Rui Cóias in conversation with Reshma Ramesh
RR: Tell us about your childhood in Lisbon Portugal. During your growing years did you think about being a writer while you studied law and eventually completed a master's in philosophy?
RC: From my childhood, I remember the Lisboa neighborhoods. Neighborhoods, buildings, where I walked through, and which today look like ancient shadows. Shadows of a lost, happy time, a kind of warm wind, but where the night winds have always stirred. Lisboa is today a geography for me; as if I discovered in my memory every street, every avenue, garden, house from some part of my life. Sometimes it's weird. I think that the pandemic gave me a more accurate sense of this melancholic impression of Lisboa, one of the most beautiful places in the world.
The boundaries of my childhood and youth are now blurred. I no longer remember where one ended and starts another. In my youth, I left Lisboa and went to study Law in Coimbra, where I was living for 6 years. At the time, it was an isolated city, sad, humid. Very strange place. Actually, as it is still now. I believe that it was the combination of all this that led me to write. I was already writing at High School, a Catholic School (Jesuits) — and then even more when I was living in Coimbra. Behind all our passions for a kind of life, there are always several places, passages, several beings. Some of these beings are more lonely as if they were traveling in a kind of absense.
During all this time I never thought to write in a serious and consistent way. I finished my studies in Coimbra and returned to Lisboa. It was a difficult transition as if Lisboa were then a desert. I no longer knew her. This today seems difficult to understand.
Then I was admited to a Law firm and did the Law internship. But suddenly I wanted to be a journalist, and for that reason, at the same time I worked as a journalist for a year, but then I saw that I didn't want that. Anyway, as a profession, I was a lawyer, and after that, I workked as a legal advisor to companies, and I also always wanted to write. And studying Philosophy, which I haven't finished yet, it is for now suspended, for personal reasons. Philosophy has always been my greatest passion. And it gives us this feeling, this understanding that there is a past, an heritage, a line; an eternal memory. The present has nothing of eternity, it is just information.
RR: In Cóias' poetry, translator Richard Zenith writes the distinctions between time and space, and between the personal and impersonal, are blurred. It's all one vast territory through which the poet journeys, making useful or poignant connections, but without any presumption that he can make the world's order intelligible. Do you think it is easy to navigate through these personal and impersonal spaces when you write and if so, do you do it consciously?
RC: I don't know, but I have this feeling that I write as in the immense sea of weaknesses, joy, History, memory, and places and that everything formed a kind of web, everything is connected. Everything written is biographical, but not only. It has to be particular but also universal, an image recognizable by all. There are traces of solemnity and ancestry, which are almost conscious.
I can't write about everyday life. In my texts, I always seek, sometimes automatically, without wanting to, an order, a philosophical propensity that goes through the acceptance of everything that happens to us. We must try to sculpt a notion of shape and shadow. Someone once wrote about one of my books that my texts value rhetoric but they are not interested in viscerality, they are pastoral but never provincial, strange but not hermetic, they are referential but not connected to everyday life.
The writer passes, conveying opinions as well as visions. He blesses the faces of time and space, the beloved yesterday and tomorrow. The order of the world is here constantly questioned by the witness of the writer, questioned by his own testimony and the imprecision of his words like a child crossing the stars, remaining in his insatiable hunger.
RR: Europa [Europe], your latest book, published in 2016. Among other texts, it contains a series of poems about the Great War in France, in 1916, for which you received a fellowship from the French Ministry of Culture & Communication. Can you tell us what compelled you to write about the war, history, and France? How did Europa change your life after its huge success?
RC: In what I write there is always a scenario of paths, lakes, travels, a cold, impersonal tone. The past, the present, and the future are the same dimensions. From here everything is mixed, the world trembles on its foundations, time and space become a remembrance, fine calligraphy marked in the human experience in which everything disappears like smoke.
I never forget the great authors, as the verses from Yeats, Eliot, Rilke. “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart, as Yeats wrote, actually about the Easter of 1916 in Ireland. Eliot's “Hollow Man”, Rilke's Elegies, and also his letters, his travels in Switzerland.
“Europa” is an extensive reflection around the concept of Europe, trying to make an image of present or past landscapes in atmospheres and places that are sometimes recognizable, although at times they are the result of the mixture of different times.
In the book, there is a chapter about the Great War, in 1916, during the Battle of the Somme. It is a mixture of an invented world and real events. Suddenly I remembered using the theme of War, one of the great themes of Humanity, to talk about other things. There is always more melancholy than horror. In fact, I am always reflecting on history, memory, landscape, time, love.
This referential is like a time-lapse in our existence and landscape, in which the themes of death, beauty, memory are present and thread together in a common path, a sort of tragedy of forgetfulness.
