Letters from the moon. Chapter … Een.

Music while you read: Huecco – Mirando al Cielo

Dear nephew,

There are many things that I might have told you already and yet those letters continue growing in my heart and my hard drive with no clear intention nor accumulation of facts.

The station, you know, suffered dramatical impacts of an asteroid fragments not far. Life seemed to have stopped for a glimpse on our hearts, souls were just awakened and brains would fail to work hard.

Some were ejected to Mars, as you probably could picture with the previous notes. Communication is poorer on the red land. And interferences from Venus would easily overlap. I was on that bunch.

Días extraños no wonder, my little beast. There was a bit of ignorance of any further bite, a bit of obscurity and anguish, some bits of anger and pieces of pathological happiness when the base was still to be properly staffed. Still a thread of hope would breach into anyone chest and head, desperation, so we choosed not to let through any.

Take a rest now

Be prompt later .

Love, Uncle J.

Letters from the moon. Chapter 6 (2.2, 5bis)

(Listen while you read (new window): Dave Matthews Band –  Two steps – Live – Central Park – Peripatetic sounds 2014)

Hey kid/s,

here I am again with my boring odd stories that however help you sleep a bit. Today in a hurry. I have been doing quite a bit of nothing the whole evening long but still I feel unease to see the clock figures fading away the very few occasions I look at the upper left corner of the screen.

I shall well tell you nothing interesting about the jour, we just surfed pass it, But many things happened despite none of them might fit the desire of your ears.

I had strong memories of Talavera this morning, I’d better say recurrent feelings and, as it couldn’t be less, most of them were linked to the amazing medical experience I had there. Despite Pio Baroja would had include it in his «Arbol the la ciencia» without a blink, the real experience was at the same time less gross and more deep.

I would definitely recommend you to follow the way of our latin-american colleagues and their «rural stage», but at the start of your specialist practice. It is not that Talavera was a little village at all. Not only you’d find an «El Corte Inglés» on it’s city center, you’ll find a capital city of a hugely diverse region framed beyond political borders by geographical accidents will. I don’t want to go too deep on the description of the place that urbanists of the time called «the ugliest city ever». One day you should visit, just as any other place. Let me just tell you: from La Vera to the lake, having madrilean Gran Vía as your holiday escape, on that way to Lisboa that you could theoretically sail, you would have to make a big effort not to feel as a king on its domain. Beware, there are as many kings as citizens, you’d better not forget.

 

Enough Talavera for the day.

I have doubts about the next bit. I was part of a quite remarkable surgical hit today. You would think I got to solve a difficult technical problem, or I managed through a mess of clinical information and images through to a brilliant diagnosis. None.

I had the opportunity to be a real assistant to a new surgeon on is very first solo on a particular type of procedure. It is not that I assisted with the tools, not even much with the strategy, none with the planning. Still it made me remember of so many previous OR assisting experiences, since Medical College to the day: the thrill of performing the intervention with all the time and energy devoted to your brain, none wasted on your hands, the huge power given by being an (almost) mute support. Could seem boring or lame to you as a young doctor but realize you have all the advantages, the perspective, the lack of stress… and none of the risk. You have much more time to think about different possibilities, gestures, tools… Of course you shouldn’t make those preferences too public or you’ll never get to be a first operator yourself. Yes, being first operator is also quite an important way to learn ;).

Any case, remember nephew, in case you choose to get into this path: no time in an OR is wasted while your brain is awake and calm.

 

As said, not much to give a damm. The water yesterday was a pipe leak that someone enjoyed to crack. Today the windows are trembling and it’s as much impossible to explain. Each day in this moon of ours is one step deeper on the sand of a desert that we can’t just picture as a whole. Hope to read you soon.

 

 

Have a rest now nephew. Be prompt later.

Big hug.

J.

 

 

Letters from the moon. Chapter 3.

(Play while you read: La negra – Yukele – new window)

To R., personally, of course.

 

Dear O.,

I’d like you to understand when I (will) share experiences and stories with you I do not expect to change any of your acts based on it.

