Nothing Exists in a Void

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Part I: I hear rumors... A possible weaving of many others...

I hear rumors…at 12 midnight…it is answering but, what do we hear?

A possible weaving of many others, some fragments of a long conversation.

How can we redirect the link that makes every scenario become a confrontation between life and economic productivity? If we start from the premise of “life” in order to break with the “productivity” paradigm, and ask ourselves what it is we value, we could begin to question the system under which we are operating.¹

I accept the contradiction that lies between feeling encouraged and living amidst this crisis. I ask myself if it’s possible for the neoliberal environment in which we live to actually collapse before we reach the point of no return, of irreparable damage to nature and extinction.

In September 2016 to begin a conversation alongside a work group I wrote the following:

Nature is responding but, are we listening? The human colonization of nature has been erected upon a system of values that regulates human interactions, and their relationship with nature in such a way that there is inequality between us and other species. This system of values has alienated, fragmented, and fostered inaction in the midst of the critical threats facing the planet.

The current socio-economic crisis affecting the islands of Puerto Rico has become a case study in collapse. The current models continue to rely on infrastructure that assumes unlimited economic growth. Both models propose erroneous solutions and socioeconomic indicators that ignore the interdependence between people and nature, which is a key relationship to any long-standing attempt at change.

The relationship that is sold to us is one that seeks economic growth as central, without considering the dark future that it projects. In other words, we are facing a very sophisticated system of production in terms of economic theories but completely blind to the future. In this way we continue to chart a dim future that impairs diversity and insists on the eradication of life. We find it unbearable when historical genocides occur under the banner of race, however, we fail to see the constant genocide of all the living organisms that inhabit pieces of land that are being developed in pursuit of a short sighted economy that creates an illusion of progress. This is the absurd loophole in which we live, where they want to sell us the idea that in order to grow, we have to exterminate some organisms and stifle the growth of others.

In conversation with artist Raimond Chaves—regarding the possibility of action in the face of the frustration we feel regarding the system we live in, where instrumentalization is inescapable—we discussed art critic and philosopher Boris Groys’s notion that “consumerism today is the great ideology” and in order to escape this we have to break away from the western paradigm that presupposes “life is full of desires” or is the pursuit of desire itself.² While imagining what it would even mean surrendering to our own desires, we started questioning how could we begin to decolonize ourselves from this ideology in which we have been brought up and which shapes our core values?

Even though we are all part of the same biosphere, we continue to live disconnected from the most fundamental natural values. In addition to this, a broken educational system, failed governance, and a constant demand to perpetuate economic growth for a few, disregarding the future, is a system that fosters the dysfunctional degradation of humans and the earth's natural habitats.

We have separated ourselves from life systems, creating a board of confrontation, a chess game against that which nurtures our existence. If we reformulate the human / nature binomial, we can redirect the route that is based on dominance. The subterranean and surface rivers running through and across our earth, our estuaries and oceans, are all abused and polluted although they contain the common denominator to all forms of life. Water continues to guide us through the path we must take towards the continued reformulation of our union. Water then should be our blueprint.

Presently, I follow the writer Ursula Le Guin’s lead towards a possible planetary reconstruction. She tells us that “the latin root of the word progress means to advance, which is what one does when walking. But progress towards what? In which direction? (Pause) The first step should be defining what this might mean. Maybe it means something better, something that leans towards progress, however, we can also progress towards evil.”³ Le Guin brings us closer to those places that fall through the cracks of ideology and distance us from the pursuit of desire, bringing us closer to the essence of wonderment. She makes us ask ourselves about the subtle spaces that differentiate “joy from pleasure” and asks us where do we draw that line? Conversely, there are others who have also inquired about what would happen if everything stayed the same and we didn’t change anything. Can we find a better course of action? Which one would it be? Where would we stop?

