In the Garden of Flowers, a peripheral district of a city of the interior of São Paulo, people interpret their world, among other ways, by telling stories about heaven and earth, and the destruction and recreation of the world. How should one interpret these interpretations? As a way for dealing with this question, Geertz developed the notion of 'thick description,' by which one may distinguish a twitch from a wink. The stories told in the Garden of Flowers are not mere interpretations, however. They emerge from the will to interrupt the very course of the world. As they say something about the world, they also erupt as provocations, with awakening effects, causing one's eyes to close and reopen. By means of tension-filled images, 'thick description' may also acquire the qualities of tense description, provoking astonishment. Perhaps ellipses, incoherencies, and suspicious emendations - where a text seems to come apart - are signs of the 'lower bodily stratum' of the text we call culture. As stories of the Garden of Flowers reveal, it is in these places that one may find the more fertile layers of a text, or, still, its eschatological soil.
Death; Earth; Lower Bodily Stratum; Eschatology; Oral Narrative