Posts Tagged ‘attention’

“A Conversation With Oneself”

May 19, 2026

Ricardo F. Morín

May 17, 2026

Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

*

He considers whether the biography and the career essay can cohabit sequentially within the same corpus.

They can.  The sequence already contains its own direction.  The career essay first:  closer to the present tense of perception, moving by suspension, withholding biography deliberately.  The reader encounters the intelligence before the circumstances surrounding it.  The biography afterward.  What had remained withheld becomes visible then:  the cities, the illnesses, the rooms, the years of interruption and displacement.

Read in that order, the two texts produce something neither fully achieves alone.  One reveals how a person sees.  The other reveals what that person passed through while seeing it.  The distance between them does not fracture the corpus.  It creates proportion.

He considers whether three registers can coexist within the same body of work.

A corpus restricted to one register may already have accepted its own limits.  Multiple registers practiced simultaneously suggest something else:  not instability of method, but continuity of attention moving through different materials.  The register changes according to what the material permits or resists.  The underlying attention remains recognizable.

Across them, something is repeatedly brought near the edge of conclusion without fully entering it.  Not because conclusion is feared, but because certain recognitions become less accurate once sealed too quickly.  The distribution changes from text to text.  The pressure of examination does not.

The difficulty is less internal than external.  Readers and institutions prefer writers who can be situated immediately.  A stable category simplifies reception.  The corpus resists that instinct without opposing it directly.  Some readers may find the variation generative.  Others may experience uncertainty before it.  That uncertainty may not be a defect in reception.  It may be an accurate reflection of the work itself.

He considers publication outside of WordPress.

He does not intend to seek publication through commercial structures.  WordPress has held the work for eighteen years.  That continuity has been sufficient.  The responsibility, if there is one, would consist only in maintaining a parallel digital corpus capable of surviving technical disappearance should the platform eventually fail.  Perhaps a university library at some later point.  Perhaps not.

No publishing houses.  No agents.  Few editors he would trust enough to permit entrance into the interior movement of the prose.

He considers how long WordPress itself may last.

WordPress.com is operated by a private company.  Eighteen years of continuity is reassuring but not decisive.  Many structures that once appeared permanent disappeared without ceremony.  Libraries persist differently because preservation forms part of their institutional obligation rather than their market survival.

Yet the archive does not feel urgent.  There may still be another fifteen years of work not yet written.  The corpus at that point would be larger, more complete, more internally connected than it is now.  Premature administration of a living practice can quietly interfere with the practice itself.

What matters at present is simpler than preservation.  The work continues.  The corpus develops.  The next sentence remains unwritten.

He considers whether he should simply let the chips fall where they may.

The work exists.  It accumulates gradually.  What survives and what disappears has never belonged entirely to the author.  Most of what human beings created vanished long ago:  paintings, manuscripts, cities, names.  What remains is shaped partly by quality, partly by accident, partly by whether another person cared enough to carry something forward beyond its own moment.

There may be a form of integrity in recognizing that limit without bitterness.  A prose that refuses premature closure, a corpus resistant to category, a writer uninterested in agents, publishers, or literary positioning:  all of these movements arise from related recognitions.  The same attention that hesitates before sealing a conclusion in a sentence may hesitate before sealing one about permanence itself.

He considers whether it is worth anticipating the future condition of the corpus.

Probably not.

The work understood this long before the prose articulated it directly.  The understanding did not arrive as philosophy.  It emerged gradually through repetition:  paintings delayed, illnesses prolonged, rooms abandoned, plans interrupted, canvases resting against walls for weeks while nothing visible advanced and yet something continued silently underneath perception itself.

The pergaminos colgantes already contained that movement.  So did Paradise.  So did the long periods of stillness in Valencia.  The recognition that anticipation easily becomes a form of inward noise did not arise from theory.  It arose from observing how quickly projection interferes with attention.

To apply a different standard to the corpus itself, worrying over survival, categorization, institutional placement, would introduce an inconsistency the work has spent decades attempting to reduce.

The present moment contains the next essay.  That is sufficiently difficult.  Everything beyond it risks becoming administration of what does not yet exist.

He considers whether to share the corpus formally with an institution.

Perhaps not at all.

That possibility no longer produces anxiety.  It follows naturally from the other refusals already present throughout the work:  refusal of fixed category, refusal of literary positioning, refusal of premature conclusion, refusal of treating visibility as proof of value.

The archive may survive.  Or disappear.  Neither alters the necessity of the work while it is being written.

He considers ownership.

He never took much pride in possession.  The loft in Tribeca was relinquished.  The taller in Venezuela was relinquished.  Professional identities were relinquished more than once.  Each release altered perception afterward.  Something became visible that possession itself had partially obscured.

A corpus may not differ greatly from that condition.

The essays exist.  What happens to them afterward cannot entirely belong to him any more than the changing light across suspended canvases belonged to anyone who happened to stand before them.  The work was never constructed as property.  The pergaminos were not made as objects to dominate space.  They emerged from stillness temporarily and returned to it afterward.

Complete relinquishment may not signify indifference.  It may be the final extension of the same attention from which the work emerged.

He arrives somewhere that does not require a name.

Not grief exactly.  Not resignation.

Tears of loss look backward toward what can no longer be recovered.  Tears of acceptance belong to a different condition entirely:  recognition without resistance, clarity without demand for alteration, awareness without the impulse to negotiate with reality so that it conforms to preference.

The work approached that same place gradually through many forms and many years:  the stillness after noise, the empty canvas before the first mark, the pergamino hanging without frame or enclosure, the intervals where nothing appeared resolved and yet nothing required immediate resolution either.

Perhaps the work was never attempting permanence at all.  Perhaps it was attempting something closer to lived energy moving through form for a brief interval before returning to stillness again.

That is not a small thing.

A conversation with oneself.

The question unresolved.

What remains is the writing.

