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When in 1818 Mary Shelley entered the laboratory to create Frankenstein, she took into account a series of physical magnitudes such as length, mass, electric current intensity... In fact, practically all of the basic ones. To refer to them, to the magnitudes, we use arbitrated units of measurement. It is essential to neutralize the time factor that, entrenched, conditions its impression. Otherwise, in absolute terms, the hundred meters that this summer separated your towel from the beach bar would be very different from the hundred meters of aimless walking through the desert, although they retain some similarities such as the heat or the sand on which you would leave your footprints. Equally disparate would be the cubic meters excavated for one's own grave and the analogous cubic meters excavated for another's grave. Of the set of 7 magnitudes, time is the only unit of measurement anchored in feelings. So much so that its imprint depends on emotions and the ladder by which such emotions climb. Mary Shelley, for example, creates a being tormented by the lack of love from his father, the scientist Victor Frankenstein, and it is prolonged solitude in time that pushes Frankenstein, the new being, to sentimentalism and hatred.
The relationship we have with our parents during childhood acts on our intention in life. With slow hours, being a child traces the master lines of what will eventually become their inner world, which will place itself in the orbit of sensualityHermann Hesse says that sentimentalism is indulging in feelings that, in the reality of others, are not taken seriously and, this fact, leads us to suffering. Sentimentalism is slow hours, those we have spent waiting for a call, sitting in the plastic chair in the emergency waiting room or those that some of us lived when we were still children, in bed, in the middle of a parental argument. It is evident that in the case of this last example, a parental argument, an adult would not assume it in the same way as a child. An adult would jump up and tell them to go to hell. But the child, of course, does not have the courage to face it and lives that argument as a space of time as eternal as it is painful, turning the interval into one of the worst experiences of their then still tender existence. Just as it happened to Frankenstein, these stages of helplessness put the child before the need to protect themselves from the brutal state of vulnerability.
The relationship we have with our parents during childhood acts upon our intention in life. With slow hours, being a child traces the master lines of what will eventually become their inner world, which they will place in the orbit of sensuality. It is in sensuality where the child begins to design their own canons of beauty, and it is in beauty where they rediscover the happiness they do not find in the family context. It is a journey that allows them to define their art, the value and breadth of which will be determined by the capacity to project love. The love absent in the parents' relationship and which they have had to weave with their own thread. Within their art, the child forgets themselves and replaces the anguish of eyes that see too clearly with happiness.
Outside of happiness, the being - both non-adult and adult - will continue to impose its canons of beauty to interpret the external world in its own way. It will be a sad beauty, but this beautiful sadness is what will literally keep it alive.This is a path of no return and can lead to the abstract or, on the contrary, end in behaviors prone to destruction and criminal behaviors as occurs with Shelley's creation.
Outside of happiness, the being -both non-adult and adult- will continue to impose its canons of beauty to interpret the external world in its own way. It will be a sad beauty, but this beautiful sadness is what will literally keep it alive: the excitability of the soul, the peremptory capacity to fall in love, the capacity to love ardently, to surrender and experience, in the world of feelings, an unusual cosmos that distances it from reality.
Fortunately, after years and having bid farewell to tragic episodes, those who have been able to leave the refuge of torment and those who have managed not to take their own lives, convert the slow hours into fixed, unalterable images. In short, they convert them into voice, into light, into artistic creation. While the non-adult being lives in tragedy, obviously, the perception is still too early to fully understand the wisdom of honorably retaining emotions to, later, when they have the tools at hand, transform them. But the intuition of the artist's future, clumsy when still a child, all it knows is to find infatuation.
Because the children of slow hours move, only, by infatuation. Everything that is not by infatuation, every reality that is not transformable, will seem rejectable to them and they will reject it. This is how the mechanism of someone who, as a child, is forced to build their own universe to survive, acts. It is clear that there are other ways to give birth to an artist. This path is only one, the one born through tears and painful tension, to which, at the same time, we have joyfully surrendered to be able to forgive.
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