I arrived here... what? 5 weeks ago already? This is above 7000 feet high, meaning 2000 meters. The lands around Santa Fe are arid. There is this huge rocky canyon northwest from here that I went visit with my mate Max and I swear you can feel the last molecules of water evaporating off the river, off your breath. Off the no-river: it's dry. The vegetation forms patches in the sand, a sand I don't believe anything can root in. Animals are rattlesnakes, black bears, coyotes... I never get to see a coyote alive. I saw many death by the road when I drove down to El Paso and I came back all thirsty.
The first week I got kind of sick. The altitude, they say. I went mad with maths and physics and didn't really sleep. I drank a lot. The second week I didn't drink that much, so my skin got flaky. I would scratch my hand and leave white traces on the table. Then things got worst. One morning my knuckles broke up bleeding as tiny, stretched red flowers. It didn't hurt much, though. I got myself a moisturizing cream I use often, but those flowers ran round my fingers and colonized my palms: I can see them bleeding right underneath my skin, itching like hell I'd love to rip them off sometime. They erode my flesh, call my nail on a suicide scrape, and wrinkle my hands.
Then I met all these people. Then my mind got blown up. This pack coming from all over the world to think about complex systems, whatever this is. They brought these ideas along, their discussions and their few, well chosen silences. I still try to get this thing off my hands at night, I can't help it. Also off my feet: it's itchy there as well. It's itchy as nothing I've known of before. It is, I guess, the closest I'll ever get to yielding new life, so it must hurt in a way. Also my dried lips. And these girls and guys around, so marvelous I just wish to cry out to the world that they exist, that an another Earth might just happen if we give them voice. And I turn to my hands darkened by the sun, my squeezed skin, and see Them growing and I understand. Now these new lines that weren't there before, shaping a new destiny that could not have happened otherwise. Those mates crossing my life, those new shapes for a future that is to come, all those things that--now--will happen.
Monday, June 17, 2013
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Trees have roots, men have legs.
When I first went to Germany in 2006 I didn't pack very much besides my clothes. I had a notebook where I wrote some loose impressions... it's lost now; I had exactly a pair of books that changed my mind for ever; and few things more. I can remember that I didn't pack anything like shampoo, shower gel, or toothpaste. The first night I used my flat mate's and on the second day I bought those fancy products that I had never heard of: Antischuppen Schauma, blend-a-med for my teeth (although old good Colgate existed as well), whatever. Damn, I loved Germany so much by that time!! A country I didn't know and that I was so eager to discover! Missing my usual toilet stuff was part of it, of letting me go into that strangeness. Why should I carry along such a piece of a homeland?
Now I see with wonder some Erasmus students coming to Barcelona. Many of them (everyone I've met) bring along their creams and brews; hair lotions with odd names, unspeakable languages. I saw this same thing with many foreigners coming to Granada when I was living there. This seems to me like an aseptic travel abroad, don't you break that umbilical cord, don't you blur out into that expanding universe of ours... I know this is not really about that, but it's an impression that I get with such little details. Say I'm silly.
However, I'm not completely rootless as yet. I didn't fucking lost my origins, they call me in the night and they still make me suffer for fucking nothing. For fucking anywhere shall be the same. I still have got some background to fucking give up. That's why I won't pack any shower stuff this time either. As I collect my clothes next Mai, as I jump into that plane. That's why I won't have a drop of nothing to clean my teeth when I arrive to the USA for the first time, and I shall rely on passersby anew. And I shall take those sands from the ground and rub them on my skin if necessary, but I don't fucking want anything from this desperately self centered culture to chase me there. I wanna breath, or discover there isn't any air worth breathing if that turns out to be.
Now I see with wonder some Erasmus students coming to Barcelona. Many of them (everyone I've met) bring along their creams and brews; hair lotions with odd names, unspeakable languages. I saw this same thing with many foreigners coming to Granada when I was living there. This seems to me like an aseptic travel abroad, don't you break that umbilical cord, don't you blur out into that expanding universe of ours... I know this is not really about that, but it's an impression that I get with such little details. Say I'm silly.
