Provenance Humana
An ongoing inquiry into inheritance, and partial evidence.
1. What I Half-Know
I think I need to begin this as a diaristic exercise. Something that might otherwise manifest itself into more familiar creative territory, where I typically translate ideas into some intended ingenious art. Or, more humanly, into an engaging conversation with a willing friend, if they’re available.
Perhaps this needs to stay closer to words, in a more obvious way, before it becomes anything else. I’ve never really kept a journal, or a diary in the traditional sense. Although that is not to say I don’t take notes liberally, plan projects on paper, or annotate books and interesting articles almost daily. But this has mostly been a pragmatic exercise for referencing thoughts later. Like a noir film detective pulling out his notepad, flipping the pages up and over, and quickly scrawling some juicy new piece of evidence to support a hypothesis already in the making.
There is a risk, for me, in making sense too quickly. I know how to do that. Taking fragments of ideas and giving them structure, rhythm, design. It is one of the ways I have moved through my world: gathering disparate things and finding a new line of coherence between them. But this, right here, may require something a little more vulnerable than that. A willingness to let fragments settle before I arrange them too confidently.
Names. Villages. Dates. Family anecdotes repeated enough to feel like my own memories, though mostly incomplete. Music played after a lifestyle collapsed. Scholarly ventures with uncertain results. My abuela remembered by someone in a remote hamlet, seventy years after she had left there. And then a novel that came much later, though maybe not as much later as I once expected.
So perhaps this begins as a diary, indeed. A place to put down what I half-know and inherited, and what I am still trying to understand about the road towards becoming a writer.
I have been wondering about chronology. Whether to begin with dates and places, because my nature is organised and sequential, or whether a broader reflective approach would be better. But I think chronology matters, at least at first. Memory is clearly not linear, yet there is something grounding about saying: this happened, then this, then this.
Perhaps this is how I begin: with what I half-know, before I make too much sense of it.
Contrapunto castellano
Quizá esto tenga que empezar así: no como una explicación, sino como una forma de dejar constancia.
Hay cosas que sé sólo a medias. Nombres que llegaron hasta mí sin todo su contexto. Aldeas pronunciadas muchas veces, pero nunca del todo habitadas. Fechas familiares que parecen firmes hasta que uno intenta tocarlas con precisión. Anécdotas heredadas, repetidas lo suficiente como para parecer recuerdos propios, aunque no lo sean exactamente.
Durante años he convertido fragmentos en forma. Música, diseño, escritura, sistemas. Esa ha sido una de mis maneras de orientarme en el mundo: recoger piezas dispersas y buscar entre ellas una línea posible de sentido. Pero quizá este ejercicio necesite algo anterior a la forma. Algo menos resuelto. Una disposición a mirar antes de ordenar.
Por eso tal vez esto deba empezar como un diario. No un diario íntimo en el sentido convencional, sino una investigación lenta de lo recibido: lo familiar, lo lingüístico, lo geográfico, lo incompleto. Una manera de acercarme a aquello que medio sé, antes de convertirlo demasiado pronto en relato.
Porque la memoria no avanza en línea recta. Pero a veces hay que empezar por decir: esto ocurrió, luego esto, luego esto otro. No para cerrar el sentido, sino para encontrar el borde desde donde seguir mirando.
