Maio 2013, Lisboa, Portugal

en las calles de BCN, 2013

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«Hay que ser responsable. (…) Uno tiene la obligación moral de ser responsable de sus actos y también de sus palabras e incluso de sus silencios»
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«Yo veo a la gente correr por las calles. Veo a la gente entrar en el metro y en los cines. Veo a la gente comprar el periódico. Y a veces tiembla y todo queda detenido por un instante. Y entonces me pregunto: ¿dónde está el joven envejecido?, ¿por qué se ha ido?, y poco a poco la verdad empieza a ascender como un cadáver. Un cadáver que sube desde el fondo del mar o desde el fondo de un barranco. Veo su sombra que sube. Su sombra vacilante. Su sombra que sube como si ascendiera por la colina de un planeta fosilizado. Y entonces, en la penumbra de mi enfermedad, veo su rostro feroz, su dulce rostro, y me pregunto: ¿soy yo el joven envejecido? ¿Esto es el verdadero, el gran terror, ser yo el joven envejecido que grita sin que nadie lo escuche? ¿Y que el pobre joven envejecido sea yo? Y entonces pasan a una velocidad de vértigo los rostros que admiré, los rostros que amé, odié, envidié, desprecié. Los rostros que protegí, los que ataqué, los rostros de los que me defendí, los que busqué vanamente. Y después se desata la tormenta de mierda.» 

Roberto Bolaño, 'Nocturno de Chile'

imaginary/memory gardens

flowers in garden, 2013

William Basinski's cinematic Nocturnes


The "Basinski" experience is quite astonishing. For as longer as it has passed, you don't actually know how much time has really passed. You might keep your notion of the real exterior time, but your inner time seems to be, somehow, decelerated. In other words, it seems more close to the dreamlike experience, where you keep focused on a subject that moves so little, although it moves in circles and repeats its movements, its variations make you feel the "everytime, new moment coming" (like you were one step back from the present time), even if you can't really distinguish it from the one before.

I know for sure the Disintegration Loops had another length and mood from the Nocturnes, the feeling of the disintegration had a material thing going on and it made us understand deeply, with a certain intuition — the very same from the dream experience too — the melancholic mood around William Basinski's performance itself. Back then, I even recalled the experience of the experimental film by Chieko Shiomi - "Disappearing Music for Face" (1966), which shows a slowly disappearing smile, where one can't almost tell the difference between the present frame and the one after, but your mind assimilates the difference and soon you'll understand the mood changing. But these Nocturnes show another feelings, those that one can recognize either from cinema either from dreams (they seem to work together in certain points of one's reception — from the outer or from the inner). To simplify the feelings exposed by these nocturnes, they are very much related to Fear and Danger, but always dissimulated, as they are indexes to those notions of the meaning of the night as a concept.

Another key point I must add from the experience of Basinski's music is also the visuals behind, which seemed before not to be this relevant. They propose now, in the Nocturnes, as they did with Disintegration Loops, the variations of repetition, that are stating the same ideas that his music.  But these Nocturnes visuals were somehow making a narration of movement that approaches cinema/dreams fiction. The quite unbelievably simple images that record the moon with the clouds at night, make this quite simple movement of a non static camera, pretending to want to be static or in one's hands, but what your eyes see is a totally different world. And boom! there you are again in a non-time dreamstate, with unbelievably small and still distinguishable variations of clouds and — the most important visual effect — a lifting moon that never stops to ascend, like a big bubble in that dark liquid of the night. And this whole amount of simple things makes you enter deeply in your inner conceptions and stop caring about what your eyes see, because they might trick you and by then your brain had already propose you another perspective of time, sound and feelings.


la contradiction qui cherche la pulsation

StillLife studies with M. and glass bottles - positive of a negative photographed w/ digital
(photo visible here: Flickr link)



Le vide du maintenant.Tout être qui ne fait que demeurer en lui-même n'est pas là. Que maintenant nous vivions ne fait l'objet d'aucune position, étant pour cela trop proche. C'est seulement lorsque cet être qui est en lui-même cesse tant soit peu de coller étroitement à son intériorité qu'alors il sort de lui-même et s'accomplit sommairement. [...] Il ne se présente jamais que dans l'obscurité d'un instant qui certes se laisse repérer mais non fixer et cède aussitôt la place à l'instant suivant. Ce maintenant auquel ne cesse de succéder un autre maintenant n'est plus seulement un bouillonnement intemporel […] : il est scansion, pulsation.(Ernst Bloch, Experimentum Mundiquoted by Louis Marin)