Physics and poetry
Carlos Norton’s Notebooks of European Contemporary Movement are able to save my assessments from the boring physics lessons of yesteryear. After all, there can be poetry in universal laws, especially when we assume them to be absurd dogmas!
It’s my task to introduce another of Norton’s magnificent sound, visual and literary exercises and I’ll try to do so by reproducing the wandering tone with which I travelled through his texts, images and sounds, which, by the way, corresponds to Movement 11, concerning the Dogma of the Wandering Movement.
As a rule, the sounds of Carlos Norton transport me to the warm Algarve. Even his voice on top of the roof, on one of the occasions when we agreed what these Movement essays would be, it immediately took me to the breadth of the Algarve horizon. Monchique. Movement 18, by the way, the Dogma of the Imaginative Intellectual Movement, since what I know of Monchique is nothing, a quick drive inland, thinking about the movement of the sea. The sea! Which I classify, without hesitation, in the Dogma of Momentary Contemplative Movement. I close my eyes and let myself be led by the waves. Ears submerged: sound of water. I think I hear my breathing: air in, the wave rises; air out, the wave falls. Body on the sand: the cadence of the water, already out of me, hitting the beach (action, reaction?) and the sounds that pass by, non-stop, voices, footsteps, laughter. The sun on a plate. I can see the transparency of the veins in my eyelids. Absence.
The transience of life on trains. It smells like oil. It arrives, it leaves. “Things that were left unsaid for a long time”, as sung by Milton (1972). The smell of oil on the tracks, the iron machine. There were times when I was traveling by train and it seemed to me that I was standing still, while the landscape flowed by. I just stood still, letting time work out its reasons. Introspective Intellectual Movement? I happened to meet Carlos Norton in the heat of July, in a bakery that is a biweekly observational post. Norton is talking about his bursting creative life and I am distracted from my ritual of observation, moving, for a moment and possibly to the status of being observed. In this patisserie, there are all sorts of pendulum movements (Dogma of Linear Chaotic Movement), which the girls who take care of the space absorb and record. M. asks for a Licor Beirão and a coffee to stand the heat and the old lady I see in the bathroom with her pants down tells me not to bother, to wash my hands while she gets ready [to leave]. Porto.
I really want to mention the boats, which also come to the call in this essay. Going out on my feet and returning to the pier, “I have the path I’ve always wanted”: Milton, once again (1972). And this coming and going can generate Kinetic Transboundary Movements of approaching and distancing. The boat, the train, public transport, they free us from our need for action. There is nothing to do but be guided to a destination, even if we chose it ourselves.
I think about how much of all of us is made up of Non-existent Movements, which sometimes cause us fatigue and so many other welcoming certainties. If it goes well, childhood is a sum of non-existent movements, which we don’t question, except when they disappear. People, I mean. And the imaginary places that we reinvent continuously.
I can’t forget the Dogma of the Creative Intellectual Movement and, in particular, the Library. The physical immobility of the hundreds of books standing on shelves produces an effect that is both calming and exciting. “We can love them from tactile love” (Veloso, 1997). Books exist to unsettle us. Standing on the beach (for example), reading, we jump into another universe. And I’ve just invented another Absurd Dogma, that of Transcendent Movement. The books that pass from bookshelves to hands (urgent, curious, distressed) fulfill the myth of Babel and, more prosaically, perpetuate the recording movement of Zenodotus, who tried to ensure that books were not tidy enigmas, but portals of access to knowledge. Speaking of movement, I’ll mention an exercise I do from time to time: observing feet in a crowd. We don’t see bodies, we don’t see expressions, we have no clue about those lives. We are only guided by the visual signs of feet: hurried, comfortable, resting the sole of the foot on the ground, bouncing, in pain, healthy.
I close with Perfect Days, by Wim Wenders (2023), and the pendulum movements of a character whose mission was to capture the unnoticeable oscillations of the trees. Is everything always the same, even if it’s random, or is there a revelation asking to be discovered?
Sorry, I forgot to mention my favorite: Divergent Pedestrian Movement. But I ask the author’s permission to move this Absurd Dogma from the place of Game Boy to that of vanishing point. What a habit for practicing the opposite. I’ll illustrate: not setting foot outside the house on Sunday afternoons or doing so only at the end of the day, in the opposite direction to the return from leisure; preferring side streets, which hide secrets; feeling the remnants of commuting, when all that’s left are the pigeons scouring the ground.
Text: Teresa Lima (CECS/University of Minho)
Photograph: Carlos Norton
Published in 15/11/2024
References
Borges, L., & Nascimento, M. (1972). O Trem Azul. EMI Records Brasil Ltda. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b7xEYhOJQ4
Nascimento, M. (1972). Cais. EMI Records Brasil Ltda. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtZVQGa9eDw
Veloso, C. (1997). Livros. Universal Music Ltda. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkPozzLSrsM
Wenders, W. (Director). (2023). Perfect Days [Drama]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzZBbX5A1FA