Posts Tagged ‘writing’

“When All We Know Is Borrowed”

August 29, 2025

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Ricardo Morín
Still Thirty-three: When All We Know Is Borrowed
Oil on linen & board, 15″ x 12″x 1/2″
2012.

Author’s Note:

This essay concludes the trilogy begun with The Colors of Certainty and continued with The Discipline of Doubt. It reflects on perception, ambiguity, and ambivalence as conditions that complicate our access to truth, especially in an age of mistrust. The trilogy as a whole asks how certainty, doubt, and ambivalence each shape the paradoxes of human understanding—and how reality is always encountered in fragments, never in full possession.

The purpose of this essay is not to resolve these tensions but to articulate them. Its value lies less in offering solutions than in clarifying the paradoxes that underlie our shared attempts to understand reality.

Ricardo Morín, Bala Cynwyd, Pa. August 30, 2025.

Abstract:

This essay examines perception, ambiguity, and belief as distinct but interrelated conditions that shape human access to reality.   Ambiguity marks the instability of meaning; perception denotes our filtered and partial contact with the world; and ambivalence names the paradoxical ground on which truth is sought.   Ambivalence sustains the search even as it undermines the certainty that truth has been attained.   Writing and reading reveal these dynamics with particular clarity.   Through writing, thought evolves; the writer participates in this evolution and discovers that meaning may remain both untranslatable and questionable.   Yet this very incompleteness expands understanding, even when what is grasped cannot be fully shared.   Extending beyond communication, the essay suggests that reality itself is encountered only in fragments—through gestures, silences, and misperceptions that weaken the line between appearance and reality.   Artificial intelligence illustrates this condition in two ways:   as a tool, it amplifies practical doubts about authorship and authenticity; as a mirror, it reflects the deeper ambivalence that precedes it.   The essay concludes that ambivalence is not a detour from truth but the paradox through which truth, if it arises at all, briefly appears.

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Perception

The word perception carries within it a history that mirrors the shifting ways in which cultures have understood reality.   From the Latin perceptio, it meant first a “taking in,” a “gathering,” or even a “harvest.”   To perceive was to collect impressions, as one might collect grain from a field: passive in form, but active in intent.

In Greek thought, perception was bound to aisthēsis—sensation was the contact one felt with the world.   Here it stood closer to the arts, to the immediacy of feeling, than to the systematic reasoning of philosophy.

During the Middle Ages, particularly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Aristotle’s writings were recovered and incorporated into Christian scholastic thought.   What had been a pagan philosophy of sensation and intellect was reinterpreted by thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas within a theological framework of knowledge.   Perception was defined as the reception of sensory data by the intellect, a necessary stage through which sensation was elevated into understanding.

With the rise of modern philosophy, the term fractured.   For Descartes, perception could deceive;   for Locke, it formed the foundation of experience; for Kant, it was structured by categories that both opened and constrained our access to reality.   By then perception had already become ambivalent:   indispensable for knowing, but never certain in its truth.

Today the word extends further still, connoting not only sensation but also interpretation, bias, and opinion. To say “that is your perception” is no longer to affirm contact with the real but to indicate distance, distortion, or subjectivity. The evolution of the word reveals a semantic instability that parallels the essay’s claim: our access to reality is always shaped by ambivalence. What perception grants, it also unsettles.

Ambivalence, and the Limits of Truth

Perception is never a simple act of receiving what is already there.   It is always mediated by memory, expectation, and predisposition.   In every exchange—whether in words on a page or in silence between two people—meaning shifts, unsettled and provisional.   From this shifting ground arises ambiguity, and from ambiguity, the unease that unsettles belief.

For the reader, this instability is unavoidable.   Every response, even silence, is colored by trust or mistrust, sympathy or suspicion, openness or fatigue.   Rarely does a reader approach a text in innocence, for every act of reading is shaped by assumptions that condition the reception of words.

