(Originally “O Cão Preto”, submitted to USP, Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas, 10/05/88)
An Abstract Of An Abstract
Translated From The Portuguese
by
Laureen Ibsen, UCLA School Of Theatre, Film And Television
Translator’s Note
Somewhere in Brazil, at this very moment, the stories of Ms. Cavalcante’s life are being told and retold, and I certainly cannot tell them any better, or any more completely. However, her struggles with depression, anxiety and post-partum mania are less well-publicised, and I hope that the presentation of this abstract from her first thesis, in English for the first time, perhaps reveals a little of what preoccupied the young, pregnant mother-of-two as she began her life-long work.
I must thank Gabi Oliveira and Caio Cavalcante for their help in the translation and preparation of this work. The University of Sao Paulo still claims restrictive copyright of the full text of Ms. Cavalcante’s doutorada, and so I am not able to reveal exactly what it was that her tutors thought of her, or where the arguments presented here finally led. It might be that she had already incubated her most radical ideas here, as a young student more at home in the favelas than the colonial arabesque of Sao Paulo. Of course, we will not know this for many years, until her papers become public-domain. What is exciting is that this abstract represents Ms. Cavalcante in her less-famous, formative years as a researcher, when her now-famous tropes were still emerging; her reluctance to directly acknowledge research works used is already present, and her confrontational, confessional, and decidedly unacademic style.
I have tried to maintain the meter and voice of the work, though this is challenging in any translation, and especially one where the original is so idiosyncratic. Interviews with some of Ms. Cavalcante’s former classmates reveal early hints of the “guerreiro bibliotecário” (a quote attributed to the Brazilian president of the time, José Sarney) into which she would transform. One noted that she had the peculiar habit of arriving early for class and sitting under the desk, as if sheltering from the rain, in order to think more clearly, and another remembers her inventing turns of phrase that were designed to evoke, “uma sensação de um velho cavalheiro, ou um capitão de mar.” I have done my best to translate these where I can find them, in the manner that they were intended. Any offence caused is intended in the original.
I am well aware of the controversy surrounding this publication, and can only speak as to my real passion for Cavalcante scholarship. This abstract should not be seen as a cynical attempt to justify the sale of the Cavalcante film rights; such discussions have been had with Caio Cavalcante, and all legal proceedings are closed, in both our opinions. I have commissioned this translation to show something less mythological of the woman in which I, and many others, are truly fascinated. Caio himself has told me that, in her present condition, he does not consider his mother alive, in any sense that consent would be required. I have visited Ms. Cavalcante myself, and it pains me to agree with him. This supplement to my funding proposal may be considered the introduction to honouring her memory, and understanding her weaknesses, as well as her brilliance.
Laureen Ibsen, California, 2013
“The picturesque is found any time the ground is uneven.”
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
I was once the world’s smallest spelunker.
When I was a little girl, before I had made myself round and leaky with children, I could fit into the spaces grown cavers could not dream of traversing. Near my father’s house was a cave complex which was the sole refuge of a very rare species of bat. I do not recall their taxonomy, now; they had a purple stripe on their throats, and my father, as an employee of the National Conservatory, was given a small house at the cave’s mouth, nestled in a small dale at the edge of the rainforest, and the task of protecting the bat’s fragile habitat.
I always thought that the creatures were a little pathetic, myself; a species that dribbles along, with no hope of spread or distribution, is not one worth the sacrifice. I used to fancy that the bats all hated my father, who would collect slivers of their guano and shine lights up into their roosts, as a Gargamelian villain, intent on ruining their slow decline into obsolescence.
The three times that he caught me in the cave, he beat me so severely that my stomach looked as if an ogre had picked me up, thinking that I was a bottle of beer. I remember, very clearly, looking down at the mauve welts across my stomach and wondering if, now that I had the markings of his beloved, if he would treat me the same. The second time was one of the first times that I can remember feeling tremendously sad, in a more permanent sense, and after the fourth time I stopped going into the caves altogether. I still have, on my windowsill, the piece of flint that I used in lieu of a lighter, striking it on the walls every few moments to show me where the sudden drops were.
