Moon

Do you know why the moon shines so beautifully?

Because there are no human beings there.

Clarissa Lake - Movement of earth is noiseless 

Situation

I would like to introduce this line saying a few words over error. This phantasm of creation which declares itself King of our spirit, commander of all rules. The universe it's an absurd sequence of errors. How common became to speak you are wrong. 

I write to deal with mistake and delusion. My aim is to commit a series of grammar and syntax errors. The text has a purpose. It wants to communicate a message. To get the code of this message, the other person must know what is wrong. 

Communication is only possible because of mistakes. Reading a text is like filtering its errors. Significant. How do we get this magical significant? How one can certainly assure that what is written is this or that?

Hence we all have knowledge of English grammar we are playing the same game. If I dare to say "Go fuck yourself", you know I'm offending you directly. 

How do you get this significant, how do you extract an iconic symbol of a simple sentence? By having the words carved in your heart? Perhaps because we were through school system? How do you get the signs of the text for yourself and claim to be the master of interpretation? Because you know error. 

How can I judge error? Making a lot of mistakes is the best part of the creativity process and free intellectual production. Since I'm not a candidate to lord Sith, what I meant is there no one to guide me in the purpose of making mistakes, I take the chances and consequences and eventual risks.

Life is a constant risk. The error. The essence of this dramatic point of view. A few more lines and we still do not understand each other. Most of my errors are debt of my inaccuracy with English language. 

To do what I wish it's necessary to commit errors. Errors is the part which forms the whole system. Every system without rules is faded to be destroyed. Discipline arises freedom. Grammar is the best example. From a couple of rules I can speak with anyone who knows it. It's a system forged by rules and sustained for them. The laws of language give me liberty to speak in a manner I never thought it was possible. I never thought I could write without thinking in my own mother tongue. 

Sometimes I'm thinking I'm going insane, because I really think in English, specially when I am writing. I can make mistakes and not feel guilty about it. The process of learning is formed and shaped on errors. In this matter of speaking, of course. I do not feel guilty of making syntax mistakes.

This is an original communication, of a very original person. A person which had learned and growth under mistakes. The mistake of love. The fatal perfume of friendship.

It's one ability I own. I do not care for mistakes. To make mistakes is to be human. I like to feel human. I like to feel that I'm going to die someday, and I wanna do more than simply produce for others. Produce to the family, produce to the institution, produce for profit, produce for care, produce for love. I am out of this freak and competitive game. 

I want to produce something which can change the world. It begins changing myself. Changing my way of thinking and my perception over the nature and the world. Sensitive. 

The one who started writing this text is dead a long time. He had a sick obsession for a woman. He died because he had hope she one day could call him. I will not grief this ancient writer. He deserved everything that happened to him. Even more pain. 

It's easy to keep talking "I love you", when he had the chance he was very violent. He was trying to forget but a woman never forget this kind of violence. Writing is a way to denounce. A way to make things clear. 

One day, this poet fevered in love, push his flower and she almost felt on the ground. That day she tried to break with him, because he deserved go to jail for such action. Yet, it was not enough.

The Shakespeare in love told her one day he was going to put a bullet in her head if she dare to stay with another guy. Very lovable. For an artist everything seems dream. For a woman the situation is serious. There are errors we must not forgive. Errors that exist beyond the lines and the meaning of a text. It doesn't matter how sheep one might appear or look like, it shall not be treated as one of a kind. You know a wolf when it show its claws. They can hurt and they are not poetic. They are not lying cool and smooth beneath the violin caprice.

My error was to love you. I will not forgive myself for that. Consequently, I will never forgive you. You hurt when we were together. I write to forget the pain. I try to make mistakes which cannot cause physical pain. I write to breath under my errors. I look to them as small statues flowing in the sea. A new life is possible. One brick at a time, one word at a time. One mistake can change everything. I am able to recognize error. I was not a perfect woman. But no woman deserves violence and this is not an easy thing to erase. 

It's not a syntax matter. It's not a lion hidden on the lines. 

Clarissa Lake - Situation 

Playlist III

1 - Dmitri Shostakovich - Symphony No 1 in F minor, op. 10

2 - Dmitri Shostakovich - Symphony No 2 in B major, op. 14 (To October)

3 - Dmitri Shostakovich - Symphony No 3 in E flat major, op. 20 (First of May)

4 - Dmitri Shostakovich -  Symphony No 5 in  D minor, op. 47

5 - Dmitri Shostakovich - Symphony No 7 in C major, op. 60 (Leningrad)

6 - Dmitri Shostakovich - Symphony No 10 in E minor, op. 93

7 - Dmitri Shostakovich - String Quartet No 5 in B flat major, op. 92

8 - Dmitri Shostakovich - String Quartet No 8 in C minor, op. 110

9 - Dmitri Shostakovich - Suite for jazz orchestra No 1

10 - Dmitri Shostakovich - Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, op. 29 (Katerina Izmailova)


Clarissa Lake - The best of music

Playlist II

1 - Sergei Prokofiev - Violin concerto No 2 in G minor, op. 63 

2 - Sergei Prokofiev - Cantata Alexander Nevsky, op. 78

3 - Sergei Prokofiev - Opera War and Peace, op. 91

4 - Sergei Prokofiev - Symphony No 5 in B flat major, op. 100

5 - Sergei Prokofiev - Piano concerto No 3 in C major, op. 26

6 - Sergei Prokofiev - String quartet No 1 in B minor, op. 50

7 - Sergei Prokofiev - Ballet Romeo and Juliet, op. 64

8 - Sergei Prokofiev - Peter and the Wolf, op. 67

9 - Sergei Prokofiev - Symphony No 1 in D major, op. 25

10 - Sergei Prokofiev - The Love for Three Oranges - Satirical opera, op. 33


Clarissa Lake - Sergei Prokofiev 

How to read a book III

I - THE ANALYSIS OF A BOOK'S STRUCTURE 

1. Classify the book according to kind and subject matter.

2. State what the whole book is about with the utmost brevity.

3. Enumerate its major parts in their order and relation, and analyze these parts as you have analyzed the whole. 

4. Define the problem or problems the author is trying to solve. 

II - THE INTERPRETATION OF A BOOK'S CONTENTS

1. Come to terms with the author by interpreting his basic words

2. Grasp the author's leading propositions through dealing with his most important sentences.

3. Know the author's arguments, by finding them in, or constructing them out of, sequences of sentences.

4. Determine which of his problems the author solved, and which he did not; and of the latter, decide which the author knew he failed to solve.

III - THE CRITICISM OF A BOOK AS A COMMUNICATION OF KNOWLEDGE

A. General Maxims

1. Do not begin criticism until you have completed analysis and interpretation. (Do not say you agree, disagree, or suspend judgement, until you can say, "I understand.")

2. Do not disagree disputatiously or contentiously.

3. Respect the difference between knowledge and opinion, by having reasons for any critical judgement you make. 

B. Specific Criteria for Points of Criticism

1. Show wherein the author is uninformed.

2. Show wherein the author is misinformed.

3. Show wherein the author is illogical.

4. Show wherein the author's analysis or account is incomplete. 

Clarissa Lake - Mortimer J. Adler - And Still More Rules, pg. 266-7 - Simon and Schuster - New York, 1966

How to read a book II

He who regards conversation as a battle can win only by being an antagonist, only by disagreeing successfully, whether he is right or wrong. The reader who approaches a book in this spirit reads it only to find something he can disagree with. For the disputations and contentious, a bone can always be found to pick on. (pg. 245)

(...) But if he realizes that the only profit in conversation with live or dead teachers, is what one can learn from them, if he realizes that you win only by gaining knowledge, not by knocking the other fellow down, he may see the futility of mere contentiousness. (pg. 246)

The ignorant often foolishly disagree with the learned about matters exceeding their knowledge. (pg. 247)

(...)The trouble is that many people regard disagreement as unrelated to either teaching or being taught. They think that everything is just a matter of opinion. I have mine. You have yours. Our right to our opinions is as inviolable as our right to private property. On such a view, communication cannot be profitable if the profit to be gained is an increase in knowledge. Conversation is hardly better than a ping-pong game of opposed opinions, a game in which no one keeps score, no one wins, and everyone is satisfied because he ends up holding the same opinions he started with.

