02023-07-11 | Book, Lx, Photos, Walking
Hers was a walking discipline, like the practices of the peripatetic dervishes. It proceeded at the speed of footsteps, which is the speed of history, and at that speed, on those long walks which are the science’s method, connections and correspondences appear. Strange symmetries appear between separated buildings as if some urban continental drift has taken place. Streets follow ancient, atavistic needs.
from The Dervish House by Ian McDonald
Of course I am going to love that… 😄
Connections and correspondences indeed appear at the speed of footsteps. Anything faster than footsteps and we might miss this door mat, so thin that it looks like a red filter hovering above the stones. Everything lines up and it is clear that the mat has not been moved in a very long time.
I think I should put together a slideshow that contains only the most basic and mundane subject matter. No grand vista, nothing amazing… just simple things that caught my eye.
02023-07-10 | Lx, Photos
Saw a (new?) mirrored bench the Gulbenkian garden. There were some small puddles on the surface, from the early morning watering. The photo looks like an entire universe.
02023-07-01 | Lx, Photos, Portugal
Walked by that wall in the morning. I enjoy literary graffiti! A little later, I sat down in a cafe and, aided by a pão de queijo and a cappuccino, attempted a translation. I think this covers the meaning, but my Portuguese is lousy:
And again we find ourselves together, the three,
refusing to be the sedative shadow of a warrior’s rest.
Warriors, we, women of full (whole?) body and holding hands.
New Portuguese Letters 1972
We join you, Tres Marias,
in sorority, in struggle, feminists.
8 March 2023
Wikipedia has this (LINK)
New Portuguese Letters (NPL) was conceived in 1971, three years before the Carnation Revolution and the consequent independence of the Portuguese colonies in Africa. Its authors, Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta and Maria Velho da Costa, were already established writers. They began to meet twice weekly in Lisbon, publicly for lunch and privately for dinner, in order to “examine the problems they shared as women and as liberal writers.” A volume of poetry by Horta had recently been banned, and they intended their new work as a direct challenge to the censors, and also, one critic has written, as “an incitement to insurrection, based on the conviction that “when woman rebels against man, nothing remains unchanged“
Emphasis my own. Well, it should happen more often then!
02023-04-24 | Lx, Photos
Just look at that little palm, craning its neck, stretching upwards, surviving. I see you!