In the midst of the despair and inertia in which we find ourselves today as a consequence of being incapable of imagining a solution, politician and philosopher Antanas Mockus asks: What do we have to do to get out of the first path in order to take the second?⁴ The complicated part of this change of route is that in order to achieve it we have to go back, undo hegemonic constructs of history, detach ourselves from faulty teachings, and rediscover the other side of history through the stories of the voices we have deliberately ignored in spite of them having spoken with harsh but crucial truths.

What are the implications of developing a course of action that diverges from the current globalized system, which instrumentalizes all activities under the banner of unlimited growth, and advocates for consumption as ideology and productivity as central to our way of life?

What would happen if everything remained the same? This is the critical juncture, between choosing not to act and staying within the comfort of our blind-spots, between knowledge and reason, and contempt for passion.

I’ve always thought of language and its translation as an action; that feeling is not a quality but rather a form of knowledge; that meaning is often veiled by the appearance of knowing; and that only by escaping this binary way of looking at these two concepts, can the possibility of listening and participating, of a co-presence, begin to emerge.

Allowing voices that have not been present to be heard is a way of imagining and forging a new course. I don’t have the answer but one thing I know is that we have to “change everything.”⁵

The possibility of yielding control, possession, of relinquishing our positions of authority to give space to everything that exists beyond the goal of productivity is to bet on life and growth. Reformulating from the ground up, the hegemonic relationships between humans and other living organisms and abiotic beings is to give up control in order to navigate and find alternative routes. The problem, or the question then becomes: how can we abandon our roles as colonizers and begin our own decolonization?

Changing our ideological habits is something that entails not only rethinking and reconstructing our value systems, but also building a non-negotiable transition from the current paradigm. Abandoning our obsession with unrestrained accumulation, embracing that which has been underestimated (e.g. water), giving up our voices so that others can be heard, and redefining the hegemony of one species over the rest requires that we assume the challenge of listening to what we don’t want to hear. Our anthropogenic processes are taken as a given and letting go of this history is the first step towards a new path.

Things don't exist in a vacuum. Reality wasn't always this way. It began before us, and in some places it continues to establish itself, a loving complicity with others that trust and rely on that which is not necessarily part of their immediate reality. According to linguist Chi Luu: “Researchers think that the ongoing cultural traditions of indigenous groups, their economy, and the management of their local environments in more remote regions of the world allowed biodiversity to thrive.”⁶ In addition to this, Esteban Valdés (concrete poet and amateur historian) points out in Herramienta Generosa Vol. 3 that our ancestors left us a language engraved in stone so that we could see what could happen in the future. Perhaps the political leaders designated to govern our territories are far from understanding these teachings, but our indigenous communities can, and I’m sure that they are willing to help with the translation.

Rethinking a possible action that changes the narrative where, for example, water becomes “actant” or, in other words, becomes the protagonist of our new narrative, is currently my proposal to guide these developing processes in order to relearn new forms of relating and existing.⁷

Like the Puerto Rican poet Luis Palés Matos, ⁸ I dare say we are living in the era of the frustrated human, of those who exist without a history in one of those “towns without geography,” and I would add, with no knowledge of where the water flows. The idea of a people without geography or water forces us to think about the urgency of the matter. It’s not a matter of giving up and being pressured into participating but rather refusing to being forced into the currents that have already been made and continue to be propagated by the political maps that clash with the maps dictated by our geology, and more specifically our hydrology.

What are the circumstances that shape physical and human development of a zone or territory? What is the relationship between territory and geographic phenomena? How much do we really know about the hydrologic relationship that constitutes us? What type of structure could we propose if we rethought the relations between the different parts of this geography? And, how could we re-evaluate our syntax so that they are more complementary to a broader way of building networks? An interesting linguistic example to think about the relations between that which is finite and the infinite possibilities of language is the following:

In English, we use special pronouns for people, but a dehumanizing ‘it’ is used for everything else. Not only do we use ‘it’ to refer to oil, energy, water, air, trees, and other resources, but we also tend to use massive and unquantifiable adjectives for them, which suggests that they are inexhaustible.⁹

