Creation in a History class: silence and mystery

Silence is like a surface where 'ghosts' slide (^{Deleuze, 2015}). Therefore, we have lightness and insistence - because sliding has no inhibiting power. In silence, the diagrams (^{Deleuze, 2005}) stop working. It does not predispose nor provide; it does not oppose nor impose. Silence is not a device. There are no sayings or looks, nor enunciabilities, nor visibilities in it. There is lightness due to the inexistence of determination of the seeing or speaking. It is an absolute silence; not only there is no speech, as there is no look. There is something like Zarathustra’s dance, the tension in the bow of a Zen archer, the paradoxical operations of Lewis Carroll's Alice. In short, there is 'something' that shines as a surface effect; not like a Being, but an aliquid extra-being (^{Deleuze, 2015}) - here it is its lightness. The insistence demonstrates that this time of silence has no stops; thus, there is not before nor later. Only the during. Silence has a length that cannot be measured; it is the illimited of the happening unfolding itself indefinitely between past and future. This is so because previously it is necessary to have with it an experience that is stranger to the measurement. There is something of mysterious in silence. A duet. A pair that now meets, dances, and provides us lightness and insistence - silence and mystery let themselves go through full of listening (because silence opens the ear to the world) and full of intuition (because mystery always carries its improbable deciphering with it).

A History class is inhabited by many things. Two of them are conditions that make the creation possible: silence and mystery (we will address other ones later in this essay). Something happens in a History class when silence dances with mystery. Despite being situated in a certain space-time, in its interior there is an outside³, the exteriority that is immanent to it. Where does this charm and lightness from silence and mystery come from? From time. Therefore, it is the time that we want to allow to absorb, revert, invert, decode the History class, which, absorbed by silence and mystery, is then established in time. ^{Bergson (2010}a) used to call this time, which interests us, a 'pure' time. ^{Nietzsche used to call it 'untimely' (2005}). ^{Blanchot preferred 'Neutral' (2010}). Deleuze thought it as 'incorporeal' (2015). For Deleuze's Foucault, it was the 'Outside' (2005). It is convenient to claim that this time is not mixed with a unit successively subdivided in past, present and future, but it consists of a difference of nature between two simultaneous realities. On the one hand, there is the time of bodies and states of things, in which only present exists. On the other, there is the time as an attribute of the incorporeal, a way of being of what does not exist, but insists, dodging itself to the present to divide itself infinitely in past and future (^{Deleuze, 2015}).

In quite a modest way, we think in silence and mystery. Silence and mystery like potential modules of what a lesson exposes to the surface of its infinite sliding, without which it subordinates itself to the fulfilment of a utilitarian role. It is about a lesson that does not want to follow its game of codes and over codes anymore, that wants to lose itself in an 'audiovisual battle' (^{Deleuze, 2005}) or a nameless 'forest' (^{Deleuze, 2015}, p. 20). This lesson wants to coincide intensely with itself, as it forgot the weave of the reproductions and the fulfilment of the programmatic objectives. Refugee in a passing cloud of not-knowing, this lesson claims the immanence of its own expressiveness (^{Seffner, 2012}). We do not know exactly what a lesson can be. However, we know that, in this precise point where everything disappeared, what remains is the affirmation of the will - not a will to be approved in the test, to be approved in the entrance exam, not even to instrumentalize oneself to understand the world; not a void will, although a certain art of the void and the lightness is part of its repertoire of tensions and slides; but an intensive will, inebriated by the affections of expansion of life that justify the existence of a lesson not only for its instrumental appeal, but for the desire of the internal forces that cross the bodies. These affections express a resistance of the lesson against its own unfolding in a History class, from where bodies are spread and mixed, leaving it secluded from the things done in its name.

This silence about which we speak is not the absence of noise, not even the imposition of a censorship and, above all, it is not signification. Silence always implies its opposite: racket, gibberish of bodies. Paradoxically, silence also is body. For silence to exist, it is necessary to have a speaking, discursive, signified world. But one does not assume that silence has in itself a hidden meaning; on the opposite, it is the very absence of this - an absence of meaning that is not translated in the desperation of the lack, but in the immoderate of a reason immanent to the bodies. We are not assuming that silence allows to foresee pictures that leave from in between, as its nature is precisely to be silence of pictures, identities, and objects. Silence is the noise of the bodies that escaped to the relativity of the proposal and the negativity of the lack to claim the completeness of its own movement. Rather than being a negative or a relative, silence has its own seminal reason: “[…] the uno and full world is complete in itself. It contains all realities” (^{Bréhier, 2012}, p. 81).

