Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão
Three Poems from Três Rostos (1989)
I think, sometimes, my capacity of understanding is as mantle of light deposited upon the world, and its endless, patina-like nature allows me to see things as hallucinations. It’s an othered feeling, a removal of the envy one often feels for the levity (and brevity) of everything else. The undiluted sentiments one had as a child attain absurd proportions in one’s own mind throughout life, culminating in their revival, and the rabbit burrows by my grandfather’s home, cradles of both personal mythologies and the motion of the world itself, are not only aesthetic experiences, but links, through something, into something. Perhaps everything. Fiama was a privileged, upper-class child, seeing a world of rurality which she spectated and a natural world whose ebbs of violence and augustness were displays and spectacles, things to be admired as poems or melodies chaos had strung together with meticulous carelessness. There is beauty in her visions in part because she acknowledged her distance and her reverence. I recognise now more than ever how these reconnective experiences are symptoms of a growing frustration; a sort of separation anxiety to whatever was lost and is continuously lost, an absence felt only in outlines, in gusts, in dreams, in colours, in chaos.
(CALIATH) 