rebirthday
Wouldn’t it be possible to think of death in the broader sense of metamorphosis, as the end of a stage and emergence of a new one, and that a transformation process not always leads to degeneration?
The end of the Mayan calendar, December 21, 2012, was interpreted as the moment when the world would reach its end. The international media turned their sensationalistic weaponry to twist the global apocalypse forecasted by the mysterious pre-Columbian culture into a big show. Nothing occurred, of course, and the ideological phantasmagoria of merchandise turned image proved, once again, no more than a commercial strategy. The Mayan calendar may have marked, rather than a universal cataclysm, another sort of ending. And it´s just that the western, colonial concept of the icons of global culture has been so efficient that it has imposed a notion of endings always linked to death in its modern, western, enlightened meaning: the annihilation of the human being. But this is not as hopeless as it seems. Wouldn’t it be possible to think of death in the broader sense of metamorphosis, as the end of a stage and emergence of a new one, and that a transformation process not always leads to degeneration? Absolute Nihilism, a disease, fear as a way for filling pockets… And at some point along the path, a mind-conquering idea that works through benevolence and vehemence: a renaissance. That was precisely the word the Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto used to baptize December 21 as the “Day of Renaissance”.
The “Rebirth” or “Renaissance” project is inspired in the previous notions and in the idea of a “Third Paradise”, a way through which Pistoletto synthesizes in his book Omnitheism and Democracy the journey of humankind, past and future.
by
Erick González León