Despite my swearing-off of spelunking, my father was so paranoid about me stepping on a whelping bat, or shattering a priceless architecture of shit with my patent leather shoes, that he began to tell me stories, learnt almost-by-heart from comic books he picked up on his infrequent trips to the city. The Hollow Earth. The Hyperboreans. The Curse Of The Moustachioed Sword. There were others, with more ludicrous titles, and he would read them to me after dinner, with a glass of cachaça and his instruments tumbling in the half-light, listening for the bats.
In every single one of them, foul, protean creatures would ooze out of the caverns and tunnels from the very centre of the earth and begin enslaving those who had taken their rightful birthright. My father was very proud of his clever technique for keeping his bats safe.
It was on one of those nights, after I had thrown away my lunchpail helmet along with the scraps, that I saw the black dog for the first time, standing in the forest, watching me.
* * * * * *
From almost that age, I was aware of the power of dichotomy, and decided that I would focus in my imagination on the very opposite of my father’s censure; the sky-bound, birds, angels, aliens, powered craft, balloons and people in the process of dreaming. I was in a particularly patriotic phase at the time, and I had decided that Brazil would be where extra-terrestrials would land, if they ever had the nous to travel to a single-sun system in the ulna of a hick galaxy, populated entirely by the retarded.
You can tell that the films of the age had made me a little pessimistic about the state of our planet.
I imagined that, if aliens were to view the Earth as they passed the bulbous headland that Jupiter denotes, and into our own little cove, past the drowning rocks of the asteroid belt, ranging over its various assymetrical offerings, and if they used light as a part of their sensory repertoire, and if they were aware of the chemical structure of water and its importance in the universe, specifically, it was likely that their sensors would be drawn to Brazil. North America uses Canada as shelter from the Arctic, giving it limited biodiversity and smooth cheeks downy with hotels, an obese, taupe coastline; Africa is too large, blunt and inelegant like a hot axe. But Brazil… Brazil offers a pleasing, slender calf of green, the universal semaphore of vitality, and in its hair is nestled a streak of silver that speaks of great experience; the river which has grown a continent around itself, a beard of land which separates the content from the ocean as surely as a floating bottle. These aliens could land and drink and discover us all over again; they would be forgiven for thinking, from above, that Brazil is a composite of all that sets Earth apart from its barren neighbours.
Of course, Brazil had another lock in its hair to attract these sky-sailors; myself, tearful, and by that point making a nightly excursion to the local bus-stop, to sit on the broken glass in the plastic seats. What a beacon I thought I was, my unhappiness bolted like a plaque onto the night sky.
But, in other ways, I decided, this continent which the Amazon has accrued would make a poor landing spot; around the great river it is loamy and pliable, and trees spread with gobs of seed in their progressive billions, spoiled by the toffee soil. Elsewhere, great mountains rise and valleys fall, full of delicate bats and mad, cruel men, as well as the lurking phalanx of Hyperboreans, ready to swarm. The deeper these creatures went, the unhappier they would become. Meeting me would have little effect; once they reached the mouth of the cave, and my father’s gentleman-shack, they would be so deep that their craft could not take off again, and they would be marooned, killed for the threat they would pose to this dull, pointless conservation.
* * * * * *
Author’s Note
My fieldwork took place in the following locations. I list them in order of strength of “black feeling" as relating to my Menin Scale Of Depression (see Appendix 2.a; my expenses form has still not been signed, please see to it that it is, unless you would like a starved baby left in your cubbyhole.)
MSD 3.4 Grainau, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria
MSD 3.2 Jiu Valley, Transylvania
MSD 2.8 Cerro Gordo, Rio Higuerón, Malaga, Spain
MSD 2.2 Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, England
MSD 2.0 Wadi Mujib (Arnon), Jordan
MSD 1.6 Iya Keikoku, Tokushima Prefecture, Japan
* * * * * *
Let us consider the valley as a construct, first of nature, and then of man. Though my interest in the subject began in that nameless gully, I soon became acutely aware of a set of mythologies that all valleys, whether in Europe or America or Antarctica, shared.
