History is a fragile subject. And sometimes I am overcome by doubts: is it possible, in principle, to transfer this vessel from hand to hand without losing even a single drop of life-giving moisture of knowledge about the past? It disintegrates before our eyes, as soon as we try to unhurriedly and slowly begin to untie the knots of contradictions, dissimilarities and entanglements. And not because our hands are rough and inept, but because each of us brings a drop of ourselves into it and thereby creates a new history.
And this is not at all about the fact that history is written by the winners. And that it belongs to the field of thoughts, understanding, reflection - and, ultimately, to the field of oral mental creativity. For when the numbers and dates are erased, a legend remains, which grows into tradition; legend, which develops into a myth, and a myth, which becomes a symbol and meaning. Where there are no longer heroes and events, but only a sign or meaning in its purest form.
And anyone who comes to this sign, what will he see in it? And will he see? And here we are standing helpless in front of the inscriptions on the stones of Egypt chipped by time, looking at these squiggles and sticks and wondering what they could mean. And we will be perplexed, because in our head there are only those meanings that we have absorbed since birth. And others have nowhere to come from. And they, ah, how very different from what other times, countries and continents show us. We see the sign and we do not see the history behind it.
The reader will undoubtedly begin to oppose, because old Champollion could combine one piece of text in a known language with the same piece of text in an unknown language and open the veil of this mystery for us! But combinatorics, which came in handy here and which is akin to cryptography, does not give us an understanding of the essence and depth of what we are researching. And what is depth in this case? And this is the point. The very sought-after meaning that helps us to understand what all this is for, what it is about, and where we can sew it, pin it, that is, embed it into our picture of the world, in our current world.
The latter is extremely important - to build it into your own, and not impose ours on the life and life of those people. For the latter is now more and more common. For some reason, it is believed that it is "intuitively clear" that it should have been this way and not otherwise. And we take and impose our intuitions on everyone, believing that we know and understand everything. To touch the real story, we are so often lazy - it’s necessary to go somewhere, read something, feel it with our own hands, research, collect facts and evidence base … Fi. Intuitive, period! And the fact that all this had an author who CONSCIOUSLY put this very meaning into it - it is already, as it were, beyond reasoning, simply thrown out as unnecessary, because it does not fit into our interesting concepts of juggling with words that we are ready to produce every minute in in order to amuse your pride. It feels likethat the goal is not to research, but simply to invent. And it does not matter what it will be in relation to objective data - to the available factology, to what those who collect this legacy of the past are communicating to us bit by bit.
The most egregious examples of such treatment of factual history are caused by free interpretations of visual material - paintings, frescoes, illustrations. We, firstly, forget that the artist could use symbols and allegories (and this is very typical for most works of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance), and secondly, we don’t even bother to study the material that remained besides paintings. Most often, the famous Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who is not credited with anything, suffers in this vein. The unimaginable amount of ancient ruins, which he so accurately documented, for some reason are, according to such researchers, UNDISPUTABLE evidence of a large-scale catastrophe that occurred in the middle of the 19th century. However, there is nowhere sufficient logical support for such a demarche.
Piranesi has two types of paintings, and he himself told in sufficient detail what, how and why he painted. As an architect, he had a passion for blueprints and accurate drawings of large structures. And it was so strong that some of the works are deliberately fictional. This is exactly what a series of fantastically detailed drawings called "Fantastic Images of Dungeons" became. The fact that his paintings are just his imagination, set free, is also evidenced by his "The first part of architectural sketches and perspectives invented and engraved by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, a Venetian architect."
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The rest of the drawings and drawings Piranesi devoted to Rome, spending a lot of time on the ruins of its ancient buildings.