A life is a very unique narrative process and I am sure we could have opposite views on the same fact or simply extract different conclusions. Still I feel impeled to let you know about some realities that are not usually disclosed in the public discourse and might be useful to you in times of boredom, loneliness or lost path.

 

I was on one of those periods of (let’s say deeper) lost path when I started taking pictures. I had a girlfriend on the time, lovely, who gave me a basic book on photography, the essentials: composition, speed, diaphragm, diferences between eye and camera, everything is light… That was all.

I wasn’t sure what to do with the knowledge at all. More technical as it was it felt to me feasible to grasp a bit of what art could be, one more childhood trauma (the absence of comprehension of art).

Lost as I was, close to teenaging as I always am, I didn’t know what to show, what to tell about. It was difficult times, I was spending my medical exams month as kitesurf teacher/waiter in a hut on the beach. There wasn’t really much to tell on that sandy, lonely, paradise to which I didn’t belong, either…

 

There was one thing I knew I was interested about: penumbra. Curious, paranoid, as I am, I felt the camera was a perfect tool to visualize those spaces, times, realities, denied to the human eye but impacting deeply on brain cortex.

I forgot to tell you I arrived into photography on the last days of what they would later call analogic. We were using film, plastic with chemical components, to inmortalize reality bites. There was already people working on digital effects, usually gross, with crazy colours and incredible contents and composition, through post-edition. I took the determination to show by analogic photography, by a mechanical process, you could prove reality to be as surprising and unexpected, as magic, as those digital editions intended to show through very elaborated manipulations.

 

At first I took some pictures for kitesurfers, and some for wedding parties. Both showed the same limitation regarding art: the subject wanted to appear pretty and cool, usually prettier and cooler than he/she really were. Unless you get a private contract (I did and was amazing) it’s really difficult to put many art/truth on it. You are there for the portrait, not for the narrative. However, dear nephew, there is always something to learn on dark times and situations (I will repeat this tirelessly) : those experiences were excellent to master camera managing, fast framing and composition.

Later on I had more freedom and I decided to just take the camera with me any time of any day. If I wanted to show a piece of reality the camera had to be there with me. It’s also true I still hadn’t found what I wanted to talk about. So, I was walking around the city, night and day with my huge camera in a bag with a huge interrogation mark. “Sembrando la duda” I used to call it, the bag, as a doubled artistic performance, hiting any conscience with a question even when they wouldn’t realice (recognice) about it.

Apparently I wasn’t moving much forward but there were two fundamental facts: keeping the camera by my side and keeping on my erratic walk on life in the seek of something I could not even describe.

There is an extra fact to this: on the analogical times we had films with a limited number of pictures, I used 36. From time to time I would go to a photo shop to have the films turned into paper and I would spend some time afterwards, with coffee and cigarrettes, looking at the images, comparing them to the memory of when, where, how, I took them. I would select my favourites and my less favourites, as if it hadnt been me the one to shoot them.

 

Once I put a handfull of the ones I liked on the bed and took a deep look… Got some more… and start grouping them. That’s the way I discovered my city was most of the time painted in orange and blue, that I was an urban kid deeply impressed by the plain colourfull country in the road to the capital, that I would be able to portrait people in movement obtaining numerous identities in one only picture and person (much more realistic from my point of view than the classical ones…) and so on… I had found my voice, through systematic instrospection, into art.

 

Not sure why I told you about this O. This is probably basic knowledge to you, if you ignore the power of image, if you choose not to be aware of it’s limitations and powerful subliminal effects…

I guess the important part of photography to me, as a scientist but also as a nomad, was it was able to prove reality much more complex than it appeared, than everyone usually tries to play it down to. Possibly this felt good because as a nomad I could feel that already but as a scientist I needed something touchable to prove it and allow me not to feel (totally) crazy.

 

 

I´ll be writing you soon nephew.

Take a deep rest now, be prompt later.

 

 

Love

J.

#Chicago #Ciencie #Life #Friends #2012

 

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