1 May
Yesterday, Michigan State Capitol.A number of men protesting the lockdown and the state of emergency. Many of them with machine guns.
They want to open the stores and the businesses.
In the state of Michigan, men with machine guns listen to arguments, threaten, and wait.
Some state representatives in bulletproof vests.
A white horse crosses an empty street.
A white horse seems to paint the landscape as it goes past.
It isn’t an animal, really, it’s a colour.
In India, on a building site, they measure fever before they carry gigantic weights.
What looks like a pistol pointed at somebody’s head is actually just a quick way of checking their temperature.
If you haven’t got a fever, you can work for twelve hours.
A Spanish actor says that he received the best possible news when he was discharged after being admitted to hospital with coronavirus.
Aristotle said that the greatest pleasure a human can have comes at the moment of relief, after a terrible pain.
All the others, medium pleasures.
Small pleasures, medium pleasures, and the highest of all: the relief from pain.
The best news does not come in words, but in pure biology.
Commemorations for International Workers’ Day.
In several cities around Europe: a mask and two metres’ distance between each person.
Shouting requires removing your mask or the shout will be muffled and won’t sound like a shout, but a whisper or a polite request.
It’s important to take care of your posture, they say.
Get yourself a comfortable chair, they say.
When home, a chair. When out, shoes.
In China, 117 million getting ready to travel again.
A rare disease, Kawasaki disease, “causes skin rashes, inflammation and heart disease in children.”
The French government is selling off antique furniture and tapestries to fund the health system.
I exchange my luxury for my emergency; my kingdom for a horse; my antique furniture for new oxygen.
It is not known whether the epidemic began “through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
In 2014, the Pope: “time is greater than space.”
This makes it possible to:
1—forget what is immediate.
2—tolerate difficult or hostile situations. Etc.
Giving time priority.
It is most important to be “initiating processes rather than possessing spaces.”
More important to begin than to buy.
Time is greater than space.
Schlegel: “Seriousness has a specific goal, the most important of all.”
Thinking about a serious time: each person only wants what’s most important of all.
We have both feet firmly planted in a serious time; there is no escape.
“It’s really a terrible moral choice,” observed Boris Cyrulnik, a French psychologist and neurologist. “Freedom will lead to death, while constriction and denying people their freedom will stave off death but will bring economic ruin,” he reminded The Atlantic.
If you have two horses of the same size how do you know which is the mother?
The mother is the one that pushes the hay towards her child.
It has always been so.
2 May
Park benches with pieces of tape indicating that nobody can sit down.Red and white tape like they put around badly parked cars.
The bench is badly parked because it’s empty and that is an invitation.
It is forbidden to sit on benches made for sitting on.
In France, somebody exercises—and off in the background there’s a crane.
They are the only two elements that look alive.
The man raises his arms breathing in and the crane does not move but it is taller.
Cranes are giant animals, building animals.
Building machinery has also sat waiting.
The crane must have been just standing there for ages. It must be going nuts too.
A sixty-two-year-old says: it’s tricky. I’m retired, I don’t see anybody.
Boris Johnson names his son after the two doctors who saved his life.
United Kingdom with more than 621 fatalities.
And in Italy it goes on, it doesn’t stop. Four, seven, four.
In other spots of the world, through fear or abandonment, some bodies are forgotten.
In some tribes, those men who were not buried by their relatives or friends were called the insepulti.
Pascal Quignard talks about this.
It was believed that they kept wandering: neither on Earth nor in the heavens.
U-topos: without a place. The insepulti would be, literally, “utopias: bodies without a place.”
A utopia in the form of a body: not in the heavens, nor on the Earth. The insepulti.
France will impose a fourteen-day quarantine on anybody who wants to enter the country.
Whoever arrives will take two weeks to get past the new borders.
It is no longer space. In 2020, the new border is time: fourteen days.
We must return to the rituals. Bow our heads at the right moment in order then to be able to raise them.
There is a time for everything and everything demands its own time.
Struggling, resistance, and happiness.
How long will you take to get past the border?
Two weeks. Longer than in the nineteenth century.
