Primera setmana de setembre 2010

Bufa el xaloc, temps de mareig, la mort té el llum verd







Acabat... un llibre que cal assaborir sovint... South Wind, d’en Norman Douglas (1917)



Un llibre que hom hauria de donar a llegir a tots els joves de tretze catorze anys — sortosos ells, quants d’anys d’inútil "filosofia" no s’estalviaven! Quin greu no em sap no haver-lo descobert de jovenet [i com més impressionable, millor (llas, amb això he fet tard de cinquanta anys!)]. Hauria arribat a les conclusions on he arribat (en acabat de tant tentinejar llordament entre piles i piles de fètides "moralitats" escrites per datspelcul sense unça de seny) just en una sola lectura del tot revelatòria.



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Bufa l’inquietant xaloc a Capri durant una dotzena de dies plens d’esdeveniments on uns quants de personatges memorables se les heuen amb l’existència. Els ulls de qualcuns s’obren a la realitat, ço és, ben lluny de les rucades ideològiques dels ignorants qui imposarien, com dic, bèsties "moralitats".



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Tothora contra messies, profetes i rampoina d’aqueixa lletjor i malignitat on s’asseuen les religions (pels pecs i per als pecs doncs inventades) : "The folly of idolizing dead men and their delusions." Les repel·lents delusions de grandesa dels "fills de déu" i tota la merda sangosa que llavors destil·len perquè els betzols i els podrits i els bútxares s’hi rabegin.



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[Pensava per un moment bo i llegint el llibre : així com pots veure en Mirbeau com un precursor d’en Céline, també en Douglas d’en Gaddis. Sí ves, qui sap.]



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Personatges.



En Ca-l’ovella, el vell comte cínic i exacte (amb vanes fantasies de masoquista qui ara pateix i aspira al jorn revelatori on — de la foscor a l’enlluernament (i de pobre a molt ric) — tot d’una esdevindrà gloriós) :



Se’n fot dels "anglo-saxons" empastifats a fons per aquell llibret merdós, la bíblia dels escarransits semites — "Your ethics are stereotyped in black-letter characters. A gargoyle morality." "They realize that their traditional upbringing is opposed to truth. It gives them a sense of insecurity."



"Yet there must be reasonable men everywhere; men who refuse to wear away their faculties in a degrading effort to plunder one another, men who are tired of hustle and strife. What, sir, would you call the phenomenon of to-day ? What is the outstanding feature of modern life ? The bankruptcy, the proven fatuity, of everything that is bound up under the name of Western civilization. Men are perceiving, I think, the baseness of mercantile and military ideals, the loftiness of those older ones. They will band together, the elect of every nation, in god-favoured regions round the Inland Sea, there to lead serener lives. To those who have hitherto preached indecorous maxims of conduct they will say : ’What is all this ferocious nonsense about strenuousness? An unbecoming fluster. And who are you, to dictate how we shall order our day? Go! Shiver and struggle in your hyperborean dens. Trample about those misty rain-sodden fields, and hack each other’s eyes out with antediluvian bayonets. Or career up and down the ocean, in your absurd ships, to pick the pockets of men better than yourselves. That is your mode of self-expression. It is not ours.’"



(Com els castelladres qui roben l’or d’Amèrica i es tanquen, avariciosos i restrets, confitant eternament llur provinciana merda) : "One would think that Commerce, which has broken down geographical barriers, might have done the same to political ones. Far from it! In sharpening men’s lust for gold, it has demarcated our frontiers with a bitterness hitherto unknown. The world of thought has not expanded; it has contracted and grown provincial."



"I think we need not trouble about majorities. No one can expect a majority to be stirred by motives other than ignoble."




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El capellà gras : "Women are so influenced by what they read!" I veu en Dionís fent l’emili, ço és, fent el faldilletes, servint begudes i pensa en Ganimedes, patró dels marietes.



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De fet, hi ha molt de marieta :



El delitosament hiperbòlic Keith (sovint alter ego de l’autor) ("he had all the Scotchman’s passion for dissecting the obvious, discovering new facets in the commonplace, and squeezing the last drop out of a foregone conclusion") :



"You derive a morbid pleasure from denying yourself the common emoluments of life. It’s a form of self-indulgence."



