Noviembre

I uploaded this image to my Deviantart account a quite some time ago, maybe it´s a completely nonsense to start a blog when my time to produce new material is very limited right now, however, since this image is in the blog´s title, I think there´s sense in presenting this character and this image in first place. 

Noviembre is the name of the girl in the picture; she should be around sixteen in it, which would situate this particular moment in 1912. I hope to make her the main character of a series of novels that I got in my mind, the first of which is already completed. She was born with the idea of being a character with a great sense of justice, acquired in one of the worst ways possible: trough a very early experience of pain and loose. During her childhood, beyond the late nineteenth century, Barcelona, where she lived, was known as “the city of bombs” by the high number of terrorist attacks which took place there. When she was five, one of these attacks caused her to lose the right leg, from that moment on she got to start to understand that the person she would become was meant to be different than the one she would expected to be. 

Her way to the future started again when her father took her to the theatre where he worked as chief of stagehands. A place full of talented people, for whom the possible and the impossible doesn´t always obeys strict rules. They gave her a new leg, when her father told her that “what is not fair shouldn´t be accepted” referring the fact that a five years old girl should not remain lame. But these words were what ended up defining her as much as her metallic leg, as they would lead her to be completely intolerant to injustice, to the point of face those who feed in the pain of others or use it as a tool for their purposes, whether they were rapists, murderers, caciques, or even monster and demons. 

Her philosophy is simple: You got right to your place in the world; if they try to take it away from you then you defend your position. It doesn´t matter how much strength you have, what matters is what you are ready to defend with it. After all, when the enemy is at the gates and you are lame, run is not an option ;)

The abstract matter

It´s not made for the fingers, It´s not made for the eyes or the ears, however it´s made to be felt. Its challenge is to remain as something blurry and without shape while keeps breathing on our necks and overlaps our own shadow. Give a name to it it´s just another clumsy attempt to make it more manageable, to draw it a face and look into its eyes. We will call it the abstract matter and try to believe that our compass has something similar to a north. 

It cannot be perceived but insists to be noticed, a chill ruffling the emotions, a strange animal scratching in the back of our brain, so in some ways it “is”, and here´s where the damned duty of trying to give shape to it starts.

For some it is on the rainy days, for others it is on the electric lights dotting the night, it is on abandoned places or in roads that dissolve in the horizon, it´s here and there, again and again, coming from outside or coming from inside. A land without place that doesn´t allow to be mapped but calls us to trace routes back to it so we can find again what we once felt. 

It´s the fiber that the storytellers try to weave, the clay the musicians have to mold, the stain to be domesticated by the painter, that thing saying that there´s work to be done and it has to be done before something gets lost forever. Is before the emotion, before the idea, before the white canvass and before the image, is the motor which moves us to cross all that distance, at the end of which, finally, something must have been found. Something now carved and molded, a reflection of that which had no shape. It´s not a task with many successes, the end rarely looks like the beginning, the purpose of this abstract matter is not to be captured, but to be inherited, to arrive where someone else can feel it and consider it again the beginning of something new, so its journey never ends. 

And here we are now, at the beginning of something uncertain, in this place out of the maps where, with humility and clumsiness, I´ll try to share my attempts to give shape to the abstract matter, indicate where it could inhabit and even talk about the work of others who have been more successful than me in this task, or, why not, about other travelers with whom I share this search. 

The journey will make me wanderer for years or sink in the same port, but it starts now.