The author is not exempt from this interpretive burden.   The act of writing does not end with publication but continues in the uncertain work of reading readers.   A pause in conversation, a fleeting acknowledgment, or a lack of reply can be interpreted as disinterest, disapproval, or indifference.   In this way, writing interprets interpretations and multiplies the layers of ambiguity until the meaning of the work appears not only untranslatable but also questionable.   Yet it is precisely through this reflection that writing continues, for without it thought cannot develop.   By persevering in this process, the writer participates in a widening of understanding, even when that understanding cannot be fully shared.

Such uncertainty is not a flaw of communication but part of its structure.   Anyone who seeks to understand through writing must accept that clarity will always be provisional and that expression will always fall short.   The act of putting thought into words reveals the distance between intention and reception, but it also creates the possibility of seeing reality from new angles.   Even when what is expressed cannot be communicated in full, the process itself enlarges understanding and deepens awareness of what is partial and in flux.

Ambivalence, therefore, is not hesitation but the paradoxical condition in which the search for meaning takes place.   It joins conviction and doubt, the desire for certainty and the recognition of its limits.   To write within ambivalence is to continue searching even when the result cannot be communicated without loss.   This condition—and not the illusion of final clarity—enables thought to move forward.

Truth, if it is ever reached, emerges despite the unstable ground of perception and ambiguity.   We arrive at it in spite of ourselves, our tensions, and our limitations.   It is not only major errors that weaken certainty:   a nuance misperceived, a pause misunderstood, or an ambiguous gesture may also diminish trust.   Daily experience shows that the line between appearance and reality is too thin to provide lasting assurance.

But this tension is not limited to writing or reading.   It extends more deeply, into our relation with reality itself.   Ambivalence is not only a feature of communication but also a feature of existence.   To perceive is always to partake of the world incompletely; to live is to do so under conditions of partial presence.   At times we see clearly, at other times dimly, and often not at all.   This rhythm of presence and withdrawal marks every relationship—between persons, between societies, and even between humanity and nature.

Technology has sharpened our awareness of this condition.   Artificial intelligence, for example, dramatizes the instability already present in human perception.   As a tool, it enables refinement of expression while amplifying doubts about authorship and authenticity.   As a mirror, it reflects the deeper ambivalence that precedes it and shapes all mediation.   Thus AI does not diminish thought but magnifies the unease that accompanies human access to reality:   the sense that what is offered is incomplete, unreliable, and never fully participatory.

The task, then, is not to eliminate ambiguity but to recognize it as part of reality itself.   Perception is interpretive, belief is unstable, and mistrust is a constant companion.   Ambivalence is not a detour from truth but the path along which truth—if it comes at all—must travel.   The challenge is not to restore a certainty that never existed but to learn to live within partial participation, to accept that what we call reality is always encountered in fragments.

In this sense, perception, ambiguity, and belief will always remain unsettled.   The writer cannot control how words are read, nor can the reader fully grasp what was meant.   No one can claim full possession of reality.   Every relation to the world depends on fragile conditions, where appearance and reality touch without ever coinciding.   If truth appears at all, it does so briefly and incompletely, arising only through ambivalence.   Yet ambivalence itself is a paradoxical condition:   it sustains our search for truth even as it undermines the certainty we long to possess.   Truth cannot confer ownership because it never rests.

Annotated Bibliography

  • Arendt, Hannah: The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. (Arendt analyzes action, labor, and work as distinct ways of engaging reality. Her distinction between appearance and reality, and her insistence that truth emerges through shared human activity, is directly relevant to the essay’s theme of perception and ambivalence.)
  • Gadamer, Hans-Georg: Truth and Method. New York: Continuum, 1975. (In this foundational text in hermeneutics, Gadamer explores how understanding arises through interpretation rather than objectivity. His view that truth is approached dialogically supports the essay’s claim that truth emerges “within ambivalence rather than beyond it.”)
  • Girard, René: Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965. (Girard’s theory of mimetic desire shows how interpretation, desire, and misunderstanding shape human relations. His work underlines the fragility of belief and the unstable boundary between appearance and reality.)
  • Nussbaum, Martha: Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. (Nussbaum argues that public emotions—such as love, compassion, and solidarity—are essential to sustaining justice. Her insights reveal how belief is fragile and shaped by interpretation; it resonates with the essay’s concern about trust, ambivalence, and human participation in reality.)
  • Turkle, Sherry: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011. (Turkle investigates how technology mediates human relationships and perceptions. Her work frames AI as a mirror of doubt; it shows how mediation both enables connection and erodes authenticity—an idea central to the essay.)

