With the Greek statue of Victory at Ancient Olympia surrounded by fire, we see a perfect visual metaphor for the state of our world. From where I write I can see the island of neighboring Sicily and the smoke from fires that have been raging here in Calabria for the past couple of weeks. With a searing North African wind called the Scirocco (pronounced “Sheeroko”) gusting through, the combination of aridity and increasing temperatures are too much for the regional environment to sustain. Fire is purifying the land and our efforts to control the world.
The Greek statue embodies the ideal of rational man as separate from nature. This worldview smolders like the fires surrounding Olympia. Our mechanical, technological world is a direct consequence of the ancient Greek template to isolate and amplify our left-brain functions through the alphabet and to reject a right-brain, holistic conceptualization process of so-called tribal cultures. To be civilized was to impose upon nature certain ideals that don’t harmonize, but facilitate greed and selfishness. It’s fitting that the fires were started illegally to clear forest for development because it is not legal to build if there is forest in the location.
Even the concept of Olympia is questioned by the image: containing the force of the body through competition so as to restrain it within predictable outcomes is no match when the rivalry is with nature.
Finally, the photo itself is a kind of “truth” that we accept. By its fact of existence, we believe the reality that it contains to be valid as well, yet the truth is that a mediary chose to frame the perspective and point-of-view that is embodied within the photo. In this case he or she recognized that there was something significant in the relationship between the ideal of permanence set against a backdrop of catastrophe.
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