dissertacao part 6

In both the pictures above there is a sense of performance from the sitter. Disguised by an anthropological and ethnographical gaze, it could be argued that the Nuba’s were the object in which both photographers could engage aesthetically. The discourse they adopted for the Nubas, a community pure and immaculate by society, allowed them to engage like that. In the case of Rodger’s, the search of this subject comes from a traumatic experience. Clearly he searched in the Nubas for signs of differences, opposite from his experience in Bergen-Belsen. Rodger used popular representations of ‘racial’ difference to reduce the cultures of black people and the Nubas to Nature. The Nubas were ‘primitive’ and not ‘civilized’. So portraying these people and their community would be no more immoral than portraying an animal. The exploitation of their image became acceptable. For Riefenstahl it was a self-confessed fascination for the beautiful, reducing the objects as a representation of naturalism where Nature and Culture coincided.


Rodger, George (1949), Kordofan, Southern Sudan, A young unmarried girl of the Messakin Tiwal tribe

When Rodger shot pictures of naked people during the war, the photos were mainly composed of rotten corpses on sidewalks or dead people being thrown at some collective grave. Arguably this would represent Rodger’s way of seen the evolution of western society, that in the end led to a mass-production of death. In his Nuba’s pictures, the naked people were portrayed as sexualised and strong well-built bodies, reassembling a natural estate that contrast with his western image of a ‘civilized’ society. The picture above, the woman was reduced to her body (sexuality) and her social condition – being unmarried and pre-disposed to being sexually active with a partner. It is the Natural and scientific gaze that allows Rodger this fetishistic approach: he relates her body with the difference of ‘races’; we can see her nakedness without being guilt because at the same time the fascination for her sexuality is being induced it is being denied by the discourse of ‘otherness’, her body was read like a text to compose a racialized analysis which associates her with the Natural order rather than to the Human culture.

This creates a connection between representation and power; a photograph creates a discourse that produces a form of racialized knowledge of the ‘Other’ deeply implicated in the operations of power. This is the core concept of Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ thesis:

“Within the framework of western hegemony over the Orient there emerged a new object of knowledge – a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial and historical theses about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic and sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural personalities, national or religious character” (Said 1991: 7-8).

Said uses the same relation between knowledge and power as Foucault; the ‘primitive’, declared to be ‘different’, becomes an object of study where everything can be done under the alibi of the search of the ‘truth’. This is what Foucault called ‘regime of the truth’, under the disguise of science research, Rodger and Riefenstahl can look at, classify and dissect the Nubas, given an excuse for an unregulated voyeurism.

“Power, it seems, has to be understood here, not only in terms of economic exploitation and physical coercion, but also in broader and symbolic terms, including the power to represent someone or something in a certain way” (Hall 1997: 259).

The power to represent someone in a certain way, which Stuart Hall speaks here, is a characteristic intrinsic to the photographic enterprise. In his book Camera Lucida, Barthes argues that because every photograph is contingent and outside meaning, “it cannot signify (aim at generality) except by assuming a mask” (Barthes 2000: 34). Arguably, in every photography the mask becomes the meaning, the representation becomes the discourse. That is why the invention of photography is linked with the creation of the first anthropological society: we don’t consume photographs politically but aesthetically. This gives the possibility for those anthropological societies to use photography as a tool for an anthropological study based on biology, the stress being on observation, recording and classification. It was what Said argued as the simplification of the Orient, generating the scientifically study of culture in which it was believed that culture was biologically determinant.
So photography was important to anthropology because of its characteristic of assuming a mask: photographing reduces, naturalizes and fixes the difference. It is this game of power and knowledge, “it is always something that is represented” (Barthes 2000: 28), which constitute the material of the ethnological gaze in photography, fixing the details of a person on the difference and reducing everything about that person and that culture to that single characteristic. This ethnographical gaze ends up by stereotyping the photographic subject.

