The electric book of Lisbon
Lisbon is stairs up and down and pastelarias and stoned pavements and lines on them, and hills here and there and coloured façades. Lisbon is new because it’s old. Or vice versa. Lisbon is circular like Pombal, but overall parallel. Lisbon is itself the same it is Paris and Berlin and London. In some manner. Lisbon wants to be Fernando Pessoa. But it is not. Lisbon is Greenwich meridian time, and Bairro Alto and Alfama. Or not. Lisbon sounds to fado at the rythm of bip-bop. Lisbon is yellow, it was always yellow, and not red or blue. If I would know well Lisbon I would say all that. Lisbon is coffee from Brasil and cigarettes. And many more things, like chestnuts in the winter time. If you’re lost in this world, go to Praça do Comèrcio and you’ll find yourself any sunny day. Lisbon isn’t either Alvaro do Campos. All these are happy words. But a city is only measured by the taste of the beer in one of its bars. Not any one. Coffee is for aficionados of desassossego. They look for sossego at the cafè table. Wetting their moustaches under circular glasses. Searching the unconventional parallelism. Thousands of anecdotes that I ignore ascertain all that. Because metallic lines course silvery paths meanwhile their counterparts fly on the air in a robotic way. Beautiful though. Enigmatic. Stylistic. Quadratic. Infinite. Not even photographs define a city. Not even these ones and they don’t want to. There are five thousands poets in Lisbon. There are night poets and daylight ones. There are symmetrical and asymmetrical poets. And summer ones and winter ones. A poet told the heart of Portugal is not in Lisbon. Then he went to the south to see the light. But this is another story, and he’s still looking for his own style since then. Lisbon dances. Dances stirringly in a symphony of black. A happy sad black. While perhaps the poet writes and writes, and the people walk and walk. If I were a poet, a summer poet, a winter poet, a night or a daylight one, a symmetrical or asymmetrical poet, I would write on Lisbon. It’s nostalgic, asymptotic. But more than any other thing, electric. And poetry was never made for electricity.
I wrote those words as an introduction to this photo dummy I made while living in Portugal.
Now, I open the book dummy again and I fucking like it.
Here a few of its pages
I’m now in a different place, in a different time.
In a different me
👋
Nice! Went to Portugal for my birthday last year. Fell in love with the country instantly.