The word weft has a primary, literal, functional meaning: a thread is said to be “of the weft” when it crosses transversely the warp threads of a loom. Its meaning is the function it fulfills: that of binding together the threads stretched upon the loom, of turning daylight into the opacity of cloth or canvas. But this first meaning is already a figure: that of the shuttle carrying the thread between the warps to bring it safely to harbor. Immediately, function becomes image: that of a movement that passes between and binds.

The word has another meaning, however, still functional though of a different nature: a weft is “the structure that constitutes the framework of an animal tissue.” Here again, images. They refer to architecture and to weaving. The weft of a fabric is merely a set of threads, but that of a living tissue gives it unity and cohesion. The latter requires a weft that is also a framework, whereas that of woven cloth remains external to it: body, wall, ground, etc. But if the weft is that which, within a thing, makes it adhere to itself, one can understand that, by extension, there may be wefts of everything: of a work, an existence, a day, or a musical improvisation. Only, in these cases, the weft is not a physical structure, a framework; it is the singular way in which the thing holds together its moments or parts, the way it forms a block despite the disparities of its lines. There are cases, however, in which the weft, despite its labile and processual character, seems to play the role of a framework.

Let us take the example of samba. A samba is first of all a rhythmic flow. A strange assemblage of two- and three-beat measures, or more precisely a syncopated flow of sixteenth notes (the ganzás, chocalhos, tamborims, and repiques) embedded in a two-beat rhythm (the surdos) and relaunched by the regular breaks of the drumheads. This is the first layer, already stratified, of the weft.

The second is entrusted to the cavaquinho, a small four-string guitar that completes the percussive flow in the upper register and produces the harmonic base of the song to come.

The third is made up of the melodic motifs of the agogôs and the cuicas, which adjust their uneven meter to the syncopated flow of the first layer in order to prepare the arrival of the melody and the voice that intones it (and of the winds if the samba is on the move).

The first produces an elementary motricity: it moves and makes move; the second phrases; the third harmonizes; the fourth sings (and all four provide rhythm).

The weft composed of the first three layers is the condition of the song, the musical ground upon which it rises, the air suited to its breathing. The energy that emanates from it, and that literally carries the voice, depends on the imperceptible frictions of the three flows, on the interplay between even and uneven, high and low, melody and rhythm, binary and ternary meter: these differences produce a generalized syncopation that each line amplifies and displaces.

One must also add to these layers that of the dancers. Their movements arise from the rhythmic weft and in a certain way participate in it, exteriorize it, and reinforce it. The weft of samba is at once music and dance, sounds and movements—or more precisely, sounds with potential movements awaiting embodiment. The weft of samba is explosive. It has nothing of a framework, and yet it is what, to all appearances, holds the samba together, ensures the cohesion of its syncopated temporality and its power to extend it to other bodies.

Let us begin again.

A weft is something that allows another thing to be what it is, even if it is not visible or identifiable as such. It is also and above all an action (to weave) or a process (to grow). Action presupposes an agent who stretches and weaves, who chooses the threads and the path of the shuttle according to the kind of fabric he intends to produce. The process, by contrast, is immanent: it produces itself—or rather, it is the thing producing itself continuously; it is the hand, the loom, the shuttle, and the thread. Poiesis versus autopoiesis. Fabrication on one side, growth on the other.

Is it so simple? Is not the weft both: the movement of the hand guiding the shuttle that carries the thread, and the living structure of the tissue self-generating?

The weft of samba is action (to play), but not an action that fabricates; it is an action that is itself what it produces, a collective production that, from the outside, appears to grow, even to proliferate when it passes by contagion into the bodies of the dancers; it is at once here and there, now and in a year, other and the same. An action that produces something that grows and contaminates. Something that allows an action to multiply without losing or exhausting itself.

The weft is both: Ariadne’s thread, the hand unwinding the skein, and the labyrinth that its twists and turns eventually draw. For the weft does indeed begin somewhere, but one does not know where it ends; or rather, one does not know where it will have led us, and the fragment of life upon which we shall then turn back—and which we believed we had improvised step by step—will offer before our eyes the mysterious form of necessity.

There is one thing the definitions of the word do not say: there is no weft that does not retain some traces of those that preceded it. The weft of an existence is also made of the lives that raised it, the lives it crossed and loved, with whom it sang, danced, played, worked. Thus wefts pass from one existence to another, openly or secretly, massively or in fragments and details, transmitted and forgotten. It may be a gesture, a way of speaking, a thread of linen or wool.

But wefts are transmitted and forgotten collectively as well. And preserving such traces requires specific devices. Carnival is one of them.

To disguise oneself, to dance, to occupy streets, avenues, and squares, to weave an endless samba, to make public a desire that becomes stasis, plateau, a cobra swallowing its own tail. But above all to remember the sambas, marchinhas, and maracatus that others have sung and danced: it suffices to sing and dance them in turn; to remember the Carioca and Brazilian past by telling the stories no longer told or forbidden to tell: stories to lull grown-ups to sleep and awaken drowsing spirits; to remember the African, Indigenous, European past, long since mestizo, transformed, mutated, that haunts every detail of carnival: costumes, feathers, fabrics, ornaments, skins painted and spangled— instruments, rhythms, tunes, dances, gestures—tresillo, maxixe, tango, waltz, polka—ngoma, kalungu, sabar, curimbó—Tupi spirits and orixás.

Carnival is a mnemonic device as much as a festive and desiring one: a machine for trafficking-transmitting the most distant and disparate pasts; for weaving each year the cities and those who inhabit and pass through them; for intertwining past and present wefts (the lives that parade) and for stretching other warp threads upon the loom.

The movement that binds is also the one that unbinds; hence one must bind again, repeat each year, redo, mend. Carnival welcomes these wefts; it is even the art of assembling and reassembling them. But they are also what ensure its cohesion, fabricate it, and allow it to grow.

Carnival can be the art of wefts only if it is itself woven by imperceptible threads: they give it that moiré appearance that changes each time one passes through it anew, for carnival is true for all who experience it; every perspective is the right one because each is a thread of the weft—even that of the morning of Quarta-feira de Cinzasi, after the surdos have fallen silent and the fabric has torn.

Carnival is a desire that has received the dressing of memory.

“A weft is something that allows another thing to be what it is,” we have written; but that other-thing is the thing itself, or rather that alterity within it that makes it adhere to itself, precisely because it is other. One must further add—as we have just shown—that this weft is itself made of a thousand other threads that one can no longer distinguish, yet without which it could not fulfill its function of weaving and of memory.

The weft holds and lets pass; its power of coalescence is that of the “trans”: it is what crosses the warp threads, connects what is separated, transmits threads believed forgotten, trans-flows bodies, transverses spirits, trans-sounds rhythms and consequently transforms those who enter into the play, who allow themselves to be woven by carnival—that is, transplanted into that shifting ground where one can only be by disguising oneself— which supposes that each person recognize that other-thing which is oneself, and which carnival reveals with such acuity: the self as trans-weft.