"You look like a boy who is fond of flowers. And yet you have never been to see my cannas, which are the finest in the kingdom, to say nothing of myself, who am also something of a flower. A carnivorous orchid, I fancy."



"Only invetebrate folks do not unbend. They dare not, because they have no backbone. They know that if they once unbent, they could not straighten themselves out again. They make a virtue of their own organic defect. They explain their natural imperfection by calling themselves pure."



"Unfortunately persons of healthy digestions were not as common as they might be. That was why straight thinking, on these and other subjects, was at a discount. Nobody had a right to call himself well-disposed towards society until he had grasped the elementary fact that the only way to improve the universe was to improve oneself and to leave one’s neighbour alone." "Had the tribe of Israel cultivated a smattering of respect for physiology or any other useful science instead of fussing about supernatural pedigrees, they would have been more cautious as to their diet. Had they been careful in the matter of dietary, their sacred writings would never have seen the light of day. Those writings, a monument of malnutrition and faulty digestive processes, were responsible for three-quarters of what was called charity. Charity was responsible for the greater part of human mischief and misery."



"Philanthropy is a disguised form of brutality. All sentimentalists are criminals." "Some persons make a profession of being scandalized. I am profoundly distrustful of them. It is the prerogative of vulgarians to be shocked."



"The drawback of Oriental gods is that they have been manufactured by the proletariat for the use of the aristocracy. They act accordingly; that is, they distil the morality of their creators which I consider a noxious emanation." "I can find no room in my Cosmos for a deity, save as a waste product of human weakness, an excrement of the imagination."



Sempre contra els cretins (els emmascarats davall la capa de la pseudoraó i tot) : "Cretinism, I call it. Look at the Orthodox Church. A repository of apocalyptic nonsense such as no sane man can take seriously. Nonsense of the right kind, the uncompromising kind. That is my point. The paralysing, sterilizing cult of these people offers a far better spring-board into a clean element of thought than our English Church, whose demi-vierge concessions to common sense afford seductive resting-places to the intellectually weak-knee’d." [Hà!]



Com hom fotia amb les "eumènides", a "déu" i a la mort hom (de caient cagat) els tracta amb cagat respecte, per por del mal que ens fotrien, malignes.




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El bibliògraf : "No en dic, del meu cos, un instrument; en dic de maleïda nosa."



"You cannot be frank with men of low condition."



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El titella Parker :



"Parker spent a good deal of his time in endeavouring to mask, under a cloak of boisterous good humour, a really remarkable combination of malevolence and imbecility. He was what you call a remittance man. He got so much a quarter — a miserable sum it was — to keep out of England. He travelled about formerly. But no amount of travel, no association with his betters, could pierce his stolid pachydermatous obliquity. He was the worst kind of Englishman; he could not even cheat without being found out. But for the wise counsels of his lady he would have been in the lock-up over and over again. Such being the case, he took a justifiable pride in his Anglo-Saxon origin. Whenever a project seemed too risky — not worth while, he called it — he would say : ’It can’t be done. That’s a job for a dago. I’m an Englishman, you know.’"



"He was a fool and liable, as such, under the stress of bodily or mental disturbance, to spasmodic fits of abject fright which he mistook for religion."




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La germana d’en Parker :



"He needed careful motherly guidance. All fools, she reflected, were subject to meteoric gleams of common sense. He was no exception to that rule. (...) He persisted in regarding them as inspirations of the devil. That was the tragedy of Freddy Parker. It made him into something quintessential — a kind of super-fool. . . ."



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El bisbe :

"He had never allowed his judgment to be warped by those degrading aspects of womanhood which he had encountered during his work among the London poor, and more recently in Africa, where women are treated as the veriest beasts."



(Per què mentir, som heretges) : "The Bitongos — they were Christians; had taken to the Gospel like ducks to the water; wore top-hats at Easter. But liars — such dreadful liars! Just the reverse of the M’tezo. Ah, those M’tezo! Incurable heathen. He had given them up long ago. Anyhow, they despised lying. They filed their teeth, ate their superfluous female relations, swopped wives every new moon, and never wore a stitch of clothes. A man who appeared among the M’tezo in a fig-leaf would find himself in the cooking-pot within five minutes."



