February has come with the W-2's
The jest of modernity
Even before the Pandemic I was reading Berdyaev. During the past 4 years even more, and reading books of his and others whom I have read a couple years ago or more I use his thought as gazing upon modernity. Covid-19 was a throw back behind Christ, B.C. Christianity says Berdyaev alone can save the world from what Christian belief meant. Christians are not Christian. Prominent in the human psychology of the pre-Christian age was fear. Not only of death but fear ridden superstition as held by Cicero when crossing the threshold of his home always on the same foot. This is the Terror Antiquus that has returned today. The modern man obeys unthinkingly their tribe. Safety from fear lies there.
In 1907, Léon Bakst visited Greece in the company of Valentin Serov. During his time there, he sketched the country’s historical monuments and Mediterranean nature and read the works of Ancient Greek philosophers and writers.
All of this helped to form a specific image of Greece and Hellenic culture in Bakst’s imagination – one both concrete and simultaneously abstract. This duality can be seen in Terror Antiquus, in which the artist uses symbols to express the apocalyptic nature of the modern age.
The painting depicts the destruction of an ancient city (possibly Atlantis) and its inhabitants, who are powerless in the face of the elements. The image of the Archaic kore reigning over the chaos personifies the inexorable force of human fate and is also simultaneously concrete and abstract.
Bakst faithfully reproduces several ancient edifices, including the Lion Gate in Mycenae, the ruins of the palace at Tiryns and the Acropolis of Athens. The natural landscape in the picture is a generalised image and also reflects the artist’s study of Greek geography.
I long have admired Bakst and only today learned of his painting and study of the Greeks. I developed my life from the world after the Great War and the Spanish Flu dry run. My mother born in rural Kentucky in 1918 so I am born in 1957 when she was 39. By 1957 safe to say the mode of music heard by masses if wished for or not had changed. Older sound budded into new ears. New thoughts-well that another topic-new thoughts then budded too. Punk is DADA for mass man as an example of New Thought. https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/dec/29/dame-vivienne-westwood-fashion-designer-dies-aged-81
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The age thing is interesting because both true and false are together. The fact we have a chronological age and a spiritual world is not a good reason to believe we are old.
I have been studying lots of archeology and history channels this last few years. The battles, the battles, the battles, the migrations over milennia, truly endless. Most not well known. The horrid lives in the industrialized slums of England the last century, and horrid lives ubiquitous now. It paints quite a bleak picture of for we the ignoble savage. At times we have improved some aspects, at the cost of other aspects. At this point I seek to withdraw to a life with a slower rate of change, and fully cannot imagine who, where and if I will 'be' this time next year. I think of my grandmother leaving Romania in 1914 on a boat, for Canada. She went on to have 9 children, 35 grandchildren and as many great grandchildren.
I, a childless woman of 60, see the chasm between us ever widening; she and I did not talk when I was young (she was not a talker and English was a second language), though I find it easier to 'communicate' now that she is long dead and I am now old. I think she had so much to say, she couldn't say a thing.