I cannot take this view. I think that knowledge can be communicated and that discussion can result in learning. (pg. 248) 

If an author does not give reasons for his propositions, they can be treated only as expressions of opinion on his part. The reader who does not distinguish between the reasoned statement of knowledge and the flat expression of opinion is not reading to learn. He is at most interested in the author's personality and is using the book as a case history. Such a reader will, of course, neither agree nor disagree. He does not judge the book but the author. (pg. 249)

 The great writers have always been great readers, but that does not mean that they read all the books which, in their day, were listed as the great and indispensable ones. In many cases, they read fewer books than are now required in some of our better colleges, but what they did read, they read well. Because they had mastered these books, they became peers with their authors. They were entitled to become authorities in their own right. In the natural course of events, a good student frequently becomes a teacher, and so, too, a good reader becomes an author. (pg. 264)

Clarissa Lake - Mortimer J. Adler - How to Read a Book: The Etiquette of Talking Back and The Things the Reader Can say - Simon and Schuster - New York, 1966

au contraire

It could be nice to read a text of yours.


Lake, Clarissa - Academic point of view


Since there is none, I will keep writing.
Until I get too much bored.
Shifts bloody moon for a half of my being
A mirror stands. Can you hear it?
The silence of the universe
Flowing over your head
Soon will come the blazing meteor
Destroy everything you knew.
Kids playing in the park,
Old woman crossing the 5th Avenue
The rainbow trying to appear
Exchange my words for a more syntactic point
There is a flower in the corner of the street
No one saw it, but like a child, I smile
I did see the spikes and the red couple of wine
After the simple sentence,
Comes the compound one.
Perhaps if comes many verbs, a complex sentence.
What is the deal of grammar anyway?
This is a bomb poem
His author, poor dynamite.
I should erase all of this.
I really don't know the meaning of danger.
Maybe I'm mad woman.
Maybe I'm just a piece of paper, trying to whisper,
trying to catch the clouds and swing in the river.
Too much water may wash my what and how
Repeat the same phrase again
So the reader knows this is a damn poem
Soon will come the blazing meteor
It will destroy your heart, it will wash your soul
On thousands tones of the same.
Freud may explain why I am like this or that
No matter what you do for life,
Do not smoke cigarettes. They stink, cause cancer, make you old,
less attractive, less confident (specially on bed...),
Marlboro: The power of propaganda:
Hey Lady would you like to buy some poison?
I hate poison!
But this one poison can make you look beautiful!
A cigarette is all your alter ego needs?
What? Says the client, almost thinking the dealer is joking
A cigarette is everything you need to be happy?
Maybe...but what about this poison?
Do not worry! Enjoy your life while you can
Please light this Napalm to make your life happy!
If the propaganda is good enough you can sell poison as pop corn
It's all the same market, which us poets belongs
Cigarettes are disgusting and I hate people who smokes.
They should remember they won't have a future
They are already in deadline, one after another, carried to hell.
Do not worry about your future, smoker
Die, but try to die alone. I don't wanna see your emphysema.
Look for pictures and videos in Google
Older poets used to smoke
Where they are?
They are sleeping
In silence
And deep sleep.
Smoking in another world. Writers are bad propaganda
They are paranoid, vicious, lascivious, not so fun, not so social people,
They love more alcohol then people and are the great hero of our adolescents heroes
Tell me what you read and I tell you who you are
I am Miss Lake and not one can take
Take what? Take what? The read desperate, says it's a horrible poem
Finish my poem yourself.
I would let some lines so you can write your poem with mine
............ .......... ............. ........... .............. ............... .............. .................... .................. ............
......... ............. ............ ................ .............. ............ ............. ............ ................ ................ ...........
................ ............. .................... ................. .................... .................... .................. .......... ...............
......................................................................... ...................................................................................
...................................! .................................... .......................... ..................................... ...............
.................... ......................... ................. ................. ...................... ................. ................ .............. .....
Lake. Take. Make. Sake. Fake. I give you some rhymes and
Try to make some of your own. Democratic enough?
Reverse all controversy
Invert the verse
Break the rule
Go away
Find happiness among a helmet of spikes
Why I cannot reach her? An specialist in discourse matters?
I cannot reach her because she had has suspended judgement.
Suspending judgement is an act of criticism. She is taking the position
that something has not been shown. She is saying that she's not convinced
or persuaded on way or the other.

Final Chapter - April fool's day chapter

I'm afraid the age has come. I am not so strong as I used to be. I do not have focus, I cry a lot and I still remember a past which has nothing in common to the present. The truth is that I suffer from mental illness.

I saw a girl in the University and I had this dream that I have met and loved her. But none of this happened. This one girl or woman doesn't even know me, she never saw my face or heard my voice.

It is kind of sick to love something that only exist in my mind. While I speak, they are trying to find me a therapist. 

It was too much imagination which created this fantasy of love. There are no such things out of my head and I confess I am sick. I just saw the woman! Where was my mind? My mind created such a wonderful story about this girl, as we had loved each other for a long time and separated tragically, as in romances. 

I will keep taking my medicine. I am furious and angry, after all. Platonic love and psychotic tendency. 

Even if I could, it's like to love a girl that you saw in a magazine. She will not respond, smile or do anything. Only your mind gives soul to that little image. Wings to imagination.

The girl of the weekly magazine shall never look to a guy like me. Like I said, age has come and I can feel it. Wrinkles, marks of alcohol, drugs and bad nights of sleep. Dark circles surround my eyes and my ill heart. 

I've never been so fat. I've never been so ugly. I woke up today not loving myself. I look to the mirror and I feel disgusting. Fat, wrinkles, without any cash inside the bank, without family or kids. I am what people use to call loser. I do not have  any hair in my head anymore. My photos of Facebook were from a time where I used to have a big hair, as a lion. I was so beautiful but I didn't know. I know now that I feel shame of my body. The photos of facebook do not express reality.

I did nothing at all in my life. It was a waste of time. Only dreaming with something that never happened. Today I'm fat and broken and when a woman see me in the streets, she runs away. Dark circles around my eyes. 

This is all because I have hope: the most stupid feeling one could have. We pass our lives always hoping, always waiting for some magical day which never happens and the frustration grows fat as my belly. 

Hope. I have hope but I do nothing to change the poor situation. I feel shame of myself. An old and solitary man which still is a dull undergraduate student. I have no future at all. I am lost in the space. Why? Because I'm too old for profession. I am not like wine, I am not getting better with time. 

Today is the day I will definitely quit writing. There is no need to put my shame on public. Today is the day I will live this problems for those which enjoy to live here, for those which are really happy, because God loves them, they have a family, father, mother, uncle, friends, girlfriends, boyfriends. I have nothing and I feel envy. I can't never achieve happiness. I don't deserve to be happy. This is why I am leaving the stage. The actor is tired of so much hatred and passive actions. I will do this because I am certain nobody will ever miss me. And it will cause a cost to the State, because I do not have a cent for my own funeral. Like I said, I'm loser and I don't deserve to be here. This world is a place for happy people, and I am deeply unhappy. 

I want to get away from here right now. With no applause or crying mother. Because I don't have one. I never had a mother and the one I had tried to kill me with medicine. I survived because I'm stupid. I survived to get a mental illness which torments me night and day, a phantom of a woman which never knew who I am, and this is a good thing for her! I could disturb her peace, interrupt her career, make her cry as I always do. 

I am not asking... This is a cruel world, a cruel play and I'm leaving the stage! Bye and do not cry for me, because you didn't cry when I was alive and lonely. Do not cry when I go. It's not because of you, or this, or that: It's because I'm sick and everybody knows it. Now people will have peace. The world is a better place without me. Bye and do not remember me, do not visit my grave. It was only my dream! My dream! 

Enough of publicity: time to move. Time to disengage this carbon carapace into thousands fragments of rotten meal. May the worms be glad with my flesh. 

Clarissa Lake - Bye  

Faith

I didn't want to write. I realize I'm not that good. These days I am making reading exercises. I need to prove to myself this is not obsession. My aim today is write so good that the highest doctors of Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard will be stunned. It's a quite ambitious goal and I take the risk of sound ridiculous. But I don't mind. 

