In der Wirklichkeitstehen: estar com os pés no chão (terra; realidade)
lazareto: hospital de leprosos, espaço destinado à quarentena
mit-teilsam: com-unicativo
Selbst-Verblendung: autocegamento
Verantwortlichkeit: responsabilidade
“Da ist eine Fliege in meiner Suppe”
“ins Dasein kommen” vir-a-ser
Desde que eu me entendo por gente
“Caso Ilse: o <ponto de partida> era o amor passional pelo pai e o sofrimento constante pelos maus-tratos que ele dispensava à mãe.”
“Enquanto, no Caso Ilse, o Dasein estaba sob uma alta-tensão que durou muitos anos e <deu vazão> a si mesma primeiramente no sacrifício da queimadura, depois no delírio de perseguição e no delírio amoroso, a alta-tensão sob a qual está o Dasein no caso Suzanne Urban mostra-se não apenas em um amor <idólatra> pelos pais, mas também em um culto amoroso hipocondríaco <quase anormal> aos pais e ao esposo. Esse culto é afetado profundamente e é colocado sob a máxima prova quando o esposo (um primo) contrai câncer na bexiga.” “Além disso, ressalte-se que não se trata de um delírio de perseguição singular <residual> que se liga a uma vivência de desabamento do mundo, como no caso Schreber-Flechsig, mas, como nos casos Lola e Ilse, de um delírio de perseguição anônimo ou plural.”
(Nota: os títulos a seguir foram insertos por mim de forma arbitrária, não correspondendo nem à posição dos capítulos e tópicos do livro nem coincidindo em nomenclatura.)
1. A FAMÍLIA RELATA O CASO
“nenhuma amizade autêntica.”
“Sobretudo nos últimos anos, colocou que o ideal haveria sido não ter se casado, mas ter feito carreira no teatro. Natureza muito erótica (…) gostava de contar ao velho pai piadinhas eróticas.”
Quem não vira artista fica doido; mas e o artista, anormal, fica o quê?
“Quando menina, era notavelmente bonita. (…) Não agia como uma coquette” “Tornou-se noiva de um primo muito rapidamente”
“Aos 27 anos começaram ataques de espirro paroxísticos [?] que permaneceram fechados à influência terapêutica. A organoterapia junto a renomados laringologistas falhou completamente.”
“O marido era dominado pela esposa, cedia a ela constantemente”“só tinha interesse pelo câncer do marido, não suportava qualquer outro assunto. Indignava-se se alguém risse em sua frente. Queria acima de tudo matar o marido ela mesma e suicidar-se depois. Desejava um acidente que trouxesse a morte para os dois.” “Insultava os médicos porque eles não matavam o marido.”
“A paciente ingressou num hospital psiquiátrico (…) desde o começo, acreditava que estava sendo observada, perseguida pela polícia, radiografada; segundo ela, a família (…) estava tomando seus bens; no parque havia fios elétricos que registravam os passos de todos, ela teria sido infectada com sífilis, além de ter câncer, e todas as doenças possíveis. Recusava comida, acreditando que estava envenenada. À noite, vozes entravam-lhe na cabeça e mandavam-na repetir tudo que havia de mau; tudo seria impresso e divulgado por meio de gravadores especiais. Havia fios por toda parte. Mesmo no banho, haveria aparatos que a fotografavam nua para expô-la publicamente. Julgava que misturados aos remédios tomava sêmen de rãs e lagartos, queria vomitar tudo.”
“As idéias persecutórias pioravam cada vez mais. Gritava da janela (…) haviam cortado fora o nariz, as orelhas, os braços da mãe. Os familiares estavam enfiados em meio a fezes, batiam neles com barras de ferro, etc.”
“alta após 4 semanas”
“Nos últimos tempos, envelheceu muito, os cabelos esbranquiçaram rapidamente.”
2. COMO SUZANNE SE VÊ
“[Internada na clínica de Binswanger,] escreveu em poucos dias 2 cadernos completos, em alemão, embora esse não fosse seu idioma natal. (…) A partir dos escritos, pode-se perceber o quão exatamente as informações dadas pela paciente concordam com as dadas pelos familiares do ponto de vista do tempo e dos fatos”
“Visto que a doença piorava cada vez mais, que meu marido começou a sofrer de insônia total apesar da medicação e que só comia se o forçavam e se alimentava principalmente de sangue prensado com creme, ovos e carne, os médicos sugeriram, uma vez que não se podia obter o novo medicamento (mesotório) onde morávamos, que fôssemos a Paris, ao que meus familiares também me encorajavam, dizendo que eu devia de toda maneira, embora estivesse arrasada, inconsolável, tentar também isso, a fim de nunca poder me culpar por [não] ter tentado fazer todo o possível para, se não salvar, ao menos prolongar a vida do homem. Essa estadia de 2 meses em P. foi o inferno para o pobre homem; alguns médicos queriam mandar operar meu marido, proposta, contudo, veementemente rejeitado por outros médicos.”
“Enquanto eu estou andando pelo parque, eu escuto minhas expressões um tanto triviais serem repetidas por algumas mulheres que estão andando o mais perto possível de mim, a fim de me mostrar que elas ouviram tudo. Isso me deixa frenética. Até mesmo meus pensamentos são repetidos por outras pessoas. Eu digo para minha irmã ‘Nós estamos aqui entre espiões, o que eles querem de mim?’, mas ela apenas ri”
“eu pressinto uma corrente elétrica”
“tornei-me assassina de toda a família; não isso apenas; eu mando despedaçar a tumba do meu pai. Esses pensamentos me vêm na língua …, que eu nunca usei em casa. (…) e eu, assassina, estou deitada aqui na cama, estou sendo alimentada, estão me dando banho enquanto meus inocentes familiares atormentam-se.”
“nós somos mendigas, eu caluniei vocês todos por meio do poder do diabo.”
“Agora estou vivendo com a única esperança de escrever um pedido (petição) de que fuzilem as pobres pessoas sofridas ao invés de martirizarem-nas por tanto tempo.”
3. ANOTAÇÕES DE BINSWANGER
“Teriam-na mandado dizer que seu sobrinho é um socialista. Sente depois, com toda a exatidão, que estão arrancando os olhos dele.”
“tão logo conta uma piada, faz mais uma vez censuras a si mesma. (…) Conta com muito gosto as piadas mais sujas. Pergunta quem lhe tirou o entendimento.”
“Em 4 de setembro de 1920 é retirada do hospital psiquiátrico pela irmã imprudente, depois da assinatura de uma declaração rigorosa (…) Desde então, não ouvimos sequer mais uma palavra a seu respeito, e todas as buscas ficaram sem resultado devido aos caos da I e II Guerras Mundiais.”
“Até o último momento, a letra era tão precisa e pequena que a paciente podia colocar toda a história de seu sofrimento em um cartão postal”
4. ANÁLISE DO DASEIN
“O médico disse-lhe que havia uma parte da bexiga que estava ferida, mas, quando ele virou as costas, fez para mim uma cara tão terrivelmente desesperançosa que fiquei completamente paralisada (…) de modo que o médico agarrou minha mão para me indicar que eu não devia mostrar a ele nenhuma das minhas sensações. Essa mímica foi uma coisa pavorosa! Meu marido também percebeu algo, talvez, mas exibiu uma expressão completamente amigável e apenas perguntou ao médico de onde isto poderia ter vindo; ele respondeu que isso frequentemente está no sangue, sem que se saiba sua origem.”
“horror mudo”
“Suzanne Urban leu no rosto e na mímica do médico não apenas a sentença de morte do marido, mas também a perspectiva das dores tormentosas que o aguardavam.”
“Todo o Dasein estava agora sob o domínio do tema de que foi encarregado na <cena original>, o tema do <câncer do marido>. Como algo de que alguém é encarregado <a partir de fora>, esse tema implica um encargo, o encargo, propriamente, de <levar a cabo> esse tema de alguma maneira, de não sucumbir a ele, mas vencê-lo.”
“Suzanne Urban agora fala consigo mesma, ouve a si mesma, escuta exclusivamente a si mesma. Se o dito de que todo monólogo é um diálogo (Vossler) é correto, isso também se aplica neste caso.”
“Enquanto o si-mesmo aberto (aberto à verdadeira comunidade) atenua a carga de tal tema falando a respeito dele com um amigo, o si-mesmo que se enclausura com o tema procura carregá-la <exclusivamente> em seus próprios ombros, sem ver que esses ombros se tornaram fracos demais para isso há muito. A essa altura estamos diante do 1º passo desse Dasein em direção ao cegamento do si-mesmo ou à extravagância.”
Vacas não-malhadas e gatos no telhado: “Nachts sind alle Kühe grau”
“Como é regra nos delírios de perseguição plurais, aqui o pretenso fundador da <desgraça de toda a família> [o psiquiatra da internação] vai depressa para o 2º plano para temporariamente dar lugar a uma pessoa completamente diferente (<a prostituta de rua>, a enfermeira) e somente ser mencionado de novo ocasionalmente. O Dr. R. figura aí como aquele que a separou de seu marido (…) o carrasco da família” “Apesar de tudo isso, não parece fora de questão que o Dr. R. deva seu significado de desgraça ou de pavor a uma <identificação atmosférica> com o urologista que <martirizou> o marido com seu exame e lhe revelou o diagnóstico de câncer tão <pavorosamente>. Pois o verdadeiro carrasco, aquele com quem <a desgraça de toda a família> começou, é decerto o médico da cena original”
Te peguei pela nota de rodapé.
Tu te tornas eternamente citável pelo artigo que publicas.
“Também a autosseculusão frente aos outros é uma forma desse ser compartilhado (…) Todavia, com isso ainda estamos na superfície, completamente à parte do fato de que a passividade sempre implica uma forma de atividade e vice-versa.”
Mundchen, a boquinha de Munique.
É fitar e começar: start and resume (pressing start): starren: é ver pra crer: que fita, pode crer!
Select your destinyfreedom!
Pausar qualquer progresso.
Engessar qualquer um que deu um pau na máquina que deu pau.
Congelar, reter, dar crise de pânico e resetar.
Meu torpor seguro onde cristalizaram as emoções já faz um tempo.
Já faz um tempo que as pessoas agem como se portas-afora fossem.
Ágora é que são elas, cuspindo na cara dos carnavais.
Parcas fora do baralho, só estão no mundo real –
Presente de hilota e pelego!
Recebo, não nego, dadivoso logro quando hipomaníaco eu estiver.
Rancorosa Lola Corre do Tempo que Assedia a Moça de Somas Bonitas.
Poxa que rosa sua coxa, recorro aos meus pensamentos para encerrar o coro
Com uma mensagem que não escoe pelo ralo: uma ponte entre nossas
Aspirações.
Abismo cheio de miasma, conhecido como el mismo.
Cacarejou a cara do novo dia normal e malogrado.
O Apanhador de Sentidos no Campo do Nonsense.
Em termos de sentido da vida, a única coisa que se apanha, em muitas pessoas, é seu eu-criança. Isso é falta de apanhar, K.! Preguiça mental!
Entorpecido em suas sólidas crenças morais.
Fagulhas de luz negra em seu olhar gasoso, de névoa desinteressada.
História da Moral: Não conte.
Wish-to-do-list:
Ator: doar um
Um ator, atordoar
fina morte morna de morfina
“Em lugar da simesmação autentica do Dasein no sentido da existência, entra a errância sem-fim para o <mundo pavoroso>, para a <odisséia pavorosa>.”
“A notável idiossincrasia das narrações delirantes dos esquizofrênicos está correlacionada ao fato de que o <como> da narração, a representação linguística, pode ser extremamente sucinta e precisa – tão precisa que um leigo, em regra, dará crédito às declarações delirantes da paciente prontamente se elas não forem abstrusas demais –, enquanto o <o quê>, o conteúdo de suas narrativas, é em regra notavelmente impreciso, vago, ambíguo, até mesmo <aventuroso>.”
“me sinto como se…”
“Quanto mais evidente é a sinistra entrega de Suzanne à publicidade, mais os órgãos executores dela (aqui como em outros lugares) se subtraem a uma verificação exata. Todos procedem de maneira mais ou menos secreta. (…) está cercada de espiões, contudo não consegue vê-los e identificá-los; ela escuta <um apitar policial>, mas não vê nenhum policial. (…) A despeito do sentimento de ódio para com o Dr. R e para com a <prostituta de rua>, Suzanne, ao contrário do presidente do senado Schreber, não implica com uma pessoa determinada, ao redor da qual circula amor & ódio. Não foi <ele> nem <ela> que armou, mas simplesmente <armaram> uma <armadilha pavorosa>” Bem weberiano!
“Lidamos com duas <linguagens> da paciente ao mesmo tempo: uma linguagem do pavor e uma linguagem da verificação calma e da reflexão. Delírio e reflexão sóbria não se excluem mutuamente”
“Suzanne ouve dia e noite um uivo pavoroso, como o dos lobos. <Tossem> e <cospem> alto diante da janela dela, ela vê grandes facas de cozinha que estão numa janela e grita alto ao ver algumas gotas de sangue sobre o chão, etc.”
“a criada do hospital está vestindo os aventais dela, para <mostrar-lhe> que estão fazendo <revistas> (policiais) em seu quarto. As declarações de uma senhora de que se deveria deixar o gato <dar uma boa mastigada no pássaro>, certos movimentos manuais e o ato de puxar o nariz, tudo isso tem o mesmo sentido, que algumas vezes ela escuta expresso por palavras: <a cabecinha precisa cair>.”
“Depois de pensar como seria bom se quisessem decapitar ela própria (em lugar de seus familiares), ela vê <diante de si> um menino que tem um sabre de brinquedo fazer o movimento da decapitação. Ao capinara grama <mostram> a foice significativamente: <Eu, contudo, entendi o sentido da foice>.”
“zombam dela, até mesmo da doença do marido: Câncer, câncer, pelo amor de Deus! Por que não lagosta?”
“O que torna o <paciente que sofre de delírio> alheio a nós, o que o faz parecer alienado não são percepções ou idéias isoladas, mas o fato de seu enclausuramento em um esboço de mundo dominado por um único ou alguns poucos temas, ou seja, enormemente estreito.”
“há os pensamentos que mandam-na pensar!”
“obrigam-na a pensar que os familiares são cobertos com chumbo e piche.”
“O mais tormentoso de todos os tormentos é, na verdade, a obrigação, que parte de um poder diabólico, de caluniar seus familiares <em pensamentos> ou com palavras e, desse modo, de fazer-se culpável pelos martírios e pela decadência tormentosa deles, portanto, de ser uma criminosa, por assim dizer, uma criminosa a contragosto.”
1) ‘voz’ inquisidora; 2) poder caluniador dos pensamentos e das palavras; 3) instância transcendente que reflete o jogo de perguntas e respostas, sendo aceita como destino pela ‘voz’, que no entanto ‘corrige’ as respostas quando necessário.
“Aí vemos que O Dasein ainda consegue resistir à publicização dos <pensamentos> ou, ao menos, ainda consegue encará-la de frente se ela estiver em extrema contradição com o si-mesmo. No entanto, é claro que as acusações caluniadores surgem a partir do próprio Dasein.”
Detalhe curioso: a ‘voz’ diz-lhe injustamente o tempo todo que seu marido, inocente, é um falso-moedeiro. “Em Kreuzlingen [segunda internação, na Suíça], ela sempre ouve o martelar de uma forja <nos ouvidos>, que indica que ali mora a mulher do falsificador de dinheiro!”
“E se alguém designa todos esses pensamentos como idéias delirantes, declara ela energicamente: Não são idéias delirantes, são idéias verdadeiras! E logo após Suzanne faz de novo um relato completamente objetivo sobre o novo medicamento que foi inventado contra o câncer em Munique e que seu irmão buscará.”
“a intenção de matar o marido com veneno (arsênico) agora é colocada como a causa de sua internação no 1º hospital”
A paciente passa a se arranhar (no lugar da enfermeira), a se masturbar sem consideração com quem a assiste ao invés de ter vergonha de qualquer atitude em seclusão, uma vez que é sempre, de alguma forma, filmada e gravada: “O mundo compartilhado, que normalmente tem o papel principal no delírio, aqui afunda em direção à completa insignificância. O Dasein retorna à vida no próprio corpo e ao gozo do próprio corpo, agora não mais na seclusão do mundo com-partilhado, mas <diante dos olhos dele>.”
ESPACIALIZAÇÃO DO DASEIN ou TEATRO DA PERSEGUIÇÃO: “Ellen West designava seu Dasein como uma prisão, uma rede e, sobretudo, um palco, cujas saídas estão ocupadas por homens armados <de espadas sacadas>
Jemandem auf den Leibrücken
“Mesmo os pensamentos são <coisas> que são como que tiradas de um recipiente e inseridas nele.”
“mundo sinistro marionético” “Essa consciência de ser uma simples marionete nas mãos de manipuladores desconhecidos está relacionada ao que há de mais pavoroso nos pavores” “Também o predomínio da tecnologia e do maquinário tecnológico está correlacionado à redução do mundo desse delírio a um simples mundo do contato.”
Minkowski – Les notions de distance vécue
E agora, que devir poderá dar uma condição de possibilidade de me salvar? EEEEuuuuuuu
Já conhecemos da <experiência natural> o papel da polícia como um poder sinistro-anônimo. É preciso ler somente O Processo de Kafka para ter uma idéia do tipo, da dimensão e do efeito desse poder. Além da polícia, agora entram em ação também seus companheiros, seja a mando dela, seja por conta própria.” “o médico encaminhador ou ‘carrasco’, os enfermeiros, os outros pacientes, os companheiros de viagem, etc.” “órgãos executores do pavoroso”
“Em todos os casos, trata-se das formas do pegar ou ser-pego por algo relacionados ao mundo compartilhado, no sentido da impressionabilidade.”
“Acima desses <ramos> dos órgãos executores do pavoroso e, especialmente, acima da polícia, encontramos – como contratantes – o partido (anti-socialista), o exército de ocupação (vive-se então a Primeira Guerra Mundial) ou mesmo o Estado. E sobre tudo isso está simplesmente o poder diabólico do pavoroso, que ora é apenas pressentido, ora é ouvido como uma ‘voz’ terrível.”
“Apesar de ele assumir uma voz, não se chega manifestamente à personificação propriamente dita do poder do pavoroso na forma de um diabo ou um demônio, como muitas vezes podemos constatar em outros casos. Em todo caso, também não ouvimos dizer nada sore visões diabólicas.”
Szilasi – Potência e impotência do espírito
5.O PALCO: CASO ELLEN WEST X CASO URBAN. QUANDO A PEÇA ENCENADA E MUITO CONVINCENTE TORNA-SE POR FIM O REAL (TEATRO DO PAVOR). REFERÊNCIA À TRAGÉDIA GREGA CLÁSSICA.
“o Dasein que adentrou o símile do palco de Ellen West está de uma vez por todas cercado por cortinas que não podem ser deslocadas, por inimigos insuperáveis.”
Resignação como a “ajuda que vem do próprio Dasein”.
“Uma vez que a possibilidade de ser da impressionabilidade se autonomize completamente e, com isso, se torne desmedida e ilimitada, e, consequentemente, o Dasein se limite ao recebimento de impressões, fala-se de alucinação. Se essa receptividade estiver sob a supremacia do pavoroso e obtiver instruções dele, trata-se necessariamente de alucinações pavorosas. O mesmo vale para os pensamentos.”
“O <palco> inteiro está posto em cena por um único <diretor>, por um único poder que confere sentido e dá uma direção. É apenas a partir desse poder que todos os atos que conferem e cumprem sentidos recebem sua diretiva e seu cumprimento intencional.”
Mergulho na viscosa piscina do delírio. Fácil entrar, difícil sair.
“Enquanto o delírio é uma das formas da sujeição do Dasein a esse poder do pavoroso, o mito e a religião, a poesia e a filosofia representam, pelo contrário, formas da superação dele.” “O pavoroso diz respeito ao Dasein em seu isolamento no autismo”
Partida bem disputada antes da partida bem acenada
“como se…” símile, analogia, erga mínimo distanciamento, abstração, consideração fria de uma autoimagem – diferente de quando se passa ao delírio (psicose) p.d.
“O ser-espiritual é exatamente esse retorno, esse recuperar-a-si-mesmo do tumulto do mundo, a possibilidade da capacidade de ser no espírito.”
passa-se à voz passiva do ente
“O próprio pavoroso-aflitivo se transformou aqui: em lugar do marido, encontramos toda a família ameaçada pelo martírio e pela morte, no lugar do martírio por uma doença incurável, entraram os martírios feitos pela polícia, etc.”
“Daí resulta que, para a compreensão do delírio, não podemos recorrer nem a um distúrbio do juízo em termos de um equívoco, nem a um distúrbio de percepção sensorial, de ilusão por meio de alucinações. Ambos são já consequências da transformação da estrutura do ser-no-mundo como um todo, no sentido do ser-no-mundo deliróide.”
“Ele não se porta de maneira diferente de uma pessoa a quem aconteceu uma injustiça real. Não tem somente a necessidade de <dizer o que sofre>, mas também de defender a si mesmo e os outros dos sofrimentos. (…) o contato com o mundo compartilhado não está de nenhuma maneira interrompido.”
Quem tem inimigos sempre tem testemunhas e objetos neutros no universo. Não houvesse isso, seria apenas uma câmara de yin-yang e partir-se-ia para o confronto direto. No entanto, o inimigo é covarde, é astuto e “mais sujo” do que nós (os personagens delirantes), precisa recorrer a subterfúgios e a táticas infames para “ganhar de nós”. Como ainda cremos, apesar de tudo, numa justiça como princípio das coisas, olhamos em todos os recantos atrás de alguém que simpatize com nossa causa e perceba a vileza e a má-fé de nossos oponentes-perseguidores.
“Desse ponto de vista, aquele que sofre de delírio de perseguição não é de forma alguma autista.” Ele sofre de hiper-realidade. Ele pensa que cometeu o crime perfeito e agora sofre uma retaliação não menos impecável…
O perseguido é um secreto exibicionista.
“a <conversão> dos acontecimentos em <ação> vai muito mais longe do que onde já se chegou ou pode se chegar na tragédia e também no mais arrepiante drama barroco. (…) o delírio (…) supera a (…) tragédia (…) [porque] (…) também os pensamentos [são] recebidos [de fora e incluídos] na ação.”
“aqui, como na tragédia, não há <rua sem-saída>, mas tudo vai a qualquer lugar e vem de qualquer lugar e claramente <se refere a um centro>”, o que, como já ressaltamos, exclui o acaso. (…) [Mas,] enquanto na tragédia o poeta é quem <transforma a matéria-prima com sua força>, no delírio o poder formador (…) é cego, e isso implica DESTRUIR A FORMA” Édipo é o autor dessa mímica infernal.
6. CONTINUAÇÃO DO TÓPICO ANTERIOR. REFERÊNCIA À POESIA DE BAUDELAIRE.
Para usar o idioleto idiótico de Einstein, no delírio de perseguição, deus joga todos os dados que tem à mão!
À procura da batida perfeita, quer dizer da cena perfeita, quer dizer, da cena original.O protótipo de todos os males.
O SONETO DA DESTRUIÇÃO AUTÔMATO-SANGRENTA
“Sem cessar, ao meu lado, se agita o Demônio,
Ele nada em torno de mim como um ar impalpável
Eu o trago e sinto que queima meu pulmão
E o enche de um desejo eterno e culpável.
Por vezes ele toma, sabendo meu grande amor pela Arte,
A forma da mais sedutora das mulheres
E, sob pretextos especiosos da tristeza,
Acostuma meu lábio a filtros infames.
Ele me conduz assim, longe do olhar de Deus,
Arquejando e quebrado de fadiga, em meio
Às planícies do Tédio,¹ profundas e desertas.
E lança aos meus olhos cheios² de confusão
Vestimentas sujas, feridas abertas,
É a máquina sangrenta da Destruição!”
Baudelaire
¹ Tártaro
² de cisne
νοῦς
Nada no ar
Ar que queima
Fogo que chamusca,
soterra
Terra que cobre
Tudo de novo.
Imagina se esse eidos pega n’olho
Você vê resultados nos testes de Rorschach?
7. A PARANÓIA DE ROUSSEAU
“nos ocuparemos de um caso especialmente famoso e bem-documentado da literatura mundial, o de Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”
“Esse caso é muito apropriado ao que nos interessa, pois a língua francesa é extraordinariamente rica em expressões metafóricas, que são aquilo de que se trata aqui.”
“Rousseau sofria de um delírio de perseguição completamente não-sangrento, puramente social ou reputacional, em termos de uma difamação levada ao extremo, e, no entanto, nele encontramos um vasto número de expressões da esfera do maquinário e da tecnologia a serviço da destruição.” UnB murky atmosphere
Rousseau, Dialogues (vol. XVIII[!] das Obras completas)
“Barbarus hic ego sum quia non intelligor illis”
Ovídio
“Aqui sou um bárbaro, pois não me entendem”
agrupamentos, cochichos, risos desrespeitosos, olhares cruéis e selvagens, escárnio… atentados… o inimigo sabe exatamente aquilo que mais nos pode ferir, como que magicamente… somos nós que temos rivais finalmente à nossa altura, ou nossa mente nos prega essa peça tão pesada (nosso maior inimigo é nossa própria inteligência tão sutil em seu masoquismo autoacusatório?)?
esse corredor polonês assintótico, entre a certeza absoluta de ser o bode expiatório e a certeza de ser só um ser-num-mundo-ruim, eternamente em dúvida entre os dois pólos perfeitos, eternamente num julgamento impreciso sobre todos os eventos e circunstâncias em pingue-pongue
“Eles encontraram a arte de me fazer sofrer uma morte lenta me mantendo enterrado vivo”
R.
“lama”
“apunhalam-me impunemente”
“tudo é uma armadilha”
“maldade diabólica”
não soa, é!
a ameaça de um vago processo…
ocafka da Kapes
a vingança é impessoal
“Imaginem pessoas que começam a colocar cada um uma boa máscara, bem ajustada, que se armam com ferro até os dentes, que surpreendem seu inimigo em seguida, o acertam por trás, colocam-no nu, atam-lhe o corpo, os braços, as mãos, os pés, a cabeça, de modo que ele não possa se mover, colocam-lhe uma mordaça na boca, furam-lhe os olhos, o estendem sobre a terra e passam, enfim, sua nobre vida a massacrá-lo de pavor docemente, de modo que, morrendo por suas feridas, ele não cesse de senti-las tão cedo … a vista cruel deles fere seus olhos por todas as partes … o espetáculo do ódio o aflige e o dilacera ainda mais [na mente que no corpo]”
“…estes Senhores conjurados em um complô anônimo para difamar-me, inclusive em face do amanhã…” “o grupo parte de 2 rivais, cujo número rapidamente aumenta para 10, mas gradualmente passa a abranger o mundo inteiro (l’univers)”
neurose de transferência do inimigo mortal zena-carolina (nevrose à 4)
cassaram-lhe a aposentadoria integral
invejavam seu carrão
não o valorizavam o suficiente
obviamente falavam mal dele as suas costas (((sem provas)))
UnB – tornar-se um adulto – emular o progenitor
pessoas falam mal de mim às costas
fazem cartazes, infringem normas do Orkut (sim, com provas!)
desvalorizam-me a olhos vistos (a imbecil que desistiu do curso para cursar medicina diz que Heisenberg não pode ser citado numa aula de Introdução à sociologia, pois “não tem nada a ver”, física nada tem a ver com este mundo compartilhado em que pisamos – e mesmo se tivesse, vc fez uma analogia idiota!!)
o calouro que tomou pinho-sol (como se tivesse sido um litro, foi um gole de desafio, mas isso não importa, é a última coisa que importaria, o que importa é a mofa e a troça, passar adiante este relato mui cômico… e ele não tem direito de se enfezar com essa história, afinal, quem mandou ele… inclusive quebrar o dente numa escada numa festa… que ridículo! que ridículo ele descontar hipócrita e dissimuladamente em seu blog intelectual – ele não tem esse direito! – ele me chamou de chato lá… disse que eu dou sono, eu atrapalho, que NÓS SOMOS BURROS, inadmissível, alguém que tomou um gole de pinho-sol ser superior a nós, ovelhas de rebanho, em qualquer coisa que seja!…apague seu blog, viva de acordo com meus preceitos, seu… doido… retifico… seu menos-que-doido pois eu li em Foucault que doidos são seres complexos e honrados vc é um menos-que-nada-e-além-do-mais-vc-é-um-playboyzinho-que-estudou-no-CEUB, meu pai arquiteto que gosta de ornar a casa com colunas gregas jamais teria dinheiro para pagar 700 reais por mês numa FACULDADE para mim, embora ele custeie minha vida numa cidade longe de Fortaleza num apartamento NO CENTRO DA CIDADE, o que pelas minhas contas, para o ano de 2007, excede com facilidade as 2 mil pratas… ó!)
O curso inteiro virou meu inimigo
Mas tinha começado com um núcleo duro…
Logo me afastei até mesmo dos meus amigos mais próximos, que decerto não compactuavam com nada dessa marmotada toda…
Virei um desconfiado de carteirinha. Estava sendo observado na biblioteca, na cantina…
E depois? Ninguém me deus os parabéns, era mera obrigação… Então, a OBRIGAÇÃO de honrar os pais eu a cancelo, porque eu sou livre. Sua obrigação é sofrer seu destino.
Meu destino foi sofrer meu estágio probatório. E rir no meio de uma pandemia, rir, gargalhar, galhofar cada vez mais alto e espalhafatoso, até o dia que por acidente (pois já não mais me perseguem, as pessoas estão paranoicas com outras coisas muito mais importantes, sem dúvida! estou curado!) – por acidente eu disse! – toparem com seus nomes nodoados num post numa entrada miserável na internet e tudo recomeçar?… MAS ESTE É UM PROCESSO SEM-FIM E AUTORRETROALIMENTADO, não se esqueça! Ele faz e paga e sofre e recebe o que pagou e assim por diante incessante infinitamente até que alunos e professores todos se esmaguem num abraço coletivo cheio de ruído e cólera e, não foi nada demais… insignificante.
No fim, eles têm de admitir: eu sou marcante. Eu tenho digitais, eu marco aquilo que toco. Se transformo em ouro ou cinzas, não interessa, o Dasein não tem – para emitir diagnósticos – qualquer resquício de pressa…
A vítima de racismo que comeu uma banana e deixou o agressor com cara de tacho é uma história que me lembra muito a minha!
Eu lavei minha boca e troquei a dentadura, para poder falar (com) coisas(-pessoas) melhores.
Eu sou viciado nessa história porque apesar da dor que me causou e que ainda me causa marginalmente, eu viveria todos estes capítulos de novo e de novo… Se sou doente de alguma coisa, essa é minha doença e ela é com toda certeza absolutamente intencional e culpa minha!
“A provocação tem 1000 vozes. É próprio da provocação misturar os gêneros, multiplicar os vocábulos, fazer literatura, e esta integridade da matéria dura que nos provoca vai ser atacada, não somente pela mão armada, mas pelos olhos ardentes, pelas injúrias. O ardor combativo, o neikos, é polivalente.”
Bachelard
Mas e Rousseau?
8.DESCONTINUIDADE TEMPORAL
“No pavor abismal relativo ao diagnóstico de câncer e no congelamento de todo o Dasein, <o tempo> estava, por assim dizer, em repouso, não se desdobrou em seus êxtases e, portanto, o Dasein não existia mais no sentido pleno da palavra.”
ab –ismo (até o exagero)
Mitwelt
mundo.com
niilismo&vc.td.a.ver.
“Enquanto no quarto estudo, o Caso Lola Voss, tivemos que nos contentar essencialmente com a verificação e a descrição dessa transformação, esperamos, neste quinto estudo, ter dado um passo a mais na compreensão daseinanalítica [hm] dela. Temos consciência que ainda estamos longe da meta.”
“A palavra physis vem do verbo phyo (nascer, originar-se).”
Um grau além da citação cruzada ou autocitação: a citação de um livro que é dedicado à própria teoria! Grosso modo: “Como diz Binswanger apud Szilasi …” Binswanger [!!!]
“com a evolução da esquizofrenia crônica, acontece pouca coisa, e sempre menos, na medida em que os pacientes esquizofrênicos não têm experiências novas no sentido da experiência natural, i.e., que <adicionem algo novo> às antigas, mas apenas experiências em termos da monotonia do velho estribilho. Permanece-se fundamentalmente na experiência do elemento geral único, e, assim, <não acontece muita coisa>”
“uma longura que se diferencia da lentidão da depressão.”
“no delírio de perseguição, tem-se uma imensidão de <<novas>> experiências”
“A temporalização da longura nunca conduz à temporalização do tédio”
“Vale notar que o termo utilizado para <andamento musical> em alemão é Tempo”
Adorno riria desse esforço: “Binswanger está tentando distinguir na etimologia de longura e lentidão vestígios de formas diferentes de lidar com o tempo. Infelizmente não é possível manter essas relações etimológicas em português.”
“A palavra para tédio é Langweile, formada pelo adjetivo lang e o substantivo Weile (momento, intervalo de tempo).”
“Se alguém, no convívio da vida e do trabalho, for irritado repetidamente da mesma maneira pela mesma pessoa, <ele não vai suportar para sempre>. Em verdade, aqui se experiencia a generalidade da irritação novamente em cada particularidade, mas não de maneira que (como no delírio) o particular represente o geral e exista somente pela graça dele, mas de modo que o geral se particularize de fato em toda sua dimensão, i.e., experiencie sua plena concreção em cada <ensejo> particular (…) É isso que, frente ao irritante, não suportamos para sempre.”
9. A CONSUMAÇÃO DO PAVOR
Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie
“Só se repare de passagem que eu, a despeito de minha convicção da importância filosófica e científica imperecível do método puramente fenomenológico, não estou no campo do <intuicionismo absoluto> da maneira que Husserl o advoga, razão pela qual ainda sou aberto a contemplações e reflexões, como disse Hans Kunz em O problema do espírito na Psicologia Profunda (art.).”
“Dormimos todos juntos sobre vulcões”
Goethe
“Naquilo que é teu, também vejo o que é meu”
Ulisses no Ájax de Sófocles
é 1000, tio! run!
é 100&cia.
10. TENTATIVAS DE DIAGNÓSTICO
“quando o clínico fala de pessoa ou personalidade, ele já deixou o campo da análise do Dasein.”
“estamos demasiado acostumados a agir como se a doença invadisse uma pessoa saudável como se fosse alguém estranho!”
Tiling, Tipificação e Distúrbio Individual do Espírito, 1904.
“Eu vejo em T., a despeito de seus esquemas psicológicos historicamente condicionados, um predecessor da psiquiatria clínica moderna.”
“Suzanne Urban nunca perdeu sua <orientação> e nunca exibiu os distúrbios de pensamento esquizofrênicos formais. Isso também é importante para o tipo de ocorrência delirante de forma de delírio de nosso caso. Pois, ainda que se diferencie dos casos Strindberg e Rousseau pelo <afeto> melancólico em alto grau, tem em comum com eles a forma do delírio.”
“A alguém que leia o histórico da doença pode surgir a suspeita de que, no caso de Suzanne Urban, se tratasse de um delírio puramente depressivo (<afetivo>, <holotímico> ou <sintímico>). Esta suspeita se funda no fato de que de acordo com a família a doença começou com um <transtorno triste de humor>, que o humor permaneceu até o final depressivo e [que] os delírios [são de tipo] melancólico.”
“O delírio de culpabilidade leva a acreditar que se cometeram os crimes mais graves sem que haja razão para tanto, ou transforma más ações pequenas e reais em pecados imperdoáveis. Por causa do crime, não somente o paciente é castigado de maneira atroz nessa e na outra vida, mas também todos [os] seus familiares, o mundo inteiro”
Bleuler
7 x 77: a Bíblia é um manual psiquiátrico de primeira grandeza!
“Aqui não se fala de um pecado imperdoável e de seu castigo atroz.” Suzanne sente-se injustiçada. Além disso ela foi uma “criminosa” completamente passiva (de acordo consigo mesma).
hunter x hunter
paranoid x depressed
sense vs. sense
Muito Além da Melancolia (de Ken?)
Delírio de referência: sistematizado e independente do ciclo crime-culpa-e-castigo. Perto disso, a pura mel-ancolia é uma doce brisa.
“há uma perda das inibições morais que não é conciliável com o diagnóstico de melancolia.”
“Com isso, chegamos ao terreno espinhoso da paranoidia, da parafrenia e da paranóia. Já dizemos de antemão que, juntamente com Kolle, Bleuler, Mayer-Gross e outros, somos da opinião de que, hoje em dia, tanto a paranóia (psicótica) quanto a parafrenia devem ser classificadas como esquizofrenia.”
“Do ponto de vista puramente sintomatológico, o caso S.U. poderia ser classificado como a paraphrenia systematica de Kraepelin, já que se trata aqui de um desenvolvimento sorrateiro de um delírio de perseguiçãoconstantemente em avanço sem degeneração da personalidade.” Sublinhados: discordantes do caso S.U.
Este sujeito é incurrável, disse o doktor alemal. Ele não pode ser comido!
“o fosso de lama, semelhantemente à caverna, é uma forma particular especialmente feia, fétida e pútrida de profundeza da terra.”
“Uma vez que o diagnóstico de esquizofrenia parece confirmado, e visto que, <onde idéias delirantes e alucinações … estão em primeiro plano>, fala-se (como em Bleuler) de paranoidia, precisamos incluir o caso nesse subgrupo esquizofrênico e, quanto à orientação delirante, classificá-lo como delírio de perseguição paranóide.” Ainda assim: “não vemos sintomas catatônicos, negativismos, estereotipias, excentricidades, maneirismos e também neologismos ou propriedades lingüísticas esquizofrênicas”.
“paralisia das pernas”: histeria
delírio de perseguição singular (portanto necessariamente identitário, vinculado a um sujeito) x delírio de perseguição plural identitário (teoricamente possível, mas que sempre tenderia a alargar seus inimigos, tendendo ao próximo) x delírio de perseguição plural anônimo (caso S.U.)
INFERÊNCIA DA DESCONFIANÇA
Aquele que não desconfia de ninguém… talvez desconfie de si mesmo.
Aquele que não desconfia de ninguém, nem de si mesmo… talvez simplesmente não exista!
Aquele que desconfia de si mesmo, talvez não desconfie de mais ninguém. Saudável desconfiado! Homem invejável!
Aquele que desconfia de um, mas que não desconfia de si mesmo, pode desafortunadamente desconfiar de muitos.
Mas, amigos, aquele que desconfia de muitos, esse desconfia de todos os homens, mais cedo ou mais tarde!
Schreber, por exemplo, o típico delirante singular, vai sucumbindo ao delírio em degraus – imagem perfeita, porque uma escada não é uma rampa. Há uma descontinuidade, mas a ocorrência de ataques ou surtos agudos, que, pelo menos até o segundo, são visivelmente mais importantes do ponto de vista clínico e do ponto de vista do aprofundamento do delírio. Após o segundo, Schreber já está convencido de que ele está no centro de uma trama que envolve o destino do mundo inteiro. E no entanto é só uma figura que emite a voz. Seu pai ou deus. Há posteriormente certa contração (relaxamento), que podemos chamar de descida da escada.
Suzanne, ao contrário, ignora a escada, dá um drible da vaca no real, mesmo no real do delírio, enquanto o delirante for um Schreber. Quem são os inimigos de Suzanne? A sociedade anônima. Enfermeiras, doutores, bedéis, a polícia inteira da cidade ou do país, todos os fascistas e capitalistas, em última instância. Porque de repente os Urban são um bando de socialistas. O mundo não vai ser salvo nem acabar de maneira alguma, mas esse terremoto com Suzanne no centro de seu palco seria suficiente para liquefazer toda a ordem do seu dia. Ela, a vítima. Não deixarão constar nas manchetes de jornais nem nos livros de história a verdadeira história: que Suzanne é inocente. O Grande Irmão a apanhou. E ele tem infinitos avatares intercambiáveis. O que é que fazem com os perseguidos políticos? Podem muito bem metralhar. Mas se não metralham? Talvez não metralham porque existe o risco de se tornarem mártires! Aí então são mais cosméticos e cirúrgicos: basta com exilá-los, torná-los párias inofensivos, eternas personae non gratae. Se Suzanne está viva, só pode ser esse o tratamento a ela dispensada pelos inimigos ocultos!
O dia em que cri que o apresentador do canal de esportes se dirigia a mim, porque sabia que eu estava na pior. A mim!
A internet escamoteia Cila ou Caribde.
Ou eu bem gostaria que fosse verdade, para vender mais livros…
Quem cai na boca do trombone e é o centro das fofocas quer se matar –
Porque não pode se identificar
Com o lunático solitário que só queria ser falado e criticado!
Ou vice-versa.
Schreber x Professor Flechsig
ódio concentrado, advindo do amor pelo pai
Suzanne x “autoridades”
culpa sem relação interpessoal específica, difundida por todos os sentidos alucinados
culpa totalizante, culpa da própria nulidade social
o delírio seria a vingança da moral contra um eu torpe, que se torna mera coisa, títere no teatro. e sua punição deve ser universalmente contemplada, como num reality show ou grande panóptico avant la lettre, seu corpo nu, sua micção, defecação, o ato de comer, transpirar, assoar o nariz, gozar… menos exibicionismo a contragosto que um voyeurismo de si, um sadomasoquismo em que se é boneco, personagem trágico, platéia, direção e os próprios antagonistas.
“Schuld em alemão significa tanto culpa quanto dívida.”
“Uma vez que o conceito de autismo é usado ora no sentido daseinanalítico, ora no psicológico, caracterológico, psicopatológico ou psicanalítico, ele se tornou cientificamente quase inutilizável hoje em dia.”
novo demais pra ser demente, velho demais pra ser bobão.
“Nós vimos que nossa própria paciente se encontra na menopausa e os cabelos esbranquiçaram rapidamente nos últimos tempos.”
“Lembramos que Bleuler notou muito freqüentemente nos paranóides uma <sexualidade fraca>, bem como a falta de desejo por filhos. (…) um autoerotismo <forte> dificilmente pode ser concebido como um sinal de sexualidade forte.” “sem a predisposição sadomasoquista, o exame e o adoecimento do marido não teriam esse papel proeminente na doença.”
“seguimos Bleuler quando ele diz <de acordo com nossos conceitos, a constituição hipo-paranóica é uma subforma da psicopatia esquizóide, assim como a paranóia involutiva é uma subforma da esquizofrenia paranóide.>”
11. DE VOLTA A HEIDEGGER& ARREMATE
“Aqui o medo não mantém o Dasein <no nada>, desse modo, ele não deixa o mundo naufragar na insignificância, antes confere a ele uma significância distinta e absolutizada, a do pavoroso e, assim, do significado pavoroso de toda singularidade.
“Vemos no conceito de necessidade de delírio o quanto a investigação do delírio (para o mal do conhecimento psiquiátrico) acabou sendo levada a reboque pela investigação normal-psicológica.”
Diretamente relacionado com as polêmicas Freud//Adler: “Bleuler observa com muita agudeza mais uma vez [péla-saco] que se alguém fala de desejo ou necessidade de estar doente, de interesse pela doença, de meta, de ganho da doença, de fuga para as doenças, de intenção e organização, é necessário ter claro em mente, por causa das conseqüências práticas, que essas expressões e conceitos são tirados das idéias de um leigo sobre a psique [!] normal e, na verdade, não deveriam ser de forma alguma empregados em relação a estados mórbidos.”
Nunca vou entender como os autores cinicamente (acordo tácito?), após ridicularizarem Freud num parágrafo, sem citar, nas suas linhas, ‘F.’ e ‘psicanálise’, procedem, logo a seguir, a uma exaltação fabulosa do <legado>: “Em F., o conceito é muito mais profundo do que naquilo que se costuma falar [mais ainda?] sobre o processo de cura, uma vez que ele está firmemente baseado na teoria (construída com muita fineza) da libido, do recalque, do retorno do recalcado e da projeção.”
Projeção continua, a meu ver, o conceito mais problemático da psicologia em geral.
“A partir desse caso de Schwab, pode-se encontrar facilmente um caminho para o <demônio diabólico> de Suzanne Urban e de muitos outros pacientes que sofrem de delírio”
“nos afastamos de Bleuler e de Jung quando eles querem desqualificar a teoria do delírio primário com a assunção e freqüente evidenciamento de motivos inconscientes”
“Hans Kunz acreditava que era necessário ver a vivência de desabamento do mundo (cf. Schreber) <como o conteúdo> do delírio primário <mais adequado à ocorrência>, contudo essa vivência (como nosso caso mostra) não é de forma alguma um pressuposto necessário para o delírio primário.”
Heidenhain, J.J. Rousseaus Persönlichkeit, Philosophie und Psychose
“Vê-se quão pouco o critério da recorrência pode, do ponto de vista da <deflagração do delírio>, ser utilizado no diagnóstico diferencial de paranóia e esquizofrenia.”“Mesmo o <esquizofrênico> que chega imediatamente à certeza delirante tem, como nosso caso mostra também, experiências sempre novas que confirmam as antigas.”
“Hoje não podemos mais dizer que as idéias persecutórias se misturam ao quadro da doença <em razão de ilusões sensoriais>, como se podia ler na avaliação do hospital psiquiátrico Sonnenberg sobre o presidente do senado Schreber e infelizmente ainda se pode ler freqüentemente. Antes temos que perceber de uma vez por todas que as alucinações não são distúrbios isolados, como ressaltam Schröder e Meyer-Gross. Mas o precursor nesse tema foi Minkowski em Le Temps vécu, 1923.”
“Um louco não faz mais do que perceber a condição humana a sua maneira”
Sartre
“As alucinações não se originam de um distúrbio do sensório – compreendendo-se essas funções no sentido psicológico –, também não se originam de um distúrbio das funções da percepção, do pensamento, do juízo, mas partem de um distúrbio e uma variação das funções simpáticas da sensação. Visto que essas funções estão alteradas, o paciente vive outra comunicação com o mundo; mas uma vez que os modos de ser-no-mundo são fundamentais para todas as vivências, as alucinações não são distúrbios isolados”
Erwin Straus, Do Sentido dos Sentidos, 1935
“No conto Na Colônia Penal de Kafka, um viajante, ao ver um delinquente, pergunta ao oficial se ele sabia sua sentença. <Não>, diz o oficial, <seria inútil anunciá-la a ele. Ele já a sente sobre seu corpo>. Dessa maneira, Suzanne Urban não vem a saber de sua sentença, mas de seu sofrimento <sobre seu corpo>, e, por isso, é <inútil> <anunciar> ou explicar a sentença a ela, ou esclarecê-la. E quando Kafka continua: <não é fácil decifrar a escrita (da sentença) com os olhos; nosso homem a decifra, mas com suas feridas>, também nossa pobre S.U. decifra a escrita de seu <destino> não com os olhos (da compreensão), mas com suas <feridas> e as de seus familiares, com os <sofrimentos infligidos> a ela e a eles. (…) O Dasein zomba de qualquer outra experiência; pois esta é a mais <impressionante> no sentido duplo da palavra.” (íntimo e doloroso)
“Por mais que a clínica não consiga evitar todas as tentativas psicológicas, caracterológicas e biológicas de responder o porquê dessa questão em termos de um conhecimento objetificante, a tarefa da psiquiatria como ciência não se esgota nisso.”
“As capacidades anímicas, as propriedades anímicas, a alma (no sentido da psicologia e da psicopatologia), o caráter, a pessoa, a personalidade, o impulso, etc., tudo isso está ontologicamente no limbo, ou seja, não tem fundamento ontológico. Encontramos esse fundamento na analítica do Dasein de Heidegger.”
Jaeger, Paideia II [!!], Die griechische Medizin als Paideia
“o terrível não pode mais se tornar algo impessoal e extramundano contra o qual se pode invocar o destino, mas ele se tornou um ente intramundo que ainda é acessível sob o aspecto da hostilidade.”
Não existe satisfação compensatória: não é uma expiação que demande “x” de tempo ou energia, até haver a quitação. Em tese Suzanne poderia sofrer de seu delírio um tempo infinito (enquanto viver), sem tendência à cura. Realmente o poema de Baudelaire caía bem: uma máquina infernal!
Não importa o conteúdo do delírio: o médico deve analisar a vida pregressa desse tipo de paciente esquizofrênico.
Situação de partida > Autonomização delirante (a paciente perde o foco da ‘angústia original’, quando ainda tinha um ser-no-mundo autêntico)
Os excertos giram em torno de dois autores contemporâneos, talvez os dois mais conhecidos hoje fora da Inglaterra em termos de literatura clássica daquele país – As Viagens de Gulliver veio ao mundo menos de quinze anos depois d’As Aventuras de Robinson Crusoe. São duas obras espantosamente similares e divergentes ao mesmo tempo. Duas narrativas, eu diria, de restless wanderers, viajantes incansáveis, espécies de maníacos tragicamente involuntários por navegar o mundo, sem propósito claro em mente…
“Assim como o novelista e ex-condenado Jeffrey Archer, a carreira de Daniel Defoe abrangeu dívidas e alta política, a profissão de escritor e o cárcere. Cronologicamente falando, a arte imitou a vida com Defoe, uma vez que ele começou a escrever maior parte de suas obras enquanto ativista. De outro ângulo, entretanto, sua vida imitou, sim, a arte, pois sua trajetória foi sensacionalista o bastante para que pudesse figurar tranquilamente como o protagonista de suas próprias novelas tumultuadas. Em diversos momentos ele se dedicou ao comércio de vestuário, vinho e tabaco, foi dono de uma fábrica de tijolos, um político vira-casaca, uma espécie de espião do submundo e dos bastidores da política, agente secreto oficial do governo, espécie de diplomata e assessor do império britânico por meio de suas publicações jornalísticas (o que na época chamavam de publicista). Não bastasse todo esse cartel, tomou parte ativa em uma rebelião armada contra Jaime II, excursionou incansavelmente pela Europa e teve um papel crucial nas históricas negociações da unificação política dos reinos da Inglaterra e da Escócia.
Defoe faliu mais de uma vez, foi preso por débitos e até exposto no pelourinho num processo de sedição após publicar um panfleto satírico. Mesmo depois dessa experiência, ele viria a publicar um Hino ao Pelourinho (Hymn to the Pillory), bem como um Hino às Massas (Hymn to the Mob), em que, escandalosamente para a época, enaltecia o povo de extrato inferior por sua extrema lucidez de julgamento. É difícil imaginar outro grande autor inglês fazendo a mesma coisa na mesma época. Entre suas obras, está também Uma História Política do Demônio (A Political History of the Devil), um estudo sobre fantasmas, motivado pela Grande Praga de Londres, um surto da peste bubônica que eclodiu em 1665 e durou até o biblicamente simbólico ano seguinte. Defoe publicou também uma apologia irrestrita da instituição do casamento intitulada Indecência Conjugal; ou da Prostituição Marital. Um tratado sobre a Utilidade e a Inconveniência da Cama de Casal (Conjugal Lewdness; or Matrimonial Whoredom. A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed). De modo algum ele seria um ‘novelista’ no puro senso da palavra (o próprio termo em voga criou sua acepção muito mais tarde), muito embora ele tenha atacado os ‘Romances’ (o gênero pré-novelístico por excelência), que para ele eram estórias que não informavam, apenas entretinham (e isso era necessariamente ruim naquela Inglaterra). Suas obras mais consagradas, Moll Flanderse Robinson Crusoe, são ‘novelas’ apenas em retrospecto. Defoe só escrevia aquilo com que pensava poder lucrar, sendo uma espécie de autor oportunista altamente prolífico que ‘atirava para todos os lados’ no mercado literário em ebulição de seus dias. A imprensa da época não discriminava entre gêneros, muito menos Defoe o faria.
Escrever, para Defoe, pois, não passava de commodity, como ele próprio retrata o mundo em suas ‘novelas’, que podemos resumir como ‘uma série de coisas a que se dá um preço de alto a baixo’. Tampouco era Defoe um ‘homem literário’: ao contrário, sua escrita é apressada, não pesa as palavras, e é transparente demais. Um ‘grau zero’ do estilo como se sempre fosse um jornalista ou historiador relatando fatos que tendia a apagar as próprias pegadas, negando seu próprio status de escritor e, portanto, de criador de realidades. O próprio Defoe batizava seu estilo de ‘cáustico’ ou ‘abjeto’ (mean), pretensamente desprovido de conscienciosidade e ignorante dos próprios artifícios. Na linguagem lacônica e um tanto caseira e pré-fabricada de Defoe sentimos, quase pela primeira vez na Literatura, o idioma dos comuns. Linguagem despida de textura e densidade, que permite ao leitor atravessar as palavras e ver as coisas de frente e em si mesmas. ‘O conhecimento das coisas, não das palavras, molda o erudito’, comentou Daniel Defoe no Compleat English Gentleman.¹ Uma profusão de aventuras e incidentes tem forçosamente de compensar as narrativas de Defoe, devido à crueza de textura. A suprema fertilidade de sua técnica é de fato impressionante. Defoe quase não se preocupa com o sentir das coisas, não mais do que um merceeiro passaria o dia acariciando e apalpando seus queijos, que são apenas seu ganha-pão. Defoe é o utilitarista-padrão: mais interessado no valor de troca dos objetos, não em suas qualidades sensuais ou sensórias. Há sem dúvida sensualidade em Defoe, principalmente nas obras de protagonistas mulheres (Moll Flanders e Roxana), mas não sensualismo, voluptuosidade. O realismo defoeniano é um realismo das coisas, enquanto que o de Richardson, por exemplo, é um das pessoas e sentimentos.”
“Depois de um bom tempo exercendo seu ofício errático, pau-pra-toda-obra, escrevendo meramente para sobreviver, Defoe morreu enquanto se ocultava ou fugia de seus credores, autodeterminado, quem sabe, a acabar da mesma maneira que havia começado, ignorando outros estilos de vida. Foi um Dissidente (um imoralista) numa época em que ser Dissidente (assim, com letra maiúscula mesmo) era o mesmo que não possuir direitos civis. Como muitos de seus compatriotas novelistas, provinha da classe-média baixa econômica mas que possuía um status de pequena-burguesia, devido ao fator da formação intelectual: ilustrado, completou sua educação formal, cultivava ambições de ascensão e em seu meio os jovens eram politicamente articulados. No seu Journal of the Plague Year,ou Jornal do Ano da Peste, ele tripudia de algumas superstições do povão enquanto dá crédito irrestrito a outras. Muito parecido com William Blake em sua origem social, a rebeldia de Defoe afirmava a radical igualdade entre homens e mulheres, sustentando que o handicap feminino não passava do resultado de convenções. Desigualdades sexuais eram puramente culturais, nada naturais. O que distingue suas personagens Roxana e Moll Flanders, como outras tantas prostitutas vigaristas (seja as de luxo ou as que trabalhavam em espeluncas) e objetificadas da literatura de então, é que havia a afirmação premente, em todo o livro: elas não são propriedade de homem algum, elas não são de ninguém. No mundo de Defoe, nenhuma relação é permanente, aliás.”
“Quando Moll Flanders diz levianamente que está grata por ter se livrado de seu filho na barriga, todo leitor de época se sentia escandalizado e ao mesmo tempo representado. Roxana é a comerciante-mulher, que embora seja a própria mercadoria é a dona do negócio: recusa o casamento, mesmo com um bom nobre, pois isso seria a ruína total de sua independência financeira. Ser esposa, para Roxana, era o mesmo que ser escrava. Os puritanos da geração de Defoe prezavam tanto a felicidade doméstica quanto o individualismo econômico; o único problema era a completa incompatibilidade de ambos. Sobretudo no caso das mulheres, que em quaisquer das esferas, isoladamente consideradas, estavam de todo modo alijadas da autonomia. Isso não significa que não fosse também uma questão masculina: na prática o individualismo econômico significava uma castração, compelindo à afabilidade, afeição, lealdade e companheirismo que o pai de família devia simbolizar.
Para complementar as credenciais progressistas de Defoe, ele militava pela absoluta soberania do plebeu, cujo direito de não se curvar a uma soberania injusta era, ele pregava, inalienável. Ele defendia os quakers e já então propagava os méritos de uma sociedade etnicamente miscigenada. Estrangeiros, segundo ele, eram um precioso acréscimo para a nação. Defoe troçava das mitologias chauvinistas dos bretões em poemas como O Inglês Puro-Sangue (The True-Born Englishman), cujos versos não hesitam em caracterizar a raça britânica justamente pela sua alta mestiçagem, desdenhando a noção aristocrática de pureza de sangue e ridicularizando a própria idéia-título do ‘puro-sangue’ com suprema ironia: mera ficção e, aliás, contradição. Não é irrelevante para essa polêmica (à época) que Guilherme III, sob quem Defoe exerceu seus trabalhos panfletários, fosse um holandês.”
“‘O que significam as capacidades naturais de qualquer criança sem a educação?’, o autor questiona no Compleat English Gentleman. Apenas tories absolutamente reacionários como Henry Fielding seriam capazes de enaltecer só o lado das qualidades inatas. Defoe não se mostrava pudico em politizar a questão: por trás dessa doutrina pedagógica ‘inocente’ havia toda uma tentativa de impedir as reformas pedagógico-sociais necessárias à Inglaterra, mediante o argumento dos talentos e habilidades congênitos e inalteráveis, que sempre legitimariam só as crianças da nobreza.”
“O homem não é rico porque é honesto, mas é honesto porque é rico.
Essa é uma doutrina escandalosamente materialista avant-la-lettre, muito mais típica de um Bertolt Brecht do que de um ardoroso cristão dos Setecentos. Valores morais são o simples reflexo das condições materiais. Os ricos são apenas privilegiados o bastante para não terem de roubar. A moralidade é para aqueles que podem cultivá-la. Ideais calham muito bem a quem tem de sobra o que comer. Defoe também exigia leis que reconhecessem a condição dos miseráveis, ao invés da replicagem de um sistema que, em primeiro lugar, criou a miséria, para depois enforcar os miseráveis por serem eles o que são.”
“Se a classe média preza tanto pelo eu autônomo na teoria, como pode ser que viole tanto essa doutrina na prática? Quer ela de fato a independência de todos os seus servos, assalariados que tem tão pouco poder de barganha que são menos do que cidadãos e pouco mais que escravos, sem falar dos colonizados além-mar? Não seria preferível para o pequeno-burguês, secretamente, é claro, preferir a liberdade irrestrita para si e a negativa para todos os competidores no mercado? A pequena-burguesia acredita na autodeterminação da população; mas ao mesmo tempo seus membros, homens e mulheres, não passam de títeres de forças econômicas impessoais. Os protagonistas de Defoe – Moll, Crusoe, Roxana, Coronel Jack – estão todos enleados nessa contradição. Se eles são, num sentido, forjadores de seu próprio destino, são, inegavelmente, vítimas desafortunadas da Providência, das leis do livre comércio e de seus próprios apetites.
“No ensaio A Divindade da Troca (The Divinity of Trade), Defoe vê a Natureza como um tipo de capitalista, que – em sua infinita e inapreensível sabedoria burguesa – criou corpos capazes de flutuar sobre as águas, para que se pudessem construir navios e fomentar o comércio; criou as estrelas para nortear os navegadores; e até escavou rios no seio dos continentes que levam as embarcações direto para os recursos espoliáveis de outros países. Animais foram feitos dóceis e submissos deliberadamente para que o homem os explorasse como instrumentos e também como matéria-prima; linhas costeiras pedregosas foram criadas possibilitando a construção de fortalezas; matéria-prima conveniente foi distribuída ao longo de todo o planeta para que cada nação tivesse algo para vender e algo para comprar. Ainda que estejamos falando de um período muito aquém dos oceanos de Coca-Cola e da produção da necessidade quase que instintiva de calçar um Nike, a Natureza, para Defoe, não perdia e não perdeu nada de vista.”
“Ora, se o homem era divinizado e elevado de forma sem precedentes nessa nova ordem social, temos em contrapartida a desvantagem de que qualquer indivíduo é indiferentemente intercambiável. Parceiros comerciais, sexuais ou maritais em Defoe vêm e vão, às vezes com tanta individualidade quanto numa coletividade de coelhos. Mas o maior conflito se dá entre as práticas amorais de uma cultura plutocêntrica e autocentrada em excesso e os altos ideais morais que essa própria cultura insiste em pregar.”
“O escritor John Dunton, também do séc. XVIII, que teve ligeiro contato com Defoe, geria um jornal mensal devotado à prostituição, ou antes a denegrir a prática da prostituição ao invés de servir como Classificados do corpo humano alheio, o Night Walker: or, Evening Rambles in Search after Lewd Women (O Caminhante Noturno [/o Homem da Noite]: ou Aventuras do Entardecer em Busca de Mulheres Lascivas). Mesmo sendo vanguardista para a época, impossível que fosse um jornal politicamente correto para nossa concepção. A novela naturalista do século XIX procedia a expedientes parecidos, num meio-termo entre a objetificação degradante e gratuita da mulher da noite e a exposição de uma espécie de mal burguês: essas escapadelas maritais tinham um odor sensual e fatalista, havia um certo prazer mórbido no retrato de becos sujos e miseráveis em que todo moralista jogava a moral fora, e a mulher podia ser vista como a vítima de uma (des)ordem social; o século XIX foi cada vez mais inquirindo sobre esta questão de forma científica, menos sensacionalista, mas Defoe não chegou a testemunhar essa evolução.”
“A família, para um puritano devoto como Defoe, é um domínio sagrado, como sugere seu panfleto de costumes O Instrutor da Família (The Family Instructor). Ao mesmo tempo, ele advoga, sem constrangimento, que tais laços podem e devem ser cortados quando se tornam mais maus do que bons: quando forem sinônimo de uma degradação do casamento, quando forem sinônimo do aviltamento das relações sangüíneas, acaba sendo a conduta mais autêntica e virtuosa o corte destes laços, ignorados ou tratados como meros meios para outros fins.”
“Em Crusoe, é como se o colonialista frio e moderado desse o tom do enredo. Ele (o narrador em primeira pessoa) também é aquele que dá o matiz exótico ao objeto (cenário) em questão, isto é, sua colônia involuntária no meio dos trópicos. Essas narrativas sem adornos e sem culpa de consciência não chegam a destruir os vasos capilares do decoro ideológico da Inglaterra pós-elizabetana, mas são um primeiro desnudamento de sua lógica imperialista. Não são narrativas de uma veia polêmica, ainda, são mais cândidas que outra coisa. Não há sentimentalismo, porque sentimentos não podem ser quantificados, e nesta literatura em que só o que é quantificável é real eles ainda não aparecem. Nesta atmosfera intermediária de amoralismo, o relato é fidedignamente subversivo ou subversivamente fidedigno espelhando a existência social daquelas décadas; as relações são o que são, não o que deveram ser. Não obstante, a pura e simples descrição do fato e da matéria bruta não deixa de ser explosivo em si mesmo, ou conducente à explosão da dinamite próxima. O realismo se torna de grau em grau Política.”
“Moll Flanders termina sua história contando como prosperou e chegou ao sucesso após uma vida de crimes, mas acrescentando, com alguma urgência, em tom de confissão compungida, que ela se arrepende sinceramente de todo seu passado. A moral da história – o crime não compensa – é explicitamente contradita pelo final efetivo. O contraste é tão desconcertante que alguns críticos passaram seu tempo imaginando se Defoe foi ou não abertamente sarcástico. Quando o náufrago Crusoe considera a inutilidade de todo o ouro que conseguira trazer do navio até a ilha, mas, no fim, decide levá-lo consigo assim mesmo – isso é uma tirada irônica do autor ou humor involuntário? Quando Crusoe, testemunhando Sexta-Feira que escapa de seus ex-irmãos canibais para não ser comido, reflete acerca da utilidade de levar consigo um servo, sendo este acréscimo a seu ‘patrimônio’ coincidente com um suposto chamado da Providência para salvar um desgraçado, seria essa harmonia entre interesse capitalista e revelação divina um artifício do autor para produzir o riso do leitor? Defoe está ou não depreciando sua heroína Roxana quando ela declara que deve manter seu próprio dinheiro separado do de seu amo e marido, para não misturar seus ganhos ilícitos com o suado e honesto capital do cônjuge?”
“Porque se essa for a opinião fática do Defoe o Realista literário e Materialista radical, dificilmente seria também o credo de sua metade dissidente e religiosa. Defoe o Cristão estabelece a moral e a religião como realidades autossuficientes e inquestionáveis. Mas autossuficientes e inquestionáveis até que ponto, cara pálida? Se esses valores transcendentais existem numa esfera própria, eles pouco impactam na conduta efetiva dos personagens. Moll sente pena de uma de suas vítimas mesmo durante o ato de roubá-la, mas sua tristeza nada impede na concretização do ato. Como o Coronel Jack, que pode muito bem ser um perfeito larápio e viver com a consciência remoída. No século XVIII, piedade e nariz empinado não eram estranhos um ao outro. E não se distinguiam muito bem. Ou a moral falha porque está muito mesclada com o mundo material, ou falha porque está, justamente, dele apartada. Defoe reconhece esta última condição quando escreve: ‘Lágrimas e orações não fazem revoluções / Não derrubam tiranos, não quebram grilhões’.”
“A moralidade em Defoe é geralmente retrospectiva. Uma vez que você tenha pilhado, pode finalmente ser penitente. Como demonstra o narrador de si próprio em Crusoe, é só ao escrever seus atos que você pode julgar sua vida como um todo. Enquanto tenta entender a própria vida ao vivo, você anda ocupado demais mantendo o nariz acima do nível d’água para levar a termo qualquer reflexão, quanto mais sentir remorso. Só há dois desfechos: continuar ou se afogar. Correr e ainda assim não ganhar nenhum terreno, continuar na condição em que já estava; ou simplesmente perecer. Não é fácil se embrenhar em considerações metafísicas enquanto a necessidade imediata é fugir dos credores ou lidar com seu atual marido. A narrativa sempre ziguezagueia num passo tão frenético que um evento vai borrando o outro num contínuo. Nenhum da horda de personagens da novela Moll Flanders chega a ter um intercurso mais que casual com a heroína – a interação típica entre cosmopolitas, mas impensável na comunidade rural dos livros de uma Jane Austen ou George Eliot. As figuras que interagem com Moll entram e saem de sua vida e das páginas de sua vida como meros transeuntes cruzam pela Piccadilly. A pergunta mais premente na cabeça do leitor que atravessa este processo metonímico virtualmente infindável é: o que vem a seguir? Sentido e relato não são concordes.
Assim como um parvo, diz-se, é incapaz de mascar chiclete e caminhar ao mesmo tempo, os personagens de Defoe só podem agir ou refletir, mas nunca os dois juntos. A ação moralmente informada é rara; a reflexão moral só vem bem depois. É essa a razão da coexistência de dois formatos literários consideravelmente diferentes sob a capa do Robinson Crusoe: a história aventuresca e a autobiografia espiritual. De todos os personagens de Daniel Defoe, Crusoe é o mais feliz na combinação dessa ação racional com a reflexão moral. Mas isso se dá, em parte, por causa das circunstâncias excepcionais: Crusoe está sozinho numa ilha, tem algum trabalho a executar, mas também muito tempo ocioso para meditar.”
“Como a vida é terrivelmente material mas também uma sucessão ininterrupta e agitada de eventos, cada ato parece simultaneamente vívido e sem substância. Essas novelas são tornadas artigos fascinantes pelo processo de criação em si mesmo, pelo valor de troca, e não pelo valor de uso (intenção final). Não há uma lógica conclusiva para a narrativa de Defoe, é uma narrativa pura e simples. Não há um momento do livro em que o fechamento seria mais natural que em qualquer outro fecho de capítulo. O eu-lírico apenas prossegue acumulando narrativa(s), como um capitalista jamais cessa de acumular capital. Um pedaço de enredo, como um investimento particular, acaba levando ao próximo. Crusoe mal volta à terra natal e já está em alto-mar de novo, ainda acumulando aventuras, que serão obviamente narradas e contarão com o desejo do eu-lírico de formular um propósito. A sede de narrativa é insaciável. A acumulação de capital parece ter um propósito, mas é pura aparência. Secretamente, pelo menos no mercantilismo defoeniano, subjaz a verdade de que o único fim da acumulação é a própria acumulação. Uma novela de Defoe não tem o epílogo de facto, como têm as novelas de Fielding. Todos os finais são arbitrários, e todos poderiam ser apenas novos começos, se se quisesse.¹ O viajante inquieto só repousa a fim de se preparar para a próxima viagem…”
“E devido a essa narratividade pura poucos eventos em Defoe são fruídos com densidade o bastante para deixar uma impressão permanente ou recordação intacta. Personagens como Moll ou Roxana vivem premidas pelo pão de cada dia, contando apenas consigo próprias, flutuando conforme a maré, dançando conforme a dança, apostando tudo ou nada a cada momento. Em perfeita adaptação com o mundo altamente mutante que encontram, esses sujeitos sincopam seu ritmo. Ou seja: não há um núcleo central da personalidade, tampouco, porque memórias e aprendizados estarão sempre se acumulando sem uma síntese definitiva. A identidade é uma improvisação, um cálculo, uma estratégia de passagem. Trata-se de uma cadeia de reações possíveis para cada ação promovida pelo ambiente. Os impulsos humanos – avareza, egoísmo, autopreservação – são fixos e imutáveis, é verdade, mas para sempre alcançá-los cada personagem é obrigado a ser flexível a ponto de se converter em metamorfo. A perspicácia e cautela necessárias para lidar com o tema da epidemia no Jornal do Ano da Peste seriam versões escandalosas e exageradas das próprias exigências do cotidiano para o leitor-padrão.”
“O Coronel Jack se casa quatro vezes, a despeito de poder passar tranqüilamente sem mulheres, e rompe com uma delas porque ela dilapida sua fortuna. Na veia mais hobbesiana e pragmática possível, o interesse burguês é muito mais fundamental que a o altruísmo iluminista. Só mesmo caçar para comer seria mais premente que caçar para lucrar.”
“O eu-narrador deslinda a trama com ar imperturbável que sugere um presente consideravelmente distanciado do passado em que o eu-narrado aparece (anos de intervalo, com toda a certeza). Este último não se pode dar ao luxo dessa parcimônia glacial do primeiro. Há uma tensão constante entre as duas dimensões temporais.”
“Embora ‘Deus não esteja morto’, pareceria, a essa altura, para o bom Protestante, que Ele se recolheu deste mundo. Essa é uma das razões para as especulações de Defoe sobre a Providência ecoarem com um quê de vacilação. Ora, lembra o autor em The True-Born Englishman: ‘O que vem da Providência, consiste no interesse de todo o universo.’. Se tomarmos a frase ao pé-da-letra, estariam justificados o estupro, o assassinato, o canibalismo. Cada um desses pecados teria seu papel na manutenção da harmonia do cosmo. Defoe declama piamente no prefácio do Crusoe como devemos honrar a sabedoria da Providência e suas obras, ‘sucedam como sucedam’; mas o protagonista, muito longe de se resignar ao destino, é hiperativo e incansável na tentativa de forjar seus próprios porquês.”
“De nossa perspectiva, se Crusoe devera ser punido, não seria por ter vivido a primeira metade da vida como um pagão, mas sim por vender Xury, seu servo, à escravidão brutal e por gerir uma plantation no Brasil movida a mais trabalho escravo. Na verdade, quando naufraga, ele estava justamente prestes a comprar mais mão-de-obra escrava numa expedição clandestina para abastecer seu engenho. Mas nem o personagem nem o autor conseguiriam ver tais ações como pecaminosas, ainda que Crusoe se indigne com as condições do imperialismo espanhol nas Américas. Como com o narrador de O Coração das Trevas de Joseph Conrad, o ‘imperialismo dos outros’ é sempre mais repreensível que o nosso. O Coronel Jack defende o castigo físico dos escravos, e não há qualquer indicativo de que Defoe pensasse diferente. A liberdade era para os ingleses, não para os africanos! Como zeloso puritano, Defoe decerto cria que os ‘selvagens’ estavam condenados irremediavelmente à bestialidade nesta terra, e ao tormento eterno no além. Seu radicalismo (progressismo de vanguarda na política) tinha seus claros limites.”
“A Natureza não é mais um livro aberto, mas um texto obscuro a ser decifrado com imensa dificuldade. O Protestante tateia avidamente no escuro atrás de qualquer signo ambíguo de sua própria salvação. Mas o fato é que, num universo secularizado, tudo está entregue à própria contingência, isto é, nada no mundo visível quer dizer alguma coisa nem dá qualquer pista de nada.”
“Signos, nesse mundo dessacralizado, como também numa profusão de textos modernistas (dali a duzentos anos), são a priori e incontornavelmente ambíguos. Essa é a razão por que o crente nunca pode parar de trabalhar, porque se não se tem certeza da salvação agora, cada dia seu de labuta pode ser o fiel na balança para a absolvição no dia do Juízo. Ilhas tropicais, é bom lembrar, estão geralmente associadas à indolência, mas não no caso de Crusoe. Ele está sempre ocupado em melhorar e estender sua ‘propriedade paradisíaca’. ‘Eu realmente gostaria de um estábulo maior.’ Tanto é assim que o próprio Crusoe responde a si mesmo, vendo o quão ilógica é essa vontade: ‘Para quê?’. Crusoe não é um capitalista de verdade – é só um de mentirinha, sem mão-de-obra como Outro, sem mercado, consumidor, produto nem competidores ou divisão de trabalho. Mas, ainda que não tenha concorrentes, ele agecomo se os tivesse…”
“A ilha de Crusoe é menos a utopia da pequena-burguesia numa dimensão paralela do que uma versão piorada ou distópica da situação pequeno-burguesa inglesa. Ou, antes, o que uma classe sofre no mundo, Crusoe sofre na sua ilha. Sua solidão é uma versão exponencial da solidão de todos os indivíduos da cidade moderna. Sendo absolutamente dependente num sentido, é verdade que é possível ser absolutamente autodeterminado num outro. Quão enérgico e engenhoso pode-se chegar a ser na administração de seu próprio império seria um índice de sua inclusão entre a minoria eleita. Assim poder-se-ia resolver o conflito aparente entre ser o joguete de Deus e, pelo próprio suor, pregar, no melhor estilo puritano, que o sucesso no trabalho é o melhor sinal que o mundo poderá dar de que você achou favor aos olhos da divindade.”
UM PROBLEMA ISENTO DE QUAISQUER “MEMÓRIAS PÓSTUMAS”: “A narrativa está sempre precariamente ancorada no presente que é um fio de navalha, em que a sorte do personagem é indefinida e o futuro absolutamente duvidoso; mas tudo isso é contado com um tal desassossego e afastamento, fechando um passado, que empresta certa autoridade. Supomos então que o narrador sobreviveu, nem que apenas pelo fato de estar agora, com a maior das calmas, falando de si mesmo na época em que corria perigo. Ansiedade e segurança se acoplam perfeitamente na escrita.”
“E assim Defoe continua a insistir que sua estória existe com um fundo moral, embora isso seja obviamente uma farsa. O realismo, no sentido de uma atenção dedicada ao mundo material por si e nele mesmo, não está ainda avalizado neste período literário, embora se encontre em visível ascensão; embora a sociedade em que ele cresce e ascende demande-o cada vez mais, e encoraje-o mais que à moralidade, pois as pessoas passam a acreditar somente no que podem cheirar, tocar, provar. Samuel Johnson argumentava que o fato de um personagem ou evento ser fidedigno à natureza não servia de desculpa para incluí-lo num enredo ou obra de arte. Na teoria, essa colisão entre o moral e o real pode ser resolvida por justificações do autor, no estilo tabloide. Quão mais gráfica e escandalosa uma estória, mais fácil transmitir uma mensagem, poder-se-ia astuciosamente argumentar. Defoe escreve no prefácio para Roxana: ‘Se há qualquer parte da história, no relato de uma má ação, que pareça descrever as coisas de forma muito direta e impudica, todo o cuidado imaginável foi tomado para purificar o trabalho de todas as indecências e indecorosidades…’. Essas linhas, ao que parece, produziam, já naquele tempo, o mesmo efeito que hoje os avisos solenes, prévios a um audiovisual, acerca da presença de sexo e violência nos minutos que seguem: são só um chamariz a mais para a audiência (‘o que é proibido é melhor’), engenhosamente acrescentado pelo autor, sem transgredir nenhuma regra.
“A novela realista se torna popular num marco da história em que o cotidiano banal começa a se tornar atrativo por si mesmo. Essa mescla do ordinário e exótico é a síntese do trabalho de Defoe. Parte do prazer extraído da leitura emana da excitação que deriva do puramente mundano. Defoe viveu em tempos turbulentos, e ninguém pode dizer que ele não viveu esses tempos intensa e perigosamente. Em épocas revolucionárias, a teatralidade adquire maior importância, mesmo fora da arte. Como a nova arte imita a vida, o teatral tem de despontar também na arte. Por último: Defoe também sabia o que era sofrer uma bancarrota, ser trancafiado nas galés e embarcar em expedições insólitas das quais não se sabia se se ia voltar.”
“James Joyce, que, para nossa surpresa, enumera Defoe entre seus autores prediletos, escreveu do Crusoe que ele encarna ‘todo o espírito anglo-saxão … a independência masculina; a crueldade inconsciente; a persistência; a inteligência devagar mas eficaz; a apatia sexual; a religiosidade prática e metódica; a taciturnidade calculada’. Poderíamos dizer que essa é exatamente a visão que Sexta-Feira tem de Crusoe: Joyce é um súdito colonial da coroa britânica, e com certeza, quando alistado para a guerra, combateu muitos soldados com este perfil, em Dublin. Um ou dois assim são vistos no Ulisses. A passagem acima, que Joyce redigiu enquanto no exílio italiano, tem ainda algo do genial vislumbre do caráter imperial, que era meio-compatível com Joyce (colonizado, mas ao mesmo tempo da elite, ou seja, colonizador pela ótica dos subalternos, das massas irlandesas): outro materialista, o irlandês devia apreciar a fisicalidade intensa de Defoe. Uma vez o dublinense se descreveu como tendo a mente de um verdureiro. Defoe, por sua vez, destila em sua obra o autêntico espírito de uma nação de sapateiros.”
“Quem é ele, ele se pergunta no mesmo estilo hipocondríaco do devoto liberal ou do pós-modernista, para interferir com a prática do canibalismo num povo primitivo? Mas o fato de maior parte da novela tratar justamente do know-how do homem civilizado e prático empresta lentes peculiares à tese do universalismo. A racionalidade ortodoxa, no sentido de ensinar quando o importante é se preservar, como não cair de um precipício, por exemplo, é mais plausível como universalidade de todos os povos do que qualquer outro tipo de raciocínio utilitário. É por isso que Sexta-Feira pode ajudar Crusoe nos trabalhos braçais muito antes de poder falar Inglês, porque a lógica do mundo material é comum a todas as culturas. Pedras caem em ambas (a ocidental e a autótocne) porque obedecem à gravidade, seja no Haiti ou em Huddersfield; quatro mãos aplicadas sempre trabalham melhor que duas para carregar objetos pesados; alguém pode jogar-lhe uma corda para evitar que você se afogue ainda que no sistema cultural de quem jogou a corda a água simbolize algo totalmente diferente do que você aprendeu em seus dogmas e valores. A racionalidade prática é, nesse aspecto, o epítome do Anglicismo: se o gentleman chegar de fato aos céus, está na cara que examinarão o lugar com bastante escrutínio, para tirarem o melhor proveito do que ele terá a oferecer. Mas eis um tipo de comportamento, senão onipresente, pelo menos atemporal.”
“Não é escassa a literatura da tradição do comerciante-criminoso e vice-versa, dos vigaristas de John Gay em A Ópera do Vagabundo ao Vautrin de Balzac e o Mr. Merdle de Dickens. Como Bertolt Brecht disse: ‘O que é roubar um banco comparado com abrir um?’. A cozinha dos ladrões é a companhia de comércio sem a ideologia da respeitabilidade. O Coronel Jack começa como um ladrão de meia-tigela e termina como um bem-sucedido capitalista na Virgínia, sem nenhum talento a mais do que quando começara sua ‘carreira’. O mestre do crime de Fielding, Jonathan Wild, é um retrato satírico do político Robert Walpole, que funde em sua figura o mundo da alta política e da contravenção chic ou do colarinho branco. A idéia de ir parar numa terra virgem e construir do zero uma civilização deve constituir uma das fantasias mais intensas para a classe média. Sem dúvida isso ajuda a justificar a permanência de Crusoe como clássico sem o menor sinal de que vá ceder o posto tão cedo.”
“Ao desafiar a influência do gentil-homem e da nobreza, era necessário, para lograr êxito, desacreditar o poder da antiguidade no processo. Defoe é sardônico sobre a obsessão aristocrática com a pureza de sangue e o matrimônio: Por que – ele pergunta no Compleat English Gentleman – os nobres permitem de boa vontade que amas-de-leite plebéias amamentem seus filhos, já que, ironicamente, elas lhes estão repassando, conforme a própria teoria eugênica dos sangue-azul, um sangue degenerado? N’O Inglês Puro-Sangue ele admite explicitamente a irrelevância do tópico da ancestralidade. Destarte, é uma fantasia muito benquista pelo homem branco imaginar-se num território virgem, poder desfazer toda a história até suas origens, recomeçando-a melhor, já com a ‘classe média’ no poder.”
O MESMO EFEITO DA ESTÁTUA DA LIBERDADE NO PRIMEIRO LONGA DE PLANETA DOS MACACOS: “O que nos deixa derrotados em Robinson Crusoe, e um dos momentos mais insólitos da literatura universal, é aquela misteriosa única pegada encontrada na areia.”
“Ainda assim, Robinson Crusoe segue muitos anos sem preocupações em sua ilha; O Gulliver, de Jonathan Swift, não tem a mesma sorte.”
“Como Defoe, Swift escreve numa prosa prática, transparente, célere, com o perdão do trocadilho,¹ sem muita textura ou ressonância. Seu texto não possui, como um crítico bem apontou, recessos ou raízes e ramificações mil. Há uma alarmante ausência de metáforas. É um estilo da superfície, sem muita profundeza nem interioridade.² Swift desconfia de toda reflexividade textual como de toda metafísica ou especulação abstrusa. Essa indiferença à verdade filosófica nos conta algo sobre o clero do século XVIII, do qual Swift fazia parte. É quase como um ladrão de banco ser indiferente ao dinheiro. Um aristocrata tory da época de Swift era necessariamente um amador, não um especialista: acreditava num certo número necessário de princípios básicos que o século do Iluminismo vinha tornar acessíveis a todos. Swift não poderia entender, ainda que sobrevivesse a sua época, a era da prosa de gêneros especializada. As Viagens de Gulliver não são, no sentido hodierno da palavra, uma obra ‘literária’, e não teriam saído do papel se o autor pensasse em escrever uma novela. A linguagem de Swift, como a de Defoe, tenta apagar a si mesma desdobrando o real no real, e na época não havia palavra para batizar esse zero fictício. As palavras perdem o valor e privilegiam os objetos, que ocupam o centro do palco.A própria linguagem ideal que o autor imaginou – uma língua que abole a língua – é a transparência do modelo. Isso acontece entre os laputianos gramáticos que, ao invés de conversar entre si usando as cordas vocais e convenções aceitas unicamente pelo seu povo, carregam para um e outro lado uma sacola com diversos objetos que eventualmente precisem comunicar, e vão-nos mostrando ao interlocutor, desempenhando uma caricata ‘linguagem de Babel’. A verdade é que a linguagem humana é este saco, mas sem fundo e diáfano, uma forma de levar o mundo conosco sem carregar peso algum (ainda que com a inconveniência de cada povo ter a sua língua). Os Houyhnhnms evitam elaborações verbais e mantêm uma perfeita correspondência entre palavra e coisa – a tal ponto, aliás, que são incapazes de mentir. Perfeitos como são em sua representação do mundo, se houvera dentre eles um escritor, seria este capaz de produzir uma bela novela realista!”
¹ Swift em inglês é ágil, veloz.
² Sublinhei em verde porque não posso estar minimamente de acordo com Eagleton neste trecho!
“As Viagens de Gulliver, muito ao contrário do Crusoe, é um libelo do ‘anti-progressismo’ em que um protagonista amnesíaco parece não aprender nada ou aprender muito pouco em cada uma de suas jornadas; assim que ele parte para uma nova aventura, volta a aparentar ser uma tabula rasa. De fato as viagens de Gulliver são mais entrecortadas que as de Crusoe. Estas, mesmo que possam ser segmentadas pelo autor em capítulos e tomos, parecem bem-costuradas narrativamente. Gulliver vive literalmente episódios desconexos um do outro. Não em vão fala-se d’As Viagens como a suprema paródia do livro de viagem, gênero literário¹ usualmente otimista e cheio de ‘lições e aprendizados’.”
¹ O leitor de minha tradução deve ter percebido que em seu afã descritivo o crítico costuma se contradizer bastante. Aqui, vemos que na verdade o europeu do século XVIII contemporâneo de Defoe e Swift já reconhecia, senão o realismo ou o romantismo, pelo menos certos gêneros literários…
“O tory Swift, ao contrário do whiggiano Defoe,¹ nada quer ter a ver com indivíduos. Sua única descrição é a de uma verdade universal, enquanto Gulliver e os personagens secundários servem apenas como meios para ilustrá-la. Gulliver não passa de um dispositivo narrativo bem conveniente, não é um ‘personagem’ propriamente dito, não é possível se identificar resolutamente com ele. Crusoe é bem diferente e vai crescendo em nossa concepção conforme avançam as páginas. Gulliver apenas ‘pede’ que observemos e julguemos os lugares que ele visitou.”
¹ Ver tabelas no final.
“Os lilliputianos são cruéis, gananciosos e sectários, como se fossem réplicas em miniatura dos políticos de Westminster. Esse retrato da raça humana como corrupta e imutável é típica do conservantismo anglicano swiftiano. Ele desdenha a possibilidade de qualquer progresso dramático e mudança revolucionária para melhor no campo social, e logo se vê que a tal verdade universal que ele tenta mostrar é uma só: já conhecíamos essa verdade antes de viajarmos. Deus nos deu tudo de que precisávamos logo de partida, e velejar a esmo tropeçando em criaturinhas de uma polegada ou esbarrando no tornozelo de gigantes pouco importa nesse quadro. Talvez todos os indivíduos exóticos que encontramos não passem de distrações válidas unicamente para o momento.”
“Mas só sabemos que os lilliputianos são diferentes de nós porque conservamos com eles a identidade do conceito de tamanho. Chamamos tarântulas de tarântulas e não de humanos porque usamos a linguagem, pela qual descrevemos e nomeamos as tarântulas, e elas não. Se as tarântulas fossem tão alienígenas assim à espécie humana, não seria esse o caso. Não se pode falar da diferença sem a comparação e o diagnóstico de algo igual. Os únicos diferentes reais de nós são aqueles que passam invisíveis, de cócoras, bem diante do nosso nariz, e que jamais percebemos.”
“A escrita de uma viagem é, mais do que antes, como se vê, um gênero muito duvidoso para um tory se engajar naquele tempo. De um livro como esse esperam-se sobretudo novidades, que são indesejáveis para os conservadores. Defoe escreveu cedo na vida um Ensaio sobre Projetos (Essay on Projects),que era o perfeito contraponto dessa ânsia de imobilismo do tory: exibia grande entusiasmo quanto às reformas técnico-científicas. Crusoe rejeita implicitamente, ao querer sair de casa, os valores benquistos pela aristocracia (o lar, a coroa, a nação). Toda essa sede mercantilista de Crusoe não parece mais do que a pornografia do progresso para muitas mentes mais estreitas ou mais clássicas. Fantasiar com monstros desconhecidos é indecoroso; tudo que não é verossímil só pode nublar nosso julgamento. Crusoe encoraja caprichos tolos e emoções extravagantes que são péssimos para a lei e a ordem. Fora que, quanto mais viaja, mais Crusoe se sente um relativista cultural, algo igualmente insidioso para um tory. Pode ser perigoso para o viajante chegar a se tornar tão sonhador e apegado a coisas estrangeiras, a ponto de bradar, por exemplo, que se deparou com selvagens que, eles sim, são felizes e vivem em harmonia com a natureza. Isso seria negar o pecado original e inspirar nas gentes utopias cândidas e pueris, coisa contra a qual se deve lutar. Além do mais, de que vale, se o aventureiro acabaria sempre voltando ao solo inglês, muito longe dessas tais utopias inúteis? As alusões anti-monárquicas e anti-establishment de tais peregrinações pareceram, em todos os tempos, muito grosseiras aos tories.
“Muito do debate em curso no século XVIII girava em torno de um consenso político que pudesse superar as terríveis dissensões do século anterior, mais animoso, de guerras civis e de queda e restauração da monarquia. Swift se referiu em vida a Defoe com toda a prepotência de um patrício: ‘Aquele sujeito que foi exibido no pelourinho – esqueci o nome dele…’. Mas não podemos deixar de observar em Swift o mesmo entusiasmo pelo comércio que em Defoe. Swift é irlandês e a Irlanda estava sempre em posição mais combalida que a metrópole. Além disso, Swift também não dava crédito à teoria da pureza da raça, e gostava de se ver como um burguês em que tudo de seus antepassados já se diluíra há muito tempo, a ponto de torná-lo irreconhecível para estes. Swift foi um tory, mas um tory radical, um exemplar do animal oximorônico que muito enriqueceu a cultura inglesa se formos considerar outros escritores tories e radicais ao mesmo tempo, como William Cobbett e John Ruskin.
“Defoe era ‘progressista’ e rebelde, mas chegava a delírios de esnobeza episódicos tão altaneiros que chegou a alterar seu nome de Daniel Foe para Daniel De Foe, e que hoje escrevemos Defoe. A conjunção ‘de’ implica origem nobre. Swift e autores como Pope viam a sociedade britânica como desprovida desde os primórdios de mérito congênito, uma raça venal que além de tudo foi muito corrompida pelo poder e pelo dinheiro com o passar do tempo, atributos que eles viam encarnados pelo odioso primeiro-ministro whig Robert Walpole (já comentado). Mas Defoe não deixava, idem, de criticar a obsessão cega e sem qualquer pano de fundo pelo dinheiro.
Poderíamos ver os mesmos entrelaçamentos complementares e/ou contraditórios em pares como Henry Fielding e Samuel Richardson. Richardson era filho de um carpinteiro de Derbyshire, não completou a escola básica e se tornou impressor, enquanto Fielding era um egresso do colégio de Eton repleto de conexões com figurões. Richardson tinha estilo agressivo, era um campeão das classes médias, e afirmava que o ofício do comércio ‘é infinitamente de mais conseqüência, e devia ser muito mais estimulado que qualquer outra posição ou ranking social, sobretudo as dos títulos inócuos típicas da Inglaterra’. E não obstante Richardson se punha estupefato diante da quantidade de personalidades decrépitas e mesquinhas das novelas de Fielding: chegou a afirmar que se não soubesse quem Fielding era, pensaria se tratar de um cavalariço. Fielding rebatia. Disse uma vez que Pamela de Richardson encorajava jovens aristocratas a se casarem com as camareiras de suas mamães, e que não conseguiria por nada pôr-se no lugar dos nobres de suas novelas. Com efeito, em vez de casar-se com a empregada de sua mãe, Henry Fielding casou-se, no segundo matrimônio, com a empregada de sua primeira esposa!” HA-HA-HA-HA!
“O nome Gulliver está muito bem-dado, por sinal.¹ Sua credulidade é o mais das vezes seu ponto fraco. Ele de alguma forma se sente pateticamente (afetivamente) ligado a pessoas que conhece em suas viagens um tanto rápido demais, sem muito senso crítico. Em Lilliput, vangloria-se de seu título de Nardac, espécie de análogo a cavaleiro da rainha, lança-se como líder militar, envolve-se em intrigas as mais pavonescas, tendo de enfrentar um processo para provar que não cometeu fornicação com uma lilliputiana. A impossibilidade física do ato sexual entre seu corpo descomunal perto de um lilliputiano não parece ter passado ora alguma pela cabeça do réu que tentava, afobado, se defender. (…) De herói a vilão da pátria, Gulliver parece ser sempre o mesmo, tanto num pólo como noutro, levado unicamente pelas circunstâncias e vilezas dos outros personagens.”
¹ “Gullible” é bobo, ingênuo.
“E a despeito do inconveniente de ser um inglês e de explorar terras tão remotas, ele é um ótimo aluno de idiomas, aprendendo rápido a falar como os nativos em suas jornadas, apesar de que isso soa mais como recurso estilístico para justificar a comunicação de Gulliver nessas praças do que uma característica que Swift gostaria de ter dado sem mais a seu protagonista. Se essa parte da personalidade de Gulliver se mostra tão expedita para se adaptar aos costumes forasteiros, sua outra metade é a de um inglês chauvinista cabeça oca, complacente e cego quanto aos defeitos dos seus conterrâneos. Seu relato visivelmente galante da história do reino britânico ao rei Brobdingnag logo produz um efeito contrário ao esperado, horrorizando-o, a ponto deste rei considerar que, se Gulliver fala mesmo a verdade, todos os bretões não passam de uns vermes.”
“Ou ele é um imperialista ou um relativista cultural, sem meio-termo. A questão é que a novela serve para demonstrar a secreta afinidade entre os dois extremos. Não há tanta diferença entre defender acriticamente a Coroa inglesa ou o poder soberano de Lilliput. Se devêramos simpatizar com outras culturas, se isso fosse um imperativo, então por que não simpatizar com a própria civilização? Se devemos desculpar os canibais, por que não as grandes multinacionais que poluem a atmosfera? Se todas as culturas estão em ordem e seguem na supracitada ‘harmonia cósmica’, então na realidade não há nada o quê escolher, e nenhum indício de que os brobdingnaguianos seriam superiores, em qualquer sentido, aos ingleses.”
“Swift com certeza conhecia o que era preconceito: difamador dos bons, satirista vituperador altamente imaginativo e polemista de vocação, capaz de ignorar a verdade só para terminar com a razão, acabava inadvertidamente por levantar a bandeira da intolerância política e religiosa. Se a sátira de Fielding é genial, a de Swift é tão brusca e amalucada em contraste que parece até semipatológica. Ele era misógino, autoritário, troçador da canalha, e acima de tudo um representante da Irlanda de seu tempo, isto é, a colônia inglesa que era quase um pária e que, caso houvesse uma corrida entre todos os povos colonizados pela Inglaterra decerto não chegaria em primeiro lugar, no juízo inglês. Eis aqui, outra vez, o incômodo e involuntário papel ambíguo de diplomata e capataz, exercido, como vimos, por James Joyce.”
“Enfim, o que As Viagens parece querer ensinar? Que você deveria apreciar todas as culturas humanas em sua parcialidade, sem ser um Gulliver, mas também sem recair no niilismo. Homens e mulheres precisam cultivar ideais, como as virtudes plácidas e racionais dos Houyhnhnms, caso queiram ser mais do que reles materialistas. O problema é deixar que esses ideais exerçam um papel predatório na própria consciência. Isso seria ser tão ao revés de um materialista que representaria a negação do próprio corpo, tão ruim quanto a falta de ideais. Não se deve chegar a esse ponto, o de perceber-se com desgosto por causa do Outro. Não se conformar inteiramente com o próprio corpo, é certo, mas nem por isso chegar a reprimi-lo.”
“Se não fosse por terem 4 patas e cauda, os Houyhnhnms talvez não estivessem totalmente fora do lugar num salão janeausteniano, tomando chá com Mr. Knightley. Mas convenhamos que este é o ponto: os Houyhnhnms são menos uma possibilidade humana do que, como um ensaísta bem colocou, uma impossibilidade insultante.”
“Qual perspectiva é a correta? Difícil responder na época em que inventaram o microscópio. Quão distanciado ou aproximado dos fatos você precisa estar para vê-lo ‘direito’? O que se vê na lente de um microscópio é a verdade ou a distorção da verdade?”
“Os novelistas do Dezoito, tendo estabelecido uma distância do mundo romanesco, estão a maior parte das vezes cônscios de que a crença no fato nu e cru é tão mítica quando o próprio ideal do Romance. A novela, sendo a forma literária que é, nada pode fazer no tocante a decidir qual perspectiva é mais ‘verdadeira’, embora exerça um importante papel na definição do ‘mundo real’. Gulliver é um empiricista ultimado ou crente no fato bruto, um ponto de vista que anda de mãos dadas com seu interesse ‘progressista’ nos problemas técnicos e mecânicos (em contraponto ao próprio Swift, parecendo-se, desse ângulo, uma reedição de Crusoe). Ele é um exemplar do ‘novo homem’: cabeça-dura, ou melhor, obstinado, pragmático, aposta todas as suas fichas na religião chamada progresso, é fascinado por esquemas quiméricos e projetos de reforma social, ansioso por galardoar sua narrativa em primeira pessoa com mapas e provas documentais que para ele atestam a veracidade absoluta do que observa nas nações forasteiras.”
“Mas Swift não nos brinda com uma solução ao dilema fundamental. Ele desaparece de vista e dá espaço para o leitor lidar com as contradições postas. É da natureza de sua sátira deixar de propor qualquer resposta construtiva – em parte porque um gentleman não carece de se envolver com esses problemas, ninharia de pequeno-burguês; e em parte porque qualquer solução logo se denunciaria como parcial.”
“Swift e Defoe escrevem ambos numa sociedade que acredita na verdade, na razão e na justiça teóricas, mas cuja conduta contumaz se tornou tão falsa, injusta e irracional que já não é possível acreditar em nenhum indivíduo na prática.”
“Se ‘primitivos’ como os irlandeses (que não são civilizados como os ingleses, ainda) e os aborígenes do Pacífico Sul forem realmente Yahoos, parece que isso justificaria o imperialismo britânico. Mas se os Yahoos são a humanidade inteira, então os colonizadores são (metaforicamente) bestiais e vivem também cobertos de fezes, o que suprime qualquer direito de soberania que tanto se arrogam. Por esta via, o colonialismo se torna uma questão de um bando de selvagens hipócritas liderando outros selvagens, não-hipócritas. Os mestres seriam tão imprestáveis quanto os súditos – uma opinião que, n’O Coração das Trevas, desautoriza qualquer colonialismo mas confirma, ainda, alguns de seus preconceitos (sim, os nativos são mesmo uns imprestáveis).”
O chefe Yahoo
“No fim, o que cavalos pensam de nós não é o suficiente para nos rotular como Houyhnhnms nem Yahoos – exceto, talvez, para os antepassados dos nobres anglo-irlandeses, para quem era regra amar um cavalo mais do que seus entes queridos, quem dirá o povão.”
Bücherwurm:verme-de-livro, porém no vernáculo seria entendido como “rato de biblioteca”.
deiscência: cisão em dois de algo previamente uno, no sentido de romper-se, fender-se, reabrir-se, uma cicatriz, p.ex. Pode-se dizer que o parto é uma deiscência entre mãe e filho, bem como o desmame sua reiteração simbólica.
1. O OUVIDO COM QUE CONVÉM OUVIR
Eu não acredito que o Victor Hugo nunca tenha ouvido falar de Leclaire!
“é então que tudo se passa como se o psicanalista tivesse pensado em voz alta e o paciente lhe respondesse como homem versado nos rudimentos da teoria e da prática analíticas, como são hoje quase todos os que se submetem a uma análise.”
Laios: eu-lá
MA GRITE!
MATE o pai na transparência
transferência
ferro
ferido
sangue
Irrefutável é o caralho!
2. O DESEJO INCONSCIENTE. COM FREUD, LER FREUD.
“De fato atualmente ninguém pode dizer que esqueceu seu guarda-chuva ou perdeu seu isqueiro – desenhos habituais de enigmas sexuais – sem provocar imediatamente o sorriso entendido do seu interlocutor, hermeneuta de ocasião.”
sexo, drogas e freud ‘n’ roll
De todas as baboseiras referentes à auto-análise de Freud mediante a interpretação de seus sonhos, o que eu depreendo é: tios mais novos que seus próprios sobrinhos têm egos enormes!
“Por outro lado, Freud não diz quase nada do amarelo como cor dos judeus. Apenas alude – analisando o sonho com o Conde Thun – a uma forma botânica do anti-semitismo, a guerra dos cravos, que assolava Viena. Os cravos brancos eram a insígnia dos anti-semitas; os vermelhos, dos sociais-democratas.” Henrique Quanto?
BLÁBLÁBLÁ: “Além disso, o amarelo – como é sabido de todo analista de criança – é a cor chave do erotismo uretral.” Preferia quando o papo era sobre cores para usar na virada de ano…
“Não é nada estranho para um leitor francês ver o pissenlit se inscrever tão profundamente na série botânica.” Mijar na cama mas folha da flor dente-de-leão (Löwenzahn) ao mesmo tempo. Dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, planta de coloração amarela. Tudo indica que é um subgênero de margarida.
Leão não escova os dentes; criança que mija na cama bebe muita água. Bege. Neve.
“Depois de ter lido a narração da expedição de Nansen ao Pólo Norte, sonhou estar aplicando, naquele deserto de gelo, um tratamento elétrico no corajoso explorador para curá-lo de uma dolorosa ciática. Ao analisar esse sonho, descobrirá uma história de sua infância que torna o sonho compreensível. Lá pelos seus 3 ou 4 anos ouviu, um dia, os mais velhos falarem de viagens, de descobertas e perguntou a seu pai se aquela doença era muito perigosa. Sem dúvida, ele confundira viajar (reisen) com dor (Reissen).”
Raizen sun: Yusule
Yu Yu HakuDor
Chinese rice
Raiz de todos os males
“H” is (rá é…)
Fakafka ferimento brancoabsurdo
Viagem
Viadagem
Vajem
Virgem
A última formiga se esconde (late-ant).
3. TOMAR O CORPO AO PÉ DA LETRA OU COMO FALAR DO CORPO?
“Ao tentarmos fugir à ordem lógica das representações que a psicanálise promove, encontramos, como consolo, o modelo biológico em sua opacidade metafórica.”
“moções de desejo (Wunschregungen)” “moções pulsionais (Triebregungen)”
“O equívoco do conceito de representante, o recurso constante à hipóstase biológica são constantes importantes no pensamento de Freud. Elas correspondem, segundo M. Tort, a «um divórcio incontestável entre a elaboração da experiência clínica das neuroses (ou das psicoses) e a teoria ou doutrina das pulsões tratada por Freud de mitologia, cujo caráter necessariamente especulativo ele manteve».”
“Se no momento eu declarar que o fetiche é um substituto do pênis, vou certamente causar uma desilusão. Apresso-me também a acrescentar que não é o substituto de um pênis qualquer, mas de um pênis determinado, totalmente especial e de grande significado nos primeiros anos de infância, que se perderá, porém, mais tarde.” F.
“Tal explicação foi constatada como profundamente verdadeira em todas as análises de pervertidos.”
“em uma história particular, o que dá tal privilégio a uma zona em vez de outra, o que estabelece de algum modo uma hierarquia dos investimentos erógenos e o que singularizaria a primazia genital?”
“a zona erógena pode ser definida como um lugar do corpo onde o acesso à pura diferença (experiência do prazer) que aí se produz fica marcado por um traço distintivo, uma [primeira] letra [a “/” lacaniana], que se pode dizer estar inscrita nesse lugar ou colocada em sua abstração do corpo.”
“Metaforicamente, podemos dizer que um intervalo é fixado no lugar em que se produziu a diferença e o jogo do desejo vai poder se desenrolar em tomo do cerco desse vazio, dentro da regra de seus engodos. É antes de tudo a ilusão retrospectiva de um primeiro objeto perdido em cuja falta se originaria o movimento do desejo” “É verdade que, num segundo tempo, o ciclo das repetições chega à eleição de um objeto determinado, substitutivo e, ao mesmo tempo, estranho à primeira letra.” “Para substituir ao mítico primeiro seio perdido, qualquer coisa que se leve à boca pode servir, até o dia em que a escolha se fixe na orelha do macaco de pelúcia que passa a ser, por um tempo às vezes bem longo, o novo mediador obrigatório de todas as satisfações.”
“Tomar o corpo ao pé da letra é, em suma, aprender a soletrar a ortografia do nome composto pelas zonas erógenas que o constituem; é reconhecer em cada letra a singularidade do prazer (ou da dor) que ela fixa e nota ao mesmo tempo”
4. O CORPO DA LETRA OU O ENREDO DO DESEJO DA LETRA
“Diferente, necessariamente, da diferença que reaviva como prazer de zona, o objeto deve ser concebido como elemento estranho ao corpo que ele excita.”
“O objeto é fundamentalmente o outro corpo cujo encontro atualiza ou torna sensível a dimensão essencial da separação.” “O objeto parece se caracterizar por sua qualidade de estar separado na medida em que o intervalo dessa separação faz surgir a dimensão do espaço ao mesmo tempo que a anulação possível do intervalo que ali se inscreve.” “Desta forma, podemos dizer que o objeto, como parte (pedaço separado) do corpo, representa (no sentido comum da palavra) a dimensão de alteridade essencial implicada na concepção do corpo erógeno.”
“De modo inverso poderíamos dizer que o objeto, por sua opacidade, representa segurança no lugar da falta.”
“Quando viu a jovem empregada de joelhos, esfregando o chão, suas nádegas proeminentes e o dorso em posição horizontal, reviu nela a atitude tomada por sua mãe durante a cena do coito.”
“Para a criança, essa situação privilegiada de ser assim promovido pela mãe à condição de um pequeno deus, constitui também uma situação fechada; isso porque uma tal conjuntura apaga, pela intensidade do gozo atingido, o efeito das insatisfações onde nasce o desejo. O ídolo-criança se vê assim preso numa espécie de relicário precioso cujo invólucro o isola de um verdadeiro acesso à realidade da letra” “Se essa mãe que o tem como objeto querido sente prazer com um outro, o seu mundo desmorona . . . a não ser que ele encontre uma defesa para esse golpe fatal.”
5. O SONHO DO UNICÓRNIO
“Philippe gosta dos seus pés que não lhe parecem feios e se diverte em brincar com eles. Houve uma época de sua infância em que, andando muito com os pés descalços, esforçava-se por calejar a planta dos pés, sonhando deixá-la dura como corno para andar sem perigo sobre os solos mais ásperos e correr pela praia sem medo de estrepes [armadilhas, no chão ou sobre muros] ocultos na areia.” “invólucro de uma pele invulnerável”
“Valor de representação fálica, o unicórnio constitui tema comum das narrações lendárias. O unicórnio, emblema de fidelidade, é evidentemente um animal difícil de ser pego. Diz a lenda que quem o quiser prender deve deixar, na solidão da floresta, uma jovem virgem como oferenda.”
“A cicatriz, como toda a superfície do corpo, é uma recordação dos cuidados atenciosos que lhe dedicou uma mãe impaciente por satisfazer sua paixão ao nível das (sic) necessidades do corpo”
“Philippe foi sem dúvida o preferido de sua mãe, mais que seu irmão, mas também mais que seu pai. Encontramos no horizonte sempre velado de sua história aquela satisfação sexual precoce. Nela Freud reconhece a experiência que marca o destino do obsessivo [que se contrapõe ao do psicótico]. Ser escolhido, mimado e saciado por sua mãe é uma beatitude e um exílio de onde é muito difícil voltar.”
O CORTE DE CABELO 2005
O CORTE DE CABELO APÓS AS FÉRIAS 2003
O CORTE DE CABELO DE VERÃO
ÚLTIMA ESTAÇÃO
AMBÍGUA
D’EROS
“<Unicórnio> (licorne) marca assim em seu traço conciso o gesto de beber e o movimento das duas mãos juntas para formar uma taça – réplica côncava da convexidade do seio”
“Poord’jeli – na própria escansão de sua enunciação secreta, saltando em torno do d’j central e recaindo sobre o júbilo do li – parece ser tanto o modelo como a reprodução do movimento da cambalhota. Há certo interesse em comparar esse nome secreto Poordjelli, que Philippe arranjou para si, com aquele que recebeu de seus pais: Philippe Georges Elhyani (transcrito também com o mínimo de deformações necessárias, tanto para resguardar o segredo da identidade real quanto para preservar todas as possibilidades de transgressão da análise).”
“Com a evocação desse nome secreto, parece que atingimos um termo intransponível: modelo irredutível, desprovido de sentido, aparece verdadeiramente como um desses nós que constituem o inconsciente em sua singularidade.”
“A rosa de Philippe é fonte inesgotável, indo do perfume das rosas à guerra das duas rosas, local mítico, tema místico, coração entre os dois seios no mais profundo de la gorge (peito) (garganta, literalmente).”
RAFAELDEARAUJOAGUIRAFAEL
nós narcisos
nós que atam os futuros-afogados n’orgulho de ser quem s’é
CAMBALHOTA, SALTO MORTAL
PIRUETA
piru
biruta
puta
punheta
chupeta
róta confulsa
pior de todas as rotas
ruas
perua que leva com motor barulhento
aos confins do vale dos fins
derradeiros
radiante
derredor
do nada real
reino do’Eu
6. O INCONSCIENTE OU A ORDEM DA LETRA
“É verdade que a letra é justamente apresentada como esse traço cujo formalismo absoluto suprime toda necessidade de referi-la a outra coisa senão a outras letras, conexões que a definem como letra. Em outras palavras, é o conjunto de suas relações possíveis com outras letras que a caracteriza como tal, excluindo qualquer outra referência. Mas esse cuidado eminentemente louvável de restaurar a própria possibilidade de análise isolando, dentro de uma pretendida <pureza> formal, os termos mínimos de uma lógica não corresponde de fato senão a uma forma extrema de desconhecimento: a que patenteia a recusa sistemática de reconhecer que o conjunto da vida psíquica – e portanto de toda elaboração lógica – é constituído pela realidade do recalque.”
“Já consideramos por que foram, entre outros monemas, Poor, d’j e li que se fixaram, quando analisamos as relações da fórmula (ou nome secreto) com o nome próprio do sujeito. O que não interrogamos, de propósito, foi o processo mesmo dessa fixação em torno do movimento de júbilo.”
“com o esquizofrênico, achamo-nos confrontados com sombras de letras. Cada uma delas conduz ao conjunto das outras sombras indiferentemente ou exclusivamente a uma delas, que parece ter para ele papel de complemento sexual.”
“No mal-estar, beirando o desmaio, da dor provocada por uma topada na quina de uma pedra subsiste apenas – ou se intensifica – o perfume da madressilva que cresce nas moitas ao redor. É como se no choque desta quase-deslocação pela erupção da dor, à beira do desvanecimento, o cheiro da madressilva se desprendesse, como único termo distinto, marcando por isso mesmo – antes que o desvanecimento propriamente dito ou a segunda dor se produzam – o próprio instante em que toda coerência parece se anular, ao mesmo tempo em que ela se mantém em torno desse único perfume.”
“Mais simplesmente ainda, imaginemos, no auge do gozo amoroso, a cabeça caída da amante, cujo olhar perdido fixa em um olho sem fundo a imagem duplamente invertida que as cortinas abertas e presas por frouxos cordões desenham com a luz da janela. Teremos dessa forma evidenciado, em sua contingência, o próprio traço que parece fixar a síncope do prazer.
Assim, em todos esses casos, no instante em que se produz a diferença na extrema sensibilidade do prazer ou da dor, um termo aparece, se mantém ou se desprende, termo que parece impedir o total desfalecimento do momento”
“a própria letra, único termo que continua marcado pelo vazio do prazer.”
game gado save say V say F… safe giver hiver
lava life lie lavarwash is det
“veremos, aliás, que tal possibilidade de formação de termos novos é uma característica necessária da ordem do inconsciente.”
“Deixemos bem claro que é difícil falar com pertinência desta anulação, pois, por definição, o zero assim evocado é, por sua vez, realmente anulado como zero enquanto dele falamos como um termo.”
zero rose salmão cheiro de rosa e de peixe
“o gozo é interdito ao falante como tal” Lacan
“ninguém jamais pode dizer <eu gozo> sem se referir por um abuso intrínseco à linguagem, ao instante do prazer passado ou futuro – instante esse em que precisamente toda possibilidade de dizer se desvanece.”
“Dentro de uma perspectiva dinâmica, o gozo designa a imediatidade do acesso à <pura diferença> que a estrutura inconsciente impede e dirige ao mesmo tempo.”
“Muito sumariamente, podemos indicar aqui que a prevalência de um termo [letra-objeto-sujeito] da estrutura constitui o modelo de uma organização neurótica, ao passo que o enfraquecimento de um deles caracteriza a organização psicótica.”
“Assim como na singularidade do exemplo do Homem dos Lobos a objetalidade maciça de um traseiro de mulher provoca o mais violento desejo, como o apelo de um vazio vertiginoso, assim também todo objeto, numa economia de desejo, parece haurir seu poder de atração do zero que ele mascara, dessa realidade do gozo que ele acalma para manter sua diferença em relação à morte.”
“objetalização da letra, para fazer dela um sinal, assim como literalização do objeto, já descrita na origem do devir do obsessivo.”
A vida como processo do olho que vê “imparcial” seria o relógio de parede, em que, à meia-noite ou ao meio-dia o ponteiro da hora desaparece sob o ponteiro dos minutos (ou fundindo-se a sua cor e indistinguível a certa distância), e tudo se sucede sempre igual, de 12 em 12 horas (doze unidades de si mesmo). A vida daquele que vive (cada ponteiro) é sempre novidade e não se sabe que se está em círculo “esse tempo todo”, com o perdão da expressão tão cirúrgica, ovalada e cronométrica.
“De modo mais aproximativo, poderíamos dizer que a função subjetiva é a contradição nela mesma e que esta particularidade a torna, em geral, difícil de conceber.”
“É certo que a tríade objeto, letra e sujeito se oferece facilmente a uma esquematização simplista demais, na medida em que a trivialidade dos termos, que caracterizam as 3 funções, pode servir de pretexto para dissimular a originalidade radical de seu emprego na descrição do inconsciente.” Mas: “Parece inútil pretender evitar absolutamente o risco de redução simplificadora de uma descrição do inconsciente. Querer <colocar> de maneira radical a objetalidade, a literalidade ou a subjetividade da ordem inconsciente, para melhor distinguir o conceito da acepção comum das palavras em questão, seria encetar um processo <neurótico> (ou perverso) de objetalização da letra, negando com isso a intenção que o subentende no processo.”
“o d’j da fórmula de Philippe seria provido de uma forte valência subjetiva e de uma função literal de valência fraca.” O contrário com li. Poor tem prevalência objetal, para seguir o didatismo do tripé.
“com a diferença sexual, tudo já está escrito.”
“é a relação bem problemática da função subjetiva com o conjunto do sistema literal assim concebido que permite caracterizar a dimensão essencialmente psicanalítica da <transferência>.”
7. O RECALQUE E A FIXAÇÃO OU A ARTICULAÇÃO DO GOZO E DA LETRA
“Sem dúvida, é essa espécie de tendência fundamental do sistema primário [o inconsciente] para o seu próprio aniquilamento que Freud observou e sustentou contra todos como <pulsão de morte>. (…) o conjunto das relações recíprocas que descrevemos tendem a manter em torno do zero radical um jogo que o produz por meio do objeto, o representa pela letra e o oculta pela alternância do sujeito. Pela articulação da letra, que é a palavra, o horizonte do gozo em sua anulação não cessa, como a beatitude na palavra de Deus, prometida e recusada, outorgada somente depois da morte.”
“Após essa lembrança da instabilidade do sistema oscilante que é o inconsciente – aparentemente ameaçado a todo instante de reabsorção – compreenderemos melhor por que ele tende a suscitar a organização paralela de um sistema antinômico ao seu, capaz de assegurar-lhe de algum modo uma organização menos precária.”
“é próprio da ordem do inconsciente suscitar o deslize da letra em direção ao sinal indicador do objeto e gerar uma instância unificante e estável, a que chamaremos de moi. É também da natureza própria da ordem inconsciente manter a função estável do objeto, deixando <esquecer>, por assim dizer, que o objeto tem essa estabilidade devido ao absoluto do zero que ele mascara.”
“Não nos deteremos nessas leis que regem o sistema da consciência. Elas são por demais conhecidas por todos, psicólogos ou não.”
O recalque é a roda que locomove os dois eixos in e cons.
“levantamento do recalque. Esse passo dá acesso à ordem inconsciente como tal numa fórmula literal – Poord’jeli – desprovida de significado mas carregada, em sua permanência, de imperativos libidinosos.”
“Como substituto materno, Lili constitui um objeto incestuoso – por isso mesmo interdito – que a organização consciente se vê obrigada a recalcar para as partes inferiores do inconsciente.”
“Do ponto de vista consciente, a fórmula parece muito <inocente>. (…) quanto mais um elemento é estruturalmente inconsciente, no sentido em que o definimos, tanto menos poderá ter acesso a uma ordem em que nada o pode acolher, a não ser para se alterar por sua vez.”
“um deslize da função literal para um valor significativo.” Cf. DIMITRI & O BILHETE
lit-lit
cama-cama
coma-coma
nurse nurse
coma — morte
s e x o
reprodução consciente
use condom
nur’s or not nur’s the q?
arse null
“o interdito se apresenta como a barreira de um dito, isto é, como o fato de uma articulação literal, escrita ou falada.” NEM SEQUER PRONUNCIARÁS ISTO AQUI.
Não comerás tua mãe porque não queres que teu filho como tua esposa.
INFÂNCIA INFALADA (redundança): “Aquele que diz, por seu dito, se interdita o gozo ou, correlativamente, aquele que goza faz com que toda letra – e todo dito possível – se desvaneça no absoluto da anulação que ele celebra.” Ponto G de Gozo de Inexprimível.para.o.Homem GIH
life safe GIHver
Gozo = cegueira = bliss = blind…doublebind…morte em vida PERIGO PERIGO PERIGO
“Aquele que diz, por dizer, se interdiz(ta)” Lacan, intraduTZível
Aquele que dita, por ditar, se interdita
gozozero
G O Z O
Z ER O
0 ER 0 (S)
0s
Or?G
the her0
hoe
O infinito são dois zeros sucessivos com intervalo 0 entre eles.
COMO SALVAR FREUD COM UM MÍNIMO (PRÓXIMO DE ZERO) DE ESFORÇO! “o gozo não poderia, por isso mesmo, ser pura e simplesmente confundido com a morte, a não ser que se queira confundir a ordem inconsciente com a ordem biológica.”
“A precariedade da ordem inconsciente, que anteriormente já apontávamos, manifesta-se clinicamente nas organizações psíquicas de tipo psicótico. Em tais casos, parece que o recalque não se teria exercido, ao mesmo tempo, na medida em que os mecanismos próprios da ordem inconsciente se manifestam de maneira mais ou menos patente à luz do dia – fato indicativo de falta de recalque propriamente dito – e na medida em que as próprias estruturas inconscientes se demonstram enfraquecidas ou, pelo menos, precárias, como se as funções que as asseguram estivessem inseguras – fato indicativo de falta de recalque originário.”
ÓLEO DA RODA DO DEVIR (DENTES SE ENTRELAÇANDO ENTRE DOIS ABISMOS INFINITOS – QUE IMAGEM!): “Assim, acham-se correlativamente perturbadas tanto a função estável [“nadal”] quanto a função tética [existencial], a ponto de – como já lembramos – uma não se poder mais distinguir da outra e as letras serem ali manipuladas como objetos ou, reciprocamente, os objetos como letras.”
O zero clama por (se)u(m) Hamlet, sem o qual ele (o nada!) não seria nada!
“Mas persiste aqui uma questão de importância capital: como se realiza o recalque originário? Interrogação legítima e necessária na medida em que, como acabamos de ver, esse tempo parece faltar no caso dos destinos psicóticos.”
AS 3 ETAPAS DE QUEM SE INSCREVEU NO COMPLEXO DE ÉDIPO E PORTANTO FUGIU DA PSICOSE PRIMÁRIA
“De início, é preciso que a carícia ao nível da covinha seja sentida como prazer; que uma diferença entre as duas bordas da encantadora depressão tenha sido sensível, intervalo que vai se marcar e que, por ora, reduziremos à (I) fórmula C1-C2, inscrevendo esse intervalo entre 2 pontos sensíveis, mas ainda não-erógena, da covinha. A seguir, é preciso – para que tal carícia seja tão intensamente sensível, agradável e diferente do contato de um pedaço de lã ou das costas da própria mão da criança – que a epiderme do dedo acariciador seja particularmente distinguida como sendo de outro corpo, intervalo que formularemos em (II) Cu-Do, covinha de um, dedo do outro. Finalmente, é evidente que – para que este último intervalo possa ser realmente distinguido nessa clivagem de alteridade – a condição mais importante e absoluta é que o dedo acariciador esteja constituído como erógeno (na economia do corpo do Outro), (III) intervalo que poderemos formular como D1e-D2e marcando assim a diferença sensível, e já erógena para ela [covinha da criança], da ponta do dedo da mãe.”
(I-II) sensibilidade esquisita
(II) “diferença” proximal 0
(II-III) erogeneidade do Outro
clivagina
tô fala no
Pobre da criança que não sabe o que é um cafuné…
novas zonas coloniais
ALGO TÃO BANAL PORÉM TÃO ESSENCIAL: “Mas como pode então suceder que essa operação não se produza ou se efetue de modo tão precário que pareça estar mal-assegurada, tal como supomos que deveria se produzir na origem dos destinos psicóticos?” “Precisamos, pois, considerar com mais atenção o que designamos como <intervalo erógeno do corpo do outro>, enquanto nos parece que sua dimensão própria é essencial para que seja efetuada a clivagem do recalque originário.”
O CARENTE-PADRÃO: “De um lado, podemos considerar que a perturbação do intervalo erógeno, no quadro da ordem neurótica, resulta do efeito do recalque secundário. Nada mais trivial que a extrema erogeneidade de uma zona íntima velada por uma hiperestesia ou uma anestesia que não exige analistas para despertar sua função erógena.”
ATAVICOSE: “Mas pode ser que o recalque seja mais vigoroso e que o conjunto do revestimento cutâneo caia sob o golpe dos seus efeitos. Imagina-se, então, no quadro de nosso exemplo, o pouco efeito <inscritor> que pode ter a mão de uma mãe afligida por tal recalque.” PSICOSE É LOUCURA DE FAMÍLIA
ANALFABETOS DO CORPO E DO ESPÍRITO, SEGREGAI-VOS!
MARCA DE ZONA ERÓGENA POR TELECONF.
ERAM OS MACACOS PSICOPATAS?
“De um lado o fálus é aquele traço que, isolado em sua ereção em forma de estela ou de obelisco,¹ simboliza universalmente o caráter sagrado e central dessa eminente zona erógena. De outro lado, ele é, sem outra mediação, reduplicação ou representação, em si mesmo, termo diferencial que faz o corpo macho ou fêmea.”
¹ Uh, pedra filosofal da porra toda!
“Afirmar que o fálus é a um só tempo a letra e o estilete que a traça não equivale a afirmar que gerar sexualmente basta para garantir, da parte do genitor, uma realização verdadeira do recalque originário. Isso porque nada impede o exercício de sua função orgânica a despeito de todo gozo digno desse nome. Contudo, a implicação fálica em tudo que se relaciona com o gozo, isto é, em tudo que se refere à afirmação da letra e à sua transgressão, deve-se ao privilégio dessa parte do corpo de ser em si mesma um termo diferencial (da fundamental diferença dos sexos) sem outra mediação, reduplicação ou representação.”
EDIPIADAS TRANSVERSAIS
“O gozo genital, no homem e na mulher, parece guardar dessa determinação erógena mais ou menos antiga, suas características profundamente diferentes que Tirésias por experiência, diz a lenda, teria podido testemunhar em termos aritméticos: <…Um dia Zeus e Hera discutiam para saber quem, o homem ou a mulher, sentiria maior prazer no amor quando lhes ocorreu a idéia de consultar Tirésias, único que fizera a dupla experiência. Tirésias, sem vacilar assegurou que se o gozo do amor se compusesse de 10 partes, a mulher ficaria com 9 e o homem com 1 só>.” E com isso Hera (uma vez) arrancou a luz dos olhos de Tirésias.
