So something that I didn´t know when I bought my dungeon apartment (that´s how it feels sometimes, up at the top of the sanatorium) is that there is some shady business going on in the building right across the street. Well, how else can I explain the white truck that backs into the dark back entrance in a very tight 90 degree-angle, every night around 11 o´clock, with much roaring, trucky sound, such loud, loud roaring and spitting that it interrupts any kind of thought I may be trying to have. And then this midnight white horse reappears mysteriously, sometimes at several other odd hours of the night (like 1 or 2 am). What exactly is deposited or loaded onto that iconic white truck?
At first I thought it was obviously the rubbish and refuse produced by the gigantic 300-people-seating Japanese restaurant next door. Then I concluded that there was no reason to load the truck with garbage SEVERAL times each night. So now I think that there is a little factory in the hidden guts of that 50s grey building, there is presumably some kind of merchandise that gets loaded and sent somewhere else in the country. The weird thing is that one cannot help but think of sweat shops, as this is the oriental quarter, isn´t it? I´ve been thinking this but it´s absurd, of course there are no sweatshops around here... Do people come all the way from China just to work packed like sardines in a Brazilian Niemeyer basement?
Lately, the night has been marked by even stranger sounds. Saturday and Sunday, in the dead of the night (like 3.30 in the morning), somebody started messing about with the pavement. It´s that distinctly familiar sound of somebody clawing at the sidewalk stone tiles with a hammer or something. I´d think somebody was indeed repairing a faulty sidewalk if it weren´t for the terribly late hour. The only thing that occured to me was that some (possibly homeless) lunatic was getting his frustrations out (I even pictured him trying to bury a dead body). I don´t know why, I couldn´t rid myself of the image of a Beckett-like clown-beggar, hammering the sidewalk on his knees with a huge tool, endlessly, waiting, waiting, waiting for something...
There are actually a couple of town crazies around here. I saw one on the day I moved in. I had just come out of a sushi restaurant with the kind friends who had transported my many boxes. First this twitching, nervous, trembling man asked for money. I mistook him for an alcoholic beggar, and feeling generous, gave him a few coins. Within a few moments, this Japanese man sporting dress pants, a buttoned-up shirt and a dirty American cap, started stopping the cars in the street, but instead of sticking his hand out for coins, he was holding his two hands together in the shape of a pistol. Then he leaped into the middle of a street crossing, right in the middle of the bustling midnight traffic, and held everyone at gunpoint with his imaginary gun. Then he went truly crazy in authentic Japanese yakuza movie style, and started spinning round and round, crazed eyes bulging out, his mouth sputtering machine-gun sounds... I´ve seen him out and about since, in a pretty calm state actually, entering the famed shady building and genuflexing devoutly to the God trapped in his 50s highrise shrine, I presume. And the guy is really a neighborhood fixture, I´ve seen bar waiters greeting him with a jolly handwave.
But anyway, back to those midnight sounds. There is definitely a midnight marauder around, who aside from hammering the sidewalk has also started scraping some ground and laying cement (or so I imagine because of the sounds, but I´m usually so dog-tired that I dare not rise and walk to the window to observe the sinister goings-on across the street). But I think that this little construction activity is also occuring somewhere in the vicinity of the suspicious building.
Also, I should mention that a little dog has started randomly yapping in the middle of the night too, a desperate yap coming from the street it seems. Perhaps a companion to the sidewalk-clawing looney?
Of course, I haven´t mentioned yet the distant chants reverberating from the hidden karaoke in the building next to my neighbouring Chinese hotel. I heard a very faint (and very poor) rendition of a U2 song the other night. Usually it´s Japaneses pop, so Japanese I cannot recognize a single note.
Soon I will start writing about the SMELLS I didn´t know about when I bought the apartment.
segunda-feira, 23 de março de 2009
domingo, 8 de março de 2009
A white white place
Every move provokes anxiety. I mean, quite literally, that every change of place, whether country, city or room, generates an empty feeling inside me, a kind of dark, deep well that is slowly and terrifyingly flooded with contradictory emotions. It always has the potential of becoming a pleasant, enjoyable anxiety. It is an anxiety that sits at the very bottom of my self and shapes my world continuously. It is is the anxiety of the new. It is an anxiety that I seek feverishly, that is pleasure and pain. An anxiety the absence of which leads to tedium, an itchy feeling inside.
I should know. According to my latest count, I have moved 24 times in my life, from the moment I was born til now. I´m not counting 3-month hotel stays, long summer camp holidays, backpacking hostels and lonely temporary rented rooms. I´m talking about homes. 24 places with my own bed, closet overcrowded with clothes and shoes and bags, kitchen with my favorite absurdly exotic food.
So the difference now, the marker, is that I OWN the place where I live. And I don't know how much the flutter in my breast, and the slight lack of air in my lungs, is related to this ownership. I bought a one-bedroom apartment in Liberdade, Japantown in Sao Paulo. I had been looking for a flat for weeks, and was disappointed with all my visits. Then one day, when I was walking out of a music venue after a mildly satisfying samba concert, I looked up and saw what would be my future home. I knew immediately. I trust my intuition infinitely more than I trust my extremely logical reason. It was a hospital-looking building, almost a sanatorium; it appeared to belong to another place, another time: the familiarity of European lines. The six-floor cream building reminded me of Paris, Geneva. Run-down proletariat housing in a vaguely French place, a vaguely French São Paulo, if that were possible. This 1930s building stood out clearly against a dark, dark sky, illuminating the night. And it sat in the middle of a poorly-looked-after Japanese garden, with Japanese street lamps, Japanese cedars and a Japanese rock garden, and Japanese carp ponds drained of water and carps.
The rest was quick. I went back to the place the following Sunday and talked to the doorman. By chance, there happened to be an apartment for sale. No, not by chance. I had known, somehow. An apartment on the last floor, looking over the city, watching over the old, decrepit center of town. This was five months ago. The space became a pile of rubble before it could actually become the very white and airy home it is now. Four months of remodelling. And still, after all the work, the walls are curvy, the walls look pregnant. The plaster guy may have been an amateur, or not. No matter, I am stuck with beautiful, tall, white, not-straight walls.
(As an aside, I would like, just for once, for someone to actually try to imagine what it´s like to be on a perpetual pilgrimage, always seeking to stay put in one place, yet always hearing the call of the sirens, the call from other shores or other voices, the blinking of distant lighthouses beckoning me to a place that will more intimately root me to my own self. Strangely, practically everyone I have most cared about has been a whole lot more sedentary than I have. Yes, opposites attract. Someone will appear, someone will help me find the ground I need to root myself to. Someone will explain my self-imposed exile to me, someone will make all my previous flights very evidently point to this one final resting point).
So, the anxiety became clear to me when I realized, lying on my bed today peering out at the silver skyline and blue sky outside my window, that this apartment was exactly like the one I had when I lived alone in Geneva. The bedroom had the exact same dimensions. It was the same rectangle, I had put the bed and the dresser in the same exact spots. There was an equally warm wooden floor. And huge, huge windows looking out on a similarly sublime view. In Geneva, it was the meeting of the two rivers, the greenish Rhône and the much whiter Arve, joining into one flood of water that passed through the huge arches of a rail bridge. From my Geneva window I saw the river and its forrested banks, and the white-peaked Jura mountains behind which the sun set gloriously. And from my São Paulo window, I had an urban spectacle: 60s highrises and dilapidated office buildings, and in the distance an Empire-State-looking tower with a flag flapping in the wind. And even the arches were there, the coral red arches of the viaduto across from the big Radial Leste, arches that were lit up at night like some industrial, 3rd world Arc de Triomphe.
All the apartments I´ve lived in have looked very similar. But now the ressemblance struck me dumb, filled me with a sensation of deja-vu, of return, of repetition that made me, for a few moments, lose track of where I was and when I was. And the crazy thing was that I was starting to feel a bit like the self I was back then, seven or eight years ago. I was that self and the present one, and all the other ones in between, at the same time. I remembered the satisfaction of my loneliness, the intimacy of my losses. I peered at the objects on my dresser, the grey vase with pink painted flowers that my grandmother had given me, the porcelain bowl my nona had given me, and also the red and gold matchbox with a silver Franc nestled inside; and the white candle-holder my musician boyfriend had given me. All these reminders of my nomad childhood and adolescence and adulthood.
I savoured the memories of my readings in bed, the poetry and the Nabokov, the Perec and the Woolf. I tasted the sleepless, burning nights with the men I had loved or simply desired. And I recalled the sleepless nights, empty, white white nights after my father had died. And this is when I struck that hard little pebble inside, that small white rock lodged forever between my ribs, that discomfort that returns no matter where I am. It is the little terrible stone of my biggest loss, the one that came as if to punctuate the long, endless series of smaller losses. The one that came to confirm that all those things that had been abandoned and left behind merely existed to prepare me, in minuscule increments, for the only loss that really mattered. That cruel white white stone.
I should know. According to my latest count, I have moved 24 times in my life, from the moment I was born til now. I´m not counting 3-month hotel stays, long summer camp holidays, backpacking hostels and lonely temporary rented rooms. I´m talking about homes. 24 places with my own bed, closet overcrowded with clothes and shoes and bags, kitchen with my favorite absurdly exotic food.