Dizziness yesterday; afternoon, lying down.
I trim my beard with the little machine that fell in the water two weeks ago but survived like a metal shipwreck.
The machine loses its memory easily.
It no longer remembers anything—it works.
Heat for a few hours. But the wind comes and says it still exists.
Lemon tree bursting into light, some new colours emerging from the ground that is always the same colour.
Strangeness and heavy breathing.
The sounds of animals that are used to the heat; the little creatures are returning and bringing a low-frequency disquiet.
I’m reminded by Daniel Hahn that Freud’s dog sensed his owner’s deathly smell and fled the room shortly before Dr Psychoanalysis died.
There has to be something physical that comes to drive away even devoted dogs.
No dog is ever scared by an idea or a word; that is why death must be a creature of some kind. Possibly a huge one—and we don’t see it.
“I heard a Fly buzz—when I died.” Emily Dickinson.
Some ventilators arrive in Europe with instructions in Mandarin.
Ten minutes aren’t enough to learn Chinese, someone says.
I imagine needing to learn a language to resolve an emergency situation.
Morya’s Garden, my oracle.
“Arriving at the crossroads, take only the new path.”
Going down the new path until you arrive home anew.
Just one crossroads with holes and traps; and a century with no old paths.
8 May
“I speak to you today at the same hour as my father did, exactly seventy-five years ago,” an address by Queen Elizabeth II. Yesterday.Seventy-five years since the Nazi surrender.
She remembers attending the victory party, on the balcony, with her parents and Winston Churchill.
Pandemic could last to the end of next year. New study talks about eighteen to twenty-four months.
In the house, window and door.
Out on the street, a chess game. Each person stops or advances, occupying an imaginary square.
“Everybody in their square”—kitsch Brazilian song.
Everybody in their square being totally free in their square being totally free in their square.
The artist Bruce Nauman goes around the perimeter of a square with his slow and slightly peculiar walk.
Like an animal marking its territory with its feet.
The doctor and writer Mbate Pedro says that in Mozambique, owing to the lack of water, people are sanitising their hands with ashes.
Hands, water, and ashes.
Out on the street, a chess game.
Take an imaginary square out onto the street like somebody taking a fixed idea.
In their imaginary square each person does as they please.
Some mute, others shouting—some sing.
A lot of English people, for example, go out onto the streets to sing the World War II anthem, “We’ll Meet Again.”
It was a request from Queen Elizabeth II.
“Never give up, never despair”—an old slogan.
Some, a castle: they always move forwards.
Others travel diagonals.
The queen in chess can do anything, and the king is protected by everyone.
A poster outside a hospital: if you’re waiting for a sign, this is the sign.
A woman walking past stares at that line.
Without stopping, she walks on.
Perhaps the rhythm of her steps changed for a few metres. But not by much as her hurry is great.
“Will happiness find me?” somebody says.
In the middle of the crowd, you have to raise your arm.
Why will happiness choose you, if everybody has their arm raised?
In the city too many people repeating: will happiness find me?
An arm raised is more visible in open fields or in the desert. But there are fewer people to see it.
It’s a demographic question: God must be more aware of the cities.
If you’re waiting for a sign, this is the sign.
“Never give up, never despair.”
Out on the street, with slow or quick steps. Moving forward and avoiding what appears before the collision: mere proximity.
As if the human body had increased in sensitivity and size.
Less than a metre away, the new body can already feel pain.
Out on the street, people like enemy pieces, standing still and moving in attack or defence.
Auden: “For those who dread to drown, of thirst may die.”
Neither a shipwreck ahead of time, nor unnecessary thirst.
A thought: out on the street and chess again.
I remember the elegant movement of the horse, the knight that can pass over obstacles without dying and without killing.
Instead of the art of flight, the art of the horse—that is the request to Our Lord of These Days.
9 May
It’s like a drop of ink in clear water, said the Korean health minister.Just one man infected seventeen people in bars in a single night, in South Korea.
An infected man is a drop of ink.
A healthy man, clear water.
I was a drop of ink, but I didn’t know it—the man might say in his defence.