Foucault banha-se milhões de vezes no rio, ao contrário de Lévi-Strauss, diria Heráclito.
O LADO ESCURO DA LUA
“A conjunção dessas 3 aberturas em um mesmo eixo, produz o que se pode chamar de o contrário de um eclipse, na medida em que aquilo que é eclipsado, escondido, escamoteado, é justamente o esconderijo ou a ocultação habitual que sutura mais ou menos todo intervalo.” A diferença é que talvez só haja uma oportunidade para esse eclipse astronômico acontecer, ele não é cíclico…
O LÓBULO ESCURO E SURDO AO PÉ DA ORELHA
O músico é o lóbulo do músico.
O sol é líquido por fora e a lua é sulcada de crateras. Isso já o bastante para sermos felizes até o gás hélio acabar!
8. PSICANALISAR. NOTA SOBRE A TRANSFERÊNCIA E A CASTRAÇÃO.
“O convite para falar que é feito ao paciente não se abre sobre algum acontecimento maiêutico ou alívio catártico… assemelha-se mais, em realidade, ao <diga 33, 33> do médico cujo ouvido está atento apenas à ressonância torácica da voz.”
“On démolit
le Cherche-Midi
à quatorze heures
tout sera dit.” Queneau
“O jogo do zero e sua representação – ou a relação do sujeito à falta que ele acentua no conjunto do qual faz <parte> – evocam esta <cena primitiva> em que Freud nos ensinou a situar o espaço do impossível saber sobre <a origem> de <cada um>.”
Quem sou eu?
Filho dos meus pais.
Filho 2 de 2 pais.
Ângulo negro de uma casa de luz fraca.
É preciso contrair uma dívida para comprar a liberdade
E viver escravizado daí em diante num novo espaço.
Confere?
No entanto não deixa de ser
Um novo zero
No bom sentido
Do número
Se é
Que m’entende!
“Não há outro artifício na psicanálise que proporcionar ao paciente a suspensão necessária de nossa <compreensão>, onde o dizer poderá evoluir”
“que vazio faria aparecer seu desaparecimento?”
1. nunca ter nascido
2. morrer hoje
Todo mundo já maquinou este simples exercício. Honestamente? Sabe-se lá! Mas eu já escrevi cerca de 2 necrológios para mim mesmo! Montaignesco!
a PEDRA no meu sapato que me incomoda há tanto tempo;
a TESOURA, pois eu corto com mordacidade o discurso dos Outros;
o PAPEL de mãe e ao mesmo tempo o dinheiro que eu rasgo, e que pode embrulhar a pedra e qualquer estômago de pedra, triangulando uma vitória!
tábula rasa instrumento cortante BAGULHO INÚTIL EM EXCESSO SOBRE A TERRA, sendo aliás a própria terra!
Pode ir na frente, eu vou de patinete!
Preciso manter o peso, perder se possível, não sou motorizado!
Meu combustível?! Autopropalado!
Eu ajudo quem os pais atrapalham Sociedade Anônima e Anômica
Eu sou o verdadeiro Messias da minha própria autocriada época.
Devaluei o $$. Olhos de serpente não vêem nada neste covil empoeirado, embolorado. Fica um dissabor equivalente, equidistante. Notícias boas e ruins vêm e vão em caráter indiferente. Ó, valei-me! Escapei dos braços de muitas Shivas e religiões!
A fúria e o Som (WILSON!!! – voz do solitário), não necessariamente nesta ordem. Significando tudo, retrocedendo quase nada. Epílogo da peça elizabetana. N de não-vingança. Eu adoro o mato, tanto que o verbo eu conjugaria, noutras circunstâncias e, sabe-se, eu tenho bastante mato escapando pelo couro, ah!, cabeludo, eriçado! Ar-tista sem fôlego – mas que espécie de paradoxo é esse?! Viva cada dia como se fosse seu último – IN VINO VERITAS!
Rogai por nós cobradores agora e na hora de nossa dívida, Aquém!
Eu e eles somos ambos (?!) gratos, a nosso modo.
“Em uma fórmula oriunda do ensino de J. Lacan, que muitos analistas presentemente adotaram, a transferência está situada como o efeito de uma não-resposta ao pedido constituído pelo discurso do paciente.”
Seja um pai para mim ou me diga aquilo que eu quero que me digam: talvez nada! Por desencargo de consciência… Para dar uma descarga no FLUXO DE CONSCIÊNCIA, melhor dizendo.
Refletir sobre a i-nelutável disparidade i-ntelectual…
Rafa el Escritor
“Resta o problema, colocado desde o primeiro capítulo, da sujeição do psicanalista ao modelo teórico que determina sua posição e sua função. Vemos à luz do que acabamos de desenvolver, que convém que este suplemento de sujeição seja reduzido ao extremo. Quer isto dizer que o modelo teórico só pode consistir numa fórmula onde apareça como dominante a função radical do zero e onde se manifeste, reduzida à sua <mesmidade>, a função alternante do sujeito.”
TOGASHI ROLUDO (OU FENDIDO): “De modo mais figurado, digamos que a castração é a cavilha ausente que junta os termos para constituir uma seqüência ou um conjunto; ou ao contrário, digamos que ela é o hiato, a clivagem que marca a separação dos elementos entre si.”
“a castração – mesmo se permanece mal[-]pensada ou insuficientemente conceitualizada – entra em cena em todo processo psicanalítico, na medida em que o tratamento visa evidenciar, analisar a articulação singular de cada <um> [I] com o espaço do zero [0] que ele desvenda no conjunto dos outros <uns> [11111110101010101…].”
“Houve um tempo em que a psicanálise cheirava a enxofre e fazia felizmente parte das atividades malditas: sabia-se então o que ela era: uma interrogação sobre o gozo.” “O que é bendito, benedictus, bemdito, é a afirmação redobrada e magnificada do dito que põe barreira à anulação que é o gozo. O maldito, maledictus, maldito, não é precisamente esta interrogação – diabólica – a respeito da própria função do dito?”
“El problema de la preferencia (o de la proairesis para los griegos) es un problema candente, por el cual se suele mostrar demasiado poco interés.” Em síntese, o problema monumental para o qual as massas não estão maduras (talvez jamais estejam): a relatividade e o absoluto envolvidos no <gosto>.
A supostamente utópica ou impossível DISCUSSÃO DO GOSTO após a Metafísica.
“Até que ponto e mediante que meios é possível determinar as razões primordiais que me permitem considerar algo como preferível e atribuir um significado a tal preferência?”
Superioridade intrínseca e escala de valores.
Outridade
“mosaico de opções”
“Que peso tem a preferência do indivíduo contra a das massas?”
Se não se pode discutir a arte, não se pode discutir mais nada.
Hume (Of the standard of taste), ensaísta e crítico do lado de lá (metafísico): a moral bíblico-alcorânica e o drama sanguinolento são inaceitáveis.
Zeitgeist da aletheia e do Belo.
SEMÂNTICA AUTOGENÉTICA: Fragmentação pós-moderna. Morte da Zeitgeist. Coabitação virtual de todas as Zeitgeister no mesmo indivíduo. Fim de um ciclo milenar e início do IMPÉRIO DA ESQUIZOFRENIA, que não sabemos quanto tempo durará.
“a necessidade de restabelecer, com critérios diferentes, um critério valorativo [valor dos valores] para aplicação aos fenômenos da vida, da arte e da sociedade.”
“as enquetes de Kinsey, método contestável”
“Vejamos alguns exemplos de vanguardas artísticas consideradas escandalosas quando apareceram: 1) numa galeria romana, o pintor Kounellis apresentou o quadro de uma mulher grávida, nua, por cujo ventre passeavam algumas baratas; 2) o artista americano Acconci, em NY, apresentava-se confinado em uma cabine estreita de madeira dentro da qual se entregava à masturbação; 3) na exposição Documenta de Kassel (1972), o romano Vettor Pisani expôs uma mulher nua (que vinha a ser sua irmã), cujo pescoço tinha uma argola metálica, e Pisani lhe aplicava uma <tortura simulada>, cutucando uma ferida falsa pintada na perna da modelo; 4) a escultora polaca Alina Szapocznikow expunha em Paris (1970) alguns <tumores>, modelados em plástico, hiperrealistas; 5) o artista austríaco Herman Nitsch alugou um castelo nos arredores de Viena (1968-72) para representar seu <teatro das orgias e dos mistérios> (Orgien und Mysterien Theater): tratavam-se de matanças <rituais> de cordeiros e bezerros, com cujo sangue e tripas os expectadores eram banhados; para isso, Nitsch usava condutos especialmente concebidos, que derramavam o sangue e pedaços dos intestinos sobre o público; o roteiro incluía a participação dos expectadores, que deviam, além de receber os restos mortais dos animais, besuntar-se a si mesmos e aos seus vizinhos com seus próprios excrementos; havia uma série de outros <jogos> sado-masoquistas na exposição, como a celebração de missas hereges e a crucificação simbólica de algumas das ovelhas. Aos interessados, uma descrição detalhada e explicação crítica deste evento figuram em PETER GORSEN, Das Prinzip Obszön, Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburgo, 1969,(*) pp. 114-5, que transcreve também um comunicado da polícia austríaca proibindo esse gênero de <espetáculo aberrante>. Segundo Nitsch, em carta ao próprio Gorsen, o cordeiro crucificado representa simultaneamente o Pai, o Rei, a autoridade política, o ídolo estatal, a divindade. Em suma, tratava-se de uma revivificação dos cultos dionisíacos (<A revolução é um fenômeno dionisíaco>, diz Nitsch), conducentes à liberação do homem de seus tabus religiosos e políticos. (…) É típico de nossa época pretender ressuscitar cultos e práticas iniciáticos ou pseudo-mágicos pertencentes a culturas antigas, em que ditas práticas possuíam ou podiam possuir um valor autêntico; hoje sua <imitação> – seja mediante a astrologia, alucinógenos, ritos budistas, mistérios dionisíaco-órficos como neste caso, ginástica iogue, etc. – tende a ser daninha e contraproducente a despeito da intenção autoral.
(*) Até o momento, o volume-resenha mais completo sobre as relações entre arte, pornografia e sociedade.”
“Exemplos como os acima multiplicam-se em outros segmentos: já pude discorrer em outra obra sobre o caso do musicólogo que gravou em fita magnética os últimos gemidos de um homem agonizante após um acidente de trânsito; bastante conhecido é ainda o caso do cineasta japonês que filmou o transcurso dos últimos instantes da vida de seu pai moribundo de câncer.”
“um deslizamento (contínuo) do significado por debaixo do significante” Lacan
Conceito de ASSIMETRIA ESTÉTICA por VON WRIGHT (ou mais bem uma primeira lei da assimetria): “Assimetria significa que se um estado é preferido em relação a outro, necessariamente o segundo estado não é preferido em detrimento do primeiro; i.e., pelo mesmo sujeito na mesma ocasião” Relação subsumida na fórmula-função (pPq) ~(qPp), p≠q.
“O assimétrico é a premissa de qualquer proairesis.” “O simétrico se identifica com a geometrização mórbida da esquizofrenia.” Paradoxo: a ERA DA ASSIMETRIA é a ERA DA ESQUIZOFRENIA. Que seja apenas um estágio transitório entre duas eras mais autênticas, não destrói-se a contradição inerente. Resta saber se ficaremos indefinidamente presos a uma simulação indefinida desta mesma condição, como diz Baudrillard, ou se essa dialética deixa de ser estéril e se torna propulsora da superação em algum momento. Em suma, se o “novo elemento” vitorioso será ou seguirá sendo a esquizofrenia, em seu sentido pejorativo, ou a assimetria. Em busca de uma nova simetria, de um novo pathos normal.
moral corrente: contradição em termos! moral petrificada
PRIMERA PARTE – UN ANÁLISIS PROAIRÉTICO
CAPÍTULO 1. PREFERENCIA, PREVISIÓN Y CAUSALIDAD
“belief is nothing but a strong and lively idea derived from a present impression (perception) related to it” HUME, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739
“A maioria das vezes, os lingüistas realizam o estudo dessas modificações [de significante-significado] exclusivamente por zelo científico e erudito, sem ter em conta adequadamente as premissas socioantropológicas que as originam (ou, se se quer, invertendo ostermos da proposição no sentido de Whorf, até que se vejam as próprias premissas socioantropológicas determinadas por tais modificações!).”
“Quando, p.ex., um termo como o italiano testa (para nos atermos a um dos exemplos oferecidos por Guiraud, La sémantique), originariamente uma metáfora estilística nascida da associação da cabeça (caput) com o vaso de terracota (latim testa), passou a significar cabeça, com o que se semantizou de outro modo, enquanto que – acrescentaria eu – em outras línguas românicas adquiriu um significado mais parcial e setorial: testa em português = <frente> ou, inclusive, permaneceu unido ao lexema antigo (cabeza em espanhol = caput), etc., encontramo-nos perante um exemplo fácil do difícil que resulta <prognosticar> a evolução semântica de um termo – do difícil que resulta a previsão de um significado –, mas ao mesmo tempo da importância que pode ter para os efeitos denotativos e conotativos de uma língua o fato de que se produzam semelhantes transformações.
Outro exemplo: a palavra italiana finestra – em espanhol ventana, em português janela – apresenta, ainda considerando só estes 3 idiomas, conotações completamente diferentes, relacionadas com as condições de <abertura ao exterior> (finestra e também no caso do alemão fenster), de <proteção contra o vento> (ventana e também no caso do inglês window) ou de <porta pequena> (janela, de janua).”
“Our ideia of necessity and causation arises entirely from the uniformity observable in the operations of Nature.” Hume
“Max Müller, para quem a própria interpretação falsa ou aberrante de algumas normas é a que abre caminho para muitas interpretações míticas destinadas a se consolidar depois com o hábito e a adquirir valor de norma. Müller explica as razões do mito de Deucalião e Pirra, que fazem nascer os homens das pedras, pela analogia entre as expressões laoi e laas; e o mito de Dafne, transformada em planta de laurel, pelo fato de que a palavra dafne tem a mesma raiz sânscrita ahana, que significa aurora, etc.” “Pouco tempo depois Cassirer viria a refutar tal teoria, detalhadamente.”
“Segundo Julius Schwabe (em seu riquíssimo volume sobre os signos do zodíaco, Archetyp und Tierkreis. Grundlinien einer kosmischen Symbolik und Mythologie, 1951), a constelação de Gêmeos conotava no passado um elemento masculino em Pólux e outro feminino (ou fracamente masculino) em Cástor. Prova-o o fato de que entre os romanos os homens <juravam a Pólux> e as mulheres a Cástor. Outra prova desta masculinidade duvidosa de um dos gêmeos da constelação seria seu próprio nome, que apresenta um evidente significado castratório, como, além do mais, a própria lenda sobre o animal castor. De acordo com a lenda, esse animal, quando caçado, preferia autocastrar-se antes que ver-se privado de seus testículos pelo caçador: segundo os antigos, nestes órgãos encontrava-se uma substância utilíssima para o preparo de medicamentos contra a histeria, o tifo e outras doenças.”
“Segundo a concepção da alternância de grandes ciclos temporais (que alguns chamam de <grande ano platônico>), à medida que avançam as diferentes constelações no céu, entra-se ou sai-se de uma era determinada. Cada grande era <cósmica> pertenceria a uma constelação zodiacal determinada e se veria influenciada por ela. Pois bem: podemos comprovar então que o nascimento de Cristo se produziu ou coincidiu com a passagem do sol da constelação de Áries para a de Peixes (e temos de sobra exemplos e conotações, não só astrológicos, como geofísicos, geográficos e lingüísticos para a sucessão dos <anos platônicos>), o que nos levaria a reconhecer uma razão muito mais profunda e <oculta> para o uso do nome e da imagem do peixe como símbolo de Cristo, além da aparição do nome peixe em grego para se referir algumas vezes a Jesus Cristo no Novo Testamento. A passagem da Era de Áries à Era de Touro, e desta à de Peixes (que coincide precisamente com o cristianismo e, portanto, com nossa era), à qual sucederá a de Aquário, aparece agora ilustrada com muitos dados inéditos a respeito dos já conhecidos à época de Schwabe. A propósito da denominação das <eras cósmicas> a partir dos signos do zodíaco, consultar o referido autor.”
“Ist es nötig noch darauf hinzuweisen, dass die Urchristen, als sie das uralte Fischsymbol aufgriffen, sich damit eben als eine Gemeinschaft kennzeichnen wollten, die an Wiedergeburt im Geiste, Auferstehung, und Unsterblichkeit glaubte? Sie knüpften damit an die orphischpythagoreische Vorstellung der delphinischen Menschenseele an.” Schwabe “Is it necessary to point out that when the original Christians picked up the ancient fish symbol, they were trying to identify themselves as a community that believed in rebirth in the spirit, resurrection, and immortality? In doing so, they followed up on the Orphic-Pythagorean concept of the Dolphinic human soul.”
“Quanto à relação entre peixe e golfinho, considerado como animal fundamental, veja-se KARL KERÉNYI, Einführung in das Wesen der Mythologie.”
“as discussões sobre a importância que esses deslocamentos das constelações no firmamento poderiam ter para a confecção do horóscopo, segundo se tenha ou não em conta a posição astronômica e real do sol com respeito ao zodíaco, foram e seguem sendo numerosíssimas e encarniçadas: alguns astrólogos sustentam que o horóscopo não deveria considerar deslocamentos puramente físicos; outros afirmam que tais modificações contam também para fins astrológicos. Vemos que até o possível aspecto premonitório, presente nas práticas astrológicas, se encontra subordinado a um aspecto puramente semiótico, ou pelo menos se discute a partir dele – algo no mínimo curioso para uma crença esotérica!”
“Só a arte está em condições de propor os invólucros vazios de um significado ainda não exposto à luz do dia.”
“Por lo demás, estudios recientes sobre el factor tiempo, sobre su base fisiológica, biológica, patológica, han demostrado de sobra la posibilidad de una dilatación o de una restricción de lo <vivido> temporal y la posibilidad de obtener (mediante drogas, medicamentos y ejercicios especiales del tipo del Yoga, como el <training autógeno> de J.H. Schultz) las modificaciones más variadas de la temporalidad.”
CAPÍTULO 2. EL SIMBOLISMO DEL TIEMPO EN EL ARTE DE HOY
“Mucho más evidente es el aspecto simbolizador del tiempo en la categoría limítrofe del arte óptico-cinético (op art) en la que nos encontramos con obras inmóviles en realidad, pero que <sugieren> el movimiento (Bridget Riley, Alviani, Soto, Cruz Díez, etc.). En dichas obras – que hace unos 10 años [1962] aproximadamente estuvieron muy en boga – el tiempo existe <potencialmente>”
“Por que o ritmo é tão importante para nossa existência e por que uma alteração daquele se reflete num mal-estar profundo?”
“No me parece que haya otra forma de explicar la razón por la que muchas creaciones de nuestros días – basadas en tiempos alterados (en sentido psicodélico, en sentido musical-aleatorio, en sentido poético, etc.) – conducen a otras tantas situaciones de malestar físico y psíquico.”
“Así, pues, esa sensación de ligereza y de <ausencia de tiempo> que se puede experimentar en un rápido vuelo transoceánico (en el que la única sensación experimentada es, no la de la velocidad, sino la de la lentitud, dado que así se nos aparece el movimiento del avión frente a la vastedad y a la inmovilidad del paisaje de nubes y del océano situado debajo) corresponde a la ausencia de tiempo de muchos ejemplos de música moderna y de algunas situaciones de las artes visuales que hoy utilizan la dimensión temporal para expresarse.”
“la obsolescencia de la obra (de arte o producida por la industria) – hoy tan aguda, tan paradigmática – demuestra tangiblemente la invasión y la acción de la <consunción> [destruição lenta mas progressiva], del factor temporal, sobre las obras del hombre y la necesidad de su simbolización por parte de las diferentes artes”
“la marcada separación entre mentalidad y comportamiento juvenil y senil encuentra una contrapartida en una diversificación igualmente marcada en la mentalidad y en las actitudes de quienes tienen 16, 25, 30 años. Así, pues, existe una diferenciación destacada entre grados que todavía pueden referirse a una edad juvenil, cosa que no me parece sucediera con igual relieve hace 20 o 40 años.” [!]
“En mi opinión, ese hecho significa que se está produciendo una aceleración del tiempo <existencial> con respecto al fisio-patológico. El tiempo – como símbolo de un devenir que no se detiene – ha invadido estructuras todavía ayer sólidas y consistentes.”
“la sensación de una <amenaza temporal>, propensa a resquebrajar la seguridad de la existencia, está presente por todas partes y la simbolizan los aspectos artísticos y pseudoartísticos a los que he aludido”
O conceito de tempo “SAE (Standard Average European” de Whorf.
“No hay duda de que el fenómeno de la progresiva desaparición o atrofiamiento del pretérito indefinido en lenguas como el italiano (a excepción del toscano) y el francés (y NO en el español), o como la eficacia cada vez menor del futuro (en lenguas que lo presentan, p.ej., en forma compuesta exclusivamente: alemán, griego moderno, croata, esloveno) o <asimilado> al presente (como el ruso y otras lenguas eslavas, cuando utilizan el presente del aspecto perfectivo para indicar el futuro) o recurren a construcciones complejas en lugar de utilizar la forma originaria del futuro (como el francés: je vais faire, el español: voy a hacer, y el propio italiano: conto di fare, sto per fare, mi accingo a fare, por no hablar del futuro japonés, que muchas veces se puede identificar con el presente), demuestra que la actitud del hablante tiende la mayoría de las veces a eludir las situaciones temporales <definitivas> o bien definidas y a adoptar otras más desdibujadas y ambiguas.”
CAPÍTULO 3. ARTE CONCEPTUAL: PREFERENCIA Y TESAURIZACIÓN [“MAL DO ACUMULADOR”]
“El abismo que separa a 2 Weltanschauungen – o, mejor, a dos Kunstanschauungen – a sólo pocos años de distancia parece insalvable.”
“¿Por qué kitsch? Porque el cielo es demasiado azul, la vegetación demasiado verde, la superficie de la figura demasiado translúcida; y, en consecuencia, el conjunto aparece ya manipulado en gran medida y preparado para que se lo comercialice y se lo ofrezca a los turistas, para uso del <delfín burgués>, que pasará en este lugar vacaciones suficientemente prestigiosas como para que sirvan de status symbol de cara a los amigos y a los conocidos.”
“la presentación más o menos exacta, más o menos magnificada, de la realidad, ya sea la fotográfica, ya sea – con mayor razón aún – la impresionista o la enteramente abstracta, resulta estar superada.”
“Aquí quisiera limitarme a precisar el porqué de la aparición de una clase de preferencia por el aspecto conceptual en el arte visual, tal como se ha ido revelando en el último decenio, porque me parece uno de los temas en que la separación entre la época actual y la que acaba de transcurrir resulta más marcada, en que resulta más sintomática la afirmación de un tipo de preferencia hasta hace poco inimaginable.”
“dadá, el surrealismo, fueron las consecuencias extremas de un persiflage de la presentación naturalista del mundo exterior. El informalismo señaló un regreso inútil a una especie de impresionismo pictórico, sin <contenidos>, pero no sine materia; e incluso la pintura-objeto, que desembocó, por un lado, en el pop-art y, por otro, en el arte programado y cinético (me excuso por la rapidez telegráfica y por la aproximación de estas definiciones), seguía recurriendo, a pesar de todo, a la tangibilidad densa y manipulable de la obra.”
“Por lo demás, no es casualidad que un movimiento tan vasto y, en definitiva, tan <incómodo> como el del conceptualismo se haya revelado precisamente en estos últimos años (de 1965 en adelante): años que han visto el surgimiento de las sublevaciones estudiantiles de 66-8 y su decadencia, la extensión y continuación de la guerra en Vietnam y de las guerrillas en tantas partes del mundo, la difusión de la droga, la decadencia de los movimientos de vanguardia en el cine y en el teatro underground, la crisis de la novela y de la música dodecafónica y, después, de la aleatoria”
“un nihilismo diferente del dadaísta, porque carece de fermentos irónicos y humorísticos, un nihilismo ya no propio de Duchamp, con frecuencia macabro, a veces irritante, otras masoquista o sádico.”
“hace 20 años [1952], la única o más importante tarea del crítico comprometido, del estetólogo, era la de defender la vanguardia, de intentar hacer de mediador entre el universo circunscrito, circunspecto, del artista y el obtuso, cargado de anteojos culturales y morales, del público.”
“la temporada de los happenings fue de corta duración, y en muchos casos se vio <comercializada> mediante la reproducción cinematográfica.”
“nuestra época ha llegado a un punto en que la escisión entre arte <puro> y arte utilitario es cada vez más clara y cruel. El primer sector se va alejando cada día más de la comprensión y del interés del gran público (incluso de un público relativamente culto), más aún de lo que ocurría con el arte abstracto de los años 30, con el op y el pop de los años 60; el segundo sector se acerca cada vez más al producto del diseño industrial y se une a la gran familia del kitsch.”
“El público se alimenta constantemente, de um modo que ya otras veces he definido como absurdo, de <sonidos musicales>, casi siempre carentes de interés artístico alguno, sin propósito renovador alguno, con una función de <relleno sonoro> exclusivamente, ni más ni menos que la del ruido que sube de la calle o del <gorjeo de los pájaros> de los tiempos remotos.” Aqui, muita coisa mudou!
“el llamado público de conciertos, los viejos ambientes de los aficionados a la <música clásica>, incluso gran parte de los profesionales (directores de orquestra, profesores de conservatorio, etc.) desarrollan sólo programas a base de música del pasado, sin interés ni comprensión algunos por la música de nuestros días (me refiero a la de Stockhausen, Schnebel, Berio, Cage, Donatoni, etc.). Las obras de los músicos contemporáneos están destinadas a pocos centenares de personas dispersas por el mundo, todavía menos que las que se interesan por el arte conceptual, por el land art, por el arte pobre.”
“Algunos de esos conceptos (como los de tesaurización y analidad aplicados al coleccionismo) surgieron en una discusión con el neurofisiólogo y psicoanalista Mauro Mancia.”
CONCEITO DE ANALIDADE POBREMENTE APLICADO AO COLECIONADOR: “Para muitos colecionadores, o fato de entrar em posse do quadro, da estátua, é por si mesmo fonte de gozo, de igual modo que o é o entesouramento [retenção] de suas próprias fezes pela criança.”
“Muchas veces, las casas de los coleccionistas tienen pocos muebles y objetos, están mal conservadas, con mobiliario anticuado y desmesuradamente moderno, incluso de gusto dudoso. Las obras están amontonadas en las paredes, una junto a otra, sin ningún respeto por su naturaleza particular, sin ninguna preocupación por ese <espacio vital> que cada una necesitaría ni por su convivencia recíproca.”
“En realidad, poetas concretos tradicionales como Ferdinand Kriwet, Rot, De Campos, etc., siguen ateniéndose, como por lo demás, Gominger (quizás el más riguroso y más imaginativo de los concretistas), al aspecto semántico del lenguaje verbal”
“En definitiva: muchos artistas conceptuales han tenido que someterse al deseo de los aficionados. Han tenido que encontrar el modo de saciar el apetito voraz de los <objetos>, siempre renovado, de aquéllos; han tenido que renunciar a sus sueños de pureza, de transitoriedade, de pobreza.”
CAPÍTULO 4. LA MODA COMO EXALTACIÓN PROAIRÉTICA
“Nenhum outro setor da atividade e da criatividade humana é mais representativo que a moda para uma investigação de caráter proairético [que versa sobre as preferências estéticas do público].” “a moda encarna, quase em estado puro, a preferencialidade, que, ressaltamos, não é a <superioridade> de determinada situação.” Sendo assim, a moda não é uma arte. Ou quem sabe seja o que vem depois do fim da arte.
“Quando dizemos hoje: <a lingüística, o estruturalismo, a psicanálise, o marxismo, a fenomenologia, etc., estão na moda>, no fundo reconhecemos que essas doutrinas poderosas, que essas solenes correntes do pensamentos, podem-se reduzir, no final, a simples momentos efêmeros de preferência, e que, portanto, depois de saboreadas o suficiente, destrinchadas e ostentadas, acabarão rápida e afortunadamente sendo substituídas por outras.”
“A palavra alemã Genuss, que os dicionários costumam traduzir por: gozo, posse, desfrute, uso, etc., significa na realidade: saboreio unido a gozo de uma substância ou situação determinada, e não me parece que exista uma palavra em nossa língua com a qual se a possa substituir. Fala-se de um Genuss pelo café, pelo álcool, pela droga, etc.”
Estilo X Styling (kitsch)
(passado – séc. XIX X séc. XX)
ex: Estilo Império, estilo Luís XVI, rococó, estilo Rainha Ana…
Havia um sincronismo e validades universais (ditados pela aristocracia).
“Bastaria recordar os numerosos trabalhos de Wölfflin, Dvorak, Panofsky, para se dar conta de que muitas de suas análises já não se podem aplicar às formas artísticas de nossos dias. Mas hoje – dado que nossa análise é predominantemente sincrônica – já nem podemos falar de estilo a propósito de certos móveis dinamarqueses, ou eletrodomésticos italianos, senão, sobretudo, de moda e de styling. É um fato – e muitos o afirmaram com razão – que o Art Nouveau, o Jugendstil, constituiu-se como o último estilo autêntico de nossa época.”
A moda do kitsch e o kitsch da moda.
“El propio hecho de haber considerado que se pudieran aplicar esquemas estructuralistas a la moda (como ha hecho Barthes en su Système de la mode), pero limitando en realidad su análisis al aspecto <verbal>, de nomenclatura, relacionado con ella, ha hecho que muchos prediquen la necesidad, o la oportunidad, de incluir la moda dentro de un aspecto lingüístico-estructuralista, como tantos otros sectores de la sociedad y de las ciencias humanas en general. Y la cosa no presentaría dificultad, si no se diera en este caso una eventualidad que no me parece se haya considerado: la de una institucionalización a priori, y no a posteriori, de los elementos lingüísticos relativos a dicho supuesto código.”
“Con frecuencia se afirma que la moda es un fenómeno vinculado a la sociedad capitalista y desconocido, o poco conocido, en los países socialistas y revolucionarios; no resulta muy difícil demostrar la falsedad de esa hipótesis.”
“A redundância: tudo é um invólucro teatral e barroco da propriedade doméstica: a mesa é coberta por uma toalha de mesa, ela mesma protegida por uma outra toalha de plástico. Cortinas e cortinas duplas às janelas. Tapetes, capas, revestimentos, abajures…” Baudrillard
“se o fato de trajar mangas de jaqueta excessivamente largas ou calças excessivamente apertadas (nos períodos em que <é moda>) deve ser considerado de mau gosto – kitsch –, podíamos também ampliar este juízo a outros setores para além da moda. Sempre voltará a época da lâmpada com luz oblíqua, talheres escandinavos, louça de aço inox, etc.”
“Mesmo no cinema, apenas em casos excepcionais – Potemkin, Greta Garbo, Buster Keaton, O vampiro de Düsseldorf (para citar 4 exemplos bem distintos entre si) – as imensas qualidades artísticas conseguem <vencer> o desgaste estilístico devido a uma questão de moda, que predomina nos longas bons mas não <ótimos>. O modo de se mover dos personagens, as frases pronunciadas, a entonação das vozes, certas atitudes românticas ou passionais hoje completamente defasadas e consideradas ingenuamente românticas, ou ridiculamente licenciosas, acabam contaminando mesmo as cenas que eram (e seriam ainda) de qualidade estética e técnica.”
“observar os rostos carrancudos e truculentos ou então inexpressivos, severos e carnavalescos dos diferentes hierarcas nazifascistas é – para todos, hoje – um espetáculo grotesco, ainda mais cômico que propriamente penoso e entristecedor. Como justificar o fato, senão pensando que um grande componente de moda interveio para dar àquela época o trato que ela merece?”
“De praxe, consideramos a toilette (a higiene, os hábitos e estilo) de nossos pais mais ridícula e démodé que a de nossos avós ou bisavós.”
“Na música, teatro, poesia não se adverte esse envelhecimento estético tão veloz decorrente da passagem da moda, uma vez que conseguimos substituir instintivamente com nosso modo de ser e de nos comportarmos aquilo que está descrito na novela ou indicado na peça. No cinema e na fotografia (meios <realistas>) isso é impossível. (…) Uma possível fonte de retroalimentação, que pode ser causa, ainda que também efeito de um espírito de época, desse estado de coisas efêmero é o fato de que no passado não era possível apresentar aos próprios descendentes, documentalmente, e com absoluta fidelidade, uma dada moda, sendo assim imperceptível, senão menos evidente e estridente, o contraste entre o ontem e o hoje.”
“Está ligeiramente out (fora de moda) quem ostenta nas paredes de seu chalé ou casa de verão uma pintura informal (em 1972), como também o está quem usa como música de fundo para receber seus amigos um Respighi¹ ou Pfitzner², embora o mesmo não se possa dizer de quem opta pelo jazz de vanguarda mais recente ou uma marcha de Bach.”
¹ Compositor italiano do XIX-XX, já ele mesmo um nostálgico de períodos ainda mais remotos (sécs. XVI ao XVIII).
² Praticamente o mesmo se pode dizer deste segundo compositor alemão, incluindo o período em que viveu e exerceu sua influência e seu gosto nostálgico, particularmente entusiasta de Palestrina.
“…e as coisas estão mudando enquanto escrevo”
“na Itália, basta seguir um automóvel para observar um exemplo perfeito dessa veemência gesticulatória do povo (não só abundante como até excessiva), com freqüência a causa de acidentes de trânsito, graves até: a maioria das vezes ambas as mãos do motorista abandonam o volante para que ele possa comunicar a seu companheiro a profundidade de seu pensamento de maneira apropriada (que o <co-piloto> decerto não vê, ocupado em vigiar o tráfego!).” “um baixo contínuo que acompanha a palavra”
“o V de vitória com a mão era quase desconhecido, antes de Churchill popularizar o gesto”
“A saudação de punho cerrado de tipo comunista está, talvez, em fase de decadência, como muitos gestos indicativos de <ter fome>, <enganar>, <vou dormir>. A saudação fascista, que esteve em voga, desgraçadamente, por muitos anos, seguiu, depois, existindo com um valor de saudação <normal>, desde que fosse executada com menor elevação do braço e com menos vigor (perdendo assim seu ar <romano>).”
O ciao ou adeus italiano na estação de trem, p.ex., antes de uma larga viagem, era vertical ou frontal (oscilações do braço entre a pessoa que saúda e a direção do viajante); com o tempo, passaram a usar o tchau que hoje conhecemos: oscilações laterais, à moda anglo-saxã ou germânica. Mais curioso ainda: em poucos anos, usos gestuais passaram por transformações importantes: antes mexiam-se os dedos das mãos no adeus, e a palma ficava imóvel; depois, os dedos ficavam juntos e sem se mexerem, e a mão adquiriu dinamismo.
“a passagem do tabaco da aspiração ao fumo se deveu a um aperfeiçoamento do gosto, ou <mudança de moda>. Não se pode dizer que amanhã não se voltará à moda de aspirar o tabaco ou de fumar o café ou mascar o chá.” Congelamento!
“é provável que num futuro próximo (quando, como é verossímil, se tenha liberado a maconha e substâncias semelhantes) o período atual pareça fortemente condicionado: primeiro, pelo proibicionismo; depois, pela liberação; e, finalmente, pela provável decadência do uso de tais substâncias.”
“Isso é o que não me parece admissível: buscar refúgio numa abolição ou atenuação da própria atividade consciente mediante fármacos que a embotam (ou a exaltam, mas desfigurando-a, desegotizando-a) é contrário a todos os princípios a que se dirigiu a civilização ocidental; é ainda adverso buscar refúgio ou auxílio em tentativas mecânicas de vidência ou de visões supressensíveis (práticas iogues, p.ex.).”
“conhecida é a relação entre sexualidade e iniciação no budismo clássico, como na prática do despertar do Chakra” “métodos ocultos que não são apropriados para nossa época”
Um tal Timothy Leary, psicólogo doidão, prescrevia o cogumelo Teonanacatl, tradicional entre aborígenes mexicanos, a seus pacientes nos anos 70. O Dalai-Lama rebateu este “profissional” em 1971: “O que mais falta aos próprios usuários desses narcóticos é o que poderia ser benéfico em seu uso – a Claridade, a Pureza e a Liberdade.”
CAPÍTULO 5. IDEOLOGÍA COMO PROAIRÉTICA PATOLÓGICA
“Joseph Gabel, em seu La conciencia falsa, que segue sendo indubitavelmente o melhor estudo dum aspecto patológico-político ou, se se quer, psicanalítico-marxista da ideologia, analizou bastante bem este <ponto fraco> do fanatismo ideológico.”
“Segundo Dévreux, se podemos considerar o período nazi como o estabelecimento de uma forma esquizofrênica, poderíamos, igualmente, considerar a sociedade européia de finais do séc. XIX como tendencialmente <histérica>.”
“Talvez não se possa dizer o mesmo da Itália em sua relação com o fascismo o mesmo da Alemanha em sua relação com o nazismo; a <cura> italiana não se produziu com o mesmo vigor.”
“Um caso de paranóia política poderia ser o de Israel: o enlace com pontos de partida ético-religiosos, que remontam a milhares de anos; a incrível firmeza na perseguição de um ideal construído sobre um conceito de <nação>, totalmente teórico; o fato de ter ressuscitado uma língua morta há vários séculos…”
“É sabido que a ignorância das funções mais elementares relacionados com o sexo era (até há pouco, se bem que segue sendo em parte) enorme, como também é conhecida a razão para isso: religião ou confissão (catolicismo), falso moralismo (vitoriano) ou alegações puritanas de virtude hipócritas (quakers, calvinistas e protestantes no geral).”
O VOCÁBULO “TEMPO” NOS IDIOMAS ESLAVOS (TEMPO METEOROLÓGICO, TEMPO CRONOLÓGICO):
Croata – vrijeme (clima); goda, rok (devir)
Eslovaco – cas (devir)
Esloveno – vreme (clima); ura (devir)
Polaco – cas (devir)
Russo – vremja (raiz ambivalente); pogoda(clima); cas (devir)
Tcheco – cas (devir)
SEGUNDA PARTE – LAS OPCIONES ECOLÓGICO-URBANÍSTICAS
INTRODUCCIÓN
“A arte (pintura e escultura, mas inclusive a poesia) deixou-se implicar nessa <glorificação do objeto> (a partir do surrealismo, percorrendo a pop art e a op art) de tal modo que não consegue mais livrar-se dessa objetualização dominante.”
“O sutil mal-estar, o sentimento de frustração que experimenta hoje um homem que tenha vivido sua infância no tempo pré-guerras, especialmente nas zonas densamente industrializadas, talvez passem batidos ao jovem nascido no pós-guerras, quando o estrondo das motos, a concentração de fumaça, o estrépito do tráfego, a poluição dos mares eram já uma realidade. E é igualmente possível imaginar que o homem de um futuro próximo esteja já imunizado, ainda mais que o jovem contemporâneo [1972!], contra o barulho e o ar poluído e cinzento onipresentes.”
“Numa praia contaminada nos arredores de Roma tive a ocasião de presenciar um filho perguntar ao pai se podia encher seu baldinho de água do mar: estava o menino tão impregnado da noção de contaminação que não podia deixar de considerar a água do mar como uma espécie de veneno, que se deveria evitar ao máximo.”
Expressões como “o céu azul” e “os eternos cumes nevados da montanha” já se tornaram tão kitsch quanto “amor à pátria” ou “lar doce lar” ou “a moral cristã”, “o seio materno”, “o espírito do corpo” e por aí vai…
“Seria hoje absurdo seguir falando de construção e urbanismo nos termos caros a um Le Corbusier ou um Lúcio Costa há não mais de 20 anos, ou a um Gropius, por exemplo.”
1. DESFASE [DEFASAGEM] ECOLÓGICO Y RESEMANTIZACIÓN URBANÍSTICA
“a indiferença quase total quanto à contribuição e à missão das <artes visuais> em integração com o meio ambiente tem feito com que o que se chama de arquitetura perca quase toda conexão com sua matriz expressiva primária.”
RECADO A LÚCIO COSTA: “A utopia do Bauhaus, que creu poder predicar e pôr em prática a identificação absoluta entre <utilidade> e <beleza> chegou ao fim.”
“Em lugar de almejar colonizar montes de pedra sem atmosfera como os da Lua (meta de aventuras recentes, já nada empolgantes, uma vez que nem as crianças assistem mais os programas dedicados aos vôos lunares na TV [1972!]), seria melhor que o homem tentasse não arruinar em definitivo o belíssimo planeta no qual teve a ventura de nascer.”
“Em primeiro lugar, é necessário livrar-se de formulações estéticas antiquadas que se obstinam em considerar a arquitetura como uma arte plástica, irmã da pintura e da escultura, como se fôra uma espécie de superdecoração em escala de cidade.”
“Se bem que em algumas artes (música e poesia) se possa apontar os equivalentes das partículas elementares da fala (morfemas, lexemas, sintagmas), no caso da arquitetura e urbanismo isso é muito mais problemático.”
“De um ponto de vista semiótico-territorial serão mais aceitáveis as tristíssimas favelas brasileiras, ou tugúrios colombianos, que as villas miseria argentinas. Talvez esta afirmação necessite um esclarecimento: significará, então, o que eu disse que não se pode identificar o aspecto semiológico com o sociológico? Se nos dispusermos a aceitar as abomináveis favelas, por se integrarem de modo mais <orgânico> à cidade do Rio, somos por isso insensíveis às conotações sociais que esta preferência supõe? Aí está o núcleo do problema: também na antiguidade romana, babilônica, grega, pré-colombiana, existiram as injustiças sociais mais inacreditáveis, mas não monstruosidades urbanístico-arquitetônicas como nas atuais Milan, Roma e Buenos Aires.”
“Os centros das cidades-satélites suecas não são nada senão shopping centers de tipo americano, enquanto que, na contra-mão, o <não-centro> das grandes cidades ianques (Cleveland, Atlanta, Houston) – excluindo-se talvez Manhattan, Boston e São Francisco da conta – já deixaram de existir, degradaram-se até se converter em setor de negócios ou mera sede administrativo-bancário-política, onde ninguém vive, onde a vida cessa quando cessa o expediente. E esse fenômeno começa a prevalecer em algumas cidades alemãs de design <americanizado>.”
2. LOS FACTORES PROAIRÉTICOS EN EL DESIGN AMBIENTAL
“Alvin Toffler contaba cómo en 70 de las mayores ciudades americanas el tiempo de residencia media en el mismo lugar era menos de 4 años. El desarraigo con respecto al hábitat propio no sería grave por sí mismo, si condujese a la reconstrucción en otro lugar de otro Heimat; pero eso es precisamente lo que ya no sucede a causa del carácter provisional del empleo, de la familia, que provocan el desinterés afectivo por el suelo urbano o por el natural.”
3. PREFERENCIAS Y PREVENCIONES EN LA ARQUITECTURA INDUSTRIALIZADA Y EN EL DESIGN
“a arquitetura industralizada (ou pré-fabricada, como com freqüência se diz, erroneamente) constitui um dos pontos delicados da exposição, que reaparece sempre que se fala de originalidade dos edifícios, de fantasia construtiva, da tão necessária luta contra o descenso do nível inventivo, contra a uniformização e a homogeneização das construções arquitetônicas de nossos dias.”
4. LOS PRECEDENTES DE UNA SEMIÓTICA ARQUITECTÓNICA
“Por mi parte, estoy convencido de que antes que nada hay que considerar la lingüística como una de las ramas de la semiótica, y no al revés (…) (como sostienen con frecuencia algunos autores franceses).” “En el caso de la arquitectura es evidente que no se puede hablar de una división en fonemas, sino, si acaso, sólo en <morfemas> (o sea, en partículas morfológicamente significativas, ¡ya que el elemento fonético está ausente!)” Um capítulo que não faz o menor sentido (como quase toda a segunda parte do livro)!
“Desgraçado do edifício que se disfarça sob o aspecto de outro, como – desgraçadamente – ocorre com freqüência: igreja com aparência de night club; estádio com a de templo; escola com a de açougue [!!!] (a menos que não seja incomum alguns prédios constituírem uma espécie de curiosidade <agradável>, conquanto isso parece ter sido moda passageira dos 1800)!”
“si una partitura de Bussotti puede considerarse con el mismo criterio que una pintura o un diseño moderno, también algunas notaciones arquitectónicas (croquis, proyectos, etc.), modernas y antiguas, tienen ya de por sí un gran valor artístico: basta con pensar en los célebres esbozos de Mendelssohn, en los de Haering o, sobre todo, en los de Scharoun, y, en el pasado, en algunos proyectos, realizados o no, de Ammannati, de Leonardo, de Miguel Angel, de Leon Battista Alberti. El valor artístico de dichos proyectos – prescindiendo de su <colocación semiótica> – es notable, y sería muy difícil decidir hasta qué punto se trata de obras de diseño, de maqueta, o equiparables a las realizaciones arquitectónicas auténticas. Como es sabido, según algunos, el croquis y el proyecto, si se desarrollaran y profundizaran lo suficiente, equivaldrían perfectamente a la obra ya realizada. (Y en cierto sentido lo vimos, cuando, durante la última guerra, se pudieron reconstruir algunas arquitecturas de la antigüedad sobre la base y con la ayuda de diseños de la época conservados y, por tanto, realizables.)”
“La lectura de la partitura, aunque informa, incluso de forma muy precisa, sobre determinado fragmento musical, no por ello deja de ser una lectura-no-musical (o, por lo menos, no sonora); según la opinión de algunos músicos (Stockhausen, Castaldi) no es otra cosa que el registro mediante un código muy perfeccionado de un objeto sonoro cuyo auténtico disfrute sólo puede producirse a través del órgano del oído. Stockhausen, p.ej., afirma que el tipo de <goce> que le produce el recorrer rápidamente una partitura (incluso saltando de un ponto a otro de la composición) es totalmente diferente al de la audición del mismo fragmento.” Cf. STOCKHAUSEN, Texte zur elektronischen und instrumentale Musik, 1963.
5. LA OPCIÓN POR LO ASIMÉTRICO Y LA ASIMETRÍA DE LAS OPCIONES
“en la Weltanschauung zen y taoísta predomina la tendencia a lo asimétrico, y algunos conceptos como los de wabí y de sabi podrían aproximarse al de asimetría.”
“Parece impossível, mas minha criada de quarto não admite que eu coloque minhas coisas na cômoda de forma assimétrica; quando limpa minha casa se apressa em <colocar simetricamente>, de acordo com um esquema fixo seu, todos os objetos que eu havia colocado de propósito fora do lugar.” Léger
“Podemos antecipar o começo do fenômeno, se pensamos na marcada tendência nessa direção que se pode advertir a partir dos últimos anos do séc. XIX com o florescimento do simbolismo na França e ainda antes, com o do pré-rafaelismo na Inglaterra: pintores e decoradores como Gustave Moreau, D.G. Rossetti, Burnes Jones, Odilon Redon, Khnopff, Puvis de Chavanne e, à geração seguinte, os austríacos da Secessão: Klimt, Schiele, etc., são todos tendencialmente assimétricos, pois começam a olhar com simpatia para o Extremo Oriente” “a adoração pelo número áureo, derivada dos círculos renascentistas, teria de ceder e ver-se invertida por novos módulos estéticos.”
“por que o coração está à esquerda e o fígado à direita? por que é mais comum ser destro? por que a mãe costuma segurar o recém-nascido pelo lado esquerdo?”
“O rosto esquerdo revela o lado oculto ou noturno (sinistro) da vida.”Werner Wolff
“…ao passo que a metade direita – precisamente por <depender> do hemisfério cerebral esquerdo, sede dos processos de criação de idéias mais racionalizados – parece ser o <espelho> da personalidade humana mais socializada e consciente.”
“normalmente o homem entrelaça as mãos de com o polegar direito superposto ao esquerdo, e a mulher ao contrário”
“e como pode ser que o laevus latino não se conservou no italiano (enquanto que se conservou no left inglês, no link alemão, no lijevo esloveno e croata e no lievyi russo?)”
derecho droit destro direito
izquierdo gauche sinistro esquerdo
“Se consideramos alguns esquemas urbanísticos clássicos – dos hipodâmicos aos estelares (tipo Palmanova), aos de L’Enfant (tipo Washington) ou Haussmann (tipo Paris) ou inclusive à aparente heterodoxia de Lúcio Costa no caso de Brasília –, vemos facilmente que em quase todos predomina um princípio de euritmia e equilíbrio, i.e., de obtenção do máximo de equilíbrio baseando-se numa simetria <dinâmica>, numa pseudo-assimetria, à la Hambidge. Hoje (1972!), até esse tipo de equilíbrio me parece pouco aceitável rumo a uma evolução da ordenação territorial e do <caráter distributivo> de nossos edifícios.”
“Na linguagem e no pensamento a assimetria está em todo lugar ou, para ser assimétrico, em quase todo lugar: podemos considerar simétricas as manobras analogizantes ensaiadas – de forma muitas vezes ingênua, mecânica – por um Lévi-Strauss? Sim, sem dúvida; mas isso seria pertencente à exceção: uma tentativa ou mania de assimilar códigos diferentes (sociológicos, alimentares, musicais, etnológicos!) sobretudo dum ponto de vista meramente sintático e sem levar em conta, salvo superficialmente, os autênticos aspectos semânticos e axiológicos que se interrelacionam. Mas, continuando, o fato de considerar como analógicas as metáforas propriamente ditas conduzirá à descoberta dum aspecto assimétrico também nelas, i.e., porque unem dois signifiés diferentes por meio dum signifiant único.”
#SugestõesdeTítulosdeLivros
OXÍMORO OU CARÍBDIS
LEITURAS PROSPECTIVAS
YASUICHI ARAKAWA, Die malerei des Zen-Buddhismus. Pinselstriche des Unendlichen, 1970
JEAN BAUDRILLARD, Le système des objets, 1968
MARIO BUNGE, The Place of the Causal Principle in Modern Science, 1963
GERMANO CELANT, Arte povera
Revista “Noigandres” (São Paulo), sobre a vertente mais séria da dita poesia concreta de origem germano-suíço-brasileira
GILLO DORFLES, Il Kitsch, antologia del cattuvi gusto, 1969 (1972) / El kitsch, antología del mal gusto, 1973
LUDWIG GIESZ, Phänomenologie des Kitsches, 1960 / Fenomenología del kitsh, 1973
HECAEN, La Symétrie en Neuropsychologie, 1970
EUGÈNE MINKOWSKI, Les conséquences psychopatologiques de la guerre et du nazisme, 1948
ALEXANDER MITSCHERLICH, La inhospitalidad de nuestras ciudades, 1969
EDWIN SCHUR, The Family and the Sexual Revolution, 1964
DAISETZ SUZUKI, Zen and Japanese Culture, 1959
VÁRIOS AUTORES, Psicología del vestir, 1975
HERMANN WEYL, Symmetry, 1952
IVOR DE WOLFE, Civilia, Architectural Press, Londres, 1972
“Nous choisissons cette place pour remarquer que, s’il y a toute chance pour que cette édition, qui s’annonce elle-même comme « définitive », soit menée à bonne fin, il n’y a pas encore en français d’édition des oeuvres complètes de Kant, non plus que de Freud. Il est vrai qu’il eût fallu que fût poursuivie une traduction systématique de ces oeuvres. Une telle entreprise eût semblé s’imposer pour Kant dans un pays où tant de jeunes forces se qualifient par l’enseignement de la philosophie. Sa carence à beaucoup près laisse à réfléchir sur la direction assurée aux travaux par les cadres responsables.”
“Ici SADE est le pas inaugural d’une subversion, dont, si piquant que cela semble au regard de la froideur de l’homme, KANT est le point tournant, et jamais repéré [diagnosticado, reconhecido] – que nous sachions – comme tel.
La Philosophie dans le boudoirvient 8 ans après la Critique de la raison pratique.”
Todo diabo é fundado por um beato.
“La recherche du bien serait donc une impasse, s’il ne renaissait, das Gute, le bien qui est l’objet de la loi morale. Il nous est indiqué par l’expérience que nous faisons d’entendre au-dedans de nous des commandements, dont l’impératif se présente comme catégorique, autrement dit inconditionnel.”
padecer o pai descer
pas d’être
“Retenons le paradoxe que ce soit au moment où ce sujet n’a plus en face de lui aucun objet, qu’il rencontre une loi, laquelle n’a d’autre phénomène que quelque chose de signifiant déjà, qu’on obtient d’une voix dans la conscience, et qui, à s’y articuler en maxime, y propose l’ordre d’une raison purement pratique ou volonté.”
« J’ai le droit de jouir de ton corps, peut me dire quiconque, et ce droit je l’exercerai sans qu’aucune limite m’arrête dans le caprice des exactions que j’aie le goût d’y assouvir »
“entre deux l’impudeur de l’un à elle seule faisant le viol de la pudeur de l’autre.”
“Tels phénomènes de la voix, nommément ceux de la psychose, ont bien cet aspect de l’objet. Et la psychanalyse n’était pas loin en son aurore d’y référer la voix de la conscience.”
“Assurément le christianisme a éduqué les hommes à être peu regardants du côté de la jouissance de Dieu, et c’est en quoi KANT fait passer son volontarisme de la Loi pour la Loi, lequel en remet, peut-on dire, sur l’ataraxie de l’expérience stoïcienne.”
“Quand la jouissance s’y pétrifie, il devient le fétiche noir, où se reconnaît la forme bel et bien offerte en tel temps et lieu, et de nos jours encore, pour qu’on y adore la Présence de Dieu.”
“Le désir, qui est le suppôt de cette refente du sujet, s’accommoderait sans doute de se dire volonté de jouissance. Mais cette appellation ne le rendrait pas plus digne de la volonté qu’il invoque chez l’Autre en la tentant jusqu’à l’extrême de sa division d’avec son pathos, car pour ce faire, il part battu, promis à l’impuissance. Puisqu’il part soumis au plaisir, dont c’est la loi de le faire tourner en sa visée toujours trop court. Homéostase toujours trop vite retrouvée du vivant au seuil le plus bas de la tension dont il vivote.”
“L’expérience physiologique démontre que la douleur est d’un cycle plus long à tous égards que le plaisir, puisqu’une stimulation la provoque au point où le plaisir finit. Si prolongée qu’on la suppose, elle a pourtant comme le plaisir son terme: dans l’évanouissement du sujet.”
“Une structure quadripartite est depuis l’inconscient toujours exigible dans la construction d’une ordonnance subjective. Ce à quoi satisfont nos schémas didactiques.”
“la peu croyable survie dont SADE dote les victimes des sévices et tribulations qu’il leur inflige en sa fable.”
“Unique (Justine) ou multiple, la victime a la monotonie de la relation du sujet au signifiant”
“L’exigence dans la figure des victimes d’une beauté toujours classée incomparable (et d’ailleurs inaltérable, cf. plus haut) est une autre affaire, dont on ne saurait s’acquitter avec quelques postulats banaux, bientôt controuvés, sur l’attrait sexuel. On y verra plutôt la grimace de ce que nous avons démontré dans la tragédie, de la fonction de la beauté: barrière extrême à interdire l’accès à une horreur fondamentale.”
“On le voit bien au paradoxe que constitue dans SADE sa position à l’endroit de l’enfer. “L’idée de l’enfer, cent fois réfutée par lui et maudite comme moyen de sujétion de la tyrannie religieuse, revient curieusement motiver les gestes d’un de ses héros, pourtant des plus férus de la subversion libertine dans sa forme raisonnante, nommément le hideux SAINT-FOND. Les pratiques, dont il impose à ses victimes le supplice dernier, se fondent sur la croyance qu’il peut en rendre pour elles dans l’au-delà le tourment éternel.
Cette incohérence dans SADE, négligée par les sadistes, un peu hagiographes eux aussi, s’éclairerait à relever sous sa plume le terme formellement exprimé de la seconde mort. Dont l’assurance qu’il en attend contre l’affreuse routine de la nature (celle qu’à l’entendre ailleurs, le crime a la fonction de rompre) exigerait qu’elle allât à une extrémité où se redouble l’évanouissement du sujet: avec lequel il symbolise dans le voeu que les éléments décomposés de notre corps, pour ne pas s’assembler à nouveau, soient eux-mêmes anéantis.”
pulsão de quase nada
“Ni recueilli un de ces rêves dont le rêveur reste bouleversé, d’avoir dans la condition ressentie d’une renaissance intarissable, été au fond de la douleur d’exister?”
“…la relation de réversion qui unirait le sadisme à un masochisme dont on imagine mal au dehors le pêle-mêle qu’elle supporte. Mieux vaut d’y trouver le prix d’une historiette, fameuse, sur l’exploitation de l’homme par l’homme: définition du capitalisme on le sait.
Et le socialisme alors? C’est le contraire…”
Ótima piada!
“L’objet, nous l’avons montré dans l’expérience freudienne, l’objet du désir là où il se propose nu, n’est que la scorie d’un fantasme où le sujet ne revient pas de sa syncope. C’est un cas de nécrophilie.”
“le moraliste nous paraît toujours plus impudent encore qu’imprudent.”
“Il n’y a de fourgon que de la police, laquelle peut bien être l’État comme on le dit du côté de HEGEL, mais la loi est autre chose comme on le sait depuis ANTIGONE.”
“Treize ans de Charenton pour SADE en sont en effet de ce pas – mais ce n’était pas sa place – tout est là. C’est cela même qui l’y mène. Car pour sa place, tout ce qui pense est d’accord là-dessus, elle [sa <folie>] était ailleurs. Mais voilà: ceux qui pensent bien, pensent qu’elle était dehors, et les bien-pensants, depuis ROYER-COLLARD qui le réclama à l’époque, le voudraient au bagne, voire sur l’échafaud.”
“Si le bonheur est agrément sans rupture du sujet à sa vie, comme le définit très classiquement la Critique, il est clair qu’il se refuse à qui ne renonce pas à la voie du désir. Ce renoncement peut être voulu, mais au prix de la vérité de l’homme, ce qui est assez clair par la réprobation qu’ont encourue devant l’idéal commun les épicuriens, voire les stoïciens. Leur ataraxie destitue leur sagesse.”
“Que le bonheur soit devenu un facteur de la politique est une proposition impropre. Il l’a toujours été et ramènera le sceptre et l’encensoir qui s’en accommodent fort bien.”
“La tête de SAINT-JUST, fût-elle restée habitée des fantasmes d’Organt, il eût peut-être fait de Thermidor son triomphe.”
“Nous voilà enfin en demeure d’interroger le « Sade, mon prochain », dont nous devons l’invocation à l’extrême perspicacité de Pierre KLOSSOWSKI. Disons que c’est la seule contribution de notre temps à la question sadienne qui ne nous paraisse pas entachée des tics du « bel esprit ».”
“Nous croyons que SADE n’est pas assez voisin de sa propre méchanceté, pour y rencontrer son prochain. Trait qu’il partage avec beaucoup et avec FREUD notamment.” Homo tempranus
“Chez SADE, nous en voyons le test, à nos yeux crucial, dans son refus de la peine de mort, dont l’histoire suffirait à prouver – sinon la logique – qu’elle est un des corrélats de la Charité.”
“This is not the first time my writing has been informed by my dreaming self. By now I am wise enough to trust such experiences even before I can make sense of them.”
“Acceptance and praise foster a feeling of well-being in the child. They encourage confidence, spontaneity, hope, and a sense of being worthwhile. Punishment and threat induce guilt feelings, moralistic self-restriction, and pressure to atone. Guilt is the anxiety that accompanies transgressions, carrying with it the feeling of having done bad things and the fear of the parents’ angry retaliation. In the interests of self-protection, the child learns to deal with this anticipated punishment preemptively by turning it into an internalized threat against himself. § Disapproval and contempt make a child feel ashamed of not being a worthwhile person. The implied danger of abandonment may make him shy, avoidant, and ever anxious about making mistakes, appearing foolish, and being open to further ridicule.”“Aceitação e elogios alimentam na criança uma sensação de bem-estar e conforto. Encorajam a confiança, espontaneidade, esperança, um senso de capacidade e de cumprir o seu papel. Punição e ameaças induzem sentimentos de culpa, auto-restrições morais, pressão corretiva. A culpa é a ansiedade que acompanha transgressões, carregando consigo o sentimento de ter feito coisas ruins e o medo da retaliação furiosa dos pais.Com a auto-preservação em vista, a criança aprende a lidar com esse castigo iminente de modo preventivo, internalizando a ameaça contra si mesma.§ Desaprovação e desdém fazem a criança se sentir envergonhada por não ser uma pessoa valorosa. O perigo implicado no sentir-se abandonado é o desenvolvimento de uma personalidade tímida, esquiva, evitativa, constantemente ansiosa ou apreensiva quanto ao cometimento de erros, com medo de acabar parecendo um tolo ou de estar vulnerável ao ridículo dos outros.”
A ANTIGA SÍNDROME DE RENAN: Medo de ser expulso de casa. Medo de dar muitas despesas. Medo de ser um mero mortal.
“<Look how foolish you are, how clumsy, how stupid! What will other people think of you when they see that you can’t seem to do anything right? You should be ashamed of yourself acting like that. If only you really cared, if only you wanted to act right, if only you would try harder, then you could be the kind of child we want you to be.> Repeated exposure to such abuse calls forth an inner echo of self-contempt. § Eventually the child learns to say of himself, <What an idiot I am, what a fool, what an awful person! I never do anything right. I have no self-control. I just don’t try hard enough. If I did, surely they would be satisfied.>” “<Olha quão tolo você é, desajeitado, estúpido! O que vão pensar de você, se você não consegue fazer nada direito? Você devia sentir vergonha de si mesmo agindo desse jeito. Se apenas você se importasse, se você só quisesse agir adequadamente, se você apenas tentasse mais, aí então você seria o tipo de criança que queríamos que você fosse.> A exposição repetida a tal tipo de discurso leva a uma internalização dum eco de auto-desprezo; uma voz interna passa a repetir as mesmas coisas antes faladas pelos seus superiores. § Eventualmente, chega-se ao ponto em que a própria criança dirá, diante de cada nova decepção: <Que idiota que eu sou, que imbecil, que péssima pessoa! Nunca faço nada certo. Não tenho sequer auto-controle. E eu nunca tento o bastante. Se eu tentasse, com certeza satisfaria a vontade dos outros.>”
“My own mother often told me: <I love you, but I don’t like you.> It was clear that this meant that she loved me because she was a good mother, but that she did not like me because I was an unsatisfactory child.”
“The experience of being seen as momentarily not yet able to cope is a natural part of growth. It is also natural to experience the embarrassment that accompanies making mistakes, stumbling, blundering, or fucking-up.”
“Some parents are too hard on their children because of their own personal problems, others because of harsh cultural standards. Some cultures make excessive demands for precocious maturing of the child. In such settings, shaming inculcates the feeling that other people will not like the child unless he lives up to their expectations. § When shaming arises out of the pathology of neurotic parents, the child may be expected to take care of the parents. Such a child may never learn that the natural order of things is quite the reverse. He is discouraged from ever realizing that it is the parents who are supposed to take care of the child. § Even more insidious is the impact of the parent who unconsciously needs to have an unsatisfactory child. Such a parent will never be satisfied, no matter how hard the child tries, no matter how much he accomplishes. Anything less than perfection is unacceptable. If the child gets a grade of 95 on an examination, he will be asked why he didn’t get 100. If he gets 100, he will be asked what took him so long to get a satisfactory grade. Told that he should have been getting 100 all along, he may become afraid to do well lest perfect grades be demanded of him all the time from then on. If he happens to be a chronic straight-A student, then he may be asked, <If you’re so damn smart, how come you can’t keep your room clean?>” “This can lead to his spending a lifetime vainly seeking the approval of others in the hope that he may someday be validated at last. § My own parents shamed me needlessly and often. They made it clear that it was my clumsiness, my inadequacies, and my failures that made them unhappy. Even my successes and accomplishments were made to reveal how inferior and insufficient I was.”
“<Enough,> she stilled me. <A boy doesn’t interrupt when a father is talking, a father who sweats in the city all week long for him.>”
“Those who have been shamed can some day learn to overcome feeling unworthy. Embarrassment, in contrast, is a natural reaction that is inevitable in certain social situations.”
“quavering speech [fala tremida] or breaking of the voice, sweating, blanching [empalidecimento], blinking, tremor of the hand, hesitating or vacillating movement, absent-mindedness” Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior, 1967
“The medical term for less-than-normal breathing capacity, for instance, is respiratory embarrassment.”
“Some unexpected physical clumsiness, breach of etiquette, or interpersonal insensitivity may leave a person open to criticism for being more crude or coarse than he claims to be. But this is an issue of manners, not of morals. It may make for a temporary change of social status, but never carries with it the self-threatening sanctions of shame, with its implications of abandonment, loss of love, and ultimate emotional starvation.”
“For a moment all bets are off. Trust of myself and others is in jeopardy. All values are once again in question. First there is the question of trust in myself. Am I an adequate human being or a fool? What can I expect of myself? Do I really know what I am doing?”“It is a time for the exotic flowering of my paranoia. At such times I may mistakenly expect contempt and ridicule from loving friends and neutral strangers. It is just as though they would turn from me in disgust as my parents did when I did not meet their impossible standards.”
Where is my floor?
Please open that door
Shut those windows
Cracked room and mind
of a sweet-salty boy
Sing along and refrain
from hiding.
“There seems to be no way for any of us to get through the day without making a careless error, doing something foolish, committing a gaffe or faux pas.” Gof., op. cit.
“After hitting the lamppost I sat on the curb and cried as little as possible. I was really worried. Now it was time to go home and face my mother. Instead of seeing this mishap as an unfortunate accident around which I could feel sorry for myself and expect some sympathy, I knew that I had let my parents down again. I headed home and climbed the stairs to our apartment, skates over my shoulder.”
“Still, echoes of this grotesque situation can be heard at times from out of my unsettled and unworthy depths. I remember just a couple of years ago when I learned that I had to undergo a second bout of neurosurgery.”
“At such times my mother’s explicit instructions were: <Don’t fight, but never, never deny that you are a Jew.> She seemed to want me to be well-behaved, but did little to help me to avoid occasions of sin.”
“One afternoon after school Charlie started beating on me in front of a girl I had a crush on. For the first time in my unhappy marriage to Charlie Hooko, my own fear of being seen as a shamefully brutal, lower-class street fighter was overcome. The fear of being humiliated in the eyes of this girl was even more shameful. And so in the midst of the fight I punched Charlie right in the mouth. He couldn’t believe it. I could hardly believe it myself. § Charlie stopped the play at once. He took me down to the park and we both washed our faces at the fountain. Charlie announced to everyone around that I was a tough guy, that he admired me, and that we would be friends from then on. That ended months of regularly scheduled defeat.”
Punch like a girlish girl
Yea, just feel the flow
“As an early teenager I did eventually graduate to becoming a marginal member of a fighting street gang. I pretended that I was a better and more enthusiastic fighter than I ever really was.”
“As my children grew, being creatures of their age they moved toward the freak culture. Part of this involved their being the first kids in our neighborhood to let their hair grow long. So it was that another macho incident came about. One of our neighbors, strong both of will and of muscle, flew the Confederate flag.”
“What proof did he have, I demanded? His only answer was that my kids had long hair. He believed vandalism occurred only in the ghetto. Ghetto kids had long hair and they broke windows, he insisted. My kids had long hair. And so he concluded that it must have been one of them who had broken his window.”
“Ironically, the blunderer often unwittingly reveals the discomfort of his predicament by the very means by which he tries to hide it: <the fixed smile, the nervous hollow laugh, the busy hands, the downward glance that conceals the expression of the eyes.>” “Ironicamente, o atabalhoado freqüente e inadvertidamente expõe seu desconforto situacional pela própria tática utilizada para disfarçá-lo: <o sorriso fixo, a risada nervosa despropositada, as mãos hiper-ativas, a vista caída que esconde a expressão dos olhos.>”
“Essa necessidade social salutar de ocultar-se o embaraço é enfatizada nas pessoas que foram excessivamente submetidas a vexames na infância. Potencialmente, o indivíduo virá a desenvolver um estilo de conduta de tipo neurótico, agindo timidamente a maior parte do tempo e preferindo evitar que outros venham a percebê-lo ou a conhecê-lo.”
“Tendo tantas dificuldades de interação, não é raro que a pessoa acredite que sua abertura para o constrangimento e a vivência de situações ridículas [pois socialmente é impossível fugir de tais ocasiões] é realmente singular. Ela pode desenvolver a crença que outras pessoas não têm a mesma tendência de <se passarem por tolas> de tempos em tempos, como ela tem.”
“Sua própria conscienciosidade de seu problema age como um efeito bola de neve: a apreensão pela sua hiper-sensibilidade eleva seu senso de isolamento, peculiaridade, solidão, enfim. Que trágico que a pessoa deva sempre sentir-se como um desajustado! Basicamente, não diferimos uns dos outros. Ninguém é capaz de lidar o tempo todo com as demandas sociais, sempre excessivas. Mas é que o comportamento tímido-neurótico é sempre desproporcional, alimentando a convicção íntima de que <há algo muito errado consigo>.”
“As maneiras reservadas do introvertido <clássico> (não-mórbido) são parte, provavelmente, de sua orientação psicológica inata; e ele estará sempre mais inclinado ao mundo interior das experiências privadas, que lhe é bem mais confortável. Certo nível de acanhamento da personalidade é mesmo, senão natural, incentivado socialmente. Algumas pessoas (como o próprio que escreve) escondem sua timidez crônica debaixo de um véu de arrogância simulada.”
“When he does try to express himself, he is likely to be hesitant, needlessly soft-spoken, ingratiating, and apologetic. Whenever possible, he simply will try to avoid contact with other people.”
“A person who is not neurotically shy understands that it is the external situation that contributes to embarrassment, rather than some defect in his own character. Unlike the shy neurotic, he has come to learn that these anxieties are triggered by his reaction to particular people and situations.”“Uma pessoa que não é neuroticamente tímida compreende que é o contexto exterior que contribui para seu embaraço, em vez de qualquer defeito de seu próprio caráter. Ao contrário do tímido neurótico, aquela pessoa aprendeu a ver que essas angústias são acionadas pela sua reação a pessoas e eventos particulares.”
AUTONOOBSAIBOTADOR
“The shy neurotic cannot get anywhere in overcoming his excessive shyness without first revealing to himself that what he truly fears most is not rejection but acceptance, not failure but success. He begins to go after what he wants out of life.”“O tímido neurótico não chegará a lugar algum, enquanto tenta superar ou minorar sua timidez, caso não admita para si mesmo que o que ele realmente mais teme NÃO é a rejeição mas a aceitação, NÃO é o fracasso, e sim o próprio sucesso! É aí que ele começa a alcançar seus verdadeiros objetivos de vida.”
we’re all looped, leaked, sinking, seeking and not finding, just overwhelmed by our own hopes’ weights… what if…
a head dive in a pool of danger
“Feeling undeserving of such unfamiliar achievement and acceptance, he has unwittingly learned to discredit these pleasureable experiences. A poignant early expression of this self-defeating attitude occurs during the first phase of psychotherapy.”
“Anything that makes him feel worthwhile calls forth the echo of his mother’s voice, demanding that he question his presumption. It is as though he can almost hear her demanding, <Just who do you think you are?> Believing even for a moment that he is satisfactory as a human being evokes the underlying shameful feeling that he has presumed too much.”“Qualquer coisa que o faça sentir-se valorizado evoca o eco da voz de sua mãe, mandando que baixe a bola. É como se realmente pudesse ouvir, <Vem cá, quem você pensa que é?>. Acreditar por um só momento que ele é um ser humano completamente satisfatório é o suficiente para ter sua paz de espírito quebrada por pensamentos de culpa de que ele agiu presunçosamente.”
O supremo oposto do vaidoso dos vaidosos – e o que isso trouxe? Mais ódio dos ‘cristãos’ sobre sua cabecinha…
“So it is that each moment of decision is followed by a moment of revision. A minute later, he has reversed his thrust forward, retiring once more into his customary shyness.”
“His life is not what he meant it to be at all. It’s just not it at all.”
Evitar a confrontação é como comprar à prestação!
“Guy de Maupassant’s short story, The Diamond Necklace, is a classic example of the high price of false pride. It is the story of Matilda, a woman tortured and angered by having to live a shamefully ordinary life because she does not possess the luxuries and delicacies which she insists befit her station.”
“It was my parents who started me off down my own painful path of shame and false pride. My parents are no longer responsible for this trip that I sometimes continue to make. Now the enemy is within. It is only my own overblown ego that shames me. It is only I, still sometimes arrogantly insisting on having higher standards for myself than I would impose on others. How much easier to accept the flaws in others than in myself. To the extent that I cling to being special in this way, I remain stuck with the tediously painful life of the perfectionistic striver. I must get everything right, all the time, or suffer shame. It is far too heavy a price to pay for maintaining the illusion that I might be able to rise above human frailty.”
“I give up being satisfied with myself as a pretty decent, usually competent sort of guy who, like everyone else, sometimes makes mistakes, fucks up, and plays the fool. Instead I insist that if only I tried harder, really cared, truly wanted to, I could become that wonderful person who could make my long-dead parents happy. Then they would approve of me. I would be the best. Everyone would love me.”
“Guilt and shame originate from different kinds of faulty parenting. Guilt arises out of a certain kind of bad fathering, shame out of bad mothering.¹ Either parent may elicit one or the other depending on the particular parent’s role and attitude rather than on his or her gender alone.
Excessive authoritarian fathering creates guilty anticipation of punishment for transgression against the lawful order of things.Overly demanding mothering breeds shame.”
¹ Kleiniano demais…
“Paradoxically, too much shaming often produces defiance rather than propriety. No longer able to bear the overwhelming burden of shame, a child may develop a secret determination to misbehave. He comes to wear a mask of spite and shamelessness.”
“We were studying Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. At the beginning of one week, the English teacher announced that we were to memorize Marc Antony’s eulogy. I protested loudly. Memorizing materials that needlessly cluttered up my head was both a waste of my time and an intrusive violation of my mind. No arbitrary school system had any right to do that to me.”
“<Ma, how come you always talk funny when you come to see a teacher?> This was one of my rare opportunities to shame her”
“Straight people were simply not prepared for coping with those of us who shamelessly stepped outside of the system, acted with contempt for the rules, and covertly shamed them for the arbitrariness of their principles.”
“At times my shameless behavior has gotten me into trouble. But so long as it sometimes gets results like that, who am I not to be tempted to continue to be outrageous?”
“More privately, I had developed the false pride of perfectionism to hide my shame and worthlessness from my own eyes. I had to avoid risking further failures and more mistakes. I had to be able to change my image so that I might escape without looking like I was running away or hiding out.”
NOSSAS TORRES DE MARFIM
“No longer would I be the fumbling incompetent who was too timid to go to parties because he never knew how to go about making friends. Instead I became a <heavy> intellectual. With such profoundly developed sensitivity, I could no longer be expected to be bothered devoting my precious energies to the pursuit of the mundane social goals that somehow seemed to excite almost everyone else I knew.
Even armoring as exquisite as this was not enough.Somewhere inside I knew I was just too damn lonely. I still needed to be needed. Acting obsequious, or even <being nice>, was an unthinkable solution. Instead I began to advertise myself as ever ready to rush into the gap whenever a task presented itself that ordinary folk found too unrewarding to mess with.”
“For the first few years of my career as a therapist I worked in impossibly archaic monolithic custodial institutions such as state mental hospitals and prisons. Though allegedly established and maintained as society’s attempt to care for and rehabilitate its social deviates, these institutions turned out to be punitive warehouses for those undesirables about whom the rest of us wished to forget. I cast myself as the champion of the oppressed.¹ Doggedly and unsuccessfully I fought the administrative powers, hoping to attain decent care, effective treatment, and eventual release for the inmates.”
¹ Incrivelmente similar a minha loucura de querer me tornar professor!
“Now I had a new problem. There were no bad parents to fight. How was I to define my role in this more benevolent situation?”
“I do not usually shake hands with a new patient unless the patient gives some indication that this is part of where he starts out in social relationships, in which case I respond.”
“His opening lines were: How long have you been a therapist? Don’t you know that phobic patients can’t stand to be touched? You insist on shaking hands with me knowing that I am too compliant to refuse. It could only make me anxious. The demands you make on me!”
“Should he awaken during the night and need to go to the bathroom to urinate, he must simply suffer through the hours until dawn. He was not able to risk disturbing his dog by getting out of bed. His feeling of friendship with the dog was substantiated by his bringing him along to the treatment sessions.”
“There he asked to be deported to Russia for asylum. Surely he would get better treatment under Communism than he had from the barbaric democratic psychiatric services in America’s capital.” “I described my own experience, and I pointed out that the patient was crazy. He had made me crazy. I warned this man that he would make him crazy, too, unless we all understood that just because the patient claimed that something difficult needed to be done did not mean that we had to do it. The patient was all heat and no light. We were vulnerable to his unrealistic outcries because of our own needs to meet every challenge heroically, no matter how nutty it might be. If we thought it over for a minute, we would realize that there wasn’t much in the way of disastrous consequence in this for anyone but the patient himself. That was unfortunate for him, but that was the way it had to be. Happily, the perspective I offered was sufficient to relieve the Congressional Counsel of his own anxiety.”
“The patient was an attractive woman in her early twenties whose birth defects included having no feet and only rudimentary hands. She managed to get about with a combination of prosthetic devices and monumental denial.” “Focusing on her frustrated wishes to become a star in the public eye allowed her to avoid her anxiety and despair about the oppressive difficulties that she encountered in everyday living. My own parallel defensiveness led me to join her, supporting her crazy longings with my own denial of shame-filled helplessness. She made her own contribution by avoiding my tentative therapeutic interventions. There was just no way she could hear my timid suggestions that this whole show business preoccupation was an avoidance of dealing with the day-to-day quality of her life.”
“Unattended snot ran out of her nostrils and down her face (her measure of how much messiness I could tolerate?). I listened and sympathized as if my mere presence would heal her.” “For some reason, which I still do not understand, after about a year of this circus she let me in on her <secret>. All during this time she had been seeing me on Thursday afternoons, and now she confessed that she had also been in therapy on Monday mornings at another clinic with another crazy therapist.”
“This new challenge’s chart described her as a borderline psychotic, a part-time alcoholic, an unhappy, aggressive woman with preoccupying sexual hangups and several previous unsatisfying bouts of psychotherapy. When I went out to the waiting room to invite her in for our first therapy session she struck me as a slight, timid waif of a woman. She looked more like an emaciated 12-year-old than a life-hardened 32-year-old.”
“Oh, now I get it, the old color symbolism test. A male therapist with a red shirt, and now I’m supposed to tell you that I’m sometimes gay, and you probably are, too!” “You’re the therapist I’ve been looking for all of my life. I’m never, never going to leave you. I know that you’ll be able to accept whatever I do without ever making me feel bad or throwing me out.” “My relief and sense of well-being was immediately transformed. I got the sinking feeling that I had just made a lifetime contract with an albatross.”
“By then I was off balance, but I knew the direction in which I must go. I told her that alcoholic beverages were not permitted in the clinic. If she opened the beer here in my office that would be the end of treatment. As in the first session, she seemed relieved rather than upset by my setting some limits on her acting out.”
“She had gone to visit her dentist to have a tooth extracted. He knew that she had bad reactions to the usual anesthetics that he used. Therefore he had brought a bottle of whiskey and insisted that she have a couple of straight shots to prepare her for the extraction. She described herself as having been rather uncertain. Still she yielded to his encouragement to have one, two, and then another couple of shots. She claimed that soon she was so high that she could not resist his insistence that she perform fellatio.”
* * *
Albert Ellis
“While I have the floor, let me also disagree with Shelly’s [Sheldon’s] (and almost all other therapists’) allegation or implication that shame largely stems from early childhood experiences. Shit, no! If anything, early childhood experiences largely arise out of our innate predispositions toward inventing <shameful> conditions and actions and consequently idiotically making ourselves—and I mean making ourselves—unduly embarrassed about our inventions.” “Because Shelly’s feelings of shame in regard to the incident with his parents have a high degree of correlation with his feelings of shame today, he mistakenly assumes that the former caused the latter.” “Shelly’s parents indubitably taught him various standards of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’—including the standard, ‘You act rightly when you stubbornly refuse to imagine yourself letting either of your parents drown and wrongly when you even consider saving only one of them from drowning.’ Given such standards, and having the human tendency to adopt them, Shelly will assuredly believe that he acts ‘rightly’ when he tells his parents that under no conditions would he let either of them drown and ‘wrongly’ when he tells them that he would choose one over the other. Granted.”
“A person’s history therefore has relatively little to do with present feelings of shame or self-downing. Shelly may have learned his standards of good and bad behavior from his parents (and others), but he decided to take them seriously and he still decides to do so if he feels ashamed of anything he does today.”
“I had a female client who had serious feelings of inadequacy about herself, especially in her relations with men, and whom I helped considerably to overcome some of these feelings. She had an attractive female friend to whom she talked about me and the way I had helped her, and who got somewhat turned on to me. This friend, in her own manipulative way, managed to meet me at a series of lectures I gave and suggested that we date.
Now I knew that I’d better not do this. Not only have I refused from my first days as a therapist to have social relations with my clients—for although this may have some advantages, I recognize that it tends to lead to more harm than good—but I also have refused to maintain close relations with any of their intimates. (…) A good idea, and I invariably—or almost invariably—stick with it. But not this time! The friend of my client seemed so charming and attractive that I decided to break my self-imposed rule and to date her. I saw her a few times, got intimate with her socially and sexually, and then decided to stop seeing her because I found her much less charming and interesting than I previously had thought. In the course of my fairly brief relations with her, I deliberately mentioned nothing about my client, since I knew that they had a somewhat close relationship, and I didn’t want to give away any confidences.
Nothing happened for several weeks; and then, after I and my client’s female friend no longer saw each other, all hell suddenly broke loose. My client, Josephine, came in one day terribly upset and said that she had discovered that I had seen her friend socially. She found this most distressing for several reasons. She thought that I might have revealed some things about her to her friend. She felt constrained, now, in telling me certain feelings that she had about this woman. She confessed a sexual interest in me and said that she felt jealous that I had shown no inclination to have sex with her while I had obviously had it with Sarah. She hated Sarah for having seduced me and then having boasted about it. Most of all, curiously enough, she felt upset because I had stupidly allowed myself to get taken in by Sarah, who, according to Josephine, had no interest in me other than as a conquest, who had fooled me into thinking she had more intelligence than she actually had, and whose inherent nastiness I had presumably entirely failed to perceive.” “I, like Josephine, at first upset myself more about my mistaken diagnosis of Sarah than about anything else.” “Her interest in me stemmed mainly from her belief that I might help her with her own personal problems and from the ego boost she experienced from telling others that she had a well-known psychotherapist interested in her. Although I had told her very specifically not to mention our association to Josephine, whom I guessed would upset herself about it, she had not only told all to her friend but had also lyingly stated that she had given me up and that I still had a great interest in resuming relations with her.” “I took a chance that my relationship with Sarah would never get back to her. I really had preferred Sarah over her, and perhaps some of this preference had come through in my relationship to Josephine. I had given her an opportunity to see some of my diagnostic weaknesses—and thereby helped remove some of her confidence in me as therapist. When she had shown an overt sexual interest in me, I had quite ethically but perhaps too brusquely repulsed her, partly because at the time I already had established a sexual relationship with Sarah, and Josephine did not seem half so attractive to me. If I had never gone with Sarah, I might well have handled rebuffing Josephine in a more tactful and more therapeutic way.” “She seemed to accept the fact that I had not deliberately done anything to hurt her and had only made some understandable errors.” “Fortuitously, she got involved with a well-known psychiatrist who treated her with a dishonesty similar to Sarah’s treatment of me, and I helped her considerably in accepting herself with her gullibility [naiveness] and in breaking away from him without feeling terribly hurt.”
“I set a few more rigorous rules for myself about socializing with the friends and relatives of my clients, and eventually I mainly forgot about the entire incident.”
“If I down ‘me’, ‘myself’, or my totality for my errors, I essentially take myself out of the human condition and view myself as a subhuman. Falsely! For, as a human, I cannot very well attain superhumanness or subhumanness except by a miracle!”
“As far as I can see, you do not really admit the true wrongness of your acts if you don’t make yourself feel very guilty about them. And, even if you do acknowledge their badness, you do not motivate yourself strongly enough to change them and keep yourself from recommitting them in the future. Poppycock [Baboseira]!” “As a person who admits his own irresponsibility but who doesn’t down himself totally for having it, I save myself immense amounts of time and energy that I otherwise would spend dwelling on my poor actions, obsessively showing myself how wrongly I did them, and savagely berating myself for having such fallibility.”
“I try not to make myself guilty about making myself guilty, nor to make myself feel ashamed of making myself ashamed. I don’t find it easy! I keep slipping. My goddamned fallibility clearly remains.”
Gerald Bauman
“I felt the role of therapist to be an artificial one requiring that I adopt a facade that made me feel like the newly clothed emperor. I think I persisted in this unpleasant exercise partly because doing therapy was then the wave of the future for young clinicians, partly because I was assured by colleagues and supervisors that I was reasonably competent and talented, and partly because I tend to become stubborn under duress.”
“The most difficult <incident> of all lasted about two years. In the course of some very significant changes in my life, I was subject to severe anxiety attacks while working with clients (and at other times as well). The awful feeling would gradually well up in a great surge that might last for several minutes and then gradually subside. The experience was particularly frightening because I never felt certain how <high> the surge would go. While working, for example, I felt as though if it went much further, I might fall out of my chair or flee the room (these never happened). Though appearing to occur at random, these <attacks> themselves seemed to become more intense over about two years; then I gradually became able to overcome them and resolve the underlying issues.”
CONTRA-MEDIDAS PARA MOMENTOS DE “NUDEZ TERAPÊUTICA”:
“Minimize (or eliminate) pretense in self-presentation. This is especially relevant to, and difficult for, beginning therapists.”;
Buscar uma espécie de “acordo tácito” com o paciente sobre o nível de nudez ideal que o terapeuta e o “tratando” desejam para a terapia;
Sempre ter em mente flexibilidade nas regras de resolução de problemas meta-terapêuticos – incluindo seguir ou não, conforme o caso, até mesmo ESTA regra!
Howard Fink
O INSEGURO ESTEIO MORAL DA NAÇÃO: “He began to wonder if his suspicious attitude toward his wife was some sort of an illusion he had to maintain to give him the upper hand in the relationship, to be the constant moral superior.”
“The subject of his wife and I forming some sort of a conspiratorial love pairagainst him was never again mentioned without a lot of genuine humor associated with it. In fact, as if to further discount the possibility, he once said that he never thought I could lose enough weight anyway to be called slim or skinny by anybody.”
Arthur Colman
“While I have known her, she has worked as a topless and bottomless dancer, a masseuse in a parlor catering to conventioneers, and now nude encounter. She has been only partially successful at these jobs. She turns off as she undresses.”
“When she worked as a masseuse, she did not like to touch men’s genitals and do <a local>. It was formally against the policy of the club, although she admitted that to <jerk a customer off> got you a larger tip.”
“Here she was, earning twenty dollars a half hour (exactly my fee, dollar for minute) by sitting nude talking to men who chose their state of dress. No touching, no closeness, no real intimacy. She didn’t admit to seeing the analogies in our situations, probably because she was frightened of exploring their meaning. Her fear protected me from the full impact of the miming that she portrayed as the naked therapist.”
“Being embarrassed about experiencing a particular feeling is just the beginning of the cycle. Confronting the need to keep the feelings hidden increases its potency. Deciding to risk the uncovering process by telling the patient what has been happening inside of me can momentarily increase the embarrassment until it is released in a rush as the communication is finally made.”
O velho dilema de se apaixonar durante as sessões.
“My wife and I have written a book, Love and Ecstasy, about merger experiences in the solitary, dyadic, and group orientations.”
“I remember one patient that I worked with in the Kopp/Colman office. Yvonne was an exquisite, delicate 18-year-old rebel. Her father was a wealthy member of the State Department, her mother the dependent matron of a colonial mansion. Yvonne worked at shattering all family hypocrisy. She attacked with reckless competence, trying everything, flagrantly, desperately, and always self-destructively. She came to Shelly through some of her friends. He represented a bearded refuge for her, an adult who might understand. He sent her to me.
Her name should have been Jezebel. At that point in my life she represented impulse, license, sensuality, limitless possibilities. (…) Falling in love with her would be a lot simpler solution to my malaise than reclaiming the lost parts of my own spirit.”
“I knew I was clever enough to translate what was happening inside of me into words and actions that would facilitate her therapeutic work with me, but I wasn’t sure that I had the courage to risk such an intimate and painful personal statement, with its unknown repercussions for both of us.”
“It is not unusual now for me to feel love in a variety of forms for men and women with whom I work.” “Fantasies from therapy (in the case of Yvonne) invaded my sexual relationship with my wife and my paternal relationship with my daughter, just as those relationships entered my therapy relationship with her.” “She described her evaluation session with me and noted that she was sure I had had an erection during some of the hour. Triumphantly she proclaimed that she was positive of that fact as I got up to escort her out of the room at the end of the hour. She wondered about my ability to work in such a state and about my designs on her. She also wondered about the quality of my marriage and my sex life.” “I remembered being sexually aroused by Susan. My response had been prompted largely by the provocative role she had assumed during the hour rather than from a personal attraction. She could be very sexy, but most often used it as a weapon and a defense. I knew that precisely because of my reaction to her—arousal without great interest.” “I said I got sexually excited by many of my patients, female and male. I tried to use all my responses to an individual in my work, those of my body (including my penis) in all its states, and of my mind, with all its fantasies. I certainly did not plan to cut off parts of myself in the therapy encounter. Integrating that openness in the special setting of therapy with my family and other personal life was difficult and a challenge.”
QUANDO DOIS JUNGUIANOS SÃO CASADOS: “Libby knows me and herself well enough to assume that we could experience other people sexually and still focus our most intimate sexual expressions in each other, that she as Every-woman could become a repository for all my sexual fantasies just as I could for hers.”
Arthur Reisel
Verdade e vitória são contraditórias.
Meu analista tem uma voz paciente, e eu ouvidos doutorais!
“Arthur, it takes ten years before a therapist begins to know what he’s doing.”
“Thinking that a straightforward discussion of the pot experience might ease some of this mother’s extreme fears, I asked the girls what it was like for them to smoke pot. Their replies were cautious and evasive. As I should have anticipated, they hit the ball smartly back into my court, asking me if I had smoked pot and if so, why didn’t I describe how it felt? Being a more skilled player than the girls, I could have used a therapeutic trick shot to put the ball back in their court. Yet something told me that the truth was called for here even if the shocked mother were to decide that a therapist who smoked pot was not for her family. Fortunately, it turned out well. Despite her innocence the mother is an open-minded woman who accepts differences in others.”
“Used with Karen’s permission, excerpts from her letters to me will amplify and enrich my presentation.”
“I think you protest too strongly and judge too harshly of a previous generation; but the protesting quite vehemently part interests me the most because I have seen it come out before with Carolyn; it wasn’t what you said as much as the intensity with which it was said. You see, on occasion I am also interested in getting into other people’s lives even though I do not get paid for it. I am interested in what makes them tick, and I try to remain as receptive as I can to subtle, non-verbal clues.”
“you are very, very far from being an open book. In other words, there is much about you that I do not know. I don’t really know how it makes you feel. I know at one point in the therapy I felt like I was naked, and you were a rapist, and you called me a beggar, and it hurt, and I thought: I’d rather be a beggar than a rapist. It just seemed that you kept taking and taking”
“you can’t beat them; you never beat them; all it accomplishes in the long run is letting them beat you. I don’t think either one of us would think that was a life well spent.”deixar-se levar é como ir para o inferno, pois não existe paraíso sem esforço. se isso significa que você “tem de dar valor”? Hoho, chega, descanse os nervos, o inferno não deve ser tão ruim… Me chama que eu vou!
“I did not tell you my complete reaction to your giving away one of your pictures. My initial feeling was a tinge of jealousy that you thought enough of one of your other female patients to give her a picture you liked very much. What felt like a little child in me yelled out: What are you doing? Don’t you know? I’m supposed to be the most important one! You’re not supposed to give your favorite picture to someone else! On that same level, I’m still not exactly bouncing off the walls about it; a little of the same feeling came back when you brought it up today. However, I feel it is so ridiculous, and childish, and unrealistic that I don’t even know if I completely allow myself to feel it, much less express it.”
uimpulsaindimpulsa
“She wasn’t going to think you had designs on her, was she? You didn’t, did you? Then, what’s to feel uneasy about? It was a very nice thing. People should do it more often. I’m glad you did, a little jealous, but pleased.”
“I get the very strong impression from you that you like doing things according to schedule, and that you really do not take deviations too gracefully. It is too bad that people’s needs do not run according to schedule also, or maybe most of your patients can program them for their hour or whatever.”
“Fuck your schedule; it might have fucked our lives. We should have gone elsewhere, but you didn’t have to worry about that because I was already too attached to you for that, and I’m sure you didn’t lose any sleep over it. I have resented it; I didn’t realize I resented it so much.”
“She then sent a brief note to apologize for blaming me for fucking up her and her husband’s lives. Karen knew they were responsible for their own lives, and she felt badly about hitting below the belt over the issue of my schedule.” Below the belt, but not too much…
Quantos anos de serviço contribuídos como “terapendo”?
Jacqulyn S. Clements
“Alan, in his 5th year of hospitalization, had been recalling the days when he was an airplane mechanic. He concluded with the comment, <That’s why I can’t ever get married; I’m a mechanic.>
You may be noting the symbolism. What I said was, <Well, I don’t know about that. I’ve known a number of mechanics and most of them were married.>
Alan pondered this thoughtfully. Then with a twinkle in his eyes, he leaned close to me and said, <But were they schizophrenic?>”
“Telling these stories is vaguely embarrassing, but, as lived, they were really good experiences for me and for the clients. My response in each case was a silent but clear <Touché!>. I don’t recommend dumb comments; but if you’ve got a Bobby or an Alan, you can learn a lot and enjoy each other.
An incident from my practice that illustrates a negative feeling of goofing and embarrassment occurred on the day I handed Mrs. B the A-child’s appointment card. My comments made it obvious that I thought she was married to Mr. A, who was also seated in the waiting room. These weren’t new people; I’d interviewed each with their real spouses. When Mrs. B pointed out my error, I wished I could disappear into a hole in the floor, and my right arm flew up in the air. I used it to touch my hair and said, <Oh, my, where is my head today?> Then, taking the A-child back to the therapy room, I quipped, <I almost got you a new mother today—ha ha.> As far as I know this had no big effect on therapeutic progress, although I certainly wouldn’t call it a confidence builder.”
“Sophisticated clients know what Gestalters and such are like; they probably saw their 6th Fritz Perls film just last week.” Um dos fundadores de um dos ramos da Gestalt (que não é monolítica): Perls, F., Hefferline, R., & Goodman, P., Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (1951).
“I went to all those miscellaneous workshops and training institutes like everybody else, but I never did manage to come home a recognizable anything. I tell them I’m a Jackie-therapist, and this means, of course, my confidence rests almost solely on results. Yes, this has bothered me some. I’ve never felt ashamed not to be a walking encyclopedia on psychoanalytic theory, but often when another therapist is visiting the premises, I feel tempted to ask my client to please get down on the floor and scream like he’s having an avant-garde breakthrough.”
“I’ve had a few clients with outstanding embarrassment records. Cindy, age 14, recalled her 1st date: She spilled Coke in the boy’s lap, bowled [derrubou] a 16, and then left his car door open, resulting in $70 worth of damage. In such award-winning-goofers I also plant seeds to the effect that they’ve hit bottom, so what’s left to fear?”
“It’s amazing how many children I’ve seen who won’t run on a dropped ball. Little princesses just pose and posture the whole game—any game. The strikeout freezers can usually stay on the team if their batting average is high enough. But princesses are eventually ridiculed and chosen last.”
NÓ CEGO: “My other chronic childhood embarrassment worry had to do with body functions. In grade school about the worst thing I could imagine was wetting my pants in class. However, I was also too embarrassed to ask to be excused to go to the restroom. Would this qualify as a double bind? I am probably one of the few people in existence who neither asked to go nor went anyway.”
“It wasn’t until this very year that I got blood on my skirt in public. I was seeing a teenage boy for therapy when it happened. I laughed.” Quando crescemos e aprendemos que dar aquela freada ou mijada na rua não é nada de mais. “Now I’ll ruin the story a little bit: The teenage boy had gone before I realized it had happened, and then I laughed.”
“Life’s traumas, goofs, negative embarrassments and such should be stored lightly. If they’re off in the warehouse, they’re hard to get at when you need them and could do something constructive with them. But even sending the empty storage cabinet to the warehouse is ill advised. Then you wouldn’t have anything to put these memories in. They’d be laying around in sight too much. There are times for getting them out, but really nobody wants to see or hear that stuff all the time, even your best friends. And how about your own probable concentration on them? That’s called negative feedback overload. To avoid repression or indiscriminate hang-out, better get those storage cabinets out of storage!” O que está sempre exposto passa a ser ignorado (como certos livros na prateleira, que estão na sua frente mas você não os vê mais).
“The hypothesis was born: Be they orthodox or atheists, Jews have one foot stuck on the wailing wall. This was a hunch, not a put-down.” “A hipótese havia nascido: Fossem ortodoxos ou ateus, os judeus têm um pé fincado no Muro das Lamentações. Isso era um palpite, não uma afirmação ou acusação.”
IDENTIFICAÇÃO ESPIRITUAL, NO NEED FOR SHOWING (wallpaper de estrela de Davi e correlatos): “My fantasies went even further. I pondered the possible effects of Jewish Depression on the theory and practice of psychotherapy. Since nearly all the geniuses and heroes in this field really are you-know-whats, there might be an accidental bias that could be labeled the J.D. factor. Non-Jewish therapists would pick it up by identification and introjection. By now, almost everybody probably has J.D. This means things may not be as bad as they look.” Ser antissemita é ser antiocidental como um todo, mas não significa ser pró-oriental. Na verdade o Oriente desconhece o pânico anti-judaico; isso é uma doença exclusiva do homem moderno autocastrador. Ser antissemita seria negar nossas mais vincadas raízes pagãs. Ser antissemita é ser um destruidor dos próprios antepassados, nobres e elevados (recado a Varg & simplórios desta era).
“Wailing Wall. To wail is to cry. A wall is a block. A crying block? Crying because of a block?” Trocadilho impossível em Português.
“Note that Adam and Eve had no neurotic human parents and did not live in an uptight culture. They didn’t even have any childhood memories. Archetypal shame may be rather far removed from psychological theories regarding its derivatives. Note also that Adam and Eve were not Jewish; they were everybody. There was a wailing wall long before the one in Jerusalem. The latter is likely a modern intensification, or reenactment.”
“For many years, as an adult, I had frequent repeats of two rather common dream themes. In one I was to be in some play. It was opening night, and the curtain was soon to rise. I couldn’t remember any of my lines. I couldn’t recall ever having been to rehearsals. I couldn’t even find a script to refresh my memory or to take, hidden, on stage with me. In the other dream it was time to go take some school exam. I hadn’t been going to class. I’d forgotten I’d even enrolled in the course. If I’d ever had the textbook, I didn’t know where it was.
Despite years of individual therapy, group encounters, and hundreds of psychological theory and how-to books, these dreams continued unchanged. Then last year I had breakthrough dreams for both of them and have not had either one since.
In the breakthrough play dream, the curtain actually goes up and I step on stage. I not only have to improvise my lines, but I’m not dressed like the others. Six women glide by in beautiful satin gowns, and I’m standing there in a terrycloth robe with a Kotex [absorvente] sticking out of one pocket. Everybody laughs. In the school dream, I go to the room, take the exam, and presumably flunk.”
“All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6) is a commentary on general goodness, not just what we call self-righteousness. As such, it always sounded like a real bummer to me. Maybe the frequency of righteousness wasn’t high, but what a slam on quality. I once thought: Now there’s a good recipe for neurosis.”
“Of course, the righteousness insight didn’t really pop out of nowhere. I’ve been on a gradually emerging spiritual journey for 3 or 4 years now. Sometime during this period the following dialogue probably took place, although I’m surely still working on the last line of it.”
Donald D. Lathrop
“<I have never had a failure in psychotherapy!> My out-bragging the braggart was so incredible that it shut him up. What a blessing for me! The rationalizations that would have poured out of my mouth in justification for my clearly unreal claim humiliate me even now as I think of them. Evidently he recognized at that point that I was crazy. He never attended another supervisory session.”
“The type of therapy—the goals, the expectations, the method—defines failure. In psychoanalysis, the best studied of the therapies, failure has two important faces. One is the therapy that never ends, the <interminable analysis>. The other is the therapy that ends without a full completion of one of the technical dimensions of (psychoanalytic) treatment, namely the resolution of the transference neurosis.” “In most psychotherapies, the transference neurosis is left almost totally untouched. Good results are achieved by minimizing its development.”
“We talked about Arlene Mildred and her father. There were parallels. Arlene had been suicidal for months and was perpetually rejected by her parents. Yet if she killed herself, there is no question that her father would be on the phone screaming threats at me.”
“I feel better (as always) when I work, when I do the work that is my calling. It’s hard to concentrate, but there is relief for me in involving myself with the immediate problems of the living. Now there is something new. I am now haunted by the reality that no one in my care, not my patients, not my family, not myself, is safe from death through my unawareness. The only relief for me is talking into my machine, blindly recording for what purpose I do not know.”
“I recalled today that Mildred had had an illegitimate child and that her parents had condemned her for it; they had disinherited her, had left her with the feeling that in no way could she redeem herself. Now that she is gone, they are going to punish me.”
“But maybe not! Sometime in the late afternoon, sometime after the first woman had comforted me, I began to permit myself to think that maybe they would not sue me. Even now this goes back and forth, now one way, now the other. I know that I will just be waiting, waiting for however long it will be before the letter comes, before the papers are served, waiting and scared and at the same time a little defiant. They are not going to destroy me. I am not going to destroy myself.”
“That’s another strange quirk in this. I can no longer take comfort, as I have for so many years, in fantasies of committing suicide myself. Some recent realizations have convinced me that not only is suicide no longer a possibility for me, but comforting myself with fantasies of suicide is no longer acceptable. How strange, how ironic, that at the same time this door is closed to me, I have experienced the first suicide in my professional career.”
“These are all games. Nothing changes the reality. Mildred is dead. The games I now play to keep other men from judging me, from punishing me for my unconsciousness, for my carelessness, for whatever part is my fault, these games do not seem to me to have much to do with Mildred and me.”
“Tonight Mildred’s parents are busy making the plans and carrying out the procedure of burying their daughter. When they are through, they will come to bury me.”
“She told me that she was responsible for all of the evil in the world. I told her she did not frighten me; I told her, as I have told lots of crazy people, that I would expose myself to her and then we would see whether she was indeed the overseer of all evil. Now she is laughing. I just wish she wasn’t angry. Of all the helpers, all the professionals who have been involved with this young woman over 6 years of suicidal behavior, she saved her act of murder for me. I can stand the laughter, but the contempt, the anger, the hurt to my therapist’s arrogance, that really digs in hard.
Strange that this poor woman and I came together. We were brought together by the impersonal forces of the State. She was covered for her psychiatric care by welfare. I was and am obliged to make much of my living by treating these people. Like many such patients, she did not even pick me. I was picked for her by the good-hearted woman who runs the boarding house where Mildred was sent after her release from the state hospital. This totally untrained person gets the horribly sick, broken souls after they are hastily patched up and discharged from the state hospital. She is understandably anxious to find some professional to take care of her boarders. Many of them are as severely disturbed as any patient I have ever seen in the backward of a state hospital.
From the first time she came to my office, Mildred did not want to see me. In fact, for her first appointment, she refused to come in. I was glad. I didn’t need any more patients. I didn’t need to convince this unattractive young woman that I could help her. So I let her go. But the lady with the burden of taking care of her day in and day out was insistent, and a reappointment was made. Second try: I got her into the office. It was at this time she told me that she was the carrier of all evil. I found something to like in her. Her arrogance regarding evil stimulated my own in a competitive sort of way. I’ve known since I was a kid that no one is <badder> than I am. After that beginning, it was a succession of broken appointments, my happily giving up on her because she was stuck in a hospital in another part of the state, getting her back, working within totally unrealistic limitations of time and money imposed by welfare regulations, step by step to the final miserable result.”
“I was aware, as dawn broke this morning during my run on the beach, of Mildred’s blind eyes that do not see this sunrise. My dream last night was that I was working with some other people, trying to finish a job. Although I was working hard and felt the importance of finishing the job, I was not frantic. Then I was relaxing with some people, perhaps having cocktails, and a young woman asked me whether I would be giving a language course. I replied, Who, me? Parlez-vous ze Deutsch? Everyone laughed, for I had demonstrated that language was my very weakest subject.
I did not understand this seemingly light-hearted and trivial dream in response to Mildred’s death. Then I went to consult my friend, my guide, Max Zeller (our relationship was called Jungian analysis, or psychotherapy, and I was the patient). Max suggested that we consult the I Ching. This was a beautiful idea. It was the very sort of objective statement that I would be willing to accept. I certainly did not want any more comforting.
I asked the I Ching about the nature of my involvement with Mildred, the meaning of this experience. The answer was hexagram 28, <The Preponderance of the Great>. In this ancient Chinese symbolism was revealed a union of solidness, steadfastness, and joy. My light-hearted dream of last night now makes sense to me. As a student, much less a teacher of the language of the unconscious, I am a rank beginner. My life is the task that must be completed. As the dream says, I no longer work frantically at the task, imagining that I will thus impress the gods or get the job done, i.e., reach perfection. The hexagram also comforts me in my experience of inner peace, my lack of grief. I had feared that this was merely denial on my part, the refusal to feel the expected emotions. But the ancient book of Chinese wisdom suggests that grief and breast-beating are simply not part of this experience.”
“Now it is years later. I never heard another word from Mildred’s parents. The boyfriend who had encouraged her to sign herself out of the hospital against my advice called a couple of times. He mainly wanted to share his feeling that all of us had been bound together by a cosmic experience. I could agree—since he made no further demand on me. I was satisfied that he had forgiven himself as I had myself.
My failure, as I now see it, was in not being aware of the purpose of my treatment of Mildred. This young woman had been in agony for years, convinced that she was personally responsible for all of the evil in the world. She had tried repeatedly to solve both her own excruciating pain and the world’s unnecessary suffering by killing herself. However, she had always been too disorganized, too fragmented to succeed. I had treated her with medication and with psychotherapy so that she finally had the necessary ego resources to carry through a definite act of self-annihilation. My job was to cure her so she could kill herself! My failure was in remaining unconscious, in not being willing to be fully responsible for my part of the therapeutic contract.
I had known for years before this incident that the danger of suicide is greatest during the recovery phase. I knew that I could have legally detained her for a while longer. It would have been a lot of trouble, but it could have been done. The fact is, I just didn’t care enough about Mildred. That’s what was lethal.
I don’t want to slip into moralizing. That has no place in a world that is moving slowly but surely away from judgment, away from manipulation through guilt. I am convinced that my own refusal of guilt in Mildred’s death was the key to my not being punished by society. If we permit guilt to take over, we communicate to others their right to take vengeance on us.”Meu satânico erro em quase todos os períodos turbulentos da minha vida: ser cristão demais! Jussara, Maria das Graças, veteranos bobiólogos, até mesmo indivíduos estranhos, conhecidos na véspera… sempre se aproveitaram dessa faceta, tantos rostos descarnados disponíveis para umas pancadinhas, impunemente… Felizmente minha língua e meus dedos, embora em efeito retardado, isso lá é verdade, não seguem ordens ou ditames do “corpo típico” (o que me lembra TÍSICO), se é que se me entende. Aloprados e mais sinceros do que idiotas e bons, eles procedem à vendeta; “fora de contexto” não existe na perspectiva dessas duas instâncias, verdadeiras guias desta carne que transpira. Uma vez, em que não importa quanto veneno a serpente inoculasse eu jamais reconheceria qualquer porcentagem de culpa: Isabel the Unimportant Nóia, leprosa que se filia com os tipos mais tortos e mendicantes, desajustados, dessa Brasília imunda (e por isso me conhece!), não tinha nenhuma razão, mas, ainda pior, nenhuma chance de, com razão ou não, me convencer de minha responsabilidade no incidente que precipitou meu divórcio. Isto não é dizer que esse tipo de pessoa sem conhecimento causal algum tem qualquer ciência socrática de que nada sabe: pelo contrário, uma Unimportant Bell é sempre e perigosamente a “personalidade forte” que carrega uma fé cega, uma autoconfiança ilimitada nos próprios métodos, a pura contingência e falta de método, a vida informe e tosca, não-lixada, torpe como madeira matéria-prima. Estas pessoas são tão fanáticas em seu niilismo inócuo quanto qualquer dogmático tentando reinjetar, atavicamente, tabus e ritos milenares já superados na nossa sociedade protestantemente laica (faz parte do jogo de cena a impressão de que os evangélicos nunca foram tão poderosos, mas é uma força de castelo de açúcar, com dilúvios à vista…). Não temos rigidez e teimosia para levar adiante nenhum propósito que não tenha nascido ontem mesmo, enquanto civilização brasileira pós-moderna. Os mais doidos e inconseqüentes que já conheço há anos, mesmo que sem qualquer padrão real, são os únicos que posso descrever com precisão em seu martelar psicológico entediante.
ATENÇÃO, FIÉIS! NOSSOS PLANOS FORAM ANTECIPADOS PARA ONTEM: “All of my life I have failed. All of my life, I have suffered depression as a consequence. But I would far rather take my punishment as depression than project the responsibility for punishing me out onto the world. Others are not likely to be as merciful to me as my own educated inner Judge. I had a revelation once: There is no judgment on Judgment Day.”
Vin Rosenthal
“Unlike Joseph K. in Kafka’s The Trial, I know what I am guilty of”
“I am so nervous! I take some Thorazine. (Why Thorazine! Especially when I’ve never taken any psychotropic drug—not even marijuana.)”
“(And now I know what my patients are talking about when they tell of their anxiety.)” Weird. Sempre achei que a descoberta antecedia a profissão!
“Were you aware that a contract with a ‘schizophrenic’ often has little binding power?”
“The Tribunal gets really hot when it suspects sexual misconduct on my part. The judges are terribly suspicious of anything that looks the slightest bit sexual. (This sometimes is a hard one because they don’t always agree among themselves about what is sexual and about the rules of common practice and the behavior of the hypothetical <reasonable therapist.>) The Tribunal casts its confronting eyes over my writings and challenges me about such statements as follows:
She says: If it hadn’t been for your response to me, your holding me, I don’t think I would ever have come to believe anyone could find me sexually desirable; no matter how long we had just talked about it.
I’m amazed and overjoyed. I had picked up her message that she genuinely desired to have me-as-a-person act warmly, lovingly, intimately, with her-as-a-person, but I was uncertain whether I should risk it. Now I can see that by limiting my risk I would have seriously limited her possibilities.
My judges are especially wary whenever I Hold a patient.” “they often are skeptical and insist on reading between the lines and beyond what I have written.”
“If I sense the person is feeling sexual as a child, I let him know he is safe. If I sense the person is sexualizing to avoid, I try to encourage his getting to his child; if he does not, we sit up and work on it. This is also true if I sense that I am sexualizing the situation. I do not continue TO HOLD a patient if I stay with my sexual feelings”
“The Age of Aquarius enables me to avoid detection; no one looks that closely, and whoever does is ridiculed for being <uptight>.”
“What would you have me do? What kind of job would you permit me to hold that would enable me to retain my humanity, use my skills and talents and develop my potential? Remember, my peers are no better than me. The few unflawed noble souls are, wisely, going about their business in an unpublic way; they couldn’t care less. I have to live somewhere, someone has to share my company—otherwise that would be too inhuman a punishment to fit my misdemeanors. Reforming seems like such a difficult, even impossible task. Disappearing feels easier, yet, I’d have to take myself along. I suppose I’ll just go along as I have and hope that nothing happens.”
Lora Price
why not just a few?
“In the social work profession, close, intensive working together with clients toward personality shifts and problem-solving is called <counseling>. This is a term that suggests <telling> someone what to do as a way to be helpful.” “It is the social worker—the woman—whom the public mind most often identifies as the offerer of the <concrete> service. The intangibles, the profundities, are within the male preserve.” “Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank supplied the educational approaches that dominate the field. When I was in graduate school the faculty was overwhelmingly female. The course in psychological theory was the only one not taught by a social worker. Instead, the instructor was a male psychiatrist with a faculty appointment as <consultant>.”
“Even those social work agencies most heavily invested in offering counseling rather than concrete services rely upon regularly scheduled psychiatric consultations to determine and consolidate diagnosis and the direction of treatment. When I was a caseworker in a family service agency, it was a male psychiatrist who was hired to offer his expert opinion on a weekly, one-hour consultant schedule. There were only one or two caseworkers who could <present> within this frame.”
“Mistakes or therapeutic errors (although they were not so designated) were to be kept <in house>. This was a familiar and oft-taught lesson.” “The case supervisor, my supervisor, and I would all sit there chatting amiably, awaiting the arrival of the psychiatrist. He always came late because his schedule was so busy. All four of us would then engage in seeming accord as if there was only one way to work with my clients, one direction for me to follow. Because my submitted materials reflected only that I knew exactly what to do, we could then all bask in the aura of certain knowledge and perfection.”
“Making one’s way is equated with manipulation and control. Although the kernel of this truth first became evident in my work in a social work unit (a family service agency), it was even more glaringly so when I began working in mental health facilities. Ironically, these are considered the apex of clinical social work placements because of the opportunity they offer to do counseling—or therapy—without the impediment of the concrete service traditionally found in social work agencies. I had decided to go this route because of my wish to work with clients more intensively and knowledgeably.”
“When I applied for the job I wanted, I was turned down by the woman who was the Chief Social Worker. She said I was too inexperienced and would make too many mistakes. Besides that, I had been trained as a Rankian and obviously would not fit in with the Freudian approach of that particular clinic. She knew that my being there would <embarrass> the social workers who needed to keep up with (if not be better than) the medical staff. The chief of the service was a male psychiatrist. I saw him next. He was pleased to maintain his position in the ongoing struggle by overruling her and hiring me. In any case, he could not conceive that anything I would do could be that important. He knew that it was the doctors who ran that clinic.”
“the <family> was considered to be my area of expertise. The people I saw were labeled <clients> in deference to their secondary standing in the treatment matrix.”
“In my mind, women were less likely to be accepted into medical school than men, and girls were not as skilled as boys in dealing with prerequisite subjects such as science and mathematics. Also, becoming a social worker consumes less time and less money. Clearly, expending less energy befits a profession which is only of secondary importance.”
“Away from my clients I wept copiously. With them, I insisted on appearing intact and untroubled. I feel embarrassed now by my complicity in perpetuating their assurances that I could be perfect”
Arthur L. Kovacs
“Presented at the symposium Critical Failure Experiences in Psychotherapy, Division 29 Midwinter Meeting, 1972.”
“I now know that this formulation is nonsense. What we do with our patients— whether we do so deviously and cunningly or overtly and brashly—is to affirm our own identities in the struggle with their struggles. We use them, for better or worse, to secure precious nourishments, to preserve our sanity, to make our lives possible, and to reassure ourselves in the face of that ineffable dread that lurks always beyond the margins of our awareness and can be heard as a very quiet electric hum emanating from the depths of our souls when everything is silent.”
“In this way, we can use our training to utter comfortable lies to ourselves and to avoid looking at the processes by which the persons we are either catalyze or defeat those who move in communion with us.”
“…what? Disaster? Chaos? Stalemate? I do not even know the right word to describe the outcome.”
“Part of me needed a persecutor, and Gwen supplied the potential to play the part.” “When I no longer needed to be persecuted, we somehow parted.”
“subjective time is always more important than objective time”
“Gwen came to see me because she had begun to experience severe anxiety attacks in school. Most of these were evoked by encounters with her psychology instructor, a married, middle-aged man. She was convinced, in her own paranoid fashion (to which I was unutterably blind in the beginning), that he was making seductive, obscene, and shaming gestures toward her continually. When he discussed masturbation in his lectures, she believed he was shaming her before the whole class, accusing her and revealing that she was a masturbator. She would blush, feel terrified, and have to leave class.Gwen was frequently aware of his genitals bulging in his trousers. She often believed he dressed in a fashion to accentuate them and positioned himself in such a way as to exhibit his endowments to her. When he talked about sexual matters, she <knew> he was lusting after her. I need to make it clear that, as I do so often, I partly trusted Gwen’s craziness and indeed believed there was something in the instructor that longed for her. She was, I must repeat, deadly cute.”
“When she returned to her next appointment, she was furious with me. She screamed at me that I was a rotten fucker, that I had sent her to her humiliation, that I took sadistic pleasure in teasing her. The force of her violence was incredible; her features contorted into a malevolent hatred that I have seldom seen. For the first time, I sensed the presence of some awesome murderousness in her, and I felt frightened. The pitch of her screaming was louder than I had ever heard. I believe, and still do, that the instructor had manipulated her and given her a dose of clever poison to choke on as he protected himself from her paranoid wisdom. I tried to get her to hear that. Her ears were closed by the noise of her own anguished, vicious screaming. She broke out of my office, fleeing from me and from her rage, almost wrenching the door off its hinges—although she probably does not weigh more than 95 pounds [43kg].”
“My beliefs, inflicted on Gwen and most others who opened themselves to me, were my armor, my sword, and my shield at that time of my life.”
“The next many months Gwen found exquisite ways to torment me, even though I could not get her to come to my office. She began, for example, to call me, usually around 3A.M.. I would stagger out of bed to answer the phone. There would be an ominous silence, then a loud screaming, You goddam piece of shit! I want you to die! or something equally vicious and abusive. Suddenly the phone would be hung up and it would be over until the next time. I believed then that my life was in the grip of some malevolent, overwhelmingly crushing principle, for Gwen’s timing was exquisite. Most of her calls occurred at times when I felt too weary, too battered to stand one more moment of anguish in my life. My struggle to build a new existence was beginning to consume me. Most of those nights I had fallen into fitful sleep after lengthy episodes of bitter acrimony with my former wife or of crying desperate tears at having to cross such a limitless desert alone. Gwen’s calls would cause me to start up from steamy, sweat-rumpled sheets in terror; I did not feel the strength to deal with her.”
“At last, after an absence of 4 months, I finally received a daytime call from Gwen. She asked to make an appointment! When she came in, she told me that she had been thinking about her therapy a lot and that she felt she wanted to enter group therapy. Having others around would, she believed, keep the 2 of us from getting into terrible trouble together. (I often notice patients possess incredible wisdom, if we would only listen!) I also, as did she, wanted and needed to dilute the horrible intensity of what had been transpiring between us. I readily assented, and Gwen started group.”
“In her middle adolescence, Gwen’s stepfather had a psychotic episode, preceded by a period of great violence during which he brandished a pistol repeatedly, screamed at his family members often in desperate viciousness, and engaged in great, raging, hallucinatory battles with his wife—during which he sometimes bloodied her or broke her bones—before he himself finally went to a psychiatric hospital. Gwen trembled violently as she remembered and related these things. During this period of treatment, also, Gwen got herself a job as a secretary, decided to attend college at night, and moved into her own apartment, separating from her family for the first time in her life. And I felt smug, pompous, and marvelously effective as her therapist. What an ass I was!”
“Once I was working with another patient. The other patient was pouting, sullen, withholding. She had come up to the edge of something and now sat stolidly, defiantly, unyieldingly. I became exasperated and started shaking her. The next thing I knew, Gwen threw herself on me, fists flailing, screaming You fucker, you fucker! It took 10 people to pry her off of me. I was very shaken.
Another marathon. Days, months, years—I do not know how much later. I had taken 20 patients into the Sierra Nevada. We were camped out in a snow-surrounded, glacial-scoured, lake-filled paradise. I had asked a woman along to share my sleeping bag at night. As I look back, I now feel ashamed of my choice. My companion was young and very pretty but had nothing more for me than sexual compliance. For this she wished to present me with a large number of emotional demands. At that period of my life I was desperate for any crumb of nourishment, did not appreciate my worth, and would hunger after anyone I believed would have me. We fought a great deal that weekend. Gwen kept watching the two of us balefully. During the 2nd day, she asked the largest man in the group to restrain her physically while she talked to me. He did so, and once again she shifted gears into her screaming viciousness, calling me a piece of shit, a motherfucker—any obscenity she could muster. He held her so she wouldn’t hit me. She struggled hard to get free while she vilified me. The gist of her tirade was, of course, that I was a moral leper, a vile sensualist, and a user of people.
As my first marriage continued to die and as I searched for the goodness I so longed for, Gwen became somehow in my mind the world’s representation of the established moral order. She had been selected to make me suffer for my sinful attempts to make a new life. The night calls and screaming at me over the telephone continued, usually when I could least bear them. Incredible vituperation also spilled out of her in group each week.”
“Weekends are always terrible when marriages are dying.”
“I want her dead! I suddenly knew it and began to fantasize the myriad ways I could kill her. I danced exultantly over her broken corpse. Her life must end so that mine could go on! (…) That shitty, stinking little cunt-bitch! I arrived at work trembling in fearful awe over the intensity of my own murderousness. That night in group my patience was exhausted. The 2 of us got into a screaming battle with each other. I told her how I longed for her to die. We traded insults and murderous fantasies. I felt momentarily better.
Another night—weeks later. I am talking to someone else about masturbation. Gwen’s paranoia flares up again. She accuses me of sitting with my legs apart to compel her to stare at my crotch. She insists that I am talking about masturbation to shame her. She yells that I should get it straight once and for all that she does not masturbate. I get furious. I tell her that she is a stupid little bitch. I tell her she is 20 years old and that it is time she started masturbating. I describe to her how to do it and order her to go home and carry out my instructions after group. I add that I never want to hear anything about masturbation from her again. She becomes silent. Finally, I start searching my heart about her accusations. I tell her that they are partly justified, that when I first met her I had indeed tried her on in fantasy as a possible lover. I assented that I had probably teased her provocatively and flirted with her in subtle ways. I admitted to her the crazy desperation that seized most of my life then, the hunger to be at rest in a good woman’s arms. I added that my fantasies about her had died, though, soon after my getting to know her—that she was not my other half, nor what I needed for me. I said that I regretted that fact. I believed that my inability even to imagine her any longer as a partner to me was a sad tragedy. I felt forlorn as I talked to her. I closed the group by expressing my wish that a day might come before either of us were dead when once again she could stir me in such a way as to invoke in me imagery of her being my woman. I knew that that would be a sign that something profound had happened to each of us.
Early the next morning, Gwen called. She asked if she could have an individual appointment with me. I had a cancellation that afternoon and readily assented. At the appointed hour, I opened the waiting room door. Her face was contracted with rage. As she walked by me, she slapped my face. When we entered my office, I asked her what the hell that had been for. She screamed that I had exposed, shamed, and humiliated her in front of her friends in group. Then she went berserk and threw herself on me, trying to claw my face and spitting at me as we tussled. We crashed to the floor, spilling furniture and books everywhere. I finally subdued her, and as she began to feel the assertion of my strength and control she murmured between clenched teeth: Go ahead, you bastard. Fuck me. I told her I wasn’t interested. She began to sob convulsively. I had never seen her like that. She was suddenly very little and helpless, a 3-year-old who had been running around in murderous fury, trying to pretend that she had adult competencies lest the world penetrate her disguise and annihilate her. An image is indelibly burned into my awareness: the two of us sitting there on the floor in the midst of the rubble of my office, Gwen sobbing helplessly in my arms, my rocking her and feeling rubber-kneed and weak from the awe and fearfulness of what we had just experienced.”