So the difference now, the marker, is that I OWN the place where I live. And I don't know how much the flutter in my breast, and the slight lack of air in my lungs, is related to this ownership. I bought a one-bedroom apartment in Liberdade, Japantown in Sao Paulo. I had been looking for a flat for weeks, and was disappointed with all my visits. Then one day, when I was walking out of a music venue after a mildly satisfying samba concert, I looked up and saw what would be my future home. I knew immediately. I trust my intuition infinitely more than I trust my extremely logical reason. It was a hospital-looking building, almost a sanatorium; it appeared to belong to another place, another time: the familiarity of European lines. The six-floor cream building reminded me of Paris, Geneva. Run-down proletariat housing in a vaguely French place, a vaguely French São Paulo, if that were possible. This 1930s building stood out clearly against a dark, dark sky, illuminating the night. And it sat in the middle of a poorly-looked-after Japanese garden, with Japanese street lamps, Japanese cedars and a Japanese rock garden, and Japanese carp ponds drained of water and carps.
The rest was quick. I went back to the place the following Sunday and talked to the doorman. By chance, there happened to be an apartment for sale. No, not by chance. I had known, somehow. An apartment on the last floor, looking over the city, watching over the old, decrepit center of town. This was five months ago. The space became a pile of rubble before it could actually become the very white and airy home it is now. Four months of remodelling. And still, after all the work, the walls are curvy, the walls look pregnant. The plaster guy may have been an amateur, or not. No matter, I am stuck with beautiful, tall, white, not-straight walls.
(As an aside, I would like, just for once, for someone to actually try to imagine what it´s like to be on a perpetual pilgrimage, always seeking to stay put in one place, yet always hearing the call of the sirens, the call from other shores or other voices, the blinking of distant lighthouses beckoning me to a place that will more intimately root me to my own self. Strangely, practically everyone I have most cared about has been a whole lot more sedentary than I have. Yes, opposites attract. Someone will appear, someone will help me find the ground I need to root myself to. Someone will explain my self-imposed exile to me, someone will make all my previous flights very evidently point to this one final resting point).
So, the anxiety became clear to me when I realized, lying on my bed today peering out at the silver skyline and blue sky outside my window, that this apartment was exactly like the one I had when I lived alone in Geneva. The bedroom had the exact same dimensions. It was the same rectangle, I had put the bed and the dresser in the same exact spots. There was an equally warm wooden floor. And huge, huge windows looking out on a similarly sublime view. In Geneva, it was the meeting of the two rivers, the greenish Rhône and the much whiter Arve, joining into one flood of water that passed through the huge arches of a rail bridge. From my Geneva window I saw the river and its forrested banks, and the white-peaked Jura mountains behind which the sun set gloriously. And from my São Paulo window, I had an urban spectacle: 60s highrises and dilapidated office buildings, and in the distance an Empire-State-looking tower with a flag flapping in the wind. And even the arches were there, the coral red arches of the viaduto across from the big Radial Leste, arches that were lit up at night like some industrial, 3rd world Arc de Triomphe.
All the apartments I´ve lived in have looked very similar. But now the ressemblance struck me dumb, filled me with a sensation of deja-vu, of return, of repetition that made me, for a few moments, lose track of where I was and when I was. And the crazy thing was that I was starting to feel a bit like the self I was back then, seven or eight years ago. I was that self and the present one, and all the other ones in between, at the same time. I remembered the satisfaction of my loneliness, the intimacy of my losses. I peered at the objects on my dresser, the grey vase with pink painted flowers that my grandmother had given me, the porcelain bowl my nona had given me, and also the red and gold matchbox with a silver Franc nestled inside; and the white candle-holder my musician boyfriend had given me. All these reminders of my nomad childhood and adolescence and adulthood.
I savoured the memories of my readings in bed, the poetry and the Nabokov, the Perec and the Woolf. I tasted the sleepless, burning nights with the men I had loved or simply desired. And I recalled the sleepless nights, empty, white white nights after my father had died. And this is when I struck that hard little pebble inside, that small white rock lodged forever between my ribs, that discomfort that returns no matter where I am. It is the little terrible stone of my biggest loss, the one that came as if to punctuate the long, endless series of smaller losses. The one that came to confirm that all those things that had been abandoned and left behind merely existed to prepare me, in minuscule increments, for the only loss that really mattered. That cruel white white stone.
quinta-feira, 25 de dezembro de 2008
Macaws flying among elephant tree trunks
One needs the enstrangement
of a different place,
sometimes,
to write about what the eyes
don't see anymore.
A real writer's cliche, but it's true.
I compare my two tropics:
after Brazil,
Venezuela.
Drier, so much drier,
medium-green foliage,
none of the dripping moisture
of the figueira
of the mangueira.
Palm trees,
with elephant trunks painted white,
banana trees,
cacti,
yucca plants.
Spanish-style houses,
austere,
two-storied,
with red-tiled roofs and white-washed walls,
with black or white fences,
always.
The sudden flourish:
flowers- coral red, or bright lemon yellow.
But always the sister villas,
the iron railings,
white Granada,
white Andalucia,
recalled?
Traces of administrative Spain
of the well-regulated,
bureaucratic maze
after the conquest?
Brazil, a Baroque chaos, a post-modern pastiche.
In Caracas, it seems,
the 50s and 60s never happened.
No beveled houses,
with absurd little bridges,
or buildings
with Niemeyer curves,
or v-shaped pillars,
like a woman's half-open legs.
Sao Paulo is so far away.
The light here is brighter,
stronger,
whiter.
More wind too.
The tops of the palm trees have been chopped off.
Macaws red and blue fly
strangely
absurdly
bizarrely
screeching.
There are more holes in the streets:
Republica Bolivariana de Venezuela.
In Sao Paulo,
Itaim,
new places pop up
like wild flowers
or weed,
Rascal,
Vanilla cafe,
Sao Pedro pub,
yet another temaki place.
But the kids, at the club,
here, there,
the teenagers look the same:
Abercrombie t-shirts,
and Aeropostale.
The boys wear pastel-colored bermudas,
checked,
hanging low around their hips,
white or navy or pink polo shirts,
and white sneakers.
The OC look.
The girls, just as clean,
ironed shorts that hug their honed curves,
pale t-shirts,
Converse.
They are clean, clean, clean.
Oh and isn't their English speckless!
In Sao Paulo and in Caracas,
the kids like Obama.
of a different place,
sometimes,
to write about what the eyes
don't see anymore.
A real writer's cliche, but it's true.
I compare my two tropics:
after Brazil,
Venezuela.
Drier, so much drier,
medium-green foliage,
none of the dripping moisture
of the figueira
of the mangueira.
Palm trees,
with elephant trunks painted white,
banana trees,
cacti,
yucca plants.
Spanish-style houses,
austere,
two-storied,
with red-tiled roofs and white-washed walls,
with black or white fences,
always.
The sudden flourish:
flowers- coral red, or bright lemon yellow.
But always the sister villas,
the iron railings,
white Granada,
white Andalucia,
recalled?
Traces of administrative Spain
of the well-regulated,
bureaucratic maze
after the conquest?
Brazil, a Baroque chaos, a post-modern pastiche.
In Caracas, it seems,
the 50s and 60s never happened.
No beveled houses,
with absurd little bridges,
or buildings
with Niemeyer curves,
or v-shaped pillars,
like a woman's half-open legs.
Sao Paulo is so far away.
The light here is brighter,
stronger,
whiter.
More wind too.
The tops of the palm trees have been chopped off.
Macaws red and blue fly
strangely
absurdly
bizarrely
screeching.
There are more holes in the streets:
Republica Bolivariana de Venezuela.
In Sao Paulo,
Itaim,
new places pop up
like wild flowers
or weed,
Rascal,
Vanilla cafe,
Sao Pedro pub,
yet another temaki place.
But the kids, at the club,
here, there,
the teenagers look the same:
Abercrombie t-shirts,
and Aeropostale.
The boys wear pastel-colored bermudas,
checked,
hanging low around their hips,
white or navy or pink polo shirts,
and white sneakers.
The OC look.
The girls, just as clean,
ironed shorts that hug their honed curves,
pale t-shirts,
Converse.
They are clean, clean, clean.
Oh and isn't their English speckless!
In Sao Paulo and in Caracas,
the kids like Obama.
sábado, 20 de setembro de 2008
The ship´s blind progress
Voyage-inthedark is an apt name for this blog. It carries just the right degree of ambiguity. Before even reading my stuff, most people would probably expect me to be embarking upon a rather somber path, associating darkness with sadness, melancholy, anger, and all those other emotions. But everything is a matter of perspective, of course.
For a long-haired teenage boy who constantly stumbles upon the incapacity of transmitting his (rather vague) feelings inside, darkness might mean: everything that is expressed in one of the sadder Metallica songs.