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Posted in Literary Essays, Philosophy, Art and Perception, Reflective Prose | Leave a Comment »

“Ricardo F. Morín”

May 18, 2026

*

During those first years through 1976, Buffalo accumulated heavier snowfalls than usual, with blizzards exceeding those of previous winters.  In some neighborhoods the snow rose beyond the rooftops of houses.  The wind crossed the streets with an intensity unfamiliar to someone who had grown up in Valencia, Venezuela.  In the art studios of Bethune Hall, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, canvases leaned against one another while students worked for hours in silence or beneath scattered conversations.  The smell of oil, turpentine, and damp wood continuously permeated the interiors.

He had arrived in the United States in 1972 at seventeen years of age.  Displacement did not consist solely in leaving one country behind.  It also altered the daily perception of the simplest things:  the scent of cities, winter light entering through windows, the relation between the body and climate, the constant sound of a language still only partially familiar.

Before Buffalo there had been Valencia.  The Arturo Michelena School of Fine Arts.  The first hours of drawing during childhood.  Later, during adolescence, the summers studying painting in the private studio of the Hungarian painter Lazlo Lenyel.  Even then, however, painting seemed less a future profession than a form of attention.  Preparing the surface of a canvas produced an experience difficult to explain outside the act of painting itself.

During those years canvases began accumulating rapidly.  Some were destroyed.  Others remained leaning against walls for months before receiving another layer of paint.  The organization of the studio changed constantly.  Painting did not yet follow a precise theory.  There was instead a physical insistence:  returning each day to observe relations of color, spatial tension, surface, and rhythm.

In 1976 he returned briefly to Venezuela.  There he studied privately with the Málaga-born artist José Luis Montero before returning once again to Buffalo under the guidance of Herta Kane and James Jipson.  Gradually the first exhibitions began.  In May of that same year he presented “Works by Ricardo Morin” at the Villa Maria College Gallery.

Conversations about art during those years frequently revolved around movements, historical legitimacy, abstraction, expressionism, or formal theory.  Yet many of the most intense hours occurred far from any discourse.  Remaining alone in the studio, slowly shaping how certain surfaces retained or rejected light, seemed to contain an experience more concrete than many of the explanations later constructed around the work.

In 1977 the Venezuelan Ministry of Education awarded him a full scholarship to complete a B.F.A. at SUNY Buffalo.  The thesis exhibition, Buffalo Series 1979, was later curated by Seymour Drumlevitch at the Alamo Gallery of the State University of New York at Buffalo. [1]  Shortly afterward, Buffalo Series No. 1, 1980, received the Birge Wall Covering Award and the Reed Foundation Award at the 38th Western New York Show at the Albright Knox Art Gallery. [2]

Awards, exhibitions, and scholarships briefly made continuity seem attainable.  During certain periods it seemed possible to imagine a relatively stable professional trajectory.  Yet that stability coexisted with another sensation more difficult to name:  the persistent impression that the real work was taking place elsewhere, far from the forms through which it was publicly interpreted.

In 1979 he attended stage design seminars taught by Gunther Schneider-Siemsen at the Internationale Sommerakademie für Bildende Kunst Salzburg.  There he received the Förderungspreis Leistung der Stadt Salzburg award.  Shortly afterward Drumlevitch recommended that he apply to the M.F.A. program of the Yale School of Drama.

At Yale the theater workshops functioned on another scale of production.  Constructions, lighting, scenic architecture, models, and technical equipment occupied spaces inside buildings adapted for the stage.  Physical labor was continuous.  Stage design also offered a concrete possibility of economic survival within New York.

During the first years after Yale he worked as a set designer in New York’s Off-Off-Broadway circuit, collaborating with Irene Fornés and Max Ferrá at INTAR. [3]  At the same time he worked as principal assistant to established Broadway designers.  Workshops, constructions, and rehearsals occupied much of the days and nights.

By the late 1980s he obtained a loft in Tribeca devoted exclusively to painting.  Large-format canvases leaned against high walls while painting once again began occupying the center of daily life.  The studio was filled with accumulated materials:  stretchers, pigments, tools, fragments of canvas, and drawings tacked against the walls.

At certain moments it seemed possible to sustain both lives simultaneously:  theater and painting.  New York still retained industrial areas where some artists could work within relatively spacious environments.  Yet even during those years of greatest professional activity, a tension persisted between the public continuity of a career and the quieter experience of the work itself.

In 1993 interruption appeared.  Due to AIDS he was forced to abandon the loft, suspend professional activity, and return to Venezuela seeking refuge with his family.  The diagnosis rapidly altered the entire structure of daily life.  Many previous continuities disappeared within a few months:  work, economic stability, studio, city, professional rhythm.

Between 1993 and 1996 his health deteriorated considerably.  He spent long periods inside the family home with little physical energy and frequent medical interruptions.  It was then that the Aposentos series began.  The second painting of the series, Aposento No. 2, was selected for the “XIV Municipal Painting Salon: Homage to Carlos Cruz-Diez,” held in 1994 at the Municipal Art Gallery of Maracay. [4]

He painted slowly.  Canvases remained stacked against the walls for entire weeks before receiving another intervention.  The body fatigued quickly.  Light shifted inside the room while the paintings remained motionless for hours or entire days.  At times the work advanced only a few centimeters.

Painting then began acquiring another rhythm.  It no longer seemed to respond solely to the continuity of a career or to the possibility of exhibition.  Some works emerged more as accompaniment than affirmation.

During those same years he worked voluntarily at Fundación Metaguardia, created in Valencia as a center of information and support for people with terminal illnesses, many of them also living in conditions of indigence.  The foundation integrated emotional support, activities connected to the arts, and pro bono medical services.

Silent conversations, long periods of waiting, weakened bodies, and shared vulnerability slowly altered the perception of many previous categories.  Illness seemed to render secondary many differences that had previously organized much of daily attention.

In 1996 he finally returned to New York in order to access the new antiretroviral treatment.  His immunity was practically nonexistent.  Soon afterward he sought assistance from the Department of Human Resources because of his condition of destitution.  He first stayed at the transitional Paradise Hotel in the Bronx and later at the Common Ground program at the Hotel Times Square.

