Roller Coaster Diaries

Cover Designers

Jeferson Barbosa de Freitas

and

Samuel Duarte Marini

Preface

Maria Alice Paes

Proofreading

João Rosa de Castro

Translation

João Rosa de Castro

To Aurora.

[...]

So we shall be companions,

By uniting our loneliness.

I would lend to you my eyes that would invade

And you would lend to me your anger for my dive,

And we would satiate ourselves like in heat and pure sex,

Like in an escape to an eternal future,

Like a wedding until north would separate us,

Until death would tie us down,

Until the world would understand us and shelter us;

[...]

(From the poem Maritime, by Léo de Carvalho)

Preface

Finally, the Diary Book, where we find the author’s everyday life, his particularities and reflections that colours the happenings of his daily life.

What to say about this writing that many times seems to be unreal for the reader, but that in João Rosa de Castro’s experience appears to have much meaning?

The reader is not up to decipher the enigmas nor understand them, but enjoy the words of the writer’s intimacy that lead us to seversal situations lived by him and that he wished to share. Like the writing in which he reveals to be the best hour, the best day, the best month and the best year of his life, or when he discusses the matter drugs based on the discussion held by Maria Rita Kehl in the Philosophical Café, or even the confession that he doesn’t know how to console when the matter is death, when he knew of the death of the dog of his Januário’s muse.

At last, getting into this book means allowing to open oneself to the perceptions, reflections of its author and enjoy his words.

Maria Alice Paes

Everything that happens to us is good,

And what we do of what happens to us is much better.

Reencarnados, Schopenhauer Family 16, 120.

I need a space to write freely, even that it’s on the computer or even by hand. It’s usual that I have something to say, but I don’t want to versify it. I just want to say it in a space without commitment with anything. Nothing previous, nor further. Some passage of my small story that doesn’t connect to anything. It wouldn’t be such a serious diary, that, perhaps, would force me to write on a daily basis. Nor anything of metre, correctness, no review or systematisation. A channel that allows me saying things for the pleasure of saying. As if I talked before the looking glass.

Now I hear the philosophical café on TV Cultura. I like André Martins. There had been weeks that the two interpreters, Maria Helena Guerra and Carlos Byngton, spoke largely about the chosen films. I don’t like cinema as much it would be expected me to like. But the interpretation of both psychoanalysts is, at least, interesting. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I’m not quite certain, my life doesn’t fit into such interpretations. They speak of love, of passion of love, of relationships and it seems to me that this doesn’t matter to me anymore. Now, more than ever, I’m mostly bound to the ways in which I will stand my loneliness. But I was saying. André speaks. It’s so interesting the way he gets lost in speech. He stutters, makes mistake in the structures of Portuguese, twists – but says. He says much more than Luiz Felipe Pondé, who makes no mistake in syntax, but he’s an idiot. How come saying! Saying that God doesn’t die?! No! Long life to André! But it’s so funny. He often speaks of good and evil. The best and the worst. It seems he still speaks to people who are under good and evil: at last, the civilized world needs that. We, the clandestines per excellence, don’t attain anymore with these good and bad things. We’re so connected to things mostly as they are, that it would be an absurd to limit them to good or bad things. Or let’s see, good means white, clean, pure and bad means what is not white, nor clean nor pure. If things are so, we make no distinction, we like both what is white and what is not. It seems to us that what’s not white may also be great. Oh. Oh, my lord. Now he speaks of limits. He says we find evil as we enjoy good. That’s not fair. I love good and evil. It sounds like that song by Nando Reis, that says: I admire what is not worthy, I enslave whom I love, I don’t understand, I bring the rubish inside.. My limits are more delayed by my desire. The moral control is a repression of desire. But then. Finally. Now he’s said everything he could in the café tonight. I put Björk to play. A new CD of hers: Volta. That is, new to me, because I bought it a few days ago. I love it. I’m enjoying it. Long life to Björk! But above her a dreadful silence lays down. The silence of the thieves.

