The ancients observed that reversals were, in many ways, as important
As the victories their communities would accrue in the course of affairs
It would become their practice to find a way to commemorate the former
Even as even the most minor triumphs were what tended to be celebrated

They recognized, however, that it is hard to resist the temptation of the salutary
When the alternative prospect is of encumbering the mind with the unpleasant
After a long consultation with the gods, they devised a solution
The mist of memory became a safe haven

The contours of this terrain was replete with caveats
Overstuffed caves and secret chambers of detailed recall
Next to retreats to escape hatches of situational amnesia
Memory islands were the conflicted legacy of mankind

Too acute a remembrance and one is inhibited
For, if vivid and at the forefront of the mind, a memory can surely blind
Too raw a reminder of past hurt, and decision making would be tentative
They found that sometimes memories were debilitating and that forgetting was best

A fine balance was needed, however, to navigate this fraught life
For, on other occasions, the reverse would be summoned
In many perilous moments, prompt recall can be of the essence
And, even without urgency, precise action can be preferable to a blank slate

The moderns - we should not begrudge them, would now speak of hormones
And sundry glands and secretions that encode our instinctive responses
Yet the ancients would maintain that these textures of ancestral memory
Are merely the rivers that course through nature's memory islands

Memory Islands, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Do You Remember by Jill Scott
• Forget Me Nots by Patrice Rushen
• It's Easy to Remember by Billie Holiday
• Don't You (Forget about Me) by Simple Minds
• I Remember When by Stan Getz
• Did I Remember by Billie Holiday
• Remember When by Ronny Jordan

See previously: Decision to Forget. Cultural memory is my enduring theme.

File under: decisions, memory, culture, observation, strategy, perception, Buyer's Remorse, Observers are worried, poetry, toli

Writing log. June 9, 2022

How to carry on when a loved one is taken one day and disappears forever?

Originally published on Global Voices

If you've seen anything about ”I'm Still Here” (“Ainda Estou Aqui”), the Brazilian film about a forced disappearance during the military dictatorship (1964–1985), you would have come across the photo above.

A screenshot from the film and the image of its official poster shows Rubens Paiva with two of his five children and his wife, Maria Eunice, on a beach in Rio de Janeiro. While Paiva and the children smile, facing the camera, Eunice looks in a different direction and frowns. Army trucks are passing by the street nearby, and their lives are about to be forever changed.

Paiva is one of the 434 dead and disappeared people in Brazil, according to the National Truth Commission. In January 1971, security forces took Paiva from his home to be interrogated by the police and drove him in his own car. He never came back, and his body was never found.

The film, directed by Walter Salles, is based on a book with the same title written by Rubens Paiva's son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, and recounts his family's everyday life in the 1970s and how they faced the days following his father's absence, setting a special focus on his mother, Eunice. His parents are played by actors Selton Mello and Fernanda Torres.

It tells a story of the present past, in the same year as the 60th anniversary of the coup d'état that started the dictatorship, and while national headlines report about a military plot to attempt a new coup that would impede Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva‘s inauguration after the 2022 elections.

The movie passed 2 million viewers in Brazil alone, more than the national audience for blockbusters such as Wicked, and is Brazil's submission for the Oscars.

A true story

Rubens Paiva's abduction is an emblematic case from one of the harshest eras for human rights violations in Brazil. According to his son, Marcelo, the National Truth Commission (CNV) installed during the government of Dilma Rousseff — herself a former political prisoner and guerrilla fighter — gave him important elements for his book.

About two years prior to Paiva's forced disappearance, the regime issued the act that would toughen the repression in December 1968: the Institutional Act Number Five, AI-5. The suspension of civil rights was expanded, and ”it enabled institutionalization of arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial killing by the regime,” as summarized on Wikipedia.

When the coup d'état overthrew João Goulart's government, Paiva was one of the Congressmen who had their mandates revoked. An engineer and father of five children, he had been elected by the state of São Paulo two years before with Goulart's party. On April 1, 1964, with the coup underway, he spoke at the National Radio, defending the president and calling São Paulo's government ”fascist” for supporting the coup.

Paiva went to exile but returned to Brazil a while later and carried on with his life alongside his family.