However, I'm not completely rootless as yet. I didn't fucking lost my origins, they call me in the night and they still make me suffer for fucking nothing. For fucking anywhere shall be the same. I still have got some background to fucking give up. That's why I won't pack any shower stuff this time either. As I collect my clothes next Mai, as I jump into that plane. That's why I won't have a drop of nothing to clean my teeth when I arrive to the USA for the first time, and I shall rely on passersby anew. And I shall take those sands from the ground and rub them on my skin if necessary, but I don't fucking want anything from this desperately self centered culture to chase me there. I wanna breath, or discover there isn't any air worth breathing if that turns out to be.
There I go: http://www.santafe.edu/
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Images from the Mind
These days I am in Berlin presenting my last work: A Brain Computer Interface to reconstruct images based on brain activity (a poster by Seoane, Gabler, and Blankertz). We are presenting it at the Berlin Brain Computer Interface (BBCI) Workshop 2012, where very exciting ideas using Brain Computer Interfaces had been presented as well!
Friday, September 14, 2012
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
forewords to my Master Thesis, and III
To part II
When I woke up I was somewhere in Poland, near the German frontier, just past the Oder river. I saw that the sky over me was the ceiling of my friend's van: a thin panel crisscrossed with random scars. Had I seen the world through those interwoven scars? Could that precarious net hold the insights I had been shown long enough before I would forget?
When I woke up I was somewhere in Poland, near the German frontier, just past the Oder river. I saw that the sky over me was the ceiling of my friend's van: a thin panel crisscrossed with random scars. Had I seen the world through those interwoven scars? Could that precarious net hold the insights I had been shown long enough before I would forget?
My eyes hold there, my brain, the lines... a revelation: they are not the lines what I am reading, nor the universe at all; it is my mind through them. Through them cause they are here, as pits or bumps which corrupt the shadows of the lights and the lights of the shadows.
I still remember the pale-blue-oranged sky which was breathing and almost made me cry with emotion. I was wheezing, my heart hurt, and a numbness held my left arm stiff.
Once understood what's beneath the delicate fabric (the ever-shaped, ever-shaping universal fabric), we are just trying to unveil what's underneath the patch of it in which our mind manifests. Does our own mind enclose a complexity enough to unveil the mystery?
The definitive cave, the uppermost myth of the cave so far. We run a cryptographic race against ourselves.
forewords to my Master Thesis, II
To part I
I had to go down to the Spree (now the corrupted Spree to which Europe dropped an unmoral succession of shot bodies) and drink its seminal waters. I had to summon the holy Road to envisage the straight path which runs firm through an ethereal realm. At either side of this, the mists of History were fighting its never-ending war. I crossed the sacred river where the youth sacrifices itself for glory, for the vaterland, the tzar and the emperor. I crossed it and I was still alive and I turned left and there I founded the clearing were I could lie and rest while a web was growing around me.
Meanwhile my senses had become clearer. I could already hear some of the remote, poietical chords which ruffled the reality since the beginning of time. When I opened my eyes, my eyes had become bigger. When I touched my skin, my skin could sense new shapes. And when I opened my mouth... when I opened my mouth and that obscene bird of the night sung its dark old chants, then my tongue melted away and out my trembling lips.
The web around me had crystallized in a quite dense woodland but I could still peer into the distance and discern the shadows and lights in it. And so I set off and directed myself to the deep darkness.
Were they, the people in the woods, scared? Tired maybe, sleepy, and could not bear the sharp light my feet emanated? They receded at every step I took forth. They covered their faces with their forearms or their hands, and they seemed so nebulous notwithstanding my straight sight. They would vanish in a crackling under my steps if I came too close, and the crackling would be followed by a splintered cloud which climbed swirling, playing with the branches up the trees. Had they tried before the path I sought? And had they grown so tired, so scared? What if science also gets me trapped in a random walk? What'd be its dimension? What its substrate... what is it? Such a random walk. So random and so. Random walk.
I had to hold my self together. Literally. My legs and arms were spread all over the scene, some of my fingers detached as well. My head had landed some meters away from the trunk, touching with the nose my genitalia--deep breath, wet and sweet. So I had to stand up and pick up my parts. Stuff them in my backpack, dry and rigid as they were. And then I dropped the backpack. I was way too heavy to carry my own weight. The reality was so dense: it had to hold all the light and shadows the woods contained. Way too much. It would just break apart.
