Restoring Aura: Straight from the Heart

This chapter makes a full circle, returning us to where we began in the corn field, the Llano de Elena. There we went to weed upon Maestro Jesús’ death to make space for the seedlings he had planted, giving them room to grow until harvest. Maestro Jesús’ life and work—his agency—is seen unfinished through the continuity provided by a homage exhibition of his work, the baptism of a new grandson and the taking up of his staff by his youngest son. The discussion of critical aesthetics concludes here drawing from the non-linear process of Warburg and Benjamin to analyze morphologies of image and text analogically and metaphorically. How is the discordance between ideal and the real reconciled in Maestro Jesús’ work? How are imperfection and perfection intertwined? What are the aesthetics of the buffoon? How is an aesthetics of the ugly, humorous, and ludic integral to a moral and aesthetic training? How is Maestro Jesús’ life like a wheel of spokes with many potential openings? How do both artisans and ethnographers practice bricolage and games of chance? And, what is the natality of making? The concept of Fortleben, living-forth, replaces the concept of Nachleben, after-life left impressed in footprints, random paths, hidden clearings, and in hammer strokes already struck. Fortleben traces the presence of absence: not as a record of a remembered past, but remembering as a path for the future, as yet un-known.