Measure Pills

Or the vain art of fencing pet hatreds!

I'm glad our grandparents and parents were able to fight for our freedom of expression. Were it not for them, freedom was something seizable, perhaps, negotiable that would be part of the wedge system. You read everything. Everything is done with impunity that only freedom of expression allows. Others will say the same about my opinion and my page. Long live freedom of expression. 

Regarding the chosen paragona of this text of my verbiage, I, Cristina Guedes, am a woman. From that point of view, I cannot compare myself with any man. I don't have a dick. I have pachacha, pigeon, vagina, pussy, whatever you might prefer. The word is not important, the rest is. And that, being a woman, doesn't diminish me or discourage me from saying what I think, in a world clearly and mostly inhabited by male chauvinists (women themselves are sexists, when they continue to educate their sons as feudal lords and their daughters as slaves of the home and family) who are apprentices of sorcerers or even collaborators in a hell of knowledge, in which they fight each other for a minute of things. Let me call it something and you see it as you see fit. If they're turned around. I've heard that light reaches all mucous membranes. We all have mucous membranes. I used to say that I am a woman and I will continue to say so. We need to be many of them saying it so that they notice us as personas or we will be eternally differentiated and pejoratively evaluated (and diminished by the lack of the appendix) as mere accessories for the propagation of the species. I'm a woman, but I graduated in Psychology.  The degree doesn't define me. Because more than a psychologist, I am a woman, a persona and I exist. To be is not to have. And what I have doesn't define me either. I have the ability to say things stupid and it seems that I can, thanks to the freedom that my grandparents and parents guaranteed me.  What I share with you follows the reading of a chronicle read about the author António Lobo Antunes. The writer. Not António Lobo Antunes, the psychiatrist. And who is António Lobo Antunes? Another persona, a being, much more than a psychiatrist. A writer, much more than a psychiatrist. And to be a good or excellent writer is not to spout verbiage like I do. And as an author I've read, does.  Being a writer, more than selling books, is saying life in what you write. It is to think about the composition of the author's name and automatically remember his works, characters and themes and not the interviews given by a human being, like us, who has an ego, who uses coping strategies to defend himself from a public opinion and from an ostensive society, severe and easy in the judgments of others. The pepper in other people's asses seems to be the refreshment in mine, from an eternal and irremediable state of trampling.  No one is more than anyone else, because they have a straw, because they have money, Because you have a Porsche à la pata or because you have whatever, you name it. Excuse me for the foreign words, but as a citizen of the world, I believe that there are legitimate expressions that define feelings and states of mind than those that occur to me in the mother tongue. I've never read anything by Eugénio Lisboa. Forgive me for my ignorance. And to be completely honest, maybe it wasn't out of ignorance. Maybe it's because the author hasn't been properly disclosed. What I write is posthumous to the life of the author who, unfortunately, passed away this April. I was looking for that interview that ALA gave, where he made nonsense about Fernando Pessoa. Therefore, Eugénio who, in defense of FP and many other authors who did not excel in up, followed the example of my favorite columnist and, not in an interview and much less in a tête à tête, with himself, delivering such blows in a reputable Jornal de Letras. The headline that forced me to read the dictum whose chronicle-text by Eugénio Lisboa was this: The only man who ordered António Lobo Antunes to be fucked. And it wasn't EL who wrote the headline. And I would like, not in defense of Lobo Antunes, firstly because he must be in the inks for the opinion they may have of him, and secondly, because Eugénio Lisboa has already passed away, to say that despite our opinions, we can all say barbarities, without diminishing who we are, which is more than what we have, more than our name, than our nickname, than whatever. A man is more than all that. We all have egos, we are all sensitive, and we possess susceptibilities that make us, through mistake, stress, and other worldly barbarities, fall into the commonplace of a savage. And that, in itself, will not sustain who we are, it will not diminish who we will continue to be. We are all human. Eugénio Lisboa no longer does. Neither did Fernando Pessoa. Not Graham Greene, not Jane Austen or Emily Dickson. All these authors have already left and cannot defend themselves. The work they leave behind will speak for them. Yes, we are still here and it will not be because of our mistakes that we will be diminished, for they make us precisely incomplete in perfection, or if you prefer, too human for us to attain perfection. Both were authors in writing. And I would really like to have access to this interview, because through it, I could try to understand what made ALA say what he said (if he said it), and if there was not, there was nothing on the part of the interviewer that led him to explain it that way. We are not all the same and anyone who reads ALA knows that the author knows the world and people in their virtues and weaknesses, but he is also clothed in those indignities and geniuses that make us who we are. There have always been and always will be "rivalries" or "differences" that particularize us or make us similar. It turns out that rivalries are nothing more than the frailties of an ego that allows itself to be affected by comparison, exaltation, diminishment or arrogance of other egos. And that's also part of who we are. Selfs in search of the best version of themselves. What doesn't make us better is to point out one defect in the other and do the same, and that's what in my view, Eugénio Lisboa did, regardless of being a productive author, among authors. In EL's place, he might try a physical or virtual rapprochement. Once it becomes accessible or more accessible to authors to communicate with each other, not without studying what makes a human being diminish another, much less diminish him by a certain boast and himself fall into the error of the same. The chronicle I read of EL who recently passed away stays here, while I continue to try to listen and read between the lines of this famous interview that gave rise to such a chronicle, very well written, with sarcasms and touches of jocular humor, nevertheless, taking advantage of the mistake of a human being to be able to show, after all, what you think about him,  instead of telling him it personally. And just as between authors in writing, so these petty and petty rivalries become trivialities in all other areas of work. There is a mismatch between psychiatrists and also, and even more notoriously, between psychologists and psychiatrists, between professors and professors with doctorates, between engineers and between engineers and architects, in all areas where there are men. It does not add to us, on the contrary.  Although we have to be aware that we are not what we say we are, we are what we do. And as much as for EL the psychiatrist writer is an outcast because he had the desire to have a less consensual opinion, the writer António Lobo Antunes did not generalize to the number of virgin writers, gays, etc., who proliferate in the world of letters, sciences and so on. Eugénio Lisboa did more and better, in attack of LA's mistake, EL counterattacks the chronicler, as if his own life depended on it, I say writing and as if that were not enough, he left such a chronicle as a work in the Jornal de Letras that tarnishes, in my view, its credibility for an ignorant woman like me, with regard to being curious to read his work. I emphasize, however, that I do not allow myself to be carried away by this and that it even arouses my curiosity even more with regard to EL, especially because I found out that he was specialized in José Régio whom I value very much. Men are men and they will always have to measure dicks. And if a man is penalized for saying what he thinks about Fernando Pessoa, who is a genius and marks our literature, just like Camões, it is still true, for me, that many texts by this author, as well as by Camões, manage to put me to sleep. I never fell asleep with António Lobo Antunes. If I were the editor of a Jornal de Letras, I wouldn't give space to a chronicle where the objective was to crucify someone. Unless it was fictionalized and would be read as a work in itself. On my page I can, in the pink magazines that seem to have been born for this purpose, ditto, as an editor, it would leave something to be desired. Or it would be fuelling private polemics that would serve its own interests.  And in my opinion, literature and various arts should not be mixed with controversies of private life. Or circumstantial lapses, all human. As seems to have been the case with the one and, for that matter, with the other. 