It had been too long since I had read the printed paper. So taken by the cybernetic space, I would only read some news or other by the Internet. But today, I bought the Vasto Interior. I browsed it, I cherrypicked what to read and what I read, I read with gloves. An absurd! An aplomb! How come a person, in a Helen day, can read 240 pages of a newspaper? How could I let to talk to Chiquinha? Change a good Helen day talk to keep reading the paper? Only in the head of Vasto Interior! Even if I lived alone. If that was the case, I would call Chiquinha, Núbia, Matheus, causin Larissa, cousin Ampliato, etc. The Helen day was made for the family living together. There no getting around of anyone! Living! Living together! Joy! Helen day is Helen day! But I didn’t fail to read João, nor Verissimo. They are actually relatives to everyone. They both write on the Helen day. It’s worth reading them. I had read in Dangling Man that Joseph read the full paper and still returned to reread the comics. How come? All the writers create characters that are more stupid than themselves. I doubt that Bellow would do it! When the character is higher than the author, it’s because the author is Shakespeare. But I, inspired in Joseph, resolved to purchase the newspaper today. Because the newspaper represents the world, and I was fully out of the world. I felt less negligible, after browsing the pages of the world. Obama! This is the world today. The world today is Obama and Obama today is the world. 

I played again the track Wanderlust of the Björk’s CD. And it’s great! I’ve heard this track a million times and I never get enough. Perhaps because I also have this wanderlust to conquest the world, but I feel stuck to this city that corrodes me and builds me at the same time. At last, I was speaking of Obama. Of the paper, of the world. I feel that the true black race today is happier; I, for instance, feel very well. I’m a son of slavery and miscegenation. They say officially that I’m white, but I feel black enough to make the world yellow. For I think badly although I act well. Black man was born to act. That’s why I consider Obama’s victory a victory of the active humanity. I feel the same discomfort when I see a white man dancing that I feel when I see a black man thinking. Only art itself to explain this inversion of roles. Art and what it brings below it: technique. Black hands, today, undertake nature with a hundred times more authority than the hands of other races. And they undertake the drums with more naturality. They worship ancestry like no other race. There’s sensuality and joy in their cults; there are less pain in a black chest. The world speaks of religion... The papers too. I was thinking that rastafarianism was structured in Chistianism. Finally, as well as wine, marijuana is also too Christian an element. Long life to Dionysus! Long life to Xangô! They don’t understand me. But how can someone out of himself or herself make a cult worthy? And if a person doesn’t become out of himself or herself after drinking wine or smoking a joint – why not drinking water or even why not simply smoke tobacco, cigar, pipe, etc.? I had told Matheus: there’s a crisis in the demand. A crisis in the search. The offer is always right in the country of the primacy of work. Thus, I justified the drugdealers, whose sole mistake is undertake the nature to manufacture the drugs... As for the rest, for me they would be all freed. And would be all free, occupied with their important distribution. Offer is offer. Offer is not discussed, especially when it forecasts a demand: and the demand is a fact, while the offer is only a hypothesis, to be or not confirmed with the demand. Therefore, I convict the users. A hundred times more guilty are the pseudoinnocent users. I believe the use of drugs is related to the fear of loneliness. As well as the tatoo and the piercing, the soap-operas, etc., the use of drugs maintain commerce with the will to be together. Will to belong. Will to be popular. Will to equality, liberty, fraternity [lol]. It’s the new French Revolution, that in the place of kings has put parentes in big trouble. A herd spirit. A pseudoliberty concerning the world, and, especially, concerning oneself, since the very psychic apparatus punishes and isolates. Thus, it’s important that culture becomes transformed, that the expectations don’t become tormentors of anyone. The excess of intelligence, the excess of consumption, the excess of desire of respect, glory, love. Excess of passion of love. A too Christian world, for it doesn’t obey the law, no law – and lives in the grace. It finds grace in everything, is always laughing in vain, eats excrements and fucks once a year, like hyenas. A world of hyenas, that’s what everyday we want to become.

