A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving. ~Lao Tzu

I once wrote home that India is the belly button of the world. If that is true, than Brazil is all that is humid, lush, soft and pleasant to the touch on the human body. It is the part of your physical self that longs for caresses – the inner thighs, the nape of the neck, the folds between the toes, the genitalia, the palm of the hand, the heart. If this offends you, you are from the northern hemisphere. If you take it as complimentary, you are from the southern. Brazil is everything that is luscious, pink and tempting in humanity. It is Georgia O’Keefe on a rich diet of fatty beef and passion fruit, her desiccated desert skin suddenly ripe on Amazonian water and the sweat of a mulatta’s breast. It is Gaugin’s European yearning for the coffee skin and lazy, natural toiling of the Tahitians. It is all that is unyielding pleasure and satiated desire, all that we hope for within the confines of our austere white office walls, all that we look for while day dreaming in the grid. Brazil not only allows the human race to languish and lose himself in his most instinctual impulses, it commands it. Brazil knows that slowly but surely even the most uptight, the most rigid, the most righteous will fall to the natural impulses of human nature. Never have I felt such a stark gulf between my own culture and that in which I am immersed. My genes, my upbringing, my color have told me over and over to be careful with my thoughts, my flesh, my presence; that I must give myself in doses and relish life in brief and acceptable staccato bursts. Brazil tells me to let go, to accept, to come to terms with all that is shocking, all that is real, for a lifetime, a never-ending samba in the dancing red shoes. The great heart that beats here, the heart of carnval and soccer, bloodshed and red meat, strife and struggle and ectasy and rage, sweeps up the rest of the world should they dare to enter and carries them away in their own dream.
Outside an enormous metropolis sits. I watch it from my confine, the walls of the acceptable world living in chaos. Work, shop, home, work, shop, home….Here you must follow strict avenues and lighted streets to maintain order. Otherwise you might fall, fall into the great void of favelas and hip gyration and angry mobs that wrestle and grapple and reach just there. Just outside the door. Beckoning.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2006 at 10:41 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.