(Com entrar al "cor" d’algú) : "It is like a passionate lover knocking to gain an entrance into our hearts. And he succeeds. He breaks down the barrier by the oldest and best of lovers’ expedients — sheer reiteration of monotony."



"The bishop was filled with a sense — a clear-cut, all-convincing sense — of the screamingly funny insignificance of everything."




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Pler de bones vinyetes :



(Qualsevol sermó) : "It was a pure invention on the part [del carrincló Torquemada de torn] who, being a high-principled ecclesiastic, had clear-cut orthodox views anent the utility of pious legends."



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(Apareix una gallina amb plomes de gall) : "The local parish priest, who, horrified at the transformation of the feathered monster and mindful of the Papal Bull ne nimis noceant nobis which enjoins upon Christians the duty of destroying all unnatural productions however generated, incontinently ordered it to be put out of the way."



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Hà! (conversa) :



—I should say that even our greatest bigots, nowadays, don’t take those old doctrines as seriously as you seem to think.

—I daresay they don’t. But they profess to reproach themselves for not doing so. And that is more contemptible. It adds insincerity to imbecility.



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Aquell cabrit de duc qui hi manava antanyasses et donava tanmateix un bon consell :



"Hom no discuteix mai amb inferiors." [O com deia, millor, aquell altre : "Poc juguis mai amb cap mofeta a qui pixaria més lluny."]




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"The Villa Mon Repos. There was a curious history attached to the place. It had been built about a century ago at the orders of an eccentric French lady, a lyric poetess, who professed to be tired of life. She had heard that somewhere on Nepenthe was a towering precipice, unique of its kind and convenient for suicidal purposes. She thought she would like to live near that precipice — it might come in handy. There was nothing of the right sort in Paris, she declared; only five-storey hotels and suchlike; the notion of casting herself down from one of those artificial eminences did not appeal to her high-strung temperament; she craved to die like Sappho, her ideal. An architect was despatched, the ground purchased, the house built and furnished. That done, she settled up her affairs in France and established herself at Mon Repos. On the evening of her arrival she climbed the little height at the back of her domain and looked southward, down a sheer wall of rock eight or nine hundred feet high, over the wrinkled ocean. It made her feel queer. Further familiarity with the precipice did not breed contempt; her visits to the site became rarer and rarer. She died, at a patriarchal age, in her bed, after writing a scholarly pamphlet to prove that the tale of Sappho’s leap over her famous silvery crag was a myth, the ’purest sensationalism,’ a fable of the grammarians ’hopelessly irreconcilable with what we know of that great woman’s character.’"



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El xaloc no era abans tan dolent : "The deforestation of Northern Africa, I suspect, has much to do with it. Frenchmen are now trying to revive those prosperous conditions which Mohammedanism has destroyed. "



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"Per fer-te cap amic, hi has d’anar ja amb un ull cluc; per a conservar-lo, amb els dos clucs."



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La molt fava duquessa :



"And not a syllable about the Incarnation, please. It scares me." ("She would have worn a pomander in her hair, or on a chatelaine, if anybody had told her what a pomander was. As her friends were unable to enlighten her — Mr. Keith even hinting that it was an object which could not be mentioned in polite society — she contented herself with a couple of patches.")



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Marten : "A fellow can’t live without vices."



"Mortifying the flesh? Got a soul, eh? Get rid of it. The soul! That unhappy word has been the refuge of empty minds ever since the world began."



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El lladre : "I’ve no use for an honest man. He always lets you down."




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(Mon parer segons, doncs) un dels millors llibres mai parits, amb estil i substància a balquena, vós.





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Llegit d’en S. N. Behrman, No Time for Comedy (1939)





Peça ambigua; dues parelles de l’alta burgesia i una minyona negra, molt racistament tractada com a objecte còmic.



