Ricardo Càstro

Assim

Você foi um dia

O que nunca seria

Se não fosse a minha fé

Acredito no bonito

No lado fantástico

Por mais que esquisito

Seja

Pense Nisso

Na minha mania de acreditar

No puro prazer

Na diferença do ser/estar

Excerpt from Assim

Music: Rita Figueiredo

Lyrics: Rick Castro

Ground Control to Major Tom,

Ground Control to Major Tom,

Take your protein pills and put your helmet on.

(Ten) Ground Control (Nine) to Major Tom (Eight)

(Seven, six) Commencing countdown (Five), engines on (Four)

(Three, two) Check ignition (One) and may God’s (Lift off) love be with you.

This is Ground Control to Major Tom

You've really made the grade

And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear.

Now it's time to leave the capsule if you dare

“This is Major Tom to Ground Control,

I'm stepping through the door

And I'm floating in a most peculiar way

And the stars look very different today.

For here

Am I sitting in a tin can,

Far above the world,

Planet Earth is blue

And there's nothing I can do.

Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles,

I'm feeling very still,

And I think my spaceship knows which way to go.

Tell my wife I love her very much, she knows.”

Ground Control to Major Tom,

Your circuits dead, there's something wrong.

Can you hear me, Major Tom?

Can you hear me, Major Tom?

Can you hear me, Major Tom?

Can you...

“Here am I floating round my tin can,

Far above the Moon,

Planet Earth is blue

And there's nothing I can do.”

Space Oddity

Music and lyrics: David Bowie

Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do. For the earthlings, it may be felt with angst, as it testifies to the finitude (of the ego, of the Western “I”), the limitation (of the linear progress) and the thin cutout that the human being is (history + biology). For Major Tom, it is an experience of physical and formal free will, incredibly liberating, exactly because it testifies to the finitude (blue), the limitation (the ball) and the thin cutout of being human (the Earth). The trust on the unlimited and the production of faux-complexities have become alienating traps of the totalitarianism of the flexible, of the hegemonic critique divided in zillions of subtitles. Planet Earth is blue and that's all right.

The issue is not to kill the analytic dimension of the description, but to magnify it: I am the one who died, who is a living being of Other form, without believing, to believe, tobelieve, to be lief (“pitiful are those who believe; they still might believe while they rest”). I believed. I transmuted. I transbelimupassed through the Portal 3PV1, just as I started to write down this text. I see you from the cosmos of indescribable color, which is the one of the recently dead (“Yet, I want my beloved close to me, taking my hand, palm-to-palm, oh, why are you so distant, why didn't you come”). It is beautiful. From here, we see the light as a reflex that has the appearance of an improvised conformation in harmony with the rhythm of what we believe all the things to be; from here, we see as a light that causes the alterity of being the neon-light of the Other: the indescribable color as a shiny copper, triplicated (3) PV, without 1 code of programmed happiness.

Nothing but freedom. Of the active and voluntary participation when set before, around, or surrounded by static elements or of volatile movements, considering that its performance modifies or concludes changes of participation according to its will, and not to a belief. By transcending it. As the shiny-lilac cosmos, just as those who do not need to believe any longer; those who do not know anymore, but that simply are (just as love, that does not need to be anything. It just is). Willys, Lygia, Beuys, who belong to the shiny-lilac cosmos. The first one says that the object is not object, it is a small dwelling place. Yet, Lygia says that the object is not object, but a vivid experience. Beuys restores the entire form of the object’s symbolic load to radiate its own substances and cleverness. Which, at the end of the day, are the same tropicaliations.

It is not a matter of creativity, but of abravanações,[1] of an ethics of being prior to any hereditary pretension of presupposing that communication equals understanding, or of submitting oneself to the vicious cycle of constant novelty. Beuys came to the shiny-copper cosmos – the major power conductor – and says to me and to you that the human being is primarily spiritual and that we need to recover the capacity of this kind of equilibrium that has been lost (Hélio sends you a kiss). Your AMOS and their love motivations; destructions, pauses and rebirths that cause each new layer of your Portal 3PV1 – everything seems to be related to the common necessities and to the inner life of all individuals. It is a matter of dilution and dilation.

Yes, because human history (of those who believe) is the boiling surface of the ordinary biology pan; we are (I was) flesh that fell down into a kind of attractive net because of the transformations of History, that sculpt us (sculpt you) from culture, consciousness, psychedelias, technologies. But the same persons who administrate this whole history know that such History (from the programming languages which form happy capacities without catching the difference between to be [to exist or live] and to be [location]: the bankers, some writers, some artists, the admen, the  journalists) is coming to an end.

We all are guilty; the human being cannot be seen as a social problem but as an elegant solution. THEREFORE, I keep your love here.

It is the lights of your shards, my love, that make you all, that I bring with me to remake me once again. Here. Transparent and light (“Something is foreseen by the artist, but the given meanings are only possibilities, roused by the work, not expected. Also including the non participation of its many possibilities”). In any case, it is as if we lived in those impossible limitations (to be [exist]/to be [location];to live/to die) and the puzzling reversibility (color/color) of all this energetic drooling. Nothing is possible (the Earth is blue), everything is possible (the Earth is blue), and we still search for signals, signs, commutators to conjugate a cosmic laughter, a planetary guffaw of love and cure.

Note: references to other dead (from the shiny-lilac and the shiny-indescribable-color cosmos) used here:

David Bowie, “Space Oddity”, from the album Space Oddity of 1969, released by Philips Records.

Hélio Oiticica, “Crelazer”, Revista Galeria de Arte Moderna, 1967.

Hélio Oiticica, “Parangolés”, Revista Galeria de Arte Moderna, 1968

Willys de Castro, “[Associação de Artes Visuais Novas Tendências]”, original typewritten on the Associação de Artes Visuais Novas Tendências. In: Roberto Conduru, Willys de Castro (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2005), p. 156.

Suely Rolnik, A geopolítica da cafetinagem (2006) http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/rolnik/pt

Joseph Beuys – Transformer, dir. John Halpern, 1988, 59 min. Documentary transferred to DVD.

Erasmo Carlos interviewed by Bia Corrêa do Lago. Program Umas Palavras, TV Futura, broadcasted on 03/01/2010 (because the dead only see open TV).

Peter Pal Pelbart, “Suwa – Mais”. Lecture given on 03/05/2010, Caixa Cultural, Rio de Janeiro.

[1] Literally, “abravanations”, from the “abravanista” movement, which preconizes the idea of letting-go and non-attachment in arts. The  word “abravanar” means to liberate oneself (N. T.).