I return to Palés Matos echoing the misty and melancholic atmosphere that accompanies me, it remains in an impassable limbo, reaching trackless geographic limits. I oscillate, on the one hand, between obstinate hope, and on the other, I embody the apocalyptic vision that leads me to think that the longer deterioration continues to exist, the farther we stray from the possibility of meaningful action. I ask myself whether we will ever be capable of turning our attention to the blind-spot where the eye lacks the cells that are sensitive to light and can’t perceive visual information to guide us towards the unperceivable new “actant” to lead us in the recuperation of our abandoned relations.

Continuing my search for another type of governance that isn't anthropocentric, I look in the dry mist for that which can’t be seen but gives us hope, that which can’t be described but is present, that which will be there with us, because it has always been, and will surely continue to exist without us.

I never lose hope, and in a continuous flutter, I ask myself: how do we re-territorialize our geography so that we stop being frustrated humans without history or geography? How do we let go of the illusion that promises us the desire for water only to take it away from us, how can we allow ourselves to be guided by the wisdom of hydrology?¹⁰ What would the water tell us?

Will we be capable of “changing everything”?

Today, Puerto Rico is facing a storm once again. This time, it is not Juracán¹¹ who usually visits us with his familiar spiral winds, but rather a storm that isn’t part of any natural regenerative process. It is caused by deliberate decisions, which are veiled under the senseless strategy that hides the real reason. Lacking any scientific, cultural, or natural analysis, our government proposes changes to the Plan de Usos de Terreno (Plan for Land Use)¹² in order to modify protected natural agricultural reserves and maritime-terrestrial zones, to cater to the interests of the financial elite and the market. This recurring habit continues to haunt us: working tirelessly for the present without looking to the past or thinking about the future.

In the meantime, I subscribe to the possibility of being explayá (to release or venting) as a strategy to temper the atmosphere of misty melancholy in which we find ourselves. Being explayao is the way in which Palés Matos describes “the magic, the ineffable force that can’t be uttered, explained, or described with words for being so subtle or diffused…”¹³

It is the possibility of a “wondrous moment that reveals itself with the magic and ineffable force of a glare.”¹⁴ A space that allows us to feel hopeful.

