'A short walk around Malaga' - 'el sueno de la razon produce monstruos.'

Digimonkey

Supporter
Supporter
Messages
3,843
'A short walk around Malaga' - 'el sueno de la razon produce monstruos' - part the first -

A picture story - if you are interested - the title - as you will know - is borrowed from Goya - number 43 of 80 in his 'Los Caprichos' etchings series. If you are not familiar with it - go have a look - it is an astonishing thing - it is generally accepted that the artist asleep is Goya himself - 1799 or thereabouts - also - it kind of underpins all the pictures I will post in this thread - this project was shot over two afternoons in Malaga last week - Soho and La Merced barrios - Nikon digital -18-35 mm lens - for those that are interested in such things.

'El sueno de la razon produce monstruos,' - normally translates into English as - 'the sleep of reason produces monsters' - let's start with a couple of images - unadorned with words -

TSR-Mal-19-02.jpg

TSR - Mal - 19 - 03.jpg

Thank you for looking. More to follow. Yours - I.

@Barry Giddens @patw @Wayne Pritchard @Blademonkey @Satanfriendly @TomG
 
There is nothing better than one of your picture stories to spark up the grey matter. Great pics and really looking forward to the continuation.
Thanks for the tag and thanks for sharing Iain. :)
 
'A Short Walk...' part the second...

TSR-Razon-01.jpg


We - homo sapiens that is - first appear in the fossil record as a distinct species around 300,000 bce - there were other hominids around but we are the only to have survived. Jump forward 150,000 years - the arrival of anatomically modern humans - same skeleton, same brain capacity - but the rate of change was painfully slow - going on the stone tool record - innovation is limited - all human populations basically use the same technologies. Nothing much changes until about 50,000 bce - something happens - some final change - either genetic or neurological - occurs - welcome to the ‘Upper Paleolithic Revolution,' and behaviourally modern humans. Theories abound as to what changed - a good candidate - in my opinion - would be mutation in the FoxP2 gene - this allows and controls the ability to use and understand complex speech. If it is damaged - severe speech and learning difficulties occur. Humans are nothing if not a chattering animal - the sophistication of our communication - is way more complex than any other animal. In the Babylonian creation myth - Enlil decides to wipe out humanity - which the gods had created to do the hard work - with a great flood - as he can't stand the constant noise they make. Not much has changed - anyway - whatever the final adaption in the way our brain was wired - a whole range of new technologies appear - stone tools are produced for specific purposes - borers, scrapers, spear tips - not just the previously ubiquitous hand axe - compound tools - spear throwers - buttons, needles, fishing nets - a whole host of innovations. In parallel to this there is huge enhancement in the ability to think abstractly - planning and cooperative behaviour became complex - along the way we start seeing organised burial with grave goods, the emergence of music, art and religion. All these things are reliant on understanding something that is not there physically - not tangible - but obviously important - they fulfilled a need - otherwise they wouldn't have caught on. So - welcome modern humans - the next big change - probably the most influential in human history - in the Neolithic - about 12,000 bce - the adoption of farming and the domestication of livestock. In retrospect - this seems kind of obvious as a next step but it wasn't - it actually initially led to a lessening of the average life span - many of the diseases that will kill humans jumped the species boundary at this point due to us living in close proximity to animals, bad weather could wipe out an entire community if the crops failed - it seems reasonable to suggest that life became more violent - you now have something worth stealing - and therefore - defending. Not withstanding this - humans never looked back - but it is worth remembering the foraging - or hunter gathering - if you prefer - model was by far the most successful method of survival in the pre-history of homo sapiens - accounting for well over 90% of our time on the planet. It worked but didn't allow the population densities you started to see at the close of the Neolithic - it has been calculated that every individual forager required ten square kilometers each to feed themselves. So - skip forward to Mesopotamia around 5,400 bce - Eridu - now a pile of stones in the desert but generally accepted to be the first city in the modern sense. Build around a temple complex and guarded by massive walls - surrounded by satellite farming communities that exist to feed the city - the egalitarian days of the forager are long gone - society is heavily stratified - you have whole castes that produce nothing - royalty, priests, merchants and standing armies - who depended on others to feed them. Warfare becomes the norm not the exception. There - I would suggest - is a straight cultural line between the Mesopotamian city states and our own urban living - granted similar developments occurred in Egypt and the Indus Valley civilisations at the same time - but we are most influenced by the Sumerians, Akkadians and Babylonians. Doubt this? - look at your watch - Mesopotamian mathematics worked on a base of 6 - not ten - thus why we still have 60 seconds in a minute - 60 minutes in an hour and 360 degrees in a circle. Most dramatically they invented writing - which was originally used as a notation system to control the massive building projects they were so fond of - allocation of rations to workers, control of the supply and use of materials - it took some time for it to become a means of free expression - sad but true - accountants are the originators of literature. With the establishment and diffusion of writing systems - so ends pre-history.

