REALITY AND REPRESENTATION IN THE POETRY OF JOÃO RICARDO LOPES — by Victor Oliveira Mateus
Reflexões à Boca de Cena / Onstage Reflections by João Ricardo Lopes, both in its title and in some of its constituent elements, might initially lead a hurried and inattentive reader to believe they are dealing with a book of poetry centered on dramaturgy as its thematic and unifying core. However, in my reading, this interpretive hint signals a deliberate ambiguity, which serves as a key to the true concern of the work: theatricality functions merely as a pretext for what the poet is inevitably compelled to confront — the human being as a social actor… with all their disenchantments, flashes of lucidity, and passions.
The abruptness with which the work opens — “the curtain opens and they exist” — is followed by a parade of characters, a kind of tumultuous and ominous procession, crossing the city-stage in which we are called to exist: “one blusters in rolled up trousers” (p. 9), “jesters and dwarves”, “fire eaters/ the freckled harlot” (p. 13), a “drunkard sticking out his tongue”, as “dogs rummage through the night” (p. 29). I was immediately struck by this conception of poetic labor, which so skillfully weaves the ceaseless probing of the inner world — reaching one of its expressive peaks in the poem The Actor Looks at Himself in the Mirror (p. 71):
do not wait so long for me
I have no future
as past I did not have.
handsome I may be
however crude
no less than statue
nor better than sand.
like every creature
what I am I am no longer.
my hands burn with the cold
and I may already be dead
or too far.
do not wait so long for me
you do not know who you wait for
.
(This beautiful soliloquy brings to the Proscenium one of the most fascinating themes in poetry: the relationship of the self with its double) — with an attentive and penetrating gaze turned toward the outer world. Consider, for example, this excerpt from the poem Center Stage (p. 57):
on the centre of the stage lamps and props
peel potatoes lovingly
wiping the snot of the little plaited girl.
the audience is utterly following the scene
just some breathing and cough measuring
the quality of the performance.
(…)
life is joyous, a shipyard of short poems
(and who needs enormous ones?), a pantomime.
and at the end the applause, the abundant applause
the essential nodding from the crowd (is it really?)
hurrahs, euphoria, delicate theatre
and this is life, this in fact, is poetry
.
This balance — this subtle and sharp interweaving of inner and outer realms, this fusion that verges on a kind of miscegenation — is, in my view, one of the great strengths of João Ricardo Lopes’ poetic voice. To live is to inhabit a stage of multiple scenarios; to live is to perform assigned roles filled with conflict (not only between roles, but within them!); to live is to pursue, endlessly, an Unstable Balance (to borrow — admittedly — the title of Edward Albee’s play, famously adapted to film by Tony Richardson with the legendary Katharine Hepburn), a balance between what is inside and what is outside us. But above all, to live is to be lucid and faithful: to ourselves, to those who love us (for in the crumbling stage of today, they alone matter!), and to the ineffable miracle of being alive in this space we have been granted and must care for. As for the outside world, it breaks into many of the poems:
this amusing, colourful circus, hollow on the inside
as well as on the outside — fragile indeed, as in the soft spot
of your dreams (p. 11)
there is between us this entire city
this blade of silence that
cuts us right through the middle… (p. 31)
.
This state of mind of the poetic subject — disoriented yet determined to resist — permeates the entire work and aligns with a dichotomy frequently explored by the author: darkness and luminosity:
with its mouth in the dark, my longing
just it, listen to it, just listen to it (p. 21)
the night is for saying nothing at all. (p. 43).
it is in the shadow the most possible of germinations
in the half-light, in the poem
in the obscure corner of the whole stage (p. 75)
.
It is also noteworthy that João Ricardo Lopes does not endow this mentioned luminosity with any redeeming power; on the contrary, the emergence of the possible is constantly and relentlessly threatened:
Noise
all said I did not say
blackened lights fattening the eyes
as if early were already so late.
a window reclines over us
the rude and silent eyelid.
may it have been worth it. everything. (p. 47)
.
In the face of the lucid gaze cast upon the stage — with its variables laid bare by countless authors over the decades; in the face of this fetid and tasteless representation, dissected ad nauseam by thinkers like Baudrillard, Lipovetsky (on emptiness and consumerism), or Singer and Hirigoyen (on greed and the perverse manipulation of others for the sake of gratuitous displays of power); in the face of a fragmented and drifting city — the poetic self redeems the courage of waiting and reinvention:
Alchemically
also I own a misleading retort.
turning into gold your heart of stone
was never easy and failure jolts my sleep in
heartless spasms. I am the one who calls you
and there is a path of trees between us.
you are distant and laugh every time my disappointment
explodes and I swear to end like this, tattered
and beaten without you. but the poem is reborn and I
am slowly reborn. a heart of gold is something
one does not quit of. not till madness, not even then (p. 61)
.
João Ricardo Lopes situates his writing within the paradigm of feeling and being in contemporary man — a subject widely discussed in recent years (see, for instance, Les uns avec les autres – Quand l’individualisme crée du lien by François de Singly). This poetry breathes and expresses not only timeless themes but also clearly delineated contemporary concerns. In fact, to return to Singly’s work, one might say that the poetic self’s discord with the world is significantly — though never definitively — softened by the presence of the beloved.
However — and this is an interesting detail — this beloved, like the play mentioned in the book’s opening verse, appears suddenly; her appearances are always contingent and under threat. The beloved carries something salvific, yet it is always a possible salvation being referred to, never a necessary one. The poem Lovage masterfully conveys this lack: though the beloved is so beautiful, night never ceases to watch and pursue the poet. There is, therefore, a fundamental lack in the soul of this voice, an unfillable void — a clearing vast enough to contain the entire world, and yet from which both the poetry and the search overflow. The great scholars of such themes (I think here of the monumental Martine Broda) assert that this “fundamental search (for the Thing)” is the mark of great poets. And I — an eternal apprentice, like António Sérgio! — have found it in João Ricardo Lopes’ work. And more than that: the book’s profound poetic quality and the incisive way it explores themes and subthemes culminate in a refined structure designed to underscore the author’s original intentions: to the constancy of the stage, to the succession of acts, to the endless reflections delivered from the very edge of the scene, corresponds the obvious — and dishearteningly routine — figure of the play’s continuity.
For all these reasons, as the book approaches its end, it simultaneously draws closer to a beginning — as seen in this excerpt from the penultimate poem:
Returning
returning one returns in many ways
home, at night, sometimes, never again, forever.
but more than home, to ourselves
to the touch of the furniture, to the smell of the soap
to other times, to the time when, back to now.
…
because that is life, because infinite is the grace of
amending the retort, just because, because this is the
theatre of the heart, because round is the gaze
because in the end is the beginning, because, just because (p. 105)
.
In this experience, at once ordinary and novel, of a quotidian that belongs to many and to all, the stagehand sends us the final poem of this poetic journey: Prologue — the last title of the performance. Let reality proceed, then, that myriad of scenes through which we pass… and which inevitably pass through us.
Lisbon, 21 May 2011
Victor Oliveira Mateus.
.
