> [!summary] Progressive Summary > Ailton Krenak's work is about waking up from the coma of modernity, and reconnecting to a cosmic sense of life. Life is about "assuring the preservation of the universe of relationships." The practice of dreaming, sustained by Indigenous people, weaves together the wisdom of ancestors and our relations with all beings. # Structured Notes ## Definitions ## Chapter Summaries ### Introduction > Listening to all the other beings that live alongside the human means building the connective tissue, the invisible vibratory link and connection that sustains a vast plurality of entities and life forms. Listening means being alive, staying alive, and keeping the ecosystems to which one belongs alive as well. Listening is caring. Not listening brings war: that is, a type of destructive encounter, a form of non-coexistence. We listen with our entire bodies, not just our ears. > Bodies are, for Ailton, the most necessary, precious, and precise pieces of equipment needed to alter the destructive actions and insatiable greed of the capitalist machine. Our bodies are part of and an extension of the Earth. If we allow them to become sensing instruments for dreaming and conversation, the cosmic sense of life would not be so threatened. > Ailton urges us to think about the ways in which we are part of constellations – "we walk as constellations" – rather than communities. As constellations constituted of visible and invisible beings, we inevitably have to stop destroying the Earth, because we would recognise everything on it as our relatives and not as raw materials with which to make things we can consume and commercialise. ### You Can't Eat Money > When I speak of humanity, I am not only talking about *Homo sapiens*. I am referring to a vast array of beings that we have always excluded. > Throughout history, humans – or rather this exclusive club of humanity, which appears in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in institutional protocols – have been devastating everything around them. It is as if they had elected a caste, named it humanity, and judged all those who are outside of it as sub-human. Not only the *caiçaras*, *quilombolas*, and Indigenous peoples, but all forms of life that we deliberately left by the wayside. And that "way" is progress: the notion that we are going somewhere. We assume that there is a horizon, that we are heading to it, and on the way, we drop everything that does not matter, everything that is left, sub-humanity – some of us are part of it. > We could put all the leaders of the Central Bank in a giant safe and let them live there with their economy. You can't eat money. > We are now governed by big corporations. Who is going to overthrow the corporations? It would be like fighting ghosts. Power is now an abstraction concentrated in brands merged into corporations and represented by a few humanoids. I have no doubt that these humanoids, spellbound by the power of money, will also reach a saturation point. We are experiencing a gradual change in the conditions for life on this planet and we will all be brought down to the same level. Both trillionaires and you and I will face the same fate. > We are addicted to modernity. Most inventions are an attempt by us humans to project ourselves into matter beyond our bodies. This gives us a sense of power, of permanence, the illusion that we will continue to exist. > Those who already heard the voice of the mountains, the rivers, and the forests do not need a theory about this: every theory is an effort to explain to the hardheads the reality that they cannot see. > Whether in a forest or in a flat, we need to awaken our inner power and stop looking for culprits around us, be they corporations or the government. Because all things come to an end, and we cannot have an expiration date like theirs. > Through agroecology, through permaculture, there are people in different places fighting for this planet to have a chance. These micropolitics are gaining momentum and will take the place of the disillusionment caused by macropolitics. The agents of micropolitics are people planting vegetable gardens in their backyards, opening up space in the pavement to let sprout whatever may be. ^505d9f > Life moves through everything, through rocks, the ozone layer, glaciers. Life goes from the oceans to solid ground; it crosses from north to south like a breeze in all directions. Life is this crossing of the planet's living organism on an immaterial scale. Instead of thinking about the Earth's organism breathing, which is very difficult, let's think about life passing through mountains, caves, rivers, forests. We have trivialized life to the extent that people don't even know what it is and think it is just a word. Just like there are words for "wind", "fire", "water", people think there may be the word "life", but there isn't. Life is transcendence; it's beyond the dictionary; it doesn't have a definition. ### Dreams to Postpone the End of the World > There are many kinds of dreams. If someone invites me to take a trip, I wait and see if I dream about it. If I don't dream about a trip or an invitation to go somewhere, it means I'm not leaving the place I'm in. I never know in advance what I'm going to do next. This kind of guidance can be thought of as magic, but in fact, it is our way of living. As long as we hold onto it, we will continue to be who we are. This experience of having a collective consciousness is what guides my choices. It is a way to preserve our integrity, our cosmic connections. We may