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As the years stand still…they babble. Incessantly. Text messages and emails and voices into little mobiles stuck in their ears and blogs and twitters and facebooks and youtubes and newscasts and talk shows and press conferences and chit-chatter as they walk in the streets and shop in stores and eat&drink, as they chatteringly demystify intimacy by making sex not love. They babble, hardly hear, barely listen, remember little. Only the born-deaf among us stay ahead of the struggle to be free in their own privacy. Only they can truly ‘read’. Only Helen Keller understood life in the present, what Siddhartha meant by: “those who live in the past have no future and those who live in the future do not live.”
The arc of the Seasons of Art: from the first hand-print on a cave wall to the astonishment of ancient Greece and Rome and Asia to the unbounded possibilities of the Renaissance to the Age of Elegance to the Age of Reason to the Age of Invention to the Age of whatever the 20th century was to the Age of Babble, the Winter season of undefined art.
At least 90% of the humans on this planet (maybe more) have never seen or touched a painting, a stretched canvas with images on it in oil or acryllic or charcoal. They see only photos - digitized, pixelated images of... painted images. The photos of paintings are not paintings!
Less for music though recordings dissolved the experience a long time ago. Less for printed books, the loss of tthe intimate experience of conversations with writers. Film, and what is now called video, the great art form of the 20th century is becoming the great babbling experience, the primary carrier of the Winter of Art as undefined, as monochromed and undefined as a winter landscape.
Every time I revisit the film, Children of Men, I am heart-struck by Alfonso Cuarón’s menacing vision of life in a flooded, suffocating land—a landscape wet, covered with residual mud, a blue-grey landscape inhabited by mud-people, who no longer can hear their own thoughts, who are suffocating in a dissolving world and like dying fish are frantically trying to pierce the surface for a gasp of air, for the sound of their own names. It is a coldly frightening, almost intolerable view of a tolerated reality. It is Kubrick’s “2002” and Mallick’s “New World” and Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven” and Edvard Munch's "The Scream."
In his film, Cuarón acquires the status of a visionary filmmaker and all the artistry that goes with it. As in the apocalyptic visions of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, Cuarón sets his image in England, that persevering bastion of civilization, healthy or sick, which at a time of Earth-shattering catastrophe offers the only home for reasonable human survival. Cuarón’s England, whose language has become a polyglot of world tongues, is now reduced to an unrelenting, 24-hour-a-day babble: police-state government babble, enterprising commercial babble, insane political babble, babbling people who cannot close their mouths or still their voices for fear that the lights will go out in their eyes. It is an image of a freezing world that has lost the rule of law and the balance of human rights, whose only hope is in the belly of a young woman, who doesn’t know how that hope got there.
A dream?... or a familiar view of the horizon of our ungovernable planet as it disintegrates after 600 years of disappearing resources, the result of an uncontrolled, overwhelming explosion of population, lack of understanding, refusal to understand, a mushroom of babble that culminates in one arrogant phrase: “Good night and good luck!”?
Unbearable? Depressing? No, I don’t think so. Think of Helen Keller and Siddhartha. Think of nonvocal music and nonverbal dance. Think of the silence of mother-evolution. Think of the silence in the loving eyes in which you can see yourself and all the colors of the sea.
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