Mythopoetics

  The narrative grew in the process of being told, as myths always do. The Blog has become more labyrinthine over the years. It contains my Mythopoetics book and a few other things. For those who access these texts without knowing anything about Mythopoetics, I am going to post the introduction of the first part, so you can decide if you want to spend your precious time thinking about the identity narratives that we humans have developed over the years. throughout our eventful existence as a species. "Mythological narratives are the only intellectual activity that has been continuously practiced by human beings, a fact that makes them a unique tool for thinking synthetically our evolution as homo-sapiens. In this sense, they are the first valuation settings that humans have made about themselves and their environment, and as such, they have conditioned the ones that have come afterwards, both in form and content. Their communicative function places them at the basis o...

For the ancient Romans, "Terminus" was the god of boundaries, represented as large stones used to divide and delimit fields. Festivals were held, called Terminalia, in which the stones that "generated" human space were sanctified. Our word "term" is the heir of that god, or better, it is that god incorporated into an everyday space, in our Lebenswelt or world of life. A philosophical term, whatever its semantic content, is the conceptual mark that we make by establishing a referential sign, it is the action of determining, of generating a reference in a mental space, a reference with which we make a sign correspond, or if we deal with a physical space, the correspondence with an object, be it a milestone, a stone, or an indicator sign. Since its beginnings, philosophy has used binary semantic terms as thinking tools, something that analytical psychology has also made good use of. One of the longest-running binary semantic terms for psychology...

  Mi abuelo paterno, ciclista amater por la montañas de Ávila, soldado en la Guerra de Marruecos, después mecánico de locomotoras de Renfe y siempre un hombre bueno en el mejor sentido de la palabra, trabajó 12 horas al día toda su vida, librando un domingo de cada dos, hasta que la gangrena le deboró una pierna y tres dedos del pie de la otra. Su salario apenas sirvió para dar de comer a su familia lo que hizo que mi abuela tuviera que regentar una tienda de ultramarinos en la Calle de la Toledana, tienda adjunta a la casa en la que pasé mágicas temporadas de mis vacaciones infantiles, días fabulosos que me reviven con su recuerdo, las horas en las que disfruté de su compañia con la veneración del niño que se siente en presencia de un héroe legendario y amoroso. Estas líneas son en su memoria. Cada generación se yergue sobre los hombres y mujeres de las generaciones previas, sobre hombros de gigantes sin duda alguna, aquellos benignos titanes que nos han permitido tomar aire, mira...

     The concept of the Unconscious certainly predates Freud. It has been traced back to Paracelsus, but we can find other precursor concepts in the upokeimenon (what lies behind) and in the different formulations of the substance-accident semantic operator used by several philosophers. Advaita Vedanta talks about the formation of waves in the sea, waves that appear and return to the sea without ever ceasing to be the sea. Our most intimate intuitions tell us of a more fundamental reality than those reported by the appearances of consciousness. When I speak here about the unconscious, I do it starting from the theoretical context developed by Carl Jung and Eric Neumann. It is a non-reductionist psychological orientation. Neither is matter reduced to a simple mental or spiritual projection, nor is spirit an emergent property of matter that can be explained in terms of mathematical physics theories. As such, it is in tune with various forms of ontological non...

       To understand and give meaning is to limit infinity. Whether in a model of physics or in an old myth, we limit reality (whatever it is) and only then claim to understand it. To understand is to verbalize, to make Logos, speech, and communication. And to do so, our limitation needs some rules and procedures. That apparent taming of the indomitable Universe is its conversion into a game. Kant said that we understand the universe insofar as we consider it the creation of an unknown creator. This amounts to saying that we understand the universe insofar as we consider it a work of art, or what is equivalent, we understand the universe when we see it as a game. Every explanation has to be made from outside of the explained system if it aspires to more than being mere gibberish. However, this simplistic distinction must be clarified: the game we are talking about, the Cosmic Game, is not a dual-action, there is not a game and a non-game (there is nothi...

The concept of mimesis allows us to access the deepest nature of music, especially when we compose it with the concept of "Will." I am going to approach this concept from the point of view of Schopenhauer, as the best and probably the first Western representative of Advaita Vedanta, the knowledge of non-duality. Musical mimesis occupies a key place in Schopenhauer's philosophical system. From the analogy of music with the other arts - says Schopenhauer - we can infer that music must be in relation to the world as the representation to the thing represented 1 . Its imitative reference to the world must be very deep, infinitely true, and really surprising, because it is instantly understood by the whole world, and presents a certain infallibility by the fact that its form can be reduced to fairly definite rules expressible in numbers, out of which cannot move away without ceasing to be completely music 2 . In this passage our attention is first drawn to t...