The premise is: in the midst of horror, in the fields of northern France, there were moments of beauty (Etty Elysium wrote this in her Diary in 1943, about Auschwitz). These moments, as well as the memories, the images, the death, and the life, were described by many writers, poets, philosophers who were in the battlefields of the Great War, both in the western front, as in the eastern front, and in the Balkans.
My next book continues this theme. I won a literary scholarship from DGALB Portugal to write this book. It is practically finished, but with the pandemic, my children at home, etc. it is delayed and it was not possible to publish it yet. I hope to publish it in 2021.
In these strange pandemic times, there is also a very strong relationship with all this.
RR: What literary pilgrimages have you been on and which has been the most memorable? Would you say writing is a spiritual process?
RC: Actually, my work is indicative of this concern with the landscape, not as something to be carefully described, but as something to be explored and experienced.
‘Landscape’ means the places visited or inhabited, the space and its relationship to place, but it also means the historical past, as it plays an integral role in human experience since our understanding of History and memory is related to the places we inhabit.
This principle does not occur in the most predictable direction. Actually, it is connected by a slow, recitative rhythm, by which one assumes the role of the geographer, and traveling, walking, from the valleys to the mountains, from the dunes, from the woods to the lost islands or to the “broken cities”, observes and crystallizes their landscapes and the thoughts that keep ordering along the paths of memory. This is a meditative point of view.
I search and construct forms by which places are suspended into a flux.
In consequence, all the travels I have made, all paths are important. There is always a search, sometimes there are no continuous paths and pilgrimages, but only certain places, a light, a train station, an afternoon, a road, the roads are very important, or just a house where the afternoon gets dark in the woods.
But there are marked places, for example, the Balkans, their melancholy, and music, their tortuous geography. — Ireland, the cliffs, and the western sea. — And India, the warm flavor of the sun, the endless mornings that caress us, the places that are at the same time spiritual places. India is very important to me. The people, the notion of distance, a strange memory. One of the most impressive memories of places I have in life is the night falling over Hyderabad. I would like to write about India. Goa is very connected to my life. And the streets of Kolkata, the impossible night around Varanasi. The night I arrived at Varanasi airport and took a taxi to the hotel.
The question is what can be done, why is time traveling, space traveling, and movement, matter? — it is simple: it matters because we can with it, as an old watchmaker, build and map in detail a game of mirrors, a network of correspondences, it seems that we remain in that phenomenon described by Michel Foucault, in The words and things, which is structured by the figures of similarity. In this case, traveling, as an act of peregrination, as a connection of geographical points, starting and ending points, would be an image of extensive events.
Among our countless ourselves, there is a kind of geographic avatars that are extinguished one after another; traveling could be understood as an erasure, where we go through all the places where we leave the body and everything we abandon.
RR: “The fleeting tremor of the fields “, in Europa (Lisbon, Portugal) - a literary essay on travel, places. Can you tell us about these essays and the places you have written about?
RC: We experience different times during our lives. It also happens that landscapes give rise to this feeling of fullness because we recognize in them a kind of perfection, where the action of chance is mixed with human intervention.
In their own way, they too are imperative; they impose themselves and invite to silence, to another degree of understanding of the world, its balance, and its geological and ecological roots. These landscapes, which we see through travel, contain History; we remain immobile and silent because the natural beauty is so opposite to the common, commercial idea.
There is no end to the world, the world is perfectly connected in itself, but some places are still more likely than others to sounds like a distant wave.
It is like this with places, routes, going from a location to another, trips, such as the places that I wrote about in that essay, because on these, to return, to go back to where we spent a long time before, is to take the measure of time, which is, as we know, our material, for artists, writers, painters, poets.
And travel, the way we should survive in a world that is increasingly dependent on the harmful influence of digital and econometric progress, is just that: a way to see what we have lost again; a way we face our dilemmas, as well the essential questions of life.
I wrote an essay about the Greek director Theo Angelopoulos movies in which I also speak about this — this essay speaks about the movies, the exiles, the immigrants, the lost children seeking for their father, but also about the borders that we cross — here, in the North of Greece, in Donegal in Ireland, or in Finland.
Actually, travel through the borders between Finland and Russia — which reminds us of the pilgrimages and trips, the impressions, of Lou-Andreas Salomé and Rilke, through Russia — in an era of slowness, moving from place to place, traveling on foot, by train, with enough time for contemplation, to see the blue vault of the world close over the valleys, the open horizon — it is exactly one of the ways to see and feel time, the "pure essence of time”, as Marcel Proust once wrote.
RR: Does writing energize or exhaust you?
