To change is to lose

(Listen along with the reading)

It wants change and lives on romantic ideas that favor maintaining the status quo. It wants change and continues to see itself as the center of the world. It wants change and expects it to be televised. It wants change and doesn't want to lose anything. It wants change and is afraid of its own desire. It wants change and justifies itself for everything it doesn't do. It wants change and wants it to come from outside, to be done by it, to be shown how, to be easy, to be painless, to be smooth, to have a manual with a proven positive impact, to not involve twists and turns, to not lose its merit, so that it doesn't take risks, so that she isn't criticized, so that she doesn't frown, so that she doesn't feel alone, so that she doesn't feel lost, so that she isn't displaced from anything important, so that idealizations work their magic in transforming for her what she denies so much to herself. Do you really want a change or do you just want to stay in fashion and not miss the party?

My birth, mine. Mine?

(Listen along the reading)

Birth.

From the Latin 'nascere' - to give birth, but to whom does it refer?

To whom does one give birth? The one who arrives, the one who gives birth?

Why is it called light?

It intrigues me. Thinking about the elixir oxytocin intrigues me.

In medical terms birth is expulsion, withdrawal.

I think of assault. My heart is racing, I'm scared, I'm on adrenaline.

Is light the new? Being? Consciousness?

Too complex?

I don't really understand.

I find it frightening.

It reveals so much that it blinds.

In the far reaches of the western frontier of Rio Grande do Sul, life happens in a

hurry, with no frills, between trotting and galloping, references to four-legged

animals, horses, mares, oxen and cows. Toughness is a hallmark, a symbol of strength, learned early on.

The first time I was born was quick, it was hard to put the words together, to come up with the flowery words to tell how I did it, how we did it, how they did it to us, me and her.

Cholera.

I'll start with how I remember the young woman pregnant with another.

Buchuda, a woman with a big belly.

A muscle belly, the stomach of mammals.

This is how I remember origins.

It was dawn when I tried to make contact with the outside world, and the little eagle was showing its first signs.

At the first touch of the woman's fingers, it became clear that it wasn't time, that it would be a long time before the dance started. From then on, she would have to put up with the sign of the unbearable that would lead her to the hospital.

She had no experience, she followed her own instincts, her own confidence - which she had never lacked.

The men in the back, antagonists of enjoyment, creation, the wild, the natural, were figures who were not as organized into an army as they would become a few decades later.

It was late morning when the stitches tightened and she was taken to hospital with her sister-in-law. They walked non-stop through the corridors as prescribed. Not many hours later, the bag ruptured and it was time for the dawn to break.

No. My name didn't become aurora! Nor would it, it wasn't on the list.

It wasn't about the baby, it was before that, it was along with that, it was hers, it wasn't the baby.

The baby could be a boy, I don't think gender was a concern. - Oh, I remember! Henrique, it was supposed to be Henrique. She told me that she really liked the name, but her husband had a problem with the 'H' in it. A silent letter, he said, I don't like it, an inventor of superstitions, he didn't like the name Henrique, with an H or without.

I was born in August, the month of the mad dog. I have the sun in Leo, my mother always says I have a star, perhaps referring to my charismatic rebelliousness, I don't know.

'The woman is going to give birth, the woman is going to give birth', you could hear the cries in the hospital corridors. My mother was then taken to the delivery room, the doctor followed... She says they put her on the delivery table.

Table? Oh yes, mom, they put you in that roast chicken position! Yes, yes, I know. Between screams and whispers, and that 'poop-mommy force', the baby sprouted.

There, I was born. I was born, we were. The daughter and the mother.

I found everything cold.

I find everything very cold, colorless, smooth, slippery, grey, opaque, icy with details.

I hear that after that my young mother was alone.

Wasn't she before? I thought.

I have to control the questions. Oh, and the way I ask them.

I've gotten the reputation of being annoying, grumpy, quarrelsome, I've even been called stupid.

It was important to think, to think critically.

Questioning was important, I was told.

