The joy of light – Severino Francisco’s Blog

Severino Francisco

A friend sent me an audio message with a radiant voice. She hadn’t been successful in Mega, she hadn’t been approved in the Senate contest or won a bid. She was happy simply because the day dawned beautiful and the Brazilian light brings joy.

Clarice Lispector felt the radiation of a white luminosity in Brasília, which always required her to be protected by dark glasses. But she only captured a small facet of the Brasilia light, which has an infinite number of nuances to be explored. Brazilian light is one of the city’s greatest mysteries and charms.

Without it, Brasília would perhaps be a monotonous city, with a tendency towards modulation and serialization of modernist architecture. However, the incidence of light adds color, a variety of hues and perspectives to the city that makes it appear different every day. Where the light falls, it produces beauty.

The hues of light translate states of mind on a very subtle scale: from epic exaltation, through light melancholy to mystical epiphany. The changes in light are a permanent source of enlightenment for the people of Brasilia. That’s why we have the feeling that Brasília is a diaphanous, floating and evanescent city.

One day, while passing through Eixão, the poet and diplomat Francisco Alvim suddenly had one of the countless possible epiphanies in a city where a surprise can always happen, caused by the proximity to the open sky and the incidence of light. He felt overwhelmed with immense and free happiness. The day unfolded in a play of light and shadow, but a luminous shadow.

The world has become an event in itself. An evocation of the painters of light came to Chico’s mind: Poussin, Turner and Guignard. And also images from literature, the transcendental cinema of the Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri. He remembered Dante’s arrival in Purgatory, which he considers a marvel.

As a poet, Chico is a kind of Dalton Trevisan from Lago Norte, distilling ironies, acid criticism and R$1.99 dramas in his anti-lira. As he himself likes to repeat, Brasília, from the outside, is sky and light; Inside, it’s pure Dalton Trevisan.

But he wrote a beautiful poem to celebrate this moment of Brazilian enlightenment. Purgatory/the happiness that the light brings/releases, naked in this sky.”

I am not alienated, or rather, I am not entirely alienated. I know that in the city there are offices, offices and headquarters of political parties that are true branches of hell and would deserve to appear in some dark section of Dante’s Divine Comedy. But, at the same time, Brasília is a city where some accident of beauty is always possible.