The facts float before us, it is impossible not to see and interpret them. Few of us already have a butterfly gaze, rather we look at what happens with the acts of a judge.
We go through life with a machete, handing out sentences, amputating hearts or skewing other people’s ideas because they do not agree with ours; It bothers us to listen to the other even before we have allowed him to finish a sentence. If we are lazy to disagree! Total, what difference does it make … we are used to being on one side.
This Spanish mania to politicize everything has infected our way of relating; it has contaminated to the point of suffocation and abuse television programming intended for relief and entertainment. Caciquismo and hostility gallop between producers and famous television presenters linked to the heart press, splashing the screens and running alongside the atmosphere of tension and fray that exists in the political suburbs.
There is an atmosphere of general enmity, already evident during the management of the pandemic, but which has recklessly spread to any area of our daily lives, no matter how small.
Twitter has become a dangerous network strewn with snipers willing to eliminate the dissenting invader who dares to make his case. Some days the screen smells of burnt meat from so much strife and stinging. One enters the most powerful microblogging service on the multimedia scene and feels anxious, embarrassed by the number of dead birds that can be found. Some days hunting is indiscriminate, without limits or borders where to stop insult, contempt, impertinence.
We try to gloss reality by inflicting pain, putting the accent on what excites the opponent’s anger and thus destroying any possibility of compromise. A practice that we had learned from past battles but that the arrival of Twitter has managed to aggravate even the grotesque and detachment.
Empathy in this social network has become a kind of silk road besieged by pirates who do not exactly seek to soak up aesthetic pleasure but to pour out all kinds of negative emotion, ignite the gunpowder and vomit the boredom of their lives.
Twitter is the corner bar where ego drunkards abound without judgment.
Twitter or discommunication, what doctors define in psychiatry as the inability to connect with the environment. Some days Twitter is pure rhythmpathy, which is the alteration of everything and everyone. In other words, the phobia of everything foreign sets the pace.
On those specific days, Twitter looks like a black Goya painting: nausea and deformities. Paintings that Goya made for a hopeless Spain, what was black inside, was also black outside; they say his soul was drenched in pain.
Oh, the art! What a balm in the midst of so much disaffection. The painting … the color against so much pain. There is no way to get lost in this leafy Madrid of cultural proposals to be dazzled and abandon the spiritual poverty that the media tentacles breathe.
In the exhibition ‘The landscape of the face’ by the Russian painter Alexéi van Jawlensky, which is hosted by the Mapfre Foundation and which I visited last Thursday, my catharsis took place, the emotional cleansing I needed to purify myself of so much fatigue. It is easy, you just have to stop in silence to look attentively at one of his paintings, with a butterfly gaze; listen to the rhythm of the brush strokes, plas, plas, plas; let him, as the poet does, translate the soul into colors, “the colors that beat in my soul and emitted sounds from within,” says Jawlensky, “songs without words.”
How distant is the environment and the materiality of the events then! What Jawlensky says – after having delved into himself – is not necessary for him,
While I was walking through his paintings, on Twitter they declared… I don’t know how many world wars.
* Journalist
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