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.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Hoist
Ines in the aftertime
I know it’s fated. Sooner than later I will go through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I will have to work it through her precious innocence lost, her first boyfriend, her first break up crisis, her first rebellious declaration of independence, her first everything lousy that might come to her along the way.
And I will see in all her temporary failures, my own failure to fix the world perfect, to model an ideal partner in her mind or to show myself imperfect enough, protecting a romantic mystery of her own making.
And after the mandatory time of grief, I hopefully will find in her come back the comfort of a father, the balmy and cleansing remains of blamelessness, the colors of her childhood kindling the arctic crisp of gray hair and skepticism. And finally, I will feel grateful and enraptured with love and pride, as I’ve always been.
Transilience
How did so many people walk away from the casualty with barely a scratch?
Who of them was the angel?
The girl in Grampian
Every night she wakes sitting straight up, cold sweating, heart pounding, holding on to the sheets as she were being sucked by a black hole in the middle of the tiny apartment in suburbia, full of cockroaches and damp blots that she rents for three hundred euros a month. She gets up, awfully dog-weary, heats some water for instant coffee in the microwave, puts the TV on and dopey drifts infomercials until the daylight breaks through the only window. Then she gets a shower, drags her body to a bar and asks for a true espresso, a bagel and the newspaper.
At seven o clock she takes the bus to the factory and begins her job of chunking and fitting recently slaughtered chicken into trays. You get the picture. Nobody knows where is her accent from.
After the premiere of Stieg Larsson’s Men who hate women, several co-workers have marked her resemblance to Lisbeth Salander.
She is too tired to go to the cinema, too tired to get the book and read it.
She leaves the factory knowing that tonight, like every night, she will wake up cold sweating, heart pounding, holding on to the sheets with the alcoholic mouth smell of her father speaking dirty upon her face permeating the bedclothes, quenching her throat with an asthmatic wheeze. She moves along the sidewalk under flickering lights praying for a truce, wishing not to hear her mother saying you are making a great fuss about it, wishing for all to end before needing to make it end herself in drastic manners.
You know what? – asks a teenager in the bus. You are much alike a swedish actress I’ve seen in a movie yesterday. Have you ever read Men who hate women or The girl who played with fire?
She shakes her head pensively while holding on to the handrail and gets off again into the chill of the night.
She would have never notice Lisbeth Salander’s face in the billboards if they weren’t so insistent about it.
A methhead is curled up by the front door, his lanky body not more alive than a roadkill.
She heats some water in the microwave and pours an instant soup in the mug to keep him from freezing. She also lets him a blanket.
Maybe she is stronger than she thought she was.
Maybe tomorrow she will get the book or go to the cinema.
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.
Beauty for granted
“Ahora tú, no dejes de hablar”
Some people wagered his name for years in betting pools of early evanescence, but a couple of weeks ago, he sort it out the best he could to sing La chica de ayer in a crappy and mawkish TV show called The battle of the decades. After the song, almost breathless, visibly weak and ready to drop, he answered a hollow question of the host about why should the 80′s had to win over the 50′s.
That was his last public appearance.
Watching the video I see Anabel, one of the eliminated contestants of the last edition of OT (a kind of cross between Pop Idol and Big Brother), visibly touched by his performance and his frailty.
It’s almost an oxymoron to see Antonio in that context, the heartbreaking afterglow of his talent in such a splurge of mediocrity. However, Anabel’s expression was surprisingly honest and maybe for the first time, I found in her something worthwhile to look at. Perhaps it was not her merit, but his shy and wounded gift.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things and he had the outstanding capacity to bring that love to the surface through his compositions and his presence.
One cannot run away from weakness. It’s all about fighting it out or perishing and he was a light flyweight warrior of his own brittleness, yet always ready to let the blaze unfold.
I read somewhere that grace comes often clad in the dusky robe of desolation and in this case it’s true without question and beyond doubt. He struggled inner demons and he had a great craving for ingravity, but he wasn’t as sad as we imagined him to be. He wanted to have a child, he was about publishing a book of poems, he was excited about his new album, and even though his body was running away through the back stairs, he didn’t want to die and he didn’t mention death in any of his songs.
I’m afraid that whatever I write about him in the aftermath of his departure, will result in a platitude.
The truth is that his two guitars were close to the coffin, available to whoever wanted to say good bye with a few accords but no one had the guts to do so, as if the only acceptable eulogy was silence.
We owe him more sweetness and kindness than we are able to pay.
The biggest curse of our times is to take beauty for granted until it’s irrevocably lost.
That great golden hive of the Invisible
Some days after knowing about the cheating, I went to a mountain retreat with some friends.
We bathed naked in the river, we had miso soup for dinner and meditated in behalf of clarity.
Rilke wrote that all insights occur after the fact: I was scared to death, but feeling relieved by
dissolution.
My hands felt unbearably hot and I was struggling hard with a lagged need for physical
containment. In that warmth I flash backed the dilapidation, the rust, the spoilage, the washout and wreck of the previous years.
The one you live with can be a spiritual master or a scrubby guru.
The one you live with can bring your essence to light or brush truth and beauty aside until you become a dead one walking.
Since then I’ve experienced a progressive turnaround and major adjustments.
I love my daughters and my girl beyond what I thought possible.
I arised refreshed from doubt and surrendered to photography as a life-long calling.
Everything is there, disturbingly appealing to the senses, reclaiming the lost years from precariousness and seclusion, ready to bloom.
Antiphon
I’ve gone through several nightmarish relationships in my life. As a result, my self esteem was damaged beyond remedy. The women I used to be attracted to vaccined me against any kind of complacency and self-absorption and made healthy vanity the fastest shortcut to shame.
Photography became the only acceptable excuse to demand approval and attention, the only source of comfort and relief, the emergency exit, the raw material of new beginnings after emotional downfalls and quakes. The spinal cord of my identity.
And suddenly, the biggest stroke of luck: her adventitious appearance, the unpredictable realization of all emotional needs. The struggle for survival mutated into another kind of primal drive: to give her something of great value in return. To let myself be noticed and succeed, putting this single virtue to a test. To clean up the mess left by past sentimental choices, working hard to earn her magnificent silences, giving the world something as precious as what I had been given.
I barely wheathered the storm until she reclaimed my name from obscurity. Maybe one must be completely emptied in order to be worthy of true grace.
I remember the first time touched her skin with my lenses, long before we really found each other, so even though times of economic recession are not the easiest for artists, I trust the means to find me like she did. Photography is not about distinction and celebrity, but love returning to the world like an antiphon. The privilege of channeling cardinal revelation through ordinary things.