Barroco: metamorfoses de uma palavra - Parte I

1 - Uma origem silogística

Foi em meados do século IV a. C., pela mão do filósofo grego Aristóteles, que apareceu no mundo das letras a primeira consubstanciação da palavra barroco: no tratado de lógica intitulado Analytica priora (Analíticos Anteriores, um trabalho envolvido mais tarde no compêndio peripatético Organon), ela assinala sob a forma baroco uma das mnemónicas pelas quais o estudante de filosofia invocaria facilmente distintos tipos de silogismos – neste caso, um dos ditos da segunda figura (como os festino e camestres), que expressa o atributo inferencial do quantificador “nem todos”: ofereço um exemplo improvisado, 1) Toda a literatura é filosofia, 2) Nem todos os escritores são filósofos, 3) Nem todos os escritores são literários.

Todavia, nesta acepção aristotélica, o silogismo baroco, mera categoria intelectual, não se liga à actuação semasiológica que a palavra comportará no decurso da modernidade. Encontramos, ainda, requícios dessa origem silogística nos ensaios do cortesão francês Michel de Montaigne, publicados em 1580: em “De l'institution des enfants”, capítulo XXVI do primeiro livro dos Essais, lê-se «La plus expresse marque de la sagesse, c’est une esjouïssance constante ; son état est comme des choses au-dessus de la Lune : toujours serein.  C’est Barroco et Baralipton qui rendent leurs suppôts crottés et enfumés, ce n’est paselle; ils ne la connaissent [à sabedoria] que par ouï-dire.» (Atentem à grafia moderna com que Montaigne escreveu barroco.)

De molde a caracterizar como obsoleta a filosofia medieval, considerada falaciosa face à quinhentista racionalidade humanista de pendor platónico, Montaigne resgata quase arbitrariamente duas mnemónicas aristotélicas para fundar o argumento que os silogistas arreigados à escolástica só chegarão a uma incompleta compreensão da sabedoria – e por ouvido… –, pois aos seus raciocínios falta a serenidade. Umas linhas à frente encontraremos novamente esta ideia da ausência de serenidade – de harmonia – associada ao “barroco”, mas, para já, introduza-se um outro concomitante sentido que a palavra detinha no período em que Montaigne escreveu e à qual ele não terá sido distante.

2 - Quando as ostras temem tempestades

Dezassete anos antes da publicação dos Essais, o físico português Garcia de Orta deu à estampa em Goa o primeiro tratado português sobre botânica, intitulado Coloquios dos simples, e drogas he cousas mediçinais da India […], no qual se funda as modernas significação e grafia da palavra barroco, aí utilizada como sinónimo de pérola imperfeita: no trigésimo quinto colóquio, “Da margarita ou aljofar […]”, lemos «Tudo por ser verdade porque ho aljofare que de cà vai, e as perolas he groso, e redondo, e em toda perfeiçam, e o que della vem das indias sam huns barrocos mal afeiçoados, e não redondos, e com agoas morras (…)» [Sublinhado meu.] Afigura-se-me plausível que Orta se tenha inspirado nesta passagem da trigésima quinta parte do nono livro da Naturalis Historia do historiador romano Plínio, o Velho, no qual se descreve a germinação de vários tipos de pérolas, inclusive aquelas que coalescem em deformidade por culpa do temor que as tempestades marítimas insuflam nas ostras: «Si tempestive satientur, grandescere et partus; si fulguret, conprimi conchas ac pro ieiunii modo minui; si vero etiam tonuerit, pavidas ac repente conpressas quae vocant physemata efficere, specie modo inani inflata sine corpore; hos esse concharum abortus.» [Sublinhados meus.]

É este o significado que o capelão e etimologista castelhano Sebastián de Covarrubias anotará no ano de 1611 em dois verbetes do seu Tesoro de la lengua castellana: na entrada alusiva ao aljôfar pode ler-se «Otras [pérolas] ay desproporcionadas; que no se acomodan à la forma redonda ; y a estas llamáron barruecos, quasi berruecos, porque tienen forma de berrugas. Las gruessas, redondas, lisas, y de color claro, llamaron comunmente perlas: los Romanos las llamaron vniones , quod nulli duo reperiantur indiscreti : y dellas haze Plinio vn capitulo bien notable (…)»; e na entrada própria encontramos o seguinte: «BARRVECO, entre las perlas llamã barruecos vnas que son desiguales, y dixerõse assi, quasi berruecos, por la semejança que tienen a las berrugas que salen a la cara.» [Sublinhados meus.]