And what is so surprising in his paintings? Combining modern interior, housing, clothing and ancient ruins on one canvas? So they still stand there - these ruins - contrasting even more with the surrounding everyday life: the Colosseum still sticks out, proudly lifting its walls to the sky, the arch of Titus is just as monumentally incomparable - the world has not turned upside down since then, how pieces of different cultures live side by side in this small historical space. And so it was before Piranesi - many, many years before. Where is the logical jumper that should prove to me that the Arch of Titus was damaged not by the wars of the 17-18 centuries, but by a worldwide flood, an asteroid, an invasion of aliens? But not only Rome - the whole world has such a unique neighborhood of layers of different times. And if we look for evidence of such theories - in fact, why not,We thought of the atomic bomb, so maybe it’s not the first time? - that is clearly not in the drawings. Where is the evidence base? Give me an evidence base! I crave her, urgently and uncompromisingly. And leave Piranesi alone, for God's sake. Let's organize trips to these antiquities, scrub them and look under a microscope. Let's do spectral analyzes, after all, we have the Hadron Collider, and we cannot determine the age from a piece of stone? Or his story? Just don't kick the radio-carbon method - it's not the only one. And it will be more scientific research to develop a new method instead of pointing fingers at pictures. But this will already be science. Science in the full sense of the word, not a fantasy in our head with you. Where is the evidence base? Give me an evidence base! I crave her, urgently and uncompromisingly. And leave Piranesi alone, for God's sake. Let's organize trips to these antiquities, scrub them and look under a microscope. Let's do spectral analyzes, we, after all, have the Hadron Collider, and we cannot determine the age from a piece of stone? Or his story? Just don't kick the radio-carbon method - it's not the only one. And it will be more scientific research to develop a new method instead of pointing fingers at pictures. But this will already be science. Science in the full sense of the word, not a fantasy in our head with you. Where is the evidence base? Give me an evidence base! I crave her, urgently and uncompromisingly. And leave Piranesi alone, for God's sake. Let's organize trips to these antiquities, scrub them and look under a microscope. Let's do spectral analyzes, after all, we have the Hadron Collider, and we cannot determine the age from a piece of stone? Or his story? Just don't kick the radio-carbon method - it's not the only one. And it will be more scientific research to develop a new method instead of pointing fingers at pictures. But this will already be science. Science in the full sense of the word, not a fantasy in our head with you. Let's do spectral analyzes, after all, we have the Hadron Collider, and we cannot determine the age from a piece of stone? Or his story? Just don't kick the radio-carbon method - it's not the only one. And it will be more scientific research to develop a new method instead of pointing fingers at pictures. But this will already be science. Science in the full sense of the word, not a fantasy in our head with you. Let's do spectral analyzes, after all, we have the Hadron Collider, and we cannot determine the age from a piece of stone? Or his story? Just don't kick the radio-carbon method - it's not the only one. And it will be more scientific research to develop a new method instead of pointing fingers at pictures. But this will already be science. Science in the full sense of the word, not a fantasy in our head with you.
However, fantasy is quite difficult to tame, so even if we say frankly that Piranesi's drawings are his fantasy, we will get the answer that this is not true, but in fact (I recommend writing this catchphrase, it works wonders with the brain of others This is also a signature technique for the school essay “What the author really meant in his work.” Poor authors. They never dreamed that they meant THAT) Piranesi drew from life, but this is carefully classified, because that it is dangerous to know the truth. The culprits can immediately be appointed and indicated with a finger - from Masons to any nationalities that are very grinning on their teeth.
The second, quite often now encountered option - is to delve into ancient frescoes and icons. I do not argue, sometimes very funny characters and images come across there. But for some reason we always forget that most of the icons are written in the footsteps of the memory of people who actually lived, who by their actions pushed people to a special attitude, and therefore nothing worldly can be alien there: religion and faith in their earthly manifestations are about people, this is part of the story.
What, for example, will our ancestors think when they see the next icon, which depicts a military man in camouflage? There will be disputes, discussions and hypotheses about an incomprehensible creature lost from another world, because no icon depicts such a thing. However, this is an image of the famous saint in Russia - John the Russian, who, during the bombing of Kosovo by NATO troops, appeared in this form to a fervently praying Serbian monk. So they captured him afterwards. But we will definitely invent something like that. If we do not invent it, we will bequeath it to our descendants to invent it.
Especially a lot of controversy arises around the letters on the icons.
Violent discussions are underway as to what kind of letters, some sort of secret code, with a title - these are numbers, without a title - these are, like, letters, but not quite letters. And for some reason it never occurs to anyone that the letters are Greek, have their own meaning and translation, which was originally and consciously laid by those who created these icons. And there is no need to play in the old days of Champollion and write whole treatises with a clever air about what a first-year seminarist knows without a hitch.
It seems that researchers of this kind grab the first thing that came to hand and run frantically to make incredible guesses, talk about world conspiracies, open hidden from everyone "treasures of thought and secrets of the century", without even bothering to dig at least two millimeters of historical material into any of parties.
Ludwig Wittgenstein has an excellent "Logical-Philosophical Treatise", in which he analyzes the foundations of language, semantics, meanings and gives a serious philosophical basis for this. In conclusion, he describes the system of ideas he created as a ladder, and proposes to reject it, but only after we climb up and use it. It is extremely important to understand: in order to reject something, to cross it out, to say that it did not happen, it is necessary to thoroughly investigate what is, it is necessary to count this ladder and sort out step by step with your hands. And then we will have the right - the moral right to assert that the world can and should be different, and that someone somewhere lied to us.
And what is the real proof of a global catastrophe? That's about it next time. And more about ancient philosophy, about the folding and unfolding of meanings through a sign and a symbol, about why the whole world came from water, and most importantly - about the Logos, sense, logic, and God the Word.
Author: ladygodiva77