Assessment

“Write about a person who is/was or has been significant in your life.”

Honesty is a fragile paradigm of human nature, but I have to be brutally honest. Nobody had more influence on me than me. Many people tried to defy this fact and climb to the number one position. Curiously, success was never on their side. In the end, solipsism was like social democracy in Sweden, it always wins.
I was about to enter into the fantasy realm. In a post-modern world, it becomes clear that fiction makes much more sense than reality. The problem with reality is that it never makes sense, so I’ve read.
Some might say that such behavior is merely a façade that conceals the lack of social skills. Nevertheless, this was an argument that never convinced me. Who should I socialize with? I couldn’t see anyone else in my room apart from me. Only very recently, when told that I needed to go out to be able to fraternize with others, those arguments fit into place. Still, experiencing surrealism and realism, I can safely say that the main difference is that, in real life, people’s clothes reflect a poorer aesthetic taste. The rest is similar.
Just like Fernando Pessoa, I felt that people were mostly boring, except when they became a scientific case study or a way to create interesting art. So I divided myself into three or four, but I maintained the same gender because even at a psychological level it is very hard to fool one’s libido and sexual orientation.
With no surprise, all my heteronyms liked to watch adult heterosexual oriented movies, which probably destroyed all my motivations to support left wing movements. Now that I think of it, they were tremendously individualistic. At the end of the day, they would only talk to each other, making me even more egotistic than I was before, so much that I couldn’t even understand what Karl Marx meant with his infamous word “class”.
It was somehow complicated to grow up in a world in which my own creations wouldn’t talk to me, but it wasn’t as dreadful as people usually think, because creations and pieces of art were never a good companion anyway. They might grow in other people’s hearts (if the artist is lucky enough) but they always fade away when permanently locked in the artist’s room, except, of course, if the room has air conditioner.
To sum it up, there is nothing more decisive in life than to be ignored by our own self. Some call it freedom. Some call it something else. I call it an assessment.
Filipe Faria

O retrato dos últimos meses

Encaixar-se

Dizia numa conversa informal que as mulheres, apesar de serem mais qualificadas do que os homens, apresentam níveis de empreendedorismo bastante inferiores. Continuei a dizer que as mulheres quando terminam os seus cursos só querem encaixar-se em qualquer sítio.

Naturalmente, a conversa acabou aí.

Bad Bad BBC !!

Facebook groups have also been set up urging users to add their voices to the debate. One message doing the rounds on Facebook said: "Why is it that Britain's minorities are always depicted in this negative light, making our positive achievements seem somewhat belittled. The BBC creates a false impression of what we are. They promote one side of the spectrum, which is usually the negative side.

"There were many intelligent black people from the UK [who] would have represented us correctly, but due to the negative images that the BBC so regularly promotes it was fitting for them to pick a RAPPER, to speak on one of the most momentous occasions for black people in the 21st century."

Taken from here

Things i can relate to

Does your innate scepticism intensify doubts about presuming to pursue a life in poetry?

You could say that every poem I write - or that anybody else writes, for that matter - is a way of overcoming those doubts. Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it. I used to think that, if you came from a background like mine, your approach to the muse was shyer than if you came from a more bookish or artistic family, but now I'm not so sure. Yeats had an artist daddy, Eliot had a poetry-writing mammy, and that was a great help to them. But what about Elizabeth Bishop or Plath? Or Kavanagh? Or Pessoa? You could argue that scepticism about literature is what actually inspired Pessoa.

Seamus Heaney