dissertacao part 5

When Riefenstahl wrote to Rodger asking him about the location of the Nuba tribe (and even offering a thousand dollars for an introduction with the wrestler), he wrote back, “knowing your background and mine I don’t really think we have much to communicate”. Riefenstahl is the author of Hitler’s documentary Triumph of the Will about Nuremberg’s 1934 rally. This film is generally recognized as a major contribution to the history of cinematography, it innovated the way of making documentaries and is an immense aesthetic accomplishment. Riefenstahl transformed an annual political rally into a larger historical and symbolic event.
The gap between Rodger and Riefenstahl’s background is not as big as the photographer claims to be. As seen before, Rodger was disturbed by the fact that when he was shooting pictures of the horrors of Bergen-Belsen he thought only about the aesthetic and composition of the image. He wanted to accomplish a beautiful image from that scene. Riefenstahl’s film is disturbing in that same aspect: “it presents as beautiful a vision of Hitler and the new Germany that is morally repugnant” (Deveraux 1992: 236). Mary Deveraux on her essay Beauty and the evil: the case of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will argues that Riefenstahl defended her film saying that her concerns in Triumph of the Will – as in all her movies – “were aesthetics, not political: that it was the cult of beauty and not the cult of the Führer, that Riefenstahl worshiped”.
Ironically, when Rodger’s pictures of the Nubas became well known, it brought those isolated tribes to the attention of the Sudanese government. The Islamic state of that government forced the Nubas into changing their life-style – making illegal their wrestling contests and forcing them to wear clothes. So when Riefenstahl pursued the Nuba’s myth created by Rodger, “progress and education” had finally reached them. But she was so fascinated and obsessed by Rodger’s photographs that she paid them to undress and to stage illegal fighting contests. Her pictures in that sense are a simulacrum of a myth.
If Rodger’s photographs are an identity construct of a post-colonial imagery, Riefenstahl’s are the staging of this identity. The interesting nature of this concept is that the end results of both photo-essays are very similar – both aesthetically and conceptually. Maybe because in the end every photograph is a type of simulacrum in the Platonian sense where the light is brought before the lens leaving a trace of the reality. Every photograph is a representation, making both photographers, Rodger and Riefenstahl, mythologists; they signified their representations from a social mask creating meaning and a sense of cultural identity to the Nubas. That is why this identity comes loaded with colonial imagery, because it was invented from a white European perspective. It could be argued that in that sense both photographers staged their pictures.




Left: Riefenstahl, Leni (1962), Kordofan, Southern Sudan, The only door in a Mekasin house-compound which reaches all the way to the ground is the main entrance. The wide top allows women with bulky loads to pass through easily.
Right: Rodger, George (1949), Kordofan, Southern Sudan, The keyhole entrance to a Nuba house in the Korongo Jebels. Doorways are shaped to allow admittance to people carrying loads of firewood of their heads

dissertacao part 4

The representation of the ‘Other’

After Bergen-Belsen Rodger decided to set out for Denmark and cover the German surrender. He was jubilant and celebrating the victory of the allied forces. He crossed the Belgian country in a Jeep with a Union Jack flag on his windscreen and when he finally arrived at the Danish border he found there, in his own words, “Cheering crowds. Flowers, wines, kisses. And my war was over” (Rodger 1994: 97). He then moved with his wife to Paris and lived there until 1948, when he decided to go to Africa. Financed by the severance pay from his work for Life magazine, Rodger set off with no plans and no commitments. From Johannesburg in South Africa he would cover a 13,000 mile journey before reaching the Equator. His journey ended in Kordofan, a place set in the heart of the Sudan and west to the White Nile, a region of difficult access because of the high mountains that surround the plains. It was there that Rodger found the Nubas tribes.
Rodger photographed every kind of animal and human during his journey, but it seems that it was in Kordofan that he would finally achieve a construction of the myth of the African man from a colonial imagery perspective. In the introduction for his photo-essay book The Village of The Nuba, Rodger said;

“The face of Africa is undergoing a change. Progress and education are reaching far into its darkest regions. (…) Government by fear and witchcraft is gradually being replaced by administrations whose characteristic tools are paper and ink (…)” (Rodger 1999: 9).