I want perfection in English. Like the boy of Whiplash I train every single day. The way I breath is the way I live English: I read the Guardian UK, Washington Post, scientific articles, cartoons and of course literature. I am mastering a lot of books in English. 

I need to confess that when I have started writing I couldn't even read The Times or something else. Most of my vocabulary comes from Cinema. It's one of my good vices. In music, I could cite Tupac: if you are a good student of English, try to listen some rap and distinguish words and sentences. I think listening difficult musics it's also an exercise. 

I will become a professional very soon. One day I will be giving some lecture in Cambridge, Oxford or any respectable institution. I am good professional because I do not want a trip. I do not want to marry. I do not want to buy a house or a car. My professional ambition is only one: To be perfect in English.  Remember that guy from Brazil? That would be I. When you have a dream and you fight for it, with everything you have, you get it. The secret is never doubt of yourself. Do not care for jealous people who want to see you falling down. 

Besides, there are no secrets in language. It's all about communication. If you can read what it is written right here I can say two things: a) I wrote it correctly because if I were too much ambiguous it would impossible to unriddle the text, b) You know how to read, what is written here is according to some rules, that you identify and catch the meaning of the text. This is the miracle of communication. If I write good enough, anyone who knows the code can break it and get into its significance. 

To end this very brief observation I would say that I will no longer use "Kalon Kakon" as a therapist, as a way to picture my troubles as a drama. I wanna try something different these time. Not to repeat the same mistake of infinite arguments of Athena and Prometheus. But they were good experiences. I could not say it represents literature, but I say for sure it's not a lie: it's fiction. 

The main difference between lie and fiction is that when a person lie, I mean in real life,  the one is trying to cause damage to somebody else. And this is ugly. A fiction is a lie which hurts nobody: you read a text and you know it's not real. 

Probably I will have those things most of workers and students are striving for: and real much more. English is more than semantics and syntax: It belongs to specific cultures, it's a living thing. I'm already glad to know that I have already read Shakespeare while many of Americans, Australians and British people don't. 

I used to say that I was stealing the fire of the Gods. Indeed, I am robing and I will be rewarded for it. 

I learned more than English. I learned faith and discipline are more than words: they are things we do everyday, as watching movies, listening to music, physical exercises, reading, work, go to college, take a shower, eat, etc. 

This is it. When I want to write, I write. I will keep writing, as Johnny Walker keep walking. Bad joke, have a nice day and do not forget to have faith. Look to the sky and see this is a beautiful and unique day. =D

Clarissa Lake - Faith

The war against humanities

A war is being waged within the cloistered world of academia, a war whose repercussions will be felt down through the generations. Long one of Britain’s global success stories, our universities are under attack by an austerity-obsessed government looking to maintain the excellence of our institutions at a fraction of the cost. The dictates of the market economy have been unleashed upon our once-sacred seats of learning, and academics wear the haunted looks of the terminally battle-scarred. With the threat of further cuts to come whichever side wins the general election, and none of the major parties promising to stand in the way of the corporate colonisation of education, the debate has reached an unseemly head, with many academics in open revolt and professional publications full of bilious fulmination.

The corridors of our universities are stalked by soft-footed technocrats who draw down six-figure salaries in exchange for implementing “right-sizing” exercises and “internationalisation programmes”, while harried academics are forced to deal with a wall of bureaucracy that is being constructed, form-by-form, between them and their students. Research is centrally mandated and programmatic; time – once the academic’s greatest resource – must be accounted for in meticulous detail; and everywhere, and at all times, the onus is on academics to “monetise” their activities, to establish financial values for their “outputs,” and to justify their existence according to the remorseless and nightmarish logic of the markets.

Since Margaret Thatcher’s education reforms in the red-braced 1980s, when performance management was the watchword and universities suffered more from cuts than any other public service, academics have been living on borrowed time. It is rarely remarked that Thatcher – the only prime minister to have been secretary of state for education – made the universities the exception in her neo-liberal drive to decentralise. She asserted more government power over the universities in an attempt to strong-arm them into complying with her vision of an entrepreneurial, vocational education system. And yet, as Roy Jenkins, then chancellor of Oxford university, noted at the time, “It is difficult to think of any field of human endeavour in which central regulation is a greater enemy of excellence than that of the organisation of the teaching and research of universities.”

Currently fixed in the crosshairs are the disciplines of the humanities – arts, languages and social sciences – which have suffered swingeing funding cuts and been ignored by a government bent on promoting the modish, revenue-generating Stem (science, technology, engineering, maths) subjects. The liberal education which seeks to provide students with more than mere professional qualifications appears to be dying a slow and painful death, overseen by a whole cadre of what cultural anthropologist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”: bureaucrats hired to manage the transformation of universities from centres of learning to profit centres. As one academic put it to me: “Every dean needs his vice-dean and sub-dean and each of them needs a management team, secretaries, admin staff; all of them only there to make it harder for us to teach, to research, to carry out the most basic functions of our jobs.” The humanities, whose products are necessarily less tangible and effable than their science and engineering peers (and less readily yoked to the needs of the corporate world) have been an easy target for this sprawling new management class.

The coalition government’s education policies, led by Michael Gove and David Willetts, continued Thatcher’s market-driven reforms, cutting all direct funding to the humanities, creating the cumbersome research excellence framework (Ref), which seeks to audit the academics’ research “outputs”, and overseeing a dramatic increase in the number of staff on short-term contracts. The coalition also put in place the recommendations of the Browne review, the manifesto of philistinism commissioned by the Labour party to map the future of higher education funding in the UK. Written by the former chief executive of BP, it was originally offered as a sop to those who opposed the imposition of £3,000 student fees in 2004. In fact, it marked the final step in the marketisation of our universities, with academics as middle management, pulled apart by the competing demands of their non-academic overlords and the newly powerful “consumers” of their “product” – the students.

A character in David Lodge’s Nice Work, set against the backdrop of Thatcher’s reforms, comments on “the extraordinary meekness with which the academic establishment has accepted the cuts”. That cannot be said this time around.

Those who read the letters pages of Times Higher Education have long been aware of the tribulations endured by humanities academics, watching horror-stricken as their disciplines are eroded and cut. More recently, the discussion has burst out of academia, led by the redoubtable figure of Dame Marina Warner. Warner has found herself, rather reluctantly, at the forefront of the struggle to defend the humanities against assaults from within and without the universities. She retired from her position as a professor in the department of literature, film and theatre studies at the University of Essex in 2014, setting out the reasons for her departure in a lucid, angry philippic in the London Review of Books. She ended the article by comparing her treatment at the hands of the managerial technocrats at Essex with life under Chinese totalitarianism, “where enforcers rush to carry out the latest orders from their chiefs in an ecstasy of obedience to ideological principles which they do not seem to have examined, let alone discussed with the people they order to follow them, whom they cashier when they won’t knuckle under.” 

I spoke to Warner on the telephone on a balmy post-eclipse Norwich morning, sitting on a bench outside the cathedral. I felt the irony of the situation – I was there to read at the International Literature Showcase, a star-studded event organised by the government-funded Writers’ Centre Norwich. It was hard to feel too desperate about the state of our creative culture as we listened to Ali Smith, Jeanette Winterson and Helen Macdonald in this Unesco City of Literature. The University of East Anglia (UEA) was a short bus ride away, still churning out an impressive array of authors from its renowned school of creative writing. Warner also had reason to be peppy. She had just walked away with one of the richest literary awards in existence, the £385,000 Holberg prize.

Earlier this month, Warner wrote another, longer, LRB article about what she called “the disfiguring of higher education”,(London Review of Books: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n06/marina-warner/learning-my-lesson )

 which was also delivered as a lecture at the British Museum. “You know it’s not really my subject,” she told me with a laugh, “but I was forced into it by this tremendous sense of injustice, not only to myself but to many others. I also have this very deep sense that the future is being robbed.”

Warner believes strongly that there is a category error taking place in the government’s vision of the humanities as impracticable and unprofitable, elitist and outdated. “Investing in the humanities should be seen as infrastructure,” she told me. “It’s not a balance-sheet equation where if you put in this much you’ll get that much out, but if you’re teaching people to be articulate, if you’re teaching people about the traditions of the country and the traditions of their culture – which can be very broad, this doesn’t mean little England at all – that’s how people connect. If we diminish that, we will all be the poorer and I really do think you can put that in value terms.”