So what's this got to do with Goya? That's a very good question - which I will now attempt to answer. The series of engravings that ‘El Sueno' comes from are satires - the artist having a crack at things that pissed him off in his society - which is quite a lot - and the usual way to interpret the picture is that Goya was complaining that - in an age of reason and progress - superstition still played a prominent role in society. We could maybe see it in a different way - perhaps the monsters are because of reason? Living in our current societies - Europe anyway - our slavish non-questioning of rampant empiricism - we need to sleep - to ignore - to survive the fact we are ill prepared by our history as a species for modern life. Cities are horribly isolating and divisive places - they invite disassociation. With sleep come dreams - sometimes nightmares. Whole swathes of techniques that early humans developed to understand and interpret their world are cast aside as ‘fake news.' To even raise the subject invites ridicule. Modern living is the aberration - not pre-history - each one of us carries the whole story of our species evolution in our genes. Strategies that - if they hadn't of worked - I wouldn't be sitting here now typing this. We still have myth and superstition - for a reason.

Thank you for reading - if you got this far - well done you. Yours - I.

TSR-Raz-02.jpg

@Barry Giddens @patw @Wayne Pritchard @Blademonkey @Satanfriendly @TomG
 
Last edited:
'A Short Walk...' part the second...

View attachment 43517


We - homo sapiens that is - first appear in the fossil record as a distinct species around 300,000 bce - there were other hominids around but we are the only to have survived. Jump forward 150,000 years - the arrival of anatomically modern humans - same skeleton, same brain capacity - but the rate of change was painfully slow - going on the stone tool record - innovation is limited - all human populations basically use the same technologies. Nothing much changes until about 50,000 bce - something happens - some final change - either genetic or neurological - occurs - welcome to the ‘Upper Paleolithic Revolution,' and behaviourally modern humans. Theories abound as to what changed - a good candidate - in my opinion - would a mutation in the FoxP2 gene - this allows and controls the ability to use and understand complex speech. If it is damaged - severe speech and learning difficulties occur. Humans are nothing if not a chattering animal - the sophistication of our communication - is way more complex than any other animal. In the Babylonian creation myth - Enlil decides to wipe out humanity - which the gods had created to do the hard work - with a great flood - as he can't stand the constant noise they make. Not much has changed - anyway - whatever the final adaption in the way our brain was wired - a whole range of new technologies appear - stone tools are produced for specific purposes - borers, scrapers, spear tips - not just the previously ubiquitous hand axe - compound tools - spear throwers - buttons, needles, fishing nets - a whole host of innovations. In parallel to this there is huge enhancement in the ability to think abstractly - planning and cooperative behaviour became complex - along the way we start seeing organised burial with grave goods, the emergence of music, art and religion. All these things are reliant on understanding something that is not there physically - not tangible - but obviously important - they fulfilled a need - otherwise they wouldn't have caught on. So - welcome modern humans - the next big change - probably the most influential in human history - in the Neolithic - about 12,000 bce - the adoption of farming and the domestication of livestock. In retrospect - this seems kind of obvious as a next step but it wasn't - it actually initially led to a lessening of the average life span - many of the diseases that will kill humans jumped the