KUDÁSZ GÁBOR ARION photography

Yes, the end of the world is coming. Atom, virus, collapse of the society, slow extinction, or something. The point is, that the end is coming. Let’s get going, let’s have a glass, or let’s keep introspection, let’s pray, meditate, because we never know, when the prophecy comes true, and we disappear from the scene. Eschatological visions, sci-fi, fantasy, Mad Max, Matrix… Although the whole thing is natural. We can say, that devastation is part of the western culture. Who builds a civilization risks that one day, when he consumed all the inheritance from his empire building ancestors, barbarians arrive in his open and spacious cities. Naturally later only the memory of the great battles remains from these ages. There is no story afloat about the Phoenician lily, which the Romans wiped out in hundred years, to make contraceptive decoction out of it. The great empires don’t only disappear in great battles, but also as a result of slow processes. On their place new empires rise from their ruins and inheritance, referring to ancient, vanished cultures. Empty churches cut in rock, abandoned desert cities, lonely castles show, that the civilization considered to be indestructible and perfect is vulnerable and transient. Maybe one day the city will become empty. Nobody will remain there. Slowly, but surely the inhabitants disappear, and decades later the barbarians arriving in the empty buildings will look around among meaningless walls. Nobody will know, that a figure walking around the ruins is a ‘Roman’, meditating on the ruins of his former palace, or a ‘Barbarian’ who came for the bricks. He will be a tiny point next to the skeleton of the giant building. The new onlookers will wonder, why these giants buildings were built, why are lamps standing in the middle of the road, why they needed towers in fields, which you can’t climb upon, why was everything covered with concrete. This transition is very exciting. The moment, when the living things disappear and only the corpus, the body is left behind. The artist holds in his hands the Piete of a city.
In the history of art dreaming and sleeping are the symbols of death. ‘Falling asleep’, ‘death and resurrection’ were present in Egypt, the first culture turned to stone. Osiris descended to the nether world, to reign when he rose from the dead. Sleeping in his mothers lap, Jesus has a kalanchoe in his neck, which symbolizes the Passion. The figure of Mary dandling the sleeping child anticipates the Pieta. Et resurrexit tertia die. [And on the third day he rose from the dead.] Pilinszky also cites the greatest thesis of Christianity in his poem, ‘On the third day’.
The city has a corpus too. Every night it falls asleep, dreams, to rise again in the morning. If we look at the sleeping city, we can see, we can suspect the death of civilization. In the beginning falling asleep is not different from dying. The body looks asleep. It’s not moving. And in that moment, when life returned earlier, but now nothing returns, only the emptiness stays. The mechanisms of the body work on for a while, the nails and the hair of the deceased still grow in the coffin. Similar reflexes work in the dead city. The traffic lights change for a not-existent queue of cars. The streetlamps light up for the disappeared pedestrians.
The channels of life are empty.
If we look at today’s world, it seems as if it’s never asleep. so many visual stimulus hits us in a week, that would hit the generation of our grandparents during their entire life. Movement is constant, everything is changing and vibrating all the time. We don’t have time to select among this amount of information. Because it never rests. Never reflects to it’s own life, it never sleeps.
There was a line in my childhood’s evening prayer: ‘If this night was to be my last, let Your angels take me to Heaven’. I haven’t said this prayer for a long time, and it’s been a while, since ash was scattered on my forehead. ‘Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’