“She began describing her stepfather coming into her room one night. Gwen stopped, flushed, went incredibly tense, and would not go on.” “My instructions to her to enter into a dialogue with the half-fantasied, half-remembered shade of that man on that nameless occasion precipitated a kind of trance-like state. Gwen became 14 again. She relived and reproduced what I knew was in store for all of us—her stepfather’s feared, longed-for, luscious, tormenting, lacerating, hungering attempted rape of her that awful night of her memory. Who knows whether the events were real or not? I still do not. But their reality was powerful that evening she described them to us.”
“Her tear-drowned eyes remained closed. I picked her up and rocked her as I would my own daughter. At first she drank me in. Then I felt her stiffen. I knew intuitively what was happening, and I said to Gwen, No, I don’t have an erection. She realized it too, at the same time, and turned to rubber once again in my lap. Yet, at that moment, I sensed our relationship was doomed and hopeless. If I held her at some emotional distance to placate her longing, terrified struggle over being penetrated, she would rail at me for being no help, disinterested or worthless to her. If she captured my attention, and I started to move closer to her, I would become the bearded satyr—too exciting, too forbidden, and too dangerous to deal with. Either way the end result was an outburst of fearful hatred. I talked to her often about this frustrated, impotent dilemma into which she thrust me. It never did any good.
Instead, Gwen began to separate from me. She started to come to group less and less. At first I felt comfortable with this, for the events of her life demonstrated a thrust toward increasing competency and mastery. She received a significant promotion at work.She separated from her boyhood lover and began to explore the possibilities of loving a much more capable man a few years older than she was. (…) One day she called me to ask me for a referral. A friend who did not have much money wanted to enter therapy and asked her, so she said, for the name of a good clinic. I provided this to her, and I added that the friend should ask for Dr. X, if possible, at that agency for I knew he had a good reputation. Three months later I found out, when Gwen began to talk matter-of-factly about it in group, that it was Gwen herself who had gone to see Dr. X and that Dr. X had begun seeing her, not at the clinic, but in his private practice!”
“She finally mustered the courage to tell her new lover that she was falling in love with him and to ask him for more of himself than he had been willing to give her thus far. He smiled, told her that she was a sweet thing, but that all he wanted her for was an occasional night in the sack. He laughed delightedly at her precious gift of her avowing that she wanted him, and he went to the refrigerator to break out a bottle of champagne. Gwen went berserk, tore up the man’s apartment, and forced him to throw her out bodily. She then came to group the next week, started up her screaming machine again, complained that I was an evil monster who ruined people’s lives, and stormed out of the office. I did not see Gwen again for three months. I was relieved. I thought she was gone forever, and I was happy. I had at last left my previous life, was living alone, and felt joyously in love with the woman who is now my wife. Gwen’s seeming departure was a mystical sign to me that my perilous journey was at last over and that I would be able to rest in my wife’s arms, exhausted, ecstatic, and optimistic about what we were beginning to build.
Much to my surprise, Gwen signed up for a weekend marathon [!] I held the next January. My soon-to-be wife accompanied me on that occasion. As I relive those moments, I remember how Gwen stared at the two of us in hateful envy. She detested my happiness. She tried to interfere, with sarcasm and cruel mockery, in any work I attempted to do. I finally stopped everything to contend with her. I was quaking with tension. After Gwen played many screaming broken records over and over again, I asked her what the hell she wanted from me. To my astonishment, she softened and asked to be held. Haltingly, I agreed. She came and sat next to me. I put my arm around her and she leaned against me, but I felt some kind of stiffness and unyieldingness in her manner and bearing. I told her I missed the vulnerable child she had—on a precious very few occasions—allowed herself to be with me. My wife, in her usual marvelously intuitive fashion, saw the look in Gwen’s eyes and began to speak to her of her own struggles with pride and envy. They swapped tales of being children, of longing for good fathers, and of all the turmoil and fear such longings create. My wife urged that Gwen be resolute in searching for what she wanted and that she not allow her fears of other women’s retribution to turn her aside from her quest. Gwen softened and allowed herself at last to surrender to being held. Later in the night one of the women in the group asked Gwen for permission to, and indeed did, feed her from a baby’s bottle. [Ah, kleinianos!]
Gwen then disappeared from my life. Once in a while I would get a phone call from her complaining bitterly about the cold, cruel, and vicious treatment she was receiving at the hands of Dr. X. I urged her each time to discuss her grievances, real or imagined, with him and told her she was always welcome, if she wished, to return to group—that many people missed her and asked about her. Last June, I got a call from her again. She and Dr. X had gotten into a fight, and he had thrown her out of therapy, saying that he was sick of her vicious bitchiness, would not put up with it anymore, and was not going to see her again. Gwen sounded crazy and frightened on the phone. I began to get anxious.
Two weeks later I came into my office and found it at shambles. All my books had been thrown on the floor. The furniture was overturned. Papers had been ripped up. A cover from Time magazine, the one with Jesus Christ Superstar on it, had been ripped off. A knife, thrust through the face of Jesus, impaled it to my couch. I knew immediately who had done it, and I began to fear for my life. Then Gwen called and asked for an individual appointment. I refused, telling her that I was afraid of the violence in her. I urged her to come to group so that we could talk where we would both be safe. She screamed at me and hung up.”
“Three weeks later, a fireman came into my office. Gwen had been gathered in off the roof of my building after having threatened noisily for an hour to jump.” “The physician in charge called me. He said Gwen had confessed to him it was the 3rd attempt she had made on her life in 48 hours.”
“The mother reported that Gwen had assaulted her parents and her father’s psychiatrist during the past week. I begged the mother to have Gwen hospitalized. Instead the mother screamed at me for being <one of the fucking Jew-doctors> that had ruined her daughter’s life. Screaming in fury, she told me she was going to take Gwen home. For the next 3 weeks I walked in dread, not knowing whether Gwen was alive or dead, not knowing if she would come at me out of some other dark night, this time with a weapon.
Late in July, Gwen called again. She asked for an appointment. For some reason known only to my sense of the uncanny¹, I granted her request. I was terrified, but I needed to confront some primitive dread in me. I was sick to death of being a person who always ducked bullies and fled from the possibility of violence. She would be the occasion for me to confront me.”
¹ Referência freudiana
“She related to me that she had made appointments with 8 different therapists in the past 4 weeks and had physically assaulted all 8 of them and fled.”
“I guess I’ll live. But I don’t think I’m going to go on with therapy.”
“As she disappeared down the hall she smiled bravely and called out over her shoulder, You’re the only one who always lets me come back. I have not seen or heard from her this past 3 years.”
“Gwen served me well as my vicious companion at a time I needed one. The impress of her being will always be with me.”
Hobart F. Thomas
“On several occasions I have experienced deep feelings of love and/or sexual attraction for clients. At other times I have felt and expressed feelings of irritation and anger. None of these emotionally charged situations, however, seems to provide the devastating frustration of those in which no truly personal contact occurred. I am recalling the long and seemingly fruitless hours spent with depressed patients in mental institutions, which seem to put one’s faith in a therapeutic process to the ultimate test.”
“Perhaps the toughest experiences of my career were the days of attempting to practice before I myself had undergone personal therapy. I had mastered the knowledge, techniques, and procedures well enough to obtain a clinical Ph.D., but the heart and guts of the process were missing. Bizarre as it may sound, I even recall on more than one occasion actually envying the experiences of some of my clients in therapy.”
“Approximately 4 years after completing a doctorate, I entered personal therapy. Reasons for the long delay are not easy to determine. In spite of episodes such as the above, I seemed to be endowed with sufficient ego strength to keep the show going. Besides, I was not convinced that the Freudian model and many of its practitioners, who represented the bulk of my exposure to clinical practice at the time, were the answer either to my own or to the world’s problems. It was then, and is now, my conviction that one best chooses a therapist out of some deep intuitive place, and one can do no better than to follow one’s feelings when making such a choice.”
“Bouts with the perfection monster”
“Being <analyzed>, at least in the circles in which I traveled at the time, also qualified one for membership in a rather exclusive club. A part of me wanted to belong, to be accepted, to be part of the action. Another part, for whatever reasons, refused to join up and pay the membership dues.”
“Ironically, my impression is that, currently, the Jungian school is considered more <in> [fashion] than the Freudian. At the time, such was definitely not the case.”
“What if all of a sudden I can’t function?”
“The outer drama in which therapist and client each play their respective roles continues, apparently without interruption, until the end of the hour.”
“The experience of panic occasionally recurs, sometimes in the consulting room, sometimes while teaching a class, or sometimes during seemingly ordinary conversation—usually, in each case, when I feel pretty much in charge and everything appears to be running smoothly. (Another clue here, perhaps?)”
“really plays well for his age”
“We need not always stand alone.”
“Look, Mom, I finally made it!”
“My hunch is that the state of panic is a corrective, devised by my wiser Self to help put things back in the proper perspective—a real therapeutic kick in the ass to remind me that I’m not God.” My hunch is that my panic is for me to saying Farewell, father!
“it is essential to know how to let be.”
“that’s all: [be] midwife. You can relax.”
“My perfection bogey-man stays with me a good deal of the time, however. Having experienced that paradisaical state of Being, I do keep searching for ways to get there and stay there. Even when I appear to be laying back, I’m trying—trying to do, trying not to do. And, too often, in rushing to reach home I forget to smell the flowers along the way.”
NO, NOT FREUD: “When my own therapists revealed themselves to me as persons, not gods, I soon realized that human imperfection has about it its own particular beauty.”
Joen Fagan (mulher – informação relevante para um dos casos que ela irá contar!)
“One of my oracles is the dictionary. Built into the derivation of words and the range of their meanings is a cohesion of human experience. So I asked Webster the meaning of naked, and found my eye pausing over and returning to <defenseless, unarmed, lacking confirmation or support.> As I sat, feeling my way into these meanings, I remembered William.”
“He sat in the front row, nodding at the right times and laughing at my jokes, behaviors much appreciated by a teacher.” “You know so much about this; don’t you think…?” or “Why wouldn’t it be true that…?”
“I was lonely, but people had to press against me to become friends; even though I needed and wanted them, my reserve and hesitancy took some broaching. It was the same with students who had asked me to counsel with them. They had to persist past my uncertainty and self-doubts. So I accepted some intrusiveness and tolerated my discomfort with him without firm limits or comments.”
“Did I think he needed to go back into therapy? Did I think he was crazy? His father had said that to him this week. His wife had told him that too. But he thought he was doing well. Would I see him for therapy?
No, William.
Why not?
You’re not finished with Carl. Besides, I won’t see students who are taking courses from me for therapy. (Avoiding saying, of course, that I doubted my ability to handle him or that he was too manipulative.)
Well, will you have lunch with me? Why not?
He was becoming a nuisance. Once, as he got up to go, he suddenly leaned over and tried to kiss me. I was angry then and told him so.”
“Did I think he was crazy? He had been hospitalized before. What did I think? <I think you’re bothered about a number of things and should go back and see Carl.>”
“Anyway, in another week summer vacation would start, and 3 months away from the college would solve the whole thing.”
“The next morning an envelope was in the mailbox at my house; it was a somewhat confused but humorous letter from William saying he had decided to spend the summer in a nearby public park and inviting me to join him.”
“The next day there was another letter, more angry and threatening, with some sexual allusions that were immediately denied. You know, of course, that I’m just kidding. I love you and wouldn’t hurt you or do you harm. I began feeling frightened and did not sleep well. The letter the next day was even more threatening. If you won’t see me, you won’t see anybody. I want you and I’ll get you.”
“The father called me later that afternoon to say that he had found William and had had him admitted to a psychiatric ward. My relief, though, was short-lived. Letters now started coming through the mail, openly delusional, abusive, threatening, and sexually blatant. Again I waited and did nothing, not knowing anything to do. Should I contact his unit? Or him? Or his father? To do what? Say I was scared? Then his father called again. He thought I might want to know that William had escaped from the ward.
There was a paranoid somewhere in the city and I was the center of his delusions. Several days of extreme anxiety. I put chain locks on my doors and jumped at noises. I remembered a patient at the hospital where I had interned, who, ten years after his last contact with a former female therapist, still maintained a similar life-focusing preoccupation with her. The hospital viewed him as sufficiently dangerous to call and warn her when he escaped”
“I remembered other threats to therapists and attacks by patients, and I frantically found work to do and friends to be with.”
“Shortly after that an FBI agent called to say they had investigated the forgery at the request of the bank but did not recommend pressing charges since William was now in the psychiatric ward at Bellevue. Again, relief.
Once every few months a postcard came, and one time, a box of candy on Valentine’s Day. He might no longer have been paranoid, but I was; thinking there was a chance it was poisoned, I threw it away. The sight of the neat, familiar writing could still evoke anxiety, but the cards came less and less frequently until finally a year or more had passed with nothing to remind me of him.”
“Do you know that you saved my life?
No, William, I didn’t know that.
He stood up, went to the door, paused, said goodbye, and left. I realized that I had no idea what he had meant.”
“Do you know, William, how much you taught me about the impossibility of running?”
Barbara Jo Brothers (e sim, é só uma pessoa)
“I am caught. There is no way my vanity will let me avoid rising to the challenge, no way I would decline contributing to this book…but knowing this as my personal dilemma: the risk of exposure of a place inside myself—a place I have found virtually unbearable… a place I have virtually given my life to protect.”
“When I met Jerry, I was in the first month of my first clinical job, armed with my degree and with all of the accompanying mixtures of zeal and anxiety. There was Jerry. Transferred to the local state hospital’s adolescent unit because his family’s funds had run out (after 9 months of psychoanalysis and private hospitalization), Jerry was as crazy at that point as he had been 9 months before. I had known his analyst, so I knew a bit of his history.”
“In my youthful mind, if one of the best analysts in town was giving up, I was already expiated from whatever penalties of failure might ensue and from the awesome demands of Knowing-What-I-Am-Doing.
Jerry and I did well. Then one day the hospital decided to discharge him, prematurely in my judgment. I sent him to what I considered to be the best mental health center in town and tried to tell myself something to make the uneasiness a little easier in my hither-to-relied-on gut.”
“My own therapist comes in, tries to look like a doctor, takes my pulse. <Are you depressed?> he says. I reply, <I’m too sick to be depressed. Come back in a few days and I might have a depression for you.>”
“We had lost our connection after my discharge. I had referred him to the best therapist I knew in community out patient mental health clinics. He was re-hospitalized. I vehemently protested when hospital policy dictated that he not be admitted to my unit simply because of having had one more birthday since his discharge [ultrapassou o limite de idade de sua clínica]. I might have conquered death, but I was not going to have an effect on the monolithic mental ill-health system. He went to the adult unit and killed himself while out on pass.”
“Exposure, expression, mistake, all are cyclical. My exposure is beginning to sound like my salvation. That which I fear most seems to serve my best interests most powerfully.”
“I dodge and twist and evade.”
Carl Whitaker
“Before antibiotics, treatment of gonorrhea in the female usually consisted of months of hospital bed-rest. The Green Girls were locked in a big ward on top of the hospital in the middle of the East River. It was my job to try to keep them from becoming overly excited in order to prevent flaring up of the infection that had gotten them arrested and imprisoned.
It was a strange flip for a religious country boy to end up dealing with Broadway chorus girls. They wanted to have their operation by our own gyn department because we used a special incision below the hairline. That way they could go back on the stage and not be laughed at for exposing their surgical scar.”
“I saw this big white polar bear sitting on the bed, and I knew he wasn’t real, but I had to call the nurse because he looked so real.”
“As I learned more about the vivid experiences of psychosis, I rapidly lost my interest in the mechanical carpentry work we call surgery.”
“A patient who was mumbling to himself explained that voices were calling him horrible things and saying that he had intercourse with his mother. I said, ‘That must be very upsetting,’ and he waved me off with, ‘Oh, no, they’ve been doing that for years, and I don’t pay attention anymore’.”
“Later I talked with an 85 year-old man who came in for molesting an 8 year-old girl. When I met the girl, who looked like a professional actress fresh out of Hollywood, it made huge gashes in my fantasy of what life and people were all about.”
“This call of the wild, the agony and ecstasy of schizophrenia, of the whole psychotic world, ballooned inside of me.” “The magic of schizophrenia, that Alice-in-Wonderland quality of spending hour after hour, sometimes all night long, with a patient whose preoccupation with delusions and hallucinations made him as fascinating as yourself, was matched by the mystery world of play therapy.”
“My discovery of Melanie Klein and her beliefs about infant sexuality was like a repetition in depth of my earlier discovery of the psychotic world.” Oh no, not this bitch again, defenestrate her, from the fifth flour, please!
“my first introduction to psychotherapy was by way of the Philadelphia social work school’s form of Rank’s process thinking. I became more and more intrigued by what brings about change. There was an 8 year-old boy who hadn’t said anything since he had whooping cough [coqueluche] at age 2. I spent 6 months seeing that boy once a week while the social worker talked to his mother upstairs. He never said anything to me either, but we threw the football out in the yard. He did listen to me talk about him. I finally gave up and admitted I couldn’t help. He and his mother went away disappointed. I thought I’d had it with psychotherapy until we got a call back 3 weeks later saying he’d started talking.”
“It became more and more clear that medical students were divided into those who didn’t know how to be tender and those who didn’t know how to be tough. How difficult it was to teach either one to have access to the other. I didn’t really know I was merely talking about myself for some years, but I did discover the joys of working with delinquents. That power! I always thought of them as Cadillacs with steering gear problems, whereas the neurotics we saw in the medical school clinic were like old Fords that were only hitting on two cylinders. Looking back, I often wonder how many of the delinquents stole cars just so they could come back and tell me about it.”
“As a matter of fact, for the next 3 or 4 years I bottle fed almost every patient I saw—man, woman, or child; neurotic, psychotic, psychopathic, or alcoholic—and with a high degree of usefulness, if not success. It was only some time later that it dawned on me that it wasn’t the patient who required the technique, but the therapist. I was learning to mother, and once that was developed I couldn’t use the technique anymore.”
“I didn’t even know then that co-therapy was a secret system for learning how to talk about emotional experiences. It allowed you to be able to objectify a subjective experience shared with someone else.”
I eventually left to work in Atlanta, where we discovered in those early days that the baby bottle was a valuable way to induce regression in the service of growth but that fighting was equally valuable. Just as the baby bottles spread from one to another in our staff group of 7, so the fighting moved until we were apt to be involved physically with almost every patient in one way or another. The intimacy of physical contact—of slapping games, of wrestling, and of arm-wrestling—became a part of our discovery of our own toughness.”
“By 1946 we had 3 daughters and 1 son. The problem of trying to be an administrator and a clinician had exteriorized a lot of my immaturity. When the stress in the hospital and medical school got high, I began to precipitate myself into psychosomatic attacks with cold sweats, chills, vomiting, diarrhea, and a half day in bed. Cuddling with my wife resolved this, but I went back into psychotherapy to help develop confidence in preventing it. Living with our own children also convinced Muriel and me that the only <unconditional positive regard> in this world comes from little children.”
“It was clear to us that the reason people work with schizophrenics is that they want to find their own psychotic inner-person, which is known more and more as the right brain—that nonanalytic total-gestalt-organized part of our cortex. We struggled over the schizophrenogenic mother and over whether the father himself can create schizophrenia. All this anteceded systems theory, which made it clear that it takes a family system (and more) to originate such a holocaust.” Quanta inocência, diria Deleuze…
“The craziness that had overlain her arteriosclerosis of the brain had long since faded into the background. She just ate and slept and smiled and went to the bathroom. But the family still loved her and still enjoyed being with her. They had not turned away from her because of her failing health.”
“It seems that the initial therapist is contaminated with all of the usual problems of being a mother: He’s all-forgiving, all-accepting, and minimally demanding. In contrast, when the consultant comes in for the second interview, he turns out to be very much like the father: He is reality-oriented, demanding, intellectual, much less tempted to accept the original complaints or the original presentation, and very much freer to think about what’s being presented in a conceptual, total gestalt manner.”
“The Atlanta clinic was our private world, and the sophisticated world of a psychoanalytic organized group left me with uncertainties, awkwardness, and the temptation to be isolated.”
“The initial phase of working with the family demands a coup d’état, in which the therapist proves his power and his control of the therapeutic process, thus enabling the family to have the courage to change their living pattern. Other concepts, such as the importance of the detumescence of the scapegoat [resolução, desinchação – conotação cancerígena] or surfacing other scapegoats in the family, spreading the anxiety around the family, and the necessity of using paradoxical intention to reverse the axis of responsibility so the family would carry the initiative for their own change, all were picked up from the residents when they were working with families as co-therapists.”
“One of the covert changes that I experienced was my increasing conviction that everybody is schizophrenic. Most of us don’t have the courage to be crazy except in the middle of the night when we’re sound asleep, and we try to forget it before we wake up. I became more and more courageous in my advancing years and tenured role, and I began to use the word with greater nonchalance. During the first 6 months to 1 year, it was quite a shock, but after that it became gradually more and more accepted, at least in my own head.”
“There is being driven crazy, which means that one’s malignant isolationism¹ is brought about by being forced out of one’s family. There is going crazy, which, in the case of falling in love, is a delightful experience, although very frightening. Going crazyalso takes place in the therapeutic setting, where it’s sometimes called transference psychosis, much in the same way we talk of transference neurosis [still two words that can’t make sense]. And then there is acting crazy—the crazy responsiveness of the individual who has once been insane and who, when under stress, returns to that state of being even though he’s not out of control in the same way. He’s like the child who has just learned to walk. If he gets in a hurry, he’ll get down and crawl on his hands and knees, even though it’s slower.”
¹ O que será que quer dizer? Meu caso? Vivendo com 3 idiotas cada vez mais incapazes de me entender e na verdade cada vez mais decorativos (1988-2017), de repente meu corpo se rebela e diz: CHEGA, VOCÊ JÁ SUPORTOU DEMAIS! ACABOU SUA AUTOIMPOSTA EXPIAÇÃO! Mas quer dizer que quem fritava a batata, no fim, eram eles… Consolador!
“the quasicraziness that happens in social groups”
Alex Redmountain (“Despite his name, he is not an American Indian, but, rather improbably, a Jewish-Slavic refugee of World War II.” – Kopp)
“The affliction is self-love, narcissism, a narrowness of vision that places everything outside oneself at the periphery. Though it appears open and seeking, it makes learning very difficult.Stop reinventing the wheel, I was told; I finally did, but since no one told me to stop reinventing the compass, and sextant, and steam engine, I kept on doing that for quite a while.”
“Out on the street, the therapist is like a hooker who’s been thrown out by her pimp. There’s no security, no status. You’re surrounded by a dozen other hustlers, each selling some exotic solution to life’s problems: astrology, card reading, Scientology, revolution, a quickie in the back of the Dodge van parked across the street. Psychotherapy looks like just another fast fix, a way to set the pain aside momentarily or to pretend to an inflated self-importance. And often it is.”
“I am a clinical psychologist, traditionally trained, and I was still doing the usual clinical psychologist things: testing, individual and group therapy, supervision, formal consultation. But I was getting restless, found it hard to stay within the confines of the clinic where I saw my patients. Little by little, mostly by self-invitation, I cultivated a street beat through familiar geography: free schools and open universities, gay people and street people, adolescents of infinite variety and the many species of chicken-hawk who prey on them, alternate enterprises of every ideology imaginable, and a total spectrum of lifestyles. It seemed like a great opportunity for checking out the barriers. It was also a great opportunity for, as we used to say in The Bronx, getting my ass handed to me—as in the sentence, When I hand you your ass, boy, your head is gonna fall so low you’ll be looking up at roach shit [cocô de barata].”
“Basically, I’m a middle-class grown-up with slightly rebellious inclinations; the one time I was impulsive enough to drop out of school, I joined the U.S. Army and was promptly dispatched to die of boredom in Korea. The setting for my street-shrink activities was a deteriorating, exciting, but not especially dangerous or sinful neighborhood in a large Eastern city. It was exciting because of its variety: its residents encompassed all ages and classes, at least 3 races, and 12 ethnic groups; Maoist food <collectives> operated on the same block with 30 year-old Mom and Pop groceries; soul music blared from one record shop speaker while salsa and bomba rhythms leaped out from another around the corner; store-front churches rose from the ashes of revolutionary Trotskyite print shops—and vice versa.”
“Another source was the illusion of being a savior, a reconciliator loved by all. When I walked around the neighborhood, greeting militants and leftover flower children, precinct captains and self-actualization addicts, I imagined myself a combination of country doctor and masterful statesman, healing rifts both psychic and physical as I passed on through. And in the best Lone Ranger silver bullet tradition, I dreamed of encountering evil, overcoming it, and riding off toward the foothills and the setting sun—all within the 30 minutes normally reserved for the radio serials of my youth.
This kind of delusion wreaks havoc with the long-distance running qualities usually required of the psychotherapist. It also helped me suppress some doubts about my own endurance. With every new patient I took on in my public practice, I wondered: Can I really last the journey? As the complexity of every individual unfolded, I worried: It may be just too hard, too long, too draining. What if I want to run off and fast alongside Cesar Chavez [uma espécie de João Pedro Stédile] in the lettuce fields? What if I decide to go to Harvard Business School so I can destroy capitalism from within?”
“I’m there in 20 minutes. Who said that house calls were a thing of the past? Upstairs I can hear crunching and smashing noises. Down in the <parlor> 8 resident runaways and 2 counselors mill about, looking worried, indifferent, scared, sullen—depending on whom you are looking at.” “a monstrous teenage version of an NFL defensive end, 6 foot 6, at least 240 pounds. He is methodically ripping apart the wooden bunks—the bunks that my friend Joe put together over a couple of weeks of unpaid labor, after his unemployment ran out! I am outraged.”
“Sally greets me with a strange, playful look in her sensual eyes. (Whoops, it’s hard to keep lust and hubris clearly separate.) For many reasons, Sally is one of my favorite counselors.”
Shrink é uma gíria suburbana para psicólogo ou psiquiatra.
“God works in mysterious ways, said Sally, having been raised a brimstone Baptist and never quite given it up. I had to agree. I often had the feeling, when I was doing therapy, that anything I said would work: insight, catharsis, epiphanies would follow some inaudible inanity from my mouth. At other times, when I thought I was being wondrous wise, my words fell as flat as a swatted bug. It all has to do with chemistry, or radiation, or smell. Or something. Before I knew that, I sometimes took the calling of therapy very seriously indeed.”
“Because I think it’s just an ego trip. I don’t even call myself a therapist, you
know.”
“What do you mean, even you! Who are you, Sigmund Freud?”
“No, but at least I’m not trying to be something I’m not!”
“Aw, fuck you!” she shouts.
“Fuck you!” I yell back.
“All that doctor done was yell at me, tell me I was a whore and would end up a junkie or dead or in prison, and I’d never have kids, or a man, or anything decent at all.”
“As far as I am concerned, the making of a therapist and the making of a centered person are parallel, though not congruent, journeys.”
“First Tale of Lust. I had agreed to see Janet for short-term therapy at her home; she had a 1 year-old daughter, a night job as a waitress, and no one to babysit. I knew there were many caveats against this kind of thing, but I was sure I could handle it.”
“I kept trying to remember why therapists shouldn’t become sexually involved with patients. I found myself perusing, at length, articles that argued an opposing view. Even the reputable Association of Humanistic Psychology, I noted, was sponsoring a panel at its annual meeting: Sexual Relations Between Therapists and Clients.”
“She observed that the tension between us was palpable. I agreed. In fact, it was becoming intolerable. Yes, I said. Well, she wanted to know, what were we going to do about it?”
“I read Albert Ellis [logo acima!] and Martin Shepard, wrote an essay entitled Challenging Some Traditional Preconceptions in Psychotherapy—in which I never mentioned sex.”
“On the 13th day, I received a short note from Janet on the back of an old Valentine card: I’ve discovered that there are more fine lovers around than psychotherapists. Will you be my (one and only) therapist?
Human, all-too-human: After I daydreamed about choking her with a spiked bulldog collar, boiling her in oil, and throwing her out of a dirigible over the most polluted part of the Hudson River, I met with her—in my office. We dealt with it, as the New Yorker cartoon says, by talking about it. We actually went on to do some excellent work together, 50 minutes at a time, 2 days a week, face to face, and no hugging.”
“Second Tale of Lust. Tamara was 16, dark as an Arab princess, radiating ripeness. She was a resident at one of the group foster homes at which I dispensed weekly advice. Whenever she greeted me, she would wrap herself around me like the original seductive serpent, and I would try desperately to keep my cool—without success.
I am seldom drawn to adolescents sexually, or so I like to believe. I like the way they look, I enjoy their narcissism from afar, but I’m not crazy enough to trade a tumble for a prison sentence, not even in fantasy.”
“Tamara, whose house parents I met regularly for case consultation and whose Oedipal problems I knew almost as well as my own”
“I couldn’t take my eyes off her, and I didn’t want to take the rest of me off, either.
Although I danced with many people that night, I found myself dancing with Tamara more than with anyone else: more sensually, more energetically, more proximately. After a few beers, I forgot the age gap between us. After a few more, stalwart drinker [robusto bebedor] that I am, I was carried upstairs by some friends and carefully placed upon an unoccupied mattress [colchonete]. I woke a couple of hours later to find Tamara bending over me, swaying, her hair against my face. I wasn’t very alert, but she seemed completely out of it—drunk and stoned and incoherent.
Without thinking, I pulled her down beside me, touched her, kissed her, felt her responding to me. As I caressed her, she spoke softly at first, and then more insistently. Her mumbling only gradually became comprehensible: Daddy, Daddy, Daddy…
Laying her head against the pillow, I drew away gently. The one short pang inside me yielded to tenderness. I massaged her eyes and brow until she fell asleep.”
“Third Tale of Lust. It was spring, and 5 of my street clients, including one gay male, declared their love-lust for me. I knew all about transference, of course, but I was also feeling very sexual in my new, slimmed-down version.
At my therapy seminar that week, another fledgling therapist like myself spoke of how he enjoyed his patients’ sexual fantasies about him. Our teacher-supervisor looked at him wryly. <Just remember,> he said, <that there are a dozen paunchy, balding, 70 year-old therapists in this town whose patients are madly in love with them. Don’t take too much credit.>
I decided not to, either.”
“Therapist hubris is based on the mutual illusion of patient and therapist that theirs is not a relationship among equals. Thus, it fires the therapist’s infantile yearnings for magical solutions, omnipotence, oceanic love.”
* * *
DE VOLTA AO KOPP (CONCLUSÃO)
“Everything is folly in this world, except to play the fool.”
“The response of embarrassment is not a personal flaw. On the contrary, it is a socially oriented readjustment pattern that acts to reestablish more orderly, adequate behavior. In showing embarrassment, the flustered person (sometimes unwittingly) reveals his responsiveness to the discrepancy between expected and actual performance. This offers the blunderer a chance to get himself together while remaining in consensual accord with the rest of the group. At the same time, perceiving his reaction, his audience is in a position to help him to reestablish his earlier state of unselfconscious ease.”
“I feel less pained and alone in my embarrassment, standing among these other naked therapists.”
“But for those of us who have not been subjected to excessive shaming, failing at something may be experienced as no more than not yet attaining what we might. For others who have too often been made to feel worthless, each failed attempt may create the feeling of being a total failure.”
“It was Erasmus who gave the West the paradox of the Wise Fool. In the literature of the Middle Ages, the Fool had played a minor role. But beginning with Erasmus’ book, In Praise of Folly, the Renaissance Fool stepped forward as a major figure in the humanist vision of man. Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the bastard son of an obscure father, emerged as a great humanist who would be courted by princes, popes, and scholars of his age, a man whose Wise Fool would foster men’s self-acceptance for centuries to come.”
“Like Socrates, her only claim to wisdom is that she knows that she knows not.”
“Like all those later Fools, Don Quixote, Huck Finn, Chaplin’s little tramp, and the Marx Brothers, she does not comprehend what is expected of her by society. Like all clowns she is free to walk irreverently through the walls of convention, simply because she does not see that they exist. Often enough, these hollow boundaries collapse before the force of her ignorance.”
“The good judgment of the Wise is sometimes no more than the closed mindedness of those who know better.” I’d say Final Judgement.
“By accepting the Fool in myself, I open my imagination to all the possibilities that I was once too wise to consider.”
“So it is that when I was a young man I hoped to make fewer and fewer mistakes, while in my later life my ambition is to make more. I would sin boldly. Not that I have come to like feeling embarrassed. Not at all! Rather most of the time now it all just seems worth it to me to experience feeling foolish if that is the price of trying new ways of being.”
O palhaço que habita em mim saúda o palhaço que um dia habitará em você.
O homem ocidental se tornou zen para não apertar o botão da bomba; isso pausará sua existência cadavérica nesse mundo além de qualquer previsão legal… Eis o problema. O Último Homem aprendeu com seus erros logo após o penúltimo erro – que infortúnio e que pepino para nós! Se apenas houvesse uma máquina de auto-sepultamento, um suicídio assistido por si mesmo, uma auto-eutanásia no mais redundantemente literal dos zentidos… Ainda estamos impessoais demais diante do nosso instinto vital, não operamos a nossa própria máquina para comandar ações grandiloqüentes deste nível e desse porte! Asia Rise!
“A single individual’s solitary failing is painful, but the shared frailties of all men are ultimately comic. So it is that one stutterer is tragic, but like it or not, three stutterers having an argument is a funny scene.”
“Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists in putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke”Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf
“Out of the Middle East comes the tradition of the Sufi, that mystical/intuitive aspect of Islam that ranges from the whirling trance states of the Dervishes to the teaching stories of that Wise Fool, Nasrudin. The Sufi tales offer the sort of folk wisdom that discloses that out of each situation comes its own remedy. Each mishap is an opportunity to learn if only our imagination is open to reappraising the source of our discomfort.”
“Enjoy yourself, or try to learn—you will annoy someone. If you do not—you will annoy someone.”
“Who is it who’s rejecting whom?… if somebody rejects me…who they think they’re rejecting isn’t me anyway.… By them pushing me away I see them caught in their own paranoia…”Baba Ram
Ser um incompreendido do meu tempo implica que eu mesmo não posso me compreender!
“You don’t decide to give something up. They fall away, that’s the secret of it.”
It’s ok to fail on an impossible mission, right, Tom Cruise?
“Even when I am doing well, or being special, being judged is oppressive, carrying with it as it does the impossible ideal of perfection. How much easier is the freedom to be what I am, ordinary and imperfect as that may be, no more than a natural Fool.”
“To witness my Self without blaming myself is like being a child again, only this time in a safe, warm place under the watchful eyes of loving parents. It is during such moments that I can accept whatever I do as no more than what I must do at that time. It is then that I would no more question the adequacy of what I am doing than I would wonder whether or not my cat knows just how to go about being a cat.”
Guru, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!, by the same author.
euhemerism: “The philosophy attributed to and named for Euhemerus, a Greek mythographer, holds that many mythological tales can be attributed to historical persons and events, the accounts of which have become altered and exaggerated over time.”
pitonisa: vidente, cartomante
zigurate: templo piramidal com terraplanagem (vários terraços configurando andares)
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PREFÁCIOS & INTRODUÇÕES GERAIS
“Estimates of the death toll during the Inquisition worldwide range from 600,000 to as high as 9,000,000 (over its 250 year long course) (…) Thus has it been said that The Malleus Maleficarum is one of the most blood-soaked works in human history, in that its very existence reinforced and validated Catholic beliefs which led to the prosecution, torture, and murder of tens of thousands of innocent people.”
“At the height of its popularity, The Malleus Maleficarum was surpassed in public notoriety only by The Bible. Its effects were even felt in the New World, where the last gasp of the Inquisition was felt in the English settlements in America (most notably in Salem, Massachusetts during the Salem Witch Trials).”
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A CARTA DO DIABO
“IN the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen. Know all men by these presents, whosoever shall read, see or hear the tenor of this official and public document, that in the year of our Lord, 1487, upon a Saturday, being the 19th day of the month of May, at the 5th hour after noon, or thereabouts, in the third year of the Pontificate of our most Holy Father and Lord, the lord Innocent, by divine providence Pope, the 8th of that name, in the very and actual presence of me Arnold Kolich, public notary, and in the presence of the witnesses whose names are hereunder written and who were convened and especially summoned for this purpose, the Venerable and Very Reverend Father Henry Kramer, Professor of Sacred Theology, of the Order of Preachers, Inquisitor of heretical depravity, directly delegated thereto by the Holy See together with the Venerable and Very Reverend Father James Sprenger, Professor of Sacred Theology and Prior of the Dominican Convent at Cologne, being especially appointed as colleague of the said Father Henry Kramer, hath on behalf both of himself and his said colleague made known unto us and declared that the Supreme Pontiff now happily reigning, lord Innocent, Pope, as hath been set out above [tá bom, que estilo grogue até para um nOTÁRIO!], hath committed and granted by a bull duly signed and sealed unto the aforesaid Inquisitors (…) granted (…) the power of making search and inquiry into all heresies, and most especially into the heresy of witches, an abomination that thrives and waxes strong in these our unhappy days, and he has bidden them diligently to perform this duty throughout the five Archdioceses of the five Metropolitan Churches, that is to say, Mainz, Cologne, Trèves, Salzburg and Bremen, granting them every faculty of judging and proceeding against such even with the power of putting malefactors to death (…) upon the tenor of the Apostolic bull, which they hold and possess and have exhibited unto us, a document which is whole, entire, untouched, and in no way lacerated or impaired, in fine whose integrity is above any suspicion. And the tenor of the said bull commences thus: <Innocent, Bishop, Servant of the servants of God, for an eternal remembrance. Desiring with the most heartfelt anxiety, even as Our Apostleship requires, that the Catholic Faith should be especially in this Our day increase and flourish everywhere, . . .> and it concludes thus: <Given at Rome, at S. Peter’s, on the 9 December of the Year of the Incarnation of Our Lord one thousand, four hundred and eighty-four, in the first Year of Our Pontificate.>” Ou seja: dois cretinos psicopatas levaram menos de 3 anos e ½ para escreverem esse verdadeiro TRATADO DE LESA-HUMANIDADE!
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“There is left no doubt in the reader’s mind that Rev. Summers not only believed in the existence of witches as the Medieval Church perceived them, but felt that the Inquisition, and the Malleus, were both justified and necessary. In both of his introductions (especially the original 1928 introduction), he seems more intent on using the occasion to convince us that the murder of thousands of innocent people, for the crime of witchcraft, during the Inquisition was somehow noble, and that the authors of the Malleus, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, were visionaries of their time. One often finds the text of the introductions reading as if it had been written 500 years previously when the Malleus was originally published and the Inquisition was in full swing.”
“There were 14 editions between 1487 and 1520, and at least 16 editions between 1574 and 1669. There are modern translations as well: Der Hexenhammer, J.W.R. Schmidt, 1906, and this one.”
“This famous document should interest the historian, the student of witchcraft and the occult, and the psychologist who is interested in the medieval mind as it was confronted with various forces which could only be explained as witchcraft.”
“Those readers whose familiarity with The Bible comes from the King James Version may be surprised by the references to these <obscure> books of The Bible, such as Paralipomenon, Apocalypse, Judith, and Tobias. These books were originally a part of The Bible, but were cut from the King James version as it was developed. They exist today primarily as a part of the Douay Rheims Version of The Bible, which is widely used by Catholics.”
DATAÇÃO POR CARBONO-14! “Many participants in this project have questioned my determination to transcribe the text of the Malleus Maleficarum by hand, as opposed to scanning the pages and using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to generate the text. While it is certain that the latter would prove more expedient and see the online edition posted much sooner, transcribing the text, while more labor intensive, ensures a more accurate translation to HTML format.” “In an age in which the Malleus Maleficarum could again achieve a relevance in the hands of radical Christian leaders, the accuracy of this online translation is, I believe, all-important.” Lovelace, 1998
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SOBRE A BULA DO CULPÊNCIO OITAVO
“It has indeed lately come to Our ears, not without afflicting Us with bitter sorrow, that in some parts of Northern Germany, as well as in the provinces, townships, territories, districts, and dioceses of Mainz, Cologne, Trèves, Salzburg, and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offences, have slain infants yet in the mother’s womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees, nay, men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, vineyards, orchards, meadows, pasture-land, corn, wheat, and all other cereals; these wretches furthermore afflict and torment men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internal and external; they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands; over and above this, they blasphemously renounce that Faith which is theirs by the Sacrament of Baptism, and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls, whereby they outrage the Divine Majesty and are a cause of scandal and danger to very many. And although (…) Henry Kramer and James Sprenger (…) have been by Letters Apostolic delegated as Inquisitors of these heretical pravities, and still are Inquisitors, the first in the aforesaid parts of Northern Germany, wherein are included those aforesaid townships, districts, dioceses, and other specified localities, and the second in certain territories which lie along the borders of the Rhine, nevertheless not a few clerics and lay-folk of those countries, seeking too curiously to know more than concerns them, since in the aforesaid delegatory letters there is no express and specific mention by name of these provinces, townships, dioceses, and districts, and further since the 2 delegates themselves and the abominations they are to encounter are not designated in detailed and particular fashion, these persons are not ashamed to contend with the most unblushing effrontery that these enormities are not practised in these provinces, and consequently the aforesaid Inquisitors have no legal right to exercise their powers of inquisition in the provinces, townships, dioceses, districts, and territories, which have been rehearsed, and that the Inquisitors may not proceed to punish, imprison, and penalize criminals convicted of the heinous offences and many wickednesses which have been set forth. Accordingly in the aforesaid provinces, townships, dioceses, and districts, the abominations and enormities in question remain unpunished not without open danger to the souls of many and peril of eternal damnation.”
“We decree and enjoin that the aforesaid Inquisitors be empowered to proceed to the just correction, imprisonment, and punishment of any persons, without let or hindrance, in every way as if the provinces, townships, dioceses, districts, territories, yea, even the persons and their crimes in this kind were named and particularly designated in Our letters.”
“We grant permission to the aforesaid Inquisitors, to one separately or to both, as also to Our dear son John Gremper, priest of the diocese of Constance, Master of Arts, their notary, or to any other public notary, who shall be by them, or by one of them, temporarily delegated to those provinces, townships, dioceses, districts, and aforesaid territories, to proceed, according to the regulations of the Inquisition, against any persons of whatsoever rank and high estate, correcting, fining, imprisoning, punishing, as their crimes merit, those whom they have found guilty, the penalty being adapted to the offence.”
DISSIMULANDIBUS: “excommunication, suspension, interdict, and yet more terrible penalties, censures, and punishment, as may seem good to him, and that without any right of appeal, and if he will he may by Our authority aggravate and renew these penalties as often as he list, calling in, if so please him, the help of the secular arm.
Non obstantibus . . . Let no man therefore . . . But if any dare to do so, which God forbid, let him know that upon him will fall the wrath of Almighty God, and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul.”
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“Witchcraft was inextricably mixed with politics.Matthew Paris tells us how in 1232 the Chief Justice Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, (Shakespeare’s <gentle Hubert> in King John), was accused by Peter do (sic) Roches, Bishop of Winchester, of having won the favour of Henry III through <charms and incantations>. In 1324 there was a terrific scandal at Coventry when it was discovered that a number of the richest and most influential burghers of the town had long been consulting with Master John, a professional necromancer, and paying him large sums to bring about by his arts the death of Edward II and several nobles of the court. Alice Perrers, the mistress of Edward III, was not only reputed to have infatuated the old king by occult spells, but her physician (believed to be a mighty sorcerer) was arrested on a charge of confecting love philtres and talismans. Henry V, in the autumn of 1419, prosecuted his stepmother, Joan of Navarre, for attempting to kill him by witchcraft, <in the most horrible manner that one could devise.> The conqueror of Agincourt was exceedingly worried about the whole wretched business, as also was the Archbishop of Canterbury, who ordered public prayers for the king’s safety. In the reign of his son, Henry VI, in 1441, one of the highest and noblest ladies in the realm, Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, was arraigned for conspiring with <a clerk>, Roger Bolingbroke, <a most notorious evoker of demons>, and <the most famous scholar in the whole world in astrology and magic>, to procure the death of the young monarch by sorcery, so that the Duke of Gloucester, Henry’s uncle and guardian, might succeed to the crown.¹ In this plot were further involved Canon Thomas Southwell, and a <relapsed witch>, that is to say, one who had previously (11 years before) been incarcerated upon grave suspicion of black magic, Margery Jourdemayne. Bolingbroke, whose confession implicated the Duchess, was hanged; Canon Southwell died in prison; the witch in Smithfield was <burn’d to Ashes>, since her offence was high treason. The Duchess was sentenced to a most degrading public penance, and imprisoned for life in Peel Castle, Isle of Man. Richard III, upon seizing the throne in 1483, declared that the marriage of his brother, Edward IV, with the Lady Elizabeth Grey, had been brought about by <sorcery and witchcraft>, and further that <Edward’s wife, that monstrous witch, has plotted with Jane Shore to waste and wither his body.> Poor Jane Shore did most exemplary penance, walking the flinty streets of London barefoot in her kirtle. In the same year when Richard wanted to get rid of the Duke of Buckingham, his former ally, one of the chief accusations he launched was that the Duke consulted with a Cambridge <necromancer> to compass and devise his death.
One of the most serious and frightening events in the life of James VII of Scotland (afterwards James I of England) was the great conspiracy of 1590, organized by the Earl of Bothwell. James with good reason feared and hated Bothwell, who, events amply proved, was Grand Master of more than 100 witches, all adepts in poisoning, and all eager to do away with the King. In other words, Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell, was the centre and head of a vast political plot. A widespread popular panic was the result of the discovery of this murderous conspiracy.In France as early as 583, when the infant son and heir of King Chilperic, died of dysentery, as the doctors diagnosed it, it came to light that Mumolus, one of the leading officials of the court, had been secretly administering to the child medicines, which he obtained from <certain witches of Paris>. These potions were pronounced by the physicians to be strong poisons. In 1308, Guichard, Bishop of Troyes, was accused of having slain by sorcery the Queen of Philip IV of France (1285-1314),Jeanne of Navarre, who died three years before [1305]. The trial dragged on from 1308 to 1313, and many witnesses attested on oath that the prelate had continually visited certain notorious witches, who supplied him philtres and draughts. In 1315, during the brief reign (1314-1316) of Louis X, the eldest son of Philip IV, was hanged Enguerrand de Marigny, chamberlain, privy councillor, and chief favourite of Philip, whom, it was alleged, he had bewitched to gain the royal favour. The fact, however, which sealed his doom was his consultation with one Jacobus de Lor, a warlock [bruxo], who was to furnish a nostrum warranted to put a very short term to the life of King Louis. Jacobus strangled himself in prison.
In 1317 Hugues Géraud, Bishop of Cahors, was executed by Pope John XXII, who reigned 1316-1334, residing at Avignon. Langlois says that the Bishop had attempted the Pontiff’s life by poison procured from witches.
Perhaps the most resounding of all scandals of this kind in France was the La Voison case, 1679-1682, when it was discovered that Madame de Montespan had for years been trafficking with a gang of poisoners and sorcerers, who plotted the death of the Queen and the Dauphan, so that Louis XIV might be free to wed Athénais de Montespan, whose children should inherit the throne. The Duchesse de Fontanges, a beautiful young country girl, who had for a while attracted the wayward fancy of Louis, they poisoned out of hand. Money was poured out like water, and it has been said that <the entire floodtide of poison, witchcraft and diabolism was unloosed> to attain the ends of that <marvellous beauty> (so Mme. de Sévigné calls her), the haughty and reckless Marquise de Montespan. In her thwarted fury she well nigh resolved to sacrifice Louis himself to her overweening ambition and her boundless pride. The highest names in France – the Princesse de Tingry, the Duchesse de Vitry, the Duchesse de Lusignan, the Duchesse de Bouillon, the Comtesse de Soissons, the Duc de Luxembourg, the Marguis de Cessac – scores of the older aristocracy, were involved, whilst literally hundreds of venal apothecaries, druggists, pseudo-alchemists, astrologers, quacks, warlocks, magicians, charlatans, who revolved round the ominous and terrible figure of Catherine La Voisin, professional seeress, fortune-teller, herbalist, beauty-specialist, were caught in the meshes [teias] of law. No less than 11 volumes of François Ravaison’s huge work, Archives de la Bastille, are occupied with this evil crew and their doings, their sorceries and their poisonings. [Livro-pédia que não podemos deixar de perder!]
During the reign of Urban VIII, Maffeo Barberini, 1623-1644, there was a resounding scandal at Rome when it was discovered that <after many invocations of demons> Giacinto Contini, nephew of the Cardinal d’Ascoli, had been plotting with various accomplices to put an end to the Pope’s life, and thus make way for the succession of his uncle to the Chair of Peter. Tommaso Orsolini of Recanate, moreover, after consulting with certain scryers and planetarians, readers of the stars, was endeavouring to bribe the apothecary Carcurasio of Naples to furnish him with a quick poison, which might be mingled with the tonics and electuaries prescribed for the ailing Pontiff, (Ranke, History of the Popes, ed. 1901, Vol. III, pp. 375-6).”
¹ Se essas coisas fossem mesmo dotadas do mais remoto interesse, Shakespeare usaria muito de magia negra para apimentar suas peças, o que, vê-se, passa longe de ser o caso.
“Jean Bodin, the famous jurisconsult (1530-90) whom Montaigne acclaims to be the highest literary genius of his time, and who, as a leading member of the Parlement de Paris, presided over important trials, gives it as his opinion that there existed, not only in France, a complete organization of witches, immensely wealthy, of almost infinite potentialities, most cleverly captained, with centres and cells in every district, utilizing an espionage in ever land, with high-placed adherents at court, with humble servitors in the cottage.”
“Not the least dreaded and dreadful weapon in their armament was the ancient and secret knowledge of poisons (veneficia), of herbs healing and hurtful, a tradition and a lore which had been handed down from remotest antiquity.”
“Little wonder, then, that later social historians, such as Charles MacKay and Lecky, both absolutely impartial and unprejudiced writers, sceptical even, devote many pages, the result of long and laborious research, to witchcraft. (…) The profoundest thinkers, the acutest and most liberal minds of their day, such men as Cardan; Trithemius; the encylcopædic Delrio; Bishop Binsfeld; the learned physician,Caspar Peucer; Sir Edward Coke, <father of the English law>; Francis Bacon; Malebranche; Bayle; Glanvil; Thomas Browne; Cotton Mather; all these, and scores besides, were convinced of the dark reality of witchcraft, of the witch organization.”
“The latest reprint of the original text of the Malleus is to be found in the noble 4-volume collection of Treatises on Witchcraft, <sumptibus Claudii Bourgeat>, 4to., Lyons, 1669.”
“It was implicitly accepted not only by Catholic but by Protestant legislature. In fine, it is not too much to say that the Malleus Maleficarum is among the most important, wisest, and weightiest books of the world.
It has been asked whether Kramer or Sprenger was principally responsible for the Malleus, but in the case of so close a collaboration any such inquiry seems singularly superfluous and nugatory. With regard to instances of jointed authorship, unless there be some definite declaration on the part of one of the authors as to his particular share in a work, or unless there be some unusual and special circumstances bearing on the point, such perquisitions and analysis almost inevitably resolve themselves into a cloud of guess-work and bootless hazardry and vague perhaps. It becomes a game of literary blind-man’s-bluff.
Heinrich Kramer was born at Schlettstadt, a town of Lower Alsace, situated some 26 miles south-west of Strasburg. At an early age he entered the Order of S. Dominic, and so remarkable was his genius that whilst still a young man he was appointed to the position of Prior of the Dominican House at his native town. He was a Preacher-General and a Master of Sacred Theology. P.G. and S.T.M., two distinctions in the Dominican Order. At some date before 1474 he was appointed an Inquisitor for the Tyrol, Salzburg, Bohemia, and Moravia. His eloquence in the pulpit and tireless activity received due recognition at Rome, and for many years he was Spiritual Director of the great Dominican church at Salzburg, and the right-hand of the Archbishop of Salzburg, a munificent prelate who praises him highly in a letter which is still extant.” “In 1495, the Master General of the Order, Fr. Joaquín de Torres, O.P., summoned Kramer to Venice in order that he might give public lectures, disputations which attracted crowded audiences, and which were honoured by the presence and patronage of the Patriarch of Venice. He also strenuously defended the Papal supremacy, confuting the De Monarchia of the Paduan jurisconsult, Antonio degli Roselli. At Venice he resided at the priory of Santi Giovanni e Paolo (S. Zanipolo). During the summer of 1497, he had returned to Germany, and was living at the convent of Rohr, near Regensburg. On 31 January, 1500, Alexander VI appointed him as Nuncio and Inquisitor of Bohemia and Moravia, in which provinces he was deputed and empowered to proceed against the Waldenses and Picards, as well as against the adherents of the witch-society.” “His chief works, in addition to the Malleus, are: Several Discourses and Various Sermons upon the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, Nuremberg, 1496; A Tract Confuting the Errors of Master Antonio degli Roselli, Venice, 1499; and The Shield of Defence of the Holy Roman Church Against the Picards and Waldenses, an incunabulum, without date, but almost certainly 1499-1500. Many learned authors quote and refer to these treatises in terms of highest praise.”
“James Sprenger was born in Basel, 1436-8 [que parto longo]. He was admitted a novice in the Dominican house of this town in 1452. His extraordinary genius attracted immediate attention, and his rise to a responsible position was very rapid. According to Pierre Hélyot, the Franciscan (1680-1716), Histoire des Ordres Religieux, III (1715), ch. XXVI, in 1389 Conrad of Prussia abolished certain relaxations and abuses which had crept into the Teutonic Province of the Order of S. Dominic, and restored the Primitive and Strict Obedience. He was closely followed by Sprenger, whose zealous reform was so warmly approved that in 1468 the General Chapter ordered him to lecture on the sentences of Peter Lombard at the University of Cologne, to which he was thus officially attached. A few years later he proceeded Master of Theology, and was elected Prior and Regent of Studies of the Cologne Convent, one of the most famous and frequented Houses of the Order. On 30 June, 1480, he was elected Dean of the Faculty of Theology at the University. His lecture-room was thronged, and in the following year, at the Chapter held in Roma, the Master General of the Order, Fra Salvo Cusetta, appointed him Inquisitor Extraordinary for the Provinces of Mainz, Trèves, and Cologne. His activities were enormous, and demanded constant journeyings through the very extensive district to which he had been assigned. In 1488 he was elected Provincial of the whole German Province, an office of the first importance [ah, o século!]. It is said that his piety and his learning impressed all who came in contact with him. In 1495 he was residing at Cologne, and here he received a letter from Alexander VI praising his enthusiasm and his energy.” “Among Sprenger’s other writings, excepting the Malleus, are The Paradoxes of John of Westphalia Refuted, Mainz, 1479, a closely argued treatise; and The Institution and Approbation of the Confraternity of the Most Holy Rosary, which was first erected at Cologne on 8 September in the year 1475. Sprenger may well be called the Apostle of the Rosary. None more fervent than he in spreading this Dominican elevation.”
“Certain it is that the Malleus Maleficarum is the most solid, the most important work in the whole vast library of witchcraft. One turns to it again and again with edification and interest: From the point of psychology, from the point of jurisprudence, from the point of history, it is supreme. It has hardly too much to say that later writers, great as they are, have done little more than draw from the seemingly inexhaustible wells of wisdom which the two Dominicans, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, have given us”“What is most surprising is the modernity of the book. There is hardly a problem, a complex, a difficulty, which they have not foreseen, and discussed, and resolved.”
“The Malleus Maleficarum is one of the world’s few books written sub specie aeternitatis.
Montague Summers.
7 October, 1946.”
6 6 6
“Sometimes, no doubt, primitive communities were obliged to tolerate the witch and her works owing to fear; in other words, witchcraft was a kind of blackmail; but directly Cities were able to coordinate, and it became possible for Society to protect itself, precautions were taken and safeguards were instituted against this curse, this bane whose object seemed to blight all that was fair, all that was just and good, and that was well-appointed and honourable, in a word, whose aim proved to be set up on high the red standard of revolution; to overwhelm religion, existing order, and the comeliness of life in an abyss of anarchy, nihilism, and despair.In his great treatise De Civitate Dei S. Augustine set forth the theory, or rather the living fact, of the two Cities, the City of God, and the opposing stronghold of all that is not for God, that is to say, of all that is against Him. [humanity itself]”
“and nations who had never heard the Divine command put into practice the obligation of the Mosaic maxim: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. (Vulgate: Maleficos non patieris vivere.Douay:Wizards thou shalt not suffer to live.Exodus, 22:18.)” // “A feiticeira não deixarás viver.” Êxodo 22:18
“It is true that both in the Greek and in the earlier Roman cults, worships often directly derived from secret and sombre sources, ancient gods, or rather demons, had their awful superstitions and their horrid rites, powers whom men dreaded but out of very terror placated; fanes [templos] men loathed but within whose shadowed portals they bent and bowed the knee perforce in trembling fear. Such deities were the Thracian Bendis [a nova Ártemis; ver referências aos jogos e festivais incluindo corridas de cavalos noturnas n’A República], whose manifestation was heralded by the howling of her fierce black hounds, and Hecate the terrible <Queen of the realm of ghosts>, as Euripides calls her, and the vampire Mormo[espécie de bicho-papão da Antiguidade: mas pelo menos era uma mulher! Posteriormente, Lamia] and the dark Summanuswho at midnight hurled loud thunderbolts and launched the deadly levin [relâmpago] through the starless sky [Curiosa espécie de anti-Zeus, o Deus do Trovão Diruno. Milton e Camões equiparam-no a Hades.]. Pliny tells us that the worship of this mysterious deity lasted long, and dogs with their puppies were sacrificed to him with atrocious cruelty, but S. Augustine says that in his day <one could scarce find one within a while, that had heard, nay more, that had read so much as the name of Summanus> (De Civitate Dei, 4:23). (…) Towards the end of the 5th century, the Carthaginian Martianus Capellaboldly declares that Summanus is none other than the lord of Hell, and he was writing, it may be remembered, only a few years before the birth of S. Benedict(*); some think that he was still alive when the Father of All Monks was born.”
(*) “The Medal of S. Benedict has been found to be extremely potent against all evil spells.”
“many strange legends attached to the island of Lemnos, which is situated in the Aegaean Sea, nearly midway between Mt. Athos and the Hellespoint. It is one of the largest of the group, having an area of some 147 square miles. Lemnos was sacred to Hephaestus, who is said to have fallen here when hurled by Zeus from Olympus.” “It should further be noted that the old Italian deity Volcanus, with whom he was to be identified, is the god of destructive fire – fire considered in its rage and terror, as contrasted with fire which is a comfort to the human race, the kindly blaze on the hearth, domestic fire, presided over by the gracious lady Vesta. It is impossible not to think of the fall of Lucifer when one considers the legend of Hephaestus. Our Lord replied, when the disciples reported: Domine, etiam daemonia subiiciuntur nobis in nomine tuo (Lord, the devils also are subject to us in Thy Name), Videbam Satanam sicut fulgur de coelo cadentem (I saw Satan like lightning falling from Heaven); and Isaias says: Quomodo cecidisti de coelo, Lucifer, qui mane oriebaris? Corruisti in terram qui vulnerabas gentes? (How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, who didst rise in the morning? How art thou fallen to the earth, that didst wound the nations?). Milton also has the following poetic allusion:
Nor was his name unheard or unador’d
In Ancient Greece; and in Ausonian land
Men called him Mulciber; and how he fell
From Heav’n, they fabl’d, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o’er the Chrystal Battlements: from Morn
To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,
A Summers day; and with the setting Sun
Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star,
On Lemnos th’Ægæan Ile: thus they relate,
Erring; for he with his rebellious rout
Fell long before; nor aught avail’d him now
To have built in Heav’n high Towers; nor did he scape
By all his Engines, but was headlong sent
With his industrious crew to build in hell.”
Paraíso Perdido, 1:738-51
Levar poeta a sério é pedir pra se queimar na fogueira de São João!
“Hephaestus, especially in later days, is represented with one leg shortened to denote his lameness; and throughout the Middle Ages it was popularly believed that his cloven hoof was the one feature which the devil was unable to disguise. In this connexion with Loki, the Vulcan of Northern Europe, will be readily remembered.”
É Hefesto o Lúcifer pagão ou não seria apenas Lúcifer o Hefesto cristão, que não saberá nunca dar a volta por cima? Mas na verdade ele tinha amores, era excelente ferreiro, e foi afinal perdoado e regressou ao Olimpo, pleno de honras!
“There were also dark histories of murder and blood connected with Lemnos. When the Argonauts landed here they found it inhabited only by Amazons, who, having murdered all their husbands, had chosen as their queen Hypsipyle, daughter of Thoas, whom she secretly preserved alive. When this was discovered the unfortunate woman was compelled to leave the island, and being subsequently captured by pirates she was sold to Lycurgus, king of the sacred groves that surrounded the temple of Zeus Nemeus in a remote Argive valley. Hypsipyle here became the nurse of the mysterious child Archemorus, the Forerunner of Death, who was bitten by a magic serpent and vanished, portending the doom of the Seven who went against Thebes.”
“It is curious to remark that a certain red clay (terra Lemnia) found on the island was, as Pliny tells us, employed as a remedy for wounds, and especially the bite of a snake.”
“In Rome black magic was punished as a capital offence by the Law of the Twelve Tables, which are to be assigned to the 5th century B.C., and, as Livy records, from time to time Draconian statutes were directed against those who attempted to blight crops and vineyards or to spread rinderpest amongst flocks and cattle. Nonetheless it is evident from many Latin authors and from the historians that Rome swarmed with occultists and diviners, many of whom in spite of the Lex Cornelia almost openly traded in poisons, and not infrequently in assassination to boot. Sometimes, as in the Middle Ages, a circumstance of which the Malleus Maleficarum most particularly complains, the sorcerers were protected by men of wealth and high estate. This was especially the case in the terrible days of Marius and of Catiline, and during the extreme decadence of the latest Caesars. Yet, paradoxical as it may appear, such emperors as Augustus, Tiberius, and Septimius Severus, whilst banishing from their realms all seers and necromancers, and putting them to death, in private entertained astrologers and wizards among their retinue, consulting their art upon each important occasion, and often even in the everyday and ordinary affairs of life.”
“stern and constant official opposition to witchcraft, and the prohibition under severest penalties, the sentence of death itself, of any practice or pursuit of these dangerous and irreligious arts, was demonstrably not a product of Christianity, but had long and necessarily been employed in the heathen world and among pagan peoples and among polytheistic societies. Moreover, there are even yet savage communities who visit witchcraft with death.”
“If the disease is universal, the medicine must be sharp.”
“a song or a country dance mayhap, innocent enough on the surface, and even pleasing, so often were but the cloak and the mask for something devilish and obscene, that the Church deemed it necessary to forbid and proscribe the whole superstition even when it manifested itself in modest fashion and seemed guileless, innoxious, and of no account.”
“I knok this rage upone this stane
To raise the wind in the divellis name,
It sall not lye till I please againe.”
Cântico de bruxas escocesas
“A pagan diviner or haruspexcould only follow his vocation under very definite restrictions. He was not allowed to be an intimate visitor at the house of any citizen, for friendship with men of this kind must be avoided. The haruspex who frequents the houses of others shall die at the stake, such is the tenor of the code. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that almost every year saw a more rigid application of the laws; although even as today, when fortune-telling and peering into the future are forbidden by the Statute Book, diviners and mediums abound, so then in spite of every prohibition astrologers, clairvoyants, and psalmists had an enormous clientèle of rich and poor alike.”
“The early legal codes of most European nations contain laws directed against witchcraft. Thus, for example, the oldest document of Frankish legislation, the Salic Law (Lex salica), which was reduced to a written form and promulgated under Clovis, who died 27 November, 511, mulcts (sic) those who practise magic with various fines, especially when it could be proven that the accused launched a deadly curse, or had tied the Witch’s Knot. This latter charm was usually a long cord tightly tied up in elaborate loops, among whose reticulations it was customary to insert the feathers of a black hen, a raven, or some other bird which had, or was presumed to have, no speck of white. This is one of the oldest instruments of witchcraft and is known in all countries and among all nations. It was put to various uses. The wizards of Finland sold wind in the three knots of a rope. If the first knot were undone a gentle breeze sprang up; if the second, it blew a mackerel gale; if the third, a hurricane. But the Witch’s Ladder, as it was often known, could be used with far more baleful effects. The knots were tied with certain horrid maledictions, and then the cord was hidden away in some secret place, and unless it were found and the strands released the person at whom the curse was directed would pine and die. This charm continually occurs during the trials. Thus in the celebrated Island-Magee case, March 1711, when a coven of witches was discovered, it was remarked that an apron belonging to Mary Dunbar, a visitor at the house of the afflicted persons, had been abstracted. Miss Dunbar was suddenly seized with fits and convulsions, and sickened almost to death. After most diligent search the missing garment was found carefully hidden away and covered over, and a curious string which had nine knots in it had been so tied up with the folds of the linen that it was beyond anything difficult to separate them and loosen the ligatures. In 1886 in the old belfry of a village church in England there were accidentally discovered, pushed away in a dark corner, several yards of incle braided with elaborate care and having a number of black feathers thrust through the strands. It is said that for a long while considerable wonder was caused as to what it might be, but when it was exhibited and became known, one of the local grandmothers recognized it was a Witch’s Ladder, and, what is extremely significant, when it was engraved in the Folk Lore Journal an old Italian woman to whom the picture was shown immediately identified it as la ghirlanda delle streghe.”
“In 578, when a son of Queen Fredegonde died, a number of witches who were accused of having contrived the destruction of the Prince were executed. (…) what else was there left for the Church to do?” Yea, what else?
HISTERIA COLETIVA: “In 814,Louis le Pieuxupon his accession to the throne began to take very active measures against all sorcerers and necromancers, and it was owing to his influence and authority that the Council of Paris in 829 appealed to the secular courts to carry out any such sentences as the Bishops might pronounce. The consequence was that from this time forward the penalty of witchcraft was death, and there is evidence that if the constituted authority, either ecclesiastical or civil, seemed to slacken in their efforts the populace took the law into their own hands with far more fearful results.”
MEDIDAS PROFILÁTICAS: “It is quite plain that such a man as Frederick II, whose whole philosophy was entirely Oriental; who was always accompanied by a retinue of Arabian ministers, courtiers, and officers; who was perhaps not without reason suspected of being a complete agnostic, recked little whether heresy and witchcraft might be offences against the Church or not, but he was sufficiently shrewd to see that they gravely threatened the well-being of the State, imperilling the maintenance of civilization and the foundations of society.”
QUANTA BONDADE ECLESIÁSTICA, DEIXAR A PENA DE MORTE PARA O ESTADO! “It may be well here very briefly to consider the somewhat complicated history of the establishment of the Inquisition, which was, it must be remembered, the result of the tendencies and growth of many years, by no means a judicial curia with cut-and-dried laws and a complete procedure suddenly called into being by one stroke of a Papal pen. In the first place, S.[atan] Dominic was in no sense the founder of the Inquisition. Certainly during the crusade in Languedoc he was present, reviving religion and reconciling the lapsed, but he was doing no more than S. Paul or any of the Apostles would have done. The work of S. Dominic was preaching and the organization of his new Order, which received Papal confirmation from Honorius III, and was approved in the Bull Religiosam vitam, 22 December, 1216. S. Dominic died 6 August, 1221, and even if we take the word in a very broad sense, the first Dominican Inquisitor seems to have beenAlberic, who in November, 1232, was travelling through Lombardy with the official title of Inquisitor hereticae pravitatis. The whole question of the episcopal Inquisitors, who were really the local bishop, his arch-deacons, and his diocesan court, and their exact relationship with the travelling Inquisitors, who were mainly drawn from the two Orders of friars, the Franciscan and the Dominican, is extremely nice and complicated;whilst the gradual effacement of the episcopal courts with regard to certain matters and the consequent prominence of the Holy Office were circumstances and conditions which realized themselves slowly enough in all countries, and almost imperceptibly in some districts, as necessity required, without any sudden break or sweeping changes. In fact we find that the Franciscan or Dominican Inquisitor simply sat as an assessor in the episcopal court so that he could be consulted upon certain technicalities and deliver sentence conjointly with the Bishop if these matters were involved. Thus at the trial ofGilles de Raisin October, 1440, at Nantes, the Bishop of Nantes presided over the court with the bishops of Le Mans, Saint-Brieuc, and Saint-Lo as his coadjutors, whilstPierre de l’Hospital, Chencellor of Brittany, watched the case on behalf of the civil authorities, andFrère Jean Blouin was present as the delegate of the Holy Inquisition for the city and district of Nantes.Owing to the multiplicity of the crimes, which were proven and clearly confessed in accordance with legal requirements, it was necessary to pronounce two sentences. The first sentence was passed by the Bishop of Nantes conjointly with the Inquisitor. By them Gilles de Rais was declared guilty of Satanism, sorcery, and apostasy, and there and then handed over to the civil arm to receive the punishment due to such offences. The second sentence, pronounced by the Bishop alone, declared the prisoner convicted of sodomy, sacrilege, and violation of ecclesiastical rights. The ban of excommunication was lifted since the accused had made a clean breast of his crimes and desired to be reconciled, but he was handed over to the secular court, who sentenced him to death, on multiplied charges of murder as well as on account of the aforesaid offences.”
“Today the word heresy seems to be as obsolete and as redolent of a Wardour-street vocabulary as if one were to talk of a game of cards at Crimp or Incertain, and to any save a dusty mediaevalist it would appear to be an antiquarian term.” MORTE AOS COMUNAS! “The heretics were just as resolute and just as practical, that is to say, just as determined to bring about the domination of their absolutism as is any revolutionary of today. The aim and objects of their leaders, Tanchelin, Everwacher, the Jew Manasses, Peter Waldo, Pierre Autier, Peter of Bruys, Arnold of Brescia,and the rest, were exactly those of Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and their fellows.”
“Their objects may be summed up as the abolition of monarchy, the abolition of private property and of inheritance, the abolition of marriage, the abolition of order, the total abolition of all religion. It was against this that the Inquisition had to fight, and who can be surprised if, when faced with so vast a conspiracy, the methods employed by the Holy Office may not seem – if the terrible conditions are conveniently forgotten – a little drastic, a little severe? There can be no doubt that had this most excellent tribunal continued to enjoy its full prerogative and the full exercise of its salutary powers, the world at large would be in a far happier and far more orderly position today. Historians may point out diversities and dissimilarities between the teaching of the Waldenses, the Albigenses, the Henricans, the Poor Men of Lyons, the Cathari, the Vaudois,the Bogomiles, and the Manichees, but they were in reality branches and variants of the same dark fraternity, just as the Third International, the Anarchists, the Nihilists, and the Bolsheviks are in every sense, save the mere label, entirely identical.”
“There is an apparent absence of motive in this seemingly aimless campaign of destruction to extermination carried on by the Bolsheviks in Russia, which has led many people to inquire what the objective can possibly be. So unbridled are the passions, so general the demolition, so terrible the havoc, that hard-headed individuals argue that so complete a chaos and such revolting outrages could only be affected by persons who were enthusiasts in their own cause and who had some very definite aims thus positively to pursue. The energizing forces of this fanaticism, this fervent zeal, do not seem to be anymore apparent than the end, hence more than one person has hesitated to accept accounts so alarming of massacres and carnage, or wholesale imprisonments, tortures, and persecutions, and has begun to suspect that the situation may be grossly exaggerated in the overcharged reports of enemies and the highly-coloured gossip of scare-mongers.” EUREKA!
“Nearly a century and a half ago Anacharsis Clootz(*), <the personal enemy of Jesus Christ> as he openly declared himself, was vociferating God is Evil, To me then Lucifer, Satan! whoever you may be, the demon that the faith of my fathers opposed to God and the Church. This is the credo of the witch.”
(*) Bases constitutionnelles de la République du genre humain, Paris, 1793
Revolucionário francês de tendências cosmopolitas (globais) à frente de seu tempo.
“Naturally, although the Masters were often individuals of high rank and deep learning, that rank and file of the society, that is to say, those who for the most part fell into the hands of justice, were recruited from the least educated classes, the ignorant and the poor [já vi isso em algum lugar…]. As one might suppose, many of the branches or covens in remoter districts knew nothing and perhaps could have understood nothing of the enormous system. Nevertheless, as small cogs in a very small wheel, it might be, they were carrying on the work and actively helping to spread the infection. It is an extremely significant fact that the last regularly official trial and execution for witchcraft in Western Europe was that ofAnna Göldi, who was hanged at Glaris in Switzerland, 17 June, 1782(*). Seven years before, in 1775, the villianAdam Weishaupt, who has been truly described by Louis Blancas <the profoundest conspirator that has ever existed,> formed his <terrible and formidable sect>, the Illuminati. The code of this mysterious movement lays down: <it is also necessary to gain the common people (das gemeine Volk) to our Order. The great means to that end is influence in the schools.>” “So in the prosecutions at Würzburg we find that there were condemned boys of 10 and 11, two choir boys aged 12, <a boy of 12-years-old in one of the lower forms of the school>, <the two young sons of the Prince’s cook, the eldest 14, the younger 12>, several pages and seminarists, as well as a number of young girls, amongst whom <a child of 9 or 10 and her little sister> were involved.”
(*) Nota corretiva (do próprio reverendo na segunda edição?): “The last trial and judicial execution in Europe itself was probably that of two aged beldames, Satanists, who were burned at the stake in Poland, 1793, the year of the Second Partition, during the reign of Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski.” Mas parece que a correção do reverendo estava errada, prevalecendo a primeira versão, conforme wiki e outras fontes…
“In England in the year 1324 no less than 27 defendants were tried at the King’s Bench for plotting against and endeavouring to kill Edward II, together with many prominent courtiers and officials, by the practice of magical arts.A number of wealthy citizens of Coventry had hired a famous <nigromauncer>, John of Nottingham, to slay not only the king, but also the royal favourite, Hugh le Despenser, and his father; the Prior of Coventry; the monastic steward; the manciple; and a number of other important personages. A secluded old manor-house, some 2 or 3 miles out of Coventry, was put at the disposal of Master John, and there he and his servant,Robert Marshall, promptly commenced business. They went to work in the bad old-fashioned way of modelling wax dolls or mommets of those whom they wished to destroy. Long pins were thrust through the figures, and they were slowly melted before a fire.(*)The first unfortunate upon whom this experiment was tried, Richard de Sowe, a prominent courtier and close friend of the king, was suddenly taken with agonizing pains, and when Marshall visited the house, as if casually, in order that he might report the results of this sympathetic sorcery to the wizard, he found their hapless victim in a high delirium. When this state of things was promptly conveyed to him, Master John struck a pin through the heart of the image, and in the morning the news reached them that de Sowe had breathed his last. Marshall, who was by now in an extremity of terror, betook himself to a justice and laid bare all that was happening and had happened, with the immediate result that Master John and the gang of conspirators were arrested. It must be remembered that in 1324 the final rebellion against king Edward II had openly broken forth on all sides. A truce of 13 years had been arranged with Scotland, and though the English might refuse Bruce his royal title he was henceforward the warrior king of an independent country. It is true that in May, 1322, the York Parliament had not only reversed the exile of the Despensers, declaring the pardons which had been granted their opponents null and void, as well as voting for the repeal of the Ordinances of 1311, and the Despensers were working for, and fully alive to the necessity of, good and stable government, but nonetheless the situation was something more than perilous; the Exchequer was well-nigh drained; there was rioting and bloodshed in almost every large town; and worst of all, in 1323 the younger Roger Mortimer had escaped from the Tower and got away safely to the Continent. There were French troubles to boot; Charles IV, who in 1322 had succeeded to the throne, would accept no excuse from Edward for any postponement of homage, and in this very year, 1324, declaring the English possessions forfeited, he proceeded to occupy the territory with an army, when it soon became part of the French dominion. There can be not doubt that the citizens of Coventry were political intriguers, and since they were at the moment unable openly to rebel against their sovran lord, taking advantage of the fact that he was harassed and pressed at so critical a juncture, they proceeded against him by the dark and tortuous ways of black magic.”
(*) “This is certainly one of the oldest and most universal of spells. To effect the death of a man, or to injure him by making an image in his likeness, and mutilating or destroying this image, is a practice found throughout the whole wide world from its earliest years. It is common both in Babylon and in the Egypt of the Pharoahs, when magicians kneaded puppets of clay or pitch moistened with honey. If it were possible to mingle therewith a drop of a man’s blood, the parings of his nails, a few hairs from his body, a thread or two from his garments, it gave the warlock the greater power over him. In ancient Greece and Rome precisely the same ideas prevailed, and allusions may be found in Theocritus (Idyll II), Virgil (Eclogue VIII, 75-82), Ovid (Heroides, VI, 91, sqq.; Amores, III, vii, 29, sqq.), and many more. (See R. Wunsch, Eine antike Rachepuppe, Philologus, lxi, 1902, pp. 26-31.) We find this charm among the Ojebway Indians, the Cora Indians of Mexico, the Malays, the Chinese and Japanese, the aborigines throughout Australia, the Hindoos, both in ancient India and at the present day, the Burmese, many Arab tribes of Northern Africa, in Turkey, in Italy and the remoter villages of France, in Ireland and Scotland, nor is it (in one shape and form or another) yet unknown in the country districts of England.”
“An astrologer, attached to the Duke’s house-hold, when taken and charged with <werchyrye of sorcery against the King,> confessed that he had often cast the horoscope of the Duchess to find out if her husband would ever wear the English crown, the way to which they had attempted to smooth by making a wax image of Henry VI and melting it before a magic fire to bring about the king’s decease. A whole crowd of witches, male and female, were involved in the case, and among these was Margery Jourdemain, a known a notorious invoker of demons and an old trafficker in evil charms.”
“In the days of Edward IV it was commonly gossiped that the Duchess of Bedford was a witch, who by her spells had fascinated the king with the beauty of her daughter Elizabeth, whom he made his bride, in spite of the fact that he had plighted his troth to Eleanor Butler, the heiress of the Earl of Shrewsbury. So open did the scandal become that the Duchess of Bedford lodged an official complaint with the Privy Council, and an inquiry was ordered, but, as might have been suspected, this completely cleared the lady.”
O Edward, Edward! fly and leave this place,
Wherein, poor silly King, thou are enchanted.
This is her dam of Bedford’s work, her mother,
That hath bewitch’d thee, Edward, my poor child.
Heywood
“Her ascendancy over the king was attributed to the enchantments and experiments of a Dominican friar, learned in many a cantrip and cabala, whom she entertained in her house, and who had fashioned 2 pictures of Edward and Alice which, when suffumigated with the incense of mysterious herbs and gums, mandrakes, sweet calamus, caryophylleae, storax, benzoin, and other plants plucked beneath the full moon what time Venus was in ascendant, caused the old king to dote upon this lovely concubine. With great difficulty by a subtle ruse the friar was arrested, and he thought himself lucky to escape with relegation to a remote house under the strictest observance of his Order, whence, however, he was soon to be recalled with honour and reward, since the Good Parliament shortly came to an end, and Alice Perrers, who now stood higher in favour than ever, was not slow to heap lavish gifts upon her supporters, and to visit her enemies with condign punishment.”
“There was nobody more thoroughly scared of witchcraft than Henry VIII’s daughter, Elizabeth, and as John Jewel was preaching his famous sermon before her in February, 1560, he described at length how <this kind of people (I mean witches and sorcerers) within these few last years are marvellously increased within this Your Grace’s realm;> he then related how owing to dark spells he had known many <pine away even to death.> <I pray God,> he unctuously cried, <they may never practise further than upon the subjects!> This was certainly enough to ensure that drastic laws should be passed particularly to protect the Queen, who was probably both thrilled and complimented to think that her life was in danger. It is exceedingly doubtful, whether there was any conspiracy at all which would have attempted Elizabeth’s personal safety.”
“That it was a huge and far-reaching political conspiracy is patent form the fact that the lives of Louis XIV, the Queen, the Dauphin, Louise de la Vallière, and the Duchesse de Fontanges had been attempted secretly again and again, whilst as for Colbert, scores of his enemies were constantly entreating for some swift sure poison, constantly participating in unhallowed rites which might lay low the all-powerful Introduction of Minister.”
“As early as 600 S. Gregory I had spoken in severest terms, enjoining the punishment of sorcerers and those who trafficked in black magic. It will be noted that he speaks of them as more often belonging to that class termed servi, that is to say, the very people from whom for the most part Nihilists and Bolsheviks have sprung in modern days.” Não consigo encontrar referências para os serui – segundo a grafia moderna poderiam ser os servi, os sérvios? Dostoievsky é o epítome da literatura niilista pré-Revolução Russa. Mas e daí? Ele queimou alguém na fogueira? Na verdade até onde eu sei era um beato (viciado em jogo, mas um beato). Nenhuma pista, só um palpite.
“On 13, December, 1258, Pope Alexander IV (Rinaldo Conti) issued a Bull to the Franciscan Inquisitors bidding them refrain from judging any cases of witchcraft unless there was some very strong reason to suppose that heretical practice could also be amply proved. On 10 January, 1260, the same Pontiff addressed a similar Bull to the Dominicans.”
DEFENDENDO O INDEFENSÁVEL: “Sixtus IV was an eminent theologian, he is the author of an admirable treatise on the Immaculate Conception, and it is significant that he took strong measures to curb [restrain]the judicial severities of Tomás de Torquemada [que bonzinho], whom he had appointed Grand Inquisitor of Castile, 11 February, 1482. During his reign he published three Bulls directly attacking sorcery, which he clearly identified with heresy, an opinion of the deepest weight when pronounced by one who had so penetrating a knowledge of the political currents of the day [ó!]. There can be no doubt that he saw the society of witches to be nothing else than a vast international of anti-social revolutionaries. (sic!!!)”
“It has been necessarily thus briefly to review this important series of Papal documents to show that the famous Bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, 9 December, 1484, which Innocent VIII addressed to the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, is no isolated and extraordinary document, but merely one in the long and important record of Papal utterances, although at the same time it is of the greatest importance and supremely authoritative. It has, however, been very frequently asserted, not only by prejudiced and unscrupulous chroniclers, but also by scholars of standing and repute, that this Bull of Innocent VIII, if not, as many appear to suppose, is actually the prime cause and origin of the crusade against witches, at any rate gave the prosecution and energizing power and an authority which hitherto they had not, and which save for this Bull they could not ever have, commanded and possessed.” “a Bull is an instrument of especial weight and importance, and it differs both in form and detail from constitutions, encyclicals, briefs, decrees, privileges, and rescripts. It should be remarked, however, that the term Bull has conveniently been used to denote all these, especially if they are Papal letters of any early date. By the 15th century clearer distinctions were insisted upon and maintained.”
“Alexander VI published two Bulls upon the same theme, and in a Bull of Julius II there is a solemn description of that abomination the Black Mass, which is perhaps the central feature of the worship of Satanists, and which is unhappily yet celebrated today in London, in Paris, in Berlin, and in many another great city.”“Leo X, the great Pope of Humanism, issued a Bull on the subject; but even more important is the Bull Dudum uti nobis exponi fecisti, 20 July, 1523, which speaks of the horrible abuse of the Sacrament in sorceries and the charms confuted by witches.”
“There is a Constitution of Gregory XV, Omnipotentis Dei, 20 March, 1623; and a Constitution ofUrban VIII, Inscrutabilis iudiciorum Dei altitudo, 1st April [hehe], 1631, which – if we except the recent condemnation of Spiritism in the19th century – may be said to be the last Apostolic document directed against these foul and devilish practices.”
“The noble and momentous sentences are built-up word by word, beat by beat, ever growing more and more authoritative, more and more judicial, until they culminate in the minatory and imprecatory clauses which are so impressive, so definite, that no loophole is left for escape, no turn for evasion.<Nulli ergo omnino hominum liceat hanc paganim nostrae declarationis extentionis concessionis et mandati infringere vel ei ausu temeraris contrarie Si qui autem attentate praesumpserit indignationem omnipotentis Dei ac beatorum Petri et Pauli Apostolorum eius se noverit incursurum.>If any man shall presume to go against the tenor let him know that therein he will bring down upon himself the wrath of Almighty God and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul.”
“infallibility is claimed on the ground, not indeed of the terms of the Vatican definition, but of the constant practice of the Holy See, the consentient teaching of the theologians, as well as the clearest deductions of the principles of faith.” “Without exception non-Catholic historians have either in no measured language denounced or else with sorrow deplored the Bull of Innocent VIII as a most pernicious and unhappy document, a perpetual and irrevocable manifesto of the unchanged and unchangeable mind of the Papacy.From this point of view they are entirely justified, and their attitude is undeniably logical and right. The Summis desiderantes affectibus is either a dogmatic exposition by Christ’s Vicar upon earth or it is altogether abominable.” Choose for the second!
“It is all the more amazing to find that the writer of the article upon Witchcraft in the Catholic Encyclopaedia quotes Hansen with complete approval and gleefully adds with regard to the Bull of Innocent VIII, <neither does the form suggest that the Pope wishes to bind anyone to believe more about the reality of witchcraft than is involved in the utterances of Holy Scripture,>a statement which is essentially Protestant in its nature, and, as is acknowledged by every historian of whatsoever colour or creed, entirely untrue. By its appearance in a standard work of reference, which is on the shelves of every library, this article upon Witchcraft acquires a certain title to consideration which upon its merits it might otherwise lack. It is signed Herbert Thurston, and turning to the list of <Contributors to the Fifteenth Volume> we duly see <Thurston, Herbert, S.J., London.> Since a Jesuit Father emphasizes in a well-known (and presumably authoritative) Catholic work an opinion so derogatory to the Holy See and so definitely opposed to all historians, one is entitled to express curiosity concerning other writings which may not have come from his pen. I find that for a considerable number of years Fr. Thurston has been contributing to The Month a series of articles upon mystical phenomena and upon various aspects of mysticism, such as the Incorruption of the bodies of Saints and Beati, the Stigmata, the Prophecies of holy persons, the miracles of Crucifixes that bleed or pictures of the Madonna which move, famous Sanctuaries, the inner life of and wonderful events connected with persons still living who have acquired a reputation for sanctity. This busy writer directly or incidentally has dealt with that famous ecstaticaAnne Catherine Emmerich; the Crucifix of Limpias; Our Lady of Campocavallo; S. Januarus; the Ven. Maria d’Agreda; Gemma Galgani; Padre Pio Pietralcina; that gentle soul Teresa Higginson, the beauty of whose life has attracted thousands, but whom Fr. Thurston considers hysterical and masochistic and whose devotions to him savour of the <snowball> prayer;Pope Alexander VI; the origin of the Rosary; the Carmelite scapular; and very many themes beside. Here was have (sic) a mass of material, and even a casual glance through these pages will suffice to show the ugly prejudice which informs the whole.The intimate discussions on miracles, spiritual graces and physical phenomena, which above all require faith, reverence, sympathy, tact and understanding, are conducted with a roughness and a rudeness infinitely regrettable. What is worse, in every case Catholic tradition and loyal Catholic feeling are thrust to one side; the note of scepticism, of modernism, and even of rationalism is arrogantly dominant.Tender miracles of healing wrought at some old sanctuary, records of some hidden life of holiness secretly lived amongst us in the cloister or the home, these things seem to provoke Fr. Thurston to such a pitch of annoyance that he cannot refrain from venting his utmost spleen. The obsession is certainly morbid. It is reasonable to suppose that a lengthy series of papers all concentrating upon certain aspects of mysticism would have collected in one volume, and it is extremely significant that in the autumn of 1923 a leading house announced among Forthcoming Books:The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism. By the Rev. Herbert Thurston, S.J.Although in active preparation, this has never seen the light. I have heard upon good authority that the ecclesiastical superiors took exception to such a publication. I may, of course, be wrong, and there can be no question that there is room for a different point of view, but I cannot divest my mind of the idea that the exaggerated rationalization of mystical phenomena conspicuous in the series of articles I have just considered may be by no means unwelcome to the Father of Lies [é coisa do demo usar a cabeça]. It really plays into his hands: first, because it makes the Church ridiculous by creating the impression that her mystics, particularly friars and nuns, are for the most part sickly hysterical subjects, deceivers and deceived, who would be fit inmates of Bedlam; that many of her most reverend shrines, Limpias, Campocavallo, and the sanctuaries of Naples, are frauds and conscious imposture; and, secondly, because it condemns and brings into ridicule that note of holiness which theologians declare is one of the distinctive marks of the true Church.” Finalmente alguém sensato na parada!
INFALIBILIDADE DOS DEMÔNIOS EM PELE DE CORDEIRO: “and Fr. Thurston for 15 nauseating pages insists upon <the evil example of his private life>. This is unnecessary; it is untrue; it shows contempt of Christ’s Vicar on earth.”
“For a full account of the Papal Bulls, see my Geography of Witchcraft, 1927” Deve ser um livro interessantíssimo. Um catálogo das páginas mais execráveis já escritos por homens de autoridade na era dos domínios de Deus-Filho sobre a superfície da redonda terra.
* * *
Verbete W I K I sobre Thurston:
“Thurston wrote more than 150 articles for the Catholic Encyclopedia(1907-1914), and published nearly 800 articles in magazines and scholarly journals, as well a dozen books. He also re-edited Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints (1926-1938). Many of Thurston’s articles show a skeptical attitude towards popular legends about the lives of the saints and about holy relics. On the other hand, his treatment of spiritualismand the paranormalwas regarded as <too sympathetic> by some within the Catholic community.” “Thurston attributed the phenomena of stigmatato the effects of suggestion.” Livro que parece o mais interessante como inicial: The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism (1952). Vemos, portanto, que o livro foi “enrolado”, mas saiu, após a segunda e nefastérrima edição do Malleus do reverendinho SummersWinters!
* * *
VOLTANDO ÀS PATACOADAS…
“It should be borne in mind too that frequent disturbances, conspiracies of anarchists, and nascent Bolshevism showed that the district was rotted to the core, and the severities of Kramer and Sprenger were by no means so unwarranted as is generally supposed.” “Unfortunately full biographies of these two remarkable men, James Sprenger and Henry Kramer, have not been transmitted to us, but as many details have been succinctly collected in the Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum of Quétif and Echard, Paris, 1719, I have thought it convenient to transcribe the following accounts from that monumental work.”
PAPAS PROCRIADORES (MAS SANTOS): (*) “Burchard was only aware of two children of Innocent VIII. But Egidio of Viterbo wrote: <Primus pontificum filios filiasque palam ostentavit, primus eorum apertas fecit nuptias.>”
(*) “One writer, professing himself a Christian, declares that it is at least doubtful whether Our Lord instituted The Holy Sacrifice of the Altar. This, of course, is tantamount to a denial of Christ.”
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“The British Museum has five editions of the 15th century: 4to., 1490? (IA 8634); folio, 1490 (IB 8615); 4to., 1494 (IA 7468); folio, 1494 (IB 5064); 4to., 1496 (IA 7503).” “Malleus Maleficarum, 8vo., Paris, an edition to which the British Museum catalogue assigns the date of <1510?>.”
“Malleus Maleficarum . . . per F. Raffaelum Maffeum Venetum et D. Jacobi a Judeca instituti Servorum summo studio illustratis et a multis erroribus vindicatus . . . Venetiis Ad Candentis Salamandrae insigne. 1576, 8vo. (This is a disappointing reprint, and it is difficult to see in what consisted the editorial care of the Servite Raffaelo Maffei [Rafael Má-fé!], who may or may not have been some relation of the famous humanist of the same name (d. 25 January, 1522)(*), and who was of the monastery of San Giacomo della Guidecca. He might have produced a critical edition of the greatest value, but as it is there are no glosses, there is no excursus, and the text is poor. For example, in a very difficult passage, Principalis Quaestio II, Pars II, where the earliest texts read <die dominico sotularia ivuenum fungia . . . perungunt,> Venice, 1576, has <die dominica sotularia ivuenum fungia . . . perungent.>)” (*) Não é Raffaello Sanzio, que morreu em 1520.
“Malleus Maleficarum, 4 vols., <sumptibus Claudii Bourgeat,> 4to., Lyons, 1669. This would appear to be the latest edition of the Malleus Maleficarum”
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“The derivation of Femina from fe minus is notorious, and hardly less awkward is the statement that Diabolus comes <a Dia, quod est duo, et bolus, quod est morsellus; quia duo occidit, scilicet corpus et animam.>”
O show de horrores continua…
“Possibly what will seem even more amazing to modern readers is the misogynic trend of various passages, and these not of the briefest nor least pointed. However, exaggerated as these may be, I am not altogether certain that they will not prove a wholesome and needful antidote in this feministic age, when the sexes seem confounded, and it appear to be the chief object of many females to ape the man, an indecorum by which they not only divest themselves of such charm as they might boast, but lay themselves open to the sternest reprobation in the name of sanity and common-sense. For the Apostle S. Peter says: Let wives be subject to their husbands: that if any believe not the word, they may be won without the word, by the conver[sa]tion of the wives, considering your chaste conversation with fear. Whose adorning let it not be the outward plaiting of the hair, or the wearing of god, or the putting on of apparel; but the hidden man of the heart is the incorruptibility of a quiet and meek spirit, which is rich in the sight of God. For after the manner heretofore the holy women also, who trusted God, adorned themselves, being in subjection to their own husbands: as Sara obeyed Abraham, calling him lord: whose daughters you are, doing well, and not fearing any disturbance.”
(*) “The extremer Picards seem to have been an off-shoot of the Behgards and to have professed the Adamite heresy. They called their churches Paradise whilst engaged in common worship stripped themselves quite nude. Shameful disorders followed. A number of these fanatics took possession of an island in the river Nezarka and lived in open communism. In 1421 Ziska, the Hussite leader, practically exterminated the sect. There have, however, been sporadic outbreaks of these Neo-Adamites. Picards was also a name given to the <Bohemian Brethren>, who may be said to have been organized in 1457 by Gregory, the nephew of Rokyzana.”
“Montague Summers.
In Festo ExpectationisB.M.V.
1927.”
Já vai tarde, martelador de coisas erradas!
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“It was published in 1487, but two years previously the authors had secured a bull from Pope Innocent VIII, authorizing them to continue the witch hunt in the Alps which they had already instituted against the opposition from clergy and secular authorities. They reprinted the bull of December 5, 1484 to make it appear that the whole book enjoyed papal sanction.
Anybody with a grudge or suspicion, very young children included, could accuse anyone of witchcraft and be listened to with attention; anyone who wanted someone else’s property or wife could accuse; any loner, any old person living alone, anyone with a misformity, physical or mental problem was likely to be accused.Open hunting season was declared on women, especially herb gatherers, midwives, widows and spinsters. Women who had no man to supervise them were of course highly suspicious. It has been estimated by Dr. Marija Gimbutas, professor of archaeology at the University of California, that as many as 9 million people, overwhelmingly women, were burned or hanged during the witch-craze. For nearly 250 years the Witches’ Hammer was the guidebook for the witch hunters, but again some of the inquisitioners had misgivings about this devilish book. In a letter dated November 27, 1538Salazar advised the inquisitioners not to believe everything they read in Malleus Maleficarum, even if the authors write about it as something they themselves have seen and investigated (Henningson, p.347).”
Edo Nyland – The Witch Burnings: Holocaust Without Equal
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TRADUÇÃO ORIGINAL DO REVERENDO CATÓLICO QUE DEVE TER VIVIDO BASTANTES “VERÕES”
“every alteration that takes place in a human body – for example, a state of health or a state of sickness – can be brought down to a question of natural causes, as Aristotle has shown in his 7th book of Physics. And the greatest of these is the influence of the stars. But the devils cannot interfere with the stars. This is the opinion of Dionysius in his epistle to S. Polycarp. For this alone God can do. Therefore it is evident the demons cannot actually effect any permanent transformation in human bodies; that is to say, no real metamorphosis. And so we must refer the appearance of any such change to some dark and occult cause.”
“For devils have no power at all save by a certain subtle art. But an art cannot permanently produce a true form. (And a certain author says: Writers on Alchemy know that there is no hope of any real transmutation.) Therefore the devils for their part, making use of the utmost of their craft, cannot bring about any permanent cure – or permanent disease.”
“But the power of the devil is stronger than any human power” (Job 40) Ou a tradução para Português perde muito do sentido original ou o autor se equivoca muito ao interpretar os versos de Jó XL como sobre o demônio, quando só falam de Deus onipotente, do homem impotente e, no máximo, do animal beemote, que é um crente, age com sabedoria, não se desespera, porque conhece a própria fraqueza melhor do que o homem.
“For the imagination of some men is so vivid that they think they see actual figures and appearances which are but the reflection of their thoughts, and then these are believed to be the apparitions of evil spirits or even the spectres of witches.”
#títulodelivro
DESBATIZADO
“an infidel and worse than a heathen”
tempstation du mal, ô Être!
Deuteronômio 18:“Este, pois, será o direito dos sacerdotes, a receber do povo, dos que oferecerem sacrifício, seja boi ou gado miúdo; que darão ao sacerdote a espádua e as queixadas e o bucho.”
Ça ser dote ou não ser, eis a questão
“Entre ti não se achará quem faça passar pelo fogo a seu filho ou a sua filha, nem adivinhador, nem prognosticador, nem agoureiro, nem feiticeiro;
Nem encantador, nem quem consulte a um espírito adivinhador, nem mágico, nem quem consulte os mortos;
Pois todo aquele que faz tal coisa é abominação ao Senhor; e por estas abominações o Senhor teu Deus os lança fora de diante de ti.
(…)
estas nações, que hás de possuir, ouvem os prognosticadores e os adivinhadores; porém a ti [descendente sacerdotal] o Senhor teu Deus não permitiu tal coisa. [Daí estaria implícito que a adivinhação e o ato de aconselhar [?] estão permitidos para todas as tribos não-sacerdotais; são simplesmente naturais dentre o povaréu. Não deveriam ser os e as possuidoras de tantos e atípicos talentos vítimas de apedrejamento, apenas deixad@s em sua ‘cegueira espiritual inerente’, para serem julgad@s na Esfera competente Quando de competência!]”
“Porém o profeta que tiver a presunção de falar alguma palavra em meu nome, que eu não lhe tenha mandado falar [um Genocídio teria de advir], ou o que falar em nome de outros deuses, esse profeta morrerá.” Não disse de quê.
“Quando o profeta falar em nome do Senhor, e essa palavra não se cumprir, nem suceder assim; esta é palavra que o Senhor não falou; com soberba a falou aquele profeta; não tenhas temor dele.” Jesus tem ainda uns 30 mil anos de crédito, relaxai…
Levíticos 19:“The soul which goeth to wizards and soothsayers to commit fornication with them, I will set my face against that soul, and destroy it out of the midst of my people.”
Levíticos 20:“A man, or woman, in whom there is a pythonical or divining spirit dying, let them die: they shall stone them.”
IV Kings I // 2 Reis 1:“His brother and successor, Joram, threw down the statue of Baal, erected by Achab”
“(…) Ide, e perguntai a Baal-Zebube, deus de Ecrom, se sararei desta doença.
Mas o anjo do Senhor disse a Elias, o tisbita: Levanta-te, sobe para te encontrares com os mensageiros do rei de Samaria, e dize-lhes: Porventura não há Deus em Israel, para irdes consultar a Baal-Zebube, deus de Ecrom?
E por isso assim diz o Senhor: Da cama, a que subiste, não descerás, mas sem falta morrerás. Então Elias partiu.
(…)
Então o rei (…) disse-lhe: Homem de Deus, o rei diz: Desce.
Mas Elias respondeu, e disse ao capitão de cinqüenta: Se eu, pois, sou homem de Deus, desça fogo do céu, e te consuma a ti e aos teus cinqüenta. Então fogo desceu do céu, e consumiu a ele e aos seus cinqüenta.
(…)
E tornou a enviar um terceiro capitão de cinqüenta, com os seus cinqüenta; então subiu o capitão de cinqüenta e, chegando, pôs-se de joelhos diante de Elias, e suplicou-lhe, dizendo: Homem de Deus, seja, peço-te, preciosa aos teus olhos a minha vida, e a vida destes cinqüenta teus servos.
Eis que fogo desceu do céu, e consumiu aqueles dois primeiros capitães de cinqüenta, com os seus cinqüenta; porém, agora seja preciosa aos teus olhos a minha vida.
Então o anjo do Senhor disse a Elias: Desce com este, não temas. E levantou-se, e desceu com ele ao rei.
(…)
Assim, pois, morreu, conforme a palavra do Senhor, que Elias falara (…)”
I Paralipomenon 10 (Bíblia Vulgata, English translation – equivalente a 1 Crônicas 10): “Saul is slain for his sins: he is buried by the men of Jabes. Now the Philistines fought against Israel, and the men of Israel fled from before the Philistines, and fell down wounded in mount Gelboe. And the Philistines drew near pursuing after Saul, and his sons, and they killed Jonathan, and Abinadab, and Melchisua the sons of Saul. And the battle grew hard against Saul and the archers reached him, and wounded him with arrows. And Saul said to his armour-bearer: Draw thy sword, and kill me: lest these uncircumcised come, and mock me. But his armour-bearer would not, for he was struck with fear: so Saul took his sword, and fell upon it. [réprobo dos réprobos!] And when his armour-bearer saw it, to wit, that Saul was dead, he also fell upon his sword and died. So Saul died, and his 3 sons, and all his house fell together. And when the men of Israel, that dwelt in the plains, saw this, they fled: and Saul and his sons being dead, they forsook their cities, and were scattered up and down: and the Philistines came, and dwelt in them. And the next day the Philistines taking away the spoils of them that were slain, found Saul and his sons lying on mount Gelboe. And when they had stripped him, and cut off his head, and taken away his armour, they sent it into their land, to be carried about, and shown in the temples of the idols and to the people. And his armour they dedicated in the temple of their god, and his head they fastened up in the temple of Dagon. And when the men of Jabes Galaad had heard this, to wit, all that the Philistines had done to Saul, All the valiant men of them arose, and took the bodies of Saul and of his sons, and brought them to Jabes, and buried their bones under the oak that was in Jabes, and they fasted 7 days. So Saul died for his iniquities, because he transgressed the commandment of the Lord, which he had commanded, and kept it not: and moreover consulted also a witch, And trusted not in the Lord: therefore he slew him, and transferred his kingdom to David the son of Isai.”
“I will not mention those very many other places where S. Thomas in great detail discusses operations of this kind. As, for example, in his Summa contra Gentiles, Book 3, c. 1 and 2, in part one, question 114, argument 4. And in the Second of the Second, questions 92 and 94. We may further consult the Commentators and the Exegetes who have written upon the wise men and the magicians of Pharaoh, Exodus 7. We may also consult what S. Augustine says in The City of God, Book 18, c. 17. See further his second book On Christian Doctrine. Very many other doctors advance the same opinion, and it would be the height of folly for any man to contradict all these, and he could not be held to be clear of the guilt of heresy. For any man who gravely errs in an exposition of Holy Scripture is rightly considered to be a heretic.”
“For they say, and S. Thomas agrees with them, that if witchcraft takes effect in the event of a marriage before there has been carnal copulation, then if it is lasting it annuls and destroys the contract of marriage, and it is quite plain that such a condition cannot in any way be said to be illusory and the effect of imagination.”
DSM-0 (IMPOTENCIAS FEITICIRIVS): “they lay down whether it is to be treated as a lasting or temporary infirmity if it continued for more than the space of 3 years”
“Any person, whatsoever his rank or position, upon such an accusation may be put to torture, and he who is found guilty, even if he confesses his crime, let him be racked, let him suffer all other tortures prescribed by law in order that he may be punished in proportion to his offences.
Note: In days of old such criminals suffered a double penalty and were often thrown to wild beast to be devoured by them. Nowadays they are burnt at the stake, and probably this is because the majority of them are women.”
A tênue linha entre a Mãe Diná, David Copperfield e o Capeta.
“Here it must be noticed that there are fourteen distinct species which come under the genus superstition, but these for the sake of brevity it is hardly necessary to detail, since they have been most clearly set out by S. Isidore in his Etymologiae,(*) Book 8, and by S. Thomas in his Second of the Second, question 92.” “The category in which women of this sort are to be ranked is called the category of Pythons, persons in or by whom the devil either speaks or performs some astonishing operation, and this is often the first category in order.”
(*) “Throughout the greater part of the Middle Ages it was the text-book most in use in educational institutions. Arevalo, who is regarded as the most authoritative editor of S. Isidore (7 vols., Rome, 1797-1803), tells us that it was printed no less than ten times between 1470 and 1529.”
“it is necessary that there should be made a contract with the devil, by which contract the witch truly and actually binds herself to be the servant of the devil and devotes herself to the devil, and this is not done in any dream or under any illusion”
CAVALGAR, ASSUNTO FEMININO POR EXCELÊNCIA: “although these women imagine they are riding (as they think and say) with Diana or with Herodias, in truth they are riding with the devil, who calls himself by some such heathen name and throws a glamour before their eyes. (…) the act of riding abroad may be merely illusory, since the devil has extraordinary power over the minds of those who have given themselves up to him, so that what they do in pure imagination, they believe they have actually and really done in the body.”“Whether witches by their magic arts are actually and bodily transported from place to place, or whether this merely happens in imagination, as is the case with regard to those women who are called Pythons, will be dealt with later in this work, and we shall also discuss how they are conveyed.”
The Evil Damnation
Devi[l-]da[-]mente orden[h]ado
“that God very often allows devils to act as His ministers and His servants, but throughout all it is God alone who can afflict and it is He alone who can heal, for <I kill and I make alive> (Deuteronomy 32:39).”
(*) “<Lex Cornelia.> De Sicariis et Ueneficis.Passed circa 81 B.C. This law dealt with incendiarism as well as open assassination and poisoning, and laid down penalties for accessories to the fact.”
“Yet perhaps this may seem to be altogether too severe a judgement mainly because of the penalties which follow upon excommunication: for the Canon prescribes that a cleric is to be degraded [?] and that a layman is to be handed over to the power of the secular courts, who are admonished to punish him as his offence deserves. Moreover, we must take into consideration the very great numbers of persons who, owing to their ignorance, will surely be found guilty of this error. And since the error is very common the rigor of strict justice may be tempered with mercy. And it is indeed our intention to try to make excuses for those who are guilty of this heresy rather than to accuse them of being infected with the malice of heresy. It is preferable then that if a man should be even gravely suspected of holding this false opinion he should not be immediately condemned for the grave crime of heresy. (See the gloss of Bernard upon the word Condemned.)”
“since an idea merely kept to oneself is not heresy unless it be afterwards put forward, obstinately and openly maintained, it should certainly be said that persons such as we have just mentioned are not to be openly condemned for the crime of heresy. But let no man think he may escape by pleading ignorance. For those who have gone astray through ignorance of this kind may be found to have sinned very gravely. For although there are many degrees of ignorance, nevertheless those who have the cure of souls [padres?] cannot plead invincible ignorance, as the philosophers call it, which by the writers on Canon law and by the Theologians is called Ignorance of the Fact.” “For sometimes persons do not know, they do not wish to know, and they have no intention of knowing. For such persons there is no excuse, but they are to be altogether condemned.”
“If it be asked whether the movement of material objects from place to place by the devil may be paralleled by the movement of the spheres, the answer is No. Because material objects are not thus moved by any natural inherent power of their own, but they are only moved by a certain obedience to the power of the devil, who by the virtue of his own nature has a certain dominion over bodies and material things; he has this certain power, I affirm, yet he is not able to add to created material objects any form or shape, be it substantial or accidental, without some admixture of or compounding with another created natural object.”
“The planets and stars have no power to coerce and compel devils to perform any actions against their will, although seemingly demons are readier to appear when summoned by magicians under the influence of certain stars. It appears that they do this for two reasons. First, because they know that the power of that planet will aid the effect which the magicians desire. Secondly, They do this in order to deceive men, thus making them suppose that the stars have some divine power or actual divinity, and we know that in days of old this veneration of the stars led to the vilest idolatry.”
“alchemists make something similar to gold, that is to say, in so far as the external accidents are concerned, but nevertheless they do not make true gold, because the substance of gold is not formed by the heat of fire which alchemists employ, but by the heat of the sun, acting and reacting upon a certain spot where mineral power is concentrated and amassed, and therefore such gold is of the same likeness as, but is not of the same species as, natural gold.”
Raimundo de Sabunde, espanhol, traduzido até por Montaigne (Theologia Naturalis).
“we learn from the Holy Scriptures of the disasters which fell upon Job, how fire fell from heaven and striking the sheep and the servants consumed them, and how a violent wind threw down the four corners of a house so that it fell upon his children and slew them all. The devil by himself without the co-operation of any witches, but merely by God’s permission alone, was able to bring about all these disasters. Therefore he can certainly do many things which are often ascribed to the work of witches.”
“uma sálvia podre, arremessada numa corrente d’água, pode causar terríveis tempestades e borrascas.”
“Um dos argumentos muito repetidos: Citamos Aristóteles, que diz, no terceiro livro de sua Ética: O Mal é um ato voluntário, o que se prova pelo fato de que ninguém executa uma ação injusta, e um homem que comete um estupro o faz em busca do seu próprio prazer, não é que prejudique apenas por prejudicar ou queira cometer o mal pelo próprio mal. Mas não é assim que entende a Lei. O diabo está apenas usando a bruxa como seu instrumento; logo, neste caso a bruxa é apenas um títere; a bruxa não deveria ser punida pelo seu ato.” [!!!]
Gálatas 3: “O senseless Galatians, who hath bewitched you that you should not obey the truth?”
“And the gloss upon this passage refers to those who have singularly fiery and baleful eyes [inflamados, perniciosos], who by a mere look can harm others, especially young children.” ???
“Alguns podem seduzir e hipnotizar pelo mero olhar” Avicena
O ímã assustava os crentes até no mínimo Santo Agostinho. O “poder” feminino da maquiagem é colocado em pé de igualdade com aquele poder de atração magnética!
“Moisés atacou o Egito com dez pragas por intermédio do ministério dos bons Anjos; já os magos do Faraó foram capazes tão-só de realizar três desses milagres pela ajuda de Satanás. E a peste que caiu sobre as pessoas por 3 dias devido ao pecado de Davi, que enumerou as pessoas, e os 72 mil homens que foram massacrados numa noite, do exército de Senacheribe, foram milagres produzidos por Anjos de Deus, i.e., Anjos bons tementes a Deus e sabedores de Sua Vontade.”
“No tempo de Jó não havia feiticeiros nem bruxas. A Providência quis que o exemplo de Jó servisse para alertar sobre os poderes ocultos do Anjo caído manifestáveis mesmo contra os justos (…) lembre-se: nada ocorre senão a vontade de Deus.”
“Vincent of Beauvais(*) in his Speculum historiale, quoting many learned authorities, says that he who first practised the arts of magic and of astrology was Zoroaster, who is said to have been Cham the son of Noe. And according to S. Augustine in his book Of the City of God, Cham laughed aloud when he was born, and thus showed that he was a servant of the devil, and he, although he was a great and mighty king, was conquered by Ninus the son of Belus,¹ who built Ninive, whose reign was the beginning of the kingdom of Assyriain the time of Abraham.”
(*) “Little is known of the personal history of this celebrated encyclopaedist. The years of his birth and death are uncertain, but the dates most frequently assigned are 1190 and 1264 respectively. It is thought that he joined the Dominicans in Paris shortly after 1218, and that he passed practically his whole life in his monastery in Beauvais, where he occupied himself incessantly upon his enormous work, the general title of which is Speculum Maius, containing 80 books, divided into 9.885 chapters. The third part, Speculum Historiale, in 31 books and 3,793 chapters, bring the History of the World down to A.D. 1250.”
¹ Grego antigo Bēlos; a reencarnação antropomórfica de Marduk; e ainda suposto neto de Hércules! Belus é algumas vezes associado à Assíria, outras à Babilônia e ainda outras ao Egito como um “pai civilizacional” e mestre militar ou semideus da guerra. Na última versão (a egípcia), teria se casado com a filha do deus-rio Nilo. De 12 autores clássicos que citaram Belus, 4 atribuem sua paternidade a Poseidon. Não estão tampouco descartadas relações do nome Belus com Ba’al do Velho Testamento (conseqüentemente, Ba’al e Marduque possuem verossimilhanças e correlações).
“From this time men began to worship images as though they were gods; but this was after the earliest years of history, for in the very first ages there was no idolatry, since in the earliest times men still preserved some remembrance of the creation of the world, as S. Thomas says, Book 2, question 95, article 4. Or it may have originated with Nembroth [Nimrod], who compelled men to worship fire; and thus in the second age of the world there began Idolatry, which is the first of all superstitions, as Divination is the second, and the Observing of Times and Seasons the third.
The practices of witches are included in the second kind of superstition, since they expressly invoke the devil. And there are 3 kinds of this superstition: — Necromancy, Astrology, or rather Astromancy, the superstitious observation of stars, and Oneiromancy.” Freud bruxão
“The prophet Isaiah (6:6) says: The earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord. And so in this twilight and evening of the world, when sin is flourishing on every side and in every place, when charity is growing cold, the evil of witches and their inequities superabound.”
“And since Zoroaster was wholly given up to the magic arts, it was the devil alone who inspired him to study and observe the stars.”
“For the eyes direct their glance upon a certain object without taking notice of other things, and although the vision be perfectly clear, yet at the sight of some impurity, such, for example, a woman during her monthly periods, the eyes will as it were contract a certain impurity. This is what Aristotle says in his work On Sleep and Waking, and thus if anybody’s spirit be inflamed with malice or rage, as is often the case with old women, then their disturbed spirit looks through their eyes, for their countenances are most evil and harmful, and often terrify young children of tender years, who are extremely impressionable.”“Os olhos dirigem sua mirada a certos objetos sem se concentrar sobre ou perceber outros, e ainda que o sentido da visão resulte perfeitamente claro, quando abstraído por alguma impureza, como, por exemplo, uma mulher em seu período menstrual, os olhos serão contaminados pela mesma impureza. Isto é o que Aristóteles diz em sua obra Sobre o Sono e a Vigília [livro contido na obra maior, Da Alma]; destarte, se a alma de alguém estiver dominada pela malícia ou fúria, o que é amiúde o caso das mulheres velhas, sua alma perturbada transparece através dos olhos; basta observar o quanto seus semblantes parecem maus e daninhos, e como assustam com tanta facilidade as crianças pequenas nos anos da inocência, que são extremamente impressionáveis.”
A lenda do “olhar letal” do basilisco: quiçá a fonte do Mito da Medusa.
EVIL NEVER DIES: “Réalité de la Magie et des Apparitions, Paris, 1819 (pp. xii-xiii), has: <Le monde, purgé par le déluge, fut repeuplé par les trois fils de Noé. Sem et Japhet imitèrent la vertu de leur père, et furent justes comme lui. Cham, au contraire, donna entrée au démon dans son coeur, remit au jour l’art exécrable de la magie, en composa les règles, et en instruisit son fils Misraim.>”
OS TRÊS REIS MAGOS VIERAM PRESENTEAR O FILHO DE DEUS (O DIABO REDENTOR) COM PRESENTES FANTÁSTICOS E ENCANTADORES.
“Caldeu, astrólogo e mago eram três sinônimos perfeitos.”
“And now with reference to the second point, namely, that blood will flow from a corpse in the presence of a murderer.” Superstição lida hoje em Tom Sawyer!
“Now there are two circumstances which are certainly very common at the present day, that is to say, the connexion of witches with familiars, Incubi and Succubi, and the horrible sacrifices of small children. (…) Now these demons work owing to their influence upon man’s mind and upon his free will, and they choose to copulate under the influence of certain stars rather than under the influence of others, for it would seem that at certain times their semen can more easily generate and beget children.”
“At first it may truly seem that it is not in accordance with the Catholic Faith to maintain that children can be begotten by devils, that is to say, by Incubi and Succubi: for God Himself, before sin came into the world, instituted human procreation, since He created woman from the rib of man to be a help-meet unto man: And to them He said: Increase, and multiply, Genesis 2:24. Likewise after sin had come into the world, it was said to Noé: Increase, and multiply, Genesis 9:1. In the time of the new law also, Christ confirmed this union: Have ye not read, that he who made man from the beginning, Made them male and female?S. Matthew 19:4. Therefore, men cannot be begotten in any other way than this.
But it may be argued that devils take their part in this generation not as the essential cause, but as a secondary and artificial cause, since they busy themselves by interfering with the process of normal copulation and conception, by obtaining human semen, and themselves transferring it.”
“to collect human semen from one person and to transfer it to another implies certain local actions. But devils cannot locally move bodies from place to place. And this is the argument they put forward. The soul is purely a spiritual essence, so is the devil: but the soul cannot move a body from place to place except it be that body in which it lives and to which it gives life: whence if any member of the body perishes it becomes dead and immovable. Therefore devils cannot move a body from place to place, except it be a body to which they give life. It has been shown, however, and is acknowledged that devils do not bestow life on anybody, therefore they cannot move human semen locally”
“the power that moves and the movement are one and the same thing according to Aristotle in his Physics. It follows, therefore, that devils who move heavenly bodies must be in heaven, which is wholly untrue, both in our opinion, and in the opinion of the Platonists.”
“as Walafrid Strabo says in his commentary upon Exodus 7:2: And Pharaoh called the wise men and the magicians: Devils go about the earth collecting every sort of seed, and can by working upon them broadcast various species. And again in Genesis 6 the gloss makes 2 comments on the words: And the sons of God saw the daughters of men. First, that by the sons of God are meant the sons of Seth, and by the daughters of men, the daughters of Cain. Second, that Giants were created not by some incredible act of men, but by certain devils, which are shameless towards women. For the Bible says, Giants were upon the earth.”
“For through the wantonness of the flesh they have much power over men; and in men the source of wantonness lies in the privy parts, since it is from them that the semen falls, just as in women it falls from the navel.”
“men may at times be begotten by means of Incubi and Succubi”
“We leave open the question whether it was possible for Venus to give birth to Aeneas through coition with Anchises. For a similar question arises in the Scriptures, where it is asked whether evil angels lay with the daughters of men, and thereby the earth was then filled with giants, that is to say, preternaturally big and strong men.” Santo Agostinho
“Satyrs are wild shaggy creatures of the woods, which are a certain kind of devils called Incubi.”
“As to that of S. Paul in I Corinthians 11, A woman ought to have a covering on her head, because of the angels, many Catholics believe that because of the angels refers to Incubi. Of the same opinion is the Venerable Bede in his History of the English; also William of Paris in his book De Universo, the last part of the 6th treatise. Moreover, S. Thomas speaks of this (I. 25 and II. 8, and elsewhere; also on Isaiah 12 and 14). Therefore he says that it is rash to deny such things. For that which appears true to many cannot be altogether false, according to Aristotle (at the end of the De somno et vigilia, and in the 2nd Ethics). I say nothing of the many authentic histories, both Catholic and heathen, which openly affirm the existence of Incubi.”
I Corinthians 11:“Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head.But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head—it is the same as having her head shaved. For if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off; but if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should cover her head. A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man.”
“materially life springs from the semen, and an Incubus devil can, with God’s permission, accomplish this by coition. And the semen does not so much spring from him, as it is another man’s semen received by him for this purpose (see S. Thomas, I. 51, art. 3). For the devil is Succubus to a man, and becomes Incubus to a woman. In just the same way they absorb the seeds of other things for the generating of various thing, as S. Augustine says, de Trinitate 3.”
INNER-BREEDING HERMAPHRODITE MUTUAL CONCEPTION: “one devil, allotted to a woman, should receive semen from another devil, allotted to a man [esperma feminino, vale dizer], that in this way each of them should be commissioned by the prince of devils to work some witchcraft; since, to each one is allotted his own angel, even from among the evil ones; or because of the filthiness of the deed, which one devil would abhor to commit.”
“the soul occupies by far the lowest grade in the order of spiritual beings, and therefore it follows that there must be some proportionate relation between it and the body which it is able to move by contact. But it is not so with devils, whose power altogether exceeds corporeal power. (…) And just as the higher heavenly bodies are moved by the higher spiritual substances, as are the good Angels, so are the lower bodies moved by the lower spiritual substances, as are the devils. And if this limitation of the devils’ power is due to the essence of nature, it is held by some that the devils are not of the order of those higher angels, but are part of this terrestrial order created by God; and this was the opinion of the Philosophers. And if it is due to condemnation for sin, as is held by the Theologians, then they were thrust from the regions of heaven into this lower atmosphere for a punishment, and therefore are not able to move either it or the earth. (…) Also there is the argument that objects that the motion of the whole and of the part is the same thing, just as Aristotle in his 4th Physics instances the case of the whole earth and a clod of soil; and that therefore if the devils could move a part of the earth, they could also move the whole earth. But this is not valid, as is clear to anyone who examines the distinction.”
“through such action complete contraception and generation by women can take place, inasmuch as they can deposit human semen in the suitable place of a woman’s womb where there is already a corresponding substance. (…) wherefore the child is the son not of the devil, but of some man.”
FREEZER ANTIGO: “devils are able to store the semen safely, so that its vital heat is not lost; or even that it cannot evaporate so easily on account of the great speed at which they move by reason of the superiority of the move over the thing moved.”
I Corinthians 15: “As long as the world endures Angels are set over Angels, men over men, and devils over devils. Also in Job 40 it speaks of the scales of Leviathan, which signify the members of the devil, how one cleaves to another. Therefore there is among them diversity both of order and of action.” “It is Catholic to maintain that there is a certain order of interior and exterior actions, and a degree of preference among devils. Whence it follows that certain abominations are committed by the lowest orders, from which the higher orders are precluded on account of the nobility of their natures.”
“Dionysus also lays it down in his 10th chapter On the Celestial Hierarchythat in the same order there are 3 separate degrees; and we must agree with this, since they are both immaterial and incorporeal. See also S. Thomas (2:2).”
“For though one and the same name, that of devil, is generally used in Scripture because of their various qualities, yet the Scriptures teach that One is set over these filthy actions, just as certain other vices are subject to Another. For it is the practice of Scripture and of speech to name every unclean spirit Diabolus, from Dia, that is Two, and Bolus, that is Morsel [pedaço]; for he kills two things, the body and the soul. And this is in accordance with etymology, although in Greek Diabolus means shut in Prison, which also is apt, since he is not permitted to do as much harm as he wishes. Or Diabolus may mean Downflowing, since he flowed down, that is, fell down, both specifically and locally. He is also named Demon, that is, Cunning over Blood, since he thirsts for and procures sin with a threefold knowledge, being powerful in the subtlety of his nature, in his age-long experience, and in the revelation of the good spirits. He is called also Belial, which means Without Yoke or Master; for he can fight against him to whom he should be subject. He is called also Beelzebub, which means Lord of Flies, that is, of the souls of sinners who have left the true faith of Christ. Also Satan, that is, the Adversary; see I Peter 2: For your adversary the devil goeth about, etc.Also Behemoth, that is, Beast, because he makes men bestial.
But the very devil of Fornication, and the chief of that abomination, is called Asmodeus, which means the Creature of Judgement: for because of this kind of sin a terrible judgement was executed upon Sodom and the 4 other cities. Similarly the devil of Pride is called Leviathan, which means Their Addition; because when Lucifer tempted our first parents he promised them, out of his pride, the addition of Divinity. Concerning him the Lord said through Isaiah: I shall visit it upon Leviathan, that old and tortuous serpent. And the devil of Avarice and Riches is called Mammon, whom also Christ mentions in the Gospel (Matthew 6): Ye cannot serve God, etc.”
Segundo este panfleto, Lúcifer e os “diabos mais altos” jamais cometeriam um ato tão impuro quanto a fornicação! Demônios pudicos…
“certain men who are called Lunatics are molested by devils more at one time than at another; and the devils would not so behave, but would rather molest them at all times, unless they themselves were deeply affected by certain phases of the Moon.”
“the choleric are wrathful, the sanguine are kindly, the melancholy are envious, and the phlegmatic are slothful.”