Warner’s experience at Essex – once a model of radically enlightened educational thought – was a long, losing battle against the technocratic tyranny of the new managers, in particular the vice-chancellor Anthony Forster (an ex-military man of whom Warner wrote “the joke on campus is that Forster was too tough for the army. His talents needed a boot camp: a university was just the thing.”) At the centre of her campaign is an appeal to government to put power back in the hands of academics. “Academics used to have a great deal of autonomy, now quite the opposite. And if you look at some of the most successful companies in the world, Microsoft or Google for instance, they have very flat structures. And that’s much more successful. People feel – jargon word – empowered, they feel in charge of their destinies in ways that makes them productive and expressive and inspired, if they’re not being leant on and breathed down on all the time by people in authority who often do not have legitimate title to that authority, people who are just brought in and appointed without any proper screening structures.” Warner contends that the management structures being imposed on universities are nothing like one would see in a real business in the current economic environment, but one from 30 years ago. “It’s so 80s. It’s Reaganomics.”

Perhaps the most shocking paragraph of Warner’s most recent article deals with the salaries being earned by the MBA-toting administrators who have been brought in to “rationalise” our universities. She points out that the average wage of a vice-chancellor exceeds £260,000, while some earn more than £400,000. A recent study by Brighton University found that wage increases among vice-chancellors ran at four times those of academic staff between 1998-2009 and that 20 institutions had more than 100 employees on £100,000 a year or more. I asked Warner what she felt when she saw these figures. “I felt I was drowning in shit, really. I couldn’t believe it. To me it’s really appalling. Ethically, universities should not have these toppling hierarchies, they should be examples of good conduct in society and I think these income differentials are unjust. They also make for a world that we dislike, where we have gated communities of the very rich and cheap labour, often imported and exploited, doing all the jobs that we don’t want to do.” 

Warner, now teaching part-time at Birkbeck College in London, retains a fondness for Essex. She even suggested, given a change in the regime, she might return to work with her friend and head of department, Philip Terry (“He defended me to the end,” she said of Terry.) With the Holberg prize money burning a hole in her pocket, she has big plans. “I learned a lot in the Essex department,” she told me. “I just don’t want to do anything for the university under the current regime. If something happens – and I hope it will – I’d like to do something there about cultural memory and performed poetry. Phil is a dear friend of mine and now I’ve won this prize, I’d love to do something with him, with that money.” Alternatively, she could pay the vice-chancellor’s salary for a year or so.

I’ve met David Willetts, and read The Pinch, his thoughtful and salutary consideration of the economic stranglehold enjoyed by baby boomers. Willetts was minister for universities and science from the 2010 election until July 2014. Even his opponents within academia admit that he is an informed speaker on higher education theory, far superior to the man who replaced him, the current minister for universities, science and cities, Greg Clark. And yet it was Willetts who presided over the government’s full-frontal attack on the humanities, Willetts who appeared to usher in this new age of philistinism. It felt like there was something I was missing, and so I arranged to meet Nick Hillman, Willetts’s former chief of staff and special adviser on educational reform, one of the architects of the coalition’s higher education policy.

Hillman was waiting for me in the morning room of the Institute of Directors on Pall Mall, his swanky London headquarters now he has left government to run an Oxford-based thinktank, the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi). Hillman is puckish and youthful, with a cheeky mop of ginger hair, a blue shirt open at the collar. We ordered a coffee and I asked him about Marina Warner and the widely held perception that this government had set out to destroy all that was great in our universities. Hillman confessed that he hadn’t read Warner’s latest LRB article, but he could guess the content. “There are these whinges about corporatism in HE and the erosion of the concept of an ‘academy’” – here his voice rose into little quote marks – “that should be run by academics. I wonder if academics have been whingeing about this since the dawn of time. Universities are different to any other institution. They’re not profit-making companies nor are they part of the public sector. But they’re not completely insulated from outside forces and the world is just a different place to be. Any multimillion-pound business – and some of the universities have a turnover of close to a billion pounds – is going to be run differently in 2015 to how it was run in 1950. They get a hell of a lot of money from the public and there should be an accountability here. I’ve pressed universities to sit their students down and say ‘This is where your £9,000 fees are going.’”

Hillman believes that there’s something disingenuous about the humanities’ complaints. “What the humanities are saying is that for the first time ever, history, for instance, is getting no money directly from the taxpayer. And they say that this means that the government doesn’t care about the humanities, which is not true. Because those £9,000 fees that are being racked up, many of them won’t end up being paid [because the students won’t earn more than the threshold where repayment kicks in] and so the burden will fall on the taxpayer in the end. The idea that there’s no public subsidy for historians is untrue, it’s just not direct any more.”

Throughout our conversation, Hillman presented humanities academics as mulish luddites, being dragged by government into the 21st century. “There is a generational thing amongst academics. If you’re 50 and your academic career predates the precursors to the Ref, you’ll think that all of this is just a pain in the arse and a whole lot of paperwork. Younger researchers tend to take it more in their stride.” He did accept that there was a problem with the levels of administrative staff in some universities. “You can look at the data for how many managers versus academic staff there are and by some measures we have more than anywhere else. Academics are stable and managers are rising.” He also conceded that the increasing use of short-term contracts for academic staff was a problem. “There has been much bigger casualisation of the labour force, which academics are right to be worried about. But taking on a permanent member of staff is a really costly proposition with pension schemes etc.”

There was also the suggestion that universities had fared rather better than other publicly funded institutions in bearing the burden of austerity so far, but that darker days may lie ahead. “You can no longer get more university funding and say ‘Listen old chap, things are running a bit short here, give me some more money.’ And the reasons you can’t do this are a) austerity – there’s no more money around, and b) not one of the political parties is promising to protect the budget of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills [BIS] in which HE lands. So the IFS [Institute for Fiscal Studies] say the cuts to BIS after the next election could be up to 40%. Now where are those cuts going to come from? BIS only funds three things: science and research, which no one wants to cut; HE; and apprenticeships, which are protected. So the cuts will hit HE.”

Hillman ends by suggesting that humanities are not alone in their sorrows. “Every week James Dyson’s lamenting the fact that we don’t produce enough engineers from our universities. Stem also feels hard done by – there’s this sense among academics of ‘Woe is us…’”

In November last year, Nicky Morgan, the secretary of state for education, speaking to group of teenagers, exploded the long-held belief “that if you didn’t know what you wanted to do, then the arts and humanities were what you chose because they were useful for all kinds of jobs. Of course,” she went on, “we know now that couldn’t be further from the truth – that the subjects that keep young people’s options open and unlock the door to all sorts of careers are the Stem subjects.” The speech prompted a furious backlash, the most eloquent of them a heartfelt opinion piece in THE in support of the humanities. It was written by Sarah Churchwell, one of our most prominent public intellectuals and professor of American literature at UEA.

I met Churchwell – rather under the weather with a cold – for lunch in Soho and, hearing that I’d come straight from Nick Hillman, she launched into an indignant tirade. “Labour instituted this policy, the Tories implemented it and the Lib Dems have taken the blame. It would be funny if it weren’t so dreadful. There’s nothing to choose between them. They’re all fixated on the marketisation of education and the university system.”

I, well-schooled by Hillman, quoted him back at her. Aren’t humanities academics stuck in the 1950s, desperate for an age of long lunches and even longer holidays? “The stereotypical academic world of the 1950s, of dilettantes lounging around with pipe and slippers sipping sherry, disappeared decades ago,” Churchwell said. “The idea of the easy life of the academic is a straw man, a caricature of academics when they say ‘You can’t just swan around like it’s 1950 any more.’ There’s been no swanning for some time, believe me. What initially happened under Thatcher was the forced professionalisation of academia and actually I don’t disagree with the imperative of professionalisation. But this notion that there are still academics at universities who can say ‘I’m going to spend 50 years at this institution, I’m never going to write a book, I’ll never publish, I’ll just sit around reading and chatting with students’, is absurd. Yes there are still a few people who chronically underperform and whom it is difficult to remove. There’s a bit of dead wood. Now I don’t know much about government-funded organisations outside of HE, but I’d venture to speculate that this may be true in other bureaucratic regimes. And the vast majority of people in UK HE are working extremely hard, all the time.”