However, it had to be done the right way, I never understood what the right way was. Innocence stolen.

My maternal grandmother stayed with her for ten days and went back to her life, she lived in another city. The maid remained, whom I love, whom I have as a second mother. My black mother.

They told me I cried a lot. My mother breastfed me for a few weeks and then stopped. She was exhausted, lonely, sleepless and depressed. The doctor told her to stop breastfeeding. It would have been her prescription to treat the exhaustion and abandonment she had suffered.

I once had a dream in which I saw myself as a baby on a bed and I cried, cried, alone until I was tired. A desperate abandonment. All my facial muscles were contracting, my mouth was open and that baby's voice was screaming until I collapsed from exhaustion.

I woke up from this dream thinking that it was a dream of wanting to be born.

How could I have been born without any woman having been born before me? Their own suppressed biographies, diffuse feminine knowledge, witch doctors, rosaries, the names of modern drugs and tragic stories and accidents.

When I was three, my sister arrived. They told me that I knocked her out of the baby carriage because I wanted to see her so much and nobody would show me. I hung onto the baby carriage and it tipped over. She wasn't hurt.

Me,

well...

I didn't either, that's what they told me.

They say I used to be very ARTEIRA and UNBOUNDED.

Nowadays I love that word - arteira!

I looked it up in the dictionary and saw that in addition to the root 'art', arteira means auspicious, mean. Was that what they wanted me to think of myself?

I didn't like compliments, I found them boring, they always used the same repertoire, they underestimated my intelligence.

I was born mature, I thought.

I remember feeling a lot, intensely.

They told me that the manicurist's husband, in an attempt to please me, said, “What a love this little girl has” and that my response was that of a wild and brazen animal. My mother didn't even know that I already had ass and pussy in my vocabulary.

All this birth stuff intrigues me.

When I was about six years old, my bisa told me that the day I was born was a beautiful day. My father had come into the house, where everyone was waiting for news, shouting 'my daughter Juliana has been born, my daughter Juliana has been born'.

Every time I heard it, I somehow felt that I was born with her, another time in bisa's story, I felt like a child, which wouldn't be the case for the rest of my births.

I have been born beyond the mirror, while impatiently waiting for the antidote to blindness, complacency and cowardice.

I insist on the body that possesses the womb, that knows that the womb is a type of brain, that gestates light, that perceives the intensity of light, that rises up and overflows in metaphors and peaceful revolutions.

Or not.

Erogenous organ, ecstasy, oxytocin, climax, enjoyment, pleasure.

Pleasure, pleasure!

Poor her, I heard behind the door, she has so much potential, there, dependent on her husband, hiding in the home, doing nothing, doing nothing for herself, glued to cholera.

Cholera, my other.

Me,

dissident.

Whoever said that being born was simple lied.

Becoming a woman is urgent.

In the meantime, I need to be born for all of them.

Resist for all of them.

Even for the self-murderers.

For all of them who?

Ah! I've learned that there are seven of them, seven before me.

Birth, mine. Mine?

Jupterians insights

(Listen along with the reading)

I fall into the hole. Wearing a skirt, I crumpled to the ground. It was a beauty pageant, I was on the catwalk, shame on me!

Everyone laughs, shame on you!

Shame on me for my excesses, excesses of words,

excesses of opinions outside what fits within a sea of obviousness,

excesses of misplaced desires in the collective imagination,

colonized by ash, death and slavery.

I don't give up,

I persevere as a walker.

It's hard to find a self that satisfies me.

Resisting projections is exhausting.

So I emanate the need not to belong to the obvious, to the constant, to the world of 0 or 1.

So I decide to live the mother.

Mother of myself now.

I mother myself, I validate myself in the condition of I-don't-know-where-I'm-going-but-there's-not-my-place.

I think of the mediocrity of a body-home-woman with no enjoyment of her own.

I think of the dependence on imaginary authorities that freeze me as a small, fearful, defenseless girl.

I talk to myself,

I tell myself that what I'm looking for transcends colonial freedoms, the freedom to do-what-I-want-at-what-time-I-want.

