The buffalo

But it was spring, and, tightening the fist in her coat pocket, she’d kill those monkeys levitating in their cage, monkeys happy as weeds, monkeys leaping about gently, the female monkey with her resigned, loving gaze, and the other female suckling her young. She’d kill them with fifteen dry bullets: the woman’s teeth clenched until her jaw ached. The nakedness of the monkeys. The world that saw no danger in being naked. She’d kill the nakedness of the monkeys. One monkey stared back at her as he gripped the bars, his emaciated arms outstretched in a crucifix, his bare chest exposed without pride. But she wouldn’t aim at his chest, she’d shoot the monkey between the eyes, she’d shoot between those eyes that were staring at her without blinking. Suddenly the woman averted her face: because the monkey’s pupils were covered with a gelatinous white veil, in his eyes the sweetness of sickness, he was an old monkey — the woman averted her face, trapping between her teeth a feeling she hadn’t come looking for, she quickened her step, even so, turned her head in alarm back toward the monkey with its arms outstretched: he kept staring straight ahead. “Oh no, not this,” she thought. And as she fled, she said: “God, teach me only how to hate.”

Clarice Lispector

1920 - 1977

Beauty

At any time between 1750 and 1930 if you had asked educated people to describe the aim of poetry, art or music, they would have replied, "beauty". And if you had asked for the point of that, you would have learned that beauty is a value - as important as truth and goodness. Then in the twentieth century, beauty stopped being important. Art increasingly aimed to disturb and to break moral taboos. It was not beauty, but originality, however achieved and at whatever moral cost that won the prizes. Not only has art made a cult of ugliness, architecture too has become soulless and sterile. And it's not just our physical surroundings that have become ugly. Our language, our music and our manners are increasingly raucous, self-centered, and offensive, as though beauty and good taste have no real place in our lives. I think we are losing beauty and with it there is the danger that we will lose the meaning of life.

Roger Scruton

1944 - 2020

The Catcher in the Rye

One of the biggest reasons I left Elkton Hills was because I was surrounded by phonies. That's all. They were coming in the goddam window. For instance, they had this headmaster, Mr. Haas, that was the phoniest bastard I ever met in my life. Ten times worse than old Thurmer. On Sundays, for instance, old Haas went around shaking hands with everybody's parents when they drove up to school. He'd be charming as hell and all. Except if some boy had little old funny-looking parents. You should've seen the way he did with my roommate's parents. I mean if a boy's mother was sort of fat or corny-looking or something, and if somebody's father was one of those guys that wear those suits with very big shoulders and corny black-and-white shoes, then old Hans would just shake hands with them and give them a phony smile and then he'd go talk, for maybe a half an hour, with somebody else's parents. I can't stand that stuff. It drives me crazy. It makes me so depressed I go crazy. I hated that goddam Elkton Hills.

The soul of man under Socialism

The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. 

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. 

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it.The people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.

Oscar Wilde

1854 - 1900

The Waves

Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent.

Virginia Woolf

1882 - 1941

Autobiografía

Oh, the sickening greed

En la oficina de empleo de Stretford, una mujer culigorda se sienta ante mí y quiere saber por qué he dejado mi espléndido puesto en las madrigueras subterráneas de la Inland Revenue. Es un neumático arenque ahumado de tan morsiles proporciones que hasta me cuesta responderle.

- Mírese, ¿acaso no podría arreglarse un poco? - me dice, y suelta en un suspiro todo el aire contenido en su puerquedad mientras agita unos brazos mantecosos y forcejea con sus piernas de gelatina... como friso yo por llegar al lugar de esta cita. Como ha dejado usted un trabajo perfectamente ventajoso, no podemos otorgarle ningún beneficio de desempleo. Tenga: quiero que acepte éste.

El hipopótamo me tiende una tarjeta con detalles de un trabajo y yo la leo con recelo.

- ¿Me está pidiendo que limpie las orillas de los canales?

- Sí.

- ¿Limpiar las orillas de los canales?

- Sí.

- ¿Como ocupación?

- Sí.

Susurro una última plegaria en busca de misericordia y recuerdo las palabras de Nancy en Oliver Twist, «dejadlo en paz o le haré alguna barbaridad a uno de vosotros que me llevará a la horca antes de tiempo...», y la morgue bosteza mi nombre. Me interrogan en la oficina de selección de Stretford porque tienen vacantes de cartero y es donde me veo con más posibilidades, pero no es así porque me rechazan - se me considera física y psicológicamente incapaz de entregar cartas. Ya no hay otra escapatoria que la muerte.

Steven Patrick Morrissey

Tropic of Capricorn

If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea. I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. (I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a change to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget. I wanted something of the earth which was not of man's doing, something absolutely divorced from the human of which I was surfeited. I wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of idea. I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and the light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night, so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think. To be englobed and encompassed and to encompass and to englobe at the same time. No more pity, no more tenderness. To be human only terrestrially, like a plant or a worm or a brook. To be decomposed, divested of light and stone, variable as the molecule, durable as the atom, heartless as the earth itself.

