MECANIKALGIA: Essay on the Silent Suffering of the Soul
By Abisay Puentes
There are pains that exist even before we are able to name them. Pains that do not come from the flesh or from thought, but from a deeper place: an inner fold where desire, fragility, memory, loss, and a profoundly human form of spiritual exhaustion all converge. For years I felt that tremor—an inner whisper that was not exactly sadness, nor confusion, nor fear, but contained something of all three. A pain that seemed to come from outside, even though it was born deep inside my own chest.
That tremor had a rhythm.
A pulse.
A foreign breath that, without my noticing, began to mark my own.
A hybrid affliction—part emotional dependence, part spiritual sedation. Something I did not recognize in any language I knew.
I understood, then, that this pain needed a name.
Not a borrowed psychological term.
Not a traditional theological concept.
Not a recycled philosophical definition.
It needed a name born from my own painting,
from my poetry,
from my anthropological interior.
That is how Mecanikalgia came into being.
A word forged out of two movements within me:
the mechanism that adheres to the soul,
and the longing for the numbness
that this mechanism produces.
A gentle longing—deceptive, almost luminous—
yet one that does not illuminate:
it only anesthetizes.
Mecanikalgia is, above all, a suffering:
the suffering that arises when the soul breathes in a perfume that does not belong to it.
I. The Origin of the Tremor: When the Perfume Touches the Soul
In the spiritual and narrative universe of La Parábola, everything begins with a perfume.
Not a physical scent, but an intimate, emotional, psychic aroma offered by Adam and Eve—symbols of human power and complicity in deception—through the machine they have constructed.
The machine is not an artifact.
It is ideological architecture.
It is the symbolic reflection of a system that promises relief, clarity, or rest,
but which, in its essence, leads to the loss of the self.
When that perfume reaches the soul, no collapse occurs.
No lightning.
No warnings.
No visible punishment.
What happens is infinitely more subtle:
the soul feels relief.
A first relief—sweet, warm, necessary.
The fruit’s perfume represents the instant in which the human being touches a lie that feels like truth.
A quiet truth.
A calming truth.
A truth that allows one not to look inward.
And it is there, in that first breath, that Mecanikalgia begins.
In the sedating relief that comes before the full fog.
II. Mecanikalgia: The Sweetness That Anesthetizes
Mecanikalgia does not arise from sharp pain.
Nor from explicit suffering or punishment.
It is born of sweetness—
of unexpected relief,
of a breath that seems to bring peace, yet does not.
It is not a sudden fall;
it is a slow, gentle descent into dependence.
In my unfinished poem—the very heart of this series—I wrote:
“Each sip,
each whisper of me,
gets lost in its perfume…”
In those lines I understood that Mecanikalgia is the soul dissolving into what it breathes.
The soul allowing itself to be carried by a sedation that calms without healing.
The soul accepting a borrowed rest because it is tired of holding itself up.
Mecanikalgia is the urgency to keep inhaling what numbs.
It is an addictive affliction—though not toxic in appearance.
The soul breathes voluntarily, because what it breathes soothes it.
That is its mystery.
That is its danger.
That is its tragic beauty.
III. The Psychology of the Contemporary Soul
The era in which I live is marked by a deep inner exhaustion.
Not merely fatigue from work or social pressure,
but an existential tiredness:
a resistance to looking inward.
We live in an age in which distraction is refuge.
Noise is self-constructed protection.
Silence is a threat.
Introspection hurts so much that any sedation seems desirable.
It is within this spiritual climate that Mecanikalgia is born—
as a contemporary poetics of voluntary numbness.
As an emotional architecture that avoids confrontation with Truth.
As a gentle mechanism that prevents us from asking:
“Who am I when no one is holding me up?”
It echoes a line I wrote in La Parábola:
“It is the architecture of ideological stupefaction.”
That is the core of Mecanikalgia:
the human psyche embracing a mechanism that promises liberation,
but only brings drowsiness into existence.
And the soul, exhausted, accepts.
IV. The Posture of Consent: The Inclined Body
In Mecanikalgia No. 4,
the man’s body appears bent forward.
His neck exposed.
His shoulders tense.
His skin illuminated by a golden light—yet a light lacking authentic meaning.
This inclination is not servitude.
Not punishment.
Not the gesture of someone defeated by force.
It is a more complex, more deeply human posture:
the posture of silent consent.
The body yields
before the mind can admit it has yielded.
The posture does not declare defeat;
it simply reveals exhaustion.
A fragile, beautiful exhaustion.
In my work, the inclination of the body is not a moral metaphor.
It is the radiograph of a soul that stops fighting—
not because it has been overpowered,
but because it has lost the strength to sustain its own truth.
Because it has been overtaken by social conformism,
the search has ceased,
the desire to see the reflection of the divine nature has ended,
it cannot see it,
and neither does it want to.
This inclination is the prelude to the coming fog—
the anticipation of the mist that has not yet arrived,
but is already manifesting itself.
V. The Symbolic Machine: When Metal Learns to Breathe
The machine that envelops the body in Mecanikalgia is not cold,
not rigid,
not industrial.
It is an organic machine.
A machine that seems to have skin.
A machine attempting to behave like a body.
In Mecanikalgia No. 4,
the tubes adhere softly,
as if they were tendons stretching toward an organism they already recognize.
The curved lines resemble adoptive veins.
The warm light creates the illusion of a heartbeat.
