In Memoriam José Antonio Rodríguez (6 Months Later)
An elegy for my much-missed mentor and friend.
Next Tuesday it will be six months since I wrote this piece originally in my native language, Spanish, and published it on my blog on the 14th of March 2021. At the time I included a link to the Google Translate English version, in case some of my readers who don’t know Spanish wanted to know what it was all about.
It is scary how good automated translation systems have become. Needless to say (why do we feel the need to say things that are “needless to say”?) they are not perfect, but as we know no translation can ever be. The essence of translation is to err in trying.
I first thought I should revise the automated version and share with you a slightly more accurate translation. On second thought (why do we say we think in sequencial order?) I thought there was something slightly poetic in the rough edges of the automated version, and thought (again), why not, let’s share it as the machine read it, because when most of us die, after all, it is likely that machines will succeed us,and read us, repeat us, perhaps preserve us, most likely also delete us, or bury us, never to be found again.
So please excuse the rough edges of the text below. It is what the algorithm understood and rendered back to us. If you can and want to read the original instead, just follow the link1.
Thank you for reading.
José Antonio Rodríguez (1961-2021)
“I want to cry my grief and I tell you”
-Federico García Lorca, "The poet tells the truth", in Sonnets of dark love , 1936
“And when that happens, I know it. A message saying so merely confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken string.”
-Truman Capote, “A Christmas Memory”, 1956
“Each one has the ghosts that they have summoned for themselves in the areas built for that purpose, sharing and assimilating them.”
-José Antonio Rodríguez, The art of illusions. Pre-cinematic shows in Mexico , 2009
José Antonio died yesterday. They called me at 8:20 am London, England time while I was making my Saturday coffee and tea. They are six hours apart so it would be 2:20 in the morning in Mexico City.
At that moment I was thinking about him. And when that happened, I knew it .
I'm not a believer or superstitious, but I was struck - although there are logical reasons - that kind of coincidence or cosmic synchronicity across the distance. Like a click . And then a light but very clear snap, like when a kite string snaps. *
José Antonio was, is and will be my brother-in-law, partner of my sister Patricia and father, with her, of Natalia and Camilla.
Each one will have a different version of their Toño. Different versions, all amalgamated, juxtaposed, superimposed, veiled and revealed. It would be necessary to collect and preserve them all. There are different ways to do it. It is not possible to synthesize it, to summarize it all. Nobody belongs to anyone, we are millions of particles of star dust and like everyday dust it is infinite and democratic. There is no one who can get rid of it no matter how much it cleans.
We called José Antonio Toño, but also Toñito, Mitón, Jar, Jarcito, maestro, wey, cabrón, man, José Antonio, all those names depending on the context and the occasion but sometimes also all at the same time. Toño was like a father to me, a friend and a mentor, instructor and guide, an intellectual and often financial and emotional sponsor. It was an anchor and a pillar.
If today I can say that I am an academic, a researcher, an editor and a curator, it is mainly because of Toño. Toño and Paty, also known as Patitoño, because they were / are a symbiotic organism, a registered trademark, a limited company, a family business, a multidisciplinary project without a deadline, they are co-responsible for practically everything I can say that I am today, and I wouldn't be writing these lines this morning if it weren't for the role they have played in my life. The verb tenses fall apart, because it is still too early, and because the time is out of joint , and we are in a duel.
Toño died yesterday. He had barely turned 60 in February. It sounds very strange but I am telling you because, as the poet sang, I have to mourn my sorrow by sharing it. The COVID-19 pandemic means that I was not able to take a plane to be with my family and share with them even from a distance. It is not the first time that I cannot be at a funeral, and that has its own grief and its own grief.
Toño died yesterday, and what he wanted to say from the beginning is that one of the first teachings that I remember he gave me is the importance of the first line in a writing. "Great writers know how to start a story," he always told me, and it was as if his criteria for selection and literary curation had always been to judge a book by the first line. From there followed the examples, the literary recommendations that all these years later continue to be formative and definitive.
Through Toño - and in parallel through my father and mother - I discovered the greats of world literature, but especially that of the twentieth century American. Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Carson McCullers, JD Salinger, Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler, but also more relatively recent genre authors such as Stephen King, Clive Barker and Peter Straub. Toño had read everything in a time without Internet and without Wikipedia and without Amazon, he was a geographer of literary, cinematographic, artistic canons in general, without discrimination of national origin, language or gender.
Toño died yesterday, and while I was making coffee around 8:20 in the morning I was thinking about Albert Camus and that book that he also gave me, L'Etranger (The foreigner in its Spanish translation), and how it begins: “ Aujourd 'hui , maman est morte. " Pum .
So are my memories of Toño, in addition to millions of other types (I have dozens of mental 'reels' of him dancing Cuban music with Paty, his daughters or my wife), where he recommended books to me on how they began. All Capote, all John Fante. Toño had a clear taste for inherently melancholic novels and stories, for him, one did not know the meaning of the blues if it had not been read well. I assure you that his taste for photography - and this was discussed several times in passionate conversations about WG Sebald - was his preference for the melancholic, for the spectrality and fantamagoria of the photo and the cinema, for the ambition to fix for the future what finite and perishable, not only as images and visual cultures but as technologies, as crafts.
Others will do the recounting of his extensive bibliography and museography, the awards and distinctions he received; their academic and institutional degrees and positions. There are examples here , here and here and here and for sure in many other documents that I have not seen yet and in many to come. What I cannot stop saying is that Toño has always emerged as a creature from another time and space, because his research work, his research, was his life, his passion, and I can truly assure that he was never motivated by Institutional evaluation “scores” or institutional academic “reputation”.
Before he even did his master's degree, let's leave his doctorate, Toño had a corpus of publications with an absolutely impressive international impact, both in quality and quantity. Excuse me if I allow myself to say that there are no academics like that anymore. Nor those that combine research with practice not only teaching but also museum and public dissemination. Before “public engagement” was buzzword, Toño and Paty, Patitoño, had already made it their daily bread.
I'd like to say more but for now I force myself to finish. It is very difficult to write about the gone without falling into common places, but what more common place for the human than death? There will be time, hopefully, to expand and share and perpetuate.
José Antonio died yesterday. Someone irreplaceable has left but he continues with us in his not only professional but personal legacy. I end with this song by the Trío Matamoros, which he liked so much.
Rest in peace, Toñito.
Left: Yours Truly. Right: Toñito.
At the end of this entry I have also added an image that I think it illustrates well my kinship with Toño.