You’ll never guess what I just bought
(conversation with a friend)
— you bought a workshop-grade table saw?
I don’t think you’ll ever guess it
I am metamorphosing into [friend of ours].
#anthropophagy
It was 23:53 when I bought an ozone generator, professional grade, 60mg/h — an action taken when one intersects genuine utility with the satisfaction of having the ideal instrument rather than a mere adequate one. Personally, I think that most people would find this distinction unnecessary. However, a dear friend of mine wouldn’t. This is probably why, somewhere between completing the purchase and closing the tab, the cosmos reminded me of the concept called “anthropophagy”.
My friend is in Germany now. Has been for a while. When people are sufficiently absent, that is, not gone, not unreachable, just away, something happens and they stop being entirely a person and start being something else too. Whether it’s folklore or a “frequency”, the essence is the same: a presence, or way of looking at things, that doesn’t require physicality anymore because an absorption, apparently, is already complete. It finds you when you’re not looking, it really does, and I in particular found it in an ozone generator at midnight.
He was always like this. Hobbies which we discovered by accident months after the fact, such as woodworking, once; how to operate small boats. Or, more frequently stated by him, the industrial kitchen he talked about wanting, someday, with the casual certainty of someone who has already decided and is simply waiting for the logistics to catch up. Everything at the correct scale, the professional grade, the instrument that doesn’t apologize for what it is, etc. I don’t think he ever owned anything merely adequate if he could help it. The fact that I chose a 60mg/h product wasn’t a coincidence, as nothing about a 60mg/h ozone generator is a coincidence. It’s a well-thought decision.
What’s interesting about people who become folklore to you are the that details survive intact. Not a general impression, not a feeling, rather the specific, the concrete, the particular weight of a specific way of moving through the world. And when you encounter that weight in yourself, whatever it is, something clarifies. But quietly, the way most true things clarify.
Curiously, there’s a word for this. However, not in the sense that language always has a word for everything, no, because it doesn’t, as there are feelings that exist without names and probably always will. But in this case the word exists, and came to be in Brazilian intellectual life in 1928: Antropofagia. Anthropophagy. Oswald de Andrade published his manifesto in the first issue of the Revista de Antropofagia with a line that has been impossible to improve on in the century since: “Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question.”
It’s funny and it’s completely serious, which is the register Oswald lived in almost exclusively, and which is the only register adequate to what he was actually proposing. The Tupi (indigenous people whose territory became, through violence and the particular alchemy of colonial history, the country now called Brazil) practiced ritual consumption of their enemies. Not out of hunger, hatred, nor even triumph in the simple sense. They ate those who had fought well, those who carried something worth having, because what other relationship could possibly honor what those people were if not by consumption? Their strength moved into your body, permanently, impossibly inseparable. The consumed became the consumer, which is either terrifying or beautiful depending on how you hold it, and Oswald held it as beautiful — as the correct methodology for a culture that had spent centuries being told it should either reject or imitate the people who had arrived to colonize it.
Neither rejection nor imitation produces anything that couldn’t have existed elsewhere; consumption does.
For a more ‘practical’ example, we’ll move over to architecture. See, when Le Corbusier arrived in Brazil in 1936 already fully formed (the five points of architecture, the pilotis, et cetera) he worked briefly with Lúcio Costa and Niemeyer on what would become the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio, left his sketches and his thinking, then returned to Europe. The building that got built was not his, for it couldn’t have been. The brise-soleils adapted to tropical light at angles he hadn’t calculated, the azulejo panels by Portinari that had no vocabulary in European modernism, the relationship between elevation and the specific weight of humid coastal air, these were problems he’d never had to think about, which means their solutions naturally couldn’t come from him. He came as influence and left as ingredient. Thus, consumed. The building that exists now contains him the way a body contains what it has eaten: present, transformed, unrecognizable as the original thing.
And then, in different registers and decades, this kept happening. It’s a ‘methodology’ that works. Another example: Caetano Veloso stood at the Festival Internacional da Canção in 1967 with an electric guitar and the purists in the audience heard colonization via American rock, British psychedelia, the foreign arriving to overwrite the native, but what was actually happening was the opposite: the electric guitar went in and Tropicália came out, which is so irreducibly Brazilian that it had no real equivalent in English and still doesn’t, a thing that could only have been made by a body that had eaten those influences and refused to simply reproduce them. It then traveled back to the countries it had borrowed from and changed what was possible there. The digestion went circular. Everyone eating, everyone being eaten, everyone producing something that the original ingredients couldn’t have generated alone.
Anthropophagy applies even to the language. Especially the language, perhaps. Oswald, as avant-garde as he was, understood this in the way that certain writers understand things, which is through the nine lines of Pronominais before the manifesto makes the case explicitly:
“Dê-me um cigarro
Diz a gramática
Do professor e do aluno
E do mulato sabido
Mas o bom negro e o bom branco
Da Nação Brasileira
Dizem todos os dias
Deixa disso camarada
Me dá um cigarro“
The grammar says dê-me: pronoun after the verb, correct as it’s formally, technically, in accordance to a rule derived from a mouth that was never Brazilian but European. The people, e.g., ‘Nation’, says me dá: wrong by the grammar’s standards, right by the popular language and right by every conversation that has ever actually happened here. The poem doesn’t argue, it stands as an observer. The absorption was already complete long before any manifesto named it. Todos os dias — every day, in every mouth, for as long as there has been a Brazilian mouth to speak with. Oswald was pointing at something that had been happening without permission, theory, or anyone to decide its ways.
There is, naturally, a shadow to all of this. Mário de Andrade (the other Andrade, a different man but equally impossible to ignore) wrote Macunaíma the same year Oswald published the manifesto. He created a hero who has eaten everything and committed to nothing. The “hero with no fixed character”, as the book announces unceremoniously. The character absorbs and transforms himself according to whatever the situation demands, and what you get is not a richer self but a self that has dispersed into everything it consumed. In summary, the appetite outpaced the integration. There’s a version of anthropophagy that produces Macunaíma instead of Tropicalia, and the difference between the two outcomes is not always obvious from the inside.
I occasionally ponder over this, and then I think about that ozone generator I bought, and the thinking resolves itself. What I mean by this is that since the ‘point’ is precisely that I recognized him in it, then the self doing the recognizing was intact enough to make the identification, which means something was genuinely absorbed, and something remained to do the absorbing. The consumption worked, or is working.
What I also keep returning to is what he said once, about that industrial kitchen thing. Not the kitchen itself, though, but the certainty with which he talked about it. It was just a fact about the future that hadn’t happened yet. And the thing about that particular relationship to the eventual, to the ideal instrument, to the correct scale, is that it isn’t imitable in the sense that you can’t ‘decide to have it’. Either it’s in you or it isn’t, and if it gets into you at all it does so through proximity and time and something that operates below the threshold of conscious decision, until something happens and the evidence is striking, already there, already yours, with nowhere to return it to.
This all could be triumphant grief, as I said somewhere in a conversation that led to this. And I think that’s still the closest available phrase, though it doesn’t fully land either, because grief implies a before that was better and this isn’t quite that. It’s more that something changed shape (a person becoming also a presence) and the shape it changed into turns out to be, in certain ways, more available than the original. More portable, more likely to arrive precisely when you need it, quietly, the way most true things arrive.
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