sovereign ana or READING IN THE AIR
Maria Filomena Molder
ethereal matter shares with the form the norm the joy however it is exempt when it unites with them it experiments when I write I am sovereign ana O Cisne Intacto
Anacyclic There are poets, like Andrea Zanzotto, who love painting and write about it (in his case, Corot), intoning a lamentation over the mortal immobility of writing’s succession, ensorcelled by the powers of pictorial simultaneity. There are painter-poets, like Henri Michaux, who experience a similar conflict; aware of the misfortune of alphabetic succession (one of the major applications of that which we in the West call time: Ana Hatherly once spoke of “spelling time”), they attempt to create a new alphabet — drawing inspiration from Chinese ideograms —, in order to overcome the breath that runs with the same speed as our familiar letters towards the final exhalation, ever arrested, ever arresting. Ana Hatherly, too, has spoken long about that violence the word exercises against the
flux of life in all beings, seemingly imitating it, but hers is a different way of saying, because, as in certain ancient cures, she has incited the words and their letters to bite themselves, pursuing them like a laboratorial lover. Sometimes, the outcome of this is: “Isto é só uma experiência [This is just an experiment]” (a humorous resource that eventually became an ongoing project, which was formally finished in later years, cf. Interact online magazine, 2000, 1994 visual poem). At other times, it is the secret source out of which pure water flows. On both occasions, we can observe her athletic gifts as an equilibrist, a runner and a hurdler, which, when put to use, allow her to access the inside, the interior, the desires of her body, which are also the “through myself” through which she runs: “I run through myself/ like a top athlete/ conqueror of hurdles and invincible distances/ trying to win/ but everything is huge and intricate/ everything in me is vigilant eyes/ ever lidless // But all that is not enough./ Everything is huge/ and I die so quickly” (“Falo do que é físico”, A Idade da Escrita). However, at the same time she imposes herself on the rush of the never-returning arrow, she also draws an intimate profile, which not only fully covers the rush but turns it back on itself, creating a reversible beauty (see the final drawings in Mapas da Imaginação e da Memória). Hence her use and love of palindromes, an instance of which (though a false, or, more precisely, a quasi-palindrome) can be found in her variation XVIII on a vilancico by Camões in Ana-
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