Mythopoetics

  Dizziness in front of an empty canvas. Death is an empty canvas that we could never fill, fathomless non-existence free of will and mistake. Biology displays a representation of life as a sequence of chance, trial and error, but what kind of knowledge do we gain from it? What is the meaning of chance, or of error? Maybe they are just ways of understanding the all too simple straight ways of our will, life’s will, that produce a thin shadow of fleeting security, a brick house resembling shelter in the middle of the ongoing storm… We are precariously sheltered.   How to begin a painting? Robert Motherwell said that he began with a series of mistakes that were later corrected by feeling. Old metaphysics to face the unheimlich. I recall Robert Mussil: it does not matter what you do, but what you do next. And then, when to stop? Are we to stop simply by dopamine exhaustion, or by any random feeling of fulfillment, when we arbitrarily think that nothing is left to tell and t...

  According to Shinichi Hisamatsu, philosopher and tea ceremony master, there are seven principles that govern Zen art: asymmetry, simplicity, austere sublimity, naturalness, profound subtlety, freedom from attachment and tranquility. A piece of Zen art should have all of them, producing the characteristic serene aesthetical impression that we associate with it. Hisamatsu gives a few examples of particular works of art which have them all: a Raku ware teabowl named Masu, Muchi’s Chinese painting of persimmons, the stone garden of Ryojan-ji… Compared to the strident grandiloquence of contemporary art the perspective of such an experience is both soothing and appealing, though the proposed way is not free from contradictions.   Zen aesthetics cannot be separated from its ethics, whose goal is satori through self-awareness, and these seven principles are tools for such awareness through aesthetical action. The action has to be asymmetrical, for in asymmetry there is incompl...

   La tradición narrativa de la India contiene verdaderas joyas de literatura fantástica que dan pie a las más divertidas especulaciones éticas y metafísicas. En la colección de historias del Katha-Sarit-Sagara ( El Océano que contiene Corrientes de Historias ), del siglo XI, en el que se recogen historias tradicionales de la India, el locuaz fantasma de un cadáver bajado de una horca, le cuenta al rey que le descolgó del macabro columpio un cuento tragicómico muy interesante. Dos amigos emprendieron un peregrinaje a un balneario sagrado de la diosa Kali, y allí vieron una hermosa muchacha. Uno de ellos enfermó de pasión amorosa, dejó de comer y dormir, y estaba seguro de que moriría salvo que pudiese obtener a la muchacha como esposa. Su amigo se puso en contacto con su padre y le explicó la situación, por lo que este, a toda prisa, se dirigió a los padres del chico enemorado con el fin de organizar la boda. Poco después de la precipitada boda la joven pare...

Una de las funciones fundamentales del arte es la de hacer sensibles nuestras ideas. La inmaterialidad lingüística toma forma en la materia, ya sea en la etérica consistencia de una onda sonora o en la persistente realidad de una piedra. La escultura contemporánea ha transformado la tradición de experimentación de la forma en una experimentación directa del espacio. A su vez, la experiencia del espacio como luz ha dado paso a su vivencia como intuición básica para la conciencia de nuestra propia vida. Bien es cierto que los museos no son precisamente escenarios adecuados para la experiencia mística o estética, ya que las consideraciones sociales que implican cierran cualquier apertura de nuestra sensibilidad, y limitan la experiencia estética a una experiencia social generalizada en la que intervienen otros factores, pero Richard Serra ha conseguido minimizar tal ruido en el Guggenheim de Bilbao al presentar una obra que se en su colosal inmediatez y geométrica simplicidad envuelve ...

The future development of Mythico-Ritual axes more complex than those of Human Law (the one we are living in) seems to point to narratives of open identity for different social, individual and collective masks. The history of our myths is the general narrative of the emergence of social personae, their associations and conflicts, in growing circles of action that have given rise to new identity masks. On this journey, Humans cross thresholds of identity transformation, liminal moments in which old identity masks are left behind and replaced by new ones more harmonious with the vital experience of the present. These moments of paleopsychology have been reflected in traditional mythical narratives. A fascinating moment in our development occurred when we stopped sacrificing on the altars of the Gods in search of a more Universal and unified principle on which to base the Universe. In a hymn from the Rigveda (I.170), the god Indra, lord of the storm, dialogues with the r...

When science steps out of isomorphic functions embraces the misty world of metaphors, for its codomains become under-determined by the structure of the domain and the rule which constitutes the function. Codomains are the epistemological pain in the neck. Say that we construct a function, φ , which pairs a theoretical object with an empirical one. Such epistemological function has proven to be surjective, in  simple terms: is what the duality wave-particle shows. Thus, φ has not inverse, ergo there is not an isomorphism between theory and fisis. Physics is nothing but a well-organized (at best) set of metaphors, useful metaphors projected upon an apeiron by the pseudo-subject of our contemporary science.

What is the meaning of being Catalan, or Spanish, or English for that matter? It is evident that the correspondent narratives of political identity express both a particular historical inertia and the very basic need for a group identity in order to function in an economic milieu. Those basic needs have deep roots in human emotional nature and imply old narratives fully equipped with hard metaphysics. And so we heard, in a not too distant past, of a unity of destiny in the universal in relation to Spain, or of a manifest destiny in relation to the British Empire. A nationality expresses, unavoidably, a set of metaphysical beliefs, for the very concept grew up in the middle of a particular European milieu, linked to particular Institutions. To declare oneself Spanish or Catalan, would be merely the expression of a belief in certain Institutions, a rather accidental question related to the place where one happens to be born or live. However, in modern Europe, and even more so in c...