To Marcos Chaves (Bernardo Mosqueira)
(for my beloved)
In the middle of a hot summer night, a wise wind blew across my house. As it left through the living room window, the impetuous draft caused the metal blinds to get caught up in the grid, leaving it wide open, like a gaping mouth, like the beginning of everything. With no one taking notice, a golden eagle took advantage of this passageway and, hovering dazzlingly, came to my bedroom. As I slept, nestled between a book and my beloved, the bird descended upon my navel, calmly morphed me into lightning, took me inside its chest and, continuing its magnificent flight, carried me off to the brightest side of the moon. Above the silver sand, it formed a nest, weaving twigs from native plants of that lunar region with long, multicolored pieces of comets’ tails, which usually fall there on feast days.
Effortlessly, the eagle gave birth to me in the guise of a crystalline egg, in the guise of an other, in the guise of the same, in the guise of a spark, in the guise of a rock smoothed out and made translucid by the continuous caress of waves in the primordial sea. From above, the bird pointed Earth to me – so immensely tiny, so whole and inapprehensible – and said that everything there was jointly alive. From far off, I could hear myself say with a thousand voices: “Ayúdame a mirar!”, as it showed me that – from the dense fire on the bottom of the oceans to the glittering steam at the top of the clouds –, nothing existed separately, there was only one great continuum in constant transmutation, an enormous, unbreakable, expansive current of love ties, a sacred river forever opening out into a thousand deltas, the body of the Great Mother entirely and indistinctly made of pure intelligence.
At that moment, it was not yet with words that the being took me through this rapturous cadence of revelations. Each time using one of its varied, innumerable beaks, it ripped off its own feathers and, one by one, jabbed them on the ground around me. As it delicately passed its claws over its plumes, brushing those fine golden threads against the grain, it was music those threads resonated – sometimes as harps, others as drums; sometimes as long whistles, others as ancient trees falling on a dense tropical forest. The overlap of those infinite sounds had my whole being vibrating, rearranging my untold structures and causing my crystalline egg constitution to essentially transmute. It was by means of these tremors the eagle taught me to hear the numberless wisdoms of the world. With each new sound, I grew a little.
As it combed the last feather plucked from its body, that being was no longer an eagle, but a glowing snail. Without its plumage – which now encircled the nest, forming a golden crown fixed upon lunar soil –, its enchanting body was revealed: a cone-shaped, spiraling nacre shell (I counted more than 360 turns), so thin it was transparent, so smooth it was reflexive. From the outside, it was impossible to see the inside – and, as for the inside, there was nothing we could glean. Persistently licking the ground with its particular dance, the snail dug a deep hole and remained there. I was alone, nestled within myself, scouring the stars for passageways.
When again I heard myself say – now with two thousand voices – “Ayúdame a mirar!”, I finally realized how quickly Earth spun. I had already been on the moon for more than 24 thousand years, that is to say, two minutes, perhaps. Earth turned quickly upon its axis; the Moon turned nearly always around Earth. With the unending turns of the Sun, the Earth and the Moon, the future haunted me again and again. The pyramids of Egypt were built, I could tell by hunger that it was lunchtime, my mother had already had the twins, we were approaching Stone Age, and I felt as though I could be stoned at any minute, a crystalline egg on the moon with an essay due on Friday.
During one of those swirls for which I am so grateful (I have always been a morning animal, like bees, parakeets, amethysts and palm-trees), as the shadow of the future receded and I finally realized I was on the right day, the perfumed smell of the beloved snail’s drool announced its return. When the first light of the new day streaked across the lunar horizon, the pointy prism at the tip of the snail, discreetly emerging through the edge of the hole, transformed it into a viscous rainbow. Each one of those 42 unnamed, refracted colors walked to different speeds, as they all had different densities, rigidities, frictional forces, boiling points, traumas, regrets and – above all – desires. Still, they walked hand in hand, sisters that they were, in an ascending curve, until they formed a halo around the sun, which, by then, was already occupying its acute, midday spot.
As the 42 colors rushed in their collective, circular race around the great star, they knocked against drops of doubt strewn about the air, releasing sparks that, when in contact with the atmosphere, became minuscule crystals of rose quartz. Falling liberally on the place we were in, those million tiny stones simultaneously touched the golden threads of the eagle feathers around me, echoing the sound of the greatest harmonic that ever was: the founding, overflowing, guttural and orgasmic sound of a sincere apology. To each new sound, I grew a little more – not me, but the crystalline egg, like an other, like the same, like a spark, like the translucid rock in the primordial sea.
