The wind doesn’t know it is wind.
On becoming before knowing
The phrase arrived the way all important things arrive: uninvited, on an ordinary Tuesday, while I was doing something else entirely. Folding laundry. Or perhaps standing at a window watching nothing in particular move through the street below.
El viento no sabe que es viento.
The wind doesn’t know it is wind.
There is a photograph somewhere, lost now in one of the boxes that follow me from city to city, never fully unpacked. In it, I am perhaps six years old, crouched in the dirt behind a house in a village whose name sounds like stones dropped in water. I am drawing something with a stick. My face carries the concentration of someone performing surgery, though I cannot remember what I was making. A map. A monster. My own name spelled wrong.
I did not know, in that moment, that I was a child. I did not know I was Spanish, or that I would leave, or that decades later I would sit in apartments in Dublin, Lisbon, Aarhus, trying to remember what the dirt smelled like after rain (petrichor).
I was simply there, fully absorbed, the way wind moves through wheat without pausing to consider itself.
We spend so much of our lives in retrospect, constructing meaning from moments that, when they occurred, meant nothing at all. Or rather, they meant everything, but not in the way we later decide they did. The meaning comes after, like subtitles added to a film that was shot silent.
I was an artist before I knew that word. Before galleries, before the weight of intention, before I understood that what I was doing had a name and a history and a market value. I made things because my hands wanted to make things.
The wind does not consult meteorological charts before deciding to blow.
In Madrid, in the early nineties, we painted walls that didn’t belong to us. Underneath overpasses. Behind warehouses that smelled of rust and gasoline.
We moved through the city at hours when the city itself seemed to be sleeping, and we left marks that would be painted over or washed away or simply fade into illegibility.
None of us talked about legacy.
None of us worried about documentation.
We were not performing rebellion; we were simply doing what felt necessary, the way your lungs expand without permission.
I did not know I was becoming something.
I did not feel the shape of my future self pressing against the edges of those nights. I was present the way water is present in a river. Moving without destination.
The wind does not know it is wind. It only knows what it touches: the surface of a lake disturbed into small waves, the pages of a book left open on a table, the hair that falls across a face and must be pushed back.
The wind knows itself through contact. Through resistance and release.
Perhaps this is how we know ourselves too. Not through introspection, but through the things we brush against. The people who bend toward us or away. The surfaces that yield or remain unmoved.
My great grandpa worked with his hands for forty years. Wood, mostly. Utensils and Furniture. The mathematics of ergonomics and materials. He never called himself a craftsman, though that is what he was. He would say only that he did the job, that the work was there and he did it.
He laid patterns into furniture that will outlast his name, and he thought nothing of it. This was simply what days were for.
I watched him once, through a doorway, when he did not know I was there. His hands moved over a broken chair, testing the edge, finding the break. His face held no expression. He was not performing care or precision. He simply was those things. The way light is warm without choosing warmth.
There is a violence in naming. In the moment when the thing we have been doing unconsciously becomes a category, a practice, a defined self.
Once I knew I was an artist, I began to hesitate before making marks. Once I understood that I carried an accent, I became aware of my mouth forming sounds it had always formed. The wind, I think, would stop if it knew it was being watched. If someone handed it a mirror and said: this is you.
Memory works this way too. It does not announce itself as memory. A scent rises from somewhere. A color catches the eye. The body responds before the mind can name what is happening, and by the time we have words for it, we are already somewhere else, some-when else, the boundary between now and then dissolved like salt in water.
I do not remember choosing to remember the things I remember. The small violences and small kindnesses. The texture of my grandma’s housecoat. The sound of rain on corrugated metal. These things chose me. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say they moved through me without asking, and I was shaped by their passage the way canyons are shaped by water that has long since gone.
There is a freedom in not knowing what you are. In acting without the burden of category. The wind does not worry about whether it is being authentic to its wind-ness. It does not compare itself to other winds, faster or warmer or more persistent. It does not wake at three in the morning wondering if it has wasted its potential.
It simply moves.
And in that moving, it becomes exactly what it is.
Tonight the air outside my window is still.
The trees hold their breath.
But somewhere, always, wind is forming over water. Gathering itself from differences in pressure that it cannot name. It will move because moving is what it does. It will touch things, and be changed by touching, and change them in return. And none of this will occur to it.
I am trying to learn from this. To make the way I once made, before making became a statement. To live in the body before the body becomes a metaphor. To love without the scaffolding of narrative.
The wind doesn’t know it is wind. And perhaps that is why it moves so freely.