Take Europe Back!

January 27th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

1. There was no need for Mario Draghi’s words to understand that the crisis has already reached an irreversible threshold in Europe. A crisis of “systemic dimensions” was what Jean-Claude Trichet said a couple of months ago. Now Draghi, his successor at the European Central Bank, tells us that “the situation has worsened” (January 16th). It is difficult to understand what the worsening of a crisis of “systemic dimensions” might mean.

What is certain is that the scenarios for the coming months are quite dark, not only for those who have already been paying for the crisis for years and the medicine that aliments it – austerity or, more “soberly”, economic rigor. Even consistent sectors of capital and European ruling classes are starting to doubt that, in the gigantic process of global readjustment of the equilibrium of power underway, they risk becoming one of the losers. The specter of “decline”, even if it hasn’t stopped haunting American metropolises, has started showing up in Europe’s squares more persistently – or at least in entire European regions. And there is no lack of pundits that foresee military reasoning behind the actions of rating agencies, the first maneuvers in a “global debt war” where the goal of saving the dollar as the sovereign currency on a global level (consequently maintaining the current command centers of financial markets) can justify disintegrating the Euro. In the background, the news coming from the Strait of Hormuz reminds us that, facing a crisis of this profundity and length, war can always be an attemptable “solution” not only through finance and “sovereign” debt. » Read more «

Taxidermy, or poetically hypocrite

January 17th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

Can I speak of death while alive?
Can I gripe of imagined hunger?
Can I fight our hidden verses?
Can I fake everything, being nothing?

Can I pull out truths from lies,
Or flood a desert with springs?
Can I change chords and lyres,
And make my night ardent sun?

If everything is reduced to empty words
and with them I cover my retreat,
From the shadow pulpit I deny light
like the song refuses to be embalmed.

Glass eyes and imprisoned wings,
I’ve remained at wasted words
Like the vestige of true things.

[ José Saramago, "Taxidermia, ou poeticamente hipócrita", Os poemas possíveis, 1966 ]

Scales

January 17th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

With dubious weights I put myself
To the scales refused until today.
It is time to know what is worth more:
If to judge, to absent, or to be judged.
I put on a flat plate what I am,
Matter, nothing else, that makes me,
The passing dream, the despair
Of grabbing violently or neglectfully
This shadow that is counting my days;
I put on the little life, the vile body,
Natural betrayals and reluctances,
I put on what love, its urgency,
The pleasure of passing among the stars,
The certainty of being only would I have
If it were you to weigh me, poetry.

 

[ José Saramago, "Balança", Os poemas possíveis, 1966 ]

Declaration

January 11th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

No, there is no death.
Not even this rock is dead,
Not even the fruit that falls is dead :
My finger’s embrace gives life to them,
they breathe to the cadence of my blood,
and the breath that touches them.
So one day, when this hand grows dry,
in memory it will linger in another hand,
and the mouth will quietly keep
the taste of the mouths it kissed.

 

[ José Saramago, "Declaração", Os poemas possíveis, 1966 ]

Creation

January 11th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

God doesn’t exist yet, nor do I know when
a sketch of him will come, or at least a tone
in the confused design of the passage
of innumerable generations on this sphere.

No gesture is lost, no trace,
that the sense of life is only this:
make the earth the God we deserve,
and give the Universe the God it awaits.

 

[ José Saramago, "Criação", Os poemas possíveis, 1966 ]