“S. Augustine (de Civitate Dei, V), where he resolves a certain question of 2 brothers who fell ill and were cured simultaneously, approves the reasoning of Hippocrates rather than that of an Astronomer. For Hippocrates answered that it is owing to the similarity of their humours; and the Astronomer answered that it was owing the identity of their horoscopes. For the Physician’s answer was better, since he adduced the more powerful and immediate cause.”
“Saturn has a melancholy and bad influence and Jupiter a very good influence”
(*) “Although in Cicero and in Senecamathematicus means a mathematician, in later Latin it always signifies an astrologer, a diviner, a wizard. The Mathematici were condemned by the Roman law as exponents of black magic. Their art is indeed forbidden in severest terms by Diocletian (A.D. 284-305): <Artem geometriae discere atque exervere oublice interest, ars autem mathematica damnabilis interdicta est omnino.>”
“Also, as William of Paris says in his De Universo, it is proved by experience that if a harlot tries to plant an olive it does not become fruitful, whereas if it is planted by a chaste woman it is fruitful.”
“And here it is to be noted that a belief in Fate is in one way quite Catholic, but in another way entirely heretical.” “Fate may be considered to be a sort of second disposition, or an ordination of second causes for the production of foreseen Divine effects. And in this way Fate is truly something.”
“as Aristotle says, the brain is the most humid of all the parts of the body, therefore it chiefly is subject to the operation of the Moon, which itself has power to incite humours. Moreover, the animal forces are perfected in the brain, and therefore the devils disturb a man’s fancy according to certain phases of the Moon, when the brain is ripe for such influences. And these are reasons why the devils are present as counsellors in certain constellations. They may lead men into the error of thinking that there is some divinity in the stars.”
“And as for that concerning I Kings 16: that Saul, who was vexed by a devil, was alleviated when David played his harp before him, and that the devil departed, etc. It must be known that it is quite true that by the playing of the harp, and the natural virtue of that harmony, the affliction of Saul was to some extent relieved, inasmuch as that music did somewhat calm his sense through hearing; through which calming he was made less prone to that vexation.”
“parteiras, que ultrapassam todas as outras em maldade.”
“there are three things in nature, the Tongue, an Ecclesiastic, and a Woman, which know no moderation in goodness or vice; and when they exceed the bounds of their condition they reach the greatest heights and the lowest depths of goodness and vice.”
“Avoid as you would the plague a trading priest, who has risen from poverty to riches, from a low to a high estate.”
Ecclesiasticus 25: “There is no head above the head of a serpent: and there is no wrath above the wrath of a woman. I had rather dwell with a lion and a dragon than to keep house with a wicked woman.”
“O que mais é uma mulher senão um inimigo da amizade, uma punição inescapável, um mal necessário, uma tentação natural, uma calamidade desejável, um perigo doméstico, um prejuízo deleitável, um mal da natureza disfarçado de beleza?”João Crisóstomo
“Cicero in his second book of The Rhetorics says: The many lusts of men lead them into one sin, but the lust of women leads them into all sins; for the root of all woman’s vices is avarice. And Seneca says in his Medea: A woman either loves or hates; there is no third grade. And the tears of woman are a deception, for they may spring from true grief, or they may be a snare. When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.”
“Intelectualmente, as mulheres são como crianças.”Terêncio
“Nenhuma mulher compreendia filosofia exceto Temeste.”Lactâncio, Instituições Divinas
Provérbios 11: “Como uma jóia de ouro no focinho dum porco, assim é uma mulher bonita que não tem modos.”
“And when the philosopher Socrates was asked if one should marry a wife, he answered: If you do not, you are lonely, your family dies out, and a stranger inherits; if you do, you suffer perpetual anxiety, querelous complaints, reproaches concerning the marriage portion, the heavy displeasure of your relations, the garrulousness of a mother-in-law, cuckoldom, and no certain arrival of an heir. [fonte?] This he said as one who knew. For S. Jerome in his Contra Iovinianum says: This Socrates had 2 wives, whom he endured with much patience, but could not be rid of their contumelies and clamorous vituperations. So one day when they were complaining against him, he went out of the house to escape their plaguing, and sat down before the house; and the women then threw filthy water over him. But the philosopher was not disturbed by this, saying, <I knew the rain would come after the thunder.>”
“If we inquire, we find that nearly all the kingdoms of the world have been overthrown by women. Troy, which was a prosperous kingdom, was, for the rape of one woman, Helen, destroyed, and many thousands of Greeks slain. The kingdom of the Jews suffered much misfortune and destruction through the accursed Jezebel, and her daughter Athaliah, queen of Judah, who caused her son’s sons to be killed, that on their death she might reign herself; yet each of them was slain. The kingdom of the Romans endured much evil through Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, that worst of women. And so with others. Therefore it is no wonder if the world now suffers through the malice of women.”
“There is no man in the world who studies so hard to please the good God as even an ordinary woman studies by her vanities to please men.”
“All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.”
“We know of an old woman who, according to the common account of the brothers in that monastery even up to this day, in this manner not only bewitched 3 successive Abbots, but even killed them, and in the same way drove the 4th out of his mind. For she herself publicly confessed it, and does not fear to say: I did so and I do so, and they are not able to keep from loving me because they have eaten so much of my dung – measuring off a certain length on her arm. I confess, moreover, that since we had no case to prosecute her or bring her to trial, she survives to this day.”
APARENTEMENTE, A REFUTAÇÃO DO ‘FENÔMENO’ DA POSSESSÃO: “And a third kind of mutation can be added, which is when a good or bad angel enters into the body, in the same way that we say that God alone is able to enter into the soul, that is, the essence of life. But when we speak of an angel, especially a bad angel, entering the body, as in the case of an obsession, he does not enter beyond the limits of the essence of the body; for in this way only God the Creator can enter, Who gave it to be as it were the intrinsic operation of life. But the devil is said to enter the body when he effects something about the body: for when he works, there he is, as S. John Damascene says. And then he works within the bounds of corporeal matter, but not within the very essence of the body.”
“the devil can directly prevent the erection of that member which is adapted to fructification, just as he can prevent local motion.”
“And again, it was a greater thing to turn Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt than it is to take away the male organ; and that (Genesis 19) was a real and actual, not an apparent, metamorphosis (for it is said that that pillar is still to be seen), And this was done by a bad Angel; just as the good Angels struck the men of Sodom with blindness, so that they could not find the door of the house. And so it was with the other punishments of the men of Gomorrah. The gloss, indeed, affirms that Lot’s wife was herself tainted with that vice, and therefore she was punished.”
PRECISO PROVAR QUE A ODISSÉIA NÃO FOI REAL, ORA QUAL É O MEU PROBLEMA? “it is read in the books of the Gentiles that a certain sorceress named Circe changed the companions of Ulysses into beasts; but that this was due to some glamour or illusion, rather than an actual accomplishment, by altering the fancies of men”
(*) “Crohns in his Die Summa theologica des Antonin von Florenz und die Schützung des Weibes im Hexenhammer, Helsingfors, 1903, has set out to show that the very pronounced misogyny which is apparent in the Malleus Maleficarum can be traced to the Summa of S. Antoninus.”
(*) “During the 16th century in France lycanthropy was very prevalent, and cannibalism were rife in many county districts.”
“penitent witches have often told to us and to others, saying: No one does more harm to the Catholic Faith than midwives.For when they do not kill children, then, as if for some other purpose, they take them out of the room and, raising them up in the air, offer them to devils.”
“Evil will be for all time, even to the perfecting of the universe.” Dionysius
“as through the persecution of the tyrants came the patience of the martyrs, and through the works of witches come the purgation or proving of the faith of the just”
“God in His justice permits the prevalence of evil, both that of sin and that of pain, and especially now that the world is cooling and declining to its end”
SALADA MISTA TEO-GENTÍLICA: “See Apocalypse 12. The dragon falling from heaven drew with him the third part of the stars. And he lives in the form of Leviathan, and is king over all the children of pride. And, according to Aristotle (Metaph., V), he is called king of princes, inasmuch as he moves those who are subject to him according to his will and command.”
Do alto de uma montanha (Escolástica, pressentimento de Dia do Juízo iminente) é fácil dizer que “a ordem do cosmo” exige descer até o último andar do porão na escada metafísica da perfeição gradual de cada coisa a seu tempo…
“Democritus and the other natural philosophers were in error when they ascribed whatever happened to the inferior creation to the mere chance of matter.”
“the sins of witches are more grievous than those of the bad angels and our first parents. Wherefore, just as the innocent are punished for the sins of their fathers, so are many blameless people damned and bewitched for the sins of witches.”
“Adam sinned only in doing that which was wrong in one of two ways; for it was forbidden, but was not wrong in itself: but witches and other sinners sin in doing that which is wrong in both ways, wrong in itself, and forbidden, such as murders and many other forbidden things.”
“in fornication a young man sins, but an old man is mad.”
“For they are called witches (maleficae) on account of the enormity of their crimes”
“For the sin of infidelity consists in opposing the Faith; and this may come about in 2 ways, by opposing a faith which has not yet been received, or by opposing it after it has been received. Of the first sort is the infidelity of the Pagans or Gentiles. In the second way, the Christian Faith may be denied in 2 ways: either by denying the prophecies concerning it, or by denying the actual manifestation of its truth. And the first of these is the infidelity of the Jews, and the second the infidelity of Heretics.”
II Pedro 2: “the infidelity of the heretics, who while professing the faith of the Gospel fight against it by corrupting it, is a greater sin than that of the Jews and Pagans.”
“they received the prophecy of the Christian Faith in the Old Law, which they corrupt through badly interpreting it, which is not the case with the Pagans.”
“a Saracen fasts, to observe the law of Mohammed as to fasting, and a Jew observes his Feast days; but in such things he is guilty of mortal sin.”
“For, besides the punishment of excommunication inflicted upon them, Heretics, together with their patrons, protectors and defenders, and with their children to the 2nd generation on the father’s side, and to the first degree on the mother’s side, are admitted to no benefit or office of the Church. And if a Heretic have Catholic children, for the heinousness of his crime they are deprived of their paternal inheritance.And if a man be convicted, and refuse to be converted and abjure his heresy, he must at once be burned, if he is a layman.For if they who counterfeit money are summarily put to death, how much more must they who counterfeit the Faith? But if he is a cleric, after solemn degradation he is handed over to the secular Court to be put to death. But if they return to the Faith, they are to be imprisoned for life.”
“For, bodily speaking, sons are a property of the father, and slaves and animals are the property of their masters; and so the sons are sometimes punished for their parents. Thus the son born to David from adultery quickly died; and the animals of the Amalekites were bidden to be killed. Yet the reason for these things remains a mystery.”
SOBRE DEUS INFLIGIR SOFRIMENTO SEM CULPA DO “CRENTE”: “For he says that for 5 causes God scourges man in this life, or inflicts punishment. First, that God may be glorified; and this is when some punishment or affliction is miraculously removed, as in the case of the man born blind (S. John 9), or of the raising of Lazarus (S. John 11).” Ou quando ele me deu 10 graus de miopia, para se gloriar na seqüência com meus infinitos livros.
“And the species of the first form of Divination, that is, an open invocation of devils, are the following: Sorcery, Oneiromancy, Necromancy, Oracles, Geomancy, Hydromancy, Aeromancy, Pyromancy, and Soothsaying (see S. Thomas, Second of the Second, quest. 95, 26, and 5). The species of the 2nd kind are Horoscopy, Haruspicy, Augury, Observation of Omens, Cheiromancy and Spatulamancy.”
“But let no one think that such practices are lawful because the Scripture records that the soul of the just Prophet, summoned from Hades to predict the event of Saul’s coming war, appeared through the means of a woman who was a witch. For, as S. Augustine says to Simplicianus: It is not absurd to believe that it was permitted by some dispensation, or by the potency of any magic art, but by some hidden dispensation unknown to the Pythoness or to Saul, that the spirit of that just man should appear before the sight of the king, to deliver the Divine sentence against him.”
“Oneiromancy may be practised in two ways. The first is when a person uses dreams so that he may dip into the occult with the help of the revelation of devils invoked by him, with whom he has entered into an open pact. The second is when a man uses dreams for knowing the future, in so far as there is such virtue in dreams proceeding from Divine revelation, from a natural and intrinsic or extrinsic cause”
“when we study at the time of the dawn we are given an understanding of certain occult matters in the Scriptures.”
MUITA FÉ NO ARI.: “doctors are very often helped by dreams in their diagnosis (as Aristotle says in the same book).”
“when they desire to see what their fellow-witches are doing, it is their practice to lie down on their left side in the name of their own and of all devils; and these things are revealed to their vision in images.”
“The other species of divination, which are performed with a tacit, but not an open, invocation of devils, are Horoscopy, or Astrology, so called from the consideration of the stars at birth; Haruspicy, which observes the days and hours; Augury, which observes the behaviour and cries of birds; Omens, which observe the words of men; and Cheiromancy, which observes the lines of the hand, or of the paws of animals.”
“although the sin of Satan is unpardonable, this is not on account of the greatness of his crime, having regard to the nature of the Angels, with particular attention to the opinion of those who say that the Angels were created only in a state of nature, and never in a state of grace. And since the good of grace exceeds the good of nature, therefore the sins of those who fall from a state of grace, as do the witches by denying the faith which they received in baptism, exceed the sins of the Angels.”
“A certain well-born citizen of Spires had a wife who was of such an obstinate disposition that, though he tried to please her in every way, yet she refused in nearly every way to comply with his wishes, and was always plaguing him with abusive taunts. It happened that, on going into his house one day, and his wife railing against him as usual with opprobrious words, he wished to go out of the house to escape from quarrelling. But she quickly ran before him and locked the door by which he wished to go out; and loudly swore that, unless he beat her, there was no honesty or faithfulness in him. At these heavy words he stretched out his hand, not intending to hurt her, and struck her lightly with his open palm on the buttock; whereupon he suddenly fell to the ground and lost all his senses, and lay in bed for many weeks afflicted with a most grievous illness. Now it is obvious that this was not a natural illness, but was caused by some witchcraft of the woman. And very many similar cases have happened, and been made known to many.”
“it is to be said that witches are not generally rich for this reason: that the devils like to show their contempt for the Creator by buying witches for the lowest possible price. And also, lest they should be conspicuous by their riches.”
“And because we are now dealing with matters relating to morals and behaviour, and there is no need for a variety of arguments and disquisitions, since those matters which now follow under their headings are sufficiently discussed in the foregoing Questions; therefore we pray God that the reader will not look for proofs in every case, since it is enough to adduce examples that have been personally seen or heard, or are accepted at the word of credible witnesses.”
“There are 3 classes of men blessed by God, whom that detestable race cannot injure with their witchcraft. And the first are those who administer public justice against them, or prosecute them in any public official capacity. The second are those who, according to the traditional and holy rites of the Church, make lawful use of the power and virtue which the Church by her exorcisms furnishes in the aspersion of Holy Water, the taking of consecrated salt, the carrying of blessed candles on the Day of the Purification of Our Lady, of palm leaves upon Palm Sunday, and men who thus fortify themselves are acting so that the powers of devils are diminished; and of these we shall speak later. The third class are those who, in various and infinite ways, are blessed by the Holy Angels.”
FAÇA O SINAL DA CRUZ, OTÁRIO! “When I had invoked the devil that I might commit such a deed with his help, he answered me that he was unable to do any of those things, because the man had good faith and diligently defended himself with the sign of the cross; and that therefore he could not harm him in his body, but the most he could do was to destroy an 11th part of the fruit of his lands.”
“Therefore we may similarly say that, even if the administrators of public justice were not protected by Divine power, yet the devils often of their own accord withdraw their support and guardianship from witches, either because they fear their conversion, or because they desire and hasten their damnation.”
“But since self-praise is sordid and mean, it is better to pass them over in silence than to incur the stigma of boastfulness and conceit. But we must except those which have become so well-known that they cannot be concealed.”
“Not even the forbidden books of Necromancy contain such knowledge; for witchcraft is not taught in books, nor is it practised by the learned, but by the altogether uneducated; having only one foundation, without the acknowledgement or practice of which it is impossible for anyone to work witchcraft as a witch.”
“But these are only the children who have not been re-born by baptism at the font, for they cannot devour those who have been baptized, nor any without God’s permission.”
“The first method is when witches meet together in the conclave on a set day, and the devil appears to them in the assumed body of a man, and urges them to keep faith with him, promising them worldly prosperity and length of life; and they recommend a novice to his acceptance. And the devil asks whether she will abjure the Faith, and forsake the holy Christian religion and the worship of the Anomalous Woman (for so they call the Most Blessed Virgin MARY), and never venerate the Sacraments; and if he finds the novice or disciple willing, then the devil stretches out his hand, and so does the novice, and she swears with upraised hand to keep that covenant. And when this is done, the devil at once adds that this is not enough; and when the disciple asks what more must be done, the devil demands the following oath of homage to himself: that she give herself to him, body and soul, for ever, and do her utmost to bring others of both sexes into his power. He adds, finally, that she is to make certain unguents from the bones and limbs of children, especially those who have been baptized; by all which means she will be able to fulfil all her wishes with his help.”
“Another, named Walpurgis, was notorious for her power of preserving silence, and used to teach other women how to achieve a like quality of silence by cooking their 1st-born sons in an oven.”
O SUPER-HOMEM ESTUDA DEMONOLOGIA: “For just as a physician sees signs in a sick man which a layman would not notice, so the devil sees what no man can naturally see.”
As bruxas evitavam fazer bruxarias aos sábados, o dia da Santa Virgem. Hohoho, quão poderosas!
“And though we are 2 who write this book, one of us has very often seen and known such men. For there is a man who was once a scholar, and is now believed to be a priest in the diocese of Freising, who used to say that at one time he had been bodily carried through the air by a devil, and taken to the most remote parts.”
“This is clear in the case of certain men who walk in their sleep on the roofs of houses and over the highest buildings, and no one can oppose their progress either on high or below. And if they are called by their own names by the other by-standers, they immediately fall crashing to the ground.” HAHAHA
“For it is manifest that some of them, which the common people call Fauns, and we call Trolls, which abound in Norway, are such buffoons and jokers that they haunt certain places and roads and, without being able to do any hurt to those who pass by, are content with mocking and deluding them, and try to weary them rather than hurt them. And some of them only visit men with harmless nightmares.”
“Did not the devil take up Our Saviour, and carry Him up to a high place, as the Gospel testifies?”
“Indeed the natural power or virtue which is in Lucifer is so great that there is none greater among the good Angels in Heaven. For just as he excelled all the Angels in his nature, and not his nature, but only his grace, was diminished by his Fall, so that nature still remains in him, although it is darkened and bound.”
“Two objections which someone may bring forward are not valid. First, that man’s soul could resist him, and that the text seems to speak of one devil in particular, since it speaks in the singular, namely Lucifer. And because it was he who tempted Christ in the wilderness, and seduced the first man, he is now bound in chains. And the other Angels are not so powerful, since he excels them all. Therefore the other spirits cannot transport wicked men through the air from place to place.
These arguments have no force. For, to consider the Angels first, even the least Angel is incomparably superior to all human power, as can be proved in many ways. First, a spiritual is stronger than a corporeal power, and so is the power of an Angel, or even of the soul, greater than that of the body. Secondly, as to the soul; every bodily shape owes its individuality to matter, and, in the case of human beings, to the fact that a soul informs it”
(GOLDEN) WITCHING (S)HOU(E)R: “Here is an instance of a visible transportation in the day-time. In the town of Waldshut on the Rhine, in the diocese of Constance, there was a certain witch who was so detested by the townsfolk that she was not invited to the celebration of a wedding which, however, nearly all the other townsfolk were present. Being indignant because of this, and wishing to be revenged, she summoned a devil and, telling him the cause of her vexation, asked him to raise a hailstorm and drive all the wedding guests from their dancing; and the devil agreed, and raising her up, carried her through the air to a hill near the town, in the sight of some shepherds. And since, as she afterwards confessed, she had no water to pour into the trench, she made a small trench and filled it with her urine instead of water, and stirred it with her finger, after their custom, with the devil standing by.”
“Know, moreover, that the air is in every way a most changeable and fluid matter: and a sign of this is the fact that when any have tried to cut or pierce with a sword the body assumed by a devil, they have not been able to; for the divided parts of the air at once join together again. From this it follows that air is in itself a very competent matter, but because it cannot take shape unless some other terrestrial matter is joined with it, therefore it is necessary that the air which forms the devil’s assumed body should be in some way inspissated [condensado], and approach the property of the earth, while still retaining its true property as air.And devils and disembodied spirits can effect this condensation by means of gross vapours raised from the earth, and by collecting them together into shapes in which they abide, not as defilers of them, but only as their motive power which give to that body the formal appearance of life, in very much the same way as the soul informs the body to which it is joined.”
“From this there may arise an incidental question as to what should be thought when a good or bad Angel performs some of the functions of life by means of true natural bodies, and not in aerial bodies; as in the case of Balaam’s ass, through which the Angel spoke, and when the devils take possession of bodies. It is to be said that those bodies are not called assumed, but occupied. See S. Thomas, 2:8, Whether Angels assume bodies.”
“To return to the point. Devils have no lungs or tongue, though they can show the latter, as well as teeth and lips, artificially made according to the condition of their body; therefore they cannot truly and properly speak. But since they have understanding, and when they wish to express their meaning, then, by some disturbance of the air included in their assumed body, not of air breathed in and out as in the case of men, they produce, not voices, but sounds which have some likeness to voices, and send them articulately through the outside air to the ears of the hearer.And that the likeness of a voice can be made without respiration of air is clear from the case of other animals which do not breathe, but are said to make a sound, as do also certain other instruments, as Aristotle says in the De Anima. For certain fishes, when they are caught, suddenly utter a cry outside the water, and die.”“If anyone wishes to inquire further into the matter of devils speaking in possessed bodies, he may refer to S. Thomas in the Second Book of Sentences, dist. 8, art. 5. For in that case they use the bodily organs of the possessed body; since they occupy those bodies in respect of the limits of their corporeal quantity, but not in respect of the limits of their essence, either of the body or of the soul.”
HAHAHA: “Therefore it must be said that in no way does an Angel, either good or bad, see with the eyes of its assumed body, nor does it use any bodily property as it does in speaking, when it uses the air and the vibration of the air to produce sound which becomes reproduced in the ears of the hearer. Wherefore their eyes are painted eyes.”“For if the secret wishes of a man are read in his face, and physicians can tell the thoughts of the heart from the heart-beats and the state of the pulse, all the more can such things be known by devils.”
JESUS CRISTO NÃO CAGAVA: “In Christ the process of eating was in all respects complete, since He had the nutritive and metabolistic powers; not, be it said, for the purpose of converting food into His own body, for those powers were, like His body, glorified; so that the food was suddenly dissolved in His body, as when one throws water on to fire.”
“in times long past the Incubus devils used to infest women against their wills, as is often shown by Nider in his Formicarius, and by Thomas of Brabant in his books On the Universal Good, or On/About Bees.”
“And it is no objection that those of whom the text speaks were not witches but only giants and famous and powerful men; for, as was said before, witchcraft was not perpetuated in the time of the law of Nature, because of the recent memory of the Creation of the world, which left no room for Idolatry. But when the wickedness of man began to increase, the devil found more opportunity to disseminate this kind of perfidy.”
“a witch is either old and sterile, or she is not. And if she is, then he naturally associates with the witch without the injection of semen, since it would be of no use, and the devil avoids superfluity in his operations as far as he can. But if she is not sterile, he approaches her in the way of carnal delectation which is procured for the witch. And should be disposed to pregnancy, then if he can conveniently possess the semen extracted from some man, he does not delay to approach her with it for the sake of infecting her progeny.” “But this also cannot altogether be denied, that even in the case of a married witch who has been impregnated by her husband, the devil can, by the commixture of another semen, infect that which has been conceived.”
“they have greater opportunity to observe many people, especially young girls, who on Feast Days are more intent on idleness and curiosity, and are therefore more easily seduced by old witches.”
“But with regard to any bystanders, the witches themselves have often been seen lying on their backs in the fields or the woods, naked up to the very navel, and it has been apparent from the disposition of those limbs and members which pertain to the venereal act and orgasm, as also from the agitation of their legs and thighs, that, all invisibly to the bystanders, they have been copulating with Incubus devils; yet sometimes, howbeit this is rare, at the end of the act a very black vapour, of about the stature of a man, rises up into the air from the witch. And the reason is that that Schemer knows that he can in this way seduce or pervert the minds of girls or other men who are standing by.”
“Husbands have actually seen Incubus devils swiving [fodendo] their wives, although they have thought that they were not devils but men. And when they have taken up a weapon and tried to run them through, the devil has suddenly disappeared, making himself invisible. And then their wives have thrown their arms around them, although they have sometimes been hurt, and railed at their husbands, mocking them, and asking them if they had eyes, or whether they were possessed of devils.”
CARTEIRADA NAS ESTRELAS: “those changes which were miraculously caused in the Old or New Testament were done by God through the good Angels; as, for example, when the sun stood still for Joshua, or when it went backward for Hezekiah, or when it was supernaturally darkened at the Passion of Christ. But in all other matters, with God’s permission, they can work their spells, either the devils themselves, or devils through the agency of witches; and, in fact, it is evident that they do so.”
(*) “<Carnival.> These Pagan practices are sternly reprobated in the Liber Poenitentiali ofS. Theodore, 7th Archbishop of Canterbury. In Book 37 is written: <If anyone at the Kalends of January goeth about as a stag or a bull-calf, that is, making himself into a wild animal, and dressing in the skins of a herd animal, and putting on the heads of beast; those who in such wise transform themselves into the appearance of a wild animal, let them do penance for 3 years, because this is devilish.> The Council of Auxèrre in 578 (or 585) forbade anyone <to masquerade as a bull-calf or a stag on the 1st of January or to distribute devilish charms.>”
“In the town of Ratisbon a certain young man who had an intrigue with a girl, wishing to leave her, lost his member; that is to say, some glamour was cast over it so that he could see or touch nothing but his smooth body. In his worry over this he went to a tavern to drink wine; and after he had sat there for a while he got into conversation with another woman who was there, and told her the cause of his sadness, explaining everything, and demonstrating in his body that it was so. The woman was astute, and asked whether he suspected anyone; and when he named such a one, unfolding the whole matter, she said: <If persuasion is not enough, you must use some violence, to induce her to restore to you your health.> So in the evening the young man watched the way by which the witch was in the habit of going, and finding her, prayed her to restore to him the health of his body. And when she maintained that she was innocent and knew nothing about it, he fell upon her, and winding a towel tightly about her neck, choked her, saying: <Unless you give me back my health, you shall die at my hands.> Then she, being unable to cry out, and growing black, said: <Let me go, and I will heal you.> The young man then relaxed the pressure of the towel, and the witch touched him with her hand between the thighs, saying: <Now you have what you desire.> And the young man, as he afterwards said, plainly felt, before he had verified it by looking or touching, that his member had been restored to him by the mere touch of the witch.”
“As when a man who is awake sees things otherwise than as they are; such as seeing someone devour a horse with its rider, or thinking he sees a man transformed into a beast, or thinking that he is himself a beast and must associate with beasts. For then the exterior senses are deluded and are employed by the interior senses. For by the power of devils, with God’s permission, mental images long retained in the treasury of such images, which is the memory, are drawn out, not from the intellectual understanding in which such images are stored, but from the memory,¹ which is the repository of mental images, and is situated at the back of the head, and are presented to the imaginative faculty. And so strongly are they impressed on that faculty that a man has an inevitable impulse to imagine a horse or a beast, when the devil draws from the memory an image of a horse or a beast; and so he is compelled to think that he sees with his external eyes such a beast when there is actually no such beast to see; but it seems to be so by reason of the impulsive force of the devil working by means of those images.”
¹ Trecho absolutamente silogístico.
Meu problema é que fui possuído por algo maligno que começa com “D”, Diagnóstico. E essa coisa de que falei me diz que eu estou (com) outra coisa que começa com “B”. Eu (e)s(t)ou (com) uma Besta!
Me disseram que minha visão foi transtornada
Pela rigorosa fé no mais puro nada!
CRIAÇÃO DE MINHOCAS: “And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as 20 or 30 members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report?”
“But in the second sense there is a distinction to be drawn between creatures; for some are perfect creatures, like a man, and an ass, etc. And other are imperfect, such as serpents, frogs, mice, etc., for they can also be generated from putrefaction.”
TRACTATUS DE ÓTICA MEDIEVAL: “For in a glamour there may be an exterior object which is seen, but it seems other than it is. But imaginary vision does not necessarily require an exterior object, but can be caused without that and only by those inner mental images impressed on the imagination.”
“It is to be said that the soul is thought to reside in the centre of the heart, in which it communicates with all the members by an out-pouring of life. An example can be taken from a spider, which feels in the middle of its web when any part of the web is touched.”
A CONVENIÊNCIA DO DIABO NÃO PODER FAZER DE MULHERES INOCENTES BRUXAS (POIS QUALQUER PIA E LINDA MOÇA ACUSADA DE BRUXARIA É AUTOMATICAMENTE CULPADA E BOA CARNE DE CHURRASCO):“although the devil can blacken men’s reputations in respect of other vices, yet it does not seem possible for him to do so in respect of this vice [the pact] which cannot be perpetrated without his cooperation.”“it has never yet been known that an innocent person has been punished on suspicion of witchcraft, and there is no doubt that God will never permit such a thing to happen.”
“For we have often found that certain people have been visited with epilepsy or the falling sickness by means of eggs which have been buried with dead bodies, especially the dead bodies of witches, together with other ceremonies of which we cannot speak, particularly when these eggs have been given to a person either in food or drink.”
DISFIGURING DIVINE JUSTICE: “And there are witches who can bewitch their judges by a mere look or glance from their eyes, and publicly boast that they cannot be punished; and when malefactors have been imprisoned for their crimes, and exposed to the severest torture to make them tell the truth, these witches can endow them with such an obstinacy of preserving silence that they are unable to lay bare their crimes.”
“For the devil knows that, because of the pain of loss, or original sin, such children [mortas antes do batismo] are debarred from entering the Kingdom of Heaven. And by this means the Last Judgement is delayed, when the devils will be condemned to eternal torture; since the number of the elect is more slowly completed, on the fulfilment of which the world will be consumed. And also, as has already been shown, witches are taught by the devil to confect from the limbs of such children an unguent which is very useful for their spells.”
REALMENTE UM ROMANCE DIGNO DE CERVANTES: “A certain man relates that he noticed that his wife, when her time came to give birth, against the usual custom of women in childbirth, did not allow any woman to approach the bed except her own daughter, who acted as midwife. Wishing to know the reason for this, he hid himself in the house and saw the whole order of the sacrilege and dedication to the devil, as it has been described. He saw also, as it seemed to him, that without any human support, but by the power of the devil, the child was climbing up the chain by which the cooking-pots were suspended. In great consternation both at the terrible words of the invocation of the devils, and at the other iniquitous ceremonies, he strongly insisted that the child should be baptized immediately. While it was being carried to the next village, where there was a church, and when they had to cross a bridge over a certain river, he drew his sword and ran at his daughter, who was carrying the child, saying in the hearing of 2 others who were with them: <You shall not carry the child over the bridge; for either it must cross the bridge by itself, or you shall be drowned in the river.> The daughter was terrified and, together with the other women in the company, asked him if he were in his right mind (for he had hidden what had happened from all the others except the 2 men who were with him). Then he answered: <You vile drab, by your magic arts you made the child climb the chain in the kitchen; now make it cross the bridge with no one carrying it, or I shall drown you in the river.> And so, being compelled, she put the child down on the bridge, and invoked the devil by her art; and suddenly the child was seen on the other side of the bridge. And when the child had been baptized, and he had returned home, since he now had witnesses to convict his daughter of witchcraft (for he could not prove the former crime of the oblation to the devil, inasmuch as he had been the only witness of the sacrilegious ritual), he accused bot her daughter and wife before the judge after their period of purgation; and they were both burned, and the crime of midwives of making that sacrilegious offering was discovered.”
“For the devil hates above all the Blessed Virgin, because she bruised his head.”Quando a Virgem Boxista Maria golpeou o crânio do Belzebu?
“The second result to the children of this sacrilege is as follows. When a man offers himself as a sacrifice to God, he recognizes God as his Beginning and his End; and this sacrifice is more worthy than all the external sacrifices which he makes, having its beginning in his creation and its end in his glorification, as it is said: A sacrifice to God is an afflicted spirit, etc. In the same way, when a witch offers a child to the devils, she commends it body and soul to him as its beginning and its end in eternal damnation; wherefore not without some miracle can the child be set free from the payment of so great a debt.”The dead lion which is the daily miracle.
“Finally, we know from experience that the daughters of witches are always suspected of similar practises, as imitators of their mothers’ crimes; and that indeed the whole of a witch’s progeny is infected. And the reason for this and for all that has been said before is, that according to their pact with the devil, they always have to leave behind them and carefully instruct a survivor, so that they may fulfill their vow to do all they can to increase the number of witches. For how else could it happen, as it has very often been found, that tender girls of 8 or 10 years have raised up tempests and hailstorms, unless they had been dedicated to the devil under such a pact by their mothers? For the children could not do such things of themselves by abjuring the Faith, which is how all adult witches have to begin, since they have no knowledge of any single article of the Faith.”
“I have sometimes seen men coming in and out to my mother; and when I asked her who they were, she told that they were our masters to whom she had given me, and that they were powerful and rich patrons. The father was terrified, and asked her if she could raise a hailstorm then. And the girl said: Yes, if I had a little water. Then he led the girl by the hand to a stream, and said: Do it, but only on our land. Then the girl put her hand in the water and stirred it in the name of her master, as her mother had taught her; and behold! the rain fell only on that land. Seeing this, the father said: Make it hail now, but only on one of our fields.And when the girl had done this, the father was convinced by the evidence, and accused his wife before the judge. And the wife was taken and convicted and burned; but the daughter was reconciled and solemnly dedicated to God, since which hour she could no more work these spells and charms.”
“But when this is publicly preached to the people they get no bad information by it; for however much anyone may invoke the devil, and think that by this alone he can do this thing, he deceives himself, because he is without the foundation of that perfidy, not having rendered homage to the devil or abjured the Faith. I have set this down because some have thought that several of the matter of which I have written ought not to be preached to the people, on account of the danger of giving them evil knowledge; whereas it is impossible for anyone to learn from a preacher how to perform any of the things that have been mentioned. But they have been written rather to bring so great a crime into detestation, and should be preached from the pulpit, so that judges may be more eager to punish the horrible crime of the abnegation of the Faith.”
“it is very true that many cattle are said to have been bewitched in some districts, especially in the Alps; and it is known that this form of witchcraft is unhappily most widespread.”
“For in devils there are 3 things to be considered – their nature, their duty and their sin; and by nature they belong to the empyrean of heaven, through sin to the lower hell, but by reason of the duty assigned to them, as we have said, as ministers of punishment to the wicked and trial to the good, their place is in the clouds of the air. For they do not dwell here with us on the earth lest they should plague us too much; but in the air and around the fiery sphere they can so bring together the active and passive agents that, when God permits, they can bring down fire and lightning from heaven.”
“In the same work we hear of a certain leader or heresiarch of witches namedStaufer, who lived in Berne and the adjacent country, and used publicly to boast that, whenever he liked, he could change himself into a mouse in the sight of his rivals and slip through the hands of his deadly enemies; and that he had often escaped from the hands of his mortal foes in this manner. But when the Divine justice wished to put an end to his wickedness, some of his enemies lay in wait for him cautiously and saw him sitting in a basket near a window, and suddenly pierced him through with swords and spears, so that he miserably died for his crimes.”
ATÉ UM ESPIRRO DO PROSCRITO PODIA CONDENÁ-LO: “For when they use words of which they do not themselves know the meaning, or characters and signs which are not the sign of the Cross, such practices are altogether to be repudiated, and good men should beware of the cruel arts of these warlocks.”
“Also it appears that it is very rarely that men are delivered from a bewitchment by calling on God’s help or the prayers of the Saints. Therefore it follows that they can only be delivered by the help of devils; and it is unlawful to seek such help.”
“it is submitted that the exorcisms of the Church are not always effective in the repression of devils in the matter of bodily afflictions, since such are cured only at the discretion of God; but they are effective always against those molestations of devils against which they are chiefly instituted, as, for example, against men who are possessed, or in the matter of exorcising children.”
“No Angel is more powerful than our mind, when we hold fast to God. For if power is a virtue in this world, then the mind that keeps close to God is more sublime than the whole world. Therefore such minds can undo the works of the devil.” Augustine, o Sofista
“There are 7 metals belonging to the 7 planets; and since Saturn is the Lord of lead, when lead is poured out over anyone who has been bewitched, it is his property to discover the witchcraft by his power.”
“In this way we have answered the arguments that no spell of witchcraft must be removed. For the first 2 remedies are altogether unlawful. The 3rd remedy is tolerated by the law, but needs very careful examination on the part of the ecclesiastical judge. And what the civil law tolerates is shown in the chapter on witches, where it is said that those who have skill to prevent men’s labours from being vitiated by tempests and hailstorms are worthy, not of punishment, but of reward. S. Antoninus also, in his Summa, points out this discrepancy between the Canon Law and civil law. Therefore it seems that the civil law concedes the legality of such practices for the preservation of crops and cattle, and that in any event certain men who use such arts are not only to be tolerated but even rewarded.”
“With regard to the bewitchment of human beings by means of Incubus and Succubus devils, it is to be noted that this can happen in 3 ways. First, when women voluntarily prostitute themselves to Incubus devils. Secondly, when men have connection with Succubus devils; yet it does not appear that men thus devilishly fornicate with the same full degree of culpability”
“As for instances where young maidens are molested by Incubus devils in this way, it would take too long to mention even those that have been known to happen in our own time, for there are very many well-attested stories of such bewitchments. But the great difficulty of finding a remedy for such afflictions can be illustrated from a story told by Thomas of Brabant in his Book on Bees.”
“William of Paris notes also that Incubus seem chiefly to molest women and girls with beautiful hair; either because they devote themselves too much to the care and adornment of their hair, or because they are boastfully vain about it, or because God in His goodness permits this so that women may be afraid to entice men by the very means by which the devils wish them to entice men.”
“At times also women think they have been made pregnant by an Incubus, and their bellies grow to an enormous size; but when the time of parturition comes, their swelling is relieved by no more than the expulsion of a great quantity of wind. For by taking ants’ eggs in drink, or the seeds of spurge or of the black pine, an incredible amount of wind and flatulence is generated in the human stomach. And it is very easy for the devil to cause these and even greater disorders in the stomach. This has been set down in order that too easy credence should not be given to women, but only to those whom experience has shown to be trustworthy, and to those who, by sleeping in their beds or near them, know for a fact that such things as we have spoken of are true.”
“the devil can inflame a man towards one woman and render him impotent towards another; and this he can secretly cause by the application of certain herbs or other matters of which he well knows the virtue for this purpose.” “he can prevent the flow of the semen to the members in which is the motive power, by as it were closing the seminal duct so that it does not descend to the genital vessels, or does not ascend again from them, or cannot come forth, or is spent vainly.”
“He who loves his wife to excess is an adulterer [!]. And they who love in this way are more liable to be bewitched after the manner we have said.”
“it is assumed to be temporary if, within the space of 3 years, by using every possible expedient of the Sacraments of the Church and other remedies, a cure can be caused. But if, after that time, they cannot be cured by any remedy, then it is assumed to be permanent.”
“But some may find it difficult to understand how this function can be obstructed in respect of one woman but not of another.S. Bonaventuraanswers that this may be because some witch has persuaded the devil to effect this only with respect to one woman, or because God will not allow the obstruction to apply save to some particular woman. The judgement of God in this matter is a mystery, as in the case of the wife of Tobias. But how the devil procures this disability is plainly shown by what has already been said. And S. Bonaventura says that he obstructs the procreant function, not intrinsically by harming the organ, but extrinsically by impeding its use; and it is an artificial, not a natural impediment; and so he can cause it to apply to one woman and not to another. Or else he takes away all desire for one or another woman; and this he does by his own power, or else by means of some herb or stone or some occult creature. And in this he is in substantial agreement withPeter of Palude.” “Philocaption, or inordinate love of one person for another, can be caused in 3 ways. Sometimes it is due merely to a lack of control over the eyes; sometimes to the temptation of devils; sometimes to the spells of necromancers and witches, with the help of devils.” “The second cause arises from the temptation of devils. In this way Amnon loved his beautiful sister Tamar, and was so vexed that he fell sick for love of her (II Samuel 13). For he could not have been so totally corrupt in his mind as to fall into so great a crime of incest unless he had been grievously tempted by the devil.”
“when a man often puts away his beautiful wife to cleave to the most hideous of women, and when he cannot rest in the night, but is so demented that he must go by devious ways to his mistress; and when it is found that those of noblest birth, Governors, and other rich men, are the most miserably involved in this sin (for this age is dominated by women, and was foretold by S. Hildegard, as Vincent of Beauvais records in theMirror of History, although he said it would not endure for as long as it already has); and when the world is now full of adultery, especially among the most highly born; when all this is considered, I say, of what use is it to speak of remedies to those who desire no remedy?” Indeed, sir: why bother?
“Avicenna mentions 7 remedies which may be used when a man is made physically ill by this sort of love; but they are hardly relevant to our inquiry except in so far as they may be of service to the sickness of the soul. For he says, in Book III, that the root of the sickness may be discovered by feeling the pulse and uttering the name of the object of the patient’s love; and then, if the law permits, he may be cured by yielding to nature [?]. Or certain medicines may be applied, concerning which he gives instructions. Or the sick man may be turned from his love by lawful remedies which will cause him to direct his love to a more worthy object. Or he may avoid her presence, and so distract his mind from her. Or, if he is open to correction, he may be admonished and expostulated with, to the effect that such love is the greatest misery. Or he may be directed to someone who, as far as he may with God’s truth, will vilify the body and disposition of his love, and so blacken her character that she may appear to him altogether base and deformed. Or, finally, he is to be set to arduous duties which may distract his thoughts.”
(*) “No formal canonization of S. Hildegard has taken place, but many miracles were wrought at her intercession, and her name is in the Roman Martyrology. The feast is celebrated on 17 September in the dioceses of Speyer, Mainz, Trier and Limburg, and by the Solesmes monks on 18 September with a proper Office. The Relics of the Saint are at Eibingen, of which town she is patron. The convent of S. Hildegard there was formally constituted on 17 September, 1904.”
“When a sick man wishes to confess, and if on the arrival of the priest he is rendered dumb by his infirmity, or falls into a frenzy, those who have heard him speak must give their testimony. And if he is thought to be at the point of death, let him be reconciled with God by the laying on of hands and the placing of the Sacrament in his mouth. S. Thomas also says that the same procedure may be used with baptized people who are bodily tormented by unclean spirits, and with other mentally distracted persons. And he adds, in Book IV, dist. 9, that the Communion must not be denied to demoniacs unless it is certain that they are being tortured by the devil for some crime. To this Peter of Palude adds: In this case they are to be considered as persons to be excommunicated and delivered up to Satan.”
“such was the case of the Corinthian fornicator (I Corinthians 5) who was excommunicated by S. Paul and the Church, and delivered unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit might be saved in the day of our Lord JESUS Christ (…) For so great was the power and the grace of S. Paul, says the gloss, that by the mere words of his mouth he could deliver to Satan those who fell away from the faith.”
“For in the primitive Church, when men had to be drawn into the faith by signs, just as the Holy Spirit was made manifest by a visible sign, so also a bodily affliction by the devil was the visible sign of a man who was excommunicated. And it is not unfitting that a man whose case is not quite desperate should be delivered to Satan; for he is not given to the devil as one to be damned, but to be corrected, since it is in the power of the Church, when she pleases, to deliver him again from the hands of the devil. So says S. Thomas.”
“This man was casting a devil out of a man possessed in the monastery, and the devil asked him to give him some place to which he could go. This pleased the Brother, and he jokingly said, <Go to my privy [vaso sanitário].> So the devil went out; and when in the night the Brother wished to go and purge his belly, the devil attacked him so savagely in the privy that he with difficulty escaped with his life.” HAHAHA
“But a man possessed by a devil can indirectly be relieved by the power of music, as was Saul by David’s harp, or of a herb, or of any other bodily matter in which there lies some natural virtue. Therefore such remedies may be used, as can be argued both from authority and by reason.” “although it is good that in the liberation of a bewitched person recourse should be had to an exorcist having authority to exorcise such bewitchments, yet at times other devout persons may, either with or without any exorcism, cast out this sort of diseases.”
ETIMOLOGIA DO TERMO ENERGÚMENO: “But if anyone asks what is the difference between the aspersion of Holy Water and exorcism, since both are ordained against the plagues of the devil, the answer is supplied by S. Thomas, who says: The devil attacks us from without and from within. Therefore Holy Water is ordained against his attacks from without; but exorcism against those from within.For this reason those for whom exorcism is necessary are called Energoumenoi, from En, meaning In, and Ergon, meaning Work, since they labour within themselves. But in exorcising a bewitched person both methods are to be used, because he is tormented both within and without.”
A FÊMEA É DUAS VEZES MAIS DIABÓLICA QUE O DIABO (MORE EVIL THAN THE DEVIL): “the labour required in the case of the bewitched is twofold, whereas it is only single in the case of the possessed.”
“The miracle of the removal of a mountain was actually performed by S. Gregory Thaumaturgus, Bishop of Neocaesarea (d. circa 270-275), as the Venerable Bede tells us in his Commentary upon S. Mark XI: <Hoc quoque fieri potuisset, ut mons ablatus de terra mitteretur in mare, si necessitas id fieri poscisset. Quomodo legimus factum precibus beati patris Gregorii Neocaesareae Ponti Antistitis, viri mentis et virtutibus eximii, ut mons in terra tantum loco cederet, quantum incolae civitatis opus habebant. Cum enim volens aedificare ecclesiam in loco apto, vident eum angustiorem esse quam res exigebat, eo quod ex una parte rupe maris, ex alia monte proximo coarctaretur; venit nocte ad locum, et genibus flexis admonuit Dominum promissionis suae, ut montem longius juxta fidem petentis ageret. Et mane facto reversus invenit montem tantum spatii reliquisse structoribus ecclesiae, quantum opus habuerant.>”
“Also, because when witches wish to deprive a cow of milk they are in the habit of begging a little of the milk or butter which comes from that cow, so that they may afterwards by their art bewitch the cow; therefore women should take care, when they are asked by persons suspected of this crime, not to give away the least thing to them.”
“In addition to the setting up of the sign of the Cross which we have mentioned, the following procedure is practised against hailstorms and tempests. Three of the hailstones are thrown into the fire with an invocation of the Most Holy Trinity, and the Lord’s Prayer and the Angelic Salutation are repeated twice or 3 times, together with the Gospel of S. John, In the beginning was the Word. And the sign of the Cross is made in every direction towards each quarter of the world. Finally, The Word was made Flesh is repeated 3 times, and 3 times By the words of this Gospel may this tempest be dispersed. And suddenly, if the tempest is due to witchcraft, it will cease. This is most true and need not be regarded with any suspicion. For if the hailstones were thrown into the fire without the invocation of the Divine Name, then it would be considered superstitious.” “And for this reason it is a general practice of the Church to ring bells as a protection against storms, both that the devils may flee from them as being consecrated to God and refrain from their wickedness” “And although, according to this rule, the ceremonies and legal procedures of the Old Testament are not now observed, since they are to be understood figuratively, whereas the truth is made known in the New Testament, yet the carrying out of the Sacrament or of Relics to still a storm does not seem to militate against this rule.”
“Another terrible thing which God permits to happen to men is when their own children are taken away from women, and strange children are put in their place by devils. And these children, which are commonly called changelings, or in the German tongue Wechselkinder, are of 3 kinds. For some are always ailing and crying, and yet the milk of four women is not enough to satisfy them. Some are generated by the operation of Incubus devils, of whom, however, they are not the sons, but of that man from whom the devil has received the semen as a Succubus, or whose semen he has collected from some nocturnal pollution in sleep. For these children are sometimes, by Divine permission, substituted for the real children. And there is a third kind, when the devils at times appear in the form of young children and attach themselves to the nurses. But all 3 kinds have this in common, that though they are very heavy, they are always ailing and do not grow, and cannot receive enough milk to satisfy them, and are often reported to have vanished away.”
“Again in Deuteronomy 22: God says that men shall not put on the garments of women, or conversely; because they did this in honour of the goddess Venus, and others in honour of Mars or Priapus.”
(*) “So in Ireland the fairies are called <good people>, and traditionally seem to be of a benevolent and capricious and even mischievous disposition. In some parts of Highland Scotland fairies are called daoine sithe or men of peace, and it is believed that every year the devil carries off a 10th part of them. It will be readily remembered that to the Greeks the Fairies were the gracious goddesses.”
ACENDE A BANANA DE DINAMITE E SAI CORRENDO: “Certainly those whose high privilege it is to judge concerning matters of the faith ought not to be distracted by other business; and Inquisitors deputed by the Apostolic See to inquire into the pest of heresy should manifestly not have to concern themselves with diviners and soothsayers, unless these are also heretics, nor should it be their business to punish such, but they may leave them to be punished by their own judges. Nor does there seem any difficulty in the fact that the heresy of witches is not mentioned in that Canon.”
“Again, Solomon showed reverence to the gods of his wives out of complaisance, and was not on that account guilty of apostasy from the Faith; for in his heart he was faithful and kept the true Faith. So also when witches give homage to devils by reason of the pact they have entered into, but keep the Faith in their hearts, they are not on that account to be reckoned as heretics.” But should be burnt!
“a heretic is different from an apostate, and it is heretics who are subject to the Court of the Inquisition” “Let the Bishops and their representatives strive by every means to rid their parishes entirely of the pernicious art of soothsaying and magic derived from Zoroaster; and if they find any man or woman addicted to this crime, let him be shamefully cast out of their parishes in disgrace.”
“But if, just as these arguments seem to show it to be reasonable in the case of Inquisitors, the Diocesans also wish to be relieved of this responsibility, and to leave the punishment of witches to the secular Courts, such a claim could be made good by the following arguments. For the Canon says, c. ut inquisitionis: We strictly forbid the temporal lords and rulers and their officers in any way to try to judge this crime, since it is purely an ecclesiastical matter: and it speaks of the crime of heresy. It follows therefore that, when the crime is not purely ecclesiastical, as is the case with witches because of the temporal injuries which they commit, it must be punished by the Civil and not by the Ecclesiastical Court. Besides, in the last Canon Law concerning Jews it says: His goods are to be confiscated, and he is to be condemned to death, because with perverse doctrine he opposed the Faith of Christ.But if it is said that this law refers to Jews who have been converted, and have afterwards returned to the worship of the Jews, this is not a valid objection. Rather is the argument strengthened by it; because the civil Judge has to punish such Jews as apostates from the Faith; and therefore witches who abjure the Faith ought to be treated in the same way; for abjuration of the Faith, either wholly or in part, is the essential principle of witches.” A canalhice do clero de que Montesquieu tão bem falou: aplicar o N.T. na esfera civil para se apropriar dos próprios bens e terras judias.
“Besides, if the trial and punishment of such witches were not entirely a matter for the civil Judge, what would be the purpose of the laws which provide as follows?” “But in contradiction of all these arguments, the truth of the matter is that such witches may be tried and punished conjointly by the Civil and the Ecclesiastical Courts.” “And again, although a secular prince may impose the capital sentence, yet this does not exclude the judgement of the Church, whose part it is to try and judge the case. Indeed this is perfectly clear from the Canon Law in the chapters de summa trin. and fid. cath., and again in the Law concerning heresy, c. ad abolendam and c. urgentis and c. excommunicamus, 1 and 2. For the same penalties are provided by both the Civil and the Canon Laws, as is shown by the Canon Laws concerning the Manichaean and Arian heresies. Therefore the punishment of witches belongs to both Courts together, and not to one separately.”
MAS NÓS, OS OPERADORES DO CADAFALSO, TEMOS NOSSA PRÓPRIA CÔRTE: “If it is an ecclesiastical crime needing ecclesiastical punishment and fine, it shall be tried by a Bishop who stands in favour with God, and not even the most illustrious Judges of the Province shall have a hand in it. And we do not wish the civil Judges to have any knowledge of such proceedings; for such matters must be examined ecclesiastically and the souls of the offenders must be corrected by ecclesiastical penalties, according to the sacred and divine rules which our laws worthily follow.”
“Our main object here is to show how, with God’s pleasure, we Inquisitors of Upper Germany may be relieved of the duty of trying witches, and leave them to be punished by their own provincial Judges; and this because of the arduousness of the work: [!!!] provided always that such a course shall in no way endanger the preservation of the faith and the salvation of souls. And therefore we engaged upon this work, that we might leave to the Judges themselves the methods of trying, judging and sentencing in such cases.
Therefore in order to show that the Bishops can in many cases proceed against witches without the Inquisitors; although they cannot so proceed without the temporal and civil Judges in cases involving capital punishment [o melhor dos mundos para o Inquisidor]; it is expedient that we set down the opinions of certain other Inquisitors in parts of Spain, and (saving always the reverence due to them), since we all belong to one and the same Order of Preachers, to refute them, so that each detail may be more clearly understood.”‘Com todo o respeito, mas discordo de vossas eminências espanholas latinas e frouxas’, parecem dizer os inquisidores saxões a cada linha…
“so many more burdens are placed upon us Inquisitors which we cannot safely bear in the sight of the terrible Judge who will demand from us a strict account of the duties imposed upon us.” “the presbyterUdalricuswent to a secret place with a certain infamous person, that is, a diviner, says the gloss, not with the intention of invoking the devil, which would have been heresy, but that, by inspecting the astrolabe, he might find out some hidden thing. And this, they say, is pure divination or sortilege.”
(*) “As Clement V died before the collection had been generally published, John XXII promulgated it anew, 25 October, 1317, and sent it to the University of Bologna as the authoritative Corpus of decretals to be used in the courts and schools.”
BEM QUE ALEMÃES SÃO REPUTADOS POR GOSTAR DE ENCHER LINGÜIÇA: “This being the case, it follows that however serious and grave may be the sin which a person commits, if it does not necessarily imply heresy, then he must not be judged as a heretic, although he is to be punished. Consequently an Inquisitor need not interfere in the case of a man who is to be punished as a malefactor, but not as a heretic, but may leave him to be tried by the Judges of his own Province.”
“For a person rightly to be adjudged a heretic he must fulfill five conditions. First, there must be an error in his reasoning. Secondly, that error must be in matters concerning the faith, either being contrary to the teaching of the Church as to the true faith, or against sound morality and therefore not leading to the attainment of eternal life [fé da igreja e fé verdadeira explicitamente diferenciadas?]. Thirdly, the error must lie in one who has professed the Catholic faith, for otherwise he would be a Jew or a Pagan, not a heretic. [Benza Pan!] Fourthly, the error must be of such a nature that he who holds it must confess some of the truth of Christ as touching either His Godhead or His Manhood; for if a man wholly denies the faith, he is an apostate. Fifthly, he must pertinaciously and obstinately hold to and follow that error.”
REPENT!“if a man commits fornication or adultery, although he is disobeying the command Thou shalt not commit adultery, yet he is not a heretic unless he holds the opinion that it is lawful to commit adultery.”
EU NÃO SABIA QUE PODIA HAVER DISCUSSÕES MAIS ESTÉREIS DO QUE “FOI PÊNALTI OU NÃO FOI”, MAS EI-LAS: “a simonist is not in the narrow and exact sense of the word a heretic; but broadly speaking and by comparison he is so, according to S. Thomas, when he buys or sells holy things in the belief that the gift of grace can be had for money. But if, as is often the case, he does not act in this belief, he is not a heretic. Yet he truly would be if he did believe that the gift of grace could be had for money.”
“For according to Aristotle every wicked man is either ignorant or in error. Therefore, since they who do such things have evil in their wills, they must have an error in their understandings.”
“A Theologian will say that it is in the first instance a matter for the Apostolic See to judge whether a heresy actually exists or is only to be presumed in law. And this may be because whenever an effect can proceed from a two-fold cause, no precise judgement can be formed of the actual nature of the cause merely on the basis of the effect. Therefore, since such effects as the worship of the devil or asking his help in the working of witchcraft, by baptizing an image, or offering to him a living child, or killing an infant, and other matters of this sort, can proceed from 2 separate causes, namely, a belief that it is right to worship the devil and sacrifice to him, and that images can receive sacraments; or because a man has formed some pact with the devil, so that he may obtain the more easily from the devil that which he desires in those matters which are not beyond the capacity of the devil; it follows that no one ought hastily to form a definite judgement merely on the basis of the effect as to what is its cause, that is, whether a man does such things out of a wrong opinion concerning the faith. So when there is no doubt about the effect, still it is necessary to inquire farther into the cause; and if it be found that a man has acted out of a perverse and erroneous opinion concerning the faith, then he is to be judged a heretic and will be subject to trial by the Inquisitors together with the Ordinary. But if he has not acted for these reasons, he is to be considered a sorcerer, and a very vile sinner.”
(*) “Extravagantes. This word designates some Papal decretals not contained in certain canonical collections which possess a special authority, that is, they are not found in (but <wander outside>, <extra vagari>) the Decree of Gratian, or the 3 great official collections of the Corpus Iuri (the Decretals of Gregory IX; the 6th Book of the Decretals; and the Clementines). The term is now applied to the collections known as the Extravagantes Joannis XXII and the Extravagantes Communes. When John XXII (1316-34) published the Decretals already known as Clementines, there also existed various pontifical documents, obligatory upon the whole Church indeed, but not included in the Corpus Juris, and these were called Extravagantes. In 1325, Zenselinus de Cassanis added glosses to 20 constitutions of John XXII, and named this collection Viginti Extravagantes papae Joannis XXII. Chappuis also classified these under 14 titles containing all 20 chapters.”
“And a Bishop can proceed without an Inquisitor, or an Inquisitor without a Bishop; or, if either of their offices be vacant, their deputies may act independently of each other, provided that it is impossible for them to meet together for joint action within 8 days of the time when the inquiry is due to commence; but if there be no valid reason for their not meeting together, the action shall be null and void in law.”
“we treat of 20 methods of delivering sentence, 13 of which are common to all kinds of heresy, and the remainder particular to the heresy of witches.”
“The first method is when someone accuses a person before a judge of the crime of heresy, or of protecting heretics, offering to prove it, and to submit himself to the penalty of talion if he fails to prove it. The second method is when someone denounces a person, but does not offer to prove it and is not willing to embroil himself in the matter” “The third method involves an inquisition, that is, when there is no accuser or informer, but a general report that there are witches in some town or place; and then the Judge must proceed, not at the instance of any party, but simply by the virtue of his office. Here it is to be noted that a judge should not readily admit the first method of procedure. For one thing, it is not actuated by motives of faith, nor is it very applicable to the case of witches, since they commit their deeds in secret. Then, again, it is full of danger to the accuser, because of the penalty of talion which he will incur if he fails to prove his case.” “Note also that in the case of the 2nd method the following caution should be observed. For it has been said that the 2nd method of procedure and of instituting a process on behalf of the faith is by means of an information, where the informer does not offer to prove his statement and is not ready to be embroiled in the case, but only speaks because of a sentence of excommunication, or out of zeal for the faith and for the good of the State. Therefore the secular Judge must specify in his general citation or warning aforesaid that none should think that he will become liable to a penalty even if he fails to prove his words; since he comes forward not as an accuser but as an informer.”Invejável engenharia do clima de denuncismo impune – laboratório avant-la-lettre do fascismo!
A figura do “laico-religioso” (com conhecimento de Direito): “if a Notary is not to be procured, then let there be two suitable men in the place of the Notary. For this is dealt with in the c. ut officium, § verum, lib. 6, where it is said: But because it is expedient to proceed with great caution in the trial of a grave crime, that no error may be committed in imposing upon the guilty a deservedly severe punishment; we desire and command that, in the examination of the witnesses necessary in such a charge, you shall have 2 religious and discreet persons, either clerics or laymen.”
O PRO-FORMA DA INQUISIÇÃO (Manual de Redação da Caça às Bruxas)
“In the Name of the Lord. Amen.
In the year of Our Lord —, on the — day of the — month, in the presence of me the Notary and of the witnesses subscribed, N. of the town of — in the Diocese of —, as above, appeared in the person at — before the honourable Judge, and offered him a schedule to the following effect.”
“And if he says that he has seen anything, as, for example, that the accused was present at such a time of tempest, or that he had touched an animal, or had entered a stable, the Judge shall ask when he saw him, and where, and how often, and in what manner, and who were present. If he says that he did not see it, but heard of it, he shall ask him from whom he heard it, where, when, and how often, and in whose presence, making separate articles of each of the several points above mentioned. And the Notary or scribe shall set down a record of them immediately after the aforesaid denunciation”
“The third method of beginning a process is the commonest and most usual one, because it is secret, and no accuser or informer has to appear.But when there is a general report of witchcraft in some town or parish, because of this report the Judge may proceed without a general citation or admonition as above, since the noise of that report comes often to his ears; and then again he can begin a process in the presence of the persons, as we have said before.”
“Since we have said that in the 2nd method the evidence of the witnesses is to be written down, it is necessary to know how many witnesses there should be, and of what condition. The question is whether a Judge may lawfully convict any person of the heresy of witchcraft on the evidence of 2 legitimate witnesses whose evidence is entirely concordant, or whether more than 2 are necessary. And we say that the evidence of witnesses is not entirely concordant when it is only partially so; that is, when 2 witnesses differ in their accounts, but agree in the substance or effect: as when one says <She bewitched my cow>, and the other says, <She bewitched my child>, but they agree as to the fact of witchcraft.” “although 2 witnesses seem to be enough to satisfy the rigour of law (for the rule is that that which is sworn to by 2 or 3 is taken for the truth); yet in a charge of this kind2 witnesses do not seem sufficient to ensure an equitable judgement, on account of the heinousness of the crime in question. For the proof of an accusation ought to be clearer than daylight; and especially ought this to be so in the case of the grave charge of heresy.” “the prisoner is not permitted to know who are his accusers. But the Judge himself must by virtue of his office, inquire into any personal enmity felt by the witnesses towards the prisoner; and such witnesses cannot be allowed, as will be shown later. And when the witnesses give confused evidence on account of something lying on their conscience, the Judge is empowered to put them through a 2nd interrogatory.” “if the prisoner is the subject of an evil report, a period should be set for his purgation; and if he is under strong suspicion on account of the evidence of 2 witnesses, the Judge should make him abjure the heresy, or question him, or defer his sentence. For it does not seem just to condemn a man of good name on so great a charge on the evidence of only 2 witnesses, though the case is otherwise with a person of bad reputation. This matter is fully dealt with in the Canon Law of heretics, where it is set down that the Bishop shall cause 3or+ men of good standing to give evidence on oath to speak the truth as to whether they have any knowledge of the existence of heretics in such a parish.” “But when, in spite of certain discrepancies, the witnesses agree in the main facts, then the matter shall rest with the Judge’s discretion”
“But it may be asked whether the Judge can compel witnesses to sweat an oath to tell the truth in a case concerning the Faith or witches, or if he can examine them many times. We answer that he can do so, especially an ecclesiastical Judge, and that in ecclesiastical cases witnesses can be compelled to speak the truth, and this on oath, since otherwise their evidence would not be valid. For the Canon Law says: The Archbishop or Bishop may make a circuit of the parish in which it is rumoured that there are heretics, and compel 3or+men of good repute, or even, if it seems good to him, the whole neighbourhood, to give evidence.And if any through damnable obstinacy stubbornly refuse to take the oath, they shall on that account be considered as heretics.”
“Note that persons under a sentence of excommunication, associates and accomplices in the crime, notorious evildoers and criminals, or servants giving evidence against their masters, are admitted as witnesses in a case concerning the Faith. And just as a heretic may give evidence against a heretic, so may a witch against a witch; but this only in default of other proofs, and such evidence can only be admitted for the prosecution and not for the defence: this is true also of the evidence of the prisoner’s wife, sons and kindred; for the evidence of such has more weight in proving a charge than in disproving it.”Wit(chn)ess.
“The case of evidence given by perjurers, when it is presumed that they are speaking out of zeal for the faith, is dealed with in the Canon c. accusatus, § licet, where it says that the evidence of perjurers, after they have repented, is admissible; and it goes on to say: If it manifestly appears that they do not speak in a spirit of levity, or from motives of enmity, or by reason of a bribe, but purely out of zeal for the orthodox faith, wishing to correct what they have said, or to reveal something about which they had kept silence, in defence of the faith, their testimony shall be as valid as that of anyone else”“So great is the plague of heresy that, in an action involving this crime, even servants are admitted as witnesses against their masters, and any criminal evildoer may give evidence against any person soever.”“But if it is asked whether the Judge can admit the mortal enemies of the prisoner to give evidence against him in such a case, we answer that he cannot; for the same chapter of the Canon says: You must not understand that in this kind of charge a mortal personal enemy may be admitted to give evidence.” “And a mortal enmity is constituted by the following circumstances: when there is a death feud or vendetta between the parties, or when there has been an attempted homicide, or some serious wound or injury which manifestly shows that there is mortal hatred on the part of the witness against the prisoner. And in such a case it is presumed that, just as the witness has tried to inflict temporal death on the prisoner by wounding him, so he will also be willing to effect his object by accusing him of heresy; and just as he wished to take away his life, so he would be willing to take away his good name.” “But there are other serious degrees of enmity (for women are easily provoked to hatred), which need not totally disqualify a witness, although they render his evidence very doubtful, so that full credence cannot be placed in his words unless they are substantiated by independent proofs, and other witnesses supply an indubitable proof of them. For the Judge must ask the prisoner whether he thinks that he has any enemy who would dare to accuse him of that crime out of hatred, so that he might compass his death; and if he says that he has, he shall ask who that person is; and then the Judge shall take note whether the person named as being likely to give evidence from motives of malice has actually done so. And if it is found that this is the case, and the Judge has learned from trustworthy men the cause of that enmity, and if the evidence in question is not substantiated by other proofs and the words of other witnesses, then he may safely reject such evidence. But if the prisoner says that he hopes he has no such enemy, but admits that he has had quarrels with women; or if he says that he has an enemy, but names someone who, perhaps, has not given evidence, in that case, even if other witnesses say that such a person has given evidence from motives of enmity, the Judge must not reject his evidence, but admit it together with the other proofs.§ There are many who are not sufficiently careful and circumspect, and consider that the depositions of such quarrelsome women should be altogether rejected, saying that no faith can be placed in them, since they are nearly always actuated by motives of hatred. Such men are ignorant of the subtlety and precautions of magistrates, and speak and judge like men who are colour-blind.”
PROCESSO DE CONDENAÇÃO SUMÁRIA: “It often happens that we institute a criminal process, and order it to be conducted in a simple straightforward manner without the legal quibbles and contentions which are introduced in other cases.(…) The Judge to whom we commit such a case need not require any writ, or demand that the action should be contested; he may conduct the case on holidays for the sake of the convenience of the public, he should shorten the conduct of the case as much as he can by disallowing all dilatory exceptions, appeals and obstructions, the impertinent contentions of pleaders and advocates, and the quarrels of witnesses, and by restraining the superfluous number of witnesses; but not in such a way as to neglect the necessary proofs” “the Judge ought to advise the accuser to set aside his formal accusation and to speak rather as an informer, because of the grave danger that is incurred by an accuser. And so he can proceed in the 2nd manner, which is commonly used, and likewise in the 3rd manner, in which the process is begun not at the instance of any party.”
“…Asked further how he could distinguish the accused’s motive, he answered that he knew it because he had spoken with a laugh. § This is a matter which must be inquired into very diligently; for very often people use words quoting someone else, or merely in temper, or as a test of the opinions of other people; although sometimes they are used assertively with definite intention.” “Here it must always be noted that in such an examination at least 5 persons must be present, namely, the presiding Judge, the witness of informer, the respondent or accused, who appears afterwards, and the 3rd is the Notary or scribe: where there is no Notary the scribe shall co-opt another honest man, and these 2, as has been said, shall perform the duties of the Notary; and this is provided for by Apostolic authority” “For this is a common custom of witches, to stir up enmity against themselves by some word or action, as, for example, to ask someone to lend them something or else they will damage his garden, or something of that sort, in order to make an occasion for deeds of witchcraft; and they manifest themselves either in word or in action, since they are compelled to do so at the instance of the devils, so that in this way the sins of Judges are aggravated while the witch remains unpunished.”
“Asked why she touched a child, and afterwards it fell sick, she answered. Also she was asked what she did in the fields at the time of a tempest, and so with many other matters. Again, why, having 1 or 2 cows, she had more milk than her neighbours who had 4 or 6. Let her be asked why she persists in a state of adultery or concubinage; for although this is beside the point, yet such questions engender more suspicion than would the case with a chaste and honest woman who stood accused.”
“It is asked 1st what is to be done when, as often happens, the accused denies everything. We answer that the Judge has 3 points to consider, namely, her bad reputation, the evidence of the fact [nada mais genérico], and the words of the witnesses; and he must see whether all these agree together. And if, as very often is the case, they do not altogether agree together, since witches are variously accused of different deeds committed in some village or town; but the evidences of the fact are visible to the eye, as that a child has been harmed by sorcery, or, more often, a beast has been bewitched or deprived of its milk [o ser humano babaca vê o que quer ver; aliás, o ser humano em geral!]; and if a number of witnesses have come forward whose evidence, even if it show certain discrepancies (as that one should say she had bewitched his child, another his beast, and a 3rd should merely witness to her reputation, and so with the others), but nevertheless agree in the substance of the fact, that is, as to the witchcraft [substância etérea!], and that she is suspected of being a witch; although those witnesses are not enough to warrant a conviction without the fact of the general report, or even with that fact, yet, taken in conjunction with the visible and tangible evidence of the fact, the Judge may decide that the accused is to be reputed, not as strongly or gravely under suspicion, but as manifestly taken in the heresy of witchcraft; provided, that is, that the witnesses are of a suitable condition and have not given evidence out of enmity, and that a sufficient number of them, say 6 or 8 or 10, have agreed together under oath. And then, according to the Canon Law, he must subject her to punishment, whether she has confessed her crime or not.”
“It is true that S. Bernardspeaks of an evident fact, and we here speak of the evidence of the fact; but this is because the devil does not work openly, but secretly.”O diabo é igualzinho deus.
“If [s]he confesses and is impenitent, he is to be handed over to the secular courts to suffer the extreme penalty, according to the chapter ad abolendam, or he is to be imprisoned for life, according to the chapter excommunicamus. But if he does not confess, and stoutly maintains his denial, he is to be delivered as an impenitent to the power of the Civil Court to be punished in a fitting manner, asHenry of Segusioshows in his Summa, where he treats of the manner of proceeding against heretics.” “he should consign the accused to prison for a time, or for several years, in case perhaps, being depressed after a year of the squalor of prison, she may confess her crimes.”
“This gives rise to the question whether the method employed by some to capture a witch is lawful, namely, that she should be lifted from the ground by the officers, and carried out in a basket or on a plank of wood so that she cannot again touch the ground. This can be answered by the opinion of the Canonists and of certain Theologians, that this is lawful in 3 respects. First, because it is clear from the opinion of such Doctors as Duns Scotus, Henry of Segusio andGodfrey of Fontaines, that it is lawful to oppose vanity with vanity. Also we know from experience and the confessions of witches that when they are taken in this manner they more often lose the power of keeping silence under examination: indeed many who have been about to be burned have asked that they might be allowed at least to touch the ground with one foot; and when it had been asked why they made such a request, they’d answered that if they had touched the ground they would have liberated themselves, striking many other people dead with lightning.”
“But if it is only a slight matter of which she is accused, and she is not of bad reputation, and there is no evidence of her work upon children or animals, then she may be sent back to her house. But because she has certainly associated with witches and knows their secrets, she must give sureties; and if she cannot do so, she must be bound by oaths and penalties not to go out of her house unless she is summoned. But her servants and domestics, of whom we spoke above, must be kept in custody, yet not punished.”
(*) “House should be searched.”Thus in the famous witch trial of Dame Alive Kyteler and her coven before the Bishop of Ossory in 1324, John le Poer, the husband of Dame Alice, deposed that in her closet were discovered mysterious vials and elixirs, strange necromantic instruments and ghastly relics of mortality which she used in her horrid craft. Holinshed in his Chronicle of Ireland (London, 1587, p. 93), sub anno 1323, has: <In rifling the closet of the ladie, they found a wafer of sacramental bread, having the divels name stamped thereon in steed of JESUS Christ, and a pipe of ointment, wherewith she greased a staffe, upon whish she ambled and gallopped through thicke and thin when and in what manner she wished.>”
“If the accused says that she is innocent and falsely accused and wishes to see and hear her accusers, it is a sign that she is asking to defend herself. But it is an open question whether the Judge is bound to make the deponents known to her and bring them to confront her face to face.(…) Although different Popes have had different opinions on this matter, none of them has ever said that in such a case the Judge is bound to make known to the accused the names of the informers or accusers. But, finally, Bonifice VIII(*) decreed as follows: If in a case of heresy it appear to the Bishop or Inquisitor that grave danger would be incurred by the witnesses of informers on account of the powers of the persons against whom they lay their depositions, should their names be published, he shall not publish them.” “any such Judge, even if he be secular, has the authority of the Pope, and not only of the Emperor.”
(*) “the collection of Bonifice VIII is known asLiber Sixtus”
BELA APLICAÇÃO DE PONTA-CABEÇA DA “BOA-NOVA” E DO PARAÍSO AOS POBRES!“it is more dangerous to make known the names of the witnesses to an accused person who is poor, because such a person has many evil accomplices, such as outlaws and homicides, associated with him, who venture nothing but their own persons, which is not the case with anyone who is nobly born or rich, and abounding in temporal possessions.”
“let the Judge take notice that he must keep the names of the witnesses secret, under pain of excommunication. It is in the power of the Bishop thus to punish him if he does otherwise. Therefore he should very implicitly [!???] warn the Judge not to reveal the name from the very beginning of the process.”
“IF, therefore, the accused asked to be defended, how can this be admitted when the names of the witnesses are kept altogether secret? It is to be said that 3 considerations are to be observed in admitting any defence. First, that an Advocate shall be allotted to the accused. Second, that the names of the witnesses shall not be made known to the Advocate even under an oath of secrecy, but that he shall be informed of everything contained in the depositions. Third, the accused shall as far as possible be given the benefit of every doubt, provided that this involves no scandal to the faith nor is in any way detrimental to justice (…) and the Advocate can act also in the name of procurator.
As to the first of these points: it should be noted that an Advocate is not to be appointed at the desire of the accused, as if he may choose which Advocate he will have; but the Judge must take great care to appoint neither a litigious nor an evil-minded man, nor yet one who is easily bribed (as many are), but rather an honourable man to whom no sort of suspicion attaches.” “Henry of Segusio holds an opposite view concerning the return of the fee in a case in which the Advocate has worked very hard. Consequently if an Advocate has wittingly undertaken to defend a prisoner whom he knows to be guilty, he shall be liable for the costs and expenses”
“First, his behaviour must be modest and free from prolixity or pretentious oratory.” Acaba-se de abolir qualquer advogado no mundo de defender uma “bruxa”!
“if he unduly defends a person already suspect of heresy, he makes himself as it were a patron of that heresy, and lays himself under not only a light but a strong suspicion”
“though these means may savour of cunning and even guile, yet the Judge may employ them for the good of the faith and the State; for even S. Paul says: But being crafty, I caught you by guile.And these means are especially to be employed in the case of a prisoner who has not been publicly defamed, and is not suspected because of the evidence of any fact; and the Judge may also employ them against prisoners who have alleged enmity on the part of the deponents, and wish to know all the names of the witnesses.”
“Common justice demands that a witch should not be condemned to death unless she is convicted by her own confession. But here we are considering the case of one who is judged to be taken in manifest heresy for direct or indirect evidence of the fact, or the legitimate production of witnesses; and in this case she is to be exposed to questions and torture to extort a confession of her crimes.”
“and behold! he was suddenly bewitched so that his mouth was stretched sideways as far as his ears in a horrible deformity, and he could not draw it back, but remained so deformed for a long time.” :O :T
“indirect evidence of the fact is different from direct evidence; yet though it is not so conclusive, it is still taken from the words and deeds of witches, and it is judged from witchcraft which is not so immediate in its effect, but follows after some lapse of time from the utterance of the threatening words. May we conclude that this is the case with such witches who have been accused and have not made good their defence (or have failed to defend themselves because this privilege was not granted them; and it was not granted because they did not ask for it). But what we are to consider now is what action the Judge should take, and how he should proceed to question the accused with a view to extorting the truth from her so that sentence of death may finally be passed upon her.” “he must not be too quick for this reason: unless God, through a holy Angel, compels the devil to withhold his help from the witch, she will be so insensible to the pains of torture that she will sooner be torn limb from limb than confess any of the truth. But the torture is not to be neglected for this reason, for they are not all equally endowed with this power, and also the devil sometimes of his own will permits them to confess their crimes without being compelled by a holy Angel.”“For there are some who obtain from the devil a respite of 6 or 8 or 10 years before they have to offer him their homage, that is, devote themselves to him body and soul; whereas others, when they first profess their abjuration of the faith, at the same time offer their homage. And the reason why the devil allows that stipulated interval of time is that, during that time, he may find out whether the witch has denied the faith with her lips only but not in her heart, and would therefore offer him her homage in the same way.”
“we may say that it is as difficult, or more difficult, to compel a witch to tell the truth as it is to exorcise a person possessed of the devil. Therefore the Judge ought not to be too willing or ready to proceed to such examination, unless the death penalty is involved.” “very often meditation, and the misery of imprisonment, and the repeated advice of honest men, dispose the accused to discover the truth.” “let the accused be stripped; or if she is a woman, let her first be led to the penal cells and there stripped by honest women of good reputation. And the reason for this is that they should search for any instrument of witchcraft sewn into her clothes; for they often make such instruments, at the instruction of devils. And when such instruments have been disposed of, the Judge shall use his own persuasions and those of other honest men zealous for the faith to induce her to confess the truth voluntarily; and if she will not, let him order the officers to bind her with cords, and apply her to some engine of torture; and then let them obey at once but not joyfully, rather appearing to be disturbed by their duty. Then let her be released again at someone’s earnest request, and taken on one side, and let her again be persuaded; and in persuading her, let her be told that she can escape the death penalty.” “she may be promised her life on the following conditions: that she be sentenced to imprisonment for life on bread and water, provided that she supply evidence which will lead to the conviction of other witches.And she is not to be told, when she is promised her life, that she is to be imprisoned in this way; but should be led to suppose that some other penance, such as exile, will be imposed on her as punishment. And without doubt notorious witches, especially such as use witches’ medicines and cure the bewitched by superstitious means, should be kept in this way, both that they may help the bewitched, and that they may betray other witches. But such a betrayal by them must not be considered of itself sufficient ground for a conviction, since the devil is a liar, unless it is also substantiated by the evidence of the fact, and by witnesses.
Others think that, after she has been consigned to prison in this way, the promise to spare her life should be kept for a time, but that after a certain period she should be burned.”
“But if neither threats nor such promises will induce her to confess the truth, then the officers must proceed with the sentence, and she must be examined, not in any new or exquisite manner, but in the usual way, lightly or heavily according as the nature of her crimes demands. And while she is being questioned about each several point, let her be often and frequently exposed to torture, beginning with the more gentle of them; for the Judge should not be too hasty to proceed to the graver kind. And while this is being done, let the Notary write all down, how she is tortured and what questions are asked and how she answers.
And note that, if she confesses under torture, she should then be taken to another place and questioned anew, so that she does not confess only under the stress of torture.
The next step of the Judge should be that, if after being fittingly tortured she refuses to confess the truth, he should have other engines of torture brought before her, and tell her that she will have to endure these if she does not confess. If then she is not induced by terror to confess, the torture must be continued on the 2nd or 3rd day, but not repeated at that present time unless there should be some fresh indication of its probable success.”
“The Judge should also take care that during that interval there should always be guards with her, so that she is never left alone, for fear lest the devil will cause her to kill herself. But the devil himself knows better than anyone whether he will desert her of his own will, or be compelled to do so by God.”
“THE Judge should act as follows in the continuation of the torture.First he should bear in mind that, just as the same medicine is not applicable to all the members, but there are various and distinct salves for each several member, so not all heretics or those accused of heresy are to be subjected to the same method of questioning, examination and torture as to the charges laid against them; but various and different means are to be employed according to their various natures and persons. Now a surgeon cuts off rotten limbs; and mangy sheep are isolated from the healthy; but a prudent Judge will not consider it safe to bind himself down to one invariable rule in his method of dealing with a prisoner who is endowed with a witch’s power of taciturnity, and whose silence he is unable to overcome. For if the sons of darkness were to become accustomed to one general rule they would provide means of evading it as a well-known snare set for their destruction.”
“For we are taught both by the words of worthy men of old and by our own experience that this is a most certain sign, and it has been found that even if she be urged and exhorted by solemn conjurations to shed tears, if she be a witch she will not be able to weep: although she will assume a tearful aspect and smear her cheeks and eyes with spittle to make it appear that she is weeping; wherefore she must be closely watched by the attendants.” Não que uma sincera torrente de lágrimas garanta algo além de uma vida encarcerada ou a cremação numa fogueira…
“I conjure you by the bitter tears shed on the Cross by our Saviour the Lord JESUS Christ for the salvation of the world, and by the burning tears poured in the evening hour over His wounds by the most glorious Virgin MARY, His Mother, and by all the tears which have been shed here in this world by the Saints and Elect of God, from whose eyes He has now wiped away all tears, that if you be innocent you do now shed tears, but if you be guilty that you shall by no means do so. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.”
“for S. Bernard tells us that the tears of the humble can penetrate to heaven and conquer the unconquerable. Therefore there can be no doubt that they are displeasing to the devil, and that he uses all his endeavour to restrain them, to prevent a witch from finally attaining to penitence.
But it may be objected that it might suit with the devil’s cunning, with God’s permission, to allow even a witch to weep; since tearful grieving, weaving and deceiving are said to be proper to women. We may answer that in this case, since the judgements of God are a mystery, if there is no other way of convicting the accused, by legitimate witnesses or the evidence of the fact, and if she is not under a strong or grave suspicion, she is to be discharged”
“they must not allow themselves to be touched physically by the witch, especially in any contact of their bare arms or hands; but they must always carry about them some salt consecrated on Palm Sunday and some Blessed Herbs.”
“And we know from experience that some witches, when detained in prison, have importunately begged their gaolers to grant them this one thing, that they should be allowed to look at the Judge before he looks at them; and by so getting the first sight of the Judge they have been able so to alter the minds of the Judge or his assessors that they have lost all their anger against them and have not presumed to molest them in any way, but have allowed them to go free.”
“And no one need think that it is superstitious to lead her in backwards”
RAPE AS TORTURE: “The 3rd precaution to be observed in this 10th action is that the hair should be shaved from every part of her body. The reason for this is the same as that for stripping her of her clothes, which we have already mentioned; for in order to preserve their power of silence they are in the habit of hiding some superstitious object in their clothes or in their hair, or even in the most secret parts of the their bodies which must not be named.
But it may be objected that the devil might, without the use of such charms, so harden the heart of a witch that she is unable to confess her crimes; just as it is often found in the case of other criminals, no matter how great the tortures to which they are exposed, or how much they are convicted by the evidence of the facts and of witnesses. We answer that it is true that the devil can affect such taciturnity without the use of such charms; but he prefers to use them for the perdition of souls and the greater offence to the Divine Majesty of God.
This can be made clear from the example of a certain witch in the town of Hagenau,. She used to obtain this gift of silence in the following manner: she killed a newly-born first-born male child who had not been baptized, and having roasted it in an oven together with other matters which it is not expedient to mention, ground it to powder and ashes; and if any witch or criminal carried about him some of this substance he would in no way be able to confess his crimes.”
MANUAL DO GUERRILHEIRO DAS CRUZADAS:“this power of taciturnity can proceed from 3 causes. First, from a natural hardness of heart; for some are soft-hearted, or even feeble-minded, so that at the slightest torture they admit everything, even some things which are not true; whereas others are so hard that however much they are tortured the truth is not to be had from them; and this is especially the case with those who have been tortured before, even if their arms are suddenly stretched or twisted.”
“But what is to be said of a case that happened in the Diocese of Ratisbon? Certain heretics were convicted by their own confession not only as impenitent but as open advocates of that perfidy; and when they were condemned to death it happened that they remained unharmed in the fire. At length their sentence was altered to death by drowning, but this was no more effective. All were astonished, and some even began to say that their heresy must be true; and the Bishop, in great anxiety for his flock, ordered a 3 days fast. When this had been devoutly fulfilled, it came to the knowledge of someone that those heretics had a magic charm sewed between the skin and the flesh under one arm; and when this was found and removed, they were delivered to the flames and immediately burned. Some say that a certain necromancer learned this secret during a consultation with the devil, and betrayed it; but however it became known, it is probably that the devil, who is always scheming for the subversion of faith, was in some way compelled by Divine power to reveal the matter.”
“Now in the parts of Germany such shaving, especially of the secret parts, is not generally considered delicate, and therefore we Inquisitors do not use it; but we cause the hair of their head to be cut off, and placing a morsel of Blessed Wax in a cup of Holy Water and invoking the most Holy Trinity, we give it them to drink 3 times on a fasting stomach, and by the grace of God we have by this means caused many to break their silence. But in other countries the Inquisitors order the witch to be shaved all over her body. And the Inquisitor of Como has informed us that last year, that is, in 1485, he ordered 41 witches to be burned, after they had been shaved all over. And this was in the district and county of Burbia, commonly called Wormserbad, in the territory of the Archduke of Austria, towards Milan.”
(*) “Our Lady of Tears, Santa Maria delle Lagrime, is the Patroness of Spoleto.A picture of Our Lady, painted upon the wall of the house belonging to Diotallevio d’Antonio, which stood on the road from Spoleto to Trevi, was seen to shed tears in great abundance. Many graces and favours were obtained before the miraculous picture. A small chapel was erected on the spot in August 1485, and Mass was daily offered therein. On 27 March 1487, the large basilica was begun, which on its completion, 8 March 1489, was entrusted to the Olivetans.”
(*) “Helen Guthrie, in 1661 dug up the body of an unbaptized infant, which was buried in the churchyard near the southeast door of the church and took several pieces thereof, as the feet, hands, part of the head, and a part of the buttocks, and made a pie thereof, that she might eat of it and by this means might never make a confession of witchcraft.” Talento para ser comunista…
“Finally, if he sees that she will not admit her crimes, he shall ask her whether, to prove her innocence, she is ready to undergo the ordeal by red-hot iron. And they all desire this, knowing that the devil will prevent them from being hurt; therefore a true witch is exposed in this manner. The Judge shall ask her how she can be so rash as to run so great a risk, and all shall be written down; but it will be shown later that they are never to be allowed to undergo this ordeal byred-hot iron.”Medinho?
“Let the Judge also note that when witches are questioned on a Friday, while the people are gathered together at Holy Mass to await our Saviour, they very often confess.”
“As a 5th precaution, when all the above have failed, let her, if possible, be led to some castle; and after she has been kept there under custody for some days, let the castellan pretend that he is going on a long journey. And then let some of his household, or even some honest women, visit her and promise that they will set her entirely at liberty if she will teach them how to conduct certain practices. And let the Judge take note that by this means they have very often confessed and been convicted.”
“For trial by combat is allowable in a criminal case for the protection of life, and in a civil case for the protection of property; then wherefore not the trial by red-hot iron or boiling water? (…) Again, a judge, who is responsible for the safety of the community, may lawfully allow a smaller evil that a greater may be avoided; as he allows the existence of harlots in towns in order to avoid a general confusion of lust. For S. Augustine On Free Will says: Take away the harlots, and you will create a general chaos and confusion of lust. So, when a person has been loaded with insults and injuries by any community, he can clear himself of any criminal or civil charge by means of a trial by ordeal.”
PAVOR DA SANTIFICAÇÃO MILAGROSA E INAUDITA DA BRUXA: “the Canon says in that chapter not that they who use such practices tempt God, but that they appear to tempt Him, so that it may be understood that, even if a man engage in such a trial with none but good intentions, yet since it has the appearance of evil, it is to be avoided.” “That which is not sanctioned in the writings of the Sainted Fathers is to be presumed superstitious.” “And it is not wonderful witches are able to undergo this trial by ordeal unscathed with the help of devils; for we learn from naturalists that if the hands be anointed with the juice of a certain herb they are protected from burning. Now the devil has an exact knowledge of the virtues of such herbs: although he can cause the hand of the accused to be protected from the red-hot iron by invisibly interposing some other substance, yet he can procure the same effect by the use of natural objects.”
“An incident illustrative of our argument occurred hardly 3 years ago in the Diocese of Constance. For in the territory of the Counts of Fuerstenberg and the Black Forest there was a notorious witch who had been the subject of much public complaint. (…) she was released from her chains and lives to the present time, not without grave scandal to the Faith in those parts.”
(*) “When scandalous reports were circulated concerning her honour, although her husband could not for a moment suspect her purity, she insisted upon an appeal to the trial by ordeal, and having walked unhurt over the red-hot plough-shares, publicly testified her innocence. The story is immensely popular in German poetry and German art. A print by Hans Burgkmair shows her stepping over the shares, one of which she holds in her hand. Upon her shrine in the Cathedral at Bamburg a bas-relief by Hans Thielmann of Warzburg depicts the same incident. Having already retired to a Benedictine cloister, upon the death of her husband S. Cunegondshe took the veil.” Como eu disse, trata-se de um milagre de santa!
“S. Augustine says that we must not pronounce sentence against any person unless he has been proved guilty, or has confessed. Now there are 3 kinds of sentence – interlocutory, definitive, and preceptive. These are explained as follows by S. Raymond. An interlocutory sentence is one which is given not on the main issue of the case, but on some other side issues which emerge during the hearing of a case; such as a decision whether or not a witness is to be disallowed, or whether some digression is to be admitted, and such matters as that. Or it may perhaps be called interlocutory because it is delivered simply by word of mouth without the formality of putting it into writing. A definitive sentence is one which pronounces a final decision as to the main issue of the case. A preceptive sentence is one which is pronounced by a lower authority on the instruction of a higher.
Now it is laid down by law that a definitive sentence which has been arrived at without a due observance of the proper legal procedure in trying a case is null and void in law; and the legal conduct of a case consists in 2 things. One concerns the basis of the judgement; for there must be a due provision for the hearing of arguments both for the prosecution and the defence, and a sentence arrived at without such a hearing cannot stand. The other is not concerned with the basis of the judgement, but provides that the sentence must not be conditional; for example, a claim for possession should not be decided conditionally upon some subsequent claim of property; but where there is no question of such an objection the sentence shall stand.”
“the Judge need not require a writ, or demand that the case should be contested. But he must allow opportunity for the necessary proofs, and issue his citation, and exact the protestation of the oath concerning calumny, etc. Therefore there has lately been a new law made as to the method of procedure in such cases.”
“the sentence should be pronounced by the Judge and no one else, otherwise it is not valid. Also the Judge must be sitting in a public and honourable place; and he must pronounce it in the day-time and not in the darkness; and there are other conditions to be observed; for example, the sentence must not be promulgated upon a Holy Day, nor yet merely delivered in writing.”
Note again that, although in criminal actions the execution of the sentence is not to be delayed, this rule does not hold good in 4 cases, with 2 of which we are here concerned. First, when the prisoner is a pregnant woman; and then the sentence shall be delayed until she has given birth. Secondly, when the prisoner has confessed her crime, but has afterwards denied it again”
“And the Canonists note that suspicion is of 3 kinds. The first of which the Canon says, You shall not judge anyone because he is suspect in your own opinion. The second is Probably; and this, but not the first, leads to a purgation. The third is Grave, and leads to a conviction; and S. Jerome understands this kind of suspicion when he says that a wife may be divorced either for fornication or for a reasonably suspected fornication.” “Applying this to our discussion of the heresy of witches and to the modern laws, we say that in law there are 3 degrees of suspicion in the matter of heresy: the first slight, the second great, and the third very great.”
“As an example of simple heresy, if people are found to be meeting together secretly for the purpose of worship, or differing in their manner of life and behaviour from the usual habits of the faithful; or if they meet together in sheds and barns, or at the more Holy Seasons in the remoter fields or woods, by day or by night, or are in any way found to separate themselves and not to attend Mass at the usual times or in the usual manner, or form secret friendships with suspected witches: such people incur at least a light suspicion of heresy, because it is proved that heretics often act in this manner. And of this light suspicion the Canon says: They who are by a slight argument discovered to have deviated from the teaching and path of the Catholic religion are not to be classed as heretics, nor is a sentence to be pronounced against them.”
“And here are especially to be noted those men or women who cherish some inordinate love or excessive hatred, even if they do not use to work any harm against men or animals in other ways. For those who behave in this way in any heresy are strongly to be suspected.”
“Those who have been found to rest under a probable suspicion should prove their innocence by a fitting purgation; if not, they are to be stricken with the sword of anathema as a worthy satisfaction in the sight of all men. And if they continue obstinate in their excommunication for the period of a year, they are utterly condemned as heretics.”
ERRAR É HUMANO, PERSISTIR É PECAR! “He who has been involved in one kind or sect of heresy, or has erred in one article of the faith or sacrament of the Church, and has afterwards specifically and generally abjured his heresy: if thereafter he follows another kind or sect of heresy, or errs in another article or sacrament of the Church, it is our will that he be judged a backslider.”
Let care be taken not to put anywhere in the sentence that the accused is innocent or immune, but that it was not legally proved against him; for if after a little time he should again be brought to trial, and it should be legally proved, he can, notwithstanding the previous sentence of absolution, then be condemned.”
“that you may be in good odour among the company of the faithful we impose upon you as by law a canonical purgation, assigning to you such a day of such a month at such hour of the day, upon which you shall appear in person before us with so many persons of equal station with you to purge you of your defamation. Which sponsors must be men of the Catholic faith and of good life who have known your habits and manner of living not only recently but in time past. And we signify that, if you should fail in this purgation, we shall hold you convicted, according to the canonical sanctions.”
“We N., by the mercy of God Bishop of such a town, or Judge in the territory subject to the rule of such a Prince, having regard to the merits of the process conducted by us against you N., of such a place in such a Diocese, and after careful examination, find that you are not consistent in your answers, and that there are sufficient indications besides that you ought to be exposed to the question and torture. Therefore, that the truth may be known from your own mouth and that from henceforth you may not offend the ears of your Judges with your equivocations, we declare, pronounce, and give sentence that on this present day at such an hour you are to be subjected to an interrogatory under torture. This sentence was given, etc.”
“Neither are they to be branded with the sign of the Cross, for such is the sign of a penitent heretic; and they are not convicted heretics, but only suspected, therefore they are not to be marked in this way. But they can be ordered either to stand on certain solemn days within the doors of a church, or near the altar, while Holy Mass is being celebrated, bearing in their hands a lighted candle of a certain weight; or else to go on some pilgrimage, or something of the kind, according to the nature and requirements of the case.”
“Therefore inasmuch as you are bound by the chain of excommunication from the Holy Church, and are justly cut off from the number of the Lord’s flock, and are deprived of the benefits of the Church, the Church can do no more for you, having done all that was possible. We, the said Bishop and Judges on behalf of the Faith, sitting in tribunal as Judges judging, and having before us the Holy Gospels that our judgement may proceed as from the countenance of god and our eyes see with equity, and having before our eyes only God and the truth of the Holy Faith and the extirpation of the plague of heresy, on this day and at this hour and place assigned to you for the hearing of your final sentence, we give it as our judgement and sentence that you are indeed an impenitent heretic, and as truly such to be delivered and abandoned to the secular Court: wherefore by this sentence we cast you away as an impenitent heretic from our ecclesiastical Court, and deliver or abandon you to the power of the secular Court: praying the said Court to moderate or temper its sentence of death against you.” Ah, com certeza…
“but you have been given up to your sin and led away and seduced by an evil spirit, and have chosen to be tortured with fearful and eternal torment in hell, and that your temporal body should here be consumed in the flames, rather than to give ear to better counsels and renounce your damnable and pestilent errors, and to return to the merciful bosom of our Holy Mother Church.”
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BIBLIOGRAFIA DO “OUTRO MUNDO”
Agostinho – De Natura Daemonis, 411 d.C.
Beothius – De Consolatione Philosophiae
Caesarius – Dialogue magnus visionum atque miraculorum, Libri XII.
Collin de Plancy – Dictionnaire Infernal, sixième édition, 1863.
Estou cada vez mais convencido de que este livro não passa de um rascunho com anotações desordenadas de um imaturo (ou senil?) Aristóteles, que estava destinado a aprimorar sua obra, mas foi interrompido por um “erro divino” e teve de abandonar seu projeto ou, pois não!, já agonizava na demência e nem que vivesse mais 10 anos poderia dar forma e estilo ao que essencialmente não tem conteúdo nem originalidade algumas (conforme veremos, reiteradamente)…
“A natureza, com efeito, não age com parcimônia, como os artesãos de Delfos que forjam suas facas para vários fins; fins; ela destina cada coisa a um uso especial (…) Somente entre os bárbaros a mulher e o escravo estão no mesmo nível. (…) Foi isso que fez com que o poeta acreditasse que os gregos tinham, de direito, poder sobre os bárbaros, como se, na natureza, bárbaros e escravos se confundissem.” “O poeta Hesíodo tinha razão ao dizer que era preciso antes de tudo A casa, e depois a mulher e o boi lavrador, já que o boi desempenha o papel do escravo entre os pobres.”
“todos os homens que antigamente viveram e ainda vivem sob reis dizem que os deuses vivem da mesma maneira, atribuindo-lhes o governo das sociedades humanas, já que os imaginam sob a forma do homem.”
“Bastar-se a si mesma é uma meta a que tende toda a produção da natureza e é também o mais perfeito estado. É, portanto, evidente que toda cidade está na natureza e que o homem é naturalmente feito para a sociedade política. Aquele que, por sua natureza e não por obra do acaso, existisse sem nenhuma pátria seria um indivíduo detestável, muito acima ou muito abaixo do homem, segundo Homero(*)”
“Assim, o homem é um animal cívico, mais social do que as abelhas e os outros animais que vivem juntos.”
“O Estado, ou sociedade política, é até mesmo o primeiro objeto a que se propôs a natureza. O todo existe necessariamente antes da parte. As sociedades domésticas e os indivíduos não são senão as partes integrantes da cidade, todas subordinadas ao corpo inteiro, todas distintas por seus poderes e suas funções, e todas inúteis quando desarticuladas, semelhantes às mãos e aos pés que, uma vez separados do corpo, só conservam o nome e a aparência, sem a realidade, como uma mão de pedra. O mesmo ocorre com os membros da cidade: nenhum pode bastar-se a si mesmo. (*)Aquele que não precisa dos outros homens, ou não pode resolver-se a ficar com eles, ou é um deus, ou um bruto.”
“Por si mesmas, as armas e a força são indiferentes ao bem e ao mal: é o princípio motor que qualifica seu uso. Servir-se delas sem nenhum direito e unicamente para saciar suas paixões rapaces ou lúbricas é atrocidade e perfídia. Seu uso só é lícito para a justiça. O discernimento e o respeito ao direito formam a base da vida social e os juízes são seus primeiros órgãos.”
“Chamaremos despotismo o poder do senhor sobre o escravo; marital, o do marido sobre a mulher; paternal, o do pai sobre os filhos (dois poderes para os quais o grego não tem substantivos).”
“outros consideram que o poder senhorial não tem nenhum fundamento na natureza e pretendem que esta nos criou a todos livres, e a escravidão só foi introduzida pela lei do mais forte e é, por si mesma, injusta como um puro efeito da violência.”
“as propriedades são uma reunião de instrumentos e o escravo, uma propriedade instrumental animada, como um agente preposto a todos os outros meios.”
“Se cada instrumento pudesse executar por si mesmo a vontade ou a intenção do agente, como faziam, dizem, as marionetes de Dédalo ou os tripés de Vulcano, que vinham por si mesmos, segundo Homero, aos combates dos deuses, se a lançadeira tecesse sozinha a tela, se o arco tirasse sozinho de uma cítara o som desejado, os arquitetos não mais precisariam de operários, nem os mestres de escravos.”
“A vida consiste no uso, não na produção.” “O senhor não é senão o proprietário de seu escravo, mas não lhe pertence; o escravo, pelo contrário, não somente é destinado ao uso do senhor, como também dele é parte. Isto basta para dar uma idéia da escravidão e para fazer conhecer esta condição. O homem que, por natureza, não pertence a si mesmo, mas a um outro, é escravo por natureza”
“Mas faz a natureza ou não de um homem um escravo? É justa e útil a escravidão ou é contra a natureza? É isto que devemos examinar agora.” “Não é apenas necessário, mas também vantajoso que haja mando por um lado e obediência por outro; e todos os seres, desde o primeiro instante do nascimento, são, por assim dizer, marcados pela natureza, uns para comandar, outros para obedecer.”
“A natureza ainda subordinou um dos dois animais ao outro. Em todas as espécies, o macho é evidentemente superior à fêmea: a espécie humana não é exceção.”
“o uso dos escravos e dos animais é mais ou menos o mesmo e tiram-se deles os mesmos serviços para as necessidades da vida.” Tal como abanar na rede e ler uma epopéia…
“Vemos corpos robustos talhados especialmente para carregar fardos e outros usos igualmente necessários; outros, pelo contrário, mais disciplinados, mas também mais esguios e incapazes de tais trabalhos, são bons apenas para a vida política, isto é, para os exercícios da paz e da guerra. Ocorre muitas vezes, porém, o contrário: brutos têm a forma exterior da liberdade e outros, sem aparentar, só têm a alma de livre.”
A deusa Hera deve ser feia por dentro.
“Além da servidão natural, existe aquela que chamamos servidão estabelecida pela lei; esta lei é uma espécie de convenção geral, segundo a qual a presa tomada na guerra pertence ao vencedor.
Será justo? Sobre isso, os jurisconsultos não chegam a um acordo, nem tampouco, aliás, sobre a justiça de muitas outras decisões tomadas nas assembléias populares, contra as quais eles reclamam. Consideram cruel que um homem que sofreu violência se torne escravo do que o violentou e só tem sobre ele a vantagem da força. Este, pelo menos, é um ponto muito controverso para eles e, se têm muitos contraditores, têm também muitos partidários, mesmo entre os filósofos.” “uns não podem separar o direito da benevolência, outros afirmam que é da própria essência do direito que o mais valente comande. (…) A superioridade de coragem não é uma razão para sujeitar os outros.”
“Ora, o escravo faz, por assim dizer, parte de seu senhor: embora separado na existência, é como um membro anexado a seu corpo. Ambos têm o mesmo interesse e nada impede que estejam ligados pelo sentimento da amizade, quando foi a conveniência natural que os reuniu.”
“O governo doméstico é uma espécie de monarquia: toda casa se governa por uma só pessoa; o governo civil, pelo contrário, pertence a todos os que são livres e iguais.”
“em Siracusa, uma espécie de preceptor abriu uma escola de escravidão e exigia dinheiro para preparar as crianças para este estado, com todos os pormenores de suas funções. Pode haver um ensino completo dessa espécie de profissão, assim como existem preceitos para a cozinha e outros gêneros de serviço, ou mais estimados, ou mais necessários, pois também o serviço tem os seus graus.”
“Há servos e servos e há senhores e senhores.”
“Quanto à ciência do senhor, como não é nem na aquisição, nem na posse, mas no uso de seus escravos que está o seu domínio, ela se reduz a saber fazer uso deles, isto é, a saber ordenar-lhes o que eles devem saber fazer.” APLICAÇÃO DOMÉSTICA RETROATIVA: Meu pai, senhor, não era um bom administrador, por isso perdeu o controle de seus escravos.
(cont.) “Não há aí nenhum trabalho grande ou sublime, e assim os que têm meios de evitar esse estorvo desembaraçam-se dele com algum intendente, quer para se dedicar à política, quer para se dedicar à filosofia.” Para se dedicar ao trabalho (como escravo de outros senhores), o caso do meu progenitor em particular. Com isso, nenhuma vantagem obteve, pois não havia superintendente. Nossos casos são análogos se eu pensar naquilo em que me dedico, tendo escasso tempo para ordenar uma futura humanidade a fazer o que eu quero. Mas como não viverei para fruir de uma eventual decepção, estou em vantagem. Sempre posso acreditar, até a minha morte, que fui um melhor mestre!
“O talento para adquirir um bem parece-se mais com a arte militar ou com a caça.” “A arte de adquirir bens será idêntica à ciência do governo doméstico? Faz parte dela ou será apenas um de seus meios?”
“É uma primeira questão dizer se a agricultura, que é apenas uma maneira de obter os alimentos necessários à vida, ou alguma outra indústria que também tenha os alimentos como objeto, pertencem à arte de se enriquecer.”
“Mas existe também um outro gênero de bens e de meios que comumente chamamos, e com razão, especulativo, e que parece não ter limites.”
“Tampouco foi a natureza que produziu o comércio que consiste em comprar para revender mais caro. A troca era um expediente necessário para proporcionar a cada um a satisfação de suas necessidades. Ela não era necessária na sociedade primitiva das famílias, onde tudo era comum.”
“Quando uma tribo tem de sobra o que falta a outra, elas permutam o que têm de supérfluo através de trocas recíprocas; vinho por trigo ou outras coisas que lhes podem ser de uso, e nada mais. Trata-se de um gênero de comércio que não está nem fora das intenções da natureza, nem tampouco é uma das maneiras naturais de aumentar seus pertences, mas sim um modo engenhoso de satisfazer as respectivas necessidades.”
“Não era cômodo transportar para longe as mercadorias ou outras produções para trazer outras, sem estar certo de encontrar aquilo que se procurava, nem que aquilo que se levava conviria. Podia acontecer que não se precisasse do supérfluo dos outros, ou que não precisassem do vosso. Estabeleceu-se, portanto, dar e receber reciprocamente em troca algo que, além de seu valor intrínseco, apresentasse a comodidade de ser mais manejável e de transporte mais fácil, como o metal, tanto o ferro quanto a prata ou qualquer outro, que primeiramente se determinou pelo volume ou pelo peso e a seguir se marcou com um sinal distintivo de seu valor, a fim de não se precisar medi-lo ou pesá-lo a toda hora.”
“Tendo a moeda sido inventada, portanto, para as necessidades de comércio, originou-se dela uma nova maneira de comerciar e adquirir. A princípio, era bastante simples; depois, com o tempo, passou a ser mais refinada, quando se soube de onde e de que maneira se podia tirar dela o maior lucro possível. É este lucro pecuniário que ela postula; ela só se ocupa em procurar de onde vem mais dinheiro: é a mãe das grandes fortunas. De fato, comumente se faz consistir a riqueza na grande quantidade de dinheiro.” “Ora, é absurdo chamar riquezas um metal cuja abundância não impede de se morrer de fome; prova disso é o Midas da fábula, a quem o céu, para puni-lo de sua insaciável avareza, concedera o dom de transformar em ouro tudo o que tocasse.” “As verdadeiras riquezas são as da natureza; apenas elas são objeto da ciência econômica.”
“A outra maneira de enriquecer pertence ao comércio, profissão voltada inteiramente para o dinheiro, que sonha com ele, que não tem outro elemento nem outro fim, que não tem limite onde possa deter-se a cupidez.” “O fim a que se propõe o comércio não tem limite determinado. Ele compreende todos os bens que se podem adquirir; mas é menos a sua aquisição do que seu uso o objeto da ciência econômica; esta, portanto, está necessariamente restrita a uma quantidade determinada.”
“O dinheiro serve ao comerciante para dois usos análogos e alternativos: um, para comprar as coisas e revendê-las mais caro; outro, para emprestar e retirar, após o prazo estabelecido, seu capital com juros. Estes dois ramos do seu tráfico não diferem, como se vê, senão porque um interpõe as coisas para aumentar o dinheiro, enquanto o outro o faz servir imediatamente ao seu próprio aumento.”
“A coragem, por exemplo, não foi dada ao homem pela natureza para acumular bens, mas para proporcionar tranqüilidade. Não é esse tampouco o objeto da profissão militar, nem o da medicina, tendo uma por objeto vencer, e outra curar.” “elas se tornam o único fim da maioria das pessoas que entram nessas carreiras e subordinam tudo à meta que se propuseram.”
“para a família gozar de saúde, convém mais o médico do que o chefe de família; assim como para o abastecimento e a abundância, este cuidado pode caber antes aos ministros do Estado.”
“O que há de mais odioso, sobretudo, do que o tráfico de dinheiro, que consiste em dar para ter mais e com isso desvia a moeda de sua destinação primitiva?” “em grego demos à moeda o nome de tokos, que significa progenitura, porque as coisas geradas se parecem com as que as geraram.”
“Existem escritores que se ocuparam desses diversos assuntos, tais como Carés de Paros, Apolodoro de Lemnos, autores de tratados sobre a cultura dos campos e dos pomares, e outros ainda, sobre outras matérias. Os curiosos devem consultá-los.”
“Como censuravam Tales de Mileto pela pobreza e zombavam de sua inútil filosofia, o conhecimento dos astros permitiu-lhe prever que haveria abundância de olivas. Tendo juntado todo o dinheiro que podia, ele alugou, antes do fim do inverno, todas as prensas de óleo de Mileto e de Quios. Conseguiu-as a bom preço, porque ninguém oferecera melhor e ele dera algum adiantamento. Feita a colheita, muitas pessoas apareceram ao mesmo tempo para conseguir as prensas e ele as alugou pelo preço que quis. Tendo ganhado muito dinheiro, mostrou a seus amigos que para os filósofos era muito fácil enriquecer, mas que eles não se importavam com isso. Foi assim que mostrou sua sabedoria. Em geral, o monopólio é um meio rápido de fazer fortuna. Assim, algumas cidades, quando precisam de dinheiro, usam desse recurso. Reservam-se a si mesmas a faculdade de vender certas mercadorias e, por conseguinte, de fixar seus preços como querem.
Na Sicília, um homem que obtivera vários depósitos de dinheiro apoderou-se dos ferros das forjas. Quando os mercadores vieram de todas as partes para obtê-los, só ele pôde vendê-los, contentando-se com o dobro, de maneira que o que lhe custara 50 talentos vendia por 100. Dionísio, o tirano, informado do caso, não confiscou seu lucro, mas ordenou-lhe que saísse de Siracusa por ter imaginado, para enriquecer, um expediente prejudicial aos interesses do chefe de Estado. Aquele homem tivera a mesma idéia que Tales: ambos do monopólio fizeram uma arte.”
“É bom que os que governam os Estados conheçam esse recurso, pois é preciso dinheiro para as despesas públicas e para as despesas domésticas, e o Estado está menos do que ninguém em condições de dispensá-lo. Assim, o capítulo das finanças é quase o único a que alguns prestam atenção.”
“A autoridade dos pais sobre os filhos é uma espécie de realeza; todos os títulos ali se encontram: o da geração, o da autoridade afetuosa e o da idade. É até mesmo o protótipo da autoridade real; foi o que fez com que Homero dissesse de Zeus:
É o pai imortal dos homens e dos deuses”¹
¹ Interessante que é uma paternidade “que não passa”; além do mais, Zeus segue eternamente mais jovem que seus ancestrais. Ele não é o protótipo da realeza, mas do despotismo.
“Deve uma mulher ser sábia, corajosa e justa? Deve uma criança ter contenção e sobriedade?”
“Se as mesmas qualidades lhes são necessárias, por que então o mando cabe a um e a obediência a outro? A diferença entre os dois não é do mais para o menos, mas sim específica e produz efeitos essencialmente diversos.” Ininteligível.
“Todos têm, portanto, virtudes morais, mas a temperança, a força, a justiça não devem ser, como pensava Sócrates, as mesmas num homem e numa mulher. A força de um homem consiste em se impor; a de uma mulher, em vencer a dificuldade de obedecer.”
“Mais vale, como Górgias, estabelecer a lista das virtudes do que se deter em semelhantes definições e imitar, no mais, a precisão do poeta que disse que
um modesto silêncio é a honra da mulher,
ao passo que não fica bem no homem.”
“um profissional está numa espécie de servidão limitada; mas a natureza que faz os escravos não faz os sapateiros, nem os outros artesãos.”
“A educação das mulheres e das crianças deve ser da alçada do Estado, já que importa à felicidade do Estado que as mulheres e as crianças sejam virtuosas.”
“O Estado é o sujeito constante da política e do governo; a constituição política não é senão a ordem dos habitantes que o compõem.”
“Alguém que é cidadão numa democracia não o é numa oligarquia.” “É cidadão aquele que, no país em que reside, é admitido na jurisdição e na deliberação. É a universalidade deste tipo de gente, com riqueza suficiente para viver de modo independente, que constitui a cidade ou o Estado. O costume é dar o nome de cidadão apenas àquele que nasceu de pais cidadãos. De nada serviria que o pai o fosse, se a mãe não for.”
“Operários (artesãos, comerciantes) livres não são cidadãos. As obras da virtude são impraticáveis para quem quer que leve uma vida mecânica e mercenária.” “Em Tebas, o próprio comércio dificulta o acesso à cidadania. Havia uma lei que exigia que se tivesse fechado a loja e deixado de vender há dez anos para ser admitido.”
HOMEM DE BEM X BOM CIDADÃO
virtudes absolutas (nobreza)¹ X virtude limitada ou específica (mediania)
Todo homem de bem é bom cidadão.
Poucos bons cidadãos são também homens de bem.
Sempre comanda (porém, via de regra, em Ari., quem sabe comandar também sabe obedecer)¹ X deve sempre saber obedecer e não lhe está vedado saber comandar (ex: o soldado de ontem pode ser o general de amanhã, que é um servo do governo)
¹ Segundo Aristóteles, as mulheres não estão excluídas da classe suprema (homens de bem), mas suas limitações são evidentes (devem mais obedecer que comandar, ser discretas, guardar-se de atos de valentia).
“num grupo de dançarinos, é preciso mais talento para o papel de corifeu do que para o de corista. A desigualdade de mérito é, pois, evidente.”
“Entre as pessoas que estão em servidão, é preciso contar os trabalhadores manuais que vivem, como indica seu nome, do trabalho de suas mãos e os artesãos que se ocupam dos ofícios sórdidos.” Definição do “idiota político” clássico (ou antigo), que não é nem homem de bem nem cidadão.
Ah, a poluição da palavra!
* * *
“Aqueles que se propõem [a] dar aos Estados uma boa constituição prestam atenção principalmente nas virtudes e nos vícios que interessam à sociedade civil, e não há nenhuma dúvida de que a verdadeira cidade (a que não o é somente de nome) deve estimar acima de tudo a virtude.
Sem isso, não será mais do que uma liga ou associação de armas, diferindo das outras ligas apenas pelo lugar, isto é, pela circunstância indiferente da proximidade ou do afastamento respectivo dos membros. Sua lei não é senão uma simples convenção de garantia, capaz, diz o sofista Licofrão, de mantê-los no dever recíproco, mas incapaz de torná-los bons e honestos cidadãos.”
“Eles fizeram um pacto de não-agressão no que toca a seus comércios e até prometeram tomar armas para sua mútua defesa, mas não têm outra comunicação a não ser o comércio e seus tratados. Mais uma vez, esta não será uma sociedade civil. Por quê, então?” “A cidade, portanto, NÃO é precisamente uma comunidade de lugar, nem foi instituída simplesmente para se defender contra as injustiças de outrem ou para estabelecer comércio. Tudo isso deve existir antes da formação do Estado, mas não basta para constituí-lo.”
“É isto o que chamamos uma vida feliz e honesta. A sociedade civil é, pois, menos uma sociedade de vida comum do que uma sociedade de honra e de virtude.”
PAI & FILHO, CARA & COROA: “Todos vemos que não é pelos bens exteriores que se adquirem e conservam as virtudes, mas sim que é pelos talentos e virtudes que se adquirem e conservam os bens exteriores e que, quer se faça consistir a felicidade no prazer ou na virtude, ou em ambos, os que têm inteligência e costumes excelentes a alcançam mais facilmente com uma fortuna medíocre do que os que têm mais do que o necessário e carecem dos outros bens.” “Os bens da alma não são apenas honestos, mas também úteis, e quanto mais excederem a medida comum, mais terão utilidade.” “A felicidade é muito diferente da boa fortuna. Vêm-nos da fortuna os bens exteriores, mas ninguém é justo ou prudente graças a ela, nem por seu meio.”
“Que vida preferir, a que toma parte do governo e dos negócios públicos ou a vida retirada e livre de todos os embaraços do gênero? Não entra no plano da Polítíca determinar o quê pode convir a cada indivíduo, mas sim o que convém à pluralidade. Em nossa Étíca, aliás, tratamos do primeiro ponto.”
AS MELHORES CONSTITUIÇÕES APUD GRÉCIA ANTIGA: “Em Esparta e em Creta, a quase totalidade de sua disciplina e de suas numerosas regras é dirigida para a guerra. Em todas as nações que têm o poder de crescer, entre os citas, entre os persas, entre os trácios, entre os celtas, não há nenhuma profissão mais estimada do que a das armas. Em alguns lugares, existem leis para estimular a coragem guerreira. Em Cartago, as pessoas são decoradas com tantos anéis quantas foram as campanhas que fizeram. Na Macedônia, uma lei pretendia que aqueles que não houvessem matado nenhum inimigo tivessem que andar de cabresto. Entre os citas, aquele que estivesse nesse caso sofria a afronta de não beber à roda, na taça das refeições solenes. A Ibéria, nação belicosa, levanta ao redor das tumbas tantos obeliscos quantos inimigos o defunto matou.”
“Não é ofício nem do médico nem do piloto persuadir ou fazer violência, um a seus doentes, o outro a seus marinheiros. Mas muitos parecem considerar a dominação como o objeto da política, e aquilo que não cremos nem justo nem útil para nós não temos vergonha de tentar contra os outros.” “Se a natureza estabeleceu esta distinção, pelo menos não se deve tentar dominar a todos, mas apenas aos que só servem para serem submetidos. É assim que não se vai à caça para pegar os homens e comê-los ou matá-los, mas apenas para pegar os animais selvagens que são comestíveis.”
“não é exato elevar a inação acima da vida ativa, já que a felicidade consiste em ação, e as ações dos homens justos e moderados têm sempre fins honestos.”
“Entre semelhantes, a honestidade e a justiça consistem em que cada um tenha a sua vez. Apenas isto conserva a igualdade. A desigualdade entre iguais e as distinções entre semelhantes são contra a natureza e, por conseguinte, contra a honestidade. Se, porém, se encontrasse alguém que ultrapassasse todos os outros em mérito e em poder e tivesse provado seu valor com grandes façanhas, seria belo ceder a ele e justo obedecer-lhe. Mas não basta ter mérito, é preciso ter bastante energia e atividade para estar certo do êxito.”
“Como a maioria dos homens tem mania de dominar os outros para obter todas as comodidades, Tíbron e todos os que escreveram sobre o governo de Esparta parecem admirar seu legislador por ter aumentado muito seu império, tendo exercitado a nação nos perigos da guerra. Mas, agora que os espartanos não dominam mais, deixaram de ser felizes, e seu legislador de merecer sua reputação. Não é ridículo que, persistindo sob as leis de Licurgo e não tendo nada que os impedisse de valer-se delas, eles tenham deixado escapar sua felicidade?”
“Não é um sinal de sabedoria para o legislador treinar seu povo para vencer seus vizinhos. Disso só podem resultar grandes males, e aquele que for bem-sucedido não vai deixar de investir contra a sua própria pátria e, se puder, de assenhorear-se dela. Essa é a censura que os espartanos fazem ao rei Pausânias, cuja ambição não se contentou com este alto grau de honra.”
“Ao fazer a guerra, vários Estados se conservaram, mas, assim que conquistaram a superioridade, entraram em decadência, semelhantes ao ferro que se enferruja pela inação.”
“Não há repouso para os escravos, diz o provérbio. Ora, os que não têm coragem para se expor aos perigos tornam-se escravos de seus agressores.”
“os que parecem felizes e, semelhantes aos habitantes das Ilhas Afortunadas de que falam os poetas, gozam de tudo o que pode contribuir para a felicidade, precisam mais do que os outros de justiça e de temperança. Quanto mais opulência e lazer tiverem, mais precisarão de filosofia, de moderação e de justiça, e o Estado que quiser ser feliz e florescente deve inculcar-lhes estas virtudes o máximo possível. Se há algo de ignóbil em não saber gozar das riquezas, há bem mais ainda em fazer mau uso delas quando só se tem isso para fazer. É revoltante que homens, aliás, dignos de estima nos trabalhos e nos perigos da guerra se comportem como escravos no descanso e na paz.”
“há dois tipos de hábitos, uns apaixonados, ou provindos da sensibilidade, outros intelectuais. E, assim como o corpo é gerado antes da alma, a parte carente de razão o é, igualmente, antes da razoável. Isto se observa pelos rasgos de cólera, pelos desejos e pelas vontades mostradas pelas crianças tão logo nascem.”
“deve preocupar-se com a sucessão das crianças; que não haja entre elas e os pais uma distância de idade grande demais, pois neste caso os filhos não podem mostrar seu reconhecimento aos pais na velhice, nem os pais podem ajudar seus filhos tanto quanto preciso.”
“O final da procriação ocorre, para os homens, aos 70 anos; para as mulheres, aos 50. Sua união deve começar na mesma proporção. A dos adolescentes não vale nada para a progenitura. Em todas as espécies animais, os frutos prematuros de sujeitos jovens demais, sobretudo se se tratar da fêmea, são imperfeitos, fracos e de pequena estatura. O mesmo ocorre com a espécie humana. Observa-se, com efeito, esta imperfeição em todos os lugares em que as pessoas se casam jovens demais. Só nascem abortos.” Continuando com a proporção 70/50: 20/14, 30/21, 40/28, 50/35…
“Aquelas que conhecem cedo demais o uso das familiaridades conjugais são de ordinário mais lascivas. Por outro lado, nada retarda ou detém mais depressa o crescimento dos moços jovens do que se entregar cedo demais ao relacionamento com as mulheres, sem esperar que a natureza tenha neles elaborado completamente o licor prolífico. Há para o crescimento uma época precisa, além da qual não se cresce mais.”
“verdadeira idade para casar as moças é aos 18 anos e para os homens aos 37, aproximadamente. Com isso a conjunção dos corpos se fará em pleno vigor, e a geração, depois, terminará num tempo conveniente tanto para um como para outro. Da mesma forma, a sucessão dos filhos a seus pais estará melhor colocada, se nascerem convenientemente no intervalo entre a força da idade e o declínio, que começa por volta dos 70.” [!!!]
“Quanto à estação do ano própria à geração, o inverno é a que mais convém, como hoje se observa quase em toda parte.” “os físicos ensinam que ventos são favoráveis ao ato sexual; por exemplo, eles preferem o vento do norte ao do sul.”
“Diremos somente que a compleição atlética não é útil nem à saúde, nem à geração, nem aos empregos civis; o mesmo ocorre com os corpos fracos, acostumados ao regime médico.”
Pedonomia: parte da pedagogia que estipula as regras (formas) da aplicação da pedagogia, i.e., do conteúdo em si da educação.
“Se o corpo precisa de movimento, o espírito necessita de repouso e de tranqüilidade. No ventre da mãe os filhos recebem, como os frutos da terra, a impressão do bem e do mal.”
“Sobre o destino das crianças recém-nascidas, deve haver uma lei que decida os que serão expostos e os que serão criados. Não seja permitido criar nenhuma que nasça mutilada, isto é, sem algum de seus membros; determine-se, pelo menos, para evitar a sobrecarga do número excessivo, se não for permitido pelas leis do país abandoná-los, até que número de filhos se pode ter e se faça abortarem as mães antes que seu fruto tenha sentimento e vida, pois é nisto que se distingue a supressão perdoável da que é atroz.” Até eugênicos antigos têm escrúpulos morais “anteprotestantes”…
“Desde os primeiros momentos do nascimento, é bom acostumar as crianças ao frio; isto faz um bem infinito à saúde e dispõe às funções militares.”
