La Voz de Galicia – January 28, 2022 →
The truth is that I had never heard that idea described in such a way. It was in the context of one of those documentaries that Xan and I sometimes choose so they can open a door to the things we know nothing about. Yesterday, it was Stuntman: The Specialist, which follows a chapter in the life of Eddie Braun, a specialist on risky scenes who has spent four decades working as a body double in Hollywood’s most popular action movies. And even though it would be beautiful to reflect upon the profession itself–there is something fascinating about the reasons that compel them to want to do what they do knowing themselves to be invisible–the idea that stuck with me was a concept briefly described in the middle of the documentary, the notion of SWAG: Scientific Wild Ass Guess. And now that I think about it, it has a difficult translation, and I don’t know a similar expression in Galician, but these four words refer to the fact that the specialists, in addition to training physically and mentally for their work, also trust profoundly on what their experience teaches them, and especially, in the intuition related to that experience.
And then I thought about the word intuition and its definition, and in the way we have of accepting it or denying it, and in how much has been written about it. And then I thought about my mother who, as so many others, constructed our lives following precisely this criterion–intuition related with experience. But the difference between the specialists in the documentary and the experience of which my mother learned was that it was not hers, but that of others because she learned by seeing and listening, and through that she «intuited» the necessary steps so that we could have a voice in the same society that made them invisible.
