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.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
That great golden hive of the Invisible
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.
Catenary
To Delia
I arrived before dawn, dead-tired from the 260 mile train trip and there she was: stunning beauty wrapped in messy sheets, offering arms and begging for cuddle.
Imagine Leonard Cohen in the darkest angle of the room, singing Suzanne, imagine me fed with tea and oranges, imagine the girl that said “Come in, I’ll give you shelter from the storm” in Bob Dylan’s song. Imagine both girls and better them, make their skin whiter and softer and give them a miraculous talent for quietude and imagine me lost in her body, feeling the whole scene somewhat unreal.
Take two extremes of this love in solemn silence, supported at its ends and acted on only by its own weight. Take us to the deepest realms of your mind and give us the joys of Sunday morning, the hush of night, the auspicious ways of the shipwrecked, the statuelike disposition of eternity and forget everything else.
We both had to get up and commute to work.
Mondays shouldn’t exist.
Stripping naked at the gates of Assisi
Photography is my primary coping behavior.
I take photographs of what I’m scared to own, lose or let go of.
I take photographs of what I fear or secretly wish to become.
I take photographs of cyclical nightmares.
I wordlessly beg for a proof of my deserving.
I hide behind the focus like a shy actor on stage.
Photography has also become my universal prayer, the multiple portrait of my flaws, the endless list of my unmet needs.
Photography makes me invisible so I can finally become visible in a figurative sense.
I get a grip on light so I can explain shadows.
Photography is for me the weird experience of being born, falling in love, falling out of love and then dying in one hundredth of a second.
Plate tectonics
Most of the people and things I love to the bones were beautiful, bountiful accidents at the very beginning. It would be risky to abridge memory without blotting out the essential. The true relationship between cause and effect is largelly concealed to the conscious mind.
My heart is the ball losing momentum before choosing black or red, odd or even and then falling on to the wheel. They used to sell cameras saying you press the button and we do the rest.
It never was that easy. The whole process takes so much responsibility that I fluctuate between elation and an overwhelming sense of failure from one click to the next.
Some days she arrives home from work totally worn-out. She barely drinks a glass of hot milk and passes away, chronically sleep deprived.
I stay awake with blurry eyes, looking at her, feeling like an impostor, wondering what happy chance put her in my way and how can I make myself deserving of such beauty.
While others spend hours playing X-Box or Wii, I have chosen impatience, expectancy, distress, distrust and fence-sitting fibrillation as my favorite entertainments. I take photographs of the other half of my whole. Starting from the bottom, attempting the way up.
I sometimes feel like things are starting to fall into place and suddenly I’m brutally assaulted by questions about my so called talent. Something goes really wrong with my self esteem.
Tailcoated men walk by the reflection I’ve built of myself on a fuzzy mirror.
Unravel
Trying to penetrate the feeling (entre lusco e fusco) I realized that my deepest craving as an author has always been hunting the story that I can’t write, but you can shoot. Writing is about chaining tentatives. Shooting is about stopping time just when the moment fades.