I am by nature shy and careless about hunting for authors to say what I myself can say without them.
[Cervantes. The Author's Preface. Don Quixote. 1605]

I listen to nature and man with amazement, and I copy what they teach me without pedantry and without giving things a meaning in which I do not know if they have it.
[García Lorca, interview. 1936]

Not all the roads take us where we want to go; the stones, when we stumble on them, serve as a warning and at the same time they change our ink.
[Ben Kotel, Paradoxas. 2016]

The image of the world: five centuries after…

These quotes evoke analogies and dichotomies: all are by writers whose native language is Spanish; each writer lived in a different era and was born in a different place; and each of them begins his writings with the line, in a place within La Mancha… and then turns towards Patagonia by way of Andalusia. It is that opening line that draws out my lost homeland – my own dichotomy between the Andes and the Guadarrama, the olive groves and the Araucarias, the sunsets of the Pacific and the sunrises of the Mediterranean.

The governance of an infinitely larger world than what was suspected led to the print and publishing industry becoming the first forms of global communication. As we well know, whoever has the power to inform has the power to misinform; whoever has the authority to educate has the authority to indoctrinate.

Analogies and dichotomies as visual aphorism

"Analogies" is the notion of the universal commonality that things have in their particularity. It allows us to argue on the basis of what we can all recognize in the physical or intangible world of ideas because we have already experienced it [meaning] or imagined it [thought] once. We are surprised to find more familiarity in what we consider unknown, but it also captivates us. When analogies appear, similarities are understood in the discrepancies of what it is to be different because duality is the minimal expression of nature.

This raises the value of duality as a natural fact because it reminds us that reality has three dimensions and at least two opposite faces impossible to see simultaneously, which urges us to reflect, to eliminate prejudice, and to establish reasonable doubt.

Sometimes we forget that written words, similar to images, are shapes, colors, lights and shadows. They are chiaroscuros that help us understand the part of reality that is visible to us and a necesary condition of our visual language. They determine much of the perception we have of the world because images are assigned concepts to help us understand them, and concepts are assigned images to make ideas comprehensible. Both might be useless if there were not a light on somewhere to enlighten us. Perhaps that is why wisdom is always associated with enlightenment. Nothing and no one will prevent the continued doxas and paradoxas, dogmas and dissents, conflicts of interest, lack of balance or contrasted dualities.

"Analogies and Dichotomies" suggests a unifying reflection which speaks of universalities without ignoring the peculiarities; it transforms the clash of frontiers into geographical vicinity, not a confrontation of insoluble opposites.

Guillermo Muñoz Vera
Chinchón, February 2018