He was a drop of ink and I didn’t know it—the other seventeen men might say in lamentation or accusation.
“Roy Horn, half of the famous magic duo Siegfried and Roy, has died in Las Vegas, from Covid-19.”
“There could be no Siegfried without Roy, and no Roy without Siegfried.”
They worked with wild animals; the wild animals disappeared from one place and appeared in another.
Regina Duarte, Brazil’s culture secretary, a few days ago sang “a song from the dictatorship” and asked “wasn’t it good when we used to sing this?”
Learning songs to drive away small creatures, medium creatures, and big creatures.
Songs from childhood are happy when the childhood is happy, somebody murmurs in my ear.
The vast world and your shoes; your shoes occupy more space than the vast world.
A one-kilometre queue to receive food parcels in Geneva.
Measuring new distances.
The length of the line of people to receive food parcels.
The minimum distance for one living person not to be afraid of the other.
The game of chess on the street; a dance without music, with only embarrassment and shame.
Two humans cannot occupy the same square unless they live in the same house.
Squares for the public by law are individual.
Accusation: you’re a drop of ink.
Or: you might be a drop of ink.
Or: I have no proof that you aren’t a drop of ink.
The scientists who in the sixties studied the possible effects of nuclear wars made calculations using the term megabody—which represented a million potential dead.
Megabody, a term that elevates statistics to the field of total devastation.
Iceland, the country says it has won the battle against the pandemic.
Flamengo football club has thirty-eight employees with Covid-19, including three players.
Madonna reveals she was infected.
Masses have returned to some countries in Europe, but with masks and preset places.
376 Mafiosi were released in Italy. And in Singapore a robot is going to give people orders to keep their safe distance.
The Brel song “Amsterdam.”
Brel sweating, his lips swollen.
The white wall and two fearless dogs.
“How threatening to me seem the names of the months,” says a line from a poem.
Information comes like an attack: by land, by sea, or by air.
Whole families surrounding somebody who is bringing a piece of news.
Like a thing that provides warmth.
Humans gather in a circle around the news.
As if information were the new fire of the century and the century was cold.
27 May
In Europe and the USA, the inhabitants have been partly expelled.Some from their homes for good reasons—and the streets are starting to fill up a little.
Others from their jobs.
Boeing makes twelve thousand workers redundant. Twelve thousand expelled.
Projectiles that move across the floor—humans.
And then feet standing still on the ground in the dole queue.
United States worse, Europe wide-eyed.
Expectation in humans uses wide eyes.
As if humans for these days were owls or animals with a strange insomnia.
An insomnia that happens during the day.
Twice awake instead of once.
Eyes that are too open, there isn’t really that much to see.
Maria Velho da Costa, died two days ago: “The house proceeds with its work of expelling.” Here it is.
The house “open like a factory at full capacity, an asylum, a crashed skyscraper.”
“The house that shines up there like a clear ship hanging on the horizon of the sea.”
The house that sheltered for weeks has now changed a little.
House that expels, expulses, and exposes its inhabitants to the rough weather of other people’s coughing and breathing.
Not earthquakes nor gales, beware of the droplets that travel in the air.
Launch of SpaceX postponed. Another projectile. At the last moment.
Meteorological conditions “forced cancellation a few minutes before the scheduled launch time.”
Two astronauts “will be transported to the International Space Station by a private company: Elon Musk’s SpaceX.” The weather still exists in 2020 after all.
Rain and wind: the various old bad weathers are there.
The weather destroys the harvests of sedentary animals and the launches of spaceships.
Modernity has done almost everything but has done little about the rain.
In 2020, progress still stays home so as not to get wet.
Next Saturday, NASA and Elon Musk will attempt lift-off again. Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
In Colombia, a designer has come up with cardboard beds for hospitals.
If things go badly, the bed changes into a coffin.
It can be folded up and avoid anybody who’s dealing with the dead body from dirtying their living hands with danger.
A sort of made-to-measure wrapping.
The living body lies down with faith in medicine, but if things go badly they just move place, they don’t need to change their coat or their nearby room.
