Luciano Duarte | Literature and philosophy

The Bureaucrats’ Resistance

I admire the resistance of the bureaucrats. In the world, there are many bureaucrats. Ten, fifteen, thirty years performing exactly the same functions, fulfilling the same processes, satisfied and proud of their own experience. The serious countenance at work, the words filled with security, skill, precision. Experts in reports, forms, formal requisitions. Masters in procedures, specifications, certificates, regulations, minutes… I admire the resistance of bureaucrats, for I cannot imagine myself in such a universe but in despair, extreme frustration, eager for death. Filling out forms for thirty years? Please, please, give me the same hemlock as Socrates…

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The Rhythm of the Letters

In prose the punctuation, the extension of periods, the chaining of paragraphs; in poetry, besides punctuation, the distribution of tonics, the extension of verses and their relationships: these are the markers of the rhythm of the letters. As for the rhythm: sandy, treacherous terrain; indomitable beast; marvelous and irresolvable enigma; visible perfection but distant, very distant…

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Independence and Resolution

The audience’s reactions to a play teach about art. The audience, usually assaulted at the end of the last act and immediately after the assault, is entitled to reply. Then the booing, the improprieties and the like echo. We say, of course, of the spontaneous audience — sincere, wild — and in first contact with the play. A play already performed, or before, an audience that knows the climax of the drama acts oppositely: it comes to the theater to analyze performances and decides to applaud. The curious thing is that, in life, the great playwrights do not usually produce under the stimulus of applause; and the audience, which is usually the conductor of criticism, contributes to his execution. Thus, we see art as forcing the artist’s autonomy by throwing him against the majority. It seems to ask him: “Are you capable of moving forward, contrary to everyone?”. The question does not give way to evasions: art seems to demand independence and resolution.

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The Fate of the Intellectual

The intellectual must be unpredictable, or he will not be worthy of the epithet. If the reader, in contact with the title of a work or a chronicle, can predict its content, then the author will be dead, plunged into disinterest. I say the obvious, is to confront the examples… Single-subject chroniclers remain, novelists with blinkers are majority. And if they achieve, these or those, the desired effects ever, the insistence only exposes their limitations. The intellectual must be dynamic, varied, unpredictable and comprehensive; otherwise, he should stop speaking…

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