RC: There was a time that I enjoyed writing more than today. It is actually very tiring for me. Sometimes I don't like it. I can spend a whole day around a sentence, a paragraph.
It is very stressful, you have to have strength. Sometimes we think about giving up. But then when the texts are finished and the letters form a set, we think we have to try again and write. We are responsible for leaving a testimony.
RR: You travel a lot presenting your work, what has been your most memorable fun experience?
RC: I would like to express my deep thanks and admiration for the work of everyone around the world who is involved in creating, promoting, and defending art, literature, and a multicultural world. Their wonderful work in organizing different worldwide repercussion events, and top publications — as Verseville is.
It is a great privilege, great happiness, for me to be a participant in these events and to be involved and work with astonishing organizations teams.
We feel that there no better way than literature to unite people, exchange ideas, break down barriers, and build a better world. All of us, authors, poets, writers, feel it, even more, when we have this wonderful opportunity for creative networks and new connections.
For us, the authors, our goal is really this: to strengthen dreams, to make connections in the world, to bring people into the world of inspiring words from millions of people.
We believe in the past, present, and future. And it is with humility, with emotion, that we can try to contribute to make a difference, to establish interactions in which books and language act as multicultural windows for tomorrow.
I look back and see faces, people I know all over the world, a great chain of friendship and common experiences. Many friends, many people with a lot of value, a lot of dignity. The pursuit of their dreams.
Of course, in these contexts, when we travel, when we participate in literary events, conferences, there are many funny, memorable experiences. Tiny moments that we cannot forget, that are part of our life, that becomes part of us.
I remember — and you know Reshma — that some of these unforgettable moments, the most beautiful, we were living them together, crying and laughing, you and me and other common friends, very recently.
This strange pandemic brought to all of us much anguish. One of my biggest fears is that I don't know if the world, the old world, the world we know, with our fundamental values, our traditions, our naivety and simplicity, and happiness, will return again.
RR: Are you building a body of work where these essays, poetry are connected to each other, or each book standing on its own?
RC: That`s a very interesting and important question. Thank you.
As samples of the passage of time, I wish my work can give us back the mirror of the world, of the past, the present, and the future. Of our memory and fragility. Also of our happiness.
A reflection on our culture, a simultaneous meditation on "the eternal farewell" that is up to every human being to live in the chain of his life. To explain what the limits of the mind are, the idea of the physical and spiritual borders, the space in which our existence ends and everything else begins.
My work tries to capture the shapes that are also yet temporal and transitory, exploring the balance between what is constructed and what is chaotic, in which the themes of death, beauty, memory, and knowledge are present and thread together in a single and common path. It is also a cognitive and abstract space that can be experienced in a highly self-conscious way, as when one is overwhelmed by the beauty of an Orthodox painting or a barrow cathedral.
I think that's what I intend to do. To transmit small pieces, parts of a whole, but at the same time very tenuous. Like a flemish painting, each text will be part of the other. All with a view to the same end, or the same beginning. In fact, I am always writing on the same topics. Books are circular, texts are circular. Everything is interconnected, and I want it to be that way.
For example, I am, as I mentioned above, now writing on a topic that I started writing about in my last book. Everything is a continuation. Even my essays are part of my books, and poems are part of essays. There is no difference between what they are and what they are. It's all the same. Just the same book or text, with several different branches.
RR: When was it first that you learned language had power?
RC: We can believe that words, books, moments, music, can change the world and the lives of all of us, of all peoples. They reconcile us with our lives and human nature, make a difference in the way we want to achieve tomorrow.
Artists pursue this contact with beauty, that is only possible at the most intimate moment of human life — and this return to memory can be the final message of the world's poems, in the pursuit of all actions aimed at the development of the cultural, economic, social and technical cooperation between all the countries.
Reading, and art in general has been coming to give lifelong advantages, in our lives, health, and happiness. Instilling a love of literature and culture is the best head start we can give in today´s world and in order to believe in the future.
Beauty is as important as truth, justice, goodness. It gives us reconciliation with the world, affirms our joys, changes our lives, gives us a reason to understand and accept our laments, our imperfections.
For me, this is the aim of art and all the wonderful human constructions, such as poetry, literature, and music. Past, present, and future are engaged in all languages, and on the same dimension, complex, dense, elliptical.
RR: You have always talked to me about your love for India and how you wish to come back (your eyes even glint when you mention India). What makes you so happy about my country?
RC: Oh… difficult to explain. But, at the same time, so simply.
Because of people like you, Reshma. As well as because of all my friends in India. Because of the involvement, and the degree of interiority that is, paradoxically, totally external, noticeable.