He argued, however, that there were places in Africa that remained inaccessible. It is in those regions, according to him, that one can find what he classified as the “real Africa”, the Africa untouched by western and white society. He goes on to say what this “real Africa” is:

“They are as primitive now as they were three centuries ago and their continuing existence forms a rare link with the Africa of time passed” (Rodger 1999: 12).

Since the nineteenth century, anthropological photography served to sate Europe’s interest for the exotic. Scientists and photographers went to Africa guided by firmly established scenarios of the “primitive” and the “savage”. Rodger clearly had an ideological filter when he shot his Nuba’s pictures. The “primitive” denomination that he used to describe the person who lives in these villages is a heritage of a post-colonial way of thinking. The term “primitive” is pejorative and is linked by the fact that white European colonialists considered themselves a greater culture (more advanced one) then the one which they were colonizing.

“At the heart of Modernism was a myth of history designed to justify colonialism through an idea of progress. The west, as self-appointed vanguard, was to lead the rest of the world toward a hypothetical utopian future” (McEvilley 1992: 85)

Everything that wasn’t part of this ideal of the exotic primitive African men was filtered out by Rodger in his Nuba’s pictures. The photographs from this photo-essay consisted mainly of naked black men and women exercising some kind of ritual. Arguably, Rodger would embrace and construct the myth of the Nuba’s identity, drawing special attention to the traditional wrestling rituals. The myth here refers to what Barthes would classify as a type of speech – not an object, or concept or an idea but a mode of signification – because cultural identity, gender and sexuality exist as cultural constructs, therefore the truth of identity as essential is put to question. The construction of the Nuba’s identity in that sense is ideological: Rodger as a representation of the white man seen as a sign of the norm and the Nuba black African men seen as a sign of difference “the marking of difference is thus the basis of that symbolic order which we call culture” (Hall 1997: 238).
This form of stereotype is a crude mental set meant to represent the world. It is an imaginary line between the self and the object, which becomes the ‘Other’. Stereotype in that sense is similar to the myth: the mental representation of the ‘Other’ shifts with the paradigms of our world. Emblematic to this argument is the photograph Rodger took of the champion of a korongo wrestler being carried shoulder high by the defeated fighter. The background is composed by black men holding huge spears. Everything in this picture is phallic, it is vertical and powerful and dialogs with manhood and power. This image is fetishist; it represents the exotic black man, the image of the ‘black’ savagery. It plays with the stereotypic white man ideal of the prowess of the black man. It could be argued that this man, the phallic champion, would represent the white western fantasy of the big black penis. The fact that the genitals of the champion are hidden by a black man’s face makes this notion more iconic.
Leni Riefenstahl, the former Nazi filmmaker, was so fascinated by this picture that she appended it in the back cover of her book The last of the Nuba with this caption;

“The author was so fascinated by this photograph, taken by the famous English photographer George Rodger, that for years she tried to find the Nuba in order to study the life of this primitive people” (Riefenstahl 1995: 208).

It is interesting that her interest in photographing the Nubas started not from a cultural interest but rather from this Rodger’s photograph. As argued by Kobena Mercer, “In this sense her anthropological alibi for an ethnographic voyerims is nothing more than the secondary elaboration, and rationalization, of the primal wish to see this lost image again and again” (Mercer 1994: 187).

dissertacao part 3

In any area of photography it is hard to avoid the influence of the aesthetic composition derived from the bourgeoisie paintings that preceded the photographic medium. War paintings specifically, where even the dead bodies serve to help the composition elements of the battle.

