instead of a definition

Every few years, but without a clear rhythm, this site is broken, reimplemented and frustraitingly put back together. Pages are moved around, sometimes slightly changed, others deeply scraped, links broken and, unusually, lost. This is a palimpsest, not in parchment but in text files.

Here you can find the following paraphernalia:

• old pieces of code in several languages
• explanations to old myself and my future self
• photos with my point of view, perhaps the odd sound recording
• traces of short stories
• flotsam and jetsam accumulated over decades

Perhaps it is somewhat like compost material, which may end up like tomatoes or mushrooms. Or we can also think of this place as an old cardboard shoe box, like those one at the top-left corner of a closet, containing: a forgotten shopping list, a $20 banknote found in a jacket pocket, a black & white photo with an old girlfriend, a train ticket from Amritsar to Delhi, a hand-written recipe for green chicken curry.

memories

I used to write mostly for myself and for the odd visitor. Now the crazy people insist we should write for bots and other inhuman contraptions. I am a dissident, I sit apart from that ideology. More than ever we have to create, to fight to retain our humanity. Today, it is easy to understand Frank Herbert’s Butlerian Jihad, the rebellion against thinking machines; except that we don’t have thinking machines but stochastic lying software.

We have the real universe and our voices, which reminds me of a poem by Raúl Zurita, that has followed me for forty years. It’s a bit older than that, but I committed it to memory that long ago.

Nadie habla, pero en esos días en que la
tormenta rompe, el silencio de sus caras
se hace más intenso que el ruido del mar
y no necesitan rezar en voz alta
porque es el universo entero su catedral

Raúl Zurita (Las playas de Chile VII, Anteparaíso, 1982)

If Spanish is not your thing, here you have an approximate translation:

No one speaks, but in those days in which the
storm unleashes, the silence of their faces
becomes more intense than the sound of the sea
and they need not pray out loud
because the entire universe is their cathedral

Raúl Zurita (The beaches of Chile VII, Anteparadise, 1982)