Because of the Marguerite Duras book “Le Vice-Consul”, which was adapted to the cinema with “India Song”. At one point in the book, the main character, Anne-Marie Stretter, crosses a park. She points towards the clouds, there is a livid light, and she says that the Ganges delta is that way; there the sky is a fantastic heap of dark green fodder, an abyss where everyone is drowning. Because of the big hotels with palm trees, when the sun goes down, in the Indian Ocean, red, and there are shady banks, shadows of palm trees, like big alleys.
We are in Kolkata, in Goa, in the fields, as at the end of a long line, and also at the link of cause and effect of the things of the world. There is a disappearance.
India is insomnia - it is a night reflected in the lights of the avenues. There is a noise, but it is a shadow of incongruous itineraries, as Antonio Tabucchi wrote. India is a good place to get lost, to be unknown, to know that everything is happening and we are just a point that is an object, a trip to the center of itself. This oceanic feeling of intimate union with the big-whole where the limits become uncertain. This has everything to do with what I write. A kind of transitional space outside of time.
Once I was in Hyderabad and from the hotel, I saw the night running on the avenue. It made me remember a movie, Marigold Hotel, and the soundtrack. I knew
I was there, and I could go out into the street and into the night, and come back to the hotel. And to feel a kind of reduction of the universe at that moment, an exaggerated exaltation, delirium, or a melancholy prostration.
In Goa, when I arrived in Old Goa, I saw that place as a strange memory of Portugal. It was unbelievable, in the middle of the forest to see those churches from the past. The way to get to Old Goa by bus, with the wind coming in the windows, was happiness.
And one night I sat at a restaurant table in Panjim (I'm an absolutely fan of Indian food) and suddenly sits in front of me, seeming to come from nowhere, a Portuguese writer. It looked like a movie. Then we walked the streets of Panjim together, across the Fontainhas neighborhood.
The idea of India is one of the ideas of great travel. I have to return!
RR: Do you think memories have landscapes?
RC: Of course — absolutely.
How are death and the journey alike? Is death the end or the beginning of a journey? How much do we seek death when we travel?
Our life is marked by the places where we pass. And death is perhaps the line that goes through everything, everything is related. One certain day is marked, in the past, as now, by a curve of a river, and of a train describing that curve, but felt like the most beautiful of places and borders, parallel to the Ganges, the Sena, the Tejo, and found again, later, years later, in a museum, in a painting by Brueghel, in a quiet corner of Vien or Brussels, and then also on the bank of the Alps, in Sierre, next to the Rilke Tower at Muzot, and to the cold of the roses. This is the outline of memory.
RR: Your poetry has a lot of geography in them. How has your travel inspired your poetry? Is there a recurrent theme you keep returning to?
RC: I pursuit through my writing to follow a very personal interpretation of reality. It should foremost serve and accentuate, through poetry and essays, a way of understanding and interpreting the world, combining the personal and subjective with the universal and collective experience.
This is how to make connections with certain points, geographic and mental points, may be of particular importance: — we can map the world, and establish the duration dimension — as it was studied by artists and writers as, for example, Anna Akhmátova and Peter Handke, philosophers as Bergson and visual artists in the field of Land Art as Richard Long — between what is time and what is space, with a focus in environmental and human nature questions, past, present and future. This intensity of meaning is identical with a place, a kind of insideness, the degree of attachment, involvement, and concern that a person or a group has for a particular place. One of the ways that I found to express my work is the thematization of time and space.
From a gaze invested by this memory of the origin which poses the order of things in its magical complexity, we seize the man, the elements according to an uncompromising confrontation, tender and violent at the same time. There are beings who make a sign, men and women who cross their souls, all truth on the alert, all quest in the making. Dreams come to support the encounter of a story which tells of our humanity "its nascent wisdom on the original abyss”. The writers' language penetrates the breath and the flame of this way of hymns pursued even in the most intimate solitude of being. The writer writes in the wild grass of our listening, our attentions, our aspirations to be expected forever by the outline of our own vigilance in this prodigious world.
RR: If you could switch professions again would you become a Geographer rather?
RC: No, I don't think so. I made my way, which I continue to do.
Of course, we always romanticize our lives, sometimes not even distinguishing what is real and imaginary, right and wrong. Today, our civilization leaves less and less space for this period of maturation of thought, and slowness. As Heidegger said. I think I need both. Action and thought, execution, active life, and contemplative life.
Of course, I never forget the famous words of Aristoteles when he said that there are 3 types of life for the free man: the life that aspires to pleasure, the one that leads to beautiful actions in the polis, and the one that dedicates itself to the truth.
All they are happiness, although contemplation in beauty through the art of words, music, is the greatest happiness, called theoria. The eternal and immutable things. Today, in Western societies, there is a great deal of focus on production and consumption.