walk around here on earth, but we walk in other places as well. Most of our Indigenous kin do this. Just look at the work of of the Indigenous youth who are publishing, speaking, and interacting with the fields of art and culture. You can see this collective perspective in them. I don't know any individual from any of our communities who has gone out into the world alone. We walk as constellations. > This thing that the political and economic sciences call capitalism has metastasised, occupying the entire planet and infiltrating life in an uncontrollable way. After this pandemic, if we want to reconceive the world without changing this framework, we will have to face the clear fact that what we are experiencing is a crisis, in the sense of a mistake. But if we realise that we're going through a transformation, we will have to admit that our collective dream of the world and the presence of humanity in the biosphere will have to be different. We can inhabit this planet, but we will have to do so otherwise. If we don't take steps in this direction, it would be as if someone wanted to get to the highest peak of the Himalayas but wanted to take a along their house, their fridge, their dog, their parrot, the bicycle. They'll never arrive with heavy luggage like that. We will have to radically reconceive of ourselves to be here. And we yearn for this newness. It may surprise us. It will have the meaning of Caetano Veloso's poetry in the song "Um indio" ("An Indian"): it will surprise us by being obvious. Suddenly it will become clear that we need to change the equipment we use. And – surprise! – the equipment we need in order to be in the biosphere is our body, precisely. > Lifting the sky means broadening everyone's horizons, not just those of humans. It is a memory, a cultural inheritance from the time when our ancestors were so in tune with the rhythm of nature that they only had to work a few hours a day to provide for everything that they needed to live. The rest of the time, you could sing, dance, and dream: everyday life was an extension of dreaming. And the relationships, the contracts woven in the dreamworld was still meaningful after you woke up. And we think about the possibility of a time beyond this one, we dream about a world where we humans will have to be reconceived in order to move around. We will have to give shape to other bodies, other affections, and dream other dreams in order to be welcomed by this world and be able to inhabit it. If we look at things this way, then what we are experiencing today will be not only a crisis, but also a fantastic, promising source of hope. ### The Thing-Making Machine > These incredible technologies that we are using today, which connect us, give us a strong dose of illusion. They are like trophies that science and knowledge have given us and that we use to justify the trace we are leaving on earth. > The planet is telling us: "You went crazy. You forgot who you are and now you're lost, believing you've achieved something with your toys." Well, the truth is that all that technology gave us was toys. The most advanced one even gets people to outer space; this is also the most expensive. It's a toy that only 30 or 40 guys can play with. And, clearly, there are some billionaires who want to play, which makes me think that this imaginary humanity, beyond its tremendous spiritual childishness, cannot criticise its own history. A history that, most of the time, is a disgrace. What is there to be celebrated about the fact that we can talk to 3,000 or 4,000 people on a little device which is the product of a civilisation that is consuming the Earth to make toys? The thing is that the Earth is a much larger organism than we are; it's much wiser and more powerful, and *we* are its most useless toy. The Earth can shut us down by taking our air away. It doesn't even need to make a noise. > Fossil fuels, which the world depends on today, should have been given up by the 1990s – all the reports at the time said so. Since then, the number of things made from oil has increased alarmingly. We have known about the destruction of the ozone layer since the turn of the 1980s. How is it possible that you've been warned that you're drilling into the roof of the sky and the most you can do is get a new refrigerator? If we ask someone who is 20 or 30 years old to question all this, the guy might say: "But now that it's my turn, you're here to tell me that the party's over?" There's a desire for this condition of consuming life to last indefinitely, without ever needing to turn the thing-making machine off. > We are all addicted to newness: a new car, a new machine, new clothing, something new. People have said: "But we can make an electric car; without gasoline, it won't cause pollution." But it will be so expensive, so fancy, that it will become a new object of desire. We know that we need to renounce such things that are ruining our life on the planet. The problem is that people want to renounce such things for other newer and nicer things. > If we get stuck with the notion that the way the world works cannot change or be changed, the conception of commodities, control and domination, of course we're going to be terrified, but try getting out of that car, try having a cosmic relationship with the world. Many people must think that only shamans – or people who have already reached some form of transcendence – can have this experience, but what they call science is constantly confirming the relationship between the Earth and the solar system, between galaxies. Let