Julio Cortázar - De su libro de poesía “Pameos y meopas” (1971).

“Fui una letra de tango
para tu indiferente melodía”.

— Julio Cortázar, La mufa (fragm.)
Salvo el crepúsculo, 1984

Y si nos mordemos el dolor es dulce, y si nos ahogamos en un breve y terrible absorber simultáneo del aliento, esa instantánea muerte es bella.

Julio Cortázar, Toco tu boca — Rayuela, capítulo 7

- Uno crede di riuscire a spiegare qualcosa, e ogni volta è sempre peggio.

- La spiegazione è un errore ben vestito, - disse Oliveira.

- Prendi nota.

Julio Cortázar, Il gioco del mondo

cortàzar-aristotele, 1-0

se, intorno ai quindici anni o poco prima o poco dopo, scoprendo i racconti di Cortàzar, e venendone disorientato anzi scosso, mi fossi fermato alla sorpresa e mi fossi fatto – diciamo così – disarcionare dalla singolarità del suo lavoro, se insomma avessi […] 
→ continua qui: https://noblogo.org/differx/se-intorno-ai-quindici-anni-o-poco-prima-o-poco-dopo-scoprendo-i-racconti-di

cortàzar-aristotele, 1-0

«Creo que todos tenemos un poco de esa bella locura que nos mantiene andando cuando todo alrededor es tan insanamente cuerdo»

Si el pleno equilibrio de una vida, que evidentemente has alcanzado pues tienes todo aquello que realmente querías, no basta para darte felicidad, es claro que en el fondo del acuario hay bichos de barro que cantan con silbidos de asma y con todas las cosas desagradables que te acosan.

—Julio Cortázar.

Carta a Eduardo Jonquières y María Rocchi, 24/02/1952

Volviendo a leer Rayuela. Hace mas de 10 años que probablemente leí este libro. Lo leeré siguiendo las indicaciones del primer libro.

Camminavamo senza cercarci, eppure sapendo che camminavamo per incontrarci.

— Julio Cortázar, Rayuela

Empapado de abejas

en el viento asediado de vacío

vivo como una rama,

y en medio de enemigos sonrientes

mis manos tejen la leyenda,

crean el mundo espléndido,

esa vela tendida.

Julio Cortázar, “Poema 2”.

Préstame un sentimiento.

Que la calidez de tus pétalos sea el anhelo perdido que encarne la suavidad de mis ojos,

y las estrellas proclamen taciturnas el deseo ávido que simboliza tu mirada;

dicho fulgor resplandeciente que hipnotiza en las altas horas de la noche,

para sentir que la vigilia es otro sueño despierto en una realidad de goce versátil.

La eternidad será utopía comparado al momento que en el fondo es todo,

para que en sintonía el placer inventado desde el complemento sea un signo de albedrío.

No es fácil ser cronopio. Lo sé por razones profundas, por haber tratado de serlo a lo largo de mi vida; conozco los fracasos, las renuncias y las traiciones. Ser fama o esperanza es simple, basta con dejarse ir y la vida hace el resto. Ser cronopio es contrapelo, contraluz, contranovela, contradanza, contratodo, contrabajo, contrafagote, contra y recontra cada día contra cada cosa que los demás aceptan y tienen fuerza de ley.

Julio Cortázar, Cronopio Mayor.

Julio Cortázar se levantó un día muy tranquilo y escribió: ‘se puede matar todo menos la nostalgia, la llevamos en el color de los ojos, en cada amor, en todo lo que profundamente atormenta y desata y engaña’.

“No importa el tiempo que pase, el futuro no se cansa de esperar.”
— Julio Cortázar - “El futuro”

“Y después despertamos y es domingo y febrero.”
— Julio Cortázar - “Ceremonia recurrente”

currently reading Rayuela and it has been wonderful

my partner who has read it a few times told me its basically a jazz song in a narrative format and i couldnt think of a better way to describe it

A Certain Lucas by Julio Cortázar, translated by Gregory Rabassa

Family Ties

THEY HATE Aunt Angustias so much that they even take advantage of vacations to let her know it. No sooner has the family gone off in different tourist directions than there’s a flood of postcards in Agfacolor, Kodachrome, even in black and white if the others aren’t available, but all, without exception, loaded with insults. From Rosario, from San Andrés de Giles, from Chivilcoy, from the far reaches of Chacabuco and Moreno, the postmen five or six times a day cursing, Aunt Angustias happy. She never leaves her house, she likes to stay in the courtyard, she spends her day getting postcards and is enchanted.

