Toda a potencialidade da mente 2

( A vida é o início )

Toda a potencialidade da mente

Toda a potencialidade da mente

  

O individuo se separa

do conteúdo cósmico,

sua contrapartida em energia.

O instante singular se dá

exatamente na concepção,

ativação alquímica catalisadora.

O ato sexual homem-mulher;

o coito entre um par de outra espécie;

até a polinização do gineceu

de uma flor

são exemplos de antigo poder

atribuído a pedra.

Ressaltam-se a composição harmônica,

as porções exatas de energia,

os opostos nos sinais.

À parte original cabem o direito e a liberdade

do seu desenvolvimento,

numa criatura autônoma.

O montante das atividades cognitivas

– físicas ou mentais –

desses seres na fase de separação das criaturas

é o complementar do universo

em fase de integração inconsciente.

Cobre-se então

toda a potencialidade da mente.

 ( A morte é o retorno )

O jogo dos nove

 

Jacinto adentra a birosca e pede uma dose de aguardente. Jorge está com o taco na mão pronto para mais uma daquelas suas bolas redondas. Ele bate forte e ela arrebenta no fundo da caçapa. Ele pensa numa tarde quente, na sala de estar, apalpando os seios dela. Acariciando-os e apertando de leve os melões enrubescidos de tesão. O nome dela é aquele das curvas empinadas na bunda. O vão doce entre as ancas. Ele bate uma dose forte da aguardente de um gole só, o Jacinto.

Diogo entra calado no recinto. Antonio olha para o alto, depois para baixo. Agora são onze horas e vinte e três minutos da noite; eles jogam o nove na bodega tomando umas biritas. A macaxeira frita é o tira gosto perfeito que ele morde com os dentes grandes da sua fome. Amanhã será um dia frio e chuvoso.

Pensa naqueles movimentos sensuais com ela por cima, encaixada no taco. Se as mordidas na nuca e nos ombros delicados deixaram as marcas depois, imagine a explosão de energia naquele exato momento. Antonio olha para o alto, depois para baixo. A cabeça de Jacinto parece explodir ao vê-la de quatro. O busto abaixo através do vazio entre as pernas.

O nove é um jogo difícil. Requer as cinco sensações no mais elevado patamar da consciência. Primeiro o tato. Precisa saber onde vai pôr. A visão dentro do par de globos oculares para captar o espectro das impressões no rosto dela. O olfato doce de seu sexo. O gosto da sua vulva em chamas. Ouvir as notas sutis dos seus gemidos. Antonio olha para o alto, depois para baixo.

Diogo: ele não deixa de pensar nisso. As outras quatro no jogo dos nove são as cartas de um baralho. Primeiro o sete de ouros; outra carta é o às de espadas; depois vem o sete de copas; enfim, o quatro de paus. Na ordem crescente. Quem fizer os nove completa a rodada. Os tacos e as bolas intatas. Porque ninguém quer botar a perder. 

Um som do caralho

às vezes ouço isso: um som do caralho tão alto que atravessa a mente qual flecha num raio as ondas lanço de um sol agora a noite que fica do outro lado do mundo a guitarra distorcida aponta contra o mesmo o teto e as paredes acima do assoalho em baixo cada acorde de um golpe só amanhã falo para ela das coisas de hoje além da última estrela o que tem depois eu não sei * * * Some Excerpts of ‘Jimi Hendrix – Electric Gypsy’ (A book by H. Shapiro and C. Glebbeek)

“On arrival in Nashville around October 1962, Jimmy and Billy went to see the manager of the Del Morocco, who fixed them up with some accommodation upstairs in a place called Joyce’s House of Glamour. When the money was even tighter than usual and they couldn’t pay the rent Jimmy slept under the stars, ‘in a big housing estate they were building around there. No roofs and sometimes they hadn’t put floors in yet. That was wild!’… Billy Cox would knock on his door in the mornings to wake him up; ‘there he was laying on his bed with the same clothes that he had on the night before, his guitar laying on his stomach or alongside him. He was practicing all night long.’” p63

“He was shy… he was extremely shy… After that first night… he just moved with me. It wasn’t hard because he was carrying all his possessions in his guitar case… The average day consisted of us waking up at noon… but not actually getting up for at least a couple of hours. Jimmy loved fooling around about with his guitar in bed, and he always slept with it. I used to think of my competition not as a woman, but as a guitar. Many times he fell back asleep with it on his chest. Any time I tried to remove it, he woke up and said, ‘no, no, no, leave my guitar alone!’” Fay, Jimmy’s girlfriend, talking about him, p75