Here I leave the chronicle, signed by EL and referring to this punctual episode about the writer who is not punctual, ALA.

"Fuck and write

I beg your pardon for the distracted tone of this prose, starting with the title: a libertine paraphrase of a famous soliloquy. I will use, as you will see, unbridled or even crude words: the culprit of all this is the writer António Lobo Antunes who, in a recent interview – of the many that he doesn't like to give but goes on giving – suggested the motto, stating the following, referring to Fernando Pessoa: "I wonder if a man who has never fucked can be a good writer." It is not the first time that the author of Elephant Memory has served us this treat. Probably, when he had it, he liked the idea so much that he never tires of serving it to us, rain or shine. I react to it, not so much because of the Vincentian crudeness of the tone (and the glossary), but because it doesn't seem scientifically tenable. And, at this point, I appeal to what, of science, still remains in the mind of the former psychiatrist Lobo Antunes. Antunes proposes, in short, that Pessoa's lack of horniness is not compatible with the professional equipment of a good writer, or, in a less crude way: chastity does not lead to powerful creation. Well, when a working hypothesis is put into science, it only remains standing until the precise moment when a new known fact comes to disprove it (or falsify it, as Popper would say). Now, there is no shortage of facts that disturb, shake and collapse Lobo Antunes' daring assertion – those facts that Ronald Reagan called "stupid", because they contradicted his primary fantasies. 

