not about brazil

I remember the image somewhat vividly. Like all memories, it is hazy and fragmented, but that was also the nature of the photograph. I’m not sure what on that day compelled me to open that one book amongst the others, having already spent hours outside the darkroom mesmerized in the works of Sebastão Salgado and other documentary artists. Perhaps I felt the urge to glimpse something different. Perhaps my photography teacher suggested it to me.

By now, I can’t recall the name of the artist or the title of the image. What I do remember is the method it used and the feeling it stimulated. The photograph was a typical glimpse into the car of a train: two rows of benches, one with three seats, one with two, where the photographer sits with the shutter focused. To his eleven o’clock, a man reads a book. In the seat behind the photographer, to his direct left, sits a woman with her cat. Outside the window is an array of tress. The image, the whole, is fragments. Elements of the wider picture fall together, imperfectly. The artist shot each individual image at a different shutter speed. Some are blurred, others are sharp; every shot has the date at the lower right hand corner. The lower half of the image of the man reading a book is still, the bench and area he sits at, still. His head, moving every so slightly as he turns a page and scans the text, is captured over a longer frame, a blur to the viewer. The multiple photographs fall uneasily over one another, overlapping one another. Some of the trees appear sharp and focused as the train passes by, others, a haze of springtime green. You can't understand the whole without looking at each photograph. Each photograph is irrelevant on its own. But it works.

My photography teacher told me that he began to see the world in black and white as his eye adjusted. Colors would vanish into grey, and that would transform into contrasts. Perhaps, I thought, my eye can do the same for shutter speed. Along the Hudson River from Poughkeepsie I grasp a sense of it. I don’t get the chance to travel by train too often. The winter makes it easier, simpler to focus; the distractions are less, both inside and outside the train car. Lines in the ice remain upon the river’s surface from a cargo ship, my view as I glance out the window on the other side of the train. To my ten o'clock in the three seat row a woman in a red dress reads Kafka on the Shore. In my lens of vision there are no cats, no spring trees to pass by, no vivid leaves to notice. Eventually, the eye sees the woman's hand turning the page as a blur, the cargo ship as still, the man walking by as frozen in space.

my professor will probably tell me this sucks, or is cliche, or has poor structure...ass

The word ­hades was substituted for sheol when scribes translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. Hades was the realm of the dead where all mortals go. Tartarus was a section of it, the kind of Hell we would be accustomed to imagine. Here the Hell was a pit in the earth, a residence of suffering and pain. After death, souls of the mortal world would be judged, and those unworthy would exist in the pit for eternity. The original sheol happened closer to reality. Sheol, too, was known as a pit, a hole, an abode in the earth. The difference is in the judgment. Sheol became the destination for both the good and the bad, yet still inescapable. I think the Hebrews had it right.

PA-150 takes you from the beginning of the Tocantins river down to the Great Carajás Project. The section of the Transamazon highway goes on for kilometers, at least an eight hour drive, and that’s only until the expanding urban center of Marabá. Along the way, you’ll note a gradual disappearance of forest trees, of the familiar açaí palms, of the common river traders so typical in images of the Amazon; it is replaced by squatter settlements, livestock production, and logging regimes. Eventually, you reach a fork in the road at PA-257; you’re almost at the very south of Pará state. Here you’ll find the prelude, a roadside memorial called Eldorado dos Carajás-it has nothing to do with gold. A large wooden memorial was raised for the shooting of nineteen landless farmers-by the state military police-in 1996 for attempting to claim unused land for their displaced families. But you can go further still, there’s more.