Now I was talking to Chiquinha. I was telling her that I desired the death of all the TV owners, but the State. She said I should refrain from feeling so. I said I deserved to have my say in my defense. It’s an absurd that I’m in my bedroom and suddenly I hear the voice of such invaders. I hate Abravanel for longer than many started loving him. And to be patent how everything becomes linked, people from TV contribute for the getting around of many people who start using drugs. It’s an absurd that so many people get together in such audiences like those of Abravanel, Jô Soares, Nico, Luciana Gimenez and many etceteras. The subterfuge of many people who see in these names the denial of humanity is to use drugs – whether because they wished they were there in their places and cannot, because they wanted to be there being interviewed by them and they cannot, or because they wanted to be in the audience playing hyenas, and they cannot. That is to say, television is the precursor of all of our mismatches. Although I don’t use drug either, I close the door of my bedroom and read a good book and listen to a good music. A white book and a music also white or a black book and a music also black. And I think of the architecture of my own house. Damn! A winter garden. In the future, I will receive my friends in my winter garden. My sleep is almost coming. The people of the house have already gone to bed. And I’m hitting the keyboard. Making the boring noise for the ears of those who sleep. Perhaps this little noise interferes with their dreams. I can’t hear them snore – they only sleep. I remain here smoking and imagining odd things I could dream of. I don’t want to dream. I mean, I want to dream. But I don’t want to remember what I dream nor do I want to dream that I’m being hurt or outraged to get to the morning and forget about everything. Now I ask my father that he gives me a normal night and guide me through a normal week. What I cannot is writing anymore; because the night exists for us to sleep. So that I shall get some sleep.

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Reencarnados, Schopenhouer Family 17, 120.

I have just woken up. Energetig. I mean, without sleep. It had been a good idea not to work in the weekend. And this week will be short. We’ll have a holyday on the 20: Black consciousness. I don’t remember my dream. Or rather, I dreamt of my first girlfriend and a dead friend of mine. We said things in the cinema. It seems that we faught, shouted with each other. An incomplete dream. Now I have two works to carry on: the two last files of the magazine and a legal document. I’ve already decided that I will start by the magazine. An unfriendly subject that adresses researches made with patients in hospitals across the country. I don’t understand how they approved of my English for this work that is so wide, while a small text of another cliente, that I translated some days ago, returned full of corrections to my English, my poor English without father, nor mother. When I think of my English, I have the image of Guilherme in my mind. How long without talking yet. Twenty years of an entire friendship, without interruptions, and now he doesn’t call me and doesn’t answer to my calls. But, at last, if we were speaking I wouldn’t be writing these pages. Now it’s become more difficult to trust anyone. If he started thinking that living together with me was like becoming corrupted; he, that wanted to purify himself so much, making catharsis all the time even for himself, whom else would I trust? In these twenty years, he looked after himself so much, that he mightn’t have paid any attention to me. Damn it! How come I didn’t think he would hurt me now? Relief! I don’t need to be listening to a person all the time conscious and alerting me about the dangers of happiness – it seems to me that I always forget about them. A person who doesn’t trust not even on his own shadow. A person who spends the whole day watching television not to feel alone. Who, instead of constituting a Family, has spent his whole life refraining himself from home to save from his presence his father family. A person who inspects himself as if he perverted himself even by thinking. A thought fully impaired with the idea of God. Treason! I’m disappointed! But finally: Independence! I hope he lives many years yet, without my helpless company. Only now, after my forty years I decided to get my soul armed. I want distance. My soul, my goal. Well then, I spoke of my English without father and mother. It was inspired in a scene of Guilherme listening to the Long Plays of the Practical Way to English, with the headphone, that my English started the first steps. Now I’m going to say what’s is not me myself who’s saying. It was the work that I chose, the only one I can do with good consciousness. With despise. I feel invisible, I feel comfortable. It would be ungratefulness of mine, both for me and for Guilherme. Since I know myself he’s been motivating me, putting me up. Sometimes he has some relapses and humiliates me, as he does systematically to everyone. So that I want to make clear that I’m getting freed from an illuminated man, from an almost-overman. Were not for his kindness with God, and he would be a complete overman, a philosopher. But now, he sleeps with God and who knows what he dreams. That my first friend remains with God: they desserve each other.  I don’t intend to mention this subject  anymore. I don’t talk of God nor of my first friend. Who knows of a second one or of a third one.

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Reencarnados, Schopenhauer Family 18, 120.

