1. Pantagruel
No ritmo quente você vai dançar / In the hot rhythm, you will dance
Preste atenção que eu vou lhe ensinar / Pay attention, I will teach you
Veja o passinho, dois pra lá e pra cá / See the steps, two to the side and back
É boi-bumbá / It’s bumbá cow.—Boi Bumbá Caprichoso, “Ritmo Quente” (Hot Rhythm)
Manaus does not have a theater. It is impossible, no matter how many postcards, stamps, or illustrated tourist guides are sold of the pink Amazonas Theater in grand Renaissance style. I don’t believe it even if there is a stage beneath a dome decorated with the national flag in a historic building at the city’s center where Brazil and the Amazon meet and intertwine like wine and blood. I don’t believe it even if it is claimed that operas and performances have been staged there since the late nineteenth century. When it is announced that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony will be performed in this building in early July of the Amazonian summer under the whirl of hundreds of air conditioners, the image of an Amazonian theater does not become anymore tangible. Because among its seats, I sweat a pororoca, gushing through the chords or the conductor’s long introductions of the counterpoints of Bruckner and the salon music of Fauré.1 At night in Manaus it becomes so dark and so hot that one cannot believe the world is made of anything other than darkness, summer, and Manaus. The choir thunders the mantras of European Romanticism from the late nineteenth century: “We love! We hate! We curse our loves!” Between one voice and another, I have already made myself an igarapé flowing into the world’s cloaca, from where I can say, like a commercial for cosmetics aimed at the international audience: amazon yourself.2
The sweat does not kill and my salt does not dissolve. The forest is not my clitoris. Tickets are sold, not decolonial slogans. Yes, there is a theater in the middle of the Amazon rainforest where some new chorus drenched in sweat will bellow Beethoven’s joy this Thursday, and my igarapé dries quickly upon realizing this. It wonders taciturn: Where can one begin to think about the Amazon? From nature or culture? From animals or from apothecaries? From trunks bleeding smoke or from an ecotourism package? The Brazilian documentarian João Moreira Salles writes in his book Arrabalde that “the Amazon suffers for not having been thought of and not having been desired. Brazilian civilization did not formulate an idea of the forest. It did not incorporate it into the collective imagination, nor did it transform it into a shared image.”3 Amid its caboclo westerns, romantic arrangements, promises of sustainable development, unbearable chainsaws, and pink river dolphins, the forest and humanity offer a thousand images of a world escaping us.
Perhaps the world escapes us not due to climatic predeterminism, historical fatalism, or dramatic poverty, but due to optics. After all, during the heyday of German Romanticism, Schelling claimed that “the first glance at nature teaches us what the last one does; because matter expresses no other or lesser bond than that which is in reason, the eternal identity of the infinite with the finite.”4 What Schelling suggests is that the human mind and nature, the infinite and the finite, before being irreconcilable or opposite, are capable at all times of reflecting and becoming aware of themselves as parts of the same system; in his words, “the system of nature is at the same time the system of our mind.”5 Thus, in this reciprocal and conciliatory gaze, bewildered human reason returns to the disenchanted womb of all things to finally affirm it.
One cannot see so resolutely as Schelling in Manaus when one’s glasses fog up all the time, when bare eyes swell in the steam baths that foretell all cycles of life, death, and rebirth traced in the distance of earthly and flying rivers. Although the names of Goethe and Schiller are carved in large letters inside the Amazonas Theater, the Amazonian sublime is not built from what thousands of unsuspecting tourists believe it is. It is not built from a rapturous gaze or a moment of encounter and identity between the megalomania of humanity and the profusion of matter. It truly arises from a permanent foreignness.
Still in the nineteenth century, the Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha spoke of the “strange sadness that this vast, wonderful, and flat land causes us, with no relief where the gaze can rest.”6 He continues his account, compiled under the name À Margem da História (The edge of history), in a true lament, stating that his dominant impression is that “man there is still an impertinent intruder. He arrived uninvited and unwanted—when nature was still arranging her vast and luxurious hall.”7 Da Cunha, a military man and positivist inflamed by the manufacture of the nation and its newly born Republic, perceives that despite the effort of his prose and expeditions, “in those places, the Brazilian leaps: he is a foreigner.”8
Two centuries later, after so many prospectors, loggers, murderous odysseys of mercury, national development projects, military excursions, and their absurd infrastructures, until finally micro-entrepreneurs, Uber drivers, drug traffickers, and hundreds of green economies and fires, the forest insists on remaining foreign despite being increasingly inhabited by “civilizing” monoculture. It and modernity do not blend to form a single gaze despite the totalitarianism of sweat, chainsaws, and the promises of contemporary ecology. The forest and man, for the most part, in the north of Brazil, do not see each other; they are, above all, an insufficient dialogue at once tardy and premature, often violent and at times tender, where estrangements and tongues made only of murmurs multiply.
