Catholic Confirmation Letters

The importance of being Don Quixote.

We all know the scene in which Alonso Quijano, self-proclaimed Don Quixote de la Mancha, unsuccessfully attacked a few windmills. This scene is considered an excellent and hilarious example of the size of the madness of Don Quixote. For as the narrator warned us the ingenious gentleman mistook windmills for giants. This confusion, says the vox populi, exemplifies the loss of sense of reality that is the victim Alonso Quijano. The culprit of all this insanity is known: excessive intake of romances. Or more specifically: the art led him to unreason.

could be good here cast doubt on the veracity of the narrator, as it could be that simple-minded Velascos us a deeper truth. Don Quixote Was it really so naive? Could it be that where the narrator is insane there is a conscious use of metaphor?

all know that the metaphor metonymic is a resource through which the artist attempts to make visible the hidden aspects of things by linking up with another object that bears some analogy. Examples abound. Think of the classic "pearls of your mouth" to refer to beautiful teeth. Another example, more systematic, is to use the figure of rhinoceros to refer to the file and show that beyond the eroticism of its design is a gray beast indifernte uncontrolled power of the structural weaknesses of the human body and the fragility of the environment. Who has been able to attend a live trampling little doubt you are fit, that this metaphor, far from distancing of reality, implies an increase in perception, a supply more layers of it.

Here we touch a hard bone matter of art and poetry. These are not mechanisms of detachment from reality, more to the contrary, the manner in which it may become more complex. Art aware of a phenomenon that often goes unnoticed: the words and ideas do not have a single reference. A word contains its meaning cicunstancias such as the willingness of the issuer, the comprehensive horizon receiver and signficant material that has historically been able to settle on it. Put simply, the complexity of hidden meanings that a word is so vast, that no picture can retain it.

Perhaps out of laziness, perhaps because of the harshness of everyday life, we are pushed to act as if the meaning of the words were unequivocal. That is what is called "common sense" and this is one point that share the positve, naive empiricism and metaphysics. For all there is only one reality and that contained in the simplicity of words.

now return to the scene where Don Quixote is stamped against the mills. Could it be that by referring to them as giants wanted it to evoke the superhuman power of technology and its attack was an act prompted by a spirit conservative or reactionary perhaps? Could it be to live life like a romance of chivalry was a conscious decision to Alonso Quijano? Should not in this case a monolítco inento to combat color of pre-modern societies by the vain attempt to "artistizar life? Mr. Quijano considering how an early precursor of the Situationist movement, the silliness would move on the pole of the narrator, who caught in a language game positivist and reductionist not understand the revolutionary act of Don Quijote de la Mancha.

Art, to navigate the vast ocean of words semantic, aesthetic causes cracks to help break rigidity of the real: the entrenchment of a world built itself from the repetition and predictability. Anyone taking a deception, defending the ability of art to subvert the metaphysical hardened our worldview is a task of strong political dimension, it lies in front of all the meanings vision and values \u200b\u200bwith which we interact or build reality. There is no clutch

something tragic in this. As you know Mr. Alonso Quijano, daring to redefine the world can lead to being the laughingstock of others. Especially when the other is the only interpretation to be heard. The worst thing that happened to Don Quixote was that his exploits are filtered by the poor and forgetful eyes of a narrator who does not understand. Here is the great problem of the artist: the poetry of lenguje is, in the eyes of the stupidity, the voice of the insane.

It Stings When I Finger

Death and 'The Dead'

"At funerals, people are not wearing sunglasses to hide his pain but his absence." That thought crossed my mind for a few weeks ago, when I was in the middle of a funeral. Surrounded by often unknown dressed in black, masked in a solemn face that hid a deep disgust that caused the summer heat. There was something of a snob in the situation, some blind ritual. He looked like a dancing puppet, with the vacuum generating death man clings to a systematic protocol. Seeing us standing there, it became apparent that really do not know how to deal with death. "I guess it is not for less than I thought, until a comment from an assistant led me to reflect. The wizard

, evidently believing person affected aspet air "we regret .... He is now in a better place. " One can not hear this phrase without thinking of the Nietzschean critique of Christianity. According to that, Christianity is a cult of death, since this is the passage to the heavenly, where God reigns and truth. Thus life becomes a dream, something transitory and relative value. Seen well, for the true Christian life begins with death.

