It seems an affront, an insult to find Victor Hugo having composed more than one hundred and fifty thousand verses in just one life. One hundred and fifty thousand! It is unbelievable, a real humiliation to be confronted with this unattainable fecundity, this poetic monument coming from the pen of a single man. If we exercise mathematics, we arrive at an average daily production that only seems reasonable to someone who spends his entire life only sleeping and composing verses. Considering the whole creative process that involves ideation, planning, structuring, realization and refinement; considering that a normal mind is exhausted in the tiresome work of hooking words in the dictionary, and that therefore a long working day is unfeasible, discouraging and even counterproductive, how to justify Victor Hugo? How can we accept his poetic work, knowing that there are plays, novels, essays under the same signature? It is amazing…
Tag: literature
There Are Few Exercises as Healthy…
There are few exercises as healthy and stimulating as personifying the immortal Bernardo Soares. In mind, talking to non-existent or distant peers, living what circumstances prevent, creating what life does not allow… all this in a practice that progressively enriches the details, changes the scenarios, expands and evolves. To do so is to open a new dimension to life, is to magnify oneself through impossible experiences, perfecting one’s reasoning, challenging oneself, experiencing whole new emotions on a plane where there are no limits or impediments. It is to finally leave the disguise of a bookkeeper’s assistant to effectively live the reality that one chooses.
For All the Times I Have Laughed…
For all the times I have laughed at Cioran’s explosive temperament, his wonderful rage in the grocery store line, and countless other situations that I always remember in laughter, it seems that I am now paying for them, and seem that laughter from heaven is directed to me. All the stupid banalities that make up my routine, the door that must open for me to leave my house, the scale that must work so that I weigh and buy food, the sun that must rise so that I know it is day… all these extremely banal things that always work because they have to work, or rather, all the human beings whose function somehow affects me, together and at the same time, fail to fulfill it, but with the whim of interrupting my routine and hindering me with problems that I have no means to solve! Cioran certainly laughs; that is the price: now it is my turn to make him laugh… But it is incredible to note the impossibility of peace in this world. Buddha is a folk character: in the real world, there would be someone to make him mad and ruin his spiritual progress.
Identical Mental Stimulation Mechanism
Curious lines from this Aleister Crowley, in Eight Lectures on Yoga:
Suppose I want to evoke the “Intelligence” of Jupiter. I base my work upon the correspondences of Jupiter. I base my mathematics on the number 4 and its subservient numbers 16, 34, 136. I employ the square or rhombus. For my sacred animal I choose the eagle, or some other sacred to Jupiter. For my perfume, saffron—for my libation some preparation of opium or a generous yet sweet and powerful wine such as port. For my magical weapon I take the sceptre; in fact, I continue choosing instruments for every act in such a way that I am constantly reminded of my will to evoke Jupiter. I even constrain every object. I extract the Jupiterian elements from all the complex phenomena which surround me. If I look at my carpet, the blues and purples are the colours which stand out as Light against an obsolescent and indeterminate background. And thus I carry on my daily life, using every moment of time in constant selfadmonition to attend to Jupiter. The mind quickly responds to this training; it very soon automatically rejects as unreal anything which is not Jupiter. Everything else escapes notice. And when the time comes for the ceremony of invocation which I have been consistently preparing with all devotion and assiduity, I am quickly inflamed. I am attuned to Jupiter, I am pervaded by Jupiter, I am absorbed by Jupiter, I am caught up into the heaven of Jupiter and wield his thunderbolts. Hebe and Ganymedes bring me wine; the Queen of the Gods is throned at my side, and for my playmates are the fairest maidens of the earth.
The parallel with art is perfect. That is to say: both the magician and the artist possess identical mental stimulation mechanism. Following the steps described by Crowley, that is, progressively inciting oneself around the same objective, no doubt it is to be expected a kind of ecstasy, of psychic overflow in the act of materialization of this long sequence of efforts. Turning the lens back to the artist, or rather the poet, it is laughable to sit before the blank sheet of paper waiting for “inspiration”. Certainly, a poet who does this is unprofessional. Sitting down, in art, is what the ceremony is in magic: the serious artist must do it only after completing the necessary preparation and when he feels inflamed, exploding by the expression of a certain idea or feeling. Thus he reaches, after scientific meticulousness in the preparations, the propitious state of mind so that the brilliance and fairness in the expression may spring up in his mind.