We discussed Warner’s article (“Marina is a very good thing”) and the sense that the reforms begun under Thatcher had been taken to their logical conclusion under Gove and Willetts. “What has changed radically in the last 10 years is that they’re trying to turn everything into a for-profit business,” said Churchwell. “And that’s bullshit. Universities are not for profit. We are charitable institutions. What they’re now doing is saying to academics: ‘You have to be the fundraisers, the managers, the producers, you have to generate the incomes that will keep your institutions afloat.’ Is that really what society wants – for everything to become a marketplace, for everything to become a commodity? Maybe I’m just out of step with the world, but what some of us are fighting for is the principle that not everything that is valuable can or should be monetised. That universities are one of the custodians of centuries of knowledge, curiosity, inspiration. That education is not a commodity, it’s a qualitative transformation. You can’t sell it. You can’t simply transfer it.”

Churchwell went on to talk about what would be lost if we didn’t stand in the way of this systematic destruction of the traditional liberal education. “Virtually every cabinet minister has a humanities degree,” she said. “And I think there’s something quite sinister about it: they get their leadership positions after studying the humanities and then they tell us that what we need is a nation of technocrats. If you look at the vast majority of world leaders, you’ll find that they’ve got humanities degrees. Angela Merkel is the only one who’s a scientist. The ruling elite have humanities degrees because they can do critical thinking, they can test premises, they can think outside the box, they can problem-solve, they can communicate, they don’t have linear, one-solution models with which to approach the world. You won’t solve the problems of religious fundamentalism with a science experiment.”

Churchwell was rehearsing the old “two-cultures model” famously – and bitterly – fought over half a century ago between Cambridge colleagues CP Snow and FR Leavis. “There is a divide-and-conquer strategy, whether it’s conscious or not, in which politicians are setting the humanities and the sciences against each other, competing for funding, competing for esteem, when in fact we’re on the same side. They are creating a zero-sum game where they say ‘resources are limited and we’re only going to give them to the sciences’. My answer to that is look at China. They’ve spent the past 30 years investing almost exclusively in the sciences and now they’re having to send their students over here to learn how to be creative, actually making announcements that as a nation they’ve lost creativity.”

This reference to China reminded me of Marina Warner’s comparison of life at Essex to Chinese totalitarianism. There has been much talk both in America and the UK of attempts to mirror China’s approach to education – rigorous, regular testing and centralised management. When I got home I telephoned Dr Yong Zhao, an expert on the Chinese education system. I’d first contacted Yong after reading his groundbreaking book on Chinese creativity, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon, and we’d stayed in touch since. In the book, Yong, who is a professor and director of the institute for global education at the University of Oregon, notes with bemusement international admiration for China’s schools and universities. “The Chinese national educational system,” he writes, “has won high praise as an efficient system with national standards, a national curriculum, a high-stakes test (the college entrance exam), and a clearly defined set of gateways to mark students’ transitions from one stage to another. Admirers note that every Chinese student has a clear and focused goal to pursue; Chinese teachers and parents know exactly what to do to help their students; and the government knows exactly which schools are doing well. What those admirers ignore is the fact that such an education system, while being an effective machine to instil what the government wants students to learn, is incapable of supporting individual strengths, cultivating a diversity of talents, and fostering the capacity and confidence to create. China, a perfect incarnation of authoritarian education, has produced the world’s best test scores at the cost of diverse, creative, and innovative talents.”

Yong and I had spoken repeatedly about this “creativity gap” – the sense that China has been unable to indoctrinate lateral thought or innovation in its students and that they were forced to come in their hundreds of thousands to the UK or the US to learn “outside-the-box” creativity. I told Yong of my own experience as a PhD student at University College London in the early years of this decade, when the vague sense of alienation that comes with being a mature postgrad among wide-eyed undergraduates was heightened by the dizzying number of those on campus chatting away in Mandarin. Now we spoke about the humanities, and how Britain was seeking to repress exactly the elements of its education system that China most envied.

“Liberal arts degrees have not been traditionally valued in China,” he told me. “People have generally placed more value on vocational/professional degrees, which is quite understandable because of the utilitarian view of education. Education – or passing exams – exists in order to get a good job. However, there is an increasing interest in liberal arts there as the government and people have begun to recognise their value in a more balanced education. One of the key problems in China is that children are not developed in a well-rounded way. Their educations don’t contain enough humanities, enough arts. There just isn’t that traditional liberal arts idea of education bringing you social welfare and emotional development. And we can see evidence of this in the lack of Chinese creativity in all domains.” Only 10% of Chinese college graduates are deemed employable by multinational businesses, according to research cited by Yong in his book. The main complaint? They are too regimented, predictable and lack the creative spark. 

I’ve interviewed a dozen humanities academics for this piece. The majority were downcast, pessimistic, reeling off vivid administrative nightmares and harking back to Edenic earlier academic careers, when they’d been immersed in their research and enthused by their students. Few of them would let me quote them by name, fearing the faceless technocracy that had them under constant surveillance, the gagging orders in their employment contracts. It’s clear that the situation for many academics in non-Stem subjects has become untenable, the exigencies of working within the new, market-oriented university system stripping so much of what was good and useful from the academic life.

In her book The Value of the Humanities, Helen Small, author and professor of English literature at Pembroke College, Oxford, traces the history of the science/humanities divide within the universities, demonstrating a critical genealogy that wends from Matthew Arnold and Thomas Huxley through Leavis and Snow to present a clear-sighted vision of the current state of the humanities in this country. I spoke to Small – who taught me at Oxford many years ago – about her book, which is far from the jeremiad I’d heard from Warner and Churchwell. “What I wanted to do,” she said, “was talk about the different genres that we rely upon in our advocacy for the humanities, many of which have their place in 19th-century thinking about the university and education, when they were putting together that idea that many of us feel is now in peril – that idea of higher education as a public good.”

I told Small that I found her book, for all its academic detachment, extremely powerful in its presentation of the central role that the humanities have to play in our cultural, social and political lives. Wasn’t she tempted to channel the anger of Marina Warner or fellow academic Thomas Docherty? “I understand their rage,” she told me, “but the kind of calmer, cooler defence that I’m trying to promote has a place in the debate. My sense is that anger and defensiveness does not play very well with politicians, and that’s partly the audience I wanted to address – Whitehall mandarins as well as academics. Because if you write only for academics, you’re preaching to the converted. It risks becoming special pleading very quickly if you keep telling academics how beleaguered they are. We have privileges, after all, we have a degree of employment protection that others in the arts would kill for. The politician who comes to academia from dealing with other areas that receive public funding that have received much harder hits than we have… We have to be very careful how we play this one, or we’ll find ourselves the targets of much harsher cuts in the next budget.”

I’m reminded of a line in Stefan Collini’s What Are Universities For? (2012), where he says “compelling and often devastating criticisms appear to have had little or no effect on policymaking. The arguments have not been answered; they have merely been ignored. Rather than blaming academics for not speaking out sufficiently strongly, the conclusion… is that those who make policy are just not listening.” And this, in the end, may be the sad truth of the situation. I spoke to Jonothan Neelands of the Warwick Commission, a multidisciplinary report on the future of culture in Britain. He told me that, soon after winning his Oscar for 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen was invited to Downing Street. He asked Nicholas Serota of the Tate what he should speak to Cameron about. The answer: education, education, education. McQueen duly spent his 10 minutes with the prime minister talking about the need for a renewed focus on the humanities in schools and universities. At the end, Cameron, distractedly, said: “Oh yes, the arts, you should talk to Sam about that – she’s interested in all that kind of thing.” Despite the Warwick Commission showing that cultural industries contributed some £77bn to the British economy, the government is simply not interested, and the cries of the academics take on a plaintive note as they realise that they are not being heard now, and will probably not be heard in the future.