Well, when I think of a teenager and then Metallica, I am giving away my age: I am recalling the dozens of headbanger boys that populated my own adolescence, those that wore Pantera and Skid Row and Iron Maiden black T-shirts, and gathered gleefully in circles around a boom box at parties, dropping their heads down at a 45-degree angle. They would jerk their heads up and down, their clean or dirty, straight or curly mane bobbing along to the rhythm of the super-sped up guitar. They may have been sad, or not. Or perhaps, and more likely, they were full of anger. No matter. Darkness was definitely part of their language, their world-view. Darkness was a recurring motif in all those heavy-metal or trash-metal songs. Think of Fade to Black:
Life it seems, will fade away
Drifting further every day
Getting lost within myself
Nothing matters no one else
It´s a song about suicide, or so it seems. It's a song about losing oneself. It´s a song about feeling nothingness. It uses well-known metaphors to indicate despair, existential angst if you will. And always, darkness is the ultimate signifier.
Emptiness is filling me
To the point of agony
Growing darkness taking dawn
Of course, there were other images: that of being frozen, for instance. There was a song called Trapped under ice.
I don't know how to live trough this hell
Woken up, I'm still locked in this shell
Frozen soul, frozen down to the core
Break the ice, I can't take anymore
Here, it was all about this feeling of imprisonment, of impotence, of immobility. I don't even know if there was a story behind the song. I suspect it was a story about waking up from a coma, or perhaps there was a hint of science-fiction to it "No release from my cryonic state". Had the guy been literally frozen? Who knows...
I never listened that carefully to Metallica, it was my brother who played it all the time locked up in his room, and played it on the guitar continuously, when he wasn´t playing the definitely more joyous songs of Jimi Hendrix.
And then, there was "One":
Darkness imprisoning me
All that I see: absolute horror
I cannot live
I cannot die
Trapped in myself
Body's my holding cell
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j39ABZyzek
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/m/metallica/one_20092051.html--------------------------------------------
I stop to think about why I am exploring so much this image of darkness as associated with being locked up in yourself. Well, it´s an image that has stayed stuck in my head for the last couple of months. I watched the film "le Scaphandre et Le Papillon" recently, the real-life story of a magazine editor who wakes up from a stroke that has left him with Locked-in Syndrome. He is paralyzed from head to toe, as well as vocally impaired. He can only move the muscle of his left eye. This left eye is his only, tiny window out onto the world outside him, and it is also his only means of communicating with other people. He not only manages to talk to people by blinking his eye; he writes a WHOLE BOOK by blinking his eye.
I cried and cried when I saw this movie. Then I bought the book and read it and cried even more. There was so much enclosed in this iconic scene of the bed-ridden man. There were the painfully bleak details of his room, the edge of his iron bed, the floaty curtains that let in a muted light, the television high up on the wall that he could not control. There were the painful details of his daily routine; being cleaned, being made to practice swallowing by trying to raise his tongue to the roof of his mouth, millimetrically.
But there was also everything that was happening inside his head. There were his voyages into his own imagination: happy memories and fantasy worlds, film-like scenes that paraded joyfully for him. A white-marble bust of the empress Eugénie, which the locked-in man saw whenever he was taken down the hospital corridor, provoked the wildest awake-dreams. He fantasized about encountering this young beauty, about sticking his nose amongst the folds of her striped gauze dress, smelling her imperial smell of cologne. He dreamt of other things too, he imagined other things too.
And here is where the magical reversal occured: being trapped inside was not just a negative darkness; it was freeing, it was the essence of freedom. With our minds we can do anything, go anywhere, feel anything we want. We have some control, we have our fingers on the switch. Everything is relative; being trapped inside is also being free to roam inside. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: the straight-jacket and the bird flight, the walls and the spirit that traverses the walls as if they were made of cottony fog...
-----------------------------------------
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I thought, was also an amazing image for the dilemma of I and the world, and by extension, I and you. Am I what is not-the-world, in a dichotomy of I vs objects outside of me? But aren´t we that which we perceive? Isn´t what I see, and what I apprehend also what I am? How much is the I the world? How much am I made up of the world outside me? Am I not that trajectory line, that leaping bridge, that butterfly´s flight, that dialectical journey between inside and outside? Shall we fall deeper into that phenomenological well, and think of how much of You is Me, and vice-versa?
Our relationships are made up of our attempts to reach out, to transmit our inner visions. The path is inevitably ridden with misunderstandings, misencounters. But it is precisely this blind path that connects us; where we reach out and try to say "I am this" and the other says "I am this" or "I am not this". And the other says "is this what you mean?", and you say, like TS Elliot*, "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all." (* http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html)
It´s a veritable miracle that we manage to communicate, to connect with other people. I am thinking of the courageous man existing in his body-tomb, his mind leaping and dancing inside his vaulted cave-body. How this man, Jean-Dominique Bauby, trapped in his diving-bell, unable to speak, unable to move, still managed to reach out to the world, and to speak to me, to try to tell me who he is (now he is no longer).
I salute you Jean-Do, your voyage-inthedark bears fruits everyday, you make my imagination leap, you make me appreciate the beauty and freedom of being trapped-inside.
.............................................
I am digressing, of course. I had meant to talk precisely about how my voyage-inthedark is not signifying darkness as despair, as sadness, as evil. I meant to talk about how I didn´t mean the darkness of the teenage head-banger. Or of the one trapped inside himself (and look where that brought me). I meant to explain how the name of my blog was about darkness as an unsad, perhaps even joyful not-knowing, as a euphoric not-seeing, as a "tatonner dans l'obscurité" --a blind man´s progress; feeling your way around the walls, with your hands out in order not to stumble and fall upon that which is there but you do not see. Or, now that another image starts to take shape in my head, it is also about a ship, at night, knowing its course, and yet not seeing what is around it. Il vogue, il vogue, le bateau. Or about a person whose eyes are closed, and what happens when she starts to open her eyes.
What is my voyage-inthedark? It is all these things and more. Darkness is not despair, it is joy in the not-seeing, not-knowing, thereby allowing the discovering, the starting-to-see. My darkness is this and something else. My darkness is more the something-else.
For a long-haired teenage boy who constantly stumbles upon the incapacity of transmitting his (rather vague) feelings inside, darkness might mean: everything that is expressed in one of the sadder Metallica songs.
Well, when I think of a teenager and then Metallica, I am giving away my age: I am recalling the dozens of headbanger boys that populated my own adolescence, those that wore Pantera and Skid Row and Iron Maiden black T-shirts, and gathered gleefully in circles around a boom box at parties, dropping their heads down at a 45-degree angle. They would jerk their heads up and down, their clean or dirty, straight or curly mane bobbing along to the rhythm of the super-sped up guitar. They may have been sad, or not. Or perhaps, and more likely, they were full of anger. No matter. Darkness was definitely part of their language, their world-view. Darkness was a recurring motif in all those heavy-metal or trash-metal songs. Think of Fade to Black:
Life it seems, will fade away
Drifting further every day
Getting lost within myself
Nothing matters no one else
It´s a song about suicide, or so it seems. It's a song about losing oneself. It´s a song about feeling nothingness. It uses well-known metaphors to indicate despair, existential angst if you will. And always, darkness is the ultimate signifier.
Emptiness is filling me
To the point of agony
Growing darkness taking dawn
Of course, there were other images: that of being frozen, for instance. There was a song called Trapped under ice.
I don't know how to live trough this hell
Woken up, I'm still locked in this shell
Frozen soul, frozen down to the core
Break the ice, I can't take anymore
Here, it was all about this feeling of imprisonment, of impotence, of immobility. I don't even know if there was a story behind the song. I suspect it was a story about waking up from a coma, or perhaps there was a hint of science-fiction to it "No release from my cryonic state". Had the guy been literally frozen? Who knows...
I never listened that carefully to Metallica, it was my brother who played it all the time locked up in his room, and played it on the guitar continuously, when he wasn´t playing the definitely more joyous songs of Jimi Hendrix.
And then, there was "One":
Darkness imprisoning me
All that I see: absolute horror
I cannot live
I cannot die
Trapped in myself
Body's my holding cell
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j39ABZyzek
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/m/metallica/one_20092051.html--------------------------------------------
I stop to think about why I am exploring so much this image of darkness as associated with being locked up in yourself. Well, it´s an image that has stayed stuck in my head for the last couple of months. I watched the film "le Scaphandre et Le Papillon" recently, the real-life story of a magazine editor who wakes up from a stroke that has left him with Locked-in Syndrome. He is paralyzed from head to toe, as well as vocally impaired. He can only move the muscle of his left eye. This left eye is his only, tiny window out onto the world outside him, and it is also his only means of communicating with other people. He not only manages to talk to people by blinking his eye; he writes a WHOLE BOOK by blinking his eye.
I cried and cried when I saw this movie. Then I bought the book and read it and cried even more. There was so much enclosed in this iconic scene of the bed-ridden man. There were the painfully bleak details of his room, the edge of his iron bed, the floaty curtains that let in a muted light, the television high up on the wall that he could not control. There were the painful details of his daily routine; being cleaned, being made to practice swallowing by trying to raise his tongue to the roof of his mouth, millimetrically.
But there was also everything that was happening inside his head. There were his voyages into his own imagination: happy memories and fantasy worlds, film-like scenes that paraded joyfully for him. A white-marble bust of the empress Eugénie, which the locked-in man saw whenever he was taken down the hospital corridor, provoked the wildest awake-dreams. He fantasized about encountering this young beauty, about sticking his nose amongst the folds of her striped gauze dress, smelling her imperial smell of cologne. He dreamt of other things too, he imagined other things too.