The role of the geographer is to give us this breath of time, just like that of the philosopher.
RC: From my childhood, I remember the Lisboa neighborhoods. Neighborhoods, buildings, where I walked through, and which today look like ancient shadows. Shadows of a lost, happy time, a kind of warm wind, but where the night winds have always stirred. Lisboa is today a geography for me; as if I discovered in my memory every street, every avenue, garden, house from some part of my life. Sometimes it's weird. I think that the pandemic gave me a more accurate sense of this melancholic impression of Lisboa, one of the most beautiful places in the world.
The boundaries of my childhood and youth are now blurred. I no longer remember where one ended and starts another. In my youth, I left Lisboa and went to study Law in Coimbra, where I was living for 6 years. At the time, it was an isolated city, sad, humid. Very strange place. Actually, as it is still now. I believe that it was the combination of all this that led me to write. I was already writing at High School, a Catholic School (Jesuits) — and then even more when I was living in Coimbra. Behind all our passions for a kind of life, there are always several places, passages, several beings. Some of these beings are more lonely as if they were traveling in a kind of absense.
During all this time I never thought to write in a serious and consistent way. I finished my studies in Coimbra and returned to Lisboa. It was a difficult transition as if Lisboa were then a desert. I no longer knew her. This today seems difficult to understand.
Then I was admited to a Law firm and did the Law internship. But suddenly I wanted to be a journalist, and for that reason, at the same time I worked as a journalist for a year, but then I saw that I didn't want that. Anyway, as a profession, I was a lawyer, and after that, I workked as a legal advisor to companies, and I also always wanted to write. And studying Philosophy, which I haven't finished yet, it is for now suspended, for personal reasons. Philosophy has always been my greatest passion. And it gives us this feeling, this understanding that there is a past, an heritage, a line; an eternal memory. The present has nothing of eternity, it is just information.
RR: In Cóias' poetry, translator Richard Zenith writes the distinctions between time and space, and between the personal and impersonal, are blurred. It's all one vast territory through which the poet journeys, making useful or poignant connections, but without any presumption that he can make the world's order intelligible. Do you think it is easy to navigate through these personal and impersonal spaces when you write and if so, do you do it consciously?
RC: I don't know, but I have this feeling that I write as in the immense sea of weaknesses, joy, History, memory, and places and that everything formed a kind of web, everything is connected. Everything written is biographical, but not only. It has to be particular but also universal, an image recognizable by all. There are traces of solemnity and ancestry, which are almost conscious.
I can't write about everyday life. In my texts, I always seek, sometimes automatically, without wanting to, an order, a philosophical propensity that goes through the acceptance of everything that happens to us. We must try to sculpt a notion of shape and shadow. Someone once wrote about one of my books that my texts value rhetoric but they are not interested in viscerality, they are pastoral but never provincial, strange but not hermetic, they are referential but not connected to everyday life.
The writer passes, conveying opinions as well as visions. He blesses the faces of time and space, the beloved yesterday and tomorrow. The order of the world is here constantly questioned by the witness of the writer, questioned by his own testimony and the imprecision of his words like a child crossing the stars, remaining in his insatiable hunger.
RR: Europa [Europe], your latest book, published in 2016. Among other texts, it contains a series of poems about the Great War in France, in 1916, for which you received a fellowship from the French Ministry of Culture & Communication. Can you tell us what compelled you to write about the war, history, and France? How did Europa change your life after its huge success?
RC: In what I write there is always a scenario of paths, lakes, travels, a cold, impersonal tone. The past, the present, and the future are the same dimensions. From here everything is mixed, the world trembles on its foundations, time and space become a remembrance, fine calligraphy marked in the human experience in which everything disappears like smoke.
I never forget the great authors, as the verses from Yeats, Eliot, Rilke. “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart, as Yeats wrote, actually about the Easter of 1916 in Ireland. Eliot's “Hollow Man”, Rilke's Elegies, and also his letters, his travels in Switzerland.
“Europa” is an extensive reflection around the concept of Europe, trying to make an image of present or past landscapes in atmospheres and places that are sometimes recognizable, although at times they are the result of the mixture of different times.
In the book, there is a chapter about the Great War, in 1916, during the Battle of the Somme. It is a mixture of an invented world and real events. Suddenly I remembered using the theme of War, one of the great themes of Humanity, to talk about other things. There is always more melancholy than horror. In fact, I am always reflecting on history, memory, landscape, time, love.
This referential is like a time-lapse in our existence and landscape, in which the themes of death, beauty, memory are present and thread together in a common path, a sort of tragedy of forgetfulness.
