Paint over your used canvas

If it is by nature, because of divine purposes or just another unwished consequence of capitalism, I actually don't know, but we humans are accumulators par excellence. We are surrounded by the culture of 'retain'. Digitally programmed to save it all. Even understanding the pointlessness of preserving a whole arsenal of useless things, we tend to think we might need some of it later on, and we keep them all. There is something awfully unhealthy in the fact that we need to retain everything we touch. As if having filled drawers and overflowing files could, ultimately, save us.

OK.

'Ephemeron, from the Greek, means something that last no more than a day (epi: on, for, hemera: day)'.

I've been lately taking special notice of a whole unpriced concept of art: the ephemeral art. Snow, ice and sand sculptures, body art, fireworks, gardening, magic fountains, graffiti, are all examples of artistic expressions that are not meant to last. Not that it is a groundbreaking brand new thing we have never heard of before, just think yourself as a child. I was used to build sand forts, and I should admit I still enjoy spending hours of patience and endurance to create useless sand barriers which will vainly fight against the fierce waves. Tons of hours spent that go down the drain. So what?

There is an explicit call to the idea of the transitory impermanence of life, something that as a rule, we humans avoid dealing with. It is to be found a strong relationship between the human being and the passage of time in the fleeting integrity of the structural components of those works of art. This is it, and it is now: later, probably it won't be anymore, and that's the whole point.

Figuring up our life stages as paintworks: we need to start painting over our used canvas! There is an urgent appeal to jettison the cursed habit of saving them all. It sounds so tough, after so much effort, thinking of letting our work go. And yes, I know, it has never been easy to experience, deeply, the devastating dispensability of being. But actually there is no need to throw them away. We just have to start over again, reuse them, paint over them.

Every brushstroke incorporates all the ones I made before. I mean: everything that I was and could not be brought me to this present place. The actual painting takes in everything that makes me be what I am. The actual painting includes somehow all the previous ones. It applies to relations, studies, decisions, failures: how many times we have changed course does not matter but for the purposes of what we are in the exact moment of now. Working on an only canvas allows us to step back and ask ourselves why. It helps us focus, clear out. Staying away from the damn habit of trying to understand it all. It helps especially to let go.

Social media as Snapchat or the recent update of Instagram moves in that direction, offering the chance to create a self-destroying message, placing first its content over its relevance in time. It makes me kind of comfortable and confident about the way the world is moving on now. It's time to stop feeding our fragile memories with poisonous chat histories and souvenirs' trunks, epic collections, which ironically stagnates us in a nostalgic whirlwind, no exit, no forward. Memories are an inevitable part of our lives, they bring almost bodily sensations (sometimes with uncanny acuteness) but come on, nothing can substitute a real experience, at no time. It avails me nothing to remember if I can't feel your skin in the end. Therefore no more brand new canvasses to buy, just the old and used ones to bring back. Provided, of course, we never run out of color and paint supplies.

The two brains

There are two brains.

There is one that we well know, inside the head, it thinks and reasons, analyzes, develops. It also imagines, magnifies, ennobles. Exposes. Spins, complicates, clarifies. Tells. All that, the brain in our head can do, and more.
However there is another brain we might miss. It is located in the chest. With another type of neurons. It feels. Some people call it heart.

There is something about the way our brain works that freaks me out. Sometimes it's just too hard to understand. The more I think about something, the further the matter darkens, the quicker the clarity vanishes, the more confused I feel. There are times in our lives, times of mental chaos. In those moments, urgent things normally impose over important ones. The threshold of endless arguments. We mistake a part for the whole. There is a beautiful saying in spanish that prays: don't let the tree prevents you from seeing the forest. Too many 'musts'. Too many contradictions. How to find peace in the midst of so much mess: the point.

When chaos reigns, it's time to pay attention to the other brain. The one located in the chest. It cannot think, analyze or explain. It can just say no or yes. But it should be enough, right? Listen to the second brain.

On transcending polarity

It is inevitable to polarize. From time immemorial, we have had the need to polarize and construct dualistic views of the world, perhaps as a human response in seeking to understand this complex environment in which we are placed. Just think about creation myths and religious stories—to quote an ancient example, but there are plenty—: they already showed these pairs of opposition: creator and created, light and shadow, day and night, sin and salvation. We still talk in terms of binarity as we continue to oppose objects and concepts to understand them: the sun and the moon, the city and the countryside, the left and the right. Even digital technologies are entirely based on two terms: ones and zeros. Over an above, human Modernity has done nothing but enhance this particular conception, mixing it with the idealization of order and progress and a cultural system that supports —and guarantees— this division.

Whether this binarization is fundamentally a structural issue of the world itself or whether it is a developed behavior of the human psyche is irrelevant to me. There is something clear: uncertainty generates anxiety, it is distressing, anguishing. Standing in front of the abstract, of the obtuse, of the vast, the inability to classify, it makes us blind, crazy, it stagnates us. We are not trained to enjoy this particular struggle between opposing forces. We humans have known, since archaic times, how to take advantage of the reduction of events' complexity to just a pair of alternatives and have turned it into a survival mechanism, which is particularly awesome. However, it looks like we are getting too accustomed to this simplification.

Grays —as the midpoints between black and white— mean complexity, the indeterminate, the incompleteness. Also, for the western culture that shapes us, grays translate directly into anguish due to the impossibility to choose between two differentiated elements, in this case black and white. The modern apparatus keep on making us think in terms of binarity. This symmetry has become even a quantum principle that now also runs our physics; just think about the latest scientific discoveries on matter and antimatter. A re-interpretation of Dante’s work The Divine Comedy actually mentions that "the darkest places in hell are reserved for those who are neutral in times of moral crisis". Why all this propaganda against the slightest idea of complexity?