“Na idade seguinte, até os cinco anos, não é conveniente dar nada para as crianças aprenderem, nem submetê-las a qualquer trabalho. Isto poderia impedir seu crescimento. Basta mantê-las em movimento para preservar seus corpos da preguiça e do peso. Este movimento deve consistir apenas nas funções da vida e nas brincadeiras, tomando cuidado somente para que elas não sejam nem desonestas nem penosas, nem destituídas demais de ação.”
“Em certos lugares, comete-se o erro de proibir à criança o choro e os movimentos expansivos. Todos estes atos servem para seu desenvolvimento e fazem parte, por assim dizer, dos exercícios corporais. O ato de reter a respiração dá força aos que trabalham. Isto também ocorre no próprio esforço das crianças para gritar.”
“impedir muita conversa e familiaridade, sobretudo com os escravos.”
SIGA SEU MESTRE: “Se proibimos as conversas indecentes, com mais forte razão proibiremos as pinturas e as exibições do mesmo gênero. Os magistrados, portanto, não admitirão nem estátuas, nem pinturas lúbricas, a não ser as de certas divindades cujo culto a lei reserva aos homens adultos, a quem ela permite sacrifícios, tanto por eles quanto por suas mulheres e crianças.”
“Também se deve proibir aos jovens os teatros e sobretudo a comédia, até que tenham atingido a idade de participar das refeições públicas e a boa educação os tenha colocado em condições de experimentar impunemente a bebedeira dos banquetes, sem contrair a embriaguez ou os outros vícios que a acompanham. Passaremos rapidamente por esta matéria, para voltar a ela uma outra vez e discutir se este costume deve ser mantido, e como.”
“Não há de se aprovar, segundo cremos, a partilha que fazem certas pessoas que dividem toda a vida de 7 em 7 anos. Mais vale seguir o ritmo da natureza. Ela apenas esboçou suas obras. A obra da educação, assim como a de todas as artes, deve unicamente completar o que falta ao ser das obras da natureza.”
“Como não há senão um fim comum a todo o Estado, só deve haver uma mesma educação para todos os súditos. Ela deve ser feita não em particular, como hoje, quando cada um cuida de seus filhos, que educa segundo sua fantasia e conforme lhe agrada; ela deve ser feita em público. Tudo o que é comum deve ter exercícios comuns. É preciso, ademais, que todo cidadão se convença de que ninguém é de si mesmo, mas todos pertencem ao Estado, de que cada um é parte e que, portanto, o governo de cada parte deve naturalmente ter como modelo o governo do todo.”
“Não se sabe se se deve ensinar às crianças as coisas úteis à vida ou as que conduzem à virtude, ou as altas ciências, que se podem dispensar. Cada uma destas opiniões tem seus partidários. Não há nem mesmo nada de certo a respeito da virtude, não sendo o mesmo gênero de virtude apreciado unanimemente. Também se diverge sobre o gênero de exercícios a praticar.”
“Não é fora de propósito conceder algum tempo a certas ciências, mas entregar-se a elas por inteiro e querer ser consumado nelas não deixa de ter seus inconvenientes e pode ser nocivo às graças da imaginação.”
“Quanto à música, sua utilidade não é igualmente reconhecida. Muitos hoje a aprendem apenas por prazer. Mas os antigos fizeram dela, desde os primeiros tempos, uma parte da educação, pois a natureza não procura apenas dar exatidão às ações, mas também dignidade ao repouso. A música é o princípio de todos os encantos da vida.”
“Se possível, é melhor descartar o jogo entre as ocupações. Quem trabalha precisa de descanso: o jogo não foi imaginado senão para isto. O trabalho é acompanhado de fadiga e de esforços. É preciso entremeá-lo convenientemente de recreações, como um remédio.”
“Não que ela seja necessária: ela não o é. Não que ela tenha tanta importância quanto a escrita, que serve para o comércio, para a administração doméstica, para as ciências e para a maioria das funções civis, ou quanto a pintura, que nos permite julgar melhor a obra dos artistas, ou quanto a ginástica, que ajuda a saúde e o desenvolvimento das forças; a música não faz nada disso.Mas ela serve pelo menos para passar agradavelmente o lazer. É por isso que ela foi posta na moda. Ela pareceu a seus inventores a diversão mais conveniente às pessoas livres.”
“Existem povos que não evitam os massacres e são ávidos de carne humana, mas que, quando atacados, são tudo, menos valentes; por exemplo, os aqueus e os heniocos do Ponto Euxino, e outras nações mais distantes que pertencem às terras da mesma região, sendo que as outras preferem a profissão de ladrões.”
“Aqueles que expõem em demasia os jovens aos exercícios do ginásio e os deixam sem instrução sobre as coisas mais necessárias, fazem deles, na verdade, apenas reles guarda-costas, que servem no máximo para uma das funções da vida civil, uma função, porém, que, se consultarmos a razão, é a menor de todas. Não é por suas proezas antigas, mas sim pelas do presente que devem ser julgados.”
“até a puberdade só se praticarão exercícios leves, sem sujeitar os corpos aos excessos de alimentação, nem aos trabalhos violentos, por temor de que isso impeça o crescimento. A prova do efeito funesto deste regime forçado é que entre os que venceram nos jogos olímpicos em sua juventude dificilmente se encontrarão dois ou três que também venceram numa idade mais avançada. Por que isto? Porque a violência dos exercícios a que se tinham submetido desde a infância esgotara sua força e seu vigor.”
PRÉ-ROUSSEAU: “Com efeito, não se deve atormentar ao mesmo tempo o espírito e o corpo. Desses exercícios, um impede o outro; o do corpo é nocivo ao espírito, e o do espírito ao corpo.”
“Se estiver em nosso poder escolhê-la segundo o desejo, a situação da Cidade deve ser próxima do mar e do campo; assim, a ajuda seria fácil de um lugar para outro e de toda parte, assim como a exportação e a importação das mercadorias. Haveria comodidade para transportar a madeira e todos os outros materiais do país.” “a comodidade do mar faz com que se envie para o exterior ou se receba na cidade uma multidão de mercadores, o que é igualmente pernicioso para o Estado.” “Somente a atração do lucro faz com que estabeleça em seu território mercados abertos a todos. Há aí uma avareza condenável, e não é assim que um Estado ou uma cidade devem praticar o comércio.”
“Os soldados da marinha, pelo contrário, são livres e, assim como seus oficiais, provêm da infantaria. São eles que comandam os marinheiros [que, diferente dos soldados da marinha, não são cidadãos]. Quanto à tripulação, é completada com camponeses e lavradores dos arredores. É o que se pratica em certos lugares, por exemplo Heracléia, cujas galeras estão sempre bem-tripuladas, embora a cidade seja muito menor do que várias outras.”
“se as águas são raras ou de diversas qualidades, deve-se separar, como se faz nas cidades bem-cuidadas, as que são boas para beber das que podem servir para outros usos.”
“no que se refere às casas particulares, elas serão bem mais agradáveis e mais cômodas se seu espaço for bem-distribuído, com uma estrutura à maneira moderna, ao gosto de Hipódamos.¹”
¹ Hipódamos de Mileto foi um polímata do século V a.C., tido como fundador da concepção de Planejamento Urbano, que estendia a preocupação da arquitetura para toda a polis em si. Planejou pela primeira vez a simetria geométrica da disposição das ruas e das casas e, ao mesmo tempo, a existência de um centro despovoado e amplamente aberto, i.e., a Ágora. As casas que ele planejou eram mais espaçosas e tinham dois andares.
“Não se alinharão todas as ruas de um extremo ao outro, mas apenas certas partes, tanto quanto o permitir a segurança e o exigir a decoração.”
“Embora não seja muito honroso opor muros de defesa a guerreiros da mesma têmpera que não têm uma grande vantagem numérica, é possível que os sitiantes consigam um tal acréscimo de forças que todo valor humano, mas com poucas pessoas, não possa resistir-lhes. Portanto, se não se quer morrer, nem se expor ao ultraje, deve-se considerar como uma das medidas mais autorizadas pelas leis da guerra manter suas muralhas no melhor estado de fortificação, principalmente hoje, quando se imaginaram tantos instrumentos e máquinas engenhosas para atacar fortificações. Não querer cercar as cidades com muros é como abrir o país às incursões dos inimigos e retirar os obstáculos de sua frente, ou como se recusar a fechar com muros as casas particulares, de medo que os que nelas habitam se tornem medrosos.”
“é claro que num Estado tão perfeitamente constituído que não admita como cidadãos senão pessoas de bem, não apenas sob certos aspectos, mas integralmente virtuosos, não devemos contar entre eles aqueles que exercem profissões mecânicas ou comerciais, sendo esse gênero de vida ignóbil e contrário à virtude” TERCEIRA REPETIÇÃO!
“primeiro, na juventude, o comando da força armada para defender o Estado; depois, quando maduros, a autoridade para governá-lo.”
“Convém não ligar ao culto divino senão cidadãos, e não se devem educar para o sacerdócio nem lavradores que puxam arado, nem trabalhadores que saem de sua forja. Tendo a universalidade dos cidadãos sido dividida em duas classes, a dos homens de guerra e a dos homens de lei, é aí que se devem tomar os ministros da religião.”
“Esta necessidade de dividir o Estado em classes diversas, segundo a variedade das funções, e de separar os homens de guerra dos lavradores não é uma invenção de hoje, nem um segredo recém-descoberto pelos filósofos que se ocupam de política. Tal distinção foi introduzida no Egito pelas leis de Sesóstris e em Creta pelas de Minos.¹ Elas ainda subsistem atualmente nestes lugares.”
¹ Afinal de contas Minos ter existido como homem de carne e osso é hipótese tão verossímil quanto com Licurgo e Sólon?
“Os sábios do país contam que um certo Italus foi rei na Enótria. Os habitantes tomaram seu nome e, em vez de enotrianos, se chamaram italianos. O nome de Itália ficou também para a costa da Europa entre o golfo de Cilética e o golfo Lamético, distantes meia jornada um do outro. Segundo estes historiadores, foi Italus quem, de pastores errantes, tornou os enotrianos lavradores sedentários. Entre outras leis que lhes deu, estabeleceu pela primeira vez que comessem juntos. Este costume ainda hoje se observa entre alguns de seus descendentes, assim como algumas outras de suas leis. Os ópicos, antigamente chamados ou cognominados ausônios, nome que lhes ficou, habitavam a costa do Tirreno; e os caonianos, descendentes dos enotrianos, a praia chamada Sirtes, entre a Lapígia e a Jônia.”
“É bem crível que muitas outras coisas foram inventadas várias vezes, talvez ao infinito, na longa seqüência dos séculos. Ao que parece, inicialmente a necessidade inventou as coisas necessárias; em seguida, por adjunção, as que servem para um maior conforto e para ornamento. O mesmo ocorre com a legislação e as constituições civis. Podemos conjeturar como elas são antigas pelo exemplo dos egípcios, que remontam à mais alta antiguidade e desde sempre tiveram leis e uma constituição. Cabe a nós aproveitar suas boas invenções e lhes acrescentar o que lhes falta.”
“Todos concordam que as mesas comuns e as refeições públicas convêm às cidades bem-organizadas politicamente. Isto também nos agrada, mas é preciso que nelas todos os cidadãos sejam recebidos gratuitamente; caso contrário, não será fácil para aqueles que só têm o estrito necessário fornecer a sua parte e ainda arcar com o sustento de sua família.”
* * *
DA CÉLEBRE DIVISÃO ENTRE AS FORMAS DE GOVERNO
MODALIDADES IDEAIS: “Chamamos monarquia (1) o Estado em que o governo que visa a este interesse comum pertence a um só; aristocracia (2), aquele em que ele é confiado a mais de um, denominação tomada ou do fato de que as poucas pessoas a que o governo é confiado são escolhidas entre as mais honestas, ou de que elas só têm em vista o maior bem do Estado e de seus membros [aristo+cracia = governo dos melhores]; república (3), aquele em que a multidão governa para a utilidade pública; este nome também é comum a todos os Estados.”
MODALIDADES CORROMPIDAS: “A tirania (4) não é, de fato, senão a monarquia voltada para a utilidade do monarca; a oligarquia (5), a aristocracia voltada para a utilidade dos ricos; a democracia (6), a república voltada para a utilidade dos pobres.”
“A oligarquia estabeleceu-se desde os tempos mais remotos em todos os lugares que tinham na cavalaria a sua principal força, como os eretrianos, os de Cálcides, os magnésios do Meandro e vários outros povos asiáticos. Montava-se a cavalo para combater os inimigos dos arredores.”
1. MONARQUIA
“No Estado de Esparta,¹ p.ex., há uma monarquia das mais legítimas, mas o poder do rei não é absoluto, a não ser quando o monarca estiver fora de seus Estados e em situação de guerra, pois então ele tem a autoridade suprema sobre seu exército. Além disso, ele tem no interior a superintendência do culto e das coisas sagradas. Esta espécie de monarquia não é, pois, senão um generalato perpétuo, com plenos poderes, sem porém ter o direito de vida e de morte, a não ser em certo domínio ou, nas expedições militares, quando se está combatendo, como era costume antigamente. É o que se chama lei do golpe de mão. Homero refere-se a ela. Segundo ele, Agamêmnon, na Assembléia do povo, tolerava as palavras menos respeitosas. Fora dali, de armas na mão, tinha o poder de morte sobre os soldados delinqüentes.”
¹ Platão e Montesquieu, por exemplo, recusam o status de monarquia a Esparta/Lacedemônia.
“O comando militar inamovível é, portanto, um primeiro tipo de monarquia, sendo umas hereditárias e outras eletivas.”
DESACERTO NOS CRITÉRIOS: “Tendo os bárbaros naturalmente a alma mais servil do que os gregos e os asiáticos, eles suportam mais do que os europeus, sem murmúrios, que sejam governados pelos senhores. É por isso que essas monarquias, embora despóticas, não deixam de ser estáveis e sólidas, fundadas que são na lei e transmissíveis de pai para filho. Pela mesma razão, sua guarda é real, e não tirânica, pois os reis são protegidos por cidadãos armados, ao passo que os déspotas recorrem a estrangeiros. Aqueles governam de acordo com a lei súditos de boa vontade; estes, pessoas que só obedecem contrafeitas. Aqueles são protegidos pelos cidadãos; estes, contra os cidadãos. São, portanto, dois tipos diferentes de monarquia.”
Antes do aparecimento da figura de um César, A. prefigura a instituição do ditador da República Romana final, no plano teóricoa, como sendo um governo monárquico não-tirânico, posto que legal. É verdade que matiza este raciocínio depois: “Estes principados são, portanto, ao mesmo tempo despóticos pela maneira com que a autoridade é exercida e reais pela eleição e submissão espontânea do povo.” Este último critério transformaria quase todos os governos atuais da Terra em monarquias constitucionais, quando vemos não passar de tiranias, se é para dicotomizar entre as duas! Hitler como um monarca constitucional seria uma piada de humor negro. Mas é ao que a taxonomia aristotélica conduz…
“Os reis dos primeiros séculos tinham autoridade sobre todos os negócios de Estado, tanto dentro quanto fora, e para sempre. A partir daí, quer porque abandonaram por si mesmos uma parte da autoridade, quer porque tenham sido despojados dela pelo povo, foram reduzidos em alguns Estados à simples qualidade de soberanos sacrificadores ou pontífices e, nos lugares onde se conservou o nome de rei, à simples faculdade de comandar os exércitos além das fronteiras.”
2. ARISTOCRACIA
“O nome de aristocracia convém perfeitamente ao regime que já mencionamos acima, pois não se deve, com efeito, dar este nome senão à magistratura composta de pessoas de bem sem restrição e não a essas boas pessoas em que toda a retidão se limita ao patriotismo.”
Aristóteles perde a mão em suas classificações, sem uma exceção sequer! “Há um ar de aristocracia em toda parte onde se observa a virtude, embora sejam prezadas também a riqueza e a popularidade, como entre os espartanos, que unem a popularidade às considerações devidas à virtude. São estas duas espécies de aristocracia, além da primeira [essas subdivisões não guardam o menor interesse], as únicas a merecerem o nome de excelente e perfeita República [no sentido lato: todos os seis governos!].”
3. “REPÚBLICA” (é o próprio Aristóteles que coloca o título entre aspas!)
“Reservamo-la para o final [meio!] não por ser uma depravação da aristocracia, de que acabamos de falar (pois é normal começar, como fizemos, pelas formas puras e depois ir às formas desviadas), mas porque ela reúne o que há de bom em dois regimes degenerados, a oligarquia e a democracia.”
“Na oligarquia, a lei não concede aos pobres nenhum salário para administrar a justiça e estabelece penas contra os ricos, caso se recusem a fazer parte de uma assembléia; na democracia, a lei dá um salário aos pobres mas não aplica nenhuma pena aos ricos. A mistura conveniente ao Estado, que ocupa o meio entre estes governos e é composta pelos dois, é conceder o salário aos pobres e aplicar a multa aos ricos.”“É democrático, por exemplo, escolher os magistrados por sorteio; oligárquico, elegê-los; democrático, não considerar a renda”
SÓ PIORA: “É o que se observa em Esparta: muitos, com efeito, a colocam na classe das democracias, porque ela tem muitas instituições dessa natureza. [!!!] Na educação das crianças, a comida é a mesma para os filhos dos ricos e para os dos pobres, a mesma instrução, a mesma severidade no trato; na idade seguinte, o mesmo gênero de vida quando se tornam homens.”
Apenas definições negativas e compósitas de “república”, além de ininteligíveis! Desistam de se apoiar nesses conceitos aristotélico, pelo BEM de todos nós!
4. TIRANIA
“Quanto mais a monarquia se aproxima idealmente do governo celeste, mais sua alteração é detestável. A monarquia não passa de um vão nome, se não se distingue pela grande excelência de quem reina. O vício mais diametralmente contrário a sua instituição é a tirania. Portanto, é também o pior dos governos.”
5. OLIGARQUIA
“Os postos são concedidos aos mais ricos e nomeiam a si próprios em caso de vacância. Se a escolha se fizesse entre todos, seria aristocrática; o que a torna oligárquica é que ela se faz numa classe determinada. Todavia, não sendo poderosos o suficiente para governar sem leis, transformam em leis a preferência que se arrogam.
Se seu número diminuir e sua riqueza tiver novos aumentos, forma-se um segundo grau de oligarquia, no qual, aproveitando a ascendência que adquiriram por seus postos, fazem com que se ordene por uma nova lei que seus filhos serão seus sucessores.”
“Tendo aumentado ainda mais sua riqueza e seu crédito, a potência dos oligarcas aproxima-se da monarquia. Este vício é semelhante tanto à tirania que se introduz nas monarquias quanto à última espécie de democracia, de que falaremos. Chama-se dinastia ou, mais exatamente, politirania.”
6. DEMOCRACIA
INDIRETA A PLATÃO? “Não se deve, como costumavam fazer certas pessoas, definir simplesmente a democracia como o governo em que a maioria domina. Nas próprias oligarquias e em qualquer outra parte, é sempre a maioria que se sobressai.”
“Se os poderes se distribuíssem de acordo com a estatura [!], como acontece, segundo certos autores, na Etiópia, ou de acordo com a beleza [Ganimedolândia ou quiçá Ilha dos alcibíadas], haveria oligarquia, porque a beleza e a alta estatura não pertencem à maioria.”
Aristóteles se esquece do espírito de um governo e da tendência das sociedades. Procura uma classificação tirando fotos, ou seja, espúria e ingênua.
“Uns e outros abundam em alguns lugares, como os pescadores em Tarento e em Bizâncio, os marinheiros em Atenas, os negociantes na ilha de Egina e em Quios, os barqueiros em Tenedos. Devem-se juntar a eles os trabalhadores manuais e todos os que não são abastados o suficiente para ficar sem fazer nada, os que não nasceram de pai e mãe livres e toda espécie de populaça semelhante.”
“Como o Estado não pode existir sem magistrados e precisa de homens capazes de realizar suas funções, precisa também de pessoas que executem suas ordens e estejam encarregadas do serviço, quer para sempre, quer alienadamente.”
A CARICATURA ARISTOTÉLICA (JULGA QUE NÃO HÁ DINÂMICA DE CLASSES OU ESTRATOS, E QUE QUEM ASCENDE AO PODER NÃO ENRIQUECE NEM SE DISTINGUE EM POUCO TEMPO): “A quarta é aquela que se introduziu em último lugar nas Cidades que se tornaram maiores e mais opulentas do que eram nos primeiros tempos. Ela exibe a igualdade absoluta, isto é, a lei coloca os pobres no mesmo nível que os ricos e pretende que uns não tenham mais direito ao governo do que os outros, mas que a condição destes e daqueles seja semelhante. Pois se a alma da democracia consiste, como pensam alguns, na liberdade, sendo todos iguais a este respeito, devem ter a mesma parte nos bens civis e principalmente nos grandes cargos; e, como o povo é superior em número e o que agrada à pluralidade é lei, tal Estado deve necessariamente ser popular. Mas, se todos são indistintamente admitidos no governo, é a massa que se sobressai e, sendo os pobres assalariados, podem deixar o trabalho e permanecer ociosos, não os retendo em casa a preocupação com seus próprios negócios. É, pelo contrário, um obstáculo para os ricos que não assistem às Assembléias nem se preocupam com o papel de juiz. Resulta daí que o Estado cai no domínio da multidão indigente e se vê subtraído ao império das leis. Os demagogos calcam-nas com os pés e fazem predominar os decretos. Tal gentalha é desconhecida nas democracias que a lei governa. Os melhores cidadãos têm ali o primeiro lugar. Mas onde as leis não têm força pululam os demagogos. O povo torna-se tirano.Trata-se de um ser composto de várias cabeças; elas dominam não cada uma separadamente, mas todas juntas. Não se sabe se é desta multidão ou do governo alternado e singular de vários de que fala Homero quando diz que <não é bom ter vários senhores>. De qualquer modo, o povo, tendo sacudido o jugo da lei, quer governar só e se torna déspota. Seu governo não difere em nada da tirania. Os bajuladores são honrados, os homens de bem sujeitados. O mesmo arbítrio reina nos decretos do povo e nas ordens dos tiranos. Trata-se dos mesmos costumes. O que fazem os bajuladores de côrte junto a estes, fazem os demagogos junto ao povo. Gozam do mesmo crédito.”
“Se pretendermos que a democracia seja uma das formas de governo, então não se deverá nem mesmo dar este nome a esse caos em que tudo é governado pelos decretos do dia, não sendo então nem universal nem perpétua nenhuma medida.”
* * *
Sobre a divisão dos poderes, existente em qualquer forma de governo, em tempos bem anteriores a Montesquieu e às noções modernas…
1. ???
Devo ter ficado burro, porque me tornei incapaz de entender Aristóteles: “No que se chama democracia, principalmente na de hoje, em que o povo é senhor de tudo, até das leis, seria bom, para se conseguirem boas deliberações, que as Assembléias fossem ordenadas e regulamentadas como os tribunais das oligarquias, ou ainda melhor, se possível. Ali são aplicadas penas aos que são nomeados para a judicatura, a fim de obrigá-los a julgar, ao passo que na democracia é proposto um salário aos pobres. Ora, delibera-se melhor quando todos deliberam em comum, o povo com os nobres e os nobres com a multidão.”
“o corpo deliberativo, o verdadeiro soberano do Estado.” Quem é o <corpo deliberativo> (que deveria ser o título deste tópico 1)? Por eliminação (categorias a seguir), seria o poder legislativo. Mas pelo que se lê acima esta categoria ou corpo ou poder é uma composição caótica de tudo que entendemos por poder executivo, legislativo e judiciário hoje…
2. O PODER EXECUTIVO
“Já é difícil determinar quem são os que devem chamar-se magistrados. A sociedade civil precisa de vários servidores. O nome de magistrados não convém a todos os que são nomeados por eleição ou por sorteio. É o caso dos sacerdotes, sendo seu ministério de natureza diferente da dos ofícios políticos, dos diretores de coro, dos arautos, dos embaixadores, embora também eles sejam eletivos.” “É de pouca utilidade o modo como são chamados, já que sua denominação, que é discutível, ainda não ficou bem decidida. Mas não é de pouca importância bem distinguir os seus atributos.”
“O primeiro cuidado do governo é fazer com que se encontrem nos mercados os víveres necessários. Para tanto, deve haver um magistrado que cuide de que tudo seja feito de boa fé e que a decência seja observada.” O Brasil de hoje já não atende ao primeiro requisito de Aristóteles…
“O oficio que se segue imediatamente é de primeira necessidade, mas também de enorme dificuldade: é o de executor das sentenças de condenação, o de pregoeiro de bens apreendidos e o de guarda das prisões. É difícil prestar-se a estas funções por causa dos ódios a que elas expõem, e não se aceitam semelhantes trabalhos a menos que sejam muito lucrativos [ou que estejamos falando de indivíduos sádicos]. Quando são aceitos, não se ousa seguir o rigor da lei, que é, porém, algo indispensável. De nada serviria sustentar uma causa e obter uma sentença se não houvesse ninguém para fazer com que ela fosse obedecida. Sem a execução, é impossível que a sociedade subsista.”
“Se a mesma pessoa condena e faz executar, é alvo de um duplo ódio. Se se depara com o mesmo executor em toda parte, trata-se de um meio de fazer com que ele seja universalmente odiado.
Em vários lugares, a profissão de carcereiro é separada da de executor, como em Atenas, no tribunal dos Onze. Esta separação é uma atenuação não menos necessária do que a precedente. Tais ofícios têm a desvantagem de serem evitados pelas pessoas de bem tanto quanto possível, e não é seguro confiá-los a malandros. Estes precisam muito mais ser eles próprios vigiados do que vigiarem. Portanto, estas funções não devem pertencer a um cargo fixo, nem estar sempre nas mesmas mãos, mas sim ser realizadas ora por um, ora por outro, principalmente nos lugares em que a guarda da cidade é confiada a companhias de jovens.”
POLÍCIA: “Depois destes ofícios de maior urgência, vêm outros não menos necessários, mas de uma ordem mais elevada e de um maior valor representativo, pois exigem mais experiência e necessitam de maior confiança.” “Nos pequenos [lugares], basta para todos um comandante em chefe. Chamam-se estes chefes Estrategos ou Polemicas, a cavalaria, a infantaria ligeira, os arqueiros, a marinha têm cada qual seus oficiais particulares chamados Navarcas (almirantes), Hiparcas (generais de cavalaria), Taxiarcas (coronéis), e seus oficiais subalternos, Trierarcas, Locagos, Filarcas e outros subordinados, todos ocupados única e exclusivamente com os trabalhos de guerra.”
“Embora nem todas as funções de que acabamos de falar participem do manejo do dinheiro público, mas como algumas estão amplamente envolvidas nisso, é preciso que haja acima delas um outro magistrado que, sem que ele mesmo administre coisa alguma, faça com que os outros prestem contas de sua administração e a corrijam. Uns o chamam auditor; outros, inspetor de contas; outros, grande procurador.
Além disso, uma magistratura suprema de que dependam todas as outras é, enfim, necessária. Ela tem ao mesmo tempo o direito ordinário de impor os impostos e de inspecionar a sua percepção. Em toda parte onde o povo é senhor, ela preside às Assembléias (pois é preciso que aqueles que as convocam tenham nelas a principal autoridade). Em alguns lugares, ela é chamada a Probulia, ou Consulta, porque prepara as deliberações. Nas democracias, em que a massa decide soberanamente, dão-lhe o nome de senado.” Realmente é curioso: senado executor!
“Recapitulando toda esta exposição, constataremos que todos os ofícios ou ministérios necessários têm por objeto quer as honras devidas ao Ser supremo, quer o serviço militar, quer a administração das finanças, vale dizer, a receita ou a despesa das rendas públicas, quer o abastecimento dos mercados ou a polícia das cidades, dos portos e dos campos, além da administração da justiça, o tabelionato dos contratos, a execução das sentenças, a guarda das prisões, a auditoria e o exame das contas, a reforma dos abusos e das prevaricações, enfim, as deliberações sobre os negócios de Estado.
Os povos que gozam de maior lazer e de uma paz profunda, ou que estão em condições de sentir o secreto encanto do bem-estar e de obtê-lo para si mesmos, têm ofícios próprios, como a Nomofilacia ou guarda das leis, a inspeção do comportamento das mulheres, a disciplina das crianças, o reitorado dos ginásios, a intendência dos exercícios ginásticos, das festas de Baco e outros espetáculos do mesmo gênero.
Destes ofícios, alguns – como a disciplina das mulheres e das crianças – não convêm à democracia, cujo povo quase só é composto de pobres que, não tendo condições de se fazer servir por outros, são forçados a empregar suas mulheres e suas crianças como domésticos.”
“Nas cidades pequenas, a falta de gente força a que se confiram vários ofícios à mesma pessoa. Não se encontram pessoas nem para todas as funções, nem para a sucessão de cada uma delas. Às vezes, porém, elas precisam das mesmas magistraturas e da mesma constituição que as grandes, com a única diferença de que umas são com freqüência forçadas a voltar sempre às mesmas pessoas, e as outras só são obrigadas a isto após longos intervalos. É assim que se suspendem em um mesmo lustre várias velas.”
“É própria da aristocracia a inspeção das mulheres e das crianças. Tal função não é nem democrática, nem oligárquica. Como, com efeito, impedir as mulheres dos pobres de saírem ou censurar as mulheres dos oligarcas, acostumadas a viver no luxo?”
“Estas diversidades podem combinar-se duas a duas, de modo que tais magistrados sejam eleitos por tais cidadãos e os outros por todos; uns escolhidos dentre eles, outros tirados de tal classe; uns escolhidos por sorteio, outros por eleição.”
3. O PODER JUDICIÁRIO
“Além destes tribunais [sete], existem juízes para os casos mínimos, tais como os de 1 até 5 dracmas, ou pouco mais, pois, se é preciso julgar estas queixas, elas não merecem ser levadas diante dos grandes tribunais.”
Nada de relevo neste tópico. Aliás, a obra como um todo se mostra fraca, indigna do maior discípulo de Platão.
* * *
“Os povos que habitam as regiões frias, principalmente da Europa, são pessoas corajosas, mas de pouca inteligência e poucos talentos. Vivem melhor em liberdade, pouco civilizados, de resto, e incapazes de governar seus vizinhos.
Os asiáticos são mais inteligentes e mais próprios para as artes, mas nem um pouco corajosos, e por isso mesmo são sujeitados por quase todos e estão sempre sob o domínio de algum senhor.” Um preconceito eterno?
“Situados entre as duas regiões, os gregos também participam de ambas. (…) Poderiam mandar no mundo inteiro se formassem um só povo e tivessem um só governo.”
PSICOLOGIA AGORA? “O coração é, de fato, a faculdade da alma de que procede a benevolência e pela qual nós amamos; quando, porém, ele se crê desprezado, irrita-se mais contra as pessoas que são conhecidas e com as quais convive do que contra os desconhecidos.”
PSEUDO-OVO DE COLOMBO: “Pois não é suficiente conhecer a melhor forma, é preciso ver, em cada caso particular, qual é aquela que é possível estabelecer”
“Corrigir a constituição que existe não é menos incômodo do que instituir outras, assim como é tão difícil perder quanto contrair hábitos.”
UM POLEMISTA DE ÉPOCA: “Ora, como pode conseguir isto se ignorar quantas espécies de governo existem? Nossos atuais políticos, por exemplo, só conhecem uma espécie de democracia e de oligarquia; trata-se, como vimos, de um erro, pois existem várias.”
VIM PARA CONFUNDIR, NÃO PARA ESCLARECER: “Dir-se-á, talvez, que cabe à lei dominar e que não se pode agir de pior maneira do que substituindo-a pela vontade de um homem, sujeito como os demais a suas paixões. Mas, se a própria lei for ditada pelo espírito de oligarquia ou de democracia, de que nos servirá para elucidar a questão proposta?”
“há uma enorme afinidade entre a monarquia e a aristocracia, elas têm quase a mesma disciplina e os mesmos costumes e seus chefes não precisam de educação diferente da que forma o homem virtuoso.” “A monarquia é, na nossa opinião, um dos melhores regimes.” Vozes da cabeça de Ari.. De todo modo, ser “um dos melhores” quando existem 4 ou 5 tipos de governo não é lá grande coisa, concordam?!
SÓ FIZ MARIAS, DIGO, SOFISMARIAS: “Querer que o espírito comande equivale a querer que o comando pertença a Deus e às leis. Entregá-lo ao homem é associá-lo ao animal irracional. Com efeito, a paixão transforma todos os homens em irracionais. (…) A lei, pelo contrário, é o espírito desembaraçado de qualquer paixão.”
“A amizade supõe igualdade e semelhança.” Não leu o Lísis.
“Se antigamente se deixaram governar por reis, é, sem dúvida, porque raramente se encontravam ao mesmo tempo várias pessoas eminentes quanto ao mérito, sobretudo nas pequenas cidades, como eram as dos velhos tempos.”
ISSO É UM DADO HISTÓRICO OU UMA ASSUNÇÃO METAFÍSICA? “Mas, quando os homens de mérito começaram a se multiplicar, não se quis mais aquele governo; procurou-se algo mais conveniente ao interesse comum e se formou uma República.”
“Se supusermos, porém, que em geral a monarquia convém mais aos grandes Estados, que partido tomar com relação aos filhos dos reis? Deve ser hereditário o cetro? Ficaremos expostos a cair nas mãos de maus sucessores, como aconteceu algumas vezes. Dir-se-á que o pai terá o poder de não lhe passar a coroa. Mas não devemos esperar por isto: esta renúncia está muito acima da virtude que a natureza humana comporta.”
“alguém aconselhou aos siracusanos que regulassem da mesma forma a importância da guarda que lhes pedia Dionísio.” Quem você quer nomear quando não nomeia?
“Mas já falei bastante da monarquia” Sim, já falaste bastante de muitas coisas e mal cheguei à metade da obra…
DANCE CONFORME A MÚSICA: “como a harmonia é dividida por alguns em dois modos, o dórico e o frígio, aos quais relacionam todos os demais e dão nome a todas as suas composições musicais, de ordinário se formam, a exemplo desses dois modos, todas as Repúblicas. Mas é melhor só admitir como bem-constituídas uma ou no máximo duas espécies. As outras são como que desvios ou da boa harmonia, ou do bom governo”
“A igualdade parece ser a base do direito, e o é efetivamente, mas unicamente para os iguais e não para todos. A desigualdade também o é, mas apenas para os desiguais. Ora uns e outros põem de lado esta restrição e se iludem, já que é sobre eles próprios que sentenciam; pois de maneira bastante ordinária os homens são maus juízes a seu próprio respeito. A igualdade da qual resulta a justiça ocorre, como igualmente o demonstra a nossa Ética, nas pessoas e nas coisas. Concorda-se facilmente sobre a igualdade das coisas.”
“Os Estados democráticos ostentam acima de tudo a igualdade. Foi este zelo que fez com que imaginassem o ostracismo. Nenhuma ascendência é tolerada, nem por riqueza, nem por credibilidade, nem por poder, e desde que um homem alcance tal preponderância é banido por um tempo determinado pela lei. A mitologia ensina-nos que foi este o motivo pelo qual os argonautas devolveram Hércules à terra e o abandonaram. Não queria remar com os outros no Argos, acreditando-se muito acima dos marinheiros.”
“O ostracismo tem por objeto apenas deter e afastar os que se distinguem demais. Os soberanos agem da mesma forma para com Estados ou nações inteiras. Foi assim que agiram os atenienses para com os de Samos, de Quios e de Lesbos. Tão logo puderam, os rebaixaram, contra a fé dos tratados. Da mesma forma, o rei da Pérsia humilhou e saqueou os medos, os babilônios e outros insolentes que não se cuidaram durante a prosperidade.”
NADA MAIS ERRADO: “o público julga melhor do que ninguém sobre música ou poesia. Uns criticam um trecho, os demais um outro, e todos captam o forte e o fraco do conjunto da obra.”
AH, ZEITGEIST! “Entendemos por médico tanto aquele que pratica a medicina como artista [acepção de formado profissionalmente] como aquele que ordena e aquele que adquiriu conhecimentos na arte tais como se encontram em todos os demais [autodidata]. Estes últimos não são menos competentes para julgar do que os doutores.”
* * *
IGUALDADE E IGUALDADE
“Ora, um dos apanágios da liberdade é que todos alternadamente mandem e obedeçam. Desta diferença entre perpetuidade e alternância dependem a disciplina e a instituição. Se houvesse uma raça de homens que superasse tanto os outros quanto imaginamos que os deuses e os heróis o fazem; se essa superioridade se manifestasse primeiramente pelo porte e pela boa aparência, depois pelas qualidades da alma, e fosse indubitável para os inferiores, o melhor sem contestação seria que seu governo fosse perpétuo e que as pessoas se submetessem a ele de uma vez por todas. Mas como, com exceção, segundo Scyllax, dos indianos, de ordinário os reis não apresentam superioridade tão acentuada sobre seus súditos, é preciso que todos os cidadãos mandem e obedeçam alternadamente, e isto por várias razões.”
“Aos descontentes se soma a gente do campo, sempre ávida de novidades, e qualquer que seja o número dos altos funcionários não pode ser grande o bastante para que eles sejam os mais fortes.”
“Ninguém se zanga ou se sente desonrado por ceder aos mais velhos, na esperança de alcançar as mesmas honras quando tiver a idade conveniente. Pode-se, portanto, dizer que os mesmos mandam e obedecem, mas são, porém, diferentes; assim, a disciplina deve ser em parte a mesma e em parte diferente. Pois, de acordo com o provérbio, para bem comandar é preciso ter antes obedecido.”
“várias funções que à primeira vista pareceriam servis podem ser executadas honestamente por homens livres. A honestidade e a torpeza residem menos na natureza do ato do que no motivo que faz agir.”
“um homem não deve se submeter a ninguém, ou que isto só deve acontecer se houver desforra, conseqüência necessária da liberdade distribuída a todos em igual medida.” Memes de internet são desforra?
PRINCÍPIOS DEMOCRÁTICO-ARISTOTÉLICOS:
(*)“os magistrados devem ser sorteados, ou todos sem exceção, ou pelo menos aqueles cujo cargo não requer nem luzes, nem experiência”
(*)“não se deve ter (…) nenhuma consideração para com a fortuna”
(*)“a mesma magistratura não deve ser conferida mais de uma vez à mesma pessoa, ou pelo menos que isto aconteça raramente e para pouquíssimos cargos, a não ser os militares”
(*)“todos os cargos devem ser de curta duração, ou pelo menos aqueles onde esta breve duração for conveniente”
(*)“todos devem passar pela judicatura, de qualquer classe que sejam, e ter poder para julgar sobre todos os casos em qualquer matéria, mesmo as causas da mais alta importância para o Estado, tais como as contas e a censura, a reforma do governo, assim como as convenções particulares”
(*)Judiciário fraco, legislativo e executivo sumamente poderosos (limite da abordagem pré-Montesquieu).
(*)“os membros do senado não devem ser indistintamente assalariados. Os salários arruínam o poder da magistratura; o povo, ávido de salários, atrai tudo para si”
(*)“Não se deve tolerar nenhuma magistratura perpétua. Portanto, se sobrar alguma magistratura do antigo regime, suas atribuições serão reduzidas e, de eletiva, passará a depender de sorteio. Eis o espírito de todas as democracias.”
“Sem contestação, o melhor povo é o que se ocupa de agricultura. Existe, pois, disposição natural para a democracia em todos os lugares em que o povo tira sua subsistência da agricultura ou da criação de gado.” “Consideram mais agradável trabalhar do que permanecer sentadas, de braços cruzados, a deliberar sobre o governo ou gerir magistraturas, a menos que haja muito que ganhar neste trabalho, pois a maioria prefere o lucro à honra. A prova de sua despreocupação quando não se desperta sua cupidez é que suportaram muito bem seus antigos déspotas e ainda hoje se acostumam com a oligarquia quando os deixam trabalhar e não tiram seus pertences. Então, eles logo alcançam a riqueza, ou pelo menos a abastança. Se tiverem além disso alguma ambição, ela é mais do que satisfeita pelo direito de voto que lhes dão nas eleições e na auditoria das contas. E mesmo que nem todos tivessem direito de assistir a elas, mas apenas o de ser voz deliberativa nas Assembléias primárias. Com efeito, é preciso considerar isto como uma das formas do governo democrático. Era esta que havia em Mantinéia.”
“Esta Constituição deixará contentes os homens de bem e os nobres. Por um lado, terão a vantagem de não serem governados por pessoas baixas; por outro lado, quando chegar a sua vez, tomarão mais cuidado para governar eqüitativamente, pois terão contas a prestar e outras pessoas que os julgarão, pois é bom depender de alguém e não ter toda a liberdade para fazer o que se quer. Esta liberdade indefinida é uma má garantia contra o fundo de maldade que todo homem traz consigo ao nascer. Resulta necessariamente desta precaução a maior vantagem para todo Estado, que é ser governado por pessoas de bem que a responsabilidade torna por assim dizer impecáveis, e isto sem ameaçar a superioridade do povo. É evidente que a melhor de todas as democracias é a que é assim constituída. Por quê? Porque nela o povo tem sua importância.”
“Dentre as excelentes leis que existiam antigamente entre vários povos, observamos sobretudo as que não permitiam a ninguém possuir terras ou acima de certa quantidade, ou a uma distância grande demais da cidade onde se mora. Em vários Estados era proibido alienar a herança paterna. Uma lei de Oxilus, cujo efeito é aproximadamente o mesmo, proibia que se hipotecasse parte dela aos credores. Podemos retificá-la por um texto dos afitianos que vem bem a propósito. Esse povo, embora numeroso, possuía um território bastante pequeno; todos eram lavradores, mas nos registros do censo não constava a totalidade de suas propriedades. Dividiam-nas em certo número de partes disponíveis, para que os pobres pudessem adquiri-las em quantidade suficiente para ultrapassar até mesmo os ricos.
Depois dos agricultores, o melhor povo é o que leva a vida pastoril e explora o gado. Tem muitas afinidades com o primeiro. Ambos, habituados ao trabalho corporal, são excelentes para as expedições militares e resistem perfeitamente aos incômodos do bivaque [acampamento e vigília militar].
Quase todos os outros povos que compõem o restante das democracias estão muito abaixo destes dois. Nada de mais vil, nem de mais alheio a todo tipo de virtude do que esta multidão de operários, de mercenários e de gente sem profissão. Esta espécie de indivíduos corre sem parar pela cidade e pelas praças públicas e só fica contente nas Assembléias.”
“Vemos como deve ser constituída a primeira e a melhor democracia, e também como podem sê-lo as outras. Basta que nos afastemos gradualmente da primeira e adicionemos aos poucos a populaça, à medida que a democracia for piorando.”
A XENOFOBIA DE VERDADE NASCE QUANDO A XENOFOBIA PASSA A SER COISA DO PASSADO: “Para constituí-la [a última democracia] e firmar o poder do povo, os governantes costumam receber o máximo possível de pessoas e conceder direito de cidadania não apenas aos que têm um nascimento legítimo mas até aos bastardos e aos mestiços de qualquer dos dois lados, paterno ou materno.” “preciso introduzir a atenuante de só admitir recém-chegados na medida em que forem necessários para intimidar os nobres e a classe média, sem jamais ultrapassar este limite. Se isso acontecer, a desordem não tardará a reinar por toda parte. Os nobres, que já têm muita dificuldade para suportar este governo, se irritarão cada vez mais. Esta foi a causa do levante de Cirene. Fecham-se os olhos diante de um pequeno inconveniente, mas quando ele assume certa dimensão, não podemos deixar de vê-lo.”
“Deve-se dividir o povo em tribos e cúrias, dissolver os cultos particulares e reconduzi-los à unidade do culto público; numa palavra, imaginar todos os meios possíveis para unir todos os cidadãos e extinguir todas as corporações anteriores; nem mesmo desdenhar certas invenções que, embora de origem tirânica, não deixam de ser populares, como o desregramento dos escravos, que pode ser útil até certo ponto, a emancipação das mulheres e das crianças, a conivência sobre o gênero de vida que agrada a cada um: nada tem melhores efeitos para essa democracia. A dissolução agrada a muito mais gente do que uma conduta regrada.”
* * *
NA PLUTOCRACIA
Na melhor oligarquia: “A divisão pelo censo deve ser tal que aqueles que têm a renda exigida sejam mais numerosos e mais fortes dos que os que não são admissíveis. Mas também é preciso ter sempre a intenção de que aqueles que são associados ao governo venham somente da parte sadia do povo.”
“É o número e a abundância de homens que salvam as democracias; sua consistência vem de uma razão diametralmente oposta ao mérito. A oligarquia, pelo contrário, só pode conservar-se pela melhor ordem de suas partes.
Assim como a multidão se compõe principalmente de quatro classes, a saber: 1a os agricultores, 2a os ligados às artes e ofícios, 3a os comerciantes, 4a os trabalhadores manuais,¹ assim também existem quatro tipos de guerreiros, a saber: 1° a cavalaria, 2° os hoplitas ou infantaria armada dos pés à cabeça, 3° a infantaria ligeira, 4° a marinha.”
¹ Curioso como hoje em dia mal se pode distinguir uma da outra!
“Os lugares mais propícios à primeira espécie de oligarquias são os chamados bippasimos, isto é, próprios, por suas campinas, à criação de cavalos. Esses lugares são propícios à oligarquia mais poderosa. Seus habitantes são protegidos e conservados pela cavalaria. Ora,
só a classe opulenta pode ter haras.
Quando o lugar só oferece homens e armas, a segunda oligarquia convém-lhe mais. A armadura completa necessária à grande infantaria só pode ser fornecida pelos ricos e ultrapassa os recursos dos pobres.
É a arraia-miúda que compõe a infantaria ligeira e os marinheiros. Em toda parte onde abunda essa turba há perigo de democracia para os ricos. Se acontece alguma divisão, os combates de ordinário terminam desfavoravelmente para eles. Para sanar este inconveniente, é preciso contar com hábeis generais que misturem à cavalaria e à infantaria pesada um número suficiente dessa tropa ligeira; assim apoiada, ela combate com maior desenvoltura. Porém, criar uma força dessa espécie, vinda do seio do povo, é armar-se contra si mesmo e trabalhar para sua própria destruição. Nas sedições, o povo vence os ricos através da infantaria ligeira. Ágil e alerta, ela facilmente domina a cavalaria e a infantaria pesada. Portanto, distinguindo as idades, é preciso encarregar os velhos de fazer com que seus filhos pratiquem os exercícios ligeiros e, ao sair da juventude, tomem os melhores destes alunos para colocá-los à frente dos outros.
Quanto ao restante do povo será admitido, como já se disse, no controle dos negócios públicos, quando atingir a taxa do censo exigido, ou, como entre os tebanos, depois que se tiver abstido das profissões mecânicas durante o número prescrito de anos, ou, como em Marselha, quando, tendo passado pela censura, tiver sido considerado digno do título de cidadãos e das funções cívicas.
Devem-se impor às grandes dignidades pesados encargos, para que o povo renuncie a eles de boa vontade e os deixe aos ricos, como se assim lhe pagassem os juros. Com efeito, os ricos, ao assumir o exercício, oferecerão pomposos sacrifícios, mandarão construir salas de banquetes ou outros edifícios destinados ao público, para que o povo, convidado a estes banquetes e encantado com a magnificência dos edifícios e outras decorações, veja com prazer o governo perpetuar-se.”
“Não é isso o que hoje fazem os grandes de nossas oligarquias. Procuram nas dignidades, pelo contrário, não menos o lucro do que a honra. Dir-se-ia que são menos oligarquias do que democracias em transformação.”
* * *
E VIVA O GOVERNO MISTO…
“Os que se chamam aristocráticos estabeleceram-se em muitos países por imitação de governos estrangeiros, e se aproximam tanto da República propriamente dita que de agora em diante falaremos destas duas formas como sendo uma só.”
…E VIVA A MEDIOCRIDADE: “O que dissemos de melhor em nossa Ética é que a vida feliz consiste no livre exercício da virtude, e a virtude na mediania; segue-se necessariamente daí que a melhor vida deve ser a vida média, encerrada nos limites de uma abastança que todos possam conseguir.”
UM LOUVOR (ANTIGO!) AO ÚLTIMO HOMEM, ‘INDA TÃO DISTANTE NO ESPECTRO DA (NOSSA) HISTÓRIA: “Em todos os lugares, encontram-se 3 tipos de homens: alguns muito ricos, outros muito pobres, e outros ainda que ocupam uma situação média entre esses dois extremos. É uma verdade reconhecida [por quem, cara pálida e exangue?] que a mediania é boa em tudo.”
“Os da primeira classe, favorecidos demais pela natureza ou pela fortuna, poderosos, ricos e rodeados de amigos ou de protegidos, não querem nem sabem obedecer. Desde a infância, são tomados por essa arrogância doméstica e a tal ponto corrompidos pelo luxo que desdenham na escola até mesmo escutar o professor. Os da outra classe, abatidos pela miséria e pelas preocupações, curvam-se diante dos outros de modo que esses últimos, incapazes de comandar, só sabem obedecer servilmente. Os primeiros, pelo contrário, não obedecem a nenhuma ordem, mas mandam despoticamente.” Também é uma verdade, paradoxal que seja, que os melhores filósofos emanam justamente da CLASSE MÉDIA.
“Por isso Focílides dizia que uma modesta abastança era o objeto de seus desejos, só pedindo ao céu ser ele próprio medíocre em sua pátria.”
“a tirania surge de igual modo da insolente e desenfreada democracia e da oligarquia”
NOMENCLATURAS MONTESQUIEUANAS: Quando os pobres não têm este contrapeso, e começam a prevalecer pelo número, tudo vai mal e a democracia não tarda a cair no aniquilamento.”
“Um poderoso argumento a favor da mediocridade é que os melhores legisladores foram cidadãos de média fortuna. Sólon declara-se tal em suas poesias, Licurgo tornou-se tal quando parou de reinar e Carondas também o era, como quase todos os outros.”
“jamais ou raramente aconteceu, e entre muito poucos povos, que se tenha optado por uma República média. Entre os príncipes não há um só exemplo desta moderação, em toda a antiguidade; em todas as outras partes, virou costume recusar a igualdade e procurar dominar quando se sai vencedor, ou ceder e obedecer quando se é vencido.”
“o árbitro mais conveniente é aquele que, colocado entre dois, não pende mais para um lado do que para o outro” Infelizmente a classe média brasileira pende mais para o tio do pavê e o véio da Havan…
“O censo não pode determinar-se pura e simplesmente. É preciso, porém, que o seja com a máxima amplitude possível, para que os participantes sejam mais numerosos do que os não-participantes. Quanto aos pobres, eles se consolam por não participarem e ficam descansados se não os ultrajam e lhes deixam os poucos bens que possuem, o que nem sempre acontece, pois os indivíduos de condição que pretendem os cargos públicos às vezes não são nem corteses, nem humanos. Resulta daí que, se houver guerra, os pobres a evitam, a menos que os sustentem. Mas se os sustentarem, passam a desejá-la.
Em alguns lugares, o governo é formado não apenas por aqueles que portam armas, mas pelos que as portavam. Os malianos escolhiam seu Conselho dentre estes, e seus magistrados dentre os guerreiros em atividade. O primeiro Estado entre os gregos foi organizado com esta espécie de cidadãos, depois da extinção das monarquias; e em primeiro lugar com cavaleiros, pois a força e a superioridade dos exércitos consistiam então na cavalaria. Pois as outras tropas de nada servem se não tiverem disciplina, e antigamente não havia nem disciplina, nem experiência na infantaria, de sorte que a cavalaria sozinha constituía toda a força do Estado.
Mas como os Estados cresceram e ganharam consideração através das outras armas, o governo foi comunicado a um maior número de pessoas. Assim, o que hoje chamamos de República era então chamado de democracia.¹”
¹ Resta saber a quando remonta esse “então” de Aristóteles: poderia estar falando já do tempo de Sócrates, não tão pretérito ao seu? Tem-se aí que Aristóteles já divisava o que a ciência política moderna divisa entre os gregos: sua democracia era com certeza uma oligarquia ou aristocracia, conforme fosse saudável ou decadente (ainda sem contar a chusma de escravos da polis).
* * *
STOP THE REVOLUTION!
“Para terminar, é normal examinar de onde vêm as revoluções dos Estados, quantas causas podem provocá-las e quais são elas, a que depravações cada governo em particular está sujeito e quais são os meios de preservação, os remédios gerais e específicos para essas perturbações.”
“A excelência do mérito é a única superioridade absoluta, e os homens que se sobressaem quanto ao mérito são os que menos provocam revoltas.”
INCÊNDIO NA BABILÔNIA DEMORA A ESPALHAR: “Do fato de as pessoas habitarem o mesmo lugar não se segue que se trata de uma única e mesma Cidade. Os muros não podem servir de critério, pois todo o Peloponeso poderia ser cercado por uma mesma muralha. Não seria a primeira vez que vastos espaços seriam assim fechados. Assim são todas as grandes cidades, que se parecem menos com cidades do que com uma nação inteira, como a Babilônia. Três dias já se haviam passado, dizem, desde que fôra tomada e em vários bairros ainda de nada se sabia.”
“São também questões de política saber se convém que um Estado só contenha uma nação ou várias, se continua a ser o mesmo enquanto conserva o mesmo gênero de habitantes, apesar da morte de uns e do nascimento de outros, como os rios e as fontes, cuja água corre sem cessar para dar lugar à água que sucede.”
“permanecendo os mesmos atores, o coro não deixa de mudar quando passa do cômico ao trágico.” “Permanecendo as mesmas vozes e os mesmos instrumentos, o canto não é mais o mesmo quando passa do modo dórico ao modo frígio. Isto posto, é a forma e não a matéria que decide se um Estado permanece o mesmo e se se deve, apesar da identidade de habitantes, chamá-lo de outro nome ou conservar-lhe o nome, embora seus habitantes tenham mudado.”
PRINCÍPIO DA DISTRIBUIÇÃO DE RENDA PAULATINA (COMO NA SOLTURA DE ESCRAVOS): “Os crescimentos desmedidos de uma classe relativamente às outras também são causas de revolução. Assim, os membros que compõem um corpo devem crescer proporcionalmente, para que subsista a mesma comensura. O animal morreria se o pé, por exemplo, crescesse até 4 côvados, não tendo o resto do corpo mais do que 2 palmos”
MEGA-SENA DA VIRADA: “As modificações ocorrem com as democracias, mas são mais raras. Por exemplo, quando a quantidade de pobres aumenta e vários deles se tornam ricos, ou então quando os bens dos ricos aumentam de valor, passa-se à oligarquia, e até à oligarquia concentrada que chamamos politirania.
Às vezes, sem que haja sedição, o governo muda em razão de seu aviltamento, como em Heréia, onde começaram a se envergonhar das eleições e os magistrados foram depois sorteados, por causa da torpeza dos eleitos.”
“Algumas vezes a mudança se realiza através de progressos imperceptíveis; no final, fica-se admirado vendo os costumes e as leis mudadas sem que se tenha atentado para as causas ligeiras e silenciosas que preparam as mudanças. Na Ambrácia, por exemplo, depois de ter escolhido magistrados de pequena fortuna, passou-se a admitir pouco a pouco alguns que não possuíam nada. Ora, há pouca ou nenhuma diferença entre nada e muito pouco.”
“Todos os que admitiram estrangeiros para residir em sua cidade, foram quase sempre enganados por eles, como os de Trezena, que, em Síbaris, receberam os aqueus. Foram obrigados a ceder-lhes o lugar quando o número deles aumentou, o que causou a desgraça. Os sibaritas retiraram-se para Túrio e ali fizeram a mesma tentativa, mas, querendo dispor do território como senhores, foram vencidos e expulsos. Os bizantinos sofreram algo semelhante da parte de estrangeiros e tiveram subitamente que recorrer às armas para repeli-los. Os antisianos, que de modo semelhante haviam aceitado os banidos de Quios, também se viram obrigados a livrar-se deles pela força. Os zanclianos foram vencidos e expulsos pelos de Samos, que os tinham recebido. Também foram estrangeiros que perturbaram os apoloniatas do Ponto Euxino. Os siracusanos, após a expulsão de seus tiranos, tendo tornado cidadãos alguns soldados e mercenários estrangeiros, tiveram tantos aborrecimentos por causa disso que foi preciso romper com eles. Os de Anfípolis foram quase todos expulsos pelos de Cálcis, por tê-los recebido em sua cidade.”
“Às vezes a sedição parece derivar da própria natureza do lugar que foi mal-escolhido para habitação. Em Clazômenas, os habitantes do Centro (ou bairro dos banhos) detestam os da ilha; em Cólofon, a parte do norte odeia a do sul; em Atenas, o pireu é mais democrático do que a cidade. Pois, assim como num exército, um riacho, mesmo bem pequeno, pode romper a falange, assim também, numa cidade, qualquer diferença de habitação basta para quebrar, o entendimento e o acordo entre os habitantes.”
“Antigamente, em Siracusa, o Estado foi perturbado por dois jovens magistrados rivais em amor. Durante a ausência de um, o outro conquistou sua amada. O despeito, quando ele voltou, sugeriu-lhe atrair e seduzir a mulher de seu rival. Tendo cada um deles conseguido o apoio de outros magistrados, a discórdia espalhou-se por toda a cidade. Portanto, nunca é cedo demais para abafar as brigas dos altos funcionários e dos grandes. O mal está na origem. Em tudo, o que começou já está feito pela metade. O menor erro cometido no início repercute em tudo que se segue.”
“O noivo, por lhe terem predito que a união lhe traria desgraça, hesitou em tomar sua noiva e a deixou sem nada concluir. Os pais da moça, considerando-se insultados, acusaram falsamente o jovem de ter roubado durante a celebração de um sacrifício o dinheiro do tesouro sagrado e o fizeram morrer como sacrílego.”
“todos os que, quer na condição privada, quer na magistratura, quer em família, quer em tribo ou qualquer outra associação que possa haver, proporcionaram ao Estado algum acréscimo de potência, sempre ocasionaram certa perturbação, quer começada por invejosos, quer por terem eles próprios, envaidecidos com o sucesso, desdenhado permanecer nos limites da igualdade.”
“se uma das duas facções se torna muito superior, a porção média não quer arriscar-se contra quem tem uma superioridade evidente.”
“em Atenas os Quatrocentos lograram o povo com a falsa esperança de que o rei da Pérsia ajudaria com seu dinheiro os atenienses a fazerem guerra contra os espartanos, e assim se apossaram do governo.”
“o temor diante do perigo comum tem o efeito de reconciliar os maiores inimigos.”
“Em Rodes, distribuíram aos soldados todo o dinheiro proveniente dos impostos e impediram que os capitães das galeras recebessem o que lhes era devido, acusando-os de vários delitos. Para evitar, então, a punição, os acusados foram obrigados a conspirar contra a democracia e a derrubaram.”
“Antigamente, quando o mesmo personagem era demagogo e general de exército, as democracias não deixavam de se transformar em Estados despóticos. Com toda certeza, os antigos tiranos originaram-se dos demagogos. Isso já não acontece com tanta freqüência quanto antigamente, pois então, não estando ainda exercitados comumente na arte de bem falar, as armas eram o único meio de se obter poder. Hoje que a eloqüência foi levada ao mais alto grau de perfeição e goza da maior estima, são os oradores que governam o povo. (…) Assim, as usurpações da suprema autoridade eram mais freqüentes no passado do que no presente, porque se davam a alguns cidadãos magistraturas de alta importância, como em Mileto a Pritania, e se submetiam à decisão deles os maiores interesses. Aliás, as cidades estavam longe de ser tão grandes, já que o povo preferia morar no campo, ocupando-se com seus trabalhos rústicos. Portanto, se esses magistrados eram guerreiros, apossavam-se do governo. Seu principal recurso era a confiança que obtinham do povo, pelo ódio que demonstravam contra os ricos. Foi assim que Pisístrato obteve a tirania de Atenas; querelando contra os habitantes da planície; Teagênio, a de Mégara, mandando matar o gado dos proprietários, quando o encontrou passando à margem do rio; e Dionísio, a de Siracusa, acusando de traição Dafne e os grandes, artifícios que eram tidos como ímpetos de patriotismo e davam popularidade.”
“quando a oligarquia está de acordo consigo mesma, não é fácil destruí-la. Temos um exemplo disto no Estado de Farsala, onde poucos homens mantêm grande número deles na obediência, porque estão em harmonia e se conduzem bem entre si.”
“Em tempo de guerra, os magistrados, desconfiando do povo, são obrigados a chamar tropas estrangeiras e não raro aquele a quem confiam o comando se torna seu tirano, como Timófanes em Corinto. Se tal comando é confiado a vários, estes se coalizam numa dinastia, ou então, temerosos de serem pegos no mesmo truque, fazem com que o povo participe do governo, para reconciliarem-se com ele. Em tempo de paz, os oligarcas, desconfiados uns dos outros, entregam a guarda do Estado a seus soldados, sob o comando de algum general neutro, o qual às vezes acaba por se tornar senhor dos dois partidos, como aconteceu em Larissa sob o comando dos Alevadas (Aleuadas) de Samos e em Ábido, no tempo das facções, das quais uma era a de Ifíade.” “Várias oligarquias, como as de Cnido e de Quios, também foram destruídas por serem despóticas demais, e isso por senadores irritados com a insolência dos outros.”
“A tirania reúne os vícios da democracia aos da oligarquia. Ela tem em comum com a segunda o fato de propor-se a opulência como fim (sem isso ela não teria condições de manter a guarda e a magnificência), de desconfiar do povo, de desarmá-lo, de oprimi-lo, de expulsá-lo das cidades e dispersá-lo pelos campos ou colônias. Da democracia, ela toma a guerra aos nobres, sua destruição aberta ou clandestina, seu banimento, considerando-os como rivais ou como inimigos de seu governo. De fato, é de ordinário desta classe que procedem as conspirações, querendo alguns deles dominar eles próprios, e outros temendo ser escravos. Assim, vimos Periandro aconselhar Trasíbulo a cortar as espigas mais altas, isto é, desfazer-se dos cidadãos mais eminentes.
“Os ofendidos conspiram, na maioria dos casos, para se vingarem, e não em seu próprio proveito. Assim foi a conjuração contra os filhos de Pisístrato; ela teve por causa a injúria feita à irmã de Harmódio e a ofensa que ele próprio sentira na ocasião. Harmódio armou-se para vingar a irmã, Aristogíton para vingar Harmódio. Periandro, tirano de Ambrácia, permitiu que conjurassem contra ele por ter perguntado num banquete a uma de suas amantes se estava grávida de um filho seu. Pausânias matou o rei Filipe porque este desdenhava vingá-lo do ultraje que Átalo lhe fizera. Derdas conspirou contra Amintas, que se vangloriava de ter colhido a flor de sua juventude. Evágoras de Chipre foi morto por Eunucus, cuja esposa fôra raptada pelo filho daquele príncipe.” “Xerxes, bêbado de vinho, encarregara Artábano de crucificar Dario. Artábano, crendo que o príncipe se esqueceria dessa ordem por ter sido dada no auge da embriaguez, não a executou. Quando Xerxes deu mostras de sua cólera por isso, Artábano o matou para evitar sua própria perda.”
“O desprezo torna infiéis até mesmo os protegidos. A confiança com que são honrados persuade-os de que poderão de repente tentar um golpe seguro. O pouco caso que têm pelo monarca também torna audaciosos os que ganharam poder e acreditam poder tornar-se senhores do Estado. (…) foi o que fez Ciro contra Astiago, cujos costumes eram desprezíveis e a incapacidade evidente, já que vivia na moleza e seu exército estava irritado com a ociosidade.”
“A magnanimidade somada ao poder transforma-se em ousadia.”
“Os que conspiram para conseguir um nome são de uma espécie completamente diferente. Não atacam os tiranos pelas honras e pelas riquezas, mas sim para conquistar a glória e fazer com que falem deles. O desejo de um grande nome e da memória da posteridade faz com que arrisquem grandes façanhas, mas pessoas deste tipo são raras. É preciso estar, como Díon, O Bravo, disposto ao sacrifício da própria vida e a perder tudo, se falhar o golpe. A natureza não engendra facilmente almas tão heróicas.”
“Os Estados opostos, por exemplo uma democracia vizinha a uma tirania, são tão inimigos quanto os oleiros o são dos oleiros, no dizer de Hesíodo, pois a pior espécie de democracia é ela própria uma tirania. O mesmo ocorre com a monarquia e a aristocracia. Por isso os espartanos e os siracusanos, enquanto foram bem-governados, destruíram várias tiranias.
Algumas vezes a tirania morre por si mesma, quando ocorre uma divisão entre os pretendentes, como outrora a de Gelão e em nossos dias a de Dionísio.”
“quase todos os usurpadores conservaram a soberania durante a vida, apesar do ódio público, mas quase todos os seus sucessores perderam-na incontinente. A vida dissoluta que levam faz com que caiam no desprezo e dá mil ocasiões de os exterminar.”
CÓLERA COM “CO” DE “CORAÇÃO PURO”: “A cólera está ligada ao ódio e produz quase os mesmos efeitos, mas é ainda mais enérgica. Os que são animados por ela insurgem-se com mais violência, não podendo, na perturbação da paixão, ouvir os conselhos da razão.” “Ao passo que a cólera é acompanhada de uma dor que não permite raciocinar, a animosidade isenta desse ardor calcula e age silenciosamente.”
“vemos hoje muito poucos Estados governados por reis. [!] Se existem ainda alguns, são de preferência monarquias absolutas e tiranias. A realeza é uma dignidade estabelecida voluntariamente, cujo poder se estende às maiores coisas. Ora, como a maioria dos homens se assemelha e raramente se encontra alguém tão perfeito para corresponder à grandeza e à dignidade do cargo, as pessoas não se submetem de bom grado a semelhantes instituições. Se alguém quiser reinar por astúcia ou por violência, não haverá monarquia, mas sim tirania.”
“Historicamente, a monarquia tirânica é, juntamente com a oligarquia, a forma de Estado menos duradoura. A mais longa tirania foi a de Ortógoras e de seus descendentes, em Sícion. Durou cem anos. (…) 73 anos e 6 meses reinou a dinastia: Cipselo reinou 30 anos, Periandro, 40, e Psamético, filho de Górdias, 3.” “A terceira [tirania mais longa] foi a dos Pisistrátidas, em Atenas. Mesmo assim, a tirania de Pisístrato se viu duas vezes interrompida por sua expulsão, de modo que, de 33 anos, só reinou de fato por 17 e seus filhos mais 18, o que perfaz no total 35.”
“Só se sente o mal quando está consumado. Como ele não acontece de uma vez, seus progressos escapam ao entendimento e se parecem àquele sofisma que do fato de cada parte ser pequena inferir-se que o todo seja também pequeno.”
“Assim, aqueles que velam pela sua segurança devem inventar de tempos em tempos alguns perigos e tornar mais próximos os perigos que estão distantes, a fim de que os cidadãos informados estejam sempre alertas, como sentinelas noturnas.”
MUITA HORA NESTA CALMA: “Não valorizar demais quem quer que seja e não distribuir nenhuma honra excessiva, mesmo que breve. Se se acumulam muitos cargos em uma só pessoa, tais cargos devem ser-lhe retirados aos poucos, e não todos de uma vez. Será sobretudo conveniente estabelecer através das leis que ninguém possa adquirir poder, crédito ou riqueza demais, ou que sejam afastados os que tiverem demais.”
“O vulgo zanga-se menos por estar excluído do governo do que por ver os magistrados viverem às custas do tesouro público. É até muito cômodo dispor de todo o tempo para cuidar dos negócios particulares. Mas se estiver persuadido de que os titulares dos cargos públicos pilham o Estado, terá a dupla vexação de estar afastado tanto dos cargos públicos quanto dos lucros pecuniários.”
ENTÃO ME PROCESSA! “Aqueles que se preocupam com a segurança do Estado devem, em vez de se apoderar em proveito do povo dos bens dos condenados, consagrá-los à religião. A pena será a mesma e deterá igualmente os crimes, mas o povo terá menos pressa para condenar, pois não tirará nenhum proveito da sentença. Além disso, os legisladores devem fazer com que as acusações públicas se tornem muito raras, estabelecendo penas pesadas contra os que agirem levianamente, pois não são as pessoas do povo, mas sim as dos meios refinados que assim se costumam atacar e humilhar.”
“Se houver rendas suficientes, não se deve, como fazem os demagogos, distribuir à arraia-miúda o dinheiro que sobrar. Mal o recebem e já voltam a cair na indigência, pois essas pessoas são tonéis furados a que essa liberalidade não traz nenhum proveito.”
“O melhor emprego das rendas públicas, quando a sua percepção está terminada, é auxiliar amplamente os pobres, para colocá-los em condições ou de comprar um pedaço de terra ou os instrumentos para a lavoura, ou de abrir um pequeno comércio. Se não for possível ajudá-los a todos, deve-se pelo menos verter os subsídios na caixa de alguma tribo ou cúria ou de alguma porção do Estado, ora uma, ora outra. Far-se-á com que os ricos contribuam para as despesas das Assembléias necessárias, de preferência a esbanjamentos frívolos e meramente aparatosos. Por meio disso, o governo cartaginês tornou-se popular, empregando sempre alguém do povo nas administrações provinciais, para que aí fizessem fortuna.”
“para eleger um general de exército, deve-se considerar mais a experiência militar do que a virtude, pois há menos generais experientes do que homens virtuosos. O caso é totalmente contrário no que diz respeito à administração das finanças, pois aí é preciso mais probidade do que tem o comum dos homens.”
A FEIÚRA DO ESTADO: “Um nariz que se afasta da linha reta, que tende para o aquilino ou é arrebitado, ainda pode agradar; mas se se alongar ou se encurtar demais, primeiro sairá da justa medida e, por fim, cairá tanto no excesso ou na falta que não será mais um nariz. O mesmo ocorre com as outras partes do corpo, e também com os regimes. A oligarquia e a democracia podem subsistir, embora se afastando de seu desígnio e de sua perfeição. Mas se dermos demasiada extensão ao seu princípio, primeiro tornaremos pior o governo, e, no final, chegaremos a tal ponto que ele nem será mais digno deste nome.”
SEJA UM MILIONÁRIO APUD CF88 (SÓ PODIA DAR MERDA): “O mais importante meio para a conservação dos Estados, mas também o mais negligenciado, é fazer combinarem a educação dos cidadãos e a Constituição. Com efeito, de que servem as melhores leis e os mais estimáveis decretos se não se acostumar os súditos a viverem segundo a forma de seu governo? Assim, se a Constituição for popular, é preciso que sejam educados popularmente; se for oligárquica, oligarquicamente; pois se houver desregramento em um só súdito, este desregramento estará então em todo o Estado.”
MANUAL DO TIRANO PRUDENTE (QUASE UMA ANTINOMIA): “Deve-se manter espiões por toda parte, saber tudo o que se faz e tudo o que se diz, destacar agentes e espiões, como fazia Hierão em Siracusa, colocando-os em toda parte onde havia uma reunião ou um conciliábulo. Não se é tão ousado quando se tem algo a temer de tais vigilantes e, quando se é, fica-se sabendo.” “Empobrecer os cidadãos, a fim de que não possam formar uma guarda armada e, absorvidos nos trabalhos de que precisam para viver, não tenham tempo de conspirar. Como exemplo dessas manobras, temos as pirâmides do Egito, os templos dedicados aos deuses pelos Cipsélidas, o de Zeus Olímpico pelos filhos de Pisístrato, as fortificações de Samos por Polícrates, que são todas coisas que tendem aos mesmos fins de ocupação e empobrecimento. Aumentar o peso dos impostos, como em Siracusa no tempo de Dionísio onde, em 5 anos, foram obrigados a dar em contribuições tudo o que valia a terra.” “Fazer uso dos recursos da extrema democracia, como a atribuição do governo doméstico às mulheres, para que elas revelem os segredos de seus maridos, e o afrouxamento da escravidão, para que também os escravos denunciem seus senhores.”
SÍNDROME DE ESTOU-CALMO: “Os escravos e as mulheres nada tramam contra os tiranos e até, se tiverem a felicidade de ser bem-tratados por eles, afeiçoam-se necessariamente à tirania, ou à democracia, pois o povo também pode ser um tirano.”
“Um prego expulsa outro” “os tiranos declaram guerra a todo homem de bem que tiver coragem. Esta categoria de pessoas é perniciosa a seu regime, por não quererem deixar-se tratar servilmente, serem francos com todos, sobretudo entre eles, e não denunciarem ninguém.”Vale para instituições na “democracia”. Beware where you step, fella.
“Sendo senhor do Estado, não deve temer a falta de dinheiro. Mais vale para ele estar sem dinheiro para suas campanhas do que deixar em casa tesouros empilhados; com isto, ficarão menos tentados de abusar desse dinheiro os que, em sua ausência, governarem o Estado, pessoas muito mais temíveis para ele do que os meros cidadãos. Estes marcham com ele para o combate, enquanto que aqueles ficam na retaguarda.”
“Que o tirano tenha também uma abordagem fácil e um ar grave, de modo que os que tiverem acesso a ele pareçam menos temê-lo do que respeitá-lo, o que homens desprezíveis não conseguem facilmente. Se não se preocupar com nenhuma outra virtude, que pelo menos seja cortês, tenha a política de passar por virtuoso, e se abstenha não apenas ele mesmo de toda injúria contra seus súditos, de qualquer sexo que for, mas também não tolere que nenhum de seus domésticos ofenda ninguém, e cuide de que suas mulheres se comportem da mesma maneira para com as outras mulheres. Pois há injúrias feitas por mulheres de tiranos que arruínam a tirania.”
“Sobre a questão dos prazeres sensuais, que faça o contrário de seus êmulos de hoje, que não se contentam em se entregar a eles da manhã à noite, durante vários dias, mas ainda querem que todos saibam a vida que levam, para serem admirados como seres felizes. Que use moderadamente deste tipo de prazeres; que pelo menos tenha a aparência de não correr atrás deles, e até de procurar furtar-se a eles. Não se surpreende com facilidade e não se despreza um homem sóbrio, mas sim um homem bêbado, nem um homem vigilante, mas sim um homem sonolento.” “Que demonstre principalmente muito zelo pela religião. Teme-se menos injustiça da parte de um príncipe que se crê seja religioso e parece temer aos deuses, e se está menos tentado a conspirar contra ele quando se presume que tem a assistência e o favor do Céu. Mas é preciso que sua piedade não seja afetada, nem supersticiosa.” “Que deixe para si mesmo a distribuição das honras e entregue a seus oficiais e aos juízes as punições.” “A própria punição das faltas deve evitar o ultraje. Só se deve fazer uso dele com uma espécie de jeito paternal.”
* * *
CONSTITUIÇÕES REAIS E IDEAIS, DEVANEIOS DE UM DISCÍPULO!
“Em sua República, Platão propõe que as mulheres, as crianças e os bens sejam comuns aos cidadãos. De fato, neste diálogo, Sócrates preconiza a comunidade total.”
“A comunidade de mulheres oferece grandes dificuldades, e se fosse preciso estabelecê-la não seria pela razão apresentada por Sócrates. O próprio fim suposto por ele para a associação política torna impossível este estabelecimento, e assim ele nada diz de preciso sobre este assunto.” Desapega!
ARISTÓTELES NÃO COMPREENDEU SEU PRÓPRIO MESTRE: “É, portanto, claro que a unidade, como alguns a apresentam, não pertence à essência de um Estado, e o que chamam de seu maior bem é a sua ruína.”
“no serviço doméstico, quanto mais empregados houver, menos o trabalho é bem-feito.”
“Haveria alguma dúvida em preferir a mera qualidade de primo em nosso costume à de filho no de Sócrates?” Sim.
ANÁLISE MAIS PERFUNCTÓRIA DO MAIOR LIVRO DA IDADE ANTIGA AINDA NÃO NASCEU: “Outro absurdo da comunidade de crianças é só se ter proibido o comércio amoroso dos dois sexos, e não o amor e suas intimidades de pai para filho, de irmão para irmão, que são o cúmulo da indecência e da torpeza [com referência em que absoluto? Que declaração mais platônica!]. Ora, não é estranho proibir as relações entre os dois sexos, em razão dos perigos da volúpia excessiva, e ser indiferente sobre essas familiaridades entre pai e filho, irmão e irmão?”
“O encanto da propriedade é inexprimível. Não é em vão que cada um ama a si mesmo; tal amor é inato; só é repreensível o excesso chamado amor-próprio, que consiste em se amar mais do que convém. Tampouco é proibido amar o dinheiro, nem outra coisa da mesma natureza: todos o fazem.”
LONGO E INÚTIL IMBRÓGLIO, NO QUAL ROUSSEAU JÁ APARECERIA DANDO VOADORA PARA DEFENDER PLATÃO: “também contribui o preconceito existente de que os vícios que grassam em certos regimes procedem da propriedade, como esses eternos processos que sempre renascem entre os cidadãos por ocasião dos contratos, a corrupção de testemunhas e a adulação a que as pessoas se rebaixam diante dos ricos. Mas não é da propriedade dos bens que derivam esses males, mas da improbidade dos homens.” Engraçado como contradiz os capítulos precedentes da própria Política!
SERÁ QUE SE FAZ DE IMBECIL? “basta submeter a uma tentativa a comunidade socrática e se terá a prova de que ela é impraticável.” Dêem o Übermensch ao Último Homem e ele apenas será morto, dizimado, castrado ou ignorado…
“De resto, Sócrates não explica e não deixa entrever facilmente qual será a forma de governo entre seus comunistas.” Haha. Bom, qual seria a graça se a República tivesse 80 tomos e não precisássemos pensar em nada?! Para começo de conversa, nem saberíamos quem foi Aristóteles…
“Platão ou, se quiserem, Sócrates, que ele faz falar, tampouco trata de uma maneira satisfatória das revoluções ou das transformações de Estado.” Hm, verdade?
“É da ordem da natureza que nada seja eterno e tudo mude após certo período de tempo. A mudança ocorre quando o número elementar epiternário, combinado com o número quinário, dá dois acordes e é elevado ao cubo.”
Comete o erro torpe e juvenil de misturar seu sistema completamente arbitrário de formas de governo com um outro, que aliás não entendeu (pois se entendesse, não teria criado o seu): “E por que essa República passaria a ter a forma espartana, se a maior parte das outras se transforma no Estado contrário e não no que se lhes aproxima? Deve haver a mesma razão em toda mudança. Segundo ele, a forma espartana se transformará em oligarquia; a oligarquia, em democracia; a democracia, em tirania, embora também se transformem no sentido contrário, a saber, a democracia em oligarquia, mais até do que em monarquia. Além disso, não fala da tirania e não diz se sofre ou não mutação, nem por que causa, nem em que espécie de República. Deixa este ponto indeterminado, como algo em que a exatidão não seja fácil.¹ Segundo ele, a mudança deveria retornar à primeira e melhor espécie, de tal forma que haveria um circuito contínuo; mas a tirania algumas vezes dá lugar a outra tirania, como em Sícion a de Míron sucedeu à de Clístenes; ou a uma oligarquia, como em Cálcis, a de Antileo; ou uma democracia, como em Siracusa, a de Gelão; ou à aristocracia, como a de Carilau na Lacedemônia, e também em Cartago.²”
¹ Na verdade não precisou falar da tirania pela razão oposta: porque é muito fácil; todo homem sabe o que é e no que consiste a tirania.
² Parabéns, discípulo, fez o dever de casa: mas és filósofo ou historiador? É que estou com a memória ruim hoje…
“As leis, que Platão escreveu depois, são aproximadamente do mesmo gênero que A República.” Mas com muito mais homofobia, não é mesmo? Afinal, por que, já tão velho, se dar ao trabalho de escrever tanto?
FIGHT RANÇO WITH RANÇO (A ARTE DAS CAROLINAS): “Todas as palavras que neste livro atribui a Sócrates são cheias de superfluidades pomposas e de novidades problemáticas, cuja apologia talvez fosse difícil fazer.”
“O mesmo autor contenta-se com dizer que, assim como a cadeia difere da trama pela lã, deve haver algum atributo que distinga os que mandam e os que obedecem, mas não explicita quais são estas marcas distintivas.” Ele queria que você adivinhasse.
NÃO ERGAS PONTES QUE NÃO TENS O TALENTO DE ERGUER! “Sua forma de governo não é nem uma democracia, nem uma oligarquia, mas um regime médio que ele chama propriamente de ‘republicano’, composto inteiramente de militares. Se propôs esta forma por ser a mais geralmente consagrada em todas as sociedades civis, talvez tenha razão; se foi como a melhor depois da primeira d’A República, ele está enganado. Sem contestação, preferir-se-á o Estado de Esparta ou algum outro mais aristocrático.” Até hoje não se sabe muito bem a relação entre as Leis e a República, falo isso por experiência própria. Na dúvida quanto ao que falar, melhor calar a boca. E olha que eu meti o pau em metade dos livros das Leis nas minhas traduções!
Obrigado pela explicação, mas eu não pedi – e, ademais, achei que você disse a mesma coisa ali em cima, com suas próprias palavras (“o rico deve ser punido pela apatia política, o pobre incentivado”, é mais ou menos a sinopse de tudo), e sem nenhum indício de ironia (há poucos parágrafos, Ari. tinha criticado Sócrates-Platão por NÃO haver estipulado classes na República, mas agora o critica por segregar nitidamente sua polis, nas Leis!): “Na verdade, todos são convocados para as eleições, mas são obrigados a escolher primeiro entre a primeira classe de ricos, depois na segunda e depois na terceira; os da terceira e da quarta classes, porém, não são forçados a dar seu voto, e só é permitido aos da primeira e da segunda eleger entre os da quarta; é preciso apenas que cada classe forneça o mesmo número de eleitos. Portanto, a maioria e os principais sairão do grupo dos mais ricos, não se envolvendo o povo na eleição porque a lei não o força a isso.”
* * *
“Faléias de Calcedônia põe os artesãos no grupo dos escravos públicos, sem lhes dar nenhum lugar entre os cidadãos. Quanto aos que se empregam nos trabalhos públicos, vá lá. Mas, mesmo assim, isso deve ser feito como se estabeleceu em Epidamno, ou como Diofante determinou antigamente em Atenas.”
“Hipódamo de Mileto não deseja que os julgamentos se façam por meio de bolas; pretende que cada um traga uma tabuleta onde inscreva seu assentimento, se simplesmente condenar, ou então indique que condena sobre o principal e absolve quanto ao resto. Condena a forma empregada em nossos tribunais, pela qual, diz ele, os juízes não-raro são forçados a julgar contra a consciência e contra o juramento que prestaram.”
“A medicina, por exemplo, a ginástica e todas as artes e talentos ganharam ao reformar suas velhas máximas. Ocupando, pois, a política um lugar entre as ciências, parece que também ela pode admitir o mesmo princípio. De fato, os antigos Estados mudaram muito de feição. O que há de mais ingênuo e de mais grosseiro do que suas leis e costumes primitivos, mesmo as dos gregos, que antigamente andavam cobertos de ferro? O que existe de mais pobre e de mais imbecil do que sua jurisprudência, como em Cumas, onde, para condenar à morte um homem acusado de homicídio, bastava que o acusador apresentasse várias testemunhas tomadas de sua própria família?”
ISSO É SÉRIO, ARI.? “É muito provável que os primeiros homens, tanto os que saíram do seio da terra quanto os que escaparam da calamidade geral da espécie humana [tebanos ou egípcios, em suma], eram tão rudes quanto o vulgo de hoje, como são representados os antigos gigantes; seria uma extravagância limitarmo-nos a seus decretos.” Haha
AGORA, PRESTA UM TÁCITO TRIBUTO À REPÚBLICA DE PLATÃO PELA SUA INTENSA PREOCUPAÇÃO DE “UNISSEXUALIZAR” A POLIS… E DEPOIS ENVOLVE-SE NUMA BARAFUNDA SEM SIM, DEPRECIANDO ESPARTA SEM FUNDAMENTO (E SENDO O AVESSO DO “PLATÃO FINAL” OUTRA VEZ, AO SER HOMÓFILO: “Como o homem e a mulher fazem parte de cada família, é de se esperar que o Estado esteja dividido em dois, metade homens, metade mulheres; donde se segue que todo Estado em que as mulheres não têm leis está na anarquia pela metade. É o que acontece em Esparta. Licurgo, que pretendia enrijecer seu povo com todos os trabalhos penosos, só pensou nos homens e não prestou nenhuma atenção nas mulheres. Elas se entregam a todos os excessos da intemperança e da dissolução; assim, em tal Estado é necessário que as riquezas sejam honradas, principalmente quando as mulheres dominarem, como acontece na maioria das nações guerreiras, com exceção dos celtas e dos povos em que o amor pelos rapazes está publicamente em uso. [PROGRAMA PEDERASTIA PARA TODOS?]Não é sem razão que a fábula associa Marte a Vênus, pois todos os povos guerreiros são dados tanto ao amor dos jovens quanto ao amor das mulheres. [E ESPARTA NÃO? NÃO ENTENDO ISSO.] Este mal manifestou-se ainda mais em Esparta, onde, desde a origem, as mulheres se envolveram em tudo.[COMO, SE LICURGO AS OLVIDOU?]Pois o que importa que as mulheres mandem ou que os que mandam sejam comandados pelas mulheres? É a mesma coisa.”
“o legislador permaneceu longe do alvo a que se propunha; fez apenas um Estado pobre e particulares avarentos.”
Um homem do tempo de Aristóteles já não pode julgar a Esparta de Licurgo no seu momento presente, ainda mais levando-se em conta a assimilação da Grécia pela Macadônia!
Logo após falar mal dos éforos:“quer os éforos tenham sido instituídos por Licurgo desde sua primeira legislação, quer sejam de criação mais recente, não foram inúteis à prosperidade da nação.” [!!] Quem é capaz de entender Aristóteles, que sequer segue seu princípio da não-contradição quando se trata de Política?!
“As virtudes guerreiras, a que se relaciona toda a Constituição de Licurgo, não são senão uma parte da virtude integral, e são boas apenas para dominar os outros homens. Assim, os espartanos conservaram-se bastante bem enquanto guerreavam, mas quando submeteram a seu domínio todos os seus vizinhos começaram a decair, não sabendo o que fazer de seu ócio, não tendo aprendido nada melhor do que os exercícios militares.”
“A ilha de Creta parece ter sido disposta pela natureza para comandar a Grécia, cujos povos, em sua quase totalidade, habitam as costas do mar: por um lado, ela está situada a pouca distância do Peloponeso; por outro lado, ela toca na Ásia, confinando com Triópia e Rodes. Foi graças a esta posição que Minos se tornou senhor do mar, reduziu quase todas as outras ilhas à obediência ou as povoou com suas colônias. Pensava também em se apoderar da Sicília, quando morreu perto de Camico.”
“Os que são chamados de éforos na Lacedemônia chamam-se cosmos em Creta, com a única diferença de que são somente 5 na Lacedemônia e 10 em Creta.” Só isso? Bom, na essência eram ministros que atuavam como contrapeso do rei, i.e., poder moderador institucionalizado (não-encarnado num ou dois monarcas).
“Em Esparta, o povo que escolhe os éforos tem também a faculdade de escolhê-los dentre aqueles que bem quiser e, por conseguinte, de sua própria classe, assim como de todas as outras, o que faz com que tenha interesse em conservar o Estado. Em Creta, pelo contrário, os cosmos provêm não de todas as classes, mas sim de certas famílias. Dos que foram cosmos, tiram-se os senadores, dos quais se pode dizer tudo o que se disse dos de Esparta. A dispensa da prestação de contas e a perpetuidade são prerrogativas muito acima de seu mérito.” “Cassam-se os cosmos sem processo e, de ordinário, pela insurreição de outros cosmos ou de particulares amotinados. A única graça que lhes concedem é deixar-lhes, antes da expulsão, a faculdade de se demitir.”
“O regime de Cartago, em geral, é sabiamente ordenado. A pedra de toque de uma boa Constituição é a perseverança voluntária e livre do povo na ordem estabelecida, sem que jamais tenha ocorrido nem alguma sedição notável de sua parte nem opressão da parte dos que a governam.”
“A República de Cartago tem em comum com a de Esparta:¹ 1° o que nesta se chama Fidítias, ou refeições públicas entre pessoas da mesma classe; 2° seu Centunvirato, que corresponde ao colégio dos éforos, com a diferença de ser composto de 140 membros e de ser mais bem-recrutado, isto é, não-escolhido ao acaso e dentre o vulgo, mas sim dentre o que há de mais eminente em matéria de mérito²”
¹ Não disse no começo da obra que Esparta era uma monarquia? O próprio Montesquieu é dessa opinião!
² Mas Aristóteles cita como um mérito dos cargos de éforos espartanos serem abertos à arraia-miúda, quando não o são entre os cartagineses!
ARISTÓTELES NÃO SABE O QUE DIZ OU TODO O TEMPO SE CONTRADIZ! “A maior parte dos pontos que criticamos por se afastarem dos princípios de toda boa Constituição são comuns às três Repúblicas. No entanto, embora todas elas tenham um jeito de aristocracia ou de República, inclinam-se um pouco mais para a democracia, sob certos aspectos, e, sob outros, para a oligarquia.”
“De resto, embora a República de Cartago se incline bastante para a oligarquia, ela escapa com bastante agilidade dos seus inconvenientes, através das colônias de pobres que envia para que façam fortuna nas cidades de sua dependência. Este recurso prolonga a duração do Estado, mas é confiar demais no acaso; devem-se abolir pela própria Constituição todas as causas de sedição. Se acontecer alguma calamidade e a massa se revoltar contra a autoridade não haverá leis que possam deter sua audácia, nem remediar a desordem.”
“Dentre aqueles que escreveram sobre o governo civil, alguns sempre levaram uma vida privada sem participar em nada dos negócios públicos; passamo-los quase todos em revista, ao menos os que deixaram escritos dignos de atenção; os outros foram legisladores quer em sua própria pátria, quer em outro lugar. Dentre estes, alguns foram simplesmente autores de leis, outros, autores de Constituição, como Licurgo e Sólon. Falamos bastante do primeiro quando tratamos da República espartana. Alguns contam o segundo entre os bons legisladores, por ter destruído a oligarquia imoderada demais dos atenienses, libertado o povo da servidão e estabelecido uma democracia bem-temperada pela mistura das outras formas, aproximadamente tal como era antigamente. O Conselho, ou Senado do Areópago, é de fato oligárquico; a eleição dos magistrados, aristocrática e a administração da justiça, muito popular. O Areópago existia antes dele, assim como o modo de eleição dos magistrados. Ele parece só ter tido o mérito de sua conservação. No entanto, foi com certeza ele quem reergueu o povo, ao determinar que os juízes fossem tirados de todas as classes. Assim, censuram-no por ter ele próprio arruinado um ou outro, ou mesmo os dois outros poderes de sua Constituição, entregando ao sorteio, quanto ao terceiro, a nomeação dos juízes, e pondo todos sob a autoridade deles. Mal esta inovação foi recebida e já fez nascer a raça dos demagogos, que, adulando o povo, como se adulam os tiranos, reduziram o Estado à democracia atual.” Bem-lhe-quer mal-lhe-quer
“Sem dúvida, era necessário entregar ao povo, como fez Sólon, a nomeação e a censura dos magistrados, sem o que ele seria escravo e, conseqüentemente, inimigo do Estado. Mas Sólon quis ao mesmo tempo que os magistrados fossem escolhidos dentre os nobres e os ricos: aqueles que possuíssem 500 medinos [?] de renda, os que podiam alimentar um par de bois, ou zeugitas, e enfim os cavaleiros, que formavam a terceira classe. A quarta classe, composta de trabalhadores manuais, não tinha acesso a nenhuma magistratura.” ?!
“Alguns tentam fazer crer que Onomacrito de Lócris tenha sido o primeiro a saber fazer leis e que, tendo passado de sua pátria a Creta, ali pôs à prova este talento, embora não tivesse vindo senão para trabalhar como adivinho; dizem também que teve por companheiro Tales, cujos discípulos foram Licurgo e Zaleuco, que, por sua vez, teve Carondas como aluno. Há, porém, muitos anacronismos nessa história.
Filolau, natural de Corinto, da raça dos Baquíadas, também deu leis aos tebanos. Apaixonou-se por Díocles, vencedor nos jogos olímpicos, que, detestando o amor incestuoso de Alcíone, sua mãe, [?] deixou sua cidade e o seguiu até Tebas, onde ambos morreram. Ainda hoje se mostram seus túmulos, um em frente ao outro, mas colocados de tal forma que apenas de um deles se pode ver o istmo de Corinto. Dizem que isto foi assim arranjado por eles próprios, sobretudo por Díocles, em memória de sua desgraça, para subtrair seu sepulcro dos olhares de Corinto, pela interposição do mausoléu de Filolau.” Intercala análises de engenharia constitucional e da biografia dos grandes legisladores com casos comezinhos e romances, tsc…
“Platão, a comunidade das mulheres, das crianças e dos bens, além dos banquetes públicos femininos; também é conhecida a sua lei contra a embriaguez, a lei em favor da sobriedade dos presidentes de banquetes e a que diz respeito aos exercícios militares e ao uso das duas mãos, pois ele não podia tolerar que se servissem de uma e a outra permanecesse inútil. Existem também algumas leis de Drácon, que ele acrescentou, por assim dizer, à Constituição existente; distinguem-se pela extrema severidade das penas.”
“Pítaco é também mais autor de leis do que fundador de República. Cita-se uma lei sua contra os bêbados, que diz que as brigas entre eles, em estado de embriaguez, serão punidas mais severamente do que se não tivessem bebido.”
* * * PRIMEIRA LEITURA DA REPÚBLICA (CONTEÚDO IMPORTADO – COM EDIÇÕES – DO ANTIGO BLOG DO AUTOR, PRÉ-Seclusão Anagógica) * * *
[PREFÁCIO DA EDIÇÃO – COMENTADOR] Foi, como é fato conhecido, o preceptor de Alexandre, O Grande, mas não por muito tempo: “Romperá com seu real discípulo depois do assassínio de Calístenes” No entanto eis a comprovação de sua imaturidade prática, até maior que a de Platão, que tanto criticou: “Jamais se envolveu com política prática.”
Meu limite: é que o pai que temos determina o raio de nossa genialidade. O meu, infelizmente, é bem curto. Zeus não respeitou seu pai, por que esperaria receber o respeito dos filhos sem o emprego da violência? O fosso etário entre pais e filhos. Profilática: que o filho seja gerado no inverno! Adoro meus “rasgos de cólera”, “Dia de fúria”. Estranhamente encarnado numa fazenda abelhuda…
Muitas de suas obras se perderam. Algumas são atribuídas a si, mas provavelmente provêm de discípulos.
Estudou 158 Constituições de Estados – na época a Grécia estava em dissolução, e a República Romana em ascensão. Havia “zilhões” de pequenos Estados (cidades-Estados) – a geografia política do mundo era bem diferente do que é hoje. Contribuiu com as bases do Direito Moderno, mas foi muito ultrapassado por Montesquieu & al.
ECONOMIA (*) ≠ CREMATÍSTICA
(Modesta e nobre X Supérflua, grotesca e vil)
(*) despida em absoluto do “D” marxista (ciclos D-M)
P. 24: o médico vendido. O professor vendido.
“a bondade intrínseca do Estado”
“a mulher passaria por atrevida se não fosse mais reservada do que um homem em suas palavras.”
“São as primeiras impressões as que mais nos afetam”
“a beleza e a estatura não pertencem à maioria.” Ora, veja só, às vezes me acho um não-maldito!
“Democracia” não é o governo da maioria, etimologicamente, mas dos pobres.
Uma hora fala em Deus, noutra fala em Zeus.
“Pelo fim do serviço militar obrigatório! Vote 25050.” Minha plataforma.
“Os homens facilmente se corrompem pela prosperidade, pois nem todos são capazes de suportá-la”
161: bem atual – sobre os parlamentares e seus vencimentos: A idéia aristotélica de se não auferir SALÁRIO ao político profissional. Assim, será uma função por VOCAÇÃO, e não COBIÇA. Só os mais ricos, que já são ricos, estariam aptos, mas eles teriam menos chances de legislar em causa própria; e os pobres não se sentiriam ultrajados como hoje se vê com os sucessivos “auto-aumentos” que se concedem os deputados.
Já cobrava TRANSPARÊNCIA das autoridades em relação às receitas e gastos, mesmo sem um site na internet para publicá-lo.
“No caso de algum rico ultrajar [aos mendigos], será punido mais severamente do que se tivesse insultado um igual.”
Da liberdade e da igualdade na Democracia: “sofisma miserável.”
170: “Que deixe para si mesmo a distribuição das honras e entregue a seus oficiais a aos juízes as punições.” Maquiavélico, literalmente. Não seria o caso, aliás, de Maquiavel ser um aristotélico?
178: Aristóteles X Platão-Marx no tocante à propriedade privada.
Recomenda-se também, como medida anti-viciosa, um teto para rendimentos por indivíduo ou família, sem falar na dignidade do pão (banquetes públicos) aos indigentes.
“Não se deve exigir que um mesmo homem seja flautista e sapateiro.”
Platão: famoso precursor do feminismo [P.S.: quem diria…]
“the <uncanny> is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”
“The Italian and the Portuguese seem to content themselves with words which we should describe as circumlocutions.”
BICAR-O-OLHO: “This fantastic tale begins with the childhoodrecollections of the student Nathaniel: in spite of his presente happiness, he cannot banish the memories associated with the mysterious and terrifying death of the father he loved. On certain evenings his mother used to send the children to bed early, warning them that <the Sand-Man was coming>; and sure enough Nathaniel would not fail to hear the heavy tread of a visitor with whom his father would then be occupied that evening. When questioned about the Sand-Man, his mother, it is true, denied that such a person existed except as a form of speech; but his nurse could give him more definite information: <He is a wicked man who comes when children won’t go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes so that they jump out of their heads all bleeding. Then he puts the eyes in a sack and carries them off to the moon to feed his children. They sit up there in their nest, and their beaks are hooked like owls’ beaks, and they use them to peck up naughty boys’ and girls’ eyes with.>”
“The grains of sand that are to be thrown into the child’s eyes turn into red-hot grains of coal out of the flames; and in both cases they are meant to make his eyes jump out. In the course of another visit of the Sand-Man’s, a year later, his father was killed in his study by an explosion. The lawyer Coppelius vanished from the place without leaving a trace behind.”
“Uncertainty whether an object is living or inanimate, which we must admit in regard to the doll Olympia, is quite irrelevant in connection with this other, more striking instance of uncanniness. It is true that the writer creates a kind of uncertainty in us in the beginning by not letting us know, no doubt purposely, whether he is taking us into the real world or into a purely fantastic one of his own creation. He has admitted the right to do either; and if he chooses to stage his action in a world peopled with spirits, demons and ghosts, as Shakespeare does in Hamlet, in Macbeth and, in a different sense, in The Tempest and A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, we must bow to his decision and treat his setting as though it were real for as long as we put ourselves into his hands.”
“The theory of <intellectual uncertainty> is thus incapable of explaining that impression.”
“We know from psychoanalytic experience, however, that this fear of damaging or losing one’s eyes is a terrible fear of childhood.” Um dia alguém me disse que tocar na pupila gerava cegueira. Outro dia ouvi dizer que não podia me aproximar de sapos nem de borboletas. E em 1994 presenciei um eclipse solar que se repete de 50 em 50 anos – se eu olhasse para o Sol meus olhos se queimariam instantaneamente, a luz estaria para sempre banida de meus sentidos. Eu tinha 6 anos quando isso aconteceu, e me perguntei como eu faria para ir ao trabalho, aos 56 anos, dirigindo – seria o pára-sol prevenção suficiente?!
Imagina se… “Many adults still retain their apprehensiveness in this respect, and no bodily injury is so much dreaded by them as an injury to the eye.”
“A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that a morbid anxiety connected with the eyes and with going blind is often enough a substitute for the dread of castration.” A única existência inútil – realmente pior que a morte.
“In blinding himself, Oedipus, that mythical law-breaker, was simply carrying out a mitigated form of the punishment of castration—the only punishment that according to the lex talionis was fitted for him.”
EGO SUM: eye think, ay! therefore, eye M.!
“For why does Hoffmann bring the anxiety about eyes into such intimate connection with the father’s death? And why does the Sand-Man appear each time in order to interfere with love?”
“the Professor is even called the father of Olympia.” Zeus, o Pai
“She, the automatic doll, can be nothing else than a personification of Nathaniel’s feminine attitude towards his father in his infancy. (…) Now Spalaazani’s otherwise incomprehensible statement that the optician has stolen Nathaniel’s eyes so as to set them in the doll becomes significant and supplies fresh evidence for the identity of Olympia and Nathaniel. (…) We may with justice call such love narcissistic, and can understand why he who has fallen victim to it should relinquish his real, external object of love. The psychological truth of the situation in which the young man, fixated upon his father by his castration-complex, is incapable of loving a woman, is amply proved by numerous analyses of patients whose story, though less fantastic, is hardly less tragic than that of the student Nathaniel.”
A TOY OE-TYPICAL STORY: “Now, dolls happen to be rather closely connected with infantile life. We remember that in their early games children do not distinguish at all sharply between living and lifeless objects, and that they are especially fond of treating their dolls like live people. In fact I have occasionally heard a woman patient declare that even at the age of 8 she had still been convinced that her dolls would be certain to come to life if she were to look at them in a particular way, with as concentrated a gaze as possible.” Os bichos de pelúcia de grua que dormiam comigo quando minha casa estava em reforma – como que me lembravam do meu próprio quarto.
“Hoffmann is in literature the unrivalled master of conjuring up the uncanny. His Elixire des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixir) contains a mass of themes to which one is tempted to ascribe the uncanny effect of the narrative; but it is too obscure and intricate a story to venture to summarize.”
“The theme of the <double> has been very thoroughly treated by Otto Rank (Del Doppelgänger). He has gone into the connections the <double> has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and the fear of death; but he also lets in a flood of light on the astonishing evolution of this idea. For the <double> was originally an insurance against destruction to the ego, an <energetic denial of the power of death>, as Rank says; and probably the
<imortal> soul was the first <double> of the body. This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of representing castration by a doubling or multiplication of the genital symbol; the same desire spurred on the ancient Egyptians to the art of making images of the dead in some lasting material. Such ideas, however, have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which holds sway in the mind of the child as in that of primitive man; and when this stage has been left behind the double takes on a different aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, he becomes the ghastly harbinger of death.”
A faculdade da auto-crítica talvez seja uma secreta vingança contra um Outro que conhecemos desde a primeira infância muito bem: nosso Duplo.
“an involuntary return to the same situation, but which differ radically from it in other respects, also result in the same feeling of helplessness and of something uncanny.”
Perder-se numa superquadra da asa norte, dentro de uma grande mansão que já havíamos visitado, em corredores do minhocão ou em estações do metrô quando esquecemos que a nossa já passou. Que horas são?
“if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number—addresses, hotel-rooms, compartments in railway-trains—always has the same one, or one which at least contains the same figures.”
Aquela música. Essa música. Eu já ouvi tocar. Mas quando, onde?!?
O rosto dum estranho estranhamente familiar. O desconfortado suscitado pelo Efeito Mandela. O livro que eu estava relendo e não sabia – até chegar à metade do livro e finalmente me lembrar. O fato de eu ter perdido a folha de número 33 das minhas anotações sobre a Bíblia justamente quando tinha começado a abordar o Novo Testamento. Uma folha que eu perdi dentro de casa, e parecia inexplicável que o papel tivesse simplesmente se dissolvido no ar…
“They are never surprised when they invariably run up against the person they have just been thinking of, perhaps for the first time for many months. If they say one day <I haven’t had news of so-and-so for a long time>, they will be sure to get a letter from him the next morning. And an accident or a death will rarely take place without having cast its shadow before on their minds. They are in the habit of mentioning this state of affairs in the most modest manner, saying that they have <presentiments> which <usually> come true.”
“if this is indeed the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why the usage of speech has extended das Heimliche into its opposite das Unheimliche; 18 for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old (…) This reference to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as something which ought to have been kept concealed but which has nevertheless come to light.”
“Many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts. As we have seen, many languages in use today can only render the German expression. <an unheimliches house> by <a haunted house>.”
“Most likely our fear still contains the old belief that the deceased becomes the enemy of his survivor and wants to carry him off to share his new life with him.”
“All so-called educated people have ceased to believe, officially at any rate, that the dead can become visible as spirits, and have hedged round any such appearances with improbable and remote circumstances; their emotional attitude towards their dead, moreover, once a highly dubious and ambivalent one, has been toned down in the higher strata of the mind into a simple feeling of reverence.”
“Sie ahnt, dass ich ganz sicher em Genie,
Vielleicht sogar der Teufel bin.”
“To many people the idea of being buried alive while appearing to be dead is the most uncanny thing of all. (…) phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence.”
“I read a story about a young married couple, who move into a furnished flat in which there is a curiously shaped table with carvings of crocodiles on it. Towards evening they begin to smell an intolerable and very typical odour that pervades the whole flat; things begin to get in their way and trip them up in the darkness; they seem to see a vague form gliding up the stairs—in short, we are given to understand that the presence of the table causes ghostly crocodiles to haunt the place, or that the wooden monsters come to life in the dark, or something of that sort.”
“whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, still in the dream, <this place is familiar to me, I have been there before>, we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body. In this case, too, the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, homelike, familiar; the prefix un is the token of repression.”
“Who would be so bold as to call it an uncanny moment, for instance, when Snow-White opens her eyes once more?”
“In fairy-tales, for instance, the world of reality is left behind from the very start, and the animistic system of beliefs is frankly adopted. Wish-fulfillments, secret powers, omnipotence of thoughts, animation of lifeless objects, all the elements so common in fairy-stories, can exert no uncanny influence here; for, as we have learnt, that feeling cannot arise unless there is a conflict of judgement whether things which have been <surmounted> and are regarded as incredible are not, after all, possible; and this problem is excluded from the beginning by the setting of the story. And thus we see that such stories as have furnished us with most of the contradictions to our hypothesis of the uncanny confirm the first part of our proposition—that in the realm of fiction many things are not uncanny which would be so if they happened in real life.”
“The story-teller can also choose a setting which, though less imaginary than the world of fairy tales, does yet differ from the real world by admitting superior spiritual entities such as daemonic influences or departed spirits. So long as they remain within their setting of poetic reality their usual attribute of uncanniness fails to attach to such beings. The souls in Dante’s Inferno, or the ghostly apparitions in Hamlet, Macbeth or Julius Caesar, may be gloomy and terrible enough, but they are no more really uncanny than is Homer’s jovial world of gods.” “The situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality. In this case he accepts all the conditions operating to produce uncanny feelings in real life; and everything that would have an uncanny effect in reality has it in his story. But in this case, too, he can increase his effect and multiply it far beyond what could happen in reality, by bringing about events which never or very rarely happen in fact. He takes advantage, as it were, of our supposedly surmounted superstitiousness; he deceives us into thinking that he is giving us the sober truth, and then after all oversteps the bounds of possibility. We react to his inventions as we should have reacted to real experiences; by the time we have seen through his trick it is already too late and the author has achieved his object; but it must be added that his success is not unalloyed. We retain a feeling of dissatisfaction, a kind of grudge against the attempted deceit; I have noticed this particularly after reading Schnitzler’s Die Weissagung and similar stories which flirt with the supernatural. The writer has then one more means he can use to escape our rising vexation and at the same time to improve his chances of success. It is this, that he should keep us in the dark for a long time about the precise nature of the conditions he has selected for the world he writes about, or that he should cunningly and ingeniously avoid any definite information on the point at all throughout the book. Strictly speaking, all these complications relate only to that class of the uncanny which proceeds from forms of thought that have been surmounted. The class which proceeds from repressed complexes is more irrefragable and remains as powerful in fiction as in real experience, except in one point. The uncanny belonging to the first class—that proceeding from forms of thought that have been surmounted—retains this quality in fiction as in experience so long as the setting is one of physical reality; but as soon as it is given an arbitrary and unrealistic setting in fiction, it is apt to lose its quality of the uncanny.”
“Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of that infantile morbid anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.”
“Biographies of gay men and lesbian women discuss their orientation only when unavoidable, as with Oscar Wilde. There have been several encyclopedias and dictionaries of sexuality (beginning with a German one of 1922, the Handbuch der Sexualwissenschaft), but this work is the first to treat homosexuality in all its complexity and variety.”
“all the efforts of church and state over the centuries to obliterate homosexual behavior and its expression in literature, tradition, and subculture have come to naught, if only because the capacity for homoerotic response and homosexual activity is embedded in human nature, and cannot be eradicated by any amount of suffering inflicted upon hapless individuals.”
“The editors are persuaded that the phenomenology of lesbianism and that of male homosexuality have much in common, especially when viewed in the cultural and social context, where massive homophobia has provided a shared setting, if not necessarily an equal duress.”
“Perhaps the most difficult obstacle to a simple focus on <homosexuality> is the growing realization that what has been lumped together under that term since its coinage in 1869 is not a simple, unitary phenomenon. The more one works with data from times and cultures other than contemporary middle-class American and northern European ones, the more one tends to see a multiplicity of homosexualities.”
“The Greeks who institutionalized pederasty and used it for educational ends take a prominent role, as does the Judeo-Christian tradition of sexual restriction and homophobia that prevailed under the church Fathers, Scholasticism, and the Reformers, and – in altered form – during the 20th century under Hitler and Mussolini, Stalin and Castro.”
ACHILLES
“He is a tragic hero, being aware of the shortness of his life, and his devoted friendship for Patroclus is one of the major themes of the epic. Later Greek speculation made the two lovers, and also gave Achilles a passion for Troilus. The homoerotic elements in the figure of Achilles are characteristically Hellenic. He is supremely beautiful, kalos as the later vase inscriptions have it; he is ever youthful as well as short-lived, yet he foresees and mourns his own death as he anticipates the grief that it will bring to others. His attachment to Patroclus is an archetypal male bond that occurs elsewhere in Greek culture: Damon and Pythias, Orestes and Pylades, Harmodius and Aristogiton are pairs of comrades who gladly face danger and death for and beside each other. From the Semitic world stem Gilgamesh and Enkidu, as well as David and Jonathan. The friendship of Achilles and Patroclus is mentioned explicitly only once in the Iliad, and then in a context of military excellence; it is the comradeship of warriors who fight always in each other’s ken: <From then on the son of Thetis urged that never in the moil of Ares [nas confusões da guerra] should Patroclus be stationed apart from his own man-slaughtering spear.>”
“The friendship with Patroclus blossomed into overt homosexual love in the fifth and fourth centuries, in the works of Aeschylus, Plato, and Aeschines, and as such seems to have inspired the enigmatic verses in Lycophron’s third-century Alexandra that make unrequited love Achilles’ motive for killing Troilus. By the IV century of our era this story had been elaborated into a sadomasochistic version in which Achilles causes the death of his beloved by crushing him in a lover’s embrace. As a rule, the post-classical tradition shows Achilles as heterosexual and having an exemplary asexual friendship with Patroclus. The figure of Achilles remained polyvalent. The classical Greek pederastic tradition only sporadically assimilated him, new variations appeared in pagan writings after the Golden Age of Hellenic civilization, and medieval Christian writers deliberately suppressed the homoerotic nuances of the figure.”
W. M. Clarke, Achilles and Patroclus in Love (1978)
AESCHINES
“Athenian orator. His exchanges with Demosthenes in the courts in 343 and 330 reflect the relations between Athens and Macedon in the era of Alexander the Great. Aeschines and Demosthenes were both members of the Athenian boule (assembly) in the year 347-46, and their disagreements led to 16 years of bitter enmity. Demosthenes opposed Aeschines and the efforts to reach an accord with Philip of Macedon, while Aeschines supported the negotiations and wanted to extend them into a peace that would provide for joint action against aggressors and make it possible to do without Macedonian help. In 346-45 Demosthenes began a prosecution of Aeschines for his part in the peace negotiations – Aeschines replied with a charge that Timarchus, Demosthenes’ ally, had prostituted himself with other males and thereby incurred atimia,<civic dishonor>, which disqualified him from addressing the assembly. Aeschines’ stratagem was successful, and Timarchus was defeated and disenfranchised. The oration is often discussed because of the texts of the Athenian laws that it cites, as well as such accusations that Timarchus had gone down to Piraeus, ostensibly to learn the barber’s trade.”
AESCHYLUS
QUEM DISSE, JAEGER, QUE NÃO SE PODE SER SOLDADO E POETA AO MESMO TEMPO? “First of the great Attic tragedians. Aeschylus fought against the Persians at Marathon and probably Salamis. Profoundly religious and patriotic, he produced, according to one catalogue, 72 titles, but 10 others are mentioned elsewhere. He was the one who first added a second actor to speak against the chorus. Of his 7 surviving tragedies, none is pederastic. His lost Myrmidons, however, described in lascivious terms the physical love of Achilles for Patroclus’ thighs, altering the age relationship given in Homer’s Iliad – where Patroclus is a few years the older, but as they grew up together, they were essentially agemates – to suggest that Achilles was the lover (erastes)of Patroclus.
Plato had Phaedrus point out the confusion, and argue that Patroclus must have been the older and therefore the lover, while the beautiful Achilles was his beloved (Symposium, 180a). Among Attic tragedians Aeschylus was followed by Sophocles, Euripides, and Agathon.
Sophocles (496-406 B.C.), who first bested Aeschylus in 468 and added a third actor, wrote 123 tragedies of which 7 survive, all from later than 440.At least 4 of his tragedies were pederastic. Euripides (480-406 B.C.) wrote 75 tragedies of which 19 survive, and the lost Chrysippus,and probably some others as well, were pederastic. Euripides loved the beautiful but effeminate tragedian Agathon until Agathon was 40. The latter, who won his first victory in 416, was the first to reduce the chorus to a mere interlude, but none of his works survive.
All four of the greatest tragedians wrote pederastic plays but none survive, possibly because of Christian homophobia. The tragedians seem to have shared the pederastic enthusiasm of the lyric poets and of Pindar, though many of their mythical and historical source-themes antedated the formal institutionalization of paiderasteiain Greece toward the beginning of the sixth century before our era.”
(o artigo de William Percyfoi transcrito na íntegra)
AFRICA, NORTH
“Pederasty was virtually pandemic in North Africa during the periods of Arab and Turkish rule. Islam as a whole was tolerant of pederasty, and in North Africa particularly so. (The Islamic high-water points in this respect may tentatively be marked out as Baghdad of The Thousand and One Nights, Cairo of the Mamluks, Moorish Granada, and Algiers of the 16th and 17th centuries.) The era of Arabic rule in North Africa did, however, witness occasional puritan movements and rulers, such as the Almohads and a Shiite puritanism centered in Fez (Morocco). This puritanism continues with the current King Hassan II of Morocco, who is, however, hampered by an openly homosexual brother.”
“400 Franciscan friars left the Spain of Isabel the Catholic and embraced Islam rather than <mend their ways>, as she had commanded them to do.”
“Universal throughout pre-colonial North Africa was the singing and dancing boy, widely preferred over the female in café entertainments and suburban pleasure gardens. A prime cultural rationale was to protect the chastity of the females, who would instantly assume the status of a prostitute in presenting such a performance. The result was several centuries of erotic performances by boys, who were the preferred entertainers even when female prostitutes were available, and who did not limit their acts to arousing the lust of the patrons. A North African merchant could stop at the café for a cup of tea and a hookah[narguilé], provided by a young lad, listen to the singing, and then proceed to have sex with the boy right on the premises, before returning to his shop.”
“The present writer has spoken with a Tunisian supervisor of schools who firmly believes in the death penalty for all homosexuals. Thus, in their rush to modernism, Third World leaders often adopt the sexual standards of medieval Christendom, even as Europe and America are moving toward legalization and tolerance of same-sex activity. Such, at least in part, is also the plight of modern North Africa.”
“Tunisia. A small and impoverished country of some 4 million, Tunisia’s high birthrate keeps the country very young – about half the people are under 18. Although it is common to see men walking hand-in-hand (as in all Islamic countries), it would not be wise for a foreigner to adopt the practice with a male lover. Tunisians can easily tell the difference between two friends of approximately equal status (where hand-holding is expected) and a sexual relation (which is <officially> disapproved of and therefore not to be made public).” “In the days of Carthage, the city was known for its perfumed male prostitutes and courtesans. After Carthage was destroyed in the Punic wars, Tunisia became a Roman colony. The country did not regain its independence until modern times. The Romans were supplanted by the Vandals, who in turn surrendered the country to the Byzantine Empire. The rise of the followers of Muhammad swept Tunisia out of Christendom forever, and the country eventually passed into the Turkish Empire, where it remained until the French protectorate.”
“Marxist societies abominate homosexuality, and this influence has had a chilling effect on Algeria. The passing tourist will see nothing of such activity, although residents may have a different experience. Another fact is that Algerians do not like the French (because of the war) and this dislike is frequently extended to all people who look like Frenchmen, though they may be Canadian or Polish. It is a strange country, where you can spot signs saying <Parking Reserved for the National Liberation Front> (the stalls are filled with Mercedes Benzes), and also the only place in all of North Africa where the present writer has even seen a large graffito proclaiming <Nous voulons vivre français!> (We want to live as Frenchmen!).
The adventures of Oscar Wilde and André Gide in Tunisia and Algeria before the war are good evidence that this modern difference between the two countries was in fact caused by the trauma of the war. There is better evidence in the history of Algiers long before. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Algiers was possibly the leading homosexual city in the world. It was the leading Ottoman naval and administrative center in the western Mediterranean, and was key to Turkey’s foreign trade with every country but Italy. Of the major North African cities, it was the furthest from the enemy – Europe. It was the most Turkish city in North Africa, in fact the most Turkish city outside Turkey.”
“The bath-houses (hammams) of Fez were the object of scandalous comments around 1500. Two factors assume a bolder relief in Morocco, although they are typical of North Africa as a whole. One is a horror of masturbation. This dislike, combined with the seclusion of good women and the diseases of prostitutes, leads many a Maghrebi [africano setentrional] to regard anal copulation with a friend as the only alternative open to him, and clearly superior to masturbation. It also leads
to such behavior being regarded as a mere peccadillo. The other, more peculiarly Moroccan tradition is that of baraka, a sort of <religious good luck>. It is believed that a saintly man can transmit some of this baraka to other men by the mechanism of anal intercourse. (Fellatio has traditionally been regarded with disgust in the region, although the 20th century has been changing attitudes.)”
Malek Chebel, L’Esprit de sérail: Perversions et marginalités sexuelles au
Magreb, Paris: Lieu Commun, 1988.
ALCIBIADES
“Reared in the household of his guardian and uncle Pericles, he became the eromenos and later intimate friend of Socrates, who saved his life in battle. His, brilliance enabled him in 420 to become leader of the extreme democratic faction, and his imperialistic designs led Athens into an alliance with Argos and other foes of Sparta, a policy largely discredited by the Spartan victory at Mantinea. He sponsored the plan for a Sicilian expedition to outflank Sparta, which ended after his recall in the capture of thousands of Athenians, most of whom died in the salt mines where they were confined, but soon after the fleet reached Sicily his enemies recalled him on the pretext of his complicity in the mutilation of the Hermae, the phallic pillars marking boundaries between lots of land. He escaped, however, to Sparta and became the adviser of the Spartan high command. Losing the confidence of the Spartans and accused of impregnating the wife of one of Sparta’s two kings, he fled to Persia, then tried to win reinstatement at Athens by winning Persian support for the city and promoting an oligarchic revolution, but without success. Then being appointed commander by the Athenian fleet at Samos, he displayed his military skills for several years and won a brilliant victory at Cyzicus in 410, but reverses in battle and political intrigue at home led to his downfall, and he was finally murdered in Phrygia in 404 [Sócrates, mais velho, foi condenado apenas em 399]. Though an outstanding politician and military leader, Alcibiades compromised himself by the excesses of his sexual life, which was not confined to his own sex, but was uninhibitedly bisexual, as was typical of a member of the Athenian aristocracy. The Attic comedians scolded him for his adventures; Aristophanes wrote a play (now lost) entitled Triphales (The man with three phalli), in which Alcibiades’ erotic exploits were satirized. In his youth, admired by the whole of Athens for his beauty, he bore on his coat of arms an Eros hurling a lightning bolt. Diogenes Laertius said of him that <when a young man, he separated men from their wives, and later, wives from their husbands,> while the comedian Pherecrates declared that <Alcibiades, who once was no man, is now the man of all women>. He gained a bad reputation for introducing luxurious practices into Athenian life, and even his dress was reproached for extravagance. He combined the ambitious political careerist and the bisexual dandy, a synthesis possible only in a society that tolerated homosexual expression and even a certain amount of heterosexual licence in its public figures. His physical beauty alone impressed his contemporaries enough to remain an inseparable part of his historical image.”
Walter Ellis, Alcibiades, New York: Routledge, 1989;
Jean Hatzfeld, Alcibiade: Étude sur l’histoire d’Athènes à la fin du Ve siècle, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951.
ANARCHISM
“Étienne de la Boétie (1530-1563) and William Godwin (1756-1836) wrote two proto-anarchist classics. Boétie’s Discours de la servitude voluntaire (1552-53) (translated as The Politics of Obedience and as The Will to Bondage) is still read by anarchists.” Ver excertos em Português em http://xtudotudo6.zip.net/arch2012-11-01_2012-11-30.html.
“Pederasty comes not so much from lack of marriage bed as from a hazy yearning for masculine beauty.”Proudhon
“The boy-lover John Henry Mackay (1864-1933), who wrote widely on both pederastic (under the pseudonym Sagitta) and anarchist topics, prepared the first (and only) biography of Stirner in 1898.”
“Karl Marx & Frederick Engels had a personal disgust for homosexuality (Engels told Marx to be grateful that they were too old to attract homosexuals). Marx published full-length diatribes against Proudhon, Stirner, and Bakunin. He used Bakunin’s relationship to Nechaev as an excuse for expelling the anarchists from the International in 1872. Lenin later denounced anarchists as politically <infantile>, just as Freudians argued that homosexuality was an arrested infantile (or adolescent) development.”
“Thomas Bell, a gay secretary of Frank Harris and a trick[?] of Wilde’s, has written a book on Wilde’s anarchism, available only in Portuguese.[!]”
“In Spain during the Civil War (1936-39), anarchists fought against both the fascists and the communists, and for a time dominated large areas of the country. Many gay men and lesbians volunteered to fight in the war, while others worked as ambulance drivers and medics.”
“Emma Goldman (1869-1940) is unquestionably the first person to lecture publicly in the United States on homosexual emancipation”
“Whether from choice or necessity, anarchists have written extensively against prisons and in favor of prisoners, many of whom either from choice or necessity have experienced prison homosexuality. William Godwin opposed punishment of any kind and all anarchists have opposed any enforced sexuality.”
“Both anarchists and gays can be found in the Punk Rock movement. Since many anarchists do not really believe in organizations, they can often be as hard to identify as homosexuals once were. During the early 80s at the New York Gay Pride marches, gay anarchists, S/M groups, gay atheists, NAMBLA, Pag Rag and others all marched together with banners as individual members drifted back and forth between all the groups.”
“A major question is whether homosexuals are inherently attracted to anarchism or whether homosexuals have been equally attracted to democracy, communism, fascism, monarchy, nationalism or capitalism. Because of the secrecy, no one can ever figure what percentage of homosexuals are anarchists and what percentage of anarchists are homosexual. But only among anarchists has there been a consistent commitment, rooted in basic principles of the philosophy, to build a society in which every person is free to express him- or herself sexually in every way.”