us summon the experience of harmoniously inhabiting the cosmos: it is possible to experience this in our daily lives without surrendering to all the terrorism of modernity. > Many people from different cultural origins have an understanding that we and the Earth are the same entity, that we breathe and dream with it. Some attribute the same vulnerabilities to this organism as our own bodies have. They say this organism has a fever. It makes sense: aren't we made up of 2/3 water and then the solid stuff, our bones, muscles, skeleton? We are microcosms of the organism Earth We just need to remember. > Until the beginning of the 20th century, the world of work and production took place with tools and means that did not have the same power to exhaust the Earth's resources as they do today. Today, only a few of these nearly human types of humanity are scattered around the planet. As the world is entirely unequal, some people – people who are not engaged in planetary consumption – have been left outside of the civilisational knot. They have not become consumers in a sense of a clientele. Eventually, they consume something from the industrial world, but they don't depend on it to survive. There are still islands on the planet that remember what they are doing here. They are protected by this memory of other world perspectives. These people are the cure for the planet's fever, and I believe they can positively infect us with a different perception of life. Either you hear the voices of all other beings that inhabit the planet alongside you, or you war against life on Earth. ### Life is Not Useful > Western ways of life have shaped the world as a commodity and reproduce it in such a naturalized fashion that a child who grows up with this logic lives as if it were totalizing. The information that such a child learns about how to be a person and act in society already follows a predefined script: the child will be an engineer, an architect, a doctor, a subject able to operate in the world, to make war; everything is already set. I have no interest in this sad, predetermined world. For me, it could've ended long ago. I don't bother postponing its end. > I think it's bullshit that schools continue to teach students how to reproduce this unequal and unjust system. What they call education is, in fact, an offence against freedom of thought. It's taking people who have just arrived in this world, brainwashing them, and unleashing them to destroy the world. For me, this is not education, but a factory of insanity that people insist on upholding > Life is joy, it's a dance, only it's a Cosmic dance, and people want to reduce it to ridiculous, utilitarian choreography. A biography: someone was born, did this, did that, grew up, founded a city, invented Fordism, started a revolution, made a rocket, went into space; this is all a ridiculous little story. Why do we insist on turning life into something useful? We must have the courage to be radically alive, not keep bargaining for survival. If we keep consuming the planet, we won't last for more than one day. > Indigenous peoples are still present in this world not because they were excluded, but because they escaped. It's good to remember that. In several regions on the planet, they resisted with all their strength and courage so they wouldn't be completely engulfed by this utilitalitarian world. Indigenous people resist this assault of white people because they know white people are wrong, and most of the time, Indigenous peoples are treated like they're crazy. Escaping capture, experiencing an existence that has not surrendered to a utilitarian lifestyle, creates a place of silence. > White peoples' empty thinking cannot coexist with the idea of living aimlessly in this world; they think work is the reason for existence. They have enslaved others to the extent that they now have to enslave themselves. They cannot stop and experience life as a gift and the world as a wonderful place. The potential world that we could share doesn't have to be hell. It could be good. White people are horrified by this, and say that we are lazy, that we didn't want to be civilized. As if "being a civilization" were destiny. This is their religion: the civilizing religion. They change the repertoire, but they do the same dance, and the choreography is the same: the tramping step on the ground. Our steps tread lightly, very lightly. > Perhaps what bothers white people a lot is the fact that Indigenous people do not accept private property as foundational. It's an epistemological principle. In ancient times, white people lived with us, but left. They forgot who they were and went to live another way. They clung to their inventions, tools, science, and technology, were led astray, and set off to prey on the planet. So when we meet again, there's a kind of rage that we stayed true to a path here on Earth that they couldn't sustain. > It turns out that nobody is immune to the effects of climate change. The world is slowly, even if belatedly, awakening to the fact that Indigenous peoples, who are also under threat, have valuable life experiences to share. What remains for us is to live the experiences: the disasters and silences. Sometimes we even want to experience silence, but not disaster, because it is very painful. We, the Krenak, have decided that we are inside the disaster. No one needs to come and get us out of here. We are going to cross the wasteland, we have to cross it. Or do you run away every time you see a wasteland? When a wasteland appears, cross it. # Quotes # References