Well, is there still anything in silence? ^{Sontag (1987}, p. 18) argues that it still remains something, even when being “[…] the ghosts of their own expectations”. The author shows, by means of the Cage experiment - that, even in “[…] a silent chamber, she still heard two sounds: the beating of her heart and the flow of blood in her temples […]” (^{Sontag, 1987}, p. 18), that silence is still body and that there is not an empty space. However, even though we agree with Sontag, this silence of which we speak is not about a void; on the opposite, it is densely inhabited by micro perceptions of the most diverse types that cross and hit among themselves, without producing any sound, or an almost imperceptible sound, that can only be heard in the fulguration of a genesis, an epic moment of the creation. These micro perceptive lines are pre-signifier forces, aloof to the signifier, void of meaning, “Visions and Hearings that do not belong to any language anymore” (^{Deleuze, 2011}, p. 16). Its silence, however, is a condition of possibility of the effecting and the updating. It is true that silence never stops implying its opposite, but this opposite, which is the world of signification, is only revealed from the clash between the bodies, dived in a silence that allows listening to its noises and incorporeal effects. The heard/glimpsed void in the silence is the void of a body that attenuates itself until losing its structuring properties. In this sense, it is a paradoxical void, a receptacle of a formless body, as it consists of the very matter of the act through which the body updates its powers and renews them. Thus, silence can be conceived as the perfect language of a void-matter, a limitless theater in which the movement of life expansion unfolds.

As in art, a History class sees in the silence a form of transcendence, what implies a momentary abandonment of the signification, communication, or designation processes. However, after this momentary surrender to the nonsense of silence, like a retreat to the interior of the forest, the historical narrative unfolds in new appearances, new temporalizations, now much more open to new forms of transcendence. The transcendence in relation to the codes of deciphering of the matter brings to the surface the immanence of the very matter. The silencing of the codes presents the problem of a raw material, before the blooming of any science or dialectic. When suspending the sensible representations (sensory-motor forms that stick to the bodies to assign a determination to them) and the general ideas (mathematical essences aimed at the bodies to copy the ideality of an external atemporal model), the causality relations reconnect themselves to the individual, internal and singular rhythm of the living being himself. When supported by the artificial silence created by Cage or merely sitting by the edge of a river, focusing on the inhabited silence of the forest, it is possible to hear the beat of the heart and the blood flow of what still is only 'a body', not a general idea of body, nor a body forged by the habit. Silence would be, then, this void-matter in which life does not split between power and act or an atemporal model and a sensible representation, but where the inner reason (cause) to the living being corresponds only to the force of its own pulse.

These silences neutralize the intermediation of the universal ones and function as a strategy to calm the historicizing obsession, not as a way to break its impetus, but as a way to renew and open it, as the one who opens a new box full of surprises and new features. It is like the time of History experienced its own ruin to strengthen itself in its ethical character of thinking and creating secular relations and producing affirmative and positive effects for the future. We can think, then, that the narratives, in order to be moved away from what they have of more dangerous - their pretension to create definitive names -, create silences around themselves to, in a deaf dialogue, remain open to their self-destruction, that is, their becoming-body. Silence, in this case, is the body that peeks the narrative, the insistence of the finitude breaking upon the density of the codes.

It should not be thought, however, that what happens here is related with a childish relativism and that, at a time of discredit of the scientific narratives, we are opening the possibility of the enunciation of any narrative. On the contrary: paying attention to the limit of the narratives does not mean to open the verb to a naïve permissiveness that would make a blank slate of the past. The silence of the raw material that surrounds the possible already known of the matter not prone to be narrated does not invite to any type of verbal easiness, nor authorizes the unruly exercise of an intelligence. The zone of silence indicates only the limits of the intellective faculty, which does not mean that, from then on, an authorization opens for the misery of an irresponsible anything-goes. What opens is not an anything-is-accepted in which the most valuable is the one who screams louder, but an area of intersection between the sensible representation and what the stoic called 'comprehensive representation' (^{Bréhier, 2012}). It is not about a banal concession to the unruly exercise of the faculties, but in a way of knowing based on the approximation between the intimate of the soul and its object. What results from this, besides the border of the intelligible formal, is a knowledge of the real, whose activity is circumscribed to a plan where there was no split yet between the 'in itself' of the things and the mobility of the bodies, as the bodies remain fully owners of themselves. This knowledge does not find expression in the discursive language but makes expressible silence and listening. It does not refer itself to the real by means of the contemplation; it demands, on the contrary, a type of activity that reaches it not only for the relations 'of law' intermediated by the language, but by the connections 'of facto' established by the intuition.

