I was born by revolution. According to the register of births, I was born in 1907 but, according to the register of significance, I was the daughter of the Mexican revolution, born in 1910 at the end of dictatorship and the beginning of the peasant revolutions of Zapata.

In the earliest aeons, before she became solid, the earth was a ball of strange gases, and I imagine her like this: if you whistled to the Northern Lights they would swim together, circling in space like a shoal of colours, heat-wraiths stretching, suggesting, dancing backwards, some losing their contact and disappearing, a phantasmic flicker of possibility evaporating into blackness.

And the moon? In the revolution of the earth’s turning—and I am a revolutionary—a shard of earth was f lung off, coalescing, reforming further and later, far off as the moon. But shard is the wrong word, too hard and substantial; so immaterial was this moment, so unearthly the earth, so unanchored the moon, what word would be better? The moon was more like Idea, more like Metaphor, or Time, Flight or Potential or Longing. A highly strung intensity of latency.

The moon, shining on the Lacandon jungle and Mexico City, on Havana and Madrid, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Montevideo and New York, is wearing a ski-mask and is rolling a cigarette with tobacco she nicked from the subcomandante while she writes a communiqué to earth. ‘Instructions for Loss,’ it begins. There are many kinds of revolutions and many of these are invisible: when loss has razed the psyche and despair seems to have massacred the spirit, insurgents of hope sometimes arm themselves in the jungles of the heart.

Picasso famously said: ‘I do not seek, I find.’ What about those whose distinctions are not between seeking and finding but between losing and being lost? Not caught between Picasso’s optimism of seeking and success of finding, but stuck terribly between unfinding and breakage?

Instructions for loss: if you lose something you can find it fractally—and indeed you must find it like this. In order to avoid bitterness, you must find what you lost a thousand times over, in other faces in the moon, other disguises, under other ski-masks, other mountains, not in fractured crystal but in the perfect refraction of a rainbow and the reflection of mirrors, seeing you in myself, myself in you. It is, as it were, a Zapatismo of the human heart, an intuition of plurality which is a salvation, an aesthetic and a rebellion.