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“The Colors of Certainty”

August 23, 2025

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Author’s Note:

This essay is the first part of a trilogy that explores how human beings approach reality through certainty, doubt, and ambivalence. It begins with certainty—how the desire for stability drives thought and belief, even when what appears secure is already open to change. Though written from personal inquiry, its scope is broader: the question of certainty concerns not one life but the fragile conditions of shared reality. The trilogy continues with The Discipline of Doubt and concludes with When All We Know Is Borrowed.

Ricardo Morín, Bala Cynwyd, Pa. August 23, 2025

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The Colors of Certainty

We live in an age unsettled by division. The subtleties of thought that once allowed us to pause, to weigh, and to distinguish are increasingly swept aside by the demand for immediate clarity. Everything is urged toward opposites: yes or no, ally or enemy, awake or asleep. The pace of public life, accelerated by technology and amplified by conflict, leaves little patience for nuance. Contradiction, which once signaled the restless work of an honest mind, is now treated as treachery. In this atmosphere, to admit complexity is to risk mistrust, and even the smallest hesitation is judged as weakness. We are asked, again and again, to define ourselves as though identity were a single stroke, not a layered drawing made across time.

Symbols flourish in such a climate while they reduce complexity into consumable images. Few have proven more enduring than the pill metaphors drawn from The Matrix film. When it appeared in 1999, the scene of choosing between a red pill and a blue pill was a cinematic device, which dramatized the tension between reality and illusion. Its influence grew gradually, as the film became a generational touchstone. Over the decades that followed, the pills slipped into online communities and political rhetoric only to harden into modes of thought that now shape how we imagine truth and the identity of belonging. To take the red pill became a declaration of awakening, access to hidden truths. To take the blue pill was to be mocked for complacency. Eventually the darker black pill emerged into both despair and fatalism embraced as destiny.

Once this logic takes hold, the world itself is reduced to a theater of absolutes. Disagreement becomes disloyalty, and belonging is measured not by shared life but by categorical allegiance. I have felt this even in conversations with people I have known for decades. In one such exchange, I remarked that I was appalled by Noam Chomsky’s recent habit, even in his nineties, of opposing Western hegemony over Russia as though that stance could excuse the war in Ukraine. Yet in another context, I expressed admiration for Chomsky’s earlier work on linguistic relevance in science four decades ago, which continues to illuminate how language shapes knowledge. To my interlocutor, these two statements seemed incompatible, as if they could not both be true. The expectation was that my judgment had to be seamless: either I rejected Chomsky entirely or endorsed him wholly.

Why must one justify such distinctions, as though every judgment were required to form a single line of allegiance? The contexts are not the same—one belongs to the 1980s, another to the present; one to the realm of linguistics, another to geopolitics. Yet in today’s climate, the demand for congruence is relentless. It reflects the pill logic that has seeped into our speech and habits of thought: one is either awake or asleep, aligned or opposed, consistent across every domain or untrustworthy in all.

That same craving for certainty also gave us Infowars—the radio podcast. Founded in 1999, the very year The Matrix was released, it became a commercial theater of the red pill metaphor. Infowars thrived on dramatizing crisis, telling its audience that elites, governments, or hidden forces manipulated events at every turn. What institutions explained as complexity, Infowars simplified into betrayal. The clarity it offered was intoxicating: good versus evil, freedom versus tyranny, awake versus deceived. It was not simply ideas being sold, but certainty itself—packaged with survival kits, supplements, and slogans. In seeking to liberate its audience from illusion, Infowars created a new one, offering not understanding but a permanent performance of awakening.

