An extraordinary day!!!!

 

From Facebook

Revista Joyce Pascovich – Gerald Thomas

Another teaser from “And Dead, We Walk” (plus Arnaldo Jabor)

Getting “fuller”

Size Matters

 

My painting (in the book “Scratching the Surface – Arranhando a Superficie)

I am NOT dead:

The cosmos is like a theatre in which, once a play is performed, after the curtain falls, the theatre is left cold and empty until it sinks in ruins. Sinks like a skin in ruins. And ruins fall upon a theater. It all fails and falls and fails better and they stand up and applaud, while we go back alone and find ourselves thinking alone having pleased or annoyed thousands in the solitudes of our impersonal hotel rooms.

All that silence after all that applause.

“Stay with me a little longer, please!”

If I could let the audience in, I would. For sex, for company, for dinner or just for laughs.

I will be alone with the brightest stars sinking into a hole, a War Hole or a Warhol, as we all tend to do, as one and the same with the Universe.

The note: It has probably expired, just like all things expire, including the notion that we exist, since human existence itself is only a nasty and ironic passtime in the hands of some lunatic.

When I look across the river, onto 131 Kent Avenue and remember all of that, and then look at myself in the mirror, I can’t help but feel this irritable bowel syndrome and laugh, laugh, laugh hoping that the echoes of my laughter might be heard by someone, anyone, next to me or far away who understands my pain and the pain of living, of being alive and the frustration of not being able to solve the unsolvable sickness called “mankind.”

It’s late on this Sunday and my seventh day comes to an end while I cry and laugh, cry and laugh. I draw the blinds and the curtains.

It’s dark and cold in here. Just as it was on the day when I was born.

– Obrigado Arnaldo Jabor: trecho de O Globo de junho 16, 2015

“A cultura mudava qualitativamente e não era apenas esse labirinto de informações inúteis de hoje. Filmes como “Deus e o diabo na terra do Sol” ficaram e deram filhos como o tropicalismo, por exemplo, o teatro de Zé Celso, Gerald Thomas, a grande música das canções, hoje desprezadas. Nosso vocabulário visual foi aprofundado nessa época do cinema novo: a lama, a fome, a favela, os presépios de miséria, a estupidez da classe média. Tudo veio à tona.”

Tudo veio à tona. E vem mesmo!

Gerald Thomas

“Gerald Thonmas – Cidadão do Mundo” – de Edi Botelho, breve nas melhores livrarias!

From Facebook – a very popular book already

A dead soldier in Iraq – from my book of drawings

“And Dead, We Walk” – autobiography teaser (Gerald Thomas)

Let’s just imagine…..No. Let’s just say it started like this: I’m sitting here in the middle of the night, nightmaring over badgoodluke dreams I’ve had when I wrote “Book” here a few years bygones and where Joyce lived and wrote and where Frisch wrote and almost nearly lived.

No sign of Yuceff in my life, unless he has changed his name to Joe and happens to be hiding in the wings. As for that “Book” he handed me….well, that was my own book which I had written about a boy falling in love. Now that I’ve kept it safely, I will read it out loud to you.

Please: only give me a little time. That pool of blood I lay in is still a vivid vision of some strange trance I was in while wearing a Testosterone patch on a swealtering day when Masha Froliak took me to the marshes of the Everglades and we traveled inside my mind and…with the shakes and all, cold patch on the back of my neck, I wonder how it is I’m going to tell you about all my friends, all my enemies, all those who endorsed me like….like Victor Garcia, like Ruth Escobar, like Peter Brook and Julian and Samuel Beckett.

Yet, my deep recession or depression is a spring awakening, and I felt the full syndrome, as if I was a character in “The Making Of Americans”, by Gertrude Stein.

Yes. Or as Beckett put it to me: “sitting, kneeling, crawling, walking, standing and looking at the walls. Imagination Dead. Imagine”.

I imagine.

I’m alive because I imagine!

I’ve had ENOUGH!!!! (Yes, I say this far too often)

Now, at this atom of a second, someone in New Orleans ain’t making it. Maybe there, she or he ain’t walking. Maybe dead and standing. Yes, standing but not making it.

