A Cloud - A Forest of Paper and Ink

In the afternoon I went to Helio's house in Jamacá but there was nobody there. His house was in a patch of forest in the Chapada dos Guimarães plateau, an elevated area at about eight hundred meters above sea level. Laying down on the hammock on his porch, I witnessed the slow arrival of clouds penetrating through the forest and changing the appearance of all things. Visibility diminished. Everything became wet. Though darkness prevailed, moments of transient light broke through with dazzling whiteness. As I rose from the hammock all colors became muted. I walked into the forest with the uncanny impression that I was going back in time, that the world had suddenly returned to its primeval stage. Some leaves turned pale, nearly translucent; others became scintillating mirrors sparkling flashes of blinking light in all directions. The animals, birds and insects had all vanished, as if swallowed by the reigning silence. Steaming whiteness moved through everything, contrasting with the coarse dark silhouettes of soaring tree trunks that suspended their twisted branches in a maze of inextricable tangled knots. Intermittently, as if cut from their surroundings, parts of trees and branches appeared isolated before a blinding white backdrop, while others vanished, absorbed by the emptiness of a dreamscape where things had ceased to exist as if magically erased. This gap, literally a blank space in between things, acted as a half-opened gate into a rapturous otherness.

I witnessed a scenario of elements suspended in an emptiness that resembled the scroll paintings of Zen masters. Upon the vanishing body of the forest, space became a moist blank paper, and nature, either dissolved in whiteness or absorbed by masses of black ink. A landscape in the making in which the random chaos of the material world was synthesized into fleeting impressions grafted by a swift brushstroke; a soaked brush struggling against the cruel and deafening silence of a heavenly order reaching down upon us.

When I returned Helio had already arrived. He made sweet lemon grass tea with leaves he picked in the yard. We sat and drank in silence as clouds kept passing by.