Things happen in a space we can't reach. From there, they yield to our world instances we recognize and put names to; so, many events of the history might be projections from the same underlying entity. One example would be what we named god. Once transcended, it's easy to see how some genial and powerful event took place in this hidden world; and its instances in our physical world, we called them god. This same event would take place later many times. But the word god had been mystified, amplified. It had taken rust and weight, acquired harsh layers of reality that usage had put upon. Humans couldn't recognize anymore as godly the instances yielded by the very same event. And so these, as powerful and genial as the original one, were given other names: Cervantes, Leon Tolstoi, Roberto Bolaño, Richard Feynman; blurred with time: Siddhartha, Pitagoras, Euclides... until they are so remote that they melt together in an abstract Unknown from which god drinks.
Each instance yielded to our world hasn't got the same expression as any other of the same kind. They happen at different moments and they interact with other instances (whether of the same type or different). Each one attains its own, singular realization. Some isolated ripples from different entities can interplay giving rise to phantom items that we identify as independent and that shape our world as well, although no onely transcendental event exists which would project such.
The reality we see is nothing but a light, subtle fabric which pervades everything; which has been lied over a more essential reality where more essential events take place. And it's their realizations in our world that we can sense and name. We are threads which move freely in this fiber and cross it with the hope of finding something at the other side; but it's the same old fabric we perceive, no matter the dimension we've chosen to traverse it across.
It's so that it emerges the goddess of History: the eternal tailor. Our free will as a naive struggle against her firm and expert hands. We play childishly; but when the moment arrives, she pulls our threads and the fabric gets wrinkled. And so the rugged and ramified shapes our lives take, and so the universe complete collapses into a moment which joins the tension points that our stitches made.
We are the projection of a standard event from this hidden realm. This standard event yields a human in our physical world each time it takes place, and this event is always one and the same. It was this same event which yielded god. We are the closest to god it ever existed. We have our lives to reverberate, make the fabric shiver, reach with the hands and push the world. Later, later enough so we won't ever see it, the coarse-graining of generations will preserve our name or will scribble it in a huge gravestone the size of the earth; so humanity can regret-less forget us, melt all of us together so the gods get fed, so the gods moved the world.
To part III
I had to go down to the Spree (now the corrupted Spree to which Europe dropped an unmoral succession of shot bodies) and drink its seminal waters. I had to summon the holy Road to envisage the straight path which runs firm through an ethereal realm. At either side of this, the mists of History were fighting its never-ending war. I crossed the sacred river where the youth sacrifices itself for glory, for the vaterland, the tzar and the emperor. I crossed it and I was still alive and I turned left and there I founded the clearing were I could lie and rest while a web was growing around me.
Meanwhile my senses had become clearer. I could already hear some of the remote, poietical chords which ruffled the reality since the beginning of time. When I opened my eyes, my eyes had become bigger. When I touched my skin, my skin could sense new shapes. And when I opened my mouth... when I opened my mouth and that obscene bird of the night sung its dark old chants, then my tongue melted away and out my trembling lips.
The web around me had crystallized in a quite dense woodland but I could still peer into the distance and discern the shadows and lights in it. And so I set off and directed myself to the deep darkness.
Were they, the people in the woods, scared? Tired maybe, sleepy, and could not bear the sharp light my feet emanated? They receded at every step I took forth. They covered their faces with their forearms or their hands, and they seemed so nebulous notwithstanding my straight sight. They would vanish in a crackling under my steps if I came too close, and the crackling would be followed by a splintered cloud which climbed swirling, playing with the branches up the trees. Had they tried before the path I sought? And had they grown so tired, so scared? What if science also gets me trapped in a random walk? What'd be its dimension? What its substrate... what is it? Such a random walk. So random and so. Random walk.
I had to hold my self together. Literally. My legs and arms were spread all over the scene, some of my fingers detached as well. My head had landed some meters away from the trunk, touching with the nose my genitalia--deep breath, wet and sweet. So I had to stand up and pick up my parts. Stuff them in my backpack, dry and rigid as they were. And then I dropped the backpack. I was way too heavy to carry my own weight. The reality was so dense: it had to hold all the light and shadows the woods contained. Way too much. It would just break apart.
