Fifty years ago, while in Harvard, John Cage went into a totally silent room, an echoic chamber. He didn’t expect to hear two sounds: his own nervous system working by itself, and the rumor of blood circulating. The reason he did not expect to hear those two sounds was that they were set into vibration without any intention on his part. That epiphanic experience gave his life a new North: the exploration of nonintention. If he wasn’t playing that music, who was? From then on, he composed music giving up making choices, and trading will for questions. He surrendered beauty to chance, tossing three coins six times, yielding the sixty four hexagrams of I Ching to get the great-circle course of harmonics.
Sometimes, when I take photographs, life stops, the noise of the mind stops, and I can only hear my own blood stream, my body working in automatic pilot, the click like a gunshot, the vive senses (plus intuition) brought together to a single setting, into a single figure. In those moments I wish I could handle the process at will, play it slow motion, be my own witness in awe, in love. Mute.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
The anechoic chamber
Bipartisan
“Who the fuck are you calling a failure?”
The verbal lash hastily hit me down to the core, while waiting for my beer at the counter of a tavern, after doing some errands.
We all keep one or two alternative selves carefully hidden, and most of the time they faithfully assume the burden of our forbidden desires, our shameful secrets, our bitter regrets. But sometimes, when defenses are weak, or the body is tired, they turn anarch and claim their rights and unmet needs.
All of a sudden, one clearly can hear their voices, and sense their anger, and notice the power that dark emotions hold, and the only mentally sound choice is to remain immobile, passive, almost vegetative, until the uprising cools down.
Enraged intentions go away one sip of beer at a time. You pick yourself together, pay the tapas, fix the discreet smile, the good guy looks, and walk away counting the paving stones. It’s just a flare-up, the beastly attempt of truth to reset its order. As it comes, as it goes.
The annoying telephone operator will spend two hours talking in circles before restoring your connection, and you’ll be affable, polite, complaisant, as if she saved your life. And the bipartisan, the angry one, the deprived will blow the coals inwards and ask for antacids. You probably saw this thing on television, The United States of Tara. Taking the others out regularly would provide great relief, but we live in the land of hypocrisy. Airs and graces, affectation, double-dealing, lip service, double-dealing and falseheartedness. For the common good.
There’s a cafe where you get discounts for the most offensive insult. No wonder plots relish on madness.
Bareback ride
It was Henri Bergson who wrote that the eye only sees what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
I think that the eye is only blessed by true beauty when the heart is ready to receive (and honor) whatever comes up, either if it’s beautiful or not.
There’s a powerful analogy between photography and love. The more I love, the better I see, the better I catch up the marvel moment, the brighter reality shows up on paper and screen.
I felt the horses galloping over my head, and the intense smell of dung and grass all over the racecourse. The sun was hitting vertical on the tracks and the noise of the hoofs from ground level waved electric through my body like an approaching stampede. I was totally in awe, riding my high, feeling so alive, so receptive, eager to absorb the moment and never let it go.
I’m not one of those people who go in raptures often. I’m quite latent, quite unaroused, secretly and silently passionate.
How much I owe to the woman who opened me up to this kind of bewilderment, striking truth into the eyes I now resist to shut.
It impresses me to no end the capacity of her presence to change my filters, to domesticate time and light in behalf of a clearer perception, to change the trajectory of my artistic purpose, to put my fears on hold, to make me proud of myself (as capable of love her in return, as deserving of her company), to encourage me to risk beyond comfort zone, turning all things threatening into potentially warmhearted, welcoming, hospitable ones, by melting my suits of armor and giving me my curiosity and my adventurous drive back.
I went into the shower, pleasantly tired of living fully. Just like a kid or a lover.
So lost
At the firtst sight, she reminded me Jane March cooking naked in Bruce Willis’s kitchen.
I didn’t even realize that my wife was about to arrive home with the groceries. Of course, she was not naked under a white apron with embroidery flounces and not baking cookies for me either, but I was speachless, paralyzed by her arrogance and candor to break into my kitchen like a burglar, covered only by a thin, almost transparent T-shirt, no bra, and a pair of jean shorts, soaking wet.
‘Who the hell are you?’ I asked in a harsh whisper, as if someone could hear us.
She was leaning on the marble worktop and adopting a naughty, deceptively naive and seductive pose. After a calculated silent lapse she said ‘I’m so lost’.
