Ricardo F. Morín New York Series, Nº 11 54″ x 84″ Oil on canvas 1989
Ricardo F Morín
January 1, 2026
Oakland Park, Fl
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.
Nothing human begins from nothing. Institutions, languages, belief systems, and works of art all arise from what preceded them. Creation is not the rejection of inheritance but the transformation of it. Every act of making draws upon accumulated perception, memory, and experience. This insight is crucial to understanding contemporary culture, where claims of unprecedented change often conceal deep continuities beneath the surface of novelty. Human beings, bound by temporality, cannot detach themselves from what has been; they can only reorder and reinterpret the materials already available to them.
The notion of invention is often described as a break with the past, a leap into the unknown. Yet even the most radical departures are shaped by what came before. The ideals of modern democracy, for example, did not emerge spontaneously. They were built upon classical Greek ideas of citizenship as a shared civic responsibility, rooted in isonomia—equality before the law—and in the belief that legitimate authority derives from the deliberation and participation of free citizens. They also drew deeply on Roman conceptions of law as a universal and rational order capable of binding diverse peoples into a common political framework, and on the Roman principle of res publica, which conceived the State as a public entity oriented toward the common good rather than the will of a single ruler. These foundational ideas, adapted and reinterpreted over centuries, provided the intellectual architecture on which modern democratic institutions were constructed. Perception frames invention. It provides the vocabulary, assumptions, and conceptual tools that make new ideas possible. What seems entirely new still carries the imprint of what it sought to move beyond. On closer examination, the products of creativity are not isolated acts of originality but reconfigurations of existing structures. Evolution, rather than spontaneous emergence, governs how ideas, institutions, and cultures take shape.
Memory underlies this process. It is not a passive record of events but an active medium through which possibilities are conceived and action becomes intelligible. Imagination draws its material from memory; it combines and redirects memory toward conditions not yet realized. This is nowhere more evident than in the idea of freedom, a concept that resists simple definition yet has long carried two complementary meanings. The first, articulated most clearly in the classical Greek tradition, understands freedom as eleutheria—the condition of living without domination or external constraint, a state in which individuals are not subject to arbitrary power. The second, rooted in the Roman legal and civic tradition, conceives freedom as libertas—the capacity to participate actively in the governance of a political community and to shape its laws and institutions. Both meanings reveal how deeply freedom depends on historical precedent: it requires language to articulate its claims, institutions to guarantee its exercise, and collective memory to frame its significance. Far from existing apart from what has been, freedom is shaped and enabled by what has already been conceived, argued, and enacted. Prior experience supplies the references and alternatives against which choices acquire meaning. Without that reservoir of knowledge, novelty would lack coherence and direction, and the exercise of freedom would collapse into arbitrary impulse. Human beings do not invent in a void; they work within the continuity of time and adapt what has been lived and learned into forms suited to what is yet to come.
This same dynamic defines the formation of identity. Selfhood is not an isolated act of invention but a continuous negotiation with what has been received. The very idea of the self has itself evolved through history: in classical philosophy, it was often conceived as a psyche—an inner essence shaped by reason and virtue and embedded within a larger cosmic order. Christian thought reinterpreted this understanding through the notion of the soul as a unique bearer of moral responsibility, oriented toward salvation and defined by its relationship to God. Early modern thinkers such as John Locke then transformed this inheritance by grounding personal identity in memory and consciousness — a conception that would later inform modern ideas of individual autonomy. Even the impulse to define oneself against the past relies on categories inherited from it. Identity is therefore neither static nor wholly self-created; it is a process of reinterpretation through which the individual positions what is given in relation to what is chosen. Human beings exist in the tension between inheritance and aspiration, between the weight of memory and the desire for renewal. That tension is not an obstacle to authenticity but its condition, for without the framework provided by the past there would be nothing from which to depart.Continuity and change are not opposing forces. Without continuity, there is no ground on which to become. Without change, continuity hardens into mere repetition. The act of becoming depends on the dynamic between the two.