Everything that a lesson on heaven and hell, the penitence and the sin, the luxury and the pride, the martyrdom and the body could cause would be half a dozen of expressions of surprise as well as one or two questions on whether, even nowadays, loving people of the same sex is a sin - an overwhelming presentation of a mythology of the medieval Christianity. This lesson, in its uncontrolled appearance in a group of about twenty students from the 10^th grade, caused a light silence and that insisted by the mystery that it carried in the surface of that plan, of that lesson. Of silence, it cannot be asked how long it lasted, whether two minutes or one hour. Silence is immoderate and incommensurable. What we know is its (incorporeal) effects, not its extension. What we know is that, when it is asked 'loving people of the same sex is a sin even today?', the language disappeared, the clock stopped, the concept did not name anything else. What happens when a History class dives in silence? What mystery is this that the books are not able to decipher?

What is certain is that silence and mystery free us of the subordination to the language, opens an exteriority point, where the precariousness of the already known names coexists with the mystery of its disappearance and, thus, induce to the immediate of the experience, the inexpressible of the creation, the vital energy that runs through a body or a lesson. And this immediate sigh in the experience does not have anything to do with a cheap empiricism, an easy spontaneity, or any improvisation. The immediate is precisely the most difficult, as it consists of a delicate portion of nothing, in that fragile pulse that only bursts when pulled out from the measured time. The question of a student apparently more worried with the present than what the medieval Christianity was one of the ends that took that lesson out of the exact measures of the codes, the communications, the meaning. When something happens in a History class, it is precisely there that we dive in the silence and that the explanations that take great care of codifying and establishing a sense to what happens are lost between the lines, the paragraphs, the footnotes, as the mystery, the earth element, the dream element, the energy that makes the encounter function are forgotten.

Listening to silence can be as hard as learning how to write or interpret a written text. The tensions that run through the hand that writes also follow the body that listens. Teachers speak; they make pictures, images, ideas to circulate; they articulate a various set of gestures and expressions, in a clash of bodies that mix; they dynamize a concept on the prowl of a happening. If anything, everything is bodies. There are only bodies. Before and after the articulated word, amidst the words that make concept in the agitation of the bodies that move, there is, however, a type of inexpressive, incorporeal exteriority that marks, at the same time, the limit, and the conditions of possibility of every happening (^{Bréhier, 2012}). Expressing a happening is always to mobilize a great mix of bodies, with their weave of cuts and assemblages, escapes, heaps and collisions, but the very happening is not constituted, does not take shape, without also being covered by a whole incorporeal drama. Here it is its paradox.

Incorporeal are the more or less private agreements and the implicit assumptions that structure each act of language and keep the inner meaning of their own hesitation (^{Deleuze, 2015}; ^{Deleuze & Guattari, 2011}). When the language hesitates, it is by touching in these secret filaments through which a certain saying comes to sense its nexus with the order of the incorporeal and its set of assumed pacts. It is for this reason that there is an outside in every act of language, and this outside is, paradoxically, its constitutive inside. It is like every happening kept an inner volcano, a fissure zone, and was threatened every moment by the risk of rupture of the agreements and nexuses that cover its supposed naturality - and these nexuses and agreements are not guaranteed merely by the good intentions of the subject that speaks, but by particular chaining of knowledge and powers that ultimately crystallize in the form of a proposition; that is, they form pacts. Paying attention to the incorporeal is to peer the drama that underlies to the pact, to risk betraying it, insisting on following the pulse of the filaments that lead us to what has not yet been formed.

It is for this reason that the question whether a student and the surprised looks of others are the pacts already in the surface, where a cloud touch them and reveals its mystery indecipherable. And the History class is void of History; the coherence of the narrative is overshadowed by silence; the logic of the proposals intended to present there an understandable, explainable, and exterior Middle Age sinks in an ocean of inconsistencies; the provision of that medieval Christian mythology in the timeline is loaded by a vendaval that dislocates it to a continuum, in which the line is not a reference anymore and the whirling time is immediate to the experience. There, the meaning drifts - it drifts by the double and ambiguous characteristic of being at the same time void and full; without the conjunctive force of the supposed pacts, it is filled by the imminence of another question. What makes a knight in Chrétien de Troyes' novel when he is not to assign a historical constant or to mean a limit of the social imaginary? The knight drifts… What happens to Samuel Beckett's characters when being surrounded and involved by a set of narrative impossibilities? What happens with the male and female dancers in a scene choreographed by Pina Bausch? There is always a type of failure and the imminence of a breach. And in the breach and the hesitation of the possible of the time, what is shown, paradoxically, is the time itself acting as question.