“Apart from some Goya pictures, there isn't a painting about war, before the invention of photography, that doesn't glorify it” (Verissimo, 2008).

What photography did is change the perception of war, it brought the dirt and the rotten corpses into the equation: it gave colour, proportion and horror to the notion of war but, conflictive as it is, coded within the bourgeoisie aesthetics. It was from that ironic element, the mix of horrors and misery of a Nazi concentration camp with a bourgeoisie aesthetic, that Rodger changed his conception of his photographic practice.

“It wasn't even a matter of what I was photographing, as what had happened to me in the process. When I discovered that I could look at the horror of Belsen – 4,000 dead and starving lying around – and think only of a nice photographic composition, I knew something had happened to me and it had to stop. I felt I was like the people running the camp – it didn't mean a thing” (Hill and Cooper, 2005: 53).

Rodger photographed the people that used to run the camp while they were waiting for trial for war crimes. Arguably, the most interesting images are a series of portraits of the camp supervisors: it consists of six pictures, each one of them with a different young woman between 20 and 25 years old. They are removed from the background, which is out of focus. This was a very intriguing choice made by Rodger: by detaching those women from any context the subject is isolated from any meaning outside their bodies. That highlights the focus on the analysis of the social mask and causes the viewer’s gaze to be initially seduced by a young dynamic-looking woman. This whole process makes this picture much more horrific: because Rodger doesn’t give any clues in the image about the narrative of events, the reading of the picture becomes more shocking and surprising when the viewer reads the caption with the real context of these women.


Rodger, George (1945), Camp Superintendent, Annalese Kholmann, Belsen

It could be argued that an analogy with the photographic process could be made from the series of pictures that Rodger took of the camp supervisors. On those pictures the “face of evil” is surprising not for being the stereotypical rude, cruel, dirty, sadistic men with some kind of disorder but quite the opposite. The camp supervisors were composed of young girls in their late twenties, and if it were not for the caption explaining their previous status in the concentration camps, it would be hard to guess that they participated in one of the biggest mass genocides of modern history. The girls are apparently untroubled and untouched by the acts they had perpetrated during their work in the camp as if they were not guilty for what happened there. They were machines, obeying orders, only an engine to be commanded by someone else. However, even alleging they were just following command, they were witnesses of that process.
The detached approach from which Rodger decided to deal with these subjects is metalinguistic with the notion of obeying orders: the subjects are outside their context and the focus is on the body and the social mask of the individual. Their personality is presented in the manner of their normal social context (young, dynamic, naïve). It detaches the individual from their action: the most important feature is not a narrative of events but rather a narrative of the body. In these portraits, these women are obeying a function inside a social environment. It is a metaphor for the whole basis for the defence against allegations of war crimes: they were only complying with demands from their superiors (they were detached from any decisions or context that could make them guilty).
There are two contradictory elements in this notion of not being guilty because they were following orders: the rules of engagement from the command chain of the army and the personality of the individual. They are impartial because they have to follow orders but at the same time they are individuals who witness their own realities. Photography acts in the same way, it is objective and impartial because it traces the reality via a machine but at the same time there is a point of view from the person operating the camera. Arguably Rodger felt like those women, he was part of a machine as a witness to the reality just there to take a picture, to convey a function.
Clearly Rodger encountered a problem engaging with this type of subject. As Susan Sontag explains in her book “On Photography”, in that period European photography was guided by notions of the picturesque, the important and the beautiful, always praising or aiming at neutrality. Photography was not an argument, but a fact witnessed by the eye, a memento traced by light onto the film. Influenced by those notions, Rodger encountered a moral dilemma at Bergen-Belsen, because photography not only is the objective recording but a personal testimony as well. However, by the same premise, he shifted his photographic gaze to a picturesque society, a foreign culture in which he could work impartially and where he could explore photography under a basic social engagement; he went to Africa. Rodger made a conscious decision to change his gaze and body of work to a purer society as a reaction to the dilemma of the Bergen-Belsen experience. That is the premise of Rodger's shift. He found on the Nubas a subject worth being admired for, but he would approach it in the same way he did at the concentration camp: detached, distanced and impartial. His subjects changed, but did the complex contradictory elements that he found during his experiences of war photography change with them?

