Several clouds, some shadows, and the river, half asleep, like a blue python. The world looks serene and safe up here, but few birds manage to survive the winds. “Our parents and their parents all disappeared,” they sing. “Remember their adagios that inspired Vivaldi and Mozart? All under sand. The spires of cathedral towers where we used to roost and sing? Buried. Khafre’s pyramid is under there somewhere, and Beijing, and the green forests of the Iroquois, and vineyards in what used to be the foothills of the Pyrenees. Palaces that once had views of the sea have sunk beneath it. Like the winds above the clouds, the Past has teeth. So does what is yet to come.”
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Azorín (nom de plume of José Martínez Ruíz), one of the members of the Generation of 1898, wrote a lovely story/essay called “Las Nubes” (Clouds) in 1912, where he reconstructs the tragic story of Calisto and Melibea from La Celestina and makes it not at all tragic via eternal return. The past repeats itself, in this case by way of the daughter of Calisto and Melibea falling in love with a young lad in pursuit of a falcon much as they themselves had done in an earlier (and now reconceived) life. The consistency, reliability, and continuity of things is reaffirmed in the clouds that always change and always remain the same.
Azorín:
“…vivir es ver volver. Es ver volver todo un retorno perdurable, eterno; ver volver todo —angustias, alegrías, esperanzas—, como esas nubes que son siempre distintas y siempre las mismas, como esas nubes fugaces e inmutables.”
It’s not so much that Azorín was wrong, or that times have become much more apocalyptic, or that really, all has fallen into oblivion. Rather, your painting, and especially the narrative that accompanies it, assure us that we do in fact see the clouds repeating, always different, always the same. But the time frame has changed. It’s no longer a matter of generations but of eons. The return is not of the generational past, but of something more cosmic: the demise of everything we know, from our prehistory to the present and then, perhaps, but only perhaps, another rebirth. “In time the Rockies may crumble; Gibraltar may tumble….”
The clouds will continue to be the same and different. It’s just that the human world they float over will have disappeared. The painting and story are very disturbing, mostly because they are very real, very much of our moment and at the same time visionary of the future.