“Books are the only place in the house where one can be at peace” Julio Cortásar
por Oscar Cusano, writer and critic
Man has always reached towards quietness, the balance of tranquility, that is to say, the perception of harmony is understood as serene immobility.
For certain minds, this dilatation, this inner representation of stillness explains all its existential finalities, and the mere possibility of experiencing any small changes precipitates them into a dimension of absolute fear. Therefore, throughout our lives, we have always chosen to reject the unknown. Hence, maturity is translated in the collective unconscious as peace of the mental cemetery, masked by inactivity.
The problem is that life is “a living thing”, it is interactive and modifiable, whose unpredictable or provoked necessities are the result of profound and constant alterations of reality. They live within us, firstly overlapping the instincts, then even more hidden in the deepest pulsations that guide our most basic and essential behavior.
Don’t look up the word “pulsation” in the dictionary (from the French “pulsion”, which comes from the Latin “pulsio”, “pulsun”, derived from the verb “pulsare” – to push, impel). It is only used in psychiatry, “normal folks don’t use this kind of terms”, which says a lot about the academic impugnment that tries to deny that pulsations motivate human behavior.
Fear is the confrontation between the apparent truth and the occultism of a powerful uncertainty that is not taken into consideration, which is denied thousands of times, disputed until exhaustion, or resisted until the boundaries of adequate reason.
Truth is of no interest to us given that it may endanger our apparent cultural entity, which offers us some sort of significance.
The question is: Is it out of fear or sheer laziness?
The answer I prefer comes out of my observations: we are a bunch of compulsive phonies and no learning would be enough in order to defeat our inability to know that certainty.
I’m sorry for not being deceitful.
When I was reading the book about the work of the artist MIEDHO, written by the writers Héctor Martinez Sanz and Diego Vadillo López, and the photographer Bogdan Ater, (Niram Art Publishing House, 2013), I was able to dig deeper in the semantics of his artwork.
The book begins with a question that I found highly intriguing: How many stories are necessary to form a child? I’m saying this because I could sense that behind an eye-catching visual shock heaping with despondent blackness and fulminate shades of red, behind an emphasized Gothic effect, behind a pair of lucid eyes, I grasped right away the other side that was sustaining the torch of wisdom, and which topped my expectations with the following paradox: given that he himself is the fruit of a lineage that grew up as the generation of the image, the artist is able to put a halt to his own steps, to notice the noticed, just like Foucault, to strip the language that guides the eye look, like Gestalt, to uncover the blind face of communication and the mercantilism of morality, like Goffman. He is able to direct the mirage of technology and the present-day syndrome of eroto-mania, to distance himself from fixed points in order to find grammatical sensorial perspectives in the “global village”, like Marshall McLuhan, to re-encounter his own ghost, Eidolon, where the departed one has lost his identity and wanders in the form of a consumed image like Ulysses in the Odyssey.
MIEDHO states: “I’m here to question it all”
And I answer him: “Welcome to the world of the living dead by laziness”.
