POEMS BY JOSÉ TONO MARTÍNEZ

PANDORA´S BOX

I. Pandora. - LIGHT, FREEDOM

I
Pandora ’s Box is a golden rope when unplaited and unfolded it totally covers
your face and mine. Like a mane under the summer’s sun, amongst pine
woods, mingled with weakening shadows while our heated feet playfully meet
on the yellow sand.

(Note for the artist: Yellow stains on broken notebooks, likes strands of long hair).

II
Pandora ’s Box.
Pandora’s Box teaches us nothing is eternal, not even eternity itself, not even all
the words we could invent to express it, it and its variations. But Pandora ’s Box
is the freedom of knowing precisely that, and to go on, and to say it everyday,
even though doubts come to assault us, and we suspect; useless.

(Note for the artist: Slightly traced sketch. An open box?)

III
Pandora ’s Box.
Pandora ’s Box is crystal clothing covering us like traveling rain since the
beginning of time, conveying us by air in minute particles, traveling across
snowed places and mountain ranges, rivers, jungles, deltas pouring out on
crowded cities, upwards and downwards, outwards and inside, like a minimal
region or space that has forsaken its own name.

(Note for the artist: A crystal space, work on the glass which covers…)

II. Pandora. - DEATH

IV
Pandora ’s Box
-The dead don’t return, my daughter Icíar, four years of age, suddenly tells me.
She says it just like that, with no warning, while walking on a street in Madrid
from school to home- There’s no doubt about it-, I think. And yet, somehow,
they are always our peers. That’s what Pandora ’s Box says to us.

(Note for the artist: Shape of coffin, a closed shape.)

 V

Pandora’s Box
Pandora ’s Box is a hermetically sealed and obscure room containing all the
pain in the world, its injustices. All remains there condensed, alive, regained,
always in present tense. All the conversations of family and friends are there,
they who bid farewell before their city is destroyed and conquered by the
annihilating hoard of the new conqueror. All the children, who sleep and do
not know what awaits them, are there. All the victims of History in capitals, with
its unavoidable progress: the tortured, the deported, the persecuted, the
condemned, the executed by firing squad, the burned, the buried, the
incinerated and the forgotten are there. Now it is February of 1994. We’re in
Auswitz-Birkenau, on the old lands of the kings and dukes of Piast, founders of
Poland. There are two naked and terrified kids holding each other, terrorized
while the gas chokes their lungs and they think the taste of dirt and dry sweat
they are sharing is also the taste of summer. Thanks to Pandora’s Box we
stretch out our hand, to touch them and bring them towards us, to here, to this
instant, thanks to a pleat in time and space that our art opens and allows.

(Note for the artist: Concentrated shape, highlights with dark stains).

VI
Pandora ’s Box
Pandora ’s Box and the amulets. In certain periods of their such a long
Empire, the ancient Egyptians came to seal up to one hundred and four charms
to protect the dead on their last voyage. This multiplicity of insurance policies
seems to belie certain skepticism on their efficiency.

(Note for the artist: Stains of amulets surrounded by the shape as if they were protecting
them, characteristic shape of an amulet).

III. Pandora.- THE MIRROR

VII
Pandora ’s Box
What Antoine de Saint-Exupery learned from Pandora’s Box (flying): “
Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add but when there is
nothing left to remove.”

(Note for the artist: On an already made sketch, randomly remove parts.)
 VIII
Pandora ’s Box
Haiku epitaph on Pandora ’s Box:
Travel
Travel
While you can.

(Note for the artist : Dig while you can in the middle of the image.)

IX
Pandora ’s Box
Pandora’s Box has no shape yet it has them all. It’s a cloud. It progresses. The
cloud is a mirror in the air. The mirror cracks and it’s a river. It too progresses
towards the Sea of Serenity. The Sea of Serenity is on the moon. “The moon
moves in the sky / with a child by the hand” Federico García Lorca wrote in his
Romancero.

(Note for the artist : Open the sketch until it nearly loses its concept of box structure.)

IV Pandora. –TENDERNESS, FIRE.

X
Pandora ’s Box
Pandora ’s Box is a crossroad where the fair meet under the tree that shelters
the sweet traders, the respectable awkwardness of the humble, the infinite
kindness of those who build thinking of the seventh generation. There where
like soapy bubbles or toasted corn the generous elder flutter and discreet youth
stretch out their hands to love and kiss because their life depends on it.

(Note for the artist : Energetically force the sketch.)

X
Pandora ’s Box
Pandora ’s Box holds the sole chance of someone perhaps remembering us at
the end of times. That’s why we do not know how to see it. Even though we
daily stumble against it like an invisible city.

(Note for the artist : Try emptiness, transparency)

 XII
Pandora’s Box
Pandora’s Box is a road of water, wood, stone and air. It is shaped with our
sweat. It has a destiny of steel. It is liberation, the inner fire of the free spirit and
the banquet of the libertine... In the midst, all the books of the worlds and don
Miguel de Cervantes’ farewell, written in Persiles’ prologue, four days before
dieing and addressed to the count of Lemos, on April 19, 1616:
“With one foot already on the parting stirrup,
And a yearning for Death
Great Lord to you I write,
Yesterday I was given the extreme unction and today I write this; time is short,
longing grows, hopes diminish and with all this, I bear life through the desire I
have to live…”
(Note for the artist : Two boxes overlapping. More hope? A single color line. As single as an
idea of a human creature?)