Some sample postcards: “Greetings, loathsome, drop dead— Gustavo.” “I spit in your knitting, Josefina.” “I hope the cat piss dries up your geraniums, your little sister.” And so on.

Aunt Angustias gets up early to take care of the postmen and tip them. She reads the cards, admires the photographs, and reads the greetings again. At night she takes out her souvenir album and goes about placing the day’s harvest very carefully in it so that not only the scenes are visible but also the greetings. “Poor angels, all the postcards they send me!” Aunt Angustias thinks. “This one with the little cow, this one with the church, here Lake Traful, here the bouquet of flowers,” looking at them one by one with tender emotion and sticking pins into each card so they won’t ever fall out of the album, although, this too, always sticking them through the signature, who can say why. (p. 42)

***

How Come One Goes By?

IMPORTANT DISCOVERIES are made under the most unusual circumstances and in the most unusual places. Newton’s apple—how’s that for something to be flabbergasted at? It happened that way with me when in the middle of a business meeting, without knowing why, I thought about cats—who had nothing to do with the order of business—and I suddenly discovered that cats are telephones. Just like that, as always in matters of genius.

A discovery like that, of course, arouses certain surprise, since no one is accustomed to having telephones coming and going and above all having them drink milk and like fish. It takes time to understand that it’s a matter of special telephones, like walkie-talkies, which don’t have any wires, and also that we’re special too in the sense that up until now we haven’t understood that cats are telephones and therefore it hasn’t occurred to us to use them.

Given the fact that this negligence goes back to remotest antiquity, little can be expected of the communication system we might succeed in establishing after my discovery, because it’s rather evident that there’s no code that would permit us to understand the messages, their origin, and the nature of the people sending them to us. It’s not a question, as has probably been noticed, of picking up a nonexistent tube to dial a number that has nothing to do with our figures, and much less understand what they might be trying to tell us from the other end with some equally confusing motive. That the telephone works is proven by every cat with an honesty that is poorly rewarded by biped subscribers; no one can deny that his black or white, brindle or Angora telephone always enters with a decisive air, stops at the feet of the subscriber, and produces a message that our primitive and pathetic literature transliterates stupidly in the form of meow and other similar phonemes. Silk verbs, felt adjectives, sentences simple and compound but always as smooth as soap and glycerine form a discourse that is sometimes related to hunger, in which case the telephone is nothing but a cat, but at other times it is expressed with an absolute lack of personal need, which proves that a cat is a telephone.

Clumsy and pretentious, we have let millennia go by without answering the calls, without wondering where they were coming from, who was on the other end of that line which a twitching tail grew tired of showing us in houses all over the world. What good does my discovery do me or any of us? Every cat is a telephone, but every man is just a poor man. Who can say what they keep on telling us, the paths they’re showing us; for my part I’ve only been capable of dialing on my ordinary telephone the number of the university where I work and announcing my discovery almost with shame. It seems useless to mention the silence of congealed tapioca with which it was received by the scholars who answer that kind of call. (p. 43-44)

***

Lucas, His Traumatotherapies

LUCAS WAS once operated on for appendicitis, and since the surgeon was a slob the wound became infected and it all went very poorly because in addition to the suppuration in radiant Technicolor, Lucas felt more flattened out than a dried fig. At that moment Dora and Celestino come in and tell him we’re off to London right away, come spend a week with us, I can’t, moans Lucas, it happens that, bah, I can change your bandages, says Dora, we’ll buy some hydrogen peroxide and Band-Aids on the way, so in the end they take the train and the ferry and Lucas feels he’s going to die because even though the wound doesn’t hurt at all since it’s barely an inch across, just the same he imagines what’s going on beneath his pants and undershorts, when they finally get to the hotel and he takes a look at himself, it turns out that there’s neither more nor less suppuration than in the hospital, and then Celestino says you see, and on the other hand here you’ll have Turner’s paintings, Laurence Olivier, and the steak and kidney pies that are the joy of my life.

