No coyote

    ++Dude, what you looking at?

    I was holding a lantern, pointing it towards the scarce canopy through the little hill and the college dorms yonder.

    --You see that window over there? It was my room. I was about to get lost in there.

    ++So what?

    --There was a night dark and with many odors sweat and beer and bare feet, and it was bright the moon had never been that close to the earth in 9 years! I was so about to lose myself that night. I reckon drinking Mezcal is like chewing a handful of this brown earth down here, it dries and itches all over your mouth just the same.

    ++That's you looking at?

    --Yeah, also. I saw a shadow. At that time I was driven back and forth from Tesuque sitting in the back. The car headlights would run fast reflecting here and there. They trick me. Made me think there were coyotes. I would be quiet most of the time just peering into the shadow, into the lights.

    **Do you fear the moment we stop talking to you? If we get lost in a forest what is there in the darkness?

    I smiled at that one, but no one could see my face.

    --Then I drove all the way to El Paso. I keep repeating to myself I saw a dead coyote by the road. It was worn out. The road I mean. By the sun. Like one of those horse skulls in the cowboy movies, just like that. A white bone under the sun half buried in the desert connecting Santa Fe and El Paso. Some unfortunate busted wheels at its sides, ripped open like rubber skins.

    **Do you think I'm gonna read that?

    ++You ever wanted to be a woman, squeeze a lemon between your legs? Ain't helping you aiming at the sky. Not even if there were snow up there. If the universe is expanding there is a limits equivalent to a black holes, you learned that this summer. Now, bend over, easy, drop that lamp, open up, easy. Chew some earth, that help me a lot.

    --Now it ain't no sun, no more of that psychedelic warmth. I get to drive my own car, back and forth to Tesuque. It rains now, so the deceptive reflections on the road run faster as I sweep my lights over some dirty puddle. They run as scared animals or as scared coyotes. But they aren't, and thus I decided there are no coyote. They don't exist. Coyote is the pitiful light we shed on the road.

    ++That's right chew more sand. Thank the rain, dude, it's wetter this way.

Knowledge is a fractal, just-percolating path between nihilism and totalitarianism

This is a tale of finding complexity and coming to terms with the world, partially. Better said, coming to terms with a little role of ours in the world, and how hard playing that role will inevitably be.

I recall my early times in Berlin when my motto was 'everything is a lie'. Even now from time to time I can't help that sentence slipping out my tongue. I was coming from a media delusion, a politics delusion, and I was confronting a University-scale scam and (once again) delusion; so I used to get drunk with friends, howl at the full moon -- which in Berlin is a bare tree laden with snow amid a desert parking lot, and repeat all over again 'this is a lie, my self is a lie, the rotting lungs of the city are a lie'. And I would doze off on a freezing concrete street until that yellow vodka would carry me home. I once lived on a 13th floor and I have memories of flying in through the window. I had abandoned myself to a hopeless nihilism.

The other extreme is being blindly sure of a truth impossible to grasp and is the essence of fascism, I have no doubt. How totalitarian this sentence was!

My little revelation was that neither position is true. It might seem small, but all of a sudden loads of dilemmas appear clear to me:

• (Wo)men is born neither evil nor good: it is a complex thing in between. 
• Evil (or good) in (wo)men is neither born nor fostered: it is a complex thing in between. 
• Media do neither lie nor tell the truth: it is a very complex thing in between. 
• There is definitively some truth and use in politics, as obvious as it is that all politicians lie. We must wring them out and out as a wet cloth to extract some of that use to the world. 
• Things are neither relative nor have they got an absolute existence of their own. Relativism is relative and difficult to size. Things exist just on a glimpse, always there and always about to vanish as if the world were quantum in nature. 

Summing up: things are complex, very complex!! And I largely recognize the defeat against this Nature in the younger, more frustrated drunkard playing chess with the shadows of the Berlin wall. A fawn hidden in the woods, its heart a nest for a dove flapping with fear. So easy to abandon ourselves to either nihilism or totalitarianism. But acknowledging that the world is complex paves a tiny, little way in front of us. The reality is complex and we must work hard to extract truth and knowledge, to make serve our work. Reality is not pointless, it is very difficult to grasp. 

The Drought in New Mexico

    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.

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.

There I go: http://www.santafe.edu/

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!

EXTREMO Y DURO

http://www.extremoduro.com

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? 

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.