Despite popular strength of feeling (if not analysis), the valley is the youngest geographical feature on earth. The deeper it is, the fresher the soil, and the more novel the aspect. In natural fact, it is a place of absolute litoral vitality, the definition of the cutting edge. This is not how most of us think of them. If you asked the average person to describe a valley, they may use one, or some, of the following words:
Forgotten
Peaceful
Quiet
Dead
Quaint
Backward
Empty
Ancient
Old
Old
Old
Venerability and degradation are the tenets of this false mythology and it is one that has burrowed deep into antiquity; in Classical Greece, the social concept of catabasis took a primacy in the collective consciousness. Although literally referring to a military retreat, it has come to be translated as “a movement downhill into darkness”. This was tied to the verticality of Ancient Greek, and therefore most subsequent, psychotopology, and the concept of descent being coupled with claustrophobia. No ancient pilgrim feels hemmed in by the clouds. The descent to Hades, to Tartarus and beyond, involves the pinning of the character by rock, or quarried stone, or bronze, to the point of hyperventilation. Towers are built up, as celebrations, once the necessary yet undesirable task of mapping dungeons and foundations are completed. Down is old, up is new. Few of us have ever considered this dichotomy, but it is one that profoundly affects almost every culture’s sense of space, longitude, altitude, and self.
I remember standing, this year, on the banks of Lake Eibsee, near Grainau (MSD 3.4) with Caio on my hip. I myself, with all the hermeticism and inoculation my education provides, never once could feel that I stood at the edge of a constantly growing child, or a site of geographical revolution. Even though, as I have explained above, I knew this to be fact, I looked up at the rock buttresses, trying to love my baby and not wet myself, and felt the decay all around me. I smelt it in the algae, in the rotting needles of the forest floor behind me, in the stagnancy of the water, in the absence of wind and the stillness of everything. This was not the sabi of Japanese aesthetic tradition; this was decay as boredom, death, danger and deceleration. There was no contemplation here, only lethargy, and the overwhelming desire to effect some change, no matter how horrific.
My father, when I was very little, and when I was much older (never in between) used to hold my head over a bowl of steaming water if I had a cold, and seal me in with a dishcloth. Standing in that valley I felt the same, too hot, too still, too sticky and without the luxury of breath.
A valley, for all its novelty and factual activity, feels like the oldest place in the world. This is not a natural designation. This is one that human beings create by existing there. I cannot be concerned, in my line of investigation, with the fact of valleys without humans. What is vital is what transformation occurs the moment a human steps into one.
Is it the fact of the geology, the configuration of the stones and the emblems of nature? No – in fact, a valley may be superficially more beautiful for its coquettish clandestiny. There are many aesthetic symbols throughout world culture of valleys as retreats, vaults of precious goods, or transcendant utopia. Superficially, the valley represents paradise.
What is to blame is gravity. The great English anthropologist, Oscar Parlay, once said, “gravity is a theatre”, and I think he may have misunderstood his own axiom. Parlay meant, I believe, that gravity contains all the drama of the world; every slump into death, every fluid moving through every brain irrigating every decision, and every movement of human beings to a conclusion. I have never liked theatre, and find it one of the least interesting of cultural tropes yet extant. I instead will make his wisdom architectural, and state that “gravity is the theatre” - a building in which all of life is drawn, reduced, and decayed through bunched proximity. Gravity traps and weakens culture, and the valley is its sink.
Every substance, even the dissident air, is dragged downwards into the drains and troughs of the world, and in none other than water is this vast vampirism better represented. I think that it is no coincidence that most of the places that I visited for research (see above) were, at one time or another, home to more than one watercourse. Water cascades, dribbles and sublimes into these environments via cleft or gorge or karst, makes its way as far downhill as it can, and then pools. Some of it will be trapped, tortured of its oxygen and made scummy by the association. Some of it may escape, slowly winding out again, but changed irrevocably by the driftlife that clings there. As I have stated, it is not only water that enacts catabasis; slurry bundles down the mountains slopes, avalanches bring shattered corpses with it, goat or mouse or man, plant-life blossoms, rots down and sluices, and, of course, that most tenacious of turbid matter, humanity, will always find a passage to the water. She takes advantage of the conveyored water, the oxbow and the bend, to cleanse herself, wash the stink from her clothes, and add her cargoed energy, every stink and poison that she has hunted, to the flow.
