You can even harvest it from the floor at dawn. That harsh Asphalt Flower. When the streets are not so dead and the people not so gone, there's that little plastic breath that someone has forgotten or let drop out of weariness. You can get it anywhere else before, of course. Don't need to hide that much. Guess a pocket or a hand, bet a price. Lick, dip, drink. The noon gets fueled up as you become field and crowd. And at some point you get back to your flat, with your jaw knocked out, a sense of boredom perhaps, your arms weight and your feet weight as well, you let yourself fall into the bed and gesticulate the air with your tired arm until you reach for your worn-out blanket that some hustle last week has burned with a cigarette. He didn't intent to, he just didn't mind the ashes and that's how... And do you ever think about delivering children to this world or to that city or that bitch? Did you know there are snipers on the roofs outside with their only eye wide open spilling out fire? Have you read about the girl, they kicked her head like a rugby ball with their heavy boots, heavy like a heartless cyborg they are planning to build in the near future or past? You will read about that tomorrow anyway, when you wake up with your tongue so dried as sandpaper, your arms still tired, your heart just pumping enough for you to reach to the internet device. You will learn that she had tattooed pink Mai one in her tongue and that she was showing them her tongue with smile and happy, with a rose still attached to its long stem between her boobs and down her trousers, with each hype on the street quietly exciting her clitoris. And what about back home? When you go there to your sadness and you learn about the thefts and the prostitution around you, the prostitution where it is not wanted and where it was never necessary but indolence made it necessary. You remember those family trees you used to draw on the streets with a white chalk, and you learn the fathers and the uncles and the big cousins are also drawing their long white lines up the trunk down to the leaves playing so free in the nearby square. Every night some walk back home. You can guess a dark shadow on that dark dark night. A night made of hands you know. If you are not stepping on the floor it looks like you can beat your shadow. That's why I jump up the stairs to my house back home, and then I shut the heavy door and not in my house but usually a jesus christ sign or something blesses you so there isn't any more night anymore.
Saturday, December 28, 2013
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Tijeras
Around the 1600s a gang was shipped away. It was likely comprised by peoples of the worst kind. That was the age of the conquistadores in what was later called the wild west and now plainly the west. They were led by Coronado or Oñate guys in suicide seeks for gold up north the Neo Méxican desert. I can't help but picturing something close to Aguirre's expedition in Herzog's film Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Indeed, I visualize something worst.
Those gangsters, criminals, renegades of their homelands didn't find any gold and some survivors to the long marches settled down around the Santa Fe area just to endure a torment similar to the fictional 40-year long Jew fable in the desert. Only this one for real and longer, with the whole folk continually at the edge of starvation.
They were just the first ones. Waves of renegados kept coming. Unlike the original ones, the later wouldn't necessary be convicts or mass murderers anymore, but disgraced families striving for a better life. The frontiers here don't matter, despite what politicians say. To be precise, they matter at the individual scale, at which human evil conjures itself to craft some living hell. But at a larger scale people come and go and they stay and go again. And you have these that remain since 400 years ago. These trying to trace a dividing line between us and them, inside a country where everything is mixed together. And they do so as in any war, as you do to mark any frontier: with a flag. In this case, with the Spanish flags.
Every once a year the great, great, ..., great grandsons of the pioneers parade around the Santa Fe plaza showing off the coat of arms of their families, wearing funny costumes, and looking proud and down on the more recent wetbacks. They hold themselves as the pure race, and their language is heralded as the pristine, Cervantine Spanish. They despise the wets as fool, lazy, and degraded versions of their blood after they were mixed with some Xocolatectl Aztec wives bellow the river.
