A lonely vision of the world to come

[jack_babalon]

Giorgio de Chirico
Melancholy and mystery of a street,1914

Here we see a child running down a deserted street toward the shadow of a statue in a square, in a small village somewhere in Mediterranean Europe. A nostalgic lonliness, the lonliness a child feels realizing that (s)he won't be a child for long. Remember those sad & perfect days in the Autumn light coming home from school, long orange shillouettes cast amongst the fallen leaves. The long stretch of the rest of your life becoming visible over the horizon of your choices. We wait at the end of our own lives casting a shadow backwards through time which we follow like an Aridane's thread back to the source.
Now look again.
This painting is an omen. A shaman vision cast in 1914 warning us of the Freudian slip we were about to take into the Great War, an oil and canvas premonition of a 'war to end all wars'. Watch as the preadolescent century rushes playfully towards the penumbra of the Patriarch. The shadow as gateway; the first step into the initation of the Father of all Fathers. The last call of the vampire throne, dying Osiris needs a good shot of death to keep the show going, and by death he needs death by war- death without purpose, death without nobility, death by the machines from the heavens and the mud. A new Aeon is awakening in an Oedipal blood bath, the son of suns, the devine Avenger-the Horus hawk sweeps majesticly above the trenches and battlefields of Europe. A new age is coming- electric voices sing in the wires flowing across the planet, engines are harnessed to turn air into fire and fire into speed, new weapons that humble the very thunder itself, a new age of "Gods and monsters" is awakening. This painting is the end of a very long and strange dream the melancholy of the brevity of our exsistence, the mystery of what lies next.

Comments

[scottopic.livejournal.com]

I wonder what the painting for our time would be?

[(Anonymous)]

Beautiful assessment of one of my favourite paintings. Many of the surrealist painters had jobs during the great war painting camoflage! Aerial views of the trenches, crazy zig-zag patterns, dripped over the blighted landscape inspired later generations of abstract expressionists. Colonel Klunk.

[kippiepoo.livejournal.com]

It reminds me of that scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang where the child catcher has his wagon out on the deserted street, hunting children.