The premise is: in the midst of horror, in the fields of northern France, there were moments of beauty (Etty Elysium wrote this in her Diary in 1943, about Auschwitz). These moments, as well as the memories, the images, the death, and the life, were described by many writers, poets, philosophers who were in the battlefields of the Great War, both in the western front, as in the eastern front, and in the Balkans.
My next book continues this theme. I won a literary scholarship from DGALB Portugal to write this book. It is practically finished, but with the pandemic, my children at home, etc. it is delayed and it was not possible to publish it yet. I hope to publish it in 2021.
In these strange pandemic times, there is also a very strong relationship with all this.
RR: What literary pilgrimages have you been on and which has been the most memorable? Would you say writing is a spiritual process?
RC: Actually, my work is indicative of this concern with the landscape, not as something to be carefully described, but as something to be explored and experienced.
‘Landscape’ means the places visited or inhabited, the space and its relationship to place, but it also means the historical past, as it plays an integral role in human experience since our understanding of History and memory is related to the places we inhabit.
This principle does not occur in the most predictable direction. Actually, it is connected by a slow, recitative rhythm, by which one assumes the role of the geographer, and traveling, walking, from the valleys to the mountains, from the dunes, from the woods to the lost islands or to the “broken cities”, observes and crystallizes their landscapes and the thoughts that keep ordering along the paths of memory. This is a meditative point of view.
I search and construct forms by which places are suspended into a flux.
In consequence, all the travels I have made, all paths are important. There is always a search, sometimes there are no continuous paths and pilgrimages, but only certain places, a light, a train station, an afternoon, a road, the roads are very important, or just a house where the afternoon gets dark in the woods.
But there are marked places, for example, the Balkans, their melancholy, and music, their tortuous geography. — Ireland, the cliffs, and the western sea. — And India, the warm flavor of the sun, the endless mornings that caress us, the places that are at the same time spiritual places. India is very important to me. The people, the notion of distance, a strange memory. One of the most impressive memories of places I have in life is the night falling over Hyderabad. I would like to write about India. Goa is very connected to my life. And the streets of Kolkata, the impossible night around Varanasi. The night I arrived at Varanasi airport and took a taxi to the hotel.
The question is what can be done, why is time traveling, space traveling, and movement, matter? — it is simple: it matters because we can with it, as an old watchmaker, build and map in detail a game of mirrors, a network of correspondences, it seems that we remain in that phenomenon described by Michel Foucault, in The words and things, which is structured by the figures of similarity. In this case, traveling, as an act of peregrination, as a connection of geographical points, starting and ending points, would be an image of extensive events.
Among our countless ourselves, there is a kind of geographic avatars that are extinguished one after another; traveling could be understood as an erasure, where we go through all the places where we leave the body and everything we abandon.
RR: “The fleeting tremor of the fields “, in Europa (Lisbon, Portugal) - a literary essay on travel, places. Can you tell us about these essays and the places you have written about?
RC: We experience different times during our lives. It also happens that landscapes give rise to this feeling of fullness because we recognize in them a kind of perfection, where the action of chance is mixed with human intervention.
In their own way, they too are imperative; they impose themselves and invite to silence, to another degree of understanding of the world, its balance, and its geological and ecological roots. These landscapes, which we see through travel, contain History; we remain immobile and silent because the natural beauty is so opposite to the common, commercial idea.
There is no end to the world, the world is perfectly connected in itself, but some places are still more likely than others to sounds like a distant wave.
It is like this with places, routes, going from a location to another, trips, such as the places that I wrote about in that essay, because on these, to return, to go back to where we spent a long time before, is to take the measure of time, which is, as we know, our material, for artists, writers, painters, poets.
And travel, the way we should survive in a world that is increasingly dependent on the harmful influence of digital and econometric progress, is just that: a way to see what we have lost again; a way we face our dilemmas, as well the essential questions of life.
I wrote an essay about the Greek director Theo Angelopoulos movies in which I also speak about this — this essay speaks about the movies, the exiles, the immigrants, the lost children seeking for their father, but also about the borders that we cross — here, in the North of Greece, in Donegal in Ireland, or in Finland.
Actually, travel through the borders between Finland and Russia — which reminds us of the pilgrimages and trips, the impressions, of Lou-Andreas Salomé and Rilke, through Russia — in an era of slowness, moving from place to place, traveling on foot, by train, with enough time for contemplation, to see the blue vault of the world close over the valleys, the open horizon — it is exactly one of the ways to see and feel time, the "pure essence of time”, as Marcel Proust once wrote.
RR: Does writing energize or exhaust you?
RC: There was a time that I enjoyed writing more than today. It is actually very tiring for me. Sometimes I don't like it. I can spend a whole day around a sentence, a paragraph.