The narrowing of discourse is not only about politics and ideology, but it also extends to who is permitted to speak. I was reminded of this in a private exchange, where writing itself was dismissed as the work of an “armchair liberal” or a “limousine socialist.” According to this view, only those directly scarred by battle may speak of war, only those who have suffered prejudice firsthand may give voice to injustice, and to write as an observer is to mock the reality of struggle. It is a charge meant to discredit, as though the act of “fighting with a keyboard” were less real than hand combat in a bloodied field. Yet such suspicion denies what writing has always been: a means of bearing witness, of preserving memory, of shaping the conversation through which societies recognize themselves. The pen has never replaced experience, but it has always transformed it into something shareable and durable. To demand firsthand suffering as the sole qualification for speech is to reduce witness to autobiography and to strip dialogue of the breadth that comes when voices join from different vantage points.

Another difficulty lies in language itself. Writers who seek precision—who stretch language to its sharpest edge—often find that what emerges are metaphors. Even when grounded in substantiated terms, description requires figures of thought, images, and analogies that can never be wholly exact. The question is how precise language can ever be. Even the most brilliant minds struggle with definitions, because in their best formulations they remain presumptive theories. To acknowledge this is not to diminish language but to recognize that our dependence on tropes is not weakness but necessity. Story lines and metaphors are the bridges of comprehension, without which complexity would dissolve into noise. To lean on metaphor is not necessarily to abandon truth but to approach it by way of what can be shared.

What began as a film’s conceit has become a method of thinking, and in many ways a prison. The Matrix offered its audience a vision of awakening through choice, but our culture has taken that image and turned it into a grid of loyalties, where every stance is measured by whether one has swallowed the right capsule. Infowars amplified this posture; it dramatized the hunger for certainty until conspiracy became a substitute for thought. Suspicion of the writer’s position narrowed it further while it mocked reflection as inauthentic and demanded that speech bear the scars of direct experience before it could count as legitimate. And beneath it all lies the frailty of language itself: its inability to define with absolute precision, its reliance on metaphors that shape the very realities they describe.

To speak today of red pills, blue pills, or black pills is not only to reference a film or a subculture; it is to acknowledge the grip of a society that prefers binaries to dialogue, antagonism to complexity, performance to reflection. To resist that grip is to remember that thought is not a pill to be swallowed but a conversation to be carried, a conversation sustained in the fragile medium of language itself. However uncertain, however provisional, it is in that ongoing act of speaking and listening that culture remains alive—where friendship can endure, where witness can be honored, and where the truths no single color can contain still find their voice.

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About the cover image:

Newsprint Series Nº 9, 2006, by Ricardo Morín (47” × 74”): Translucent dyes, ink, white-out, and blotted oil paint on newsprint.

This image belongs to a series that transforms fragments of printed matter into layered fields of color and erasure, this piece speaks to the instability of certainty itself. The pigments veil and expose in turns, while the newsprint beneath reminds us that truth is mediated, provisional, and never free of interpretation. As with language in the essay, meaning emerges only through contrast, through what resists containment.

Annotated Bibliography

  • Cialdini, Robert B. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. New York: Harper Business, 2006. (A classic study in behavioral psychology showing how persuasion exploits binary choices and authority cues, useful for understanding the appeal of pill metaphors and the certainty promised by conspiracy movements.)
  • Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark: Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. (A foundational text on metaphor in cognition and language, relevant to the essay’s argument that even the most precise use of language depends on tropes and figurative structures for human comprehension.)
  • Marwick, Alice, and Lewis, Rebecca: Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online. New York: Data & Society Research Institute, 2017. (This analytical report documents how conspiracy narratives spread through online ecosystems; it highlights the role of platforms in amplifying symbolic binaries such as “red pill” awakening.)
  • Pew Research Center: “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2023”. Washington: Pew Research Center, 2023. (Presents longitudinal data on the decay of institutional trust in the United States and offers a data-driven context for why audiences turned to alternative voices such as Infowars.)
  • Southern Poverty Law Center: “Male Supremacy”. Montgomery: SPLC, 2019. (A report classifying the Incel subculture and related groups within the larger “male supremacist ecosystem,” cited in connection to the black pill ideology and its links to violence.)
  • Sunstein, Cass R., and Vermeule, Adrian: Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. (This book explores why conspiracy theories flourish and frames them as efforts to create certainty in moments of social disorientation. It is highly relevant to the discussion of Infowars as a commercial theater of the red pill metaphor.)
  • Taguieff, Pierre-André: The New Culture Wars. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2020. (This book is a political-philosophical treatment of identity politics and binary antagonisms in Western democracies: it offers a perspective on how pill metaphors entered the broader theater of culture wars.)
  • Tversky, Amos, and Kahneman, Daniel: Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. (A landmark in cognitive science explaining why people reduce complex realities into simplified binaries; it anchors the essay’s meditation on the lure of certainty.)