This dialogue takes the form of a web of voracities, vertigo, and metabolisms in which the human is the flesh of a body straining with heteroglossia and polyphony, grotesque like Rabelais’s giants and their carnivals, where the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin sees “pregnant death, a death that gives birth.”9 The grotesque body of pregnant death is an impossible simultaneity, a “miniature of chaos,” as da Cunha preferred to describe the Amazon.10 The reconciliation this body pleads for leaves the human thirsty for being one with its surroundings but cannot at the same time dream of so many lives, deaths, and worlds immersed in the roots of a samaúma tree. Rabelais warns us about his giant Pantagruel in its very name, derived from a demon who threw salt in the mouths of sleeping drunks to make them thirsty for more, drinking without ever finding their own bottom. Likewise, the forest allows itself to be filled by the maps and names of El Dorado, the conspiracy theories of Ratanabã, the green hell of the military, the fetish of the world’s lungs, marks, patents, pharmaceutical industries, niobium, and progress to strangle all our dreams like a boa constrictor slowly digesting a thin, starving cow.11
A famous statement by the leader of the Yanomami people, Davi Kopenawa, says that “white men do not know how to dream. That is why they destroy the forest this way.”12 Kopenawa’s testimony in his colossal The Falling Sky speaks of smoke and ash wounds left by colonial violence on the Amazon’s body: a body made of dreamed-of spirits. Kopenawa does not ultimately answer a question that he hints at: How can we return to dreaming? Is the human Kopenawa portrays—whose perfume and alcohol leave the “chest too odorous and too hot” to welcome spirits, and who “[does] not possess spirit houses or songs”—forever incapable of dreaming?13 Separated from ancestry, spirits, and cosmic meaning, thousands of people buy Kopenawa’s books and venture into Indigenous medicine, exotic journeys, ancestry DNA tests, art and more art, and fashion reveries of shamanic materialism, seeking to excite similar psychedelia and inspire dreaming. But what does this dream truly consist of? What does this search genuinely aim for?
Brazilian anthropologist Carlos Fausto, analyzing the customs of the Parakanã people of the Xingu, writes that “dreams were seen as events in which the double (aʼowa) of the dreamer encountered and interacted with the doubles of other agents, generically called akwawa.”14 The act of duplicating not only reality but the self resonates with Kopenawa’s insistence that dreaming is, above all, becoming other: “I continued to become other while I slept and the xapiri persisted in visiting my dreams.”15 To become other by duplicating oneself is to widen the sphere of the possible, of the very reality one inhabits, as stable and fixed wakefulness is transmuted into the continuous plasticity of the double. To double oneself is also to double the possibility of the world. This is the main theme of a famous passage from the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi), who, after dreaming of being a butterfly and flying like one, woke up to question whether his life was not merely the dream of the butterfly he actually was while awake.
Jacques Lacan understands Chuang Tzu’s questioning as a questioning of the gaze itself, which expresses the conditions for the construction of the subject:
In a dream, he is a butterfly. What does this mean? It means that he sees the butterfly in its reality as a gaze. What are so many figures, so many forms, so many colors, if not this gratuitous display, in which the primary nature of the essence of the gaze is marked for us? … He is a captive butterfly, but captured by nothing, for in the dream, he is not a butterfly to anyone. It is when he is awake that he is Chuang Tzu to others and is caught in their net of butterflies.16
The dream allows an opening of the gaze; it is, above all, a space where that gaze that manufactures the subject escapes and dissolves into something akin to Borges’s Aleph: a point in space that contains all other points, or a gaze that contains all human, nonhuman, and post-human glances.
In this vein, there is a crucial testimony given by modernist Brazilian poet Mário de Andrade when he confronts the waters of the sea and the river duplicating to give birth to the Amazon:
The mouth of the Amazon is one of those grandiosities so grand that it exceeds human physiological perception. We can only monumentalize it in intelligence. What the retina brings to consciousness is just a world of dirty waters and a small mantle, always the same in the poorly perceived distance of the islands.17
Here lies the great difficulty of thinking about the Amazon beyond exoticism and cliché, beyond exploitation, violence, and the deification of the swamp man. There, amid the monotony of the landscape, thirst, and sweat, one must traverse the gaze itself, the subject itself. It is necessary to transcend the theater where oneself is built, to belong to a liminal and foreign space within which man and nature double themselves, slipping in and out of the encounter, drawn toward the same aleph of sap and ash.