Clarissa Lake -  Article from The Guardian UK - Alex Preston, Sunday 29 March 2015

Gamelist

1 - Pac-Man - Arcade,1980

2 - Donkey Kong - Console - SNES/Nintendo, 1981

3 - Mario Kart - Console - Nintendo 64/Nintendo, 1996

4 - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Console - Nintendo 64/Nintendo, 1996

5 - Metal Gear Solid - Console - Playstation One/Playstation, 1998

6 - Shadow of Colossus - Console - Playstation Two/Playstation, 2005

7 - Mortal Kombat - Console/Arcade - Various, 1992

8 - Grand Theft Auto - Console - Playstation One/Playstation, 1997

9 - Black - Console - Playstation Two/Playstation, 2006

10 - Grand Theft Auto V - Console - Playstation Three/Playstation, 2013


Clarissa Lake - Top 10 of history of games

How to read a book

I would say that the techniques of communication, which make for literacy, are our first obligation, and more so in a democracy than in other kind of society, because it depends on a literate electorate. 

In their false liberalism, the progressive educators confused discipline with regimentation, and forgot that true freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline. A disciplined mind, trained in the power of thought, is one which can read and write critically, as well as do efficient work in discovery. (Pages 81-82)

...

There is a lot of talk today, among liberal educators who fear the rise of fascism, about the dangers of regimentation and indoctrination. I have already pointed out that many of them confuse discipline with Prussian drill and the goose step (military march). They confuse authority, which is nothing but the voice of reason, with autocracy or tyranny. But the error they make about indoctrination is the saddest. They, and most of us, do not know what docility is.

To be docile is to be teachable. To be teachable one must have the art of being taught and must practice it actively. The more active one is in learning from a teacher, dead or alive ("dead" teacher: book), and the more art one uses to master what he has to teach, the more docile one is. Docility, in short, is the precise opposite of passivity or gullibility. Those who lack docility - the students who fall asleep during a class - are the most likely to be indoctrinated. Lacking the art of being taught, whether that be skill in listening or in reading, they do not know how to be active in receiving what is communicated to them. Hence, they either receive nothing at all or what they receive they absorb uncritically.

Slighting the three R's in the beginning (3 R's: reading, writing and reckon/fail of primary school/fail of school system), and neglecting the liberal arts (liberal arts: grammar, logic and rhetoric) almost entirely at the end, our present education is essentially illiberal. It indoctrinates rather than disciplines and educates. Our students are indoctrinated with all sorts of local prejudices and predigested pap. 

Even when the doctrines they impose are sound democratic ones, the school fail to cultivate free judgement because they have forsaken discipline. They leave their students open to opposite indoctrination by more powerful orators or, what is worse, to the sway of they own worst passions.

Ours is a demagogic rather than a democratic education. The student who has not learned to think critically, who has not come to respect reason as the only arbiter of truth in human generalization, who was not been lifted out of the blind alleys of local jargons and shibboleths, will not be saved by the orator of the classroom from later succumbing to the orator of the platform and the press. (Pages 99-100)

...

Clarissa Lake - Mortimer J. Adler: How to read a book, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1940 - Parentheses are some of my notes 

Time to beer

Clarissa Lake 

Selected poems

O poeta
Declina de toda responsabilidade
Na marcha do mundo capitalista.
E com suas palavras, intuições, símbolos e outras armas
Promete ajudar
A destruí-lo
Como uma pedreira, uma floresta,
Um verme.

Carlos Drummond de Andrade - Nosso tempo

Clarissa Lake - Selected poems

Playlist

1 - Frédéric Chopin - Nocturne in C-sharp Minor

2 - Frédéric Chopin - Waltz no.1 in G-flat major. op. 70

3 - Frédéric Chopin - Grande Valse Brillante in E-flat major. op. 18

4 - Frédéric Chopin - Polonaise in A-flat major, 'Heroic' op.53  - Maestoso

5 - Frédéric Chopin - Etudes,  no.12 in C-minor 'Revolutionary' op.10 -  Allegro con fuoco

6 - Frédéric Chopin - Waltz,  no.3 in A-flat major op.64 - Moderato

7 - Frédéric Chopin - Piano Sonata no.2 in B-flat minor, op.35 - 3. Marche funèbre. Lento - attacca

8 - Frédéric Chopin - Impromptus, no.4 'Fantaisie-Impromptu' in C-sharp minor, op.66 - Allegro agitato

9 - Frédéric Chopin - Nocturnes,  no.2 in E-flat major op.9- Andante

10 - Frédéric Chopin - Preludes,  no.4 in E-minor op.28- Largo

11 - Frédéric Chopin - Mazurkas,  no.4 in A minor op.17- Lento ma non troppo


Clarissa Lake - The best of Chopin 

1988

(Henrique gritando no megafone e usando balaclava no rosto)


_Dizem pra você:

OBEDECER

_Dizem pra você:

COOPERAR

_Dizem pra você:

TOMAR NO CU!

_Dizem pra você:

FILHA DA PUTA!


(Percussão e solo de bateria, acompanhado pela multidão em coro gritando FILHA DA PUTA! FILHA DA PUTA! FILHA DA PUTA! Solo de Guitarra e continuação com pot-pourri)


_Liberdade de expressão:

DEIXA EU FALAR FILHA DA PUTA: EXPRESSÃO!

_Liberdade de EXPRESSÃO:

DEIXA EU FALAR FIHA DA PUTA: EXPRESSÃO!

Clarissa Lake - FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION! LEMME SPEAK MOTHERFUCKER: EXPRESSION! 

HSBC

Hospital Central

ALA DA PSIQUIATRIA

Bloco C - Leito 4

Prometeu conversando sozinho:

Prometeu: _Você mentiu pra mim.

Atena: _Eu nunca te prometi nada. 

Prometeu: _Como isso pode ser justo? Como isso pode estar certo? Enquanto eu estou aqui me fudendo, ela está curtindo, esse tempo todo!

Atena: _Isso não é problema seu. 

Prometeu: _Eu não vou ficar de braços cruzados esperando você fazer alguma coisa! Você é inútil e eu odeio você.

Atena: _...

Prometeu: _Enquanto ela ri, eu choro, enquanto ela viaja, eu estou preso, enquanto ela ama e tem milhares de amigos eu estou sozinho. Como que ela ficou rica tão rápido?

Atena: _Ela não está rica. Apenas trabalhando bastante

Prometeu: _O que agora? Uma porra de uma aeromoça?

Atena: _Você não tem autorização pra isso. Ela pode acabar com a sua vida, mesmo sem fazer nada.

Prometeu: _Isso não vai ficar assim Atena! 

Atena: _Se você fugir daqui eu não vou poder te ajudar. 

Prometeu: _Foda-se! 

Enfermeira chegando com uma bandeja prateada na mão e um copo d'água.

Enfermeira: _Olá! Onde está nosso super herói? É hora do remedinho. Você anda conversando muito sozinho meu bem, e tá bem agitado. Toma uma pílula dessa que você vai ficar bem melhor, novinho em folha.

Prometeu: _Porque você não enfia uma no meio do seu rabo? 

Rápido como uma corsa, Prometeu pega o comprimido na bandeja e enfia na boca da enfermeira a força.

Prometeu: _Assim é gostoso?

Atena: _Não faça isso! Pra onde você vai?

Prometeu: _Preciso de dinheiro. Vou pegar o que é meu.

Duas horas depois, no semáforo de um bairro nobre:

Casal se beija dentro de uma Land Rover. 

Prometeu chega quebrando o vidro do carro com a coronha da arma.

Prometeu: _VAI FILHA DA PUTA! DESCE DO CARRO E MÃO NA CABEÇA. VOCÊ TAMBÉM VADIA LORA. VAI ANDANDO OS DOIS. EU DISSE MÃO NA CABEÇA, CARALHO. Quer levar um tiro pra ver se entende?

Vítima Masculina: _Você é da polícia?

Prometeu: _Polícia o caralho mermão! Deita no chão viado. Vem aqui sua vaca ou não ouviu o que eu disse?

Vítima Masculina: _Não machuca ela pelo amor de Deus! Ela acabou de me contar que está grávida.

Prometeu puxa a  vítima feminina pelos cabelos e a arremesa no chão, obrigando os dois a ficar com a mão na cabeça.

Prometeu: _Cadê o cartão do banco?

Vítima Masculina: _No porta luvas dentro da carteira.

Prometeu: _Qual o limite de saque?

Vítima Masculina: _10 mil por dia, mas eu já saquei mil.