dissertacao part 2

Walking nonchalant on a road of death

It could be argued that what made Rodger’s name as a recognizable photographer was, in part, due to the World War II pictures he took, especially those at the concentration camps in Bergen-Belsen. Rodger was the only British freelancer to travel to various battlegrounds covering the wars for the American Life magazine. In 1940 he covered the Blitz when the Germans finally attacked Britain. He then was sent to Africa and stayed for two years reporting the combats in that area. In 1944 Rodger followed the armies on to the liberation of Paris. After that, he pressed to Belgium until a he came across a small village called Belsen where he photographed the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Those are shocking and horrible pictures, and despite having photographed dead people during his trips around Africa and Europe, the experience at that concentration camp in Belgium would have an enormous impact on Rodger.

“Under the pine trees the scattered dead were lying not in their twos or threes or dozens, but in thousands. The living tore ragged clothing from the corpse to build fires, over which they boiled pine needles and roots for soup. Little children rested their heads against the stinking corpse of their mothers, too nearly dead themselves to cry” (Rodger, 1994: 96).

One of the most emblematic pictures of that event shows a child walking on a road unaware of the bodies in an advanced state of decomposition sidelined on the pavement. His face looks in the opposite direction of the corpses, as if in some way he is trying to ignore the human degradation that he has to live with every day. Everyday life, the trees and an innocent child walking becomes highlighted by the image composition of this road of death. This photograph is dispassionate and bucolic, bringing the disturbing aesthetics of normal life to the foreground? in a small village surrounded by the horrors of war. Those trees, the road, the boy and all other bucolic aspects are distressed by the corpses on the floor. Arguably, one of the reasons for which there is a constant demand for shocking elements in war pictures is the factor that these pictures help sell papers.

“The hunt for more dramatic (as they’re often described) images drives the photographic enterprise, and is part of the normality of a culture in which shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source of value” (Sontag 2004: 20).

This photograph accomplishes that because it grabs the attention of the viewer for its juxtaposition of a calm boy walking among a road full of rotten corpses. It is the undisturbed expression of the boy that is so shocking. The fact that in the caption is stated that this boy is Jewish makes this more horrific: the notion that he could have been among those dead bodies, or that his parents probably are.
Rodger, George (1956), Dutch Jewish boy walks through the camp, Belsen

Would it be possible to describe this scene with words and cause the same emotions as this picture? It is the juxtaposition of the nonchalant boy with the aligned corpses, the normal with the insane, and the notion that the photograph is the exact reproduction of a moment in time that redefines the memento value of this image and summons an abominable reality that cannot be described by words with such effect. This picture not only is a record of a moment in history but it also can be used to define that moment.
Its brutality and shock value are contrasted by the beautiful and pastoral scenario that merges all the components of the picture together, resulting in a very plastic, odd composition as a result of the competent craft of Rodger’s photography. Its nature is disquieting because the events that lead to this image are disquieting; our own knowledge of events that brought the holocaust. This photograph is evil and seductive, and for that characteristic is corruptive – it brings aesthetic accomplishment with a documentary of chaos, horror and madness on its most degenerate form.

