WAR
Just because it hasn’t burst into action in your breast doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen in other people’s breast. The eau sucrée of the pacifism doesn’t quench the human longing for change. Unarmed, a man assumes a bone white boring look: aged baby, he day-dreams that above the cradle of civilization spurts a never-dying milk of a cow which nobody will butcher ever.
Peace poison gets everywhere and no-one of its singers ever tells you until soil and seeds are dead. How do you know where you are if there’s no enemy who stops you going further on? You sit at the back of this scar on earth called boundary and wait for a shout to go in front of you. The possibilities seem endless to the kid with a wood blunted sword in his hand, but before long the feasibility of today feels like the photocopy of yesterday, and a man prefers an averse face to come to him. The fewer loose abstractedness there are, the more they can be useful to the human type, and a battle’s the pulse and flow of the type.
Let’s ponder Synopsis of a Battle , the MCMLXVIII masterpiece of Cy Twombly. Let’s enjoy the absolute lack of grief rhetoric. What more could we want from an artist? This painting is done by amounts, by parts which are getting narrower in the distance, by signs which don’t intend to affect us or horrify us. Who dies is only one of several deads that never will walk on the road again. When the field can no longer accomodate these ever-multiplying corpses, the battle comes to an end.
If an universal castration could let us have the eternal standstill of the conflict, metamorphoses wouldn’t find an opening to come about, and nations would be Waxworks Museums from where would be banished the exploit that discloses the cleverness, the temper that sets a race free, the force whereby the underlings can come to delight of prevailing. And Twombly loves Ovidius too much to wish metamorphoses to palsy themselves.
Ideas work their ways some period, then take their own nefarious course, and there’s need to decimate those who brandished them. They were meant a full gallop of the mind towards better days but they had the worms in their hooves. However that may be, a bellicose pope as Giulio II knew about art much more than a mawkish pope as would be Paolo VI. If Della Rovere bore out a genius as Bramante’s and we owe to him the grand arrogance of Michelangelo’s Mosè , on Paolo VI we have to lay a collection of present-day junk that one might look forward to the shelling of Vatican City.
Only in the modern lunacy could you embalm the concept of man describing him after harmony and return he would have with everybody. Septuagenarian, Twombly will celebrate in twelve passages the Battle of Lepanto, once again fascinated by the contrary vigours, not by brotherhood; by fouling, not by the amicable landing.
Pope Pio V entrusted his warships to Marcantonio Colonna. Blood crop, even if watered down, is impossible to resist. Twombly mette il gambo alle navi [ Twombly stands a stalk to the ships – pyrography on plank, 70 centimetres in width, 118,2 in height, 0,8 in thickness ] falls upon the elderly artist suddenly: Karl Evver portrays him while is adding a sort of
handle to any keel. These handles remain undetected by the pride of combatants, sailors, historians: they believe men can guide things and events to wanted aims, but after trying for better than the whole lived life they die where a mysterious handle has led them.
Bad masters give you an ethical riddle to try and solve before you die, the master to whom we are thankful states wanton that there’s no solution even if sometimes it feels like it is.
Is therefore Twombly a great master? It would be unsuitable to say that: in our Demotic Age greatness is a term wich belongs to the market and the marketing pomp, not the purport. In his MCMIXC farewell speech, Ronald Reagan cleverly shunned the pedestal of the personal importance: I wasn’t a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn’t spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation .
Men don’t know where their nation got those from.