species boundary at this point due to us living in close proximity to animals, bad weather could wipe out an entire community if the crops failed - it seems reasonable to suggest that life became more violent - you now have something worth stealing - and therefore - defending. Not withstanding this - humans never looked back - but it is worth remembering the foraging - or hunter gathering - if you prefer - model was by far the most successful method of survival in the pre-history of homo sapiens - accounting for well over 90% of our time on the planet. It worked but didn't allow the population densities you started to see at the close of the Neolithic - it has been calculated that every individual forager required ten square kilometers each to feed themselves. So - skip forward to Mesopotamia around 5,400 bce - Eridu - now a pile of stones in the desert but generally accepted to be the first city in the modern sense. Build around a temple complex and guarded by massive walls - surrounded by satellite farming communities that exist to feed the city - the egalitarian days of the forager are long gone - society is heavily stratified - you have whole castes that produce nothing - royalty, priests, merchants and standing armies - who depended on others to feed them. Warfare becomes the norm not the exception. There - I would suggest - is a straight cultural line between the Mesopotamian city states and our own urban living - granted similar developments occurred in Egypt and the Indus Valley civilisations at the same time - but we are most influenced by the Sumerians, Akkadians and Babylonians. Doubt this? - look at your watch - Mesopotamian mathematics worked on a base of 6 - not ten - thus why we still have 60 seconds in a minute - 60 minutes in an hour and 360 degrees in a circle. Most dramatically they invented writing - which was originally used as a notation system to control the massive building projects they were so fond of - allocation of rations to workers, control of the supply and use of materials - it took some time for it to become a means of free expression - sad but true - accountants are the originators of literature. With the establishment and diffusion of writing systems - so ends pre-history.

So what's this got to do with Goya? That's a very good question - which I will now attempt to answer. The series of engravings that ‘El Sueno' comes from are satires - the artist having a crack at things that pissed him off in his society - which is quite a lot - and the usual way to interpret the picture is that Goya was complaining that - in an age of reason and progress - superstition still played a prominent role in society. We could maybe see it in a different way - perhaps the monsters are because of reason? Living in our current societies - Europe anyway - our slavish non-questioning of rampant empiricism - we need to sleep - to ignore - to survive the fact we are ill prepared by our history as a species for modern life. Cities are horribly isolating and divisive places - they invite disassociation. With sleep come dreams - sometimes nightmares. Whole swathes of techniques that early humans developed to understand and interpret their world are cast aside as ‘fake news.' To even raise the subject invites ridicule. Modern living is the aberration - not pre-history - each one of us carries the whole story of our species evolution in our genes. Strategies that - if they hadn't of worked - I wouldn't be sitting here now typing this. We still have myth and superstition - for a reason.

Thank you for reading - if you got this far - well done you. Yours - I.

View attachment 43518

@Barry Giddens @patw @Wayne Pritchard @Blademonkey @Satanfriendly @TomG

Of course I 'got that far'

Well founded, well researched and a well written ramble. Always a joy and I wish I could extract the same insight in to life from a city.

Great stuff Mr Digital Monkey
 
'A Short Walk...' part the second...