Everything happens as if the creative vitality in a History class had to first pass-through silence, mystery, and the ruin of the narrative - this experience of the Outside, the nothing, the void and the impertinence of the secret of the pacts, that at the same time disclose them in the present time of a space-time and make them sink in some space-time, in time as itself, time in itself. The creation of new narratives to tell other histories seems to have, there, its irremediable bond with the a-historic, the sublime gesture of dance, surpassing and overcoming the defined limits of what is said and what is seen. This is so because not seeing and not saying becomes a condition of possibility to create new forms of enunciability and new forms of visibility.

Despite being called by the same word, the classroom time is not the time of History. History, the one that we spell with a capital H, makes a logic of time, creates next to it a chronology, from which the coordinates of its own scientific function are distributed. History-science elaborates, thus, with time, a relation of homogenesis, establishing 'of law' a systematic order that organizes a multiplicity of 'of factos' in a narrative of meaning. On the other hand, there is the classroom time, whose stratifications reverberate the state of a game between constants and variables established in the scope of Education itself. Public policies, curricular demands, time schedules, attendance lists, didactic manuals, stacks of papers, established periods, break bells, resting windows, holes in the walls, bare wires, cracked blackboards, agitation of bodies that hit, grasp, lose, annoy, play, cry, sleep and even, occasionally seat and listen. The classroom does not reach to establish a relation of homogenesis with time. Different from History, it is not exactly a science able to keep the variable under the control of constants, although science is also present there. The classroom is crossed by a series of vectors and fragmented dimensions that do not form a scientific function and even so focus on time, creating a wide typology of markings. It is not only science that marks time. The classroom time is marked by all these injunctions that cross its nothing of existence to temporarily bring some form of code to it.

In face of these marked times, everything happens as if creation in a History class would impose the requirement of folding an outside to its interior. The fold happens when this pure exteriority turns to the interior of the codes, the names and the space-time delimitations that form the present time of a History class. When unfolding this interior, it excavates such a deep ditch that it sucks the codes, the names, and the very extension where the lesson is materialized in the world. And the unmeasurable brightness of silence is made. Because the narrative has ruined; the timeline stopped offering the breath of a 'secular location'; the map is not able anymore to mark a place in space; the explanatory schemes become obsolete and are not able to make anything understood. And when everything seems desert of meaning, the History class remakes itself in new poetics, new encounters and, above all, an opening from where walls or stonewalls cannot be seen, allowing an infinity of medieval forces to drain and run by its surface, forces that the History class had not released, as they were flowing around a complex and closed mythology that drew a dominant, univocal and omnipresent Church.

Suddenly, telling stories can become much more excessive than merely narrating passed facts, from a writing, leaned over in a totalitarian timeline. Telling stories can be to sing, to dance, to imagine or to dream. One does not know exactly what a History class can when a Chaos is open in its interior.

The Chaos-lesson: from the mystery of silence to the problem of the Great Navigation

When observing the Christian mythology losing something of its pretense universality and experiencing the drift through the question of a student who took the dramatic structure of the lesson until the silence of the desert, a lesson must face the following issues: How are the new worlds opened during or after the silence/mystery duet? In case they have different narratives, what narratives are these? How are they presented? Are there words for the new worlds presented in the thickness of silence? Which words would these be? What makes the New World an actual new world?

In a lesson that abandons the silence of the desert to become involved in the issues of a Great Navigation, it is not merely about historically situating the presence of new peoples in the order of historicity, appointing to a geography of the planetary routes - although this is also important -, but learning something different on relations of words, points of view on the matter, limits and enigmas on the very plasticity assumed by any act of language or exercise of meaning conveying. The cross from silence to the Great Navigation involves the issue of the new mixtures of bodies and its incorporeal effects. Under the impact of the novelty, the unprecedented mixtures are quite often bestialized, stigmatized, reduced to the gentleness of the law. Monsters, cannibals, terrible beings are created, a varied series of counterfigures of the identity, which only have in common the fact of translating a reactive reply of the language to the enigma of the mystery. But the tension between awareness of the precariousness of language and the mystery of its disappearance invites us to sail in uncertain and dangerous waters, in a barge destitute of the arrogance of the caravels. Without the artifices of the Cross, of the Book and the Sword, what will be of a lesson aimed to sail in these waters kept by the silence of the difference? If Ulysses were to sail along the high Amazon river and were caught in a stream, would he dare to close eyes and ears? Far from the Latin grammar teachers, how to define where the sound ends, and the meaning starts? Which are the limits of a body that slides in a surface without paper, letter, and metal?

