Life is not useful
Text: Bruno Freire
Hello, good evening,
I dreamed of this dance in the living room of my home. So I started rehearsing it between the sink and the sofa, there I started to search for the marvelous. To practice it, I danced while listening to the words of indigenous philosopher and activist Ailton Krenak, as a way of "living with the troubles" he presents to us (Donna Haraway, 2016). Living with its critiques of my own existence.
Being an urban citizen in the west is to exist violently, consciously or unconsciously. If we are about to live the decisive decade, the last decade capable of averting the worst climate catastrophes, it seems to me that "we should listen to those who have always helped protect the forests, not those who have always destroyed them" (Eliane BRUM, 2021). "Let's be more modest, less modern" (Bruno LATOUR, 2022).
So, I’m going to dance, and I'm going to dance to a music, a ready-made conference, an immortal author who is now honored with a chair at the Academia Brasileira de Letras. He affirms that "life is an experience of wonderment”, that "life is a marvelous gift that cannot be reduced to utilitarian choreography" and that "life is beyond a dictionary word, that it has no definition".
As a dance artist, it interests me to build a collection of authors and their thoughts on choreography and on the marvelous. What I'm going to do here, nothing is fixed yet, I seek to adapt it to each presentation. But the principle remains the same: I try to listen once again, in front of you, to the words of Ailton Krenak. He whispers in my ear and I move around, letting the movements arise from my self, or myselva.
The idea of the self, as selva, as jungle, was conceived by Massimo Canevacci, an Italian philosopher who went to Mato Grosso do Sul to research Bororo funeral rituals, following in the footsteps of Claude Levi Strauss, the French anthropologist, author of "Tristes Tropiques/Sad tropics". Well, this title, sad tropiques, I do believe that Levi Strauss had failed in his idea of understanding Brazil, because it is not sadness but joy that defines life in the tropics (Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 2019). At least that's what I'd like to remember myself (myself, myselva).
The title of this dance lecture is “Life is not useful ou It is what it is", but sometimes I think I should have called it just “Life is marvelous”. Ailton Krenak initiates by saying: “At this moment, we are all being challenged by a kind of erosion of life. The beings that are crossed by modernity, the constant updates of new technologies, are also consumed by them.”
This idea occurs to me at every step we take towards technological advancement: that we are eating something wherever we go. It is becoming impossible to tread so softly on the earth as to leave no footprint, or sign of our passage behind: our footprints are getting deeper and deeper. The idea that everyone leaves their individual footprint on the world is gone; when I step on the earth, it is not my footprint that remains, it is our footprint, the trail of a disoriented humanity, stepping deeply and heavily. With every move one of us does, we all move.
When I move, you move (Ludacris, 2003).
A baby in its mother's arms shakes its little leg and sinks to the ground. A baby, to live in this world, will need hygiene products, diapers, fabrics, materials that eat up the Earth. Involuntarily, as soon as it's born, a baby is already a small predator of the planet.
The other day, I won a marvelous little plant that produces leaves that you can pick, wash, put olive oil or lemon on top of it, and eat. It is full of protein, it is called moringa (Moringa oleifera). My moringa plant was growing in the backyard, and one day, in the late afternoon, the ants found it. The next time I looked, there weren't any leaves left: all had been eaten, only the stalk remained. I got so upset with those ants … `cause we are doing the same thing with the planet from noon to late afternoon we’ll finish eating it.
Ecology was born from the concern that what we seek in nature is finite, but our desire is infinite. If our desire has no limit, then we will eat the whole planet. Slowing down and reducing the use of natural resources may suggest the idea of postponing the end of this world, but in some places, that end has already happened – yesterday, today, and the day after tomorrow. Someone might say, "Oh, but that's apocalyptic, it terrifies us!". Actually, I'm just giving you old news.
We are slowly erasing the worlds our ancestors cultivated without all the equipment we now consider indispensable. People who live in the forest feel it directly, on their skin. They see the forest disappearing, the bee, the hummingbird, the ants, the flora, they see the cycle of the trees change.
When someone goes hunting, they have to walk for days to find a species that used to live around the village, sharing this place with humans. The whole world around them is disappearing. Urban people don't experience this with the same intensity, because everything seems to have an automatic existence: you reach out and there’s a bakery, a hospital.
In the forest, there's no such substitute for life; life flows and you feel the pressure in the flow. Beyond the idea that "we are nature", we should be crossed by the awareness of being alive in exactly the same way as a river, a forest, the wind, and the clouds are alive. I take great joy in living this feeling and try to communicate it, but I also respect that everyone is passing through this world in their own way.
For thousands of years, under different cultures, we've been led to imagine that humans could act with impunity on the planet, and we've reduced this wonderful organism to an abstraction.
We have constructed justifications for acting on the world as if it were a plastic material: as if we could make it square or flat, stretch or compress it. The Western way of life has formatted the world as a commodity, and the child who is born and grows up in this logic perpetuates this model and lives it as if it were the total experience. The information a child receives on how to constitute themselves as a person and act in society already follows a predefined scenario: they will be an engineer, a doctor, a lawyer, a subject qualified to operate in the world, to wage war; everything is already configured. I'm not interested in this ready-made, sad world; for me, it could have ended a long time ago, and I'm not trying to postpone its end.
