The box, the fall, and the looking-glass...

It was not what I was after. What I wrote yesterday made me feel too light, too one-eyed, like a cyclop with no peripheral vision. Being funny, if I was funny at all, is easy. Or at least, it isn’t hard. But after I wrote, I felt I had betrayed something. I had condensed the experience, taken things out of the flux, out of the unordered order in which they happened, out of the context or landscape or way in which they existed when I first encountered them. I made a list, and took out the feeling out of each thing on the list. I regulated the temperature, I established one climate, and one climate only, because I’d decided it was easier that way.

I chose one side, when the truth is that I could always see two, three or more sides at once. This choosing one side made the writing sound unlike me, and more like some Lonely Planet whore, like someone who has an audience in mind.

When I write explaining things to myself, everything comes out very differently than when I write picturing a person, or several persons, reading. I am already having a dialogue, or a three-way conversation when I’m explaining things to myself. I ‘m already presenting things this way, and then that way, and then juxtaposing that other view from that third angle. But when I get outside of me and try to find a point to focus on, to make it easier for that imaginary reader, I lose all the other points.

And why, why did I look outward, write outside of me, try to make it easier for that imaginary reader? Why did I slot myself into a predictable narrative? Yes, perhaps I have a clue. Writing about what I went through, and what I’ve been going through, with no particular order, or goal, was becoming uncomfortable, it was starting to itch, and so I interrupted the unplanned, unexpected flow of things that were appearing. I created a diversion, I interrupted because it was too much. Plunging inside one self and inside the world and inside god knows what was just too heavy.

And here is, after all, finally, at last, what I felt, often, in my first few weeks here; with not much comic relief to soften the disorienting blow of culture shock. I felt: moving to Brazil: like opening a great, terrible Pandora’s box.

There was no going back, I had unleashed all the scary demons, or rather, opened the door to another world, huge, larger than everything I’d ever known, unknowable, overwhelming, ungraspable. I would try to teeter on the edge and hold on for dear life, not wanting to fall into the vortex, the whirlwind. The immensity of Brazil, of Sao Paulo. This feeling of being about to be buried alive. Tall buildings congregating around me, high above me, pressing me against the ground, the endless streets and avenues pulsating with the insect-like traffic. The multiplicity of realities, types of people, consciousnesses.

At times I realized almost with horror that it would have been easier to stay put, in London, in Europe, and not have opened up this door to this crazy world. And not just to this crazy world, but to that past that insisted on slipping away, in metamorphosing into a dream.

It was becoming clear and evident that I would be changed by my experience here, by this place. And there was a feeling of wanting to hold on to who I was, or who I had been. I did not want to be transformed. Things that I had known to be true, values and ways of being that I considered real, were discarded or discounted here. It was painful to let go of the known; the desire was to hold on for dear life, to the self and to the ways that I knew, that I was familiar with. But these so-called familiar ways… These were recent ways; I had known Brazil a long time ago, but I had lost it. I didn’t know it anymore, but perhaps I could know it again.

The truth was that stepping into Brazil felt like stepping into an adolescent world, an adolescent way of thinking. With all its intensity, and impatience, and innocence, and stubbornness, and contradictions, and lack of experience, and arrogance, and know-it-all attitude, and appalling lack of reference points and wisdom and experience. I wanted to set the clock back to my world, to the supposed adulthood of Europe.

But I was wrong to think of the country and its life as adolescent. The old world and the new world were not on the same timeline. I used to think that Brazil was merely Europe a few years or decades behind. Then it became clear that Brazil was on a different path all together, and that it would never join up with Europe’s path. They had crossed perpendicularly a long time ago, and then the whole graph had exploded and the timelines and paths had gotten sucked into a vortex, got whipped up in a tornado. And each path was stubbornly walking its own way. Could I have a foot in both of them, in both realities?

As a matter of fact, the two realities co-existed, or were the same reality on two different sides of a two-sided mirror. And I was in the mirror. No, I was the mirror itself, separating and joining and reflecting both realities.