In its etymology, “theater” has always meant a place to look or a place from which to see.18 It may not be enough to say that Manaus does not have a theater. Perhaps it is necessary to imagine the pink walls of its imposing nineteenth-century building as the petals of a giant water lily that, as described by de Andrade, “becomes all pink calling from afar with a pleasant aroma, becoming more beautiful each time. It is like this. It lives a whole day and always changes color. Of rosy life incarnated, and there by the mouth of the night, it softens, aged, the necklaces of purple petals.”19 In this interval where the pale pink unfolds into all tones from which purple emerges, the thin and starving cow is also a fragment of the infinite skin of the snake of signs that swallows it.
2. Guaranteed
O velho comunista se aliançou / The old communist allied himself
ao rubro do rubor do meu amor / to the red of the blush of my love
O brilho do meu canto tem o tom / The brightness of my song has the tone
e a expressão da minha cor / and the expression of my color
Meu coração / My heart
Meu coração é vermelho (hey, hey, hey) / My heart is red (hey, hey, hey)
De vermelho vive o coração (oh, ê, oh, ê ,oh) / In red lives the heart (oh, hey, oh, hey, oh)—Boi Bumbá Garantido, “Vermelho” (Red)
The sun has ten thousand shades that it hides in the curve of the river—this is the first thought that quietly grips me when the light enters through the invisible windows of the boat. The sky does not wake the man in the hammock beside me who snores, vomits, and rises trembling, dancing the somnambulistic steps of the night before. He drags the black soles of his feet across the floor, staggering as the morning drizzle mixes with the first rays of light; it’s a widow’s wedding somewhere else.
The landscape does not change despite the abundant light of the morning, even though it is devoured by the powerful engine of the ferry boat The Emperor and all the other slumbering engines of cars, motorcycles, and people that the vessel carries in the fifteen-plus hours from Manaus to Parintins. Before drinking, snoring, and vomiting, the man in the hammock next to me told me that the two cows of Parintins are like yin and yang, the figure and background of the same painting, the moon and the sun of the same bleeding sky this morning.20 But he and all the others seriously affirm that in Parintins, you only choose one cow, or rather only one cow chooses you.
I travel to Parintins to “play cow,” as they like to say. I travel to be chosen by one of the two male cows, or bois—a word I can’t translate—even though I fear that they will choose me like the stakes of the Parintintin people once chose the decapitated heads of their enemies to guard the island entrance when the Spanish captain Francisco de Orellana sought El Dorado along the riverbanks. De Orellana did not find gold, only many dry heads stuck on stakes as he approached a river island immersed in the Amazon forest. Six centuries later, bodies continue to disappear on the way to Parintins in the wide ferry boats that leave Manaus laden with alcohol, heat, and so many people with stupefied lips. The body opens its infinite pores among the infinite hammocks, like a lazier version of Bataille’s sovereign Acéphale. Interspersed with the excesses of a carnival liquefied in the murky and unfathomable waters of the Amazon, beneath all the lights hidden in the curve of the river, the same doubt arises over whether we are anything but where the current flows. Before the gift, in the current that pulls and brings, there is already a permanent metabolism between being and ceasing to be.
Bataille asserts that “life beyond utility is the domain of sovereignty.”21 Still, the crossing of more than fifteen hours between Manaus and Parintins permanently confuses the necessary and the futile, sovereignty and utility in the unreality of the overflow of man in nature, of soil in fertility, of the sun in light. Everything unfolds in excess in the landscape, in the green, in the mud, in the voluptuousness of being born and fermenting; this excess in itself remains incomprehensible, and in the impossibility of understanding it or reaching it or situating oneself in its immensity, the same dissolution is emulated, in which the full empties out.
