Meditation and Reverie

Between the River and the Forest

Abstract

River and forest are enigmas of the Amazon. Dependent on the river and the forest for almost everything, the caboclo draws sustenance from these assets but also transfigures them. This same transfigurative dimension governs the exchanges and symbolic translations of culture, stimulated by an imaginary imbued with the seminal and fecund viscosity of the aesthetic dimension. The river flows into the imaginary, where one can read the multiplicity of the rhythms of life and time and observe the uncertainties at the boundary between the real and the imaginary. Between the river and the forest, one must know how to see in order truly to see through a gaze sustained by belonging to the emotion of the land, with a sensitivity open to the rare, with the soul placed in the act of seeing.