“Photographs can and do distress. But the aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by neutralizing it” (Sontag 2002: 109).

dissertacao part 1

George Rodger: haunted by the light

“Poverty is no more surreal than wealth; a body clad in filthy rags is not more surreal than a principessa dressed for a ball or a pristine nude. What is surreal is the distance imposed, and bridged, by the photography: the social distance in time. Seen from the middle-class perspective of photography, celebrities are as intriguing as pariahs. Photographers need not have an ironic, intelligent attitude toward their stereotyped material. Pious, respectful fascination may do just as well, especially with the most conventional subjects”. (Sontag, 1979: 58)

In the reception of the University College for the Creative Arts in Maidstone there is an original print of Rodger’s champion of Korongo Nuba wrestling carried shoulder high. What does it mean for an institution to exhibit that picture to represent the University? This image is loaded with meaning and discourse of a problematic subject: the post-colonial imaginary of the African continent. In this essay I will discuss one photographer, George Rodger, that made a conscious decision to shift his subjective gaze from a body of work which recorded the horror and violence of war to the African continent ideal of ‘otherness’.

“Primitive it is true, but so much more hospitable, chivalrous and gracious than many of us that live in the 'dark continents' outside Africa” (Rodger, 1999: 112)

The reason Rodger changed his gaze to the Nuba tribe is partly due to the end of war. However it could be argued that the reason why he chose to undergo an anthropological trip to one of the most isolated tribes of Africa is that after his experience of the worst horrors that Western civilisation can produce during the second world war, the photographer searched for what he believed was, as he said in an interview, the “idyllic existence that you are so amazed to find” (Hill and Cooper, 2005: 62). I will textually analyse through Rodger’s images how this shift represents his ideal of ‘self’ and ‘other’, western society and oriental society, civilized people and primitive people; and how his photography approach changed between this two subjects.

A historia do Joao parte 7

Agora Joao tinha uma mae, pois todos temos mae. As vezes se nasce sem pai, outras o pai eh outro. De vez em quando o pai vai embora. Mas a mae fica. Vem do ventre, uma existencia simbiotica a outra; nao, simbiotica nao, parasital mesmo. A mae nao tem como fugir, desde cedo o filho a rouba a nutricao e saude: pois se ha a existencia do filho, eh por causa da gestacao da mae.

Pois quando disserem a mae de Joao que seu filho morrera na cruz, ela nao acreditou. Todos a aconselheram a vestir preto, a fazer luto, orar pela alma de Joao. Ela achava bobagem e dizia: "meu filho vai bem, cuide do seu". Ateh o pai havia se conformado, e ficava preocupado com a situacao de sua esposa: "ficou louca depois de velha".

A mae Nao acreditava naquela besteira de que Deus o levara, de que estaria morto mesmo que vivo. "Sua alma nao estah entre nos, aquilo eh soh uma casca vazia", diziam mas a mae nao acreditava, conhecia bem ao seu filho, e ninguem a podia enganar. "O Pai Supremo", como chamavam deus naquela sociedade, "sabe o que faz". "Pro inferno com o Pai", respondia, "eu sou a mae e sei melhor".

De fato naquela sociedade Deus representava a morte, o castigo e a danaçao. Deus via tudo, Deus sabia de tudo. Se a Deus nao respeitassem, era a morte. Se a Deus nao orassem, era a morte. Deus era a luz e a noite. Deus era o homem, era o pai. Jah a naturesa representa a vida, a flor que brota, a comida que nasce. Temos uma relacao simbiotica com a natureza; as vezes parasital. A natureza eh a mae, e a mae eh a vida.

Um belo dia os homens da igreja levaram a mae de Joao e a sentenciaram a morte. Era uma herege, vejam bem. No dia da execussao, quando lhe cortaram a cabeca, a mae chorou, e muito. Nao porque ia morrer, porque todos morrem, mais cedo ou mais tarde. Deus mata. Nem pela vergonha da excomunhao publica, jah nao ligava mais pra isso. Chorou por ser mulher, e por tantas vezes nesse mundo em que a vida chora.

A historia do Joao parte 6

Quando nasceu, ela teve de empurar o mundo com a cabeca, combater todas as possibilidades que a negavam a existencia. Joao, sentado a sombra de sua arvore, um dia reparou aquele pequeno brotinho que lutava pela vida, e resolveu batiza-la de Tatiana.