And here is where the magical reversal occured: being trapped inside was not just a negative darkness; it was freeing, it was the essence of freedom. With our minds we can do anything, go anywhere, feel anything we want. We have some control, we have our fingers on the switch. Everything is relative; being trapped inside is also being free to roam inside. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: the straight-jacket and the bird flight, the walls and the spirit that traverses the walls as if they were made of cottony fog...
-----------------------------------------
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I thought, was also an amazing image for the dilemma of I and the world, and by extension, I and you. Am I what is not-the-world, in a dichotomy of I vs objects outside of me? But aren´t we that which we perceive? Isn´t what I see, and what I apprehend also what I am? How much is the I the world? How much am I made up of the world outside me? Am I not that trajectory line, that leaping bridge, that butterfly´s flight, that dialectical journey between inside and outside? Shall we fall deeper into that phenomenological well, and think of how much of You is Me, and vice-versa?
Our relationships are made up of our attempts to reach out, to transmit our inner visions. The path is inevitably ridden with misunderstandings, misencounters. But it is precisely this blind path that connects us; where we reach out and try to say "I am this" and the other says "I am this" or "I am not this". And the other says "is this what you mean?", and you say, like TS Elliot*, "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all." (* http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html)
It´s a veritable miracle that we manage to communicate, to connect with other people. I am thinking of the courageous man existing in his body-tomb, his mind leaping and dancing inside his vaulted cave-body. How this man, Jean-Dominique Bauby, trapped in his diving-bell, unable to speak, unable to move, still managed to reach out to the world, and to speak to me, to try to tell me who he is (now he is no longer).
I salute you Jean-Do, your voyage-inthedark bears fruits everyday, you make my imagination leap, you make me appreciate the beauty and freedom of being trapped-inside.
.............................................
I am digressing, of course. I had meant to talk precisely about how my voyage-inthedark is not signifying darkness as despair, as sadness, as evil. I meant to talk about how I didn´t mean the darkness of the teenage head-banger. Or of the one trapped inside himself (and look where that brought me). I meant to explain how the name of my blog was about darkness as an unsad, perhaps even joyful not-knowing, as a euphoric not-seeing, as a "tatonner dans l'obscurité" --a blind man´s progress; feeling your way around the walls, with your hands out in order not to stumble and fall upon that which is there but you do not see. Or, now that another image starts to take shape in my head, it is also about a ship, at night, knowing its course, and yet not seeing what is around it. Il vogue, il vogue, le bateau. Or about a person whose eyes are closed, and what happens when she starts to open her eyes.
What is my voyage-inthedark? It is all these things and more. Darkness is not despair, it is joy in the not-seeing, not-knowing, thereby allowing the discovering, the starting-to-see. My darkness is this and something else. My darkness is more the something-else.
quarta-feira, 27 de agosto de 2008
The eye of the storm
I spent my first week in Brazil at the beach, in Ubatuba, with Lilian and Lilian´s friends, jumping waves, sailing, eating churrasco, drinking, smoking up, and watching the samba schools parade on television, because it was carnaval.
Then I found myself back in the disturbing chaos of São Paulo, alone in a two-bedroom flat in a sixties building near the ever-throbbing Avenida Paulista. I was going to house-sit for a friend, who would be away in London for another three months. Blessed to be alone! I had a comfortable, fully-furnished apartment, a place full of colorful naif paintings, craftwork from all over Brazil, and Brazilian CDs galore to indulge my interest in rootsy music. The eight-floor apartment was a little island of tranquility and coolness, because it was unbearably hot at this time of the year.
At first I did not really know what to do with myself. There was such a long line of bureaucratic tasks awaiting me before I could properly get started with my life in Brazil: getting 3 X 4 photos to bring along with my birth certificate to the downtown Poupa Tempo, that kafkaesque yet strangely efficient and even pleasurable temple of endless paperwork processing. Getting my RG, which made me an official human being in the eyes of Brazilian law. Then getting my voter´s card, the "título de eleitor". Then the CPF, and the carteira de trabalho, and another myriad of pieces of paper that validated and proved my existence in this latitude.
---------------------------------------------------
Not just hours, but sometimes even days went by between each complicated step of the long journey to acquiring an identity in my birthcountry. In my vacant hours, I sat home and roamed the internet looking for a job. And when I had enough of staring at the screen, I explored some new part of town, or went to the park, or sat in a boteco, and drank ice-cold beer, Bohemia, or Brahma, or Original, while I read the papers or jotted down my impressions on napkins that more often than not got wet from the beer, and proved to be illegible when I read them over again back in the apartment.
I felt strange, I felt suspended in a limbo state, in-between two lives, in-between two continents, in-between two stories of who I was. Everyday brought new impressions that left my head reeling at night with odd visions, and too-strong smells, and scenes that played themselves out over and over again in my head as I tried to decipher and make sense of them. Culture shock, full blasts of it, like being on a permanent hallucinogenic trip; and not being able to get off the carrousel that was now going too fast.
There was a certain melancholic peace to my staying alone in the flat. Solitary activities brought me comfort and some sense of stability in the midst of my emotional turmoil. I took my time to cook, put sheets and towels in the washing machine, wash delicate clothes, mop the floor, water the plants…
In that quiet place, I started paying attention to the little things. I started becoming more aware of the subtle differences in sounds, light, and color in this new hemisphere. I noticed, in the "área de serviço" where I hung my clothes to dry, how the latticed exterior wall filtered bright sunlight, and how this softened light painted moorish patterns on the opposite wall. I learned the best time to sit in the living room to catch the little direct sunlight that penetrated the apartment for just a few hours.
Lying in my bed or sitting in the living room, I discovered a whole new collection of sounds, a continuous "bourdonnement". I started waking up at five in the morning with the roaring sounds of the first buses climbing up steep Brigadeiro Luis Antonio, training my ear to pick the momentary gaps in sound that signified the shifting of gears. And during the day there were always layers and layers of noise, fom the high-pitched voices and children's yelling from the buildings nearby, to the more indistinct drone coming from thousands of cars and buses and motorcycles, and endless building sites and pavement renovations and street repairs all over the city.
It was summer, and I experienced for the first time in a long time the constant extremes of rain and sun; very hot sun, very constant rain. I grew accustomed to sitting by the window, watching the city under the rain: the two towering blocks that faced each other, framing each side of my window, with hundreds of little square windows at which sat other lonesome figures smoking, playing computer games, watching TV (or so I thought from the bluish glare that reflected at night on the propped-up glass panes); the clump of green down below, with a tall solitary tree that masked the little playground underneath, and from which emerged strange bird cries at the strangest times of night; and the small football/basketball court annexed to the garden.
And beyond all this, on the other side of Brigadeiro Luis Antonio, there was a parking lot, and next to the parking lot, the building site, with a crane and another gigantic machine that pounced the ground in the morning like Gulliver´s sledge hammer, planting the structural pillars that would later hold the weight of a whole building. Early in the morning, I heard its dull thudding, I felt it pounding my brain into the pillow, into the thin mattress, and into the ground below the mattress.
------------------------------
I had brought dozens of old photographs of my childhood, which I taped up on the bedroom wall opposite the bed to form a kind of mnemonic mosaic. Something about this apartment triggered a bitter-sweet feeling; a nostalgia for things past, for childhood, for a moment that could never be relived, Brazil in the 70s and 80s. I would lie in bed, and let hazy memories wash over me, I would sink in a strange state of contemplation, watching my memories play out on my mind's screen. I drifted into scenes where I was playing in the club, feeling the hot yellow stones under my feet, spending all day in the water, watching the ends of my fingers wrinkle up like pale dried raisins. The industrial, clinical smell of chlorinated skin. Drinking fresh fruit juice, mamao and abacaxi and orange juice with carrot juice. Always going around bare-foot. The foliage of childhood.
I thought longingly about Brasilina, my old nanny, the woman that had been with me from my birth and had disappeared from my life when I was seven, when our family had left Brazil heading for Santiago. I wanted to find her. She would have been very old by now; she had disappeared, sunk back into my past. I asked my mother about her. "Nathalie, surely she is dead by now!" she said. I inquired what she had known about her, where she´d come from. My mother said: "She came with the apartment". My parents rented an apartment on Alameda Jaú, and she came with it. Like Luciano said, "sabe aqueles doces que vêm com brinquedinho?" The little toys you got when you bought sweets? The tattoo you´d get with buballoo bubblegum?
--------------------------------
There was one week in particular, towards the end of my first month in Brazil, when I wanted to cry all the time. I felt a secret happiness at the core of my sadness; it was a bizarre and destabilizing sensation of being extremely happy and extremely sad at the same time.
One day I had an aha! moment. I saw that I had dropped to the very bottom of a well that was saudade itself. Suddenly I thought, "I'm almost breaking, because this is too strong a dose of saudade, I'm in the eye of a very beautiful but very dangerous storm." Saudade: I was so extremely sensitive, les nerfs a fleur-de-peau, as we say in French.
What is saudade? I googled it up: "a feeling of longing for something that one is fond of, which is gone, but might return in a distant future. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return." Amazing, how could there be a word that contained so much? Saudade: "Uma coisa profunda e leve ao mesmo tempo, triste e alegre."