As in Herzog's Aguirre, the role of the church can't be dismissed -- «You know, my child, for the good of our Lord, the church was always on the side of the strong.» When I moved into the gas station I noted all the paintings of saints and crosses and our lord jesus christ. It was a pitiful station with a little side food store, somewhere at the route 66 at its passing by Tijeras. So decadent and filthy that I immediately loved it. "Where are you from, Sir?" People call me Sir here, specially after I grew my Movember mustache. "Spain. " It hurts to say that word describing myself. All the sins my country is responsible of weight too much on the tip of my tongue. "¡Oh! ¡España! ¡Mis antepasados vinieron de allí! ¡De Lorca, Murcia! ", said the man behind the counter. "Ah sí? Sus padres? Sus abuelos? " "Noo, mis antepasados en el 1610. " He said proudly how his ancestors were something like the governors at the lands on war -- outsiders of the Spanish crown anyway, I guessed. "Nosotros fuimos de visita a España hace años" the woman said from behind, her eyes wide open and overflowing with hope "con el Padre, ¿sabe? El Sacerdote. " They were talking with a Méxican accent, or with an accent that I couldn't tell apart from the Méxican anyway. And they were happy with my presence and they saw how very important their place on earth had been for these 400 years and "¡Buen viaje, Señor!" they said and "no se olviden que nosotros estamos aquí" and I left weaving bye and I drove away and looked back in the rear-view mirror. The gas station, diminished in its reflection, laid pathetic as if seeded deep on the dirty snow, abandoned forever in the empty desert as a spaceship drifting away and with its last two survivors trapped in, the ambassadors of a kingdom that never existed.
Those gangsters, criminals, renegades of their homelands didn't find any gold and some survivors to the long marches settled down around the Santa Fe area just to endure a torment similar to the fictional 40-year long Jew fable in the desert. Only this one for real and longer, with the whole folk continually at the edge of starvation.
They were just the first ones. Waves of renegados kept coming. Unlike the original ones, the later wouldn't necessary be convicts or mass murderers anymore, but disgraced families striving for a better life. The frontiers here don't matter, despite what politicians say. To be precise, they matter at the individual scale, at which human evil conjures itself to craft some living hell. But at a larger scale people come and go and they stay and go again. And you have these that remain since 400 years ago. These trying to trace a dividing line between us and them, inside a country where everything is mixed together. And they do so as in any war, as you do to mark any frontier: with a flag. In this case, with the Spanish flags.
Every once a year the great, great, ..., great grandsons of the pioneers parade around the Santa Fe plaza showing off the coat of arms of their families, wearing funny costumes, and looking proud and down on the more recent wetbacks. They hold themselves as the pure race, and their language is heralded as the pristine, Cervantine Spanish. They despise the wets as fool, lazy, and degraded versions of their blood after they were mixed with some Xocolatectl Aztec wives bellow the river.
As in Herzog's Aguirre, the role of the church can't be dismissed -- «You know, my child, for the good of our Lord, the church was always on the side of the strong.» When I moved into the gas station I noted all the paintings of saints and crosses and our lord jesus christ. It was a pitiful station with a little side food store, somewhere at the route 66 at its passing by Tijeras. So decadent and filthy that I immediately loved it. "Where are you from, Sir?" People call me Sir here, specially after I grew my Movember mustache. "Spain. " It hurts to say that word describing myself. All the sins my country is responsible of weight too much on the tip of my tongue. "¡Oh! ¡España! ¡Mis antepasados vinieron de allí! ¡De Lorca, Murcia! ", said the man behind the counter. "Ah sí? Sus padres? Sus abuelos? " "Noo, mis antepasados en el 1610. " He said proudly how his ancestors were something like the governors at the lands on war -- outsiders of the Spanish crown anyway, I guessed. "Nosotros fuimos de visita a España hace años" the woman said from behind, her eyes wide open and overflowing with hope "con el Padre, ¿sabe? El Sacerdote. " They were talking with a Méxican accent, or with an accent that I couldn't tell apart from the Méxican anyway. And they were happy with my presence and they saw how very important their place on earth had been for these 400 years and "¡Buen viaje, Señor!" they said and "no se olviden que nosotros estamos aquí" and I left weaving bye and I drove away and looked back in the rear-view mirror. The gas station, diminished in its reflection, laid pathetic as if seeded deep on the dirty snow, abandoned forever in the empty desert as a spaceship drifting away and with its last two survivors trapped in, the ambassadors of a kingdom that never existed.
Thursday, November 21, 2013
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.
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.
Monday, October 14, 2013
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:
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.
Monday, June 17, 2013
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.
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.
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!
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