was so late there! And he left us all here in this Center waiting for him to return, all of us with that cold burning of complaint in our throats, because before leaving he had told us that, in the spurts, he had found money to increase the number of tilapia cages and I brought the matter up with the people here and everyone was on my neck asking where the boy is, where the money is, we have to buy the fry right away, it takes a long time for the fish to get to the point of sale and we are already selling everything we have in the lake and so it has to be done now. And where is the boy? I pulled out a knife, in the middle of the commotion, to explain that I trusted the boy, and that I wanted everyone there to be quiet, because when they made me nervous, I was also suspicious of that boy!
Ôrra! It wasn't enough to have solved the van problem so quickly, what were those bunch of country bumpkins thinking?! So I asked them to calm down, bumping into them with a shout of orders in their ears, to think better in the meantime, and even while still mixing their names in my head, I found myself making myself understood, resulting in a lot of silent cigarette smoking around the campfire. I convinced them I hadn't lost my touchy vibe with the boy, I had a vision of progress, the work was going well. Of course, the mining thing was still just me and the boy's business, also hungry for progress to the river, but for things to go well, I would soon have to find some candidates among those people. Three, four, repeating the right words so as not to be talked about by everyone. A miner must have a lot of backbone! And also a quiet appreciation of how things are done. And damejos of sovereignty!, putting in our eyes an “Esperento” that makes a leak in the law, outside the daily mole, soaking time like a dredge at the bottom of a river.
ResponderExcluirThen the boy appeared again that day. He was lost in the fog, coming from nowhere, as he said, in that empty moment. He said:
ResponderExcluir"I bought two engines, two dredges, and some diving equipment. I brought the screens and pans with me; they'll deliver the rest to my house in a few days. You have to police the area closely to keep this from becoming news. It's all completely illegal! And this isn't Pará; the Minas Gerais residents are bureaucratic. As for the money for the tilapia cages and the fry, I've already put it in your account. Find a way!"
The boy spoke in a short, simple voice, his voice thick with the heat inside, caught in the eyes of the people who laughed, self-assured. And he added:
"And gather the receipts for all the fish we sell, because at the end of the month I need to submit a financial report to Votorantim Energia. The land where the lakes we use to raise tilapia are located is their environmental compensation park; we need to produce a decent amount of it, without jeopardizing the agreement we have with them. Honey is easier, because it's sold little so far. Despite everything, that honey from the Center showing up at the Saturday market here in the village looks pretty good. Tell the beekeeping men to keep those old ladies busy with it, and get a bigger banner for the grocery store. We need to produce photos of everything for the NGO's website."
ResponderExcluirThat boy wasn't just there to make things laugh with idle chatter. He was all talk and action!, constantly warning about vigilance and caution, in a wild gesture full of half-hearted intentions, putting a stop to the unthinkable. And with a severe edge in those logistical masterpieces, with direct, unsmiling words, the boy helped us find our way through that hidden web full of news and political intrigue. He didn't hold back, the boy! That sudden cash he announced was a commotion that revived the spirits of the country folk, almost on the verge of vote-buying. The boy breathed deeply, amidst the country folk. No one could guess how many thoughts of more money fit in that boy's head. I went to the bank myself the next day and there really was a good advance payment there, but he hadn't made the deposit – so I asked the boy why, and he said it was for "security", that some friends of his from a law firm, actually three firms, one for each thing, according to him, made the payments here and there, so as not to leave a huge trail in his account, since the mining equipment was about to arrive and he was going to risk his skin along with everyone else in the river.
ResponderExcluirLater, the boy explained to me that upon arriving in Valadares, he had to spend two days sorting out a deal with a pulp roll company for some friends of his who sold cellulose-based silk here in Juiz de Fora. And that once there, he found time to pluck up the courage to do other business, using the business cards of his friends, old clients of the company, as payment. He was so certain the owners liked him that he started making money with it, on his own, even inventing a different name: Agnelo, and his NGO was his alone. And that night, they took him to a party at an expensive nightclub to celebrate something he didn't want to explain. He had a private space and everything.
ResponderExcluirThe boy laughed, unafraid of the structure of that conversation. Sometimes he laughed so much, even I couldn't contain my nerves. I was burning with a consuming longing for sleepiness while awake. When the boy put on that machine-like behavior, talking and laughing, I breathed heavily, closing my eyes and keeping silent, wanting to let the boy rid himself of all that air of madness. Then, either the boy would withdraw into himself and disappear, or he would come with that "come-me-home," reluctantly undoing his agitated steps to who knows where, and he would rejoin his normality with the shared voice of our work, "SHORT! SIMILAR!", breathing in laughter. AaaaaaaaaaRa!