Viewed from this perspective, the human condition is defined less by pure invention than by the capacity to transform. What is called “new” is the familiar reorganized with new intentions, the established redirected toward new purposes. Recognizing this does not diminish creativity. It clarifies its nature. Humanity’s most significant achievements—in politics, art, science, and thought—are not escapes from what has been. They are deliberate reinterpretations of what has been, shaped to answer new questions and confront new circumstances. In the sciences, paradigmatic shifts often described as revolutions still follow this pattern. Einstein’s theory of relativity did not erase Newtonian mechanics; it incorporated and extended its principles, a revision that revealed their limits while preserving their usefulness within a broader understanding of space, time, and motion. This same principle governs artistic innovation. The Renaissance revival of classical forms did not merely reproduce antiquity; it reinterpreted ancient visual languages to express the spiritual and humanistic concerns of a new era. The evolution of digital communication and artificial intelligence reflects a comparable continuity. The internet did not replace human interaction; it expanded its reach and scale, a transformation that altered how language circulates, how memory is archived, and how collective knowledge is formed. Similarly, artificial intelligence—often portrayed as autonomous or unprecedented—rests on centuries of linguistic, mathematical, and conceptual developments. These systems extend rather than supersede the cognitive inheritance from which they originate. The future is built in this way: not in its rejection of the past but in its continuous interaction with it.
Resistance to this understanding persists wherever the idea of evolution is denied. Such resistance is rarely a matter of evidence alone. It reflects a desire for permanence—for a beginning that is untouched by change and a truth that stands apart from time. It offers certainty where process allows none and promises stability in place of adaptation. Yet even this resistance is shaped by the forces it seeks to escape. Languages evolve, beliefs adjust, and traditions adapt, even as they proclaim their immutability. Those who defend what is fixed do so with concepts and arguments that themselves have been shaped by historical change. The very doctrines that claim timeless authority — such as the medieval conception of divine sovereignty, once invoked to legitimize monarchies and later transformed into the principle of popular sovereignty in modern constitutional systems—reveal this dependence: they persist not by remaining unchanged but by being continually reinterpreted to meet new contexts. The contrast, therefore, is not between evolution and its absence, but between recognition and refusal. The reality remains: existence unfolds through transformation, and humanity, whether consciously or not, participates in that unfolding—a truth with profound implications for how societies remember their past, shape their present, and imagine their future.
Further Reading:
Arendt, Hannah: Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking Press, 1961.
Kuhn, Thomas S.: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
MacIntyre, Alasdair: After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.
Floridi, Luciano: The Philosophy of Information. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Koselleck, Reinhart: Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Design cover by Ricardo Morín Aposento Nº 2 29″ x 36″ Oil on canvas 1994
Author’s Note
Intervals is written in a cadence held taut at the threshold of life and death. It does not withhold itself, though its language remains stripped of explanation. Ambivalence may be inescapable, but it is not the aim. The anonymity of the speaker is deliberate, to keep attention on what is spoken rather than on who speaks.
Ricardo Morín, September 11, 2025. Bala Cynwyd, Pa.
Intervals
To heal himself, he would cover his body in mud and then rinse it away. Crouched beneath the burning sun, he stared diagonally from a corner across the far end of the yard. From the clothesline he hung a black umbrella, upside down. Into it he cast the last handful of potions. From its collapse, heavy with weight, he hoped to avoid his own death.
He covered his books with a black sheet; blindly he pulled one out at a time and, after finding a sentence giving meaning to his thoughts, he put it back. He waited for revelation. His mother, now old, took another book out and searched for a better reply.
Exhausted and sleepless, he lay wrapped in a red blanket with his back to the mirror. Drenched in tears, he felt undone. Shivers traced his spine, as though his entrails were on fire.
He woke to the sound of running water. His mother would scrub his garments until the fabric began to fray. He had painted the walls white; the doors ceased to be brown. An intruder leapt over the fence. Then, with a surprising strength, he tore up the garden.
Nights followed without sleep. He was unaware of sunken cheekbones; only his neighbors’ gaze could see him wasting away. He managed to fly afar. Though attentive to life, he found disappointment.
On arrival the hotel summoned an ambulance. After a ten-hour flight, septic shock seized him; a nurse asked him to choose a destination. Shivers returned. He saw many dying, though it was not his turn. Days later, his flesh returned to life.
With the memory of past ties, he departed again disappointed. He crossed another distance and knew how fragile his solitude was.
You rescued him and he you. A bridge was built out of longing. Three years of passion did not mend the abyss; he took his life and you remained.
A Roman curate attended his mother’s cries, while he twisted her son’s. Little did the curate know that it was by his own design. He called for you, a new love, to come. To love, to sustain the bond of the moment.
Epilogue
Intervals rests on our fearful perception of death, solitude, survival, and rupture (an interval is the rhythm of time and its ending is the emptying of what the consciousness of fear carries in it). An interval seeks neither consolation nor resolution; it remains with what occurs, in the exposure where solitude and fracture reveal the fragility of existence.
Observations On Perception 