March 20, 2006
Peddling a poet
I was waiting for an exhibition to open and this man comes up to me and asks where the door to the exhibition is.
- It's right here. They open at 3.
- Thank you. Are you a journalist?
(the exhibition took place at a portuguese newspaper gallery and I was standing at the building's front door which, obviously, qualified me for the job)
- No.
- Oh.
(pause)
- You know, there's this great Portuguese poet no one talks about anymore...but I love his work so much. Pessoa used to say that he was the most trascendental of our poets. He was a great man. A fighter for freedom, a scientist, a man of ideas. At a time when the rate of illiteracy was 78% he said this sublime sentence: "There is more light in the letters of the alphabet than in all the firmament".
At this point I'm thinking whether I should give him the "get lost creep" treatment. But I'm a sucker for literature and curious as a cat.
- Who is this poet you're talking about?
- A great man, miss. A great, great man. One of our greatest poets. He's buried at the national pantheon, right next to Amalia. His name was Guerra Junqueiro.
- Oh, I've read "A Velhice do Padre Eterno" by him.
And so I have a new item for my "what not to say to weirdos" list. The man's eyes shined and he didn't leave me alone during the time I was wandering around the Schwitters, Warhols and Paiks.
He's carrying a plastic bag and excitedly takes out a sheet of paper with the poet's quotations which he gives to me.
- I also have here with me xerox copies of the newspaper edition when he died in 1923. He made the front page!
-Thank you (he's now between me and the Jacquet).
Alain Jacquet, Le Déjeuner sur L'Herbe (1967)
Manet, Le Déjeuner sur L'Herbe (1865)
- He was a great Republican. He fought to bring down that useless monarchy we had...what a man. Here, I have extra copies for you to give to your friends and let him be known to everyone.
(maybe he's founding a new religion)
As I was trying to read Jenny Holzer's electronic-display signboard he comes up to me again.
- You know, he was a man of ideals. He was very active politically, he worshipped freedom but got away from it all when he realized that the parties weren't fighting for the country's benefit but for themselves. He returned to poetry. And today our poets can't get away from politics.
(one of the candidates for last January's presidential elections was a poet)
- Ah.
(and he hands me another sheet of paper with quotations; but this time they're not by Guerra Junqueiro)
What matters most in life is not duration but intensity - Jacques Brel
- You really like culture and art, right?
- Right.
- Good, good. It's important that there is freedom of expression. People should be free to paint and write whatever they feel like. I belong to a very repressed generation. I wish the revolution took place much earlier, we could have avoided a war. It's one of the things I regret the most about my life: to have lived all my youth and adult age under a dictatorship. We have to prevent this from happening again. No more censorship, ever.
(and I'm also a sucker for anti fascists so I'm beginning to like the guy)
He hands me another piece of paper, a xerox copy of a text by Guerra Junqueiro, and walks away.
Posted by claudia