“Fay would sometimes wind up by suggesting in ‘mid-stream’ that he wasn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread. Jimmy would take his revenge. One time Fay woke up to find Jimmy sitting at the foot of the bed ‘wearing nothing but an attitude’, in the process of tying her to the bed. The look on his face scared the life out of her. He tied her mouth up, made love to her and then left her still bound and gagged while he went off to some rehearsal. When he came back, he undid her and began talking about the session he’d just come from as if nothing had happened.” p75

“This was one of the strangest contradictions in Jimmy’s character. Boy and man, he was universally regarded by everyone who knew him as the kindest, most retiring and polite person you could wish to meet – by rock and roll standards he was a saint… However, there is enough evidence later on to suggest that Jimmy was prone to sudden uncontrollable bursts of anger and that much of this was directed against women whom him otherwise cared for very much. As he said himself, ‘no matter how sweet and lovely you are, there are black and ugly things deep down somewhere.’” p76

“I still have my guitar and amp and as long as I have that, no fool can keep me from living. There are few record companies I visited that I probably can record for. I think I’ll start working toward that line because actually when you’re playing behind other people you’re still not making a big name for yourself as you would if you were working for yourself… I just want to let you know I’m still here, trying to make it. Although I don’t eat every day, everything’s going all right for me. It could be worse than this, but I’m going to keep hustling and scuffling until I get things to happening like their supposed to for me… Tell everyone I said hello… It’s pretty lonely here by myself. Best luck and happiness in the future. Love, your son. Jimmy.” A letter Hendrix sent home dated 8 August 1965, p90

“The word was out to all the hot-shot guitar players in the Village to check out this black guy who played a Strat upside down. The name guitarist on the block was Mike Bloomfield, who played with Paul Butterfield as his regular gig, but had been called up by Dylan for Highway 61Revisited. ‘I thought I was it’. Mike saw Jimmy for the first time when he was still at the Café Wha?. ‘Hendrix knew who I was, and that day, in front of my eyes, he burned me to death. I didn’t even get my guitar out. H bombs were going off, guided missiles were flying – I can’t tell you the sounds he was getting out of his instrument. He was getting every sound I was ever to hear him get right there in that room… I didn’t even want to pick up a guitar for the next year’.” p103

“The Loft on Hudson Street was a general hangout place for musicians to drop by and jam or just get stoned. Guitarist Roy Buchanan came by – he and Jimmy blasted each other into the night racing ahead the music on speed. Smoking dope to keep mellow and snorting methedrine to keep going was as natural as breathing for the tight community of musicians. Jimmy kept his speed crystals in a baby’s bottle, always a source of great amusement. It was no big deal. The only time Jimmy ever met Dylan, at the Kettle of Fish on MacDougal Street, they were both completely stoned. Asked about what should have been an auspicious event, Hendrix could only recall, ‘We just hung about laughing. Yeah, we just laughed’.” p104

“At 9 a.m. on Saturday 24 September 1966, Jimmy stepped off his first-class Pan-Am flight on to the tarmac at London’s Heathrow airport. In his guitar case was everything he possessed, one Fender Stratocaster, a change of clothes and a jar of Valderma cream for washing his face.” p108

“Last night at the Plaza, Newbury, the Jimmy Hendrix Experience roared and romped their way through an hour and a quarter’s worth of music that shattered the senses both aurally and visually. Resplendent in red corduroy trousers and antique waistcoat, Jimmy proceeded to show just how many positions it was able to play the guitar in, at the same time showing his very own professional skill which must rate him as one of the most outstanding newcomers on the scene since Jeff Beck or Eric Clapton. Outstanding for the Experience on drums was Mitch Mitchell… Throughout the evening, Jimmy showed flashes of on-stage humour for which he must be given full credit. ‘Hey Joe’… was introduced as been written by Mickey Mouse” A journalist review about the band gig in England, 20 February 1967, p142.

“Jimmy had great difficult conveying his feelings to those few around him (usually women) prepared to listen to him. As Jimmy said himself, ‘Ever since I can remember, I have been moody. I can’t help isolating myself from the world. Sometimes I just want to be left alone. People think I’m funny. I’m sorry, I can’t help it.’ Thus Jimmy lyrics speak his thoughts and he tended to unpack his heart in his songs. They were confessionals of his beliefs and opinions, ecstasies and loneliness, a map of his emotions with music styles chosen to match the sentiments expressed in the lyric. Music is performed here as knowledge – from the songs you can learn something of their creator.” p169

“Jimmy used water imagery both literally and metaphorically – here he makes an allusion to one’s inner calm which can so effectively negate external chaos, putting problems into perspective:

Waterfall, nothing can harm me at all

My worries seem so very small

With my waterfall

Jimmy expects ridicule, but keeps faith with his beliefs:

Some people say ‘day dreaming is for all the lazy minded fools

with nothing else to do’

So let them laugh, laugh at me

So, just as long as I have you

To see me through, I have nothing to lose

Long as I have you

Poetically and musically, ‘May This Be Love’ is Jimmy at his most spiritual.” p176

“Speeded up to 66&2/3, the slowed down vocals on ‘Third Stone from the Sun’ are revealed as an interstellar communication:

‘Star fleet to scout ship, please give your position. Over.’

