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| omnipoetics:daily_space_-_psychology_of_composition [2025/03/26 19:14] – [Themes in Daily Space] jobson | omnipoetics:daily_space_-_psychology_of_composition [2025/04/24 00:07] (current) – [Exploring Daily Space Through Adam Phillips "Dead or Alive"] adriana |
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| === Daily Space/Psychology of Composition === | === Daily Space/Psychology of Composition (p.p. 451-2) by João Cabral de Melo Neto === |
| ==== João Cabral de Melo Neto ==== | |
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| {{:omnipoetics:joao_cabral_de_melo_neto_oscar_cabral.jpg?nolink&200 |}} | {{:omnipoetics:joao_cabral_de_melo_neto_oscar_cabral.jpg?nolink&200 |}} |
| [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%A3o_Cabral_de_Melo_Neto|João Cabral de Melo Neto]] was a Brazilian poet, writer, and diplomat. Known as the “engineer of words," he was part of the third generation of Brazilian [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism|modernism]]: the Generation of 45. Although his affection for the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parnassianism|Parnassianism]], Melo Neto was one of the predecessors of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism|Surrealism]] in Brazil, concerned about the life and suffering of Brazilian people, especially those from the northeastern region, where he grew up, such as the difficult lives of farm workers trying to survive in dry lands, while they hope to have a land of their own before death comes. JCMN is considered the most important poet of the post-war generation, and his “The Death and Life of a Severino” ([[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morte_e_Vida_Severina|Morte e Vida Severina]]) poem is agreed to be one of the greatest literary works from Brazil, in which the author portrayed the saga of a northeastern migrant who left the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sert%C3%A3o|Sertão]] (dry lands) towards the southern cities in Brazil in pursuit of a better life. | [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%A3o_Cabral_de_Melo_Neto|João Cabral de Melo Neto]] was a Brazilian poet, writer, and diplomat. Known as the “engineer of poetry," he was part of the third generation of Brazilian [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism|modernism]]: the Generation of 45. Although his affection for the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parnassianism|Parnassianism]], Melo Neto was one of the predecessors of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism|Surrealism]] in Brazil, concerned about the life and suffering of Brazilian people, especially those from the northeastern region, where he grew up, such as the difficult lives of farm workers trying to survive in dry lands, while they hope to have a land of their own before death comes. JCMN is considered the most important poet of the post-war generation, and his “The Death and Life of a Severino” ([[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morte_e_Vida_Severina|Morte e Vida Severina]]) poem is agreed to be one of the greatest literary works from Brazil, in which the author portrayed the saga of a northeastern migrant who left the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sert%C3%A3o|Sertão]] (dry lands) towards the southern cities in Brazil in pursuit of a better life. |
| ==== Themes in Daily Space ==== | ===== Themes in Daily Space ===== |
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| Daily Space (//Espaço Jornal// in Portuguese) addresses the monotony of man being consumed by work, without enjoying his life. Melo Neto evokes images in his word choices in this poem. The orange represents the sun, which goes down through the day while the shadow eats the orange fruit, until sunset, spreading its color in the reflections of the river and the sea. In the second stanza, the poet portrays a life of simple ambitions, having a partner and food, but fulfilled only in the world of dreams. In the last stanza, the author dialogues with dying in vain, a recurrent theme in his poems. | Daily Space (//Espaço Jornal// in Portuguese) addresses the monotony of man being consumed by work, without enjoying his life. Melo Neto evokes images in his word choices in this poem. The orange represents the sun, which goes down through the day while the shadow eats the orange fruit, until sunset, spreading its color in the reflections of the river and the sea. In the third stanza, the poet portrays a life of simple ambitions, having a partner and food, but fulfilled only in the world of dreams. In the last stanza, the author dialogues with dying in vain, a recurrent theme in his poems. |
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| ===== Exploring Daily Space Through Adam Phillips "Dead or Alive" ===== | ====== Psychology of Composition (VII) ====== |
| In the commentary to "Daily Space," Richard Zenith discusses Cabral's transformatory poetry, "Cabral's project is to re-create the world, taking the things—both abstract and concrete-that are common to all men and turning them around, making them uncommon, conferring on them the dimension they lacked" (452). This idea of recreation and defamiliarization is explored in Adam Phillips essay, "Dead or Alive," as a way to address the question of aliveness, | |
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| <blockquote> | |
| Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian formalist literary critic, wrote in his famous essay 'Art as Technique' (1917), 'habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife and the fear of war... [art, through its defamiliarizing practices] exists that one may recover the sensation of life.. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself, and must be prolonged.'... Art, in this sense, unsettles and disrupts preconceptions; it waylays our anticipation, and it does this by increasing the difficulty and length of perceptions; art resists and sabotages our familiar habits of perception (Phillips 2). | |
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| </blockquote> | |
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| Phillips continues by discussing the drive to familiarize and Frued's "destructive drive" as being instincts that lead to the feeling of deathliness, and the idea of language and words being the way that a person can give a nudge to create language anew in aliveness, "but what common sense is, by the same token, reminding us of is that language that is or seems alive can be, or sometimes seems, a comparative rarity; aliveness in language may be in short supply, and so we may wonder what it is in ourselves that might want to deaden language; or to put it the other way around, what is the fear of aliveness in language a fear of?... There is a defense against aliveness in language. And the study of literature, we might say, is always broaching this conflict between the aliveness and deathliness, or deadliness, of language" (5-6). | |
