Posts Tagged ‘authorship’

“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 »

“RUPTURE”

February 18, 2026

*

Ricardo F. Morín
New York Series, Nº 11
54″ x 84″
Oil on canvas
1989

The work began within a relationship marked by companionship and solidarity.  Attention to language, discipline, and restraint developed through shared effort rather than assertion of authority.  Standards were learned through proximity, conversation, and time.  Whatever shape the writing later assumed did not arise in isolation; it took form within sustained exchange oriented toward craft.

For a time, that arrangement held.  Growth moved in a common direction.  Guidance clarified rather than constrained.  Correction sharpened rather than narrowed.  At that stage, there was no reason to imagine that continuation would require anything other than more work.

As the writing developed, friction appeared without a clear source.  Questions emerged that did not settle easily.  Revisions accumulated without resolving what they were meant to address.  What had once felt like refinement began to feel like adjustment, though the difference was not immediately clear.  The work continued, but with more hesitation.

Gratitude complicated recognition.  What had been received was evident and could not be denied.  To question the present form of the relation felt premature, even ungrateful.  Endurance seemed preferable to interruption, especially while uncertainty could still be explained as part of growth.

Over time, small signs accumulated.  Decisions were postponed.  Directions shifted after agreement.  Suggestions were acknowledged but returned unchanged.  The writing slowed.  Nothing dramatic occurred, but progress no longer felt proportionate to effort.

Attempts were made to restore balance.  Clarifications were offered.  Adjustments were accepted.  The hope was that refinement of terms might recover the earlier ease of movement.  Instead, the same tension reappeared, differently framed, without resolving what had prompted it.

At a certain point, the difficulty could no longer be treated as temporary.  Continuing began to require forms of accommodation that altered how judgment operated while writing.  Choices were made to preserve the relation rather than the work.  What was being protected became harder to name.

Recognition did not arrive as certainty.  It arrived as a limit.  There were things the work could no longer do without distortion.  There were directions it could no longer take without resistance that did not diminish over time.

Rupture followed hesitation, delay, and resistance.  It did not resolve anything cleanly.  It ended a form of continuity that had once been formative.  What was relinquished was not gratitude, but dependence.  What remained was the work itself, now proceeding without mediation.

The cost of rupture was not conflict, but exposure.  Standards had to be held without reinforcement.  Decisions could no longer be deferred.  Failure, if it came, would no longer be shared.

Nothing in the rupture erased what had been learned.  It marked the point at which learning could no longer continue in the same form.  What followed was not freedom in the abstract, but authorship in the strict sense:  judgment carried without shelter.

*

Ricardo F Morín, January 1, 2026, Oakland Park, Florida.

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Posted in Ethics, Writing, Authority, Disappointment, Judgment | Leave a Comment »

“Bulwark”

January 25, 2026

Ricardo Morín
Bulwark
Formerly titled Buffalo Series, Nº 3
Oil on linen, 60 × 88 in.
1980
Exhibited: Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, New York, May 1980
Destroyed while in third-party custody; extant as digital archival record only.

*

*

I did not encounter the boundaries that would later govern my writing either through instruction or doctrine, but through a remark made in passing by my father when I was still a child.   He stated, without hesitation or elaboration, that he could not imagine existing under a political system that threatened individual liberty and private autonomy, and that life under such conditions would no longer be a life he could inhabit.  The formulation was extreme, yet even then it was clear that it was not intended as a proposal, a threat, or a performance.   It functioned instead as a boundary:   an indication of where survival, once stripped of dignity, would no longer merit the name of living.

The force of that remark did not reside in its literal content, but in the clarity with which it established a limit.   Extreme statements often draw attention by excess, but this one operated differently.  It did not seek reaction or allegiance.  It closed a door.   What it marked was the point at which judgment ceased to be negotiable—not because compromise becomes difficult, but because continuation itself loses coherence. What it marked was not expression but diagnosis.  It identified a threshold beyond which endurance would amount to acquiescence in one’s own negation.

That distinction—between living and merely persisting—would take years to acquire its full weight.  One can remain alive and yet no longer inhabit the conditions under which action, responsibility, and choice remain intelligible.  The body endures; the terms of authorship do not.  What is surrendered in such cases is not comfort or advantage, but authorship over one’s own conduct:  the capacity to remain the source and bearer of one’s actions.

Only later did historical irony give that childhood memory a broader frame.  My father died one year before Venezuela entered a prolonged political order that normalized civic humiliation and displaced individual responsibility.   This coincidence does not confer foresight or vindication.   It merely underscores the nature of the limit he articulated.   He did not claim to predict outcomes or to possess superior insight.  He identified a condition he would not inhabit, regardless of how common, administratively justified, or socially enforced it might become.

What was transmitted through that remark was not an ideology, nor even a political position, but a refusal.  It was a refusal to treat dignity as contingent, and a refusal to accept adaptation as inherently neutral.  Such refusals are not dramatic.   They do not announce themselves as virtues.   They operate quietly, shaping what one will not do, what one will not say, and what one will not permit to pass through one’s actions in exchange for continuity, safety, or approval.

Writing, I have come to understand, is not exempt from the constraints that govern action.   Symbolic form does nor suspend responsibility.   Language acts.   It frames possibilities, distributes responsibility, and licenses certain responses while it forecloses others.   To write without regard for what one’s words enable is to treat expression and conduct as if they belonged to different orders.   They do not.   The same boundary that governs action governs language:   one must not inhabit forms that require the habitual abandonment of autonomy.