ANDERSEN, HANS CHRISTIAN
“His fame rests upon the 168 fairy tales and stories which he wrote between 1835 and 1872. Some of the very first became children’s classics from the moment of their appearance; the tales have since been translated into more than 100 languages. Some are almost child-like in their simplicity; others are so subtle and sophisticated that they can be properly appreciated only by adults.”
“It has been speculated that the fairy tale The Little Mermaid, completed in January 1837, is based on Andersen’s self-identification with a sexless creature with a fish’s tail who tragically loves a handsome prince, but instead of saving her own future as a mermaid by killing the prince and his bride sacrifices herself and commits suicide – another theme of early homosexual apologetic literature.”
ANDROGYNY
“There is a tendency to consider androgyny primarily psychic and constitutional, while hermaphroditism is anatomical.”
“with reference to male human beings <androgynous> implies effeminacy. Logically, it should then mean <viraginous, masculinized> when applied to women, but this parallel is rarely drawn.Thus there is an unanalyzed tendency to regard androgynization as essentially a process of softening or mitigating maleness. Stereotypically, the androgyne is a half-man or incomplete male. In addition to these relatively specific usages there is a kind of semantic halo effect, whereby androgyny is taken to refer to a more all-encompassing realm. Significantly, in this broader, almost mystical sense the negative connotations fall away, and androgyny may even be a prized quality. For example the figures in the Renaissance paintings of Botticelli and Leonardo are sometimes admired for their androgynous beauty. It comes as no surprise that these aspects of the artists were first emphasized by homosexual art critics of the 19th century.”
“In Hinduism and some African religions there are male gods who have female manifestations or avatars. A strand of Jewish medieval interpretation of Genesis holds that Adam and Eve were androgynous before the Fall. If this be the case, God himself must be androgynous since he made man <in his own image>. Working from different premises, medieval Christian mystics found that the compassion of Christ required that he be conceived of as a mother. Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), the German seer, held that all perfect beings, Christ as well as the angels, were androgynous. He foresaw that ultimately Christ’s sacrifice would make possible a restoration of the primal androgyny.”
“androgyny points the way to a return to the Golden Age, an era of harmony unmarred by the conflict and dissension of today which are rooted in an unnatural polarization.”
Mircea Eliade, Mephistopheles and the Androgyne, New York: Harper and Row, 1965.
ANIMAL HOMOSEXUALITY
“In the 1970s the well-publicized reports of the German ethologist Konrad Lorenz drew attention to male-male pair bonds in greylag geese. Controlled reports of <lesbian> behavior among birds, in which two females share the responsibilities of a single nest, have existed since 1885. Mounting behavior has been observed among male lizards, monkeys, and mountain goats. In some cases one male bests the other in combat, and then mounts his fellow, engaging in penile thrusts – though rarely with intromission. In other instances, a submissive male will <present> to a dominant one, by exhibiting his buttocks in a receptive manner. Mutual masturbation and fellatio have been observed among male stump-tailed macaques. During oestrus female rhesus monkeys engage in mutual full-body rubbing. Those who have observed these same-sex patterns in various species have noted, explicitly or implicitly, similarities with human behavior. It is vital, however, not to elide differences. Mounting behavior may not be sexual, but an expression of social hierarchy: the dominant partner reaffirms his superiority over the presenting one. In most cases where a sexual pairing does occur, one partner adopts the characteristic behavior of the other sex. While this behavioral inversion sometimes occurs in human homosexual conduct, it is by no means universal. Thus while (say) Roman homosexuality, which often involved slaves submitting to their masters, may find its analogue among animals, modern American androphilia largely does not. This difference suggests that the cultural matrix is important.” “In the light of this complexity, a simple identification of human homosexual behavior with same-sex interactions among animals is reductive, and may block or misdirect the search for an understanding of the remaining mysteries of human sexuality. Still, for those aspects to which they have relevance, animal patterns of homosexual behavior help to place human ones in a phylogenetic perspective – in somewhat the same way as animal cries and calls have a relation to human language, and the structures built by birds and beavers anticipate the feats of human architecture.”
ARISTOCRATIC VICE
“In the 17th century Sir Edward Coke attributed the origin of sodomy to <pride, excess of diet, idleness and contempt of the poor>. The noted English jurist was in fact offering a variation on the prophet Ezekiel (16:49). This accusation reflects the perennial truism that wealth, idleness, and lust tend to go together – a cluster summed up in the Latin term luxuria.”
“The stereotype of aristocratic vice has a sequel in the early 20th-century Marxist notion that the purported increase of homosexuality in modem industrial states stems from the decadence of capitalism; in this view the workers fortunately remain psychologically healthy and thus untainted by the debilitating proclivity. In the Krupp and von Moltke-Eulenburg scandals in Germany in 1903-08, journalists of the socialist press did their best to inflame their readership against the unnatural vices of the aristocracy, which were bringing the nation to the brink of ruin.”
ARISTOTLE
“As a thinker Aristotle is outstanding for the breadth of his interests, which encompassed the entire panorama of the ancient sciences, and for his efforts to make sense of the world through applying an organic and developmental approach. In this way he departed from the essentialist, deductive emphasis of Plato. Unfortunately, Aristotle’s polished essays, which were noted for their style, are lost, and the massive corpus of surviving works derives largely from lecture notes. In these the wording of the Greek presents many uncertainties”
“Although Aristotle is known to have had several male lovers, in his writings he tended to follow Plato’s lead in favoring restraints on overt expression of homoerotic feelings. He differs, however, from Plato’s ethical and idealizing approach to male same-sex love by his stress on biological factors. In a brief but important treatment in the Nicomachean Ethics (7:5) he was the first to distinguish clearly between innate and acquired homosexuality. This dichotomy corresponds to a standard Greek distinction between processes which are determined by nature (physis) and those which are conditioned by culture or custom (nomos).The approach set forth in this text was to be echoed a millennium and a half later in the Christian Scholastic treatments of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae, 31:7). In The History of Animals (9:8), Aristotle anticipates modem ethology by showing that homosexual behavior among birds is linked to patterns of domination and submission. In various passages he speaks of homosexual relations among noted Athenian men and boys as a matter of course. His treatment of friendship (Nicomachean Ethics, books 8 and 9) emphasizes its mutual character, based on the equality of the parties, which requires time for full consolidation. He takes it as given that true friendship can occur only between two free males of equal status, excluding slaves and women. Aristotle’s ideas on friendship were to be echoed by Cicero, Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne, and Francis Bacon.
The Problems (4:26), a work attributed to Aristotle but probably compiled by a follower, attributes desire for anal intercourse in men to the accumulation of semen in the fundament. This notion derives from the common Greek medical view that semen is produced in the region of the brain and then transferred by a series of conduits to the lower body.
In England and America a spurious compilation of sexual and generative knowledge, Aristotle’s Masterpiece, enjoyed a long run of popularity. Compiled from a variety of sources, including the Hippocratic and Galenic medical traditions, the medieval writings of Albertus Magnus, and folklore of all kinds, this farrago was apparently first published in English in 1684. A predecessor of later sex manuals, the book contains such lore as the determination of the size of the penis from that of the nose.”
ART, VISUAL
“Before the 16th century, we find only representations of friendship between women; then in the Venetian school there begins an imagery of lesbian dalliance – but only for male entertainment. Only in recent decades has there been a substantial production of lesbian art by lesbians and for lesbians.”
pe(re)nial tradition
“In antiquity the Greeks were noted for their national peculiarity of exercising in the nude. Out of this custom grew the monumental nude statue, a genre that Greece bequeathed to the world. The tradition began a little before 600 B.C. with the sequence of nude youths known as kowoi. (Monumental female nudes did not appear until ca. 350 B.C.) Although archeologists have maintained a deafening silence on the matter, it seems clear that the radiance of these figures can only be explained in the light of the Greek homoerotic appreciation of the male form. Whatever else they may have been, the kowoi were the finest pin-ups ever created.”
“The Romans did not share the Greek fondness for nude exercise and their attitude toward homosexual behavior was more ambiguous. Perhaps it is not surprising that they favored the old religious subject of the hermaphrodite, the double-sexed being, but now reduced largely to a subject of titillation [erotização – vulgarização]. They also were capable of depicting scenes of peeping toms [machos, provavelmente felinos] that recall the atmosphere of Petronius’s Satyricon.”
“After the reign of Hadrian, who died in 138, the great age of ancient homoerotic art was over. Consequently, the adoption of Christianity cannot be said to have killed off a vibrant tradition, but it certainly did not encourage its revival.”
“Since Freud’s essay of 1910 the enigmatic figure of Leonardo has offered a special appeal.”
“By the turn of the century magazines began to appear in Germany presenting, by means of photographic reproduction, works appealing exclusively to male homosexual taste; lesbian magazines were only to emerge after World War I. Exceptionally, the American George Piatt Lynes (1907-1955) pursued a career in both mainstream and gay media (the latter in his extensive work for the Swiss magazine, Dei Kreis).”
“Although the Surrealists sought to explore sexuality, the homophobia of their leader André Breton placed a ban on gay subjects – or at least male ones. Two related figures did explore in this realm however, the writer Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), with his drawings of sailors, and the Argentine-born painter Leonor Fini (b. 1908), with enigmatic scenes of women. The ambitious Russian-born Pavel Tchelitchev (1898-1957), connected with several avant-garde circles in Europe and America, also belongs in this company.”
“It may be doubted that the long-standing premises of the modernist aesthetic – its sense of discontinuity, irony, and high seriousness – have been definitively overcome, but there is no doubt that the boundaries of the acceptable have been broadened. This enlargement creates opportunities for gay and lesbian artists. At the same time, however, the tyranny of the market and of critical stereotypes is as great as ever, so that artists are under great pressure to settle into niches that have been prepared for them. It should be remembered that many painters, sculptors, and photographers whose personal orientation is homosexual are as reluctant to be styled <gay artists> as they are to be called neo-expressionist, neo-mannerist, or some other label.”
BALZAC
“Vautrin’s secret is that he does not love women, but when and how does he love men? He does so only in the rents of the fabric of the narrative, because the technique of the novelist lies exactly in not speaking openly, but letting the reader know indirectly the erotic background of the events of his story. The physical union of Vautrin with Lucien he presents with stylistic subtlety as a predestined coupling of two halves of one being, as submission to a law of nature. The homosexual aspect of the discourse must always be masked, must hide behind a euphemism, a taunting ambiguity that nevertheless tells all to the knowing reader. The pact struck between Vautrin and Lucien is a Faustian one. Vautrin dreams of owning a plantation in the American South (sic) where on a 100,000 acres he can have absolute power over his slaves – including their bodies. Balzac refers explicitly to examples of the pederasty of antiquity as a creative, civilization-building force by analogy with the Promethean influence of Vautrin upon his beloved Lucien. Vautrin is almost diabolical as a figure of exuberant masculinity, while Lucien embodies the gentleness and meekness of the feminine. The unconscious dimension of their relationship Balzac underlines with magnificent symbolism. He characterizes Vautrin as a monster, <but attached by love to humanity>.Homosexual love is not relegated to the margin of society, as in the dark underworld of the prison, but expresses the fullness of affection with all its physical demands and its spiritual powers.”
“Having revealed to the hero and heroine an ideal love, Séraphitus-Séraphita departs for a heaven free of the earthly misery that human beings must endure.”
BARTHES, ROLAND
“Barthes introduced into the discussion of literature an original interpretation of semiotics based on the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. His work was associated with the structuralist trend as represented by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Julia Kristeva, Tzvetan Todorov, and others. Attacked by the academic establishment for subjectivism, he formulated a concept of criticism as a creative process on an equal plane with fiction and poetry. Even those favorable to his work conceded that this could amount to a <sensuous manhandling> of the text. The turning point in his criticism is probably the tour de forceS/Z (Paris, 1970), analyzing Balzac’s novella about an aging castrato, Sarrasine. Here Barthes turns away from the linear, goal-oriented procedures of traditional criticism in favor of a new mode that is dispersed, deliberately marginal, and <masturbatory>. In literature, he emphasized the factor of jouissance, a word which means both <bliss> and <sexual ejaculation>. Whether these procedures constitute models for a new feminist/gay critical practice that will erode the power of patriarchy, as some of his admirers have asserted, remains unclear.”
“Barthes, who never married, was actively homosexual during most of his life. Although his books are often personal, in his writing he excluded this major aspect of his experience, even when writing about love. Because of the attacks launched against him for his critical innovations, he was apparently reluctant to give his enemies an additional stick with which to beat him. Barthes’ posthumously published Incidents (Paris, 1987) does contain some revealing diary entries. The first group stems from visits he made, evidently in part for sexual purposes, to North Africa in 1968-69. The second group of entries records restless evenings in Paris in the autumn of 1979 just before his death. These jottings reveal that, despite his great fame, he frequently experienced rejection and loneliness. Whatever his personal sorrows, Barthes’ books remain to attest a remarkable human being whose activity coincided with an ebullient phase of Western culture.”
Sanford Freedman, Roland Barthes: A Bibliographical Reader’s Guide, New York: Garland, 1983.
BEAT GENERATION
“The origins of this trend in American culture can be traced to the friendship of three key figures in New York City at the beginning of the 1940s. Allen Ginsberg (1926-[1997]) and Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) met as students at Columbia University, where both were working at becoming writers. In 1944 Ginsberg encountered the somewhat older William Burroughs (1914-[1997]), who was not connected with the University, but whose acquaintance with avant-garde literature supplied an essential intellectual complement to college study. Both Ginsberg and Burroughs were homosexual; Kerouac bisexual. At first the ideas and accomplishments of the three were known only to a small circle. But toward the end of the 1950s, as their works began to be published and widely read, large numbers of young people, <beatniks> and <hippies>, took up elements of their life-style.”
“The word beat was sometimes traced to <beatific>, and sometimes to <beat out> and similar expressions, suggesting a pleasant exhaustion that derives from intensity of experience. Its appeal also reflects the beat and improvisation of jazz music, one of the principal influences on the trend. Some beat poets tried to match their writings with jazz in ballroom recitals, prefiguring the more effective melding of words and music in folk and rock. The ideal of spontaneity was one of the essential elements of the beat aesthetic. These writers sought to capture the immediacy of speech and lived experience, which were, if possible, to be transcribed directly as they occurred. This and related ideals reflect a new version of American folk pragmatism, preferring life to theory, immediacy to reflection, and feeling to reason. Contrary to what one might expect, however, the beat generation was not anti-intellectual, but chose to seek new sources of inspiration in neglected aspects of the European avant-garde and in Eastern thought and religion.”
“First published in Paris in 1959, his novel Naked Lunchbecame available in the United States only after a series of landmark obscenity decisions. With its phantasmagoric and sometimes sexually explicit subject matter, together with its quasi-surrealist techniques of narrative and syntactic disjunction, this novel presented a striking new vision. This novel was followed by The Soft Machineand The Ticket That Explodedto form a trilogy. Nova Express (1964) makes extensive use of the <cut-up> techniques, which Burroughs had developed with his friend Brion Gysin. A keen observer of contemporary reality in several countries, Burroughs has sought to present a kind of <world upside down> in order to sharpen the reader’s consciousness. One of his major themes has been his anarchist-based protest against what he sees as increasingly repressive social control through such institutions as medicine and the police. Involved with
drugs for some years, he managed to kick the habit, but there is no doubt that such experiences shaped his viewpoint. His works have been compared to pop art in painting and science fiction in literature. Sometimes taxed for misogyny, his world tends to be a masculine one, sometimes exploiting fantasies of regression to a hedonistic world of juvenile freedom. Burroughs’s hedonism is acerbic and ironic, and his mixture of qualities yields a distorting mirror of reality which some have found, because perhaps of the many contradictions of later 20th-century civilization itself, to be a compelling representation.”
Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William Burroughs, New York: Henry Holt, 1988.
BEATS AND HIPPIES
“The journalistic word <beatnik> is a pseudo-Slavic coinage of a type popular in the 1960s, the core element deriving from <beat> (generation), the suffix -nik being the formative of the noun of agent in Slavic languages. The term <hippie> was originally a slightly pejorative diminutive of the beat <hipster>, which in turn seems to derive from 1940s jivetalk adjective <hep>, meaning <with it, in step with current fashions>. The original hippies were a younger group with more spending money and more flamboyant dress. Their music was rock instead of the jazz of the beats. Despite differences that seemed important at the time, beats and hippies are probably best regarded as successive phases of a single phenomenon.”
“Attracted by the prestige of the beat writers, many beats/hippies cultivated claims to be poets and philosophers. In reality, once the tendency became modish only a few of the beat recruits were certifiably creative in literature and the arts; these individuals were surrounded by masses of people attracted by the atmosphere of revolt and experiment, or just seeking temporary separation – a moratorium as it was then called – from the banalities of ordinary American life. At its height the phenomenon supported scores of underground newspapers, which were read avidly by curious outsiders as well.”
“Significantly, the street term for the Other, <straight>, could refer either to non-drug users or heterosexuals.”
“Mysticism exerted a potent influence among beats and hippies, and some steeped themselves in Asian religions, especially Buddhism, Taoism, and Sufism. This fascination was not new, inasmuch as ever since the foundation of Theosophy as an official movement in 1875, American and other western societies had been permeated by Eastern religious elements. Impelled by a search for wisdom and cheap living conditions, many hippies and beatniks set out for prolonged sojourns in India, Nepal, and North Africa. Stay-at-homes professed their deep respect for American Indian culture.”
“Most hippies were heterosexual, but their long hair exposed them to jibes of effeminacy. In this way they could experience something of the rejection that had always been the lot of homosexuals.”
“With its adoption of a variant of jive talk, largely derived from black urban speech, the movement has left a lasting impression on the English vernacular, as seen in such expressions as <cool>, <spaced out>, and <rip off>.”
Marco Vassi, The Stoned Apocalypse, New York: Trident, 1972.
BENTHAM, JEREMY (1748-1832)
“English philosopher and law reformer. Bentham was the founder of the Utilitarian school of social philosophy, which held that legislation should promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. (…) His Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) was eventually extremely influential in England, France, Spain, and Latin America where several new republics adopted constitutions and penal codes drawn up by him or inspired by his writings.
Bentham’s utilitarian ethics led him to favor abolition of laws prohibiting homosexual behavior. English law in his day (and until 1861) prescribed hanging for sodomy and during the early 19th century was enforced with, on the average, 2 or 3 hangings a year. Bentham held that relations between men were a source of sexual pleasure that did not lead to unwanted pregnancies and hence a social good rather than a social evil. He wrote extensive notes favoring law reform about 1774 and a 50-page manuscript essay in 1785. In 1791, the French National Assembly repealed France’s sodomy law but in England the period of reaction that followed the outbreak of the French Revolution made reforms impossible. In 1814 and 1816 Bentham returned to the subject and wrote lengthy critiques of traditional homophobia which he regarded as an irrational prejudice leading to <cruelty and intolerance>. In 1817-18 he wrote over 300 pages of notes on homosexuality and the Bible. Homophobic sentiment was, however, so intense in England, both in the popular press and in learned circles, that Bentham did not dare to publish any of his writings on this subject. They remained in manuscript until 1931 when C.K. Ogden included brief excerpts in an appendix to his edition of Bentham’s Theory of Legislation. Bentham’s manuscript writings on this subject are excerpted and described in detail in Louis Crompton’s 1985 monograph on Byron. Bentham’s views on homosexuality are sufficiently positive that he might be described as a precursor of the modern gay liberation movement. Bentham not only treats legal, literary, and religious aspects of the subject in his notes, but also finds support for his opinions in ancient history and comparative anthropology.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“The emergence of systematic bibliographical control had to await the birth of the first homosexual emancipation movement in Berlin in 1897. This movement firmly held that progress toward homosexual rights must go hand in hand with intellectual enlightenment. Accordingly, each year’s production was noted in the annual volumes of the Jahrbuch fur sexuelle Zwischenstufen (1899-1923); by the end of the first ten years of monitoring over 1,000 new titles had been recorded. Although surveys were made of earlier literature, up to the time of the extinction of the movement by National-Socialism in 1933, no attempt had been made to organize this material into a single comprehensive bibliography of homosexual studies. Nonetheless, much valuable material was noted in the vast work of Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weisses (Berlin, 1914).”
Athenaeus (fl. ca. A.D. 200), Deipnosophists, Book 13;
Félix Buffiére, Eros adolescent: la pederastie dans la Grece antique (Paris, 1980);
Vern Bullough et al., Annotated Bibliography of Homosexuality(2 vols., New York, 1976);
Wayne R. Dynes, Homosexuality: A Research Guide (New York, 1987).
BRAZIL [HOMOPHOBIA NEWLAND] & PORTUGAL
“The Colonial Era.When the Portuguese reached Brazil in 1500, they were horrified to discover so many Indians who practiced the <unspeakable sin of sodomy>. In the Indian language they were called tivira, and André Thevet, chaplain to Catherine de Medici, described them in 1575 with the word bardache, perhaps the first occasion on which this term was used to describe Amerindian homosexuals. The native women also had relations with one another: according to the chroniclers they were completely <inverted> in appearance, work, and leisure, preferring to die rather than accept the name of women. Perhaps these cacoaimbeguire contributed to the rise of the New World Amazon myth.
In their turn the blacks – more than 5 million were imported during almost 4 centuries of slavery – made a major contribution to the spread of homosexuality in the <Land of the Parrots>. The first transvestite in Brazilian history was a black named Francisco, of the Mani-Congo tribe, who was denounced in 1591 by the Inquisition visitors, but refused to discard women’s clothing. Francisco was a member of the brotherhood of the quimbanba, homosexual fetishists who were well known and respected in the old kingdom of Congo-Angola. Less well established than among the Amerindians and Africans, the Portuguese component (despite the menace of the Tribunal of the Holy Office, 1536-62) continued unabated during the whole history of the kingdom, involving 3 rulers and innumerable notables, and earning sodomy the sobriquet of the <vice of the clergy>. If we compare Portugal with the other European countries of the Renaissance – not excluding England and the Netherlands – our documentation (abundant in the archives of the Inquisition) requires the conclusion that Lisbon and the principal cities of the realm, including the overseas metropolises of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, boasted a gay subculture that was stronger, more vital, and more stratified than those of other lands, reflecting the fact that Luso-Brazilian gays were accorded more tolerance and social acceptance. Thirty sodomites were burned by the Inquisition during 3 centuries of repression, but none in Brazil, despite the more than 300 who were denounced for practicing the <evil sin>. They were referred to as sodomitas and fanchonos.
Independence. With Brazilian independence and the promulgation of the first constitution (1823) under the influence of the Napoleonic Code, homosexual behavior ceased to be criminal, and from this date forward there has been no Brazilian law restricting homosexuality[Bolsonaro e seu séquito se encontram quase 200 anos enterrados na História; me admira que não tenham morrido asfixiados em seu ideal de mundo até agora!] – apart from the prohibition with persons less than 18 years of age, the same as for heterosexuals. Lesbianism, outlawed by the Inquisition since 1646, had always been less visible than male homosexuality in Brazil, and there is no record of any mulher-macho (<male woman>) burned by the Portuguese Inquisition. In the course of Brazilian history various persons of note were publicly defamed for practicing homosexuality: in the 17th century 2 Bahia governors, Diogo Botelho and Câmara Coutinho, both contemporaries of the major satirical poet, Gregorio de Matos, author of the oldest known poem about a lesbian in the Americas, Nise. He himself was brought before the Inquisition for blasphemy in saying that <Jesus Christ was a sodomite>. [HAHAHA!] In the 19th century the revolutionary leader Sabino was accused of homosexual practices. A considerable surviving correspondence between Empress Leopoldina, consort of the Brazil’s first sovereign, Dom Pedro, with her English lady in waiting, Maria Graham, attests that they had both a homosexual relationship and an intense homoemotional reciprocity. Such famous poets and writers as Álvares de Azevedo (1831-1852), Olavo Bilac (1865-1918), and Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) rank among the votaries of Ganymede. The list also includes the pioneer of Brazilian aeronautics, Alberto Santos-Dumont (1873-1932), after whose airship the pommes Santos-Dumont were named. At the end of the 19th century homosexuality appears as a literary theme. In 1890 Aluizio Azevedo included a realistic lesbian scene in O Cortiço, and in 1895 Adolfo Caminha devoted the entire novel O Bom Crioulo(which has been translated into English) to a love affair between a cabin boy and his black protector. In the faculties of medicine of Rio de Janeiro and Bahia various theses addressed the homosexual question, beginning with O Androfilismo of Domingos Firmínio Ribeiro (1898) and O Homosexualismo: A Libertinagem no Rio de Janeiro (1906) by Pires de Almeida – both strongly influenced by the European psychiatrists Moll, Krafft-Ebing, and Tardieu. From 1930 comes the first and most outspoken Brazilian novel on lesbianism, O Terceiro Sexo, by Odilon Azevedo, where lesbian workers founded an association intended to displace men from power, thus setting forth a radical feminist discourse.”
“In 1976 appeared the main gay journal of Brazilian history, O Lampião (The Lantern)[!], which had a great positive effect on the rise of the Brazilian homosexual movement.” “One of the chief battles of gay activists is to denounce the repeated murders of homosexuals – about every 10 days the newspapers report a homophobic crime.”
“Recently the transvestite Roberta Close appeared on the cover of the main national magazines, receiving the accolade of <the model of the beauty of the Brazilian woman>. In the mid-1980s more than 400 Brazilian transvestites could be counted in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris; many also offer themselves in Rome. When they hear the statistics of the Kinsey Report, Brazilian gays smile, suggesting through experience and <participant observation> that in Brazil the proportion of predominantly homosexual men is as high as 30%.”
“Brazil, once the paradise of gays, has entered a difficult path.” Premonitório. Mas falava apenas da AIDS.
BUDDHISM
“Among world religions, Buddhism has been notable for the absence of condemnation of homosexuality as such.”
“For an account of the earliest form of Buddhism, scholars look to the canonical texts of the Tipitaka preserved in the Pali language and transmitted orally until committed to writing in the 2nd century B.C. These scriptures remain authoritative for the Theravada or Hinayana school of Buddhism, now dominant in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. The Pali Canon draws a sharp distinction between the path of the lay-person and that of the bhikkhu (mendicant monk, an ordained member of the Buddhist Sangha or Order). The former is expected primarily to support the Sangha and to improve his karmic standing through the performance of meritorious deeds so that his future lives will be more fortunate than his present one. The bhikkhu, in contrast, is expected to devote all his energies to self-liberation, the struggle to cast off the attachments which prevent him from attaining the goal of nirvana in the present lifetime.”
“all acts involving the intentional emission of his semen are prohibited for the monk; the insertion of the penis into a female or male is grounds for automatic expulsion from the Sangha, while even masturbation is a (lesser) offense.” “there is no law against a monk receiving a penis into his own body.”
“The full rules of the vinaya are not applied to the samanera or novice monk, who may be taken into the Sangha as early as 7 years old and who is generally expected though not obligated to take the Higher Ordination by the age of 21. In this way the more intense sexual drive of the male teenager is tacitly allowed for. A samanera may masturbate without committing an offense. Interestingly, while a novice commits a grave offense if he engages in coitus with a female, requiring him to leave the Sangha, should he instead have sex with a male he is only guilty of a lesser offense requiring that he reaffirms his samanera vows and perform such penance as is directed by his teacher. This may be the only instance of a world religion treating homosexual acts more favorably than heterosexual ones.”
“it has been speculated that homosexual orientation may arise from the residual karma of a previous life spent in the opposite gender from that of the body currently occupied by the life-continuum. This explanation contains no element of negativity but rather posits homosexuality as a <natural> result of the rebirth cycle.”
“The form of Buddhism which spread northward into Tibet, China, Japan, Korea, and Mongolia from its Indian heartland came to be known as the Mahayana. It de-emphasized the dichotomy between monk and lay-person and relaxed the strict vinaya codes, even permitting monks to marry (in Japan). The Mahayana doctrinally sought to obliterate categorical thinking in general and resolutely fought against conceptual dualism. These tendencies favored the development of positive attitudes toward homosexual practices, most notably in Japan.”
“When Father Francis Xavier arrived in Japan in the mid-16th century with the hope of converting the Japanese to Christianity, he was horrified upon encountering many Buddhist monks involved in same-sex relationships; indeed, he soon began referring to homoeroticism as the <Japanese vice>. Although some Buddhist monks condemned such relationships, notably the monk Genshin, many others either accepted or participated in same-sex relationships. Among Japanese Buddhist sects in which such relationships have been documented are the Jishu, Hokkeshu, Shingon, and Zen.”
“Zen, that form of Buddhism perhaps most familiar to Westerners, emerged during the 9th century. In the Zen monasteries of medieval Japan, same-sex relations, both between monks and between monks and novices (known as kasshiki and shami), appear to have been so commonplace that the shogun Hojo Sadatoki (whom we might now refer to as <homophobic>) initiated an unsuccessful campaign in 1303 to rid the monasteries of same-sex love. Homoerotic relationships occurring within a Zen Buddhist context have been documented in such literary works as the Gozan Bungaku, Iwatsutsuji, and Comrade Loves of the Samurai [1972]. The blending of Buddhism and homoeroticism has continued to figure prominently in the works of contemporary Japanese writers, notably Yukio Mishima and Mutsuo Takahashi.”
“the Gelugpas [seita tibetana dos Lamas que se sucedem] condemned heterosexual intercourse for monks, believing that the mere odor resulting from heterosexual copulation could provoke the rage of certain deities. Such misogynistic and anti-heterosexual notions may have encouraged same-sex bonding.”
“Among those who may be credited with introducing the West to Buddhism are Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, both of whom are thought to have loved members of the same sex and both of whom blended elements of Buddhism with elements of other spiritual traditions in their work. In the latter half of the 20th century, many American gays are practitioners of Buddhism, and the blending of homoeroticism and Buddhism may be found in the work of a number of gay American writers and musicians including Allen Ginsberg, Harold Norse, Richard Ronan, Franklin Abbott, and Lou Harrison.”
BYRON
“The most influential poet of his day, with a world-wide reputation, Byron became famous with the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-
18), an account of his early travels in Portugal, Spain, Albania, and Greece. The proud, gloomy, guilt-ridden, alienated Harold defined the <Byronic hero> who was to reappear in various guises in Byron’s later poems, notably in Manfred, The Corsair, and Lara. The type became a defining image for European and American romanticism. Forced into exile in 1816 because of the scandal caused by his wife’s leaving him, Byron settled in Italy, principally in Venice. There he wrote his sparkling satire on cant and hypocrisy, Don Juan. He spent the last months of his life in Greece, trying to help the Greeks in their struggle to gain independence from the Turks.”
“Because of the intense homophobia of English society these poems were ostensibly addressed to a woman, as the name Thyrza and Byron’s use of feminine pronouns implied.”
“publicity about his love affair with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, compounded the scandal [of his homosexuality].”
“Byron’s last three poems, On This Day I Complete My 36th Year, Last Words on Greece, and Love and Death, poignantly describe his love for Loukas, which was not reciprocated.”
“A surreptitiously published erotic poem, Don Leon, purporting to be Byron’s lost autobiography, probably written in 1833, had set forth many of the facts about Byron’s homosexuality but was dismissed as an unwarranted libel. An edition appeared in 1866 but it remained unknown to all but a few specialists. When the Fortune Press reprinted it in 1934, the publication was confiscated by the British police.”
CAESAR
“In addition to his three wives and several mistresses, Julius Caesar had a number of homosexual affairs.”
Arthur D. Kahn, The Education of Julius Caesar: A Biography, a Reconstruction, New York: Schocken, 1986;
“American novelist and journalist. Capote became famous at the age of 24 with his elegant, evocative book Other Voices, Other Rooms, which concerns the growing consciousness of a boy seeking to comprehend the ambivalent inhabitants of a remote Mississippi house. Dubbed <swamp baroque>, this short novel was easily assimilated into then-current notions of Southern decadence. (…) In 1966 he published In Cold Blood, a <non-fiction novel> about the seemingly senseless murder of a Kansas farm family by two drifters. In preparing for the book, Capote gained the confidence of the murderers, and was thus able to make vivid their sleazy mental universe.”
“Capote became the confidant of rich and famous people, especially women, and he gathered their stories for incorporation in a major work which was intended to rival Marcel Proust. Yet when excerpts from this work-in-progress were published in magazines, not only were they found to be vulgar and lacking in insight, but Capote began to be dropped by the socialites he had so unsubtly satirized. Dismayed, the writer sank more and more into a miasma of alcohol, cocaine, and valium – his only consolation the devoted love, or so he claimed, of a succession of straight, proletarian young men whom he prized because of their very ordinariness.”
CARAVAGGIO
“Caravaggio came under the protection of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, a homosexual prelate. During this period he painted several works showing ambiguous or androgynous young men, including The Musicians (New York, Metropolitan Museum). Efforts have been made to deny the homoerotic implications of these works, but they seem feeble.”
“Only after World War II did his reputation begin to climb, attaining remarkable heights in the 1980s, when even the abstract artist Frank Stella praised him. In 1986 Derek Jarman’s stylish film Caravaggio was released, presenting the artist as bisexual, but emphasizing the homosexual side.”
Baco/Dionísio pelas mãos do pintor bissexual italiano.
CASTRATI
“The castrati were male singers emasculated in boyhood to preserve the soprano or contralto range of their voices, who from the 16th century to the 19th played roles in Italian opera.” “Boys are commonly mischievous, unruly, and troublesome, and by the time they have really been trained their voices are usually on the edge of breaking; falsettists do not share these drawbacks, but their voices have a peculiar, unpleasant quality, and as a rule cannot attain as high a range as the soprano.”
“The elaborate a cappella style, which began to flourish about the middle of the 15th century, required a much wider range of voices and a higher degree of virtuosity than anything that had gone before, and for this task the existing singers were inadequate. The first response took the form of Spanish falsettists of a special kind, but by the end of the 16th century these had yielded to the castrati, who also dominated the new baroque art form – the opera, which was the principal musical activity of the Italian nation in the next two centuries. Opera was unlike legitimate theatre in that it traveled well; it was the first form of musical entertainment that was both popular and to a certain degree international, so that a star system transcending national borders arose. Leading singers were discussed, criticized, and compared in fashionable drawing rooms from Lisbon to St. Petersburg. (…) If other nations had some form of native opera, this ranked lower on the cultural scale and was indifferently sung, while the Italian version enjoyed the highest standard of singing that had ever been known, and will in all likelihood never again be attained. France alone refused admission to Italian singers, and virtually banned the castrati; but Frenchmen, like other Europeans, were full of praise for the opera of Italy.
Since no recording devices existed in the heyday of the castrati, the modern critic has no way of judging the quality of their performance, yet 6 generations of music-lovers preferred the voices of these <half-men> to those of women themselves and of whole men.”
“In this economic stratum, however, it was accepted that any male child who betrayed the slightest aptitude for music should be sold into servitude, just as in modern Thailand children are sold by their parents to labor in factories or serve in brothels. The successful castrato naturally tried to conceal his humble origins and pose as the scion of an honorable family. The singing-masters of that era were responsible for the perfection of the art of the castrati; no one since has rivaled them in perseverance and thoroughness, and in their perfect command of the capabilities and shortcomings of the human vocal organs. They usually worked in a conservatorio, though sometimes they had their own singing schools or tutored pupils on the side.
Since canon law condemned castration and threatened anyone involved in it with excommunication, which could be reinforced by civil penalties, the business had to be carried on more or less clandestinely, and everywhere prying questions brought only misleading and deceitful answers. The town of Lecce in Apulia, and Norcia, a small town in the Papal States about 20 miles east of Spoleto, are mentioned as notorious for the practice, though the castrati themselves came from all parts of the peninsula. The doctors most esteemed for their skill in the operation were those of Bologna, and their services were in demand not just in Italy but abroad as well.”
“The curriculum entailed much hard work, and was thorough and comprehensive; as much attention was given to the theory of singing as to its actual practice. Between the ages of 15 and 20, a castrato who had retained and embellished his voice, and passed the various tests with greater or lesser distinction, was considered ready for his debut. On contract to some opera house, he would often first be seen in a female part, for which his youth and fresh complexion would particularly suit him. His looks and unfamiliarity would perhaps gain him greater success than his art would have merited, to the rage and envy of his senior colleagues. Once his name was made, he would have his clique of admirers who attended en masse his every performance and extolled him as their idol; aristocratic ladies and gentlemen would fancy themselves in love with him and manipulate a piquant interview. Backstage, the rivalry with other singers could rage with intense virulence; and a castrato who was too vain and insolent might be assassinated by the hirelings of a rival’s protector. If, however, the performer did not please his audience, he would be doomed to touring small provincial opera houses, or to performing in a church choir. Dissatisfied with his situation, he could set off for Bologna, the marketplace for the musical profession in Italy, to better his fortunes. The castrati came in for a great amount of scurrilous and unkind abuse, and as their fame increased, so did the hatred of them. They were often castigated as malign creatures who lured men into homosexuality, and there were admittedly homosexual castrati, as Casanova’s accounts of XVIII century Italy bear witness. He mentions meeting an abbé whom he
took for a girl in disguise, but was later told that it was a famous castrate. In Rome in 1762, he attended a performance at which the prima donna was a castrato, the minion of Cardinal Borghese, who supped every evening with his protector. From his behavior on stage, <it was obvious that he hoped to inspire the love of those who liked him as a man, and probably would not have done so as a woman.> He concludes by saying that the holy city of Rome forces every man to become a pederast, even if it does not believe in the effect of the illusion which the castrati provoke.”
“Opponents of castration have claimed that the practice caused its victims an early loss of voice and an untimely death, while others have affirmed that castration prolonged the life of the vocal cords, and even that of their owner. There is no solid evidence for either contention: the castrati had approximately the same life span as their contemporaries, and retired at roughly the same age as other singers. The operation appears to have had surprisingly little effect on the general health and well-being of the subject, any more than on his sexual impulses. The trauma was largely a psychological one, in an age when virility was deemed a sovereign virtue.” A castração tardia não elimina a libido, ao contrário da crença vulgar. Não há solução fácil para o dilema da energia! Eu-nuco El-niño or neverminds…
“Toward the end of the XVIII century castrati went out of fashion, and new styles in musical composition led to the disappearance of these singers. Meyerbeer was the last composer of importance to write for the male soprano voice; his Il Crociato in Egitto, produced at Venice in 1824, was designed especially for a castrato star. Succeeding generations regarded their memory with derision and disgust, and were happy to live in an age when such products of barbarism were no longer possible. A few castrati performed in the Vatican chapel and some other Roman churches until late in the XIX century, but their vogue on the operatic stage had long passed.”
Angus Heriot, The Castrati in Opera
CATAMITE
“The Latin common noun, catamitus, designating a minion or kept boy, is usually derived from the Greek proper name Ganymede(s), the favorite of Zeus. Another possible source is Kadmilos, the companion of the Theban god Kabeiros. The word entered English in 16th century as part of the Renaissance revival of classical literature, and has always retained a learned, quasi-exotic aura. The term could also be used as a verbal adjective, as <a catamited boy>.” “In modern English the termination -ite tends to be perceived as pejorative, as in Trotskyite (vs. Trotskyist) and sodomite.”
CATULLUS
“Born at Verona, he spent most of his life in Rome, but kept a villa near his birthplace at Smirno on Lake Garda. Often considered the best Republican poet, he imitated Sappho as well as other archaic, classical, and Hellenistic models, upon which he often improved, and which he combined with native Latin traditions to create stunning, original pieces. He wrote poems, 250 of which survive, of happiness and bitter disappointment. Some are addressed to his mistress Clodia, 10 years his senior, whom he addressed as Lesbia(though with no insinuation of what we now call lesbianism), and who was unfaithful to him with other men. Homophobic Christians and modern schoolmasters have, however, greatly exaggerated the importance of the poems to Lesbia, which amount to no more than 1/8 of the Catullan corpus.”
“Sophisticated and fastidious, he set the standard for the Augustan poets of love Ovid, Horace, Vergil, and Propertius. In the Silver Age even Martial acknowledged his debt to Catullus’ epigrams. Like those poets, and most specifically Tibullus, he showed little inhibition and equal attraction to boys and women, but also shared the traditional attitude that the active, full-grown male partner degraded the passive one, and that the threat to penetrate another male symbolized one’s superior virility and power. On the other hand, the accusation of having been raped by another male has a largely negative force”
CENSORSHIP AND OBSCENITY
“The practice of tolerating certain hand-produced materials clearly shows that censorship is concerned not simply with the prohibition of materials, but with the size of the audience. It is for this reason that medical and other books dealing with sexual matters formerly had the crucial details in Latin.”
“The urge to censor is probably ultimately rooted in fear of blasphemy, the apprehension that if utterances offensive to the gods are tolerated their wrath will fall on the whole society. It was impiety toward the gods for which Socrates was tried and condemned in 399 B.C. The Roman erotic poet Ovid was banished by the puritanical emperor Augustus in A.D. 8.”
“Since the monasteries had a monopoly on producing manuscripts, it was assumed that such oversight was not necessary. In fact the abbey scriptoria not only copied erotic materials from Greco-Roman times, but created their own new genres of this type. In any event, the medieval authorities were concerned more with doctrinal deviation than with obscenity.” “The centralization of printing in the hands of a relatively few firms made it possible to scrutinize their intended productions before publication; only those that had passed the test and bore the imprimatur [seal] could be printed. It was then only necessary to make sure that heretical materials were not smuggled in from abroad. In Catholic countries this system was put in place by the establishment, under the Inquisition, with the Index of Prohibited Books in 1557. In countries where the Reformation took hold the control of books was generally assumed by the government. In England the requirement that books should be licenced for printing by the privy council or other agents of the crown was introduced in 1538. These origins explain why the activity of censors was for long chiefly concerned with the printed word. Revealingly, this system is still in force in Communist countries today [1990].”
“The French author Nicolas Chorier contrived an even more ambitious ruse for his pansexual dialogues of Aloisia Sigea (1658(?)), which purported to be a translation into Latin by a Dutch author (Jan de Meurs) working from a Spanish original by a learned woman.” Entendeu? Uma tradução para o latim (língua culta) de um escrito erudito (mas vulgar) de uma espanhola, feito por um holandês, para circular na França!
“Many French books, unwelcome to throne and altar, were published in Geneva, in Amsterdam, and in Germany. With the coming of the French revolution, however, all restraints were off. Thus the large works which the Marquis de Sade had composed in prison were published, as well as two fascinating homosexual pamphlets, Les enfans de Sodome and Les petits bougres au manège. Although controls were eventually tightened again, Paris gained the reputation (which lasted until about 1960) among English and American travelers as the place where <dirty books> could be obtained.”
“Through his prudish editions of Shakespeare, Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) gave rise to the term <bowdlerize>. At the ports, an efficient customs service kept all but a trickle of works deemed to be obscene from coming in. In the United States, the morals crusader Anthony Comstock (1844-1915) not only fought successfully for stringent new legislation, but as head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice [haha] he claimed responsibility for the destruction of 160 tons of literature and pictures. The restrictions on malleability proved to be particularly hard on publishers of homosexual material, and this problem was not overcome until the ONE, Inc. case in 1954. A landmark in freedom to read books in the United States was the 1931 Ulysses case. Shortly thereafter, however, Hollywood instituted a system of self-censorship known as the Hays Office. This device effectively prevented any direct representation of homosexual love on the silver screen for decades, the only exceptions being a very few foreign films shown at art houses. During this period book publishers practiced their own form of self-censorship by insisting that novels featuring homosexual characters must doom them to an unhappy end.
Only after World War II did the walls begin to come tumbling down in English-speaking countries. In Britain the publishers of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence were acquitted after a spectacular trial in 1960. In America Grove Press had obtained a favorable court decision on the availability of Lady Chatterley in 1959; three years later the firm went on to publish Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer without difficulty. The travails of a book containing explicit homosexual passages, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, were more extended. In 1958 authorities at the University of Chicago refused to permit publication of excerpts in a campus literary review. This led to the founding of a new journal, largely to publish the Burroughs text; once this had been done, a lengthy court battle ensued. Only in 1964 was the way clear for the whole novel to be issued by Grove Press. (The book had been published in Paris in 1959.)
Subsequently, a series of United States Supreme Court decisions made censorship impractical, and for all intents and purposes it has ceased nationally, though local option is sometimes exercised. This cessation permitted the appearance and sale of a mass of sexually explicit
books, films, and magazines. The only restriction that is ubiquitously enforced is the ban on <kiddy porn>, photographs and films of children engaging in sexual acts. In an unlikely de facto alliance, two groups emerged at the end of the 1970s in America to reestablish some form of censorship: one consisting of fundamentalists and other religious conservatives; the other of feminist groups [haha].”
Michael Barry Goodman, Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1981;
Rocco, Alcibiades The Schoolboy (1652) (diálogo êmulo de Platão apólogo da pederastia)
CERVANTES
“For 5 years he was a captive in Algiers, where he was on surprisingly good terms with a homosexual convert to Islam; he refers several times in his writings to the pederasty that flourished in the Ottoman empire – on his return from Algiers he was accused of unspecified filthy acts. His marriage was unhappy, and women in his works are treated distantly. Like Manuel Azaña, he put a very high value on freedom.
While Cervantes presented the male-female relationship as the theoretical ideal and goal for most people, the use of pairs of male friends is characteristic of his fiction, and questions of gender are often close to the surface. In his masterpiece Don Quixote (1605-15), which includes cross-dressing by both sexes, the middle-aged protagonist has never had, and has no interest in, sexual intercourse with a woman. A boy servant who appears fleetingly at the outset is replaced by the unhappily-married companion Sancho Panza. The two men come to love each other, although the love is not sexual.”
Verbete por Daniel Eisenberg
Louis Combet, Cervantes ou les incertitudes du désir, Lyon: Presses Universitaires, 1982 (review in MLN, 97 [1982], 422-27);
Rosa Rossi, Ascoltare Cervantes, Milan: Riuniti, 1987 (Spanish translation: Escuchar a Cervantes, Valladolid: Ámbito, 1988);
Luis Rosales, Cervantes y la libertad, 2ed., Madrid: Cultura Hispánica, 1985;
Ruth El Saffar, Cervantes and the Androgyne, Cervantes, III (1983);
______. Beyond Fiction: The Recovery of the Feminine in the Novels of Cervantes, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
CHINA
“The civilization of China emerged from pre-history during the first half of the 2nd millennium B.C. in the valley of the Huang-He (Yellow River), spreading gradually southwards. Over the centuries China has exercised extensive influence on Korea, Japan, and southeast Asia. Inasmuch as Chinese society has traditionally viewed male homosexuality and lesbianism as altogether different, their histories are separate and are consequently treated in sequence in this article.”
“During the latter part of the Zhou, homosexuality appears as a part of the sex lives of the rulers of many states of that era. Ancient records include homosexual relationships as unexceptional in nature and not needing justification or explanation. This tone of prosaic acceptance indicates that these authors considered homosexuality among the social elite to be fairly common and unremarkable. However, the political, ritual and social importance of the family unit made procreation a necessity. Bisexuality therefore became more accepted than exclusive homosexuality, a predominance continuing throughout Chinese history.
The Eastern Zhou produced several figures who became so associated with homosexuality that later generations invoked their names as symbols of homosexual love, much in the same way that Europeans looked to Ganymede, Socrates, and Hadrian. These famous men included Mizi Xia, who offered his royal lover a half-eaten peach, and Long Yang, who compared the fickle [volúvel] lover to a fisherman who tosses back a small fish when he catches a larger one. Rather than adopt scientific terminology, with associations of sexual pathology, Chinese litterateurs preferred the aesthetic appeal of these literary tropes [figures of speech].”
“One incident in the life of Dong Xian became a timeless metaphor for homosexuality. A tersely worded account [relato oral sucinto] relates how Emperor Ai [last Han] was sleeping with Dong Xian one afternoon when he was called to court. Rather than wake up his beloved, who was reclining across the emperor’s sleeve [manga, sobra de tecido], Ai took out a dagger and cut off the end of his garment. When courtiers inquired after the missing fabric, Emperor Ai told them what had happened. This example of love moved his courtiers to cut off the ends of their own sleeves in imitation, beginning a new fashion trend.”
“The Jin dynasty (265-420) poet Zhang Hanbian wrote a glowing tribute to the 15-year-old boy prostitute Zhou Xiaoshi. In it he presents the boy’s life as happy and care-free, <inclined toward extravagance and festiveness, gazing around at the leisurely and beautiful>. A later poet, the Liang dynasty (502-557) figure Liu Zun, tried to present a more balanced view in a poem entitled Many Blossoms. In this piece he shows the dangers and uncertainty associated with a boy prostitute’s life. His Zhou Xiaoshi
<knows both wounds and frivolity
Withholding words, ashamed of communicating.>
Although these poems take opposite perspectives on homosexual prostitution, the appearance of this theme as an inspiration for poetry points to the presence of a significant homosexual world complete with male prostitutes catering [sendo ofertados] to the wealthy.”
“The high profile of male prostitution led the Song rulers to take limited action against it. Many Confucian moralists objected to male prostitution because they saw the sexual passivity of a prostitute as extremely feminizing. In the early 12th century, a law was codified which declared that male prostitutes would receive 100 strokes of a bamboo rod and pay a fine of 50,000 cash. Considering the harsh legal penalties of the period, which included mutilation and death by slicing, this punishment was actually quite lenient. And it appears that the law was rarely if ever enforced, so it soon became a dead letter.”
“Legal intervention peaked in the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) when the Kang Xi Emperor (r. 1662-1723) took steps against the sexual procurement of young boys, homosexual rape, and even consensual homosexual acts.” “it seems that the traditional government laissez-faire attitude toward male sexuality prevented enforcement of the law against consensual homosexual acts.”
“A thirst for knowledge of homosexual history led to the compilation of the anonymous Ming collection Records of the Cut Sleeve (Duan xiu pian) which contains vignettes of homosexual encounters culled from nearly two millennia of sources. This anthology is the first history of Chinese homosexuality, perhaps the first comprehensive homosexual history in any culture, and still serves as our primary guide to China’s male homosexual past.”
“In Fujian province on the South China coast, a form of male marriage developed during the Ming. Two men were united, the older referred to as an <adoptive older brother> (qixiong) and the younger as <adoptive younger brother> (qidi). The younger qidi would move into the qixiong’s household, where he would be treated as a son-in-law by his husband’s parents. Throughout the marriage, which often lasted for 20 years, the qixiong was completely responsible for his younger husband’s upkeep. Wealthy qixiong even adopted young boys who were raised as sons by the couple. At the end of each marriage, which was usually terminated because of the familial responsibilities of procreation, the older husband paid the necessary price to acquire a suitable bride for his beloved qidi.” [!!!]
“The famous 17th century author Li Yu wrote several works featuring male homosexuality and lesbianism. The greatest Chinese work of prose fiction, Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng), features a bisexual protagonist and many homosexual interludes. And the mid-19th century saw the creation of A Mirror Ranking Precious Flowers (Pinhua baojian), a literary masterpiece detailing the romances of male actors and their scholar patrons.”
“Within a few generations, China shifted from a relative tolerance of homosexuality to open hostility. The reasons for this change are complex and not yet completely understood. First, the creation of colloquial baihua literary language removed many potential readers from the difficult classical Chinese works which contained the native homosexual tradition. Also, the Chinese reformers early in the century began to see any divergence between their own society and that of the West as a sign of backwardness. This led to a restructuring of Chinese marriage and sexuality along more Western lines. The uncritical acceptance of Western science, which regarded homosexuality as pathological, added to the Chinese rejection of same-sex love. The end result is a contemporary China in which the native homosexual tradition has been virtually forgotten and homosexuality is ironically seen as a recent importation from the decadent West.
Communist China.In the People’s Republic of China, homosexuality is taken as a sign of bourgeois immorality and punished by <reeducation> in labor camps. Officially the incidence of homosexuality is quite low. Western psychologists, however, have noted that the official reporting of impotence is much higher in mainland China than in the West. It seems that many Chinese men, unfamiliar with homosexual role models, interpret their sexuality solely according to their attraction to women. Nevertheless, a small gay subculture has begun to develop in the major cities since the end of the Maoist era [?]. Fear of discovery and lack of privacy tend to limit the quality and duration of homosexual relationships. And for the vast majority of Chinese living in the conservative country-side, homosexual contacts are much more difficult to come by.” “With the 1997 return of Hong Kong to China approaching, British liberals have supported a last minute repeal of the sodomy law.”
“Traditionally, Chinese people have viewed male homosexuality and lesbianism as unrelated. Consequently, much of the information we have on male homosexuality in China does not apply to the female experience. Piecing together the Chinese lesbian past is frustrated by the relative lack of source material. Since literature and scholarship were usually written by men and for men, aspects of female sexuality unrelated to male concerns were almost always ignored.” “Sex manuals of the period Ming include instructions integrating lesbian acts with heterosexual intercourse as a way of varying the sex lives of men with multiple concubines.”
“Li Yu’s first play, Pitying the Fragrant Companion (Lianxiangban), describes a young married woman’s love for a younger unmarried woman. The married woman convinces her husband to take her talented beloved as a concubine. The 3 then live as a happy ménage-à-trois free from jealousy. A more conventional lesbian love affair is detailed in Dream of the Red Chamber, in which a former actress regularly offers incense to the memory of her deceased beloved.”
The most highly developed form of female relationship was the lesbian marriages formed by the exclusively female membership of Golden Orchid Associations. A lesbian couple within this group could choose to undergo a marriage ceremony in which one partner was designated <husband> and the other <wife>. After an exchange of ritual gifts, a wedding feast attended by female friends served to witness the marriage. These married lesbian couples could even adopt young girls, who in turn could inherit family property from the couple’s parents. This ritual was not uncommon in 19th-century Guangzhou province. Prior to this, the only other honorable way for a woman to remain unmarried was to enter a Buddhist nunnery.” “The existence of Golden Orchid Associations became possible only by the rise of a textile industry in south China which enabled women to become economically independent. The traditional social and economic attachment of women to the home has so far prevented the emergence in modem China of a lesbian community on even so limited a scale as that of male homosexuals.”
Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng, Golden Lotus ou The Plum [Ameixa] in The Golden Vase (2013) (título original: Jin ping mei)(novela de costumes, considerada o “Lolita” oriental), s/ data precisa (~séc. XVI; ed. por Zhang Zhupo no século seguinte). trad. francesa: La merveilleuse histoire de Hsi Men avec ses six femmes (1), Fleur en fiole d’or (2);
Pai Hsien-yung, The Outsiders (Niezi) (inspirou um filme homônimo, de 1986)
CHRISTIANITY
“ORÍGENES” DO MAL II: “By about A.D. 200, the church had come to recognize the texts making up the New Testament as a single canon. After some hesitation, the Hebrew Bible, known to Christians as the Old Testament, was taken from Judaism and also accepted as divinely inspired. From this point onwards, Christian doctrines were elaborated by a group of intellectuals, known as the Fathers of the Church or the Patristic writers, beginning with such figures as Origen, Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian.” “Though they based their exegesis upon the Bible, they were inevitably influenced by philosophical and religious currents of their own time, especially Greek Stoicism and Neo-Platonism and by rival mystery cults such as Manichaeanism and Gnosticism.” “Still today there are differences on such sexually related topics as divorce, celibacy, and so forth between Roman Catholics and members of various eastern branches of Christianity which date from the foundations of Christianity, including Coptic, Nestorian, and various Orthodox Churches. In practice, most of these churches have been more tolerant of homosexuality than the Roman Catholic Church and its Protestant off-shoots.”
RESUMO DAS CONFISSÕES DE UM HOMEM POUCO SANTO
“St. Augustine (d. 430), one of the great scholars of the ancient world, had converted to the austere faith of Manichaeanism after receiving a classical education. It seemed to his mind more suited to his Neo-Platonic and Stoic ideals than the Christianity of his mother. In Manichaean belief, which drew heavily from Zoroastrianism, intercourse leading to procreation was particularly evil because it caused other souls to be imprisoned in bodies, thus continuing the cycle of good versus evil.
Augustine was a member of the Manichaean religion for some 11 years but never reached the stage of the Elect in part because of his inability to control his sexual appetites. He kept a mistress, fathered a child, and according to his own statement, struggled to overcome his lustful appetites everyday by praying: <Give me chastity, and continence, but do not give it yet>. Recognizing his own inability to give up sexual intercourse, Augustine finally arrived at the conclusion that the only way to control his venereal desire was through marriage. He expelled his mistress and his son from his house, became engaged to a young girl not yet of age for wedlock (probably under 12 years of age), and planned a marriage. Unable to abstain from sex, he turned to prostitutes, went through a religious crisis, and in the process became converted to Christianity.”
HA-HA: “All other sex was sinful including coitus within marriage not performed in the proper position (the female on her back and facing the male) and using the proper appendages and orifices (penis in vagina). St. Augustine’s views became the views of the western church centered in Rome.” “In general there was no extensive discussion of homosexuality by any of the early Church Fathers, and most of the references are incidental.”
“The Augustinian views were modified in the 13th century [o que houve nestes 7 séculos além de monges devassos e burros?] by St. Thomas Aquinas, who held that homosexual activities, though similar to other sins of lust, were more sinful because they were also sins against nature. The sins against nature in descending order were (I) masturbation, (2) intercourse in an unnatural position, (3) copulation with the same sex (homosexuality and lesbianism), and (4) sex with non-humans (bestiality).”
One of the key sources in the early medieval Church is the penitential literature. Originally penance had been a way of reconciling the sinner with God and had taken place through open confession. The earliest penitentials put sexual purity at a high premium, and failure to observe the sexual regulations was classified as equal to idolatry (reversion to paganism) and homicide. Ultimately public penance was replaced by private penance and confession which was regulated by the manuals or penitentials designed to guide those who were hearing them. Most of the early penitentials classified homosexual and lesbian activities as equivalent to fornication. Later ones classified such activities as equivalent to adultery although some writers distinguished between interfemoral intercourse and anal intercourse and between fellatio or oral-genital contacts. Anal intercourse was regarded as being the most serious sin.” “Sodomy came to be regarded as the most heinous of sexual offenses, even worse than incest, and as civil law began to take over from canon law, it could be punished as a capital crime.”
Antes só dormia, hoje sodomia.
Só dormia, ou será que prazer também? No lato sensucht
Calvin & Child Harolde: “Catholics denounced Calvin for his supposed pederasty, a charge that was completely unfounded.”
NADA COMO COMER O BRIOCO DUMA INDIAZINHA: “In 1730-31 the great Dutch persecution of sodomites occurred, and in the accompanying propaganda the old charges against Roman Catholicism were revived. In Catholic countries themselves, the dissolution of the Jesuit order in 1773 was preceded by accusations of sodomy.”
Graciano, A Harmony of Discordant Canons (1140)
St. Peter Damián (1007-1072), Liber Gomorrhianus
CHURCHES, GAY
“The emergence of Christian churches with predominantly gay and lesbian congregations, as well as interest groups within or allied to existing denominations, is a recent phenomenon, centered in the English-speaking world. There are records of homosexual monks, nuns, and priests, especially in the later Middle Ages and in early modern times, but no indication that they even thought of organizing on the basis of their sexual preference. Christian homosexuals drawn to particular parishes, where cliques [panelinhas] occasionally even became a visible segment of the congregation, would not openly avow this shift in the church’s character: they remained closeted gay Christians, so to speak.”
“Some maintain that Jesus – an unmarried man in a Jewish milieu where marriage and procreation were de rigueur even for the religious elite – had a passionate relationship with John, the beloved disciple. Liturgically and sociologically the UFMCC tends to be of a <low church> character, with notable exceptions in some congregations. The evangelical fundamentalist domination of the UFMCC may be regarded as a response to the homophobic vehemence of the mainstream fundamentalist churches, which drives gay Christians out of their fold with a vengeance and forces them into an external redoubt, in contrast to the relatively more tolerant atmosphere, hospitable to internal gay caucuses [panelinhas, partidos], of the more liberal churches.”
CICERO
“Roman politician, orator, and writer, who left behind a corpus of Latin prose (speeches, treatises, letters) that make him one of the great authors of classical antiquity. Unsuccessful in politics, he was overestimated as a philosopher by the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and underestimated in modern times, but was and is ranked as one of the greatest masters of Latin style. His career as an orator began in 81 B.C., and from the very beginning his speeches revealed his rhetorical gifts. His denunciation ofVerres, the proconsul who had plundered the province of Sicily, opened the way to his election as aedile, praetor, and then consul, but subsequently the intrigues of his enemies led to his banishment from Rome (58/57), followed by his triumphal return. In the civil war he took the side of Pompey and so failed again, but was pardoned by the victorious Caesar, after whose death he launched a rhetorical attack on Mark Antony. The formation of the triumvirate meant that Cicero was to be proscribed by his opponent and murdered by his henchmen.”
“In the last turbulent century of the Roman republic in which he lived, a contrast between the austere virtue of earlier times and the luxury and vice of the present had become commonplace. Also, as we know from the slightly later genre of satirical poetry, a taste for salacious gossip had taken root in the metropolis. In his orations Cicero remorselessly flays the homosexual acts of his enemies, contrasting homosexual love with the passion inspired by women which is <far more of natural inspiration>.”
“Something of the Roman antipathy to Greek paiderasteia transpires from Cicero’s condemnation of the nudity which the Greeks flaunted in their public baths and gymnasia, and from his assertion that the Greeks were inconsistent in their notion of friendship. He pointedly noted: <Why is it that no one falls in love with an ugly youth or a handsome old man?> Effeminacy and passive homosexuality are unnatural and blameworthy in a free man, though Cicero remained enough under the influence of Greek mores to express no negative judgment on the practice of keeping handsome young slaves as minions of their master.” “The Judaic condemnation of homosexuality per se had not yet reached Rome, but the
distinction that had existed in Hellenic law and custom between acts worthy and unworthy of a citizen was adopted and even heightened by the com[cu]bination of appeal to Roman civic virtue and his own rhetorical flair.”
SMEAR CAMPAIGN: “Cicero’s rhetoric thus had two sides: the attempt to discredit opponents by inflammatory imputations of homosexual conduct and of sexual immorality in general – a type of smear to be followed in political life down to modern times”
CIRCUMCISION
GENEALOGIA DA PROFILAXIA: “Male circumcision, or the cutting away of the foreskin [prepúcio] of the penis, has been practiced by numerous peoples from remotest antiquity as a religious custom, while to some modern homosexuals it has an aesthetic and erotic significance. It has been speculated that the custom originated somewhere in Africa where water was scarce and the ability to wash was limited. Thus the Western Semites (Israelites, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Arabs, Edomites, Syrians), who lived in an area where water was never really plentiful, also observed the custom, while the Eastem Semites (Assyrians and Babylonians), in an area where water was more abundant, did not circumcise. This is true also of the Greeks and other Aegean peoples who always lived near the water.”
“Jesus never mentioned circumcision, though the Jewish rite was (Luke 2:21) performed upon him on his 8th day as it was with all other males of his community of faith – hence the designation of the calendar in which the first day of the year is January 1 as <circumcision style>. In the early church the party of Paul of Tarsus which opposed circumcision was victorious, and uncircumcised Greeks and Romans poured into the new faith, so that to this day the majority of European men have retained their foreskins. With the coming of the faith of Islam, however, in the VII century the Middle East and North Africa became a stronghold of the practice of circumcision. Hindus and Buddhists avoid it, hence East Asians – and Amerindians – retain their foreskins.”
“In the late 20th century the trend is being reversed in America as more and more medical articles – and some books – have argued that the operation in most cases is needless.”
“There are even groups of men who have retained their foreskins (and others who admire them); these individuals with generous or pronounced <curtains> are in demand.”
Bud Berkeley & Joe Tiffenbach, Circumcision: Its Past, Its Present, and Its Future, San Francisco: Bud Berkeley, 1983-84;
Rosemary Romberg, Circumcision: The Painful Dilemma, South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1985;
Edward Wallerstein, Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy, New York: Springer Publishing Co., 1980.
CLASS
“When there are no children to raise there is more discretionary income, so that adopting a homosexual lifestyle provides a margin for class enhancement.” “An established gay man or lesbian may put resources which parents would use for raising the status of their children into helping a lover-protegé. The mentor may also provide private lessons in manners and business acumen.” “Curiously, some parents seem to tolerate same-sex alliances by their offspring more easily than those that cross class or racial lines. § Internalizing the folk belief that homosexuals are more <artistic>, some gay men cultivate musical, theatrical, and culinary tastes that are above their <station> – and above their income. Acquisition of these refined preferences, together with <corrected> speech patterns, hinders easy communication with former peers, though there are many factors that work for geographical and psychological distance between homosexuals, on the one hand, and their families and original peer groups, on the other. Given their relative freedom, some individuals may be inclined to experiment with <class bending>, [sinuosidade de classe] sometimes with paradoxical results.”
“There is class, and there is class fantasy.”
CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA
“Greek church father. Born in Athens, probably of pagan and peasant ancestry, he is not to be confused with Clement, bishop of Rome, author of the New Testament epistle. After his conversion, Clement of Alexandria traveled widely to study under Christians, finally under the learned Pantaenus in Alexandria. Of the early Fathers, he had the most thorough knowledge of Greek literature. He quoted Homer, Hesiod, the dramatists, and (most of all) Platonic and Stoic philosophers. Sometime before 200 he succeeded Pantaenus, whom he praised for his orthodoxy, as head of the catechetical school at Alexandria, but in 202 he had to flee the persecution unleashed by the emperor Septimius Severus and perhaps died in Asia Minor.”
“Although Clement’s christianity has been criticized as being too Hellenized, his serene hope and classical learning helped convert the upper classes. His pseudo-Platonic doctrine that homosexuality was particularly noxious because it was <against nature> served to combine that strand of classical philosophy with Hellenistic Jewish homophobia, most trenchantly exemplified by the Alexandrian philosopher Philo Judaeus (20 B.C.-A.D. 45), to justify persecution of sodomites. He thus preceded and stimulated the homophobia of the Christian emperors, from Constantine’s sons to Justinian, and of the two most influential Fathers, John Chrysostom and Augustine of Hippo.”
CLERGY, GAY
“that there is a psychological affinity between religious ministry and hemophilia”Edward Carpenter
“The patrician John XII (938-964) went so far as to model himself on the scandalous Roman emperor Heliogabalus, holding homosexual orgies in the papal palace – a practice imitated by Benedict IX (1021-ca. 1052).” “paradoxically the enforcement of celibacy on priests and even attempts to impose it on those in lesser orders increased the danger of homosexuality.”
“Friars, who unlike the monks were free to wander among the laity without much supervision, became notorious as seducers of boys as well as women, whose confessions they often heard to the disgruntlement [desabono] of parish priests. Many homosexual clergy, then as now, confessed to one another and were formally absolved. Indeed, the confessional at times became the locus of seduction.”
“Philip IV of France charged Boniface VIII not only with heresy, usury, and simony, but with sodomy and masturbation as well.”
“The Renaissance in Italy, with its revival of classical antiquity and love of art, saw a number of popes who were interested in their own sex. Among them were the anti-pope John XXIII (d. 1419), who began his career as a pirate. Entering the clergy he quickly acquired the reputation of an unblushing libertine. The humanist pope Pius II (1405-1464) watched boys run naked in a race at Pienza, noting a boy <with fair hair and a beautiful body, though disfigured with mud>. The vain Venetian Paul II (1417-1471) toyed with adopting the name Formosus. Affecting the most lavish costumes, he was attacked by his enemies as <Our Lady of Pity>. His successor, Sixtus IV (1414-1482), made his mark as an art patron, erecting the Sistine chapel. He also elevated to the cardinalate a number of handsome young men. Julius II (1443-1513), another art-loving pope, provoked such scandal that he was arraigned under various charges, including that of sodomy, but he managed to survive the attempt to depose him. His successor, the extravagant Medici Leo X (1475-1521), became embroiled in intrigues to advance favorite nephews, a hobby that strained the treasury to the utmost. Julius III (1487-1555), who had presided over the Council of Trent before his pontificate, was nonetheless sometimes seen at official functions with catamites [<coroinhas>], one of whom he made a cardinal.”
“The anticlerical literature of the last decades of that century delighted in exposing cases in which a clergyman had committed a sexual offense, to the point where in 1911 the Pope had to issue the motu proprio decree Quamvis diligenter forbidding the Catholic laity to bring charges against the clergy before secular courts. This step unilaterally abolished the principle of the equality of all citizens before the law established by the French Revolution, reinstating the <benefit of clergy> of the Middle Ages. The anticlerical literature of that period still needs study for the light that it can shed on the homosexual subculture of the clerical milieux.”
The Bible for Believers and Unbelievers (1922)(clássico anticlerical russo)
The Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 22.
Transcrição completa do capítulo 22 das regras de São Benedito (regulamento dos monges na alta idade média):
“CHAPTER XXII: HOW THE MONKS ARE TO SLEEP
Let them sleep singly in separate beds. Let them receive bedding suitable to their manner of life, at the discretion of the abbot. If it can be done, let all sleep in one room: but if their number does not allow of this, let them repose by tens or by twenties with their seniors who have charge of them. Let a candle burn continually in the dormitory until morning. Let them sleep clothed and girded with girdles or cords, but let them not have knives at their sides while they sleep, lest by chance while dreaming they wound a sleeper; and let them be monks always ready; and upon the signal being given let them rise without delay and hasten one after the other, yet with all gravity and decorum, to be ready in good time for the Work of God. Let not the younger brethren have their beds by themselves, but among those of the seniors: and let them be allowed gently to encourage one another as they rise for the Work of God, because some may feel drowsy and listless.”
COCTEAU, JEAN
The Infernal Machine (peça)
COLETTE
“A happy childhood is a bad preparation for contact with human beings.”
COLOR SYMBOLISM
“A current Russian term for a gay man is golubchik, from goluboy, <blue>, evidently through association with the <blue blood> of the aristocracy of the Old Régime.”
“According to Havelock Ellis, one could not safely walk down the streets of late 19th century New York wearing a red tie without being accosted, since this garment was then the universal mark of the male prostitute.” “Because of the <scarlet woman>, the great Whore of Babylon of the book of Revelation, that color has acquired a strong association with prostitution and adultery”
“In American culture the word lavender – a blend of red and blue (as in <lavender lover>, The Lavender Lexicon, etc.) – almost speaks for itself.”
“The mid-1980s saw public display at rallies and marches of a rainbow Gay Pride Flag, consisting of six parallel stripes ranging from bright red to deep purple. The juxtaposition of colors stands for the diversity of the gay/lesbian community with regard to ethnicity, gender, and class – perhaps also connoting, in the minds of some, the coalition politics of the Rainbow Alliance headed by Jesse Jackson.”
COMICS
“The first true comic strips were introduced in 1897 as a circulation-building device in the Sunday supplements of the Hearst newspapers. The now-familiar pulp comic book was a creation of the Depression: the first commercial example is Famous Funnies of 1934. Although these strips generally affirmed middle-class values, and certainly contained not the slightest overt indication of sex, they were regularly denounced by pundits as a pernicious influence on the young.”
“Batman, appearing in 1939, featured the adventures of a playboy detective and his teenage ward, Robin. Although the relationship is portrayed as a simple mentor-protegé one, some teenage male readers were able to project something stronger into it. This aspect was certainly flirted with in the campy television off-shoot beginning in 1966, though this series reflects a much changed cultural climate. In 1941 there appeared Wonder-woman, featuring an Amazon with special powers living on an all-woman island. This strip – contrary to the expressed wishes of its creators – served as a focus for lesbian aspirations. In the 1970s it was rediscovered by the women’s movement as a proto-feminist statement.
In the late 1940s Blade drew several illustrated stories, including The Barn and Truck Hiker, that can be considered predecessors of the gay comics. Circulated underground, they have been officially published only in recent years. Somewhat later the wordless strips of supermacho types created by Tom of Finland began to circulate in Europe.
It was the American counterculture of the 1960s, however, which first made possible the exploration of taboo subjects in a context of crumbling censorship restrictions. In 1964 a Philadelphia gay monthly, Drum, began serializing Harry Chess by Al Shapiro (A. Jay). Modeled on a popular television series, Harry Chess was both macho and campy, though explicit sex scenes were veiled. In the 1970s no-holds-barred examples appeared drawn by such artists as Bill Ward, Sean, and Stephen (Meatman).”
COMING OUT
“A few gays and lesbians report no memory of a coming out process; they always considered themselves homosexual and were never <in the closet>. Others have reported a sudden revelation of their own homosexuality which does not fit into any theory of stages but has brought them from apparently heterosexual to comfortably homosexual virtually overnight.”
“The self-help literature for gay and lesbian youth is quite explicit in designating parents as the crucial factor in the youth’s coming out process. Those who do not come out to their family, according to G.B. MacDonald, become <half-members of the family unit: afraid and alienated, unable ever to be totally open and spontaneous, to trust or be trusted… This sad stunting of human potential breeds stress for gay people and their families alike – stress characterized by secrecy, ignorance, helplessness, and distance.> The scientific literature, however, has largely ignored the role of parents, having centered on gay and lesbian adults.”
CONTEST LITERATURE
Diálogos.
Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon
Pseudo-Lucian, Affairs of the Heart
CONTRARY SEXUAL FEELING
“the linguistic remnant of the first, uncertain psychiatric attempt to grapple with the problem of homosexuality.”
COUNTERCULTURE
“Apparently the term counterculture is an adaptation of the slightly earlier <adversary culture>, an expression coined by the literary critic Lionel Trilling (1905-1975). In many respects the counterculture constituted a mass diffusion – fostered by diligent media exploitation – of the prefigurative beat/hippie phenomenon. As American involvement in the Vietnam War increased, in the wake of opposition to it the counterculture shifted from the gentle <flower-child> phase to a more aggressive posture, making common cause with the New Left, which was not, like the radicalism of the 30s, forced by economic crisis to focus on issues of unemployment and poverty. Of course radical political leaders were accustomed to decry the self-indulgence of the hippies, but their followers, as often as not, readily succumbed to the lure of psychedelic drugs and the happy times of group togetherness accompanied by ever present rock music.”
MESSIANISMO EPIDÊMICO: “The counterculture shamelessly embraced ageism: <Don’t trust anyone over thirty.> Observing this precept cut young people off from the accumulated experience and wisdom of sympathetic elders. Moreover, it meant that the adherents of the movement themselves quickly became back numbers as they crossed over the 30-year line. In regard to gay adherents, the distrust of older people tended to reinforce the ageism already present in their own subculture. To be sure, the full force of such problematic effects has become evident only in retrospect. Although outsiders, and some insiders as well, exaggerated the fusion of the counterculture and the New Left, still the convergence of massive cultural innovation with hopes for fundamental political change gave the young generation a heady sense of imminent revolution.”
“The psychiatrist Thomas Szasz and others correctly perceived the link between the campaign to decriminalize marijuana and the efforts to reform sex laws.” “many assumed that homosexuals were essentially counterculturist, leftist, and opposed root and branch to the established order. Subsequent observation has shown, not surprisingly perhaps, that a majority of gay men and lesbians were (and are) liberal-reformist and even conservative, rather than revolutionary in then-overall political and social outlook.”
CROWLEY, ALEISTER
“After the turn of the century Crowley’s public career began, and he was regularly attacked in the press as <The Great Beast> and <The Wickedest Man in the World>.”
Raulseixismo: <There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.>
“In a 1910 memoir Aleister Crowley proclaimed, <I shall fight openly for that which no Englishman dare defend, even in secret – sodomy! At school I was taught to admire Plato and Aristotle, who recommend sodomy to youths – I am not so rebellious as to oppose their dictum; and in truth there seems to be no better way to avoid the contamination of woman and the morose pleasures of solitary vice.>”
“he advanced beyond the grade of Magus to the supreme status of Ipsissimus.” E o Quico?
“Scarcely known today outside occult circles, Crowley is an extravagant instance of the concern with heterodox religion that has flourished among some male homosexuals who could find no peace within established Christianity, and more recently among female adherents of <the craft>. Through his voluminous writings Crowley foreshadowed the emergence of the <Age of Aquarius>.”
Israel Regardie, The Eye in the Triangle: An Interpretation of Aleister Crowley, St. Paul: Llewellen Publications, 1970.
CRUISING
Nicole Ariana, How to Pick up Men, New York: Bantam, 1972;
Mark Freedman & Harvey Mayes, Loving Man, New York: Hark, 1976, chapter 2;
John A. Lee, Getting Sex, Toronto: General, 1978 [Tinder on paper for human beings as archaic as those from a century ago];
Publius Ovid, Art of Love [~1A.D., obra seminal do “flerte” e “sondagens de sexo casual”, homo e heteronormativas!]
CUBA
“The largest island of the Antilles chain, home to 10 million Spanish-speaking people” Para 2017, o censo ainda não aponta população superior a 11.5 milhões.
“The British, French, and Dutch seized islands from the Spanish or colonized vacant ones as naval bases or sugar plantations; like the pirates they seldom brought women along. All 3 European powers were involved in the notorious triangular trade, shipping molasses or rum to Europe, guns and trinkets from there to Africa, and slaves back to the West Indies.”
“Cuba began to excel in sugar production after 1762. Havana became a glittering metropolis, rivaling New York and Rio de Janeiro, by 1800. The slave population, including huge numbers of males imported for work in the cane fields or molasses manufacturing, grew from fewer than 40,000 in 1770 to over 430,000 seventy years later. The census of 1841 reported that more than half the population was non-white (black and mixed blood) and that 43% were slaves. Males outnumbered females by 2 to 1 in the center and west and were just equal in the east. Other islands in the Caribbean had even greater sexual imbalances. Documentation for the homosexuality that must have abounded is scarce but the earlier prevalence can be assumed from attitudes and customs that still survive.”
“With Spain’s adoption of the Napoleonic Code in 1889, homosexuality was decriminalized 3 years after the abolition of slavery.”
“During World War I, Europe was closed to North Americans and Cuba, especially Havana, became a resort for the more adventurous. Prosperity increased with a rise in commodity prices. Also, the Prohibition in the United States after 1920 left Cuba as an oasis where liquor still flowed freely. Casino gambling and prostitution were also legal. A favorite port of call of cruise ships [pun intended!], Havana flourished as a mecca for pleasure-seekers.”
“The post-war collapse of commodity prices was to some extent offset by tourism. Everything was for sale in Havana under the dictator Fulgencio Batista, whose 1952 coup ousted an outwardly democratic but venal and nepotistic predecessor.
Old Havana had gay bars. Moral laxity, characteristic of the slave-rooted Caribbean economy, the Napoleonic Code, and the weakness of the Catholic Church (which was mainly Spanish, urban and upper class) produced an environment where gays were only mildly persecuted and could buy protection from corrupt officials. Drugs, especially marijuana, which flourished throughout the Caribbean, were available in Cuba long before they won popularity in the United States.”
“Exploiting popular revulsion against continuing political corruption as well as resentment of the diminishing but still important American domination, Fidel Castro led an ill-assorted group of liberals, patriots, and Marxists, including some gays, to victory over Batista in 1959. Only after he came to power did the United States realize that Castro was an avowed Communist. The American Central Intelligence Agency then tried and failed to assassinate him. His triumph was sealed by the missile crisis of 1962 when Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles in return for Kennedy’s promise never to try to invade Cuba.”
“Soviet hostility toward homosexuality since 1934, when Stalin restored the penal laws against male homosexuals, combined with traditional Latin American machismo and Catholic homophobia, made the existence of Cuban homosexuals wretched and oppressive. To prevent their <contamination> of youth, thousands of gays in the 1960s were placed in work camps known as Military Units to Increase Production (UMAP). Although the camps were abolished by the end of the decade, other forms of discrimination continued. Article 359 of the Cuban penal code prohibits public homosexuality. Violations are punished with a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 20 years. Parents must discourage their children from homosexuality or report their failure to officials as Articles 355-58 mandate. Articles 76-94 punish with 4 years imprisonment sexual deviation regarded by the government as contrary to the spirit of Socialism.”
“The gifted playwright and fiction writer Virgilio Piñera (1912-1967) returned from Argentina in 1957 and after Castro’s triumph worked for several of the newspapers of the regime. On October 11, 1961, he was arrested and jailed for homosexuality. Che Guevara personally denounced him.”
Allen Young, Gays under the Cuban Revolution
DANDYISM
“The dandy has been since antiquity the man who prides himself on being the incarnation of elegance and of male fashion. The word itself stems from the Romantic period in the 19th century, when the character type reached its apogee; England and France were the principal countries in which it flourished. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was one of the first to perceive that the type was not limited to the age just preceding his own, but had emerged across the centuries in some celebrated historical figures. Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808-1889) wrote an Essay on Dandyism and George Brummel (1845), dealing with Beau Brummell (1778-1840), the most famous English representative of the dandy in the London of George IV.
History of the Type. Ancient Greece saw two classical specimens of the dandy: Agathon and Alcibiades. In Plato’s Symposium Agathon is a poet and tragedian, not merely handsome, but obsessed with the most trivial details of his wardrobe. Aristophanes shows him using a razor to keep his cheeks as smooth and glistening as marble, wearing sumptuous clothing in the latest Ionian fashion. Later in the same dialogue Alcibiades also enters the stage, the most dazzling figure of the jeunesse dorée of Athens, richer and more influential than Agathon, and never sparing any expenditure that would enhance his renown.”
“Another aesthete of this era, Oscar Wilde, affected a particularly striking costume when he made a lecture tour of the United States, capitalizing on a character featured in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Patience (1881).”
“Rationale. The relation of the dandy to male homosexuality is complicated. As a rule the homosexual – more than the male who is attracted to women – feels the need to distinguish his person in some way, is more conscious of the world of male fashion and more likely to be narcissistically preoccupied with his image. Naturally not all the dandies of the past were homosexual or bisexual, and an element of leisure class self-demarcation and snobbery enters into the picture. Since it is usually the male of the species whom nature makes physically more noteworthy, the male-female antithesis in style of dress that has prevailed in Western culture since the French Revolution reverses the immemorial state of affairs. The notion that only a woman may be preoccupied with her wardrobe and that a man should dress simply and even unobtrusively is of recent date.”
DANTE ALIGHIERI
“As a youth he had a profound spiritual experience in an encounter with the young Beatrice Portinari; after her death he submerged himself in the study of philosophy and poetry. In 1302 Dante was banished from Florence, pursuing his literary career in various other cities of Italy.”
“The presence in both the Inferno and the Purgatorio of groups of <sodomites> has given rise to a series of debates over the centuries. These passages must be interpreted in the larger context of the great poem’s situations and personnel.” “The sodomites of the Inferno (cantos 15 and 16) are seen running under a rain of fire, condemned never to stop if they wish to avoid the fate of being nailed to the ground for a hundred years with no chance of shielding themselves against the flames. Having recognized Dante, Brunetto Latini (ca. 1212-1294) called him to speak with him, voicing an important prophecy of Dante’s future. In describing his fellow sufferers, Latini mentioned a number of famous intellectuals, politicians, and soldiers.
In the Purgatorio (canto 26) the sodomites appear in a different context – together with lustful heterosexuals. The two categories travel in opposite directions, yelling out the reason for their punishment.
How can one account for the striking deference and sympathy that Dante shows for the sodomites? This matter began to puzzle commentators only a few years after the poet’s death.”
“Dante’s education took place in the 13th century when Italy was beginning to change its attitudes toward homosexual behavior. Conduct which had been a transgression condemned by religion but viewed with indulgence by everyday morality assumed increasing seriousness in the eyes of the laity. For Dante it was still possible – as it had commonly been through the first half of the 13th century – to separate human and divine judgment with respect to sodomy.”
IDADE DAS LUZES E O BURACO ESCURO: “For Dante’s commentators sodomy was a sin of such gravity that it was inconceivable for them to treat with respect men seared with such <infamy>.”
“That Dante had spoken of Brunetto Latini and the sodomites with too much sympathy because he too shared their feelings was the conclusion of one anonymous commentator of the 14th century. Another wild suggestion is that the shameless Latini had made an attempt on Dante’s own virtue, and that hence Dante’s gentle words are in reality sarcasm that must be understood <in the opposite sense> (Guiniforto dei Bargigi; 1406-ca. 1460). Then, foreshadowing a thesis that would be favored by medical opinion in the 12th century, it was suggested that there were two types of sodomites, those by <choice> and those who are such by <necessity>.”
“The debate on Dante’s motives has continued until our own day. In 1950Andre Pezard devoted a whole book, Dante sous la pluie de feu, to an effort to show that the sin for which Brunetto and his companions were being punished was sodomy not in the usual sense, but in an allegorical one: sodomie spirituelle, which in Brunetto’s case meant having used the French language as a medium for one of his works.”
“The authoritative Encyclopedia Dantesca has sought to bring the conflict to an end, taking adequate account of Dante’s indulgent judgment as the correct key for solving the supposed <enigma> of the band of sodomites. As regards the reason for Brunetto Latini’s presence among the sodomites, Avalle D’Arco’s recent confirmation of the attribution to him of a long love poem directed to a man, S’eo son distretto inamoramente, shows that it was probably on the basis of facts that were publicly known in Dante’s time that he was consigned to Hell.” Aposto o cu que você já deu o cu.
DICKINSON, EMILY (1830-1886)
“American poet. After brief periods at Amherst Academy and Holyoke Female Seminary, she settled into an outwardly uneventful life keeping house for her family. Dickinson never married. The real events in her life are her writings, which have assumed classic status in American literature.”
“These homoerotic poems are never joyous, but that is to be expected in a society where heterosexual marriage was virtually believed inevitable and there was little possibility of two unrelated women establishing a life together if they were not wealthy through independent inheritance.”
DIONYSUS
“Greek god associated with wine and emotional exuberance. Although the name occurs in linear B tablets [?] from the end of the second millennium B.C., his figure absorbed additional elements from Thrace and the East in the following centuries. Dionysus, called Bacchus in Latin, was the son of Zeus and a mortal, Semele. When his mother unwisely besought Zeus to reveal himself in his true form, she was incinerated, but the embryo of her son escaped destruction. Zeus then inserted it into his own thigh and carried the child to term. This quality of being <twice born>, once from a woman and once from a man, points to the ambiguity of the god, who though male had effeminate traits. In literary and artistic representations, he sometimes served as a vehicle for questioning sex roles, otherwise strongly polarized in ancient Greece.
According to the late-antique writer Nonnus, Dionysus fell in love with a Phrygian boy, Ampelos, who became his inseparable companion. When the boy was killed in a bull-riding accident, the grief-stricken Dionysus turned him into a vine. As a result, the practices of vine cultivating and grape harvesting, of wine making and drinking, commemorate this deeply felt pederastic relationship: in honoring the vine (ampelos in Greek), one honors the god through his beloved.
In historic times Dionysus attracted a cult following consisting largely of women, the Bacchae or maenads. During the ritual followers abandoned their houses and work to roam about in the mountains, hair and clothing in disarray, and liberally imbibing wine, normally forbidden to women. At the height of their ecstasy they would seize upon an animal or even a child, tear it to pieces, and devour the uncooked flesh, by ingesting which they sought to incorporate the god and his powers within themselves. From a sociological point of view, the Bacchic cult is a <religion of the oppressed>, affording an ecstatic relief to women, whose status was low. Occurring only once during the year, or once every two years, these Dionysiac rites were bracketed off from the normal life of the Greek polis, suggesting comparison with such later European customs as the feast of fools, the carnival, the charivari, and mardi gras.
The maenads assume a major role in Euripides’ tragedy, The Bacchae (406 BC). Accompanied by his female followers, Dionysus appears in Thebes as a missionary. Unwisely, King Pentheus insults and arrests the divine visitor; after he has been rendered mad and humiliated, the transgressor is dismembered by the maenads. Interpretations of the play differ: a warning of the consequences of emotional excess versus a reaffirmation of the enduring presence of humanity’s irrational side. The subject probably attracted Euripides as a phenomenon of individual and group psychology in its own right, but it is unlikely that he intended it as a forecast of modern gay liberation in the <faery spirituality> mode, as Arthur Evans has argued. Inasmuch as the sexuality of The Bacchae was not pederastic, the Greek audience would not have seen the play as homosexual (a concept foreign to their mentality), but rather as challenging gender-role assumptions about men and women, whatever their sexual orientation. That the parts of the maenads were taken by men was not exceptional: women never appeared on the Greek stage.
Bacchanalian rites were introduced into Rome during the Republic. Men joined women in the frenzied gatherings, and (according to the historian Livy) there was more debauchery among the men with each other than with the women. Apart from their orgiastic aspects, the rites caused concern because they crossed class lines, welcoming citizens, freed men and slaves alike. Condemned as a subversive foreign import, the Senate suppressed the Bacchanalia in 186 BC, but they evidently were soon revived. Roman sarcophagi of the 2nd and 3rd century of our era show Bacchic scenes, projecting hopes for an afterlife spent in Dionysic bliss. In its last phases the cult of Dionysus emerged as an other-worldly mystery religion, showing affinities with Mithraism, the religion of Isis, and Christianity. Meeting now behind closed doors, members of the sect recognized one another by passwords and signs.
Although the early Christians regarded all pagan worship as demonic, they were not averse to purloining the Bacchic wine harvest imagery for their own sarcophagi and mosaics. Some Bacchic reminiscences recur in drinking songs of medieval goliardic poets, notably the Carmina Burana.”
“At the end of the 16th century the flamboyant bisexual painter Caravaggio created a notably provocative image of Bacchus-Dionysus (Florence, Uffizi Gallery).” Veja pintura no verbete do pintor mais acima.
“The most influential latter-day evocation of the god occurs in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) of Friedrich Nietzsche, who exalted the category of the Dionysiac as an antidote for excessive rationality in the interpretation of ancient Greece and, by implication, in modern life as well.
Nietzsche’s ideas were modernized and correlated with anthropology and psychoanalysis by the classical scholar E.R. Dodds, who in turn influenced the poet W.H. Auden. Together with his lover, Chester Kallman, Auden turned Euripides’ play into an opera libretto entitled The Bassarids.”
Karl Kerenyi, Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, London: Routledge, 1976.
DREAMS
“When a dream has homosexual content, the hermeneutic process is complicated by the ethical assumptions of the dreamer and the interpreter, which reflect the attitudes of society toward same-sex experience.
To understand their dream experiences human beings have formulated a lore to which the ancients gave the name oneirocritical. Because the ancient world accepted homosexual interest and activity as part of human sexuality, the dream interpreters of the eastern Mediterranean cultures could calmly explain the homoerotic episodes in dreams in terms of their overall system of signs and meanings and without anxiety. Such was the work of Artemidorus of Daldis (middle of the 2nd century), which alludes to pédérastie and homosexual dream sequences and assigns them a specific, often prophetic meaning. Not so the Christian Middle Ages; the literature of dreams became exclusively heterosexual because the taboo with which theology had tainted sexual attraction to one’s own sex imposed a censorship that is only now being lifted.”
DRUGS
“It should be noted that there has never been a country or society in which unrestricted use of all psychoactive drugs has been permitted over any period of time.”
“In some users hallucinogens cause terrifying experiences; psychological problems can be exacerbated, and brain damage caused. The action of stimulants is often followed by a compensatory negative experience through which the body restores its equilibrium.”
“Society can tolerate drug use if it is encapsulated within an artistic, recreational, religious, or therapeutic context; while some are able to so control their usagé, for many that is a daunting or impossible condition, at least in our present culture”
“education is more effective than prohibition. Exaggeration of drugs’ harmful effects reduces respect for law, overwhelms the courts and prisons, inhibits research on any therapeutic use of drugs, makes drugs of controlled strength and purity unavailable, gives drugs the glamour of the forbidden, and encourages progression to ever more dangerous yet legally equal substances. As with alcohol during America’s Prohibition (1920-33), the supply of illegal drugs has become a very profitable industry, and not a passive or benign one. Foreigners who supply drugs sometimes justify their actions to themselves and their countrymen as a means of striking back at the political and economic power of the United States.”
“during the 1960s, there were a considerable number of reports of people becoming aware of homoeroticism for the first time while under the influence of LSD especially. Drugs have also been used by musicians, artists, and writers who claim that the substances help them create, although this claim is controversial, perhaps because if substantiated it would be a powerful argument for drug use.”
“The use of hashish (cannabis), eaten in sweets rather than smoked, is found in the Bible (Song of Songs 5:1; I Samuel 14:25-45), and there is evidence of psychic use of hemp (marijuana), from which hashish is made, from pre-historic times. Herodotus, for example, reports its popularity among the Scythians. However, widespread use of hashish begins in Islam in the 12th and 13th centuries. While the Koran prohibited wine, which because of distribution costs was somewhat more expensive than today, it was silent on hashish, which was also much less expensive. There was debate about whether the Koran’s silence was to be taken as approval, or whether prohibition was to be inferred from the treatment of wine; still, as long as it remained a minority indulgence it was tolerated, as wine usually was. Hashish users became a subculture; in particular it is linked to the mystical Sufis, who made a cult and ritual of its use. However, almost every Islamic poet from the 13th to the 16th centuries produced at least some playful poems on hashish, although wine poetry is much more abundant.”
“Hashish was thought to cause effeminacy, a preference for the passive sexual role, and a loss of interest in sex. However, it was also prized as the drug of scholars and lovers of young men, and an aid in seduction of the latter. Turkish soldiers frequently ate hashish together before going into battle.
Coffee was introduced to Europe in the 17th century from the Turkish empire. Both within Islam and in Europe coffee was at first a similarly controversial drug, subject to occasional legal restriction or suppression. Its use in coffee-houses, later cafés, was typical of intellectuals and dissidents.”
“The first half of the 20th century was characterized by a wave of reaction against drugs and the establishment of legal controls throughout Westem Europe and North America. However, the tensions of the 1960s, against a backdrop of the Holocaust and the invention and use of the atomic bomb, brought on a new wave of drug use. The hedonistic use of cannabis increased greatly; its enthusiasts promoted it as an aid to sensual and sexual enjoyment. The Beat generation, especially William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, had already turned to potent psychedelics as a means of self-improvement; they became part of the short-lived counterculture of the late 1960s. The discovery of psychedelics was in part due to progress in anthropology and archeology. The use by native peoples of mescaline (peyote), psilocybin (mushrooms), and other psychedelics became known, and the possible role of such substances in visions and oracles of the ancient Mediterranean world was proposed by scholars. The hallucinogenic properties of the most potent psychedelic yet known, lysergic acid diethylamine-25 (LSD), were discovered in 1943” “until it became too controversial, it was manufactured by a pharmaceutical company for research in psychotherapeutic treatment.”
“The gay bar remains the only gay institution in many American communities, as it was almost everywhere until the 1970s.”
“Poppers are a vasodilator of transitory effect, and cause a <high> from a drop in blood pressure; users say that the intensity and/or duration of orgasm is increased, that muscles (such as throat and anal sphincters) and gag reflexes are relaxed, and that feelings of increased union or <melting> with the sex partner result. Many users report that continued use (a single inhalation produces effects only for a few minutes) inhibits erections, while other users seem unaffected. Likewise, some users say the poppers encourage passivity and complete relaxation, while others report no such effect. Headaches and dizziness are sometimes reported as side effects.” “In the early 1980s poppers were accused of being a co-factor in the development of AIDS, and they were made illegal in some areas, although the accusation remains unproven.”
EFFEMINACY, HISTORICAL SEMANTICS OF
“In reading older texts it is important to bear these differences in mind, for the term effeminate can be used slightingly of a womanizer [mulherengo] as well as of a <womanish> man.
The ancient Greeks and Romans sharply differentiated the active male homosexual, the paiderastes (in the New Testament arsenokoites, literally <man-layer>), from the passive partner, the cinaedus or pathicus (New Testament Greek malakos; Hebrew, rakha). The Greeks also sometimes used the term androgynos, <man-woman>, to stigmatize the passive homosexual. Beginning with the Old Attic comedies of Aristophanes, the passive is a stock figure of derision and contempt, the active partner far less so. Because of the military ideals on which ancient societies were founded, passivity and softness in the male were equated with cowardice and want of virility. A seeming exception is the god Dionysus – whose effeminate characteristics are, however, probably an import from the non-Greek East.
In ancient Rome the terms mollis (soft) and effeminatus acquired special connotations of decadence and enervating luxury. By contrast the word virtus meant manliness. The Roman satirists took sardonic delight in flagellating the vices of luxury that were rampant among the upper classes of a nation that, once rude and war-like, had succumbed to the temptations that followed its successful conquest and plunder of the entire ancient world. The classical notion of effeminacy as the result of luxury, idleness, and pampered self-indulgence is thus far removed from the claim of some gay liberationists today to kinship with the exploited and down-trodden.”
“The old Icelandic literature stemming from medieval Scandinavia documents the condemnation of the argr, the cowardly, unwar-like effeminate (compare Modern German arg, <bad>). The Latin term mollities (softness) entered early Christian and medieval writings, but often with reference to masturbation. It may be that the 18th-century English term molly for an effeminate homosexual is a reminiscence of Latin mollis.”
“In the 16th century the French monarch Henri III assembled an entourage of favorites whose name mignon connotes effeminacy and delicacy. In French also the original meaning of bardache was the passive partner of the active bougre. English writings of the 17th and 18th century frequently denounced foppery [dandismo], sometimes homosexual but more often heterosexual.”
“Restoration times also witnessed the popularity of the self-referencing habit of male homosexuals adopting women’s names: Mary, Mary-Anne, Molly, Nance or Nancy, and Nelly. The habit occurs in other languages as well – Janet in Flemish; Checca (from Francesca) in Italian; Maricón (from Maria) in Spanish; and Adelaida in Portuguese.”
“19th-century English witnessed a semantic shift of a number of terms originally applied to women to provide opprobrious designations of male homosexuals. Thus gay had the meaning of a loose woman, prostitute; faggot, a slatternly woman –, and queen (or quean), a trollop. Even today the popular mind tends to the view that gay men seek to imitate women, or even become women –, the considerable number of unstereotypical, masculine homosexuals are not taken into account.”
“Termagant and virago, though pejorative, do not suggest variance of sexual orientation. The girl who is a tomboy has always been treated more indulgently than the boy who is a sissy.”
“Men who cross-dress as women are of two kinds. Some go to great lengths to make the simulation credible, an effort that may be a prelude to transsexualism. In other instances the simulation is imperfect, a kind of send-up. Although some feminists have interpreted such cross-dressing exercises as mockery of women, it is more likely that they signify a questioning of gender categories. In any event, transvestism is not normally held to lie within the province of effeminacy, which is thought to be the adjunction of feminine traits in a person otherwise fully recognizable as masculine.”
Hans Herter, Reallexikon fur Antike und Christentum, 4 (1959).
EGYPT
“Traditionally the pharaohs married their half-sisters, a custom that other peoples considered curious. Self-confident in their cherished habits and customs, the Egyptians nonetheless cherished a distinct sense of privacy, which restricted discussion of erotic themes in the documents that have come down to modern times. Most of our evidence stems from temples and tombs, where a full record of everyday life could scarcely be expected. Unfortunately, Egypt had no law codes comparable to those known from ancient Mesopotamia.”
“The realm of mythology provides several instances of homosexual behavior. In order to subordinate him, the god Seth attempted to sodomize his brother Horus, but the latter foiled him, and tricked Seth into ingesting some of his (Horus’s) own semen. Seth then became pregnant. In another myth the ithyphallic god Min anally assaulted an enemy, who later gave birth to the god Thoth. Both these stories present involuntary receptive homosexuality as a humiliation, but the act itself is not condemned; in the latter incident the god of wisdom is born as a result. (In another myth the high god engenders offspring parthenogenetically by masturbation.) While it is sometimes claimed that the ancient Egyptians were accustomed to sodomize enemies after their defeat on the battlefield, the evidence is equivocal.”
“In what is surely history’s first homosexual short story, King Pepy II Neferkare (2355-2261) makes nocturnal visits to have sex with his general Sisinne. This episode is significant as an instance of androphilia – sex between two adult men – rather than the pederasty that was dominant in the ancient world. From a slightly earlier period comes the Tomb of the Two Brothers at Thebes, which the excavators have explained as the joint sepulcher of two men, Niankhnum and Khnumhotep, who were lovers. Bas reliefs on the tomb walls show the owners embracing affectionately.”
“Queen Hatshepsut (reigned 1503-1482 BC) adopted male dress and even wore a false beard; these male attributes probably stem from her decision to reign alone, rather than from lesbianism.
A figure of particular interest is the pharaoh Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV; reigned ca. 1372-1354 BC), who was a religious and artistic reformer. Although this king begat several daughters with his wife, the famous Nefertiti, in art he is often shown as eunuch-like, with swollen hips and feminine breasts. According to some interpreters these somatic features reflect a glandular disorder. Other scholars believe that they are a deliberate artistic stylization, so that the appearance of androgyny may convey a universal concept of the office of kingship, uniting the male and the female so as to constitute an appropriate counterpart of the universal god Aten he introduced. Scenes of Akhenaten caressing his son-in-law Smenkhkare have been interpreted, doubtfully, as indicating a homosexual relation between the two.”
ELLIS, HAVELOCK
“Pioneering British writer on sexual psychology. Descended from a family with many generations of seafarers, Henry Havelock Ellis was named after a distinguished soldier who was the hero of the Indian Mutiny. Early in life he sailed twice around the world and spent some years in Australia. In boarding school he had some unpleasant experiences suggesting a passive element in his character, and his attachments to women were often more friendships than erotic liaisons. At the age of 32 he married Edith Lees, a lesbian; after the first year of their marriage all sexual relations ceased, and both went on to a series of affairs with women. By nature an autodidact, Ellis obtained in 1889 only a licentiate in Medicine, Surgery, and Midwifery from the Society of Apothecaries – a somewhat inferior degree that always embarrassed him. More interested in his literary studies than in the practice of medicine, he nevertheless collected case histories mainly by correspondence, as his autobiography makes no mention of clinical practice.”
ERA DE AQUARIUS: “In the atmosphere that prevailed after the disgrace of Oscar Wilde (May 1895), publication in England was problematic, but under doubtful auspices the English edition was released in November 1897.”
“Sexual Inversion was the first book in English to treat homosexuality as neither disease nor crime, and if he dismissed the current notion that it was a species of <degeneracy> (in the biological sense), he also maintained that it was inborn and unmodifiable – a view that he never renounced. His book, couched in simple language, urged public toleration for what was then regarded as unnatural and criminal to the highest degree. To a readership conditioned from childhood to regard homosexual behavior with disgust and abhorrence, the book was beyond the limits of comprehension, and a radical publisher and bookseller named George Bedborough was duly prosecuted for issuing <a certain lewd wicked bawdy scandalous and obscene libel>” “The book was to appear in two later editions as the second volume of Ellis’ Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which in its final format extended to 7 volumes covering the whole of sexual science as it existed in the first three decades of the 20th century.” “Ellis never endorsed the explanations offered by Freud and the psychoanalytic school, so that the third edition of Sexual Inversion (1915), which was supplemented by material drawn from Magnus Hirschfeld’s Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes, published a year earlier, presented essentially the standpoint of 1904. The next in radical character was the measured discussion of masturbation, which Victorian society had been taught to regard with virtual paranoia as the cause of numberless ills.”
EPHEBOPHILIA
“The term ephebophilia seems to have been coined by Magnus Hirschfeld in his Wesen der Liebe (1906)”
ANTI-AQUILINO (BANQUETE): “those with bearded faces who had outgrown the stage at which they were appropriate as the younger partners in pederasty, but not yet old enough to marry: the prime age for military service. The ancient Greek age of puberty was likely in the mid-teens rather than the younger ages typical of contemporary Western society.”
“In other societies, ephebes are legally on a par with younger children, but in practice sexual activities with them are not as harshly repressed as with the younger group.”
“The combination of heightened sexual energy with a lack of heterosexual outlets (owing to marriage ages in the twenties and restrictions on pre-marital opportunities) and low incomes (characteristic of males still in school, military service, or just beginning to acquire work experience) has in many societies made heterosexual ephebes more available for trade (one-sided) relationships with homosexuals than any other group of heterosexual males.
For many ephebophiles, the naïveté of ephebes is a source of attraction, their enthusiasm for new experiences (including sexual and romantic involvements) contrasted with what is perceived to be the more jaded and skeptical attitudes of other adults.”
“The ancient Greeks acknowledged this trait with the term philephebos (fond of young men) and philoboupais (one who is fond of over-matured boys, <bull-boys> or <husky young men>), but generally slighted it in favor of the pederastic preference. Nevertheless, the athletic games of which the Greeks were so fond featured nude ephebes, the size of whose members received public acclaim, and the victors basked in adulation; Pindar wrote odes to them.”
“In the 20th century, the dominance of the androphile model of male homosexuality has tended to subsume, appropriate, and obscure the ephebophile current, and to consider it as a mode of adult-adult relationships rather than as a distinctive type of preference.”
EPICUREANISM
“Knowledge of Epicureanism, the classical rival of Stoicism, is fragmentary because Christians, disliking its atheistic materialism, belief in the accidental existence of the cosmos, and ethical libertarianism, either failed to copy or actually destroyed the detested works. Of all the numerous works composed in antiquity, only Lucretius’ philosophical poem De rerum natura survives intact. Diogenes Laertius reported that Epicurus wrote more than anyone else, including 37 books On Nature. A typical maxim: <We see that pleasure is the beginning and end of living happily>.
Epicurus (341-270 BC), the founder of the school, served as an ephebe in Athens at 18 and then studied at the Academy, a fellow classmate of Menander, when Aristotle was absent in Chalcis. Having taught abroad, where he combatted the atomist philosophy of Democritus, he returned to Athens and bought his house with a garden in 307-6. There he taught until his death, allowing women and slaves to participate in his lessons – to the shock of traditionalists. Only a few lines of his works survive. Apparently he likened sexual object choice, whether of women or boys, to food preferences – a parallel that often recurred in later times. His beloved Metrodorus predeceased him.
[O LEITMOTIF INCONSCIENTE DO BLOG] The Epicurean school, consisting of scholars who secluded themselves from society in Epicurus’ garden, lived modestly or even austerely. Stoics, however, libeled the secretive Epicureans because of their professed hedonism, accusing them of profligacy of every kind despite the fact that Epicurus felt that pleasure could be attained only in restraint of some pursuits that in the long run bring more pain than the temporary pleasure they seem to offer. Natural pleasures are easily satisfied, others being unnecessary. The ideal was freedom from destiny by satisfying desire and avoiding the pain of desires too difficult or impossible to satisfy. By freeing man from fear of gods and an afterlife and by teaching him to avoid competition in politics and business it liberates him from emotional turmoil. Friendship was extremely important to Epicureans.”
“Lucretius (ca. 94-55 BC) seems not to have added any ideas to those taught by Epicurus himself. But others, like the fabulously rich general Lucullus, whose banquets became proverbial, excused their gross sensuality by references to Epicurus’ maxims. Julius Caesar proclaimed himself an Epicurean. Under the Empire Stoicism vanquished its rival and vied with Christianity, which when triumphant anathematized Epicureanism.”
“the Soviet Communists, who naturally ranked Epicurus above Plato as the greatest philosopher of antiquity.” ???
“Gassendi (1592-1655) [neo-epicurean] exerted enormous influence on both Newton and Leibniz.”
FAGGOT
“One of the most persistent myths that have gained a foot-hold in the gay movement is the belief that faggot derives from the basic meaning of <bundle of sticks used to light a fire>, with the historical commentary that when witches were burned at the stake, <only presumed male homosexuals were considered low enough to help kindle the fires>.
The English word has in fact three forms: faggot, attested by the Oxford English Dictionary from circa 1300; fadge, attested from 1588; and faggald, which the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue first records from 1375. The first and second forms have the additional meaning <fat, slovenly woman> which according to the English Dialect Dictionary survived into the 19th century in the folk speech of England.
The homosexual sense of the term, unknown in England itself, appears for the first time in America in a vocabulary of criminal slang printed in Portland, Oregon in 1914, with the example <All the fagots (sissies) will be dressed in drag at the ball tonight>. The apocopated (clipped) form fag then arose by virtue of the tendency of American colloquial speech to create words of one syllable; the first quotation is from the book by Neis Anderson, The Hobo (1923): <Fairies or Fags are men or boys who exploit sex for profit.> The short form thus also has no connection with British fag as attested from the 19th century (for example, in the novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays) in the sense of <public school boy who performs menial tasks for an upper-classman>.
In American slang faggot/fag usurped the semantic role of bugger in British usage, with its connotations of extreme hostility and contempt bordering on death wishes. In more recent decades it has become the term of abuse par excellence in the mouths of heterosexuals, often just as an insult aimed at another male’s alleged want of masculinity or courage, rather than implying a sexual role or orientation.
The ultimate origin of the word is a Germanic term represented by the Norwegian dialect words fagg, <bundle, heap>, alongside bagge, <obese, clumsy creature> (chiefly of animals). From the latter are derived such Romance words as French bagasse and ltalian bagascia, <prostitute>, whence the parallel derivative bagascione whose meaning matches that of American English faggot/fag, while Catalan bagassejar signifies to faggot, <to frequent the company of loose women>.
The final proof that faggot cannot have originated in the burning of witches at the stake is that in English law both witchcraft and buggery were punishable by hanging, and that in the reign of the homosexual monarch James I the execution of heretics came to an end, so that by the time American English gave the word its new meaning there cannot have been in the popular mind even the faintest remnant of the complex of ideas credited to the term in the contemporary myth. It is purely and simply an Americanism of the 20th century.
Given the fact that the term faggot cannot refer to burning at the stake, why does the myth continue to enjoy popularity in the gay movement? On the conscious level it serves as a device with which to attack the medieval church, by extension Christianity in toto, and finally all authority. On another level, it may linger as a <myth of origins>, a kind of collective masochistic ritual that willingly identifies the homosexual as victim.”
FASCISM
“The term fascism derives from fasces, the bundles of rods carried by the lictors of ancient Rome to symbolize the unity of classes in the Republic. Fascism is the authoritarian movement that arose in Italy in the wake of World War I. Although Hitler admired its founder Mussolini and imitated him at first – the term Führer is modeled on Duce – one cannot simply equate his more radical National Socialist movement with the Italian phenomenon, as writers of the left are prone to do.”
“Not essentially racist like Nazism or anti-bourgeois like Marxism, Italian fascism, with its corporative binding of workers and employers, has been less consistently hostile to homosexuals.”
“Mussolini also argued in a discussion of a draft penal code in 1930 that because Italians, being virile, were not homosexuals, Italy needed no law banning homosexual acts, which he believed only degenerate foreigners to practice. A ban would only frighten such tourists away, and Italy needed the money they spent to improve its balance of payments and shore up its sagging economy. Napoléon had promulgated his code, which did not penalize homosexual acts between consenting adults, in northern Italy in 1810, and thus decriminalized sodomy. It had already been decriminalized in Tuscany by Grand Duke Leopold, the enlightened brother of Joseph II. The Albertine Code of 1837 for Piedmont-Sardinia was extended to all its dominions after the House of Savoy created a united Kingdom of Italy, a task completed in 1870. Pervasive was the influence of the jurist MarquisCesare Beccaria, who argued against cruel and unusual punishments and against all offenses motivated by religious superstition and fanaticism.
Thus Italy with its age-old <Mediterranean homosexuality> in which women were protected, almost secluded – upper-class girls at least in the South being accompanied in public by dueñas –, had like other Latin countries allowed female prostitution and closed its eyes to homosexuality. As such it had became the playground par excellence during the grand tour of the English milords, and also the refuge of exiles and émigrés from the criminal sanctions of the Anglo-American common law and the Prussian code. The Prussian Code was extended in 1871-72 to the North and then South German territories incorporated in the Reich, including ones where the Code Napoleon had prevailed in the early part of the century. Byron and John Addington Symonds took refuge in Italy, as William Beckford did in Portugal and Oscar Wilde in Paris. Friedrich Alfred Krupp’s playground was in Capri, Thomas Mann’s in Venice, and Count Adelswárd Fersen’s also in Capri.”
“Personally, Mussolini was somewhat of a sexual acrobat, in that he had a succession of mistresses and often took time out in the office to have sex with one or another of his secretaries.”
“Believing in military strength through numbers, Mussolini did more than Hitler to subsidize parents of numerous progeny, thus hoping to increase Italy’s population from 40 to 60 million.”
“However, after he formed the Rome-Berlin Axis with Hitler in 1936, Mussolini began, under Nazi influence, to persecute homosexuals and to promulgate anti-Semitic decrees in 1938 and 1939, though these were laxly enforced, and permitted exceptions, such as veterans of World War I.”
“Oppressing homosexuals more than Jews, Mussolini’s regime rounded up and imprisoned a substantial number, a procedure poignantly depicted in Ettore Scola’s excellent film A Special Day (1977).” “Even exclusive homosexuals, if they were not unlucky, survived fascism unscathed.”
“Admiral Horthy seized control of Hungary from the communist Bela Kun in 1920 and as Regent unleashed a <White Terror> largely directed against Jews, two years before Mussolini marched on Rome with his black-shirts.”
“Fascists were less consistent and more divided among themselves than even communists or Nazis. After all, they had no sacred text like Das Kapital or Mein Kampf, and further were not ruling only a single powerful country.” “Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in Central Europe to survive this period, simply continued the Austrian penal code of 1852 that penalized both male and female homosexuality.”
“The great homosexual poet Federico García Lorca was shot by a death squad near Granada in 1936; it is said that they fired the bullets through his backside to <make the punishment fit the crime>.” “More than Mussolini, Franco resisted the theories and pressures of Hitler, whom he regarded as a despicable (and perhaps deranged) upstart. It has been argued that Franco was not a fascist at all and that he actually maintained a pro-Jewish policy, granting asylum to refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe and attempting to protect Sephardic Jews in the Balkan countries. In his last years he in fact liberalized Spain to a certain extent, allowing among other things a resurgence of gay bars, baths, and culture even before the accession of King Juan Carlos upon his death in 1975. Today Spain is one of the freest countries in Europe.”
“Naturally Latins, like Slavs, being considered inferior peoples by Hitler, did not in general espouse racism (Hitler had to make the Japanese honorary Aryans to ally with them in the Tripartite Pact of 1937), so they had no reason to think of homosexuals in his terms.”
FASCIST PERVERSION, BELIEF IN
“Fascism and National Socialism (Nazism) were originally distinct political systems, but their eventual international ties (the <Rome-Berlin axis>) led to the use of <fascist> as an umbrella term¹ by Communist writers anxious to avoid the implication that <National Socialism> was a type of socialism. Neither in Italy nor in Spain did the right-authoritarian political movements have a homosexual component. Rather it was in Weimar Germany that the right-wing paramilitary groups which constituted the nucleus of the later National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) attracted a considerable number of homosexuals whose erotic leanings overlapped with the male bonding of the party. This strong male bonding, in the later judgment of their own leaders, gave the Nazis a crucial advantage in their victory over the rival Social Democratic and communist formations in the early 1930s.
The most celebrated of the homosexuals in the Nazi Party of the 1920s was Ernst Rohm, whose sexual proclivities were openly denounced by left-wing propagandists, but this did not deprive him of Hitler’s confidence until the putsch of June 30, 1934, in which he and many of his homosexual comrades in arms were massacred.”
¹ Discordo, mas segue o jogo.
“theorists such as Wilhelm Reich who were opposed to homosexuality [?] could claim that the right-wing youth were <becoming more homosexual>. The victory of National Socialism at the beginning of 1933 then reinforced Communist and émigré propagandists in their resort to <fascist perversion> as a rhetorical device with which they could abuse and vilify the regime that had defeated and exiled them – and which they hoped would be transient and unstable.
In particular, the statute by which Stalin restored the criminal sanctions against homosexuality that had been omitted from the penal codes of 1922 and 1926 was officially titled the <Law of March 7, 1934> – a pointed allusion to the anniversary of the National Socialist consolidation of power one year earlier.”
“In the United States Maoists charged that the gay liberation movement of 1969 and the years following was an example of <bourgeois décadance> that would vanish once the triumph of socialism was achieved. “
Samuel Igra, Germany’s National Vice, London: Quality Press, 1945.
FILM
“Adolescent alienation was the theme of Rebel without a Cause (1955), in which, however, the delicate Sal Mineo character dies so that James Dean can be united with Natalie Wood.”
“In the book Midnight Express the hero admitted to a gay love affair in prison, but in the movie version (1978) he rejects a handsome fellow inmate’s advances.”
“Screen biographies of gay people have had similar fates. Michelangelo and Cole Porter appear as joyful heterosexuals; Oscar Wilde could not be sanitized, to be sure, but he was presented in a <tasteful> manner (3 British versions, 2 in 1960, one in 1984). Recent screen biographies have been better; the documentary on the painter Paul Cadmus (1980) is open without being sensational; Prick Up Your Ears, on the life of Joe Orton, is as frank as one can wish, though it somehow misses the core of his personality.”
“In The Third Sex (West Germany, 1959) a sophisticated older man has an entourage of teenage boys. Although this film purveys dated ideas of homosexuality, it went farther in explicitness than anything that Hollywood was able to do for over a decade. Federico Fellini’s celebrated La Dolce Vita (1960) is a multifaceted portrait of eternal decadence in chic circles in Rome.”
“One breakthrough came in 1967 when the legendary Marlon Brando portrayed a closeted homosexual army officer in John Huston’sReflections in a Golden Eye, a film which drew a <Condemned> rating from the Catholic Church.” Who gives a fuck (literally)!
“Sunday Bloody Sunday: this film was notable for the shock experienced by straight audiences at a kissing scene between Peter Finch and Murray Head. Perhaps the most notorious of the gay directors was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose Fox and His Friends (1975) deals with homosexuality and class struggle. Fassbinder’s last film was his controversial version of a Genet novel, Querelle (1982). The death of Franco created the possibility of a new openness in Spanish culture, including a number of gay films. Influenced by Luis Buñuel, Law of Desire (1986) by Pedro Almodóvar is surely a masterpiece of comic surrealism.”
“Already in the 1920s some major directors were known to be gay, including the German Friedrich W. Murnau and the Russian Sergei Eisenstein.”
“During their lifetimes Charles Laughton and Montgomery Clift had to suffer fag-baiting taunts from colleagues, while Rock Hudson remained largely untouched by public scandal until his death from AIDS in 1985. Tyrone Power and Cary Grant were decloseted after their deaths. The sexuality of others, such as Errol Flynn and James Dean, remains the subject of argument. In Germany the stage actor and film director Gustav Grundgens managed to work through the Nazi period, even though his homosexuality was known to the regime.”
“In 1969, however, hardcore porno arrived, apparently to stay. Some 50 theatres across the United States specialized in the genre, and where the authorities were willing to turn a blind eye, sexual acts took place there, stimulated by the films.”
“Much of the early production was forgettable, but in 1971, in Boys in the Sand starring Casey Donovan (Cal Culver), the director-producer Wakefield Poole achieved a rare blend of sexual explicitness and cinematographic values.”
“In the later 80s AIDS began to devastate porno-industry workers, gay and straight, and safe sex procedures became more rigorous on the set (it should be noted, however, that long before AIDS, by strict convention, pornographic film ejaculations were always conducted outside the body, so as to be graphically visible; hence film sex was always basically <safe sex>).”
PROVAVELMENTE ULTRAPASSADO: “Lesbian porno exists only as scenes within films addressed to heterosexual males, their being, thus far, no market for full-length lesbian films of this nature. A number of independent lesbian film-makers have made candid motion pictures about lesbian life, but they are not pornographic.”
Carel Rowe, The Baudelairean Cinema: A Trend Within the American Avant-Garde, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982.
FLAUBERT
“From his early years at the lycée onward, he preferred the pen to his father’s scalpel, and single-handedly edited a minor journal, the Colibri, that clumsily but clearly foretold his future talent. In Paris he read Law but never took the degree for reasons of health, and there met Maxime Du Camp, with whom he formed a close friendship. Together they traveled through Brittany and Normandy in 1847, bringing back a volume of reminiscences that was to be published only after Flaubert’s death (Par les champs et par les grèves, 1885). Between October of 1849 and May of 1851 the two traveled in Egypt and Turkey, and there Flaubert had a number of pédérastie experiences which he related in his letters to Louis Bouilhet.”
BORING FASHION: “On his return to France Flaubert shut himself up in his country house at Croisset, near Rouen. Instead of aspiring to self-discovery in the manner of the Romanticists, Flaubert sought to bury his own personality by striving for the goal of art in itself, and he devoted his entire life to the quest for its secrets. His ferocious will to be in his works <like God>, everywhere and nowhere, explains the nerve-wracking effort that went into each of his novels, in which nothing is left to the free flow of inspiration, nothing is asserted without being verified, nothing is described that has not been seen.” “This explains the multiple versions that are periodically uncovered of almost every one of his works, with the sole exception of Madame Bovary (1857), which led to his being tried for offending public decency.”
“In 1857 he traveled to Tunisia to collect material for a historical novel set in Carthage after the First Punic War. Salammbô (1862), abundantly documented, is so rich in sadistic scenes, including one of a mass child-sacrifice, that it horrified some contemporary readers.”
“In 1874 he published La tentation de saint Antoine, a prose poem of great power and imagination. His last work, Bouvard et Pécuchet (issued posthumously in 1881), is an unfinished study in male bonding.”
“Sodomy is a subject of conversation at table. You can deny it at times, but everyone starts ribbing you and you end up spilling the beans. Traveling for our own information and entrusted with a mission by the government, we regarded it as our duty to abandon ourselves to this manner of ejaculation. The occasion has not yet presented itself, but we are looking for one. The Turkish baths are where it is practiced. One rents the bath for 5 fr., including the masseurs, pipe, coffee, and linen, and takes one’s urchin into one of the rooms. – You should know that all the bath attendants are bardaches [homossexuais passivos].”
FOUCAULT
“at the end of his life he surprised the world with 2 successor volumes with a different subject matter: the management of sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome. While completing these books he was already gravely ill, a fact that may account for their turgid, sometimes repetitive presentation. In June 1984 Michel Foucault died in Paris of complications resulting from AIDS.”
O CONTINENTE SE ESMIGALHA: “Discontent with the systems of Marx and Freud and their contentious followers had nonetheless left an appetite for new <mega-theories>, which the Anglo-Saxon pragmatic tradition was unable to satisfy.”
“This concept of discontinuity was all the more welcome as the ground had been prepared by an influential American philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, whose concept of radical shifts in paradigm had been widely adopted. In vain did Foucault protest toward the end of his life that he was not the philosopher of discontinuity; he is now generally taken to be such.”
“Not since Jean-Paul Sartre had France given the world a thinker of such resonance. Yet Foucault’s work shows a number of key weaknesses. Not gifted with the patience for accumulating detail that since Aristotle has been taken to be a hallmark of the historian’s craft, he often spun elaborate theories from scanty empirical evidence. He also showed a predilection for scatter-gun concepts such as episteme, discourse, difference, and power; in seeking to explain much, these talismans make for fuzziness. Foucauldian language has had a seductive appeal for his followers, but repetition dulls the magic and banalization looms.”
FOURIER
“French Utopian philosopher and sexual radical. Fourier spent much of his life in Lyon, trapped in a business world which he hated with a passion. Disillusioned in childhood by the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the people around him, he gradually formulated an elaborate theory of how totally to transform society in a Utopian world of the future known as Harmony, in which mankind would live in large communes called Phalansteries.
Fourier hid his sexual beliefs from his contemporaries, and it was more than a century after his death before his main erotic work, Le nouveau monde amoureux, was first published. (…) Fourier did not believe that anyone under 16 had any sexual feelings, nor did he understand the psychology of sadism, pedophilia, or rape, so that his sexual theories are not entirely suitable for modem experimentation. (…) He recognized male homosexuals and lesbians as biological categories long before Krafft-Ebing created the modern concept of immutable sexual <perversions>.” “He wrote some fictional episodes in the vein of William Beckford, one of which describes the seduction of a beautiful youth by an older man.”
