Petru Popescu - The Encounter: Amazon Beaming

by Simon McBurney

W HY ARE YOU HERE?

In forty degrees centigrade and 100% humidity, I am as drenched as if I had plunged fully clothed into the vast River Solimes that runs alongside the Mayoruna village of Marajai, not far from Tefe in the heart of Brazilian Amazonia. I lick the sweat dripping off my upper lip.

When I was given this book in 1994 I never imagined the journey it would take me on twenty years later.

I am standing before the headman of Marajai, who has just posed the above question; half of the inhabitants of the village, all crammed into his hut, are gazing at me expectantly. Desperately thirsty, I glance around, looking in vain for something to drink; a fifth of the worlds fresh water is here in the Amazon, I tell myself, surely someone will get me something.

Faced with the expectant silence of this collective gaze, however, I cannot delay my answer. So I clear my throat and find myself plunging into an entire re-telling of The Encounter: Amazon Beaming.

This story is of a journey and an encounter. It is a chronicle of photographer Loren McIntyres journey to the Javari valley in the remote heart of the vast Amazon basin and his encounter with the Mayoruna, otherwise known as the Matss, who are the indigenous people of that land.

But this is as much a voyage of the mind as a bodily one, an inner journey which proves as attritional as any of the physical challenges McIntyre has to face. And the series of encounters in this book reveal a pattern of thinking, a vision of the world, that startles and disturbs as deeply as any of the physical events that unfold in Petru Popescus remarkable account.

When we think of a journey we think of distance. But hidden within the word is a reference to another dimension: that of time. For the word journey derives from the latin diurnum, which itself originates from dies, meaning dayan appropriate revelation, because this book is as much about time as it is about distance, and the encounter it describes is as much with ourselves as it is with any idea of the distant other.

McIntyre encounters not just a people, but also ideas that throw his view of himself and the world into question. And through Petru Popescus extraordinary focusing of Loren McIntyres lens, The Encounter confronts the reader with questions that are just as urgent as those facing Loren and the Mayoruna in 1969.

Our adamantine vision of time as an arrow, moving in a pitiless irreversible horizontal motion towards oblivion, is called into doubt. Could it be that this version of time is a fiction, a story that only exists in our common imagination? Could there be more than one time existing at any one moment? Certainly contemporary scientific thought accepts the possibility of multiple dimensions of time.

Our idea of distance, crucially the distance between one person and another, is also challenged. The notion of a separate self, so precious to our contemporary notion of identity, is undermined to the point that it becomes, for McIntyre, utterly illusory. One self, one so-called individual consciousness, he discovers, is not necessarily separated from another by language, time or distance. We are possibly interconnected in ways to which we are, mostly, blind in the modern worlda world in which, paradoxically, we are more connected by technology than at any time in history.

It is both salutary and necessary to have our assumptions challenged in the self-centred times we live in. To really consider the idea that we are deeply interconnected, inseparable from one another, just as we are inseparable from nature even when we do not think of ourselves as living in nature. To truly accept that we are part of the ecosystem wherever we are and that we cannot escape it, just as we cannot escape the planet. And also to accept that our ability to hear, to listen to each other, is perhaps essential for our collective survival. These thoughts are urgent because, in order to survive, we need to acknowledge that there is another way of seeing the world and our place in it.

Why are you here?

In Marajai, as I finish my answer by explaining that The Encounter has lead me to their village because I wish to tell its story to other people in a theatre, I realise I have been speaking for more than an hour. Whatever else is happening I know that my thirst is real. There is silence. The headman, Norival, clears his throat.

We are moved by what you told us. Thank you. And when you are retelling your story to your people, you can tell them that we, the Mayoruna, exist too.

And without my asking, someone places a bottle of water in my hand.

And if, like me, you find The Encounter to be deeply resonant for our times, I urge you to place it in someone elses hand too.

SIMON MCBURNEY

December 2015