On January 20, 1971, at 41 years old, he was taken from his home, in front of his wife and children, to be interrogated — never to return. Eunice and their 15-year-old daughter were also taken right after, but they didn't see him at the army facility where they were held. ”I'm Still Here” focuses on how his wife coped with this moment and his brutal and sudden disappearance, without telling much about his fate, in the same way Eunice couldn't get any answers for decades about what happened to her husband.

Past uncovered 

More details were revealed years later through hearings at the Truth Commissions, which began in 2012. São Paulo's state commission was even named after Paiva.

In 1986, Cecilia de Barros Viveiros de Castro, a woman who was detained at the Galeão Airport after visiting her son in Chile, told the police she recognized Paiva in a car when she was being taken to be interrogated. Letters from people exiled there were found with her and another woman, one of them addressed to Paiva.

Six months after Paiva was taken, in June 1971, the military regime issued a document that was read by a Congressman at the National Congress, claiming they were driving Paiva to a location to identify the house of the person responsible for bringing the letters, but the car was intercepted, a shooting took place, and he fled with a group.

As the National Truth Commission's report stresses, this version of the story and the denial of knowing his whereabouts were repeated by the military over the years despite contradictions.

Official records and testimonies given to the Truth Commissions made it collapse. Coronel Ronald Leão told CNV that Paiva arrived at the 1st Army DOI (Department of Information), and he was then interrogated and tortured. An eyewitness said the commander responsible for the place was made aware Paiva wouldn't survive the torture sessions.

Former Colonel Paulo Malhães, also in a deposition to the CNV, said those who died at the hands of the repression were usually not buried to avoid leaving any trace. He went on to describe their methods to hide the corpses: they would erase the features of victims, remove teeth and fingerprints, and cut their stomachs to avoid gas so the bodies wouldn't float on the water after being thrown at rivers or the sea.

About Paiva, Malhães said he did receive the mission to hide the body but couldn't conclude it because of other tasks. After Malhães’ assassination in 2014, his widow came clean, saying he told her Paiva was thrown into a river.

The same year, 43 years after Paiva's abduction, five military officers were accused by the Federal Public Prosecution of killing and concealing his corpse. The case stalled at the Supreme Court, with three of the accused men dying since then without ever being judged.

Past present

At the same time that Rubens Paiva's story fills movie theaters with Brazilians learning more about the state terrorism that shattered lives and families, news about another coup attempt, also involving military officers, made the past even more present.

On November 21, the Federal Police indicted former president Jair Bolsonaro and 36 other people for attempting a coup that would have ruptured the rule of law to keep him in power after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's election win in 2022. Among the accused, 25 are military or former military, including Bolsonaro himself.

According to the investigation's 884-page report that was released to the public, the former president led the criminal organization that plotted the coup d'état. The document says, as reported by AP:

The evidence collected throughout the investigation shows unequivocally that then-President Jair Messias Bolsonaro planned, acted and was directly and effectively aware of the actions of the criminal organization aiming to launch a coup d’etat and eliminate the democratic rule of law, which did not take place due to reasons unrelated to his desire.

The case will continue its legal process with the federal prosecution.

In 2014, a statue honoring Paiva's memory was placed at the National Congress. Bolsonaro, a congressman at the time who grew up in the same region where the Paiva family had a farm, showed up at the ceremony and spat on it in front of Paiva's family members.

In an interview while promoting the film, director Walter Salles said:

You know, when we started this, we thought that we were making a film to somehow reflect a bit of our past that hadn't been captured by the camera. And then we realized that it is also about our present, and may be also about our future.

#ImStillHere is about more than just the past. Walter Salles reflects on what it can mean to audiences today. pic.twitter.com/z2gQdCFmRa

— Sony Pictures Classics (@sonyclassics) November 30, 2024

Written by Fernanda Canofre

Trying to get back to a normal schedule after a couple of weeks on the road at two extremely fun conferences (as always, I apologise to readers when I do this, while reminding them that it’s basically an investment in the future as it very much reduces the chances of me running out of ideas!). While dropping off to sleep on the plane back home, a phrase popped into my mind which has proved extremely difficult to shift, and so I’m passing it on ...

“The only people who try to pay attention to every single bit of information that they have all the time, are babies”.

As a mid-morning DJ might say, please don’t write in. I adapted it from William James and don’t know if it is still regarded as true as a statement about child development. But I will defend the underlying point even if it isn’t. Although lots of people go on about the information that gets left out of measuring systems (including me! A lot of the time! Even in posts I regard as centrally important!), it’s important to remember that deciding what you’re going to ignore is a very important part of thinking like a grown up.

