MATERIA – ESPÍRITU

Madre Zaragoza

Mi carcel, mi pasión 

It seems I am not the result of any victory or defeat, but rather I must think —and that annoys me— that, like everything in Nature, I too am the result of a compromise.

I deny that there is any life within me, and I am horrified at not being dead, at having to feel the repugnant life beating inside me like an ancient animal.

I think about myself and I can even manage to understand myself, which is already saying something, but sometimes I catch myself thinking about Spain or, without even being surprised, I think of it just because. And I say this as I feel it, which is no small thing, and death comes to a halt.

If one day I was a drum in the fields, now I am entirely a piano in the centre of the home. Neither old nor new, but a domestic piano at the centre of my own people, played by them and silent —entirely mine, silent— if no hand plays me.

Do not try, then, to know me, or what I have accumulated in my blood, because when the artist is explained, he dies. Those who claim to need keys to understand discourse should know that one can be alive and active without understanding certain things, and that asking more than what the artist offers of his own initiative is gossip, voyeurism.

For me, for example, any question about the past brings me back to painful times that, fortunately, I have left behind; it drags me into their darkness and makes me lose my footing and the time I so desperately need to survive.

Nor do I want to know anything, and least of all about myself. I do not wish to be that blind thing that enters and impregnates so that others may know me and remember me. I do not want to be a burden in their memory, only lightness and oblivion in my own.

Let him laugh who, like me, has excess. My excess, my necessity, my peace, my balance, even the indifference with which I look at death. What does it matter to be here alive or there dead, if I know that in both places I will do the work I am always ready for.

Because in my character there is no place for laughter, I do not laugh when I look at Spanish culture, although I would gladly do so until bursting at that presence of pale flesh, with the whiteness of what is kept sheltered, of timid flesh that has not been embraced, that has sinned in darkness, under the sheets. A presence without roots, an animal that leaves no traces, a culture without memory, shit and only shit and inconsolable weeping over the empty bed of women.

I hate travel and I am astonished to see people travelling. I only desire the journey back home. A hard and exhausting journey, but the most beautiful one. When I find the way, I will do it. I have faith and I wait patiently. To return home, from where I should never have left—that is what I want. But I am lost and I go far away, like everyone, although I know that one does not need to go far to find what is best, which is right next to me. That is known by this paint-soaked brush I hold in my hand, this brush that digs like a hoe, natural and violent.

I wanted to go far away, like Rimbaud I wanted to go far away, and I searched for Ethiopias everywhere, virgin lands where my feet would sink in order to feel the pulse of the earth. I searched and searched, sometimes calmly, sometimes desperately, and in the winters of frozen Germany I knew how to dig until I unearthed the eternal Tahiti that lies hidden and throbbing beneath modern brightness. I bent down to kiss the snow, I placed my lips of an unaccustomed, burning Spaniard upon the white ground, and it seemed to me that I was kissing the white killer of virgin cloths.

Emotionally driven artists, I thought, there had already been enough. I wanted to be the mute, super-frozen artist who would kill life and that Nature that never ceases to be dark and disturbing frenzy, the same one that pushed me to ask myself questions about my way of painting. Breathe before each brushstroke or after it? Or perhaps remain without breathing while my hands did something so…? Or breathe and breathe?

Anything, as long as I did not do two things at once, because I wanted to be radical and ultra-frozen, and for my brushstrokes to be pure burning ice, like divine manifestations. No canvases filled with passion, screaming in all languages as soon as they are left alone.

Too many voices, too many things said again and again, and I desire silence and, above all, a space empty of culture. I want to paint at home, where paint dries slowly and I can take my time to think. Because I think slowly, while I paint as if I were in bed; I get everything right, I anticipate what happens here and there, and I feel sorry for myself when I am far away, wandering lost and disturbed like a poor modern man. One knows much more about things by seeing them every day than by seeing them only once when passing through.

It does not matter that many, even all, think I am wrong—these are my feelings. Two or three, no more, to which I am faithful, and when the damned temptations push me, I refuse to take a single step outside this illness that protects me day and night from the work of art, that keeps me in crisis, head-on, and clearly distinguishing health.

At home, busy with my own things, I do not dream of travelling, nor of going where I am told I should go. At home, busy and confronting the exceptional head-on, I stick to myself for matters of art and listen to God for everything else, for God, being truly much, is not always art.

These are the things I think about and nothing else. These matters, this laborious waiting that is art, and I do not want to go far, although I know that many—the best—have had to go far to find their home, and I think of them—the best—who had to go far to find the key to their studio, the sick key to their work.

I will not open the door to anyone; the tomb in which I rot belongs entirely to me. Nothing can improve me in what is mine, which is so proper to me and, above all, so mine, even against my will. I do not wish to be modified, but only to be my own, painfully my own, just as it is proper to things to be painfully their own, just as it is proper for me to question my parents when they represent the worst of being parents.

While I lived tied to home, I wondered how far I would have to go for the chain to break, and I looked at the bed, the armchair, the kitchen, all that human industriousness, and I found nothing around me that truly moved me enough to make me feel its brother.