Things happen in a space we can't reach. From there, they yield to our world instances we recognize and put names to; so, many events of the history might be projections from the same underlying entity. One example would be what we named god. Once transcended, it's easy to see how some genial and powerful event took place in this hidden world; and its instances in our physical world, we called them god. This same event would take place later many times. But the word god had been mystified, amplified. It had taken rust and weight, acquired harsh layers of reality that usage had put upon. Humans couldn't recognize anymore as godly the instances yielded by the very same event. And so these, as powerful and genial as the original one, were given other names: Cervantes, Leon Tolstoi, Roberto Bolaño, Richard Feynman; blurred with time: Siddhartha, Pitagoras, Euclides... until they are so remote that they melt together in an abstract Unknown from which god drinks.
Each instance yielded to our world hasn't got the same expression as any other of the same kind. They happen at different moments and they interact with other instances (whether of the same type or different). Each one attains its own, singular realization. Some isolated ripples from different entities can interplay giving rise to phantom items that we identify as independent and that shape our world as well, although no onely transcendental event exists which would project such.
The reality we see is nothing but a light, subtle fabric which pervades everything; which has been lied over a more essential reality where more essential events take place. And it's their realizations in our world that we can sense and name. We are threads which move freely in this fiber and cross it with the hope of finding something at the other side; but it's the same old fabric we perceive, no matter the dimension we've chosen to traverse it across.
It's so that it emerges the goddess of History: the eternal tailor. Our free will as a naive struggle against her firm and expert hands. We play childishly; but when the moment arrives, she pulls our threads and the fabric gets wrinkled. And so the rugged and ramified shapes our lives take, and so the universe complete collapses into a moment which joins the tension points that our stitches made.
We are the projection of a standard event from this hidden realm. This standard event yields a human in our physical world each time it takes place, and this event is always one and the same. It was this same event which yielded god. We are the closest to god it ever existed. We have our lives to reverberate, make the fabric shiver, reach with the hands and push the world. Later, later enough so we won't ever see it, the coarse-graining of generations will preserve our name or will scribble it in a huge gravestone the size of the earth; so humanity can regret-less forget us, melt all of us together so the gods get fed, so the gods moved the world.
To part III
forewords to my Master Thesis, I
At the beginning, Neuron sat on the top of the Teufelsberg and he masturbated while contemplating the virgin world below. His orgasm was like the tremble of a Guitar which stroke the earth so hard that its strings broke up free releasing the chords which fell over the earth during the next 2666 years; and the chords were sacred sperm. And so Neuron created Berlin and the flattened land in its surround. And so he created the Spree, and he created the length that the hand can reach. So was born the Road and the roads, the Night and the nights. The sun was born and the moon, and while the chords would fall, then would appear the (wo)man as well. And all (wo)men stood drinking that holy milk, never growing old.
Well after the chords had posed underneath Berlin, they remained as a tidal wave for ever bending the floor of the city, for ever enlightening whoever would drink the Spree, whoever would listen to its string.
And then in a final shake, huge as a spike which traverses the spinal cord of the universe, Neuron released the remains of the Guitar from his trembling, stiff and ecstatic hands; and those remains rose up and became unsung chords and fell over the young earth for many centuries more.
So the universe was born and made: with its structure and its maths, and everything would behave accordingly. But if we were to look at it, its very essence would not be revealed. A dislocation of the being had to take place so we could see.
To part II
Well after the chords had posed underneath Berlin, they remained as a tidal wave for ever bending the floor of the city, for ever enlightening whoever would drink the Spree, whoever would listen to its string.
And then in a final shake, huge as a spike which traverses the spinal cord of the universe, Neuron released the remains of the Guitar from his trembling, stiff and ecstatic hands; and those remains rose up and became unsung chords and fell over the young earth for many centuries more.
So the universe was born and made: with its structure and its maths, and everything would behave accordingly. But if we were to look at it, its very essence would not be revealed. A dislocation of the being had to take place so we could see.
To part II
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