* 2-2-05 * amazon vs. hey. it's been a couple weeks and i'm not sure if i needed the perspective but here we are anyhow and i wanted to share a few details about the trip i went on last month to chapada diamantina, just in case anybody has the audacity to think they can a) not go before leaving brazil, or b) not come to brazil and therefore have a) not apply. people had been telling us about chapada (a huge national park the size of the netherlands) since we first got to bahia. i remember having lunch with hernan, an argentine emigre who runs a pizzeria in arembepe, and how sad he was when he first went to chapada -- after he had already bought land somewhere else. lily went there for weeks and came back so in love with the landscape that she painted her entire wall to evoke it. it sounded a lot like el bolson in both nature and culture -- tropicalismo aside -- with a laid back-to-the-land atmosphere, some eco-tourism, and gorgeous expansive terrain. but we were set on living on the praia, so we never went to check it out. matt decided to come for a visit back in november, and cholmes and i decided it'd be a good opportunity to go on a little trip. before the expedition, i hadn't left pousada o bigode for more than one night in the previous four months, and i knew the change of scene would be revolutionary. so to speak. we had originally planned on immersing ourselves in the amazon, but the money to time ratio of a week in the most badass ecosystem on the planet didnt offer the depth we were looking for. so, with a pastel tinge of disappointment, we decided to head to chapada. only seven hours away -- a busride west of salvador -- and we would be in some huge national park with weeks of hiking trails to confuse us. typically, we left buying the tickets to the last minute and ended up at the rodoviaria with all passages booked for the next 47 hours and no place to go. some random guidebook flipping and the stunning realization that we were Free to go wherever we wanted -- we were 25 and in love and ready for the <> -- landed us on a midnight passage to Jacobina. about 60 hours of adventure travel later, we finally ended up in the chapada diamantina, in the town of "vale do capao". we had explored mango markets (bought 75 of them for 2 brazilian reals...) and waterfalls (see naked photos of cholmes under red clay pools of water), taxid and hitchhiked, scrounged a gentle fix of acai out of the harsh bahian sertao, eaten roasted goat and chocolate pancakes. we rumbled into vale do capao from palmeiras on a broken clay road whose 20 kilometres took over an hour to traverse. she let us out in the center of town, in full view of the one supermarket, three restaurants, and sole bar. by nightfall we had rented and cleaned an old house a block outside of town, and begun a short decoration process. it's a bad habit i guess -- moving to abandoned cities in thirld world countries, renting broken-down palaces and putting ones soul into them for ridiculously short periods of time. but it's our scene, and that's that. that night there was a small hint that shit was going to get weird -- a brazilian college student sat with us at dinner (yakisoba), speaking to us in english. while it's apparently a common enough phenomenon for the brazilian middle class (especially in the south of the country), i had never met an english-speaking brazilian and was pretty weirded out. as a potential conversation stopper, i responded to his "what are you interested in" in disinterested confidence -- "the effects of psychadelic plants on the soul." expecting him to either be quiet or go away. the ruse, however, seemed to backfire: his eyes lit up, he deepened his forward lean, and confided -- "i did the LSD one time. i will say it was the best day of my life." at no point in the ensuing gush of adulation did I manage to mention that -- to the best of my feeble knowledge -- LSD is not a plant. it was hard enough to extricate ourselves, and only when he asked us if we were all homosexual did we manage a definitive break. "i dont have to *mean* anything by that, you three guys just *look* really gay..." thirty-six hours of rain later had matt and i up in the early morning, hiking towards "the bomb waterfall" (cachoiera bomba) with a daypack, water, and assorted art supplies. cholmes couldn't get enough sleep and we decided to take advantage of what looked to be an auspicious morning for some real exploration. a little over two hours down the road, through an outlying village, some communes, various rivers, and some intense rainforest, we emerged onto a scrabbly hillside with a gorgeous overlook down the tropical valley. mango and jackfruit trees dotted the low lands, red rivers rushed to our ears, and huge plateaud rocks dotted the horizon. we hadn't seen a soul (mangos dont have souls; neither do spiders nor dragonflies) since we started and were well attuned to the huffing which rapidly approached. the huffer passed silently, sans the traditional happy thumb or greeting, and