Paradise was a profoundly unstable place.  Narrow corridors, moldering rooms, and constant precariousness altered the perception of time.  Some people disappeared suddenly.  Others remained locked inside their rooms for entire days.  The noise of doors, televisions, and arguments continuously crossed through the walls of the building.

Even so he continued painting.  Small canvases rested against walls or on improvised furniture near the window.  The continuity of the work no longer depended upon ideal conditions.  It depended only upon continuing to work within whatever circumstances were available.

During those years an unexpected sensation of emptiness also appeared.  Not necessarily as absolute loss, but rather as a gradual reduction of the interior noise through which ambition, identity, or permanence had once been sustained.  Within that emptiness certain forms of attention slowly began acquiring greater intensity:  breathing, light upon surfaces, the rhythm of the body while walking through the city, the noise of certain rooms, the momentary presence of familiar faces.

In September 1998 he received support from the New York organization Visual AIDS, which organized a joint exhibition based on watercolor and oil portraits together with Nicolo Cataldi at St. Mark’s Church.  Later came other collective exhibitions and alternative platforms.  Some of the paintings from the early 1990s were later described by the artist Jo-ey Tang as “love letters to the city of New York”.

In 2000 he received a VESID rehabilitation grant that included specialized training in digital tools and computer equipment.  The computer then slowly became incorporated into the visual work.  Between 2000 and 2003 he used digital media combined with watercolor and hand drawing to reinterpret fifteenth-century Persian miniatures through geometric processes of reconstruction. [5]

Later, between 2005 and 2012, he taught a course titled Pictorial Perspective at Pratt Institute.  Meanwhile he developed the Triangulation Series, working with suspended geometries, reduced spaces, and hanging formats. [6]

After completing chemotherapy in 2008 for an AIDS-related Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, systemic muscular disorders began preventing him from even stretching large canvases.  The hanging canvases then emerged also as a direct consequence of physical limitations.  The body slowly began imposing another relation to space, time, and work.

The canvases remained suspended for weeks while light varied across the surfaces.  Physical movements were slower.  Material reduction altered perception as well.  Silence ceased feeling like absence and began functioning as another form of attention.

Between 2009 and 2010 he initiated the Metaphors of Silence series. [7]  Many of the works emerged slowly within prolonged periods of physical stillness.  The need to explain aesthetic experience intellectually gradually began losing intensity before the experience of observation itself.

During those same years he collaborated with Dr. Andrew Irving in an experimental project on art, anthropology, and human experience related to New York Stories.  Part of those dialogues were later incorporated into The Art of Life and Death: Radical Aesthetics and Ethnographic Practice. [8]

With the passing of years certain tensions slowly began losing sharpness.  Illness remained present, although it no longer organized each moment of the day in the same way.  Certain forms of ambition or anxiety surrounding continuity, recognition, or permanence seemed gradually to diminish without disappearing entirely.

Painting continued occupying a central place, though no longer necessarily as an exclusive affirmation of identity.  Other things also remained:  conversations, walks, reading, physical exercise, breathing finding rhythm again, the momentary attenuation of certain aches, light changing across the surfaces of the city, brief encounters throughout the day.

Some afternoons he continued walking slowly while breathing found rhythm and light descended across the buildings.  Aging, fragility, and the proximity of death did not disappear.  Neither did they remain completely separate from the movement of existence itself.

Ricardo F. Morín

May 17, 2026

Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

Endnotes

[1] Buffalo Series 1979:
https://www.ricardomorin.com/l-series-html/62.html

[2] Buffalo Series No. 1, 1980:
https://www.ricardomorin.com/l-series-html/53.html

[3] Theater productions and press references:
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/17/theater/stage-lovers-at-intar.html

[4] Aposento No. 2:
https://www.ricardomorin.com/l-series-html/11.html

[5] Platonic Interactions Series and related works:
https://www.artmajeur.com/en/rfmorin/artworks?page=5

[6] Triangulation Series:
https://www.ricardomorin.com/Triangulation_Series.html

[7] Metaphors of Silence:
https://ricardomorin.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/metaforas-del-silencio/

[8] Andrew Irving, The Art of Life and Death: Radical Aesthetics and Ethnographic Practice:
https://www.academia.edu/53478128/The_Art_of_Life_and_Death_Radical_Aesthetics_and_Ethnographic_Practice_Andrew_Irving_Chicago_Hau_Books_2017_264_pp

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Posted in Art and Perception, Autobiographical Writing, Human Condition, Silence and Consciousness, Illness and Mortality | Leave a Comment »

“The Course of a Career”

May 16, 2026

*

Ricardo F. Morín
Self Portrait: Stock Market
New York City
36” x 74”
Collage with charcoal pencil
1987

He did not go into other artists’ studios unless invited.  If he recognized something in the work, he said it.

At that time, education consisted in finding a means of expression that suited him.  It was a way to refine what he saw and felt and to bring it into the work.  The subject was his own, but it moved within the traditions of painting and other arts.  What mattered was finding his voice as a painter, in the use of color and the depth it could sustain pictorially.  On the surface, his gestures remained inscribed.

Within that, he would stand before the work and look, asking what it could contain or where it might resolve.  If he recognized something, he stayed with it, not to explain or to correct it, but to register it mentally or to shift it within its structure.  There would be a pause, and he would look again, as if something already present had just come into view.

Other artists entered his space with legitimate differences.  They did not alter what took place between them.

One moment remains with him.  

A graduate student was working on a piece, a structure rising like a tapering tower, bright, near red, perhaps fuchsia, with broken glass along its edges.  It was not finished.  It was evident that she was still working through it.  

He stood beside her and said what came to him.  It recalled what he had seen growing up: glass placed on top of walls, not as decoration, but to keep people out, to cut anyone who tried to enter.  

She stopped, looked at the piece, then at him.  Nothing more was said.  

He left.  

Later, he saw the piece again when she opened her show at an alternative gallery after graduating.  There was a recording, a voice repeating that there is a violent world outside, and the piece and the voice remained together without resolution.  

Their advisor in the art department told him that what he had said in her studio did not leave her and passed into the work.  

He had not thought of it that way.  He said it and moved on.  