When the nest became too small for my growth, the egg swallowed up the nest. When the crown of feathers became too tight, I absorbed the crown. Rather like the nest of twigs and comets’ tails, the thin golden threads immediately became crystalline inside me. No longe fixed upon the soil, they impregnated me in a chaordic dance, and combing themselves against one another, generated sounds unheard-of in their new primitiveness which made me grow even more.
The force of the light of the new day, having crossed the prism at the tip of the snail, had broken the hardness of its nacre shell following the creation of the 42 colors. From inside the snail, limpid water began to sprout. The sweet gushing from that little waterhole soon filled the deep hole. It became a well, a rivulet, a river, a huge stream that carried the snail off onto the center of the Milky Way, relatively far from there.
With the new sounds unfolding within me, I could not stop growing. I was already bigger than a pea, than a watermelon, than a brown bear, than a soccer field, than the buzzing of a cicada in spring, than my own exhaustion by the end of the day. When I grew bigger than a sucked-on thumb, I absorbed the rose quartz mountains, the 42 unnamed colors, and, fatally, the moon itself. Incommensurate and unstuck in space, the crystalline egg would not move away from Earth as a matter of affinity. Upon realizing I had reached the size of Gaia, all sounds within me ceased, silencing my growth as well.
Through millennia, the crystalline egg was able to witness from on high everything that took place on Earth. I saw images being produced, children skipping rope on school-breaks, rivers forcing passages on mountains, grandmothers cooking for their grandsons, flamboyances of flamingos migrating, shadows crossing hallways, squirrels planting sequoias, salt deserts recollecting the time they were seas, atomic bomb tests, ludicrous combinations of objects filling out holes on the street, choirs caroling at Christmastime, corals dancing on the bottom of the ocean, the sadness and joy of mops, dreams guiding communities, remedies better than the disease, landscapes in the making, volcanic isles surfacing, Caetano Veloso parking his car in the neighborhood of Leblon, archives exploding like pinatas, sperm whales discussing the weather, buddhas dancing to the record player, war prisoners being tortured, ants conspiring against anteaters, dinosaurs waiting for holidays or a revolution, branches embracing limits, roots charmed into ouroboros, people incorporating orishas, whispers erupting out of flies, peoples holding the sky in place, interspecific colligations replanting life, my straight cousins playing videogame, rats and vultures abandoning and widening my fantasies, volcanoes ejaculating over plains, flowers pregnant with star fruit, tsunamis building up lacks, infinite gods creating the universe, designers making chairs no one will sit on, birds snacking stones knowing full well the size of their assholes, the light of the sunset laying down its orange weight upon the woods, the mating dance on cruising areas, the intertwining of complicity, trust, contentment and celebration forming the embraces of eternal friendships, lives being saved on Coney Island, the first supernova heating up around a fire in the Atacama desert, security tapes making way, the arrival of the microwave oven, showers of comets whetting the appetite, brand new brooms kissing before it’s too late, magic carpets more knowledgeable than the house itself, the end of slavery for domestic animals, tadpoles morphing into butterflies, the unending conversation of switches, the thousand organic and inorganic faces as mirrors of mankind, princesses morphing into rivers, gladiators licking their armpits on the dancefloor, the end of gender, the end of oil, the cancellation of leap years, pups sucking, grown-ups sucking, walls growing ears, earthquakes causing whole cities to shed their skin, flying saucers hovering with their zenith lighting over lesbian monuments, spiders with their corners for work and for play, the discretion of private desires in public places, the overflowing of public pleasures in private places, the fatal toppling of the public-private antinomy, howling laughter occasioning short-circuits, exhausted translators mistaking imprisonment for love, the carnival of statues, fire hydrants caught between the longing for a cure and the need for protection, seagulls inventing their periodic table, cells from outer space turning the sun’s memories into edible forms, the harsh wisdom of stones being ignored in favor of the smoothest novelty around, the grey pants season swinging the collective spirit, dreamers sipping on cups brimming with horizon, the great battle of angels and humans against the reptilians’ deadly conservative plans, the mighty redemption of the Atlantic Ocean, headlights guiding one another in secret, secrets self-destroying, the touching reunion of tectonic plates, witches setting fire to parliaments, the full life of the amorous, bands finally coming through. I’d been able to be with it all. The only thing I did not witness was contradiction, since contradictions, separations and similar distances do not factually exist outside blunders in vision.
