THE GAMBIARRA MANIFESTO
enzo gangi
SKYPE CALL WITH BAD INTERNET
My electronic mother, comprised of pixels, peels garlic from behind the screen. Looking at a photonic mimicry of my kitchen, I see the pans on the stove, the oven light turned on, my father sitting by the table in the back, examining the fruit basket. She is making eggplant parmigiana for dinner. Suddenly she becomes distorted, her figure warping into a collection of blurred squares, and what the computer speaks to me is no longer in accordance with what she originally said. Her likeness is torn apart little by little as the wifi icon on the top right blinks stupidly, three thinking dots severing our connection until she is frozen. In the place of her voice is static, a modulated shriek, a mess of data, audio that somewhere deep within its untranslatable bleeps and blongs contains some fragment of the truth of what was being spoken. But my ears are only human, and my brain cannot make sense of this kind of chaos.
At this moment, whatever she is saying is dissolved into the ether, a scramble of network code and a confusion of optic fiber.
I wonder what is said in the space of the delay. We are never truly talking to one another. We talk to vibrations in the air coming from the speakers. Past versions of each other, our true selves being beamed through the eight thousand miles that sit between us as nothing more than information. Zeros and ones. Interpreted by a machine. Spoken by a machine. And I am content with this excuse for human interaction.
Suddenly, the internet blinks back, the world unfrozen. In my absence, the number of peeled garlic cloves on the polyethylene cutting board has grown considerably.
My electronic mother has teleported away, gone to get the olive oil.
DREAM
When I close my eyes, I see static and amoeba-like blemishes. The strange geometry of consciousness. I was terrified when I first saw them, at twelve years old—interpreted them as warning signs of impending blindness. We were in Cartagena and I was rushed to a hospital when I swore to my father that my peripheral vision was narrowing, that there was a thin film over my eyes, that soon everything would darken and I would be stranded with the ectoplasm.
In reality, I was just a hypochondriac and interpreted eye strain as loss of vision.
My younger self put so much faith into concreteness. Reality as seen, as touched, as felt.
I’m not sure what these shapes are, in a physical sense. I’m not even sure the doctors are sure. Sometimes, I think they are messages. Attempts at communication from the other side, whatever that may be, their swirling patterns random, existing in another realm, cautionary.
In one of my dreams, I see my girlfriend and a walrus, and there is a puddle of milk under the walrus, and I believe the dream when it tells me it is the walrus’s milk, and my girlfriend kneels and drinks the puddle.
I have no fucking clue what any of this means.
GAMBIARRA AND STARLIGHT
Gambiarra is a fuckedness that is balanced by an equal and opposite fuckedness within a given system. The result is a careful balance that must not be upset, for should that happen, one fuckedness would overpower the other and the universe would inevitably be thrust into chaos and disrepair. It is a permanent state of being which all things occupy. A star exists because the crushing pressure it suffers within itself matches the violent need to outwardly expand. A dancer dances because the cells in their body have not yet ceased to function, but the dancer understands that the dance will end when the last cell has been extinguished.
Neither holds the largest amount of control – if given the choice, the dancer would choose to dance forever, and the cell to cease existing.
So the dance becomes a slow detachment of spinning limbs. A bargain between dancer and cell, order and chaos. Control lies with no particular entity, so it becomes nonexistent altogether and transitions into gambiarra. It is like mending a wire with a piece of scotch tape, but the affair is incredibly unsafe and poses a significant danger of electrocution.
The reader might argue this is balance. The result of the meeting of two wills who compromise as to facilitate each other’s existence. This is not balance. Balance is a fallacy.
This is unfair. We have been fundamentally convinced that compromise is the way of the universe, that we must be complicit to it. We give up so much in the name of compromise. In the name of gambiarra.
Next time I miss my mother, I will start a revolution. I will cross the Atlantic in a cardboard plane.
THE VINES
The cities of Brazilians aren’t really theirs—there are always tendrils reaching for their feet. Trees sprout between the spaces in the concrete, cracking it with their roots. Small ferns grow in manholes and fungal formations creep into the dark, forgotten spots of a place that itself seems to carelessly expand. One time, I even remember seeing a mushroom—a whole-ass mushroom, growing on the side of the street, and wondered how deep its mycelia reached in the soil-less ground. The vines are all around us.
When the first colonizers arrived in Brazil, they traded mirrors with the native population. Reportedly. Perhaps that was what marked our downfall, and theirs as well. Colonization and the mirror and the power to perceive. We engage with the mirror in the same way we do with the Skype call, the dream, the struggle of existence inside a pulsating growth that must always consume, and in order, be consumed.
We must always see more. Of ourselves. Of our buildings and reflective glass.
So we have tried to tame the land. It has not worked. It has become ruthlessly competitive. It grows all around us, undermining structural integrity, sowing greenery, sowing chaos. Its rage grows in strength with every road built, every mirror glazed. It does not accept the gambiarra. We are beginning to implode.
When the rain comes down smelling like cigarette smoke and the cinders of rainforests darken the sky at three in the afternoon, we wonder what went wrong. We are so good at acting stupid. So good at standing in the acrid rain, then going home, wringing the smoke out of our clothes. But the vines tug at every step.
Eventually, uncertainly, the gambiarra must fall.