These days a seminar organized by Adena is being held on the natural space of the Chinijo Archipelago' and they asked me to participate, especially to tell the beginning. I told them up to the beginning of the name 'chinijo'. So, I began to remember where the world was 40 years ago, which is when I left for Alegranza. I self-confined myself. In order not to be a nuisance, I actually moved away from the confinement to which they were subjecting themselves. The physical and, above all, the mental. That's what they called freedom.
I began my stay in Alegranza in the early 80s. I arrived there doing the reverse journey of the world, more than against the current, taking advantage of the flows and spaces of the current to go upstream in the opposite direction. My dreams of a better world (human relations) were evaporating (against the general opinion). I arrived there with nothing, the rod and some food. A little clothes and the sleeping bag. By boat stop. Neither hippy nor new age. A fool, without more, but full of intuitions.
Information stopped arriving from the world to the brain to pass the prior filter of television to the brain
There was no internet, no mobile telephony. In 1984 a first mobile phone was presented in Spain, very expensive. I didn't have a radio, so I communicated with the boats with bonfires and mirrors, if there was sun. And, of course, I didn't have a TV, a device that would change the mental structures of the time and, with it, all external forms. Information stopped arriving from the world to the brain to pass the prior filter of television to the brain. And desire, in all its aspects, exploded. Everything was desirable. And every desire had its price. Even spirituality.
The world was taking a radical turn. The gunslinger Reagan and Thatcher were starting. Attention!: and AIDS. They created the World Trade Organization. You know, globalization and those things and they went (anti-missile shield in between) after the USSR, which was going through its deep internal crisis. The Olympics of 80 and 84 suffered international boycotts and headed, at the end of the decade, from what was an event that presumed amateurism towards the massive participation of professional athletes.
China and some Asian countries (almost three quarters of humanity) were beginning their awakening towards international trade. With or without communism. If the next Olympics were in China, I wonder if they would not be boycotted by Trump. They barely escaped. On October 27, 1986 (year of the declaration of the Chinijo Natural Park), the London Stock Exchange enacted new liberalized laws that allowed the internal connection of global markets, with the expectation of large increases in market activity. This event became known as the Big Bang in the financial markets.
Strong dynamic duo Reagan-Trump. Can you imagine them singing 'I Will Survive'?
Chernobyl and Bhopal happened. Bhopal alone is the example of that decade. The Yankee audio-visual propaganda market deployed all its power and colonized the mind of the world. More or less that's how things were. Either you were a Yankee in any of its multiple marketing modalities or you were a marginal rarity. An idiot. That on this side of the curtain. The world was like two theaters face to face separated by a single curtain. So that nobody saw any work beyond their own belly buttons reflected in the curtain.
Now, another gunslinger wants to undo the game because the chinks got out of hand. Strong dynamic duo Reagan-Trump. Can you imagine them singing Resistiré? The natural park was possible because the Canarian right fought arguing over whether bananas or free ports prevailed and those things. And for two years, only two years, the so-called Pact of Progress had a small margin to pass some laws of the territory.
So 40 years ago things were so bad and the trail of fallen by heroin and suicides was so great, that I self-excluded myself in the confines of the world. Alegranza. The innocent joy of the new democracy was fading inside my heart. There, one day, the loneliest of my life, spontaneously and radically, I had the first 'vision' of what was the nature of the mind that possessed me and that made it so easy for advertising to colonize it. Yankee. Or communist. Or nationalist? up to an almost infinite list including environmentalist.
And that day I returned to the world. I was world again, to be more precise. The vast majority of people (and excuse the pedantry or don't excuse it) are at that point a second before that event. So I know firsthand the suffering of others. Not the one that manifests itself physically or psychically in each one. The one that encompasses all of us.
Some last data. Between 1980 and 1990 is the title of the novel 1984. And already 2001: a space odyssey was left behind. Even Blade Runner was left behind. Ahhhh...! and now people complain that they want to take us to orders and orders all neatly. To me, who loves words because they come enchanted, I remember telling them if they didn't feel creeped out by a device that was called 'computer'. I started using them when I was already quite mature, so as not to lose sight of where they were ordering and what, to my son, who was starting to grow up. To balance. It is not easy for a father to 'disorder' his son without anyone, not even him, noticing. To ensure that for nothing in the world no one could instill in him that creativity is or can be a regulated or ordered or described process. Everything else was the same to me. Deep creativity is never evil. As science would not be if it had not and had not displaced us to that attitude of 'magical thinking' that it is going to solve everything, turning citizens into absurd elements waiting for the pill of the moment or the vaccine or the energy or eternal salvation. While we prey on the planet without any trace of intelligence.