Of course, a mathematician might say that “deciding what you’re going to ignore” is the same thing as “deciding what to pay attention to”, which is one of those true-but-annoying things that mathematicians say. It is uncomfortable to admit that there are things in the world which are important, but which you’re not going to pay any attention to. It reminds us of our own limited capability, which in turn reminds us of our mortality, which in turn reminds us that one of the things we can choose to ignore is the person who’s making us uncomfortable by saying all these annoying things. Something like this, I think, is at the heart of what annoys and confuses people about the POSIWID Principle. A system chooses what it’s going to be when it chooses what information is going to have a causal role in its decision making; this is bad enough, but it’s intolerable to be reminded by some passing smartass that the information which doesn’t have any such causal role is also part of the creation of systemic identity.

And it has to be so. One way in which I might have (but didn’t) express the whole problem that I wrote a book about is that the connective tissue of society is the shared understanding that all the stuff we are ignoring is going to be taken care of by somebody else. When that starts to go, everything goes.

Venus would appear in its first guise as a morning star
Paving the way for the sun to rise a few hours later
And casting a faint shadow in its greatest illuminated extent
A waxing crescent state in the predawn hours
The liminal twilight before sunrise

In modern times, adjustments were needed amidst the man-made glare
To favor eyes unaccustomed to discerning such distant objects
How best to perceive its shape during the fleeting apparition
The advice was to first stare at the receding horizon
To habituate the senses to behold the roving vision
For the eye to truly gather a full glimpse
We had to learn anew how to see the wonders of this world

Still, the ancients would take its journey as an omen
In their urge to understand the paths of nature's higher bodies
A reminder, in its elliptical motion, of the proper order of things
Mankind's gaze recorded that Venus would precede the sun

Thus it was their practice to wake at the crack of dawn
To savor the quality of the light of the early morning sun
And they would make sure that those bearing the very young
Would be shielded in the shadows from the later burning sun

And the word was passed down, the stories were retold across the ages
Grandmothers would explain as they called you in, mine would speak in this way:

Spirits are often contemplated in the dark, messengers of the night
And Venus, in its full grandeur, visits humanity before sunrise

Venus, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Morning Star by Stan Getz
• Venus Rising by Wallace Roney
• Morning Star by Jack DeJohnette's Directions
• Cumbia de Venus by La Sonora Norte
• Morning Star by Sarah Vaughan
• Venus by Lutan Fyah
• Morning Star by Johnny Clarke
• Venus Rising by Barry Osbourn
• Morning Star by The Scientist
• Venus Sunrise by Pranatronic
• Morning Star (Live) by Stan Getz
• Elliptical by Wallace Roney

Bonus beats: Happier than the morning sun by Stevie Wonder

File under: life, myth, culture, observation, perception, astronomy, appreciation, tradition, nature, poetry, toli

Writing log. June 9, 2022

I'll confess that my intentions in your regard are not what you'd call honorable
That the ache that I feel points to a rather earthy origin
Pores, skin, flesh and ultimately sweat are what I envision
In the moment, you can bring the laughter, I'll make sure to bring the heat
We can go Dutch, rub-a-dub style, you do know what that means

The highlights, we'll never forget,
And even a mundane touch will be remarkable
Stay with me, whatever fits the bill,
I'll lay all my cards on the table
These words may be intense but are a mere testament to my ambitions
It's about the great longing, rub-a-dub style, you know what I mean

Nights exchanging whispers and then screams of passion
Surprising ourselves and watching each other's reactions
But, first things first, can I hold your hand?
Let me not get ahead of myself, may I have this dance?
Let's make memories rub-a-dub style, know what I mean?

Rub-A-Dub Style, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note, I favor a direct approach in accordance with the style. 25 odd spins on the rub-a-dub notion starting of course with Johnny Osbourne's One More Rub-A-Dub and the great Dennis Brown's Rub-A-Dub all the time. (spotify version)

File under: love, humour, language, seduction, attention, hubris, flirtation, toasting, culture, observation, perception, male gaze, toli, poetry

Writing log. June 7, 2022

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Hovertext:
Anyone who thinks AI endangers poets should first prove that there exists a poetry journal with more readers than contributors.

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