cosmos (Andrzej Zulawski, 2015)
"I was very happy not doing films for 15 years. Maybe it was the happiest period of my life. I was busy with really interesting things, like living."
I wrote about Velazquez's The Rokeby Venus in a review of the film Resolution, so it is perhaps inevitable that I find myself standing in front of it again now. Well, I say 'now' but that whole concept is about to become slightly problematic. Anyway... The painting hangs in room 30 at The National Gallery, the same site also houses The Arnolfini Portrait by van Eyck, another painting which exemplifies many of the issues The Rokeby Venus presents. If you were to travel to The Prado in Madrid you would find yourself standing in front of Velazquez's Las Meninas which, again, covers the same issues raised by The Rokeby Venus (If you're too lazy to read the above review of Resolution then let me summarise by saying that we're interested in this painting, and Las Meninas, because of the way the relative positions of creator, subject, and observer are collapsed together). If you travel to the second floor of The Prado you'll find, in the bathroom, second stall from the left, a note on the back of the door. It's in an envelope that's marked with a symbol that could be either an arrow or a rake. You open the envelope carefully and find a quotation from Carl Sagan's Cosmos which reads as follows:
"Space and time are interwoven. We cannot look out into space without looking back in time. Light travels very fast. But space is very empty, and the stars are far apart. The distance from our galaxy to the nearest spiral galaxy, M31, is approximately 2,000,000 light years. When the light we see today from M31 left for Earth, there were no humans on our planet. This is not a situation restricted to astronomical objects, but only astronomical objects are so far away that the finite speed of light (300,000 km per second) becomes important. If you are looking at a friend three meters (ten feet) away, at the other end of the room, you are not seeing her as she is 'now'; but rather as she 'was' a hundred millionth of a second ago. (3m) / (3x108 m/sec) = 1/108/sec) = 10-8 sec."
Standing in front of Las Meninas not only are you not seeing the painting in the 'now' at all, but there's a bridge, or tunnel, connecting you to how Velazquez saw the painting in his 'then'. You're connected to him. All past objects construct this, enabling you to effortlessly be in different times and different places and different people simultaneously.
You're at the ICA watching a Laurel & Hardy retrospective and you're halfway through Way Out West (James W. Horne, 1937). You're currently in an in-between place, transported to the 'now' as it was for the cast and crew, while remaining in the 'now' as it is for you. Stan Laurel eats his hat and Oliver Hardy turns to the camera with a simpering look. Creator, subject, and observer are all collapsed together fleetingly in this ongoing clamour of sound and activity that we experience every single day. However, unlike looking at M31 Way Out West gives you distinct clues that what you're watching is in the past. Clues that M31, or any other astronomical object, withholds: clothes, haircuts, technology, and so on. You see the duo start a car with a hand crank and think 'this is yesterday.' Astronomical objects such as stars don't deviate in this way, they don't have fashion. They simply burn hydrogen for a long time, and then do something else. If they have enough mass they'll eventually explode in what we call a supernova. And when stars explode like this they create gold (Au). That's how gold is made.
There's an argument to be made that the very nature of how gold is produced, and its subsequent rarity in the universe, is the reason for its intrinsic value to us. Of course, it's highly unlikely that this is the case everywhere. It's entirely possible that there are other worlds where gold is abundant, and an element that's commonplace to us is hard to come by. Worlds where calcium (Ca), or lead (Pb), or magnesium (Mg) are held aloft above others. Worlds which champion the mundane, and allow that which is precious to remain relatively untouched.
In the next cubicle at The Prado there's another hidden envelope. It's covered with a loose tile and reads:
"This is a secret message."
Digging further into the envelope you find another piece of paper. One which looks as though it has not been unfolded for a long time. You open it up as carefully as you can and this is what you see:
"Tomorrow it will rain, and it will be sunny. You will be both wet and dry, sad and happy. In many ways this news about tomorrow reminds me of a story that my mother used to tell me. I'll reproduce it here in full, but bear in mind that she was paraphrasing Sartre's Nausea. Or maybe it was On Emotions."
"A spider crawls across your foot, but you do not want to betray your fear, so you hold these feelings inside, and tremble silently. It is the same as how I felt when I first met your father. My mouth would grow dry, and my hands would quiver uncontrollably, but I felt it best to hide all of this. I'd keep my hands below the table, holding a pencil as hard as I could until it broke. Then I'd take the jagged ends of the broken pencil and push them into the flesh of my thighs, which would weep with blood."
A casual observer is in the same cafe as your father and mother, but doesn't understand the significance of these people to you, and instead simply looks at the legs of the woman who will become your mother. He's writing in a journal and with the image of this young woman mutilating herself burned into the retina of his mind's eye he turns the page and scrawls these words: "Today we had chicken and rice for lunch."