FRANCE
“French politics and literature have exercised an incalculable influence on other countries, from England to Quebec, from Senegal to Vietnam. Whether justified or not, a reputation for libertine hedonism clings to the country, and especially to its capital, Paris – by far the largest city of northern Europe from the 12th to the 18th centuries (when London surpassed it), making France a barometer of changing sexual mores.”
“The heavy-drinking later Merovingians, descendants of the Frankish king Merovech and his grandson Clovis, who conquered all Gaul, were barbarians who indulged their sensual appetites freely. Lack of control allowed considerable sexual license to continue into the more Christianized Carolingian period (late 8th-9th centuries), and probably to increase during the feudal anarchy that followed the Viking invasions of the 9th and 10th, but in the 11th century the church moved to regulate private conduct according to its own strict canons.”
“The term sodomia, which appears in the last decades of the 12th century [?], covered bestiality, homosexual practices, and <unnatural> heterosexual relations of all kinds.” “Popes organized the Inquisition against them and invoked the bloody Albigensian Crusade which devastated much of Languedoc, homeland of a sensual culture tinged by Moslem influences from the south. The word bougre itself survives to this day as English bugger, which in Great Britain, apart from legal usage, remains a coarse and virtually obscene expression.”
“The guilt of the Templars remains moot to this day; while some may have been involved in homosexual liaisons, the political atmosphere surrounding the investigation and the later controversy made impartial judgment impossible. A persistent fear of sexuality and a pathetic inability to stamp out its proscribed manifestations, even with periodic burning of offenders at the stake and strict regulations within the cloister, plagued medieval society to the end.”
“Henri III was celebrated for his mignons, the favorites drawn from the ranks of the petty nobility – handsome, gorgeously attired and adorned adolescents and magnificent swordsmen ready to sacrifice their lives for their sovereign. Although the king had exhibited homosexual tendencies earlier in life, these became more marked after a stay in Venice in 1574. Yet neither he nor the mignons scorned the opposite sex in their pursuit of pleasure, and there is no absolute proof that any of this circle expressed their desires genitally. Yet a whole literature of pamphlets and lampoons by Protestants and by Catholic extremists, both of whom disapproved of the king’s moderate policy, was inspired by the life of the court of Henri III until his assassination in 1589.”
“Even the entourage of Cardinal Richelieu included the Abbé Boisrobert, patron of the theatre and the arts, and founder of the French Academy, the summit of French intellectual life. His proclivities were so well known that he was nicknamed <the mayor of Sodom>, while the king who occupied the throne, Louis XIII, was surnamed <the chaste> because of his absolute indifference to the fair sex and to his wife Marie de Medici.”
“In his posthumously published novel La religieuse, Denis Diderot indicted convents as hot-houses of lesbianism.”
“The Revolution secured the release (though only for a time) of the imprisoned pansexual writer and thinker, the Marquis D.A.F. de Sade, who carried the transgressive strain in the Enlightenment to the ultimate limits of the imagination.”
“The novels of Jean Genet, a former professional thief, treated male homosexuality with a pornographic frankness and style rich in imagery unparalleled in world literature. Genet enjoyed the patronage of the dominant intellectual of the time, the heterosexual Jean-Paul Sartre, who also wrote about homosexuality in other contexts.”
“Innovations such as a computerized gay bulletin board – the Minitel – reached France, but also the tragic incursion of AIDS (in French, SIDA), spread in no small part from Haiti and the United States.”
FREE-MASONRY
“The fraternal order of Free and Accepted Masons is a male secret society having adherents throughout the world. The order is claimed to have arisen from the English and Scottish fraternities of stone-masons and cathedral builders in the late Middle Ages. The formation of a grand lodge in London in 1717 marked the beginning of the spread of free-masonry on the continent as far east as Poland and Russia. From its obscure origins free-masonry gradually evolved into a political and benevolent society that vigorously promoted the ideology of the Enlightenment, and thus came into sharp and lasting antagonism with the defenders of the Old Régime.”
“The slogan Liberty, Equality, Fraternity immortalized by the French Revolution is said to have begun in the lodges of the Martinist affiliate.”
FREUDIAN CONCEPTS
“Five aspects of Freud’s psychoanalytic work are relevant to homosexuality, though by no means have all of them been fully appreciated in the discussion of the legal and social aspects of the subject. These include: (1) the psychology of sex; (2) the etiology of paranoia; (3) psychoanalytic anthropology; (4) the psychology of religion; and (5) the origins of Judaism and Christianity. In regard to the last two the psychoanalytic profession in the United States has notably shied away from the implications of the founder’s ideas, in no small part because of its accommodation to the norms of American culture, including popular Protestant religiosity.”
“Freud pointed out that the pederast is attracted only to the male youth who has not yet lost his androgynous quality, so that it is the blend of masculine and feminine traits in the boy that arouses and attracts the adult male” “with a narcissistic starting point they seek youthful sexual partners resembling themselves, whom they then love as the mother loved them. He also determined that alleged inverts were not indifferent to female stimuli, but transferred their arousal to male objects.”
“Recent investigations have sought to confirm this insight for paranoia in male subjects only, and in all likelihood it is related not just to the phenomenon of homosexual panic but to the generally higher level of societal anxiety and legal intolerance in regard to male as opposed to female homosexuality. This would also explain why lesbianism is invisible to the unconscious: the collective male psyche experiences no threat from female homosexuality.”
“The outcome of Freud’s explorations in this direction [anthropology] was Totem and Taboo (1913), which despite the break with his Swiss colleague in that year is the most Jungian of all his works.” “While Hellenic civilization could distinguish between father-son and erastes-eromenos relationships, Biblical Judaism could not, and expanded its earlier prohibition of homosexual acts with a father or uncle to a generalized taboo. It is perhaps pertinent that pedophilia (sex with pre-pubertal children), as distinct from pederasty, usually involves members of the same family, not total strangers. Also, extending this mode of thinking, the fascination which some homosexual men have for partners of other races may be owing to the unconscious guilt that still adheres to a sexual relationship with anyone who could be even remotely related to them, which is to say a member of the same ethnic or racial group.” “Totemism and exogamy are the two halves of the familiar Oedipus complex, the attraction to the mother and the death wishes against the rival father.” “Freud then appealed to Robertson Smith’s writings on sacrifice and sacrificial feasts in which the totem is ceremonially slain and eaten, thus reenacting the original deed. The rite is followed by mourning and then by triumphant rejoicing and wild excesses –, the events serve to perpetuate the community and its identity with the ancestor. After thousands of years of religious evolution the totem became a god, and the complicated story of the various religions begins. This work of Freud’s has been condemned by anthropologists and other specialists, yet it may throw considerable light on aspects of Judeo-Christian myth and legend that cluster around the rivalry of the father and his adolescent son – in which the homosexual aggressor is, ostensibly, seeking to destroy the masculinity of his rival by <using him as a woman>.”
“Obsessional neurosis is a pathological counterpart of religion, while religion may be styled a collective obsessional neurosis.”
“From the secondary sources that he had read, Freud surmised that the lawgiver Moses was an Egyptian who had opted for exile after religious counter-revolution had undone the reforms of the first monotheist, Akhenaten. His Egyptian retinue became the Levites, the elite of the new religious community which received its law code, not from him, but from the Midianite priest of a volcanic deity, Jahweh, at the shrine of Kadesh Barnea. This last site, amusingly enough, presumably took its name from the bevy of male and female cult prostitutes who ministered at its shrine. The Biblical Moses is a fusion of the two historic figures.
Freud also, on the basis of a book published by the German Semiticist Ernst Sellin, posited the death of Moses in an uprising caused by his autocratic rule and apodictic pronouncements. The whole notion was based upon a reinterpretation of some passages in the book of Hosea, which because of its early and poetic character, not to speak of the problems of textual transmission, poses enormous difficulties even for the expert.” “Judaism is a religion of the father, Christianity a religion of the son, whose death on the cross and the institution of the eucharist are the last stage in the evolution that began with the slaying and eating of the totem animal by the primal horde.”
“The particular emphasis with which Freud contradicted Magnus Hirschfeld’s notion that homosexuals were a biological third sex led – together with a tendency (not confined to psychoanalysis) to deny the constitutional bases of behavior – to the assertion that homosexuality was purely the result of <fixation> in an infantile stage of sexual development provoked by the action or inaction of the parents. (…) Thus in the popular mind the belief that homosexuality is somehow a failure of psychological development has its underpinning in the Freudian concepts.”
“his legacy has quietly worked in favor of toleration”
FRIENDSHIP, FEMALE ROMANTIC
“When Sarah’s family discovered that she had run off with a woman instead of a man, they were relieved – her reputation would not suffer any irreparable harm (as it would have had her accomplice been male). Her relative Mrs. Tighe observed, <Sarah’s conduct, though it has an appearance of imprudence, is I am sure void of serious impropriety. There were no gentlemen concerned, nor does it appear to be anything more than a scheme of Romantic Friendship.> The English, during the second half of the 18th century, prized sensibility, faithfulness, and devotion in a woman, but forbade her significant contact with the opposite sex before she was betrothed. It was reasoned, apparently, that young women could practice these sentiments on each other so that when they were ready for marriage they would have perfected themselves in those areas. It is doubtful that women viewed their own romantic friendships in such a way, but – if we can place any credence in 18th century English fiction as a true reflection of that society – men did. Because romantic friendship between women served men’s self-interest in their view, it was permitted and even socially encouraged. The attitude of Charlotte Lennox’s hero in Euphemia (1790) is typical. Maria Harley’s uncle chides her for her great love for Euphemia and her obstinate grief when Euphemia leaves for America, and he points out that her fiancé <has reason to be jealous of a friendship that leaves him but second place in Maria’s affection>; but the fiancé responds, <Miss Harley’s sensibility on this occasion is the foundation of all my hopes. From a heart so capable of a sincere attachment, the man who is so happy as to be her choice may expect all the refinements of a delicate passion, with all the permanence of a generous friendship.>”
“The most complete fictional blueprint for conducting a romantic friendship is Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millennium Hall (1762), a novel which went through four editions by 1778.”
“Mrs. Delany’s description of her own first love (in The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mrs. Delany, ed. Sara L. Woolsey) is typical of what numerous autobiographies, diaries, letters, and novels of the period contained. As a young woman, she formed a passionate attachment to a clergyman’s daughter, whom she admired for her <uncommon genius … intrepid spirit … extraordinary understanding, lively imagination, and humane disposition.> They shared <secret talk> and <whispers> together –, they wrote to one another every day, and met in the fields between their fathers’ houses at every opportunity. <We thought that day tedious,> Mrs. Delany wrote years later, <that we did not meet, and had many stolen interviews>. Typical of many youthful romantic friendships, it did not last long (at the age of 17, Mrs. Delany was given in marriage to an old man), but it provided fuel for the imagination which idealized the possibilities of what such a relationship might be like without the impingement of cold marital reality. Because of such girlhood intimacies (which were often cut off in an untimely manner), most women would have understood when those attachments were compared with heterosexual love by the female characters in 18th century novels, and were considered, as Lucy says in William Hayley’s The Young Widow, <infinitely more valuable>. They would have had their own frame of reference when in those novels, women adopted the David and Jonathan story for themselves and swore that they felt for each other (again as Lucy says) <a love passing the Love of Men>, or proclaimed as does Anne Hughes, the author of Henry and Isabella (1788), that such friendships are <more sweet, interesting, and to complete all, lasting, than any other which we can ever hope to possess; and were a just account of anxiety and satisfaction to be made out, would, it is possible, in the eye of rational estimation, far exceed the so-much boasted pleasure of love.>”
“Saint Mery, who recorded his observations of his 1793-1798 journey, was shocked by the <unlimited liberty> which American young ladies seemed to enjoy, and by their ostensible lack of passion toward men. The combination of their independence, heterosexual passionlessness, and intimacy with each other could have meant only one thing to a Frenchman
in the 1790s: that <they are not at all strangers to being willing to seek unnatural pleasures with persons of their own sex>. It is as doubtful that great masses of middle and upper-class young ladies gave themselves up to homosexuality as it is that they gave themselves up to heterosexual intercourse before marriage. But the fiction of the period corroborates that St. Mery saw American women behaving openly as though they were in love with each other. Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormand, for example, suggests that American romantic friends were very much like their English counterparts.”
“But love between women, at least as it was lived in women’s fantasies, was far more consuming than the likes of Casanova could believe. Women dreamed not of erotic escapades but of a blissful life together. In such a life a woman would have choices; she would be in command of her own destiny; she would be an adult relating to another adult in a way that a heterosexual relationship with a virtual stranger (often an old or at least a much older man), arranged by a parent for consideration totally divorced from affection, would not allow her to be. Samuel Richardson permitted Miss Howe to express the yearnings of many a frustrated romantic friend when she remarked to Clarissa, <How charmingly might you and I live together and despise them all>.”
FRIENDSHIP, MALE
“For Plato, friendship is rather part of the philosopher’s quest: a link between the world of the senses in which we live and the eternal world.”
“How could the masculinity of a youth be preserved in a homosexual relationship with an older man? That was the kernel of the problem for the Greeks. For the Romans it was the perennial anxiety that a free citizen might take a passive role in a sexual relationship with a slave. Homosexuality in itself was not the problem for either: it was in the forms that homosexuality might take that the difficulty lay.”
“Homosexuality and friendship: they may well appear at first as two discrete histories, one of society and the other of sexuality. But if one tries to follow their subterranean currents in the Europe of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, one will end by finding oneself drawn into writing about something larger. One will find oneself writing about power and the power not only of judges but of words.”
“Marriage itself was redefined, with implicit consequences for friendship. A society that had observed the tradition of arranged marriages between unequal partners was confronted with a need for change. Under the influence of the middle-class ideology of the 18th century, society now accepted the principle of a marriage founded upon the affinity of equals, upon love rather than family interest. In this sense husband and wife could now be friends, and friendship was no longer invested with an exclusively homo-social character. The decisive shift in this direction occurred in England, where the Industrial Revolution and the ideology of classical liberalism went hand in hand.”
“So Romanticism revived the classical model of friendship for which Hellenic antecedents could always be held up as an ideal by such homosexual admirers of antiquity as Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a thinker who in Goethe’s words <felt himself born for a friendship of this kind> and <became conscious of his true self only under this form of friendship>.”
“While Ernst Röhm could boast, late in 1933, that the homoerotic component in the SA and SS had given the Nazis the crucial edge in their struggle against the Weimar system, homophobic writers could call for the suppression of all forms of overt male homosexuality and the enactment of even more punitive laws – which were in fact adopted in 1935.”
“Certain women feel more comfortable in their dealings with gay men, just because they know that they do not have to be constantly on guard against sexual aggression, but can have close relationships, both social and professional, that attain high levels of creativity and imagination.”
“The use of friend or friendship as an euphemism for the homosexual partner (lover) and the liaison itself persists. Recently the compilers of newspaper obituary columns have taken to describing the lifelong companion of a deceased homosexual as <his friend>, in contexts where a heterosexual would be survived by the spouse and children.” Haha
Edward Carpenter, Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship (1902)
GAMES, GAY
“Anyone was allowed to compete regardless of race, sex, age, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, or athletic ability. In keeping with the Masters Movement in sports, athletes competed with others in their own age group. The track and field and swimming events were officially sanctioned by their respective national masters programs. Athletes participated, not as representatives of their respective countries, but as individuals on behalf of cities and towns. There were no minimum qualifying standards in any events.”
“The organizers of the Gay Games have experienced considerable legal difficulties. Before the 1982 Gay Games, the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) filed a court action against the organizers of the Gay Games, which were going to be called the Gay Olympic Games. In 1978, the United States Congress passed the Amateur Sports Act which, among other things, granted the USOC exclusive use of the word Olympic. Although the USOC had allowed the Rat Olympics, Police Olympics, and Dog Olympics, it took exception to the term Gay Olympic Games. Two years later, the USOC continued its harassment of the Gay Games and filed suit to recover legal fees in the amount of $96,600.”
GAY
“The word gay (though not its 3 later slang meanings) stems from the Old Provençal gai, <high spirited, mirthful>. A derivation of this term in turn from the Old High German gahi, <impetuous> (cf. modem German jah, <sudden>), though attractive at first sight, seems unlikely. Gai was a favorite expression among the troubadours, who came to speak of their intricate art of poetry as gai saber, <gay knowledge>. Despite assertions to the contrary, none of these uses reveals any particular sexual content. In so far as the word gay or gai has acquired a sexual meaning in Romance languages, as it has very recently, this connotation is entirely owing to the influence of the American homosexual liberation movement as a component of the American popular culture that has swamped the non-Communist world.
Beginning in the 17th century, the English word gay began to connote the conduct of a playboy or dashing man about town, whose behavior was not always strictly moral but not totally depraved either; hence the popularity of such expressions as <gay lothario>, <gay deceiver>, and <gay blade>. Applied to women in the 19th century (or perhaps somewhat before), it came to mean <of loose morals; a prostitute>: <As soon as a woman has ostensibly lost her reputation we, with grim inappositeness, call her gay> (Sunday Times, London, 1868).”
“The expansion of the term to mean homosexual man constitutes a tertiary stage of modification, the sequence being lothario, then female prostitute, then homosexual man.”
“The word (and its equivalents in other European languages) is attested in the sense of <belonging to the demimonde> or <given to illicit sexual pleasures>, even specifically to prostitution, but nowhere with the special homosexual sense that is reinforced by the antonym straight, which in the sense of heterosexual was known exclusively in the gay subculture until quite recently.”
“Although it has not been found in print before 1933 (when it appears in Noel Ersine’s Dictionary of Underworld Slang as gay cat, <a homosexual boy>), it is safe to assume that the usage must have been circulating orally in the United States for a decade or more. (As Jack London explains in The Road of 1907, gay cat originally meant – or so he thought – an apprentice hobo, without reference to sexual orientation.) In 1955 the English journalist Peter Wildblood defined gay as <an American euphemism for homosexual>, at the same time conceding that it had made inroads in Britain. Grammatically, the word is an adjective, and there has been some resistance to the use of gay, gays as nouns, but this opposition seems to be fading.”
“Many lesbian organizations now reject the term gay, restricting it to men, hence the spread of such binary phrases as <gay and lesbian> and <lesbian and gay people>.”
GAY STUDIES
“Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895), whose Forschungen zur mannmännhchen Liebe (Researches on Love between Males), published from 1864 to 1870, ranged in an encyclopedic manner over the history, literature, and ethnography of past and present.”
“In England John Addington Symonds may be considered the first gay scholar, since he composed two privately printed works, A Problem in Greek Ethics and A Problem in Modern Ethics, the latter of which introduced to the English-speaking world the recent findings of continental psychiatrists and the new vision of Ulrichs and Walt Whitman. Symonds was also a major contributor to the first edition of Havelock Ellis’ Sexual Inversion (German 1896, English 1897). At the same time the American university president Andrew Dickson White quietly inserted into his 2-volume History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896) a comprehensive analysis and demolition of the Sodom legend. In the same year Marc-André Raffalovich published his Uranisme et unisexualité (Uranism and unisexuality), with copious bibliographical and literary material, some from German authors of the 19th century, which he supplemented at intervals in a series of articles in the Archives d’anthropologie criminelle down to World War I.”
“psychoanalytic biographies of famous homosexuals, a genre initiated by Freud’s philologically rather weak Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci (A Childhood Reminiscence of Leonardo da Vinci; 1910).”
“The interest of geneticists in twin studies led to some papers on the sexual orientation of monozygotic and dizygotic twins, a field pioneered by Franz Kallmann. While certain issues continue to be disputed, the study of monozygotic twin pairs has revealed concordances as marked as those for intelligence and other character traits, albeit with a complexity in the developmental aspect of the personality that earlier thinkers had not fully appreciated.”
“black studies and women’s studies are by their very nature interdisciplinary. In 1976, for example, ONE Institute, the independent Los Angeles homophile education foundation, articulated the subject in the following fields: anthropology, history, psychology, sociology, education, medicine and biology, psychiatry, law and its enforcement, military, religion and ethics, biography and autobiography, literature and the arts, the homophile movement, and transvestism and transsexualism (An Annotated Bibliography of Homosexuality, New York, 1976).”
“In anthropology there is a continuing temptation to ethno-romanticism, that is over-idealizing the exotic culture one is studying, viewing it as natural, non-repressive, organic, and so forth.”
GENET, JEAN
“The homosexuality of Genet’s characters is explicit, and the scenes of love-making attain the limit of physical and psychological detail, recounted in the argot of the French criminal underworld (which largely defies English translation) and in a style once possible only in pornographic novels sold <under the counter>. If the homosexuality of the heroes of Genet’s novels has a strong sado-masochistic component, their love is depicted with honesty and tenderness. The plot construction borders on free association, while the sordid and brutal aspects of male love are not suppressed or denied.” “Since French writing shapes literary trends throughout the world, the influence of Genet on future depictions of homosexual experience is likely to mount.”
GERMANY
“In the Passion of Saint Pelagius composed in Latin by Roswitha (Hrotswith) of Gandersheim, there is the story of the son of the king of Galicia in Spain who, captured by the Moslem invaders, was approached by Abderrahman with offers of the highest honors if he would submit to his pederastic advances but violently refused – at the cost of his life. The Latin poem on Lantfrid and Cobbo relates the love of two men, one homosexual, the other bisexual. A High German version of Solomon and Mololf composed about 1190 makes an allusion to sodomy, while the Eneid of Heinrich von Veldeke has the mother of Lavinia, the daughter of King Latinus of Italy accuse Aeneas of being a notorious sodomite to dissuade her from marrying him. Moriz von Craun, a verse narrative of ca. 1200, makes the emperor Nero the archetype of the mad sodomite, who even wishes to give birth to a child. In his rhymed Flauenbuch (1257), Ulrich von Lichtenstein presents a debate between a knight and a lady, in which the latter accuses men of preferring hunting, drinking, and boy-love to the service of women. About the same time the Austrian poet Der Strieker used references to Sodom and Gomorrah in his negative condemnation.”
“Prussia was the first German state that in 1794 abolished the death penalty for sodomy and replaced it with imprisonment and flogging. After 1810 many states (including Bavaria, Württemberg, and Hannover) followed the model of the Code Napoleon in France and introduced complete impunity for homosexual acts, a policy reversed in 1871 in favor of the anti-homosexual Paragraph 175 of the uniform Imperial Penal Code.”
“In German poetry, however, the homosexual theme was rare before the 19th century. Friendship between men is, to be sure, a frequent subject of poetry (especially in Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, Wilhelm Heinse, even in Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen and others), but the amicable feelings depicted in them are clearly demarcated from the longing of pederasts and sodomites, and the boundary between friendship and sexuality is seldom if ever crossed (though possibly in F.W.B. von Ramdohr, Venus Urania, 1798, Part 2, pp. 103ff.)”
“The flowering of a gay movement in the first third of the 20th century was the outstanding feature that set the homosexuals in Germany apart from those in other countries.”
“The campaign for the abolition of Paragraph 175 provoked an enormous literature of books, pamphlets, and articles pro and con, so extensive that by 1914 the criminologist Hans Gross could write that everything that anyone could ever have to say on the subject had by then appeared in print. There was also a profusion of gay and lesbian poetry, short stories, and novels. Such mainstream authors as Hans Henny Jahnn, Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann, Anna Elisabet Weihrauch, and Christa Winsloe also discussed the theme. This cultural efflorescence lent substance to the claim of Weimar Germany to be a land of cultural innovation, though to be sure the Republic had its dark side as well.”
“If until then Germany was probably unique and unparalleled in the world in terms of governmental liberalism and of opportunities for homosexual life, then the same was true in reverse for the Nazi era from 1933 to 1945: at least 10,000 homosexual men, stigmatized with the pink triangle, were confined in German concentration camps under the Holocaust during those 12 years, and many of them were killed.”
“In West Germany after about 1948 conditions returned to what they had been before 1933. Although the Nazi version of Paragraph 175 remained on the books, homosexual organizations, bars, and gay magazines were tolerated in many West German cities and in West Berlin. In East Germany, to be sure, only the milder pre-1933 version of paragraph 175 was in force, but homosexual life was subject to restrictions on the part of the state and the police, so that gay men and lesbians had scarcely any opportunity to organize and express their views freely.”
Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle, New York: Henry Holt, 1986.
GIDE, ANDRÉ
“In 1891 Gide met Oscar Wilde, the flamboyant aesthete, who set about ridding him of his inhibitions – with seductive grace. Gide’s first really striking work of moral <subversion> was Les Nourritures terrestres (The Fruits of the Earth, 1897), a set of lyrical exhortations to a fictional youth, Nathanaël, who is urged to free himself of the Christian sense of sin and cultivate the life of the senses with sincerity and independence. During the political turmoil of the 1930s Gide returned to the same themes and stylistic manners in Les nouvelles nourritures (1935).”
“In 1895 he married his cousin, Madeleine Rondeaux, and suffered an acute conflict between her strict Christian values and his own yearning for self-liberation, together with his awakening homosexual drives. The never-ending battle within himself between the puritan and the pagan, the Biblical and the Nietzschean, caused his intellect to oscillate between two poles that are reflected in his succeeding books. In Les Caves du Vatican (The Vatican Cellars, 1914), the hero, Lafcadio, <lives dangerously> according to the Gidean formula and commits a seemingly senseless murder as a psychologically liberating <gratuitous act>. A further series of short novels have an ironic structure dominated by the viewpoint of a single character, while his major novel, Les Fauxmonnayeurs (The Counterfeiters, 1926) has a Chinese-box like structure meant to reflect the disorder and complexity of real life.”
“Limited in scope as they were, Gide’s four dialogues constituted a remarkable achievement for their time by blending personal experience, the French literary mode of detached presentation of abnormal behavior, the traditional appeal to ancient Greece, and the then quite young science of ethology – the comparative study of the behavior of species lower on the evolutionary scale.”
Gide, Retour de l’U.R.S.S. (Back from the USSR, 1936)
GILGAMESH
“This Mesopotamian figure ranks as the first tragic hero in world literature. The Epic of Gilgamesh has survived in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hittite versions that go back to the 3rd millennium before our era. Lost from sight until the decipherment of the cuneiform script retrieved the literatures of early Mesopotamia, the epic is a blend of pure adventure, morality, and tragedy. Only the final version, that of Assurbanipal’s library in Nineveh, has survived in virtually complete form, but all the episodes in the cycle existed as separate poems in Sumerian. The setting of the story is the 3rd millennium, and the original language was Sumerian, the Paleoeurasian speech of the first literate civilization of Mesopotamia, which continued like Latin to be copied as a dead language of past culture even after it was displaced by the Eastern Semitic Akkadian.”
“Gilgamesh is announced at the outset as a hero: two-thirds god and one-third man, endowed by the gods with strength, with beauty, with wisdom. His sexual demands upon the people of Uruk are insatiable: <No son is left with his father, for Gilgamesh takes them all . . . His lust leaves no virgin to her lover, neither the warrior’s daughter nor the wife of the noble.> In reply to their complaints Aruru, the goddess of creation, forms Enkidu out of clay. <His body was rough, he had long hair like a woman’s. He was innocent of mankind; he knew not the cultivated land.> To tame the wild man a harlot offers her services, <she made herself naked and welcomed his eagerness, she incited the savage to love and taught him the woman’s art.> At the conclusion, the transforming power of eros has humanized him; the wild animals flee from him, sensing that as a civilized man he is no longer one of them. The metamorphosis from the subhuman and savage to his new self proves strikingly how love is the force behind civilization.”
“Gilgamesh has two dreams with symbolism which presages the homoerotic relationship which the gods have planned for him and the challenger Enkidu. In the Akkadian text there are puns on the words lusru, <ball (of fire), meteorite>, andiezru, <male with curled hair>, the counterpart of the harlot, and on hassinu, <axe>, and assinu, <male prostitute>. Gilgamesh’s superior energy and wisdom set him apart from others and make him lonely; he needs a male companion who can be his intimate and his equal at the same time, while their male bond stimulates and inspires them to action. After a wrestling match between Enkidu and Gilgamesh in which the latter triumphs, the two become comrades. Their erotic drive is not lost, but rather transformed and directed to higher objects; it leads to a homoerotic relationship that entails the rejection of Ishtar, the goddess of love. A liaison of this kind is not contingent on the physical beauty of the lover, it endures until death. Gilgamesh himself abandons his earlier oppressive conduct toward Uruk and comes to behave like a virtuous ruler who pursues the noble goals of fame and immortality through great deeds. But a dream warns Gilgamesh: <The father of the gods has given you kingship (but) everlasting life is not your destiny … Do not abuse this power, deal justly with your servants in the palace.>”
“To obtain the secret of everlasting life he journeys far across the sea to Utnapishtim, who tells him the Babylonian version of the story of the Deluge. On his return he carries with him a flower that has the power of conferring eternal youth, but loses it to a serpent lying beside a pool and so reaches Uruk empty-handed, yet still able to engrave the tale of his journey in stone. Gilgamesh has been transformed by a love that makes him seek not the pleasures of the moment, but virtue, wisdom, and immortality, hence the motif of the epic is that male bonding is a positive ingredient of civilization itself.”
George F. Held, “Parallels between The Gilgamesh Epic and Plato’s Symposium”, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 42 (1983) (artigo)
GOETHE
BIOGRAFIAS PARTE II & III: “Settling at Weimar under the patronage of the ducal heir and elected to the Privy Council, he became leader in that intellectual center, associating with Wieland, Herder, and later Schiller. His visit to Italy recorded in Italienische Reise and probably involving pederastic adventures inspired him anew as did his intimate friendship with Schiller. Even after he married in 1806 he continued his frequent love affairs with women. His autobiographical Wilhelm Meister, a Bildungsroman or novel of character formation [probably boring…], and the second part of Faust (in 1832), exalted his reputation further, although he was already first in German literature. The non-exhaustive Weimar edition of his works extends to over 130 volumes.”
Knaben hebt ich wohl auch, doch
lieber sind mir die Mädchen,
Hab ich als Mädchen sie sätt, dient
sie als Knabe mir noch.
“If I have had enough of one as a girl, she still serves me as a boy.”
“In the play Egmont (1788) the hero’s enemy Alba is embarrassed by his son’s intense emotional bonding with Egmont. The figure of Mignon, the waif girl in Wilhelm Meister, could be androgynous. In his Travels in Switzerland [DV] he waxed rapturous over the sight of a nude comrade bathing in the lake, and in the West Eastern Divan (1819, enlarged edition, 1827), he used the pretext of being inspired by Persian poetry to allude to the <pure> love which a handsome cupbearer evokes from his master (sec. 9).”
GREECE, ANCIENT
“Paiderasteia, or the love of an adult male for an adolescent boy, was invested with a particular aura of idealism and integrated firmly into the social fabric. The erastes or lover was a free male citizen, often a member of the upper social strata, and the eromenos or beloved was a youth between 12 and 17, occasionally somewhat older. Pedophilia, in the sense of erotic interest in young children, was unknown to the Greeks and the practice never approved by them. An interesting question, however, is what was the average age of puberty for ancient Greek boys? For some men (the philobupais type), the boy remained attractive after the growth of the first beard, for most he was not – exactly as with the modern pederast.”
“It formed part of the process of initiation of the adolescent into the society of adult males, of his apprenticeship in the arts of the hunter and warrior. The attachment of the lover to his boy eroticized the process of learning, making it less arduous and more pleasurable, while reinforcing the bond between the mentor and his pupil.”
“a biological universal – the physical beauty and grace of the adolescent that invest him with an androgynous quality soon lost when he reaches adulthood.”
“The achievements of their own history necessarily rested upon the legacy of 3,000 years of cultural evolution in the Semitic and Hamitic nations. In technology and material culture they – and their successor peoples – never went far beyond the accomplishments of the non-Indo-European civilizations of the East. It was in the realm of theory and philosophy that the Greeks innovated – and created a new model of the state and society, a new conception of truth and justice that were the foundations of Western civilization.”
“Sir Francis Galton calculated in the late 19th century that in the space of 200 years the population of Athens – a mere 45,000 adult male citizens [número controverso] – had produced 14 of the 100 greatest men of all time. This legacy – the <Greek miracle> – owed no small part of its splendor to the pederastic ethos that underlay its educational system and its civic ideal.”
“Marriage and fatherhood were part of the life cycle of duties for which the initiation and training prepared the eromenos. Needless to say, family life did not hinder a male from pursuing boys or frequenting the geisha-like hetairai. Down to the 4th century BC, however, the really intense and reciprocal passion that the modern world calls romantic love was reserved for relationships between males. Only in the Hellenistic period (after 323 BC) was the additional possibility of love between man and wife recognized.”
A INSÂNIA E O RANCOR DO MESTRE: “The misinterpretations have been reinforced by the strictures of the elderly Plato in the Laws, where an element of resentment toward the young and of embitterment at his own failures and disappointments as a teacher seems to have been at work. This text, however it may anticipate later judeo-Christian attitudes and practices, was never typical of Greek thought on the subject. The evidence of the classical authors shows that as late as the early 3rd century of our era the Greeks accepted pederasty non-chalantly as part of the sexual order, without condemnation or apprehension.”
“The Greeks knew nothing of the Book of Leviticus, cared nothing for the injunctions it contained, and scarcely even heard of the religious community for which it was meant down to the beginning of the Hellenistic era, when Judea was incorporated into the empire of Alexander the Great. On the other hand,there is evidence that in the Zoroastrian religion pederasty was ascribed to a demonic inventor and regarded as an inexpiable sin, as a vice of the Georgians, the Caucasian neighbors of the Persians – just as the Israelites identified homosexual practices with the religion of the heathen Canaanites whose land they coveted and invaded. However, the antagonism between the Greeks and the Persians precluded any adoption of the beliefs and customs of the <evil empire> – against which they won their legendary victories. The Greek spirit – of which pederasty was a vital component – stood guard over the cradle of Western civilization against the encroachments of Persian despotism. Only on the eastern periphery of the Hellenic world – where Greeks lived as subject peoples under Persian rule – could the Zoroastrian beliefs gain a foothold.”
“Oral-genital sexuality seems not to have been popular, but this was probably for hygienic reasons specific to the ancient world.”
“The career of Sappho suggests that lesbian relations in ancient Greece took the same pattern, that is to say, they were corophile – between adult women and adolescent girls who were receiving their own initiation into the arts of womanhood. But the paucity of evidence makes it difficult to assay the incidence of the phenomenon, especially as Greek sexual mores were entirely androcentric – everything was seen from the standpoint of the adult male and free citizen. The subordinate status of women and children was taken for granted, and the effeminate man was the object of ridicule if not contempt, as can be seen in the plays of Aristophanes and his older contemporary Cratinus.”
“It is true that the more abstract thinking of the Greeks ultimately recognized the parallel between male and female homosexuality, beginning with a passage in Plato’s Laws (636bc) in which both are stigmatized as <against nature> – a concept which the Semitic mind, incidentally, lacked until it was adopted from the Greek authors translated in the Middle Ages.”
“Toward the end of the 2nd millennium the Mycenean era closed with a series of disasters, both natural catastrophes and wars – of which the Trojan war sung by Homer was an episode. During this period the Dorians invaded Greece, blending with the older stocks. One landmark paper on Greek pederasty, Erich Bethe’s article of 1907, ascribed pederasty to the military culture of the Dorian conquerors, an innovation ostensibly reflected in the greater prominence of the institution among the Dorian city-states of history.”
“The sexual lives of the Greeks were free of ritualistic taboos, but enacted in a context of comrade simplified in the devotion of Achilles and Patroclus, which foreshadowed the pederastic ideal of the Golden Age. The lyric poetry composed in the dawn of Greek literature was rich in allusions to male love, between gods and between mortals.”
“In a mere 4 centuries Greek civilization had matured into a force that intellectually and militarily dominated the world – and laid the foundations not just for Western culture, but for the entire global meta-system of today. What followed was the Hellenistic era, in which Greek thought confronted the traditions of the peoples of the east with whom the colonists in the new cities founded in Egypt and Syria mingled. The emergence of huge bureaucratic monarchies effectively crushed the independence of the city-states, eroding the base of the pederastic institution with its emphasis on civic initiative. The outcome of this period, once Rome had begun its eastward expansion, was Roman civilization as a derivative culture that blended Greek and indigenous elements. Even under Roman rule the position of the Greek language was maintained, and the literary heritage of previous centuries was codified in the form in which, by and large, it has been transmitted to modern scholars and admirers.”
“For nearly 200 years scholars have argued the Homeric question: Did one, two, or many authors create the two great epic poems known as the Illiad and the Odyssey? What were the sources and techniques of composition of the author (or authors)? The current consensus favors a single author utilizing a traditional stock of legends and myths – the final redaction may have taken place as late as 640 BC. A second question arises in connection with these epic poems: Did they recognize homoerotic passion as a theme, or was this an accretion of later times?” “Homer may not have judged the details of their intimacy suitable for epic recitation, but he was not oblivious to a form of affection common to all the warrior societies of the Eastern Mediterranean in antiquity. The peculiar resonance of the Achilles-Patroclus bond probably is rooted in far older Near Eastern epic traditions, such as the liaison between Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the Mesopotamian texts.”
PLATÃO CHATEADÍSSIMO: “The famous Athenian lawgiver Solon was also a poet, and in two surviving fragments (13 and 14) he speaks of pederasty as absolutely normal.”
“Despite the mutilated and fragmentary state in which Sappho’s poetry has been transmitted, she was hailed in antiquity as the <tenth Muse>, and her poetry remains one of the high points of lyric intensity in world literature. In the 19th century philologists tried to reconcile her with the Judeo-Christian tradition by dismissing the lesbian interpretation of her poems as libelous, and misinterpreting or misusing bits of biographical data to make her nothing but the strait-laced mistress of a girls’ finishing school.”
“Anacreon of Teos [Ceos?], who flourished in the mid-6th century, owes his fame to his drinking songs, texts composed for performance at the symposia, which inspired an entire genre of poetry: anacreontic.”
“Herodotus, the <Father of History>, used the data that he gathered on his
extensive travels to point up the relativism of moral norms. Among the phenomena that he reported was the Scythian institution of the Enarees, a shift in gender that puzzled the Greeks, who called it the nousos theleia or <feminine disease>, but can now be identified as akin to the shaman and the berdache/bardache of the sub-Arctic and New World cultures. Profiting from the insights of the pre-Socratic thinkers, Herodotus anticipated the findings of modern anthropology in regard to the role of culture in shaping social norms. The consequence of his relativistic standpoint was to discredit absolutist concepts of <revealed> or <natural> morality and to allow for a pluralist approach to sexual ethics.”
“Thanks to a surviving oration of Aeschines, the Contra Timarchum of 346 BC, we know of the restrictions that Athenian law placed on the homosexual activity of male citizens: the male who put his body in the power of another by prostituting himself incurred atimia or infamy, the gymnasia anathose who had authority over youth were subject to legal control, and a slave could not be the lover of a free youth. There is no evidence for parallel statutes elsewhere, and certainly no indication that homosexual behavior per se was ever the object of legal prohibition, or more stringently regulated than heterosexual, which had its own juridical norms.”
“In the writings of Plato and Xenophon, Socrates basks in a strongly homophile ambiance, as his auditors are exclusively male, even if he was no stranger to heterosexuality and had a wife named Xanthippe who has come down in history as the type of the shrewish wife. His chief disciple, Plato (ca. 429-347 BC), whose thought cannot easily be disentangled from that of his teacher, never married, and left a record of ambivalence toward sexuality and homosexuality in particular that is one of the problematic sides of his thinking. His influence on Western civilization has been incalculable. One of the ironies of history is that the atypical hostility to pederasty in the elderly Plato, probably reflecting both personal resentment and envy and the decline of the institution in the 4th century (while anticipating later <puritan> attitudes), was often received with enthusiasm in later centuries, becoming a Hellenic source of Christian homophobia.” “he inculcated the notion of sexual activity as ignoble and demeaning, which was integrated with the absolute <purity> of biblical Judaic ascetic ideal of complete asexuality which was to have fateful consequences for homosexuals in later centuries. A completely negative approach to pederasty emerges in one of his last works, the Laws, the product of the pessimism of old age disappointed by Athenian democracy and the failure of his ambitions at statecraft in Sicily. In the 1st book Plato calls homosexual acts <against nature> (para physin) because they do not lead to procreation, and in the 8th book (836b-839a) he proposes that homosexual activity can be repressed by law and by constant and unrelenting defamation, likening this procedure to the incest taboo. The designation of homosexual acts as <contrary to nature> found its way into the New Testament in a text that intertwined Judaic myth with Hellenic reasoning, Romans 1:18-32. This passage argues that <the wrath of God is revealed from heaven> in the form of the rain of water that drowned the Watchers and their human paramours and the rain of fire that obliterated the homosexual denizens of Sodom and Gomorrah. Later Christian thinkers were to insist that the morality of sexual acts was coterminous with procreation, and that any non-procreative gratification was <contrary to nature>, but this view never held sway in pagan antiquity, so that Plato himself cannot be charged with the tragic aftermath of this belief and the attempt to impose it upon the entire population by penal sanctions and by ostracism. The attempt of modern Christian historians to prove that Plato’s idiosyncratic later attitude corresponded to the mores of Athenian society, or of Greece as a whole, is unfounded.
Plato was succeeded by the almost equally influential Aristotle (384-322 BC), who sought to correct some of the imbalances in his teacher’s work and bring it more in line with experience.” “In the Nicomachean Ethics (1148b) he undertook to differentiate two types of homosexual inclination, one innate or constitutionally determined (<by nature>) and one acquired from having been sexually abused (<by habit>). He stated categorically that no fault attached to behavior that flowed from the nature of the subject (thereby contradicting Plato’s assertion that homosexuality per se was unnatural), while in the second type some moral fault could be imputed. In the 13th century Thomas Aquinas utilized this passage in arguing that sodomy was unnatural in general, but connatural in some human beings; yet in quoting Aristotle he suppressed the mention of homosexual urges as determined <by nature>, so that Christian theology has never been able to accept the claims of gay activists that their behavior had innate causes. At all events, Aristotle can be cited in favor of the belief that in some forms, at least, homosexuality is inborn and unmodifiable.
The successors of Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics, are sometimes regarded as condemnatory of pederasty, but a closer examination of their texts shows that they approved of boy-love and engaged in it, but counseled their followers to practice it in moderation and with ethical concern for the interests of the younger partner [= Epicureans].”
“the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata (IV, 26) claims that the propensity to take the passive role in anal intercourse is caused by an accumulation of semen in the rectum that stimulates activity to relieve the tension.”
“pangenesis – the belief that the semen incorporated major parts of the body in microscopic form; yet the belief that the male seed alone determines the formation of the embryo (only in the 19th century was the actual process of fertilization of the ovum observed and analyzed).”
“The Hippocratic treatise On Airs, Waters, and Places touched upon the effeminacy of the Scythians, the so-called nasos theleia, which it ascribed to climate – a view that was to recur in later centuries. The Greek adaptation of late Babylonian astrology created the individual horoscope – which included the factors determining sexual characterology. Such authors as Teucer of Babylon and Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria named the planets whose conjunctions foretold that an individual would prefer his or her own sex or would be effeminate or viraginous. Because Greek religion and law did not condemn homosexual behavior, it fell into the category of an idiosyncrasy of temperament which the heavenly bodies had ordained, not of a pathological condition that entitled the bearer to reprieve from the severity of the law. Ptolemy taught, for example, that if the influence of Venus is joined to that of Mercury, the individuals affected <become restrained in their relations with women but more passionate for boys> (Tetrabiblos, III, 13). The astrological texts make it abundantly clear that the ancients were familiar with the whole range of sexual preferences – a knowledge that psychiatry was to recoup only in modern times.”
GREECE, MODERN
“The modern Greeks derived their sexual mores, like their music, cuisine, and dress, from their overlords the Turks rather than from ancient Greece. During the long Ottoman domination from the fall of Byzantium in 1453 to 1821 and in Macedonia and Crete until 1911, and in Anatolia and Cyprus even today, the descendants of the Byzantines who did not convert to Islam preserved their language and religion. Orthodox bishops were given wide political authority over their flocks whom they helped the Turks fleece. The black (monastic) clergy were forbidden to marry, and they were often inclined to homosexuality. Greeks, like Armenians, often rose in the hierarchy at the Sublime Porte, sometimes as eunuchs. Also they served as Janissaries in the Ottoman regiments which were taught to revere the Sultan as their father, the regiment as their family, and the barracks as their home. Forbidden to marry, they engaged in sodomy, particularly pederasty, and in such Ottoman vices as opium and bribery. Along with the Armenians, Greeks became the chief merchants of the Empire, especially dominating the relatively backward Balkan provinces where they congregated in the cities and towns as Jews did in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth.”
Winckelmann e Byron morreram durante a guerra de independência da Grécia.
GREEK ANTHOLOGY
“The Greek Anthology is another name for the Palatine Anthology preserved in a unique manuscript belonging to the Palatine Library in Heidelberg. It was assembled in the 10th century by the Byzantine scholar Constantine Cephalas on the basis of 3 older collections: (1) the Garland of Meleager, edited at the beginning of the 1st century BC; (2) the Garland of Philippus, which probably dates from the reign of Augustus; and (3) the Cycle of Agathias, collected in the reign of Justinian (527-535) and including only contemporary works. But in addition Cephalas incorporated in his anthology the Musa Puerilis or <Boy-love Muse> of Strato of Sardis, who probably flourished under Hadrian (second quarter of the 2nd century). It is probable that the segregation of the poems on boy-love from the rest of the anthology (with the mistaken inclusion of some heterosexual pieces) reflects the Byzantine attitude, quite different from that of the pagan Meleager who indifferently set the two themes side by side. These poems, assembled in the 12th book of the Anthology (with others scattered elsewhere in the collection), are monuments of the passion of an adult male for an adolescent boy (never another adult, as some modern scholars have suggested; XII, 4 is the most explicit testimony on this matter) that was an integral part of Greek civilization. The verses frankly reveal the mores and values of Greek pederasty, exalting the beauty and charm of the beloved youth, sounding the intensity of the lover’s attachment, and no less skillfully describing the physical practices to which these liaisons led, so that it is not surprising that the complete set of these poems was not published until 1764.”
HANDBALLING
“This sexual practice involves the insertion of one partner’s hand – and sometimes much of the arm – into the rectum of the other. Before attempting such insertion the nails are pared and the hand lubricated. Sometimes alcohol and drags are used by the receptive partner as relaxants. This practice acquired a certain popularity – and notoriety under the name of fistfucking – in a sector of the gay male leather/S&M community in the 1970s. A few lesbians have also reported engaging in it. A medical term, apparently uncommon, has been proposed for handballing: brachiproctic eroticism.
It need scarcely be stressed that handballing is dangerous in all its variations, as puncturing of the rectal lining may lead to infection and even death. Although handballing does not directly expose the passive partner to AIDS or to sexually transmitted diseases, by scratching or scarring the rectal wall it may create tiny portals for the invasion of microbes during a subsequent penetration. With the new emphasis on safe sex in the 1980s, handballing has greatly declined, and it will probably be relegated to history as one of the temporary excesses of the sexual revolution.”
“It may be conjectured that the recent resort to the practice is due to medical knowledge of operations in which the anus is dilated, since the ordinary individual scarcely credits that such enlargement is possible or desirable. In a late Iranian version of the binding and riding of the god of darkness Ahriman by the hero Taxmoruw, the demonic figure breaks loose by means of a trick and swallows the hero; by pretending to be interested in anal intercourse the brother of Taxmoruw manages to insert his arm into Ahriman’s anus and retrieve the body from his belly. The brother’s arm – the one that entered the demon’s anus – becomes silvery white and stinking, and the brother has to exile himself voluntarily so that others will not become polluted. The myth is interesting as linking the forbidden sexual activity with stigmatization and outlawry of the perpetrator. There seems to have been no term for handballing in the Greek language, though siphniazein (from the island of Siphnos) has been defined as to <insert a finger in the anus>. This harmless practice has long been known, and it may have served as a kind of modest precedent.”
HELIOGABALUS / ELAGABALUS
O imperador teria vivido apenas 18 anos – como regente, 4!
“he reigned in a style of luxury and effeminacy unprecedented even in the history of Rome. He sent out agents to comb the city for particularly well-hung partners for his couch, whom he made his advisers and ministers. His life was an endless search for pleasure of every kind, and he had his body depilated so that he could arouse the lusts of the greatest number. His extant portraits on coins suggest a sensual, even African type evolving through late adolescence. The refinements which he innovated in the spheres of culinary pleasure and of sumptuous interior decoration and household furnishing are mentioned by the historians of his reign as having survived him and found emulators among the Roman aristocracy of later times. For what Veblen called <conspicuous consumption> he set a standard probably unequaled until the Islamic middle ages.
His sexual personality cannot be reduced to a mere formula of passive-effeminate homosexuality, although this aspect of his erotic pleasure-seeking is the one stressed by his ancient biographers. He loved the role of Venus at the theatre and the passive role in his encounters with other men, yet he was married several times and even violated a Vestal virgin, but remained childless.”
“As high priest of the Syrian deity Elagabal he sought to elevate the cult of the latter to the sole religion of the Empire, yet he did not persecute the Christians. Family intrigues ultimately cost him the favor of the soldiers who murdered him and his mother on March 11, 222. Unique as he was in the history of eroticism and of luxury, he has inspired writers from the 3rd century biographer Aelius Lampridius in the Scriptores Historiae Augustas through the later treatments of Jean Lombard, Louis Couperus, and Stefan George to Antonin Artaud and Alberto Arbasino.”
HOLOCAUST, GAY
“The genocide of Jews and Gypsies in Nazi-occupied Europe has overshadowed the persecution and murder of male homosexuals, which is only now beginning to be recognized and analyzed from the few surviving documents and memoirs. Regrettably, in the immediate post-war period most of those who wrote about the concentration and extermination camps, and even courts which dealt with the staffs and inmates of the camps, treated those sent there for violating the laws against homosexual offenses as common criminals deserving the punishment meted out to them by the Third Reich. The final insult to the victims of Nazi intolerance was the decision of the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) in Karlsruhe on May 10, 1957, which not only upheld the constitutionality of the more punitive 1935 version of Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code because it <contained nothing specifically National-Socialist> and homosexual acts <unquestionably offended the moral feelings of the German people>, but even recommended doubling the maximum penalty – from 5 to 10 years. If any other victims of National-Socialism had been rebuffed in this manner by a West German court, there would have been outraged demonstrations around the globe; but this one went unprotested and ignored – above all by the psychiatrists who until recently never missed an opportunity to assert that <homosexuality is a serious disease> – for which ostracism and punishment were the best if not the only therapy. Until the late 1980s homosexuals, along with Gypsies, were denied compensation by the West German authorities for their suffering and losses under the Nazis.”
“Günther (1891-1968), professor of rural sociology and racial science first at Berlin and then at Freiburg im Breisgau, the chief authority on such matters in the Third Reich, held that the genetically inferior elements of the population should be given complete freedom to gratify their sexual urges in any manner that did not lead to reproduction because they would painlessly eliminate themselves from the breeding pool.”
“National-Socialism in Germany, like Marxism-Leninism in Russia, was a conspiracy of the 17th and the 19th centuries against the 18th-century Enlightenment” OK
“Among all modern states for which figures can be compiled, Nazi Germany offers the horrible example of suicides increasing rather than decreasing in wartime.”
HOMER
“Although dramatically dated to Mycenean times, the late 2nd millennium BC, the epics sometimes refer to things that cannot predate 650 or even 570, because interpolations existed in one form or another when 7th century poets cited the epics.”
“It is difficult to detect all interpolations and changes, especially additions of Attic terms as high culture became increasingly centered in Athens, where the Peisistratids in the mid-6th century had the epics recited annually at a festival, and many believe the first texts written well over a century after the latest possible date for Homer’s death. A definitive text resulted only from the efforts of 2nd century editors in Alexandria. These texts became almost sacred to the Greeks, whose education was based on them even until the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453.”
“Homer failed to depict institutionalized pederasty, to which almost all subsequent writers referred, many making it central. Though poets and artists around 600 BC make the earliest unmistakable references to institutionalized pederasty, Homer mentioned Ganymede twice, <the loveliest born of the race of mortals, and therefore the gods caught him away to themselves, to be Zeus’ wine-pourer, for the sake of his beauty, so he might be among the immortals> (Iliad, 20, 233-35) and Zeus’ giving Tros, Ganymede’s father, <the finest of all horses beneath the sun and the daybreak> (Iliad, 5, 265ff.) as compensation for his son. Sir Moses Finley concluded that <the text of the poems offers no directly affirmative evidence at any point; even the two references to the elevation of Ganymede to Olympus speak only of his becoming cup-bearer to Zeus.>Sir Kenneth Dover denied that these passages implied pederasty: <It should not be impossible for us … to imagine that the gods on Olympus, like the souls of men in the Muslim paradise … simply rejoiced in the beauty of their servants as one ingredient of felicity.> However, the Abrahamic religions’ taboo on homosexuality did not exist in Hellenic and Etruscan antiquity. Societies that had the formula <eat, drink, and be merry> held that banquets should fittingly issue in sexual revelry. Anachronisms such as those of Finley and Dover should therefore be dismissed, even though Homer’s allusions to Ganymede may be pederastic interpolations like those ordered by the Peisistratids – successors of Solon, who introduced institutionalized pederasty into Athens – to antedate the cultural prominence of Athens.”
HUMBOLDT
MAGNUM OPUS: Voyage aux regions equinoxiales du nouveau continent (30 vols.!)
Mas não só: Cosmos: Outline of a Physical Description of the World (5 vols.!) (1862)
O FIM DE UMA ERA: “It was the last attempt by a single individual to collect within the pages of a work of his own the totality of human knowledge of the universe; after his time the increasing specialization of the sciences and the sheer accumulation of data made such a venture impossible.” Embora Le Bon seja um respeitável polímata, outrossim.
“Through the accounts of his findings – models for all subsequent undertakings – he made significant contributions to oceanography, meteorology, climatology, and geography, and furthered virtually all the natural sciences of his time; but above all else he was responsible for major advances in the geographical and geological sciences.”
HYDRAULIC METAPHOR
“The idea that sexual energy accumulates in the body until sufficient pressure is generated to require an outlet has over the centuries had considerable appeal. The notion acquires plausibility through observation of the wet dream, which eventually occurs in males if the semen is not evacuated through intercourse or masturbation.”
“The first statement of the doctrine is probably owing to the Roman philosopher-poet Lucretius who says that the semen gradually builds up in the body until it is discharged in any available body (On the Nature of Things, IV, 1.065).”
“As a device for relieving erotic tension, a homosexual outlet stands on the same plane as a heterosexual one. A curious attestation of the hydraulic concept comes from colonial America. In his reflections on an outbreak of <sodomy and buggery> in the Bay Colony, William Bradford (1590-1637) noted: <It may be in this case as it is with water when their streams are stopped or dammed up; when they get passage they flow with more violence and make more noise and disturbance, than when they are suffered to run quietly in their own channels.>”
“Some Victorians defended prostitution as a necessary evil. Without this safety valve, they held, the pent-up desires of men would be inflicted on decent women, whose security depends, ironically, on their <fallen> sisters. The Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler even extended this belief by analogy to hustlers and male homosexuals.”
“Despite its appeal, the metaphor is not unproblematic. The hydraulic idea rests upon materialist reductionism, identifying the accumulation of semen with the strengthening of sexual desire. Yet the two do not necessarily act in concert, as anyone knows who has visited some sexual resort such as a sauna and felt sexual desire far more frequently than the body is able to replenish its supply of semen.”
INCARCERATION MOTIF
“This term refers not to literal incarceration or confinement but to an aspect of gender dysphoria – the idea that a human body can contain, locked within itself, a soul of the other gender. In their adhesion to this self-concept, many pre and post-operative transsexuals unknowingly echo a theme that has an age old, though recondite history.”
“Foreign as this idea is to the rationalistic Jew of the 20th century, and to the Biblical and Talmudic periods of Judaism as well, it is first mentioned by Saadiah Gaon (882-942), the spiritual leader of Babylonian Jewry, who rejected it as an alien doctrine that had found its way into Judaism from the Islamic cultural milieu.”
“The transmigration of a man’s soul into the body of a woman was considered by some Kabbalists a punishment for the commission of heinous sins, such as man’s refusing to give alms or to communicate his own wisdom to others.”
“In the Hollywood film Dog Day Afternoon (1975), which was based upon a real incident in Brooklyn a few years earlier, the character Leon asserts that <My psychiatrist told me I have a female soul trapped in a male body> (…) So a doctrine of medieval Jewish mysticism has entered the folklore of the gay subculture, and thence passed into the mainstream of American popular culture as a metaphor for a profound state of alienation.”
JUNG
“The two thinkers increasingly diverged, particularly after Jung published his own ideas in a book entitled The Psychology of the Unconscious (1912), later renamed Symbols of Transformation. At the first meeting of the International Psychoanalytic Association in Munich in 1913, the rift between Jung and Freud turned to open hostility, and the two never met again. In April 1914 Jung resigned as President of the Association. Between 1913 and 1917 Jung went through a period of deep and intensive self-analysis; he now asserted that he had never been a Freudian, and set about creating his own school, which he dubbed analytical psychology in contrast to psychoanalysis.” Diferentão…
“his Collected Works amount to eighteen volumes.” “He treated not only psychology and psychotherapy, but also religion, mythology, social issues, art and literature, and such occult and mystical themes as alchemy, astrology, telepathy and clairvoyance, yoga, and spiritualism.”
KEYNES
“A polymath [raça resiliente!], Keynes cultivated many interests, from book collecting to probability theory. His real importance, however, stems from the epistemic break he achieved with the classical theory of economics, changing the landscape of that discipline for all time. Keynes was no ivory-tower theorist, and the 30-year boom in Western industrial countries (1945-75) has been called the Age of Keynes.”
“In the Apostles he met his lifelong friends Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf. Believing himself ugly, Keynes tended to be shy in the presence of the undergraduates he admired. In 1908, however, he began a serious affair with the painter Duncan Grant, whom he later said to be the only person in whom he found a truly satisfying combination of beauty and intelligence.”
“In 1908, however, he obtained a lecturer-ship in economics at King’s College, and the courses he gave there were the foundation of his later writings in the field. As editor of the Economic Journal he actively promoted new trends in the discipline outside of Cambridge. Yet he did not turn immediately to the core of the subject, as he spent a number of years writing a challenging Treatise on Probability, which was published in 1921.”
ESCASSEZ DE RECURSOS (GAYS) & SEMENTES DO NAZISMO: “Keynes elected to enter the Treasury where, despite the chronic disapproval of the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, he worked wonders in managing the wartime economy. During this period the homosexual members of Bloomsbury (Keynes included) found their supply of eligible young men cut off, and began to engage in flirtations and even liaisons with women. After the end of the war Keynes spent a frustrating period as an adviser at the Paris peace conference [for British to see!], trying to limit voracious Allied demands for reparations from defeated Germany. Returning to London, he set down his pungent reflections on the event in what became his most widely read book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), which eroded the resolve of the Allies to enforce the Treaty of Versailles, at least in its financial provisions.
In 1925 Keynes, now famous, married the noted ballerina Lydia Lopokova. He became an adviser to government and business, consolidating his practical knowledge of economic affairs. These experiences contributed to his great book, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936).”
[PET-ROYAL]TIES: “Economic difficulties after 1975 subjected Keynesian views, which had become orthodoxy, to contemporary reassessment.”
“Surprisingly, in the decades after the conviction of Oscar Wilde, his numerous affairs with young men never caused the slightest legal or even social trouble. This charmed life can be explained only by his combination of extreme personal brilliance, family and professional connections, and remarkable self-confidence.”
KLEIST HEINRICH VON (1777-1811)
“German playwright and short story writer, whose The Broken Pitcher is esteemed as possibly the greatest of (and among the few) German comedies. Overshadowed by his contemporary, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kleist’s significance came to light only after his suicide at age 34, a secretive joint pact made with a terminally ill female friend.
Kleist’s slim literary production (8 plays and 8 short stories) vividly and violently captures the historical break between Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic mysticism, often framed as either a psychological conflict (Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, Penthesilea) or a political one (Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, Die Hermannsschlacht). A profound sense of the irrational and absurd permeates Kleist’s works. In stories such as Michael Kohlhaas or Earthquake in Chile, individuals stand powerless before arbitrary circumstances. Kleist’s remarkable heroines, who bear uncanny resemblance to Kleist psychologically, act from the unconscious, for example when The Marquise of O. places a newspaper ad in hopes of discovering the gentleman responsible for her pregnant condition, or when Penthesilea’s confusion between love and war leads her, while intending to kiss her lover Achilles, instead to tear him from limb to limb with her bare hands and teeth.”
LAUTRÉAMONT, o Conde que faltava ao Marquês
“Ducasse [nome de batismo] certainly shows more strongly the influence of Baudelaire and Sade than does any other writer. Like Sade, he is rarely studied in universities.”
LAWRENCE, DAVID HERBERT (1885-1930)
“Born in a mining area of Nottinghamshire, Lawrence derived much of the problematic of his work from the tension between his coal-miner father, representing for him the physical and the elemental, and his mother, a former school-teacher, who stood for the world of higher culture, politeness, and civilization. Having attended a 2-year teacher training course in Nottingham (his only higher education), Lawrence wrote two early novels, The White Peacock (1911) and The Ties-passer (1912), while teaching at Croydon. In 1912 he eloped with the German-born Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, and the two led a bohemian life of wandering on the continent until the outbreak of World War I. During this period he wrote and published his first masterpiece, Sons and Lovers (1913), an intensely autobiographical novel [more so?].
“Women in Love(1921) [currently reading!] has, despite the title, an extraordinary emphasis on the male love affair (though it is non-genitally expressed [forçação de barra, i.m.o.]) between the wealthy Gerald Crich and the school-teacher Rupert Birkin. These aspects were further explored in the Prologue to the book [!], which Lawrence withheld from publication.”
LORCA
“In the famous Residencia de Estudiantes, he met and collaborated with such future celebrities as Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, with the latter of whom he had an amorous relationship of several years’ duration.”
“An extensive literature exists concerning the mechanics of and motives for his death, which immediately became an international incident and a symbol of fascist stupidity and anti-intellectualism. Lorca’s leftist sympathies, friends, and relatives would be sufficient to explain his execution, but much evidence suggests that his sexual orientation, activities, and writings were at least as important.”
A CANALHA (ESPERO QUE NÃO CUIDEM DO MEU ESPÓLIO!): “The House of Bernarda Alba, suppressed by his family, in 1945.”
MCCARTHYISM (BOECHATISMO NO BRASIL CONTEMPORÂNEO)
“The political tactics of the United States Senator from Wisconsin Joseph R. McCarthy (1908-1957)(*) have since the 50s been labeled McCarthyism. They consisted in poorly founded but sensationally publicized charges against individuals in government service or public life whom McCarthy accused on the Senate floor of being Communists, security risks, or otherwise disloyal or untrustworthy. Senator McCarthy’s campaign did not spare <sex perverts in government>, and so it made homosexuality an issue in American political life for the first time since the founding of the republic.” Homossexualidade restrita ao Triângulo das Bermudas.
(*) Oxalá nosso expoente morresse tão jovem! (P.S.: Escrito antes de sua inesperada – hoho, que clichê – morte!)
“It is also noteworthy that the danger of blackmail which Magnus Hirschfeld and his Berlin Scientific-Humanitarian Committee had used as an argument for the repeal of Paragraph 175 was now turned against homosexuals to deny them employment in the name of <national security>. This factor and others worked so strongly in McCarthy’s favor that despite bitter opposition he was reelected in 1952 in the Eisenhower landslide that brought the Republican Party back to the White House after 20 years of Democratic rule.
Once the Republicans had become the majority party for a brief time, McCarthy’s tactics became a source of embarrassment to them [huhu, quantas semelhanças…], and in 1954 a campaign was launched against him in the Senate which included the (true) accusation that a young University of Wisconsin graduate employed in his office in 1947 to handle veterans’ affairs had been arrested as a homosexual and then promptly fired, and the (probably false) accusation that McCarthy himself was a homosexual, which Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont included in his denunciation. However, it was alleged that McCarthy’s marriage in 1953 at the age of 45 was motivated by his need to squelch the rumors of his own sexual deviation; the marriage remained childless, though the couple did adopt a little girl. What is significant in retrospect is that Roy Cohn, a young attorney who was one of McCarthy’s chief aidés [sponsored by him] during his heyday, was a lifelong homosexual who died of AIDS in 1986 [meme Cazuza de direita]. Censured by the Senate in 1954, McCarthy thereafter faded in political importance, and when he died in 1957 no great wave of emotion went through the ranks of either his friends or his enemies.”
“The policy of denying employment to homosexuals on moral grounds and as security risks, however, remained long after McCarthy himself.”
“In France, after André Gide published his negative reflections on his trip to the Soviet Union in 1936-37, he was attacked by his former Communist associates as a pédé (faggot).”
“The sexual aspect of McCarthyism has an ancestry going as far back as Aeschines, Cicero, and the Byzantine Emperor Justinian (r. 527-565), whose laws against sodomites forged the <crime of those to whom no crime could be imputed>, a weapon for political intimidation and blackmail that even the enlightened 20th century has not deprived of its cutting edge.”
PEDOPHILIA
“the term <p(a)edophilia> was first used in English only as recently as 1906, by Havelock Ellis. It had previously appeared as a specific form of sexual pathology in a German article of 1896 by Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Because the term <pedophilia> originated in a medical context and today connotes disease, efforts have been made to replace it. Pederasty is sometimes used as a synonym, or as a term restricted to post-pubescent adolescents, but in the present writers’ view, it should properly be restricted to the Greek custom it originally designated, which, though a form of pedophilia as we understand it, is not congruent with it.” “The earlier average age for puberty within the last century also means that classical texts (and even more recent ones) which speak of relations with mid-teenage boys were not necessarily referring to sexually mature individuals. (The term ephebophile has been used to describe erotic attraction to boys in their late teens, who are considered adults in many if not all cultures.)” “woman/girl (korophile)” “<Child molestation> or <abuse>, terms current in the media, and in psychological and legal discourse, are neither descriptive of the phenomenon, nor value-free, as academic discourse requires.
That variant of pedophilia occurring between men and boys – male homosexual pedophilia – will be the chief focus of this article. This choice is dictated by several considerations, including the context of the article, the dearth [escassez] of research on korophile relationships, and the fact that until very recently man/boy relationships were accepted as a part, and indeed were a major part, of male homosexuality.”
“pedophilia might be considered a remnant, more evident in some persons than others, of the instinct to nurture and protect the young of the species, which in human development has come to serve an educational (including sex-educational) or initiatory purpose in some societies. The attempt to root pedophilia in man’s biological inheritance is controversial, but a cross-cultural survey of man/boy pedophilia at least suggests that it is a universal phenomenon, which, when accepted by a society, generally carries a socially constructed meaning related to the acculturation process for boys.”
“Several of these societies (as the Melanesians) believe that without receiving the man’s semen through fellatio the boy cannot physically mature.”
TRANSIÇÃO GRÉCIA-ROMA: “As the function of same-sex relationships increasingly became hedonistic, the age limits broke down: we find increasing references to homosexuality between men (particularly in the satiric poets, who make it clear that this was still scorned) and, to a lesser extent, to the sexual use of very young children.”
“That Ganymede was more than an artistic convention is shown by the number of artists who were charged with sodomy with boys, especially their studio assistants. Histories of the Renaissance record similar charges involving popes, poets, and nobles.”
“Incarcerated pedophiles continue to be subject to coercive procedures to alter their sexual interest or reduce its level. Although surgical castration is no longer employed, chemical dosages and aversion therapy may be used without the subject’s consent.”
“Much of the <research> that exists on pedophilia today reflects a predetermination that adult-child sexual contacts are evil or pathological, and merely documents the point of view with which the authors began. There has been no lack of evidence by which such negative pre-suppositions could be supported, because in the same way that studies of homosexuality until quite recently were limited by the source of their research subjects, resulting in a portrayal of homosexuals as criminal, troubled, and unhappy, most studies of pedophilia examine only cases which have come before either courts or psychiatrists, precisely those where the subjects are most under stress or disturbed. In many countries, research into pedophile relationships under other circumstances is legally
impossible: if a researcher should find a healthy, quietly functioning relationship he or she would be required to report it for prosecution under <child protection> laws. These factors, plus the sensationalism surrounding the topic, assure that much of what is written on the subject is, and will continue to be, worthless.”
“Pedophile organizations have linked their arguments to support of the rights of children. While emphasizing that these rights most certainly include the power to say ‘no’ to any unwanted sexual contact as well as the opportunity to say ‘yes’ to contacts children desire, some groups go further than others in espousing a broad range of children’s liberation issues. Related to the question of legal rights for children is the issue of the child’s consent in pedophile relationships. Those speaking for the protection of children frequently assert that children are incapable of consenting to such sexual relationships, sometimes justifying this assertion by the child’s lack of experience or knowledge of long-range consequences of an act. It has been answered that children can and do consent, or at least are quite capable of rejecting experiences they find distasteful, and that the proper response is to empower children to be able to say ‘no’ effectively. This impasse raises the issue of what consent means – freedom to refuse, simple assent, or an <informed> consent that is probably not realized in most human relationships? Closely related to this is the issue of power, and the assertion that the power imbalance between the adult and the younger partner in a pedophile relationship is so great that it inevitably leads to coercion and exploitation. Various responses have been made: either that the power imbalance is not so clear-cut as the critics state, particularly citing the power of the child to terminate the relationship; or that while power imbalances are inherent in all human relationships, they do not necessarily lead to exploitation, but can be used for benevolent ends, and the real issue is not the power imbalance but the use of power.
Child pornography is the sharpest point of attack on pedophilia and pedophiles. Included in this attack are the imputation that children are always abused in the production of such images, and the fear that such images will stimulate the abuse of children. It has been shown that this issue has been exploited for political purposes, and the statistics on the amount of such material exaggerated beyond proportion. Despite rhetoric, it has not been demonstrated that any more connection exists between pedophilia and child pornography than between any other sexuality and its pornography: either to show that pedophiles are more likely to create or use pornography than other persons, or that child pornography encourages sexual contacts with children. Indeed, the Kutschinsky study of the Danish experience with pornography, which has never been refuted, demonstrated that sexual assaults on children declined with the availability of pornography. Pedophiles who have responded to this issue have noted that there is no reason that depictions of children nude or even engaged in sexual actions should be any more or less objectionable than such depictions of adults, and argue that the true issue, as with all pornography, is whether coercion actually is employed in making it. The issues of child prostitution and the sexual exploitation of children in Third World countries have also been used to attack pedophiles and, by implication, pedophilia. Once it is acknowledged that pedophiles are by no means the only persons who engage in <sex tourism> or patronize prostitutes, the debate again seems to resolve itself into issues of power and consent. A defense has been offered that the right of self-determination in sexual behavior for the individual choosing prostitution should apply here. Poverty, however, may diminish the individual freedom of choice in these situations.”
???, Men and Boys[“America’s first anthology of homosexual poetry”];
Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg, Tabu Homosexualität: Die Geschichte eines Vorurteils (The taboo of homosexuality: The history of a prejudice), 1978;
______., Mannbarkeitsriten: Zur institutionellen Päderastie bei Papuas und Melanesiern (Rites of passage into manhood: On institutional paederasty in Papuas and Melanesians), 1980;
______., Der Weibmann: Kultischer Geschlechtswechsel im Schamanismus, eine Studie zur Transvestition und Transsexualität bei Naturvölkern (Androgynous: Cultic sex change in shamanism, a study on transvestism and transsexualism in primitives), 1984;
______., Paidika 1/3 (The Journal of Paedophilia): Der pädophile Impuls: Wie lernt ein junger Mensch Sexualität? (The paedophile impulse: Toward the Development of an Aetiology of Child-Adult Sexual Contacts from an Ethological and Ethnological Viewpoint), 1988;
Cook & Howells, Adult Sexual Interest in Children, 1981;
Fraser, Death of Narcissus, 1976;
Mackay, Books of the Nameless Love, 1913(sécs. XIX-XX; o pai do “associacionismo pedofílico”);
Theo Sandfort, The sexual aspect of paedosexual relations: The experiences of 25 boys with men, 2000.
SCHOPENHAUER
“Through a large inheritance from his father the celebrated misanthrope enjoyed financial independence so that he could devote his life completely to philosophy. Even today Schopenhauer’s ethic of compassion possesses great philosophical significance.”
“Schopenhauer’s teleologically oriented conception of nature therefore had to assume in male homosexual behavior – the only form he discussed – a <stratagem of nature> (in the words of Oskar Eichler). Referring to Aristotle he hypothesized that young men (supposedly boys just past puberty) and likewise men who are too old (the magic boundary is here the age of 54) are not capable of begetting healthy and strong offspring, because their semen is too inferior. As nature is interested in perfecting every species, in men older than 54 <a pédérastie tendency gradually and imperceptibly makes its appearance>. When he formulated this argument Schopenhauer himself was 71 years old, so that he could have harbored a homosexual tendency for some years.”
“Schopenhauer was himself the father of at least two illegitimate children and had many unhappy affairs with women. He passionately admired Lord Byron and like him came to the conclusion that women could be considered beautiful only by <the male intellect clouded by the sexual instinct>. In intellectual and aesthetic respects Schopenhauer had homosexual preferences. In a letter to his admirer Julius Frauenstadt he stressed that <even women’s faces are nothing alongside those of handsome boys>. Bryan Magee hypothesizes that the philosopher systematically suppressed his gay tendencies, a view shared by Oskar Eichler and others. Thirty years after the publication of the third edition ofThe World as Will and RepresentationOswald Oskar Hartmann adopted Schopenhauer’s teleological explanation of homosexuality, suggesting that the first champions of homosexual rights voluntarily followed Schopenhauer’s arguments.”
SEPARATISM, LESBIAN
“In its strongest form, lesbian separatism means social, cultural, and physical separation from all who are not lesbians. As society is now constituted this option is possible only for a very few. Many lesbians who regard themselves as separatists seek to live and work in circumstances that are as far as possible <women’s space>, without insisting on the absolute exclusion of men.”
“Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata (411 BC) shows Athenian women seceding from their city in a <sex strike>, but only temporarily – until the men agree to make peace. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), a pioneering American socialist and feminist, wrote a novel, Herland (1915; reprinted 1979), depicting a Utopia in Africa populated only by women.”
“Outsiders tend to label lesbian separatists as <women who hate men>. In their defense, separatists often say that what they are opposed to are the domineering, aggressive aspects of male behavior, rather than men themselves. They wish to make a clear statement that will set them apart from the ambivalent stance of heterosexual women, even those who profess feminism. Separatists believe that such straight women enter too readily into complicity with the power structure of patriarchy; by continuing to meet the sexual and emotional needs of men, these women give aid and comfort to the enemy.
Some women choose to form communes on <women’s land>, setting themselves apart from all males, including male children and animals. In so doing they hold that they are creating liberated zones in which their natures can grow unhampered by the dictates of patriarchy.”
“Some women have entered lesbian separatism for a number of years as part of a process of personal growth, only to emerge later with a more complex position. This seems to have been the experience of a principal theorist of the movement, Charlotte Bunch, who remains a radical lesbian feminist.”
SHAKESPEARE
“Of tenant farmer stock and the son of a glover, Shakespeare was born in the provincial town of Stratford-upon-Avon in England; however, the very few facts known about his life are derived from various legal documents. In 1582, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had 3 children within the next 3 years; the following 5 years are unaccounted for, but by 1594 he was involved in the theatre world in London as both an actor and a playwright. He enjoyed an increasingly successful theatrical career until his retirement in 1612 and his return to Stratford.”
“Shakespeare’s prolonged separation from his wife and the stipulation in his will that she inherit his <second best bed> has sparked much debate about his sexuality.”
“Historically, theatrical companies of Shakespeare’s time did not employ women; instead, their roles were played by boys, apprentices to the companies. In adherence to the laws and sympathies of the times, the plays were, therefore, unable to display any overtly sexual behavior, but one of Shakespeare’s most frequent plot devices was to have his heroines disguise themselves as boys, particularly in the comedies. Thus, what in reality was a boy pretending to be a woman pretending to be a boy leads to some psychologically acute and complex scenes with homoerotic suggestions, such as the encounters between Rosalind (as Ganymede, a name rich in suggestiveness) and Orlando in As You Like It and Viola (as Caesario) and Orsino in Twelfth Night.
“For more substantive evidence, one must turn instead to Shakespeare’s sequence of 154 poems in the form of sonnets, published surreptitiously in 1609 and immediately protested by their author. Probably intended as a personal exercise for private circulation, the sonnets may be the works that reveal something of the man himself; in them, Shakespeare names the persona Will, an obviously personal and intimate diminution of William, and, as in most of the Renaissance sonnet sequences, their subject is erotic love. Dedicated to Mr. W.H., who has been variously identified as the Earl of Southampton, a boy actor named Willy Hewes, Shakespeare himself (in a misprint of his initials), someone unknown to history, or someone invented, the first 126 are clearly homoerotic, while most of the others concern a woman conventionally called <the Dark Lady>. Historically, those scholars who begrudgingly admit to their subject matter try to discount their message. Most claim that the attraction the persona feels for the fair young man is either platonic or unconsummated; others assert that the poems are only examples of the Renaissance male friendship tradition. Still others insist on the fallacy of equating the persona with the poet and confusing literature with autobiography.”
Joseph Pequigney, Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
SOCRATES
“In early life he was interested in the scientific philosophy of his time and is said to have associated with Archelaus the physicist, but in the period best known to posterity he had abandoned these interests and was concerned solely with the right conduct of life, a quest which he conducted by the so-called <Socratic> method of cross-examining the individuals whom he encountered. While serving in the army he gained a great reputation for bravery, and as one of the presidents of the Athenian Assembly at the trial of the generals after the battle of Arginusae, he courageously refused to put an illegal motion to the vote despite the fury of the multitude.”
“There has been considerable dispute over the precise meaning of the indictment, but the first part seems not to have been serious, while the second amounted to a charge that he had a <subversive> influence on the minds of the young, which was based on his known friendship with some of those who had been most prominent in their attacks on democracy in Athens. He made no attempt to placate the jury and was found guilty and sentenced to die by drinking a cup of hemlock.”
“He probably rejected the conventional Greek religious beliefs of his time, yet professed or created no heterodox religious doctrines. From time to time he had paranormal experiences, signs, or warnings which he interpreted as guideposts to his own conduct.
His sexual life, apart from the unhappy marriage, reflected the Greek custom of paiderasteia to the fullest. He was both the teacher of the young men who frequented his circle and the lover of at least some of them. As a boy of 17 he had been the favorite of Archelaus, because he was in the bloom of youthful sensuality, which later gave place to serious intellectual concerns.”
“he was never given to a coarse and purely sensual pederasty; if the beauty of the young Alcibiades made an intense and lasting impression on him, he never forgot his duty as a teacher to guide his youthful pupils toward perfection.” “As a bisexual Hellene, Socrates was always responsive to the beauty of the male adolescent and craved the companionship of young men; as a philosopher he practiced and taught the virtues of moderation and self-control. He endures as one of the outstanding examples in antiquity of a teacher for whom eros was an inspiration and a guide.
Because Socrates is a major figure in Western tradition, his sexual nature posed a continual problem. From Ficino to Johann Matthias Gesner (1691-1761) scholars sought to address the question discreetly. The Marquis de Sade was bolder, using socratiser as a verb meaning to sodomize. Even today, however, many classicists choose to evade the problem.”
SODOM AND GOMORRAH
“These legendary cities have been traditionally located in the vicinity of the Dead Sea, where they constituted two members of a pentapolis, the Cities of the Plain. According to the Old Testament account in Genesis 14, 18, and 19, God overthrew 4 of the 5 cities in a rain of brimstone and fire. The names of Sodom and Gomorrah, especially the former, have become proverbial. Echoes of the episode recur in the Bible and in the Koran, as well as in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic exegetical and homiletic writings. From the first city, Jewish Hellenistic Greek formed the derivative sodomites, from which medieval Latin obtained the noun of agent sodomita – as a result, the connection with male homosexuality is for many axiomatic. However the matter is more complex.”
“The ancient world’s rudimentary science of geology correctly related this barrenness to the circumstance that the water level of the Dead Sea had in prehistoric times been far higher; the sinking of the water level had exposed the previously inundated, now strikingly arid and sterile region to the gaze of the traveler.”
“to the Bedouin living east and south of the Dead Sea it suggested the etiological inference that at one time the area surrounding this salinized body of water had been a fruitful garden belt. Yet the inhabitants of the cities of the plain had even in the midst of their abundance and prosperity denied hospitality to the poverty-stricken and the wayfarer, while the luxury in which they wallowed led them inevitably into effeminacy and vice (the parallel in the Hellenistic world was the city of Sybaris, whose proverbial self-indulgence gave the English language the word sybaritic). For this reason they were punished by the destruction of their cities and the conversion of the whole area into a lifeless desert.”
“In Genesis 14:12 Lot is taken captive when Sodom is conquered by the 4 kings who have allied themselves against the Cities of the Plain; Abraham saves him by military intervention in the manner of a tribal sheikh with his retinue of 318 warriors. In 19:4-9 the Sodomites threaten Lot’s guests with gang rape, but are miraculously blinded and repelled, and in 19:13, 15 the angelic visitors warn Lot of the imminent destruction of the city so that he and his family can leave just in time to escape the rain of brimstone and fire. This underlying motif explains why Lot later <feared to dwell in Zoar> (19:30), even though God has spared the place as a reward for his model hospitality toward the 2 visitors. Over the centuries Sodom and Gomorrah, along with the Babylon of the Book of Revelation, came to symbolize the corruption and depravity of the big city as contrasted with the virtue and innocence of the countryside, a notion cherished by those who idealized rural life and is still present, though fading in 20th century America.”
“These volcanic eruptions, which have left traces still to be seen at the present day, inspired the <rain of brimstone and fire> (burning sulfur) of Genesis 19:24, which supplemented the notion that the 4 cities had been <overthrown> (destroyed by an earthquake) that figures in Genesis 19:25.” Sempre o nº 4!
+ Judges 19; Romans 1:18
“the currency in antiquity of world destruction legends, in which the earth is annihilated either by water (kataklysmos) or by fire (ekvyrosis). The story of Noah and the deluge is the rendering of the first in the book of Genesis, while the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is a localization of the second, in which the catastrophe is limited to 4 cities in the vicinity of the Dead Sea (Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim) even though the epilogue involving Lot and his daughters clearly derives from a universal conflagration myth.”
“If the human race were annihilated with the exception of a single family, the earth could be repeopled only by means of sexual unions ordinarily condemned as incestuous.”
“World destruction fantasies [are] associated in modern clinical experience with the early stages of schizophrenia.”
“Astrological literature supplied the ancients with an entire list of calamities that betokened divine wrath, as in Luke 21:11, all of which were later ascribed to retribution for <sodomy>. Fear of homosexual aggression plays a role in these paranoid fantasies, of the sort analyzed by Freud in the classic Schreber case.”
“The notion of sodomy is an innovation of Latin Christianity toward the end of the 12th century; it is not found in Jewish or Byzantine writings.” “In the late Middle Ages the tendency of the allegorizing mind to parallelism led to the notion that Gomorrah, the twin city of Sodom, had been a hotbed of lesbianism, even though there was nothing in either Testament that would suggest such a construction.”
TURING, ALAN (1912-1954)
“He seems to have been a brilliant, awkward boy whose latent genius went unnoticed by all his teachers; he also had no friends until his very last years at Sherborne. Then he fell in love with a fellow science enthusiast, Christopher Morcom: the Platonic friendship was returned, and Alan Turing was for the first time in his life a happy young man. He had dreams of joining Christopher at Trinity, to pursue science together – unfortunately, Christopher Morcom suddenly died (from a much earlier infection with bovine tuberculosis).”
“Turing spent two years in America, at Princeton University, and, on his return to Britain, was drafted into British cryptanalysis for the war effort. Turing was already unusual among mathematicians for his interest in machinery; it was not an interest in applied mathematics so much as something which did not really have a name yet – applied logic. His contribution to the design of code-breaking machines during the war led him deeper and deeper into the field of what would now be called computer programming, except that neither concept existed at the time. He and a colleague named Welshman designed the Bombe machines which were to prove decisive in breaking the main German Enigma ciphers. For his contribution to the Allied victory in World War II Turing was named an Officer of the British Empire (O.B.E.) in 1946. (…) He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951.”
“The earliest inventor of such a device was the eccentric 19th century Charles Babbage, who could not obtain the necessary hardware to implement his ideas.”
“He was brought to trial and sentenced to a year’s probation under the care of a psychiatrist, who proceeded to administer doses of female hormone to his patient, this being the current <wonder-therapy> which replaced castration as an attempt to kill the sexual instinct. For the entire year, Turing underwent the humiliation of femininization (<I’m growing breasts!>, he confided to a friend), but emerged seemingly intact from the public ordeal. He committed suicide in 1954, by eating an apple he had laced with cyanide.”
WHITMAN, WALT
A VIDA TEM DESSAS: “Often acclaimed as America’s greatest poet, Whitman, of working-class background, was self-taught, but as a printer, school teacher, journalist, and editor he contributed fiction and verse in the worst modes of the day to the best literary journals. There is no evidence of his genius until he suddenly began to write scraps of what was to become Leaves of Grassin his notebooks.”
“It has in fact been argued that Leaves is an inverted mystical experience. This work, which encompassed his complete poetic opus, was first published in 1855 with 12 poems (Song of Myself being rather lengthy); the second edition (1857) had 32, the third (1860) 156, and so on through various printings and editions until 1881. Beginning in 1860, Whitman not only added poems (including the homoerotic Calamus collection), but dropped them, changed them, and rearranged the order. He has often been criticized for making changes, but he clearly did not do so for purposes of concealment.”
“In his more programmatic poems, Whitman was always careful to say he and she, him and her. Women are permitted to have sexual lives, and he sympathizes with a prostitute, but they are generally thought of and idealized as perfect mothers for the new race of Americans.”
“It was his explicitness about male-female sex that shocked his early readers. Only a few homosexuals in England and some readers in Germany caught what is now obvious to any reader who can admit what he sees on the page. The 2nd and 3rd sections of Song of Myself are homosexual in their imagery, as is the subsequent discussion of the body and soul, which climaxes in the intercourse between body and soul in the 5th section. One might also cite the tremendous sweep of eroticism from section 24 to the climax of fulfillment in male intercourse in section 29.”
“He was not merely the poet of an idealized Jacksonian democracy nor of a new political structure, but of a culture bound together by love and religious faith in which each person could fulfill his or her own sexual nature.”
“Whitman, who was disappointed at his contemporary reception, would have been gratified by his reputation in the 20th century, which is too widespread to more than mention. He is the democratic poet and a progenitor of the development of poetry beyond traditional metrical practice in the United States and foreign countries. A remarkable number of modern poets have paid him tribute in prose or verse, among the most notable being Ezra Pound, Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, Fernando Pessoa, and Allen Ginsberg.”
WOOLF, VIRGINIA
“Virginia Woolf was educated largely through reading books in the family library. Unlike her brothers, she did not go to university, and this perceived slight was later to sustain her feminist critique of discrimination against women. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, a brilliant Cambridge graduate who had served as a judge in Ceylon, and her sister Vanessa married the art critic Clive Bell. The two couples were major figures in the Bloomsbury group, which also included such male homosexual writers as E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey. Through much of her life Virginia suffered from severe spells of mental depression, and it was partly to provide work therapy that she and Leonard founded the Hogarth Press in 1917.”
“Virginia Woolf remained a virgin until her marriage, and found the idea of sex with a man repellent. At the time of their engagement she warned Leonard of this aversion, and their sexual relations seem to have been rare. Before marriage Virginia Stephen was closely attached to her sister Vanessa – loving her almost to the point of <thought-incest> –, and was deeply involved platonically with Madge Vaughan, a daughter of John Addington Symonds, and Violet Dickinson, to whom she wrote an enormous number of letters. Throughout her life, Woolf was to draw emotional sustenance from her intense relations with other women.
Her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), concerns the trip of a young Englishwoman to South America, followed by her engagement and death there. While this novel was conventional in form, Jacob’s Room (1922) joined the mainstream of innovative modernism through its poetic impressionism and indirection of narrative development. After this work, which marks her real beginning as a literary artist, Woolf secured her place in modernism by a series of carefully wrought books. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) blends interior monologue with the sights and sounds of a single day in central London. To the Lighthouse (1927) explores the tensions of the male-female dyad in the form of a holiday trip of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey. Its fantastic form notwithstanding, Orlando (1928) is of great personal significance, tracing the biography of the hero-heroine through 4 centuries of male and female existence. This book is a tribute to, and portrait of, her lover Vita Sackville-West, whom she had met in 1922. Woolf’s most ambitious novel is probably The Waves (1931) which presents the contrasting personalities of 6 characters through a series of <recitatives> in which their inner consciousness is revealed.
Shortly after completing her last book, Between the Acts (1941), she suffered a final bout of mental illness and drowned herself in a river near her country home. The posthumous publication of Virginia Woolf’s Letters and Diaries have revealed some unattractive aspects of her personality: she was xenophobic and snobbish, sometimes given to expressions of personal malice, as well as anti-Semitic and homophobic sides. Yet she participated wholeheartedly in the Bloomsbury ethic of individual fulfillment and social enlightenment. Her use of stream-of-consciousness techniques, and other sophisticated literary devices, places her very near the front rank – if not within it – of modernist writers in English.
With the general decline of the Bloomsbury ethos in the middle decades of the century, Woolf’s reputation seemed to fade. In the 1970s, however, feminist critics hailed her as a major champion of then-cause. There is no doubt that A Room of One’s Own (1929), and its sequel, Three Guineas (1938), are powerful pleas for women’s creative independence. Yet her own feminism was fluid and variable, and thus not easily accommodated to present-minded uses. Throughout her life she struggled valiantly against mental illness, succeeding in building up an imposing corpus of writings while expressing her own emotional feelings in her deep relationships with women.”
WORKING CLASS, EROTICIZATION OF
“One of the reasons why Walt Whitman had such an impact on English homosexuals of this period was that his praise of democracy was (mis)understood in large part as a veiled plea for such prince-and-pauper liaisons.”
espermatorréia: derramamento involuntário do esperma
“As investigações de Forel na organização racional das formigas dirigiram a minha atenção para o problema do vitalismo. Entre 1919 e 1921, familiarizei-me com a Philosophie des Organischen e com a Ordnungslehre, de Driesch.”
Lange – Geschichte des Materialismus
Grimm – Buddha
“Hoje muito poucas pessoas sabem que a moralidade foi uma vez encarada como um instinto filogeneticamente, e na verdade sobrenaturalmente, determinado. Isso se dizia com absoluta seriedade e grande dignidade.”
“Adler era decepcionante. Criticou Freud.”
“O seu inconsciente é como a <coisa em si> de Kant. Em si mesmo não pode ser agarrado” A coisa-em-si não existe
“A teoria da esquizofrenia de Freud tinha parado na conclusão prematura de que essa doença é atribuível a uma regressão auto-erótca. Ele tinha idéia de que uma fixação do desenvolvimento psíquico de uma criança no período do narcisismo infantil primário constitui uma disposição para a doença mental. Defendi essa idéia por ser correta, mas não por ser completa. Não era tangível. Parecia-me que o ponto em comum de contato entre a criança absorvida em si mesma e o esquizofrênico adulto está na forma como sentem o seu meio ambiente. Para o recém-nascido o meio ambiente com os seus inúmeros estímulos não pode ser mais que um caos do qual as sensações do seu próprio corpo são uma ponte. Em termos de experiência, não existe nenhuma distinção entre o eu e o mundo. (…) Se, durante o processo de separação, a criança experimenta um choque sério, as fronteiras entre o eu e o mundo permanecem confusas e nebulosas.” “a perda do sentido da realidade no esquizofrênico começa com a interpretação errônea das sensações do seu próprio corpo em desenvolvimento.”
“Foi só muitos anos mais tarde que Ferenczi afirmou que ninguém realmente seguia, ou podia seguir, essa regra. Isso é tão claro para nós hoje que nem mesmo esperamos que alguém o faça. [sobre o <dizer tudo quanto lhe viesse à cabeça>]”
“Sabe-se que pacientes que sofrem de súbito estupor catatônico se tornam logo normais outra vez, quando são capazes de ter acessos de violência.” “Em pacientes que sofrem de estupor catatônico a <couraça> muscular domina o corpo inteiro. A descarga de energia se torna cada vez mais restrita. Em um acesso de violência, um impulso forte irrompe do centro vegetativo, que ainda é móvel, e, através da couraça, libera a energia muscular presa. Mas o seu caráter real como experiência tem de ser agradável. Isso era impressionante, e a teoria psicanalítica da catatonia não podia explicá-lo. Dizia-se que o paciente catatônico <voltava completamente ao útero e ao auto-erotismo>, explicação que não era satisfatória”
“O que o analista levava meses deslindando e interpretando em pacientes compulsivos era expresso em linguagem clara pelo paciente psicótico.” “O paciente psicótico é assediado pelas idéias sexuais que nos outros são cuidadosamente escondidas, reprimidas ou apenas meio admitidas. O ato sexual, atividades perversas, relações sexuais com a mãe ou com o pai, cobrir de excremento os órgãos genitais, sedução de – ou por – mulher ou marido de amigo ou amiga, fantasias grosseiramente sensuais, inclusive mamar e outras semelhantes, inundam o pensamento consciente do psicótico.” “Quanto a sua experiência de vida, o paciente neurótico e o paciente pervertido estão para o esquizofrênico assim como o ladrão ordinário está para o arrombador ousado.”
“Observei uma garota que estava de cama na clínica havia anos e não fazia nada exceto mover a região pélvica e passar o dedinho no clitóris. Estava totalmente bloqueada.” “De vez em quando, entretanto, uma expressão inteligível se desenhava no seu rosto. Se alguém conhece realmente a terrível angústia das crianças pequenas que são proibidas de masturbar-se, então entenderá semelhante comportamento em pacientes neuróticos. Eles desistem do mundo, e dementes, praticam o ato que um mundo irracionalmente governado uma vez lhes proibiu. Não se vingam; não castigam; não causam qualquer mal. Simplesmente permanecem deitados e tentam salvar os últimos restos de um prazer patologicamente corrompido.”
O ouro deve ser misturado ao cobre, e nunca ao pague.
“Estava a ponto de empurrar as crianças para dentro d’água quando foi tomada de terrível angústia. Daí em diante foi atormentada pelo impulso de confessar-se à polícia a fim de proteger as crianças contra ela mesma. O impulso mantinha-a em um estado de medo mortal, pois temia ser enforcada pelo crime. O pensamento provocou-lhe uma constrição na garganta. O mutismo impedia-a de ceder ao impulso.” “Fôra órfã e vivera com estranhos, morando com 6 ou mais pessoas no mesmo quarto. Menina, fôra sexualmente violada por homens feitos. Era atormentada pelo desejo de uma mãe que a protegesse.” “Ninguém a entendia. Embora fosse totalmente fria, dormia com muitos homens diferentes.” “Apesar do fato [de] que o seu trabalho era dificultado por perturbações psíquicas agudas, era explorada cruelmente e sem piedade. Recebia uns 2 schillings por dia de 10h de trabalho, o que quer dizer que devia sustentar-se, e aos 3 filhos, com uns 60 ou 80 schillings por mês! O extraordinário é que o conseguia! Nunca pude descobrir como. Apesar de tudo, não se descuidava absolutamente da sua aparência. Lia sempre, inclusive alguns livros que me tomou emprestados.”
“Outra paciente estava sofrendo da chamada ninfomania. Não conseguia nunca experimentar a satisfação. Por isso, dormia com qualquer homem disponível — sem encontrar satisfação. Masturbava-se com o cabo de uma faca, ou mesmo com a lâmina, até que lhe sangrava a vagina. Somente aqueles que conhecem o tormento de uma excitação sexual insaciável e sumamente tensa deixarão de falar sobre a <transcendência da espiritualidade fenomenológica>.” “Quando a mãe percebe que a criança se está masturbando, atira simplesmente uma faca na criança.” “Esse caso está pormenorizadamente descrito no meu livro Der triebhafte Charakter [A Compulsão do Caráter].”
“Os neuróticos compulsivos e os pacientes histéricos foram educados desde tenra idade de forma absolutamente anti-sexual. Na primeira infância, não tiveram orientação sexual, ou foram prematuramente ativos. Então, subitamente, foram brutalmente punidos, e a punição viveu no inconsciente como um sentimento de culpa sexual.”
EXTATÍSTICA, UMA ESTATÍSTICA ENÉRGICA E SEMOVENTE
“Freud agarrava-se à idéia de que as meninas têm apenas uma sexualidade clitória e não experimentam o erotismo vaginal na primeira infância.”
“Um menino que tivesse uma vinculação genital plenamente desenvolvida em relação à mãe teria muito maior facilidade em estabelecer uma vinculação genital com uma mulher do que um menino que houvesse amado a mãe de uma forma somente anal, i.e., perversa.”
“O desenvolvimento independente da economia sexual começou com a questão da diferença entre prazer pré-genital e genital. Nem um só ponto da minha teoria é válido sem isso.”
“O seu caso parecia totalmente desesperado. Subitamente, surgiu uma fantasia incestuosa, e pela primeira vez o paciente se masturbou com satisfação. Todos os seus sintomas desapareceram imediatamente. Em 8 dias voltaram pouco a pouco. Masturbou-se outra vez. Os sintomas desapareceram de novo, apenas para voltar alguns dias mais tarde. Isso continuou por várias semanas. Finalmente consegui chegar à raiz dos seus sentimentos de culpa quanto à masturbação, e corrigir alguns hábitos prejudiciais de comportamento. Após um total de 9 meses, terminei o tratamento.”
“Uma vez que o paciente era diligente e ordeiro — <ajustado à realidade>, como costumávamos dizer — não ocorreu a nenhum de nós que era precisamente essa tranqüilidade emocional, essa equanimidade inabalável,que formava a base patológica do caráter, pela qual a impotência eretiva podia ser mantida.” “Terminei a análise alguns meses mais tarde e o paciente não estava curado. A imperturbabilidade com que aceitou isso era tão estóica quanto a imperturbabilidade com que aceitou tudo, durante o tratamento todo. Esse paciente gravou em mim o importante conceito de <bloqueio emocional> na análise do caráter.”
“Os psicanalistas faziam graças maliciosas a respeito da sua preguiça durante a sessão analítica. Se um paciente não fazia nenhuma associação durante horas a fio, o analista tinha de fumar muito para não adormecer. Houve analistas, inclusive, que deduziram disso teorias grandiosas. Se o paciente permanecia em silêncio, então, o analista devia também manter-se em silêncio, mesmo que fosse, afinal, por horas ou semanas. Isso era considerado como <técnica consumada>.” “A situação não era nada melhorada nem pelas brincadeiras a respeito: do analista que despertou de um sono profundo, durante uma sessão, e encontrou vazio o divã; nem pelas explicações enroladas para provar que estava certo que o analista cochilasse um instante, pois o seu inconsciente permaneceria atento ao paciente. Afirmava-se mesmo que o inconsciente do analista podia, ao despertar do sono durante um tratamento, compreender exatamente o rumo que o inconsciente do paciente estava seguindo. Era deprimente e desanimador. Por outro lado, Freud aconselhava-nos a não ser demasiado ambiciosos nos nossos esforços terapêuticos.”
somático: corpo menos tripas e cabeça (físico, por oposição a psicológico, psíquico).
“Como muitos outros, Stekel não conseguia ver a diferença fundamental entre a excitação psicossomática e o conteúdo psíquico de um sintoma.” “não havia dúvidas de que as psiconeuroses tinham um cerne neurótico atual (estase) e que as neuroses estásicas tinham uma superestrutura psiconeurótica.”
“Embora muitos analistas atribuíssem a maior importância aos conteúdos psíquicos dos sintomas neuróticos, eminentes psicopatologistas, como Jaspers (cf. a sua Psychopathologie) negavam completamente o caráter científico da interpretação psicológica do significado, e por isso negavam o caráter científico da própria psicanálise. Jaspers afirmava que o <significado> de uma atitude psíquica ou de uma ação podia ser compreendido apenas <filosoficamente> — e não cientificamente.” “Allers, o filósofo e fisiologista vienense, recusou-se a entrar na questão da vida psíquica inconsciente porque, do ângulo da filosofia, a hipótese de um <inconsciente> era a priori falsa.”
“Um ano mais tarde, o médico vienense Chrobak enviou uma paciente a Freud. Sofria de crises agudas de angústia e ainda era virgem, após 8 anos de casamento com um homem impotente. Chrobak escreve o seguinte comentário: <Sabemos bem demais qual é a única prescrição para estes casos, mas não podemos prescrevê-la. É: Penis normalis, dosim repetatur!>”
“Uma mulher era considerada genitalmente sã quando capaz de experimentar um orgasmo clitório. A esse tempo, desconhecia-se a distinção econômico-sexual entre excitação clitória e vaginal. (N.E.:) A controvérsia não chegou ao fim. Masters e Johnson são as autoridades que mais recentemente negaram a distinção. Ainda assim, a única autoridade verdadeira deve ser a mulher que experimentou tanto o orgasmo clitório como o vaginal. Invariavelmente afirmará que há uma diferença.” “a pura verdade é que uma análise precisa do comportamento genital, além das frases nada explicativas <dormi com uma mulher> ou <dormi com um homem>, era absolutamente proibida na psicanálise. Levei mais de 2 anos de experiência para livrar-me completamente dessa reserva delicada, e descobrir que as pessoas confundem o ato sexual puramente animal com a posse amorosa.”
“um economista sexual — que sabe que o homem é a única espécie biológica que destruiu a sua própria função sexual natural e está doente em conseqüência disso.” “Até 1923, ano em que nasceu a teoria do orgasmo, apenas as potências ejaculativa e eretiva eram conhecidas da sexologia e dos psicanalistas. Sem a inclusão dos componentes funcionais, econômicos e experimentais, o conceito de potência sexual não teria existido. Potência eretiva e ejaculativa eram apenas pré-condições indispensáveis da potência orgástica. Potência orgástica é a capacidade de abandonar-se, livre de quaisquer inibições, ao fluxo de energia biológica; a capacidade de descarregar completamente a excitação sexual reprimida, por meio de involuntárias e agradáveis convulsões do corpo.”
“Nem um único neurótico é orgasticamente potente, e as estruturas de caráter da esmagadora maioria dos homens e mulheres são neuróticas. No ato sexual livre de angústia, de desprazer [hm] e de fantasias, a intensidade de prazer no orgasmo depende da quantidade de tensão sexual concentrada nos genitais. Quanto maior e mais abrupta é a <queda> da excitação, tanto mais intenso é o prazer.” Soninho pós-coito: bom sinal.
Fase de controle voluntário da excitação
“A ternura também está ausente no <coito onanista> com um objeto não-amado. Normalmente a atividade da mulher não difere de modo algum da do homem. A passividade da mulher, embora comum, é patológica e resulta habitualmente de fantasias masoquistas de violação.” “Pela fricção mútua, gradual, rítmica, espontânea e sem esforço, a excitação vai-se concentrando na superfície e na glande do pênis, e nas partes posteriores da membrana mucosa da vagina. A sensação característica que precede e acompanha a descarga do sêmen está ainda totalmente ausente (não nos casos de ejaculação prematura). O corpo ainda está menos excitado que o genital. A consciência está inteiramente dirigida para a assimilação das sensações ondulantes de gozo. O ego participa ativamente, na medida em que tenta explorar todas as possíveis fontes de prazer e atingir o mais alto grau de tensão antes do momento do orgasmo. Intenções conscientes obviamente não têm lugar aqui. Tudo acontece espontaneamente com base nas experiências de anteprazer individualmente diferentes, por uma mudança de posição, pela natureza da fricção, pelo ritmo, etc. Segundo a maior parte dos homens e mulheres potentes, quanto mais lentas e delicadas são as fricções, e mais estreitamente sincronizadas, mais intensas são as sensações de prazer. Isso pressupõe um alto grau da afinidade entre o homem e a mulher. Um correspondente patológico disso é o desejo de fazer fricções violentas, especialmente pronunciado nos caracteres sádicos compulsivos que sofrem de anestesia do pênis e da incapacidade de descarregar o sêmen. Outro exemplo é a pressa nervosa dos que sofrem de ejaculações prematuras. Os homens e mulheres orgasticamente potentes nunca riem ou falam durante o ato sexual exceto, possivelmente, para trocar palavras de carinho. Falar e rir indicam sérias perturbações da capacidade de entregar-se” “Nesta fase, a interrupção da fricção é em si mesma agradável por causa das sensações especiais de prazer que acompanham essa pausa, e não exigem esforço psíquico. Dessa forma, prolonga-se o ato. A excitação diminui um pouco durante a pausa. Não desaparece inteiramente, entretanto, como nos casos patológicos. A interrupção do ato sexual pela retração do pênis não é desagradável na medida em que ocorra após uma pausa tranqüila. Ao continuar a fricção, a excitação aumenta firmemente além do nível anteriormente atingido. Toma gradualmente, mais e mais, posse do corpo inteiro, enquanto o próprio genital mantém um nível mais ou menos constante de excitação. Finalmente, como resultado de um novo aumento habitualmente repentino de excitação genital, inicia-se a fase de contração muscular involuntária.”
Fase de contrações musculares involuntárias
“Neste ponto, a consciência se torna mais ou menos nublada; seguindo-se a uma pequena pausa no <auge> do clímax, as fricções aumentam espontaneamente e o desejo de penetrar <completamente> se torna mais intenso com cada contração muscular ejaculatória. As contrações musculares na mulher seguem o mesmo curso que seguem no homem; há apenas uma diferença psíquica, isto é, a mulher sã quer <receber completamente> durante, e logo após, o clímax.”
Pressupõe-se que é patológica a continuidade do ato, isto é, refazê-lo, como se a tensão não houvesse sido dissipada.
“a pessoa orgasticamente impotente experimenta um esgotamento plúmbeo, desgosto, repulsa, aborrecimento ou indiferença e, ocasionalmente, aversão ao companheiro. Nos casos de satiríase e ninfomania, a excitação sexual não desaparece. A insônia é uma das características essenciais da falta de satisfação. Não se pode, entretanto, concluir automaticamente que uma pessoa experimentou a satisfação quando cai no sono imediatamente após o ato sexual.”
experiência sensorial x experiência motora
(fase 1) (fase 2)
convulsão=solução
“É preciso distinguir dois grupos de fantasias que poderiam acompanhar o ato sexual: umas em harmonia com a experiência sexual, outras em contradição com ela. Se o companheiro é capaz de atrair todo o interesse sexual para ele, ou para ela, ao menos momentaneamente, então as fantasias inconscientes são também supérfluas. Em termos da sua própria natureza, essas fantasias se opõem à experiência real, pois só se fantasia o que não se pode obter na realidade.” “Quanto mais intensamente a fantasia precisa trabalhar para aproximar, do ideal, o companheiro, tanto mais o prazer sexual perde em intensidade e valor econômico-sexual. Depende inteiramente da natureza das discordâncias que existem em toda relação prolongada a redução, ou não, da intensidade da experiência sexual; e, no caso afirmativo, o grau de redução. Essa redução tende a transformar-se em uma perturbação patológica muito mais cedo quando há uma fixação forte do objeto primitivo e incapacidade de realizar uma transferência genuína, e quando, além do mais, é necessária grande quantidade de energia para superar no companheiro as características em contradição com o objeto primitivo.”
“A fórmula terapêutica de Freud para as neuroses, embora correta, é incompleta. O pré-requisito fundamental da terapia consiste em tornar o paciente consciente da sua sexualidade reprimida. Só isso não cura; isto é, pode curar, mas não cura necessariamente. O tornar o paciente consciente dos impulsos sexuais reprimidos garante a cura quando também elimina a fonte de energia da neurose, i.e., a estase sexual. Em outras palavras, esse tipo de terapia efetua a cura quando a consciência das exigências instintivas restaura também a capacidade de obter uma plena satisfação orgástica. Dessa forma, as proliferações patológicas são privadas da fonte da sua energia (princípio de remoção de energia).”
“A excitação sexual é um processo somático. Os conflitos da neurose são de natureza psíquica. O que acontece é que um conflito secundário, em si mesmo normal, causa uma leve perturbação na balança da energia sexual. Essa estase secundária intensifica o conflito, e o conflito por sua vez aumenta a estase. Assim, o conflito psíquico e a estase da excitação somática aumentam-se mutuamente. O conflito psíquico central é a relação sexual entre a criança e os pais. Está presente em toda neurose. É o armazém histórico da experiência, de que se alimenta o conteúdo da neurose. Todas as fantasias neuróticas podem ser reduzidas à primeira vinculação sexual da criança com os pais. (…) As fixações patológicas incestuosas pelos pais, pelos irmãos e irmãs, perdem a sua força quando se elimina a estase simultânea de energia, i.e., quando a plena satisfação orgástica é experimentada no presente real. Por isso, depende do grau de descarga da energia sexual que o conflito de Édipo se torne ou não patológico. Em suma, a neurose atual [a neurose somática de Freud, também chamada de pré-genital ou pré-edipiana, num mal-entendido, por algumas gerações de psicanalistas freudianos] e a psiconeurose[a neurose clássica, genital ou edipiana] se sobrepõem: não podem ser concebidas como tipos separados de neuroses.” “Se as atividades sexuais não-genitais são reprimidas, a função genital se torna perturbada. Essa perturbação provoca fantasias e ações pré-genitais. As fantasias e atividades sexuais pré-genitais, que encontramos nas neuroses e perversões, são não apenas a causa das perturbações genitais mas, de qualquer forma, também o resultado dessa perturbação. Esses critérios e observações constituem o fundamento da distinção, que fiz, em 1936, entre impulsos naturais e secundários.”
“As enfermidades psíquicas revelam apenas qualidades. Todavia, sempre parecem depender dos chamados fatores quantitativos, da resistência e da força, da catexia de energia, das experiências e ações psíquicas. Em uma reunião do círculo mais íntimo de analistas, Freud uma vez aconselhou-nos a ser prudentes. Tínhamos, disse, que estar preparados para esperar perigosos desafios de uma futura organoterapia à terapia psíquica da neurose. Não havia maneira de saber o que poderia ser essa organoterapia, mas já se podiam ouvir os seus expoentes batendo à porta. A psicanálise deverá um dia estabelecer-se sobre uma base orgânica. Isso era uma verdadeira intuição freudiana!”
“Todo paciente é profundamente cético em relação ao tratamento. Cada um apenas o disfarça de maneira diferente. Apresentei uma vez um relatório sobre um paciente que disfarçava a sua secreta desconfiança de um modo extremamente engenhoso: mostrava-se muito polido e concordava com tudo.” “A adaptação da técnica à hipocrisia do caráter do paciente apresentava conseqüências que ninguém adivinhava, e que todos inconscientemente temiam.”
“O id era <mau>, o superego sentava-se num trono com uma longa barba e era <austero>; e o pobre do ego esforçava-se por ser um <medianeiro> para os dois.” “Desapareceu a seriedade das comunicações psicanalíticas: foi cada vez mais substituída por um pathos, reminiscência dos filósofos morais. Pouco a pouco, a teoria das neuroses foi traduzida para a linguagem da <psicologia do ego>. A forma eclipsou o conteúdo; a organização tornou-se mais importante que a tarefa. Teve início o mesmo processo de deterioração que destruiu os grandes movimentos sociais da história. Exatamente como o primitivo cristianismo onde Jesus se havia transformado na Igreja, e como a ciência marxista se tornara na ditadura fascista, muitos psicanalistas logo se tornaram os piores inimigos da sua própria causa. A cisão no âmago do movimento já não tinha conserto. Hoje, 15 anos depois, isso é evidente para todos. Foi somente em 1934 que o percebi claramente. Era tarde demais.”
“sinais de desintegração dentro do movimento psicanalítico (por exemplo, a teoria do instinto de morte)” “A psicanálise jamais se recuperou disso.” “Se o analista não conseguia curar um paciente, o instinto de morte é que era o responsável.”
“Reik publicou um livro, Geständniszwang und Strafbedürfnis [Compulsão de Confessar e Necessidade de Punição], no qual todo o conceito original de enfermidade psíquica estava de cabeça para baixo. O pior de tudo é que o livro encontrou aprovação. Reduzida à expressão mais simples, a sua inovação podia ser descrita como a eliminação do medo à punição pelas transgressões sexuais cometidas na infância. Em Beyond the Pleasure Principle e The Ego and the Id, F. presumia a existência de uma necessidade inconsciente de punição. Essa necessidade explicava ostensivamente a resistência do paciente à cura.”
“O paciente aventurava-se a procurar uma companhia, abandonava a abstinência, ou experimentava contatos sexuais mais satisfatórios. Entretanto somente em poucos casos se concretizava a esperança de que essa libertação de energia sexual acarretasse também o estabelecimento da função orgástica. Concluindo, poder-se-ia dizer que apenas uma energia insuficiente se havia libertado das amarras neuróticas. De modo geral, entretanto, o paciente permanecia bloqueado. Propunha-se, assim, a questão: onde, além dos sintomas neuróticos, se prende a energia sexual? Isso era um problema novo na psicanálise. mas não estava fora da sua estrutura. Pelo contrário, tratava-se apenas de uma aplicação consistente do método de raciocínio analítico, que tomava o sintoma neurótico como ponto de partida. A princípio, não obtive resposta para a pergunta. Problemas clínicos e terapêuticos nunca podem ser resolvidos pela meditação. Solucionam-se no processo de controle dos trabalhos práticos.”
“Somente o aparelho genital é capaz de proporcionar o orgasmo e de descarregar plenamente a energia biológica. A pré-genitalidade pode apenas aumentar as tensões vegetativas”
“não há conversão de uma excitação sexual. A mesma excitação que aparece nos genitais como sensação de prazer é percebida como angústia quando se apodera do sistema cardíaco, i.e., é percebida como o oposto exato do prazer.” “A angústia cardíaca se encontra na angina pectoris [dor isquêmica do peito, i.e., parestesia], na asma brônquica, no envenenamento pela nicotina e na exoftalmia [saliência exagerada do globo ocular]. Assim, a angústia sempre se desenvolve quando o sistema cardíaco é afetado por qualquer excitação anormal.” Quando se vive? “era necessário distinguir a angústia que resultava de uma estase de excitação e a angústia que era a causa de uma repressão sexual. A primeira determinava as neuroses estásicas, a última, as psiconeuroses. Mas os dois tipos de angústia agiam simultaneamente em qualquer dos casos.”
“Na fantasia ou na expectativa de um perigo, o organismo age como se o perigo já estivesse presente.” Me afadigo apenas de pensar na troca de uma lâmpada no meu futuro apartamento…
“Eu estava firmemente convencido da exatidão da minha ampliação do conceito original de F. sobre a angústia. Era muito agradável sentir que me estava aproximando cada vez mais da sua função fisiológica.” “Freud havia demonstrado que a angústia na neurose se torna fixa. O paciente escapa à angústia se, por exemplo, desenvolve um sintoma compulsivo. Se a função da compulsão é perturbada, a angústia aparece imediatamente. Muitos casos persistentes de neurose de compulsão e depressão crônica não puderam ser alterados. Eram de certa forma inacessíveis. Na literatura psicanalítica, não havia processos técnicos para vencer a superfície desse estado enrijecido. Era o caráter como um todo que resistia.” pensar é sofrer, por outro lado…
Eu leio para não (me) odiar.
“A função da terapia psicanalítica era descobrir e eliminar resistências. Não se esperava que interpretasse diretamente a matéria inconsciente. Assim, o analista devia partir da repressão dos impulsos inconscientes pelo ego moralista.”
“O esquema de Freud, da interrelação do <inconsciente> com o <pré-consciente> e o <consciente>, não coincide com o seu outro esquema da estrutura psíquica, que consiste do <id>, do <ego> e do <superego>. [DUAS ABSTRAÇÕES COMPLETAMENTE ARBITRÁRIAS, POR SINAL.] De fato, freqüentemente se contradizem. O <inconsciente> de Freud não é idêntico ao <id>. O último é mais profundo. O inconsciente compreende os desejos reprimidos e importantes elementos do superego moralista. Uma vez que o superego tem a sua origem na vinculação incestuosa da criança aos pais, carrega as antigas características dessa vinculação. O próprio superego é provido de grande intensidade instintiva, particularmente de natureza agressiva e destrutiva. O <ego> não é idêntico ao <sistema consciente>. A defesa do ego contra os desejos sexuais proibidos é, ela própria, reprimida. Além disso, o ego tem origem no id, do qual é apenas uma parte especialmente diferenciada, embora, mais tarde, sob a influência do superego, entre em conflito com o id.” “a esse tempo não era possível trabalhar com o id, que não era tangível, nem como superego, que era apenas uma hipótese teórica, expresso claramente na forma de uma angústia de consciência. (…) Para Freud, o <inconsciente> nunca tinha sido mais que uma <hipótese indispensável>.”Fala como se não continuasse sendo uma pura hipótese de trabalho. Incompreensível ingenuidade – como se de um momento para outro se tivesse passado de uma pré-história caótica para uma sistematização empírica e milenarmente testada da mente. O que “provou” de súbito o id no meio do caminho, a própria psicanálise?! Não pode ser esse o nível silogístico do argumento!!
“o jovem passivo-feminino que sofria de sintomas histéricos, incapacidade para o trabalho, e impotência ascética. Abertamente, era muito polido; secretamente, o seu medo o tornava muito astuto. Assim, concordava com tudo. A polidez representava o estrato mais alto da sua estrutura. Produzia matéria superabundante sobre a fixação sexual pela mãe. <Produzia>, sem qualquer convicção interior. Não examinei essa matéria, mas procurei continuamente chamar-lhe a atenção para a sua polidez, como uma defesa contra a percepção realmente afetiva. O ódio escondido começou a aparecer cada vez mais nos seus sonhos. (*) Como a sua polidez diminuísse, tornou-se insultante. (**) Assim, era a polidez que lhe aparava o ódio.(***) Consegui torná-lo evidente, por completo, destruindo cada uma das suas inibições. Até então, o ódio havia sido uma atitude inconsciente. Ódio e polidez eram antíteses. Ao mesmo tempo, a sua polidez excessiva era uma expressão disfarçada do ódio. Pessoas excessivamente polidas são habitualmente as mais impiedosas e perigosas. [continua!]”
(*) Mesma época do “poodle preto de Ranna”. A falta de compaixão para com os animais. “Quero que minha família vire farelo”; “…que meus ex-colegas da DRI morram”, “…que os sociólogos que conheci sejam infelizes”, etc., como pensamento-mor e desejo reinante seriam o equivalente simbólico da auto-destruição genital?!
22/02/2022: ocorrência esporádica do mesmo estilo de sonho (um cão pequeno, iracundo, de alguma pessoa secundária, grande perigo de me ferir, muito ódio presente). Como se todo um ressentimento só “me acessasse” em sonho.
(**) Sentimento da onda purificatória – Liz, Yssel, Jana, Cathy… Avanços e retrocessos.
Descontar a frustração cotidiana nos incautos mendigos e pedintes ou internautas desavisados/desaforados. Mas PRINCIPALMENTE nos segundos, que estão cada vez mais intragáveis.
(***) “Seja educado com os outros, Rafael, eles não têm culpa. Amadureça!” “Você não pode falar assim com a sua avó, com o seu chefe, com o seu pai, com a mãe dos outros! Mas com o seu presidente (Satanás), sim!” Estranha semelhança a versos bíblicos. (2022:) Veja quanto ressentimento o fascista doente não estava aprendendo a espocar – como a Dilma corroía o coraçãozinho dessas flores? O quanto eu não tive de padecer para aturá-los? O quanto hoje eles NÃO estão um centímetro melhores e toda a evolução e distância emocional e sentimental que conquistei? Esses imbecis são mesmo sencientes? São, sabem-no e estão AINDA mais amargurados? Porque se não mudam de idéia, como poderiam não estar?
cila com “c” de cão raivoso;
homem com “h” de hostil.
“[cont.] Por seu lado, o ódio libertado repelia um medo intenso ao pai. Era simultaneamente um impulso reprimido e uma defesa inconsciente do ego contra a angústia. Quanto mais claramente o ódio era trazido à superfície, mais distintamente apareciam as manifestações de angústia. Finalmente o ódio deu lugar a nova angústia. O primeiro não era absolutamente a agressão original da infância, mas uma formação nova, de um período posterior. A nova angústia que irrompeu era a manifestação de uma defesa contra um estrato mais profundo do ódio destrutivo. O estrato superficial do ódio se havia satisfeito com o ridículo e o desprezo. A atitude destrutiva mais profunda consistia em impulsos assassinos contra o pai. Eliminado o medo a esses impulsos (<angústia destrutiva>), a atitude destrutiva mais profunda se tornou manifesta em sentimentos e fantasias. (…) o medo à destruição não podia subir à superfície sem, ao mesmo tempo, trair a agressão destrutiva. Como resultado da maneira pela qual se desenvolve a estrutura de caráter do homem moderno, uma <resistência interior> é constantemente interpolada entre o impulso biológico e a sua realização; o homem age <reagindo> e está intimamente voltado contra si mesmo.” Tenho pena do D***.
Hora de ultrapassar nossos sonhos mais profundos até aqui…
ziguezague
Voltar a odiar, forçar o “corpo” a engolir esse ódio,
que não sou eu
f***-** Gaia!
“Ele anda muito sentido!”
2 idiotas na lagoa
A dependência econômica nos fez pensar três vezes a cada ato de coragem do passado; quando não era mais absolutamente necessário meditar tanto… esquecemos como se fazia rebeldia e vôo livre… Temos que pagar alguém que nos reensine e readestre… Mas não há garantias de sucesso… Quando finalmente tivermos concluído o processo, estaremos às portas da velhice para colher os frutos. Pupilas gustativas deterioradas contraídas que não vêem…
“[e ainda continua!] O impulso destrutivo em relação ao pai era, por sua vez, uma defesa do ego contra a destruição pelo pai. Quando comecei a descobrir isso e a desmacará-lo como uma defesa, a angústia genital veio à superfície. Assim, as intenções destrutivas contra o pai tinham a função de proteger o paciente contra a castração pelo pai.” Já não se aplica inteiramente a mim.
E assim Reich poderia seguir indefinidamente inventando novos teatrinhos…
“[cont.] O medo de ser castrado, que era reprimido pela aversão destrutiva ao pai, era em si mesmo uma defesa contra um estrato ainda mais profundo de agressão destrutiva [JÁ CHEGA], principalmente o desejo de privar o pai do seu pênis e assim eliminá-lo como rival.” “Uma descrição completa desse caso aparece no meu livro Character Analysis [o mesmo do acima no título original em alemão?].” Completa perda de tempo a-social; nem parece que estamos diante do mesmo autor da PMF…
“Não havia mais nenhuma dicotomia entre a matéria histórica e contemporânea. O mundo total da experiência passada incorpora-se ao presente sob a forma de atitudes de caráter. O caráter de uma pessoa é a soma total funcional de todas as experiências passadas.”
