If it is the OTHER. Do not just turn a different cheek, or another cheek. Turn the OTHER . Let them come, and explode or implode. Greet them.

What you describe, people deliberately trying to harm you , or pretending that from now on you don´t exist, wanting to negate your person, grudging and grudging foolishness until it bursts out through their mouths and in their actions,  is in many ways known to me and surely to be expected. Depending on the tide it can be daily. It is possible to learn how to delight oneself in those situations. They are exercises in being awake,  opportunities for exerting creativity and vision as soon as you learn to recognize their coming miles and miles away, which you can easily do, and then to carefully prepair the fun they will afterwards give. Such stirrings of deliberate harm will become more frequent as one advances through the work. They will also become more imaginative, albeit more stupid in their logic, albeit always much more clearer in their motivations.They are very good signs. They do teach how to become more uncompromisingly ruthless with what is actually essential. There is a point in which your mere existence can and will make a lot of people angry, and disturb many others.  Be very glad that it is happening. Find the ones you love and stick with the ones you love. This is one of the essentials.

Whatever you do don´t let events lead you into the round outer darkness. Do not let them precipitate you in the dances of corpses. Nevertheless, the smell of corpses in the morning is very revigorating . Even more if it is yours. Smelling one´s own corpse is indeed a very revigorating experience. Exhilarate yourself in the arms of the Living and in the nose of the Living. In this way you will easily smell the deadly. The red sea of corpses will naturally part it´s waters, most of the times. Cross it swiftly, cross it silently, cross it fully, don´t be caught in the middle and don´t look back . Know that your back never leaves you. Enjoy the. miracle as it is, turning the OTHER cheek ruthlessly. Keep turning, keep spinning. Go.

Another essential is to know who and what you are against in your work. First, against hipocrisy and mediocrity of being. Have no faith in human nature or in good will and good feelings. To live is an act of magnificent insanity. Most of the people one interacts with are nothing but dead corpses . Demiurgic puppets . It is wise to treat them as such: looking behind their eyes to find the seed of something worthy. An innate sense of dignity, at first. Dignity is a rather dangerous and non social quality: it comes from within, in isolation. All stupidity and smallness begins to itch and fart and prick when dignity is near. This is to be expected and is by itself an wonderful experience to testify and develop, the seed of the grotesque and the comic.

Finally, there are particular secrets of craft and art that are not truly found  except with long devotion and dedication to practice and to results, together with an element of fate. These secrets, away from their historical sources, are only conquerable via active obsession and active empathy in desire . One aims for the spirit behind and before the coagulation of forms and methods and statements, re-petitioning continuously, asking and asking again, demanding them to become effective. The work is a constant interrogation towards this purpose. The ones who ask and the ones who answer should in the end be the same and abide in the same place. Where and what is this place ? How does one create the gap for precipitation ? There is no movement if both sides of the equation have equal charge or are both full.

First you truly speak. Then you are truly silent.

Hugo Calhim Cristóvão