sábado, 10 de agosto de 2019

mira, Clara

Mira, Clara, siempre me ha atraído mucho tanto tu belleza interior como la exterior, pero, por algún motivo que no alcanzo a comprender, había algo en mí que no hacía el click necesario para decidirme a dar el paso adelante, como si en el fondo no creyera que pudiésemos estar hechos el uno para el otro.

Sin embargo, conservo un montón nada despreciable de borradores de notas, escritos, cartas, etc., dirigidos a ti, explicándote las más variadas cosas. Es lo que tiene este mi síndrome de Diógenes del mail... Narran tantos momentos, tantas vivencias que se van a malograr cuando me vaya, pero eso sí, los comentarios más absurdos, estúpidos, y banales ahí quedarán para siempre, enredados en la Red de Redes, configurando una impresión tan naif de lo que un día fui.

Me consuela pensar que, entre tanta basura digital, algún día alguien encontrará alguno de estos mensajes de amor perdidos sobre amores perdidos, a los que nunca se les dio, o nunca tuvieron, su opción.

Dime iluso, pero sí, me consuela… me consuela saber que algún día alguien abrirá esta caja perdida de mis recuerdos –vamos, mis mierdas, que recuerdos suena demasiado romántico, muchas de ellas guardadas no sé por qué–, y con una sonrisa condescendiente descubrirá todo un universo de lo que pudo ser, una matriz de infinitas realidades que se entrecruzan o divergen, tantas como gotas en la lluvia ácida, donde los únicos acontecimientos que verdaderamente ocurrieron son las lágrimas del Replicante.



los últimos serán los primeros 2008
Note: drawing done with my left hand; belongs to a series of drawings entitled "mundo siniestro"

the middle age crisis (or better call it Julius Caesar´s breakdown)

The “middle age crisis” is a very boring name for such an interesting phenomenon. They could make us all a favor and help us feel less vulgar and thus better by naming it something like “Julius Caesar´s breakdown”, since he may be one of the very first (to the best of my knowledge) documented cases of this syndrome. The legend says the roman leader cried before a monument to Alexander the Great located close to one of the Pillars of Hercules (now Gibraltar, in the South of the Iberian Peninsula), because at that time he was 44 years old and had achieved nothing remarkable in his life yet, while the most famous Macedonian had conquered the world and died at a much younger age (by the way, a completely natural reaction; who in his 40s would not panic after comparing himself to Alexander?).

And this leads me to the second thought I’d like to comment. Often I find myself thinking “what a boring time in history we live in, missing epic so much” or “it would be so cool to live in this or that époque” bla bla bla (see Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris”, it’s about that). Aside from the fact that it is arguable that you can build your own epic daily (winning and defending your vital space in the NYC metro in the rush hour), of course one tends to forget that it would only be cool (really cool, you know, enough to think that the time trip was worth) to live in this or that époque provided one was rich. Apparently rich people live fine or more than that no matter the time in history, exception is made for those revolutions here and there that we all know, where it is hard to keep your head attached to your thorax or you find yourself in the gulag with your toes frozen and eating mud, but, you know, I recall we term them “exceptions” for a reason.

But seriously, all the previous introductory non-sense to say that sometimes it also makes me sad to feel like there’s nothing left to discover, nothing comparable to Caesar’s or Alexander’s achievements to be the first one at (some may complain and wave before my nose the newspapers talking, for example, about the detection of the Higgs boson or gravitational waves, but I’m thinking more of discovering a new world, and colonization of other planets seems very far ahead in time nowadays). Oh, Alexander, I wish you were here and told us that parking the ass on the sofa and watching TV with a cold beer in one hand is much more exciting than trekking in Persia. But then, from a completely opposite perspective, we might be living one of the most important centuries in human history, since, like in the XXth Century, the humanity (some more than others) is again playing naïvely with the fate of the Earth and the world as we now it. If in the previous century the nuclear war was the danger never equaled before, now it is the climate change, ignored by the celebrated crazy capitalism, enslaving people, and simultaneously exhausting the Earth’s resources and polluting at an amazing rate. A great philosopher (Spiderman’s uncle, Ben) once said “With great power comes great responsibility”, and that is precisely what applies better than never to humanity in the XXth and XXIst Centuries. We now have the power to destroy the Earth and hell we’re good at destroying things, but this time there is no other place to go to and there are no second chances.


embracing crowd (2004)

viernes, 9 de agosto de 2019

haunted: a novel of stories (Chuck Palahniuk)

"Pollution, overpopulation, disease, war, political corruption, sexual perversion, murder, and drug addiction… Maybe they weren’t any worse than they’d been in the past, but now we had television carping about them. A constant reminder. A culture of complaint. Of bitch, bitch, bitch… Most people would never admit it, but they’d been bitching since they were born. As soon as their head popped out into that bright delivery-room light, nothing had been right. Nothing had been as comfortable or felt so good.

Just the effort it took to keep your stupid physical body alive, just the finding food and cooking it and dishwashing, the keeping warm and bathing and sleeping, the walking and bowel movements and ingrown hairs, it was all getting to be too much work."

                                                                                Haunted: a novel of stories (Chuck Palahniuk)


P.S.: Making a "free interpretation" of the great quote by Christopher McCandless, I'd say: "Complaining is not real unless shared"  ;-)


Alexander Platz, Berlin, Germany (2019)