It is very stressful, you have to have strength. Sometimes we think about giving up. But then when the texts are finished and the letters form a set, we think we have to try again and write. We are responsible for leaving a testimony.
RR: You travel a lot presenting your work, what has been your most memorable fun experience?
RC: I would like to express my deep thanks and admiration for the work of everyone around the world who is involved in creating, promoting, and defending art, literature, and a multicultural world. Their wonderful work in organizing different worldwide repercussion events, and top publications — as Verseville is.
It is a great privilege, great happiness, for me to be a participant in these events and to be involved and work with astonishing organizations teams.
We feel that there no better way than literature to unite people, exchange ideas, break down barriers, and build a better world. All of us, authors, poets, writers, feel it, even more, when we have this wonderful opportunity for creative networks and new connections.
For us, the authors, our goal is really this: to strengthen dreams, to make connections in the world, to bring people into the world of inspiring words from millions of people.
We believe in the past, present, and future. And it is with humility, with emotion, that we can try to contribute to make a difference, to establish interactions in which books and language act as multicultural windows for tomorrow.
I look back and see faces, people I know all over the world, a great chain of friendship and common experiences. Many friends, many people with a lot of value, a lot of dignity. The pursuit of their dreams.
Of course, in these contexts, when we travel, when we participate in literary events, conferences, there are many funny, memorable experiences. Tiny moments that we cannot forget, that are part of our life, that becomes part of us.
I remember — and you know Reshma — that some of these unforgettable moments, the most beautiful, we were living them together, crying and laughing, you and me and other common friends, very recently.
This strange pandemic brought to all of us much anguish. One of my biggest fears is that I don't know if the world, the old world, the world we know, with our fundamental values, our traditions, our naivety and simplicity, and happiness, will return again.
RR: Are you building a body of work where these essays, poetry are connected to each other, or each book standing on its own?
RC: That`s a very interesting and important question. Thank you.
As samples of the passage of time, I wish my work can give us back the mirror of the world, of the past, the present, and the future. Of our memory and fragility. Also of our happiness.
A reflection on our culture, a simultaneous meditation on "the eternal farewell" that is up to every human being to live in the chain of his life. To explain what the limits of the mind are, the idea of the physical and spiritual borders, the space in which our existence ends and everything else begins.
My work tries to capture the shapes that are also yet temporal and transitory, exploring the balance between what is constructed and what is chaotic, in which the themes of death, beauty, memory, and knowledge are present and thread together in a single and common path. It is also a cognitive and abstract space that can be experienced in a highly self-conscious way, as when one is overwhelmed by the beauty of an Orthodox painting or a barrow cathedral.
I think that's what I intend to do. To transmit small pieces, parts of a whole, but at the same time very tenuous. Like a flemish painting, each text will be part of the other. All with a view to the same end, or the same beginning. In fact, I am always writing on the same topics. Books are circular, texts are circular. Everything is interconnected, and I want it to be that way.
For example, I am, as I mentioned above, now writing on a topic that I started writing about in my last book. Everything is a continuation. Even my essays are part of my books, and poems are part of essays. There is no difference between what they are and what they are. It's all the same. Just the same book or text, with several different branches.
RR: When was it first that you learned language had power?
RC: We can believe that words, books, moments, music, can change the world and the lives of all of us, of all peoples. They reconcile us with our lives and human nature, make a difference in the way we want to achieve tomorrow.
Artists pursue this contact with beauty, that is only possible at the most intimate moment of human life — and this return to memory can be the final message of the world's poems, in the pursuit of all actions aimed at the development of the cultural, economic, social and technical cooperation between all the countries.
Reading, and art in general has been coming to give lifelong advantages, in our lives, health, and happiness. Instilling a love of literature and culture is the best head start we can give in today´s world and in order to believe in the future.
Beauty is as important as truth, justice, goodness. It gives us reconciliation with the world, affirms our joys, changes our lives, gives us a reason to understand and accept our laments, our imperfections.
For me, this is the aim of art and all the wonderful human constructions, such as poetry, literature, and music. Past, present, and future are engaged in all languages, and on the same dimension, complex, dense, elliptical.
RR: You have always talked to me about your love for India and how you wish to come back (your eyes even glint when you mention India). What makes you so happy about my country?
RC: Oh… difficult to explain. But, at the same time, so simply.
Because of people like you, Reshma. As well as because of all my friends in India. Because of the involvement, and the degree of interiority that is, paradoxically, totally external, noticeable.
