Mediums without listening and underemployed spirits keep things goofy

I fail repeatedly. Just now, I failed in my purpose of going to bed at 9:30 p.m. For some reason along the lines of “holy shit! I never sleep more than four hours anyway,” I surrendered myself to the drift of the dark.

I fear that some stern authority will bark to discipline me: “it is not time to go to the bathroom.” Activities in general. The small-hours chats have come to an end, covered in sand, disintegrated by a shock, incinerated. It stirs a little pity. All that chaotic literature that brought me so many friends has gone mad and talks to itself in Mark’s posts.

The book Maku sent me is well written, of course, but is read in super slow motion. The character begins to reveal herself from the wish to die. One does not find honest people like that easily. Like toast with cream cheese and red-berry jam. It was the carton, the tub. I swapped it for cream. Cream never fails.

This fractal, then: death and life explaining themselves little, speaking fast and loud, like Brazilian women tourists in red lipstick and crossbody bags enchanting the world with a smiling rudeness. My analysis, below, is sophisticated.

There are mistunings of life that are, it bears repeating, forces of nature. Mistunings, in this text, are metaphorically Meryl Streep playing Florence Foster Jenkins in the movies, or any instrument that should vibrate a sublime “ooowooowooow” but ends up materializing Grandma Jephinha venturing off key, without melody.

I like water because it does not waste time on stone or wall; it detours, accepts a good tunnel, but, if need be, smashes everything. Water claims for itself land that had no vocation for a swimming pool, resting there as a calamitous flood.

The regions of the world that are about to disappear need intellectual support to settle questions of property, repatriation and the return of predictable bureaucracies. One cannot raise an island on the top floor of a house; not even Japanese cathedrals of drainage make a difference in the ocean. Dangers like these equate our intelligence to nothing. Nature is one of the three notable sources of displeasure in Freudian psychoanalysis.

There is a line in a lyric by Gabrielle Seraine in which she says she was never an apprentice of this whole out-of-tune instrument. And in her music too, when she sings “out of tune” — when she sings, precisely, the “deceased” hidden inside it (in Portuguese, desafinado, “out of tune,” contains finado, “deceased”) —, the harmony shatters for an instant, like a damn kid blowing a plastic flute. It is the valley before the peak, the “dark before the dawn.”

Flusser’s spirit

When the out-of-tune individual — the “medium” (as in media, not talking to the dead) — emits noises, communication becomes clearer. Let us use the word “communication” as a future synonym for “spirit,” a beautiful conception of Flusser’s.

In religions that deal with “spirits,” note the similarity in how intentions are conducted: doors are opened and closed, people are encouraged to move the psyche, and even trivial requests that are nothing but predictable bureaucracies. One asks, promises, thanks, expels, infuses — all through the conjuring of human, intelligible words.

Accepting Jesus, renouncing Freemasonry, declaring victory, taking possession of the blessing, doing macumba (a hex) so that Dona Ida would die (children are very inventive) — all of this requires speaking. From the spell of Pai Grego to the prayer chain Seven Knocks at the Door of Grace of Janine’s people. Communication. Speech. Listening.

In some evangelical worship services, faced with unsatisfactory communication, someone is likely to start playing the role of the demon-possessed on behalf of the group. The Catholic Mass has so many communication resources that part of the sermon ends up set aside.

“Spirits” are an old, primitive subject. It was the way of keeping the dead close. Later, those dead became demons. History records it in anthropological terms; I have here an original Frazer that I got from Luca. My point is: if spirits are “born” of domestic dead, it is natural that, before committing to events outside the home — speaking at séances, making wind — they are available in the family inventory.

Powerful yet goofy

There is power in psychoanalysis, in transactional analysis, in Narcotics Anonymous. But these undertakings need far more time, specialization and opportunities for mistakes than can be achieved in a family, when a family is available. Family, of course, understood broadly.

A family that has understood the perennial nature of love, that has left struggles for recognition for community practices, has a better chance of success in invoking powerful spirits.

The powerful spirit of the creator, for those who believe so, has to make some difference. Is God dead? Do not be fooled. I am writing about communication. About conjuring, invoking, good communication. In the last line of the noise, “taking possession of the blessing,” as Nina well observed.

In Portuguese, “spirits” have meant communication at least since 1976, when Cartola composed a line about how from each dead person we inherit only cynicism. From my tensioning, Flusser offers us a simplification: it is a lot of “spiritual battle” for very little “talking like normal people.”

Let us go back. The relationship of the out-of-tune, the deceased — properly the word in question, noise, this thing that disturbs sleep — with sharpness is not only poetry. The physics and computer engineering that underpin image generation proceed from two very basic steps that do not harm each other.

To improve someone’s skin in a photograph, you first need the caress of blurring, like a farsighted person without glasses. Then you have to add noise, something like old TV with no signal. And then one can see better.

So my suggestion to the group — laughter — is an appreciation of noise, along with careful observation of the contents of the disturbances. When this battery runs out, with more clarity, let us be arrogant in our claims to dignity,

Only I was going to write about something completely different. I will do another post.