For mathematics, infinity is the idea of a number to which we can always add one more, and one more, and one more... and it will always continue to grow, i n f i n i t e l y ... or, the whole that we can divide and divide and divide and divide, and the divided parts can always — in theory — be divided i n f i n i t e l y ... on their way towards the infinitesimal. This is the poetics of mathematics which, in needing to explain numbers and dimensions beyond reach, drew upon the concept of infinity to illuminate them; and from this idea-concept, other spheres of knowledge likewise draw, using infinity to define — or illustrate — countless situations in which we cannot establish their limits.
In conceptual terms, we might say that infinity is the unattainable, the eternal, the boundless, the immortal, the unreachable... In this sense, we might think of infinity as the — unknowable — edge of the cosmos that surrounds us, or the deepest depths of our unconscious self. The infinitesimal part that composes us, or the totality of what surrounds us. We might also think of infinity as encompassing the end of something that gives rise to the beginning of countless other possibilities — new worlds, new universes, new cycles, new ways of being and dwelling in life, as well as new lives that emerge and vanish in an endless succession of beginnings and endings. Or, as Nêgo Bispo would say, in an eternal "beginning-middle-beginning" where the end does not exist, because it is the foundation and origin of new realities.
The theatre of the world in constant transformation — the anthropo-scenic — is an infinity. By existing in this state ad æternum of transformation, it is the beginning-middle-beginning of human stagings upon the stage of life, in intimate relation with all that navigates the universe, aboard the vessel Gaia.
Infinity might be the land without borders — a stage without limits — where the lives of all species and peoples could act and interact through — and with — this stage, freely and transrelationally, in an endless array of arrangements, experimentations, and discoveries of new forms of life. Yet this anthropo-scenic is increasingly being compartmentalised and appropriated by minorities who dictate the place and manner in which the actors of this spectacle shall perform, creating artificial and amorphous fragmentations in which suffering and pain and hardship gain an imperative and segregating protagonism, relegating to those poetic spaces where life dwells — and where it is the mistress of a fluid transit of interrelations — not even the most muted of supporting roles.
Ailton Krenak says that every forest carries within itself a becoming-city, just as every city carries within itself a becoming-forest. And it is towards this becoming-forest that the new acts of the anthropo-scenic ought to aim. Not to restore all the forests, but to learn from their logic the infinite ways of dancing with all the actors of this stage, sensitively and respectfully, in a time without time and without end — with only middles and new beginnings. Faced with these becomings, perhaps infinity might be the tireless and persistent act of hoping into action — for an anthropo-scenic that stages, and becomes the stage of, times without fragmentations, without tyrants, without segregation and artifice, where the fluidity of living rhythms pulses once more in harmonic measures, without the metronome of existence being altered.
Virgínia Stela Bueno Lambert