Don’t ask me how a grown up man, a married man, a self-made man, a father, a responsible adult could let himself get caught in a trap like that. I have no clue. I used to be one of those claiming life sentence for child and teen sexual offenders.
She seemed like she used sex to get a fix, to ease some kind of deep emotional pain. She seemed to be hooked on it, she craved me like an addict craves drugs. And she acted older than sixsteen. I know it’s not an excuse, but she acted older than sixteen.
We did it in less than five minutes, fiercely. And in those five minutes I had a blowjob, a soggy hookup and a back door raid better than anything before in my whole life. I came into her, groaning like a beast. Such a bang, such a seizure, such a liberation. The garage door opened just when I was making up my suit. My wife was asking help with the bags.
All of a sudden I realized she wasn’t there anymore. I came out from the trance like if someone punched my stomach. My heart was pounding wildly, my face felt feverish, and my clothes were wet. I filled a jar with water and I smashed it against the tiles, trying to arrange a plausible scenario to justify my messy looks. My wife didn’t notice the tiny footsteps, but she found a bra on one of the deckchairs by the pool and nail tracks in my back a few hours later.
I am sleeping on the couch and she is giving me a silent treatment, while she decides if I deserve to be forgiven or not. And if you ask me if I deserve, I say I don’t.
But I can’t take her wet, tiny, juicy body off my mind. I can’t think about anything else.
It’s killing me.
The whisperer
Like a hunter, patiently awaiting for its prey, Carla spent fifteen years for him to exhaust his energy, his sexual drive, his hunger for all things expensive and exciting, his eleventh lover, his eleventh breakup, and finally, when he had been fired and gone through full-blown bankruptcy, and was bleeding from a coke-hole in his nasal septum, she approached him in the street, not far away from his attic and said hello.
Power driven men are the easiest to blackmail and put into trance.
Certainly, he didn’t care she was a little plump, he didn’t notice that she wasn’t his type of girl.
He couldn’t think about anything but their advantageous encounter and he couldn’t remember anything but that night she whispered him out from fear in the summer camp.
They spent the evening making an inventory of the last decade.
They moved together three weeks later.
He is dogmatic about the blessing that was to find his first love.
Don’t even try to change his mind about Carla. He will fire you.
Traveling lights
I’m pretty sure that true success (happiness) comes down to the decision to shift from frustration and fear to curiosity and fascination, and I always feel as if I am a step away from cloud nine, yet not knowing what is keeping me stuck or making me walk around with this heavy burden of uncertainty and half belief.
Next time maybe I will let things just flow at the speed of trust, abdicating all enquiry about the causes and reasons of the unfolding.
Hoist
She just does those things, totally unaware of her talent to stop time or defy gravity.
She humbles me, unraveling the wordless meanings of my own existence.
She makes me think about the way I cringe the dark emotions and how that avoidance is keeping me a homeless while joy is knocking the door at an empty house.
She doesn’t rush the moment, she just hangs on there like a tiny Isadora, dancing, flowing by still orstormy waters, awake, in awe, unconditionally present.
Two girls under the searchlight's beam
A searchlight’s beam passed by our temporary shelter. One of the girls was crying and the other one was holding her close so the soldiers couldn’t find us all. Neither of them spoke in the two hours that we shared the abandoned bakery. When the soldiers walked away, we silently sneaked into the nearest metro station, which was very crowded.
A lot of people had been shipped to an unknown destiny, including their parents, awakened in the middle of the night while the girls were staying at Oma’s. I knew the family. They owned a cyber café not far from the bank where I worked as a cashier. The girls were left behind due to a pen pusher’s mistake in the register, and that mistake might saved their lives. The eldest kept the other fed and warm, hidden in a warehouse until the new inspections and house searches make it risky to stay there.
The rumor of trains passing drowned our voices, but I clearly heard that amazingly strong and sweet girl saying: ‘Whatever it happens from now on, remember that you are much more stronger than you think. Don’t cry, don’t make noise, never let go of my hand. I don’t know how, but I will find Mom and Dad for you. Ok ?’
Then she gave her a piece of bread she kept in her school backpack. She wasn’t older than eleven. In the blink of an eye they weren’t there any more and I haven’t seen them again, but every time I feel tempted to abandon hope or cry quits, her voice comes to my mind, powerful, mighty and determined so I can’t help but bringing myself together to carry on.