Prometeu: _Amarra o braço dela e deixa ela amarrar o seu. Me passa a merda dos celulares. Eu vou ligar o carro e vazar, se eu ouvir um piu eu estouro a cabeça dos dois. Filhos da puta do caralho! Eu passando fome e vocês roubando, roubando e rindo da nossa cara. Como que é agora? O HSBC vai subornar o diabo pra ter a alma de vocês de volta?

Vítima Feminina: _Eu sou apenas gerente de transações financeiras, não tenho nada a ver com o escandâlo!

Prometeu: _Cala a boca vadia não te perguntei nada. Eu poderia matar vocês dois agora, porque tô com uma raiva do caralho. TO ARDENDO POR DENTRO DE RAIVA! Não...agora vocês só vão se cagar de medo.  Vocês vão ficar vivos pra repensar a vida imbecil e corrupta que vocês levam. 

Falow seus arrombado bunda mole. 

Prometeu liga o veículo e sai cantando pneu na avenida. Liga o som e dá uns tiros pro alto. 

Prometeu: _Perdão pai. Eu não queria que fosse desse jeito. Eu queria ser honesto. Mas honesto é a mesma coisa que tolo. E eu não sou tolo. Todos estão roubando, inclusive ela! Ninguém ganha tanto dinheiro tão rápido assim. Atena não quer me ajudar. Grande amiga. Já que ela não faz nada eu mesmo faço. Vou quebrar o sigilo telefônico e bancário dela. Preciso saber como se ganha tanta grana assim tão rápido. 

Atena: _Eu não vou te perdoar por isso. 

Prometeu mira a arma na cabeça de Atena e dispara. Ela desaparece do banco do passageiro.

Prometeu: _Quem faz a justiça aqui sou eu. 

Clarissa Lake - HSBC

Addendum

Em 1860, guerra terminada (Guerra do Ópio), os ingleses tiveram a ideia de abrir um banco para financiar o comércio baseado no tráfico de drogas. Dessa forma apoteótica, nasceu o HKSC, tempos depois transformado em HSBC (Hong Kong and Shangai Bank Corporation), conhecido de todos nós atualmente. Sua história é o exemplo mais bem acabado de como o desenvolvimento do capitalismo financeiro e a cumplicidade com a alta criminalidade andam de mãos dadas

Professor Vladimir Safatle

Warning

Kalon Kakon is a fictional and experimental work on literature. Places, names, personalities, thoughts of characters, clothes they wear, personal objects, ages, gender, movements, silence, eyes, lips and the actions characters may play or omit  are just poetic creation, anything else is purely coincidence.

Most rights reserved.


Clarissa Lake

Medium

Durante muito tempo eu fui como Paulo, o evangelista. Cético, cínico, falso poeta e filosofo. Deus e o mundo espiritual não passavam de uma piada de mau gosto. 

Nem sempre foi assim. Já fui cristão pelas aparências e até seguia alguns princípios da doutrina espírita. Até eu conhecer uma pessoa que mudou tudo isso. Por uma questão de respeito e consideração, não vou citar nenhum evento ou situacão que possa remeter a este espírito (encarnado) que contribuiu para deixar-me cético, confuso e mais tarde doente da alma.

Como todo espírito evoluído moralmente eu sofri como uma criança abandonada na lata de lixo, sofri como o viciado na sarjeta bebendo cachaça. Parei de acreditar em tudo o que era bom e justo, passei a amaldiçoar Deus e sua criação, doente mental, insano, árvore seca e infrutífera que em seu desespero egoísta não conseguia dar bons frutos.

Até que um dia eu estava a vagar pela capital do país, já de madrugada, o sereno e o frio não me incomodavam, estava lunático, a beira do suicídio quando aquele espírito apareceu para mim.

Era uma garota de uns dezesseis, dezessete anos. De costas ela parecia normal, mas ao virar o rosto eu vi vermes saindo da sua bochecha, cheiro de enxofre da boca, ela babava e olhava para mim com o mais puro ódio.

Nesse dia, mesmo depois de grande, adulto, corajoso, violento, frustrado, senti o maior medo, achei que meu coração fosse parar. Fiquei congelado. Mijei nas calças e quase fiz coisas mais nojentas. Corri sem saber pra onde, sabia que a loucura havia se apossado de mim: Só me restava o suicídio.  “Eu sou sua ex-noiva. Lembra?”

Por ser ateu eu jamais diria que aquela aparição era um espírito. Não, aquela forma é simples degeneração cerebral, e eu andava usando muitas drogas. Não era aquilo, e os calafrios não passavam. O toque das mãos dela no meu rosto era frio como o congelador. Resisti o máximo que pude à insensatez ou a fantasmagoria. 

Daquele dia em diante os espíritos sentiram-se a vontade para aparecer, e como perceberam que eu tinha medo, não me deixavam dormir, estudar, tocar piano.  Que tipo de remédio poderia curar esta doença eu não sabia. Eles chegavam, sentavam no sofá de casa, ligavam a TV, fumavam meus cigarros, compartilhavam minhas bebidas, drogas e prostitutas. Sempre ao redor, não importa o que eu estivesse fazendo. Nem para tomar banho eu tinha privacidade, sempre um espírito a espreitar minhas ações, me colocar um terror, me fazer ter vontade de colocar uma bala na própria cabeça. 

Até que um dia um deles resolveu falar comigo: disse que não ia me deixar em paz nesta vida ou na próxima, pois eu estive com a amada dele.Eu até me senti culpado no começo. Muito atormentado na verdade, eu ainda não sabia que ele era um filha da puta mentiroso. Disse-me que em outra vida, lá pelo século XVII, eu o assassinei impiedosamente. Mais tarde eu descobri como isso aconteceu, lendo livros do Chico Xavier e indo até a Sociedade Espírita da Capital: realmente eu o havia assassinado, e faria o mesmo hoje ou a qualquer momento: Eu não me faço de cordeirinho para levar a sua alma, caro leitor. 

Este espírito do século XVII era um artesão de quinta categoria, morava em Veneza e tinha seu cargo na Guilda. Minha filha de onze anos ingressou na escola de pintura, e como o mestre estava sempre ocupado, este sujeito de nome M. acabou sendo seu professor.

Um dia, fui visitar minha amada garota na corporação e ela estava envergonhada, chorando, não queria falar. Ao observar suas roupas, percebi pequenas manchas de sangue no vestido. Ela me disse que esse senhor M. havia mostrado o pipi pra ela, e que se ela contasse pra papai ele iria matar nós dois.

Não disse nada. Levei ela pra casa e a ama tratou de dar banho, chá, sopa e colocar ela na cama. Quando ela já estava dormindo, eu peguei o primeiro instrumento que vi na frente e sai andando pelas ruas.  Quando cheguei na guilda o safado estava rindo, fez uma piada e veio me cumprimentar, como se ele fosse Iago de Shakespeare, falso, nocivo e imundo. Só que eu não era inocente como Roderigo ou Otelo.Sou mais um tipo doente de amor como Hamlet e pessismista como Macbeth.

Primeiro bati nele com as mãos, depois abri seu cérebro com o martelo. Para finalizar havia uma escopeta no armazém, estava com tanto ódio que carreguei de chumbo a arma, voltei, enfiei o cano bem no fundo da garganta do desgraçado e apertei o gatilho gritando MALEDITO! FILHO DE PUTANA!  

Até hoje ele me odeia, mas eu quero que ele se foda. A esposa dele na época tentou vingar-se de mim, mas eu quebrei uma braço dela e ela ficou tranquila. Pelo menos no século XVII. Nesta encarnação presente ela voltou fingindo me amar, hipócrita e falsa como uma cobra, no fundo ela queria que eu morresse para compensar o que eu fiz com aquele lixo do marido dela: Pobre espírito frustrado! Ela até tentou, mas a luz que existe dentro de mim é onipotente. 

E outros vieram, débitos do passado que não contavam em nenhum extrato bancário. 

Estes espíritos sedentos de sangue e vingança foram os primeiros que eu consegui dominar. Espíritos viciados em cocaína, maconha, cigarro, espíritos perversos ligados aos prazeres do corpo e atrelados a esta matéria bruta. 

Mais tarde percebi os espíritos hipócritas. Estes sim são a maior fonte de perigo. Eles falam, agem e dizem as coisas mais sinceras e boas para nossas vidas, eles nos dizem qual o melhor caminho a se tomar na vida e acabam nos protegendo, como anjos da guarda.

