Between times

I haven't had an easy time lately. The uncertainty of the journey has left me feeling unsettled. I thought I could handle the unpredictability, but I was wrong. I want to hold on to ideas, stories, but they all slip away from me. I keep thinking about the ban that has been placed on poetry, on the powerful use of metaphors, which seem to have no effect. This impoverishment of reflective capacity, of abstract thought for understanding events—this erasure of the sensitive, inquisitive, intuitive, creative, embodied with vital energy. I relate to this thing of growing up in a regime of excessive responsibility for the self, as if the meaning of life were to take care of everything ourselves, so as not to depend on anyone. As if the anxieties of being alive, the doubts we carry, were moving toward a functional meaning: to harden our bodies and crystallize our thoughts into prophecies where we will be swallowed up, regardless of what we do, as individuals and collectively.

As Byung-Chul Han says, we are exhausted from trying so hard to be someone. In painting, I stuck to an image of subversion, irreverence that tires me just to remember. A silent exhaustion took over my body when I realized I had to perform this damn identity all the time. In my desire to control my path, which has long been tortuous, I fell into the trap of my time. Reading Byung-Chul Han was like a slap in the face. Toxic positivity (me?), the cult of transparency (me?), of performance (me?), of efficiency (me?)

- I say 'me' because I have been reflecting on these issues of social behavior for a long time, as an immigrant in Canada for almost two decades. I have been trying to weave my values, ideas, thoughts, and ways of being in the world together in a hybrid way—because I am Brazilian, but I have been transformed, affected, and shaped by the experience of immigration, of being in a welfare society, and also by motherhood, which happened here and demands my body, soul, and all the patience I don't have to be responsible for the lives of two little souls who drink from me through a straw.

And all this hijacks creative power, spontaneous gestures, existence as experience. I remember a TED talk where Isabel Allende talks about menopause as a moment of transition, when the body begins to say more forcefully what the mind avoided hearing. Perception sharpens, desire changes, haste loses its meaning. And with that, the illusion that identity is something fixed falls away. We are not what we think we are. We are the result of what passes through our perception, our sensory field, which is related to what we think and feel, what we want to experience, everything that builds our experiences. Therefore, nothing is, when we are living in the moment. This is not a philosophical abstraction. The illusion of being “me” implies an intrinsic competitiveness, something like “if I'm not,” “if I don't do,” “if I don't win,” I don't really exist, I have no value, I don't deserve the joy of enjoyment.

All that remains of my desire now is to put into practice the sustenance of not wanting, not because I no longer desire anything and have given up, but exactly the opposite. I want to be more whole, I want to access more life and creativity within myself. I want to feel that I can handle the discomfort of not being my “profile,” my crazy and irreverent doppelganger. The idea of being a “brand” of myself is a prison that torments me. I am capable of inventing stories and amazing adventures so as not to be stuck with a fixed image.

It hurts not to have anywhere to lean on. I feel discomfort, a pain at not finding a place or language that recognizes me entirely. I have no tribe. I don't belong to those clans I see around me. And at the same time, I need other people to be myself (a self without the functions and uses of others). Not out of emotional dependence, but because subjectivity is always co-created, it is relational. As Morena Cardoso said, the body is porous, it is a field of affections, it is living language — and it is here, in this body that writes to you, that flows reorganize themselves, that creation happens, that life becomes enchanted again. Nomadic thinking, as Deleuze proposes, is the only thing that works for me now. A way of thinking that does not plant flags, that does not close meanings, that does not transform life into a concept. I no longer want sedentary thinking that organizes everything into fixed categories and is easily co-opted by neoliberal, imperialist ideas, leading to voting for the far right. I want to inhabit the flows. I want to be a creature. The creature is that state of radical attention, of listening to perceptions, of surrendering to life as a creative force that passes through us—without needing to define us. I no longer wish to be a creator, an author, the owner of anything. I want to perceive myself as generated, inhabited by life itself. In the state of creature, there is no longer any project, coherence, or identity to sustain. There is body, presence, contrast, breath, becoming.

The body is the birthplace of insights—not the logical mind, but the body that trembles, dreams, digests. In creatures, there is no competition, comparison, or desire to win. Difference is a condition for expansion. Divergence is a way of breathing. For an idea to exist, it must be felt. Thought that does not pass through the body is amputated thought. The creature lives without guarantees. It has let go of control. It lives by listening and permeability, like a cell membrane: it knows its contours, but allows exchange. It learns to exist in a new time — more sensitive, more vibrant, more unpredictable.