The Valley

Now with all the crossin’ fingers

that mother nature sends

Your mirrors get jammed

up with all your friends,

That personality, every scene

is starting to blend,

Personality, when your mind

starts to blend

Personality Crisis

The New York Dolls, 1973

Civilization lights can be seen from afar. With no perspective, a child points to the right, which is also our right, and the one who appears as a phantasmagoria from a world in betwixt, seems to pay mind to the kid, listening intently. It’s more a character than a person, wearing two masks. That's not to say it’s Janus, dissociated from itself and the surrounding wonder, including human beings, who identify it in its difference, in its belonging to almost everything, unable to recognize its own ‘someone’. Then indifference shall take place.

Its exacerbated self-awareness leads to a recurrent cognitive dissonance, to identity stridency, to behave according to a divided, dissonant inner morality. Its incongruous intimacy has led it to a vague detachment, to an exile from the self that doesn’t allow to find a path, so it walks a trail with no end in sight, as a stray and deprived entity. But, in this case, identity is an unstable and liberating multiplicity: the world is the house - what little belongings, those which can be carried on back.

- and the city is configured as the cosmos, an incongruous one, but cosmic, nonetheless.

Both real desire and possibilities dictate borders, like the fox’s, but in that understanding the angle made by lines crossing widens up infinitely, waking in multiplicity, in all options, not one, not two, but three or more, maybe. Is it because the affirmation of alterity would imply a simultaneous negation?

Are there wrong questions?

Accepting all doubts may describe a ubiquity split from any personality as a goal, perhaps analogous to those of the displaced, the homeless, the landless, the dispossessed, the underprivileged, encouraged probably by the mythic construction of that resonating in the eye’s end as a ghost city, one that’s not reachable because it was never left.

Such a tearing bears naked all inner narratives, then, future, past and present manifest together into the image of a body - painted with egg tempera, a putrid - that wishes to be three-dimensional, but that will remain flat, even when the story tells us the opposite: what’s appearing there could mean what happened, and what appears closer is what’s happening now, what will happen?

Foreshortening and delusion that became convention, like almost all revolutions, opened Pandora’s window, a cruel and decadent theater, in social media, with ads and news - war, desire, filth, sex, environmental devastation, the pernicious beauty of the forest, true love, and art auctions - live.

Deciding (if this verb is the one that could describe properly what this implies) not to remove the mask and unveil ‘the person’ and see itself in it, but, instead, to make evident that ‘the person’ is essentially a mask in reverse, apparitions, not appearances, as the poet referred when speaking about the dadaist: 4th dimension.

From its attributes, besides the double mask - Xipe Totec before the obsidian mirror - economic possibilities can be inferred that are not only allegorical:

· a bindle, like The Ugly Ducking’s, the bundle containing its few belongings, a scarf, a shawl that,perhaps merely, wraps itself as an abandonment gesture.

· its four arms emphasizing a multitasking simultaneity (two of them warmed up with the canvases from other oil paint representations, braided as a straw-mat, that one from Western culture’s lapsed gaze, maybe?), like Kali’s, handling with one of them her consort’s head, so he can stare - ecstatic- at the deity devouring him.

· a kerosene lamp reminiscent of the phallic Auer-Bec lantern - a late caricature of lightning, of knowledge, of the paradigm per self of Enlightenment, of the Cartesian grid - could be a curlicue of interpretive excess, making any bystander unnecessary, as it lights and watches itself, and us. And we watch it, impudently, as intruders.

· its feathered headdress sweetens and redeems our gaze, meaning only what it implies. Subject dilutes becoming The Other, then we stop calling ourselves like that, to say ‘we are’.

Like something enshrouding us, hinge, ambient and screen all at once, the shelter in which we find its - our - existence, allowing us to think aloud, anew, within any system or methodology, without any loss of mysticism, technique, or word, to state possible thresholds. Manga transitions, Shunga.

And the source of the animate happens in that vortex, the parade of the hundred specters, anthropomorphic, dehumanized and not, the opinion-giving beacon, the thunder’s sound, the sewer’s stench, the armpit’s scent, the rhizome, the seed and the bullet, the rebar, the barometer and the tea, the slipper, the petiole and the kilo of tortillas, the school-board, the wooden beam and the ink, the peach of longevity, the squeegee and the Kabbalah, the pupil’s reflection, the felt and the texture of recently washed rice, the slug, the sizzle of fat in the copper pot and the toothbrush, the water ox hair paintbrush, the sequin and the 40 oz beer bottle, the buried yoke, the willow and the palm, The Verb, the photocopy and the spatula, the barbecue earth oven, the polyvinyl acetate and Artaud’s favorite painting, the wig, the platform shoe and Insurgentes subway station. We are all.

– Abraham Cruzvillegas