"Y tú, padre mío, allá en la triste altura,
Maldice, bendice, ahora con tus lágrimas fieras, te lo ruego.
No te vayas mansamente hacia esa buena noche.
Rabia, rabia contra la muerte de la luz."*
What do they leave us? What do we leave?
We all go around gathering objects, not always with some resale value, that tell the life that was, that tell a different story to each one who sees them, brutal or loving, but ultimately a story, sometimes to be told and other times just to assure ourselves we don't forget it.
Rooms full of these stories, objects I grew up with, that were often untouchable and still are, his gaze hovers over them, his way of caring for them, I leave here a trace of what were my father's objects intact and functional with an order of his own life and a disorder of the time it took him to go abandoning them when his hands no longer responded, dust and cobwebs inhabit them today, a strange grimace of fate.
A poem said "With three grandfathers I can touch my birth" and if I walk through the place I find tools used by my grandfather and by this one's father, living in perfect harmony with the others, a long collection of work and dreams realized.
As if frozen in time the objects dialogue with me, together we search for unspoken words.
Objects that interrogate me since childhood.
Objects of an absence that calls you and calls me.
To see, not to look and to know that you're there, that I'm here seeing.
To close my eyes and know you…
I will stop seeing with my gaze,
I invite you to travel through time with me, discover what objects you keep, which ones you leave, do the exercise yourself and see with memory.
By the way, his name was Jorge they called him "the crazy one," I called him Dad.
* "And you, father, there in the sad height,
with fierce weeping curse, bless me now, I beg you.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light"
Dylan Thomas