He felt completely empty inside, kind of weightless, during that night when right before going to bed he could not get a glass of milk. Unable to go to sleep for a while, blaming not having the glass of milk, he thought about his love for milk and his upbringing, until he realized that he no longer missed his mother. After that night he was never to have sleeping problems again nor the need to drink a glass of milk before going to bed.
She was always the second in command. Power for her was not about leading projects that would make an impact in her field or serve to transform society. It was about control, leading groups that followed her instructions, who would not dared to challenge her. She was about meeting whatever requirements or standards were in place. Power for her was concentrated, dense, never expansive. It was not the type that would dilute itself and involve others, bringing a larger and evolving mass together. She could control, but would not grow. Dense and static.
A papyrus pressed over a hand carved rock created a new story. It was photographed by an author with no personal files of his own nor hand-written material left in his possession. The palimpsest was documented, registered in chips, stored in a man-made cave in Utah; later on downloaded in New York, was used as background in a multilayer visual text as part of a selfie. The curator tried to link the work to the world of spirits, to no avail, since his framework of reference was the human condition. The artist believed in the dilution and transformation of what can be perceived at a given moment, losing its old form as it becomes part of a new type of matter.
Moving to a new place was usually quite a festive event, with friends helping and suggesting possible decorations, dinners to celebrate the continuous exploration of the world, from the perspective of a new home. The experience -though, cumbersome- was light. Not so, three or four generations later: most friends are dead, the few ones left are too old to help with boxes and dismantling and assembling furniture, cabinets; no much more of a world left to be explored, while packing and unpacking the sum of very dense photons of the self integrated into what carries so many years of history,
Each object thrown away took a weight out of my own density. I felt lighter, not missing an entity that was once part of mine: books, tools, notebooks, computers, mattresses, an Omar Rayo lithograph, a set of depression era plates, Ariel’s paintings of rocks, his tables, a photo of my mother. Some objects took longer to disappear from my mass, moving slowly out my consciousness, lightening up the body, becoming themselves detached from my self. Although it is almost impossible to know how the old inhabitants of the Caribbean basin and Meso América applied their ch’ull cosmology, one wonders if it provided the formula to understand how to completely separate one corpus from another. Is it possible?
The nightmare kept coming back, repeating itself, often enough that it marked me so hard that whenever I recall it, my body shivers. The fear of having an absence of walls or furniture or people, a complete empty space with no end to it, forces the creation of one, where security, protection, and the belief, the idea that there always be a safe place, a home to feel connected to, be part of a particular relationship -symbiosis- protected by others, something else; quite difficult to separate from the fear of abandonment, to avoid lacking density, takes over the body.
Wool feels protective, caring, can hug you and put you to rest, like the lover next to you at night, both slowly losing sense of a different self, embracing bodies, falling asleep in each other’s arms; the mother who tightly holds and cuddles the baby, and tenderly moves him to the crib, replacing her arms and chest with a security blanket; the wool filled comforter, becoming so attached to a body, unable to separate itself, making it a physical extension, part of the same body's density.
She was always the second in command. Power for her was not about leading projects that would make an impact in her field or serve to transform society. It was about control, leading groups that followed her instructions, who would not dared to challenge her. She was about meeting whatever requirements or standards were in place. Power for her was concentrated, dense, never expansive. It was not the type that would dilute itself and involve others, bringing a larger and evolving mass together. She could control, but would not grow. Dense and static.
A papyrus pressed over a hand carved rock created a new story. It was photographed by an author with no personal files of his own nor hand-written material left in his possession. The palimpsest was documented, registered in chips, stored in a man-made cave in Utah; later on downloaded in New York, was used as background in a multilayer visual text as part of a selfie. The curator tried to link the work to the world of spirits, to no avail, since his framework of reference was the human condition. The artist believed in the dilution and transformation of what can be perceived at a given moment, losing its old form as it becomes part of a new type of matter.
Moving to a new place was usually quite a festive event, with friends helping and suggesting possible decorations, dinners to celebrate the continuous exploration of the world, from the perspective of a new home. The experience -though, cumbersome- was light. Not so, three or four generations later: most friends are dead, the few ones left are too old to help with boxes and dismantling and assembling furniture, cabinets; no much more of a world left to be explored, while packing and unpacking the sum of very dense photons of the self integrated into what carries so many years of history,
Each object thrown away took a weight out of my own density. I felt lighter, not missing an entity that was once part of mine: books, tools, notebooks, computers, mattresses, an Omar Rayo lithograph, a set of depression era plates, Ariel’s paintings of rocks, his tables, a photo of my mother. Some objects took longer to disappear from my mass, moving slowly out my consciousness, lightening up the body, becoming themselves detached from my self. Although it is almost impossible to know how the old inhabitants of the Caribbean basin and Meso América applied their ch’ull cosmology, one wonders if it provided the formula to understand how to completely separate one corpus from another. Is it possible?
The nightmare kept coming back, repeating itself, often enough that it marked me so hard that whenever I recall it, my body shivers. The fear of having an absence of walls or furniture or people, a complete empty space with no end to it, forces the creation of one, where security, protection, and the belief, the idea that there always be a safe place, a home to feel connected to, be part of a particular relationship -symbiosis- protected by others, something else; quite difficult to separate from the fear of abandonment, to avoid lacking density, takes over the body.
Wool feels protective, caring, can hug you and put you to rest, like the lover next to you at night, both slowly losing sense of a different self, embracing bodies, falling asleep in each other’s arms; the mother who tightly holds and cuddles the baby, and tenderly moves him to the crib, replacing her arms and chest with a security blanket; the wool filled comforter, becoming so attached to a body, unable to separate itself, making it a physical extension, part of the same body's density.
(from the book in progress, Densities, 2019)
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