I wandered across the earth, searching and digging; I too was sincere when I took my three or four steps to see beyond my nose. But soon I felt, with joy, that the space occupied by my feet was more than enough for me—even too much. Just the patch of earth my feet occupied and a patch of sky. Going far away to seek more seemed to me like eating twice because there is plenty of food, or sleeping two nights in one because time is abundant. Better to remain still, for thus, believing myself still, I have had patience—the holy patience that all despair needs in order to be calmed.

I distrust any kind of urgency, all that work done from one day to the next, in haste, but I love the swift blows of my heart when, in the semi-dead stillness of my home, I work driven by the best of myself.

When I work with that loving intention, I take my own life as something long, something that extends without importance day after day.

And the same sea strikes the same rocks, and I like that. The same river flows night and day beside the Pilar, and I like that. And I need to see the same thing again and again: in my mother’s face, my own; and upon waking each morning, to see my wife with her own face and my mother’s and mine; and my daughter with her face and with all faces. And for each day to be like the next, and nothing new, for everything is new in this nothingness, in this celestial and laborious monotony that repeats itself over and over again. Every day the same. This novelty begets seven days, and that is all there is.

Antiheroes

The antihero is a subject of new content that coincides in many ways with the concerns of today’s human being. As far as I know, there is no deep understanding of the content of the antihero.

If heroes were born with the sun rising above the clouds that oppose it, the antihero—even when traced back to astronomical processes—finds no better reason to emerge than from the human psyche. A movement of primary origin generated by the human mind and expressed not in the form of opposition, but of the opposite; thus, an antihero is precisely the opposite of a hero.

The antihero arises from the human source and affects us and moves us, because his destiny could be our own. But whereas in the hero there is myth and dream, in the antihero there is an affirmation of the pain caused by everyday experience. The antihero is a structure of the human imagination with unmistakable traces, like those human figures created containing the mother, the original earth of universal fantasy.

At the core of the antihero there is also a rebel and someone who fails, with the consequent recognition of a painful reality; for if the hero is a residue of childish imagination, the antihero is almost a scientific argument about human unease on earth.

In the antihero there is no guiding star of events, no peace, and even less psychological peace. Darkness and twilight in Mother Earth opposing the solar hero. The antihero arises from a world without brilliance, a land without the beneficial power that renews its splendour. On this earth, the antihero appears as a human being without category as a human being and without any transcendental dimension.

The antihero as a cultural form is associated with the artist, and the artist in turn with the magical element of transformation. Both, therefore, share a fertilising essence that, in symbolic association, connects to Mother Earth—wounded and contaminated by the centre of energy, by semen and by power.

Nature and human being in the simplifying image of a tripartite cosmos formed by a terrestrial world, a subterranean one, and a celestial one. Neither is the hero the sun, nor the moon the antihero, still less represented by hallucinogenic beliefs in a pure earth. Antiheroes are the image of our world: idea of danger, illness, and imminent death. The human body created from earth, interpreted in terms of segments where ordinary reality is not distorted by unreal visions.

The antihero as a figurative image that humanity projects from the accumulated reservoir of experiences, calling into question the psychological normality of the human being, since he is both executioner and victim; within him there is a dissociation by which the human being splits into a knowing that one is, without knowing what one is.

Both the antihero and the artist: death followed by rebirth in a state of knowledge, are closely related to butterflies, to animals that shed their skin, such as snakes or crabs.

The artist as companion to all human beings and also their double represents the model metaphor for a life of transformations in which the antihero is always defeated.

Antiheroes are all of us in the desperate cry for help at the very point of disintegration. Not an apocalyptic fantasy produced by society in its disgust, in its waste.

The antihero emerges from a deep abyss, a unique and extremely ancient prototype possessing fundamental traits in close relation to the forces of nature. In the antihero there is nothing of a fantastical nature. They are absolutely beautiful in their nakedness, everyday victims, images produced by a time of wars and of times of peace obsessed with destruction. There is no weakness in them, but the fact of belonging to certain peoples or minorities turns them into losers, often despite their tenacity.

Here is the earth, the flesh, the sounds, the return to the ultimatum of the present. Intensity in description is the sugar of fantasy and not only the image of things, but what is transcendent that exists in everyday life, the primacy of the earth as the root of time. The submerged version of man emerges visible, illuminated by the light that defines it as the element of unique importance.

Antiheroes on crosses, not in Christian iconography but as a synonym of the Suprematist movement and its conviction that from ruins a new order would arise. Antiheroes as an integral part of the process of sacrifice, victims and those relegated to the dark background of society.

No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.

No to the sacrifice of flesh, no to the sacrifice of the earth struck like rotten food. No to negative love illuminated by the light of dawn in the desert landscape.

The artist identified as the antihero stands against good fortune, against contentment, but reflects time, collective memory, and his personal memory. The memory of a world in chaos.

Antiheroes are also defeated rebels wrapped in their repulsive beauty. They are the ruins of our world, of a collapsing civilization.

Víctor Mira