Zé Celso and the family of friends and strangers – 07/10/2023 – Vera Iaconelli

The best marriages are based on the most fragile ties, because, as Rubem Alves warned in “Retorno e Terno” (Papirus, 1992), a marriage based on love is capable of breaking up in the name of the good of the other. Already the one based on hate and resentment can extend infinitely.

Maintaining an unhappy and hateful relationship responds to some demands: having someone as an excuse for all our unfulfilled desires, enjoying being the victim, reproducing the unhappy marriage of our parents, not having to deal with the envy of seeing the other happy or being envied…

While love is magnanimous and aims at the good of the other as well as itself, hate carries a tension capable of filling a life devoid of self-grace. Hence, to deal with the excuses of unhappy couples who hate each other, but have not separated “in the name” of family and financial stability, it is necessary to listen to other places where this knot can be tied.

Couples who get together end up forcing kinship between their families of origin. Maybe they adopt or place other people in the world, generating the foundation of new families. But the endless combinations of family relationships that arise from this can lead to an absolute lack of affinity and common interest, given the familiar Fla-Flu between Bolsonaristas and Lulistas.

Even fractured, families share a common history, whether happy or tragic (in general, they are a little of each). In tragedies, mourning done and not done is shared.

In the first case, the ties are more likely to tighten, as the worked mourning releases the libido to circulate again towards the loved ones. In cases where the mourning did not take place partially or completely, the melancholic trait takes the lead and affections, even loving ones, are charged with a sadness that disturbs the encounter.

It remains to know, for each one, what mourning is about. The loss of a loved one, the fantasy of a perfect family, the omnipotence of parents, an idyllic childhood, in short, there are many unfinished losses that prevent loving affection from circulating and people from sustaining a pleasant coexistence.

Families, even the most well-established ones, have their time to start, grow and disappear, in a cycle of generations that depends on descendants —ever smaller— on affinities, on history and on common mourning.

The oldest die, the youngest are dispersed throughout the world, many of whom will not have children and, in the end, what began as a promise of eternity comes to an end. There is a mourning that needs to be done so that the family can be appreciated during its existence without the melancholy of the announced end taking over.

Families’ greatest risk is posed by their very foundation: the bourgeois model that serves as their origin and north. In it, the family closes itself off from the public space, obsessively controlling the relationships that may or may not be added to the central nucleus and having the maintenance of social status, name and heritage as a reason. Its permanence in time can be extended, but affective failure is intrinsic to its project.

This week we saw the family of José Celso Martinez Corrêa celebrate his life on the occasion of his wake: hundreds of people, countless unknown to the artist himself, sang, laughed and cried around his body. How many of us will eventually have cultivated such a beautiful and generous family, made up of relatives, lovers, friends and strangers? Even at that time, Zé Celso left us a lesson.

When the time of the self-absorbed and police-oriented family comes to an end, we will only have something to celebrate. Evoé, Zé Celso!

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