“Um conflito, combatido em determinada idade, sempre deixa atrás de si um vestígio no caráter do indivíduo. Esse vestígio se revela como um enrijecimento do caráter. Funciona automaticamente e é difícil de eliminar. O paciente não o sente como algo alheio; freqüentemente, porém, percebe-o como uma rigidez ou como uma perda da espontaneidade. Cada um desses estratos da estrutura do caráter é uma parte da história da vida do indivíduo, conservada e, de outra forma, ativa no presente. A experiência mostrou que os conflitos antigos podem ser bem facilmente reativados pela liberação desses estratos. Se os estratos de conflitos enrijecidos eram especialmente numerosos e funcionavam automaticamente, se formavam uma unidade compacta e não facilmente penetrável, o paciente os sentia como uma <couraça> rodeando o organismo vivo. (*) Essa couraça podia estar na <superfície> ou na <profundeza>, podia ser <tão macia quanto uma esponja> ou <tão dura quanto uma rocha>. A sua função em todos os casos era proteger o indivíduo contra experiências desagradáveis. Entretanto, acarretava também uma redução da capacidade do organismo para o prazer. Experiências de vários conflitos compunham o conteúdo latente da couraça. A energia que conservava a couraça unida era, habitualmente, uma tendência destrutiva inibida. Isso se comprova pelo fato de que a agressão começava a soltar-se imediatamente, quando a couraça era penetrada. (…) as pessoas reagiam com profunda aversão a qualquer perturbação do equilíbrio neurótico da sua couraça. (**) Essa era uma das maiores dificuldades na investigação da estrutura do caráter. A tendência destrutiva, em si mesma, nunca era livre. Era refreada por atitudes de caráter opostas. Por isso, nas situações da vida em que era necessário ser agressivo, agir, ser decidido, assumir uma posição definida, a pessoa era levada pela piedade, pela polidez, pelas reticências, pela falsa modéstia; (sic) em suma, pelas virtudes que são tidas em alta estima. Mas não podia haver dúvidas de que paralisavam toda reação racional, (sic) todo impulso ativo de vida no indivíduo.”
(*) Isso é deveras nítido. Eu sou o planeta e eles são os satélites e detritos de estações espaciais. Em inércia, mas em órbita. É necessário enviar um astronauta… E é uma operação perigosa.
(**) Idéia de título de livro [hahaha!]: TEMPO COME ESPAÇO: O MITO DE CRONOS, O DEVORADOR DE PLANETAS. // A HISTÓRIA DE UM ÓDIO IMPRESSIONANTE // O COMPLEXO DE SOUJIRO SETA: Rafael, o Solícito
A que preço, hein, teu velho cheio de cicatrizes? A que preço tu superaste todos os obstáculos diante de ti como um rolo compressor? Estás multifragmentado por dentro. Não és mais que uma couraça gigante.Combater a depressão formando uma casca deve ser o conselho médico mais imbecil que já ouvi na vida… Médico da posse na CAPES.
ENSAIO PESSOAL: Estratificações do meu caráter (síntese)
(nota-prólogo: sonho de hoje – 28 de julho)
Eu voltava à clínica do Dr. Minoro, meu primeiro psiquiatra. Era horário de almoço, ele não estava. A secretária me atendeu. Me forneceu uma medicação, uma espécie de líquido amarelo que despejou na própria mão e que eu deveria “recolher” (como se fosse guardar com minhas mãos no bolso, ou num recipiente; não era para consumo imediato, para sorver com a boca, era o correspondente a várias dosagens que devia tomar homeopaticamente em casa); ela cometeu um erro e despejou mais do líquido do que era necessário; ele transbordou da sua mão para a mesa. Ela riu e eu também; queria ter sido grosso com ela, mas me contive, sendo sempre muito polido. Mas esse não parecia ser o motivo principal da minha visita. Era como se eu estivesse ali para revisitar meus colegas da terapia coletiva/hospital-dia com quem estive em “pé de igualdade” antes, para mostrar-lhes que “estava bem melhor agora”. Como era horário de almoço, não pude encontrar ninguém. Um detalhe é que o dr. Minoro tinha estipulado que eu devia voltar à clínica a cada quatro sextas, isto é, uma vez ao mês, e por alguma razão eu passei cerca de 2 ou 3 meses sem comparecer, por puro esquecimento e desleixo.
Angústias do meu histórico que o sonho pode estar refletindo: Foi meu primeiro tratamento psicológico-psiquiátrico, e o resultado, embora na própria clínica tenha sido dado como satisfatório, não me agradou. É como se tudo que eu tivesse feito foi “dar uma pausa” nas correrias e demandas do mundo real. Sem trabalhar ou estudar, meu corpo e minha mente restauraram de alguma forma a saúde e a noção de bem-estar, mas eu não tinha certeza alguma em relação ao futuro a longo prazo. Fato é que recebi alta do hospital-dia; continuei a visitar o dr. Minoro a cada mês para receber receitas de remédios, o que não durou mais do que 2 ou 3 vezes. Lembro que estava com muitos remédios acumulados, que davam para um tempo de 2 ou mais meses, mesmo que eu não voltasse ao consultório. Houve alguma discussão entre mim e meu pai em que ele insinuou que os remédios eram inúteis e caros; eu, afligido com a situação de dependência econômica em relação e ele, e considerando-me um “ex-paciente” que já voltara à normalidade, me auto-dispensei dos medicamentos. O que, diferentemente do que haviam relatado (tanto outros pacientes quanto profissionais da clínica) sobre o efeito-rebote, não me causou qualquer efeito colateral ou abstinência. Minha vida seguiu no ritmo desejado: fiz curso para concurso, fiz várias provas, depois, quando achei que não agüentaria o mesmo ritmo de estudos e as provas interessantes escassearam, tendo certa margem para poder me concentrar noutras coisas (ainda tinha dinheiro no banco da minha época de professor, de forma que nunca mais havia pedido dinheiro para o meu pai; das provas que realizei, era boa a chance de ser empossado em algum cargo nos próximos meses, etc.), me tornei ativo esportivamente. Primeiro me engajei em diversas sessões fisioterápicas para um velho problema de fascite plantar [fáscia: tecido fibroso, sangüíneo, nervoso]; me informei sobre meu caso (“pisada pronada” ou “pé chato” – “Harry!”) e passei a usar somente calçados adequados. Fiz academia pela primeira vez. Emagreci muitos quilos. Emagreci cerca de 20kg na balança, mas devo ter perdido mais de 30kg de gordura. Tinha uma rotina regrada; não sofria de insônia. Dormia sem esforço à meia-noite e às 8 da manhã já estava de pé. Fazia os exercícios pela manhã. Me sentia com apetite regular, aprendendo a comer menos nas refeições, e ainda assim me sentia saciado. A tarde e a noite eram livres. Podia ler, escrever, ouvir música e ver anime.
Lembro que durante o tratamento no hospital-dia, interrompi o consumo de álcool assim que iniciei com a medicação (tarja vermelha). Mais ou menos nas últimas semanas, senti nova curiosidade e novo ímpeto para provar álcool e reinseri-lo na minha “dieta alimentar”, porque tornava as saídas mais interessantes afinal. Ou seja, fui abstinente da substância aproximadamente entre 18 e 24 meses, não me lembro ao certo quanto tempo. Uma vez fiquei quase 30 dias sem fumar, num mês de dezembro, por causa de uma dor de garganta. Considerava que seria fácil de parar se eu quisesse, naquele momento, mas julguei que eu tinha direito a certa arbitrariedade nos meus prazeres, então continuei fumando, simplesmente porque é agradável. Nota: no máximo 5 cigarros por dia.
Todo esse ciclo que descrevo durou de setembro-2011 a dezembro-2013 ou janeiro-2014. Raramente eu sentia episódios de ansiedade. De forma crônica e moderada, posso dizer que no pôr-do-sol sentia meu ritmo acelerar; durante dois dias na semana, eu fazia curso de francês, começando às 19h ou 19h30. Me sentia um pouco mais nervoso e inquieto antes de entrar na sala de aula, sem saber definir o porquê. Sempre fui muito pontual em meus compromissos. Pela primeira vez, comecei a me atrasar nas aulas, parte voluntária parte involuntariamente, porque decidia terminar alguma tarefa no computador e não administrava o tempo corretamente. Por exemplo: queria terminar de uma vez uma resenha de jogo, ao invés de deixar para depois. Além disso, as aulas estavam “banais” (eu já estava no módulo avançado do curso e tinha bastante autonomia na língua; não aprendia nada essencial ou inédito via curso). Um dos professores era considerado imensamente tedioso pelos outros alunos (jovens de 18-20 anos da UnB), um verdadeiro robô que apenas seguia o livro didático ordeiramente. Mas fato é que hoje eu me considero um sujeito que “se atrasa” em encontros, ao invés de ser o que chega “demasiadamente cedo”, como até antes dessa época.
Uma briga com meu pai, em particular, em 2013, motivada pelo pouco caso que ele exibia sobre a situação traumática de eu sofrer assaltos, me deixou mal por uma semana; não foi o suficiente para me fazer deixar de freqüentar a academia nem deixar de executar meus hobbies, mas um grande sentimento de culpa tomou conta de mim por ter gritado em alto e bom som, numa festa de um primo dele, que ele tinha que morrer.Mesmo sabendo que seria merecido se acaso ele morresse. É como se eu acreditasse que estava moralmente impedido de “ir contra as regras da moral”, que meu corpo me puniria caso eu insistisse nessa volição homicida… Mas nunca fui injusto: a opinião que tenho dele é a mais correta. De qualquer forma, comecei a me sentir diferente, mais inseguro e intranqüilo, na véspera de ser convocado para o cargo público na CAPES (7 de maio de 2014, meu primeiro dia aqui). Desde então meu quadro reverteu à situação anterior, quando dava aula, e me ressubmeti ao tratamento, em outra(s) clínica(s).
Em resumo, porque o primeiro tratamento deu apenas parcialmente certo, mas sem que eu achasse que tenha sido pela qualidade dos profissionais que me atenderam, e porque eu não o segui até o final (recebi alta apenas do acompanhamento psicológico), é que eu considero que tive esse sonho agora. Me ressinto pelo meu primeiro psiquiatra ser um velho que não conseguia entender minhas angústias, e porque meus psicólogos de variadas vertentes não atacavam meus problemas fundamentais. A pior experiência do período foi quando meus pais foram chamados para uma sessão de psicodrama. Acho que o psicólogo se chamava Ivan. Pois bem, a sessão foi um fiasco completo; meu pai se descontrolou e eu voltei para casa bastante instável. A partir desse dia, não tolerava mais os métodos da clínica. Aquele dia deveria ter sido minha “formatura”, pois já estava implícito que minha alta estava próxima. Tinha avançado bastante e agora era preciso apenas “aparar as arestas” na relação com meu pai. Como nada do que pudesse ser feito por eles converteria o meu pai de suas convicções fossilizadas, me senti traído por todos, principalmente pelo psicólogo do psicodrama, que disse que “não há nada de errado com seu pai, ele é um homem bom, honesto, mas não enxerga algumas coisas”. Mas foi nesse dia do fiasco do psicodrama que finalmente disse para mim: não quero mais “descansar”. Quero estudar para concursos. Vamos ser pragmáticos! Procurei uma instituição para me matricular num curso. Creio que dali a 2 meses já estava estudando. E dali a 1 mês (em relação ao dia do psicodrama) já não freqüentava o hospital-dia. Por algum tempo (umas 3 semanas) ainda compareci às sextas-feiras para fazer a “transição” e terminar de me despedir dos pacientes, que afinal foram as pessoas com quem mais interagi depois de me demitir da escola. Ainda converso com uma enfermeira e uma psicóloga deste lugar (CAPP-Vida) pelo Facebook. Eu queria estar melhor do que estava, mas de certa forma já esperava por isso, porque nunca me sentira compreendido naquele lugar. Fiquei bem comigo mesmo, embora tivesse o pressentimento de que aquela serenidade seria efêmera e quando “o mundo” me atacasse com o mesmo vigor de antes eu voltaria a cair e me ver em maus lençóis.
0
0-12
Até onde eu sei, tive uma infância bastante saudável e resolvi satisfatoriamente o que psicanalistas chamariam de “Complexo de Édipo” da primeira infância, não sofrendo de uma incapacitação severa ou neurose delicada.
I
13-16:
conflitos: pai, socialidade, sexualidade, amadurecimento, vida escolar
soluções parciais (vestígios): mudança de escola, procura por outros amigos, auto-afirmação intelectual, conquista amorosa e primeiro sexo, procura de maior diálogo e intimidade com o sexo oposto, comportar-se adequadamente com base numa nova visão e consideração a longo prazo (para que sintam orgulho de mim e me tomem como um modelo a se seguir).
partes mais duras da crosta (contrapontos, resíduo negativo): bullying (Pedro e Pinguço – “você jamais seria um de nós, a panela headbanger, embora não seja um deles [os playboyzinhos da sala ou do colégio – SIGMA])”, autoestima afetada, saudade do colégio militar (considero a expulsão minha 1ª morte), desafio aos professores (devido a meu posto desprivilegiado, de mero aluno, jamais poderia ganhar), perda da belicosidade enquanto ferramenta vantajosa, a vulnerabilidade do amor (estresses e angústias anteriormente desconhecidos; vida fica mais “séria” a partir deste ponto); o número de hobbies cresce cada vez mais (início da construção da “bomba-relógio fatal” de quem quer coisas demais e tem pouco tempo para concretizá-las) – será?!?
II
17-19:
conflitos: pai, pós-sexualidade, amadurecimento, vida acadêmica, mercado de trabalho
soluções parciais (vestígios): eu não fazia o que meu pai queria que eu fizesse (tirar a carteira de motorista, cursar direito…, mas no fim eu me achava no lugar que queria [cursando jornalismo, que queria desde os 10, talvez 11 anos]); meu primeiro namoro acabou, e eu ainda a amava, mas eu sempre estava saindo com alguém ou me apaixonando por curtos períodos de tempo – o que me preocupava era não ter mais uma parceira fixa; eu me via me transformando em jornalista, mas sem a recompensa financeira por isso; veio a “crise”: devia abandonar o barco, queria estudar sociologia e ser professor. Quem sabe finalmente eu conseguisse “soltar a língua”, me recuperar da rigidez e ser mais espontâneo! Além disso, me livraria de um peso: meu pai não reclamaria das mensalidades do curso de jornalismo no CEUB.
partes mais duras da crosta (contrapontos, resíduo negativo): eu tinha pânico de ter de trabalhar durante o curso (queria tempo para me aperfeiçoar, para ler, para curtir), e meu pai falou no sentido de um ultimato: “a partir do quinto semestre você vai ter de me ajudar a pagar seu curso, arranjar um estágio”. Não é possível obter estágio no curso de jornalismo antes do quinto semestre. Mas eu havia feito 2 estágios logo no primeiro semestre; um deles não-remunerado, e o outro ilegal, até que a empresa foi obrigada a me desligar. Eu me sentia mal nesses lugares, preferia as aulas. Achei perda de tempo. Por isso, era muito importante passar no vestibular da UnB para não ser obrigado pelo meu pai a trabalhar (e o que é pior: sem vantagem financeira nenhuma, pois o dinheiro iria para os boletos do curso). Ou seja, eu não “estava mais onde queria”, tinha que dançar conforme a música do “mundo real”. Me adaptar. Uma vez na UnB, eu tinha um compromisso comigo mesmo de “me enxergar como um professor” tão rápido quanto possível.
(2022: O engraçado é que o ser mais desadaptado ao mundo que conheço é o EXIGENTE EX-PAI!)
III
20-22
conflitos: vida acadêmica, amadurecimento, socialidade
soluções parciais (vestígios): comecei a me entrincheirar, para não me sentir desconfortável em relações com colegas que eu não desejasse ter; meus semestres letivos eram inteiramente dedicados ao curso. Lia todos os textos das disciplinas. Nas férias, procurava textos complementares que via nas ementas, ou investigava assuntos do meu interesse, como filosofia, leituras recomendadas na época do jornalismo, etc. Não havia tempo para mais nada (meus hobbies, como resenhar jogos, escrever um livro de ficção, esse tipo de coisa – talvez a única exceção fossem “descobertas musicais”, que fazia com prazer e alívio). (2022:) De certa forma foi, até hoje, o momento “mais ocupado” de minha vida.
partes mais duras da crosta (contrapontos, resíduo negativo): Me senti um solitário, cada vez mais “pesado”. Nunca era maduro o suficiente, por mais que crescesse muito como escritor e pensador. Nenhum professor morria de paixões por mim ou me enxergava como um gênio ou talento promissor, coisas que eu fantasiei que aconteceriam antes do curso começar. Deixei inteiramente de lado o campo amoroso.
IV
23-26
(fase tratada acima, no prólogo com a ajuda da descrição do sonho)
V
27-presente
conflitos: socialidade, sintomas físicos (somatização), administração do tempo, pais
soluções parciais (vestígios): aberto a novas amizades, vou, no entanto, conforme me desapontam, me fechando cada vez mais, como que por reflexo, como se fosse uma planta carnívora competente (automática, sem liberdade). Toda a soma das minhas angústias, não encontrando escapatória, nem se esgotando psiquicamente, começou a afetar meu físico de “n” maneiras. Trabalhar 8h por dia é tão ruim quanto sempre me falaram minha vida inteira, e me sinto um zumbi durante boa parte da semana.O jeito é me concentrar nas leituras por quanto tempo eu puder, dentro ou fora do trabalho, é claro. Até mesmo a dor física parece nos dar uma trégua durante nossas horas de concentração em problemas “auto-propostos” e de uma esfera mais alta e abstrata do que as “coisas mundanas”. Voltei a assumir hobbies antigos como os reviews de jogos e interesses literários extra-acadêmicos. Na verdade, iniciei publicamente minha carreira de escritor. Voltei a ter uma parceira fixa, “sonho” antigo. Ou seja, diferentemente do que pensava, não estava morto para o amor.
partes mais duras da crosta (contrapontos, resíduo negativo): Me sinto um solitário, ora mais leve, ora mais pesado. Sou até mais maduro do que deveria ser. Se eu pudesse ser tão acéfalo quanto alguns “respeitáveis pais de família” que conheço, isso redundaria em prazer e qualidade de vida. O acúmulo dos meus hobbies e a insatisfação com o ritmo dos trabalhos, tendo em vista que o cronograma de um trabalhador em tempo integral é apertado, me frustra continuamente. Ler e escrever virou praticamente uma compulsão, um mantra, um sine qua non. Eu não chamaria de uma atividade satisfatória, mas apenas catártica: pelo menos serve de substituto para um rivotril de vez em quando. Mas é “tudo que tenho”. Cada vez mais a coexistência com meus pais me oprime. Todo o amadurecimento que acumulei neste tempo terá sido em vão se não puder “exercê-lo” de fato, “voando” sozinho (ou com uma parceira, no caso).
“O paciente queixava-se do vazio das suas experiências. Mas quando eu lhe apontava o mesmo vazio na essência das suas comunicações, na sua frieza, na sua natureza grandiloqüente ou hipócrita, ele se enfurecia. Ele percebia o sintoma — uma dor de cabeça ou um tique — como algo estranho. Mas o seu caráter era ele próprio. Perturbava-se quando lhe apontava isso. O que é que impedia uma pessoa de perceber a sua própria personalidade? Afinal, a personalidade é o que a pessoa é! Gradualmente comecei a entender que é o ser total que constitui a massa compacta e obstinada que obstrui todos os esforços de análise.” “a tendência destrutiva cravada no caráter não é senão a cólera que o indivíduo sente por causa da sua frustração na vida e da sua falta de satisfação sexual. (…) O desejo de destruir é apenas a reação ao desapontamento amoroso ou à perda do amor.” “Em suma, o amor contrariado causa angústia. Igualmente, a agressão inibida causa angústia; e a angústia inibe as exigências do ódio e do amor.” “a pessoa orgasticamente insatisfeita desenvolve um caráter artificial e um medo às reações espontâneas da vida; e assim, também, um medo de perceber as suas próprias sensações vegetativas.” “Traços de caráter como <complexo de inferioridade> ou <ambição de poder> são apenas manifestações superficiais do processo de <encouraçamento>, no sentido biológico da inibição vegetativa do funcionamento vital.”
“Quanto à necessidade inconsciente de punição, não tinha nenhuma utilidade terapêutica; pois, se há um instinto biológico profundamente enraizado de permanecer doente e de sofrer, então a terapia nada pode fazer!”
“Muitos analistas desorientavam-se por causa da desolação reinante no campo da terapia. Stekel não quis trabalhar sobre a resistência psíquica à revelação da matéria inconsciente, preferindo <atirar contra o inconsciente com interpretações>. Essa prática ainda é seguida por muitos psicanalistas desorientados. Era uma situação desesperada.”
STEKEL, Wilhelm – Nietzsche und Wagner, eine sexualpsychologische Studie zur Psychogenese des Freundschaftsgefühles und des Freundschaftsverrates, [Nietzsche e Wagner: Um estudo sexual-psicológico sobre a psicogênese dos sentimentos e rompimentos de amizade], 1917. In: Artigo em jornal alemão de Sexologia.
“Jung generalizou a tal ponto o conceito de libido que este perdeu completamente a sua significação de energia sexual. Acabou no <inconsciente coletivo> e com isso no misticismo, que mais tarde representou oficialmente como nacional-socialista.”
“digam aos pacientes que tenham relações sexuais, se vivem em abstinência; que se masturbem, e tudo irá bem! Era assim que os analistas tentavam interpretar — mal — a minha teoria da genitalidade. De fato, isso era precisamente o que muitos médicos e psiquiatras estavam dizendo aos seus pacientes naquele tempo.”
“No meu trabalho clínico, nunca encontrei um instinto primário correspondendo à sexualidade ou à fome. Todas as manifestações que poderiam ser interpretadas como <instinto de morte> provaram ser produtos da neurose. Assim, por exemplo, ocorria no suicídio, que era ou uma ação inconsciente contra outra pessoa — com a qual o indivíduo se identificava —, ou ação para escapar do enorme desprazer causado por uma situação de vida extremamente difícil.” “o medo da morte e de morrer equivale a uma inconsciente angústia de orgasmo, e o suposto instinto da morte, o desejo de desintegração, de inexistência é o desejo inconsciente da solução orgástica da tensão.”
“Agressão, no sentido estrito da palavra, não tem nada que ver com sadismo ou com destruição. A palavra significa <aproximação>. Toda manifestação positiva da vida é agressiva: o ato do prazer sexual assim como o ato de ódio destrutivo, o ato sádico assim como o ato de procurar alimento. Agressão é a expressão de vida da musculatura e do sistema de movimento. (*) A avaliação da agressão tem enorme importância para a educação das crianças. Grande parte da inibição da agressão que as nossas crianças têm de suportar, em seu próprio detrimento, é o resultado da identificação de <agressivo> com <mau> ou com <sexual> (*). Agressão é sempre uma tentativa de prover os meios para a satisfação de uma necessidade vital. (**) Assim, a agressão não é um instinto, no sentido estrito da palavra; consiste mais no meio indispensável de satisfação de todo impulso instintivo. Este último é essencialmente agressivo porque a tensão exige satisfação. Conseqüentemente, há uma agressividade destrutiva, uma sádica, uma locomotora e uma sexual.”
(*) “Você ainda tem que aprender muito na vida pra deixar de ser arrogante!” Desaprender a ética dos humilhados. Ser grande não significa ser presunçoso. Para cortar a ínfima parte com larvas do fruto, os “educadores” de nosso tempo despejam safras inteiras nos esgotos!
(**) depressive-agressive
“a perversão denominada <sadismo> é uma mistura de impulsos sexuais primários e de impulsos destrutivos secundários. Não existe em nenhum outro lugar do reino animal — e é uma característica do homem, adquirida em um período tardio do seu desenvolvimento; um impulso secundário.”
“toda supressão dos impulsos sexuais provoca ódio, agressividade não-dirigida (i.e., inquietação motora sem um objetivo racional), e tendências destrutivas.”
“Toda conversão de uma neurose compulsiva em histeria era acompanhada de uma redução de ódio. Perversões ou fantasias sádicas no ato sexual diminuíam na medida em que a satisfação aumentava. Essas observações nos permitem entender o aumento dos conflitos conjugais quando a atração sexual e a satisfação diminuem; permitem-nos também entender o desaparecimento da brutalidade conjugal quando aparece outro companheiro de satisfação. Investiguei o comportamento dos animais selvagens e verifiquei que são inofensivos quando bem-alimentados e sexualmente satisfeitos. [não está exagerando?] Os touros só são selvagens e perigosos quando levados para junto da vaca; não, porém, quando levados de volta. Cães acorrentados são muito perigosos porque a sua atividade motora e a sua satisfação sexual são impedidas. Acabei por entender os traços brutais de caráter que se manifestam em condições de insatisfação sexual crônica. Pude observar este fenômeno em solteironas malevolentes e em moralistas ascéticos. Em compensação, pessoas capazes de obter satisfação sexual são visivelmente amáveis e boas. Uma pessoa capaz de sentir a satisfação sexual nunca é sádica. Se uma dessas pessoas se tornasse sádica, poder-se-ia presumir com segurança que uma perturbação súbita havia impedido a satisfação habitual. Isso também se observou no comportamento de mulheres que estavam na menopausa. Há mulheres que, na idade crítica, não apresentam traços de maldade ou ódio irracional, e outras que desenvolvem características de ódio na medida em que ainda não as haviam desenvolvido. Não pode haver dúvidas de que a diferença no comportamento se deve à sua experiência genital anterior. O segundo tipo se constitui de mulheres que nunca tiveram uma relação amorosa satisfatória e lamentam agora essa falha, sentindo consciente ou inconscientemente as conseqüências da estase sexual. Cheias de ódio e de inveja, tornam-se os mais violentos oponentes de qualquer forma de progresso.” “Assim, quanto à técnica, era necessário encontrar os mecanismos que inibiam as reações de ódio a fim de liberar a energia encravada.”
“As crises apareciam sempre que ia ter relações sexuais com o marido, ou quando namoriscava alguém e começava a ficar excitada. Nessas ocasiões, sofria de dispnéia aguda [dificuldade de respirar e desconforto generalizado], da qual só melhorava com o uso de drogas anti-espasmódicas. A vagina era hipestésica [insensível ao toque]. A garganta, pelo contrário, hipersensível. Inconscientemente, sofria de fortes impulsos — dirigidos à mãe — de morder e de sugar. (…) A fantasia de um pênis transpassado na garganta manifestava-se claramente nos seus sonhos e ações. Quando as fantasias se tornaram conscientes, a asma desapareceu pela primeira vez. Mas foi substituída por excitações intestinais vagotônicas agudas [tensão do nervo vagal] em forma de diarréia. Esta alternava com uma constipação simpaticotônica [hipertensão arterial e taquicardia decorrente de alteração mórbida no sistema nervoso simpático]. (…) A fantasia do pênis na garganta cedeu lugar à fantasia de <ter um bebê no estômago, e de ter que vomitá-lo fora>. (…) Temia uma crise de diarréia durante a cópula. (…) Os intervalos entre as recaídas se tornaram mais longos. Isso continuou por vários meses. A asma desaparecia com cada progresso em direção à excitação vaginal, e reaparecia com cada deslocamento da excitação para os órgãos respiratórios. A oscilação da excitação sexual entre a garganta e a região pélvica era acompanhada das correspondentes fantasias da sexualidade oral e genital infantis. (…) Depois que esse medo foi superado, foi tomada pela angústia de que se desintegraria ou estouraria por causa da excitação.”
“Nos homens a sensação da ejaculação esconde freqüentemente a angústia de orgasmo. Nas mulheres, a angústia de orgasmo aparece na sua forma pura. As suas mais freqüentes angústias são de sujar-se durante a excitação, de deixar escapar um flato, ou de urinar involuntariamente.” “As mulheres reagem de formas diferentes à angústia de orgasmo. A maior parte delas conserva o corpo imóvel, sempre meio conscientes da atividade sexual. Outras movem o corpo de maneira muito exagerada, porque o movimento delicado produz uma excitação muito grande. As pernas se conservam juntas. A região pélvica é puxada para trás. Como forma de inibir a sensação orgástica, sempre prendem a respiração. Muito estranhamente, não percebi isso até 1935.”
“Se o paciente sofre de um medo hipocondríaco de catástrofe, então toda excitação forte é bloqueada. (…) Assim, é necessário <não perder a cabeça>: é necessário estar constantemente <em guarda>. É necessário <estar alerta>. Essa atitude de vigilância se expressa na fronte e nas pálpebras.” “As neuroses compulsivas caracterizam-se por uma abstinência ascética, rígida e bem racionalizada.”
P. 86: Pelo que pude entender, A Função do Orgasmo nasceu como um artigo ou livreto. O autor trata metalingüisticamente da obra na obra, isto é, fala acerca dela em terceira pessoa; basta lembrarmos que esta é a nona edição, muito posterior à data das primeiras descobertas de Reich sobre o binômio neurose-sexualidade [a posteriori: A Função do Orgasmo é só a primeira das duas partes da obra-maior A Descoberta do Orgone – créditos ao Dimitri]: “Os principais aspectos das minhas descobertas clínicas foram apresentados no meu livro Die Funktion des Orgasmus. Dei o manuscrito a F. no seu apartamento, no dia 6 de maio de 1926; o trabalho lhe fôra dedicado. Pareceu meio aborrecido ao ler o título. Olhou o manuscrito, hesitou por um momento e disse como se estivesse agitado: <Tão grosso?> [em qual sentido?] Não me senti muito à vontade. A sua reação não fôra racional. Era muito polido e normalmente não teria feito uma observação tão cortante. Antes, Freud costumava ler todo manuscrito em poucos dias, fazendo então seu comentário por escrito [tão dissimuladamente quanto Adorno?]. Agora, mais de dois meses se passaram, antes que eu recebesse a sua carta.” “Você mesmo não consegue explicar alguns dos sintomas mais característicos, e toda a sua idéia do deslocamento da libido genital ainda não está muito boa para mim. Entretanto, espero que continue a estudar o problema e chegue, finalmente, a uma solução satisfatória…” Tertuliano, se quisesse ser academicamente universal, devia ter também escrito um panegírico da Humildade.
“Em 1928, foi publicado no jornal psicanalítico o primeiro ensaio sobre o tema [de Análise do Caráter], com o título de <Técnica de Interpretação e Análise das Resistências>. No fim do ano, revi o ensaio e o apresentei ao seminário de técnica. Foi o primeiro dos inúmeros artigos que nos cinco anos seguintes foram compondo o mencionado livro. Deveria ser publicado pela imprensa psicanalítica. Estava justamente lendo as segundas provas tipográficas, quando a comissão executiva da Associação Psicanalítica Internacional decidiu não permitir que o livro saísse com a sua chancela. Hitler acabava de assumir o poder.
O princípio de coerência desenvolveu-se com base nos erros típicos da análise convencional, chamada ortodoxa. Esta seguia a regra de interpretar o material na mesma seqüência em que o paciente o oferecia, sem considerar a estratificação e a profundidade. Sugeri que as resistências fossem tratadas sistematicamente, começando-se com a que estivesse mais próxima da superfície psíquica e tivesse particular importância imediata. A neurose devia ser combatida de uma posição segura. Toda quantidade de energia psíquica liberada pela dissolução das funções de defesa deveria reforçar as exigências instintivas inconscientes e, dessa forma, torná-las mais acessíveis. Uma remoção sistemática dos estratos da couraça do caráter deveria levar em conta a estratificação dos mecanismos neuróticos. Interpretações diretas da matéria instintiva inconsciente podiam apenas romper esse trabalho, e assim deviam ser evitadas. O paciente devia primeiro entrar em contato consigo mesmo antes de poder compreender as relações dos seus diversos mecanismos neuróticos. Enquanto a couraça funcionasse, o paciente podia, no máximo, conseguir uma compreensão intelectual da sua situação. De acordo com a experiência, isso tinha um efeito terapêutico secundário.”
Desconhecia a caducidade do método de associação livre antes de ler este livro: “Como a couraça limita o paciente, é claro que a sua inabilidade para expressar-se faz parte da enfermidade. Não é má vontade, como pensavam muitos analistas. A solução correta do encouraçamento psíquico rígido deve levar finalmente à relaxação da angústia. Liberada a angústia estásica, têm-se todas as possibilidades de estabelecer uma energia que flua livremente e, em combinação com ela, a potência genital.”
“Já sabia que o como, a forma do comportamento e das comunicações, era muito mais importante do que o quê o paciente dizia ao analista. As palavras podem mentir. A expressão nunca mente. Embora as pessoas não tenham consciência disso, a expressão é a manifestação imediata do caráter [lição primeiro aprendida com a Tharsila]. Aprendi, com o tempo, a compreender a forma das próprias comunicações como expressões diretas do inconsciente [cavar, cavar e cavar… nada ainda!]. A necessidade de convencer e de persuadir o paciente diminuiu em importância e logo se tornou supérflua [“pense sobre isso… ou não” – V.H.]. O que quer que o paciente não entendesse espontânea e automaticamente não tinha nenhum valor terapêutico. Atitudes de caráter tinham de ser entendidas espontaneamente. A compreensão intelectual do inconsciente era substituída pela percepção imediata do paciente da sua própria expressão. Deixei de empregar a terminologia psicanalítica com os meus pacientes. Isso, por si mesmo, afastava a possibilidade de esconderem um sentimento atrás de uma palavra. O paciente não falava mais do seu ódio: sentia-o.”
“As transferências de amor e de ódio para o analista perderam o seu caráter mais ou menos acadêmico. Uma coisa é falar sobre o erotismo anal da própria infância, ou lembrar-se de que um dia foi sentido; muito diferente é experimentá-lo durante a sessão como uma necessidade real de expelir um flato e ter, até, que ceder à necessidade.”
“Muitas regras psicanalíticas tinham um caráter inerente e forte de tabu, que apenas reforçava os tabus neuróticos do paciente no campo sexual. Assim, por exemplo, a regra era que o analista não devia ser visto — mas deveria permanecer, por assim dizer, como uma folha branca de papel, na qual o paciente inscreveria as suas transferências. Esse procedimento não eliminava, antes reforçava, o sentimento do paciente, de estar lidando com um ser <invisível>, inatingível e sobre-humano, i.e., em termos de um modo de pensar infantil, com um ser assexuado. Assim, como podia o paciente superar a timidez que se encontrava na raiz da sua enfermidade? Tratado dessa forma, tudo o que pertencia à sexualidade permanecia como diabólico e proibido, como algo que devia ser <condenado> ou <sublimado>, a qualquer preço.” “Não considerava curado nenhum paciente que não pudesse, pelo menos, masturbar-se livre de sentimentos de culpa. Atribuía a maior importância à supervisão da vida sexual genital do paciente, durante o tratamento. (Espero que se entenda que isso não tem nada que ver com a teoria de masturbação praticada por alguns analistas.)”
“por mais ampla e multiforme que a minha prática tenha sido, não tive um só caso de suicídio. Foi só muito mais tarde que cheguei a entender os casos de suicídio que ocorriam durante o tratamento. Os pacientes cometiam suicídio quando a sua energia sexual fôra excitada mas era impedida de conseguir uma descarga adequada.”
“Era claro que os impulsos anti-sociais que enchem o inconsciente são viciosos e perigosos apenas enquanto está bloqueada a descarga de energia biológica por meio da sexualidade. Se este é o caso, há apenas, basicamente, três saídas patológicas: impulsividade autodestrutiva desenfreada (vício, alcoolismo, crime causado por sentimentos de culpa, impulsividade psicopata, assassínio sexual, violação de crianças, etc.); neuroses de caráter por inibição dos instintos (neurose compulsiva, histeria de angústia, histeria de conversão); e psicoses funcionais (esquizofrenia, paranóia, melancolia ou insanidade maníaco-depressiva). Estou omitindo os mecanismos neuróticos operantes na política, na guerra, no casamento, na educação das crianças, etc.”
NO DIVÃ…
– Quê que tá pegando, bicho?
– Faço a menor Idéia, meu!
– Jocasta, talvez?
– Não, ela ocupa a posição passiva…
– Disso eu entendo, afinal sou um anal-ista…
– He-he [forçada]
– Parabéns!
– Pelo quê?!
– Meu intuito nesta sessão era arrancar-lhe inconscientemente este seu desejo latente de rir de uma fria piada instrumental, de um jogo de linguagem [ba]c(a[na-l]. Isso fará de você, a médio prazo, um analisando menos banana!…
– Como pode ser tão cruel, Senhor Doutor?! Me comparando a um objeto passivo, devorado o tempo todo por macacos, o Pai do Homem!
– Isso porque eu não mencionei que se tratava de uma Banana Nanica!…
– Dizem que banana dá muito, em todas as estações do ano…
– Seja no litoral, seja no interior…
– Mas, desconversando, do que você chamaria o Popeye?!
– Agora o piadista é você?
– Ainda não está na pista?
– Eu diria que é um belo dum Freudiano clássico… Que se revela mormente nos sonhos…
– Por quê? Why? Cause then you pop ‘n eye?
– Porque ele tem PULSÃO!
– De vida ou de morte?
– Ora essa, de vida, pois o espinafre é verde e germina, como machão que é… Agora você paga!
– Como assim?
– É, como eu disse, é uma pulsão devida… Eu te dou motivos para continuar vivo, e fermento o fluxo de caixa em sua carteira…
“Não entendia como é que o tenaz processo neurótico podia ceder tão rapidamente. Não desapareciam apenas os sintomas de angústia neurótica: mudava toda a personalidade do paciente. Eu não conseguia explicá-lo teoricamente.” “A atitude em relação ao trabalho mudou. Se, até então, haviam trabalhado mecanicamente, sem demonstrar nenhum interesse real, considerando trabalho como um mal necessário que uma pessoa assume sem pensar muito, agora se tornavam judiciosos. Se as perturbações neuróticas os haviam impedido antes de trabalhar, agora eram impelidos por uma necessidade de entregar-se a algum trabalho prático, pelo qual pudessem ter um interesse pessoal. Se o trabalho realizado era capaz de absorver os seus interesses, floresciam. Se, porém, era de natureza mecânica, como o do empregado de escritório, o do homem de negócios ou o do funcionário medíocre, então se tornava um peso quase intolerável.” “Em outros casos, houve completo abandono do trabalho quando o paciente se tornou capaz de obter a satisfação genital. Isso parecia confirmar as advertências mal-intencionadas do mundo, de que a sexualidade deixou de ser alarmante. Ficou claro que os últimos eram pacientes que, até então, haviam realizado o seu trabalho com base em um senso compulsivo do dever, à custa dos desejos íntimos a que haviam renunciado; desejos que não eram absolutamente anti-sociais, muito pelo contrário.Uma pessoa que se sentisse mais capacitada para ser um escritor e se empregasse em um escritório de advogado precisaria reunir toda a sua energia para dominar a sua revolta e suprimir os seus impulsos sãos.” “Os pacientes mais difíceis eram os que estavam estudando para o sacerdócio. Inevitavelmente, havia profundo conflito entre a sexualidade e a prática da sua profissão. Resolvi não aceitar mais sacerdotes como pacientes.”
Conservamos todas as utopias de nossa história pessoal. A nossa utosfera ou redetopia ou biotopia.
“O jovem ficaria cada vez mais emaranhado em uma situação difícil. Não apenas se absteria da possibilidade da satisfação instintiva, mas se negaria também a possibilidade de procurar outro objeto.(*) Uma neurose para ambos resultaria necessariamente. Permaneceria a lacuna entre a moralidade e o instinto. Ou o instinto se expressaria de uma forma disfarçada ou corrompida. O jovem poderia, facilmente, desenvolver fantasias compulsivas de violação, impulsos de violação real, ou as características de uma dupla moralidade.(**)Freqüentaria prostitutas e correria o risco de adquirir uma doença venérea. Não haveria nenhuma possibilidade de harmonia interior. De um ângulo puramente social, o resultado não poderia ser mais desastroso, nem a <moralidade>, como quer que seja, teria sido satisfeita.”
(*) COMO DESTRUIR O VELHO MUNDO COM O MARTELO – COMECE POR SI MESMO: Um segundo tudo bem, mas um terceiro? Curso de graduação, a mulher perfeita, o melhor amigo… Um terceiro pai, um terceiro olho, terceiro gênero, terceiro membro colateral?! Um terceiro comprimento de cabelo? Uma série infinita de concursos cada vez mais bem-remunerados? Uma semiótica cada vez mais desnudadora? Temos um limite. Mesmo as brincadeiras atualizáveis da infância (videogame) se cristalizaram e são impedidas no mundo real. Gostam de ser revividas apenas esterilmente, em mil labirintos oníricos. Zum zaravalho… 1, 2, 3, COLÉGIO!!!
(**) Se eu fosse um monge, seria devasso. Se eu fosse mau, eu seria um bom homem.
título LIVRO: CALIGRAFIA DISCURSIVA
“A auto-regulagem segue as leis naturais do prazer; não apenas é compatível com os instintos naturais: é, funcionalmente, idêntica a eles.” “A estrutura psíquica moralista abertamente adere às rígidas leis do mundo moralista; exteriormente adapta-se a elas; e interiormente revolta-se [Não seria esse o comportamento mais natural, em vez de anti-natural? O raciocínio silogístico de Reich parece não percebê-lo. Se se revolta, não é moralista. É uma mulher de César por necessidade.]. Uma pessoa com semelhante estrutura [Inata? Curável?] está constantemente à mercê de inclinações anti-sociais [A sociedade é moralista ou natural? A moral não é uma segunda natureza?] — de natureza tanto compulsiva como impulsiva. A pessoa com uma estrutura auto-regulada e sã não se adapta à parte irracional do mundo; insiste na satisfação dos seus direitos naturais. Parece doente e anti-social [Reich apenas se enrola na prosa, mas começamos a entender o que ele pretende afirmar] aos [olhos dos] moralistas neuróticos. Na realidade, é incapaz de praticar ações anti-sociais. Desenvolve uma autoconfiança natural, baseada na sua [pre]potência sexual[, diria uma Thaís]. Uma estrutura moralista caminha sempre de mãos dadas com uma potência fraca, e a pessoa é constantemente forçada a procurar compensações, i.e., a desenvolver uma autoconfiança artificial e afetada [Vanigracismo]. A felicidade sexual [contradição em termos] dos outros lhe desperta o mau humor [dilema/trampa/doublebind: estaria eu me disfarçando de auto-regulado, ou apenas estagiando no inferno do moralismo, perdido e desorientado?], porque se sente excitado por ela mas é incapaz de gozá-la. Essencialmente, empenha-se na relação sexual apenas para provar a sua potência [U*****]. Para a pessoa que tem uma estrutura genital [auto-regulada], a sexualidade é uma experiência de prazer, e nada mais. O trabalho (*) é uma atividade agradável e uma realização [salto complicado]. Para o indivíduo moralistamente estruturado, o trabalho é um dever cansativo, ou apenas uma necessidade material [que trabalho, cara pálida?].”
(*) Critério de decisão: expediente burocrático ou período de criação e investigação artístico-filosóficas??
“A pessoa que tem uma estrutura moralista [minha cobaia: A******] tem de desenvolver uma couraça que restringe e controla automaticamente todas as ações e funções, e independe de situações exteriores [exemplo concreto: Sempre considerou repulsivo que eu tivesse hábitos que os outros considerariam excêntricos, isto é, fazer listas de objetivos a curto ou médio ou longo prazo, expressar sentimentos ou exprimir-me poeticamente sobre laços de amizade originados na infância (episódio do Orkut). Hoje em dia, caso ainda conservasse contato comigo, ou, abstraindo, se pudéssemos divisar sua rotina na Valec, poderíamos intuir a continuidade desse quadro:A CREDIT TO DEMENTIA: <Qual o nexo de você perder seu tempo manuscrevendo ou digitando essas coisas no horário de almoço ou mesmo enquanto está vago no trabalho? Qual o sentido de ler esses caras? O que você GANHA com isso tudo?!? Pior: por que problematizar, racionalizar, sobre o que eu falo, essa sua própria condição anormal? Mire-me e inspire-se, eu sou o sucesso, o ~padrãozinho~ de nascença. Todas as doenças psicossociais passam por mim resvalando, no máximo de raspão, é isso mesmo, graças a minha condição exuberante desde o berço. Esse é o mito que NÓS nos criamos, percebe? Lembra-se? FRATURA EXPOSTA NOS SEUS SONHOS. Você não me ligou no dia do meu último aniversário porque afinal nós nascemos juntos. Prova disso é que eu me sinto em sintonia com os outros, fazendo o que todo mundo faz, ganho mais que você, tenho o carro do ano e não estou em crise com isso. Moro bem, sou bem-casado… Você só anda com malucos, não sabe nem dirigir, e tenho certeza que é um socialista! Ainda escuta heavy metal e deixa o cabelo e a barba crescerem, como se adolescente sujismundo fosse… Não sabe jogar bola, está acima do peso e fala mal dos outros pelas costas. Tenho pena de você! Inclusive esse eu imaginário que você trata de, realisticamente, que seja!, dotar de vida e incrustar no seu blog, em palavras, é a manifestação literal da sua patologia, a obra de uma mente insana e insanável! Eu, eu sou a prova, que você testemunha de 4 em 4 anos em época de Copa! Você no espelho gostaria de ser-me! Será que eu sei disso, Rafael? Seu sonho é me usar para um dia vender seus livros, eu rendo discursos. Pois bem, bolsominions são vendáveis! E tem mais: enquanto você digita, teima em achar que está sendo observado e julgado! Mas ninguém liga para o que você faz nesse computador o dia todo, simplesmente… Não poderia ser mais curto, ferino e grosso… Por que eu sou tão importante para VOCÊ VOCÊ VOCÊ?!?!?!?! My mother once said: you need Morals, you need Christian Morals, to survive and educate children in this world…You need my Son always in your unconscious, you need to be an A.A.V II’s Dad! Otherwise, it won’t work, I’m predicting, I’m prophesying> — Affectionately, Sphinx].”
DIREITO DE RESPOSTA AUTODADO: – É verdade, eu só queria um mundo em que ainda pudéssemos ser melhores amigos, em que você existisse e eu também (por incrível que pareça nem 2 desses 3 fatores podem coexistir… Se você existe e é meu amigo, eu não existo como tal; se eu e você existimos, não somos amigos como tais; se eu existo e sou seu amigo, você não é isso que você é, a negação mais positivada da carne que eu jamais testemunhei!
“A regulagem moralista não pode ser destruída a menos que seja substituída por algo diferente, e melhor.”
“Desempenho reativo do trabalho: O trabalho é executado de modo mecânico, forçado e maçante; enfraquece os desejos sexuais e é diametralmente oposto a eles. Só pequenas quantidades da energia biológica podem ser descarregadas na sua execução. O trabalho é essencialmente desagradável. As fantasias sexuais são fortes e interrompem o trabalho. Por isso, têm de ser reprimidas, criando mecanismos neuróticos, que reduzem ainda mais a capacidade para o trabalho. A redução do rendimento de trabalho sobrecarrega todo impulso amoroso com sentimentos de culpa. A auto-confiança é enfraquecida. Isso acarreta fantasias neuróticas compensatórias de grandeza.”
R. – The Sexual Revolution
“Essas reuniões mensais na casa de Freud eram abertas apenas aos titulares da Sociedade Psicanalítica. Todos sabiam que se diziam palavras da maior importância e que se tomavam importantes decisões. Era preciso considerar cuidadosamente o que se dizia. A psicanálise tornara-se um movimento muito controvertido, de âmbito mundial. A responsabilidade era enorme, mas não era do meu feitio fugir parodiando a verdade: devia apresentar o problema exatamente como era, ou calar-me. A última hipótese já não era possível. O meu trabalho político-sexual adquirira autonomia”
“O que é que se deve fazer quando a mulher, apesar de um desejo consciente, tem a vagina seca?” “Por que é que os homens gostam tanto de conversar entre eles sobre as suas relações com as mulheres?” “O ato sexual entre irmão e irmã é punido na União Soviética?” “Um operário estava casado com uma mulher gravemente doente que, havia anos, não podia deixar o leito. Tinham três crianças pequenas e uma filha de 18 anos. A moça tomou o lugar da mãe, cuidava das crianças e do pai. Não havia problemas. Dormia com o pai. Tudo ia muito bem. Ela continuava a tomar conta da família, a cozinhar, a cuidar da casa. O pai trabalhava e cuidava da mulher doente. A filha era boa para os irmãos menores. O povo começou a murmurar. A polícia de costumes foi chamada. O pai foi detido, acusado de incesto e jogado à prisão. As crianças foram postas no asilo. A família desabou. A filha teve de empregar-se como criada em uma casa estranha. Por quê?” “O que é que se deve fazer quando se quer ter uma relação sexual e há outras pessoas dormindo no mesmo quarto?” “O meu filho tem 3 anos e vive brincando com o pênis. Tento puni-lo, mas não adianta. Faz mal?” “Eu me masturbo todos os dias — casualmente três vezes no mesmo dia. É prejudicial à minha saúde?” “Zimmermann – um inovador suíço – diz que, para evitar a gravidez, o homem deve impedir a ejaculação não se movendo dentro da mulher. É verdade? Dói!” “Qual deve ser o relacionamento entre meninos e meninas em um acampamento de férias?” “A leucorréia [corrimento vulvovaginal esbranquiçado] é causada pela masturbação?”
“Nesses serões, dedicados à discussão da profilaxia das neuroses e à questão da cultura, Freud a princípio exprimia claramente as opiniões que haviam sido publicadas em Civilization and its Discontents, em 1931 e que muitas vezes estavam em evidente desacordo com a posição assumida por ele em The Future of an Illusion.”O Mal-Estar na Civilização/Modernidade como reação freudiana a Reich.
“A neurose é uma epidemia que age debaixo da superfície. A humanidade, como um todo, está psiquicamente enferma.” Problema infinito “Segundo os dados estatísticos que eu havia compilado em diversas organizações e grupos de jovens, podia demonstrar-se que não menos de 60 e até 80% dessas pessoas eram afligidas por graves moléstias neuróticas. E é preciso ter em mente que essas cifras representam apenas os sintomas neuróticos conscientes; não incluem as neuroses de caráter, das quais os membros dessas organizações não suspeitam.” “em reuniões de sociedades fechadas (por exemplo: organizações de livres pensadores, grupos de estudantes e de operários, todos os tipos de grupos jovens politicamente orientados, etc.), que não tinham nenhuma atração para os neuróticos, a percentagem de neuroses sintomáticas era apenas, em média, 10% mais baixa que a das reuniões abertas. Nos 6 centros de orientação que estavam sob a minha supervisão, em Viena, uns 70% dos que vinham em busca de ajuda e de conselho precisavam de tratamento psicanalítico. Apenas uns 30%, homens e mulheres que sofriam de neuroses estásicas de tipo médio, podiam ser ajudados por meio de orientação e ajuda social.”
“qual é, na vida, o destino posterior dessas pessoas sãs? Não terão uma vida fácil: isso é certo. Entretanto, sem a ajuda da <organoterapia espontânea da neurose> (emprego a expressão para designar a solução orgástica das tensões), superam o laço patológico que as liga à família, e também os efeitos da miséria sexual da sociedade.”
“O flagelo maciço das neuroses é produzido em três estágios principais da vida humana: na primeira infância, através da atmosfera de um lar neurótico; na puberdade, e finalmente no casamento compulsivo, na sua concepção estritamente moralista.”
“Adolescentes que encontram o seu caminho dentro da verdadeira vida da sexualidade e do trabalho, rompem o laço que os ligava aos pais, e que fôra adquirido na infância. Os outros, seriamente afetados pela frustração específica determinada pela inibição sexual, regridem mais que nunca para a situação de infância. É por essa razão que a maior parte das neuroses e psicoses se desenvolve na puberdade.”
“Age-se com hipocrisia quando se permite legalmente a um, ou uma, adolescente que se case na véspera do seu 16º aniversário — proclamando assim que as relações sexuais não são nocivas nesse caso — ao passo que, ao mesmo tempo, se exige o <ascetismo até o dia do casamento>, mesmo que este não se possa realizar antes que o homem, ou a mulher, tenha os seus 30.”
“A rebelião típica dos adolescentes contra o lar paterno não é uma manifestação neurótica da puberdade, mas uma preparação para a função social que esses jovens terão de desempenhar mais tarde, como adultos. Eles têm de lutar pela sua própria capacidade e pelo seu progresso.”
“A saúde psíquica se caracteriza não pela teoria do Nirvana dos iogues e budistas, nem pelo hedonismo dos epicuristas (*) ou pela renúncia do monasticismo; caracteriza-se pela alternância entre a luta desagradável e a felicidade, entre o erro e a verdade, entre a derivação e a volta ao rumo, entre o ódio racional e o amor racional; em suma, pelo fato de se estar plenamente vivo em todas as situações da vida.
(*) A expressão emprega-se aqui no seu sentido vernacular. Na verdade, Epicuro e a sua escola não têm, além do nome, nada em comum com a chamada filosofia epicurista da vida. A filosofia natural séria de Epicuro foi mal-entendida pelas massas semi-educadas e não-educadas como defensora da satisfação dos impulsos secundários. Não há como evitar essas falsificações de idéias verdadeiras. A economia sexual é traída pelo mesmo fato — pelos que sofrem da angústia de prazer, por uma ciência que teme a sexualidade.”
“A capacidade de suportar o desprazer e a dor sem se tornar amargurado e sem procurar o refúgio no encouraçamento caminha lado a lado com a capacidade de receber a felicidade e de dar o amor. Como salientou Nietzsche, aquele que poderia <exaltar-se até atingir as culminâncias do céu> deve estar preparado para <ser mergulhado na morte>.” Human being against the turtle-in-us
“As necessidades sexuais podem ser satisfeitas com um, e mesmo, companheiro durante algum tempo apenas. (…) A satisfação sexual pode prover a base de um casamento feliz. Mas essa mesma satisfação está em desacordo com todos os aspectos da exigência moralista da monogamia vitalícia.” “A intimidade sexual e a amizade humana são substituídas, nas relações conjugais, por uma fixação paterna ou materna e por mútua dependência escravizante: em suma, por um incesto disfarçado. Hoje esses temas são lugares-comuns, há muito tempo descritos pormenorizadamente, que só padres, psiquiatras, reformistas sociais e políticos continuam, em grande número, a ignorar.”
“Biologicamente, o organismo humano são necessita de 3000 ou 4000 atos sexuais ao longo dos 30 ou 40 anos em que é genitalmente ativo.” Média de uma transa a cada 5 dias.
“Os elementos do caos sexual são inter-relacionados. A proibição da masturbação na infância reforça na mulher a angústia de sentir a vagina penetrada ou tocada, levando-a a temer o uso de meios anticoncepcionais.”
“a psicanálise, embora correta como psicologia individual, não tinha importância social. Era assim que falavam os marxistas que simpatizavam com a psicanálise.” R. – Dialektischer Materialismus und Psychoanalyse
“Deixava os meus manuscritos permanecerem na gaveta do meu escritório durante anos, antes de me sentir suficientemente seguro para publicá-los. Ser esperto era algo que eu podia deixar para os outros.”
“Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, hat auch Religion,
Wer jene beiden nicht besitzt,
der habe Religion!”
“Aquele que tem Ciência e Arte também tem Religião,
Aquele que ambas não tem,
que esse tenha Religião!”
Goethe
“Hoje, encarando o perigo universal, o mundo inteiro percebe aquilo que há 12 anos apenas se mencionava.”
“Toda a política da cultura (filmes, romances, poesia, etc.) gira em torno do elemento sexual e medra sobre a sua renúncia na realidade e a sua afirmação no ideal. As indústrias e a propaganda capitalizam-no.”
CONTRA O PAPA: “Admitir a possibilidade da felicidade humana teria sido a mesma coisa que admitir a incorreção da teoria do instinto de morte.” “Hoje entendo também a necessidade da sua resignação. Durante uma década e meia, ele havia lutado pelo reconhecimento de fatos simples. Os seus colegas de profissão o tinham caluniado, o haviam chamado de charlatão, e posto em dúvida a sinceridade das suas intenções. Freud não era um pragmatista social, <apenas> um cientista; mas era um cientista cuidadoso e honesto. O mundo não podia mais continuar a negar a existência da vida psíquica inconsciente e assim se valeu da sua antiga manobra de corrupção: enviou-lhe muitos estudantes, que chegaram a uma mesa servida e não tiveram de preocupar-se com a cozinha. Tinham apenas um interesse: popularizar a psicanálise o mais depressa possível. [ninguém obrigou Fraud a isso: ele foi o mais desejoso desse processo abestalhador!] (…) Freud sabia em 1929 que, apesar de todo o meu entusiasmo juvenil, eu estava certo. Admiti-lo, porém, significaria sacrificar a metade da organização psicanalítica.”“A maior tragédia de Freud é que ele procurava refúgio em teorias biológicas, em vez de calar-se ou de deixar que cada um fizesse o que bem entendesse. Foi isso o que o levou a contradizer-se.” “O sofrimento causado pelas relações do sujeito com outras pessoas, disse Freud, é mais doloroso que qualquer outro. As pessoas têm a tendência de encará-lo como um aborrecimento superficial, mas não é menos fatal ou mais evitável do que o sofrimento que tem outras origens. Aqui, Freud dá voz às suas próprias experiências amargas com a espécie humana. Aqui, atinge o problema econômico-sexual de estrutura, i.e., a irracionalidade que determina o comportamento de um homem. Eu mesmo tive dolorosa amostra disso na organização psicanalítica, organização cuja tarefa profissional deveria consistir no controle médico do comportamento irracional.” “Freud estava desiludido. A princípio, pensava haver descoberto a terapia radical das neuroses. Na realidade, isso fôra apenas um começo. Era muito mais complicado do que sugeria a fórmula de tornar o inconsciente consciente. Sustentava que a psicanálise podia abraçar não apenas problemas médicos, mas problemas universais da existência humana. Mas não encontrou o seu caminho na sociologia.”
“Uma criança brinca de maneira natural. É coibida pelo seu ambiente. A princípio, defende-se contra a coibição. Vencida, preserva apenas a defesa contra a limitação do prazer, sob a forma de reações irracionais de despeito, destituídas de objetivo, e patológicas. Da mesma forma, o comportamento humano reflete apenas as contradições entre a afirmação de vida e a negação de vida no próprio processo social. A psicanálise tornou-se uma <teoria de adaptação cultural> abstrata e portanto conservadora, cheia de contradições insolúveis.”
“influenciando os impulsos instintivos, e não o mundo que obriga as pessoas a viverem com o desejo, é que o homem poderia esperar libertar-se de uma certa dose de sofrimento. A finalidade dessa influência estaria em dominar as pontes interiores das necessidades. De um modo radical, isso poderia conseguir-se matando os instintos, como ensinado pela filosofia oriental e posto em prática pela ioga. Esses são os argumentos de Freud, o homem que, incontestavelmente, pôs diante do mundo a verdade da sexualidade infantil e da repressão sexual!” “Eu sabia que um dia todos os espíritos da escuridão e do medo à vida apontariam Freud como o seu chefe.”
“O amor sexual proporciona as mais fortes sensações de prazer e é o protótipo do anseio de felicidade em geral. Mas uma pessoa nunca está menos protegida contra o sofrimento do que quando ama, e nunca está mais desamparadamente infeliz do que quando perde o objeto amado, ou o amor.”
“No sentido estrito da palavra, a história e a mitologia primitivas são reproduções da economia sexual da espécie humana.”
“Eu visava a descobrir os motivos inconscientes de um homem como Freud, que se pôs, e à sua autoridade, no ápice de uma ideologia conservadora e, com a sua teoria da civilização, destruiu aquilo que havia realizado por meio de um trabalho contínuo como cientista natural e como médico. Não podia haver dúvidas de que não agira assim por covardia intelectual ou por conservadoras razões políticas.”
EUNUCO, O POLÍTICO MAIS CRUEL
“A supressão sexual tem a função de tornar o homem dócil à autoridade exatamente como a castração dos garanhões e dos touros tem a função de produzir satisfeitos animais de carga.”
O precoce tem sua vendeta na velhice, que lhe é mais confortável e contemporânea.
“era precisamente essa a questão que os acontecimentos sociais, por volta de 1930, tornavam imperativa. Foi o dilúvio fascista que varreu a Alemanha como um macaréu [enchente, cheia, onda fluvial acarretada pelo encontro da água do mar com a correnteza de um rio em momento de maré alta], surpreendendo a todos e fazendo com que muitos se perguntassem como podia acontecer semelhante coisa. Economistas, sociólogos, reformistas culturais, diplomatas e homens de Estado procuravam por uma resposta nos livros antigos. Mas os livros antigos não continham nenhuma explicação desses fenômenos. Não havia um só modelo político que facilitasse uma compreensão das emoções humanas irracionais que o fascismo representava. Nunca, antes, a própria alta política havia sido posta em xeque coma estrutura irracional.”
“O psicanalista inglês Ernest Jones protestou categoricamente contra esse argumento funcional e sociológico afirmando que o complexo de Édipo descoberto no homem europeu era a fons et origo de toda a cultura. Por isso, a família dos dias de hoje era uma instituição biológica imutável.”
“A poucas milhas das ilhas de Trobriand, nas ilhas de Amphlett, vivia uma tribo com um sistema patriarcal baseado na autoridade da família. Todas as características dos neuróticos europeus (desconfiança, angústia, neuroses, suicídios, perversões, etc.) já eram evidentes nos nativos dessas ilhas.” Não sei por que lamentamos tanto o fim do patriarcado. O mal de ver a casa desabar de dentro? Enfim, 30 anos de neurose, desconfiança, angústia, perversões e, bem, pelo menos de 5 a 7 anos com pensamentos suicidas em nível moderado são o que meu pai me legou enquanto vivi sob este teto. Feliz dia dos pais (13 de agosto de 2017)!
“O casamento de primos cruzados encontrou-se em toda parte onde a pesquisa etnológica pôde provar a existência atual ou histórica do matriarcado (cf. Morgan, Bachofen, Engels e outros). Exatamente como as nossas, essas crianças são obrigadas a viver vida ascética; demonstram as mesmas neuroses e traços de caráter que conhecemos nos neuróticos de caráter.”
“Uma humanidade que tem sido forçada, por milhares de anos, a negar a sua lei biológica e que, em conseqüência dessa negação, adquiriu uma segunda natureza — que é uma anti-natureza — pode apenas debater-se em exaltação irracional quando quer restaurar a sua função biológica básica e, ao mesmo tempo, teme fazê-lo.” “Na superfície, usa a máscara artificial do autocontrole, da insincera polidez compulsiva e pseudo-socialidade. Essa máscara esconde o segundo estrato, o <inconsciente> freudiano, no qual sadismo, avareza, sensualidade, inveja, perversões de toda sorte, etc., são mantidos sob controle, não sendo entretanto privados da mais leve quantidade de energia. Esse segundo estrato é o produto artificial de uma cultura negadora do sexo e, em geral, é sentido conscientemente como um enorme vazio interior e desolação. Por baixo disso, na profundidade, existem e agem socialidade e a sexualidade naturais, a alegria espontânea no trabalho e a capacidade para o amor. Esse terceiro e mais profundo estrato, que representa o cerne biológico da estrutura humana, é inconsciente e temido. Está em desacordo com todos os aspectos da educação e do controle autoritários.” “Uma das suas características mais essenciais veio a ser essa de sentir-se felicíssimo em atirar a sua responsabilidade de si mesmo para cima de algum führer ou político —, pois não se compreende mais e, na verdade, teme a si mesmo e às suas instituições. Está desamparado, é incapaz para a liberdade e suspira pela autoridade porque não pode reagir espontaneamente; está encouraçado e quer que se lhe diga o que deve fazer [complexo de Shinji], pois é cheio de contradições e não pode confiar em si mesmo.”
desamparado se depara com o desânimo, esse mundo parado
don’t tell me what ta do
don’t go travel to the United States of Claustrophobia
Hitler morreu… e o sociopata já não se sente muito bem…
“O que o verniz superficial da boa educação e um autocontrole artificial havia refreado durante tanto tempo irrompia agora em ação, completado pelas próprias multidões em luta pela liberdade: nos campos de concentração, na perseguição aos judeus, na aniquilação de toda a decência humana, na destruição sádica e divertida de cidades inteiras por aqueles que só são capazes de sentir a vida quando marcha o seu passo de ganso [*], como em Guernica [**], em 1936 (…) uma dança de São Vito [***] que voltará sempre”
[*] Cadência militar não criada mas apropriada pelo nazismo e que hoje se conserva como um símbolo seu.
[**] Massacre (bombardeio aéreo) de civis pelas próprias forças aliadas (já que o Franquismo se aliou ao Nazifascismo às vésperas da Guerra) na cidade de mesmo nome. 1937. O número de vítimas parece risível hoje em dia: não chegou a 1000. Parece um daqueles fatos históricos banais que só repercutem mesmo em sua forma artística.
[***] Febre reumática e mal nervoso que gera espasmos involuntários em músculos dos membros e da face, geralmente em bebês. Excerto Wiki:“Sydenham’s chorea is characterized by the abrupt onset (sometimes within a few hours) of neurologic symptoms, classically chorea [a dança dos pés e das mãos], usually affecting all four limbs. Other neurologic symptoms include behavior change, dysarthria, gait disturbance, loss of fine and gross motor control with resultant deterioration of handwriting, headache, slowed cognition, facial grimacing, fidgetiness and hypotonia.”
CAMPO DE LABORATÓRIO DE CONCENTRAÇÃO: “Em 1928-30, ao tempo da controvérsia com Freud, eu sabia muito pouco sobre o fascismo; quase tão pouco quanto a média dos noruegueses em 1939, ou a média dos americanos em 1940. Foi só em 1930-33 que comecei a conhecê-lo na Alemanha. Senti-me desamparadamente perplexo quando redescobri nele, aos poucos, o assunto da controvérsia com Freud.” “O fascismo alemão deixou bem claro que não operava com o pensamento e a sabedoria do povo, mas com as suas reações emocionais infantis. Nem o seu programa político nem qualquer das suas muitas e confusas promessas econômicas levaram o fascismo ao poder e o garantiu aí no período seguinte: mas sim, em grande parte, foi o apelo a um sentimento místico e obscuro, a um desejo vago e nebuloso, mas extraordinário e poderoso. Aqueles que não entenderam isso não entenderam o fascismo que é um fenômeno internacional.” “o fascismo não era uma nova filosofia de vida, como os seus amigos e muitos dos seus inimigos queriam fazer o POVO acreditar; ainda menos tinha qualquer coisa que ver com uma revolução racional contra condições sociais intoleráveis. O fascismo é meramente a extrema conseqüência reacionária de todas as anteriores formas não-democráticas de liderança dentro da estrutura do mecanismo social.” “O desapontamento por parte de milhões de pessoas quanto às organizações liberais, mais a crise econômica, mais um irresistível desejo de liberdade, produzem a mentalidade fascista, i.e., o desejo de entregar-se a uma figura autoritária de pai.”
“As massas populares pareciam sentir que as sugestões a respeito das <técnicas de amor> tais como as que lhes dava Van de Velde, embora fossem um bom negócio, não tinham realmente nada que ver com o que procuravam, nem eram atraentes.”
“obrigados a dizer <procriação eugênica superior> quando queriam significar <felicidade no amor>, as massas congregaram-se em torno de Hitler”
“Todo ser humano percebe em si mesmo aquilo que se chama de <sentimentos oceânicos ou cósmicos>. A seca ciência acadêmica sentia-se orgulhosa demais para ocupar-se com semelhante misticismo. Esse anseio cósmico ou oceânico que as pessoas sentem não é senão a expressão do seu desejo orgástico pela vida. Hitler fez um apelo a esse desejo, e é por essa razão que as multidões o seguiram, e não aos secos racionalistas, que tentavam sufocar esses vagos sentimentos de vida com estatísticas econômicas.”
preservação da família überalles
perversão
cada um per se
ser 0.0 final solutionversion
perseveração
perversão de cão
“afastando o jovem — da família para os grupos da juventude —, o fascismo levava em consideração tanto os laços familiais quanto a rebelião contra a família.”
“Quando o fascista diz <judeu>, designa uma sensação irracional definida. Irracionalmente, o <judeu> representa o <fazedor de dinheiro>, o <usurário>, o <capitalista>. Isso foi confirmado pelo tratamento psicológico de profundidade de judeus e não-judeus, igualmente [?]. Em nível mais profundo,o conceito de judeu significa <sujo>, <sensual>, <bestialmente sexual>, mas também <Shylock>, <castrador>, <assassino>.” “Francês para o alemão tem o mesmo significado que judeu e negro têm para o inglês inconscientemente fascista. Judeu, francês e negro são palavras que significam <sexualmente sensuais>. Esses são os fatores inconscientes que permitiram que o moderno propagandista sexual do século XX, o psicopata sexual e pervertido criminoso Julius Streicher[*], pusesse o seu Der Stürmer nas mãos de milhões de adolescentes e adultos alemães. Nas páginas do Der Stürmer, mais que em qualquer outra parte, ficou claro que a higiene sexual deixara de ser um problema das sociedades médicas; tornara-se muito mais uma questão de decisiva significação social.”
[*] Wiki: “Within the pages of Mein Kampf, Hitler even praised Streicher for subordinating the German Socialist Party to the Nazi Party, a move Hitler believed was essential to the success of the National Socialists.”
“Freud psicologizou a biologia. Disse que há no campo da vida <tendências> que <pretendem> umas coisas e outras. Isso era um ponto de vista metafísico. A sua crítica foi justificada pelas posteriores provas experimentais da natureza funcional simples dos processos instintivos.” “Se uma criança quebrava uma vidraça, esse ato se encarava como a expressão do instinto destrutivo. Se caía freqüentemente, isso se encarava como o efeito do instinto mudo de morte. Se a mãe a deixava sozinha e a criança brincava indo e voltando, isso se encarava como o efeito de uma <compulsão de repetição além do princípio de prazer>.”
“O masoquista imagina estar sendo atormentado porque deseja <romper-se>. Só dessa maneira é que espera conseguir a relaxação.” Síndrome de Kuririn ou de Vítima do Hokuto no Ken “Mulheres de caráter masoquista só se podiam entregar às relações sexuais com a fantasia de estarem sendo seduzidas ou violadas. Como se o homem as obrigasse a fazerem aquilo que simultaneamente desejam e temem.” “A conhecida índole vingativa do masoquista, cuja autoconfiança está gravemente abalada, se realiza quando leva o outro a passar mal, ou quando provoca nele um comportamento cruel.” O que o E****** e a M******* efetivamente significam para meu sistema psíquico? “A idéia de que a pele, especialmente a pele das nádegas, se torna <quente> ou <está queimando> é freqüentemente encontrada entre os masoquistas. O desejo de ser esfregado com uma escova dura, ou de apanhar até que a pele <se rompa> não é senão o desejo de conseguir a liberação de uma tensão por meio de uma explosão. Assim, a dor não é de maneira nenhuma o objetivo do impulso; é simplesmente uma experiência desagradável durante a liberação de uma tensão sem dúvida real. O masoquismo é o protótipo de um impulso secundário, e demonstra por força o resultado da repressão da função de prazer natural.” “sem que o pretendesse, eu havia descoberto a natureza dinâmica de todas as religiões e filosofias do sofrimento.”
“A perturbação do orgasmo do masoquista difere da perturbação de outros neuróticos pelo fato de que, no momento da mais alta excitação, o masoquista é possuído pelo espasmo e o conserva. Dessa forma, cria uma contradição entre a expansão acentuada que está a ponto de ocorrer e a contração súbita. Todas as outras formas de impotência orgástica inibem antes de ser atingido o ápice da excitação. Essa diferença sutil, que pareceria ter apenas um interesse acadêmico, decidiu o destino do meu trabalho científico. Está claro pelas minhas notas, entre 1928 e mais ou menos 1934, que o fundamento do meu trabalho experimental no campo da biologia, até o momento das experiências com o bíon, foi preparado nesse período.”
“Se a excitação atingiu o ápice e exige uma descarga completa, o espasmo da musculatura pélvica tem o mesmo efeito que o puxar o freio de mão de um carro a 75 milhas por hora; tudo é lançado em confusão. O mesmo acontece ao paciente em um genuíno processo de cura.”
ESCORRIDO
Espasmos no vaso
espasmos no vazio
no vácuo
vácuo emocional
zero prazer
prazero
vazamento
“A imagem do caráter humano como uma couraça [crosta morta] em volta do cerne do organismo vivo era extremamente significativa. Se uma bexiga [extremamente elástica] dessas fosse colocada em uma situação insolúvel de tensão e pudesse exprimir-se, lamentar-se-ia. Desamparadamente vencida, procuraria fora de si mesma as causas do seu sofrimento e se queixaria. Pediria para ser aberta com furos. Provocaria os que a cercam até pensar que havia atingido o seu objetivo [<O que será que ele quer? Acho que ele é enrolado!> consórcio V****-T****; minha vida é um VT: crise sempre repetida, autotransmitida impunemente. Meu agradecimento às heroínas amazonas.]. O que ela não conseguia realizar espontaneamente, de dentro para fora, esperaria passiva e desamparadamente do mundo exterior.”
“O paciente neurótico desenvolve uma <rigidez> na periferia do corpo, conservando embora um cerne interior vivo. Sente-se <constrangido dentro da sua própria pele>, <inibido>, incapaz de <compreender-se a si mesmo>, como se <estivesse emparedado>, <sem contato> e <tenso a ponto de romper-se>. Esforça-se, por todos os meios disponíveis, <em direção ao mundo> mas é como se <estivesse amarrado>. Mais que isso, os seus esforços para entrar em contato com a vida são freqüentemente dolorosos; está tão mal preparado para suportar as dificuldades e desapontamentos da vida, que prefere <arrastar-se dentro de si mesmo>.” Epilepsia como convulsão orgástica?
“Estava claro que a ejaculação do sêmen sozinha não podia ser responsável por isso, pois a ejaculação sem prazer não reduz a tensão.”
“Que o soma [corpo] influencia a psique é correto; é uma afirmação correta, mas unilateral. O reverso, i.e., que a psique condiciona o soma é coisa que pode ser vista freqüentemente. Não se pode alargar o campo psíquico a ponto de tornar válidas as suas leis para o soma.”
“Na excitação sexual, os vasos periféricos se dilatam. Na angústia, sente-se uma tensão interior centralizada como se fosse explodir, os vasos periféricos se contraem.”
“Daí em diante, descobri que sempre que eu dissolvia uma tensão muscular, irrompia uma das três excitações básicas do corpo — angústia, ódio ou excitação sexual.”
CAMINHOS DE RESOLUÇÃO DA ANGÚSTIA
(ENSAIO EXPERIMENTAL AUTOBIOGRÁFICO):
vamos associar cada uma das 3 excitações a “representantes” antropomórficos:
“MUNDANÍSSIMA TRINDADE”
angústia – colegas
ódio – pai
libido – a ex
CENÁRIO 1
2008
tensão gerada pela sensação de abandono e isolamento > “alcoolismo” > Maniax e Jardim Ingá > força anestésica da ressaca (descompasso) > bipolaridade semanal (interiorização das obrigações x escape ideal) > amigos apenas na 2ª instância (a ideal) > tentativa de realização do ideal na figura M**** > reação à recusa na intoxicação e misticismo > cena da fogueira > alucinação noturna > experimentação singular do triplo orgasmo múltiplo > enfraquecimento do sentimento inicial > primeiras dormências nas mãos (tremores nos dedos)
CENÁRIO 2
2009-10
discussões filho-pai > ódio concentrado (rompantes de fúria) > adormecimento consciente (transição com remorso e dor nas costas – sensação de abandono ou absurdo – textos “O ÓRFÃO”; “O INCOMUNICÁVEL”, etc., demonstrando o grande solipsismo em que me achava) > tratamento “musical” (…And Justice for All) > a longo prazo, transformação do ódio em indiferença (dormência pulsional) > desafetos universitário (Ceariba’s) > autossuficiência (busca recalcitrante) > o caso policialesco de Afrodite
…
Equilíbrio forjado entre a concupiscência, a ascese (masoquismo velado), o rancor, a euforia, a irritabilidade e a completa inércia ou afundamento melancólico. Esperando a improvável ajuda exterior.
Sentir-se atropelado (furacão Sabrina) não é tão ruim assim. Pelo menos o atropelamento não foi interno!
…
CENÁRIO 3
2014
O câncer J***** > a difícil expulsão da cólera adormecida > remorso e paralisia arrastada (falência corporal), purgatório CAPES > ressurgimento (conversão do ódio inicial em fetiche – a inusitada resolução da incompatibilidade entre o ateu combalido e heróico e a evangélica ressentida)
(sensação máxima de audácia no contra-ataque ao harém)
…
mas a represa continua
como em Mariana, as barragens não se rompem
auto-comiseração milica
se não pode com seu inimigo, junte-se a ele
corteje a Morte vestida como a noiva de preto
sua foice é de isopor,
ela só quer ser enrabada
…
Sem dúvida devemos ignorar os gostos ao redor,
Alimentar com rações parcas o cão chamado Ódio que mantemos adestrado (mascote da família),
E cultuar nossa Deusa caseira,
Sim, é isso.
“Podia, agora, eliminar um sorriso amistoso atípico que dificultasse o trabalho analítico, ou descrevendo a expressão ou perturbando a atitude muscular, por exemplo levantando o queixo do paciente.” a extinção dos atendentes de telemarketing
“Alguns fisiologistas pensam que os nervos armazenam excitação, enquanto a contração muscular a descarrega; pois não é o nervo, mas somente o músculo que pode contrair-se e é capaz de descarregar energia.” “Em estado de extensão, a bexiga poderia executar vários movimentos rítmicos; poderia, por exemplo, produzir uma onda de expansão e contração alternadas, como se verifica no movimento de uma lombriga ou na peristase intestinal.” “Uma sociedade formada de semelhantes bexigas criaria as filosofias mais idealísticas a respeito do <estado de ausência de sofrimento>. Como qualquer extensão em direção ao prazer ou motivada pelo prazer poderia ser sentida somente como dolorosa, a bexiga desenvolveria um medo à excitação agradável (angústia de prazer) e criaria teorias sobre a <maldade>, a <propensão para o pecado> e a <ação destrutiva> do prazer. Em suma, seria um asceta do século XX. Conseqüentemente, teria medo de qualquer idéia de possibilidade da tão ardentemente desejada relaxação; e então odiaria semelhante idéia e finalmente perseguiria e mataria qualquer um que falasse a respeito. Juntar-se-ia a outros seres igualmente constituídos, peculiarmente rígidos, e traçariam rígidas normas de vida. Essas normas teriam a função única de garantir a menor produção possível de energia interior, i.e., de garantir a tranqüilidade, a resignação, e a continuidade das reações habituais.” “A bexiga poderia ser sacudida por convulsões que emergiriam subitamente, por meio das quais se descarregaria a energia represada. Por exemplo, poderia ter acessos histéricos ou epiléticos. Poderia, por outro lado, tornar-se completamente rígida e desolada, como ocorre na esquizofrenia catatônica.” “Associar a natureza a convulsões do corpo seria uma blasfêmia. Assim mesmo criaria indústrias de pornografia, sem perceber a contradição.”
“Em um nível fisiológico mais profundo, a expansão corresponde ao funcionamento parassimpático e a contração ao funcionamento simpático. De acordo com as descobertas de Kraus e Zondek, a função do parassimpático pode ser substituída pelo grupo iônico do potássio e a função do simpático pode ser substituída pelo grupo iônico do cálcio.”
A sensação de boca seca está associada à angústia. Em contrapartida, o suor (particularmente o suor frio) é abundante na pessoa angustiada e tensa.
A pele irrigada (rubor) é sinal de expansão (euforia, satisfação). O que permanece confuso para mim: o desconforto do tímido seria um prazer disfarçado?
A produção de adrenalina está relacionada à angústia.
Retenção do esfíncter: euforia; retenção da urina: angústia (apesar de a pessoa sentir mais vontade de ir ao banheiro).
Pênis flácido e escroto rígido: angústia.
Sentimento orgiástico: dissolução do ego, pressentimento de naturalidade (nos comportamos como autômatos, por mais que a expressão esteja “contaminada” pela perspectiva mecânica) e impressão de perfeição, ao contrário do ego prensado e claramente divisável e experimentado, que se sente “falhado” em tudo que executa, constrangido, sem espontaneidade.
Hipertensão: sintoma de que o coração “não vai bem”.
“o mesmo nervo que inibe a glândula salivar estimula a secreção de adrenalina” “Em termos do organismo total, é também significativo que no prazer as pupilas sejam diminuídas pelo parassimpático (correspondendo ao diafragma de uma câmera), aguçando-se assim a visão. [mas não dizem que a pupila se expande até 2 ou 3x para ‘melhor observar’ o objeto amado?] Na paralisia causada pelo medo, ao contrário, a visão diminui, por causa da dilatação das pupilas.”
“Todos os nossos pacientes contam que atravessaram períodos na infância nos quais, por meio de certos artifícios sobre o comportamento vegetativo (prender a respiração, aumentar a pressão dos músculos abdominais, etc.) haviam aprendido a anular os seus impulsos de ódio, de angústia ou de amor. (…) Pode dizer-se que toda rigidez muscular contém a história e o significado da sua origem. Não é como se tivéssemos de deduzir a partir de sonhos ou de associações a maneira como se desenvolveu a couraça muscular;a couraça é a forma na qual a experiência infantil é preservada como obstáculo ao funcionamento.” “Não pode haver dúvidas de que a maior parte do que as pessoas costumam descrever como uma <disposição> ou como uma <constituição instintiva> acabará provando ser um comportamento vegetativo adquirido.” “o afeto reprimido aparece antes da lembrança correspondente. Semelhante aproximação proporciona uma garantia segura da liberação dos afetos, uma vez que a atitude muscular crônica tenha sido entendida e dissolvida com êxito. Quando se tenta liberá-los somente por meio de trabalho no campo psicológico, diminuem-se os afetos por uma questão de sorte.”
“A atitude muscular é idêntica ao que chamamos expressão corporal. Muito freqüentemente não é possível saber se um paciente é hipertônico, ou não. Todavia, com o corpo inteiro, ou com partes dele, <expressa algo>. (…) A esse respeito lembramo-nos da perda da expressão espontânea nas crianças, primeira e mais importante manifestação da supressão sexual final que se dá no quarto ou no quinto ano de vida. Essa perda é experimentada primeiro como <estar morrendo>, como <estar sendo metido em uma couraça> ou como <estar sendo emparedado>. Em alguns casos, esse sentimento de <estar morrendo> ou de <estar morto> pode ser mais tarde compensado parcialmente pela camuflagem de atitudes psíquicas, por exemplo por uma jovialidade superficial ou por uma sociabilidade indireta.”
“Quando, por exemplo, um impulso de chorar deve ser reprimido, não é o lábio inferior que se torna tenso, mas toda a musculatura da boca e do queixo, e assim também a musculatura correspondente da garganta; em suma, todos os órgãos que entram em ação como uma unidade funcional no ato de gritar. Lembramo-nos a esse respeito do conhecido fenômeno de que as pessoas histéricas delimitam os seus sintomas somáticos não de acordo com áreas anatômicas, mas funcionais. Um rubor histérico não segue as ramificações de uma determinada artéria; mas envolve quase exclusivamente o pescoço ou a testa. A função vegetativa do corpo ignora os limites anatômicos, que são indicações superficiais.” A amigdalite crônica como afetos não-resolvidos… Vontade de gritar e de chorar reprimidas.
“a dissolução de uma couraça muscular começa em geral nas partes do corpo mais afastadas dos genitais, habitualmente a cabeça. A atitude facial é a mais visível. A expressão facial e o tom da voz são também as funções que o próprio paciente sente e às quais presta atenção com mais freqüência e cuidado.” Minha expressão sem vida nas fotos sempre me assusta.
“Cabeça e pescoço: dor de cabeça forte é um sintoma encontrado em muitos pacientes. Localiza-se muito freqüentemente acima do pescoço, sobre os olhos ou na testa. Na psicopatologia, essas dores de cabeça definem-se em geral como <sintomas neurastênicos>. Como começam? Se alguém tentar forçar a musculatura do pescoço durante um longo período de tempo, como se fosse evitar um golpe iminente, sentirá logo o aparecimento de uma dor na parte posterior da cabeça, bem acima do ponto no qual a musculatura está tensa. Por isso, a dor na parte posterior da cabeça pode ser reduzida a uma tensão excessiva dos músculos do pescoço. Essa atitude expressa uma angústia contínua de algo perigoso que possa sobrevir por trás; por exemplo, a angústia de ser agarrado pelo pescoço [estranho neo-freudianismo], golpeado na cabeça, etc.” Até hoje não se pratica uma terapia que una os benefícios da acupuntura, fisioterapia e RPG à psicanálise ou psicologia comportamental.
“Alguns pacientes têm uma expressão facial que poderia ser descrita como <arrogante>. A dissolução dessa expressão mostra que é uma atitude de defesa contra uma atenção nervosa ou apreensiva do rosto. Alguns pacientes mostram <a testa de um pensador>. É raro encontrar um paciente que na infância não tenha criado a fantasia de ser um gênio. Habitualmente, essa atitude facial é o resultado de uma defesa contra a angústia, na maior parte das vezes, de natureza masturbatória. Em outros pacientes, observamos uma testa <lisa>, <chata> ou <inexpressiva>. O medo de ser golpeado na cabeça é sempre o motivo dessa expressão.” “Muitas pessoas têm uma expressão facial como uma máscara. (…) a parte inferior da boca é tensa. Esses pacientes sofrem freqüentemente de náuseas. A sua voz é habitualmente baixa, monótona ou <diluída>.” “Nessas condições é inútil tentar falar alto e com voz ressoante. As crianças freqüentemente adquirem essas condições em idade muito tenra, quando são obrigadas a reprimir violentes impulsos de chorar. A concentração contínua de atenção em uma determinada parte do corpo resulta invariavelmente em uma fixação da inervação correspondente.” Maldito Diego, maldito Marcel, maldito Cintra! “Não há possibilidade de eliminar a náusea se a tensão do assoalho da boca não é descoberta (…) Antes que a sensação crônica da náusea possa ser eliminada, a inibição do impulso de chorar tem de ser completamente dissolvida.” “Conhecemos o rosto deprimido da pessoa melancólica. É notável como uma expressão de abatimento pode combinar-se com a mais extrema e crônica tensão da musculatura. Há pessoas que assumem uma expressão continuamente radiante; há aquelas cujas faces são <rígidas> ou <encovadas>.” “O choro reprimido leva facilmente os músculos faciais a uma impermeabilidade de máscara.”
“As perturbações respiratórias nas neuroses são os sintomas que resultam das tensões abdominais. Imagine que você está assustado, ou que prevê um grande perigo. Involuntariamente aspirará o ar e prenderá a respiração. Como a respiração não pode cessar inteiramente, você logo respirará outra vez, mas a expiração não será completa. Será superficial.” Havia momentos na DRI em que eu me sentia quase que debaixo d’água: enquanto o ouvido permanecesse alerta, era sufocante inspirar e expirar. Qualquer gesto ou ruído mais dilatado pareciam me denunciar, me tornar vulnerável.
“Em estado de apreensão, os ombros são involuntariamente levados para a frente, e permanecem nessa atitude rígida. Às vezes são também forçados para cima. Se essa atitude é mantida durante algum tempo, sente-se uma pressão na testa. Tratei vários pacientes nos quais não consegui eliminar a pressão na testa enquanto não descobri a atitude de expectativa amedrontada na musculatura do tórax.”
“Qual a função dessa atitude de <respiração curta>? Se examinarmos a posição dos órgãos internos e a sua relação com o plexo solar, entenderemos imediatamente a situação com que estamos lidando. Em estado de medo, involuntariamente se inspira; estamos pensando na inalação involuntária que ocorre no afogamento e que verdadeiramente causa a morte.”
“<Há algo no meu estômago que não consegue sair> — ou—
<Sinto como se tivesse um prato no estômago> — ou —
<A minha barriga está morta> — ou —
<Preciso segurar a minha barriga> —, etc.
Quase todas as fantasias das crianças sobre a gravidez e o nascimento giram em torno das suas sensações abdominais vegetativas.”
“Pacientes que se queixam de um aperto crônico, assim como de um cinto, ou de um sentimento de pressão, apresentam a musculatura abdominal superior rígida, isto é, dura como uma tábua.”
“À mais leve manifestação de sentimento, <regulava algo no estômago>, prendia a respiração e olhava inexpressivamente para o espaço. Os olhos pareciam vazios; pareciam <voltados para dentro>. A parede abdominal tornava-se tensa e as nádegas encolhiam-se.”
“Era visível entre os seus traços patológicos o fato de ser incapaz de qualquer agressão. Sempre se sentia impelido a ser <amável e polido>, a concordar com tudo o que as pessoas diziam, ainda que expressassem opiniões opostas e contraditórias. Sofria por baixo da superficialidade que regulava a sua vida. Estava sofrendo dessa enfermidade muito comum — uma sociabilidade mal-interpretada e indireta — que se transforma em uma compulsão rígida e destrói intimamente muitas pessoas. (…) A boca dava a impressão de ser pequena e apertada; quase não a movimentava ao falar; os lábios eram estreitos, como se comprimidos um contra o outro. Os olhos careciam de expressão.
Apesar dessa diminuição óbvia e grave da sua mobilidade vegetativa, percebia-se, debaixo da superfície, uma natureza inteligente e muito viva. Era esse, sem dúvida, o fator que lhe permitia tenta resolver as suas dificuldades com grande energia.
O tratamento subseqüente durou 6 meses e ½, com 1 sessão por dia [!].” Demoraria de 2 a 3 anos para freqüentar o mesmo número de sessões semanalmente…
(…) O paciente ficou meio sentado no divã, tremeu de cólera, levantou o punho como se fosse dar um soco, sem entretanto completar o gesto. Então, sem fôlego, recuou exausto. Toda a ação se dissolveu em uma espécie de choro de lamentação. Essas ações expressavam <cólera impotente> semelhante à que as crianças freqüentemente experimentam diante dos adultos.”
“havia, em algum ponto, uma ruptura na conexão entre a excitação muscular vegetativa e a percepção psíquica dessa excitação.”
“Ele sabia que estava expressando uma cólera esmagadora que conservara trancada dentro de si mesmo durante anos. O desligamento emocional desapareceu quando uma crise provocou a lembrança do irmão mais velho, que o havia dominado e maltratado demais quando era criança.”
“Quanto mais intensas se tornavam as ações musculares da face, mais a excitação somática, ainda totalmente desligada do reconhecimento psíquico, se expandia em direção ao tórax e ao abdômen. Várias semanas mais tarde, o paciente contou que durante as contrações no peito, mas principalmente quando essas contrações diminuíam, sentia <correntes> que se estendiam em direção ao baixo abdômen. Nesse meio tempo, separou-se da mulher com a intenção de ligar-se a outra. Entretanto revelou-se no decorrer das semanas seguintes que a pretendida ligação não se realizara. De início o paciente permaneceu indiferente a isso. Depois que lhe chamei a atenção para o fato, foi que tentou, arriscando várias explicações aparentemente plausíveis, interessar-se pelo assunto. Mas era bem evidente que uma interdição interior o impedia de tratar o problema de uma forma realmente afetiva. Como não se costuma, no trabalho de análise do caráter, tratar de um assunto por mais imediato que seja se o paciente não tocar nele por si mesmo de uma forma plenamente afetiva, adiei a discussão do problema”
“Tornava-se cada vez mais claro que o paciente estava resistindo à compreensão do conjunto em todas as suas partes. Nós dois sabíamos que era muito precavido. Não era só na sua atitude psíquica que essa precaução se expressava; nem só no fato de que até certo ponto cooperava, e se adaptava às exigências do trabalho; e no fato de que se tornava meio inamistoso e frio quando o trabalho ultrapassava certos limites.”
“Eu me sinto como um animal primitivo” “Sinto-me como um peixe”
“Era um homem que as mulheres achavam muito atraente; mas por estranho que pareça não se aproveitara muito disso.”
“DEFESA ABDOMINAL. Esse fenômeno existe em todos os neuróticos sem exceção, sempre que se ordena que expirem plenamente e se faz uma leve pressão na parede abdominal uns 3cm abaixo da extremidade do esterno. Isso provoca uma resistência forte dentro do abdômen; ou o paciente experimenta uma dor semelhante à que é causada por uma pressão nos testículos.”
EXPRESSINHO (conforto e carinho): A nostalgia do viaduto: toda criança gosta, e todo adulto gosta, por tabela, nostalgicamente, da sensação da queda, daquele êmulo de dor-de-barriga, típica da montanha-russa ou do carro veloz na ladeira íngreme: o puxar e repuxar, o arrepio convulsivo, no ventre. Dor-prazer de Adão?!
O que significa o aparecimento de crises de bocejo durante a sessão psicanalítica?
[v]idas e (vi)n(das)
“É como uma casca protetora em volta de uma criança. É incrível como posso agora sentir a profundidade do mundo”
Este homem também se angustiava com gorilas quando pequeno: “Agora irrompera afinal. O gorila representava o pai, figura ameaçadora que queria impedi-lo de mamar.”
“A forma forçada e dura da convulsão orgástica correspondia a uma atitude psíquica que dizia: <Um homem é duro e inflexível; qualquer forma de entrega é feminina>.”
Análise do caráter (psiquismo) e Vegetoterapia (somatismo, músculos): dois lados de uma mesma moeda, etapas intercaladas e indissociáveis do processo terapêutico integral.
“Há dois pontos nos quais a inibição sempre se encontra: a garganta e o ânus.” As extremidades do sistema digestório.
Contra o formalismo excessivo: “Em muitos casos, um espasmo sério de garganta não é descoberto enquanto a excitação vegetativa na pélvis não se tenha dissolvido até certo ponto.”
“muitos pacientes sofrem de uma tensão crônica da musculatura dos maxilares, o que dá um aspecto mesquinho à metade inferior do rosto. Na tentativa de empurrar o queixo para baixo, verifica-se forte resistência e rigidez. Se se ordena ao paciente que abra e feche a boca, ele só executa o movimento depois de alguma hesitação e com visível esforço. Mas o paciente deve ser levado, primeiro, a experimentar essa forma artificial de abrir e fechar a boca antes de poder ser convencido de que a mobilidade do seu queixo está inibida.”
“um movimento rítmico da musculatura das sobrancelhas (<tique>) pode funcionar como uma defesa contra um olhar tenso.”
“descobrir as inibições e os pontos onde a fragmentação obstrui a unificação do reflexo do orgasmo”
“Como maneira de preparar e conseguir o reflexo do orgasmo, faço primeiro os meus pacientes inspirarem e expirarem profundamente e os encorajo a <acostumarem-se com isso>. Se se ordena ao paciente que respire fundo, ele em geral força a respiração, para dentro e para fora, de modo artificial. Esse comportamento voluntário serve apenas para obstruir o ritmo vegetativo natural da respiração. Desmascara-se a inibição; pede-se ao paciente que respire de <modo inteiramente normal>, i.e., sem se entregar a quaisquer exercícios respiratórios, como gostaria de fazer. Depois de 5 ou 10 movimentos, a respiração em geral se torna mais profunda, e emerge a primeira inibição. Quando uma pessoa expira natural e profundamente, a cabeça se move com espontaneidade para trás no fim do movimento. Os pacientes não podem deixar a cabeça ir para trás de modo espontâneo e natural. Esticam o pescoço para frente para evitar o <movimento para trás>, ou movem a cabeça com um puxão violento para o lado; em qualquer caso, de modo diferente do movimento natural.
Na exalação profunda, os ombros relaxam-se com naturalidade e se movem suave e levemente para frente. É no fim preciso da exalação que os nossos pacientes mantêm os ombros firmes ou os levantam; em suma, executam movimentos vários com os ombros para impedir o movimento vegetativo espontâneo.
Outra maneira de liberar o reflexo do orgasmo é exercer uma pressão suave no alto abdômen. Coloco as pontas dos dedos de ambas as mãos aproximadamente no meio do abdômen superior entre o umbigo e o esterno, e digo ao paciente que inspire e expire fundo. Durante a expiração, vou aplicando, aos poucos, uma suave pressão no alto abdômen. Isso provoca reações diferentes em pacientes diferentes. Em alguns, o plexo solar se mostra altamente sensível à pressão; em outros, há um movimento de reação no qual as costas se arqueiam. Esses são os pacientes que suprimem toda excitação orgástica no ato sexual, puxando a pélvis para trás e arqueando as costas. Há também os pacientes nos quais uma pressão contínua no alto abdômen produz contrações ondulantes no abdômen. Isso às vezes libera o reflexo do orgasmo. Se a exalação profunda é continuada durante certo tempo, uma parede abdominal tensa e dura se torna invariavelmente macia. Pode ser pressionada com mais facilidade. Os pacientes contam que <se sentem melhor>, afirmação que não pode ser tomada ao pé da letra. Na minha prática, lanço mão de uma fórmula que os pacientes entendem espontaneamente: digo-lhes para <cederem> por completo. A atitude de entrega é a mesma que a da rendição: a cabeça desliza para trás, os ombros movem-se para a frente e para cima, o meio do abdômen se encolhe, a pélvis move-se para a frente e as pernas separam-se espontaneamente. A expiração profunda produz a atitude de rendição (sexual). Isso explica a inibição do orgasmo nessas pessoas que são incapazes de render-se, e que prendem a respiração quando a excitação se eleva a um clímax.”
“Uma abertura frouxa da boca parece contribuir para o estabelecimento da atitude de rendição.”
“Prender a respiração durante bastante tempo era algo que se considerava como uma façanha heróica de autocontrole”
“Quando sinto medo, fico muito birrenta; então tenho vontade de lutar contra alguma coisa, mas não sei contra quê. Não pense que tenho vontade de brigar com o mágico {a mãe não o havia mencionado}; tenho muito medo dele. É uma coisa que eu não sei o que é.”
“A inalação profunda provoca uma obstrução da atividade biológica dos centros vegetativos, resultando em uma irritabilidade reflexa aumentada. A exalação repetida reduz a estase e, com isso, a irritabilidade angustiosa.”
“A reação reflexa desapareceu à medida que o paciente começou a superar o medo de expirar. Assim, a atividade respiratória inibida pela neurose é um fator central do mecanismo neurótico em geral. Bloqueia a atividade vegetativa do organismo, criando a fonte de energia dos sintomas e fantasias neuróticas de todo tipo.”
“Quanto mais arduamente tentava superar a sua falta de auto-estima por meio da ruminação compulsiva [por que por que por que eu me odeio todos me odeiam], mais intensa se tornava a pressão. (…) Essas reações sempre apareciam quando uma excitação não conseguia chegar aos genitais e era desviada <para cima>. Essa é a base fisiológica do que os psicanalistas chamavam <deslocamento de baixo para cima>.”
“é fácil pôr a mão entre as costas do paciente e o divã.”Ficam arqueados e tensos na ponta da poltrona do consultório. Igual na sessão de fisioterapia!
“A musculatura das nádegas também fica tensa. Os pacientes, freqüentemente, superam a ausência de excitabilidade nesses músculos tentando produzir neles contrações e relaxações voluntárias.”
“A defesa contra o reflexo do orgasmo provoca várias perturbações vegetativas, por exemplo a constipação crônica, o reumatismo muscular, a ciática, etc.Em muitos pacientes, a constipação desaparece, mesmo quando existiu durante décadas, com o desenvolvimento do reflexo do orgasmo.O seu pleno desenvolvimento é freqüentemente precedido por náuseas e por sensações de vertigem, somadas a estados espasmódicos da garganta, contrações isoladas da musculatura abdominal, do diafragma, da pélvis, etc.Mas todos esses sintomas desaparecem logo que se haja desenvolvido plenamente o reflexo do orgasmo.”
“Embora nunca se expressasse abertamente, havia em muitos pacientes uma maldade escondida que eu não conseguia localizar. O tratamento do comportamento vegetativo permite determinar onde se localiza somaticamente a mesquinhez. Há pacientes que expressam amistosidade com os olhos e com as bochechas, mas que expressam, quanto ao queixo e a boca, exatamente o contrário. A expressão é completamente diferente na metade inferior da face e na metade superior. A dissolução da atitude da boca e do queixo libera incrível quantidade de cólera.”
“escondendo o pum na barriga” “encerrou a maldade”
“Na neurose simples, há só uma restrição superficial da mobilidade vegetativa, que permite excitações interiores e descargas <na fantasia>. Se o encouraçamento atinge a profundidade, se bloqueia áreas centrais do organismo biológico e controla completamente a musculatura, há apenas duas possibilidades: irrupção forte (cólera violenta, que se experimenta como um alívio) ou deterioração gradual e completa do mecanismo vital. Várias enfermidades orgânicas, como a úlcera gástrica, o reumatismo muscular e o câncer, prendem-se ao problema neste ponto.”
“O reflexo do orgasmo encontra-se em todas as criaturas que copulam. Entre organismos biológicos mais primitivos, como por exemplo os protozoários, encontra-se na forma de contrações plasmáticas. O estágio mais elementar, no qual se pode encontrar, é a divisão de células únicas.
Há algumas dificuldades para chegar a uma resposta a respeito do que é que, nos organismos mais altamente organizados, toma o lugar da contração, quando o organismo não pode mais contrair-se assumindo a forma esférica, como o protozoário [talvez Aristófanes esteja correto n’O Banquete!]. A partir de um certo estágio do desenvolvimento, o metazoário [todo animal pluricelular que já possui órgãos e sistemas especializados, membros diferenciados, etc.] tem uma estrutura óssea. Isso impede a operação, natural nos moluscos e protozoários, de se tornarem esféricos no ato de contrair-se. Imaginemos um tubo flexível, no qual a nossa bexiga biológica se tenha desenvolvido. Imaginemos depois que introduzimos nele uma vara que se pode curvar em uma direção. Isso representaria a espinha. Imaginemos que o impulso de contração é agora introduzido nessa bexiga longitudinalmente esticada. Podemos ver que a bexiga só tem uma possibilidade quando, a despeito da sua inabilidade para tornar-se esférica, deseja contrair-se. Tem de curvar-se o mais possível, e rapidamente.” “As pessoas histéricas têm uma tendência especial para desenvolver espasmos musculares em partes do organismo cuja musculatura é anular, sobretudo na garganta e no ânus.” O SER HUMANO CONTRA A CATATONIA: “Além disso, a musculatura anular encontra-se na entrada e na saída do estômago. Desenvolvem-se, nessas duas aberturas, espasmos que têm freqüentemente conseqüências sérias para o estado geral da pessoa. Esses pontos do corpo, especialmente dispostos para contrações continuas, e correspondendo biologicamente a estágios muito primitivos de desenvolvimento, são os pontos mais freqüentes de desordens espasmódicas. Se a garganta e o ânus são bloqueados, a contração orgástica se torna impossível. A retração somática expressa-se por uma atitude que é o oposto exato do reflexo do orgasmo: as costas ficam arqueadas, o pescoço duro, o ânus bloqueado, o peito para a frente e os ombros tensos. O arc de cercle histérico é o oposto exato do reflexo do orgasmo e o protótipo da defesa contra a sexualidade.”
“A reserva psíquica expressa-se em rigidez vegetativa. O ódio psíquico expressa-se em uma atitude vegetativa definida de ódio.” “Bioenergeticamente, a psique e o soma funcionam condicionando-se mutuamente e ao mesmo tempo formando um sistema unitário.”
“Uma paciente excepcionalmente bonita e sexualmente atraente queixava-se de sentir-se feia, porque não sentia o seu corpo como um todo unido. Descreveu assim o seu estado: <Cada parte do meu corpo é independente. As minhas pernas estão aqui e a minha cabeça está ali e eu nunca sei muito bem onde estão as minhas mãos. Eu não tenho o meu corpo todo junto>. Em suma, sofria da conhecida perturbação da autopercepção, especialmente pronunciada na despersonalização esquizóide. (…) Logo no começo do tratamento, era notável a <indiferença> da sua expressão facial. (…) Nessas ocasiões, os seus olhos tinham um olhar vazio e <perdido>. (…) A indiferença [dos olhos e da testa] tinha a função de impedir que a paciente ficasse continuamente à mercê da torturante percepção do ódio expresso pela boca. Depois de tratarmos a região da boca por umas duas semanas, a expressão maliciosa desapareceu por completo em conexão com o desenvolvimento de uma reação muito forte de desapontamento da paciente. Um dos seus traços de caráter era a compulsão de exigir continuamente amor. Zangava-se quando as suas exigências impossíveis não eram satisfeitas. Depois que se dissolveu a atitude da boca e do queixo, apareceram contrações pré-orgásticas em todo o corpo, primeiro em forma de serpentina — movimentos ondulantes que também, incluíam a pélvis. Entretanto, a excitação genital estava inibida em um ponto definido. Durante a procura do mecanismo da inibição, a expressão da testa e dos olhos foi-se tornando cada vez mais pronunciada. Tornou-se uma expressão de fixidez má, observadora, crítica e atenta. Com isso, a paciente percebeu que tinha de <estar em guarda> constantemente, e que nunca fôra capaz de <perder a cabeça>. (…) a <testa morta> havia escondido a <testa crítica>. O passo seguinte era descobrir que função tinha a <testa crítica> e maliciosa. (…) a testa da paciente montava guarda quando ela queria ceder a um impulso sexual. (…) Não eliminamos um sintoma somático apenas tornando-o historicamente compreensível. Não podemos progredir sem o conhecimento da função simultânea do sintoma. (Que não deve ser confundida com o <conflito atual>!)¹ O fato de que a atitude atenta da testa derivasse da sua identificação infantil com o pai severo não teria tido o mais leve efeito sobre a perturbação orgástica. O decorrer do tratamento dessa paciente provou a exatidão desse critério (…) Aos poucos, a expressão severa alternou com uma expressão alegre, meio infantil da testa e dos olhos. Assim, uma vez estava de acordo com o desejo genital; outra vez a sua atitude em relação a ele era crítica e adversa. Com a substituição da atitude crítica da testa pela atitude alegre, a inibição da excitação genital também desapareceu.”
¹ (2022) Essa parte supostamente histórica da psicanálise é sem dúvida a mais defasada.
“<Não perca a cabeça> é uma atitude muito comum. A nossa paciente sofria da sensação de ter um corpo dividido, não-integrado e não-unificado. Por isso, também não tinha a consciência e a sensação da sua graça vegetativa e sexual. Como é possível que um organismo que constitui um todo unificado possa <despedaçar-se> na sua percepção? O termo despersonalização não indica nada, pois em si mesmo exige uma explicação. O que nos devemos perguntar é como é possível que partes do organismo funcionem por si mesmas, independentemente do organismo total.” “A observação clínica ensina-nos ainda que as perturbações da auto-percepção não desaparecem realmente enquanto o reflexo do orgasmo não é plenamente desenvolvido em um todo unificado.” “Assim, a despersonalização torna-se compreensível como uma falta de carga, i.e., como uma perturbação da inervação vegetativa dos órgãos isolados ou dos sistemas de órgãos (por exemplo, as pontas dos dedos, os braços, a cabeça, as pernas, os genitais, etc.).” “quando o paciente deveria estar à beira de recuperar a saúde, surgem contra esta as piores reações.” “Todo desequilíbrio da sensação somática total afeta simultaneamente a autoconfiança e a unidade do sentimento do corpo. Ao mesmo tempo, esses desequilíbrios obrigam o corpo a fazer compensações.” “variadas formas [d]a cisão da personalidade. Entre as mais simples sensações de frigidez ou rigidez, de um lado, e a divisão esquizofrênica, a falta de contato e a despersonalização de outro, não há diferenças de base mas tão somente diferenças quantitativas, que se expressam também qualitativamente. A sensação de integridade tem conexão com a sensação de contato imediato com o mundo. A unificação do reflexo do orgasmo também restaura as sensações de profundidade e seriedade. Os pacientes lembram-se do tempo da sua primeira infância [que idade?], quando a unidade de sensação do seu corpo não estava perturbada. (…) do tempo em que se sentiam <vivos>; e como finalmente tudo isso fora despedaçado e esmagado pela educação. No rompimento da unidade do sentimento do corpo pela supressão sexual, e no contínuo anseio de restabelecer contato consigo mesmo e com o mundo, encontra-se a raiz de todas as religiões negadoras do sexo. <Deus> é a idéia mistificada da harmonia vegetativa entre o eu e a natureza.”
Nem a música me encontra mais…
“Isso é especialmente verdadeiro quanto às culturas da Índia, da China e do Japão. Quando um patriarcado austero e negador do sexo quer propagar-se, precisa suprimir severamente os impulsos sexuais das crianças. Isso resulta em angústia e cólera agudas, ambas prejudiciais à cultura da família patriarcal e dependentes da ideologia do autocontrole e do poder de não mover um só músculo, por maior que seja a dor (…) Essa ideologia também proporciona uma interiorização nos exercícios respiratórios dos iogues. A técnica de respiração ensinada pelos iogues é o oposto exato da técnica de respiração que usamos para reativar as excitações emocionais vegetativas nos nossos pacientes. (…) A expressão facial rígida semelhante a uma máscara, dos hindus típicos, dos chineses e japoneses, encontra o seu extremo oposto na capacidade para o êxtase intoxicado. O fato de que a tática iogue tenha podido espalhar-se na Europa e na América se deve ao fato de que nessas culturas se procura um meio de conseguir o controle sobre os impulsos vegetativos naturais e, ao mesmo tempo, de eliminar estados de angústia. Não estão longe de um pressentimento da função orgástica da vida.” “A <rígida atitude militar> é o exato oposto da atitude natural, solta, ágil. O pescoço tem de estar rígido, a cabeça esticada para a frente; os olhos devem olhar rigidamente para a frente; o queixo e a boca devem ter uma expressão <varonil>; o tórax deve estar puxado para fora; os braços devem ser rigidamente mantidos rente ao corpo; as mãos devem estar esticadas ao longo da dobra das calças. Sem dúvida, a mais importante indicação da intenção sexualmente supressiva dessa técnica militar é a ordem proverbial: estômago para dentro, tórax para fora. As pernas são duras e rígidas.” “a tensão dos tornozelos é uma indicação clínica típica do controle artificial dos afetos.”
ESPARTA: “Ensinar o povo a assumir uma atitude rígida e não-natural é um dos meios mais essenciais usados por um sistema social ditatorial para produzir, com a perda da vontade, organismos que funcionem automaticamente.”
“Quem quer ser homem deve dominar-se.” “Não se deve deixar-se levar.” “Não se deve demonstrar medo.” “Cólera é falta de educação.” “Uma criança decente senta-se quieta.” “Não se deve demonstrar o que se sente.” “Deve-se cerrar os dentes.” “Essas frases, características da educação, inicialmente são repelidas pelas crianças, depois aceitas com relutância, laboradas e, por fim, exercitadas. Entortam-lhes — via de regra — a espinha da alma (…) É um dos grandes segredos da psicologia das massas que o adulto médio, a criança média e o adolescente médio são muito mais propensos a resignar-se com a ausência de felicidade que a continuar a lutar pela alegria de viver, quando esta última atitude acarreta sofrimento demais.”
Thomasismo: “Se a hipertonicidade da musculatura continua por anos e décadas, leva a uma contratura crônica e a nódulos reumáticos, como resultado do depósito de substâncias sólidas nos feixes musculares. Nesse último estágio, o processo reumático não é mais reversível. Observa-se na vegetoterapia do reumatismo que ele ataca tipicamente os grupos musculares que desempenham papel importante na supressão dos afetos e das sensações orgânicas. O reumatismo muscular é sobretudo comum na musculatura do pescoço (<pescoço duro>, obsticidade [inclinação patológica da cabeça para um dos dois ombros]) e entre as omoplatas, onde o gesto de puxar os ombros para trás dá a impressão, do ângulo da análise de caráter, de <autocontrole> e de <retração>. Essa doença atinge em geral os dois músculos grossos do pescoço que correm do occipício até a clavícula (músculos esternoclidomastóideos). Esses músculos tornam-se curiosamente hipertônicos quando a cólera é inconsciente e continuamente suprimida. Um paciente reumático teve a idéia de chamar a esses grupos musculares de músculos do ódio. Somado a esses está o espasmo crônico dos masseteres, que dá à metade inferior da face uma expressão obstinada e mal-humorada.”
“O lumbago [lombalgia] requer uma investigação pormenorizada a esse respeito. Encontra-se muito freqüentemente em pacientes cuja musculatura das nádegas se encontra em estado de tensão crônica que retrai as sensações anais.Outro grupo de músculos em que encontramos com frequência o reumatismo muscular compreende os adutores profundos e superficiais da parte superior das coxas, que mantêm as pernas juntas. Têm a função, especialmente nas mulheres, de suprimir a excitação genital. No trabalho vegetoterapêutico, adotamos a expressão músculos da moralidade para designá-los. O anatomista vienense Julius Tandler referia-se jocosamente a eles como custodes virginitatis.”
“Temos todas as razões para crer que o enfisema pulmonar, caracterizado pela forma de barril do tórax cheio de ar, é o resultado de uma atitude crônica e extrema de inspiração. Devemos lembrar-nos de que qualquer fixação crônica de uma atitude determinada prejudica a elasticidade dos tecidos; esse é o caso do enfisema, no que diz respeito às fibras elásticas dos brônquios.”
“A úlcera gástrica como subproduto de uma perturbação afetiva crônica é tão freqüente que não pode haver mais qualquer dúvida quanto à sua natureza psicossomática.”
“Hemorróidas, como resultado de um espasmo crônico do esfíncter anal. O sangue nas veias periféricas do esfíncter anal contraído é mecanicamente represado, causando a dilatação das paredes dos vasos.”
“Com base no trabalho pioneiro de Wartburg sobre a asfixia do tecido no câncer (excesso de CO²) tornou-se claro que a restrição crônica da exalação causada pela simpaticotonia é um elemento essencial da disposição para o câncer. A reduzida respiração externa resulta em uma respiração interna escassa. Os órgãos cuja respiração é cronicamente prejudicada são mais suscetíveis aos estímulos que produzem o câncer do que os órgãos com boa respiração.”
EXPECTATIVA ETERNAMENTE ADIADA
“Tive apenas a intenção de indicar um importante campo da patologia orgânica intimamente relacionado com o tema da função do orgasmo: para enfatizar conexões até aqui menosprezadas; para fazer um apelo à consciência da profissão médica no sentido de encarar as perturbações sexuais dos homens e mulheres tão seriamente como merecem; e para imprimir nos estudantes de medicina a necessidade de estudarem corretamente a teoria do orgasmo e a sexologia geral a fim de serem capazes de enfrentar as tremendas necessidades da população. O médico deve ter cuidado para não se confinar ao limite de uma lâmina de microscópio: deve relacionar o que vê no microscópio com a função autônoma da vida do organismo total. Deverá dominar essa função total nos seus componentes biológicos e psíquicos, e compreender que a influência exercida pela sociedade sobre a função de tensão-carga do organismo e dos seus órgãos exerce uma influência decisiva sobre a saúde ou doença daqueles que dependem dela. A medicina psicossomática, que é hoje o ramo especial de entusiastas e de especialistas, poderá ser, sem demora, o que promete vir a ser: a estrutura geral da medicina do futuro.”
“Seriam as cargas da superfície da zona sexual de um milésimo de volt, ou de meio volt? A literatura fisiológica não fornecia chaves para a resposta a semelhante pergunta. Mesmo a idéia de uma carga na superfície do organismo não era geralmente conhecida. Quando, em dezembro de 1934, perguntei ao diretor de um instituto fisiológico em Londres como se podia medir a carga da pele, achou a própria pergunta muito esquisita. Tarchanoff e Veraguth, mesmo antes do início do século, haviam descoberto o <fenômeno psicogalvânico>, que revelava a manifestação das excitações psíquicas em forma de oscilações potenciais na pele.” Cf. REICH, Experimentelle Ergebnisse über elektrische Funktion von Sexualitat und Angst. Sexpol Verlag, 1937.
“Nos homens e mulheres descontraídos e vegetativamente vivos, o potencial de uma mesma zona sexual raramente é constante. Oscilações de até 50 mv [microvolts], e mais, podem ser observadas nas zonas sexuais. Isso está definitivamente de acordo com o fato de que as zonas sexuais são dotadas de alta, e extremamente variável, intensidade de sensações e capacidade de excitação. Subjetivamente, a excitação das zonas sexuais é experimentada como o fluir de uma corrente, como uma comichão ou como uma sensação confortante de calor ou de <suavidade>. As áreas da pele não-especificamente erógenas apresentam essas características em grau muito menor, ou não as apresentam.”
“Reações negativas de angústia em forma de redução rápida da carga de superfície podem ser verificadas na membrana mucosa da vagina, na língua, e nas palmas das mãos. Um susto inesperado, causado por um grito, por uma bola que se estoura ou pelo som barulhento de um gongo que se toca, são particularmente adequados como estímulos.”
“Órgãos desapontados e habituados reagem lentamente aos estímulos de prazer.”
“Segundo a visão tradicional, a energia bioelétrica se move pelos caminhos das fibras nervosas, pressupondo-se que as fibras nervosas não sejam contráteis. Até aqui, entretanto, todas as observações levam à hipótese de que os plexos sinciciais vegetativos são, eles mesmos, contráteis, i.e., podem expandir-se e contrair-se. Conseqüentemente, a ameba continua a existir em todos os animais, inclusive no homem, na forma do sistema nervoso autônomo contrátil. Essa suposição é confirmada microscopicamente. Por exemplo, movimentos de expansão e contração em vermes pequenos e translúcidos podem ser facilmente observados ao microscópio. Esses movimentos do mecanismo autônomo da vida ocorrem independentemente dos movimentos do corpo total, e os precedem.” “A sensação de <ser frio> e de <estar morto>, e a <falta de contato> do paciente psiquiátrico são expressões de uma deficiência da carga bioelétrica na periferia do corpo.”
“Como só as sensações vegetativas de prazer são acompanhadas de um aumento da carga na superfície do organismo, a excitação agradável tem de ser considerada como um processo especificamente produtivo no sistema biológico. Todos os outros afetos, por exemplo o desprazer, o aborrecimento, a angústia e a pressão, em termos de energia, são o oposto a esse processo e por isso representam funções negadoras da vida. Assim, o processo do prazer sexual é o processo da vida per se.” Engraçado como há apenas uma força da vida e da alegria do existir e 3, 4, 5 forças negativas e destruidoras.
“Os vitalistas sempre haviam afirmado que a matéria não-viva é fundamentalmente diferente da matéria viva. Aduziam sempre um princípio metafísico, como a <enteléquia>, para explicar o funcionamento vivo per se. Por outro lado, os mecanicistas afirmavam que, física e quimicamente, a matéria viva não é em nada diferente da matéria não-viva; apenas não fôra ainda suficientemente investigada. Assim, os mecanicistas negavam que há uma diferença fundamental entre a matéria viva e a não-viva. A fórmula de tensão-carga podia provar a exatidão de ambas as visões, embora de maneira diferente do que ambas poderiam imaginar.” Não se pode provar isso, Reich.
“Os experimentos elétricos demonstraram que a excitação biológica do prazer e a excitação biológica da angústia são funcionalmente equivalentes à sua percepção.”
“A energia eletromagnética move-se à velocidade da luz, i.e., a aproximadamente 186 mil milhas (300 mil quilômetros) por segundo. A observação da natureza das curvas e das medidas de tempo que caracterizam o movimento da energia bioelétrica demonstra que o movimento da energia bioelétrica é fundamentalmente diferente da velocidade conhecida e do tipo de movimento da energia eletromagnética. A energia bioelétrica move-se extremamente devagar, a uma velocidade mensurável em milímetros por segundo. (A velocidade pode ser medida contando-se o número dos pontos máximos cardíacos) A forma do movimento é lenta e ondulante. Assemelha-se aos movimentos de um intestino ou de uma serpente. O movimento também corresponde ao lento despertar de uma sensação orgânica ou de uma excitação vegetativa. Poder-se-ia sustentar que é a grande resistência dos tecidos animais que baixa a velocidade da energia elétrica do organismo. Essa explicação é insatisfatória. Quando um estímulo elétrico é aplicado ao corpo, é sentido imediatamente e respondido.
De modo inesperado, o conhecimento da função biológica de tensão-carga levou-me à descoberta dos processos de energia nos bíons, no organismo humano e na radiação do sol.
No verão de 1939, publiquei um pequeno ensaio, Drei Versuche mit Gummi am statischen Elektroskop. A borracha e o algodão expostos a uma cultura de bíons obtidos da areia do oceano produziam nítida deflexão do indicador de um eletroscópio estático. As mesmas substâncias em contato com um corpo humano vegetativamente não-perturbado, em particular na região do abdômen e dos genitais, por aproximadamente 15 ou 20 minutos, influenciarão igualmente o eletroscópio. Em última análise, a areia da qual surgiram os bíons por meio do aquecimento e da dilatação é apenas a energia solar concentrada. Daí veio a idéia de expor a borracha e o algodão aos raios fortes do sol, depois de verificar que não afetavam o eletroscópio. Demonstrou-se que o sol emite uma energia que influencia a borracha e o algodão da mesma forma que influencia a cultura de bíons e o organismo humano após a respiração plena, em estado vegetativo não-perturbado. Chamei a essa energia, que é capaz de carregar a matéria orgânica, orgônio.”Logo, o ser-em-angústia, que não reage ao bíon, está mais morto que o morto, i.e., mais morto que o inorgânico? Isto não pode ser!
“A esse ponto, a investigação do organismo vivo foi além dos limites da psicologia profunda e da fisiologia; entrou no inexplorado território biológico. Durante os últimos 5 anos, a investigação do bíon absorveu toda a atenção disponível. Os bíons são vesículas microscópicas carregadas de energia orgonal [energia solar concentrada na matéria]; desenvolvem-se a partir da matéria inorgânica por meio do aquecimento e da dilatação. Propagam-se como bactérias. Desenvolvem-se também espontaneamente e na terra ou, como no câncer, a partir de matéria orgânica em degeneração. O meu livro Die Bione (1938) mostra a importância da fórmula de tensão-carga para a investigação experimental da organização natural da substância viva a partir da matéria não-viva.
A energia orgonal demonstra-se também visual, térmica e eletroscopicamente no solo, na atmosfera e nos organismos vegetais e animais. A vibração do céu, que alguns físicos atribuem ao magnetismo terrestre, e o cintilar das estrelas em noites claras e secas, são expressões diretas do movimento dos orgônios atmosféricos. As <tempestades elétricas> da atmosfera que perturbam os aparelhos elétricos quando há intensificação da atividade das manchas solares são, como se pode demonstrar experimentalmente, um efeito da energia orgonal atmosférica. Anteriormente essas tempestades eram percebidas apenas como perturbações das correntes elétricas.
A cor da energia orgonal é azul ou azul-cinza. Conseguimos torná-la visível dispondo de certa forma determinados elementos. A detenção da energia cinética do orgônio é expressa por um aumento de temperatura. A sua concentração ou densidade é indicada no eletroscópio estático pelas diferenças na velocidade da descarga. A descarga espontânea dos eletroscópios no ar não-ionizado, fenômeno conhecido como natural leak, <vazamento natural>, pelos fisiologistas, é o efeito do orgônio atmosférico e não tem nada que ver com a umidade. (…) A cor azul-do-céu e o azul-cinza da neblina atmosférica nos dias quentes de verão são reflexos diretos do orgônio atmosférico. O azul-cinza, as luzes setentrionais em forma de nuvem, o chamado fogo de Santelmo e as formações azuladas recentemente observadas no céu pelos astrônomos durante um aumento de atividade das manchas solares são também manifestações da energia orgonal.
As formações de nuvens, até aqui mal-entendidas, e os temporais dependem de mudanças na concentração do orgônio atmosférico. Isso pode ser demonstrado simplesmente medindo-se a velocidade das descargas eletroscópicas.”
“Todos os alimentos cozidos consistem de vesículas azuis, que contêm orgônio.”
“Numerosas observações de biólogos (Neisenheimer, Linné e outros) tornam possível entender a coloração azul das rãs em estado de excitação sexual ou a luminosidade azul dos botões das plantas como uma excitação biológica (orgonótica) do organismo. As culturas de bíons obtidas da areia do mar, nas quais descobri a radiação de orgônio em janeiro de 1939, tiveram o mesmo efeito sobre o filme colorido tanto na escuridão completa como à luz do sol, i.e., fizeram o filme ficar azul.” Blue Planet
“Em contraste com a energia eletromagnética, a energia do orgônio é capaz de carregar matéria orgânica não-condutora.” “O segundo volume deste livro descreverá como a pesquisa do bíon levou à descoberta da energia atmosférica do orgônio, como a existência do orgônio pode ser objetivamente demonstrada e qual a importância da sua descoberta para a compreensão do funcionamento biofísico.”
Seclusão Anagógica 