Saudade: love, death and despair

Photo taken in Havana, Cuba.

Fado music is a key element of traditional Portuguese culture. The Portuguese word saudade is often associated with it. Each works with the other to express a particular emotion, an almost fatalistic world-view where love is doomed and destiny rules on. From an Anglo-Saxon perspective, it is very easy to confuse saudade with nostalgia – it is nostalgia and something more. Fado music, which comes from the word fatum in Latin, meaning fate, is a Portuguese urban folk style, with supposed origins in the rhythms of African slaves. The style was adopted by the poor of Lisbon to express a discontent with the status quo. Its common themes are destiny, betrayal, love, death and despair.

Saudade is a nostalgic longing for someone or something that once was and is no longer. An element of this longing is the submerged realisation that the missing object or person will never really return, and yet hope for its return remains constant. Saudade differs from nostalgia because it is located firmly in the present, while also looking towards the future for the eventual realisation of this longing. Saudade can express varying forms of love and longing, from the unrequited love to the love one feels for a missing person, or a distant relative. It can also express a longing for the motherland, and is thus used by Portuguese emigrants as a way of illustrating their homesickness and estrangement in their new land. A fado performer or fadista who does not express saudade is not a true fadista.

I once saw a fado performance in a Portuguese Social Club in Westbourne Grove. The female singer emerged, cloaked in black and resplendent, from the men’s toilets mid-song. As we ate our stew and got steadily drunker, she walked slowly around the tables and sang with such a presence, such a palpable sadness, that we couldn’t help but be moved. Several members of the audience cried hopelessly. If a fado performance does not move one to tears, it has failed as an art form.

This article is featured in this month’s edition of Garageland Magazine, the Nostalgia Edition

Dissocia Zine

Work has started on Jay and I’s new zine, Dissocia. Here’s our creative mess, below. Thou must follow us on Facebook, Twitter, the Dissocia blog, and whatever goddamn piece of technology we can master.
Contribute, contribute! We’re looking for prose, poetry, fashion writing, satire, comics, doodles, paintings, photography, one-page plays, jokes, essays, sketches, book reviews, film reviews, rants; write about politics, or art, or sport. And send in your stuff: dissocia @googlemail.com.

Randomly, while flyering around Cowley Road, Rosy and I came across this gem of a wall:

“DISSOCIA, DISSOCIA, WELCOME TO DISSOCIA!”
-Anthony Neilson, ‘The Wonderful World of Dissocia’ (2004)-

The Post-it

This is one of a series of 71 photographs by Phil Grey of Will Self’s room, viewed in 360 degrees.

For Will Self, the Post-it note is an inherent part of his creative process:

“My books begin life in notebooks, then they move on to Post-it notes, the Post-its go up on the walls of the room. The shaggy patch of them in the middle of the wall (they’re stuck to a map of the Isle of Grain, my spiritual home) are all short story ideas, tropes, metaphors, gags, characters, etc. When I’m working on a book, the Post-its come down off the wall and go into scrapbooks, which is why the wall to the left of the window has Post-it alopecia – that’s where some of The Book of Dave was stuck up. I can’t throw anything away. Anything. I’m going to end up like one of those old weirdos who lives in a network of tunnels burrowed through trash – yet I do not fear this”.

The Post-it is the baby of the inventive genius of Dr. Spencer Silver and Dr. Arthur Fry. In 1968, Silver developed a high-quality but “low-tack” adhesive which consisted of small, indestructible acrylic spheres that stick only when tangent to a surface (such as a wall). As a result, the adhesive’s grip was strong enough to hold papers together but weak enough that the paper can be pulled apart again without being torn.

For the humble student, the Post-it is a visual aid, the condensed germ of an idea or a quotation stuck up on a visible plain. It is a to-do list (“Buy print cartridges”). It is a messaging device, a homing pigeon in note form to leave on other student’s doors (“Ella: dinner tonight? S+ P xx”). It is an easy-to-find notebook for jotting down numbers and messages. It is an empowering fridge magnet in paper form (I know someone who jots down carpe diem style notes on her fridge and changes the message at random). It can also function as a sort of modern day billet-doux, a quick love letter stuck on a lamp, the words I love you. Call me text me when you get this scrawled on neon yellow. It is, in scientific lingo, a retrieval cue, an adhesive aid for absent-mindedness. The point of the Post-it is that it is totally ephemeral. I’ve only ever saved one Post-it in my life and that was a special one. The rest are ripped off walls when the crucial exam or important errand is completed. Will Self sticks them in note-books when he’s done with them as plot-helping devices. The best thing about the Post-it is that it is a small tool for classifying the external disorder around you. Two friends in my halls post-ited every object in their room while drunk one night (“table”, “chair”, “book”, “book”, “book”, “toaster”). The post-it is a stationary object in a rapidly moving world.

A photo of Frank Long, 88, and Shirley Knappe, 83, of Coral Springs, Florida, who were married three years ago and use different types of Post-it notes to organize their lives (Barbara P. Fernandez for The New York Times).

Marrakech

We took a bus from the centre of Marrakech that went all the way up into the mountains, a ‘precarious’ journey (the odd rock slide and snowstorm got in the way). The landscape went from busy city, to dusty desert, to the snowy peaks of the Atlas mountains in the space of a couple of hours.
Exploring a kasbah was my favourite part of the trip. A kasbah, like a medina, is a walled city, a fortress if you like. A lot of filming had been done in this area; Lawrence of Arabia was filmed here, as were some other films I hadn’t heard of, and you can see why they chose this location. It really is beautiful:

Bellydancing:

On the last night, a belly dancer performed in the local restaurant where we were having dinner. I was struck by how sensual it is, how much flesh the dancer shows, bearing in mind that Morocco is a predominantly Muslim country. It brought back the bellydancing lessons a friend and I did ages ago, very badly, when we thought the teacher was coked up to the eyeballs.

Even though many of the women I saw were veiled, or at least it seemed so to me while I was there, I loved the way the eyes, so heavily kohled, became such a focal point. There’s a bit in Anais Nin’s diary when she’s in Morocco and some women in a harem show her how to kohl her eyes:

“At the house of Driss Mokri Montasseb I was allowed to visit the harem. Seven wives of various ages…They told me how they made up their eyes. They bought kohl dust at the market, filled their eyes with it. The eyes smart and cry, and so the black kohl marks the edges and gives that heavily accented effect”.

Speaking of harems, I include a picture of the window of a harem in the kasbah we visited. This is where the women look through to the outer world. It is a very old window…

And finally, the shelves of the pharmacy in the kasbah:
Pretty drugs!

more journals

Some of these journals are two years old, the order is a bit random. In fact, I’ve just learnt how to scan properly, so I’ll try to scan some more later on. Meanwhile, I recommend a much better journaller (journalist? It can’t be): Blu. Blu is also a seriously talented graffiti artist. My favourite piece of his is a massive wall grafitti of guns he did in Rio, but I can’t find it on the internet. His style is weird and distinctively his; alien, political, sci-fi:

Paris journals

scanned journals