Follow the Transamazon past Paraupebas and you’ll arrive at the Great Carajás Project. In 1967 a United States Steel Company helicopter flew over the Carajás site and, low on fuel, made a forced landing. They found below them a mineral reserve of 66% iron concentration. Not willing to allow a foreign company control over such wealth, the Brazilian government found a way for control to fall into the grip of the Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, now known as VALE. In 1985, VALE obtained complete control over the mineral deposit, over 1.5 billion tons of iron ore. A year later, the government helped construct the Carajás Rail, linking the site with export ports in the neighboring state of Maranhão, along the Atlantic. The highways linking the port cities of Belém and Sao Luís in the states connect with the dam up north, all part of the political and developmental climate of the 1960s and 1970s in Brazil. “Land without people for people without land”, that was the saying. Within a decade large hydroelectric dams sprouted from the black soil to feed the demands of the great industrial consumption in the south of the state.

The Great Carajás Project is the largest of those.

It is also the largest mine in the world. Like a vortex, it sucks in and consumes labor, offering pay to the poor, to the landless that it at the same time displaces. The cycle and pull of the machine never ends, and the foreign and domestic demand never falls. From space, from the map, you might think it was a canyon, something beautiful. Didn’t the Greeks have that understanding of the word beautiful, meant to portray the beauty and at the same time terror of an entity? But still, the Hebrews must have had it correct. Sheol drew in the worthy and the unworthy. And here, all seem unworthy for what lies within The Project. Debt labor, cardiovascular disease, and the other forms of death associated with strip mine projects. We in the United States are no stranger to it in our development past either. Do you remember the incident in Pennsylvania last year? Virginia?

Instead, we face not being able to imagine that kind of Hell, as foreign to us as the old Hebrew hell is to hades. Instead, there is the inability to process it from the scale I was let to see it, up against the railing of the view area. All I do is hear a few stories, interpreted to the group through a company translator. All I get to see is the portraits of a few web sites. And see the movement of rock from below. The scale from GoogleMaps only goes so far, but I can still see the detail of the red earth, a gash, a fissure, a pit, an abode from above

Center for Health, Environment, and Justice

Today I had a phone interview with the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice. It was great, and they described what I would do as an internship. If I chose to work with them this summer, which I am more and more learning towards, I will work with the Science Director to do applied research. Communities contact CHEJ when they suspect an environmental health related problem and want assistance. CHEJ helps them collect, analyze, interpret, organize, and use the data for political leverage to win environment/health struggles.

CHEJ's web site describes they community assistance program as the following:

"The core mission of CHEJ’s science and technical assistance is to demystify the scientific aspect of environmental health issues by evaluating technical reports and reviews, guiding communities through the maze of technical information, distinguishing good information from bad and translating jargon into plain language. Services include:

• Serving as an on-call technical advisor to groups.
• Reviewing and evaluating data and analyses from air, water and soil tests.
• Reviewing and evaluating technical reports, health studies and site proposals.
• Traveling to meet with groups to answer questions, educate the public about a local environmental health risk or evaluate scientific information or data.
• Preparing specific guidebooks, written for the layperson, on how to use technical information to win a community victory."

I was told that they are doing a current program in conjunction with Tufts University to go into communities, talk to communitiy members, and help them in the fields of capacity building and interpretation of scientific data. Sounds perfect, and I would be working with this program, doing research, helping analyze and interpret data for communities once I adjust to the work, and helping to write up reports for CHEJ, communities, and the general public.

CHEJ is located in Falls Church, VA, 7 miles outside of DC. Depending if my friend stays around in her apartment in DC, I might already have a place to stay. CHEJ also gives a $150 stipend and pays for local travel expenses. Like I said, so far I am leaning towards this heavily. I was a little torn because the idea of doing an internship on emergign infectious diseases and climate/ecosystem change looked really interesting as well, but this seems to much more hands on and community based I just can't say no. Plus I'll be close to DC.