View attachment 43517


We - homo sapiens that is - first appear in the fossil record as a distinct species around 300,000 bce - there were other hominids around but we are the only to have survived. Jump forward 150,000 years - the arrival of anatomically modern humans - same skeleton, same brain capacity - but the rate of change was painfully slow - going on the stone tool record - innovation is limited - all human populations basically use the same technologies. Nothing much changes until about 50,000 bce - something happens - some final change - either genetic or neurological - occurs - welcome to the ‘Upper Paleolithic Revolution,' and behaviourally modern humans. Theories abound as to what changed - a good candidate - in my opinion - would a mutation in the FoxP2 gene - this allows and controls the ability to use and understand complex speech. If it is damaged - severe speech and learning difficulties occur. Humans are nothing if not a chattering animal - the sophistication of our communication - is way more complex than any other animal. In the Babylonian creation myth - Enlil decides to wipe out humanity - which the gods had created to do the hard work - with a great flood - as he can't stand the constant noise they make. Not much has changed - anyway - whatever the final adaption in the way our brain was wired - a whole range of new technologies appear - stone tools are produced for specific purposes - borers, scrapers, spear tips - not just the previously ubiquitous hand axe - compound tools - spear throwers - buttons, needles, fishing nets - a whole host of innovations. In parallel to this there is huge enhancement in the ability to think abstractly - planning and cooperative behaviour became complex - along the way we start seeing organised burial with grave goods, the emergence of music, art and religion. All these things are reliant on understanding something that is not there physically - not tangible - but obviously important - they fulfilled a need - otherwise they wouldn't have caught on. So - welcome modern humans - the next big change - probably the most influential in human history - in the Neolithic - about 12,000 bce - the adoption of farming and the domestication of livestock. In retrospect - this seems kind of obvious as a next step but it wasn't - it actually initially led to a lessening of the average life span - many of the diseases that will kill humans jumped the species boundary at this point due to us living in close proximity to animals, bad weather could wipe out an entire community if the crops failed - it seems reasonable to suggest that life became more violent - you now have something worth stealing - and therefore - defending. Not withstanding this - humans never looked back - but it is worth remembering the foraging - or hunter gathering - if you prefer - model was by far the most successful method of survival in the pre-history of homo sapiens - accounting for well over 90% of our time on the planet. It worked but didn't allow the population densities you started to see at the close of the Neolithic - it has been calculated that every individual forager required ten square kilometers each to feed themselves. So - skip forward to Mesopotamia around 5,400 bce - Eridu - now a pile of stones in the desert but generally accepted to be the first city in the modern sense. Build around a temple complex and guarded by massive walls - surrounded by satellite farming communities that exist to feed the city - the egalitarian days of the forager are long gone - society is heavily stratified - you have whole castes that produce nothing - royalty, priests, merchants and standing armies - who depended on others to feed them. Warfare becomes the norm not the exception. There - I would suggest - is a straight cultural line between the Mesopotamian city states and our own urban living - granted similar developments occurred in Egypt and the Indus Valley civilisations at the same time - but we are most influenced by the Sumerians, Akkadians and Babylonians. Doubt this? - look at your watch - Mesopotamian mathematics worked on a base of 6 - not ten - thus why we still have 60 seconds in a minute - 60 minutes in an hour and 360 degrees in a circle. Most dramatically they invented writing - which was originally used as a notation system to control the massive building projects they were so fond of - allocation of rations to workers, control of the supply and use of materials - it took some time for it to become a means of free expression - sad but true - accountants are the originators of literature. With the establishment and diffusion of writing systems - so ends pre-history.

So what's this got to do with Goya? That's a very good question - which I will now attempt to answer. The series of engravings that ‘El Sueno' comes from are satires - the artist having a crack at things that pissed him off in his society - which is quite a lot - and the usual way to interpret the picture is that Goya was complaining that - in an age of reason and progress - superstition still played a prominent role in society. We could maybe see it in a different way - perhaps the monsters are because of reason? Living in our current societies - Europe anyway - our slavish non-questioning of rampant empiricism - we need to sleep - to ignore - to survive the fact we are ill prepared by our history as a species for modern life. Cities are horribly isolating and divisive places - they invite disassociation. With sleep come dreams - sometimes nightmares. Whole swathes of techniques that early humans developed to understand and interpret their world are cast aside as ‘fake news.' To even raise the subject invites ridicule. Modern living is the aberration - not pre-history - each one of us carries the whole story of our species evolution in our genes. Strategies that - if they hadn't of worked - I wouldn't be sitting here now typing this. We still have myth and superstition - for a reason.