Henry Miller

1891 - 1980

Fahrenheit 451

"People don't talk about anything".

"Oh, they must!"

"No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming-pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else".

Ray Bradbury

1920 - 2012

Fahrenheit 451

Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non?combustible data, chock them so damned full of "facts" they feel stuffed, but absolutely "brilliant" with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

Ray Bradbury

1920 - 2012

Fahrenheit 451

- Patience, Montag. Let the war turn off the "families." Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.

- There has to be someone ready when it blows up.

- What? Men quoting Milton? Saying, I remember Sophocles? Reminding the survivors that man has his good side, too? They will only gather up their stones to hurl at each other. Montag, go home. Go to bed. Why waste your final hours racing about your cage denying you're a squirrel?

Ray Bradbury

1920 - 2012

The revolution in poetry

Voltaire was the last great dramatist to subdue through Greek moderation a soul many-formed and equal to the mightiest thunderstorms of tragedy - he was able to do what no German has yet been able to do because the nature of the Frenchman is much more closely related to the Greek than is the nature of the German - just as he was also the last great writer to possess a Greek ear, Greek artistic conscientiousness, Greek charm and simplicity in the treatment of prose speech; just as he was, indeed, one of the last men able to unite in himself the highest freedom of spirit and an altogether unrevolutionary disposition without being inconsistent and cowardly.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

The book become almost human

Every writer is surprised a new how, once a book has detached himself from him, it goes on to live a life of its own; it is to him as though a part of an insect had come free and was now going its own way. Perhaps he almost forgets it, perhaps he raises himself above the views he has set down in it, perhaps he no longer even understands it and has lost those wings upon which he flew when he thought out that book: during which time it seeks out its readers, enkindles life, makes happy, terrifies, engenders new works, becomes the conscience of new designs and undertakings - in short, it lives like a being furnished with nature and essence and is yet not human. - That author has drawn the happiest lot who as an old man can say that all of life-engendering, strength-ening, elevating, enlightening thought and feeling that was in him lives on in his writings, and that he himself is now nothing but the grey ashes, while the fire has everywhere been rescued and borne forward. - If one now goes on to consider that, not only a book, but every action performed by a human being becomes in some way the cause of other actions, decisions, thoughts, that everything that happens is inextricably knotted to everything that will happen, one comes to recognize the existence of an actual immortality, that of motion: what has once moved is enclosed and eternalized in the total union of all being like an insect in amber.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

Os cus de Judas

O espectro de Salazar pairava sobre as calvas pias labaredazinhas de Espírito Santo corporativo, salvando-nos da ideia tenebrosa e deletéria do socialismo. A PIDE prosseguia corajosamente a sua valorosa cruzada contra a noção sinistra de democracia, primeiro passo para o desaparecimento, nos bolsos ávidos de ardinas e marçanos, do faqueiro de cristofle. O cardeal Cerejeira, emoldurado, garantia, de um canto, a perpetuidade da Conferência de São Vicente de Paula, e, por inerência, dos pobres domesticados. O desenho que representava o povo em uivo de júbilo ateu em torno de uma guilhotina libertária fora definitivamente exilado para o sótão, entre bidés velhos e cadeiras coxas, que uma fresta poeirenta de sol aureolava do mistério que acentua as inutilidades abandonadas. De modo que quando embarquei para Angola, a bordo de um navio cheio de tropas, para me tornar finalmente homem, a tribo, agradecida ao Governo que me possibilitava, grátis, uma tal metamorfose, compareceu em peso no cais, consentindo, num arroubo de fervor patriótico, ser acotovelada por uma multidão agitada e anónima semelhante à do quadro da guilhotina, que ali vinha assistir, impotente, à sua própria morte.

António Lobo Antunes

1942 - 2026

Casa-grande & senzala

A história social da casa-grande é a história íntima de quase todo brasileiro: de sua vida doméstica, conjugal sob o patriarcalismo escravocrata e polígamo, da sua vida de menino; do seu cristianismo reduzido à religião de família e influenciado pelas crendices de senzala.

Gilberto Freyre

1900 - 1987

Os cus de Judas

Viu por acaso como nos assustamos se alguém, genuinamente, sem segundos pensamentos, se nos entrega, como não suportamos um afecto sincero, incondicional, sem exigência de troca? A esses, os Camilos Torres, os Guevaras, os Allendes, apressamo-nos a matá-los porque o seu combativo amor nos incomoda, procuramo-los, de bazooka ao ombro, raivosos, nas florestas da Bolívia, bombardeamos-lhes os palácios, colocamos no seu lugar sujeitos cruéis e viscosos, mais parecidos connosco, cujos bigodes nos não trepam pelo esófago refluxos verdes de remorso. De forma que as relações sexuais constituem entre nós, percebe, uma violação mole, uma apressada exibição de ódio sem júbilo, a derrota molhada de dois corpos exaustos no colchão, à espera de reencontrarem o fôlego que lhes foge para verificarem as horas no relógio de pulso à cabeceira, se vestirem sem uma palavra, examinarem sumariamente no espelho do quarto de banho a pintura e o cabelo, e partirem, a coberto da noite, ainda húmidos do outro, a caminho da solidão das suas casas. Os que moram a dois, aliás, e dividem com má vontade o edredão e o dentífrico, padecem, de resto, de um isolamento semelhante; ah, as refeições frente a frente, em silêncio, cheias de rancor que se palpa no ar como a água de colónia das viúvas! Os serões junto à televisão acariciando projectos vingativos de assassínio conjugal, a faca do peixe, a jarra da China, um oportuno empurrão pela janela! Os sonhos minuciosamente detalhados do enfarte de miocárdio do marido ou da trombose da mulher, a dor no peito, a boca à banda, as palavras infantis babadas a custo na almofada da clínica!

