Where do the forgotten desires end up?

Roots, foliage, astral rays, hair, beard hair, spirals of sound: threads of death, threads of life, threads of time.The weft weaves and unweaves: unreal what we call life, unreal what we call death (Octavio Paz, 1983).

Here we will speak of the relationship between what is and what is to be, or of things that are and will be at the same time. I suppose that at some point it is possible to relate what is with what is visible and what is not yet, but will be, with that which is not seen; in the middle, then, we would be left with that mysterious "vision of the non-visible" acquired by those who are creating something, that creative intuition of what is about to happen or perhaps has already been happening in silence. There are so many expressions going around among us: "from the labyrinths you get out from above", "a turn of the screw", "redouble the bet", all of them referring to thinking the unthought, underlining the urgency of de-automatizing our ordinary perception of things to make room for the novel (sometimes cordially invited to do so, other times violently pushed towards it).

The known and the unknown, two dimensions suggest themselves and with them a question: is it possible that they can coexist, with each other and with us? Remedios Varo can help us rehearse an attempt at an answer. The surrealist painter conceived as many magical universes as atmospheres full of symbols, and in each of her works there are stars and scientists, sorceresses with dreams and archetypes, alchemists who link matter and spirit, magicians of the conscious and the unconscious, all in the same place. However, and regarding the question that summons us here, we will stay with one of his last works, Fenómeno de ingravidez (1963). In it, the earth has moved off its axis, and with it the walls of the room. Trying to balance on an out of phase and weightless floor, a bewildered astronomer tries to keep his left foot in one dimension and his right foot in another, just as we do when we try to think the unthought, from the thought.

Phenomenon of Weightlessness, Remedios Varo, 1963

Perhaps what Remedios Varo proposes to us is to surrender ourselves to the loss of equilibrium. That is to say, not to think the unthought in reference to the thought, but to give the unthought an identity of its own that escapes any kind of known reference. What, then, is the power of the unthought? How to give this dimension a name that cannot even be defined by the negation of something else? Despite so many questions, what is important here is that the weightlessness of the work is something that happens, or rather, something that is already happening beyond our desperate explanations and our yearning for equilibrium. What is not seen is happening here and there, despite being invisible. After all, isn't that what the phrase we all repeat says: "magic exists where we choose to find it". The invisible is already happening and it is up to us to ignore it or pay enough attention to it so that what is not seen can be a vehicle and even precipitate new and unknown events. To see or not to see the share of magic is, after all, the most mundane and real choice of all: how else would children invent their universes? Those where a cup can be a table and where bears can fly, or where the impossible is in turn possible. Why wouldn't playing be serious enough to give it the entity of an event? Why would our most bizarre and fairytale-worthy dreams be so alien as not to be considered real?

We live with the invisible all the time and it is from there that we sense possibilities. Remedios Varo goes ahead by not only seeing more than what is seen, but also by exploring and bringing to life in her work the universes of possibility hidden in the invisible. That said, it happens that these universes are sometimes overlooked in the rigid automatism of what we see; to think the unthought supposes immersing ourselves in a different space and time, like someone who shouts eureka! when something lights up to understand what he does not understand, or like someone who feels a mysterious hunch that tells him where to go next. It is from this place that we are inspired or discover the hidden meaning of things: caressing the textures of the invisible depends on the way we choose to nourish our intuition, knowing that what is about to be glimpsed is already happening in and for us all the time, everywhere, without aging and without being diluted.

Visible and invisible, one inside the other, folded together and sometimes indivisible. It is necessary to look at that which emerges from matter without being material: even a piece of furniture in the corner of the house has its share of invisibility, because in spite of its defined wooden contours, memories, records of anecdotes, desires to sell it or place it somewhere else, invisible meanings and senses about it, but in it, are housed in it. Sometimes there is no need for glasses or a lamp to see better, just to see beyond what is seen: the invisible is the atmosphere of an era or of an interaction with someone else, the invisible color of each moment, the "way of shaping" life without lines or contours. Our fears and our desires, what we remember and what we forget, the future and the possibility, all there floating in an invisible universe that coexists permanently with what we can see. It is in that universe that the unthinkable is kept, it is there where the most remote possibilities coexist and it is also that place where we can surprise others, but also ourselves.

One more thing

To see beyond what is seen, to find the forgotten desires or to think the unthought: all that is found where one resonates and one can resonate with many things, but especially with symbols. It is the symbols that are in charge of materializing the invisible and representing it, so that we can perceive that which cannot be seen. In that place, from the opening to that image or symbol, we can be transformed and transported to distant sensations, intuitions, values, lost ideas. Symbols find us and produce resonance, because after all, we are nothing more than antennas picking up signals from the environment. To think the unthought would not mean, then, to come up with the most original of ideas, but to embark on the adventure of finding and producing resonance, paying special attention to that invisible thing that is always there with us, to give it form. In my opinion, three questions remain to be answered: First, to what symbols are we accustomed? Second, in what way could we challenge that habit by accessing new and different symbols? Third and last, how open are we to it?