Em 1712, o padre teatino estrangeirado Raphael Bluteau deu no segundo volume do seu Vocabulário Portuguez e Latino […] algumas definições complementares no verbete correspondente a barroco – e, em analogia com Covarrubias, ignora Orta e cita novamente Plínio: «BARROCO. Barrôco. Perola tosca, & desigual, que nem he comprida, nem redonda.»; poucas linhas em seguida, cita este excerto da História Natural de Plínio para corroborar uma familiaridade etimológica: «Crassescunt etiam in senecta conchisque adhaerescunt nec his evelli queunt nisi lima. Quibus una tantum est facies et ab ea rotunditas, aversis planities, ob id tympania nominantur.» Porém, do nome tímpano (ou tímbale, que vai dar ao mesmo), aqui chamado por Plínio para designar uma conformação inchada (já que, conforme o trecho, estas pérolas anormais possuem uma face convexa e uma base achatada), nunca derivaria o nome barroco empregue por Orta, nem este se encontra, aliás, sob nenhuma morfologia, no clássico texto de Plínio.

a) Metamorfose ou metaplasmo?

Com efeito, a única passagem dessa parte que incita a uma ligação entre ela e a proposta de Orta é esta, na qual o autor descreve o torpe engelhamento das pérolas envelhecidas: «Quare praecipuum custodiunt pelagiae, altius mersae quam ut penetrent radii. flavescunt tamen et illae senecta rugisque torpescunt, nec nisi in iuventa constat ille qui quaeritur vigor.» [Sublinhado meu.] A presença de «rugisque», do latim ruga, com o significado de prega ou sulco, credibiliza a hipótese etimológica covarrubiasiana de verruga, assomando até a habitual metaplasmia entre o /v/ e o /b/ e entre o /g/ e o /c/ nas palavras em latim vertidas em vernáculo peninsular. Com efeito, a palavra em latim verruca é empregue por Plínio como uma das maleitas que o sangue vertido do pescoço de uma tartaruga decapitada é capaz de curar: no décimo quarto capítulo do trigésimo segundo livro lê-se «Sunt qui testudinum sanguinem cultro aereo supinarum capitibus praecisis excipi novo fictili iubeant, ignem sacrum cuiuscumque generis sanguine inlini, item capitis ulcera manantia, verrucas. Iidem promittunt testudinum omnium fimo panos discuti; et, quod incredibile dictu sit, aliqui tradunt tardius ire navigia testudinis pedem dextrum vehentia.» [Sublinhado meu.] Não custa, pois, a conceber que Orta, inspirado pelo modelo de Plínio, baseasse o neologismo barroco na palavra em latim verruca para desenhar na imaginação uma coisa inchada e engelhada, oposta à beleza esferetérea evocada por uma pérola perfeita.

Ten shorts in english

I. 

Memory and life are not the same; nor are they cuncurrent. There remain certain days that once had meaning, but now — void of life — they repeat themselves filled with brittle, bristling memory. Memory is always a representation, an adaptable construction, congenial to shortcut. There is a cloud in our heads, full of this pliable, translucent aether, and in it we assume it is possible to keep our dead within. We cannot contain a thing — truth is, we are sieves. We all are — without exception — sieving through life.

II.

My cat, Plutão: an unsubstantial tiger: hardly of paper — but acciaccaturian, none the less. Whimsical. Quixotic as a cosmonaut.

III.

A winged wanderer soul lost its light and fell at my hands; a husk, discarded, disdained, by some cruel aether, bounded entertainment. 

IV.

Contemporary fiction and social media are enantiomorphic — chiral in the viewer's minds; and, as such, uncuncurrent. For in the first case, it is demanded that the protagonist's psyches should be enough stratified in order to enshroud what passes for complexity these days; e.g., that an artificial ambiguity should be superimposed on characters otherwise plain, the more blatant the fact once washed the vapid veneer, the gloss of gross glamour. The aftermath is as uncouth as downward clumsy. I, for sure, cannot stand it.

As for the second case, the same minds that demand 'complex' characters in fiction — the so called 'grey area', in which one can be, oh!, so good and so bad, simultaneously (and be loved for it) — are, notwithstanding, oppressive in the demand that everyone should think accordingly to some infeasible political-correctness agenda that borders on the aethereal: which translates in everyone behaving as uni-dimensional as cardboard. It amounts to flesh and bone individuals being put to death socially every time they misstep from whatever the social consensus may be at any given instant — at the same time that the coryphees of moral police root for their favorite baddies in cock and bull stories. We live in a profoundly spurious society: hypocritical to a fault; darn ugly in its self-righteousness. Its shrillness only makes it worst.

V.

History shows us the terrible thing: that there is method to madness — always.

Anachronism and contemporary ideologies might invade the gaps in the train of knowledge, making a spurious path to follow: one in which Brueghelesque insanity is a sheltered label to apply to individuals whose lives we look upon through a glass darkly; but when going back on foot to thought long forgotten stations there is a chance of finding clues to what in their absence would just be perfunctory errors.