Into the millennia, when spring in the northern hemisphere by chance coincided with spring in the southern hemisphere, I was surprised by one day of calm, which made me let out a lengthy sigh. Said sigh of relief engendered an unexpected undulation on the view I had of Earth, revealing that, for all the time that had elapsed, I had been watching the planet through the surface of an ample water mirror. At this point, coming from the bottom of the galaxy, I could hear myself say with three thousand voices: “Ayúdame a mirar!”. Curious, getting closer and closer to that surface, I soon realized that between me and the planet flowed a great, heretofore unseen river. Trailing that canny, ineluctable body of water, I discovered it ran simultaneously into the bottom of five different oceans, the bottom of eight great rivers and into two hundred and six sovereign grottos spread throughout the continent. Overflowing both underground and onto the atmosphere, that flow gave rise to oases, multicolored mushrooms, enchanted worlds, “terreiros”, as well as new and loving ways of living collectively around the planet. Having acquainted myself with its destinations, I then set out to find, against the current, the source of this cosmic river, finally locating it more than 25.800 light-years away.
Right in the center of the Milky Way, ordering all of existence into its rightful dimensions of time, space, spirit and feeling, there she was: my great ancestor. Though I could hardly believe it, there seemed to be little room for doubt. In front of her and emanating from her, through everything that is to us space and connection, I was able to hear my own meaning – not only mine, but also, as a crystalline egg, of everything that is an other, that is the same, that is a spark, that is a drifting part of the translucid rock in the primordial sea.
Without uttering a word, the great ancestor commanded I approach her, entering that river which did not cease becoming others. Submerged, crossing the flow and being crossed by it, the crystalline egg proceeded to dissolve. The stream took away the moon, the 42 unnamed colors, the rose quartz mountains, the feathers and their thin golden threads, the comets’ tails and the nest’s twigs. When I resurfaced at the opposite margin of the river, I was no longer the crystalline egg, but only myself, pregnant with the universe.
Looking up, I again found, resting on the left hand of the great ancestor, the glittering snail. Limpid water was still streaming from its nacre shell, and that was the source of the cosmic river I had followed all the way to that spot. In her right hand, there was a passionate, active volcano, brandishing its own heart at the tip of its spear – and that was my father. In her third hand, there was a small bowl containing a blue powder. On the black soil of her fourth hand, a majestic corn stalk, which would later prove to have much to say. With her fifth and sixth hands, she wove a long velvety black cloth that is the very darkness at the bottom of the universe. The cloth was made out of the same mysterious stuff that fills the tensed gaps between protons, neutrons and electrons, the biggest, strongest component in all bodies – however occult and essentially unverifiable. The seventh hand was the great ancestor herself, integrally, with all her movements and her own transmutations. Her eighth hand, on the other hand, was empty, full of time and caprice, available for anything she might wish to do.
Faced with all of that, I immediately knelt down and touched the ground with my forehead, in reverence to that figure that had always appeared to me whenever I closed my eyes, that I’d always sensed in each rebirth, that I’d always idolized in my mornings and my loves. I recognized the power of this mind-womb that had given birth to 16 children, who spawned 256 grandchildren, 4.096 great-grandchildren, 65.536 great-great-grandchildren, 1.048.576 great-great-great-grandchildren, 16.777.216 great-great-great-great-grandchildren, 268.435.456 great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren, 4.294.967.296 great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren, and 68.719.476.736 great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren. Inconceivable and ever so fecund is this force, celebrated by its descendants even so many millennia before they are born. I still had my forehead to the ground in front of her when, employing her eighth hand, she touched my left shoulder, my right shoulder, the center of my back and, then, reached my face and pulled me up.