In 1986 the NATO referendum was also held and the Canary Islands said no, pa'ná, but it said no. And in those years the Canarian fishing boats were machine-gunned in the Canarian-Saharan bank. In the midst of the frenzy of nonsense. In Lanzarote, how not and up to the times, Dimas began his career as mayor. And Lanzarote joined the fireworks of the speculation party, cutting off any possibility of creativity or own development. It was sold, already without qualms. Everything.
I told them things, things I knew because I had experienced them, hahaha, but no fucking attention. Now I don't say a word. I accompany where I can accompany. And I observe. It seems that I was born to observe, without limits in the observation. And I tell stories. And I laugh at my thoughts, before they take shape.
So, on a political level, what worries me is that if China wins this challenge, the US may disintegrate as the USSR did. But the USSR did it in relative peace; they disappeared without blowing everything up. I don't know if the US would do the same, they are gunslingers. And the USSR had a historical country behind it (Russia), where to gather and protect itself. The US has nothing. It never existed. It is just an immense movie in our heads. And a war that they won together with the communists against the fascists. To then go after the communists and protect small fascists here and there, or democrats at the imperial orders.
Of course, outside of that movie there is a place with many states and a large army. But they are neither so united nor are they what they have told us. As the USSR was not what they told us. Neither more nor less. In short, we have a statue engraved in the depths of the coconut that is a story that the Chinese do not believe: freedom. Neither do the Yankees. And I think, to simplify, that we live like the one who 'has' a dog that can live millions of years and still says that the dog is his. And he can even sell it. Or he believes that he sells it.
For example, it is said: if we want to live from tourism we have to sell ourselves well. What is selling oneself? Because, literally, it can mean acting in an illicit or unworthy way in exchange for a benefit. The RAE says of selling:
1. Transfer to someone for the agreed price the ownership of what is possessed.
2. Expose or offer to the public the genres or merchandise for those who want to buy them.
3. Sacrifice to the interest something that has no material value. Sell honor, justice.
4. Said of a person: To fail one to the faith, trust or friendship that owes to another.
5. To make something or someone appear or present in a skillful and persuasive way. He sold his image well.
6. Said of a person, of an idea, of a conduct and, especially, of a commercial product: To achieve greater or lesser sales success or to achieve social acceptance.
7. To be bribed.
8. To offer oneself at all risk and cost in favor of someone, even exposing one's freedom.
9. Said of a person: To say or do inadvertently something that reveals what one wants to keep hidden.
10. Said of a person: To attribute to oneself a condition or quality that one does not have.
I would review well these ten points offered by the RAE. Thinking about island and individual and ultimately in a whole. And I would look calmly and creatively at what we want to do. And from the outset if we want to continue 'selling ourselves'. Or we begin to use other terms, analyzing well the meanings. Now, if we feel like a prostitute (the island) abandoned miserably and unfortunately in the sea of life, then let's be honest and assume it. And let's sell ourselves to the best bidder to be able to feel in 'well-being' for a little while longer. It is curious, China can win not because they sold themselves, but because we wanted to buy them cheap with what we had earned by selling ourselves. We assumed that they were going to prostitute themselves. And everything turned out to be very strange.
Alegranza remains as it was forty years ago, which would almost be normal for an island in the middle of the Atlantic, in such a short time. And Chinijo has its influence. Only its influence, which is opposed to the intense and disturbed human desire to sell oneself. Personally, I always used a key to know when I was being sold. In tourism it is 'when the customer is always right'. In private, when one thinks that 'I am always right'. If nothing has changed, that is the 'place' that awaits us.
I trust not to be right and I trust to make friends with the next humans who walk around here on tourism. And that we make cisterns. Hundreds, thousands of cisterns. And Europe? Europe in those times was moving from a Club of Atomic Energy of Coal and Steel to what it is now or is not. And all these commotions will continue like this until the observers understand, radically, that they are an indivisible part of what is observed.