A lesson like the Great Navigation needs to promote a type of drift in relation to the traditional metaphysical supports that cancel the encounter of bodies. What we are able to think today, especially to the light of the cannibal metaphysics (^{Viveiros de Castro, 2015}), is that the whole constitution of the Kantian Aufklarung lies on a particular type of desolation. However, the drift in relation to the support does not do without an understanding on its functionality - what we will present next, from the criticism of the critique of pure reason effected by Viveiros de Castro. In face of the inaccessibility of the 'thing in itself', the intellectual faculties hesitate. In face of the hesitation of the faculties, the limit of a categoric-moral ontological imperative is formulated. Thus, it is created an abutment, functional to the efforts of a reflexive humanity that wishes to be free from the guardianship of ignorance and enter a state of moral majority. The 'what' and 'who' of the 'thing' would be inaccessible to the human intelligence, and all reasonable analytical efforts would have this impossibility as a logical starting point. Given the impossibility, the human intelligence comforts with its own reflex in the possible of the synthetic judgment. Lévi-Strauss, for example, who introduced himself as an ordinary Kantian, summarized his Kantianism in the following way: “[…] that the spirit has its limitations, that imposes them to a forever impenetrable real, and that only understands it through them” (^{Lévi-Strauss & Eribon, 2005}, p. 156-157). This same intellectual operation resonates, in a certain way, in the metaphysical component that follows the constitution of the modern scientific thought. A point of view on the limitations of the spirit and the impenetrability of the real constitutes the starting point or the common denominator of a thinkable substance. However, with ^{Deleuze and Guattari (2011}), thinkers whose perspective is in tune with the proposal of the cannibal metaphysics, this double postulate (the limitation of the spirit and the impenetrable real) is not the foundation for the exercise of a universal reason, but only the way of functioning of a particular semiotics, the signifier semiotics. Beyond its limits, there would not be the impossible or the nonsense in which a hesitant intelligence would sink, but the singularity of the operations of other regimes of signs. The Kantianism, with the impenetrability of the real and the limitations of the spirit, would establish the variables of a particular language, made despotic in its movement trying to encompass the totality, but gravitated concretely by a plurality of non-signified points of view, a plurality of voices irreducible to the reductions of the spirit.

In the opposite direction of Kantianism and its structural translations, Deleuze’s Bergsonism and Bergson himself invite us to have a fond relation with the real, and intuitively penetrate it in what it composes in itself (^{Bergson, 2010}b, ²⁰⁰⁶; ^{Deleuze, 2012}). For ^{Bergson (2006}), the real is only impenetrable by an operation of the intelligence, that cuts and breaks the movement in favor of a calculation that measures and limits itself to the breakpoints. The intuitive method comprises another metaphysics, for which the reality is not an unattainable transcendent, but an immanence, that is not beyond or essentially in a recondite place, gathered to a spirit that obsessively measures and represents it. The immanent real is revealed in the length of things, in the uncatchable movement by the intelligent man, but accessible to the intuition and the spirit that is released from its limitations and its names. There are two distinct ways of metaphysical meditation between Kantianism and Bergsonism. While the former one was basic for the constitution of the intellectual traditions of the modern, urban, white, civilized man, the latter retakes another line of facts. In the same interview in which he confesses being an ordinary Kantian, Lévi-Strauss homages Bergson, claiming the identity between the text of the philosopher and the words of a Sioux indigenous person. “Bergson meditates on metaphysical problems as an indigenous person make it and as effectively the Sioux made it” (^{Lévi-Strauss & Eribon, 2005}, p. 167-168).

However, in South American lands, considering the most recent productions of a thought that wishes to expand epistemological thresholds, could we ask ourselves what would a Yanomami shaman have to say on the impenetrability of the real or the accommodation of the body in face of the limitations of the spirit? In the book A queda do céu: palavras de um xamã yanomami (2015), resulting from a forty-year partnership between the French anthropologist Bruce Albert and the shaman Davi Kopenawa, the limits between translation, vision, and inaudible voices - which 'scientifically' could be assigned as problems of inter- and trans-specific semiotics - are constantly presented, reconfiguring the register of the possible. All these problems interest us to think what happens when a lesson-silence/mystery is open to a lesson that is effectively a Great Navigation. At this point, it must be already clear that, to sail it must be able to suspend the imperatives that constrain the limit of the sayings and the mix of the bodies; otherwise, it is better not even leave Europe.