Thank you for reading - if you got this far - well done you. Yours - I.

View attachment 43518

@Barry Giddens @patw @Wayne Pritchard @Blademonkey @Satanfriendly @TomG
Erudite, articulate and entertaining. Nothing less than what we have come to expect from you Iain. Bravo.
 
'A Short Walk.....' - part the last. This thread hasn't caught on - never flog a dead horse - I leave you with this -

Santiago Rusinol - Catalan painter and poet - late 19th century - quoting - 'during these fiestas he uttered fluent, cloudy, mystical, enthusiastic orations, in one of which he exhorted his hearers - '' to translate the eternal verities into wild paradox; to draw life from the abnormal, the extraordinary, the outrageous; to tell the horror of the reasoning mind as it gazes upon the chasm.''

From - 'Picasso' - Patrick O'Brian


TSR-Mal-3-1.jpg

TSR-M-F-03.jpg

TSR-Mal-19-04.jpg

That's me - cheers - thank you for looking -

TSR-Mal-1.jpg

Your correspondent - at work - I.

@Barry Giddens @Wayne Pritchard @Satanfriendly @udrako
 
'A Short Walk.....' - part the last. This thread hasn't caught on - never flog a dead horse - I leave you with this -

Santiago Rusinol - Catalan painter and poet - late 19th century - quoting - 'during these fiestas he uttered fluent, cloudy, mystical, enthusiastic orations, in one of which he exhorted his hearers - '' to translate the eternal verities into wild paradox; to draw life from the abnormal, the extraordinary, the outrageous; to tell the horror of the reasoning mind as it gazes upon the chasm.''

From - 'Picasso' - Patrick O'Brian


View attachment 43662

View attachment 43663

View attachment 43664

That's me - cheers - thank you for looking -

View attachment 43665

Your correspondent - at work - I.

@Barry Giddens @Wayne Pritchard @Satanfriendly @udrako
Brilliant series Iain - thank you.
 
'A Short Walk...' part the second...

View attachment 43517


We - homo sapiens that is - first appear in the fossil record as a distinct species around 300,000 bce - there were other hominids around but we are the only to have survived. Jump forward 150,000 years - the arrival of anatomically modern humans - same skeleton, same brain capacity - but the rate of change was painfully slow - going on the stone tool record - innovation is limited - all human populations basically use the same technologies. Nothing much changes until about 50,000 bce - something happens - some final change - either genetic or neurological - occurs - welcome to the ‘Upper Paleolithic Revolution,' and behaviourally modern humans. Theories abound as to what changed - a good candidate - in my opinion - would be mutation in the FoxP2 gene - this allows and controls the ability to use and understand complex speech. If it is damaged - severe speech and learning difficulties occur. Humans are nothing if not a chattering animal - the sophistication of our communication - is way more complex than any other animal. In the Babylonian creation myth - Enlil decides to wipe out humanity - which the gods had created to do the hard work - with a great flood - as he can't stand the constant noise they make. Not much has changed - anyway - whatever the final adaption in the way our brain was wired - a whole range of new technologies appear - stone tools are produced for specific purposes - borers, scrapers, spear tips - not just the previously ubiquitous hand axe - compound tools - spear throwers - buttons, needles, fishing nets - a whole host of innovations. In parallel to this there is huge enhancement in the ability to think abstractly - planning and cooperative behaviour became complex - along the way we start seeing organised burial with grave goods, the emergence of music, art and religion. All these things are reliant on understanding something that is not there physically - not tangible - but obviously important - they fulfilled a need - otherwise they wouldn't have caught on. So - welcome modern humans - the next big change - probably the most influential in human history - in the Neolithic - about 12,000 bce - the adoption of farming and the domestication of livestock. In retrospect - this seems kind of obvious as a next step but it wasn't - it actually initially led to a lessening of the average life span - many of the diseases that will kill humans jumped the species boundary at this point due to us living in close proximity to animals, bad weather could wipe out an entire community if the crops failed - it seems reasonable to suggest that life became more violent - you now have something worth stealing - and therefore - defending. Not withstanding this - humans never looked back - but it is worth remembering the foraging - or hunter gathering - if you prefer - model was by far the most successful method of survival in the pre-history of homo sapiens - accounting for well over 90% of our time on the planet. It worked but didn't allow the population densities you started to see at the close of the Neolithic - it has been calculated that every individual forager required ten square kilometers each to feed themselves. So - skip forward to Mesopotamia around 5,400 bce - Eridu - now a pile of stones in the desert but generally accepted to be the first city in the modern sense. Build around a temple complex and guarded by massive walls - surrounded by satellite farming communities that exist to feed the city - the egalitarian days of the forager are long gone - society is heavily stratified - you have whole castes that produce nothing - royalty, priests, merchants and standing armies - who depended on others to feed them. Warfare becomes the norm not the exception. There - I would suggest - is a straight cultural line between the Mesopotamian city states and our own urban living - granted similar developments occurred in Egypt and the Indus Valley civilisations at the same time - but we are most influenced by the Sumerians, Akkadians and Babylonians. Doubt this? - look at your watch - Mesopotamian mathematics worked on a base of 6 - not ten - thus why we still have 60 seconds in a minute - 60 minutes in an hour and 360 degrees in a circle. Most dramatically they invented writing - which was originally used as a notation system to control the massive building projects they were so fond of - allocation of rations to workers, control of the supply and use of materials - it took some time for it to become a means of free expression - sad but true - accountants are the originators of literature. With the establishment and diffusion of writing systems - so ends pre-history.