Additional benefit: close to DC. This means...Universities? I was browsing through George Washington University's summer course offerings and this has some potential. They do offer night classes...in public health. CHEJ usually works their interns 4 days a week, normal work hours, 9-5. For instance, they offer a 1 credit course in Community Based Participatory Research from 6:10-8:40 on Tuesdays. Same with Climate Change and Public Health, on Thursdays. Hmmm. From Mid-May to the end of June. Potentially awesome. And this would take care of the whole "interest in climate change and human health thing". But also would give me actual course experience in research methods. But it also runs in with Bard class time. Bummer, but the song remains the same. I'm sure I can find at least one summer class somewhere in DC that fits my interests. It would make for such a good summer. And although I'm still going to see what I hear from other organizations, so far this one looks really great and the "interview" left a really good impression. Who knows, maybe I will even be able to use some GIS.

number two for writing the world

It is not at all the same. Back to the streets of Belém. It is known as the city of mangoes on the common tongue, and it rightfully lives to its name. They line the main street of the city, Nazaré, all the way from the grand Basilica in the center to the old Republican plaza, the name itself sounding alien in English. Walking from the cathedral and its stained glass windows, passing by cell phone vendors and the Cairo ice cream shop, it is possible every few minutes to pass a mango littered along the street, perhaps the way apples fall somewhere back home. Or at least, they used to. Just as common is to see one collected off the sidewalk bricks by a passer-by, eaten on the spot. The mangoes are smaller here, nothing like the colossuses grown in or imported to America.

It is the smells that get you the most, nothing at all like the mocha, the coffee, the fry grease, the Cinnabon of an upstate New York’s pit stop along the Taconic State Parkway. Here, a Starbucks sign tells me that by purchasing a special holiday peppermint mocha, five cents will be donated to a cause in Africa. Chairs are lined up alongside the burger stand like a conveyor belt, its members feeding and consuming during a pause in the drive. But Belém? There is a vitality to it all, a freshness and a decay. You can smell it and you can taste it. The open-aired sewers persistently remind you that the city is alive. Walking down Almirante Barroso, you take in the street vendors with their array and sales of mint gum, morning bread and cheese, roughly made fruit juices. They are part of the informal economy of the city, the kind that is starkly obvious during the unanimous daily walk to work, but vital to the daily grind.

It is noon, lunchtime, and the city indulges in açaí. On any given day, one can bet to find the frozen fruit pulp in a variety of houses throughout the city, regardless of income level. Along the Taconic road-side stop I see an advertisement exploring the berry’s elusive benefits. A superfood, it tells me. There is a false magical quality about it all. The man at the counter does not even recognize the name of the fruit when I order with its Portuguese pronunciation. Behind the counter the man pours a faint purple juice into a mix of grape, banana, and yogurt, amongst other things I am not able to distinguish. I am reminded of the five percent juice labels along most fruit juices I see in the grocery. Along Almirante Barroso, I see a real sign. It is not made of plastic, but wood, painted white. The red letters spelling out product and price have been applied in haste. There is an immediacy to it all, something one doesn't find elsewhere. Here the fruit is raw, sloppy, and thick. In the corner of the shed, the açaí berries pack full the medium sized bucket, continually sloshing in the water, seeds and bits sinking and floating, bumping into one another. The scene is not too different from a typical Brazilian bus ride from Almirante Barroso to the city’s main Praça.

Along this main road, my friends and I arrive at the window of the familiar shed, only four blocks from our office. Here they sell a bag of the fruity mush for five reals, close to three dollars. Taking a cup, the vendor scoops a host of berries from his bucket. A single açaí berry is no bigger than a dime, dark purple, with a tint of black. The man empties several scoops of the fruit into the machine, churning the berries, grinding them, removing the fruit’s pulp, spitting out the seeds into the bin below. He pours fresh water two, three times into the device. The process continues, the tart, bitter smell becoming more and more evident to our senses. We can both smell it and taste it revolving around the air of the vendor’s shack. Eventually, the thick, watery pulp begins to come out the machine. The man takes several small plastic bags and fills them each with the goo. His fingers covered in gritty purple, the vendor ties the tops into knots and hands one to Nigel, one to Lynn, and one to me. He asks if we would like tapioca too, only one real more, and we nod our heads in agreement, ruffling through our shorts pockets for a coin. We walk through the main street once more.