By the intrusion of the words of a shamanic knowledge, a classroom loses its systematic line of significance. It must open to another pre-signifier, a-subjective, impersonal time, which is the time of dream. Just like ^{Bergson (2006}) insisted on the distinction between the ‘plan of action’ and the ‘plan of dream’, ^{Kopenawa and Albert (2015}) insist particularly in the idea that the whites do not know how to dream, as they only dream with themselves, victims of a repetitive cycle that keep them besieged by the shadows of their own personality and stuck to the ontological poverty of a narcissistic drama. Following the influx of these conjugated knowledge, liberating the time of dream from its individualistic and psychological marks is not only listening to what the peoples of the forests have to tell us. It is also learning to listen to a different order of reasons from the man-Narcissus, the same one that took us to mix the possible of knowledge with the limits of a proprietary knowledge (the operations of time reification are analogous to those that reify land in territory and matter in goods).

In the route of a 'Great Navigation', it is not enough to accept or even tolerate a 'different' narrative with a favorable paternal nod. It is necessary that the voices that come from the forest 'enter' the dreams and the bodies, fecundate our own conceptual mediocrity, and teach us to breach the limits of an egological, ethnocentric behavior, forgotten from the immanence and the multiplicity. Clearly, this is not easy at all, but it is only forcing the thought to the unthinkable, the intellection to the intuition, that it becomes able to reach an area free from the entropy of the cliches. Thus, it can be perceived that the intellectual operations of man-Narcissus, exactly the one who disembarked in the American continent about five hundred years ago, over codifies and inverts a series of basic assumptions in relation to what time, space, life, existence, knowledge are.

According to the shamanic knowledge shared by Kopenawa, the time of dream is the learning time of another anti-narcissistic, ecological order in the most radical sense of the word, through which the 'beings-image' descend from the skies, swarm through the forest, perform, make their dances, allowing one to see what maybe was under covered and making the words and the acts of their eventual host clearer and precise (^{Kopenawa & Albert, 2015}). In this register, the dream is not the reverse of reality, not even the nocturnal environment inhabited by the revolt of the repressed realities (these would be, rather, the reactionary replies provided to the dream by the paranoia of a frightened and self-absorbed psychism), but the time in which reality is disclosed in its elaborate fabric, in which the most delicate connections between beings of distinct natures are intertwined and something like a 'knowledge' can effectively be conveyed.

Back to the questions posed at the beginning: 'What new narratives are these?' 'How are they presented? Are there words for new worlds presented in the thickness of silence?' 'What words would these be?' 'What makes the New World an effectively new world?' The reply to all of them is made from a displacement in relation to the modern historical thought and in relation to classic metaphysics. How to listen to new words? What words are these? What voices are these? Is this new world actually new?

To reply to these questions, we think about a History class inhabited by silence and mystery, that opens to the time, in the way it is, and is allowed to listen to the voices of the forest - the one of the Amazonian shaman and the one of the Middle Age man. The loss of narrative is what transforms the lesson into Chaos⁴ as an original and genetic source of energy to create encounters with other peoples, beings, cosmologies, lives far away from across the sea, quite distant from the caravel that brought ethnocentrism, eurocentrism, the moral value as an element from which the historical narrative is formed. A Chaos-lesson is free. This exterior of the forest gives rise to learning and to the difficult and 'quite dangerous' trip towards deviant ways of expression, so open and sublime that they listen, in silence, to the mystery of all the encounters of bodies, those we can imagine and the unimaginable ones. This is how the navigators get lost in the ocean and never reach the other sides of the ocean, allowing the emergence of improbable possibilities of life existing there.

In a History class, used to the narcissistic-man, to the Socratic doctrine of concept, to the Platonism of intellectual beings, to the measures that make time gathered to a line, to the marks of an expression that only happens through the writing and, consequently, through the written document, the new words do not appear, but they insinuate themselves; an effectively new world does not seem possible either, but it insists; the voices and the dreams of the Yanomami appear as wingless birds in the interior of the white narrative, but they speak insistently, like the smoke that covers the meanings, lines, social pyramids, the explanatory pictures and other expression forms that transform the boredom of a lesson into a cult to everything that arrived with the caravels, in navigations intended to be great, but that only knew to transform into negative and lesser standards whatever they were not able to listen. But the new words insinuate themselves, the really new worlds insist, and the Yanomami speak. They are existences that coexist in the illimited of time, that are not depleted in the chronology, as they are its contemporary. Only silence (of narrative, ethnocentrism, eurocentrism) and mystery (as a metaphysical articulator of the encounters) make possible the voices, the worlds, and the Yanomami as effectuation in a History class. In this case, to think the unthinkable, to think the exhaustion of chronology in a History class.