The metal glistens with a sheen that does not come from without,
but from an inner breath.
It is not technology.
It is symbolic physiology.
The machine imitates the human in order to invade it without violence.
It imitates in order to replace.
It accompanies in order to dominate.
It breathes so that the man no longer needs to.
And it is precisely this organic softness
that makes Mecanikalgia so profound—and dangerous.
Because a mechanism that resembles the body
can aspire to replace it.
And in fact, it does—
for a moment it becomes part of the organism and the DNA of the individual.
VI. Addictive Suffering: When Sweetness Rules the Will
The suffering I describe in Mecanikalgia does not arise from force or violence. It emerges from sweetness that enters without resistance. This sweetness, which on the surface appears comforting, is the very core of the suffering. A gentle, pleasant, almost maternal influence that gradually conditions the soul to depend on it.
In my poem, the emotional root of this dependence appears:
“But I breathe this scent,
as if I had never tasted a soul,
and its atoms want to tell me who I am,
but they close my eyes,
like a blow of false sedation…”
Here I discovered that Mecanikalgia is not machinery invading from the outside. It is inner sedation sustained by the human will itself. The soul breathes a false relief, a sweetness that convinces it that it does not need to look within. The seduction lies in the sweetness feeling sincere, while what it offers is a continuous, perpetual lie.
Mecanikalgia is therefore an addictive affliction in its purest form: a recurrence. A need to return to the scent that quiets every urge to question. A search for emotional sedation that spares me from confrontation. A dependence that grows without disruption, carried by a softness that imitates peace.
VII. When the Machine Breathes for Me
In Mecanikalgia, artificial breathing is always present. Not because there is a medical device, but because the visual composition imitates the rhythm of a foreign pulse.
The tubes do not enter the body—they connect.
The lights do not illuminate—they swallow the inner shadow.
The shadows do not conceal—they become part of the anesthetized being.
Every tension in the canvas suggests an invisible organism breathing beside me—or within me.
Not to harm me, but to offer an alternative breath.
That foreign breath is the key to this suffering:
when the machine breathes, my soul stops breathing fully.
The painting reveals the precise moment when the body rests upon a pulse that was not born inside it.
A borrowed pulse.
A mechanical pulse.
A pulse that imitates life without possessing it.
That is Mecanikalgia’s visual language:
not invasion, but delicate substitution.
Not domination, but self-surrender.
Not force, but the exhaustion that gives in to a more comfortable respiration.
VIII. The Figure in Shadow: Memory of the Self I Once Was
In some works of this series—such as Mecanikalgia No. 4—a secondary figure appears, almost evaporated, in the background. This is what remains of the reflection of Adam and Eve. A corrupted memory, expired by the hours spent immersed in long inhalations.
Adam sought to subdue the man,
but that act caused the man to forget Adam’s face.
Thus it all became an eternity of solitude.
It seems his aspiration to grow has been distorted over time.
But in truth, he simply yielded to time, building a false image of who he really is.
Thus the man stops understanding why he remains in this state of voluntary forgetting.
He stops believing,
stops persevering,
stops seeking.
IX. The Inner Music of Mecanikalgia
Music is integral to my work. I do not understand it as accompaniment, but as an extension of visual thought. In Mecanikalgia, music cannot be melody—it must be atmosphere.
Here sound is not song or harmony.
It is adulterated breathing.
A contained echo.
A pulse without resolution.
A low hum that does not threaten, but unsettles.
Frequencies that imitate stability without giving it.
The music in Mecanikalgia is a disguised voice:
a gentle noise that replaces silence.
True silence requires introspection—
requires depth—
requires truth.
And the sedated soul prefers not to hear it.
Thus, in this series, sound becomes the companion of anesthesia—
so intimate that it appears compassionate, though it is not.
Its function is not to reveal, but to prevent.
X. Mecanikalgia as a Mirror of My Era
This suffering is not a phenomenon of the past, nor an isolated mystery. It belongs to my era—
to this century—
to this collective psychology that has normalized emotional numbness as a way of life.
We live in times when clarity is perceived as threat and confusion as refuge.
Times when deep thought has become strange,
and noise has become companionship.
Times when inner comfort is sought at any price—even if the price is identity itself.
Mecanikalgia is, therefore, a mirror.
Not a mirror that shows punishment or explicit deterioration,
but one that reveals the dangerous softness of self-deception—
a softness that can sustain a human being for years
without them realizing what they have lost.
I do not intend to moralize with this work.
It is not a sermon.
Not a warning.
It is an image—
an image in which I recognize a real phenomenon
in myself and in my generation:
sedation as a response to spiritual exhaustion.
XI. Conclusion: The Soul That Adopts a Foreign Heartbeat
If I had to define Mecanikalgia in a single sentence, I would say:
It is the poetics of the soul that adopts a foreign heartbeat so it does not have to hear its own.
In this series, my painting does not accuse or denounce.
It does not scream or confront.
It does not force or threaten.
It simply reveals the fragility of a soul that, tired of its own weight, accepts a pulse that was not born within it.
It is the prelude to the mist,
the threshold of total numbness,
the lukewarm instant before the fog.
That is why Mecanikalgia is an aesthetic confession—
a poetic radiograph of contemporary suffering,
a map of how the sweetness of deception
slowly replaces the clarity of the spirit.
Because before the soul sinks into the fog,
there is a mechanical whisper that promises rest.
And it is there—exactly there—
that Mecanikalgia is born.