The purple paste is nothing like the pit-stop smoothie; it is thick, strong, bitter. It is raw, just fruit, water, and work. In the interior of the state, the heartland of the fruit, edible açaí is formed through a long process of mashing, labor, and the water of the river. There's a sense of pride and tradition in making and eating açaí that one finds here in the state of Pará. Elsewhere in Brazil, one finds families gorging on açaí with a mix of banana, honey, and granola, sometimes sweet avocado. In Pará, this would be tantamount to sacrilege. This principle applies even more strongly in the communities of Belém, who eat açaí with tapioca, sugar, farinha, or simply plain, savoring the bitter, gritty experience. My friends and I pour the mush of our bags into cups, adding spoonful after spoonful of sugar. Nigel and I use tapioca as well. We all sitting outside, taking in the heat and humidity of the afternoon Belém sun, only several degrees from the equator. It is 90 degrees Fahrenheit, normal for the city. Spoonful by spoonful the cup becomes empty, each mouthful turning our teeth a new shade of purple. It gets caught in the gums and between the teeth. The smell hits your nose, the bitterness hits your tongue, and the thickness of it all leads to a nap on the tiles outside, or in the hammock in one’s room, or a quick retreat on a couch, as I come home to find Maura my host mother doing. A few empty bowls sit in the sink.

Somehow, this transforms to that. It goes from there to here. Something is lost in the transition, translation, and production of the açaí. Ah-sigh-ee, not ah-kai. The man at the counter pronounced it the way it is here, just another health fad. A slight pour of an ingredient into some mess, not understood in the least. My Gmail account tells me it can cure cancer. Here, the fruit loses its magic, reduced now to a magical cure-all. Back in Belém, the berry is lunch and family; for many, it is what allows them to bring home other meals, textbooks, medicines, more. It is what families laugh about and enjoy together after a large afternoon fare of fried fish, fresh limes, rice, feijoada, spaghetti, and morning-made pineapple juice, leading to the communion of a household-wide late-day nap. It is something that an outsider like me learns within the first week of my time in the city, so much so that even we learn the daily route to the nearest açaí shed by heart. Family bonding and laughs over purple teeth at every afternoon transforms into solitarily consumed health drinks and weight control powder. All else seems to vanish away and I, faced with the cold and the hustle of New York, throw the half-drank fruit smoothie into the trash.

to make you see

"my art is not without a purpose. physicians, when they wish to treat children with a nasty dose of wormwood, first smear the rim of the cup with a sweet yellow fluid of honey. the children, too young as yet for foresight are lured by the sweetness at their lips into swallowing the bitter draught. so they are tricked but not trapped, for the treatment restores them to health. in the same way our doctrine often seems unpalatable to those who have not handled it, and the masses shrink from it. that is why i have tried to administer my philosophy to you in the dulcet strains of poesy, to touch it with the sweet honey of the Muses. my object has been to engage your mind with my verses while you gain insight into the nature of the universe and the pattern of its architecture." - Lucretius (c. 100- c. 55 BCE)

or as Joseph Conrad said about the question, why write: "above all, to make you see". i really enjoy reading it, such a good change of seasons. reminds me of marcel mauss's "the gift", or loren eiseley's "the invisible pyramid". tomorrow we get to go over our pieces. i feel content with mine.

today i had GIS (geographic information systems). i think it is going to be one of those classes. GIS is a model of the world via visual layers of information. land use, socio-economic data, risk hot spots, environmental variables. GIS allows us to compile layers of this information about almost anything into a visual map form so that we can see where, for instance certain groups might be at risk, where the highest concentration of a certain population lives, and so on. interestingly enough, its not too far off from Conrad's statement. it helps us simply visualize a problem (and the way to its resolution) in a simpler fashion. a few examples:

