So, because I obviously don’t have enough to do, I spent an hour in the library this evening trying to find anything at all connected to capoeira. There were several titles missing/lost and it seems that at least one shelf had been moved, who knows where to. Anyhow, I walked away with several books, several books I really shouldn’t be reading.
But if you’re a book addict, you know how this goes (you know who you are).
So, having just made a little break-through in work, which I had been trying in vain to do all weekend, I decided to just flip through this one book, Capoeira and Candomble: Conformity and Resistance through Afro-Brazilian Experience by Floyd Merrel (and I am still flipping through it as I am typing this and really really excited to sit down and read it from front to back) and this caught my eye:
The match is over. But Capoeira isn’t over, because the Roda is now the world, and Capoeira is life. Capoeira there will always be, for the capoeirista. In Bira Almeida’s (1986:7) words, Capoeira “should always be present in our minds.” Yet knowledge of Capoeira can never be “absolute because no one can explore the infinite possibilities of Capoeira regardless of methods, quality, or intensity of training.” Methods, quality, and intensity of training are concrete, finite matters. Capoeira itself implies infinite possibilities. As such, Capoeira’s playing out finite bits and pieces of this continuum of possibilities suggests that it is process. Process, but never finished product. Perpetual change in space and time, never a fixed repertoire of rules and moves.
If this isn’t a wonderful summary of being a graduate student or an artist or a scientists or a human being, I don’t know what is.
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