The river that leaves the valley is a poor facsimile of its higher, quicker ancestor.
Let us return to our aliens. Though I cannot assume the fact, I believe that their capabilities preclude a knowledge that light is a wave, and is not affected by gravity. Light moves with a superciliousness across the world, dwelling nowhere for more than half a day. Nobody, in any true sense, can trap it, excepting the rather dubious attempts at solar energy production, which is not a true trapping, only a scavenging of what is already departed.
Let us denounce this theory. Light is a wave, but can be trapped, and the valley is the perfect net to do so. In Cheddar Gorge (MSD 2.2) I saw the limestone glow long after the sun had set, and a fetid warmth rollicked along the canyons for the entire night. The next day’s sunrise contained within it a little of the geriatric heat of the day before, and the day before that, and so on.
So far we have learnt that valleys:
seal in and decay all matter;
trap light and heat, removing their vital and transient essence (this has precedence in many different cultures, including our own);
trap complexions of matter, such as animals and humanity, with several lures (see below), and then disallow expansion by their very nature, keeping civilisations, drawn there by thirst and fear and atavistic hatred of the open air, hemmed in and unable to move in the way that is intended, out of hunter-gathererhood and into suburbanisation.
Thus we can see that valleys, the natural seed of many of our communities and conglomerations, are detached by human observation from their youthful geological truth and imbued with an equally true, yet entirely artificial, sense of claustrophobia and degradation. It is interesting that we choose to live so close to our underworlds. Given that many of our most ancient cities are located as such, it is not surprising that there is a “psychological crisis” ongoing within the human collective mind.
I may be challenged on this point. For one, not all cities of civilisations rest in the low places, and even those that do garner some advantage from their situations. Valleys are attractants, or lures, to humans precisely because of the benefits they provide. The kloof-states of Romania have used the bedrock as castle walls for over a thousand years, keeping the clandestine kingdoms safe from Mongols, Russians, and the Church of the West. The narrow vâlcea mean that no invaders can enter in force, and water and vegetation thrive in the close-packed defiles. For those that live there, this trawling of all life’s amenities is the ultimate luxury; there is little need to range for sustenance or community. Compared to the mountain peak, with its vulnerability, its winds and the cold threat of erosion, it is, at a base level, comfortable. No human, you could argue, could ask for more.
Now, this point is almost universally accepted, and it is a point which I struggle to contend. I have two children asleep behind me as I write this, and an equally infantile mother in between them. Were it not for them, I would say DAMN to comfort, in return for my own mental health. We are currently living, through lack of other options, at the foot of Sugarloaf Mountain, in between two opposing hilltops, and I have created my own microclimate of misery here. I see the black dog most days, cantering up the mounds of refuse, sniffing at my vacant mother’s crotch, and slathering on my children’s dresses.
I would say DAMN to comfort, to leave this place.
Comfort has been achieved by our species, almost universally, with a slow struggle of suffering, compromise, and ingenuity. Now we have achieved it, it leads only to compost. Comfort is the same as entropy, and humanity, psychologically, should resist the natural inclination that all matter has towards such a state. Stored sunlight spoils as readily as meat, and without wind, without the movement of air, our brains crave dopamine and endorphins. Why else would mankind climb mountains but for a taste of that wind, that newer sun? Our aliens, on their homeworld, most likely also maintain the curious, quasi-religious practice of devoting the highest levels of their structures to “observation decks”, and the ticketed festival of surveillance, and the departure from the sludge of life far below us. This is anabasis, the polar opposite of catabasis, but it, neither, presents a true solution, as I will show.