A day that had started sunny. I was feeling cold inside. I coughed. It seemed that my lungs didn’t stand nicotine anymore, although my destructive metabolism made me desire it. I didn’t read Saul Bellow in the first half. At the smoking stops, I laid down in the living room sofa and remained staring at the pictures. I had to deliver the work at two and had started it at nine in the morning. A well written agreement – that is, I returned the file at one. Today it was a day for eating cattle meat; which I finished tonight. It was past two o’clock when I had lunch. I called the psy-muse to rearrange the session. She had arranged it for 21st of Schopenhauer Family. I thought they wouldn’t open the clinic on this day between the holiday of 20 and the weekend. And I was right. She had actually made a mistake at the time of writing down the date on my return card. They wouldn’t work on the 21st and we arranged for the very Clarice’s day. Alas. Eleven years and I still go there to talk of myself. How I am interested in speaking of myself! I should be tired of it all, of my insights, of my greed for novelty. I went back to my small corner. Then I called the accountant’s and informed them of the receipts’ amounts. It’s time to pay taxes, before the holiday finishes the money that I still have available and I get butchered. The company. Oh, the company. How come I hadn’t thought of that before? I was born to be an entrepreneur. It’s so nice to make my own schedule, stand up in favor of an undertaking that elects me. I need to seize the chance that I don’t have employees. After the company expands, I won’t be entitled to lay down in the sofa between a production and another. Let alone divide the day into two halves separeted by a gap in the afternoon. We are only three so far: me, myself and I – id, ego and superego, I-father, I-son, I-holy Spirit, I-father, I-mother and I-child, etc. The company works well. Everything paid until three months from now. Well. Different from many, the company is not the red. I hope it remains so for many many years and that the angels say amen. I had lunch and rested. I woke up at seven for the second half. Thanks be to my father that I don’t remember what I dreamt of. O consider the journey of one day more than enough to do everything I have to do. In the second half, after I received the tax slips, I paid all and got free. Free and out of money. But I woke up better. I didn’t cough anymore, I din’t feel a weak body with a supposed flu. I began to translate the last file of the Medical Journal. Finally. They were more than 30 thousand words and now there are still two thousand and so to finish the project of Schopenhauer Family. After the tomorrow production we shall only retake it on Voltaire Family. And I expect the long holiday. I much rather do not work. If I spend a weekend working, I become deprived of inspiration and I feel poor, enslaved by my own rigour. I began with the file and the work flew well. At the stops, I read Nietzsche, went to the bakery, remained a little at the gate observing the cold drizzle and kept company with Chiquinha. I thought a bit of the debate in Roda Viva [Lively Wheel] last night.  They interviewed the prince of Brazil, Don João de Orleans e Bragança. The gentleman is cool, and you will forgive me for the expression. Entrepreneur and photographer. He doesn’t adhere neither to the right wing nor to any political party. He speaks of tradition with property. Seems optimistic. His nobility remains in his ideas and gestures. He defends parliamentarianism. And one thing he said was remarkable with the appraisal of Don Pedro I: While, when, at the age of 23, he took serious diplomatic efforts, the 23-year-old guys nowadays are playing videogame. What happened in Brazil? The youngsters play videogame, and, sometimes, spend hours smoking at the bars smoking shisha, marijuana or cocaine. No cinema anymore, let alone theatre. DVD with popcorn and guaraná are more accessible, for the more discreet ones and who knows how much one drinks of alcoholic to convict my cigarettes. And, at last, the silence covering our wider and wider ignorance.

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Reencarnados, 19 de Família Schopenhauer de 120.

What a nonsense! A work waiting for me to be finished today and I sleeping! But what can I do? The antipsychotic makes me faint. Long time ago, when I didn’t take this blessed medicine, I also slept too much. So that I don’t know whether I sleep until five o’clock p.m. for the same or for the new reason. I even had woken up at a half past seven a.m. But I felt a little cold so nice to keep me in bed, smoking and thinking. I slept again. I remained so. Could only stand up decided at five o’clock. Fortunatelly I finished the work tonight and sent it at ten p.m. I seemed to have guessed there was an email of a boring man complaining of a work I had delivered some days before. He should be from Preciosos to pay for a work and to keep on complaining later that the work was badly done. I proved that he was uninformed. How come a Brazilian translator not aware of the International Dictionary? As well as hunger, ignorance is something sad. After I had read the email quickly and spent the whole afternoon and the night thinking the consumer was right, that my work was unsuitable. When I reviewed the complaints of that citizen attentively, I noticed that what he considered to be an error was actually confusion of his, lack of care with the language, lack of information, being stuck with prejudiced and narrow-minded translation. How hateful! I have just sent him an email that I