Isaac Newton, unquestionably the greatest scientist of all time, died a virgin or, if Lobo Antunes prefers, it is not said that he ever fucked – which did not prevent him from probing, like no one else, the enigmas of the universe. Nor do I believe that one of the greatest artists and prodigious inventor of technological artifacts – Leonardo da Vinci – fucked up all the while. These two examples, by themselves, would be enough to irremediably fuck up the scientific hypothesis of the former psychiatrist's apprentice doublé of fiction, who goes by the name of Lobo Antunes. It is true that none of these characters I have mentioned are exactly a writer and Lobo Antunes referred only to the inability of a chaste to write good literature. Let's see, then, from the writers' side. There is no shortage of examples – the so-called "stupid" facts. Henry James, for example, is not recorded to have ever gone to bed, with a girl or a boy. Walpole wanted to seduce him to his bed one day (suspicious that he was so reticed more like a parched spinster), but the author of Portrait of a Lady backed down. There was even a woman who committed suicide because he rejected her or didn't decode the passes she was making to him, but nothing would lead him to do what Lobo Antunes considers fundamental for a fruitful literary life: fuck, even if it's just a bit. James left a monumental work and Graham Greene only referred to him, calling him, with a bow, "the Master",but Lobo Antunes is of the opinion that the work of the great American fictionist was completely fucked up because its author didn't fuck up. Jane Austen, who managed the miracle of simultaneously pleasing the general public, filmmakers and university high-brows, didn't fuck either. She lived unmarried and a virgin and produced, in the midst of the most impertinent chastity, half a dozen masterpieces. Thus helping to fuck up the antunesina hypothesis considerably. John Ruskin, who wrote so well about art, even deserved the glory of being translated into French by Marcel Proust – that Lobo Antunes admires so much and with such exclusivity! – he didn't get to fuck either, although he tried: on the wedding night, the bride's pubic hair – something he had apparently never contemplated – horrified him so much that he left the poor girl intact and never repeated the attempt. Fucked up, isn't it? The American poet Emily Dickinson was also an aunt, which justifies, according to Antunes, a reassessment of her poetry, in light of so much not fucking. On the other hand, Edgar Poe, the one of detective literature – with the unforgettable Dupin, illustrious precursor of Sherlock Holmes – but also the wizard of fantastic and horror literature – which Baudelaire admirably translated – and the romantic poet that Pessoa translated for Portuguese, Poe, I said, committed what Antunes would classify as the most heinous of crimes: he married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, without, however, having her. Neither to her nor to any other, that is known. The great poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, a priest, was also chaste (I don't know if it was because he was a priest, but the truth is that he was), which will soon force a whole scholarly colloquium to be organized, for the re-evaluation of his work: those who work hard do not fuck, write well cannot, assures Antunes to those who want to listen to him. Also the emeritus Yeats, one of the greats of twentieth-century poetry, remained chaste until his thirties, and during this period of "no fucking" Spartan, he wrote and published a great deal of poetry. And, by the way, to conclude, I suspect that our tender António Nobre, the undisputed precursor of our modern poetry and "our greatest poetess", according to the meek perfidy of the great Pascoaes, was also not particularly given to the fornications that Antunes considers fundamental to the act of writing.

Finally, still in the aforementioned interview, the author of Os Cus de Judas gives Virgil what is Horace's, when he clumsily alludes to the odes of Ricardo Reis: thus he fucks, without appeal or aggravation, the prevailing erudition. It is a case of saying that, if those who do not dare to write cannot, it is no less certain that those who little handle the old cannot see beyond the wicket. Abrégé from the text above, with thesis (mine): when it comes to writing, it doesn't matter to fuck or not to fuck. The important thing is to have to say it and know how to do it. Simple? I'd even go so far as to say it: elementary."

Eugénio Lisboa 

writer, teacher and essayist "Jornal de Letras"

And we see in this chronicle stripped of other people's lives that an author, in order to whip a living writer and defend a dead poet, walks around, talking about the sex lives of various authors, as if he were writing his most beautiful work, a behavior typical of the "writers of the social chronicles of the pink magazines". I didn't think the opinion of the ALA chronicler was correct, but the behavior of the author EL leaves more to be desired. As someone said (Freud, Lise Bourbeau), when Peter talks about Paul, we know more about Peter than we do about Paul, and frankly, it wasn't necessary! Or, perhaps, maybe there was an ego to deal with.