ResponderExcluirEnd Mr. ADAMASTOR here!
ResponderExcluirPost script
ResponderExcluirIndeed, a mental life reduced to subjection or subjectivity crushed by the submissive and compulsory socialization operated by the language systems in which Capital geared or engineered the world of human labor --- a mental life made of ciphers and expectations (illusory or real, never satisfied) of places, things, objects, meals and people ---- always having only fragile and fickle ties and phrases coagulated by repetitive use like a code trapped within the fossil meaning itself, far from that point where things appear naked, in the nakedness of a solitude capable of bringing together all the conditions for uprooting, far, very far from nearby readers, far beyond, in an expanse of events that leads to silence, refusing all the deceptions by which people live --- CLIMBING and reintegration into a void unified by the energy concentrated in meditation, where one often asks, with Bataille: "How would ecstasy be possible unless we stopped clinging fearfully to life?"
ResponderExcluirHere we suppose a phase of anguish; Bataille is terribly influenced by Kierkegaard (the object of Bataille's ecstasy becomes clear before one changes: although this attracts (Bataille continues), it becomes clear that this will leave nothing to subsist of the reassuring and comfortable isolation of being.
ResponderExcluir--------------------------- animated by its movement
finding joy in a certain rush-------------------------- it does not depend on us whether belief in ourselves is ruined -------------------------------------
as for the Christian faith, its survival is neither comical nor shocking ------------------------------------
however, for them the evidence is given BLINDLY, without SEEING ---------------------
the unreality here, apparent unreality, both in Bataille and in Christians, the artificial character of their ecstasies
the unreality here, apparent unreality
of the Christian with his Bible and his adventitious expectations and his charity and expectation of the return of good deeds and his illiterate visions old testament
and from Bataille himself:
ResponderExcluir''...................................................I just want to get drunk, to live.
..................................................indifferent to any and all work, no servitude beyond the solitary, seething empire
.................................................with the strength to slowly articulate angular words
.................................................solitude where my deserted parties take place
.................................................I don't know how to convince, all I know is to live
.................................................I still suffer from phrases I endure''
* the artificial nature of its ecstasies
This obviously has nothing to do with the intoxicating literary quality of "THE GUILTY," which, honestly, after Rimbaud's A SEASON IN HELL and ILLUMINATIONS and Flaubert's TEMPTATIONS OF SAINT ANTHONY, is surely a literary masterpiece still little "noticed" --- in a way, capital and prophetic of the postmodern sensibility (to return to some crude and sociological terms of the present)
B, in the epigraph, crossed out in NOTEBOOK 2, from the drafts of THE GUILTY
ResponderExcluiris an epigraph from Nietzsche's Zarathustra (in I, Reading and Writing).
"I hate idle reading. He who knows the reader does nothing for him. Another century of readers and the spirit itself will stink! We do not write maxims in blood to be read, but rather to be memorized, known by heart."
and just below, Bataille himself scribbled:
"...I must not be caught up in any struggle. If there is a struggle within me -----------------------" (crossed out)
and
"Yesterday I picked up an encyclopedia --------------------------- alcohol and knowledge"
*
I would conclude by saying the only "struggle" is for the DIRECTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. See how Bataille confesses to being "tired" in these notes close to the draft above:
"Sometimes I was exhausted: I would get up again, saying to myself, 'THIS FATIGUE DOESN'T MATTER.'"
".........................................long and ardent devotion to CHANCE."
"To belong completely to CHANCE."
ResponderExcluir''........................................LISTENING TO THE ETERNAL SILENCE OF INFINITE SPACES..................................................DRY INTERROGATION OF SILENCE (low energy).....................................my curiosity linked to my ''habits'' thickens my curiosity for the unfathomable enigma even more'' .............................all the human disorder of reasonable occupations, of efforts..................................................''
''.......................my curiosity linked to my ''habits'' thickens my curiosity for the unfathomable enigma even more'' .............................all the human disorder of reasonable occupations, of efforts............................................................''
This excerpt is capital to place THE GUILTY in the order of works that Foucault characterizes in THE CARE OF THE SELF (History of Sexuality, Volume 2): techniques of the self, art of existence, in Greek also the transmission of this: ''to di'allelon sozesthai''; and anachoresis, use of oneself, permanent exercise of oneself (for the Epicureans, the LETTER TO MENECEUS gave access to the general principle that philosophy should be considered a permanent exercise of self-care)