1. I refer here to the evaluation of context where objectives are determined (i.e. “life”) and are compared to what has been achieved (i.e. “extinction of life”).
2. In a cyber-conversation between Raimond Chaves and myself for the interview titled “A workshop as a political thermometer—turning around with the pedagogy of art in Lima,” published in Peru’s Bisagra magazine, I shared the following paragraph: “When you think about a school of art that prepares artists for the market, but that simultaneously opens possibilities that don’t go through there, in order to imagine another type of economy, it reminds me of the crossroads that Boris Groys points out when he says, ‘consumerism is today the great ideology’ and explains how in Russia people want to consume now and that the ‘artificial happiness of the great storefronts has become the only goal’ and that the ‘only freedom that really counts is that of being free from work’ but that ‘nobody can escape, in turn from the networks of the market. You can’t fool the market because you depend on it, on the money it gives you in order to live’ and how ‘there is a false idea in the West and that is that life is full of desires.’” See: José Andrés Rojo, “El consumo es hoy la gran ideología,” interview with Boris Groys, El País, July 26, 2008.
3. Translation of the author. See: “Ursula K. Le Guin Guest of Honor Speech,” AussieCon, 33rd World Science Fiction Convention, Melbourne, Australia, 1975.
4. Antanas Mockus at an interview that took place in 2005 with students of the Universidad Nacional de Bogotá about Colombia’s educational model.
5. See: Greta Thunberg, “Speech at Brilliant Minds conference,” Stockholm, June 13, 2019.
6. Chi Luu, “How Language and Climate Connect”, JSTOR Daily, July 10, 2019.
7. Bruno Latour, for example, proposes the term “actant” to think about how objects, ideas, processes, and any other factor that is relevant, is considered as important in the creation of human social situations as humans themselves. According to his theoretical and methodological focus, social and natural worlds exist in networks of relations that are in constant change, nothing exists beyond these relations. All factors that are involved in a social situation are at the same level and thus there are no social forces that are external beyond what and how they interact with the participants.
8. Luis Palés Matos, Litoral, reseña de una vida inútil. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Folium (2013) p. 4.
9. Translation of the author. Luu, op cit.
10. Tai Pelli speaks in the name of the Confederación Unida de Pueblos Taínos (UCTP) about ecological racism, sacred sites, and the education of Borikén (Puerto Rico) in the 15th Session of the Permanent Forum of the United Nations about Indigenous Matters, May 9–20, 2016. See, “UCTP Tai Pelli speaks at the 5th meeting Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, 15th session 9–20 May.”
11. I am interested in thinking about Taíno mythology and in the notion of the greater forces that alert us to an urgent situation, but also in pointing out that during our recent experience with Hurricane Maria, it wasn’t the strength of the winds which caused the deaths of hundreds of organisms (human and not human), but rather other forces that are not involved in natural processes, those choreographies of political decisions. According to Taíno mythology, Juarcán is the answer to Guabancex, goddess of the winds, a chaotic and indomitable spirit, who, when offended, sent “juracanes”—terrible winds that destroyed everything—to manifest her contempt of those who had disobeyed her. It is the destructive aspect of the divine mother, the goddess of the hurricane, which reaps havoc in the Antilles. See: La tríada: Guabancex— Coatrisquie—Guataubá,” Pueblos Originarios. Dioses y Personajes Míticos (website), https://pueblosoriginarios.com/centro/antillas/taino/guabancex.html.
12. See: Petición “Todxs Contra El Plan De Clasificación De Suelos Pr 2019,” https://www.change.org/p/junta-de-planificaci%C3%B3n-de-puerto-rico-todxs-contra-el-plan-de-clasificaci%C3%B3n-de-suelos-pr-2019-74fb5e67-f43b-485c-be78-46a20cdf5ca9?recruiter=992283679&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=share_petition.
13. Palés Matos, op cit. p. 4.
14. Ibid.

Part III: Preamble for a song after a lived moment

“I hear the murmur of a thousand voices penetrating through my window…I listen…It’s the sea! The waves in their strange and eternal chit chat, full of tenderness…as if they’d want to spill from their boundless container…other times, (the ocean) moans as if longing to attract to its bosom something that will give them solace…”¹

If I had read the folder I had in my backpack—which I didn’t have time to share during the walk celebrating the summer solstice on the 21st of June, 2019—I would have emphasized the following Manuel Delgado words: “The Indians did not disappear. They stopped registering themselves as Indians because in 1808, Governor Toribio Montes ordered they be included in the category ‘free mulattos.’”² Instead, I continued walking and listening to Jorge González as he read along with other colleagues while we headed to Cueva Las Golondrinas in Barrio Cordillera in the town of Ciales.

A few days before the walk, Jorge had written to us the following:

As part of the learning process sustained by some artisans of the Villalobos family, we want to think of this meeting as an encounter with the natural space of the denominated karstic region, which contains resources that speak of the geologic and human development of the Island. Because of the different elements that are present in the cave, our meeting will head towards a space of recognizing ancestral communities, a conversation-areyto that also connects with the text “The Humanity of the Future,” by Luisa Capetillo. This cave is in a nearby territory to that of the community of artisans that produce traditional furniture for the Villalobos family, with whom I have been working since 2014 through the Escuela de Oficios (Trade School), a practice/platform for collective learning that promotes self-directed education.³

As we walked, I couldn’t stop thinking about the message I received from Fernando Lloveras, from Para la Naturaleza. It was a link that connected to a map which unveiled a series of clandestine garbage dumps in the karstic region (post Hurricane María), nor could I stop thinking about the geologic and human development of the Island, and the “deliberate silences.” The murmur of a thousand voices made me ask myself: What do we hear, or what do we want to hear? What conversations make themselves visible and which remain absent and silenced?

