I think we are still children. All of us. Perhaps almost all. I don’t know if it matters how many there are if there is still one left. Someone who requires, needs, insists on taking a peek, not to see another thing other than the one looked at, but to see precisely that where his look rests. And it is very difficult to see things with technical eyes, in which sight is the perception of light beams, where the eye is like a camera inside which the retina, with its cone cells and rod cells, feels those first impressions and through the optical nerve and the lateral geniculate nucleus gives the cerebral cortex pieces of a story to assemble. And in the brain occurs that process of (re)construction piece by piece: the distances, colours, movements, textures and shapes are no longer impressions and they solidify.
This seeing happens until exhaustion, because it is always present. It doesn’t cease to happen and even with your eyes shut I think it still happens. Light meddles through the eyelashes and throws itself into the depth of the brain cosmos in order to make us keep on seeing. But this seeing, apparently easy because it happens all the time, is the most difficult one of them all. It exists to puzzle us, to make believe that things have only one shape, the one the eyes show. And if we don’t know how to talk with the eyes, they continue their incredible task, just like alchemist magicians, turning light into reality.
But then it happens there is one… and the amazing thing of that one is the effect it creates in the eyes, the eyes to see in a difficult way. It shows them the things. So that they can see them. It doesn’t tell them what they are, nor what name they should have, nor what taste, nor smell nor touch beyond those that already belong to them. The thing never ceases to be the thing. And that gesture disarms the seeing machine, because the eyes are used to see things where they are (but allow me to tell you that where they are is not a place, it is more a state of permanence).
The eyes are used to see everything with an accurate precision, they (we) need it to create a reality which we can live in. Therefore, rocks are minerals and pencils are writing tools. They are neither sheets of paper nor mountain peaks. Such a change of state happens when we no longer see or want to see the thing that way, which appears to be easy, but it is the most difficult one; when the desire of the accuracy of the thing allows us some space to really see the thing. And maybe it is yet through the eyes that things seem to happen, but they are already other eyes, the ones we lost while growing up amazed by things. Those eyes from back when we were young and we now long to have again. The eyes that enable us to see when we have our eyes closed. The peeking eyes.
And what matters the most, probably, it is not even what is hidden under the rock when we go and take a peek – we always know that there is something else there and we will be even wiser when we understand that that other thing is exactly that thing that we thought to be another thing, but it is itself.
What matters is that thing that came before and that exists without a name as it is a different name in each and every one of us and therefore it doesn’t have just one name nor it is only one thing, what matters is the reason why we insist on taking a peek to see what happens under the rock.
I think we are still children. All of us. Perhaps almost all. I don’t know if it matters how many there are if there is still one left. Someone who requires, needs, insists on taking a peek, not to see another thing other than the one looked at, but to see precisely that where his look rests. And it is very difficult to see things with technical eyes, in which sight is the perception of light beams, where the eye is like a camera inside which the retina, with its cone cells and rod cells, feels those first impressions and through the optical nerve and the lateral geniculate nucleus gives the cerebral cortex pieces of a story to assemble. And in the brain occurs that process of (re)construction piece by piece: the distances, colours, movements, textures and shapes are no longer impressions and they solidify.
This seeing happens until exhaustion, because it is always present. It doesn’t cease to happen and even with your eyes shut I think it still happens. Light meddles through the eyelashes and throws itself into the depth of the brain cosmos in order to make us keep on seeing. But this seeing, apparently easy because it happens all the time, is the most difficult one of them all. It exists to puzzle us, to make believe that things have only one shape, the one the eyes show. And if we don’t know how to talk with the eyes, they continue their incredible task, just like alchemist magicians, turning light into reality.
But then it happens there is one… and the amazing thing of that one is the effect it creates in the eyes, the eyes to see in a difficult way. It shows them the things. So that they can see them. It doesn’t tell them what they are, nor what name they should have, nor what taste, nor smell nor touch beyond those that already belong to them. The thing never ceases to be the thing. And that gesture disarms the seeing machine, because the eyes are used to see things where they are (but allow me to tell you that where they are is not a place, it is more a state of permanence).
The eyes are used to see everything with an accurate precision, they (we) need it to create a reality which we can live in. Therefore, rocks are minerals and pencils are writing tools. They are neither sheets of paper nor mountain peaks. Such a change of state happens when we no longer see or want to see the thing that way, which appears to be easy, but it is the most difficult one; when the desire of the accuracy of the thing allows us some space to really see the thing. And maybe it is yet through the eyes that things seem to happen, but they are already other eyes, the ones we lost while growing up amazed by things. Those eyes from back when we were young and we now long to have again. The eyes that enable us to see when we have our eyes closed. The peeking eyes.
And what matters the most, probably, it is not even what is hidden under the rock when we go and take a peek – we always know that there is something else there and we will be even wiser when we understand that that other thing is exactly that thing that we thought to be another thing, but it is itself.
What matters is that thing that came before and that exists without a name as it is a different name in each and every one of us and therefore it doesn’t have just one name nor it is only one thing, what matters is the reason why we insist on taking a peek to see what happens under the rock.