In some hundred years from now we also be weighed by harsh scales — and at that time we could only hope that some unprejudiced, unveiled intellect treats us — not condescendingly — but evenhandedly.

 VI.

I'm doubting if knowledge killed religion and pushed Western civilization to the path of scientific bliss. This may be pure historical interpretation through commonplace, an effect Arendt already warned about. Inasmuch as the hegemony of a knowledge based intellectual structure versus some religious based emotional structure, we might be seeing it all wrong, for to what extent is knowledge no more a process? In so far as we having come to terms with this process — for it is one —, it should be useful to keep in mind that in every period people thought of themselves as infinitely wiser than forerunners from past societies, which rings as a cautionary tale against the hubris of half-knowledge or, worst!, of philistinism, the crudeness of pure ignorance.

This age is plagued by all the artlessness, all the inelegances of yesterday — the worst being the kind of Halo Effect operated by dilettantes and media darlings in the semi-private, semi-public, space of virtual communication. There really seems to exist some type of maladroitness endemic to this mucoidal space we call the social network — mucoidal in the sense of being porous, like the mouth or the anus; a liminal proscenium — pregnable and retentive, both. It is in this frontispiece that we stand civilized as in a public space, but, nonetheless, as oafish as one can be when unobserved in the recesses of domiciliary space. It is in this fake frontier that we gather to conform and to feel the amniotic freedom of bashing the ones marginalized by whatever consensus society chooses to structure itself around in any given moment, since bashing, in itself, is no longer considered a civilized behaviour, except when feigned as indignation.

In this regard I don't think we live in a more enlightened age than before or that the religion of progress will take care of all our problems. The past is full of examples in which consensus got it wrong — in some cases, harrowingly so. We suffer from short-sightedness and the desire to belong to whatever the consensus might be — myopia and monomania are this age's fifth and sixth horsemen. We lost the capability of discerning right from wrong, substantial from superfluous, valuable from vapid — and the nakedness of our dispensation from it, of our withdrawal from it, signals at last the true and only exclusivity of our time. The fact that we didn't kill Hell, like we would like to think: we just made it into a kiddie-ride.

VII.

In the graveyard: a flower in the dregs... Allegory of life: we are all flowers in the dregs — blossomed for just a little and always surrounded by scree.

VIII.

Sumptuous sundown viewed from my living room window — no filter used: it's grandiose as it is. Looks painted by Turner. 

IX.

Words have power: the spoken word and the written word are vinculative, indenturing us — enslaving us — to the each other and the world in uncertain, capricious, ways. Whatever the outcome, it stems from the fact that words have precise meanings — a multitude of meanings, sometimes, but precise meanings, nonetheless. I came to believe that the most proficient and powerful danger of our time is the ignorance people have towards words. Words will continue to affect us, even if we don't know their meanings. Society take words for granted - dangerous words and dangerous meanings. This is sorcery, have no doubt about it: try telling someone a harsh word and you'll get harsh behaviour in return — that's tangible, that's real magic. So, dictionaries are grimoires, in more senses than one. The worst evil of our time is ignorance towards words: that's malfeasance, that's corruption. We live in a very corrupted atmosphere.

X. 

In a plain light the lately coined moniker 'post-horror''s only function appears to be the cajoling of audiences, but it should not escape the seasoned thinker that its raison d'être may be the insecurity in assuming that a horror film was made — a skewing of perspectives is also involved, since the notion might harbour the perception that horror is solely made from 'lewton buses' and its ilk, forgetting or ignoring that horror gave us such a variety of autheurs and experiences — from the proverbial 'lewton bus' of Jacques Tourneur, the existential dread of Carl Dreyer or David Cronenberg's visceral body horror.

It may be that only ignoramus or pressuposeurs* think in such a clumsy way about one of the styles in which the imagination is best served: horror don't have blank codes or tropes to be coloured by hacks. The nature of horror is suppression of bonds, dissolution of frontiers, total transgression. If the majority of films and books that studios, publishers and marketing number crunchers make visible to the public is utter crap, please don't blame horror: blame the fear of losing money.

Speaking of blame, If one is willing to blame, let's say, Dracula for all the vampire trash that is continuously being produced, then one must be willing as well to blame La Princesse de Clèves for all the televised sentimental hogwash in soap opera format or to blame Childhood for every single autobiographical wreck that sink in library shelves. The reductio ad absurdum of this train of thought could go on till Doomsday, so the thing to mind here is: we don't need the 'post-horror' summer name at all.

If one is cowardly enough to call it as it is, e.g. a horror movie a horror movie, that's his or her problem, but horror itself don't have anything to do with it. The prejudice on horror seasonally rears its head and there is always someone ready to be the poster boy for it. Although these cases are dismal enough, the fact that one is willing to exploit a style, in this case horror, and at the same time seeing fit to deride it it's worst than hypocrisy.

(*Not a gaffe: portmantologism.)