My abstract concludes with a solution in this regard, one that does not involve space travel, like the positions of so many of my contemporaries.
One day, when I was climbing through those caves, I did step on a bat. I do not know why it had descended to the cave floor, but I do know that I felt it writhe when my shoe ground against it. I began to panic, my throat closing up and my mind rattling. There was the black dog winking at me. I remember so vividly seeing a brace of dead bats in its mouth, their purple cheeks wet with innards, and knowing that I would be blamed.
I ran, cutting my elbows and knees as I scrambled out through a tiny exit in the valley wall, I found a tiny stream, tapping its way down between rocks wider than I was, and out across a scree into the forest. As I washed the blood from my shoes, I realised, then, that despite the high walls around me, and how impossible escape felt, that little river, venomous with bat spoor and suspended lime, had found its own passage. The Amazon was not far away, and I knew that this brook, so filthy with everything I hated about my home, would eventually find its way there. Perhaps only part of it would survive, or perhaps it might nearly dry before it mounted the last ramparts and sank into the main highway. But from this place there was a route to the sea, one that anybody could follow.
In this piece I will show how every culture that has sheltered in a valley has actively rebelled against it in the form of their folklore, architecture and general psychology; despite its advantages, the valley is a ditch writ large, a place for refuse to collect, and every attempt by every people is made at convex escape, in the form of bell towers, flagpoles, and bridges flexing over rivers (see Appendix 3e ‘Gullyfluff’). Despite our advancement as a species we have not outgrown this larval reliance on comfort. We seek valleys as shelters for our thoughts and processes, and do not recognise the effect they have on our psyche. This is what I will designate “The Rotting V”. What I propose is a reinvention of human psychology, to alleviate this suffering which our evolution has imposed upon us. I call this method “The Route To The Sea".
As I have previously noted, most valleys that attract beings contain a river as a form of potable community center. No matter how impregnable the valley may seem, how high its mountains and how frozen its passes, how safe one believes one’s harvest, water will always come for dinner. Seventy-three percent of the world’s surface belongs to a being which claimed these places when they were just flat mud, in the years before spines were evaluated and approved. Foundations were lain, dungeons mapped, and the valley was theirs.
I am not for one second suggesting that water is intelligent - it is a tool bound strictly to gravity, and as such its conclusion is always the sea. No matter how clean the spring, it will gather up all it can and hurtle downhill, underhill, through bridge and wall and wood. It can sometimes be put to sleep in great silvery dormitories, but even these are mobile, and with such a weight of dreamers the valley itself can become smoothed like a filling.
However, as master of the valley, water knows where all the secret passageways may be found. Humankind would do well to follow the baron, as it were. Currently, we dam and control waters to suit our own needs, to justify our fear of open spaces, and maintain the dreadful habits which keep us unhappy and stagnant.
The word catabasis has another meaning; of a journey down from inland towards the coast. As we cannot rid ourselves of catabasis, we must repurpose it. The sea has always held a certain amount of dread for humanity; the salt is poison to her, the aspect is flat, dull and unpicturesque, and it changes constantly, shifting beneath her feet in such dangerous, unpredictable motions. The longer we can keep the water from the sea, which corrupts it with turbidity, and a loss of structure, the better. Keeping to the deep places postpones the necessity to re-evaluate one’s life.
Of course, this does depend on one’s outlook. For a sailor, or the young, the sea is a customs house for transformation, a system of exchange were entire existences can be stocked. For the old, or the terrified, it is a wall against which one is pushed. One glimpses what could be promised (blue, infinity) but it is immediately tarnished by worldly things (drowned corpses, flies on seaweed, the tiny dicks of worms, crabs upturned to be ravished by seagulls).
This piece will resolve humanity’s psychological problems by suggesting one very simple change in society. That we move up out of the valleys and the sunken places, and out into the bright uplands and the sky, down the rushing torrents and the weedy streams, and remove our reliance on these deep dark places, with their false venerability, their caught rot, their mildewed civilisations. We need a route to the sea.