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. . .So what was São Paulo to me that first time when I came here, and what’s it now? What frames of reference, what structure of attitude and feeling did I work through then and how do they differ from those I use for working through it now? In what cognitive idiom, through what concepts, ideas and devices – imaginative, symbolic, subconscious, hermeneutic, sensual – did I phrase and form this city that’s the one I know today? These references and understandings are slowly cultivated and transformed from patterns of thought and feeling that shift the city imperceptibly as through a mental fault-line running through its heart. Yes, it’s due in part to the weight of time, but it’s not duration in a linear sense, the accumulation of experiences culminating in a final understanding; it’s not something that hardens and ossifies like geographical knowledge. It’s more lateral and informal, more mutable and protean, a dialectical motion with residues and blanks, amplifications and extensions, oscillations back and forth – overlapping, simultaneous, diachronic, uncertain and unsteady – an existential process with no teleology to underpin the mutations of its shifting shape. . .