After much too long of a wait, I am finally back in Brazil. This visit is bringing a cascade of thoughts and ideas and stories, which will eventually arrive in later issues, but, for today, I want to send an earlier essay that’s appropriate for my mood.
Perhaps ‘indescribable’ is one of the most loathsome words in the language, a word that negates the very act of writing, a word that is almost painful to hear. The colors in this country, however, bring me ever so close to using it myself.
If I close my eyes and picture a country, I find that a color appears. Italy conjures a pastel spectrum of yellowish orange. South Africa flashes in bright red. Mexico, somehow, emerges in a blinding white. Now all of these colors are predictable but still completely individual to me and my experiences and they almost certainly vary depending on my mood—yet it is curious how the colors erupt when I close my eyes. It is instantaneous, without forethought, but it feels almost factual. Britain is a little nebulous at first, I don’t exactly have a clear view, until my mind drifts toward a specific time period, such as the 19th Century, and a range of grays and blacks paint the entire scene. France is just as dreamlike and impressionistic and overcast until this vision is clarified by the decade before electrification, with all the streets coated by the golden glow of a gas flame just after a rain. Romania appears lush and verdant; Turkey is warm and muted; Morocco appears, understandably, a little sandy. Brazil is, however, the most curious, as it alone has all the colors.
If you imagine all the usual attributes of a country, the sounds and tastes and sights, and you twist the dial higher, adding a little more intensity to those attributes, then you are picturing the real Brazil. It is a place where the music and conversation and cities are just a bit louder. It is a place where the food and drinks are just a bit sharper. And it is a place where all the colors are, somehow, just a bit richer. In this massive, unwieldy, impossible to encapsulate country, there’s an intensity and exaggeration to every sensation—the traffic is more chaotic, the parties last longer, the laughter is louder, and there’s a brilliance to the colors that is best described as Brazilian. Even though you can’t miss how these colors burst forward in the dazzling clothing, or in the magnificent, vibrant cities, there’s a sense that all this glitter is rooted in the landscape right beneath your feet.
More people should be aware of the existence of Brazilian Green, a color that, unfortunately, doesn’t travel beyond the borders—it is lush, bright, thick, and present in Brazil even when you close your eyes. Of course you can see its richness in the thick forests, in all the leaves that shroud the undulating hills, alongside the jagged coastline, but you will also see that this green emerges in sidewalk cracks and between buildings, it forms the canopy that shades every treelined street, and it somehow encases, or veils, everything in its path, which prompts you to question the speed at which plants grow in Brazil—a glance to your right leaves you with the disconcerting sensation that the plants to your left are creeping closer.
You sense that encroachment is the norm, and that stasis is always the lie, as everything you build will, immediately, start to rust, crumble, and deteriorate, with nature perfectly content to settle in for a long battle of attrition. To stand in one spot always requires a never-ending process of maintenance, and the creeping Brazil Green—vigorous, dense, endless—doesn’t let you forget.
Even in a population center like São Paulo, you have the sensation that all the concrete and all the people are borrowing the land, to nature it is a temporary, inconsequential development, a tiny city when compared to the permanence of the Brazilian Green—because you see the potency of the landscape underneath the city when it lifts and bends and sinks the concrete, in how plants somehow thrive while rooted in parking lots or roadway medians, in the unbelievable force of an afternoon rain. If you sit for too long in one spot, it is likely, in Brazil, that something lush and verdant will consider you just as good as topsoil.
But it is only thoughts of Brazil that thrust my mind into iridescent daydreams. A monochrome image, on nearly every other occasion, is enough to satisfy my curiosity, though I don’t consider that a loss. Just as when I take pictures, my usual focus is black and white, as there’s already so much to appreciate about contrasts and textures and shapes. Even my haphazard associations of countries and colors doesn’t disturb my greater fascination with the spectrum from light to dark.
Of course one commonplace mistake is to assume that a black and white picture is simply a picture that’s subtracted the color; it is, instead, a picture that reveals the variations of light and shade that are typically hidden. Only in black and white can you spot the details of texture—such as in tree bark or leaf ridges. And only in black and white can you spot edges that were otherwise hidden—the new contours that appear in the distinctions between light and shadow.
To assume that a black and white picture is derivative of a color picture is to assume that an x-ray is derivative of an MRI—these are different images and they exhibit different aspects of the truth. Each has its benefits, and each, of course, has its drawbacks. Just as no single picture can showcase both a spectrum of colors and the contrast in a scene. You have to choose what truth you don’t want to see. And a black and white picture of a striking, succulent landscape in Brazil displays, for me, an even greater appreciation of the contrast that my eyes can’t uncover, along with an even better understanding of the relentlessness of Brazilian Green in every scene.
Thankfully, for my eyes, the colorful sights in Brazil are still resplendent and mesmerizing, the feeling dreamlike, almost mystical. A mere look into the forest reveals an intense and evocative and pulsing display of flamboyant greens. And even though the entire country is saturated by this hypnotic spectrum, in a manner that’s a tad overwhelming, I haven’t acclimated to the glitter, or lost my sense of childlike wonder. It is a respite from reality, and it is one dreamscape that’s visible with open eyes.
I love this so much! As a Brazilian, I appreciate your generous and beautiful writing in describing this "indescribable" feeling <3