-----------------------------------------------
With the rainy weather, I started getting extremely strong allergies; constant sneezing, watery eyes, an eternally itchy nose. I bought extra-strength pills, because that´s what the pharmacist sold me: prescription strength, the kind of stuff that required a doctor´s note. He gave it to me as if it were a mild dose of aspirin. Little did I know how my carelessness would bring me down.
I could have never foreseen the pills´ mind-blowing effect. Within half an hour, I started feeling short of breath. I felt mysef going hot and cold. I started pacing the apartment, obsessively going over all the tasks left undone that day: I hadn´t called up job agencies, I hadn´t done my laundry, I hadn´t called the port of Santos to see what was up with my boxes, I hadn´t bought a converter for my computer, I hadn´t uploaded my beach photos from my camera, and most terribly, I hadn´t performed the latest required fragment of bureaucratic activity to get my name made official in this god-forsaken freaky monster of a country. That´s how I felt: like the immensity of Brazil, and the immensity of my forecoming duties to get established here, were just about to swallow me whole. I felt myself spiralling down, dropping down, and down, and down. I felt my pulse, and it seemed too fast, or too faint, and I had an attack of hypocondria, or what others might call, a panick attack. What had I done, how had I left everything behind, what the hell was I doing here? My heart was beating very fast. And then I hallucinated that it wasn´t beating at all. Taquicardia, I later read in the medication´s list of possible side-effects.
I called Luciano, my new friend, and blurted out that I wanted him to come over right away. I tried to convey to him that somehow I was losing my grip on things. I don't think he realized how scared I was, how absolutely terrified I was at that moment. He arrived quite fast, and took me to a padaria where we bought cake and juice, and as I talked to him and tried to explain to him what had happened, the effects of that strong drug started softening.
The rest of the night passed in a blur. But that voyage into the eye of the storm left ripples inside me for quite a while. It is hard to recall those first-days feelings now. I have been growing accustomed to things here lately. And sometimes, I even experience nostalgia, a strange feeling of loss, of wanting to feel the fear again. I seem to have a love-hate relationship with roller-coaster emotions. Perhaps it´s just an addiction to change.
Then I found myself back in the disturbing chaos of São Paulo, alone in a two-bedroom flat in a sixties building near the ever-throbbing Avenida Paulista. I was going to house-sit for a friend, who would be away in London for another three months. Blessed to be alone! I had a comfortable, fully-furnished apartment, a place full of colorful naif paintings, craftwork from all over Brazil, and Brazilian CDs galore to indulge my interest in rootsy music. The eight-floor apartment was a little island of tranquility and coolness, because it was unbearably hot at this time of the year.
At first I did not really know what to do with myself. There was such a long line of bureaucratic tasks awaiting me before I could properly get started with my life in Brazil: getting 3 X 4 photos to bring along with my birth certificate to the downtown Poupa Tempo, that kafkaesque yet strangely efficient and even pleasurable temple of endless paperwork processing. Getting my RG, which made me an official human being in the eyes of Brazilian law. Then getting my voter´s card, the "título de eleitor". Then the CPF, and the carteira de trabalho, and another myriad of pieces of paper that validated and proved my existence in this latitude.
---------------------------------------------------
Not just hours, but sometimes even days went by between each complicated step of the long journey to acquiring an identity in my birthcountry. In my vacant hours, I sat home and roamed the internet looking for a job. And when I had enough of staring at the screen, I explored some new part of town, or went to the park, or sat in a boteco, and drank ice-cold beer, Bohemia, or Brahma, or Original, while I read the papers or jotted down my impressions on napkins that more often than not got wet from the beer, and proved to be illegible when I read them over again back in the apartment.
I felt strange, I felt suspended in a limbo state, in-between two lives, in-between two continents, in-between two stories of who I was. Everyday brought new impressions that left my head reeling at night with odd visions, and too-strong smells, and scenes that played themselves out over and over again in my head as I tried to decipher and make sense of them. Culture shock, full blasts of it, like being on a permanent hallucinogenic trip; and not being able to get off the carrousel that was now going too fast.
There was a certain melancholic peace to my staying alone in the flat. Solitary activities brought me comfort and some sense of stability in the midst of my emotional turmoil. I took my time to cook, put sheets and towels in the washing machine, wash delicate clothes, mop the floor, water the plants…
In that quiet place, I started paying attention to the little things. I started becoming more aware of the subtle differences in sounds, light, and color in this new hemisphere. I noticed, in the "área de serviço" where I hung my clothes to dry, how the latticed exterior wall filtered bright sunlight, and how this softened light painted moorish patterns on the opposite wall. I learned the best time to sit in the living room to catch the little direct sunlight that penetrated the apartment for just a few hours.
Lying in my bed or sitting in the living room, I discovered a whole new collection of sounds, a continuous "bourdonnement". I started waking up at five in the morning with the roaring sounds of the first buses climbing up steep Brigadeiro Luis Antonio, training my ear to pick the momentary gaps in sound that signified the shifting of gears. And during the day there were always layers and layers of noise, fom the high-pitched voices and children's yelling from the buildings nearby, to the more indistinct drone coming from thousands of cars and buses and motorcycles, and endless building sites and pavement renovations and street repairs all over the city.
It was summer, and I experienced for the first time in a long time the constant extremes of rain and sun; very hot sun, very constant rain. I grew accustomed to sitting by the window, watching the city under the rain: the two towering blocks that faced each other, framing each side of my window, with hundreds of little square windows at which sat other lonesome figures smoking, playing computer games, watching TV (or so I thought from the bluish glare that reflected at night on the propped-up glass panes); the clump of green down below, with a tall solitary tree that masked the little playground underneath, and from which emerged strange bird cries at the strangest times of night; and the small football/basketball court annexed to the garden.
And beyond all this, on the other side of Brigadeiro Luis Antonio, there was a parking lot, and next to the parking lot, the building site, with a crane and another gigantic machine that pounced the ground in the morning like Gulliver´s sledge hammer, planting the structural pillars that would later hold the weight of a whole building. Early in the morning, I heard its dull thudding, I felt it pounding my brain into the pillow, into the thin mattress, and into the ground below the mattress.
------------------------------
I had brought dozens of old photographs of my childhood, which I taped up on the bedroom wall opposite the bed to form a kind of mnemonic mosaic. Something about this apartment triggered a bitter-sweet feeling; a nostalgia for things past, for childhood, for a moment that could never be relived, Brazil in the 70s and 80s. I would lie in bed, and let hazy memories wash over me, I would sink in a strange state of contemplation, watching my memories play out on my mind's screen. I drifted into scenes where I was playing in the club, feeling the hot yellow stones under my feet, spending all day in the water, watching the ends of my fingers wrinkle up like pale dried raisins. The industrial, clinical smell of chlorinated skin. Drinking fresh fruit juice, mamao and abacaxi and orange juice with carrot juice. Always going around bare-foot. The foliage of childhood.
I thought longingly about Brasilina, my old nanny, the woman that had been with me from my birth and had disappeared from my life when I was seven, when our family had left Brazil heading for Santiago. I wanted to find her. She would have been very old by now; she had disappeared, sunk back into my past. I asked my mother about her. "Nathalie, surely she is dead by now!" she said. I inquired what she had known about her, where she´d come from. My mother said: "She came with the apartment". My parents rented an apartment on Alameda Jaú, and she came with it. Like Luciano said, "sabe aqueles doces que vêm com brinquedinho?" The little toys you got when you bought sweets? The tattoo you´d get with buballoo bubblegum?
--------------------------------
There was one week in particular, towards the end of my first month in Brazil, when I wanted to cry all the time. I felt a secret happiness at the core of my sadness; it was a bizarre and destabilizing sensation of being extremely happy and extremely sad at the same time.
One day I had an aha! moment. I saw that I had dropped to the very bottom of a well that was saudade itself. Suddenly I thought, "I'm almost breaking, because this is too strong a dose of saudade, I'm in the eye of a very beautiful but very dangerous storm." Saudade: I was so extremely sensitive, les nerfs a fleur-de-peau, as we say in French.
What is saudade? I googled it up: "a feeling of longing for something that one is fond of, which is gone, but might return in a distant future. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return." Amazing, how could there be a word that contained so much? Saudade: "Uma coisa profunda e leve ao mesmo tempo, triste e alegre."
-----------------------------------------------
With the rainy weather, I started getting extremely strong allergies; constant sneezing, watery eyes, an eternally itchy nose. I bought extra-strength pills, because that´s what the pharmacist sold me: prescription strength, the kind of stuff that required a doctor´s note. He gave it to me as if it were a mild dose of aspirin. Little did I know how my carelessness would bring me down.
I could have never foreseen the pills´ mind-blowing effect. Within half an hour, I started feeling short of breath. I felt mysef going hot and cold. I started pacing the apartment, obsessively going over all the tasks left undone that day: I hadn´t called up job agencies, I hadn´t done my laundry, I hadn´t called the port of Santos to see what was up with my boxes, I hadn´t bought a converter for my computer, I hadn´t uploaded my beach photos from my camera, and most terribly, I hadn´t performed the latest required fragment of bureaucratic activity to get my name made official in this god-forsaken freaky monster of a country. That´s how I felt: like the immensity of Brazil, and the immensity of my forecoming duties to get established here, were just about to swallow me whole. I felt myself spiralling down, dropping down, and down, and down. I felt my pulse, and it seemed too fast, or too faint, and I had an attack of hypocondria, or what others might call, a panick attack. What had I done, how had I left everything behind, what the hell was I doing here? My heart was beating very fast. And then I hallucinated that it wasn´t beating at all. Taquicardia, I later read in the medication´s list of possible side-effects.