we continued after him, wondering, "who does that?" matt continued in the lead through another half-hour of uphill scramble. the path was dry and well-established, winding up the slope until it crested at a large flat rock which formed the cap of the hill. a stream stram across it, wide and shallow, and we saw our fellow-hiker relaxing on the other side, smoking a cigarette. the symbolism would not disappoint. matt remarked how it was too bad the spot was taken -- an idyllic location to read, draw, or meditate away the day. clean water, long vista, and a feeling of total freedom. we decided to keep going. as he stepped across the river and saluted the smoker ("bom dia"), the man erupted in a rage of swearing. verbally, his diatribe went from "do you know where you're going? do you know the Shit you're walking into? have you ever been here before? do you have a guide? i am a guide! i work for the brazilian government! you are not going in there! you goddamn mother...." and degenerated from there. matt kept calm, apologized, understood linguistic communication was not the right theme to explore, turned, and walked hurriedly and securely down the hill. i followed, keeping in mind matt was a black belt in something asian word and could probably kill this dude. matt led, keeping in mind our estranged species-brother might have a gun. the guy followed us for a half a kilometer down the yell, shouting and swearing abuse the entire time. it was a torrent of raw, pure, malicious energy. i don't know any other way to put it -- the words were but a dim shadow of the viciousness with which he moved, walked, chased us down that hill. we were both sure he would have used a weapon had he possessed one, and were damn thankful he didn't. as soon as he spoked i recognized he was beyond language, beyond reason, some sort of demon-possessed guardian. not in control of his actions, but rather slave to some foreign impulse -- some drug or trance, poision or creature. an inauspicious lump in nature's busom. three hours of decompressive walking later, we still hadn't deciphered the demon-coded message. we headed back to the house for water, and then planned on hiking in a totally different direction. cholmes was up by this point, and we joined paths towards another waterfall, cachoeira as rodas. the terrain was rolling and open, the path at the foot of some impressive green hills. the sky opened larger than i had ever seen it, huge fast clouds speeding behind, over, past us. an hour later matt and i stopped at the riverbank to recalibrate, replenish fluid and perspective. cholmes kept going, intent on seeing the actual falls. we probably didn't spend too long there -- an hour or two maximum -- but that collection of spots and movement on the rocky banks of a brazilian river taught us more about nature (in all its capital incarnations -- as we shall see later) than any walden or wilderness ever could. or perhaps its fairer to thank all those walden and wilderni for preparing me to be blown away by the Life of vale do capao. everywhere we turned, fled, or crawled, we were surrounded, covered, and hounded by Life in all its variegated immanence. a catalog of birds, frogs, lizards, ants, flies, buzzers, chirpers, swimdles, copters, croaks, cracks, blues, biters, wisps, and fuddles. there was no escape. the world slowed to the pace of these creatures, we enter-ed, through-ed, and exit-ed on the far side of their perspective. tracing their microficent lives, opening our senses and pride to truly understand how many of these goddamn creatures there were, in existence, in sight, in the border regions between their world and our bodies. in the end, it came down to islam, to submission. we decided (were forced?) to prostrate ourselves before the multitude, to sit still in a meditation i can't imagine repeating, to watch dispassionately as the snakey vines and distracted spiders crisped and crawled all over us, to watch with equanimity as a mosquito touched, landed, jumped, touched, targeted and finally drew blood. the fear of Dengue passed over me. Malaria. Yellow Fever. they could kill me. i'm out here with my best friend, totally enraptured in the overbearing minutae of class insecta and friends, and these bastards -- bugs, virii, bacteria -- could kill us. but how to fight the buzzing of a bee or the graze of a spider? finally paying attention to this world and (in our terms) How They (SO-TOTALLY) Own It, you understand that you have no semblance of control -- if they want to bite you, they will. if they want to poision you, they will. this is probably the point i'll be accused of "nature mysticism" or "sunstroke" or "forsaking my stanford education and babbling like a damn hippie" but I know that after the islam, after we had abdicated everything to Them, the mass of countless wills that swarmed around, over, and even Into us, a harmony began to emerge. they seemed to be acting in concert. something like an emergent properties dynamic on the level of ecosystem. the