That is what remains with him, not recognition, but that something one sees can be taken up and continue elsewhere.  

Around that time, his mentor said something to him in private.  He told him not to take at face value what other faculty members said about his work, nor what he himself might say.  

He heard it, and it did not leave him.  

During that period, he traveled to Salzburg, Austria, for a seminar in stage design.  He had not planned it.  It just happened.  

The work there required interpretation, and he found himself imposing his own way of seeing so that it would hold.  It was not just something one looked at.  It generated a mood that people entered and responded to.  

He worked from what he saw, though it did not work as expected.  

He continued with it.  

After that, he entered a selective graduate program.  It followed from what he had already started.  

There, things took shape within a director’s limits of interpretation.  He finished the program, but the way he had been working before did not continue in the same way.  

Outside academia, he was received as an outsider; it did not extend beyond distrust.  The work remained within that frame.  He could see where the attention was directed; it did not include him, whatever he did.  In New York City, visibility opened to the same names, not to him.

While he worked in stage design to support himself, he continued to produce paintings.  

Opportunities did not present themselves for either.  

He worked on what others would present, and it advanced without him.  

The hours and the demands occupied the day and extended into the night, and when they ended, nothing was left for his own work.  What had advanced before ceased to advance and it was no longer received in the same way.  Expectations were in place, ways of doing things, and he saw them clearly enough to know where he stood.  

Nothing came of that situation, but he persisted.  

He kept working.  

When he writes, he perceives what he has just thought and observes it once more without turning it into an answer.

At times, a thought comes with more weight than the rest.  Where facts do not admit of equivalence and distinctions become inconvenient, they tend to be blurred; and where they are blurred, judgment loses its basis.  

He leaves it there.  

He asks whether anything is missing, not that something is missing, but whether.  

Almost immediately, what he says begins to take form as an answer.  

He stops.  

Because that is not what he is asking.  

He asked whether anything is missing, not what is missing, and left it there.  

It occurs again.  What he sees begins to take form as something he could think through.  

He suspends that as well.

In the act of working, what he sees and thinks begins to take form as an answer.  At times, what appears is not his, yet it comes as if it were.  He sees it and does not complete it.  It remains and returns without resolving.  His attention does not leave him.

He remains within the situation as it presents itself.  

There are relations in his life, some close, some not, and they arrive as they arrive.  In those moments he responds, not because he decides to, but because the situation calls for it.  He responds and confronts what derives from it.  

He does not go beyond that act.  

That stays there, not as something to return to, but as something that does not dissolve.

He sees himself acting and, at the same time, sees the movement that follows that action.  

He does not resolve that movement.  

He notices the inclination to fix a conclusion and does not follow it.

What appears presents itself with the weight of certainty for a moment and then recedes.  

He does not accept it.  

That movement loses force.  

He remains intact.  

The question is unresolved.  

Is anything missing?  

He does not answer.

*

Ricardo F. Morín

May 5, 2026

Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

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“The Proportion of Boredom”

May 15, 2026

 

Ricardo F. Morín
Buffalo Series, Nº 5
48″ x 48″
Oil on canvas
1979

*

Author’s Note

The conditions that pass through this text continue in “The Impossibility of Conviction” and “The Impossibility of Recognition.”

*

Ricardo F. Morín
April 17 through May 14, 2026
In transit

A conversation,  a concern,  a loss or a moment of joy begin to take shape when they remain present long enough to demand attention,  alter our conduct or affect our relation with others.  Our lives do not acquire form through intensity or through the scarcity of what occurs.

There are days that pass leaving almost no trace.  Conversations are forgotten.  One concern gives way to another before it can alter what follows.

At other times,  everything demands attention at once.  Attention passes from one incident to another before anything acquires consequence.  What is immediate displaces what needed to remain present.  Priorities begin to blur into one another,  and nothing retains enough presence to awaken interest.

An empty day disappears without resistance;  a day in which everything demands attention dissolves in much the same way.  In both cases,  a conversation,  a concern or a loss cease affecting the way a person responds to what unfolds around them.

Either nothing succeeds in awakening interest,  or what does awaken it loses force among too many competing demands upon attention.  Boredom may appear even when nothing seems to be missing.

Proportion allows a conversation,  a loss,  a concern or a moment of joy to remain present long enough to acquire consequence alongside one another.  Without proportion,  conversations,  concerns and responsibilities begin to disperse before they can remain related to one another.  With proportion,  a conversation,  a loss or a responsibility may preserve enough presence to continue affecting the way a person attends or responds.

When that relation weakens,  judgment begins to weaken with it.  What is trivial acquires urgency,  while a loss,  a responsibility or an important relation recede without drawing attention.  Public life eventually reflects the same condition:  noise makes it difficult to distinguish what truly demands our attention,  and people begin reacting more through accumulation than through understanding.

What is near may impose itself until it occupies everything.  What is distant may withdraw until it loses presence.  Between those extremes,  conversations,  concerns and relations still manage to remain separate.

Proportion changes with the demands of life,  with attention,  fatigue,  pressure and the capacity to remain affected by what occurs.  It does not remain static.  A person may come to no longer recognize what once mattered to them,  not because they decided to abandon it,  but because the relation to a loss,  a responsibility or another person also changes under certain conditions.

Boredom appears when a conversation,  a concern,  a responsibility or a relation cease remaining present long enough to continue affecting the way a person attends,  remembers or responds.  For this reason,  boredom does not depend upon how much happens or how little does.

Dissatisfaction and skepticism emerge when a conversation,  a loss or a responsibility no longer preserve sufficient relation to what continues occurring around them.  Dissatisfaction and skepticism are not the origin of this condition.

At times,  a person continues speaking,  working or responding without knowing what still preserves relation to their life.  Even under those conditions,  another person’s affection,  a remembered conversation or someone’s presence may remain active while many concerns begin losing consequence.  At times,  they are the only things still preserving relation to what continues.

Proportion exists in allowing a conversation,  a loss,  a responsibility or a relation to preserve enough presence to continue affecting the way we attend,  remember or respond to what occurs.  Maintaining proportion does not consist in reducing life.

