A naked bonzo burned to ashes upon my retina, kindly agreeing to pose near the book stands.
Within that brief time lag I was a nobody, too. We barely talked. Nothing personal, nothing cardinal, nothing transcendental along with the click of the shutter, although he left a fading scent of selflessness, the dust of pilgrims and a silent, subversive trail of questions behind.
Would you erase yourself to write, to do or to give a poem?
Would you agree to have a disposable name?
Would you chop off your feet not to step over other people’s shadow?
Would you reject any private right or comfort if it not shared with everyone else?
Would you throw yourself into the candent abyss of the unthinkable?
Can you set fire to the house of incest?
Can you do without the countless gains of your affliction?
Who would you be without the ones you blame?
Are you daring enough to drop your parent’s dogma?
What if not finding what you are looking for means finding yourself?
What keeps you from letting everything fall away for things to be as easy, wondrous and simple as they should be if words didn’t exist, if you didn’t have a name or even a life to call yours?
If all wisdom could be merged in one koan or mitzvah, capable of answering to the basic human inquests, kindling good deeds and random acts of grace, maybe his life stance would suit the universal bon mot: just be poetry and give it away outrageously, blazing up through every moment of miraculous possibility.
Then he answered an incoming call to his cellular.
Ordinary, tenderhearted, unangelic, ready to be no more.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
Ceci n´est pas un Jodorowsky
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.
One firm spot on which to stand to move the earth
They teach me what I need to come fully alive and how to move from one moment to another as if life were a scavenger hunt.
They are also the center of gravity, the axis, the omphalos, the pivot, the transversal line that bind my worst fears: to lose them, to see them lost or hurt, to lose myself without having anchored and supplied their basic rights and needs.
Sometimes I get into some sort of inner do-or-die state of mind, a sudden divergence in my habitual style of slow cautious progress, and get antsy about shyness and this apparently natural inclination to underachievement, despite the flaming passion that drives me to photography.
It’s a wild, ambitious, greedy thing: I want a big house (for them to spend the weekends and holidays with me), I want to be famous and recognized as an artist (for them to be proud of me), I want to buy expensive things (for them to feel special), and I’m ashamed of my banal desires all at once. I’m all hollow scared of whatever the wire pulling that might may make them feel fatherless, insecure or unsupported, but also to neglect the artistic values I go after and I’m trying to be loyal as a legacy.
I take the train and travel a great deal of miles every Friday so I can give them the only richness I can offer now: my love, my physical presence, my voice soothing their growing pains and angst, and then I travel or drive back to arrive on time, have a shower and go to work, utterly exhausted.
What does it take to be seen as the only thing you can be and to earn money doing the only thing you love to do in the world? It depends so much on other people’s perception and priorities. Should I sacrifice my vocational dictum to get that money? What would I be teaching them, if so?
Most of the things beautiful and valuable and the people I couldn’t live without, I found during times and situations that demanded a lot from me or pushed me on and over this comfort zone of mine that I seldom probe. But the greatest values and lessons put before me (truth, trust, patience, surrender, love, integrity to face what I am and what I want, standing up for it even if it annoys other people and baffles my ‘likeability’) have arised from struggle and discomfort.
Robert Frost wrote that he had been through a long standing lover quarrel with life.
Maybe I can’t give my girls all the amenities that money can give (yet), but I can be an advocate of their blooming affair with upcoming opportunities and travel a ridiculous batch of miles just to hearten their beauty and breath in the audacious wisdom of their untouched instinct, and to bed cover them before sleep, in such a deep gratitude for their teaching and their existence, which is my most powerful source of motivation so far.
Maybe in the future they can read these lines and find in them the proof of their preciousness, that firm spot on which I stand to move the earth.
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.
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.
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.
The Vanished
“You will soon travel far and away” said the gipsy, carefully examining the lines of her hand. Amelia looked straight to her eyes with a frown forehead, as if it sounded ridiculous, allowing the ritual only because she had always been superstitious about gipsy spells.
The weird and chunky woman agitated a small bunch of rosemary tied with a string all over her body while murmuring and humming some sort of cryptic litany. Then she spit to the ground and opened a rough, cracked hand for money.
Amelia was annoyed with the unexpected nuisance and so eager to go on with her errands that she gathered the small change of the wallet and the pockets and gave it to her, vanishing through the corner of the street, wrapped in a shabby brown overcoat.
A street cam captured the last trace of her at half past eleven. Nothing unusual, except for two arrows pointing directly to the figure, as if she were chosen.
Apparently, this is not the first and last case so far. Authorities are being cautious about it, to avoid social panic.
Lola, the eldest of her daughters and the only one that keeps her mother’s secrets doesn’t know about the others yet, so she fakes concern assuming that she has finally found the courage to leave. In her wildest fancies she could never have foreseen such a dauntless determination.
Tomorrow, checking the secret drawer where she has saved money for years -what an operative to change pesetas to euros when they run obsolete- she will change her mind and start to wonder where is Amelia, what happened to her, and what if she doesn’t come home.
Who is going to hang in there with Dad then.
Transilience
How did so many people walk away from the casualty with barely a scratch?
Who of them was the angel?