Eles parecem iluminados, anjos mandados pelo próprio Senhor para nos orientar em momentos difíceis. Mas no fundo, estes espíritos iluminados são tão egoístas quanto os pobres encarnados. Eles precisam se alimentar dessa falsa moral que construiu nossas sociedades, são os equivalentes aos partidos conservadores de direita, e seus valores ainda são puramente materiais.

Para atingir meu objetivo, que era resgatar um amor perdido, um desses espíritos falsos sempre me acompanhava. Percebi a sua índole pelo caminho que ele estava me conduzido: “Para ter ela de volta você precisa trabalhar, se esforçar”, ou seja, ganhar dinheiro. Mas qualquer cristão hipócrita sabe que dinheiro, desejos e posses materiais não são o caminho para chegar até o Senhor. No fundo eles sabem que vão sofrer mas eles querem a todo custo desfrutar das migalhas e sobras dos poderosos, para poder ter o mínimo de orgulho e poder pisar em alguém.  Fama e dinheiro não foram propostas de Jesus Cristo no meu modo de ver as coisas.  “Faça o que todos fazem pois este é seu desígnio espiritual”.

Mentira. No final das contas eu sabia que para ter meu amor eu teria que enriquecer, ou pelo menos me esforçar como um louco para garantir meu carro e meu apartamento. Só que esta busca de realização pessoal não tem nada a ver com o espírito.

Tem a ver com a lógica do capitalismo e da competição desenfreada e eu não queria entrar neste jogo. As sugestões dadas pelo espírito hipócrita eram até boas: “Faça academia, tenha um físico bonito. Pare de fumar. Passe em um concurso público”. Seja um produto atraente para o mercado de mulheres. Não, obrigado, meu caminho é outro.

Quando eu mostrei para esses espíritos o quão viciados e luxuosos eles são, ficaram furiosos e prometeram acabar com a minha paz.  Só que eu não sou qualquer espírito. Não sou melhor, não sou mais evoluído e muito provavelmente estou abaixo de você em muitas coisas.

Contudo, eu não vim do Nosso Lar, de Capela e de nenhuma outra colônia espiritual conhecida por aqui.

Quando estes hipócritas desencarnados ameaçaram a integridade do meu espírito eu tive que revidar: Durante um sonho, conduzi  o meu espírito para o Umbral, que é quase um inferno para aqueles que dão ouvidos para estes duas caras desmaterializados. 

Procurei o espírito mais poderoso do Umbral e deixei bem claro pra ele que se ele continuar insistindo em me atormentar, eu iria destruí-lo.  Ele riu bem alto, com os dentes podres, olhos vermelhos e ossos saindo dos ombros. Chamou toda a horda de espíritos ruins para me colocar medo, disse que por ter feito isto eu jamais sairia do sonho, morreria ali mesmo e seria escravo deles.

Enquanto ele falava eu via cenas de brigas, mortes, gritos de histeria, adultos transando freneticamente, orgias no meio da lama e vozes e mãos que tentavam pegar em mim e me arrastar, me conduzir para este pequeno inferno.

Quando percebi que realmente estava para desencarnar, tive fé: Chamei por Deus do fundo de minha alma e parece que fez efeito. Uma luz começou a emanar do meu espírito, ficando cada vez mais intensa ao ponto de meu espírito tornar-se uma labareda  e fritar todos espíritos do Umbral.  Leia denovo esta frase: Fritar. Quem foi que disse que espíritos não sentem calor e frio? Que não podem sentir dor? Eles podem inclusive morrer definitivamente, mas isso eu vou deixar pra lá. 

Esta história não vai ser contada por André Luiz, Fénelon e nenhum outro, a sociedade espírita vai dizer que eu sou louco e inventei tudo isso, quiça até me processar. 

De uns tempos pra cá coisas estranhas tem acontecido. Eu continuo vendo, sentindo espíritos malignos em toda parte, encarnados e desencarnados. A diferença é que os mortos inteligentes passaram a me respeitar e os burros, duas caras a ter medo. Assim que eu gosto, agora posso viver minha vida humildemente. 

Quando algum espírito desavisado entra na minha casa, ele toma um susto tão grande que nunca mais volta. Agora, sou eu quem assusta os espíritos horrorosos dos mundos ínferos, estes que vivem a vagar por aqui e nos dizer o que temos que fazer.

E vou continuar assim, pois não há nenhum mal que possa chegar até mim e sair ileso.  Parece estranho, mas sou eu quem coloca os fantasmas para correr, eles tem medo de mim e os mais sábios me respeitam como um Deus. Nenhum deles se mete comigo ou com quem eu amo.

Hoje estou protegido, calmo e cada dia mais forte. Como diria Nietzsche, o que não nos mata, nos fortalece.  Fico feliz em saber que nem todo espírito aqui na Terra está expiando. Não é este o meu caso. Não tenho dívidas e aqueles que querem cobrar o que eu não devo, merecem sofrer. Eu sou sádico e sei  pegar pesado com quem gosta de ser mal. Entretanto sou uma alma caridosa e nada me alegra mais que gentilezas. Só que o mundo não é feito apenas de pessoas gentis. Muitos hipócritas vivos e mortos e eu não tenho paciência com um nem com outro. 

Não sou apenas um espírito. Sou plasma. Sou fogo. Sou energia. Sou luz. Portanto posso fazer muito mais do que qualquer humano. Não sou melhor nem pior que você: Sou diferente, sou de outro sistema.  Um dia vou voltar pra lá e contar para o meu povo como vocês ainda são patéticos aqui, encarnados ou desencarnados. Entretanto, eu ainda tenho fé na humanidade. Mesmo sendo tolos, vocês vão atingir uma pequena evolução moral daqui uns trezentos anos. Tenham fé e lutem: O medo é a fonte de todos os prazeres.

In memoriam

Chico Xavier

Clarissa Lake - Experience #1

Next life

The day that you will understand me will come.
A thousands years from now, perhaps.
That's fine. I'm not in a hurry.
A hundred years from now
Your spirit will be free of this prison
So does mine
"We were such fools"
And hug each other
This is not the day.

Today is the day to wake up early, pay your bills,
Think about your marriage, feed your dog, study for the exam,
Wash the car and say Good Morning to the neighbor.
Today is the day for newspaper, milk, cookies and hidden jealousy.

Today is the day to respect your choices
No matter how puerile they are.
Today is the day to have strong faith.
Because it's everything which I can really have.

I don't mind for minutes or centuries.
I really believe good things can happen.
This is why they call me silly.

I have faith life is very much alike the novels.
The evil is powerful, stronger and win during all the time
But In the end...the Good power will overcome
But this is not the day
This is the day for patience and another hour wasted in the traffic.
This is the day for sick poets and bad poems.
Another day to think about you and not see you.
Another day to rethink my life.

"She will never believe you.
She sees you as a completely mad one"
I don't mind.
I don't mind if she listen to me when I'm mad
And despise me when I am sane.
I love her more than anything in the universe.

If I can stay without the one I love
I can stay without everything:
I don't need alcohol.
Cigarettes.
Computers.
Dreams.
LSD.
Pot.
Cocaine.
Butter.
Television.
Sugar.
If I can stay without my sweet flower
I don't need any thing  else.
Keep waiting until the next life
There we are understanding each other
As the old frame that insists to persist
In my memory.
Making my heart beat fast
As the heart of a happiest kid.

"Do you remember what you did to me"
"Now do you expect friendship?
Do you really wanna know? You scare me"

This is what I want.
This is what I like.
If you don't know if I am that simple guy
Which used to give you roses
And cite poems
Or a freak murderer
If you really had no idea about the difference
My purpose is done.
Because that's my intention.
Create things which never existed.
Sorry if I have too much imagination.
I never meant to hurt you.


Poets have no moral sense of things.
I am quite sure you will comprehend
And send myself to that horrible place.
I laugh because it's your voice.
This is the day we look to each other as friends once again.
Do not trust me yet! Do not trust any poets.
They are all lonely and insane
Wasting their years with words
I don't mind. Things pass
And I live my life waiting for the day in the next life
Because in this life you already made your choice.
I accept and wish you the best.
Until the day the universe will fade.


Clarissa Lake - ?