Stretching this observation, and putting it in perspective of an architecture that exists not in words or form, but as a silent provider; I see it as a temp-less temple, as a cathedral-less cathedral, allowing the aromas of lives lived previously to linger endlessly; finally I see the swinging thurible, unstopped, smoking it all, caressing the bodies that dip into it. The words of affirming despair felt and captured by Cravajal, and which were written in preterite, go like this:
‘To the second day we departed and left behind our peers, we were to get lost in the middle of the river, because the boat hit a stick and a board broke away, so we ended our day there as a consequence of being not close to the shore. (…) Because day after day no food nor people were to be spotted, by orders of the captain I gave mass like the ones given on a stormy sea, entrusting to Our Lord ourselves and our life, supplicating as unworthy, to be saved from such an impending voyage and doom; because, even if we wanted to go upstream, it was impossible due to the great water flow, for try to go on land was unconceivable, so that we were in great danger of death as a consequence of the great hunger we suffered, and looking for advice on what to be done, we talked about our afflictions and duties, it was agreed that we should choose between two evils the one the captain felt to be the least, which was go on and follow the river and die, and see that in him, trusting Our Lord would be accepting on preserving our lives until we could see our remedy. ‘ ––– GASPAR DE CARVAJAL
The landscape presents an inaccessible abundance of life, which is always present, always harming, never accepting or embracing. This extract from Gaspar de Carvajal diary depicts, very graphically, the exact moment when the civilized pilgrim that I have been so obsessively writing over, gives up to ‘Our Lord’, being the latter discharged of any previous meaning because what ‘Lords’ over life and death here is nothing but the vileness of Nature, never stopping and never looking back or forward. This is the start of the fever-dream; now once this lost soul has accepted the visions the jungle is presenting, fact or fiction matter no more. A specific outcome, or destiny is of no importance, here the voyager/pilgrim/wanderer embarks in the real odyssey, a journey not bounded to space or time restrictions, there is no past and no future, only visions, images of delirious character, total and crystalline, innocent and childishly cruel. Once the one that aimed to find and acquire what he most desired is seized by the intoxicating Amazonian nature, the way he engages with this new world is not restricted to his body, or individual being, finally he has become part of a grand play, tragic, also perfect. The cruel affairs of living in despair have become operatic in form, axioms of emotions, which cannot be deduced by rationally reducing their manifestations to legible theorems. In this jungle, growth and decay are displayed so intensely and violently that the only way to make sense while in feverish madness, is by the use and abuse of the impossible and the axiomatic. Hence, my next example, which is the link for the upcoming chapter, does this, again by the use of writing over paper. Gaspar Chillán el Irlandes, constructed, with the help of circulating popular stories, the existence and geographical position of a mystical city, lost in the middle of the jungle. Even though this legend has
xiii