If you want a short-cut to enlightenment, there is no quicker route than looking at a mirror, listening to your secret judgments or finding purpose or use in any unwise step.
Don’t panic, bear with composure, sit up, sit tight, delay the common belief, let go of the stroke of vanity and assumption. Wait and see.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Faux pas
Five boyfriends later
The street dancer was not an especially sensitive man. He didn’t do the dishes, he peed over the toilet like most men and certainly was not the kind of guy that cares about feelings, but openly liked chubby women without any trace of macho pride, hesitation or embarrassment.
Our relationship began with a flirtatious compliment about my bosom when I stopped by to applaud their break dance performance and that same afternoon I lost virginity on a filthy bed in a filthy patera lodge near Lavapiés.
At the beginning I felt pressured to go further than a skinny girl would go, but soon I realized that my ample flesh was arousing enough for him. He showed no interest at all in risky practices and seemed perfectly content with a few basic positions, so I had no need to undergo cheap book- learned Kama Sutra twists. Condoms were not an issue either and he never asked for a blowjob, yet he loved going downwards and my beefy thighs around his neck.
I felt one lucky chick, the only among my messmates that got a big O the first time. For a buxom hangdog like me, such an early ravishment was almost an assumption of superiority.
Following my intuition, I never discussed our relationship, but after five months of fine carnal romance and sharing a rotten and bad smelling den with a throng of Colombian, Moroccan and Nigerian outlanders, I forgot the odds and my anemic self esteem and brought our future into question.
He said he was earning the money to go back to Michoacán on time for his wedding to someone called Angélica. Then he opened his wallet and show me a shabby photograph of a raw-boned, flat-chested and undersized Mexican girl.
Although speechless, I pushed the question out with great effort: “Did you ever love me?”.
He didn’t temporize: “No, you just make me horny”.
I dressed up holding tears, I said good bye and left the Embassy of Cockroaches with any idea of where to go.
Five boyfriends later I just fake it to work it through, and still miss him like crazy.
The proved notion of my power to make a man steamy is the only thing that keeps me going.
Sheep behavior
Stupid behavior is domain-dependent and a puzzling paradox: one can be a genius in a given area and act like a natural-born fool, a jerk, a moron or a cretine in another.
But sheep behavior is even more a mystery: the crowd buying in the same things, the same myths, the same lies, the same political ideas, the same religion. The crowd going to the same places, expecting the same unrealistic things, watching the same cretinous reality shows and acclaiming the same mediocre, insipid and artless idols just to go on belonging to the disquieted majority as it were a merit of some kind, a contest of purposeless renunciation, the Herculean harvest of an inexistent self. The crowd picking Paris Hilton or Chiki Chiki as buffoons and role models or making Antonio Vega a posthumous best selling just because he is now dead.
Playground reality show
On the second day of the pre-school year he was confronted with the perplexity of his own bloodlessness and vulnerability. “Nobody is all-powerful, you better learn to fight your own battles” was the only comfort he received at home when arriving with a purple eye and a blood stained jumper.
Six months later, the muddle of all fears had evolved in an almost obsessive commitment to survival. And it was all about that: being the strongest in the playground and the one destroying rivals at any means.
At ten he attempted rape over an older girl and things have only degenerated since his first real sociopathic endeavor.
Now tell me about the making of Attila the Hun: was it lack of love or too much television?
No place higher
They nursed their hatred for years until that Bloody Saturday.
They observed each other with animosity across the street, day after day, year after year.
They held their creeping flesh until a sparkle of aggression, a minor fault agitated the latent stockpile of scorn and curse.
Ten were shot down in a few minutes, six of them little kids.
After cleaning the blood spill from the pavement, and releasing the shiny balloons to the apex, the deadly countdown launched off again. Widows and comfortless mothers cried alone in dark bedrooms and nothing but the crickets disturbed the slow, silent and peaceful summer.
Let the night do the talking
Two girls shared an extended banal conversation at the end of a dusty wooden counter.
Three Victorian cracked mirrors reflected their faces and the busy street behind the window.
I spent a long time watching the scene, while waiting for her to come back from the ladies’ room.
The dust on the counter was part of the decoration, as well as the alabaster pendulums hanging from the ceiling, the paper glasses containing remains of tea and coffee. Everything seemed so artificially old and shabby, so London á la mode that I wondered why we hadn’t pick Prague as our destiny.
Later, we had dinner in a café where Formica-topped tables that hadn’t changed in fifty years. I looked at her pensively munching a serving of ham omelet and chips. My moodiness banished in less than a second. She touched the corner of her mouth as if I had seen a drop of mayo or whatever. She did it so graciously that Picadilly at dusk felt the perfect place at the perfect moment to me.
I suddenly remembered Clea’s Alexandria, the making of a world through love, the remembrance of things half forgotten and I noticed my new biography replacing the old one only for her.
A struggle against conformity
It amazes me how the fragments of the moment always manage to fit together in spite of all the defective maneuvers and devices of the mind to impose a Procrustean strict conformity to what we are supposed to see and feel.
Meaning appears beyond the image, fading as we attempt to state it as if reality had a defense mechanism of its own.
The two girls with hair extensions, heavy makeup and deep racks passed by the boy without noticing him.
I shot the camera from intuition and even though I can’t remember what I was thinking at the time the shutter was released, I can easily relate to the boy’s gawk: we can only see what we already believe and perpetuate the rule in order to shrink the anxiety associated with desire and to avoid the emotional insulation resulting from rejection.
Robert Doisneau wrote that one’s got to struggle against the pollution of intelligence in order to become an animal with very sharp instincts – a sort of intuitive medium – so that to photograph becomes a magical act, and slowly other more suggestive images begin to appear behind the visible image, for which the photographer cannot be held responsible.
Maybe none of the girls were worthwhile looking at (dull, average, unexceptional), but at this moment, the boy’s glance yields a return: a foreknowing vision beyond them.
Thunder and shadow
I’m suddenly aware of my true artistic purpose: to survive the temptations of the past opening up in blatant integrity. The yes, the no, the not yet are still very challenging as my nature is a paradox of mental impatience coupled with a physical lack of verve. But everything moves at such high speed, and the moment fades as fast as my camera’s shutter so I have no time for defending old beliefs and assumptions. What comes up to my eye is reckless, and sometimes offensively bold, but if I censor the input or pay too much attention to the detail, if I black out in allegiance, trying to appear perfect, trying to get public attention, I become part of the majority that loses the day and closes the window to the wondrous failure that art is, that love is, that life is.
Despite the collateral damage, I was able enough to bounce, to take the leap, to bear off from the death house and wave my flag of rebellion from the distance. I’m still awfully scared, but I’ve never felt so mindful, so willing to put up with the truth of what is at hand. Faithfully, precisely, immediate and even religiously. So ready to conjure reality in it’s wholeness: thunder and shadow.