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| This conflict between aliveness and deadness in language is something that is at the forefront of the exploration of poetry and translation. While reading "The Scandalous Life of César Moro," this question of aliveness and deadliness was at the forefront when a fellow classmate said something along the lines of, "I don't think we are supposed to make sense of it, I think by trying to analyze it we are missing the point." This conflict between literary exploration and preservation of aliveness is a conflict that stands at the forefront of literary criticism, as commented on by Berlin in //Roots of Romanticism//, “…it is a process of perpetual forward creation, and all schemas, all generalisations, all patterns imposed upon it are forms of distortion, forms of breaking. When Wordsworth said that to dissect is to murder, this is approximately what he meant;” (Berlin 139). This idea makes us consider how we approach poems without murdering them. | |
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| The solution I want to explore is the idea of nudging language on an individual level. Phillips contemplates the idea of how people can live a life alive and the question of what might make us feel like we haven't lived or aren't currently living, "Indeed, what the nudge of language-the choosing and creating our language-and the sense of having lived have in common is the sense of having to satisfy what is taken to be an essential individual need; partly of making my language and my life my own, whatever that might mean" (8). Within this idea, he utilizes Winnicott and his paper, "The Use of an Object," to explore play and how play relates to the "True Self" as, "The noncompliant self of spontaneity and desire and singularity, the self committed to play rather than to adaption or, indeed, to compliance, involves no more and no less than collecting together the details of the experience of aliveness" (11). | |
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| In order to put this idea of aliveness into practice, I am choosing to not engage in a close reading of João Cabral de Melo Neto's "Daily Space," and "Psychology of Composition (VII)," and instead, I am going to share what I wrote directly after reading his poems. As Phillips ends his essay, "What, if anything, is it possible to do to ensure that you are actually living? In the absence of any hard and fast information and advice-and in the absence of any kind of consensus (or shared criteria) about what it is to live and to have lived-all we can do, if we are interested, is ask these questions and see what, if anything, we want to do," I end this post passing this question off to you. This is what I choose to do to feel alive - to share my thoughts and response to the the poems, by nudging language in a way that preserves my sense of aliveness within. | |
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| <blockquote> | |
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| <poem> | |
| the march snow storm | |
| stops and the | |
| mourning dove returns | |
| its spot perched | |
| upon the deck | |
| railing overlooking a | |
| man-made yard | |
| every once in a while | |
| their feathers ruffle in | |
| the wind or perhaps | |
| jostle in response | |
| facing outward the | |
| nearly circular | |
| neck continues around | |
| in an impossible | |
| looking way and antoher | |
| feather flick makes | |
| the nearly 360 degree | |
| neck look more | |
| fitting | |
| flying off in an | |
| instant - a | |
| moment of expansion | |
| leaves the dove | |
| looking like an eagle | |
| its broad wings | |
| expand larger | |
| and longer | |
| than you think | |
| a mourning could | |
| spread - | |
| the snow starts | |
| to drip | |
| cold enough to cover | |
| but not to last | |
| just like the instant | |
| of the bird flying away | |
| a longer but still | |
| the same | |
| flight of life | |
| from one state | |
| to another | |
| like when you | |
| watch the moon | |
| you don't see it | |
| moving but as | |
| soon as you | |
| look away its | |
| transformation across | |
| the sky - | |
| a cloud that covers | |
| the sun | |
| for what feels infinite | |
| because you don't | |
| tend to notice | |
| the sun until it | |
| isn't there to | |
| greet you - | |
| .... | |
| (excerpt from a much longer poem I wrote in response to "Daily Space" and "Psychology of Composition") | |
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| </poem> | |
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| </blockquote> | |
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| ====== Psychology of Composition ====== | |
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| ====== Connections between poems and the author ====== | |
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| | For João Cabral de Melo Neto, every word has weight, is a stone, must be valid, and must be spoken in order to have meaning. Therefore, four stanzas beginning with the statement “It is mineral” point to the image that, once in written form, everything becomes concrete. Paper is concrete, “flowers, plants, fruits, animals”, that is, living forms that will die, but that are preserved and last for the afterlife when put into a “state of word”. And even abstractions, such as “horizon, name” also gain weight when converted into words. |
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| ====== References ====== | ====== References ====== |
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| Berlin, Isaiah. The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton Univ. Press, 2001. | Berlin, Isaiah. The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton Univ. Press, 2001. |
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| | Miranda, A. (n.d.). João Cabral de Melo Neto. Antônio Miranda. Retrieved March 26, 2025, from http://www.antoniomiranda.com.br/poesia_ingles/joao_cabral_de_melo_neto.html |
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| Phillips, Adam. “Dead or Alive.” Raritan, vol. 42, no. 4, 2023, pp. 1–14. | Phillips, Adam. “Dead or Alive.” Raritan, vol. 42, no. 4, 2023, pp. 1–14. |