As our encounter continued I thought of another locality distant from where we were, an urbanized area in the town of Canóvanas called Pueblo Indio (Indian Town) which names the different indigenous elements in its structural framework. This area is adjacent to the natural protected area known as Los Frailes where several years ago, on a similar walk with Escuela de Oficios, we identified a large amount of enea (cattail), the raw material used by the Villalobos family to weave their furniture. Enea is a marsh plant that gives us a lot of information about the health of wetlands, it can also be used as nourishment and is also a resource to make utilities. As I walked, two images stood out: the wetland in Pueblo Indio and the scaffolding used to dry the enea at the workshop of artisan Guadalupe Villalobos. How and why did these two distant spaces resemble one another? A thought arose that day about the connection of these two distant points, one where the enea could reproduce itself in a healthy way and the other where it was produced by artisans in a way that was joyful. I remembered a conversation I had with Marina Reyes Franco about the karst. On the distribution map of the karstic region of Puerto Rico,⁴ I identified a piece of karst floating in the Northeast of the Island, visually separate from the known karstic region that runs to the North of Puerto Rico’s Cordillera Central (or central mountain range). It is located in the terrain of Pueblo Indio. And even though I was familiar with another area of karstic formation that is visually separate from the karstic region of the North, in the Southeastern part of the Island, I didn’t know about this one located in the East. I thought of the murmurs of the canals that connected the town of Loíza with San Juan; of the maps of Puerto Rico’s caves and of the rivers that we don’t see but that run through them; of the cave that is located in the natural reserve of El Convento, a natural area protected by Para la Naturaleza (and where we found the perfect site for the presentation of the work Puerto Rican Light [Cueva Vientos] by Allora and Calzadilla); and of the garbage running through the gullies that was made visible after Hurricane María. I thought of Juan Manuel Delgado, of the last sip of coffee I drank before I got to Barrio Cordillera, and of his phrase, “the Indians did not disappear.”⁵

During the walk between geologic times and coffee sips, I thought of the actions that are made invisible behind the luster of the tropics, and the deliberate absences and silences in our historical narrative. I returned to a fragment of a book by Rometti Costales, Little animals, ash trays, which speaks of historical contradictions:

Although at the beginning it was said that the Spaniards had taken the production of indigo to Mesoamerica, there is proof that contradicts this:

In La Garrafa Cave in Chiapas, a girl’s huipil, a blanket, a shirt, and some canvases dated from the late XV and the beginning of the XVI century were recovered. The huipil was dyed blue, corresponding to the tone of indigo, which supports their use during the pre-hispanic era. Other researchers have proposed that the Mayan blue (sic) of the murals and vases is a combination of indigo and atapulgita. The Chilam Balam explains that, when one of the characters included in the narrative suffered an ailment, it would be manifested by dying the body with indigo…

[…] Therefore, the generally accepted phases and sequences about origin and order, about birth and death, experience and recollection, language and image, objects and objecthood, books and expositions, a song and what is sung, chromatics and colonialism, botany and violence, suffering and transformation, continue to be a current issue.⁶

So, then, isn’t the invisibility of our subterranean waters that connect our geologic times the possibility of what is to come? Aren’t the silences and voices we’ve denied about our origins what can lead us to experiences where a song and what is sung can uncover that which continues to be a current issue?

