I was supposed to have submitted this text in August, but today, at the time of its writing, it is 23 September. I had to submit it in August, but the reminder email failed to reach me: I was offline, with my auto-reply activated and the email app on my phone disabled. I was resting for two peaceful weeks after feeling an overwhelming need for rest during the preceding six weeks. In a pocket of beauty, with collapse all around us: fire, Palestine.
When I apologised for missing the deadline, I received a response similar to those we like to receive in work message threads, saying not to worry, and that if I wanted to, I could submit it in September; if not, then not to worry either. But I was able to do it; what’s more, I was eager to bring my online harvest here. So here I am now.
With tired eyes
That introduction may have served you to sense exactly how the cultural issues that have accompanied me recently have helped me. With tired eyes, I have turned to listening, in a state of desire described by Remedios Zafra in the prologue to the second edition of Ojos y Capital (2018).
“At some point recently, this essay dreamed of a narrated and voiced second edition, subversive with times and useful for those drifting into a blurrier or darker world because of impaired vision, or simply taking a break from ‘seeing without rest’. […] for this edition, I had imagined accompanying these pages with a book that did not need to be seen, but rather be heard, one that could no longer be leafed through, a voice-book capable of resisting reading as a glimpse into our online drifts. Imagine a trembling voice with its hoarse hesitations and restrained air reading this essay to you, at times a mechanical voice.”[1]
With tired eyes, my hearing has found solace in listening to the podcast Las Hijas de Felipe. Would you believe, someone like me, who knows almost nothing about history – even the history of the Spanish state, apart from the 20th century – has become completely hooked on the story woven by Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita around the 16th and 17th centuries: that elastic Baroque so characteristic of theirs. Right now, I have just suddenly remembered what was said about Andu Lertxundi’s magnificent novel Otto Pette at the time: that it was a work primarily sustained by its language, a variety of Basque that was both familiar and original, expressly created by Lertxundi for his novel. I would say the same thing occurs with Garriga and Urbita’s programme: they have created a language – they are literary researchers, not historians – and with that language, a community. This summer, in that pocket of beauty, my partner and I, on the road, content and calm, among other things, we carefully listened once again to that long, crazy and fun episode dedicated to relics.
Focused and present
Pockets of beauty in collapse. Before the August holidays, I took another break in June. The filmmaker Ainhoa Gutierrez and I were at the AZALA creative space in Lasierra developing a script, thanks to the opportunity provided to us by the Dirdira Lab project. We were working, but it one of those jobs that gives you pleasure, because you are focused and present on what you are doing: I also set up an auto-reply on my email account. I remember one afternoon, shortly before the end of our stay. We were lying comfortably outside, and I was reading about collapse. Once again, related to hearing, a pink copy I found in the library: Dani Zelko’s Oreja madre.
An initial excerpt reads as follows:
“[Ghassan Kanafani] walks with his niece to the car. He puts the key in the lock. He opens the door and sits in the seat. He shrugs his shoulders, puts the key in the ignition and activates a three-kilogram bomb. That my great-uncle planted. A bomb that my great-uncle had planted just as Ghassan Kanafani was celebrating the fact that his people and his words were gaining momentum. My great-uncle had been trained to plant a bomb in Kanafani’s car, a kind of Palestinian Rodolfo Walsh. My great-uncle told me: kill or be killed. Kanafani told me: you can change the story of your life.”[2]
Here is the interview conducted with Zelko on the MACBA museum’s Radio Web Son[i]a – a sweet treat for the ears.
[1] Zafra, Remedios (2015): Ojos y capital, consonni.
[2] Zelko, Dani. Oreja Madre, Caja Negra Editora (2025).