 

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“The Ethics of Perception, Part I”

November 20, 2025

*

Ricardo Morín
Triangulation 4: The Ethics of Perception
22″ x 30″
Graphite on paper
2006

Ricardo F. Morín

October 2025

Oakland Park, Fl

Introduction

Perception often seems immediate and uncomplicated.    We see, we hear, we react.    Yet between that first contact with the world and the choices we make in response, something slower and more fragile takes place:    the formation of meaning.    In that interval—between what appears and what we assert—not only understanding is at stake, but ethics as well.

This essay begins with a simple question:    what changes when understanding matters more than assertion?    In a culture that prioritizes reaction, utility, and certainty, pausing to perceive can seem inefficient.    Yet it is precisely this pause that allows experience to take shape without force and keeps the relationship between consciousness and the shared world in proportion.

The Ethics of Perception does not propose rules or moral systems.    It examines how sustained attention—able to receive before imposing—can restore coherence between inner life and external reality.    From this basic gesture, ethics ceases to operate as an external norm and becomes a way of being in relation.

Perception

Perception may be understood as the emergent outcome of mechanisms collectively designated as intelligence in the abstract.    These mechanisms do not operate solely as interior cognitive functions, nor are they reducible to external systems, conventions, or instruments.    Perception arises at the continuous interface between interior awareness and exterior structure, where sensory intake, pattern recognition, and interpretive ordering converge through sustained attunement.

Such a relation does not presume opposition between internal and external domains.    Cognitive processes and environmental conditions function as co-present and mutually generative forces.    Disruptions frequently described as pathological more accurately reflect misalignment within this reciprocal relation rather than intrinsic deficiency in any constituent mechanism.    When normative frameworks privilege particular modes of perceptual attunement, divergence is reclassified as deviation and difference is rendered as dysfunction.

Models grounded in categorization or spectral positioning provide descriptive utility but often presuppose hierarchical centers.    An account oriented toward attunement redirects emphasis away from comparative placement and toward relational orientation.    Perceptual coherence depends less on position within a classificatory schema than on sensitivity to the ongoing exchange between interior processing and exterior configuration.

Claims of authority over perceptual normality weaken under recognition of ubiquity.    If the interaction between cognitive mechanism and environmental structure constitutes a universal condition rather than an exceptional trait, no institution, metric, or discipline retains exclusive legitimacy to define deviation.    Evaluation becomes contextual, norms provisional, and classification descriptive rather than prescriptive.

Within this framework, perception is not measured by conformity, efficiency, or accommodation to dominant systems.    Perception denotes the sustained capacity to remain aligned with the dynamic interaction of interior awareness and exterior articulation without collapsing one domain into the other.    Such an understanding accommodates analytical abstraction, scientific modeling, artistic discernment, contemplative depth, and systemic reasoning without elevating any singular mode of intelligence above others.

Considered in this light, perception resists enclosure within diagnostic, cultural, or hierarchical boundaries.    What persists is not a ranked spectrum of cognitive worth but a field of relational variance governed by emergence, attunement, and reciprocal presence.

Understanding begins with seeing the world as it is, before any claim or assertion shapes its meaning.    My disposition turns toward perceiving, attending, and responding rather than toward struggle or untested impulse.    This orientation works as a discipline through which clarity and proportion take form.    Thought, in this sense, does not impose significance; it receives it through the living exchange of experience.    Perceiving gathers the immediate presence of the world, and understanding shapes that presence into sense.    Both arise from the same motion of awareness, where observation ripens into comprehension.    Philosophy then ceases to be an act of mastery and becomes a way of seeing that restores balance between mind and existence.

Philosophy has long been driven by the impulse to assert rather than to understand.    From antiquity to modern times, thinkers built systems meant to secure certainty and protect thought from doubt.    Nietzsche inherited that impulse and inverted it by turning volition into affirmation.    His view freed reason from dogma yet confined it within self-assertion.    Understanding, by contrast, grows from recognizing that meaning arises in relation.    The act of grasping does not depend on force but on perception.    When thought observes instead of imposing, the world reveals its own coherence.    Ethics springs from that revelation, because to understand is already to enter into relation with what is seen.    Comprehension is therefore not passive; it is active participation in the unfolding of reality.

Perception becomes ethical when it recognizes that every act of seeing carries responsibility.    To perceive is to acknowledge what stands before us—not as an object to be mastered but as a presence that coexists with our own.    Awareness is never neutral; it bears the weight of how we attend, interpret, and respond.    When perception remains steady, recognition deepens into connection.    A single moment makes this visible:    watching an elderly person struggle with opening a door, the mind perceives first, then understands, and then responds—not out of impulse, but out of the recognition of a shared human condition.    Art enacts this same movement.    The painter, the writer, and the musician do not invent the world; they meet it through form.    Each creative gesture records a dialogue between inner and outer experience, where understanding becomes recognition of relation.    The moral value of art lies not in a message but in the quality of attention it sustains.    To live perceptively is to practice restraint and openness together:    restraint keeps volition from overpowering what is seen, and openness lets the world speak through its details.    In that steady practice, ethics ceases to be rule and becomes a way of living attentively within relation.

Modern life tempts the mind to react before it perceives.    The speed of information, the immediacy of communication, and the constant surge of stimuli fragment awareness.    In that climate, unexamined volition regains its force; it asserts, selects, and consumes out of bias rather than understanding.    What vanishes is the interval between experience and reflection—the pause in which perception matures into thought.    Ethical life, understood as living with awareness of relation, re-emerges when that interval is restored.    A culture that values perception above reaction can recover the sense of proportion that technology and ideology often distort.    The task is not to reject innovation but to exercise discernment within it.    Every act of attention becomes resistance to distraction, and every moment of silence reclaims the depth that noise obscures.    When perception reaches the point of recognizing another consciousness as equal in its claim to reality, understanding acquires moral weight.    Such recognition requires patience—the willingness to see without appropriation and to remain present without possession.

