The name of things

Sometimes the meaning of things slips away and I wonder who has decided the words we use, what kind of society, what kind of politics, what kind of hierarchies have defined our way of understanding of the world?
¿How we look to the space around us? Then I read and the sense drifts, because:


I read and the sense drifts, because:


But:



As a performative exercise, or rather just to be able to escape from everything that suffocates us, we used to go to the woods. While we were walking J. suddenly stopped to pick a small white flower from the edge of the path.


J. always tells me a lot of medicinal uses for plants, she knows them all. What for me is a green bush of indecipherable lives is for her a field of names, characteristics, and information. I try to absorb everything she says with a certain envy of that special relationship she has with each one of the plants.


Since that day I have not stopped seeing Cap Blanc. There are plenty of them, but I didn't know it untill then. The fact that I couldn't name it meant I couldn't separate it from the rest.
Doesn’t this lack of knowledge of names imply a deep detachment from the world, or a profound lack of looking to the world?

In order to situate ourselves in the middle we have to get closer, to touch. To recognise the world and recognize ourselves in between, to establish new connections, it is necessary to look back and recover a knowledge buried underneath the floor of the supermarkets.
It is necessary, first of all, to recover the name of things.

The gaze is constructed from patterns of normality so engraved in our retinas that we can hardly identify them unless we do performative exercises that put them in check.

Reality is an active verb.

How many verbs associated with the voice do we humans have? Why does a cicada just chirp and a donkey only bray? Doesn’t this lack of verbs mean we miss out on nuances and expressions and imply a radical lack of knowledge, or a profound lack of listening to the world?

This is the Cap Blanc. The flower can be eaten, look, taste it, it's a bit spicy. Look, this one with the four petals. You can put it in salads, it's very good.

She says she knows the important information, the information that doesn't appear in the books.
She says hypericum has the energy of the sun.

[1] Helen Torres, “El amor en tiempos de Facebook”, /Transfeminismos. Epistemes, fricciones y flujos/, eds. Miriam Solá, Elena Urko, (Tafalla: Txalaparta, 2016), 243.
[2] Donna Haraway, /The Companion Species Manifesto/, (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 6.
[3] Maria Arnal, María Sánchez, Irene Solá, “Lichen”, /CCCBLab/, June 2021, https://lab.cccb.org/en/lichen/

My grandfather knew them al too.