The ruin of the narrative: timeline

A timeline is not a harmless didactic and methodologic artifice. Like any artifice, its use reverberates a series of choices, assemblies, a true assemblage of assumed elements. In the specific case of a History class, a timeline (or rather, the timeline, as it is more frequently presented in the definite article) is a way to create meaning, connecting the valences of the body to the intellectual abstraction operations from a type of a ground zero, of a founding instance that is precisely the face of Jesus Christ. Under the aegis of this instance, the trace of the line conveys to the very time the form of a liturgical calendar, whose markings catch and distribute the pure flow of time in a logical, chronological order. This implicit face, from which a line is distributed, although ultimately behaving as a universal, expresses, precisely, the relative distribution of a particular chaining. Whether History teachers like it or not, a timeline is a way to homage Jesus, placing him, as a distributive function, in the center of the picture. And no matter how big the universalist maelstrom of temporality and the ecumenical force of the Christian archetypes are, they cannot stop being what they are, that is, folds, pleats, over coding operations carried through on the continuum and perpetual mobile of time.

None of this should be read in a prescriptive sense, but as an invitation to expand its own instruction, to potentialize the intelligence of the use. Without abdicating of timeline, it is possible, however, to display the eminently political nature of its circumscriptions. What does a variable intended to be constant wishes? When erected under the form of a universal constant, what are the tremors and anxieties that it hides? In more precise terms, as a distributive function of the meaning of time, centralized by Jesus face, what does the line make visible and enunciable? What does escape through the edges of the picture, leaving it out of its reach of observation? Despite Jesus being Superstar, as in the 1973 homonym movie, no matter how big the archetypical capacity of his figure to make different traditions syncretized, which are the zones of singularities, semiotic others, exterior to the orbit of central significance of Christ face? To understand its particularity, its relative way of carrying through a distributive operation, to evidence the political nature of the variables, is to recognize that the timeline has an outside, an exteriority, whose meaning is not recognized by the irradiation of the Christic significance to the images anymore, but by the coordinates proper to a matter in a state of escape (trans-escape), faceless, not intended to the metaphysical shelter of over coding.

The importance of the outside is only highlighted at the cost of metamorphosing in the inverted signal of a specific particularization of the inside. Thus, singularities are captured and transformed into ghosts of weak line, or various instances whose weave of lines is not significant enough to belong to the plot of the secular picture. The radical exteriority is never tolerated, not even captured. What is tolerated and captured is the conversion of the exteriority in a type of specific deviation, always relative to the standard. The outside is only visible through a game of mirrors in which its particular trace is suppressed at the same time when it is translated as a relative or negative variable. This is how, for example, the 'primitive', the 'Stateless', the 'writingless', lawless , faithless, or kingless' is characterized as 'Historyless'. On the other hand, if a 'primitive', or 'pre-signifier' semiotics becomes visible, the timeline is immediately suppressed, as the separation between body and head that originated the face, and its respective symbolic-distributive function of the meaning stops happening. In a pre-signifier semiotics, body and head remain strictly connected, hindering the emergence of a language or a conscience in an over coding state. Time is filled by the immanence of the territorial codes, and the body branches off in animal-spiritual becomings that are not symbolic or imaginary, but strictly real.

It is not about abandoning the timeline, not even the face of Christ; neither it is the case to go back to pre-signifier semiotics, remaking connections of wild corporealities or reactivating conflicts between territorial codes. It is about, however, to expand the repertoire of the practices and the limits of visibility, making use of the line, the body, and the time in all senses, in multiple directions. A white, western, European matrix timeline has as 'contemporaries' so many other temporalities. It is necessary to understand that the different modulations of time were not left 'behind', filed in a type of mythical past, separated from reality, surpassed for once and for all by the imperatives of an inexorable modernizing progress. Other temporalities subsist and have always subsisted. They insist by the edges, they remain intensely alive in regions populated by knowledges and practices closed to the discourse of the majority, the colonizer discourse. However, there is a 'dialogic wall' which is hard to trespass, that separates the exclusive use of a line from the totalizing time of a proliferation of voices, gestures, words, bodies, marking a limit between a type of 'normality' known and the hesitation in face of the foreign, unknown repertoire, associated to the deviant articulations.

Considering that the timeline is nothing more than a relative constellation, cutting only part of the universe, its powers are lesser and its power to regulate deviations is weakened. However, its quality of line discloses it as a highly political step in the history of the West, constituted in the interior of a coloniality (^{Quijano, 2005}), a product of the colonialism, in its dangerous connections with processes that have tried to hinder the silence of the listening. A History class does not begin by the middle, the edges, or the rhizomes, but always by the timeline. Its powers are immediately renewed, as the diagram that places it in the center of the narrative presents its relative constellation as universal and, dangerously, identifies time to the line, to the succession, to the chronology. In this little majestical beginning of the lesson, we were regulated by a handful of powers of this 'line diagram', breaking time in pieces and breaking the world in moral. Time in pieces is accepted as time itself. The Four Ages derived from it, having reigned sovereign as a form to temporalize time and think historically. For a long time, true history was the quadripartite History, which, based on a relative representation of time, created from the image of Jesus and made universal by the Europeans, has produced effects in quite singular universes and captured its forces.