The next day after having walked miles, Lucas is completely healed. Dora still puts on two or three Band-Aids for the pure pleasure of pulling out his hairs, and from that day on Lucas feels that he’s discovered the traumatotherapy that, as can be seen, consists in doing exactly the opposite of what has been prescribed by Aesculapius, Hippocrates, and Dr. Fleming.

On numerous occasions Lucas, who has a good heart, has put his method into practice with surprising results among family and friends. For example, when his Aunt Angustias contracted a life-size cold and spent days and nights sneezing out of a nose that was looking more and more like that of a platypus, Lucas disguised himself as Frankenstein’s monster and waited for her with a cadaverous smile behind a door. After giving out with a hair-raising shriek, Aunt Angustias fell into a faint on the cushions that Lucas had prepared in advance, and when the relatives roused her out of her swoon, the aunt was too busy telling what had happened to remember to sneeze, apart from the fact that for several hours she and the rest of the family could only think about chasing Lucas armed with sticks and bicycle chains. When Dr. Feta brought about a truce and they all gathered together to comment on the events and have a beer, Lucas made the casual observation that the aunt was completely cured of her cold, to which and with the habitual lack of logic in such cases the aunt answered him that that was no reason for her nephew to carry on like a son of a bitch.

Things like that dismay Lucas, but from time to time he applies his infallible system to himself or tries it out on others, and so when Don Crespo announces that his liver is bothering him, a diagnosis always accompanied by a hand holding up his guts and eyes like Bernini’s Saint Teresa, Lucas fixes it so that his mother calls for cabbage stew with sausages and fatback, which Don Crespo loves almost more than a game of blackjack, and by the third helping it can be seen already that the invalid is interested in life and its merry games again, after which Lucas invites him to celebrate with some Catamarca grappa to settle the fat. When the family gets wind of these things there’s an attempt at lynching, but deep down they begin to respect the traumatotherapy, which they call totherapy or traumatopy, it’s all the same to them. (pp. 109-10)

***

Lucas, His Pianists

LONG IS the list, as the keyboard is long, black and white, ivory and mahogany; a life of tones and semitones, of heavy and soft pedals. Like the kitten on the keys, the vulgar delight of the thirties, his memory is based on a bit of chance and the music jumps from here to there, remote yesterdays and todays from this morning (so certain because Lucas writes while a pianist plays for him from a record that creaks and gurgles as if it were hard for him to cover forty years, to throw out into the still unborn air the day when he recorded “Blues in Thirds”).

Long is the list, Jelly Roll Morton and Wilhelm Backhaus, Monique Haas and Arthur Rubinstein, Bud Powell and Dinu Lipatti. The monstrous hands of Alexander Brailowsky, the tiny ones of Clara Haskil, that way of listening to herself that Margarita Fernández had, the splendid implosion of Friedrich Gulda into the Buenos Aires habits of the forties, Walter Gieseking, Georges Arvanitas, the unknown pianist in a bar in Kampala, Don Sebastián Piana and his milongas, Maurizio Pollini and Marian McPartland, amidst unpardonable forgetfulness and reasons to cut off a roster that would end in weariness, Schnabel, Ingrid Haebler, Solomon nights, Ronnie Scott’s bar in London where someone who was going back to the piano was on the point of pouring a glass of beer onto Lucas’s woman’s hair and that someone was Thelonious, Thelonious Sphere, Thelonious Sphere Monk.

At the hour of his death, if there is time and lucidity, Lucas will ask to hear two things: Mozart’s last quintet and a certain piano solo on the theme of “I Ain’t Got Nobody. If he feels that there won’t be enough time, he’ll only ask for the piano record. Long is the list, but he’s already chosen. Out of the depths of time, Earl Hines will accompany him. (p. 118-19)