Mythopoetics

The construction of our myths, whether traditional or modern (scientific), did not follow a cosmic plan of progressive unfoldment. They are not, as Schelling thought, tautegoric expressions of an extra-human force wrapped around itself which becomes self-evident and acting in the course of time, knowing itself in the process, expressing itself through the physical means available and formed at that particular time. They are neither, as less pantheistically inclined minds thought, metaphors of an analogous extra-human reality, shadows of a true essence which convey reflected meanings which our petty minds can hardly understand, though we benefit from their eternal radiance in the filtered versions given to us by officials and priests. In order to have a metaphor, we need something which is not a metaphor to relate it to, a referent whose ontic nature is independent. Even if there was such a thing we could never tell, for its independence would make it independent from us, and therefor...

   Dejando que la pena hablara, dijo Vicente Aleixandre que amar era olvidar la vida. Mas ¿cómo olvidar lo que somos, y abandonar lo querido en las frías manos de la nada? Los años, que acumulan infortunios, torpezas y malevolencias en forma de hábitos e inercias de llantos, las heridas, que nos empujan a no recordar el dolor para poder seguir amando con aquella niñez del mar -o a apenas respirar-, oprimen con daños, exiliando el corazón cansado, extrañado de sí, acorralado entre fantásmicas fronteras donde sólo las lágrimas de opio son la ideal compaña y el consuelo.   ¡Qué famélico el amor que olvida muerte o vida en su delirio! Se ha de querer morir como se ha de querer vivir, siempre por amor a la vida. En un ya sin dioses universo, ningún sentido es mayor que hacer poema de los ojos compañeros, de los asombrados espejos solares por donde riela la voz y la vaga memoria de otras vidas.   Amar es creer que a la vida aún le queda otra canción por cantar, sea...

Most traditional mythologies have equated life to breath. Breath was considered to be something more than respiration, linked -in a tradition that goes back to myths of Anima Mundi- to some sort of universal life. In this context, death was the departure of such transcendental airy entity towards fabulous scenarios of different kinds. The link of breathing and the capacity for speech contributed for a further metaphysical development of the physiological act of oxygenation. The Parmenidean tradition in Greece, but especially the Aristotelian philosophy, linked life more to intelligence than to any other physiological action. In fact, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle declares life to be some sort of intelligence. This double link, to breathe and to intelligence, in their transcendental or materialistic interpretations, gave for centuries a cornerstone for the definitions of life. Even, in the practice of modern medicine up to the 1960’s, it was the loss of the capacity to breathe (toget...

  What is the meaning of the Kantian question in the sphere of the Lyrical Citizen ? Devoid of transcendental meaning, we are talking about ethical action under the narrative of domination of Human Rights. What do I do with my life, today, under the restraints of a wild system of production which leaves no time for personal development beyond the social persona which tradition, luck and effort offers me? In terms of the guilt/debt narrative that we inherited from parents and state, the answer to Kant is: simply pay your dues, be a slave and die (in that order, for suicide is an order disruptor). When you live chained to the inertia of old myths of domination there is no room for the ethical question, in fact, ethics has to be postponed to a future nowhere land of the blessed, whether supernatural or super-historico-materialist. For most, the ethical question is answered in immediate physiological terms of survival, a poor reply, a forgetful automatism. Grounded on our basic emotio...

     Breathing the depth of the starry night is stimulus enough to feel ataraxia . The whirlpool of movement and change in which my thoughts about the apeiron take shape in flowing words and metaphors detains when it encounters its silence. The concept is in Epicurus: mental imperturbability, a general desire for strifeless existence, a deep longing for a permanent homeostasis. I find particularly interesting the poetic and active dimensions of ataraxia , for the passive ones are also produce by morphine, or by any random process which ends up in a discharge of internal opiates, a mere blind experience in which there is not a symbolic creation which pushes life towards new frontiers.   In its endless negantropic fight, life looks for equilibria. To stop mental perturbation is to detain its energy demands: existence’s unceasing fire is temporally mitigated and we feel endorphinic peace. Such a negative liberation- mistaken by a road to immortality - if pursue...

The countercultural movements that have flourished all around the world since 2008 represent a new instance of a very old paradox of political metaphysics: the defense of a private realm of rights within a social structure of stratification. The paradox is produced by the fact that it is precisely the structure of stratification what created the conditions of possibility for the genesis of the private realm represented by the social persona of the citizen, and such structure is not compatible with the implications of those rights. The present formulation of the paradox within the narrative of the human being , an abstract social persona which is the subject of some ideal social rights, is just the latter development of a very old religious story. It is obvious that the root of the paradox intermingles with the roots of social stratification which lies at the foundation of urban settlements, but it is not only explained by this phenomenon, and needs to be understood in relation to t...

  The fact that from the subjective necessity of a certain connection of our concepts we infer an objective necessity of such connection is what Kant calls the transcendental Illusion . From the way we connect things, we deduce how things are in themselves. Traditional myths are good examples of this. Where Kant says transzendentale we could say biological , or neurophysiological .   The fascinating thing about this illusion is that even when you know it you cannot avoid it, for how could we think outside of our biological conditioning? More than a final limit for our knowledge, the transcendental illusion implies the end of the unquestionable character of the myths of the universal law. Contemporary science ignores this limit to the cognitive universality of our theories.