The Illustrious House part II
An outsider to my own address and the mortification(s) of an expat.
It started when I read about the fire that consumed, in its entirety, the Brazilian National Museum in Rio last Saturday, September 1st.
It wasn’t just one of the largest and most notorious Museums in Latin American history and anthropology, with millions of science discoveries and research from over 200 years; it was also the former Palace to the Portuguese colonizers that fled Europe and made their chaotic start in the new exotic land of Brazil. The irony, in that sense, is to watch past and present beginning to interweave until both become fictional.
Brazilians are mourning its non-fictional reality. And it’s not the first, neither I believe, the last time. This may just be the most disastrous in my life time. The loss and the never ending disdain with our cultural legacy and our history. Not even philosophers seek this kind of living, in vainly patching together fragments of its dead results. Like a short lived joke, loaded with authoritative abuse and its timed efficiency. Yet, there’s a way a disaster throws people into the present and gives them this supersaturated immediacy that also includes a deep sense of connection.
And when I think about our dead history tellers, and their disasters in particular, as far back as we can see, they have been here for a very long time. They’ve figured out a lot about how to live well on the earth, and, for me, I think they’re really good storytellers in the way that they live. They are exemplars of not only surviving, but flourishing by working it out, within their means.
In this case, time doesn’t do anything. Without the tick of a clock, the something, somewhere, changing or the sight of an object, our logic and limits of language remain in our conclusions to what is fate. And the Brazilian fate, so far in History, is not necessarily fatalist but when we press the elevator button, it’s not a free choice either; but we still go through the trouble of doing it. Yet this upward-downward orientation in our cultural history is neither obvious nor universal. Some people are certain that up means higher or down means lower, but others are equally certain that it means faster or slower. Other cultures have different points upward when talking about the past, but in Brazil, our past is when we speak of the flow of a river, and of course a river can change its direction of flow, and the hours pass slowly as if always peering over the horizon to find a breach in the timelines.
In short, I don’t know what fate means for a shared humanity. We just don’t know how to do it. And we’ve been so entrenched in the way things are. It’s hard to imagine the world being different. I just hope this catastrophic erasure of history doesn’t mean that stories simply don’t get told.
Now, I write sitting in another country speaking about the past of my own experience in my home country. A parallel path, as incomplete as it is, to imagine in contrast with those that I left behind. Neither alive or dead, or as a matter of taste, simultaneously alive and dead. My fate is a probability distribution and so is that of my home.

Part of I of Illustrious House:
https://medium.com/@damadesign/the-illustrious-house-5795eee49431