• which populations in a given space have proper access to public health services
• mapping outbreaks of diseases tied to environmental phenomenon/degradations
• natural disaster risk hotspots
• urban planning
• locating locations for a youth center that will be of optimal location based on demographics
• locating which populations will be most affected by rising sea levels due to climate change
• vulnerability of emerging infectious diseases
• air pollution exposure

im excited. the schedule matches up. cultural technologies of memory works so well with writing the world. most theories on individual memory posit that our memory is broken into fragments, and is recalled via not only certain cues, but the contexts of those cues. memory does not act as an empty shell where we hold our memories. neither is it all memories buried into our subconscious to be awoken at points with the right trigger, as Freud believed. instead it is also a social process, where at times we depend on others to spur on our memories, to jog and image to life, to awaken triggers and memories that we hadn't thought about for years. memories of brazil seem to be in these fragments, and once in a while somebody will say something that opens the flood gates. by writing, maybe i can discover what there was there that awoke something in me, and through that writing, i can figure out how to apply the same tool here. liberation.

i met with diana the other day to talk about brazil and bard. she read through my isp and was impressed, had some critiques, and good things to say. it felt great to talk about my research with someone, but also to hear that she felt that this kind of work was the sort of thing she saw in me a lot in class. she had been the one to be..disappointed, not the right word, with me at moderation. my analysis of this text was based mostly in high-theory, instead of an analysis that was political and activist-ish in nature. going to my isp, on capacity building, the need for environmental education, and political participation, she said that this was a good direction for me to be going to. and was glad that i had seemed to flip-flop from theory to...the real world and the politics at stake in it all. she even said she would consider doing a tutorial on medical anthropology (applied) dealing with the environment, but also agreed on my presumption that the best thing to do would to get an internship in community (environmental) health this summer.

hmm.

starting over

"we saw what would happen, and maybe it wasn't what we expected"

in sum. it feels weird and odd, but in a strange way, it feels like what should be the case. i said i didn't want anything upon coming back to the U.S, to Bard. and maybe it was fear of losing, but i think more, but i tried, but in the end, i think this is...right, in some sense? i feel like i haven't been the greatest person to the people i care about, and so i feel it is time to set things straight and move forward. i said long before that i didn't want something serious, and i meant it, and it hurt someone. and then returning back i realized that's what this was becoming into, and i've felt bad and odd about that. because i know it isnt what i need either. and im not really sure what this means for the rest of my life right now. i know i need to take care of myself. i know that i probably wont lose a friend, and can try to see what i can fix. besides, its felt more like that, a close friend, for the past weeks anyway. and im not really sure for what, or whats right or not any more, but i feel like i did the right thing. and am giving myself a fresh start, in a sense. new semester, new status, new me. i feel confused, weird, maybe bad, but also somewhat...ready. who knows. oh yeah, im crazy. why? because i still have to finish undoing string to make eel mops tomorrow. but i also read Book I of Lucretius, a Roman writing about the cosmos, atoms, and the nature of the universe. i think ive come to the conclusion that my life makes no sense, and it is better to just embrace the chaos. ive also found that writing, as my art medium of choice, it seems, feels so liberating. i dont know what to think about the piece below. but then again, i dont know what to think about my life in general. HA.

writing piece, #1

He rips the hook from its mouth. The fish falls. It hits onto the floor of the canoe. The fish is brown. An orange tint speckles its sides. The boat is old. It is full of patches and leaks. The pool of water rocks the fish towards my feet. My sandals are on the opposite end of the canoe. The fish hits my bare feet. I feel scales. It flops against my left foot. More water slowly saturates through the cracks. Its my job to scoop it out. Leo passes me the half of a soda bottle. The fish flops again. My host father grabs a plank of wood. He beats the fish over the head. Tucunaré, he says. Leo hits it again. He hits the fish two more times. It flops no more. Its mouth hangs open. Some fish blood has landed next to my feet.