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“Unattainable Gestures”

June 14, 2025

“Echoes of a life devoted to the elusive”

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

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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.

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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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“The Ethics of Expression, Part II”

June 13, 2025

Writing, silence, and the art of understanding in stillness

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Ricardo Morín
Triangulation 4
22″ x 30″
Graphite on paper
2006

To my sister Bonnie

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Ricardo F. Morín

June 2025

Oakland Park, Florida

Author’s Note

This reflection was originally drafted before The Ethics of Perception, Part I, yet it belongs to the same inquiry into attention, understanding, and ethical relation.

There are moments when the truest form of intimacy is silence.
At other times, it’s the quiet labor of reaching for the right word—however incomplete—that brings us closer.
Expression, in this light, is not just a vehicle for communication, but an act of care.

To speak, to withhold, to write, to listen—each choice carries a particular weight.   
Intimacy lives in these gestures:    not in grand declarations, but in the ethics of how we reveal ourselves—and how we receive what another dares to offer.
What follows is not a theory, but a reflection on how intimacy appears in expression—and in its absence.

I. Prelude:    in the pause between words

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when something becomes intimate.
It isn’t always a touch, or a glance, or even a confession.
Sometimes, it’s just a pause—a shared pause—between one word and the next, when both people sense that something true is either about to be said or has just been said, without quite naming it.

Once, sitting face to face, I watched someone I cared for stare silently out the window.
I said nothing either.
There was no gesture, no disclosure, no clarifying words.
And yet the silence didn’t feel empty—it felt full.
In that stillness, something passed between us—not a message, not even an understanding, but a kind of permission:

To exist without explanation.
To be present without having to perform.

That moment stayed with me not because it was dramatic, but because it was unplanned.
I hadn’t expected it, and I couldn’t have recreated it.
I only knew, afterward, that I had been in the presence of something rare:
an intimacy that asked nothing more than to be.

And yet, not all intimacy is born in silence or in someone else’s presence.
Some comes later, through writing—in that long interval between feeling and saying.
Some is only possible thanks to the quiet distance that makes reflection possible.

II. What we mean when we say “intimate”

The word intimacy often evokes physical closeness:
the realm of touch, proximity, lovers, secrets shared in the dark.
But what if intimacy were less about closeness than about permission?
The permission to be undefended.
To move slowly.
To be unclear—and still be trusted.

To be intimate with someone is not merely to be known, but to be seen—
seen without the pressure to explain yourself quickly or justify what you feel.
It’s an opening, and it’s also a risk:
the risk of being misunderstood, and the deeper risk of being understood too well.

Some forms of intimacy unfold face to face.
Others require distance.
Some happen through dialogue.
Others need a single voice, speaking on one’s own in a quiet room.

That’s where writing begins—
not as performance, but as a long conversation, uninterrupted.

III. The varieties of intimacy

Intimacy shifts with context, with time,
with the shape of the self we bring to another.
It is not one thing—
not just closeness, or tenderness, or vulnerability—
but a set of ways we allow ourselves to be known,
and sometimes, to know another.

There’s the intimacy of the body—
perhaps the most visible and least understood.
It belongs to touch, proximity,
the instinctive draw toward another’s presence.
But this form can deceive:
physical closeness without emotional resonance is common—
and easily faked.
Yet when body and emotion align,
there’s a wordless attunement:
a hand resting on a shoulder for just the right amount of time;
a breath falling into rhythm without intention.