When the archaeologist Eduardo Góes Neves writes that “the ancient peoples of the Amazon made chipped stone artifacts and then stopped producing them, invented pottery and then ceased to make it, created fertile soils like terra preta, but did not take all their sustenance from it, domesticated plants but in many cases did not want to be farmers, glimpsed the possibility of the state but fled from it whenever they could,” he expresses in archaeological history the same ambivalence between composing and dissolving oneself.22 All creations and forms ultimately reveal themselves as attempts to return to the original gesture of the gift, of sacrifice, of the loss of a totality. However, before becoming teleology, this coexistence of the boat and the current is a swallowed breath—a rhythm that slowly transforms heads fixed to stakes into aquatic roots, from which more life spills out in the proximity of something that is rehearsed and drafted in anticipation of an arrival. Arriving to play cow. The question of the cow is the question of my body in the boat, of the man in the hammock beside me, drunken with the sediments collapsing into the current in an uneasy vortex that seeks to return to being river. How to return to being river? How to dissolve?
In the nineteenth century, Wagner described the theme of his total artwork, the Gesamtkunstwerk, as the dissolution of the hero in the collective. For Wagner, the
last and most complete renunciation [Entäusserung] of his personal selfishness, the demonstration of his full ascent to universalism, a man can only show us through his Death; and this not by his accidental death, but by his necessary death, the logical sequence of his actions, the final fulfillment of his being. The celebration of such death is the noblest thing men can experience.23
This death, for Wagner, would redeem the isolated artist of his time, which was for Wagner a result of a deeper and older fissure between human and nature. The Art-Work of the Future, in its early pages, expresses the mourning in which,
from the moment Man perceived the difference between himself and Nature, and thus commenced his own development as man, breaking with the unconsciousness of natural animal life and passing to conscious life—when he looked at Nature face to face and, from the first feelings of his dependence on her, thereby aroused, evolved the faculty of Thought—from that moment did Error begin, as the earliest utterance of consciousness.24
The Gesamtkunstwerk is thus formulated as the most ambitious systematization of the return to the whole through art. To articulate this, Wagner directly links art to nature, since the artistic, according to him, “throws means on means behind it, pierces through derivative after derivative, to arrive at last at the source of every derivation, of every mean, in Nature’s self, and there to slake its need in understanding.”25 What Wagner seeks in the total work of art is to reconstruct a primordial unity through the artwork that would unify all the arts and every derivation of nature. The Gesamtkunstwerk becomes the dissolution of the artist and their time in the arts, a performance of the dissolution of man in nature—the end of individuality in the resurrection of community and the sacrifice of the self to achieve the whole.
No preludes to Lohengrin or even the strident chords of the Ride of the Valkyries are heard in the stadium shaped like a cow’s skull into which a frenzied crowd enters, emerging muffled from boats to see the festival of Parintins, the so-called “cow celebration.”26 Wagner’s music would correspond in no way to the sway of the Amazonian rhythm of the toada that tears apart the newly arrived bodies on the island with shouts of well-decorated lyrics and choreographies known by heart. All these people, now distributed between blue and red sides, where they can’t sit still, lose their own form in the same cry of wanting to play cow. And when this playing cow begins, with the roar of music in the air moving the enormous floats into the stadium and spiraling so many dancers juxtaposed microscopically with so many lights and causing bodies and trees and flesh and smoke to collapse into the center from which a human figure covered in fabric in the shape of a cow bursts forth, there is a sigh of Gesamtkunstwerk—a sigh of totality, of dissolution into a community in the same sway of the rhythm’s two this way, two that way.
Yet this is no Wagnerian sigh. The cow made of fabric is no hero, author, or prophet of socialism and the union between men. The cow in the center of the stadium does not carry the immaculate innocence of a new world, nor a return to the old. Everywhere in Brazil, the cow is the bloodstained and inescapable emblem of the country’s colonization. It was through cattle, through the insertion of a non-native animal, that the Portuguese colonizer populated the interior of the territory, opened forests, and spread misery, whose paths still bear bovine carbon footprints today in the expansion of the agricultural frontier, burning the forest to become pasture to feed more cows. Here at the festival of Parintins, in all its popular strength, in its stunning aesthetic articulation between so many arts and mediations of the Brazilian north’s mix of Indigenous imagination, Afro-Brazilian trances, and popular Christian ecstasy, lies an inextricable paradox: a cow is at the heart of the Amazon.
Is this cow the same as the rodeo cows tortured by America’s soft-power cowboys? Or the bulls tormented in mercantilist bullfights, with their echoes of the brutality of conquest? Is it the cow defended with an iron fist by the ruralist caucus in the Brazilian congress? Is it soaked in the same symbolism through which the colonial superstructure continually becomes spectacle and stage, until it seems infinite and invincible? The cow of Parintins is a fabric cow, a dead cow resurrected in mimicry and collective phantasy. The cow of Parintins is a puppet that pantomimes the emptiness and arbitrariness of colonial violence.