So what's this got to do with Goya? That's a very good question - which I will now attempt to answer. The series of engravings that ‘El Sueno' comes from are satires - the artist having a crack at things that pissed him off in his society - which is quite a lot - and the usual way to interpret the picture is that Goya was complaining that - in an age of reason and progress - superstition still played a prominent role in society. We could maybe see it in a different way - perhaps the monsters are because of reason? Living in our current societies - Europe anyway - our slavish non-questioning of rampant empiricism - we need to sleep - to ignore - to survive the fact we are ill prepared by our history as a species for modern life. Cities are horribly isolating and divisive places - they invite disassociation. With sleep come dreams - sometimes nightmares. Whole swathes of techniques that early humans developed to understand and interpret their world are cast aside as ‘fake news.' To even raise the subject invites ridicule. Modern living is the aberration - not pre-history - each one of us carries the whole story of our species evolution in our genes. Strategies that - if they hadn't of worked - I wouldn't be sitting here now typing this. We still have myth and superstition - for a reason.

Thank you for reading - if you got this far - well done you. Yours - I.

View attachment 43518

@Barry Giddens @patw @Wayne Pritchard @Blademonkey @Satanfriendly @TomG
A cracking read I, I learned a few things too! :) well done and keep it comming please. P.
 
'A Short Walk...' part the second...