Then there’s emotional intimacy:
the slow courage to say what one feels—
not just when it’s beautiful or convenient,
but when it’s awkward, incomplete, or raw.
This kind of intimacy isn’t given—it’s earned.
It may take years, or a single night.
Trust lives here—or breaks.

There’s also intellectual intimacy:
what arises in conversation
when ideas flow without anyone guarding their ground.
It’s rare.
Most social spaces reward speed,
the need to shine, or the safety of politeness.
But sometimes, with someone equally curious,
thought expands in the presence of the other—
not in agreement, but in response.
There’s nothing to prove—
only the pleasure of discovery.
That’s intellectual intimacy.
It creates a different kind of closeness—
not of feeling, but of perception.

Stranger still is narrative intimacy—
the kind that forms not between two people in the same room,
but between the one who writes and the one who reads,
separated by silence and time.
It isn’t immediate—
but it isn’t less real.
A voice emerges from the page
and seems to speak directly to you,
as if it knew the contours of your mind.
You feel understood—without being seen.
You may never meet the person who wrote those words,
but something in you shifts.
You are no longer alone.

These are not rigid categories.
They overlap, interrupt, evoke one another.
One may deepen another.
Physical presence can create emotional safety.
Intellectual closeness can open into unexpected tenderness.
And still, each has its own rhythm,
its own grammar—
and its own risks.

In that complexity, intimacy ceases to be a condition.
It becomes a practice:
something we learn,
lose,
revise,
and sometimes write
when no other form is possible.

IV. Writing as intimacy with oneself (and with another)

Writing, too, is a kind of intimacy—
not only with others,
but with oneself.
Especially when it’s honest—
when what’s written is not just clever or correct,
but true.
That kind of writing doesn’t flatter.
It doesn’t argue.
It reveals.

We write to bring something forth—
not just for an audience,
but to hear ourselves think,
to see what we didn’t yet know we felt.
In writing, we become witnesses to our own consciousness—
both its lucidity and its evasions.

We follow a sentence
not only for its logic,
but for the feeling it carries.
And when that feeling falters,
we know we’ve lost the thread.

So we begin again, and again—
trying not just to explain,
but to say something that feels just.

In that sense, writing is an ethical act.
It demands attention.
It requires patience.
It invites us to inhabit our own experience
with precision—
even when that experience is fragmented or unresolved.

And if we are lucky—
if we are honest—
something in that effort will reach someone else.
Not to impress.
Not to convince.
But to accompany.

V. When intimacy fails or is refused

Sometimes you reach out—carefully, sincerely—and receive silence, indifference, or a response so misaligned it makes you feel naïve for having tried.
Other times, the failure is subtler:
a conversation that scatters just as something real begins to take shape—or a listener who hears your words, but not your meaning.

Those moments stay with us.
Not because they’re dramatic, but because they remind us how precarious intimacy can be.
It can’t be forced—just as humility can’t.
Both require a quiet letting go—a willingness to offer something without knowing how it will be received.
We can prepare the ground, make the gesture, risk the truth—but the rest depends on the other: their timing, their capacity, their willingness to meet us there.

There’s also the experience of being misunderstood—not just in fact, but in essence.
You try to say something that matters, and the other person responds to what they think you said—or to a version of you that never was.
It’s a blow—
that mismatch between what you tried to share and what actually landed.
The desire for intimacy becomes exposure without connection—a wound instead of a bridge.

Sometimes we avoid intimacy not because we don’t want it, but because we fear what it might cost.
We’ve been made to feel clumsy—for caring too much, or for being too visible.
Or we’ve shared something intimate, only to have it treated lightly—or analyzed without feeling.
After that, we grow cautious.
We speak less—or in fragments—or not at all.

It’s in the wake of such rejections—large or small—that writing ceases to be mere expression.
It becomes repair.
Writing allows us to recover what was lost in the moment—
to name what never reached its destination,
to finish the thought no one waited for,
to say it again—this time without interruption, without assumptions, without fear.

And while writing cannot undo the failure of a shared moment, it can offer something else:
coherence.
A record.
A form of truth that endures—even if it wasn’t heard.