The other day I made a public comment that the idea of sustainability was a personal vanity, and this angered many people. They said I was undermining initiatives aimed at educating people about overconsumption. I agree that we need to educate ourselves about this, but it is not by inventing the myth of sustainability that we will move forward. We will just fool ourselves, once again, like when we invented religions.
Of course, it was a provocation about our selfishness: I am not going to save myself alone, we are all in trouble. And when I realize that I can't make a difference on my own, I open up to other perspectives. Out of this care for others, another understanding of life on Earth can emerge.
If you still live within the culture of a people who have not lost the memory of being part of nature, you are an inheritor of this—you don’t need to rescue it. But if you have gone through this intense urban experience of becoming a consumer of the planet, the difficulty of finding your way back must be much greater. That’s why I think it would be irresponsible to tell people that saving water, eating only organic food, or riding bicycles will slow down the rate at which we are consuming the world—that’s a well-packaged lie.
We are turning the oceans into garbage dumps that cannot be treated, yet you will surely hear a biochemist or a clever engineer claim that a start-up will throw something into the water, melt the plastic, and solve everything. This deceit even guides the choices of young people who go abroad to specialize in universities in Germany, England, or Belgium, and return even more convinced of their mistake. They come back brimming with expertise, ready to persuade others that consuming the world is a great idea.
Only when a disaster occurs do individuals, disconnected from their usual sources of supply, begin to suffer and to question themselves. Those who survive a major catastrophe usually reconsider their lives, because they have had a brief experience of what it truly means to be alive. There are many people living right now in situations of loss, disaster, and war. Hearing how these people act to overcome deep trauma, survey their surroundings, and restart their journey can be instructive, but it is no substitute for firsthand experience.
I’ve been living for ten years on the left bank of a river that was killed by toxic sludge from the explosion of a dam used by the ore extraction industry. Along with the other families of his people, who, from a practical point of view, should have been moved from here. The Krenaks did not accept being removed; they wanted to stay in the place of the burden. "Ah, but you don't have water!" So what? "Ah, but you don't have food!" So what? They know that this place has been deeply affected, they are inside of it and they are not going to leave. It is a disturbing question, but it is necessary to be in this condition to be able to produce a response in full consciousness. Awareness of the body, awareness of being what you are, of choosing to go beyond the experience of survival.
A rescue operation is intended to save a body that is being plagued and take it to another place, to be restored. And who knows, after its rehab, it may even continue to function in life. But this is based on the idea that life is useful; actually, life has no utility at all. Life is so marvelous that our mind tries to give it a use, but this is nonsense. Life is fruition, it’s a dance, a cosmic dance, and we want to reduce it to a ridiculous and utilitarian choreography.
A biography: someone was born, did this, did that, grew up, founded a city, invented Fordism, made a revolution, made a rocket, went to space; all of this is a ridiculous little fairy tale. Why do we insist on turning life into something useful? Why do we insist on turning life into something useful? We have to have the courage to be radically alive, and not bargain for survival. If we keep eating the planet, we will all survive for just one more day.
I have insisted to people that survival is already a negotiation around life, and life is a marvelous gift and cannot be reduced. In our relationship with life, we are like a little fish in a huge ocean, in a marvelous fruition. It will never occur to a little fish that the ocean has to be useful – the ocean is life.
Living the experience of truly enjoying life should be the wonder of existence.
Someone will say: "But there are so many people who live in material difficulty, people who have to live in places of misery and violence…". But places of misery and violence are created by us; they don't exist on their own. All the wars in the world are created by us. Nor can we continue to feed this idea of destiny. "Ah, these people suffered, they went through all this misery, they died, but it was their destiny." That’s absurd. It's not their destiny, nor mine, nor anyone else's: we're here to enjoy life, and the more we awaken our consciousness to existence, the more intensely we live it. No self-delusion. If you need to rush off to a church, mosque, or temple to feel at peace, watch out. Religions and political ideologies lend themselves very well to the elaboration of a useful life.
White people cannot live with the idea of living in the world for nothing, without a purpose; they think that work is the reason of existence. They have enslaved others so much that they now need to enslave themselves. They cannot stop and experience life as a gift and the world as a marvelous place. The possible world that we can share can be good. But they are horrified by this, and say that we are lazy, that we didn’t want to become civilized. As if becoming civilized were a destiny. This is one of their religions, the religion of civilization. They change their repertoire, but they repeat the dance, and the choreography is the same: a hard stepping on the earth. Ours is to step lightly, very lightly.
When the Indigenous say, "the earth is our mother," others say, "they are so poetic, what a beautiful image!" That is not poetry, that is our life. We are glued to the Earth's body; when someone pierces it, hurts it, or scratches it, they disrupt our world. Perhaps what bothers the whites is the fact that the indigenous people do not admit private property as a foundation. It is an epistemological principle. The whites came out, in a very old time, from among us. They lived with us, then forgot who they were and went on to live another way. So when we meet again, there is a kind of anger that we have remained faithful to a path here on earth that they have failed to maintain.
As it turns out, climate change on the planet leaves no one out in the cold, so, even if belatedly, an awareness is being awakened that native people in different parts of the world still hold precious experiences that can be shared – they are also being threatened. What is left for us to do is to live the experience, both of disaster and of silence.
