Topography in blue

Traditions and authenticity

Now that I made a temporary come back to books, music and movies I’m remembering which ones I’ve already read, heard or saw taking advantage of the Facebook (for security reasons I don’t share it) utility to add lists of interests… For now I’m around 728 movies, 226 groups of music and musicians, 178 TV series, 356 books of literature, history, philosophy, arts, architecture, etcetera, and near one hundred artists (they’re mixed with several likes…)  and the list is growing… so many things I’ve seen… to me it’s almost like I had spend my life in objects that sometimes are repetitive. I know that that number just says the number of my ignorance but also I think life is so short to spend in the creations of others instead to create what our self wants to say. So I’m more focused in build my own art and knowledge, at least these moths.

I add a book or movie or musician when I remember them, among the movies today I remembered one of the most powerful and emotional I saw in my whole life, Le Grand Bleu by Luc Besson. I don’t know what say the critics, I think much more important is what do you feel so I can say that when kid it was a giant touching movie. It starts near my home, in the lake Titicaca, a free diver exploring the lake in a way I would be afraid to do because the cold waters I know (every time I go there I’m afraid to fall to the deep waters…) and it was like that gentleman was truly much more native than me, a six years old kid. Since then I loved that spirit of freedom in the waters I saw in the film, the two competitors were around the world in a competition that also was a competition against death and their will was so powerful that they could felt the sea and the lakes as a kind of true home…

What brings me to being a native… I think native is not and issue of race, more it’s about a feeling. I feel myself for example closer to Borges, I think he’s a true American man, because I understand him when he talks about the infinite horizon of his dear pampa, and that sentiment that makes him say that he feels Buenos Aires like a place that hadn’t foundation because he feels it eternal. Instead other authors, that I admire, like Vargas Llosa or García Márquez are to me actually Europeans living in America, because every time they speak about the jungle or the highlands they write about it like a mystery just natives known, and is evident that their traditions corresponds to a certain nostalgia of Europe.

Instead I’m against traditions. My definition of tradition is just the laziness to don’t think to just follow conventions based in another ways of life. Yes, I heal my wounds with special earths I select; yes, I can read the eyes; yes, I pay to the Earth and climb the hill when it’s needed; yes, I follow the ancient etiquettes; yes, I know to read the signs in the sky and seeing above my city the clouds I know how is the weather in far cities in other countries like La Paz or the cities in the desert of the coast. But those are parts of my culture I chose to follow, I don’t follow traditions that I consider should be learned just to don’t be made again, for example the tradition of peasants to kill our endangered species as our rare native cats, our Pumas, even when child we were taught to kill toads with stones, I dislike that because I don’t see the merit to take lives when in our modern world we could put special fences to avoid the pumas and instead to kill our rare wild native cats we should use modern breeding technics and adequate building spaces. An animal shouldn’t pay for the ignorance of a human.

I don’t follow the tradition to follow rules and just get stuck in the inadequate adobe house, I follow the Incan tradition haunted but knowledge. The genetic investigation was triggered by the regular “el niño” (the warming of the Ocean that brings periods of excessive rains in some places and droughts in others) so our ancestors developed in kind of laboratories thousands of vegetable species resistant to the weather, architectonic systems to fight the desert and the earthquakes, urban and regional organization so the Empire would be connected across their thousands of rich cities. I know there is a romantic idea that we were like some kind of hippies (nothing against them btw) or a wild civilization visited by aliens (lol) but the reality was, is, more complex. I’m against that vision tourists have, even national tourists, that we should be in poverty to conserve that “traditions” so we still should use clothes made for Spanish peasants and to live in homes without services, internet and TV’s are a sin it seems because that “fakes” us XD The time advances, I want to have the comfort of tomorrow and I design according that, my last designs implies in the technical side a hybrid solar/public-electric system and in the architectonic side it’s the mirror of a electrical engineer.

Returning to the beginning that’s the reason I felt so connected with the characters of that movie… I could sense a kind of brotherhood in the man diving the Titicaca… being native doesn’t mean to have a race or following without thinking archaic traditions; but to have a bond, like Borges had, with your earth and sky and city. Feel that your place perhaps couldn’t have a foundation date but it is with your spirit an eternity along.