‘I am in orbit around the third planet from the star called the Sun. Over.’

‘You mean it’s the Earth? Over.’

‘Positive. It is known to have some form of intelligent species. Over.’

‘I think we should take a look.’

The images of science fiction – battles on distant planets, visitations from UFOs and near future Armageddon on Earth – were regularly employed by Jimmy to highlight what he saw as the essential hopelessness of the human condition bereft of any spiritual values.” p177

“So on 4 June 1967, with their debut album galloping up the charts, the Experience played a ‘farewell’ concert at the Saville Theatre – the last gig before flying out to Monterey. Jimmy delighted the audience (including Paul McCartney) by launching into ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, from the album which had gone straight in at number one in the charts. He ended the gig by smashing a guitar handed to him for the finale of ‘Are you Experienced?’ and hurling it into the audience. Inscribed on the back of the white Fender was a poem written by Jimmy:

May this be

Love or just

Confusion Born out of

Frustration wracked

Feelings – of not

Being able to

Make true physical

Love to the

Universal gypsy Queen

True, free expressed music

Darling guitar please

Rest. Amen

In Britain and Europe, Jimmy had proved himself.” p183

“That evening they all visited Jimmy’s old stamping ground in the Village. They ate at the Tin Angel and moved on to the Café Au Go Go. Keith Altham was traveling with the band to file a report for NME… Jimmy didn’t play that night; instead they went to see the Doors at the Scene club before returning to the Buckingham Hotel where they were staying. Jimmy strolled through the Village in a multi-coloured floral jacket, white trousers, emerald-green scarf and gold medallion inscribed with the words ‘Champion Bird Watcher’. Which was fine until they tried to get a taxi, as Keith explains: ‘You had three chances of not getting one in the Village. One if you were a weird-looking hippie. Two, if you had long hair. Three, if you were black. And he made it on all three counts. Not only would they not stop for him, they would also try and run him over, so we would have to hide him in doorways, go and stop a cab and even then the cabby would tell him to get out. We had to get out of a couple of cabs and I’d get a bit humpty about it. But Jimmy would say, ‘Just get out and don’t say a word.’ But of course, a year or two later, when he was a superstar, they couldn’t do enough for him’.” p185

“But those who were there and have since written of that weekend all talk of the totally benevolent atmosphere, how you got a contact high just from being there surrounded by stoned, happy, laughing faces. People spoke of tribal connections and collective unconscious experience… Certainly as the Festival wore on, increasing numbers of policemen meandered about wearing sloppy smiles, not unconnected with the marijuana smoke that hung like LA smog over the site and, of course, Owsley’s special gift to the people. In some respects the significance of Monterey was the audience, not the music… It was Disney time for rock’n’roll.” p187, about Monterey International Pop Festival, June 1967.

“It was the calm before the storm. The announcement begins: ‘And now the next act, one of the hottest bands from England. It’s led by an American – Jimmy Hendrix. And here to introduce him – he’s all the way over from London – Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Jones!’ Then Jones said, ‘I’d like to introduce a very good friend, a fellow countryman of yours… he’s the most exciting performer I’ve ever heard – the Jimi Hendrix Experience.’ Jimmy hit the stage – looking eerily like Little Richard, wearing the same kind of ruffled shirt he had not been allowed to wear only two years before, with red pants, feather boa and hair pushed up almost in a pompadour. This was the sideman’s revenge. Jimmy was on the verge of outstripping all those who had given him the sack or who’d scorned his music… But now Jimmy was taking them with him, his confidence was growing and his talk became less gabbled: ‘Like I said before, it’s really groovy. I’d like to bore you for six or seven minutes and do a little thing… ‘Scuse me a minute and let me play my guitar… Right now we’d like to do a little thing by Bob Dylan and that’s his grandmother over there [points to Noel], a little thing called “Like a Rolling Stone”.’ That does it, he’s mentioned a homage to their hero – audience and artists are now humming on the same wavelength. p191, about Experience gig in Monterey Festival, 18 June 1967.