I called Luciano, my new friend, and blurted out that I wanted him to come over right away. I tried to convey to him that somehow I was losing my grip on things. I don't think he realized how scared I was, how absolutely terrified I was at that moment. He arrived quite fast, and took me to a padaria where we bought cake and juice, and as I talked to him and tried to explain to him what had happened, the effects of that strong drug started softening.
The rest of the night passed in a blur. But that voyage into the eye of the storm left ripples inside me for quite a while. It is hard to recall those first-days feelings now. I have been growing accustomed to things here lately. And sometimes, I even experience nostalgia, a strange feeling of loss, of wanting to feel the fear again. I seem to have a love-hate relationship with roller-coaster emotions. Perhaps it´s just an addiction to change.
domingo, 10 de agosto de 2008
The dream-bird that lost its colours
He was a plumed, sequined serpent, a beautiful and strange snake that scintillated as he danced to the beat of the music. He ondulated on stage, mesmerizing us with his tattooed body, the inky tribal rings around his thighs, his tight-fitting, majestic headdress, his gold mask, his kohl-rimmed eyes. His antique, blackened eyes flashed, throwing darts at us from a distance.
He was sensual, absurdly seductive when he changed costumes right there on stage, or rather, undressed, scandalizing us with his string thong, his strong buttocks, his bulge. He had firm, wide shoulders, slender muscular arms, and he liked to stand in profile and throw a leg out and set his foot on a velvet sofa to emphasize the outline of his leg, of his body in profile, like an Egyptian painting. Tall blue feathers bursting out of his head, he would turn suddenly with a swish, and like a feline demon prance around the stage. He pranced around like a hungry tiger, and lingered in a corner, singing, and almost dancing with one of his musicians, enticing him.
The tempo of the music increased, he started jerking, twisting, hopping absurdly about like a mad Indian god, a cross of a tiger and a divine monkey, reincarnating after his bird-snake life. He changed his adornments again, always seducing us with his poses. He lay a wide gold Egyptian necklace across his chest. He turned and gave his naked back to the audience. A tattooed back, wide black lines following his spine. An Aztec god he was, or perhaps a sacrifice, ready to be thrown into a great big cauldron in a distant mountain.
The artist, at sixty-something-years-old, was a spectacle that belonged to another time, to the decadence of pre-war cabaret life in Germany, combined with the decadence of 80s, new-to-AIDS Brazil, mixed with the eternal exhuberance of Amazonian animal life. He was the very embodiment of the carnivalesque, an ode to life, to primordial forces. He was an explosion of colours, shine, gloss, sparkle. He was an incarnation of macunaima, the trickster indian. He was Ney Matogrosso.
I remember the man from my Brazilian chilhood, the singer with the high voice. His recent show was on an August night; he performed in a cold, dark space, a theater with the name of a bank, an impersonal space with hundreds of tables where people sat eating their cheese and ham canapes and drinking their beers and caipirinhas. People did not stand during the show, people did not dance to accompany the beautiful bird-snake's rapturous flights across the stage. They sat and watched and consumed and asked for more cachaca and another round of beer and a few more portions of olives, please?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This whole scene symbolizes what happened to my dream of Brazil. The technicolor spectacle-dream of my birthplace seemed to turn grey when I started to settle into the reality of Sao Paulo. After the euphoria of arrival and the strangeness of culture shock, things morphed into a kind of oppressive flatness. A bit like the exhuberant bird-like singer I went to see a couple of weeks ago, trapped in the indistinct, soulless, corporate theater, trapped in the Zona Sul of Sao Paulo, old swamp land where new office buildings are built by the dozens or even by the hundreds, and where the grey-brown hazyness of condensed pollution hangs in the air permanently.
I have been searching for a way back to the exhilaration I associated with Brazil when I was most far away from the country.
My image of the country where I hadn't lived for twenty years was slowly built up, it was an amalgam of experiences and stories and symbols that I acquired in London only recently. As an adult, I hadn't been in touch with the culture at all, or if I had, it had been in a distant and formulaic way. When I watched the World Cup, I always rooted for Brazil. If I went to Portugal on vacation, I tried out my rusty Portuguese and was delighted to see that people recognized my accent as Brazilian.
I had memories of Brazil, but they were wispy and static, frozen scenes that felt as if I'd snatched them from a book or a movie or from somebody else's acid trip. I remembered the Bandeirantes monument, a mass of yellowish stone, a bunch of men standing in the middle of some avenue next to a park, a bunch of men pulling something but I couldn't recall what exactly it was that they were pulling. I remembered learning how to swim in the Clube Paulistano's huge swimming pool. I remembered my mother putting mascara on my lashes when I was four years old, readying me for my very important role as a bride at the Festas Juninas. But despite these memories, sometimes it really felt as if I'd made up my past in Brazil. Somehow it felt like I'd never lived there at all, or perhaps only in a previous life.
I came to know Brazil again in a beautiful yet most improbable way. In London, I started working at a Brazilian magazine doing their PR and organizing events. I was immediately thrown into a whirlwind of cultural life. Miraculously, I had landed a job that didn´t pay much yet felt like a permanent vacation.
I still remember my first boat party on the Thames. We hired a boat that stayed moored, yet threatened to take off into never-never land, such was the glowing energy that the party produced. Three different dance rooms, playing funk carioca, tropicalia music, hits from the eighties, Seu Jorge, forro,afro-grooves, and downstairs, in the hidden depths of the boat, under the water, it was heavy-duty electronica, minimal and trance, and other types of mushroomy sounds, where people got off on laughing gas and lost themselves in the pumping beats. And in the other rooms, samba-rock, most importantly, beats, beats, beats, and warmth, people touching, smiling, laughing.
And there were such lines to get in! Of course there were the regulars, and those who had read about the party in our magazine or in TimeOut. But there were also people leaving the infamous (and cheap) Australian pub across the street, and people who had been strolling along the Thames after a river-side dinner meal, and East London kids heading for Schoolnight parties in West London, and young boys from out of town looking for some action: everyone seemed to be eager to check out what it was all about. Any party with a long line to get in MUST be out of this world. As the clock struck twelve, the line became even more absurdly long, and the people at the entrance, at the caixa and with the guest list (which included me) went into a frenzied mode to get everyone in and take in the much-needed dough. It seemed as though from the street, people literally saw the fumes of happiness steam or a rainbow aura around the boat.
Brazil in London, Brazil from afar, collapsed all social and cultural differences into one big colourful happy party. There were Brazilians, Brits, Spaniards, French, Indian and other London variations of lost nomads from the world over. There were people from the embassy, from sponsoring companies, from the business world, and there were artists, musicians, officer workers, motoboys, manicures, pub workers; they were black, white, brown, young, old, cool, nerdy; it was a beautiful zoo.
I want to find the Brazil that I knew in London, the hallucination that possessed me and that compelled me to come back, to feel it all pulsating in me.
Here are some mementos from that happy time, press releases I sent out to the media, exaggerating, embellishing and yet providing a true snapshot of Brazilian life in London.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
COLLAGE N 2
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
AUGUST 2006
TWO OF THE BIGGEST NAMES IN THE UK BRASILIAN SCENE JOIN FORCES TO BRING YOU THE HAPPIEST DANCE BASH OF THE SUMMER HELPING STREET CHILDREN IN BRASIL
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JungleDrums Magazine, purveyor of London’s best Brasilian-flavoured boat bashes, has joined forces with special guest DJ Cliffy of Batmacumba fame to host the happiest party of the summer, with part of the proceeds going to Ruas e Praças, a Brasilian charity for street children.
The notorious Cliffy is a music writer, producer and one of the most successful global beat deejays in Europe. This Brasil-lover has deejayed in over 25 countries from Canada to China and hosts Batmacumba (usually at the ICA), the longest running Brasilian club-night in England (9 years), a multi-media event combining films, photography, graffiti, dance, capoeira and much more. We’re very proud to present the Batmacumba Room, featuring the man himself playing the amazing sounds he’s collected from down under.
But there’s loads of wicked stuff going on in the other rooms too! Just fresh off the coolest outdoors festival on the Thames this year, JungleDrums will be back on the boat with the sounds and DJs that most roused the crowd. The DJ sets at Brasil Tô Dentro! (our festival that pulled over 30’000 people to the South Bank on July 2) attracted every dancing creature in London from aging Elvis impersonators to hard clubbers willing to brave the sub-tropical temperatures and sunshine to bounce around joyfully.
Our downstairs Reaction Room will bring back this electric atmosphere, with funky, progressive and electro house care of crazy collective Djs Marcio Groove, Lucas Datt and Alec Fasani. This is the zaniest room, gathering shiny, happy people turbo-charged with energy.