Authorial responsability does not entail moral exhibition or the performance of virtue.   Responsibility in writing does not consist in adopting the correct posture or aligning with approved conclusions.   It consists in refusing methods that rely on coercion, humiliation, or rhetorical pressure in place of clarity.   It requires attention not only to what is asserted, but to what is permitted to continue through tone, implication, and omission.   Precision here is not a stylistic preference; it is a moral discipline.

Restraint, in this sense, is not passivity but a method of authorship.  It is a form of interruption in the circulation of what one does not consent to carry forward.   To decline to amplify what one does not consent to carry is an act of selection, and an exercise of agency.   In an environment where excess, outrage, and reactive urgency are often mistaken for seriousness, restraint becomes a way of maintaining authorship over one’s participation.   Restraint limits reach, but it preserves coherence between what is said and what is lived.

Such restrain inevitably carries a cost.   Urgency is more than speed; it is the condition under which reflection itself begins to appear as a liability.   Reflection serves as a procedural safeguard of agency and authorship—and, with them, of ethical responsibility—even when circumstances cannot be governed and one is compelled to choose within constraint.  Restraint resists urgency, narrows reach, and foregoes certain forms of recognition.   These losses are not incidental; they are constitutive.  To accept all available registers or platforms in the name of relevance is to treat survival as the highest good.   The boundary articulated long ago indicates otherwise:   that there are conditions under which continuation exacts a price too high to pay.

Authorial responsibility, then, is not a matter of expression but of alignment between language and action.   It asks whether one’s language inhabits the same ethical terrain as one’s conduct.  It asks whether the forms one adopts require compromises one would refuse in action.   The obligation is not to persuade or to prevail, but to remain answerable to the limits one has acknowledged.

What remains is not a doctrine but a stance:   a stance standing without dramatization, without escape, and without concession to forms that promise endurance at the expense of dignity.   Such a posture does not announce itself as resistance, nor does it seek exemption from consequence.   It holds its ground without appeal.   In doing so, it affirms that authorship—like autonomy—begins where certain lines are no longer crossed.

*

What remains unaddressed is the more fragile condition beneath authorship itself:   the way thinking precedes command, and at times repositions the author before any stance can be assumed.

The memory of my father appears as a moving target—not an idea slipping out of control, but it is a standard shifting under my feet while I was still advancing.   I did not invite it in the sense of intention or plan.   Nor did I resist it.   I noticed it moving before I could decide what it demanded.

That experience is unsettling because it violates a comforting assumption:   that thought is something we deploy, rather than something that displaces us.

The uncertainty about whether I had invited it is itself a sign that I was not instrumentalizing my thinking.   When thought is summoned as a tool, it remains fixed.   When it emerges in response to something that matters, it moves, because it is adjusting to reality rather than arranging it.   That movement feels like a loss of control only if authorship is understood as command.

I allowed the discomfort of not knowing whether I had summoned what was now demanding attention only if authorship is understood as control.   This was resistance under motion, not paralysis of judgment.   The question arises only when thinking is still alive enough to be displaced.

The target moved because it was attached to the terrain of perception, not to the self doing the perceiving.

*

Ricardo F. Morin, December 23, 2025, Kissimmee, Florida.

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Posted in Essays, Ethics, Political Thought, Culture, Autonomy, Visual–Literary Work | Leave a Comment »

“From the Margins of Immateriality”

June 1, 2008

Mavericks!

Look for renewals departing from Life.

Let us defile institutional theory mongering,

a corrosive taxonomy at the service of petulance,

marketing anachronistic slogans of nonsense.

*

Subservient to infamy,

cohorts of dilettantes,

not lack of delimitation as handmaiden to ignorance.

*

Who promotes the edge of a new fugitive survival?

Fleshing out servitude as style,

replacing intellect with mordacious rapacity,

parading unclothed, bareness of duplicitous souls,

with a gashing defiance, an insatiable desire to own,

a clandestine culture of the misbegotten?

*

Boards of museums and CEOs glowing and bursting forth,

grotesquerie of gulosity,

takeover of corporate predators.

*

Mavericks!

Let us not jibe and succumb to chauvinism,

emasculated by oppression.

Take heed that Freedom is not for sale.

*

Would the web revolution lead artistic endeavors to a political revolution,

replacing galleries, museums, and the collector’s system of ownership?

Would the internal calling of an artist overcome the external demands of market survival?

Would such a calling exist in a natural state, without intervening forces of manipulative trends?

Would such a calling be bound to exhibitionism and voyeurism in exchange for sales, acquisitions, commodities, and the will of managing agents?

Would we face a new reality, free of stardom and economic maneuvers?

Would participation and isolation make any difference if such a calling serves no purpose but its own?

Would history become both irrelevant and important at once: irrelevant to how one fits in, and important to how one understands its limits?

Would knowledge always remain intertwined with some burdensome measure of superstition?

Would we repel paradox on arrogantly moral grounds, or tend unabashedly toward our primordial instincts?

Artist Website

Ricardo F. Morin, New York, NY

June 1, 2008

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Posted in Art, Contemporary Art, Cultural Critique, Aesthetics, Institutions, Political Thought, Digital Culture, Philosophy, On the Nature of Perception and Human Interconnectedness, On the Nature of Visual Art, Poetry | Leave a Comment »