An arrow at rest and the number 7
An arrow at rest and the number 7 Ever since the first photographs – the stone, Christ, the dim light, and everything far beyond a volume of destinies – I sought for the word. And the word didn’t come. The photographs were there – and here, looking at them like myriad identical shadows, the wordless, mute viewer. Days and nights went by like this, submersed under that horizon between sunlight and water, marble, blood and page. Mario Cravo Neto had told me that he saw these images as dream, as “fog”; that there was an audible sound among them. And that after seven years of deep involvement with Candomblé, the “things” had become cloudy, like a waiting period. And there I sat, looking at the first image, an almost tactile object, an immediate red spot of a sacrifice to Exu, and its sequence of shadows, of “fog,” a sort of sketch that came out of a camera. But there was still no word. Though I was striving to find it, the word was also enshrouded in fog. So I looked at the second image: between the dim light and the marble of time was the Pietá di Palestrina. In an unfinished composition, in a verve of supports – and light and stone, like men and gods – the image had become a twin, like a painting, where once again the red formed a diptych for a single man. There was no illusion here. There are three mainstays in Mario Cravo Neto’s images: One: Birth. Two: Passage. Three: Displacement. Along this single invisible thread of existence, a slowly breathing voice searches for itself. It is the continuity by way of breath: the photographer absorbs the randomness: here is the rhythm that brings Christ together with Exu. Then came all the other images. And I had to take them with me, from one city to another (São Paulo – Salvador), once again in silence, because – now – it was my turn. I was faced with the most profound exercise that existence would ever be capable of posing for me: Gilda, my mother, had begun to stop breathing. During the last four days we were together, and while she slept I opened the images and I found everything there: One: Birth. Two: Passage. Three: Displacement. But every time I sought for the word, it wouldn’t come. So I looked at the photographs that Mario Cravo Neto had sent me and thought (while the devices set forth the graphics between life and the air that was
gradually fleeing, toward what we believe to be another beginning): “What can be said about this ‘fleeing dream’ once again like a ‘fog,’ like smoke, that the photographer waylaid on the bridge between Cachoeira and São Félix? Why does this near abstraction break this movement even though we know it isn’t abstract at all, but rather a reflection of memory? How does an artifice reach this point?” It is nearly a swallowed, anthropophagic image. Poetic, at its furthest extension, but anthropophagic. There is no distance between the bridge and the gaze of the observer, in fog, like smoke. From one day to the next, during the stints I spent wide awake in the wee hours, at Ladeira da Gamboa de Cima (waiting for the result of the air that was gradually leaving Gilda’s life), I had a view of Avenida Contorno where I saw: “those guys”, those others, the “same ourselves” that Mario Cravo Neto sought in Laróyè, the Jungian analogue to Exu, they all continued there: on the straight concrete path of the avenue and on the wooden platforms rigged precariously over the waters of Todos os Santos Bay the shouting and crack-smoking characters of the book did not sleep. This is the point: his photographs recover the wounded city within the soul of the mute city, Salvador. His photographs run against the perverse treaty of memory loss which Bahia has been undergoing for more than one and one-half decades. His photographs speak to us “of the ebony cloths of night.” Of the ebony cloths of the nights of the times. Of the crown of aruera leaves in the ritual of passage of the animal sacrificed to Exu. Mario sent me a text and a song. The text, whose English title is Mysticism and Logic, by Bertrand Russell, begins by saying that in this capricious world, “nothing is more capricious than posthumous fame.” That’s right: posthumous fame. Later, in a passage of mathematical reasoning he poses the question: When a body moves, “all that we can say is that it is at one place at one moment and at another at another.” So, in regard to the photographs I repeat that here are: One: Birth. Two: Passage. Three: Displacement. Russell even comments on the unspeakable: “An arrow in flight is really at rest.” Isn’t this what these photographs want to say? If they reconstruct a movement in their poems of existence and symbols why would they pass through the surface of the body? Why do they reach threedimensional spectrums, if, when we see them, we know that earth and muscles and residues are a core of awareness for a new founding principle?
Who of us will find themselves in this time? And once again the fog wells up, along with the veil of silence and the absolute water. But is this how one passes through the cosmic solitude? And, once again, there comes the extract, the punctum, the sting. The act of uneasiness that leaves us on the edge.