In this way, writing becomes a quiet act of insistence—not against the world, but on behalf of the self.
It’s a way of saying:
What I tried to share still matters—even if it wasn’t received.

VI. The gesture that remains

In the end, intimacy is not a state but a gesture—
repeated again and again—
toward understanding,
toward presence,
toward a shared sense that may arrive… or may not.

Sometimes that gesture is a word spoken at the right moment.
Sometimes it’s a silence held just long enough for the other to speak.
And sometimes it’s the act of writing—solitary, patient, unfinished—
offered not to a crowd,
but to a single imagined reader
who, one day, might need what you are now trying to say.

Writing, at its core, is a form of listening.
Not only to others,
but to the self that doesn’t rush,
doesn’t perform,
doesn’t need to persuade.

To the self that waits—
that wants to be known not by what it manages to say in quick response,
but by what it keeps trying to say with care.

That’s why I return to the page:
not because it guarantees connection,
but because it keeps the door open.
Because in a world that demands speed, certainty, and charm,
writing makes room for something slower and more faithful:
the long, unfinished gesture of trying to reach someone—
perhaps even oneself—
with something resonant.

And when intimacy happens—on the page or in life—
it’s never because we found the perfect words.
It’s because someone stayed.
Someone listened.
Someone let the moment open—without rushing to close it.

That’s what I’m doing now:
writing not to end something,
but to leave it open—
so that something of greater consequence might enter.

*

Ricardo F Morín Tortolero

Capitol Hill, D.C., June 9, 2025

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“Notes From Within” 

May 28, 2025
Triangulation Series M
C-Print
2007

“On Vulnerability”

*

Dedicated to my siblings

There’s a certain kind of person the world seems to admire—sharp-tongued, composed, deliberate.    He moves through life as if he’s never doubted the sound of his own voice.    His gestures are practiced, his opinions unshakable.    It’s a performance of authority, and to many, it’s compelling.

But I’ve never fit that mold.    I don’t hold myself like someone bracing for a fight with the world.    I don’t presume to master a room.    And more and more, I’ve come to believe that what makes a person is not how forcefully he presents himself, but how honestly he shows up.

Vulnerability has never been fashionable.    It doesn’t draw applause or dominate the stage. But it’s where I’ve found the most truth.    Not in being right, or revered, or untouchable—but in admitting how little I know, how often I’ve failed, and how much of life resists explanation.

We’re taught to act as if we’ve earned our place—through effort, through cleverness, through some innate worth.    But I’ve lived long enough to see how much is assumed, how much is favored, how many doors open not because of merit but because of circumstance, appearance, proximity to power.    The world flatters performance.    It often mistakes loudness for depth, certainty for wisdom.

But beneath all that, we’re fallible—achingly so.    We get things wrong.    We hurt people.    We retreat when we should have stayed, and speak when silence would have been kinder.    We tell ourselves stories to survive, not always to understand.

And yet, that fallibility isn’t shameful.    It’s not a flaw to be punished—it’s the most human part of us.    The mistake is not in being wrong; it’s in pretending we’re not.    Intimacy begins where performance ends—when we stop curating ourselves and let others see what is:    our confusion, our fear, our imperfect love.

I’ve stopped wanting to impress.    I want to be known.    I want to know others—not through their accomplishments or their poses, but through the quiet truths they carry.    I don’t need anyone to be flawless.    I need them to be present, to meet me somewhere beneath the surface.

That, to me, is strength.    Not the kind that commands a crowd, but the kind that sits across from others, unguarded, and says, “Me too. I don’t have it either.”

The world may never reward dishonesty with applause.    But it will reward it with connection—with moments that feel real, human, and lasting.    And in the end, I think that’s the only recognition that ever matters.    Not the illusion of certainty or the performance of strength, but the willingness to return, again and again, to the quiet inside us—the one where we are fallible, open, and fully alive.

*

Ricardo F Morin

Bala Cynwyd, Pa; May 28, 2025

Editor:    Billy Bussell Thompson

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“The Language of Silence: An Elegy to Nothingness”

February 3, 2025

(A Prose Poem)

~

Andreina Teresa Morín Tortolero [1955-2025]

~

_

She will come to me . . . not being incarnated;

She will not appear in her own image;

I see and feel her voluble spirit,

and I also see her sans arguments, or advice

in the resonance of her heart upon mine.