Inside me, I felt the pregnancy grow with each second. Lightly feeling my belly, I noticed a curious reaction to the touch of my hands. With tiny electric shocks and heatwaves, the pregnancy told me tales that were like leaves from an almond tree that fall in a perfect swirl, like god hiding beneath a stone, like an uprising of students with their Molotov cocktails. That was when the corn stalk said to me, in a pre-Babel, pre-Adamic language – a language prior to myth, language itself –, that there was no such thing as “human beings” (Translator’s Note: in this pre-Babel, pre-Adamic, prior-to-myth, language-itself language, “there is no such thing as ‘human beings’ means “there are only human beings” – allowing for what might have got lost in the long, transhistorical spiral of translations). The corn stalk revealed to me that everything that exists, exists equally, though necessarily in different guises. It told me that in this pre-Babel, pre-Adamic language – this language prior to myth, language itself – there exists no resources for comparisons which might create linear hierarchies such as “better than”, “greater than”, “superior to”. With all its experience, the potassium in the grains of corn jumped into the conversation to say that being mineral is as good as being vegetable. While in the middle of being chomped by a colorless locust, the corn stalk added that being an animal is just as good as being vegetable. The shadow of the corn stalk upon the black earth advanced that being shadow is just as good as being light. The reflection of the corn stalk on the water mirror interrupted the conversation to say that being the image of corn is just as good as being corn. Finally, all of their words converged to say that being word is just as good being anything else – and then they confided in me: there isn’t a word world, nor an image world, all of them exist equally in the same world, although in different ways. Words and images, rather like people, have their stories, their will, their whims, their secrets and, above all, their own efforts and strategies for survival. They nourish themselves, excrete, procreate, take part in ecosystems, interact with a multitude of beings, manipulate them, are manipulated by them, exchange energy and favors, make mistakes, die, grow moldy, rot, sometimes they spawn, sometimes they do not. Clearly they were all bursting with stories to tell, and I was trying to pay attention to them all.
Touched, deeply infatuated with its own corny condition, the corn stalk began to run a fever. Heated by itself, a grain of corn, turning into popcorn, jumped into the abyss of the unknown shrieking: “In the world, there are no categories, names or relations that are not a mistake”. (Translator’s Note: Once again, in this pre-Babel, pre-Adamic, prior-to-myth, language-itself language, “In the world, there are no categories, names or relations that are not a mistake” also means “Mistake categories, names and relations in order to generate other worlds”). And the corn stalk went on:
“This being who thinks himself human, exclusively human, supremely human, so lost in his (un)own delusions of grandeur, had been tricked and overtaken by a demon who made him believe his doubt, who made him believe in the very likelihood of certainty, who smashed him to bits by leading him to think he was in opposition to everything he is a part of. In the moment of the world’s making, this evil genie who feeds on greed and ignorance, was part and debris of the advent of life, the reversal of harmony, the contrary of entropy and, at the same time, an emergency brake in the project of life’s creation. The olden ladies had imprisoned this accursed spirit in the world of the dead, down below the ground, amidst shiny metals and heavy oils, so it could never be found. When the greed in human beings moved them to dig tunnels into the world of the dead in search of shiny metals, this demon was released and began to stalk the world, unfolding into a fractal of destruction. Fooled by this greedy, abstracting, extractivist spirit; fooled by the illusion of balance generated by its terrible smooth designs, fooled by the white light treachery, this “human being” believed in separability, believed in the atmospheric perspective, in a possible existence of individual beings. Disoriented, he believed in his own centrality – in the centrality of presumably human beings concerning all narratives. This being transformed separation into its only way into knowledge and, losing sight of everything by centering himself on vision, stopped listening to the planets, missed out on the chance of listening to cells. He did not listen to the Earth, he did not listen to the skies, he did not listen to spirits and figures, he did not listen to darkness. Alienating himself from the material dance that is the adventure of sound, this being unlearnt the pre-Babel, pre-Adamic language; the language prior to myth, language itself, and, no longer able to learn from the other wisdoms of the world, he isolated himself in a maze of deaf mirrors.
The corn stalk then offered me an abundant handful of its grains and suggested I ate them. As I attempted to put them all in my mouth at once, it insisted that everything that exists has its desires, secrets, vital flows, its own particular way of vibrating in search of life and harmony, its own paths through time and space. It suggested I close my eyes and wished me a happy journey. On the other side of my navel, the grains sprouted as my pregnancy continued to grow. In that visceral conversation, the sprouts told me how the corn, with its sweetness and graciousness, had discovered a way to communicate with humans millennia ago and how, since then, it has been using humans in order to be spread through enormous plantations all over the world. Other beings – such as soy, cattle, the idea of the nuclear family, certain words and certain images – also employ humans in order to get themselves made, replicated and transformed. The problem is that humans, disoriented by delusions of centrality and superiority, have unlearnt to interpret the quaint talk of the elements of the world, and began to be at fault, both through excess and lack. The corn stalk told me it might already be too late. But my pregnancy contradicted it, stating that it was still time at least for something that was not tragic. After some time, my body digested the cornfield, which fueled the growth of my pregnancy.