river rocks and blue helicopter dragon flies alternated instead of clashed -- one perhaps set the baseline for the other. the mosquitos drew lots for the one who would bite me. i was not going to get sick. and if I did, it would somehow be fine. this leap was pretty strong for both of us -- it hit on a level of sensory and meditative immediacy with such a force that we were (literally) speechless for the entire walk home. we couldn't talk about anything, really. except for the moment, after packing up and brushing off, when we ran into a reckless party of brazilians out for a hike. they moved in slow motion, babbled incoherently, and had pupils the size of jackfruit seeds. remembering our conversation of yakisoba, i checked my curiosity as to what prescriptions they ended up with and tried to make sure they came in peace. some calm and near wordless negotiations ensued -- they were high on pyschadelic mushrooms, crazy out of their minds, and totally harmless. they just wanted some water and to relentlessly shake our hands and pat our backs. done and done and we were out of there, marvelling at how people will do anything to escape the nature and presence around them, in the name of "fun". the amerikan philosopher Kenneth Wilbur has a section in his (incredible) book "Sex, Ecolology, and Spirituality" (he means gender, dfky) describing different interpretations of nature. The narrowest, which he calls, understandably, "nature", refers primarily to elements of the biosphere -- bugs, beasts, minerals, acid rain, ozone, anthills, kudzu, and maybe unicorns -- and excludes human culture and designs. A broader understanding of nature, dubbed capital "Nature", expands the definition to include all sensory and perceptual experience, including cars, computers, petanque, and Big Pharma. Wilbers third and rather clever term, "NATURE", is meant to signify the entire "Kosmos" -- all of the diverse expressions of "Spirit" unfolding together in our Reality (one hesistates to stop at universe, you understand), including agents physical, biological, philosophical, and mystical. The point here is not to enter into a discussion of eastern or western metaphysics, nor try to hint at That Which Lies Beyond, what rationalism is afraid of touching and what commercial mysticism can only cheapen, but to insert the missing link that Wilber left out: AMAZON. AMAZON, is, of course, the term Matt gave -- in a post-epileptic fit of genius back at the house -- to the teeming yet unified presence we had experienced. Or that had forcefully experienced us. It is the immediate -- in that it absolutely refuses mediation, and any sort of mediation (such as this very missive) must necessarily miss its essence -- expression of "Spirit" in all its thorny, creeping, multifarious glory. The revised diagram of how can we talk about the world which surrounds us, which we developed breathless and reunited with cholmes back at the house, looks this: nature Nature NATURE AMAZON nb: it helps to imagine them as concentric circles, with each larger circle transcending yet including its smaller brethren... At this point, travelers, cartographers, and listeners might care to interject that the Chapada Diamanta national park, in which Vale do Capao, this magical river, and the three young men are all situated, is NOWHERE NEAR the Amazon. Indeed, we decided to go there because we didn't have the gold or mettle to get to the Amazon. So what's with the misnomer? Well. You can turn to your "(Extremely) Rough Guide to (Some Place in) Brasil" guidebook and see that the Amazon System covers nearly half of Brazil. And I had spent 95% of my time in Brazil in Aratuba, not in the Amazon. So clearly, having left Aratuba, we were thick in the Amazon. Or, to put it another way, the AMAZON is so expansive, so visionary, and so powerful, that you don't even half to GO THERE to feel it. The Amazon came to us -- either by way of outpost or raiding party -- to teach us some very important lessons. * You cannot talk about AMAZON * Go ahead and try to talk about AMAZON * AMAZON can kill you all * AMAZON might kill you all * You must go to AMAZON It's my understanding -- after two sunscorched scratchy hours wandering in the technically non-Amazonian forest -- that the only reason we as a species (and as nations, and as social classes) are able to treat nature so myopically and NATURE so blindly, is because we've never really understood AMAZON. And by "really understand" I mean understand _immediately_. Which means, GO, GO AMAZON YOUNG (wo)MAN!, or find and AMAZONian outpost or raiding party near you. Submit. Abdicate. Get Lost. Understand what it means that these beasts can FUCKING KILL US ALL, and then try to drink you coffee in plastic cups, try to throw aluminum in the garbage can, try NOT to start a community garden. I dare you. But who am I? The same peace of beautiful nothing as yourself. Don't let me dare you. AMAZON dares you. AMAZON fucking dares you. AMAZON fucking dare you to face it. Coward.