And last but not least, Booty Beats Room is back too! Why change anything when the recipe works? Stay in this room and you’ll shake your booty all night to badass Baile Funk, and new contemporary urban music, with a dash of Drum’n ’Bass thrown in, courtesy of DJ S.P.Y., and the unbeatable Herman ♥s Pauline.
As we’re all warming up for carnival, the dress-code is pre-carnival, so bring out the exhuberant bird of the night in you: dress up and go way over-the-top in true Brasilian style. Masks, sequins, feathers, body paint, translucent fabric, tiny outfits and vertiginous heels are encouraged!
(check out some of the artwork for these parties at http://www.jungledrums.org/boatparty/ or http://www.jungledrums.org/sambatralia/)
He was sensual, absurdly seductive when he changed costumes right there on stage, or rather, undressed, scandalizing us with his string thong, his strong buttocks, his bulge. He had firm, wide shoulders, slender muscular arms, and he liked to stand in profile and throw a leg out and set his foot on a velvet sofa to emphasize the outline of his leg, of his body in profile, like an Egyptian painting. Tall blue feathers bursting out of his head, he would turn suddenly with a swish, and like a feline demon prance around the stage. He pranced around like a hungry tiger, and lingered in a corner, singing, and almost dancing with one of his musicians, enticing him.
The tempo of the music increased, he started jerking, twisting, hopping absurdly about like a mad Indian god, a cross of a tiger and a divine monkey, reincarnating after his bird-snake life. He changed his adornments again, always seducing us with his poses. He lay a wide gold Egyptian necklace across his chest. He turned and gave his naked back to the audience. A tattooed back, wide black lines following his spine. An Aztec god he was, or perhaps a sacrifice, ready to be thrown into a great big cauldron in a distant mountain.
The artist, at sixty-something-years-old, was a spectacle that belonged to another time, to the decadence of pre-war cabaret life in Germany, combined with the decadence of 80s, new-to-AIDS Brazil, mixed with the eternal exhuberance of Amazonian animal life. He was the very embodiment of the carnivalesque, an ode to life, to primordial forces. He was an explosion of colours, shine, gloss, sparkle. He was an incarnation of macunaima, the trickster indian. He was Ney Matogrosso.
I remember the man from my Brazilian chilhood, the singer with the high voice. His recent show was on an August night; he performed in a cold, dark space, a theater with the name of a bank, an impersonal space with hundreds of tables where people sat eating their cheese and ham canapes and drinking their beers and caipirinhas. People did not stand during the show, people did not dance to accompany the beautiful bird-snake's rapturous flights across the stage. They sat and watched and consumed and asked for more cachaca and another round of beer and a few more portions of olives, please?
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This whole scene symbolizes what happened to my dream of Brazil. The technicolor spectacle-dream of my birthplace seemed to turn grey when I started to settle into the reality of Sao Paulo. After the euphoria of arrival and the strangeness of culture shock, things morphed into a kind of oppressive flatness. A bit like the exhuberant bird-like singer I went to see a couple of weeks ago, trapped in the indistinct, soulless, corporate theater, trapped in the Zona Sul of Sao Paulo, old swamp land where new office buildings are built by the dozens or even by the hundreds, and where the grey-brown hazyness of condensed pollution hangs in the air permanently.
I have been searching for a way back to the exhilaration I associated with Brazil when I was most far away from the country.
My image of the country where I hadn't lived for twenty years was slowly built up, it was an amalgam of experiences and stories and symbols that I acquired in London only recently. As an adult, I hadn't been in touch with the culture at all, or if I had, it had been in a distant and formulaic way. When I watched the World Cup, I always rooted for Brazil. If I went to Portugal on vacation, I tried out my rusty Portuguese and was delighted to see that people recognized my accent as Brazilian.
I had memories of Brazil, but they were wispy and static, frozen scenes that felt as if I'd snatched them from a book or a movie or from somebody else's acid trip. I remembered the Bandeirantes monument, a mass of yellowish stone, a bunch of men standing in the middle of some avenue next to a park, a bunch of men pulling something but I couldn't recall what exactly it was that they were pulling. I remembered learning how to swim in the Clube Paulistano's huge swimming pool. I remembered my mother putting mascara on my lashes when I was four years old, readying me for my very important role as a bride at the Festas Juninas. But despite these memories, sometimes it really felt as if I'd made up my past in Brazil. Somehow it felt like I'd never lived there at all, or perhaps only in a previous life.
I came to know Brazil again in a beautiful yet most improbable way. In London, I started working at a Brazilian magazine doing their PR and organizing events. I was immediately thrown into a whirlwind of cultural life. Miraculously, I had landed a job that didn´t pay much yet felt like a permanent vacation.
I still remember my first boat party on the Thames. We hired a boat that stayed moored, yet threatened to take off into never-never land, such was the glowing energy that the party produced. Three different dance rooms, playing funk carioca, tropicalia music, hits from the eighties, Seu Jorge, forro,afro-grooves, and downstairs, in the hidden depths of the boat, under the water, it was heavy-duty electronica, minimal and trance, and other types of mushroomy sounds, where people got off on laughing gas and lost themselves in the pumping beats. And in the other rooms, samba-rock, most importantly, beats, beats, beats, and warmth, people touching, smiling, laughing.
And there were such lines to get in! Of course there were the regulars, and those who had read about the party in our magazine or in TimeOut. But there were also people leaving the infamous (and cheap) Australian pub across the street, and people who had been strolling along the Thames after a river-side dinner meal, and East London kids heading for Schoolnight parties in West London, and young boys from out of town looking for some action: everyone seemed to be eager to check out what it was all about. Any party with a long line to get in MUST be out of this world. As the clock struck twelve, the line became even more absurdly long, and the people at the entrance, at the caixa and with the guest list (which included me) went into a frenzied mode to get everyone in and take in the much-needed dough. It seemed as though from the street, people literally saw the fumes of happiness steam or a rainbow aura around the boat.
Brazil in London, Brazil from afar, collapsed all social and cultural differences into one big colourful happy party. There were Brazilians, Brits, Spaniards, French, Indian and other London variations of lost nomads from the world over. There were people from the embassy, from sponsoring companies, from the business world, and there were artists, musicians, officer workers, motoboys, manicures, pub workers; they were black, white, brown, young, old, cool, nerdy; it was a beautiful zoo.
I want to find the Brazil that I knew in London, the hallucination that possessed me and that compelled me to come back, to feel it all pulsating in me.
Here are some mementos from that happy time, press releases I sent out to the media, exaggerating, embellishing and yet providing a true snapshot of Brazilian life in London.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
COLLAGE N 2
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
AUGUST 2006
TWO OF THE BIGGEST NAMES IN THE UK BRASILIAN SCENE JOIN FORCES TO BRING YOU THE HAPPIEST DANCE BASH OF THE SUMMER HELPING STREET CHILDREN IN BRASIL
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JungleDrums Magazine, purveyor of London’s best Brasilian-flavoured boat bashes, has joined forces with special guest DJ Cliffy of Batmacumba fame to host the happiest party of the summer, with part of the proceeds going to Ruas e Praças, a Brasilian charity for street children.
The notorious Cliffy is a music writer, producer and one of the most successful global beat deejays in Europe. This Brasil-lover has deejayed in over 25 countries from Canada to China and hosts Batmacumba (usually at the ICA), the longest running Brasilian club-night in England (9 years), a multi-media event combining films, photography, graffiti, dance, capoeira and much more. We’re very proud to present the Batmacumba Room, featuring the man himself playing the amazing sounds he’s collected from down under.
But there’s loads of wicked stuff going on in the other rooms too! Just fresh off the coolest outdoors festival on the Thames this year, JungleDrums will be back on the boat with the sounds and DJs that most roused the crowd. The DJ sets at Brasil Tô Dentro! (our festival that pulled over 30’000 people to the South Bank on July 2) attracted every dancing creature in London from aging Elvis impersonators to hard clubbers willing to brave the sub-tropical temperatures and sunshine to bounce around joyfully.
Our downstairs Reaction Room will bring back this electric atmosphere, with funky, progressive and electro house care of crazy collective Djs Marcio Groove, Lucas Datt and Alec Fasani. This is the zaniest room, gathering shiny, happy people turbo-charged with energy.
And last but not least, Booty Beats Room is back too! Why change anything when the recipe works? Stay in this room and you’ll shake your booty all night to badass Baile Funk, and new contemporary urban music, with a dash of Drum’n ’Bass thrown in, courtesy of DJ S.P.Y., and the unbeatable Herman ♥s Pauline.
As we’re all warming up for carnival, the dress-code is pre-carnival, so bring out the exhuberant bird of the night in you: dress up and go way over-the-top in true Brasilian style. Masks, sequins, feathers, body paint, translucent fabric, tiny outfits and vertiginous heels are encouraged!
(check out some of the artwork for these parties at http://www.jungledrums.org/boatparty/ or http://www.jungledrums.org/sambatralia/)
sexta-feira, 8 de agosto de 2008
Imagined homelands
This image of mountain and water and sky has a strong hold on me. I have had it inside me as far as I can remember.
My father must have drawn that mountain landscape for me dozens, perhaps hundreds of times since I was a toddler. "Please papa, can you draw it again?" On any kind of paper, with a pencil or pen or crayon, he would sketch that scene, with bold, sure lines he would etch it out. I try to think of the order in which the elements were placed on paper. Somehow they always came together in the same way.
