Auto Thurible

The cigar immediately brought to mind the thuribles I know from Catholic Mass. Smoke would rise, spread through the space, and disappear, carrying with it a sense of expectation that I have never quite known how to name. I am not drawing a connection between different religious practices. My connection to the Catholic Church comes mainly through my upbringing; I do not consider myself Catholic. My understanding of God belongs to a private relationship, between Him and me. I have also spent time in Afro-Brazilian religious communities. None of that determines what I felt in that moment.

What stayed with me was the possibility that smoke might carry a wish. Good fortune. A blessing. Good energy. Some form of protection. The cigars moved among people, became part of their interaction, brought bodies together, and seemed to belong to something shared. I do not smoke, and I have no particular relationship with smoke. Still, that suspended matter left me with a question.

I thought about purification. Not as an explanation for what was happening, but as a mental image for everything I might want carried away: the roots of violence, injustice, pressure, loneliness, the hardness that life accumulates. There is a human desire to let certain burdens go without turning every experience into something larger, more complicated, or farther removed from simplicity.

Perhaps that simplicity is part of what I encountered in Nego Fugido. A culture I knew little about, ways of living and seeing the world that expanded my experience, a history that stopped being distant knowledge and became something much closer. Among so many sensations, what stayed with me was the uneasy recognition that parts of this history are still alive. There are things that should have been overcome, structures that still demand change, wounds whose persistence makes it impossible to treat memory as something belonging only to the past.

Perhaps the smoke stayed with me because it offers no solution. It simply moves, changes, loses its form, and goes on. There is something in that movement that I recognize: the desire to leave behind what needs to end without erasing what needs to be remembered.

I will return to Nego Fugido. When an experience touches my soul, I return to it. I have always been faithful to what brings me something good, to what unsettles me, to what continues to work within me after it is over. Perhaps returning is simply a way of staying close to the questions I still have no way of answering.