The 'line diagram' was such a powerful fiction on time and history that, once drew on the surface of a blackboard to ' historically locate the students', it unchains provisions that regulate and limit the experiences. Thus, time, rather than being the object of an experience, becomes a number of pieces, breakpoints, clippings that define a 'colonial time', a 'modern time', a 'Middle Age darkness time', a 'time of lights and wisdom', a 'barbarian time', a 'time of Renaissance'. Please observe that all these time markers are moral and exterior, they qualify time in moral terms, as better or worse, as right or wrong, as more or less developed. Well, what time is this that is not itself? How would it be possible to listen to silence in a lesson that begins with the clipping, the line and the moral?

Likewise, the world has been broken in moral - a moral that established values of good and evil, right and wrong, corporal and rational. The world was split between the better and the worst ones, between European navigators and native people. These European navigators were constituted as great heroes who found the New World, a new world, full of naivety and susceptible to the timeline, which has the face of Christ as the 'measure of all things'.

But silence and mystery certify the inexorable weakness of this 'line diagram', that cuts time in pieces and the world in moral.

Back to silence - an ethics in the History class

These provisions that seem definitive, like the timeline or explanatory schemes, are a device of the History class and drain to its interior dissensions and disputes, in an attempt to decrease the effect of its screams. But the History class, a Chaos-lesson, is much more excessive than its own device; it is a point in which the current and virtual variations (Deleuze, 1996) affect the creation processes in a permanent way, not being possible that it is taken by a totalizing process to erase minority becomings (Deleuze & Guattari, 2012). On the opposite, it is precisely the vitality of these becomings that torment the device, as the teaching of History happens in the intersection between a virtual mist of singular and wild forces and a set of current definitions. This intersection constantly disturbs the resulting individuations, in fact making the classroom a place of intermittent silence. Thus, everything happens like this atmosphere were really nurtured by silence and mystery, which, in its it flirts with the outside, the time, constitute an opening and breach the definitions projected and crystallized by disciplining and the resulting cliches.

Without silence and mystery, a History class is a center of regulation and control that goes back to the time of colonialism and the creation of coloniality, as the proposals of the only truth are imposed as work of a policy that makes time in pieces and splits the world in moral. Silence and mystery carry orality, the dream, the memory with them. Despite not being a product of a childish relativism, that opens to any form of denial or revisionism, the valences that we have questioned and presented carry with them the hard problems of a lesson unarmed of its interfaces of government of the sense and the bodies. More than learning 'about' something, what we wish here is a type of diplomacy of the otherness, a learning of the 'means', that does not deliver the monopoly of the expression to the assertive exercise of the faculties of the judgment or to the devices of domestication of time.

Our wish is inscribed in an ethical dimension that, if not reaching to the very 'transformation' of the faculties, at least indicates the need of pacification of the classificatory obsession and the logical disjunctions of moral character. This is not done by advocating for a higher morality, but by the genuine desire to see another thing, to multiply the ways of seeing until it dodges from its own postulates and the disenchanted form of its commonplaces. Thus, we dare again to imagine, as this is what this is about, always. Dived in the element of the genetic chaos, a lesson already does not silence the tremors of time by the line device. Now, it risks sailing slowly along the curves of the high Toototobi river (AM), in Yanomami lands, where an Amazonian shaman, touched by the effects of surface of his sacred yãkoana powder, makes us to listen, simultaneously, to the urgency of the real and the lightness of the sublime, through the voice of the xapiri and the words of Omama.

I would like the whites stopped thinking that our forest is dead and that it was set there for nothing. I want to make them listen to the voice of the xapiri, who play endlessly there, dancing on their radiating mirrors. Perhaps then they will want to defend it with us? I also want that their children understand our words and are friends of ours, so that they do not grow in the ignorance. Because if the forest is completely destroyed, another one will never be born. I’m a descendant of these inhabitants of the land of the rivers, children and sons-in-law of Omama. These are his words, and of the xapiri, emerged in the time of dream, that I wish to offer here to the whites. Our ancestors had them since the early times. Later, when it was my time to become a shaman, the image of Omama placed them in my chest. Since then, my thought goes from one to the other, in all directions; they increase in me endlessly. This is it (^{Kopenawa & Albert, 2015}, p. 65).