Homi Bhabha, in his famous essay “On Mimicry and Man,” asserts that colonialism “repeatedly exercises its authority through the figures of farce.” Its discourse is that of “trompel’œil, irony, mimicry, and repetition.”27 However, as Bhabha explains, this mimicry in which the metropolis expects to construct and justify the exploitation of the colony is ambivalent in that it contains a “double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority … a result of what I’ve described as the partial representation/recognition of the colonial object.”28 What Bhabha points out is that if colonial discourse is constructed from the lie of a model to be followed, an exemplary structure to be repeated, the repetition on the part of the colony simultaneously satisfies the desire of the colonizer while revealing the spurious, arbitrary, violent, and unreal character of what it repeats. Imitation unveils the paper tiger or, in Brazilian terms, the fabric cow that undergirds colonial teleology, which can never be fulfilled because, for the colonizer, the colony is always incomplete.
The white fabric cow with a heart stitched on its forehead is obscured amid the rapture of the crowd entering the allegory and the Indigenous ritual. With a blood-red rose in its mouth and smoke flaring from its nostrils in fury and fire, the colonizer’s cow transforms into the dream of its annihilation into forest. The community does not split; there is no Brazil and its abysses. Brazil is only affirmed in its own possibility of denying itself. Under the skin of the cow and the ghost of so much death and misery, another world and path can be affirmed by turning this one we inhabit amid the skull stadium into contingency. Another life, another future-past and past-future is being born in the breath and beat of the drum, marking the heart cow’s steps: two to this side, two to that side, this world is dead.
The structure of the colonial cow then opens in tenuous seams to reveal the entrails of a human pulse, of the human who wears the cow’s phantasy and makes all these figures of north and south as vanishing and fragile as urucum body paintings dripping.29 They call the white fabric cow with the heart on its forehead the people’s cow. They speak of its red, of its heart, and say that it hides in its veins the secrets of the forest, moving, mixing, transforming. Gradually, the floats and their human figures all open up and turn into more leaves and flowers; a tree is born from within the cow’s skull stadium.
Intricately intertwined with all the force of human life is the unimaginable body of that same generosity, the porous excess, the current that founds the world in a clumsy pantheism of going and coming. The white fabric cow with the heart on its forehead and all the hybrid figures dancing alongside it with black-soled feet, feathered with eternity and mingled with the flora and fauna of the forest, are turning it into the cow of Krishna—metonymy of the metabolism between human and nature, in which everything metamorphoses into milk, life and generosity.
One breathes deeply, strongly, and for a long time in Parintins, whether there with the ground trembling in the midst of the whirlwind of drums or even on the way to the stadium, covered by the soot from the smoke of street barbecues that envelop the muddy, narrow, and labyrinthine passages of the island. One breathes among the hands that roast the meat, that move the allegories’ floats, that hold the fabrics and the fantasies and become just part of the same “process involving human beings and nature” where “their own activity mediates, regulates, and controls their metabolizing of nature.”30 The spell of this profusion of signs, lights, dances, labor, and clamor returns to the current. The blood going and coming shapes the forms of things between sediments and promises to close the fissure, return the gift, retrieve time.
The white fabric cow with the heart on its forehead no longer has time. It ends its performance like a large and overcrowded ferry boat, passing through and bidding farewell without me knowing exactly what it means to play cow. Does it mean making a tree grow from the navel or tearing out the heart and transforming the body into the river? The music quiets down; the toada singer stops, already hoarse. It seems to me at that moment that the cow is moving away. I’m too naive in my attempts to see something beyond the Coca-Cola advertising boards surrounding the stadium; I do not take into account that all that joy will be wrapped in more ecotourism packages and electoral propaganda under the “people of the forest” spectacle, an Amazonian encounter of carnival and football.
When it does not pulse and instead diverts, the entire Parintins festival and all those faces, exhausted from standing in line for days, seem like fragile and passive prey, caught in an impenetrable infrastructure of bread, circus, reality-show influencers, and competition for sponsorship from a deforestation butcherhouse. The cow falls silent amid the slumber. It would be easy to slaughter it now; it would be trivial to reduce the popular to the pop, to the inexorable victory of the culture industry that butchers life in Parintins and everywhere else under the sun. But even in this silence of still trying to decipher the cow and its play, still trying to hear the heartbeat in its forehead and everything surrounding me, systole and diastole speak the language of the heart sutra from the cow fabric: “Form is emptiness, and emptiness itself is form.” The chimeras also return to die in the river’s curve.