Not that freedom!

Not the freedom to choose where to live, to travel, to consume beautiful things.

I know that,

it's white privilege, it's the freedom of those who play the game, who accept creating their identity and their power to act in the selling of time in exchange for material illusions and empty ideas of belonging.

What I'm really hunting is something with no name.

Something that makes you laugh and cry, something that makes you squirm, sweat, relax and become aware.

All at the same time.

This nameless thing that when it crosses me lets me sleep and dream that I'm swimming among whales.

The power of the majesty of reality itself, understanding human responsibility, working from your place, with what you have, from your social place, to be able to inhabit this body-home, to make use of this body-temple of pleasurable and libidinal festivals.

The power to be able to create rituals, to open the eyes of consciousness, to feel part of the land, so part that you feel like home.

The power to give birth to the future, to want to belong and not want to run away. To differentiate, to fight, to resist.

Inadequacy is a character in this private theater that opens the curtains and presents itself to me.

What does it want to say, what message does it want to convey?

I came up with an answer, and it was good to feel what it did to me.

I persist with the answer I've invented.

It suits me, it causes me to let go.

It warns me of revolution, revolution of the gaze, revolution of desire, revolution of the imaginary.

It calls for insurgency, for the ideology of human care to be anchored in time.

It cries out for daring to make life a space for constant, symbolic experimentation, for diverse, real, face-to-face experiences.

It suggests making a home in the discomfort of the new.

I then think of neurological plasticity, I think of human, noble virtues,

I think of the humility to learn, to be in relationship with the world.

IN relation! Neither above nor below.

Because after all, before the sky, the sun and the sea, we are all small.

Who corrupted the idea of hierarchies in the natural world by making them the subject of bloody racial and misogynistic disputes?

Who corrupted the idea that because it is in nature it can be extracted, appropriated?, who needed to invent the concept of nature and what we need it for anyway? If it's perfectly clear that we need air, water, food and protection over our heads...

Why does it seem impossible for us to overcome the idea of scarcity and that we will no longer be eaten by the lion?

It seems that we are suffering from a shortage of humility, it seems that our dreams need to be capitalized on in order to be legitimate.

And they must be recorded, photographed, divulged, shared, propagated, exhibited, made explicit??... it all seems so obvious.

Inadequacy speaks to pushing the boundaries, subverting everyday life and going beyond, reinventing desire.

To desire beyond the capital-centric horizon. Letting go of the idea of seeking to belong to the clan of dominant values of a few (always few, but very armed and bloodthirsty) murderous men who call themselves masters. Owners of people, owners of knowledge, owners of the decisions of those who can know.

Owners of violence, of ideas of domination. That's what they are!

They spread the mantra of domination. Dominate everything. From the earth to emotions.

Now, how can we believe that this is possible, that this is natural and the only possible story to explain why we have come this far? Where bodies-race-gender dissenting from the hegemonic white male, are restricted and alienated from their existence.

There's a lot of patience, a lot of stomach to endure hearing these shitty mantras over and over again from armored bodies that become fascistized in their quest to adapt to the intense flow of constant changes and new revelations that sometimes cause worlds of predatory beliefs and ideologies to collapse, professorships that are crumbling...

I look away and ask my friends to dance with me in the middle of the living room at that little party.

Nobody wants to come, they're embarrassed, they're afraid of who knows what.

So am I.

They don't come. I go, I stay, I'm already here.

I take a chance, I'm disappointed by the looks around me of admiration for the extravagance mixed with debauchery and evil whispers.

I keep it, I keep the pleasure of dancing to myself, I keep it so much that I forget where I kept it.

Inadequacy tells me that for me to be okay with it, I need to feel it.

It just wants to be a funny memory from a time of inconsequential and unprotected spontaneity. She wants to be part of history, she wants to be a chapter in a biography.

She is what doesn't fit. She's a gale, the water of a raging sea.

She is the dissent in me,

she is my other.

I need to love her to become people, to become human.

I'm learning...