Abans de la guerra, un dramaturg de peces lleus, ara angoixat amb càrrecs de consciència, impel·lit a la tortura mental per part de la molt presumida dona d’altri. La dona del dramaturg és una actriu famosa. L’home de la presumida un negociant seriós — l’únic personatge amb una mica de seny i tanmateix el qui se n’ha d’anar d’escena com si fos un carallot.



Diu l’home de seny : "My wife has a passion for developing latent powers. When they are not there she invents them. Her first husband was a mediocre but amiable man whom she utterly ruined by persuading him he was first-rate. (...) She adores to inspire." [Hà!]



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L’actriu al pueril dramaturg : "What is this mania for under-rating yourself that’s caught you lately? Is it bait for contradiction?" [Exacte.] "Your abrupt concern over cosmic misery makes me guess that you have one....less cosmic." "I am not impressed by the dead....The he knows how to die (el personatge espectral de la peça que l’altre escriu), that does not impress me. Millions of people know how to die — stoics and fanatics — the insensitive and the robots. In any case it is an art that sooner or later nature imposes on all of us....Don’t spin for me fantasias of death. Imagine for me variations for life." [Hi toca sovint, mes l’amor li fa fer la follia de triar guardar el capsigrany marit seu.]



El patètic i repulsiu dramaturg, en canvi, hi toca un sol cop : "We’re such exhibitionists that we think that because other writers and other actresses discuss us endlessly that the general public cares. They don’t give a god damn. And they are quite right!"



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Les dues dones. La presumida primer, l’actriu després :



—I am afraid you are selfish, Linda.

—Of course I am. What are you?



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[Diuen moltes de rucades de la guerra d’agressió del feixisme castelladre contra l’independentisme català. És clar que no tenen ni puta idea de res i per això en diuen "war in Asspain".]



L’home de seny ho diu pla i ho endevina de mig a mig : "Civil war is no new thing in Asspain. They fought the carlist wars for forty years. They kill each other because they want to — that is their pastime. You are like the sentimentalists who divorce the totalitarian rulers from their peoples. No such divorce is possible. They have the governments they want, the governments they deserve. The average man is bloodthirsty and contemptible. The great satirists, Voltaire and Swift, knew that. Your indignation is sentimental and romantic. It is infantile." [Perfecte. I tanmateix, per haver dit aqueixes veritats monumentals, se n’ha d’anar desfet.] [Absurd!]



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Fluixot.







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Llegit d’en Frank Kane, Green Light for Death (1949)






En Liddell descobrint un altre criminal — una altra (pèl-roja per a recargolar el nus, on les rosses aquest cop són "bones") amb una facilitat no gens fàcil. La coberta del llibre el punt culminant — ui, l’heroi armat entrant en orgia on hom consumeix haixix. Un pèl carrinclonet, doncs.



El bòfia dolent se’l vol treure de sobre de bon començ : pse, investigador privat, tot el que saps fer és "peeping through keyholes".



La dolenta se li’n fot : segons la bona (i morta) "you’re a cross between Sam Spade and Ellery Queen with a little Superman thrown in on the side".



pàg. 20 : "In this town... the cops so crooked they could hide behind a corkscrew without throwing a shadow."



p. 29 : un parell de buls més : "a couple gorillas... would beat their mothers’ brains out just to kill a rainy afternoon."



El pudent en cap : "he used to hire out union sluggers and strike breakers before the war. He tied in with the mob running that town, settled down, and became police chief."



Hà : "if you want to do any talking with him, you’ll have to use a ouija board; he died two years ago."



p. 85 : bàrman : "you must have the idea we don’t like you, mister; we hardly ever give a paying customer a mickey; hardly ever."



Liddell al bòfia en cap podrit : "from now on we’re playing for keeps; don’t sit in the game unless you can afford to lose".



Li diu a un marieta : "you know how undependable those fags are when you push them too far?"



La hipòcrita pèl-roja : "you know what a fag like that would do to a girl."



I ara : "she dragged her nails down the side of his face, leaving four parallel red grooves down either ckeek..."



Heus-te’l doncs, fet i fet en Liddell d’afeccionat molt català.




Fort llegívol, hò.




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