1. See: “Fuerzas Naturales” in Luisa Capetillo, Felix V. Matos Rodríguez (ed.), A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist Speaks Out: Mi opinión sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer. Alan West-Duran (Translator). Houston, Texas: Arte Público Press, 2004. This text was part of the file for the walk to Cueva Las Golondrinas together with Escuela de Oficios and Mónica Rodriguez’s La Germinal, a project created to think about the writing body and the nomadic thought that detonate in Luisa Capetillo’s texts. Luisa Capetillo was a Puerto Rican feminist and worker’s rights leader. Among the references used to approach her as a literary figure is the chronology made by Norma Valle Ferrer, Luisa Capetillo. Historia de Una Mujer Proscrita. San Juan, Puerto Rico Editorial Cultural, 1990.
2. This reference was shared by Robinson Rosado during our first visit to the Las Golondrinas Cave on the 14th of January of 2016. See, Juan Manuel Delgado, “La supervivencia indígena en la cultura del cafetal,” Biblioteca de Historia Nacional (website), January 14th, 2012. http://bihinapr.blogspot.com/2012/01/la-supervivencia-indigena-en-la-cultura.html.
3. On the 30th of January of 2016, Escuela de Oficios presented “ruta artesanal ejercicio #3: tejido de eneas articulación expositiva,” where the documents of the excursion to Bo. Certenejas, Cidra and Bo. Cordillera, Ciales were shared with the audience. This essay is part of an editorial exercise that took place alongside this project in Pueblo Indio in collaboration with the project La Germinal, or it could also be a narration of the experience of the communal encounter that took place on the second walk in Bo. Cordillera, Ciales, on June 21st of 2019.
4. Andrea Hall and Mick Day, “Ecoturism in the State Forest Karst of Puerto Rico,” Journal of Cave and Karst Studies, Vol. 76, No. 1, p. 32. https://caves.org/pub/journal/PDF/v76/cave-76-01-fullr.pdf.
5. Delgado, op cit.
6. Juan Canela (ed.), Rometti Costales. Little animals, ash trays. Madrid: Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo / Berlín: Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite, 2018, p. 19.

Translated from Spanish by Gabriela Suau.

Part III: A continued, repetitive sound during the last ten years

In the lyrics of Lhasa di Sela I find joy and hope. Reorganizing phrases from her songs to navigate the volatility of the moment and connect key elements within an urgent narrative has been healing. Her songs have been a support and companion; a continued, repetitive sound which during the last 10 years has not only helped me manage anxiety in moments of despair, but also, has helped me relate and respect that which is unknown; by amplifying the senses beyond words, even if we mediate with words. An endless space, but of care, that ignites curiosity. Like Arnold Naes said: “We know that things go together but the question is how things go together.” Lhasa helps us think about the importance of relations and belonging to a planetary ecosystem. It helps me listen to those moments of urgency that can only be found in the fragility and localized details that connect life.

The leaves are falling falling down
Your sisters on the open sea
Your brothers here on land
A garden growing underground
Out into sound and sun
You don’t have to believe it
A thousand and one nights of this

I have no way to prove it
No proof but I believe
A fish on land
Gasping for breath
He had a human face
I carried him
And sang this song
To where the water was
Is life like this for everyone
Is life like this for everyone

Things were flying around
And doors were slamming
And windows were breaking
And I couldn’t hear what you were saying
I couldn’t hear what you were saying
I couldn’t hear what you were saying

Bells are ringing
You could tell me a story
Although our days of living life together
of living life together are over
That does not end this way
There is no end to this story
No final blow or glory

I came to you in light of day
I got turned, turned around
And carried away
I had a dream last night
He had a human face
A fish on land
I picked him up

I will repeat the sermon of the mountain
To return to love what I wanted
There is no end to this story

The leaves are falling falling down
Your sisters on the open sea
Your brothers here on land
A garden growing underground
Out into sound and sun
You don’t have to believe it

A thousand and one nights of this
I will repeat the sermon of the mountain
A thousand and one nights of this
And then I will be free

*This text is a quotation of reorganized phrases from the following songs: Por eso me quedo, Floricanto, Rising, Love Came Here, Bells, A Fish On Land, 1001 Nights, and Anyone And Everyone.

Parts I, II, and III written in July 2019.