As I was trying to get my bearings following the loss of all the categories I had inherited and the worldview they sustained, the great ancestor held out one of her hands and, careful as could be, painted my whole body with the blue pigment, making me feel absolutely blessed and protected, even though I wasn’t feeling threatened before. By this time, it was already clear to me that she was a poetess. In the wrinkles of her elbows one could read, in alexandrine verse, gossip from a time before the verb. Beneath half her nails, I recognized the glow of the dust that lives between the portuguese stones on the pavement, during carnival. On the other half, the unforgettable smell of honey and palm oil.
I was very homesick. I’d already been on the moon for over 24 million years, that is to say, two hours, perhaps. On the moon, in space, or whatever the hell this place was, painted blue, I felt ready for any battle. I wanted it to be a homecoming, but I sensed it would be yet another rebirth.
I could feel the blue pigment trickling into my skin. Heat emerged from the center of my body, climbing all the way to the top of my head. As if I had become an electric snake, I started to lose consciousness until I had fallen once again on the water stream. Gravity kept pulling my paralyzed self down indefinitely to the bottom of the river, which was the bottom of the sea, which was the deep of the woods, where the charmed ones reside, the ancient ones, those who are yet to be born, where poetry, imagination and the chance of everything transforming live. In this darkness, I could sense starfish, the stars in the sky, the great secret society of the octopuses, jellyfish, some microplastic or other at times, comets, supernovas, satellites, the reversals, the contraries, the inverts, the dark sun under the earth at midnight. I realized I had dived into a crossroads. Part of me knew there was a chance I might dissolve completely into the whole, surrender to the eternal return, leave on what would be my greatest petite mort, the ultimate erotic experience. Another part of me kept itself terse and harmonious, longing to be done with that pregnancy so it could finally head home.
At a certain moment, sinking into those depths, an old acquaintance of mine bumped against my arm. It was the word “Potency”, written by myself at the age of ten, with a pencil, on the surface of my school desk. It was my favorite word, a kind of hope, a being with whom I’d made a secret, complex pact, with a thousand clauses, forms of rescue and manifestation. For a while, that word had been the only person who understood who I was, who knew what I could become, and who loved my secret becomings. According to that childhood pact, if one day I were to get lost again, the word would come for me. Bumping into that word, which took the guise of a mermaid there, or of a black hole, made me wake up. As I came to, once again feeling my pregnant outlines, it told me it had waited for me for a long time, that an important secret had been waiting for me right there for millennia – not because I did not know already it, but because it would eventually condense everything of consequence I was ever to learn in life; everything that moved, moves and will ever move me. It asked me to follow it, entering its palace which was a great bivalve copper shell. In the middle of the main hall of that uncanny edifice lay a black pearl. Following orientations from the word-mermaid, I placed the pearl in my mouth. Its surface dissolved into my saliva, revealing that within it was the greatest treasure in the universe, the secret that had brought me there, the reason for this whole adventure, from the moment the eagle morphed me into lightning and took me off to the moon onwards. In my mouth, revealed from inside the black pearl, was the most valuable material in all the universe: the power and the beauty of Friendship.
And Friendship was a deep breath. Pure air, it filled out my lungs, made me emerge back to the surface of the water, allowing me to leave the river once again. My pregnancy grew at such a pace that the rest of my body had been reduced to the thinnest of layers when compared to the enormous roundness growing inside me. Like an animal shedding its skin, my body became no more than a blue hind, impregnated with the pigment that had sunk into it. The belly would not stop growing. The moment my skin burst open, the wind of Friendship in my lungs shot out into the Universe, like some beautiful gall, as I was given to see that, inside me, it was the world itself that had expanded. With the birth of the planet, my skin-body dissolved into the air. Earth – so immensely tiny, so whole and inapprehensible – was twirling in space. Friendship, the greatest treasure in the universe, the reason behind this whole adventure, unlatched like a fast gust, traced a glorious trajectory and then approached the planet. That wise wind blew across the atmosphere, hovered over the continents, came into my house, blessed me as I slept, nestled between a book and my beloved, and, as it left my living room window, caused the metal blinds to get caught up in the grid, leaving it wide open, like a gaping mouth, like the beginning of everything.
Bernardo Mosqueira, September 2022