Staging moments

A story about bonds, books and chess.

My grandfather thought me how to play chess many years ago, back in a day when I wore shorts by default. Every other Saturday -right after breakfast- we would hide in his home office, sit down and play chess. Those Saturdays we talked about everything; history, grammar, football…

And today -even if I live 30 years and 3,000 kilometers away from them- those mornings still dance and burn up to the skies like a bonfire, along with many other memories, those beautiful ones we refuse to let go. Perhaps, are we not… just a bunch of walking memories? An aging stack of newspapers?

I know! that might be a stretch but let me tell you this; for many years -almost religiously- I would regularly travel back to Lima, visit my grandmother, and carve out some time to hide in my late grandfather’s office.

Quietly sitting on his chair with my elbows on his desk became my own type of pilgrimage. One taking me deep into my memories, exalted by the profound emotions I had for that space. It was then when I began to understand that emotions are a powerful catalyst, a vehicle reason cannot match or comprehend. Emotions escape the linear or structured pattern of logic. Emotions… merely “exist” and they do so, always in truthfulness. What humans have done driven by, or surrendered to, emotions might be humanity itself. I slowly became enthralled with the wise and subtle language of emotions as I cared less and less for logic.

While on his chair, I would close my eyes and take deep long breaths. And it was so easy, so damn easy! to just magically break the barriers of time, open the curtains and fall right into those mornings happening such a long time ago. Between us, I still believe the key was the smell of his office. He was a lawyer and had a large library of leather-bound books, with its own particular aroma. A feverish one, gently pulling you down the vortex of time.

And once back in those magical moments, the present would slowly zero into a void; a thick and intense one, a suspended moment in total absence of distractions. So deep in the now were those voyages, that they became at points almost unbearably quiet, which I can presume happens when we silence out our concerns for the future.

The funny thing is that, again, at the core of the memories, or the “passed moments”, all I can -or cared to- remember were the emotions. The actual conversations or the particulars of our chess games didn’t matter. And I think that makes perfect sense.  Could it be that only through emotions we can reach truth? And if so, everything truthful mustn’t also be wise and beautiful? What if for truth, beauty and wisdom to be real, they all have to escape language? I don’t know, seems to me they behave much like an electron, the minute we conceptualize them, we contaminate them. We should write and talk and celebrate emotions but at the end, aren’t emotions just meant to be felt?

You see my dearest visitor, across Light2Matter you will find a myriad of machinations, outlandish hypothesis and extravagant interpretations all fused together into bizarre equations arduously looking to produce one, just one single drop of crystalline water; a sincere object that calls and responds to emotions, an object meant to rescue a single altruistic ideal: to wake up from the despotic rule of routine, by reminding us of our immense individuality firing within, primarily fueled by these emotions and those beautiful souls that bring them to us.

And so the truth stands clear to me; all I’m doing here is looking for more moments to hold on to, to share, to manufacture… and there’s a big chance you are looking to capture significant moments as well.

I don’t know about you but to me, in retrospective, most of these moments seem to happen spontaneously while sitting down at a table, with cherished or awfully eloquent people, in a setting so indefinably musical and unique that they can rarely be recognized at the moment.

Flashy cars, splendid meals and staggering scenarios, they fall short every-single-time if not for the company around us.

And that is all this artisan strives for, to help me, you and everyone else stage more and more of these moments.

“But you must bring the wine

And gather the people

To let moments spontaneously rise

Smiles will travel across ultraviolet horizons

From your very heart beyond the moons of Jupiter.

As long as you wake

As long as you jump

as long as you fly”

By AJPC in memoriam of the Great Alberto Jose Palomino Fernandez.