~

She comes to me in an endless flow of memories quieting her absence.     

You return to me in every heartbeat . . .    

There is no light nor shadow, nor color nor texture.     

There is no pain in the embrace of uncertainty.     

~

Our coexistence ceases to exist;

the rancor of fear departs as the idea takes us in.     

Pain turns silent, emptied of guilt and regret.     

Though your lungs exhale not,

I feel the breath of your longing in search of union.  

    ~

I understand better your inexorable faith,

with no sting of doubt.     

Resentment held no place, the frankness of your soul loved everything.     

I feel you in my chest, tight with not seeing you     

I see you in the resonance of your mind upon mine.

*

Pain shatters my chest,

I am dying as well,

I fear the very meanness of not accepting

your dignified and glorious absence.

~

How can one ponder eternal love

without knowing eternity,

I do not understand and tears choke me.

~

Eternity is a story we tell ourselves

from our first appearance.     

Before, we were nothing

and nothingness impregnated us with clumsiness

to create stories that console our finitude.

~     

We are nothing,

and to nothing we return.

~

I believe in the goddess of love

for she sustains me,

but immortality and eternity do not depend on her.     

Abstraction is a pretense that believes it heals itself.

~

Confuse reality not with abstraction,

if you know nothing;

unconsciousness is soaked in the unjustifiable.     

Contradiction is the palpable reality,

Humility and neutrality do not exist:     

and are not controllable.  

  ~ 

Intelligence is a tool of fiction.     

We are nothing.

~

Words of comfort ruminate me and my feelings,

they assume compassion for filling the void     

Yet compassion, like humility, can

not boast of itself.     

They come from nothing

and are nothing.

~

The feelings of death arise in old age,

our fragility is tangible.     

“If newly born, what do you know of old age?”     

How can we boast …      even if for the best of reasons!

~

Words can evoke the void of silence,

yet they remain a pretense.

~

Silence is deeper than declarations.     

Listen to silence, filled with nothingness.     

Yet, an energy that’s unchangeable, immutable.     

Persistence is yet another vanity,

a desire to accumulate the unsustainable.     

Parallels are paradoxical, yet real.

*

Ricardo Federico Morín Tortolero,

Oakland Park, Fl. 5:00 am, 3 de Feberero de 2025

Edited by Billy Bussell Thompson

*
(A Poem written by our mother, María Teresa Tortolero Rivero, English translation by this author, and read by Andreina in Spanish)


GREATNESS YOU BESTOWED UPON MY SPIRIT

[July 1979]

*

Greatness you bestowed upon my spirit
for the whole world rests upon my bosom
though in sadness I stray
in vain attempts to redeem my heart.

As pariah in a desert
in my migrant existence
I feel the prick of painful thorns.
and the corrosive doubt of uncertainty.

My home’s encumbered by the punching of loneliness
only absence occupies it.
Why have you forsaken me?
Why so much cruelty?
If born to love
when for love’s sake
I wish to be faithful.

*

In Memoriam Andreina Teresa

~

We, the Morín Tortolero siblings:      Alberto José, Ricardo Federico, María Teresa, and José Galdino, deeply regret to announce to our family and friends the heartfelt passing of our beloved sister

ANDREINA TERESA MORÍN TORTOLERO

November 10, 1955 – February 2, 2025

*

The wake was held at Funeraria Tendencia Ecológica, located in the Las Acacias neighborhood in Valencia, next to the CICPC, on Monday, February 3, 2025, at 12:00 PM.

The funeral service took place at the Puertas al Cielo crematorium, located in La Entrada, Naguanagua, on Tuesday, February 4, 2025.      The Novena is held at Valencia’s El Viñedo Church starting on February 5th at 4:30 pm.

We are grateful for your support and prayers during this time of deep sorrow.

Here, Andreina was among friends and relatives between Valencia, Venezuela in 2024 and her last visit to Broward and Dade Counties in Florida, January 2024,

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