Por muito tempo Joao teve Tatiana por compania. Eles conversavam sobre a vida, riam sobre a verdade universal, sentiam frio e calor juntos. Joao acompanhou todas as fases de crescimento de Tatiana: o dia em que nasceu sua primeira folha, a consolou quando teve espinhos durante a adolescencia, aguentou sua ansiedade quando estava para brotar.

Um dos momentos mais felizes da vida coletiva de joao e a flor foi quando Tatiana se abriu. O dia era lindo: estranhamente fazia um lindo sol com um chuva fina e constante. As petalas de Tatiana brilhavam com o orvalho da manha, seu perfume acalmava Joao e o mundo era lindo e perfeito. Joao cantou, como nao fazia desde que tinha morrido, e fechou os olhos e sonhou que voava entre as estrelas.

Ao acordar, Tatiana estava morta. Suas folhas muchas, o caule inclinado. Joao gritava por ela, mas jah nao podia responder mais. Joao, de joelhos com o rosto inclinado postado ao lugar que Tatiana sempre ficara, pos-se, lentamente, depois de uma longa pausa, a chorar. Suas lagrimas iam escorremdo o rosto e molhavam Tatiana e a terra em volta de Tatiana. Nao sei por quanto tempo Joao chorou, mas foi o bastante para que com o sal de suas lagrimas nada mais pudesse nascer, crescer e morrer naquele lugar.

A historia de Joao parte 5

Agora o mundo gira. Nisso nao ha duvida, mas eh claro que muita gente duvida. Mas eu repito, nao importa o que aconteca, com ou sem Joao, com ou sem ninguem, o mundo gira, e nao a nada que se possa fazer sobre isso.

Mas a pergunta fica: se nao ha ninguem para ver que o mundo girou, o mundo realmente girou? Se nao ha ninguem para presenciar a existencia, sera que ela realmente existe? Um som eh som sem ninguem para ouvi-lo? Ora, o som se faz na presenca de um receptor, e o mundo soh passou a ser mundo a partir de quando alguem passou a reconhecer o mundo como o mundo. E o mundo, assim, girou.

Pois Joao via o mundo girar, e o mundo girava. Entre dia e noite, verao e inverno, Joao reconhecia sua propria existencia meramente pelo falo que ele reconhecia que o mundo girava. Vejam, isso eh um fato importante: tinha dias que ateh mesmo Joao duvidava que estava vivo. De vez em quando pensava: "Sera que nao estou mesmo morto como todo o mundo pensa que estou e soh eu estou errado?". Mas entao Joao via o mundo girar, e isso o tranquilizava. Pois veja voce: o mundo nao gira para os mortos, ele para no exato momento de seu ultimo suspiro.

A historia de Joao parte 4

Joao calejou. Um paria, um fantasma. Esquecido, nem gente nem bixo. Invisivel. Teve dias que preferia ter morrido, pois aos mortos sempre lembravam. O que era pior, quando alguem passava a sua frente, fingia nao ve-lo. Aos poucos Joao se tornava um recluso e soh saia debaixo da sombra de sua arvore para comer. Do alto de seu morro via a cidade se movimentar como uma peca de relogio aberta, seus habitantes comprindo funcao exata e sistematica para o funcionamento da maquina, e o tempo passava. Joao contemplava o ceu e o universo. Sua mente viajava entre as estrelas e o infinnito. Comecou a ter uma nocao melhor das coisas, do significado da vida.

Em um belo dia, quando olhava uma formiga que carregava um pedaco de folha para sua rainha, um estalo lhe veio: finalmente compreendera. O que? Ora, tudo. Entendera tudo. Comecou como ideia, depois virou verdade e por fim certeza. Joao riu. Melhor: gargalhou. Nao que achava aquilo engracado, nem tampouco gozava da verdade universal. Joao riu nao porque a verdade era bananal, mas sim porque era obvia.