juventude em marcha

zeca no sul

Insisto não ser tristeza
soluçar sobre uma mesa
e mais não ser deste mundo
meter navios no fundo
num caminho de gravetos
sempre se plantam gravetos
e se a velhice for tua
senta-a no meio da rua.
José Afonso

um espaço de dúvida

um espaço de dúvida
a ideia não é dar respostas
colocar questões que outros interlocutores por estarem tão embrenhados nos seus papéis

e identidades relativas terão muito mais dificuldade em percepcionar a sua identidade própria
trabalhos com duplos sentidos para que a resposta não se instale

uma resposta alternativa.

transnational station without crossborders

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

Thoreau

message in a bottle

For Jules Verne, there is no place that cannot be illuminated. Moonlight cuts through the waves and gives the ocean floor the pale luminosity of a romantic ruin. When moonlight fails, electricity cuts in. But the sunken galleons on the floor of Vigo Bay, the secret source of Captain Nemo's mysterious insurrectionary wealth, are never described within Verne's text, although they are pictured in two of the illustrations to the first French edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Within the written narrative, which is elsewhere replete with such scenes, there is no underwater tableau, no landscape, no town on the shore.
Nemo's sunken treasury remains both invisible and frozen in its connection to historic plunder, to the process of what Marx called "primitive accumulation." For Verne, this lost fraction of the wealth that came to fuel the emergence of modern Europe is confiscated by a magical fable of inheritance: "It was for him and him alone America had given up her precious metals. He was heir direct, without anyone to share, in those treasures torn from the Incas and from the conquered of Ferdinand Cortez."
Nemo's wealth, despite his patronage of revolutionary movements, remains liable to the charge of barrenness. His project is blocked on the one side by aristocratic nostalgia and on the other by an abstract and futuristic motto of perpetual flux within flux: mobilis in mobili. The Galician writer Ferrin has grasped the irony of Nemo's scavenging in the waters off Vigo. Wealth always leaves Vigo, whether in the form of fish, granite, or sheer emigrant labor power. Nemo, no exception to this rule, is for Ferrin quite simply a "nihilist," another external, destructive demiurge.
For all his genius as a naval engineer, Nemo is also a philosophical idealist. Matter is always subordinated to will and to thought. Nemo embodies the secret idealism of all science fiction. He can flaunt the laws of economics because his relation to wealth is consistently magical. Verne's narrator observes that Nemo's voluminous library aboard the Nautilus contained "not one single work on political economy; that subject appeared to be strictly proscribed." Nemo's answer to the misery of the land lies in the imaginary pre-industrial plentitude of the sea.
If Nemo has no respect for terrestrial economies, the booksellers and readers of Vigo have either too little or too much respect for Nemo. In the outdoor stalls that are set up from time to time on the Praza de Compostela one can buy inexpensive paperback editions in Spanish, but not in Galician, of most of Verne's novels. Among them, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea is nowhere to be found. I am tempted to think that here, under the canvas tarp and the swinging electric light two blocks from the waterfront, amongst the used volumes devoted to Velazquez and the several translations of the American inspirational writer Dale Carnegie, the indifference of Verne and his hero Nemo is reciprocated. And this reciprocated indifference is a function of an economic attitude: the distrust borne toward submarines by those who work the surface of the sea.
Allan Sekula