Nights, from the series, Dissolution of I. Dare to love an artist. Gonzalo Gutierrez, 2024
XXVIII
For T.
October is, as always, taken for something else. Not for that precise task. It happened the year all the Hemlocks died. When it was still the height of the rolling up and down that was life. You sat down to compile all your literary might under a tiger. The vision came to you like that and it helped you correlate all the moments you had experienced wilderness. You gathered in your memory the vision with your feelings so as to witness this new and ancient archetype being born. Perhaps because you witnessed this wild cat at this precise moment in your life you came to realize that his only way out was back into the wild. I was going to put this poem under beauty because it happened in the year of the dying hemlocks, so much beauty lost, unknown but to us, here and now.
I was telling you before that we got the last part of the picnic table disassembled and put away before the wet season began. And after I went for a walk and saw fresh bear poop on the new trail, covered in poisonous and hallucinogenic mushrooms. Wet season, moist bark, fog is a permanent visitor, it moves around, mysterious. We speak with the voice of silence, a mystery. The forest is our witness. I have grown old and parts of me are broken, missing, lost in the beauty of this forest in which I will live the rest of this earthly life.
Without name, without image, I am the dissolution of the world that appears through you while I’m lost, with nothing to do but what I have been doing all along. Fog like. Shadow like. Silence like. Unmoved, untouched, boundless, out of the mythical, unknown and mysterious, like the silence in all the waters of the world.
Gateless, Gonzalo Gutierrez 2024
XXIX
They were turned into locked doors. The mind opener arrived one rainy morning and unlocked them all. What happens after is wild. The sun was shining and there was nothing locked but the illusion of being locked. The fiction dissipated itself. This was called mind opener and it has appeared in our world for millennia. From the nameless and imageless, certain beings listen and watch in silence the unfolding of the real. Out of the mythical world, how irrational has always been the world. Why take the mythical for real? For it is Ego’s land of perpetual devastation. We are still in Ego’s eon. Many more centuries we need to transcend this epoch. All one hears is the dangers, the pitfalls, the delusions. Hold fast to the centre until you become the centre, empty and impermanent like the silence of this forest. Can you hear it?
Gateless serie, Gonzalo Gutierrez 2024
XXX
A way of liberation
As I am
You are free
I’m my way of liberation
You are your way of liberation
To think that I am your way of liberation
Is to cage you.
I am a way of liberation said Zen
A new myth was born
In the form of none and all.
XXXI
Art is our way of liberation they said, without art there is no liberation, zen doesn’t judge our minds just opens it. What one does with his or hers zen is individual. You walked barefoot on the grass, listening to the echo in your mind: Art is our way of liberation. Nobody defines the art nor our way of liberation. Only us. Only me. A hummingbird started talking to another hummingbird, in silence we hear frogs, drops of water are falling everywhere. There are no trees with signs in here he said. We have nowhere to go, we arrived a long time ago to not even anything land, and now that we had rolled the broad and boundless we listen, we speak without speaking, we act without acting, we remember and we forget, and we live our everyday life beyond your world of myth.
XXXII
She said, these images are my words. Anything and everything can be a word. These are my sentences, they are measured in years, decades. Among all the loss we remain.
Only I will not remain he said. Only I will be completely lost to the certitude of silence, boundless. No mind to have, to grasp, but perfect silence, prefect awareness, presence of being joyously human being. Human being is my name. I’m nameless and imageless, a mystery, a forgetting, a loss, out of myth, existing for this brief life one breath at a time. My heart pumps and I breathe, and I sometimes laugh, cough, and speak my way into the myth. I’m the open hungry, the open thirsty, the open breathless, I’m an experience that can only be felt, from each directions all at once. I’m not this sentence. Without an I to exist, but as a presence, an open, an impermanence; talking you into myth.
Gonzalo A Gutiérrez Hernández, October 2024
XXXIII
During the day they want a memory of the night.
“A Memory of the Night”
They bring it home and hang it on the wall. They come and go while the memory remains in the wall. Each time you step in front of it, it receives you fully open, infinite, mysterious, for as I said already it is a memory of the night. Each time over the course of your life in that memory of the night converged all your nights. You would stare into its abyss which was a way of staring into the abyss you were. In time the memory moved from place to place. It hang at your bed wall at the end but by then it had become an old friend and a permanent visitor in your life. You grew jaded that you would have to give up the ghost you had been and the memory of the night would remain untouched, unknown, infinite, eternal gatherer of souls.
The night grew to incredible proportions. Large groups during subsequent historical periods studied it, turn it into a discipline and populated the imagination of humanity.
Humanity slept at night and need it now more than ever a memory of the night. What happens when you sleep is of utmost importance for both sleepers and the awake. The sleeper try hardest to lucid dreaming and the awaken gives it significance.
