'This poem stages its dialogue through the cento as an homage to Dogme 95's ethos of economy art-making. In poetry, the cento offers itself as a low-cost production that allows appropriation of source texts while bypassing the nasty business of intellectual property rights. Equally inexpensive to produce, this short-short film can be shot by any diner with a Nokia phone camera at Shangri-la Hotel's The Line, a restaurant renowned for possibly having the most lavish buffet spread in Singapore - it can easily afford all the food items needed for this production. No additional lighting, props, music or special effects required. For an additional stab at a Rortyian sense of irony, the screen dialogue re-authors Dogme 95's general guidelines, encapsulated in its Vow of Chastity.'HA-D
(Around midnight, the antipasto gets mixed up with the hors d'oeuvres….)
ADELIA PRADO:
This is what I ate: plain rice, beans, and raw onion…
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[in Alberto Caeiro's voice] You who are a mystic see a meaning in all things. For you everything has a veiled significance.
ADELIA PRADO:
…but the plate had a painted border.
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[Caeiro's voice] There is something hidden in each thing you see. What you see you always see to see something else.
ADELIA PRADO:
The spoon was tarnishing, but there were forget-me-nots engraved on the handle. The body experiences joy, the tongue eats it….
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[Caeiro's voice] Yes, sometimes I weep for the perfect body that doesn't exist.
(All under covers, nibbling on crackers in goat cheese and spinach dip)
ADELIA PRADO:
It's God we need, and fast.
SANTIAGO ZABALA:
Nietzsche said, "I fear that we shall be unable to get rid of God, since we still believe in grammar." Are we supposed to interpret this negatively or positively?
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[In Ricardo Reis' voice] Your dead gods tell me nothing I need to know.
ADELIA PRADO:
I always dream something's taking shape, nothing is ever dead. What seems to have died fertilizes. What seems motionless awaits.
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[As Himself] At times I'm the god I carry in myself, and then I'm the god, the believer and the prayer and the ivory image in which this god is forgotten. At times I'm no more than an atheist of this god I am when exalted. I see in myself an entire sky, and it's only a vast and hollow sky.
(Over Angels on Horseback, served straight from the sheet pan)
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[In Álvaro de Campos' voice] How about that, I found a solution, via my stomach! I discovered a truth, I perceived it with my intestines!
SANTIAGO ZABALA:
What I would like to know is: how does weak thought work with the end of metaphysics from a religious point of view? There is a connection that you both pointed out in your essays….
ADELIA PRADO:
Right now what's important is to untangle the hair.
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[Reis' voice] As long as I feel the full breeze in my hair and see the sun shining bright on the leaves, I will not ask for more.
ADELIA PRADO:
Or maybe more, I'm very sad today: what I say, I unsay. But God's Word is the truth. That's why this song has the name it has.
(Bruschetta, bruschetta, and tearing roti canai with hands, dipped in chilli crab curry)
ADELIA PRADO:
Can a woman have twenty orgasms?
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[Reis' voice] I don't know if the love you give is love you have or love you feign.
ADELIA PRADO:
I don't worry about such silly details.
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[Reis' voice] Love is not in the object but in the act.
ADELIA PRADO:
I want love, superior love.
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[Reis' voice] I only love something when I start loving it.
(Wontons unfurled for watercress chunks, using toothpicks from Angels on Horseback)
ADELIA PRADO:
And I am in heat, unceasingly…. I fall in love once a day, I write horrible letters, full of spasms, as if I had a piano and bags under my eyes….
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[As Himself] The maestro waves his baton, and the sad, languid music begins….
ADELIA PRADO:
I need to confess to a man of God: I committed gluttony, I craved the details of other people's frailties, and - even though I have a husband - I explored my own body….
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[As Himself] Day or night, always the same (even when different) disillusioned gaze, cast from the tower of the ruined church across the futile plain!
ADELIA PRADO:
…everything she learned on the street the converted tart does for mystical ecstasy….
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[de Campos' voice] I kiss every whore on the lips, I kiss every pimp on the eyes….
ADELIA PRADO:
[mimicking de Campos' voice] What's between the thighs is public. Public and obvious.
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[de Campos' voice] …I multiplied myself to feel myself, to feel myself…
ADELIA PRADO:
What a fate!
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[de Campos' voice] …I had to feel everything, I overflowed, I did nothing but spill out, I undressed, I yielded, and in each corner of my soul there's an altar to a different god.
(Zabala offers Prado the last deviled egg à la dijonnaise)
SANTIAGO ZABALA:
So the future of religion will depend on a position which is "beyond atheism and theism"?
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[de Campos' voice] No! All I want is freedom!
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[As Himself] They say I lie or feign in all I write. Not true. It's simply that I feel via the imagination. The heart I never use. All I dream or live, whatever fails or dies, is no more than a covering over some other thing where true beauty lies. That's why I base my writings on things that are remote, freed from my reality, serious about what isn't. Feel? That's up to the reader!
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[Reis' voice] Symbols? I'm sick of symbols… Some people tell me that everything is symbols. They're telling me nothing.
(Prado tastes the tarragon in the yolk, frowns, and spoons it out for Pessoa)
ADELIA PRADO:
Poetry will save me. I won't tell this to the four winds, because I'm frightened of experts, excommunication, afraid of shocking the fainthearted. But not of God. What is poetry, if not His face touched by the brutality of things?
(Prado licks clean the nonya sambal from the terracotta sauce dish)
ADELIA PRADO:
Poetry catches me with her toothed wheel and forces me to listen, stock-still, to her extravagant discourse.
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[de Campos' voice] Sometimes I meditate. Sometimes I meditate deeply, more deeply, still more deeply, and the whole mystery of things seems like an oil on the surface, and the whole universe is a sea of faces with eyes bugging out at me. Each thing - a corner lamppost, a stone, a tree - is an eye that stares at me from an inscrutable abyss, and all the gods and ideas of the gods march through my heart….
(Prado reaches for more masala tea…)
FERNANDO PESSOA:
[Reis' voice] …I devote my higher mind to the ardent pursuit of the summit, leaving verse to chance and its laws, for when the thought is lofty and noble, the sentence will naturally seek it, and rhythm slavishly serve it.
(…but the pewter pitcher is empty)
ADELIA PRADO:
Once in a while God takes poetry away from me.
(tonight is but one more night;
Narcissus blows into his coupette glass…
red tracings effacing,
then the retreat inland;
echo whispers,
a bluing around the salt)
NB: This cento appropriates the dialogue between Santiago Zabala, Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo printed verbatim in The Future of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2005), displacing the latter two philosophers and intercalating modern mystic poets, in particular the Brazilian Adelia Prado and Portuguese Fernando Pessoa. The cento culls lines from Prado's "Dysrhythmia", "Lesson", "Guide", "Seduction", "Love Song", "Concerted Effort", "Not Even One Line in December", "Passion", "Absence of Poetry", "Pieces for a Stained-Glass Window", and "Professional Mourner". Of Pessoa's work, the following poems were used: "You who are a mystic see a meaning in all things", "Ah! They want a light that's better than the sun's", "I was never one who in love or in friendship", "Your dead gods tell me nothing I need", "I devote my higher mind to the ardent", "As long as I feel the full breeze in my hair", "I don't know if the love you give is love you have", "Time's passage", "Sometimes I meditate", "No! All I want is freedom", "Symbols? I'm sick of symbols", "God", "Slanting Rain", "In the light-footed march of heavy time", and "This". Pessoa is known for writing in the voices of his heteronyms, the fictional characters of Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos and Pessoa Himself.
FIN
