Audubon e Welty

John James Audubon (1785-1851)
"Snowy Heron or White Egret", 1834


"Audubon's eyes embraced the object in the distance and he could see it as carefully as if he held it in his hand. It was a snowy heron alone out of its flock. He watched it steadily, in his care noting the exact inevitable things. When it feeds it muddies the water with its foot... It was as if each detail about the heron happened slowly in time, and only once. He felt again the old stab of wonder-what structure of life bridged the reptile's scale and the heron's feather? (...) He watched without moving. The bird was defenseless in the world except for the intensity of its life, and he wondered, how can heat of blood and spead of heart defend it? (...)
Fixed in its pure white profile it stood in the precipitous moment, a plumicorn on its head, its breeding dress extended in rays, eating steadily the little water creatures. (...) before (him) the white heron rested in the grasses with the evening all around it, lighter and more serene than the evening, flight closed in its body, the circuit of its beauty closed, a bird seen and a bird still, its motion calm as if it were offered: Take my flight...
(...)
Audubon dreamed, with his mind going to his pointed brush, (...) and he tightened his hand on the trigger of the gun and pulled it, and his eyes went closed. In memory the heron was all its solitude, its total beauty. All its whiteness could be seen from all sides at once, its pure feathers were as if counted and known and their array one upon the other would never be lost. But it was not from memory that he could paint.
(...)
Audubon, splattered and wet, turned back into the wilderness with the heron warm under his hand, his head still light in a kind of trance. It was undeniable, on some Sunday mornings, when he turned over and over his drawings they seemed beautiful to him, through what was dramatic in the conflict of life, or what was exact. What he would draw, and what he had seen, became for a moment one to him then. Yet soon enough, and it seemed to come in that same moment, (...) he knew that even the sight of the heron which (...) he had appreciated, had not been all his belonging, and that never could any vision, even any simple sight, belong to him or to any man. He knew that the best he could make would be, after it was apart from his hand, a dead thing and not a live thing, never the essence, only a sum of parts; and that it would always meet with a stranger's sight, and never be one with the beauty in any other man's head in the world. As he had seen the bird most purely at its moment of death, in some fatal way, in his care for looking outward, he saw his long labor most revealing at the point where it met its limit. Still carefully, for he was trained to see well in the dark, he walked on into the deeper woods, noting all sights, all sounds, and was gentler than they as he went."

Eudora Welty (1909-2001)
"A Still Moment", The Wide Net and Other Stories, 1943


Nos anos que se seguiram à Declaração da Independência (1776), o universo artístico norte-americano empenhou-se em retratar a especificidade cultural, geográfica e natural do país. Fizeram-se, em particular, vários levantamentos sobre a fauna do continente, entre os quais o extraordinário trabalho "Birds of America" , de James Audubon, retratando mais de 700 espécies de pássaros da América do Norte.
Desde jovem que Audubon desenhava pássaros, tendo como modelo um espécime morto que arranjava numa composição "animada" (prendendo o corpo com arames, em contraste com os métodos dos ornitologistas da época, que recorriam a animais empalhados), onde incluía por vezes exemplos da flora local por si também recolhidos. Viajou extensamente pelos Estados Unidos (para onde imigrou em 1803 com um passaporte falso, escapando às Guerras Napoleónicas), e dedicou-se a diversas actividades que (mal) lhe garantiam a subsistência; em 1812 naturalizou-se americano. Em 1826 deslocou-se a Londres com o intuito de publicar as suas imagens, gravadas a aquatinta, em tamanho natural, num portfolio de enormes dimensões (102 x 66cm), pago pelo autor em diversas edições, através de conferências, exposições e vendas de peles (que ele próprio caçava nos Estados Unidos).

No seu conto, Welty reflecte sobre o impulso de catalogação subjacente a este tipo de projecto e, em simultâneo, reconhece a paixão artística que move Audubon, o seu desejo de representar as maravilhas de um mundo natural fascinante na sua multiplicidade. O conto poderá quase ser tomado como uma recriação ekfrástica das aguarelas do artista, na precisão minuciosa com que descreve a garça, num jogo em que a linguagem verbal procura adquirir a precisão da representação visual. Para mais, a autora comenta a perversidade da abordagem artística mimética e do método peculiar de Audubon, que pretende encapsular a realidade substituindo-a pela sua representação. No excerto citado, a personagem do pintor e naturalista apercebe-se deste paradoxo, da impossibilidade de (re)criar o mundo natural na sua organicidade e da solidão da sua tarefa; curiosamente, esta figura será absorvida pela natureza selvagem do Natchez Trace, no Mississippi, onde perde os seus contornos fundindo-se com as sombras.

Bibliografia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_James_Audubon
Craven, Wayne. American Art: History and Culture. Madison, Wisconsin: Brown & Benchmark, 1994.
Pingatore, Diana R. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Eudora Welty. Nova Iorque: G. K. Hall & Co., 1996.
Welty, Eudora. Stories, Essays, & Memoir, organizado por Richard Ford e Michael Kreyling. Nova Iorque: The Library of America, 1998.

Autoria: Diana Almeida