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IN MEMORIAM Philadelpho Menezes (1960 - 2000)
Despite
his youth, Philadelpho Menezes held a respectable post in Sao Paolo’s
university background: he was professor of Semeiotic in the Comunication
Department of the Catholic Pontifical University; and two years ago
he had entered the Sao Marcos University, also in Sao Paulo.
At the begginning of the last decade, he very successfully assumed
the direction of the publishing house of his university department,
the EDUC. I remember being said, in the university corridors, that
more books had been published under his direction than during all
its previous years of existence. Besides, he had founded the very
interesting Visual and Sound Poetry Archives, which included an optimum
section of Videopoetry, with very well selected important acquisitions.
Not to mention its Experimentation Lab, fully equipped with all the
necessary means to carry out the most complete work about the voice
in its multimedial development.
It seemed his success would be unlimited; joking, I used to tell him
he would soon become rector. In fact, he had no rival capable of keeping
up his pace.
He had even managed to find the time for the creation of his own publishing
house, Experimento, which at that moment counted with great quality
books, of authors like Mario Costa or Lúcia Santaela.
I had known him since the late nineteen eighties, when, for a whole
year, we had lived within a hundred metres of distance. It was then
that we became truly great friends (brothers?), and we established
an iron pact of action, or better, of interaction. In fact, in the
course of that decade, a solid companionship made of concise interchanges
between Bolonia and Sao Paulo had been created; a factory of projects
and ideas, last of whose has been the magazine "Brasilitalia",
which can be found in my web page. And one should not forget about
the festivals I organised within Bolonia’s DAMS, which had an
immediate echo in the international meetings he used to organize in
the Sao Paulo’s region.
As regards the critic work, he linked up a series of texts which would
make an unfallible impact: "Poética e Visualidade"
(1991), result of the doctorate he took in Italy, in a period I very
well recall because, living practically in symbiosis, the world in
which I myself moved very quickly became his own world; later on,
"A Crise do Pasado" (1994), and up to the most recent one,
"Poesia Concreta e Visual", published by the famous Editora
Ática. But the text to which both him and I were more attached
was "Poesia Sonora", collected essays published in 1992.
We can, no doubt about, consider that year the official date of arrival
of the sound poetry in Brasil. This was an idea that I had always
tried to encourage, because the concretists having left the way free,
this was a virgin land in the strict sense of sound experimentation.
It was certainly controversial, as it had to. And, what is more, I
want to recall here what was probably his last battle.
There was in him an obvious contrast between what he really was and
what he felt he was, and this can be sensed glancing through an exchange
of articles with a pamphleteer from the Brasilian magazine "Cult".
In the course of the last year, as I have mentioned before, he had
published a very well documented research about visual and concrete
poetry with Atica, a renowned powerful publishing house. This fact
was in itself an undeniable success, and it might have been the reason
why the faction which had always hindered him, the historical hard
core of the concretists, had paid -to put it that way-a crummy murderer-writer
to attack the unexperienced, brilliant and sharp (despite his youth)
university professor. When I now have reread his answer, I have been
immediately stricken by the colour reproduction of a visual poem of
his from 1993: the image, from "Playboy", depicts a female
boxer (naked breasts, gloves, aggressive glance outlined by the leather
of her protection helmet) sitting in the corner of the ring, dying
to go back to the fight; and the written legend says, "art is
the place where man looks for spiritual peace". That is it: a
fighter with the inborn sense of the fight, while the text, instead
of questioning the miserable, pathetic, vacuous reasons of the attack,
purely gratuitous, describes an episode he had lived not long before.
Those who are familiar with Sao Paulo know that, whenever waiting
at traffic lights junctions, it is wise to keep car windows closed,
to avoid unpleasant surprises. That is exactly what his text tells
us about. While waiting at a junction, he had been assaulted by a
young thief. But, what he found most disturbing was the fact that,
of the so many cars stopped by the lights, the bandit had gone straight
towards his, without the slightest hesitation, and had pointed the
barrel of the gun against him, asking for his money and his watch.
In that situation, he was at once surprised to see the absolute indifference
of the rest of drivers and passangers, safely kept inside their cars.
Afterwards, noticing that the cars themselves formed a wall which
in fact protected the thiefs’ moves, allowing him to act without
being neither disturbed nor found guilty, he calls them "blind
motorists". The moral of this fable: the young thief is the salaried
pamphleteer; the motorists, the protective mandatory concretist accomplices;
himself, the chosen victim.
He was also an excellent visual poet: let us recall, at least, his
picture of a calculator dial, which instead of figures displays the
word "poetry". He had already created several visual poems.
He soon abandoned the written page, although as a translator he will
remain memorable for his work about Quasímodo’s poetry,
and particularly for an extremely original version of "La carne,
la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica", de Mario
Praz. Plunged into the oral world, he immediately produced a CD which
became a historical feat for Brasil: "Poesia Sonora" (1996),
followed by "Sound Poetry Today" (1998); until, with the
CDRom "Interpoesia" (2000), produced with the faithful friend
Wilton Azevedo, he shifted to hipermedia.
As regards his performances -for it has to be mentioned that he had
also developped this field of research--, I have always liked the
act where he read the world’s literary classics skipping, by
turns, one vowel. This used to have a hilarious effect among the audience,
and hilarity increased as soon as he started nibbling peanuts, and
kept on reading and munching, stopping for a second to have a sip
from a tin of Coke, and he read on, chewing words, minced syllables,
bits of phonemes, looking for oral and phonic distortions of altered
meanings. Intellligent scratches at literary classicism: a sympton,
once again, of pure and simple experimentation.
When I come to think about it, I conclude that the best of his performances
was the one I saw last December, just before Christmas, at Guarda
(North of Portugal), on occassion of the festival "Correntes
de Ar". For practical purposes, this was also last time I saw
him. That evening, at the auditorium of the Council Theatre, he did
a very suggestive piece called "Luz": in the most absolute
darkness, he pointed towards the audience with a little torch, a point
of light not too dazzling, and with quick gestures he started drawing
the word "light", while at the same time he developped a
pattern of phonetic "noisinism"(sorollisme) around the word
itself. He was doing what I love so much, Polipoetry, whereon the
voice of the sound poet, always lider, interacts with the body, and
even more so, it devents body and becomes image. In other instances,
the same effect had been attained with the help of the video image,
as in that piece, "Focali", where the white outline of the
vowels optically distorted by an unusual use of fire was phonetically
propped by long, lamenting, obssessive repetitions, voiced matches
of daring vowel distortions.
He was an untiring, inexhaustible, happenning designer. The latest
he had conceived was to be held this last August 2000: The First Sound
Poetry International Series, a tour of performances, conferences,
seminars, debates and televisions broadcastings in four Brasilian
cities, Sao Paolo, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro and Maceió.
I carried on this tour with death in my heart, to commemorate a great
poet, a great scholar, an irreplaceable friend (brother?). Because
the dream was prematurely broken on the evening of the 23rd July when,
driving his car, he ran into a truck. Near Rio.
Only a miracle saved his wife and daughters, who stood uninjured.
Now dearest Phila rests in a typical, quite pretty garden-graveyard,
in the residential town of Morumbí, very near its homonimous
football pitch, where we used to spend fear wheathered Sundays. You
can notice he lies there, underground, just because in the midst of
the general green there is this lump of reddish earth. As we had agreed,
I have brought him a copy of my last book, with the inscription: "To
me it is as if you were still alive; you have to know that whatever
I do, wherever I go, you will always be with me".
ENZO
MINARELLI
13th september 2000
menezes
and minarelli in sao paulo, 1998
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