First, the wide curve of the lake, usually on the lower right side of the paper. Then, a series of disconnected up and down strokes in the upper third of the sheet that together formed a craggly mountain chain. And finally, the village, on the left side of the lake, at just the spot where we might imagine the beginnings of the mountains slopes. A bunch of little boxes with triangular roofs, outlines of houses really, unspecific, symbols of houses practically. Perhaps there was a church, recognizable by its high tower and a cross, but I'm not sure. Above the village, a few rows of pine trees scattered about, also drawn very fast, with minimal lines. What I am sure of is the strong shape of the mountains, and a few vs drawn in the sky to signify birds. He had always had a talent for drawing. He drew with sharp, strong strokes. Almost telegraphic dashes, usually black, etched with his Parker pen, or perhaps with Caran d'Ache black pencils. No colours usually, no filling in of blue and brown and green.
The picture probably represented St. Moritz, the town near Pontresina that had a lake and where his godmother, Tanta Orsi, lived. Infinite versions of this picture were produced for me, but always drawn in the same way, always containing the same elements. I eventually came to draw it myself, more awkardly and more exhuberantly, making full use of my coloured pencils, employing an absurd array of shades of turquoise and aqua and cobalt blue for the lake and the sky.
But his black, minimalist mountains were the original prototype. He was very good at technical drawing, and for my brothers, he delected himself producing drafts of planes, machinery, architectural landscapes. For me, at least as far as I can recall, he drew that iconographic landscape, an archetypal mountain valley that he carried inside at all times and in all places of the world, and which he inevitably transmitted and engraved in my own consciousness as if I myself had been born there.
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The drawn landscape is one thing that represented faraway Switzerland for me. The image would be confirmed whenever we went to visit grandmother nona. I knew it was not invented, it was not abstract in the way that an elephant or a tiger might be, things you would see on TV and in children's books but would never live with. The mountains were where my grandmother lived, and where papa had grown up with a huge extended family full of cousins, and where we went on vacation every two years, crossing the ocean, enduring transatlantic flights from Sao Paulo to Zurich that had a stopover in Africa, in Dakar actually, to refuel. All I remember of those stopovers, when we did not even leave the plane, was a brownish colour -- in my mind's eye I can only see a golden-brown light, and earthy hues.
The Swissair flights were also an essential part of our Swiss cosmology. We were never afraid of flying. Aside from the exciting visits to the cockpit, which my father made sure would happen on almost every occasion, we enjoyed getting the hot wet towels to wash our hands and faces and ears and whatever else needed washing, and then eating airplane food in its cute containers, and we loved getting the stuff that was meant to shut us up, namely, sets of playing cards, memory cards, puzzles, coloured crayons, colour-by-number sheets and little wooden clowns and horses that jerked about when you pushed your thumb into their base, the wire coil inside making the little marionnettes come alive. And oh the extasis, for the little girl that I was, of the small necessaires containing earplugs, a mini-comb, a mini-toothbrush, and a tiny, tiny toothpaste.
Papa made it very clear that flying was safer than any mode of transport, as he would explain that the amazing forces that held the plane aloft were stronger than those that could get it down. He would describe in extreme detail to my brothers and to me exactly how besides the engines it was also currents and drafts that maintained that steel bird up in the air.
Our father, aside from being a supreme purveyor of mountain drawings and F-16 blueprints, was also a meteorology expert. He knew absolutely everything there was to know about the weather, about atmospheric conditions, winds and clouds and storms. He would describe, analyze and interpret the size and shape and colour of clouds, lecture on details of precipitation, air pressure, and so on. This wondrous knowledge may have come to him from his having been an airplane pilot (of small aircraft and gliders), or it may have come from his military service training (I have kept his innumerable fascicles of Swiss military manuals, very thin beige-coloured books printed with intricate, detailed diagrams full of arrows), or even from his boy scout years. Or it may have been knowledge he had simply because he was a mountain boy, a true Swiss mountain boy.
There were many other things that came to represent Switzerland for us during our childhood growing up in South America, including the snow igloos we built in front of our nona's house, the ducks we fed at lake Zurich with our maternal grandmother, the trips to Franz Karl Weber, the huge toy store, as well as riding trams, sledding in the Zollikon forest, and holding paper "lampions" with lit candles inside while watching 1st of August bonfires.
But I now know that the mountains are some of the strongest links we have with that country we only came to know in spurts, in short yet intense bursts, but that became real to us through the stories and images that were given to us unawares.
My father must have drawn that mountain landscape for me dozens, perhaps hundreds of times since I was a toddler. "Please papa, can you draw it again?" On any kind of paper, with a pencil or pen or crayon, he would sketch that scene, with bold, sure lines he would etch it out. I try to think of the order in which the elements were placed on paper. Somehow they always came together in the same way.
First, the wide curve of the lake, usually on the lower right side of the paper. Then, a series of disconnected up and down strokes in the upper third of the sheet that together formed a craggly mountain chain. And finally, the village, on the left side of the lake, at just the spot where we might imagine the beginnings of the mountains slopes. A bunch of little boxes with triangular roofs, outlines of houses really, unspecific, symbols of houses practically. Perhaps there was a church, recognizable by its high tower and a cross, but I'm not sure. Above the village, a few rows of pine trees scattered about, also drawn very fast, with minimal lines. What I am sure of is the strong shape of the mountains, and a few vs drawn in the sky to signify birds. He had always had a talent for drawing. He drew with sharp, strong strokes. Almost telegraphic dashes, usually black, etched with his Parker pen, or perhaps with Caran d'Ache black pencils. No colours usually, no filling in of blue and brown and green.
The picture probably represented St. Moritz, the town near Pontresina that had a lake and where his godmother, Tanta Orsi, lived. Infinite versions of this picture were produced for me, but always drawn in the same way, always containing the same elements. I eventually came to draw it myself, more awkardly and more exhuberantly, making full use of my coloured pencils, employing an absurd array of shades of turquoise and aqua and cobalt blue for the lake and the sky.
But his black, minimalist mountains were the original prototype. He was very good at technical drawing, and for my brothers, he delected himself producing drafts of planes, machinery, architectural landscapes. For me, at least as far as I can recall, he drew that iconographic landscape, an archetypal mountain valley that he carried inside at all times and in all places of the world, and which he inevitably transmitted and engraved in my own consciousness as if I myself had been born there.
-----------------------
The drawn landscape is one thing that represented faraway Switzerland for me. The image would be confirmed whenever we went to visit grandmother nona. I knew it was not invented, it was not abstract in the way that an elephant or a tiger might be, things you would see on TV and in children's books but would never live with. The mountains were where my grandmother lived, and where papa had grown up with a huge extended family full of cousins, and where we went on vacation every two years, crossing the ocean, enduring transatlantic flights from Sao Paulo to Zurich that had a stopover in Africa, in Dakar actually, to refuel. All I remember of those stopovers, when we did not even leave the plane, was a brownish colour -- in my mind's eye I can only see a golden-brown light, and earthy hues.
The Swissair flights were also an essential part of our Swiss cosmology. We were never afraid of flying. Aside from the exciting visits to the cockpit, which my father made sure would happen on almost every occasion, we enjoyed getting the hot wet towels to wash our hands and faces and ears and whatever else needed washing, and then eating airplane food in its cute containers, and we loved getting the stuff that was meant to shut us up, namely, sets of playing cards, memory cards, puzzles, coloured crayons, colour-by-number sheets and little wooden clowns and horses that jerked about when you pushed your thumb into their base, the wire coil inside making the little marionnettes come alive. And oh the extasis, for the little girl that I was, of the small necessaires containing earplugs, a mini-comb, a mini-toothbrush, and a tiny, tiny toothpaste.
Papa made it very clear that flying was safer than any mode of transport, as he would explain that the amazing forces that held the plane aloft were stronger than those that could get it down. He would describe in extreme detail to my brothers and to me exactly how besides the engines it was also currents and drafts that maintained that steel bird up in the air.
Our father, aside from being a supreme purveyor of mountain drawings and F-16 blueprints, was also a meteorology expert. He knew absolutely everything there was to know about the weather, about atmospheric conditions, winds and clouds and storms. He would describe, analyze and interpret the size and shape and colour of clouds, lecture on details of precipitation, air pressure, and so on. This wondrous knowledge may have come to him from his having been an airplane pilot (of small aircraft and gliders), or it may have come from his military service training (I have kept his innumerable fascicles of Swiss military manuals, very thin beige-coloured books printed with intricate, detailed diagrams full of arrows), or even from his boy scout years. Or it may have been knowledge he had simply because he was a mountain boy, a true Swiss mountain boy.
There were many other things that came to represent Switzerland for us during our childhood growing up in South America, including the snow igloos we built in front of our nona's house, the ducks we fed at lake Zurich with our maternal grandmother, the trips to Franz Karl Weber, the huge toy store, as well as riding trams, sledding in the Zollikon forest, and holding paper "lampions" with lit candles inside while watching 1st of August bonfires.
But I now know that the mountains are some of the strongest links we have with that country we only came to know in spurts, in short yet intense bursts, but that became real to us through the stories and images that were given to us unawares.
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