A POETICS OF SILENCE — by Paulo José Miranda
No word is more obsessively pursued in the work of João Ricardo Lopes than that which writes “silence.” In all his books, including those of fiction, it (re)appears imbued with the weight, power, and prestige of a fetish-word (as the author himself acknowledges), around which a poetics of refusal, fracture, and reconstruction of the world is structured, born of a minimalist vision that he imposes both on himself and on others.
In his most recent volume of poetry, Em Nome da Luz (In the Name of Light, 2022), the concept-word silence is invoked in eleven of the book’s forty compositions. Significantly, as though a penitent engaged in an act of ablution, a neophyte finding his peace, a wanderer discovering a meaning for his existence, or a creator defining a formula, the poet notes:.
IN PRAISE OF SILENCE
when you need silence,
you wash your hands many times,
you slowly warm a cup of coffee,
you read Bashō’s haikus
silence, like the paths sought
between cities, is not entirely reliable –
it is merely an adoration, a flare,
where your love burns
and sometimes, unwittingly,
a poem
.
Here we encounter a verbalisation—one might recall the great master Ruy Belo—of a principle that confirms: “No great poet has failed to feel the seduction of silence,” for “One is a poet in practice, not so much by what is said as by what is subtly suggested to remain unsaid.” These verses clarify not only a purifying impulse on the part of the poet—who desires to rid himself of filth (“you wash your hands many times”)—but also, once purification is complete, a yearning to return to simple routines that may spark the creative act: the preparation of a cup of coffee, the reading of Bashō’s haikus, the nourishment drawn from the fascination—read flame—enabled by contact with what is intimate and bare.
This profound introspection that silence signifies for João Ricardo Lopes—a synonym for catharsis, for asceticism—was already present in embryonic form in earlier works, particularly the magnificent Eutrapelia (2021). In it, the poem “Duomo, Milan” echoes, with astonishing lightness, the gestures made by the pilgrim, the ascetic, the homo silens, in an effort of self-suppression, a striving towards inner emptiness and the search for redemption:
DUOMO, MILAN
the first impressions are the chiselled stone,
the flickering light in the stained glass
then the knees touch the wood
and the hands touch the face
prayer, slowly secreted
in a thread of voice
invades the rock down to our final sin
silence is total.
through the naves and columns, it reaches
the far end of the temple
and it is pure
we belong to another era,
the final impressions are already distant,
like someone calling from within a dream
or calling from another world
.
We have known since the Greeks that catharsis may save or allow survival. The dramatic force of words, together with the lyrical (and rugged) beauty of their imagery, has constituted one of literature’s most sublime achievements. In the particular case of João Ricardo Lopes’s poetry—a poet I have known since his inclusion in the third and final edition of the anthology Anos 90 e Agora (2005)—this catharsis tends to merge with an escape from reality, or rather a fierce resistance to it, through detachment and the pursuit of solitude, through the selection of details from that reality that ultimately aim to nullify it: I refer to the reality the poet disassembles and reassembles into simple elements, trifles, minutiae only knowable through silence and attentive observation—what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “literary miseries”—which give his writing a (sometimes enumerative) charm of remarkable intensity.
THIS MORNING THE SILENCE
this morning the silence climbed the walls and rafters,
scaled the beams, the high webs, the frozen eaves
and passed through the stone, the cement, the fissures, the air itself
I am now all my life, my destiny
and the house trembled
and the words – frozen iron –
pained the hands
.
The unusual imagistic substratum emerging from the hands of this once-young poet brings to mind the pleasure with which, at the ill-fated Bulhosa, I received his Contra o Esquecimento das Mãos (Lest Hands Be Forgotten, 2002), when, compelled to study the new generation of poets, I encountered verses such as:
from refraction to refraction sinks
thought into the linens of the house
the afternoon is white
in the soul impurities are panned
.
Or:
during the intermezzo
we did what was possible
from the fat, the stench,
from the muds we cleansed ourselves
until we became this transparency of water
.