An arrow at rest and the number 7 Ever since the first photographs – the stone, Christ, the dim light, and everything far beyond a volume of destinies – I sought for the word. And the word didn’t come. The photographs were there – and here, looking at them like myriad identical shadows, the wordless, mute viewer. Days and nights went by like this, submersed under that horizon between sunlight and water, marble, blood and page. Mario Cravo Neto had told me that he saw these images as dream, as “fog”; that there was an audible sound among them. And that after seven years of deep involvement with Candomblé, the “things” had become cloudy, like a waiting period. And there I sat, looking at the first image, an almost tactile object, an immediate red spot of a sacrifice to Exu, and its sequence of shadows, of “fog,” a sort of sketch that came out of a camera. But there was still no word. Though I was striving to find it, the word was also enshrouded in fog. So I looked at the second image: between the dim light and the marble of time was the Pietá di Palestrina. In an unfinished composition, in a verve of supports – and light and stone, like men and gods – the image had become a twin, like a painting, where once again the red formed a diptych for a single man. There was no illusion here. There are three mainstays in Mario Cravo Neto’s images: One: Birth. Two: Passage. Three: Displacement. Along this single invisible thread of existence, a slowly breathing voice searches for itself. It is the continuity by way of breath: the photographer absorbs the randomness: here is the rhythm that brings Christ together with Exu. Then came all the other images. And I had to take them with me, from one city to another (São Paulo – Salvador), once again in silence, because – now – it was my turn. I was faced with the most profound exercise that existence would ever be capable of posing for me: Gilda, my mother, had begun to stop breathing. During the last four days we were together, and while she slept I opened the images and I found everything there: One: Birth. Two: Passage. Three: Displacement. But every time I sought for the word, it wouldn’t come. So I looked at the photographs that Mario Cravo Neto had sent me and thought (while the devices set forth the graphics between life and the air that was
gradually fleeing, toward what we believe to be another beginning): “What can be said about this ‘fleeing dream’ once again like a ‘fog,’ like smoke, that the photographer waylaid on the bridge between Cachoeira and São Félix? Why does this near abstraction break this movement even though we know it isn’t abstract at all, but rather a reflection of memory? How does an artifice reach this point?” It is nearly a swallowed, anthropophagic image. Poetic, at its furthest extension, but anthropophagic. There is no distance between the bridge and the gaze of the observer, in fog, like smoke. From one day to the next, during the stints I spent wide awake in the wee hours, at Ladeira da Gamboa de Cima (waiting for the result of the air that was gradually leaving Gilda’s life), I had a view of Avenida Contorno where I saw: “those guys”, those others, the “same ourselves” that Mario Cravo Neto sought in Laróyè, the Jungian analogue to Exu, they all continued there: on the straight concrete path of the avenue and on the wooden platforms rigged precariously over the waters of Todos os Santos Bay the shouting and crack-smoking characters of the book did not sleep. This is the point: his photographs recover the wounded city within the soul of the mute city, Salvador. His photographs run against the perverse treaty of memory loss which Bahia has been undergoing for more than one and one-half decades. His photographs speak to us “of the ebony cloths of night.” Of the ebony cloths of the nights of the times. Of the crown of aruera leaves in the ritual of passage of the animal sacrificed to Exu. Mario sent me a text and a song. The text, whose English title is Mysticism and Logic, by Bertrand Russell, begins by saying that in this capricious world, “nothing is more capricious than posthumous fame.” That’s right: posthumous fame. Later, in a passage of mathematical reasoning he poses the question: When a body moves, “all that we can say is that it is at one place at one moment and at another at another.” So, in regard to the photographs I repeat that here are: One: Birth. Two: Passage. Three: Displacement. Russell even comments on the unspeakable: “An arrow in flight is really at rest.” Isn’t this what these photographs want to say? If they reconstruct a movement in their poems of existence and symbols why would they pass through the surface of the body? Why do they reach threedimensional spectrums, if, when we see them, we know that earth and muscles and residues are a core of awareness for a new founding principle?
Who of us will find themselves in this time? And once again the fog wells up, along with the veil of silence and the absolute water. But is this how one passes through the cosmic solitude? And, once again, there comes the extract, the punctum, the sting. The act of uneasiness that leaves us on the edge.
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