Yet, in Rio, a daughter cries out loud to her distant father. Yes, her distant father, just as I cried out to my mother and father so many times as a young or older man having had answers or too many questions to remain quiet. It’s all become too quiet.

No, it’s not what you’re thinking. Crying does not heal. It opens further and wider the wide wounds of living and crawling. It offers no relief.

Have you ever put yourself in the shoes of a Kosovo survivor or a Syrian refugee? Or, say, a kindling minding holocaust numbered man or woman? Or a Lybian dehydrating after a horrible crossing towards Sicily?

Or a US Veteran?

Or an abused pet?

Or an abused child?

Have you ever been a Jew? Have you ever tried looking at Islam in the face of solitude for comfort, since no comfort is ever comforting enough?

ENOUGH!!!!

No, you don’t think that way.

I look at the lighting grid here believing it’s the sky over Zurich as the trams rail their trail and moan Stein’s words from the making: “Every one in family living Who does not come to be a dead one before coming to be almost an old one, comes to be almost an old..”

You stone yourself… I stone myself to death and blame all of me for not having achieved the goals of the Gargoyles of the months past.

What is it out there??? Please will someone tell me? What is it out there? I mean, where the inner eye can’t reach and the outer eye can’t see? For those who grow old enough, they’ll know that getting older isn’t all that much. For those who look at age as a bygone thing, life has never been all that much anyway.

Why go on living this crazy path inexplicable to scientists but jaw dripping enough for one to exclaim in such loud words:

– It has been a wonderful journey so far. Enough to put a smile on my face and leave dry tears in my eyes.

“Good morning”, a young man introduces himself. “I’m Youcef. Sorry to be late.”

XX runs away like a mad dog.

I have no idea of what’s going on.

“Youcef? And who may you be?”

Silence.

“I brought your book”

“Book?”

“The one you…”

“Book?”

“Gleiss Wroughter”

“WHAT”

The design on the cover …No, let me start again. The drawing…no, not a drawing: it was a photo…it was that of ..
The photo was similar in looks as that flower handed to me by the blind boy”

“Youcef, you told you to come here? Where do you know me from?”

“Sir, you do not remember? I was small then, probably nine or ten, and asked you for directions in New York City. I needed to meet a fellow of mine on Great Jones…”

“WHAT? YOU ARE WHAT?

“ I handed you a note and a flower and then I ran because I sensed…”

“BUT YOU WERE BLIND, YOU WERE FUCKING BLIND MAN”

“I still am, Sir”

Gerald Thomas

“Lost Case of a Brief Case” © A Novel by Gerald Thomas.

It all begins here with Ruth Escobar and Victor Garcia staging Genet’s “Balcony” , São Paulo in 1970. There will NEVER be (and there never has been) anything so audacious, fantastic and glorious!!

Aerial View of New Mountain Formations – The “Omega 3 high cholesterol mountains”

Almost landing…

“Paris, not Paris. Steps or no steps. Suicide or a metaphor? This is where it all begins. Or, as the case may be, this is where the story should end.

That’s what I thought when I finally woke up to the world and not to my inner meanderings. I realized that a book had fallen onto my lap and, as destiny would have it, it began by pointing me (and all around me) into a new direction, rather than sowing old seeds into and old and crumpled field of staleness.

“This is a book not about the decline but, rather, about the rise of everything else. It is about the transformation taking place around the world, a transformation that, though often discussed, remains poorly understood” (authored by an unknown poet named Hendon Volvic)”

I looked around me and saw that all the books I used to own and love (and touch), were now made into a thin layer of wallpaper, fake, all fake, emulating a library of sorts and / or a badly made theater set. I also noticed that I had not shaven in months and that a huge sign on my wall had been posted during my sleep and it read: “GET OUT OF MY LIFE”.

“you’re an amalgam”

“I’m an amalgam?”

“Yes, you unite qualities that are rare. You’re egocentric and you think that the world revolves around you. Yet, you care enough to return your wisdom and knowledge to people in whatever form”.

I took that to be a compliment.”

Gerald

GT – Painting circa 2003