All philosophy begins as a gesture toward harmony.    The mind seeks to know its bond with the world yet often confuses harmony with control.    When understanding replaces conquest, thought rediscovers its natural proportion.    The world is not a stage for self-assertion but a field of correspondence where awareness meets what it perceives.    To think ethically is to think in relation.    The act of grasping restores continuity between inner and outer life and shows that knowing itself is participation.    Each meeting with reality—each moment of seeing, listening, or remembering—becomes an occasion to act with measure.    The reflective mind neither retreats from the world nor dominates it.    It stands within experience as both witness and participant, and lets perception reach its human fullness:    the ability to recognize what lies beyond oneself and to respond without domination.    When thought arises from attention instead of struggle, it reconciles intelligence with presence and restores the quiet balance that modern life has displaced.    In that reconciliation, philosophy fulfills its oldest task—to bring awareness into harmony with existence.

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“The Seventh Watch”

August 6, 2025

*

Ricardo Morin
The Seventh Watch
(Template Series, 5th panel)
Watercolor over paper
22” x 30”
2005

Introductory Note

Ricardo Morin is a writer and researcher of the history of thought as a dynamic and evolving practice—a student of unspoken gestures, a language stronger than words, especially when interlocutors no longer listen to each other. Drawing on reflections on the cycles of life and a personal experience approaching the last, he invites readers to consider how quiet vigilance and tenderness can shape a meaningful existence. The Seventh Watch emerges from decades of living attentively, offering a humble testament to dignity through perseverance and care.

71 Years

I’ve lived seventy-one years. That alone still surprises me—not because I ever expected an early end, but because each year has asked more of me than the last. There was no dramatic fall, no single crisis to point to. Just a slow, constant shaping—of the body, of temperament, of the will.

Illness didn’t come in childhood. It arrived later, in my early twenties, during a snowbound winter in Buffalo. I was just beginning to live on my own, full of ambition and unfinished dreams. The diagnosis was mononucleosis—but it wasn’t the name that mattered. It was the way it interrupted momentum, slowed my pace, and revealed something deeper: the lifelong task of learning to live within my own limits.

That was the beginning—not of a medical history, but of a different kind of vigilance. Not directed outward, but inward. A quiet realization took root: that survival, if it was to be meaningful, required not just endurance, but restraint. A way of protecting myself from myself. That discipline wasn’t harsh—it became a kind of devotion. Not to self-denial, but to finding the clarity of a peaceful mind. To living with more care than urgency.

I don’t see illness as noble, but I do see in it a mirror—not for the pain, but for the truth it reflects. What can be tended, what must be relinquished, what deserves attention. I don’t claim wisdom from illness, but I recognize what it’s taught me to let go of: illusion, pride, and the frantic chase after things that do not last—such as the accumulation of wealth or power.

I’ve come to think of it simply as endurance—the kind illness teaches when you stop resisting and begin listening. There’s an ethical arc in this awareness—not born of dogma or belief, but shaped by experience. It bends not toward triumph, but toward tenderness.

This isn’t a story of pathology. It’s a story of attention—of refining the self without hardening it. Of discovering that maturity means knowing when to persist and when to pause. That the quiet act of sustaining one’s life—daily, attentively—is its own form of courage.

I never set out to write a testament. But seventy-one years in, I see the outlines more clearly. And in that, there is dignity.

Yet, dignity is not a reward. It arrives without announcement, without ceremony. It builds slowly—through the daily rituals of rising, of choosing what to carry and what to set down. It does not shield one from sorrow, nor make suffering easier to bear. But it gives the days a certain weight.

I’ve come to cherish that weight—not as a burden, but as proof. Proof that I’ve lived through each season not untouched, but intact. And that, even now, the task is not to escape life’s demands, but to meet them with steadiness.

What I’ve learned isn’t mine alone. Anyone who lives long enough will be asked to reckon with time—not as a thief, but as a sculptor. Illness, especially, teaches us how little control we truly have—yet how much presence we’re still capable of. It humbles and joins us. Not in sameness, but in mutual recognition.

Endurance, I’ve found, is not passive. It’s not about waiting for pain to pass. It is active, quiet, often unseen. It means choosing how to live when choice feels narrow. It means tending to life not with haste, but with attention.

There is no finish line to this work. Just the quiet act of continuing.

So I continue—not because I must, but because life, even in its reduced dimensions, still offers room for meaning. Some days that meaning is faint. Other days it is simply the act of rising, or writing a letter, or remembering the snow. But it is there. And as long as it is, I remain.

*

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“Questions That Hold Their Answers”

August 3, 2025

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Ricardo Morin
Sonata Series
Each 30″x 22″= 60″h x 66″ overall
Watercolor on paper
2003

The Whittington chime, though rooted in the specific historical and ecclesiastical context of St. Mary-le-Bow in London, speaks in a language far broader than its origins. Every fifteen minutes, its melody punctuates the passage of time—not with dominance or insistence, but with a sequence of tones that seem to lean toward attentiveness rather than control. It does not call; it invites. Its fourfold phrasing unfolds with the day and carves it gently into intervals of awareness.

The hour does not ask to be heard.

It leans, it yields, it breathes.

In four phrases, time steps into its own shadow—

Not to rule, but to be received.

The first phrase is sparse and anticipatory. It announces nothing—yet it creates space for something to begin. The second phrase, slightly more confident, suggests that the shape of what’s coming may already be present in what has been. The third phrase swells with fullness, as though recognizing that something unspoken has come to form. And the fourth does not repeat or resolve—it releases. A soft culmination, an unforced closure. Nothing more is needed.

Four phrases like footprints.

Not forward, but inward.

The last does not complete the first—

It simply continues without demand.

Time is neither summoned nor announced—it is welcomed in silence. The melody performs a quiet orienting function. It makes no claims, prescribes no doctrine, and excludes no one. It requires attention, not belief. It passes through space and enters those who allow it, and in doing so, it reveals time not as a line to be followed, but as a vessel to be filled.

There is no message, only rhythm.

No doctrine, only form.

Not a path to walk,

But a shape to inhabit.