3. Caprice
A fogueira espera a chama / A bonfire waits for the flame
O sol beijar o teu rosto / The sun to kiss your face
O vento teus cabelos / The wind your hair
Assim como a selva / Just like the jungle
O filho que partiu / The child who left it
Tururucari, Tururucari, Tururucari—Boi Bumbá Caprichoso, “Requiem”
Stars are born from clouds of gas and dust. When these clouds are sufficiently dense, gravity causes them to clump together, heating the mass until the temperature rises enough to fuse hydrogen and produce radiation. Finally, a glow stabilizes in the murky night of space, birthing light as if the dust and gas wished to distinguish themselves from the void.
Distinguished from the rest of the stadium, yet drawn to its warmth, the enormous crane hoists a float that carries within it the other cow.31 The lights on the other side go out, the red seats empty, and everything turns blue. The black fabric cow with a blue star on its forehead has no choice but to descend from the Amazonian sky in a solitary splendorous walk. The star cow’s glimmer doesn’t melt away as a heart, but remains sparkling on the edge of space. Its light isn’t a current or a wave but the reflected image of the complete river, emptying into the sea.
This fabric cow is entirely distinct from its predecessor, despite similar rhythms, allegories, dances, and figures. It doesn’t seek the same return to the crowd—to the fever of people, forest, and sweat—but rather aims to give form to the crowd beneath the vast sky. The cow with the star on its head seeks beauty, so the gestures through which its allegories and rituals discover the night are like sketches in which an artist begins and incessantly interrupts their work, transforming it into another world that evades us like a sailor pulled out of a harbor by the northern wind.
For philosopher Alexandre Kojève, the primordial and essential scene of art consists of the artist extracting what they see as beautiful from nature, to “incarnate” it in another material form.32 Crucial in Kojève’s view is that the artist is an extractor who separates beauty from nature and transforms it into something else, into another world that opens up. However, in the extraction, the artist subjectively chooses what is beautiful, and as Kojève explains, the world that the artist creates is “only beautiful—or nothing at all.”33
The beautiful for Kojève, the artistic act that unfolds from nothing, is fundamentally linked to his conception of the human, which builds itself in opposition to nature. In his words: “Man, once constituted in his human specificity, opposes himself to Nature and thus engenders a new becoming which essentially transforms natural given Being and is the Time that annihilates it—i.e., he engenders the history of negating Action.”34 For Kojève, from the beginning nature is the enemy of the human, inasmuch as “to remain human, Man must remain a subject opposed to the object.”35 To remain separate, the subject converts themself into pure form, into a world apart, into an open negation through nothingness. Outside the laws of necessity and utility, one might contemplate humanity as beautiful in its snobbery towards necessity, landing itself in a foreign universe to which it no longer belongs.
When it dances in its murky toadas during the longest hours when dawn announces itself, the black cow of Parintins is more beautiful than any other for being more foreign. A strangeness in its whim is reflected in all the richness of the details of its performance, from the phosphorescent sailor hats of the musicians that accompany it to the giant snake into which its cunhã poranga transforms.36 It seems like a mirage from another reality, another forest and humanity so rarefied and distinct that one can only touch it in the moments that the human does not possess and cannot see between the many scales of life, nature, light, and death.
If Kojève understood human specificity as the negation of an original nature, several Amerindian peoples of South America comprehended nature as a negation of primordial humanity. As Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro explain: “A considerable number of Amerindian myths—as well as some from other ethnographic regions—imagine the existence of a primordial humanity, either crafted by a demiurge or simply presumed to be the only substance or matter from which the world could have formed.” Thus, “after a series of events, some groups of this primordial humanity gradually transformed—either spontaneously or due to the action of a demiurge—into the biological species, geographical features, meteorological phenomena, and celestial bodies that make up the current cosmos. The part that has not changed is historical or contemporary humanity.”37
All that world of floats, costumes, and toadas opened by the demiurgic cow seems truly like an alien humanity whose unfathomable form can only be admired while being carried along in the same enchantment of its steps. Everything departs, everything changes, everything mixes and is no longer recognized or reconciled in its distance. And in those distances and losses—incessant departures between giving and taking—a form is manufactured in wonder and beauty, in the glowing and shining star on the cow.