Although duality works effectively when it comes to solving rational issues, it presents serious problems with regard to irrational affairs, often deeper and more relevant to our existence. The lack of polarity hence requires a higher critical analysis of what we know, see and experience, which does not sound particularly appealing to the world power system. Binarization continues to exert an obsolete hold on us if it stops us from looking beyond this duality of black and white, or good and bad. That's why it urges the need to transcend polarity.

There are probably other ways but this is what has worked for me so far —and I am sorry I always talk about my life, but the fact is I haven't lived another one—. If we assume that our understanding of the world depends on its deconstruction in pairs of opposition, then it is logical to choose one of two alternatives. Save that in order to transcend this polarity, I deeply believe it's necessary to explore both alternatives, and furthermore, carry to the extreme of them. There is somewhat controversial with the extremes and also a lot of modern propaganda against its implications. But I personally think that going to the extreme of possibilities is actually the best way to perceive the whole. It demands a high degree of commitment, a release of the organicity, an opening to the risk of exposing oneself to the self-awareness of being. The journey may become even magic when we find the opposites in total syncretism —the order in disorder, for example— and the whole conception of dualism starts to weaken: the two mutually exclusive alternatives show up together?

Openness to radical change is not seen as an alternative anymore, but as a consequence in the search of transcending polarity. Of course it's clear we have to think about what we're willing to lose, to let go, but not necessarily overthink. After all, there is no thing such as pure state of the subject, moreover, if something is actually true, it is the capacity of the subject to be affected by everything. We are so social, so created by the coercive apparatus, so assembled, that we find it almost impossible to think about a range of possibilities that breaks away from what we and society expect from us. These limits are closely related to the polarization model that runs our critical thinking.

If we are able to spot this slight deviation, this shift, this variation in our natural organicity, it probably means that somewhere there is a positive perturbation: time to take advantage of it, time to start exploring. Polarization is essential, as long as we do not just simply choose one of the poles but transcend carrying both alternatives to the extreme in order to lead the emergence of a new wider and more complex understanding of the whole thing in question, and also of oneself, of course. The era of continuous change is paying off, especially in this quest to transcend polarity. But the willingness to make it happen is still the determining factor.

When the road disappears

More than two years have passed since my last entry. I have recently found myself reading some of my old posts, and for some moments I couldn't help feeling that they were written by other person than me. Time is nothing but distance, and now, when I read those entries, it becomes clear to me how far we can travel from our old selves as time goes by, even being in the same physical location.

Fortunately I started this year travelling, and after being devoured by the most imposing corners of Patagonia, I wanted to share what I felt down there, which I believe is in tune with the beginning of a very special year for most of the people that surround me.

I would dare to say that more than light beings, humans are movement beings (which would be pretty much the same anyway). There is something about the way we move and what leads us to move, and I'd like to call it here 'the road', just to be clear in the metaphor. So, there is this certainty under our feet, the road we follow, with different intensities, more or less passionate, more or less confident, but still there: the road. If there is a road, therefore there is a goal, there is a destination, projects, ambitions, just movement, and when we move, we often have a kind of marked road underneath us. But recently, I have come across the thought that sometimes we put so much attention on the road, that it makes us unable to see where are we actually heading to.

But beyond that, the big thing comes when the road forks, or even worse, when it disappears. How difficult it is to keep us as movement beings when we can't descry the road! On a small scale, I felt this uncertainty when the trail vanished in the middle of a forest day-trekking in Fireland. There we were, standing still at the end of the road, at the beginning of the real world, looking forward but unable to move even a toe. Of course it took us not long to start walking our own path, avoiding swamps and passing through tunnels of fallen trees. What happened: we had to switch our source of confidence, what takes time, of course, and the bigger the scale, the more time it takes to unblock the fears and get back into the ring.

On the flight back home, it was extremely cloudy and I thought of the pilots, trying to catch sight of any hint that could locate them in the space. The cabin has to turn very very mystical when the plane is shrouded in clouds so thick that impede any vision. Even for them, the road disappears. The have to switch their sources of confidence: they can't trust their senses any longer, since those become fuzzy and confusing, but still they have other ways to feel that they are on the right path. There is no fear.

When the road disappears, one feels itself small. Roads make world look smaller, certainty makes world look smaller. As soon as the path vanishes and darkens, we feel tiny, minimum, fragile, but part of a huge expanding universe though. It puts us in a place where our boundaries, in communion with the outside, are effaced, and we cannot do anything but cultivate ourselves and grow. And once we dispel all our fears, we are able to move again. That absence of fear is the closest thing to God I've experienced in recent years, and in the Andes, in the middle of nowhere, it becomes stronger and emotional.

This year comes to me as a year of uncertainty. A kind of tabula rasa, empty. Far away from all the previous ones. I feel that what is certain today can change dramatically tomorrow. Everything changes, but actually. The evidence is everywhere. I've visited yesterday La Menesunda, a 1965 mythic work of the Argentine art’s history by Marta Minujin, which has been recreated at the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires. Anyone in Buenos Aires should visit it, mainly to feel this discomfort of the sudden, of the surprise, but also to realize how comfortable it becomes the uncertainty, so postmodern, so hedonist. This year appears as a year of uncertainty: which means, I need to switch my source of confidence. That's why, when I look back in time, those old entries on my blog strikes me as being remote and distant. There was a road, and now it's disappeared.