That's what you can unite the Marxist critique of this idea. According to Marxism, this description of reality hides an ideological use, it is designed to perpetuate the miserable situation of the disadvantaged and maintain the privileges of the rulers.

In both cases (Marxism and Nietzsche) criticizes the ontological subordination of life to a story. There is a strange stunt whereby the space of our experience becomes false and the truth is only a story, this is religion. There is then a denial of life. Nietzsche calls this denial "nihilism."

be interesting to see that nihilism is not something unique to Christianity but the essence of every religion (or speech about the inner structure of reality) to consider life as a mere transition to a higher state which is beyond death . In our current westernized cities and allegedly rampant hyper-rationalized cancerísticamente something I call "new-age wisdom" whose main characteristic oriental uncritical jumble with pseudo-scientific.

According to this discourse we need not fear death, because this does not go away nothing. When someone dies, all that happens is a redistribution of atoms. The individual atoms disintegrates but continuing part of being single (or god). Let's say that death is only change the furniture in the room.

These concepts of death understood as atomic transition and reunification could add a third nominee will born with anti-metaphysical. This is the existentialist understanding of death as anything radical. According to him death is the total disappearance of the individual, standing against the above mentioned positions. From this fact arises as primary existential existentialism fundamental moral imperative: the need for an authentic life. In front of the nothingness of death, the individual assumes the contingency and annulment of its existence and decides to give life meaning through the heroic pursuit of a project. An authentic life is one that manages to make something so meaningful to be remembered after the individual died.

Without many difficulties can be seen that in this position smuggles the utility requirement of life. Again the productivity drag constrains the notion of life.

now would like to note that these three concepts of death (such as transition, and no atomic unification radical) have one thing in common: the dead man condemned to oblivion.

Indeed, when we comfort ourselves with the loss of a loved one saying that we'll find it in the next life what you are doing is relieving us, denying the nature of loss that the death total. Something similar happens with atomic unification, the individual as a matter of supreme being has not disappeared, it has simply mutated configuration. In both evades the tragic death of his character. Existentialism maintains this tear, but despises the individuals who succumb at the end of life without a project. In other words, how many existentialist heroes know who have not won a nobel or non-literary?

In the three concepts of death introduces a systematic neglect of the individual. All metaphysical made a sacrifice of the ephemeral for the eternal. For her, people are small contingent hazards and death, the only invariable and permanent. This articulates a discourse that assumes the divine look weak and despising all human. In nihilism, the real victims are the dead. Then think of death as a transit space prevents the pain of their loss and encourages his forgetfulness.

Perhaps, if we want to be accomplices of forgetting the dead, we should avoid thinking about them as a concept of death and proceed in reverse, ie, thinking about death from the dead. That may come a notion of death related to our everyday experience: death is the irreversible pain to an absence.

We would like here think that if you want to be faithful to this pain, the best way to treat the dead is not forgotten but making this: a dialogue with them, rebuilding their idiosyncratic elements or recalling shared experiences. At bottom, this is turning into fantsamas.

Ghosts, in this sense, live and act consistently in our lives. A reminder, at a certain point, can be much more than a mere mental image can become an active intervention of the past in the present. A good visual expression of it could find in the story Joyce's The Dead. In this, the player feels less than a machine to confuse love with lust and drunkenness. This sense of annulment is enhanced to discover that the strong rule of his wife's melancholy is caused by the sudden memory of his great love of youth. A boy in a fit of passion died. The protagonist, Gabriel, becomes aware that he can never cause this effect on his wife and certainly can never love her as did one young miserable. In the revelation end of story, is a radical reversal, a change of state between living and dead.

If we want life to be a mere wilderness of this transition, if we do justice to the emotion of love clotting in grief at the death, missing turn into ghosts may be the best solution to avoid killing the dead and not condemn them to eternal life on the island of forgetfulness.