Carried by the crane, a giant spider made of night descends over the stadium, weaving its web between it and us. I want the spider to finally devour me, to make me part of this night and this distant world separated from me in its beauty. I want a ritual of life in the metabolism of the now, in the boiling womb of the forest. But the spider shyly returns to the darkness that made it, where my eyes cannot touch it. Even if Humboldt once found in nature a web of interconnection, even if we are woven into its breath and heartbeat, its work and metabolism, and even if we appropriate its gift to build the form in which we live, the forms it offers us are as indifferent as the twinkle of stars above the stadium in the shape of a cow skull. Every life, inside and outside, stitched by the same web, is nothing more than a form taken under a profound emptiness, where I can only recognize an incomplete part of myself that unfolds but never reaches anywhere, whether as dust or as gas. There are no conclusions or encounters, only openings, announcements, promises, and time installments.
I wanted to whisper, seeing the vastness of the Amazon sky above Parintins, like the protagonist of Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 science fiction novel Star Maker, who, after admiring so many worlds and galaxies through the ages, affirms that “we, individual inhabitants of a host of worlds, were playing a small part in one of the great movements by which the cosmos was seeking to know itself, and even see beyond itself.”38 But no one knows the dark sufficiently, the night where the human separates from their senses and only small, discontinuous sparks of light sprout, miniatures of chaos like our selves dissolving and reconstituting without bottom or maker amid the explanations of cosmos and chaos. There was no star maker in the sky of Parintins, no shaman to heal the cows’ foreheads, whether bleeding heart or lonely foreign star; there was nowhere to begin or end. So many travel to the same Amazon to find where to begin or end with the world, to speak of golden cities, Indigenous utopias, infinite resources, salvations or apocalypses of earth and men. I wanted to think the Amazon, but it only offered me two cows dissolving and forming ceaselessly, meeting in the passage from one to the other, the passage from blood to skin, from dust to sparkle, night to day, dream to reality; it is a widow’s wedding somewhere far away.
Gradually, the enormous floats empty themselves, their operators emerge from within them, and the giant carcasses become the landscape of the island, populating it until next year’s festival, like debris from portals and idols of a time without memory. The eyes of the animated figures are as incomprehensible as those of the cow made of fabric, like the eyes we sense but do not see in the midst of the forest, the current, the passage: eyes without a center, coming from nothing and returning to it in the blindness of their images. In his anthropology of art, Alfred Gell states that
the animation of the image is not a matter of finding the “sacred center.” What matters is merely the reduplication of skins, outward towards the macrocosm and inward towards the microcosm, and the fact that all these skins are structurally homologous; there is no definitive “surface,” no definitive “interior,” but only an incessant passage back and forth, and it is here, in this traffic of comings and goings, that the mystery of animation is resolved.39
In this incessant “traffic of comings and goings” of eyes and gazes, I return to the solid pink walls of the Amazon Theater, its duplications of human and nature, nature and world, my gaze blurred with sweat in impossible mixtures, encounters of waters forming and dissolving in the same incomplete perspectives. Amongst ten thousand images in which the world has left me, I am leaving Parintins. Crossing its imagination, I am pulled by the northern wind back to the port, back to the ferry boat, watching the web of bodily festivity, so much forest erupting, salting the laments and distances of these years of thirst, since the festivals, the burnings, the destruction, the hope to delay the end of the earth can never properly be fulfilled.
The friend who boards with me is dazed, barely able to speak. He asks me, if I write about the Parintins festival, to describe him as a Kafkaesque character, plastered among the unfathomable processes of people, cows, heat, and dreams. My friend also dreams of the end of things, of a stop to the movements of loss and gain, life and death, reality and illusion, and all that continues to leave him. He longs only for sleep in the bed of a woman from the north who dances close to his body and calls him love. Like me, my friend, in his exhaustion, also wonders if he learned to play cow. The boat accelerates into the day, roaring as if saying that perhaps playing cow is not something to be learned or a choice one makes. Perhaps one merely sways to a rhythm that stitches time, space, and opposites together according to the laws of dialectics and optics. To plunge what exists and what can exist between multiple blue and red chairs, blue and red eyes, Amazonian theaters built in the before and after of a past-future and a future-past. Fractured dreams and gifts. Giant water lilies of dust and ashes. Wombs, birthplaces, nonreturns. The toada that echoes from the island, the red cry of the uirapuru bird.40 To make a wish: depart without homeland, depart in a sparkle, depart unceasingly and dream. Cow Bumbá, they say. “Bumbá” suggests explosion, but does it mean to dissolve language or to form another? It blows up, it blows the morning; it blows life, emptiness, and the cowherd.
The Amazon river’s tidal bore, pororoca is assumed to mean something like “great roar” in the Tupi language.