View attachment 43517


We - homo sapiens that is - first appear in the fossil record as a distinct species around 300,000 bce - there were other hominids around but we are the only to have survived. Jump forward 150,000 years - the arrival of anatomically modern humans - same skeleton, same brain capacity - but the rate of change was painfully slow - going on the stone tool record - innovation is limited - all human populations basically use the same technologies. Nothing much changes until about 50,000 bce - something happens - some final change - either genetic or neurological - occurs - welcome to the ‘Upper Paleolithic Revolution,' and behaviourally modern humans. Theories abound as to what changed - a good candidate - in my opinion - would be mutation in the FoxP2 gene - this allows and controls the ability to use and understand complex speech. If it is damaged - severe speech and learning difficulties occur. Humans are nothing if not a chattering animal - the sophistication of our communication - is way more complex than any other animal. In the Babylonian creation myth - Enlil decides to wipe out humanity - which the gods had created to do the hard work - with a great flood - as he can't stand the constant noise they make. Not much has changed - anyway - whatever the final adaption in the way our brain was wired - a whole range of new technologies appear - stone tools are produced for specific purposes - borers, scrapers, spear tips - not just the previously ubiquitous hand axe - compound tools - spear throwers - buttons, needles, fishing nets - a whole host of innovations. In parallel to this there is huge enhancement in the ability to think abstractly - planning and cooperative behaviour became complex - along the way we start seeing organised burial with grave goods, the emergence of music, art and religion. All these things are reliant on understanding something that is not there physically - not tangible - but obviously important - they fulfilled a need - otherwise they wouldn't have caught on. So - welcome modern humans - the next big change - probably the most influential in human history - in the Neolithic - about 12,000 bce - the adoption of farming and the domestication of livestock. In retrospect - this seems kind of obvious as a next step but it wasn't - it actually initially led to a lessening of the average life span - many of the diseases that will kill humans jumped the species boundary at this point due to us living in close proximity to animals, bad weather could wipe out an entire community if the crops failed - it seems reasonable to suggest that life became more violent - you now have something worth stealing - and therefore - defending. Not withstanding this - humans never looked back - but it is worth remembering the foraging - or hunter gathering - if you prefer - model was by far the most successful method of survival in the pre-history of homo sapiens - accounting for well over 90% of our time on the planet. It worked but didn't allow the population densities you started to see at the close of the Neolithic - it has been calculated that every individual forager required ten square kilometers each to feed themselves. So - skip forward to Mesopotamia around 5,400 bce - Eridu - now a pile of stones in the desert but generally accepted to be the first city in the modern sense. Build around a temple complex and guarded by massive walls - surrounded by satellite farming communities that exist to feed the city - the egalitarian days of the forager are long gone - society is heavily stratified - you have whole castes that produce nothing - royalty, priests, merchants and standing armies - who depended on others to feed them. Warfare becomes the norm not the exception. There - I would suggest - is a straight cultural line between the Mesopotamian city states and our own urban living - granted similar developments occurred in Egypt and the Indus Valley civilisations at the same time - but we are most influenced by the Sumerians, Akkadians and Babylonians. Doubt this? - look at your watch - Mesopotamian mathematics worked on a base of 6 - not ten - thus why we still have 60 seconds in a minute - 60 minutes in an hour and 360 degrees in a circle. Most dramatically they invented writing - which was originally used as a notation system to control the massive building projects they were so fond of - allocation of rations to workers, control of the supply and use of materials - it took some time for it to become a means of free expression - sad but true - accountants are the originators of literature. With the establishment and diffusion of writing systems - so ends pre-history.

So what's this got to do with Goya? That's a very good question - which I will now attempt to answer. The series of engravings that ‘El Sueno' comes from are satires - the artist having a crack at things that pissed him off in his society - which is quite a lot - and the usual way to interpret the picture is that Goya was complaining that - in an age of reason and progress - superstition still played a prominent role in society. We could maybe see it in a different way - perhaps the monsters are because of reason? Living in our current societies - Europe anyway - our slavish non-questioning of rampant empiricism - we need to sleep - to ignore - to survive the fact we are ill prepared by our history as a species for modern life. Cities are horribly isolating and divisive places - they invite disassociation. With sleep come dreams - sometimes nightmares. Whole swathes of techniques that early humans developed to understand and interpret their world are cast aside as ‘fake news.' To even raise the subject invites ridicule. Modern living is the aberration - not pre-history - each one of us carries the whole story of our species evolution in our genes. Strategies that - if they hadn't of worked - I wouldn't be sitting here now typing this. We still have myth and superstition - for a reason.

Thank you for reading - if you got this far - well done you. Yours - I.

View attachment 43518

@Barry Giddens @patw @Wayne Pritchard @Blademonkey @Satanfriendly @TomG

Excellent...thank you...
 
Back
Top Bottom