António Lobo Antunes

1942 - 2026

Os cus de Judas

À tarde, o tenente e eu costumávamos parar o jeep na cerca de grades oxidadas, retirar o assento traseiro, instalarmo-nos junto de uma árvore sob o sossego gordo dos pássaros, um silêncio grande e bom de folhas altas, e fumávamos sem falar porque as palavras se tornavam subitamente desnecessárias como um barco na cidade, um aquário no mar, um fingimento de orgasmo durante o orgasmo, fumávamos sem falar e uma quietude de paz deslizava devagarinho pelas veias a reconciliar-nos connosco, a perdoar-nos estarmos ali, ocupantes involuntários em país estrangeiro, agentes de um fascismo provinciano que a si mesmo se minava e corroía, no lento ácido de uma triste estupidez de presbitério.

António Lobo Antunes

1942 - 2026

Mrs Dalloway

One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.

Virginia Woolf

1882 - 1941

Os cus de Judas

Tento desesperadamente fixar, dizia, o cenário que habitei tantos meses, as tendas de lona, os cães vagabundos, os edifícios decrépitos da administração defunta, morrendo pouco e pouco numa lenta agonia de abandono: a ideia de um África portuguesa, de que os livros de História do liceu, as arengas dos políticos e o capelão de Mafra me falavam em imagens majestosas, não passava afinal de uma espécie de cenário de província a apodrecer na desmedida vastidão do espaço, projectos de Olivais Sul que o capim e os arbustos rapidamente devoram, e um grande silêncio de desolação em torno, habitado pelas carrancas esfomeadas dos leprosos. As Terras do Fim do Mundo eram a extrema solidão e a extrema miséria, governadas por chefes de posto alcoólicos e cúpidos a tiritarem de paludismo nas suas casas vazias, reinando sobre um povo conformado, sentado à porta das cubatas numa indiferença vegetal.

António Lobo Antunes

1942 - 2026

Smoke rolling down street

Red Scabies on the Skin

Police Cars turn Garbage Corner — 

Was that a Shot! Backre or Cherry Bomb? 

Ah, it’s all right, take the mouth o,

it’s all over. 

Man Came a long way, 

Canoes thru Fire Engines, 

Big Cities’ power station Fumes

Executives with Country Houses — 

Waters drip thru Ceilings in the Slum — 

It’s all right, take the mouth o 

it’s all over —

Allen Ginsberg

1926 - 1997

Capitalism and the real

 

Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in wich advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.

If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from? A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism. Poverty, famine and war can be presented as an inevitable part of rality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism's ostensible realism turns out to be nothing of the sort.

Needles to say, what counts as realistic, what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly, neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a business ontology in wich it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business.

Environmental catastrophe is one such Real. At one level, to be sure, it might look as if Green issues are very far from being unrepresentable voids for capitalist culture. Climate change and the threat of resource-depletion are not being repressed so much as incorporated into advertising and marketing. What this treatment of environmental catastrophe illustrates is the fantasy structure on which capitalist realism depends: a presupposition that resources are infinite, that the earth itself is merely a husk which capital can at a certain point slough off like a used skin, and that any problem can be solved by the market. [...] Yet environmental catastrophe features in late capitalist culture only as a kind of simulacra, its real implications for capitalism too traumatic to be a assimilated into the system. The significance of Green critiques is that they suggest that, far from being the only viable political-economic system, capitalism is in fact primed to destroy the entire human environment. The relationship between capitalism and eco-disaster is neither coincidental nor accidental: capital's need of a constantly expanding market, its growth fetish, mean that capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability.

But Green issues are already a contested zone, already a site where politicization is being fought for. In what follows, I want to stress two other aporias in capitalist realism, which are not yet politicized to anything like the same degree. The first is mental health. Mental health, in fact, is a paradigm case of how capitalist realism operates. Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect. Madness was not a natural, but a political, category. [...] In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with Jame's claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem os stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The mental health plague in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.

The other phenomenon I want to highlight is bureaucracy. [...] The persistence of bureaucracy in late capitalism does not in itself indicate that capitalism does not work - rather, what it suggest is that the way in which capitalism does actually work is very different from the picture presented by capitalist realism.

In part, I have chosen to focus on mental health problems and bureaucracy because they both feature heavily in an area of culture which has becoming increasingly dominated by the imperatives of capitalist realism: education.

Mark Fisher

1968 - 2017