It is the night of course always present, showing you the sun, convincing you you are awake, that you are conscious of the night, that mystery you are, that beauty you are, that peace you are.
Among the most enduring records to come out of the night remains this letter to W. B by an unknown hand.
Dear W. Benjamin.
The angel of history was an old myth maker. I met him once but he doesn’t remember. He who never forgets. The personification of memory allegorized and printed in that book by P. Ricouer, Memory History, Forgetting, I think is called. I’m listening to that album again. I love that album. We share the music. I know, I can see what you see, I can feel what you feel, I am scared at what you are scared. We are here all alone. All these images, all these guests; what are they looking at? Humanity looks into the abyss of your eyes and sees itself, gaps, overwhelmed, exhausted, etc., and you sigh. Memory could never reach you you are always too far away and I am looking right at you. When you gazed inside him what did you see?Something I projected myself, a made me believe, I think, a hope in a dream. He was certainly speaking to me from a place I had never seen or known. No words to describe it, no image to form it, no abstraction to grasp it. He laughed at me and sat down. He said he was tired of walking over five centuries and enjoyed the silence. In time I knew he was called the most extreme of us. The oldest secret society - the original expression of the way started with her: unknown, nameless, imageless.
Gonzalo A Gutiérrez Hernández. 141024
MADRE, Gonzalo A Gutiérrez Hernández, October 2024
XXXIV
Vidya
To my mother Lazara Hernández Sigas (06-08-1958-10-22-2024).
Mother, last night I felt your spirit inside of me. I was lost in you and my head was a rock. The black waters took me in to where memory does not exist. Just before it happened you visited me young, beautiful, full of a sad and gentle hope that gave me joy and the deepest willingness to be taken by you.
I can’t remember anything but a sense of peace of the deepest peace. The days pile up and I was filled with sorrow.
Mother, you are the love of my life: this energy you gave me, this name, this memory. My brother was the biggest gift you gave me and I am thankful. I knew when you transformed with all the certainty of being. First I was not - I flew 24hrs straight just to see you again: the love I was was calling onto you for it was you. I knew I would feel you in the water, my brother and your friend gave me the strength. I know your breath took your mind and follow the light. I saw it. I was there with you. I am a dead mother inside a living son and a living father and if the mystery wants it perhaps one day I will be a grandmother. Mother was always body and mind. Mother flows through me and taught me all I have ever known. She knows she is a living grandmother inside a mother inside a daughter and that we all are one.
Gonzalo A Gutiérrez Hernández 311024
En la muerte de nuestra madre, Gonzalo Gutiérrez Hernández, October 2024
XXXV
Dear I have been reading you from all over the world. I have inhabit all these places to see what you see to feel what you feel. We are about to fall asleep but the rain will accompany us tonight, all night. Atmospheric rivers rain on us. We have secured the property. Tonight I will tell you about the rock picker who worked for Laozi where myth ends. I have met a few seers in my time when all I could was hear the rain and now the rain has brought the memory. I love this time in the circle. I love my life. All the beauty. Mountain life. Forest life. Water life. Silence life.
Gonzalo A Gutiérrez Hernández, 101824
When I woke up I was in the bottom of the ocean, in a valley next to a mountain. I realized midway while talking to a great grand mother of a whale. You checked the perimeter drain system and it was working well. You hadn’t had opportunity to test it since you built it several years ago. The lilies drown and for the first time you thought about the strangeness of a lake at the bottom of the ocean. The great whale ask your name and you said nameless. You talked through the silence in the crushing rain. It has been raining for eternity and all are sheltered in their homes. Nobody knows is raining, only you. Nobody knows this rain, only you.
Self portrait: Lotus Born, Gonzalo A Gutiérrez Hernández, 141124
XXXVI
Picking rocks, balanced strong back, a test of your power. Down you go. Flowing with the weight, without thoughts. We could only collaborate with my absence. You are free to feel all your feelings, to express all your feelings just don’t be in your head but out here. Here, said the rock picker. The limits of your control are your fears. The story you tell yourself about your untouchability, free of danger, and you can made believe yourself to be fear, danger, etc. But these are of course the limits of your control. To step into the unknown, to escape your preselected mode with which you function is the most difficult thing you could do. Down here, picking rocks, balanced strong back, a memory of your power. This was the most important lesson that our myth maker ever heard in his life. It is said that he extrapolated the entire philosophy of his life which was a type of anti philosophy in that it abide in silence and the god of the rock. Planetary rock, cosmic rocks turns to ashes: space. You thought he painted like a myth maker that forgets they are myth, so as to become real. You are lucky enough to be there. All you have to do is care for the life given. It will grow by itself and it will teach you everything.
Gonzalo A Gutiérrez Hernández, October 2024
