Reproducing clouds or rain would be my approach to visual art. Only the second semester had passed, and I discovered that the habitual nature of my past was the subject of my artistic creation. It was at this moment that I realized that my work mediated the temporality of clouds and rain into the true question to be answered as an artist. The question is about how to be in the world. Like the cloud or the rain, my life was a passing phenomenon. I wanted to be the pilot of my life, not a passenger.
How to face death, the only certainty in my life, as an expression of the anguish I felt as a creator? The answer was laid out in the path of my life. But it’s difficult to look forward as one looks back. Time, not only atmospheric but ontological, was the subject I had to resolve. But if that’s the only way to see it? What was the point of repeating the question that befalls all humans?
It does not ease the burden of the past to share its recollections; for with every plunge into it, with every withdrawal, something is left behind that weighs more heavily than memory; something that can never be shared or communicated—a sense of mounting unease, surprise, or contrast, of walking alone, in unsuspected isolation, on one’s own path; and worse, a disconsolate suggestion that the path—life, in short—is without continuity. Is it possible to look back from the present, as if one were watching a movie reel unfold smoothly in reverse from its end, to say that that time and that hour have brought one inevitably, with only apparent deviation, to this hour, this place? No: as one plunges headlong, flying with time, portions of life splinter off and float away, one little world after another; and looking back, one sees them behind one like stars and constellations. Old burning fragments of experience now gleam from their fixed places with a dispassionate ray; perhaps that fragment which was torn away with the cruelest twist and the most wrenching shake now hangs there, near indeed, but cold, like extinguished fires, like that dead star, the moon. And between those little lights lies trackless darkness: chaos and the old night close on one’s heels, and devour the path forever.
And yet, though one can never recover, turn back, and revisit, lo, there come now and then—to a sound, a scent, a word—intimations with the past; the threads of life fray tremulously, flinging out feelers after intimations of affinity. Misgivings come, bewilderment, hope, foreboding—a host of witnesses, striving to give form [flesh?] to the spiritual shape of what has been; until it seems that in a moment everything is linked, gathered in unity and meaning.
Si quieres saber sobre otros tiempos, continua leyendo.
Si quieres conocer del tiempo pasado, pasa al siguiente link.
Si quieres conocer del tiempo atmosférico, pasa al siguiente link.