Magnetic Resonance: the name alone can cure by fright.
Here I am.
A tunnel into which the body is put as in an oven.
Sounds around the head. Shrill honking sounds and a shaking like on a boat.
Suddenly I remember a confessional.
Without a priest, this machine does the same. It demands confessions.
A machine that without speaking compels the body to confess everything.
A strange confession without opening your mouth, or your eyes.
Please don’t open your eyes—they tell me before going in.
I haven’t opened them in years, I almost answer.
And, yes, a modern machine for ancient confessions.
But you can even fall asleep while they demand decisive answers of you.
I’ve never seen the like; something strange, yet possible. But, yes, there are people who fall asleep in this machine that is frightening and is long.
Duchamp and the sculptor Brâncuși standing beside an airplane’s propeller.
“Who could make anything more beautiful than this?” says Duchamp.
Propellers are indeed beautiful.
The most beautiful of sculptures is the one that takes flight, that seems obvious to me.
Here I go, mask over my mouth, calm faith and concrete medicine. All set, I go in.
28 May
In May 2020, human beings started to walk again.Project: look into walks.
The Dada group, April 14, 1921.
One of the first performances connected to walks.
They argued for excursions to “places that have no reason to exist.”
Artists, writers.
Louis Aragon, Hans Arp, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Théodore Fraenkel, Benjamin Péret, Francis Picabia, Jacques Rigaut, Philippe Soupault and Tristan Tzara.
April 14, 1921.
Many brilliant humans moving forward in a group towards a place that has no reason to exist.
A possible synthesis of utopias and dystopias.
Finding a place that has no reason to exist and staying over there until it is late, another project.
But for now, walk towards foolish places.
In Greece, tango lessons resumed.
Dance is a walk to a place that is right next to the place where the feet are now.
And the tango is a dance that at the very least is moving against the Constitution.
A temporary Constitution that says: at least two metres between one body and its enemy. Or its partner.
Tango in May 2020 should be illegal twice over.
My Greek translator, Athena, also says it isn’t just tango.
They have set up wind power generators everywhere.
Mountains, protected areas, etc.
Wind power generators all over Greece.
A machine comes into nature in order to take energy from the wind.
Transform the wind into something else.
The giants from myths are now made of pure metal.
The wind is not enough.
USA passes a hundred thousand deaths.
Another death, this one. A death that is one.
“I can’t breathe,”—George Floyd.
“An unarmed black man was detained by the police and for nine minutes was suffocated till he died.”
One, no one and one hundred thousand, a book by Pirandello.
Are you one, no one, or one hundred thousand?
In Pirandello, the question of identities.
In May 2020, the question of the quantity of a death.
Is one death one, none, or a hundred thousand?
Protests starting now on the streets of Minneapolis where George was suffocated by the police.
In the Globo newspaper, a few days ago.
“Maria da Glória Oliveira da Cruz, aged 80.
She always said to women that ‘money that’s good is money that’s ours.’
José Bráulio Sousa Ayres, aged 66.
Ordained in 1981, he was parish priest for the Holy Trinity Parish, in São Luís. He leaves a whole crowd of orphans.
Ana Michelli Pereira Ferreira, aged 36.
Always cheerful and entertaining, Ana Michelli talked loud and she wasn’t the sort to take any nonsense from anybody.
Francisca das Chagas Corrêa, aged 84. Died in Petrópolis.
She had a reputation for making rice, chicken and noodles better than anyone. And the best coffee in the world.”
A tribute, I imagine, to each person who has died: describing their favourite thing to eat.
Do that, write that.
Twentieth Century: Heidegger in Greece—he was disappointed.
What would he think of the wind power generators on the Greek mountains today?
Heidegger and his thought/limit: “it is only at borders that decisions are taken.”
We cannot think just anything in just any place.
The place where you are physically determines what you think.
Some years ago, I was in the Black Forest.
A forest where a philosopher built a hut.
There are things that can only be thought at the border.
In the transition between one space and another, one time and another.
Certain thoughts are only possible in 2020.
A precious period in that sense: we must make the most of the border.
