Associação Cultural Videobrasil

In the Image of the Poet: tribute to Waly Salomão

“The poet works with images”, said the primary teacher to an inattentive class, and also to me, a silent pupil in whose spirit that phrase fell as a ray. A real ray, with a metaphoric thunder and voltage, i.e., also real.

I was dizzy. Still today, in remembering here, I feel a little more of this benign dizziness that was generated by the phrase. “What do you mean, images?”, I thought absorbed in a life environment whose inner side was the gas still liquefied of my new soul and the outer side was the classroom, precisely the classroom, one of the essential sets of the initial stage of the civilizing process, where drills as intelligent as American bombs are launched into our gas for a surgical war mission: to separate the word from the landscape, to extract the name from the image, to definitely dissociate reality from imagination.

“The poet works with images.” I don’t know if the paradox of the phrase and of the situation drew my classmates’ attention. But I was really very confused. In the teacher’s mouth, the poet already seemed to contradict all those things which the teacher herself was there to teach. Perhaps what I still did not understand about this introduction of poetry in the curriculum is that it its above all an official chance given to children to relearn all those things they already knew when they were born. Imagination is landscape. Ground is Dream. Word is Image. Isn’t it?

Out of the dissolutions that poetry applied to my senses, the phrase from the primary school should be the first one. But, with no doubt, the major one was having known Waly Salomão. Not a Waly’s poem, but his own primary person. For a simple reason. Like almost every poet, Waly projected images on paper. Like few of them, Waly projected the immediate poetry on live screen. On the reality set. Modifying it, or, at least, changing me forever.

I remember our first encounter. I was taken by Duncan, our common friend. I remember well. In HDTV, with digital sound and emotional edition, after all, as Waly himself used to say, “memory is an editing island.” It happened 15 years ago. Waly was staying at the most banal flat in São Paulo. I rang the bell. And he opened the door of one of those instantaneous friendships. Of humour at first sight. We talked, in a fair exchange where he offered the verb and I was provided the belly laugh. In a certain moment, the telephone rang. He picked the phone and went to the window, looking at the city outside. Behind him, I looked discreetly for the watch, sideways. That was a mistake. “Are you late, honey?”, he asked coming towards me. Of course, I blushed. The primary teacher did not have warned that poets have an eye on their back.

“It’s not on their back, it’s indeed on their ass.” He did not say this. But it was by chance. Anyone close to Waly knows that he would certainly tell me something like that, even if he had been introduced to me few minutes before. Always in full syntony with those verses by Oswald de Andrade that he loved to cite: “poetry is all: game, anger, geometry/ astonishment, curse and nightmare/ but never/ topper, degree and suit”. Waly’s 24-hour poetry sometimes appeared crossdressed in acid and pedestrian gags, or in agressivities almost always smooth, congregating, well-aimed blows on the existential apartheid in which the good education can be transformed. And no matter where that eye could be located, the impression was that he was really omniscient. In life and on the paper. Waly’s poetry captured/launched ratiocinate cut-ups from/to all sides of time/space. As if he intended to be a kind of total radar, a kind of absolute camera, a completely starved browser, connected to life in wideband.

I don’t know if Waly’s presence turned things more real or unreal. But I’m sure that it certainly gave things a plus. This experience of world, so wide, had a huge impact on my way of thinking. In life and in video. A certain day, walking on the sidewalks in Leblon, going to nowhere, we were once again talking about images. I said that I wanted to see the video very different from the film, not as an achievement project, not as a goal. If the film, the traditional film, always results from a hard and long way to be made, I’d rather want the video was only a document of a life journey, of an experience. Then Waly translated this whole pretension into a simple little poem, dedicated to me, but whose title undoubtedly could be dedicated to his own work as a whole: Pan Permanent Cinema.

Since then we never stop collaborating one with other. He made performances in almost all my videos or installations, in different corners of the planet, always counting on some sort of support by Videobrasil. But in a moment like this, just few days after his death, I must be very sincere and confess that I used to feel a bit of disappointment at the end of each work we have done together. It is not that we didn’t have given our souls. It’s not that we have got no success. On the contrary. We gave. We got. It’s just that, in an inevitable comparison, Waly’s life performance was an unsurpassed masterwork.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL,"Displacements - 14th International Eletronic Art Festival": 22nd September to 19th October 2003, pp. 275 and 276, São Paulo, Brazil, 2003.