“But directly as a result of Monterey, Jimmy was the instant toast of the LA rock elite in much the same way he had been acclaimed in London. Peter Tork invited him up to his estate in Laurel Canyon… Jimmy also went to Steve Stills’ house in Malibu for a jam session involving Buddy Miles and the Buffalo Springfield bass player, Bruce Palmer, among others. Steve Stills setup his amps, ‘we took some acid and just went. We played quite literally for twenty hours straight. We must have made up about fifty songs, but there was no tape running. We just played for the ocean.’ The music brought the cops, but this time not to cause trouble. ‘Would it be okay if we parked across the street and listened? We don’t care what you’re doing, we just want to listen. And if one of our sergeants shows up, someone will sound a siren which means just cool it for a few minutes.’ ‘So me and Hendrix jammed with the sheriff’s protection! And that night I really stared to learn how to play lead guitar’.” p195

“The new album Axis: Bold As Love was recorded at the Olympic Studios in Barnes with Chas producing. The engineer was Eddie Kramer, who had impressed everybody with his sensitive mixing of Jimmy’s earlier recordings. At the time there were very few engineers around who hand any feel for rock music at all.” p214

“In the early recording days of the Experience, Jimmy had been quite taciturn in the studio and generally went along with what Chas suggested. But with every visit to a studio, Jimmy’s confidence grew, as Eddie Kramer explains: ‘There were no meetings in advance and Jimmy created things in a very loose sort of fashion. He knew in his own head what he wanted to do and how he wanted to create – he had pages and pages of lyrics to choose from – but he knew exactly what he was doing. Every overdub, every backward guitar solo, every double-tracked thing was very carefully worked out… in his own head… in a very private sense. I was not to know what he was going to do until he walked into the studio. I think anybody else did. Take any of the backwards guitar solos – and there are quite a number of them. When the tape was put on backwards, with the music rushing by you – Jimmy knew where he was on every inch of that tape. It didn’t matter where you started it. And he knew exactly in his own mind as he was doing the solo what it should sound like afterwards. The point is the man had a firm grasp of what he was doing and what its end result would be’.” p217

“His ballads represent the most endearing part of the Hendrix legacy, none more evocative than ‘Little Wing’, covered by musicians as diverse as Eric Clapton, Gil Evans and Sting.

Well she’s walking through the clouds

With a circus mind that’s running round

Butterflies and zebras

And moonbeams and fairy tales

That’s all she ever thinks about

Riding with the wind

When I’m sad, she comes to me

With a thousand smiles, she gives to me free

It’s alright she says it’s alright

Take anything you want from me, anything

Anything

Fly on little wing

Yeah, yeah, yeah, little wing

Talking to a Swedish journalist in January 1968, Jimmy said of ‘Little Wing’: ‘It’s based on a very, very simple Indian style… I got the idea like when we were in Monterey and I just lookin’ at everything around. So I figured that I take everything I’d see around and put it maybe in the form of a girl, or somethin’ like that, you know, and call it ‘Little Wing’, and then it will just fly away. Everybody’s really flyin’ and they’re really in a nice mood, like the police, and everything was really, really great out there. And so I took all these things and put them in one very, very small matchbox, you know, into a girl and then do it. It’s very simple, but I like it though…’.” p224

“He holds the song in tension at the end with some vicious note bends and let go of the reins for the crashing finale. Like to go ahead and do a song that goes something like this here:

I wish I was a catfish

Swimming all in the deep blue sea

I’ll have all you pretty women

Fishing after me

Jimmy lends his own considerable weight to the density and passion of Muddy Waters’ classic declaration of sexual bravura, emulating the shimmering metallic vibrations of Waters’ Telecaster rasp.” p242

“Most people believe that, to be a good blues musician, one has to suffer. I don’t believe this. I just like the sound of the blues. When I hear certain notes, I feel real happy.” Jimmy interview to Cheltenham Chronicle, 11 February 1967, p243.

“The Mississipi Delta stretches 200 miles from Memphis, Tennessee to Vicksburg, Mississipi. This flat land of cotton and soybeans was home to the greatest blues singers, Son House, Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and B.B. King, master craftsmen of the purest and most deeply rooted of all blues strains – Delta blues. On first appearance, a simple enough musical form, but as Robert Palmer observed in Deep Blues: ‘The fact of the matter is, Delta blues is a refined, extremely subtle and ingeniously systematic musical language. Playing and especially singing it right involve some exceptionally fine points that only a few white guitarists, virtually no white singers and not too many black musicians who learned to play and sing anywhere other than the Delta have been able to grasp. These fine points have to do with timing, with subtle variations in vocal timbre and with being able to hear and execute, vocally and instrumentally, very precise gradations in pitch that are neither haphazard wavering nor mere effect. We’re talking here about techniques that are learned and methodically applied, are meaningful in both an expressive and purely musical sense, and are absolutely central to the art’.” p243