This surrender—this subtle willingness to listen—is not weakness, nor is it a form of passivity. It is a kind of interior readiness, a posture of faith in what does not insist upon itself. As one hears the chime at a distance—through open window, across an empty street, or at the center of a sleepless night—it becomes clear that regularity is not rigidity. It is a form of grounding, a pulse that reminds us of something more than measurement: the possibility that rhythm itself is a form of remembering.

Some things endure not because they hold us fast—

But because they return.

Each return is a soft petition:

Are you listening now?

To be transformed by time, the vessel must remain open. And openness is not emptiness in the deficient sense, but the fullness of a receptivity that listens before it responds. There are patterns here, but they do not bind. They unfold. Each phrase in the chime allows what came before to echo—faintly, without repetition—and then continues without imitation. It does not search for novelty, nor does it cling to what has passed.

It simply arrives.

An echo does not ask for an answer.

It waits until the shape of silence

Begins to sing it back.

In this way, the melody becomes an offering. And if there is meaning to be found in its intervals, it is not imposed from without. It is disclosed in the act of listening. Each person who hears it becomes part of its form, not by adding to it, but by receiving it. And in receiving, they are also shaped.

Some questions do not seek reply.

They seek a place to rest.

They carry their answers folded within—

Waiting only to be heard.

We often think of arrival as the end of something—as the completion of a search. But perhaps it is not the final step that matters most. Perhaps what matters is the quiet unfolding that prepares us to meet it. The chime does not deliver anything. It accompanies. It affirms that movement can be gentle, that order can serve grace, and that meaning is not attained, but awakened …

… —gently, without insistence.

It arrives, and we recognize it—

Not because we were waiting,

But because we were listening.

*

By Ricardo Morin

August 3, 2025

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“A Soliloquy”

July 6, 2025

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Ricardo Morin
New York Series, No. 1
56″ x 84″
Oil on canvas
1992

Preface

What follows does not simplify or announce itself.  It moves inward—through observation, thought, and the tension between clarity and disappearance.  The soliloquy keeps to its own course:  neither performing nor explaining, but sustaining an interior gaze.  To read it is not to be guided, but to remain with it—where thinking becomes presence, and language measures what endures.


Soliloquy

Once upon a time, there lived within the writer a creative energy—its force and passion for self-expression—that sustained him. It was not summoned; it simply endured.  So arresting was this presence that he could not discipline it into routine or mold it into a pattern for physical endurance.  He could not pause it for walks or for any activity not already part of the act of creation itself.  He resorted to standing while writing, walking while reading, sleeping while thinking.

His experience was never an affliction to be named or cured, but a life to be lived on its own terms—a creative testament to the fullness of being, not a clinical footnote to someone else’s definition.  Choosing not to be defined by it honored both its agency and his lifelong work.  It was a condition to be understood alone, even if shared in writing—yet never in search of validation.

Within the boundaries of personal insight, it revealed itself as a form of devotional absorption, one that brought dignity even in moments of physical strain and aging.

His refusal of validation was not an opposition to authority, but a denial that any external pressure should exist.

Some said there was nothing unique in anyone, that all expression merely reflected what had been learned.  The writer did not disagree, yet he knew there was more to being than what one received—even from experience itself.  Perhaps no one was unique, but each voice was distinct—formed from the sum total of an existence that could not be equated. From a random mixture, an ineffable summation, something emerged:  something irreplaceable and irreproducible—not because it exceeded others, but because it belonged only to the one who bore it.

He feared madness—not as spectacle, but as the slow drift of meaning into isolation.  The force within him was real, yet not entirely satisfying unless it discovered truth—truth that resonated not only within his own logic but in the logic of others.  How else could one know oneself if intelligence remained solitary?  Without echo, thought became a sealed chamber:  intricate, yes, but airless.  He did not seek certainty; he sought correspondence.  It was not solitude he feared, but becoming untranslatable.

Life now appeared transient, precarious—timeless in sensation, yet embedded in time.  It moved furtively—through failings, disappointments, and sudden moments of radiant clarity.  Nothing could be reproduced.  But he had come to accept that—not because it was lost, but because even memory altered what it held.  What repeated was not the moment, but the act of noticing—the deepening of attention.   And so he did not live to preserve what was, but to remain present as it changed.  There was no going back, only going further—more attentively, more awake.

*

Ricardo F. Morin Tortolero

In transit on July 6, 2025

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“Unattainable Gestures”

June 14, 2025

“Echoes of a life devoted to the elusive”

*

Ricardo F Morin
Triangulation Series Nº 38
9” x 13”
Oil on linen
2009

*

In memoriam José Luis Montero

For him, inspiration didn’t strike—it settled.    It arrived not with answers, but with permission to begin.

There was no ritual.    No dramatic turning point.    Only the canvas, the scent of oil, the shifting light across the floor.    One day folding into the next, until the work became its own weather—sometimes clear, sometimes stormy, but always present.

He believed in attention, not mastery.

What moved him wasn’t how the painting was achieved at any given moment, but when deconstructed he had to reclaim it, not out of skill, but out of necessity—when the hand moved before thought, and something more honest than intention began to lead.    And when it happened, it asked everything of him.

Any one watching—anyone but him—would have seen very little.    A trace.    A pause.    A slight adjustment.    But inside, something in him was listening—not to himself, but to the world, the material, the echo of a form not yet known.

He didn’t make work to be remembered, though he carried each piece like a child of his.    He made it to stay alive.    And when he encountered a finished painting years later, it stirred him physically.    It wasn’t nostalgia.    It was the smell of pigment, the sound of bristles, the grief of something nearly realized—lost, then found again.

Some days, the work moved with a kind of ease.    Other days, it refused.    He learned not to chase either.

He always began without knowing what he was after.    A shade.    A flicker of transparency.    A stroke that unsettled the surface.    Often the brush would stop midair, suspended while he waited for the next move to reveal itself.    Sometimes nothing came.    Those pieces sat untouched for weeks—a quiet unease in the corner of the room.

He lived alongside their silence.