Because of the Marguerite Duras book “Le Vice-Consul”, which was adapted to the cinema with “India Song”. At one point in the book, the main character, Anne-Marie Stretter, crosses a park. She points towards the clouds, there is a livid light, and she says that the Ganges delta is that way; there the sky is a fantastic heap of dark green fodder, an abyss where everyone is drowning. Because of the big hotels with palm trees, when the sun goes down, in the Indian Ocean, red, and there are shady banks, shadows of palm trees, like big alleys.
We are in Kolkata, in Goa, in the fields, as at the end of a long line, and also at the link of cause and effect of the things of the world. There is a disappearance.
India is insomnia - it is a night reflected in the lights of the avenues. There is a noise, but it is a shadow of incongruous itineraries, as Antonio Tabucchi wrote. India is a good place to get lost, to be unknown, to know that everything is happening and we are just a point that is an object, a trip to the center of itself. This oceanic feeling of intimate union with the big-whole where the limits become uncertain. This has everything to do with what I write. A kind of transitional space outside of time.
Once I was in Hyderabad and from the hotel, I saw the night running on the avenue. It made me remember a movie, Marigold Hotel, and the soundtrack. I knew
I was there, and I could go out into the street and into the night, and come back to the hotel. And to feel a kind of reduction of the universe at that moment, an exaggerated exaltation, delirium, or a melancholy prostration.
In Goa, when I arrived in Old Goa, I saw that place as a strange memory of Portugal. It was unbelievable, in the middle of the forest to see those churches from the past. The way to get to Old Goa by bus, with the wind coming in the windows, was happiness.
And one night I sat at a restaurant table in Panjim (I'm an absolutely fan of Indian food) and suddenly sits in front of me, seeming to come from nowhere, a Portuguese writer. It looked like a movie. Then we walked the streets of Panjim together, across the Fontainhas neighborhood.
The idea of India is one of the ideas of great travel. I have to return!
RR: Do you think memories have landscapes?
RC: Of course — absolutely.
How are death and the journey alike? Is death the end or the beginning of a journey? How much do we seek death when we travel?
Our life is marked by the places where we pass. And death is perhaps the line that goes through everything, everything is related. One certain day is marked, in the past, as now, by a curve of a river, and of a train describing that curve, but felt like the most beautiful of places and borders, parallel to the Ganges, the Sena, the Tejo, and found again, later, years later, in a museum, in a painting by Brueghel, in a quiet corner of Vien or Brussels, and then also on the bank of the Alps, in Sierre, next to the Rilke Tower at Muzot, and to the cold of the roses. This is the outline of memory.
RR: Your poetry has a lot of geography in them. How has your travel inspired your poetry? Is there a recurrent theme you keep returning to?
RC: I pursuit through my writing to follow a very personal interpretation of reality. It should foremost serve and accentuate, through poetry and essays, a way of understanding and interpreting the world, combining the personal and subjective with the universal and collective experience.
This is how to make connections with certain points, geographic and mental points, may be of particular importance: — we can map the world, and establish the duration dimension — as it was studied by artists and writers as, for example, Anna Akhmátova and Peter Handke, philosophers as Bergson and visual artists in the field of Land Art as Richard Long — between what is time and what is space, with a focus in environmental and human nature questions, past, present and future. This intensity of meaning is identical with a place, a kind of insideness, the degree of attachment, involvement, and concern that a person or a group has for a particular place. One of the ways that I found to express my work is the thematization of time and space.
From a gaze invested by this memory of the origin which poses the order of things in its magical complexity, we seize the man, the elements according to an uncompromising confrontation, tender and violent at the same time. There are beings who make a sign, men and women who cross their souls, all truth on the alert, all quest in the making. Dreams come to support the encounter of a story which tells of our humanity "its nascent wisdom on the original abyss”. The writers' language penetrates the breath and the flame of this way of hymns pursued even in the most intimate solitude of being. The writer writes in the wild grass of our listening, our attentions, our aspirations to be expected forever by the outline of our own vigilance in this prodigious world.
RR: If you could switch professions again would you become a Geographer rather?
RC: No, I don't think so. I made my way, which I continue to do.
Of course, we always romanticize our lives, sometimes not even distinguishing what is real and imaginary, right and wrong. Today, our civilization leaves less and less space for this period of maturation of thought, and slowness. As Heidegger said. I think I need both. Action and thought, execution, active life, and contemplative life.
Of course, I never forget the famous words of Aristoteles when he said that there are 3 types of life for the free man: the life that aspires to pleasure, the one that leads to beautiful actions in the polis, and the one that dedicates itself to the truth.
All they are happiness, although contemplation in beauty through the art of words, music, is the greatest happiness, called theoria. The eternal and immutable things. Today, in Western societies, there is a great deal of focus on production and consumption.
The role of the geographer is to give us this breath of time, just like that of the philosopher.