Mohamed Mrabet (1936) is a Moroccan painter who was discovered by Paul Bowles on one of his trips to Tangier, back in the sixties. Mrabet barely knew how to read and write, but that did not stop him from publishing books. Paul Bowles himself served as translator of the many stories that Mrabet left recorded in his own voice; testimonies and experiences told in first person about his comings and goings through different jobs: caddy, fisherman, boxer, bartender or hustler.
In his autobiography, published by Anagrama a few years ago with the title look and runMohamed Mrabet He introduces us to Zohra, his wife. In one of her chapters she appears sick, with swollen legs and unable to walk; The skin on her feet was falling off and, faced with this situation, Mrabet went to consult a sorcerer. The explanation given by the sorcerer was that his wife put out the fire of a brazier with water at the time when there was an evil goblin among the flames. The water surprised the goblin who, in a bad mood, threw the ashes from the brazier on Zohra’s leg. To remedy the evil, on the advice of the sorcerer, Mrabet had to sacrifice a black rooster and burn some papers at the same time. He then whitewashed the house and sprinkled its corners with milk.
Beliefs contrary to reason dominated—and continue to dominate—a good part of the world. Irrationality leads people to think that goblins exist in the real world and are the cause of many misfortunes. Something as absurd as thinking that elves are part of the scientific method. Nothing further. In any case, the only elf that is related to science is the one discovered in October 2023 by Andreas Mogensen, an astronaut from the European Space Agency (ESA). It is a red goblin or, in other words, a Transient Luminous Event called TLE by its acronym in English and through which you can see a figure similar to a red goblin in the sky. This is a phenomenon that occurs when clouds become stormy. The aforementioned phenomenon is difficult to capture from Earth, since it occurs in the upper atmosphere.
To give us an idea, the so-called red goblins are electrical discharges that shoot upward from the clouds; They are fleeting, they are brief flashes of light that look like elves. The oldest known allusion to these darts of light dates back to November 1885 when, from a boat, flashes of color could be observed in the sky, little lights that later, once rationalized, were discovered as electrons passing through the air. at full speed, causing heat and, with it, light.
One hundred years, a century, had to pass before, in 1995, the phenomenon was named with the word “goblin”. In this way, elves entered scientific terminology from heaven; nothing to do with the story of Mrabet who, in the end, would end up taking his wife to a doctor who prescribed, in addition to injections, an ointment and some pills. Because tricks to put your mind to sleep, no matter how attractive they may seem, are harmless when it comes to finding a remedy for an ailment. And elves only exist in the sky on stormy days.
The stone ax It is a section where Montero Glezwith a desire for prose, exerts its particular siege on scientific reality to demonstrate that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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