Twenty minutes pass. I hear the sound of the motor. I hear a few birds off in the distance. A dolphin breaks the surface of the water. Wood and leaves break the same surface. The varzea is a flooded forest. Its water is black. It is acidic. One cannot see anything underneath. Leo asks me about America. He asks about my family. He asks if we have farinha there. Language hinders my response. The canoe reaches the village. The dark Rio Negro runs up against the shore. My host father hands me a fish to hold. He takes the other one. He takes his knife and fish to the wooden dock. Minutes pass. It smells of fish guts.

The house is up the hill. Wet laundry hangs across the porch. We approach it. The chickens scuttle under the foundation of the home. Leo kicks off his sandals. I do the same. Him and I both hold the cleaned fish. We walk up the five wooden steps. A dog barks from underneath. The home has two rooms. Nubia is in the kitchen. Leo greets his wife. We bring the two fish into the room. I wait in my hammock. The others are tied up to the rafters. One is white. One is orange. One is green. Mine is blue.

The stove and oven run off the community generator. I hear the fish skin cackling. It cackles amongst lemon juice and butter. He adds salt. It cackles more. It is the most delicious fish in the world. Leo takes the head for himself. Manly, he tells me. Fish juice and skin are stuck to my fingers. Ana Paula and Neto come into the room. They have been outside. They watched the community play soccer. Futebol. They fight over who gets to eat the eyeballs. They are two and six years old. The later takes the fish eyes from his father. They pop in his mouth. Ana Paula begins to cry. Her mother fixes her a cup of coffee. It has tapioca and sugar in it. She stops and drinks. We continue to pick at the fish body. The head is now a skull.

making eels mops in my free time

http://www.orionmagazine.org/

i think it would be a sort of dream job to do environmental health work and write for a magazine like that.

im feeling decent. school seems better, i just know i cant lose hold of those things i gained from brazil. its frustrating sometimes how different the atmosphere is, and im not quite used to it. does everything right now need to have a purpose? im not sure, and im conflicted about it. in the end, im pretty sure as long as you are reading things that challenge your mind and make you think then everything is ok. but at the same time, i have trouble applying how reading the original microscope manuscript has any bearing on the present. even if i do find it interesting....is that really enough? like...maybe its not right of me to say, but when i know there are so many people out there without a college education who deserve so badly to have one, shouldn't i make more out of what i have? not that i dont take full advantage of it or anything. i dont know, it confuses me and hurts my head. but i know i am studying the importance of community, and in the end thats what matters. or something.

yes. i like what i am studying and enjoy my classes this semester, so far they are off to a great start. im very excited about the writing class. our professor has a phd in english literature, and then realized he hated academic prose. so hes going to work with us on doing just that, and writing interesting and artistic things to a broader audience. which i think is so important.

i did brazilian ju jitsu yesterday, and am going to commit myself to it fully. it felt so good to be doing something like that again. and it gives me incentive to train. really train. sometimes i think its at times like those that i feel the most alive. i think between jujitsu and writing, spending time looking at stuff under microscopes, catching eels in the sawkill river and raising daphnia in the ecology lab, making maps, and understanding the importance of memory to social movements and social change and activism, i will get there.

and so ive been thinking about what else i need to do to feel independent, content, and free. and i know the answer to that, and it is hard to figure out what to do. but im pretty sure what i do need is to be on my own, and as in brazil, find my own path here. besides, im never very good at this sort of thing. plus, its time to make amends. i do wish all this was simpler, and that knowing what/how to do was easy. but, im also not afraid, in general. thank you brazil. its good to feel a sense of real strength again. and strength comes from doing the right thing. which ive been trying to slowly do in general. be a better friend, better son, better student. if i compare myself from last semester at bard to now, yes, i do feel better, improved, and in a lot of ways, new. even if bard does make me feel sucked back into the old at times, i know the me i know deep down is there, but not as hidden anymore.

for eco&evo we are making eel mops to catch eels in the sawkill. which entails ripping apart thick rope thread by thread.