The studio was never clean, but always ordered.    Rags folded.    Jars fogged with old turpentine.    Walls bearing soft outlines of past canvases.    The mess wasn’t careless.    It was lived-in—not careless, just lived-in.    Notes of Goethe’s pyramidal harmony hung besides mineral samples, sketches, color wheels, torn letters from art dealers.    Not for revelation—but for proximity.

Not every piece held.    Some failed completely.    Others, losing urgency layer by layer, failed gradually,    He kept those too—not as records, but as reminders.    Where the hand had gone quiet.    Where the work had ceased to ask.    Yet they became platforms—spaces for later returns, for deeper entry.

His days had no fixed schedule, though a rhythm formed over the years—a long devotion, interrupted, resumed, endured.

Now, he arrived late morning from the City.    The studio held the faint scent of wax and turpentine, laced with something older—dust, fabric, memory.    He opened a window if weather allowed.    Not for light but for air.    For movement.    For the slow turning of the fans like breath.

He made tea.    Sometimes he played Bach, or a pianist, whose fingers pressed deeper into the keys than others.    Other mornings:    National Public Radio.    A poet, a scientist, someone trying to say the impossible in ordinary words.    He liked the trying more than the saying.

He painted standing—rarely seated.    Some days he moved constantly between easel, sink, and mixing table.    Other days he barely moved at all.    Just watched.

Lunch was simple.    Bread.    Fruit.    A little cheese.    Sometimes eggs, lentils, soup across several days.    He didn’t eat out much—not out principle, but because it broke the thread.

If tired, he would lie on the couch at the back wall.    Twenty, thirty minutes.    No more.    And when he woke, the light had shifted again—slanted, softened, more forgiving.    The canvas looked changed.    As if it had waited for his absence.

Late afternoons were often the best.    A second wind, free of pressure.    There was a looseness in the air, born from knowing no one would knock or call.    He spoke to the work then—not aloud, but inwardly.    This tint?    Too warm.    This stroke?    Too sure.    Let it break.    Let it breathe.    Let it speak without saying.

Sometimes the medium resisted.    A brush faltered.    A gesture collapsed.    He didn’t fight.    He gave it space.    If he stayed patient, it found its rhythm again.

Not everything reached completion.    Some works remained open—not abandoned, simply finished enough.    Others came suddenly, like music that plays without lifting the fingers.

By evening, he cleaned his tools.    Never rushed.    He wiped the palette.    Rinsed the jars.    Hung the rags to dry.    It was a kind of thanks.    Not to the painting.    To the day.

Then lights out.    Door closed.    Nothing declared.    Nothing completed.    Yet something always moved forward.

Grief, too, remained.    It lived in the room like dust—settled in corners, clinging to stretchers still bare, woven into old white sheets.

His sister’s illness came slowly, then all at once—while Adagio in G Minor played low across the studio.    He painted through it.    Not to escape, but because stopping would have undone him.    In the silence between strokes, he could feel her breath weakening.    Sometimes he imagined she could see the work from wherever she was.    That each finished piece carried a word he hadn’t dared to say aloud.    She would have understood.    She always had.

Later, when his former lover died—alone, unexpectedly, in Berlin—he stopped painting altogether.    The studio felt still in a way he couldn’t enter.    Even the canvas turned away from him.    When he returned, it was with a muted palette.    Dry.    Indifferent.    The first brush stroke broke in two.    He left it.    And continued.

Desire, too, had quieted.    Not vanished.    Just softened.    In youth it had been urgent, irrepressible.    Now it hovered—an echo that came and went.    He didn’t shame it or perform it.    He lived beside it, the way one lives beside a field once burned, now slowly greening.

Grief didn’t interrupt the work.    It deepened it.    Not in theme—but in texture.    Some of those paintings seemed familiar to others.    But he knew what they held—the weight of holding steady while coming apart inside.

Even now, some colors recalled a bedside.    A winter walk.    The sound of someone no longer breathing.    A flat grey.    A blue once brilliant, now tempered between longing and restraint.

He wondered sometimes about that tension.

But when he painted, stillness returned.

Seventeen years ago, when chemotherapy ended, the days grew quieter.

There was no triumph. Just a slow return to rhythm—different now.    The body had changed.    So had the mind.    He couldn’t paint for hours without fatigue.    The gestures once fluid were heavier, more tentative.

He didn’t resist it.

The studio remained, but the center of gravity shifted.    Where once he reached for a brush, now he reached for a pen.    At first, just notes.    Fragments.    A way to hold the day together.    Then came sentences.    Paragraphs.    Not about himself, not directly.    About time.    Memory.    Presence.    Writing became a solace.    A way to shape what the body could no longer carry. A place to move, still, with care.

It wasn’t the end of painting.    Just a pause.    A migration.    Writing required its own attention, its own patience.    And he recognized in that a familiar devotion.

Sometimes, the canvas still called.    It would rest untouched for weeks.    Then one day, without announcement, he would begin again.

The two practices lived side by side.    Some days the brush.    Some days the page.    No hierarchy.    No regret.    Only the quiet persistence of a life still unfolding.

There is no final piece.    No last word.

He understands now:    a life is not made of things finished, but of gestures continued—marks made in good faith, even when no one is watching.    A sentence begun.    A color mixed.    A canvas turned to the wall—not in shame, but because it had said enough.

He no longer asks what comes next.    That question no longer troubles him.

If anything remains, it will not be the name, or the archive, or even the objects themselves.    It will be the integrity of attention—the way he returned, again and again, to meet the moment as it was.

Not to make something lasting.
But to live, briefly, in truth.

*

Ricardo F Morin Tortolero

Bala Cynwyd, Pa., June 14, 2025

Editor:    Billy Bussell Thompson

Author’s Note

This piece, like much of what I’ve made in recent years, exists because of those who have sustained me.

To David Lowenberger—whose love and steadfastness give my life its rhythm.    Without him, continuity itself would falter.

To José Luis Montero, my first art teacher, whose presence early on became a compass I’ve never stopped following.

To my parents, whose quiet influence shaped my regard for form, devotion, and care.

And always, to my friend and editor, Billy Bussell Thompson, whose voice lives quietly in mine.

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