I recall a conversation with Jorge Reis-Sá, who also recommended I read the poet’s first book, awarded by the Portuguese Writers’ Association in 2001. In it—a short sequence entitled A Pedra Que Chora Como Palavras (The Stone Weeping Wordlike)—there already appear, in foundational form, the themes that time would later entwine and develop. For instance: the magnetic appeal of metapoetry; the cinematic rendering of scenarios in which the speaker is portrayed (autobiographically or fictionally); the musicality and syncopated rhythm of verses, almost always short and lapidary; the visual minuteness, the insistent eye absorbing the nuances of dusk; the refinement of metaphor, often startling, sharp, unmoored. And, in conclusion, the restorative power of silence—that silence of which we have spoken—which aptly expresses the permanent tension between equilibrium and disequilibrium described by Rosa Maria Martelo.
in autumn, when the leaves oxidise,
the brilliance of poets seems clearer
and more unsettling
with cigarettes in the coat
and a train ticket to an uncertain place
we briefly note on the skin of the hand
that one day, should we return,
it will be only for this little silence (…)
.
I may be digressing from the nerve centre I wish to emphasise. And that point lies in the admission that the poetry of the author of Em Nome da Luz—insufficiently known, scarcely disseminated—contains successive appeals to a daily practice of cleansing, of decanting, of precision, of hygienisation, suggested more or less explicitly in countless poems in which the I voluntarily renounces literary luxuries in order to find contentment in the dignity of the minimal, a minimal that paradoxically contains the maximal of poetic ethos. So it is expressed, for example, in the beautiful penultimate poem of his latest book:
DAILY HYGIENE
things a man needs:
van Gogh’s twelve sunflowers,
the four Gospels,
pink soap
.
I emphasise this note. I do so because it seems evident that the poetry of this author has evolved towards a syncretic tendency, one that progressively fuses author and work, suggesting that poetry is not for him merely the art of verse (as metapoetry implies), but an apologia for the hermit’s life, a deeply personal manifesto of cosmification, a salvific path for the subject through the byways of the abyss: nothing matters so much as the brief life of the poem, the power to dwell within it by whatever means, even if—as Gastão Cruz so finely put it—it may be “a labour doomed to failure,” even if that little may contain all he has managed to gauge in life.
Perhaps this is the purpose of João Ricardo Lopes’s poetics of silence: to charge the written word with the mission of annulling itself, of becoming nothing, in the sense Jean-Paul Sartre invokes, to create (in an anticipatory process of self-erasure) the miracle of life and, within it, most especially, the birth of the poem—much like drawing or building on sand, existing only because it once existed. This process, increasingly assumed as the only path, opens the door to an entire order of chaos: the poet is the one who discovers by accident, who uncovers by chance, who finds something while seeking something else.
SERENDIPITY
I thought of Fernando Pessoa,
of you,
of the quantity of love that words demand of us,
of the fog over the Zambezi,
of May’s thunderstorms,
of the rigorous vein in each leaf
perfection is found while looking for something else,
emptiness, for instance
today I remembered the fir trees of Cremona.
I felt once again the harshness of the cold and the dread of the wind
striking the forest
emptiness is also a form of serendipity:
you seek the poem and you shall find it
.
I find this poem from Em Nome da Luz, recipient a few months ago of the National Poetry Prize of Vila de Fânzeres, deeply interesting. The entire volume demands a discerning eye. Those who follow this author’s poetic trajectory will recognise that he has been making his mark somewhat against the current—not merely through the prominence he gives to metaphor, or the lexical revival of terms long out of use (or forgotten), nor through the quasi-monastic vow of isolation to which the writer has consigned himself (a factor that alone might explain his near-anonymity), but above all through the quiet act of composing nothingness, of loving the insignificant, of firmly believing in the utter futility of the world’s noise.
ON WISDOM
feed on the rain,
on occasional tubers, on wild
fruit,
feed on the landscapes,
on the most
rigorous silence
poetry, in its essence,
is a hermit.
everything else is excessive
and useless.
everything else is wind,
passing poison
.
It is worth recalling that all which is “excessive” and “useless,” “wind” or “passing poison,” has no place in poetry (“inutilia truncat,” as Horace prescribed), nor in the soul of a clean man, deeply aware of life’s brevity (not my words, but those of Ecclesiastes).
In short, there is no better understanding of the worth of a book, a poem, or a verse, than the sense of rectitude defended in it unto “the most rigorous silence.” Let that silence mean—let the reader measure it—what it may.
Bahia, 08.06.2023
Paulo José Miranda
Translator’s Note:
We have chosen to present a possible English translation for each of the author’s titles for easier understanding of their literary work.
