By José Enrique Delmonte
This work is a door that opens to force us to think in moments when the skill that the mind has developed to produce ideas is removed from everyday life. It is an exaltation of thought in its condition as being the highest human capacity to understand the environment and create objects, an act that, as we know, concatenates images that are articulated to transform us and the world. It all starts from thinking.
But thinking is a dialogue with the self, a vocabulary that exists before words and much more powerful than action. It is, of course, an act of faith, a bet on freedom that acts as a force that affirms and “disaffirms”, becomes matter and dissipates in its own energy. In the structuring of ideas that are linked into a rational version of what is assumed to be true, thought has a short life. Its nature is volatile and its value is mutant.
Those who know Herrera know of his questions and his introspection. Those who don’t, know that he is, without a doubt, one of the densest thinkers on the Dominican scene, endowed with an enormous capacity to attack the superficiality of things. He delves into common spaces to show us that the common is not so simple, that there is an immense void in collective knowledge about the meaning of the principle and an anguish to recognize the ambivalence of ideas, perhaps his main motivation to organize his wisdom. The strange thing is not that a full-time scientist bets on falsification as a result of a full exercise of thinking but that, in the case of our author, he additionally possesses a very particular ability to know how to write.
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Reading Dr. Herrera is detecting an essay precise, concise and forceful that demonstrates that mastery of using language as energy. The skill in revealing the hidden inserted in literature, in the visual arts, in the humanities and in the scientific text that is observed in his works is a rarity in our environment. His work turns the ground we walk on into quicksand, dismantles our thoughts and suggestively incites us to apprehend wonder.
Some of these characteristics are inserted in his most recent book, Of the objects and the environment (Isla Negra Editores, San Juan, Puerto Rico 2023), a set of ten essays that open like magic artifacts to let complex questions and assertions escape. . Named with titles that could confuse us due to their shortness, the texts can be understood as loose pieces agglomerated in an editorial proposal, a characteristic that, if so, would not detract anything from the whole. However, Herrera sets a trap for us: one essay contributes to the next as if it were a musical work made up of parts that become a single product.
In the book in question, there is a crescendo that begins from the individuality of the being until reaching a collective vision of humanity in a single narrative of objects and their significance in terms of their position in space. Consequently, Herrera’s concerns begin with the first possible object –clothing-, with the subject as the occupant of an environment adverse to his own condition and his capacity to modify him. order to survive and dominate. Nudity and the elements constituted the most basic relationship between the self and the surroundings, until these conditions were overcome and what was initially an instrument of survival became a complex system of identities and meanings that surrounds fashion.
From the journey of the imagination and the depths that the reflective surface stimulates, Herrera exposes three artifacts that accelerated human evolution significantly. The wheel, the clock and the coins are objects that amaze due to the skill of imagination that led to the realization of important leaps in the relationship with the environment. Circulating in three directions: to and from distances, controlled measurements of time and movements with transaction units essential for survival, were the first use of objects that were extensions of the human context. The author displays an eloquent framework of a rolling world, where humanity has remained in motion with its processes of translation and adaptation and the formation of conglomerates that determined associative behaviors.
Regarding the clock, our author does not limit himself to remembering its physical and mechanical characteristics as a time control tool, but also delves into the ideas of time as a dimension, reality and fiction that encompasses the memorization of existential processes and consciousness. of temporality.
In this tenor, the sense of emptiness of the present appears, the sensation of indeterminacy of the significant spaces of the past and the evanescence of time as a result of increasingly rapid changes.
If in global problems these things radicalize the conviction of helplessness that humanity manifests, the gaze is fixed on heaven as a territory for utopia, hope for a different reality and imagination of the construction of new, less harsh and more promising worlds. Therefore, Herrera addresses that thought in the three final essays of the book: “Clouds”, “Lunatics” and “Martians”, a trilogy of science, physics and astronomy that mixes poetry and metaphysics to invite us to think.
In the first of them, the author’s skill in amplifying the topic with diverse inputs is evident, whether from pure science or from the arts and philosophy. Deep down, he envelops us in the sense of the intermittency of clouds, a reason for contemplation or predictions of all kinds, a constant theme in the history of universal literature.
And he points out: “And what about poetry? Does he have anything to say about the events of the skies and clouds in this present invaded by the smallest emptiness? Does it matter in this day and age that the immediacy of almost every human act threatens to become the norm; in which the iron weight of feeling and thinking have disrupted liquid existence?”
Hope, as has been said, remains in the sky, in the closest balloons that classical literature and science fiction have used from afar, perhaps the horizon of versions of a humanity transmuted into an ideal of happiness.
The moon, for Herrera, is analyzed from its most tangible aspect to the daydream of those who have seen it as a mystery, like a dream. In eight strokes and a colophon, she presents us in this book the kaleidoscope of emotions that is part of the satellite’s imagination: the 1969 moon landing, the sea of Tranquility, the moonlight, mythology, songs, pictorial interpretation, poetry and myth. From the moon it continues to the most desired planet, the obsession with Mars that “is fashionable,” according to the author. Preferred sphere for thought and the construction of different dimensions, it bets on the human power to continue the journey, from the wheel, time and imagination.
José Enrique Delmonte is an architect, poet and essayist.