An igarapé is a small, often narrow waterway or stream found in the Amazon rainforest.
João Moreira Salles, Arrabalde: Em Busca da Amazônia (Companhia das Letras, 2022), 15. My translation.
The Schelling Reader, ed. Daniel Whistler and Benjamin Berger (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), 60.
F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World, trans. Frederick de Wolf Bolman (Columbia University Press, 1942), 13.
Euclides da Cunha, “Correspondência ativa de 1905” →. My translation.
Euclides da Cunha, À Margem da História (Editora Lello Brasileira S.A., 1967), 12. My translation.
Da Cunha, À Margem da História, 18.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Indiana University Press, 1984), 25.
Da Cunha, “Correspondência ativa de 1905.”
“Ratanabã” is the name given to an apocryphal hidden city in the Brazilian Amazon that is alleged to be 450 million years old.
Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky, trans. Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy (Belknap Press, 2013), 440.
Kopenawa and Albert, Falling Sky, 375.
Carlos Fausto, Art Effects: Image, Agency, and Ritual in Amazonia (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), 33.
Kopenawa and Albert, Falling Sky, 76.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), 76.
Mario de Andrade, O Turista Aprendiz (IPHAN, 2015), 68. My translation.
The word “theater” comes from the Greek word “theatron” (θέατρον), which means “a place for viewing.” This derives from the verb “theaomai” (θεάομαι), meaning “to see” or “to watch.”
De Andrade, O Turista Aprendiz, 97. My translation.
The “cows of Parintins” refers to the two characters at the center of Parintins’s annual Boi Bumbá festival: “Boi Garantido” (“Guaranteed Cow,” which is made out of white fabric and has a red heart on its forehead) and “Boi Caprichoso” (“Caprice Cow,” made out of black fabric, with a blue star on its forehead). Each cow represents a distinct theme, and they compete with each other in displays of music, dance, and theater. The festival celebrates local culture and folklore, attracting many visitors. Parintins’s economy is largely dependent on the festival, and the entire city dons the colors of the two cows (red and blue). Crosswalks, bank facades, soda cans—and everything on the island turns blue and red.
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 2 and 3, trans. Robert Hurley (Zone Books, 1991), 198.
Eduardo Góes Neves, Sob os Tempos do Equinócio: Oito Mil Anos de História na Amazônia Central (Ubu, 2022), 189. My translation.
Richard Wagner, The Art-Work of the Future and Other Works, trans. W. Ashton Ellis (Bison Books, 1993), 94.
Wagner, Art-Work of the Future, 70.
Wagner, Art-Work of the Future, 85.
The stadium is popularly called “Bumbódromo” and is shaped like a cow’s head. It is lined with grandstands and sections of boxes divided into two sides, corresponding to the supporters of the Boi Caprichoso (who wear blue) and the Boi Garantido (who wear red). Half of the tickets to the three-day of festival are given away for free, leading to long lines, which some people wait in for days under the hot sun. Each cow performs for two hours, followed by the other cow, and so on. During the rival cow’s performance, supporters on the opposing side must remain silent, while during their own cow’s performance, they are expected to actively participate.
Homi K. Bhaba, The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994), 85.
Bhaba, Location of Culture, 88.
Also known as “annatto,” the urucum plant is native to tropical regions of the Americas. Its seeds are used to produce a natural red dye.
Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Paul Reitter (Princeton University Press, 2024), 153.
At the festival the Boi Caprichoso is lifted up by a Terex Demag AC 500 crane, whose boom can reach a height of 110 meters—although the Caprichoso float is only lifted to a maximum height of forty meters.
In his own words: “Art is thus the art of extracting the Beautiful from its concrete incarnation, from this other thing, which is also beautiful and of preserving it in its purity.” Alexandre Kojève, Kandinsky: Incarnating Beauty (David Zwirner Books, 2022), 28.
Kojève, Kandinsky, 28.
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980), 158.
Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 162.
At the Parintins festival, a cunhã poranga is a female character or type that represents the feminine strength in Indigenous rituals and legends of Amazonian culture. In her dance, she transforms into one of the animals of the forest.
Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Is There Any World to Come?” e-flux journal, no. 65 (May 2015) →.
Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (Global Grey, 2023), 39.
Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Clarendon Press, 1998), 148.
The uirapuru is a mythical bird in Brazilian folklore, particularly among Amazonian Indigenous cultures. It is often associated with beauty, music, and nature. Those who see it are allegedly granted a wish. It can also refer to the actual bird species Cyphorhinus arada, known for its melodious song.
