I detect -I don’t know if it’s my thing- a certain fascination, a certain fetishism with the nuclear threat. It’s those things of representation: we get used to the image being what the world tells us, and the image always provokes a superficial reaction. The same when schoolboys in heat scream through the windows and when vegan activists throw tomato sauce on a painting protected by glass. It is not lobotomy that destroys brains, but the suggestion of images.
The problem with images is that they lack narrative. They are flash points, flashes, impressions. A novel is the opposite. The image places before the world, dazzles, and the novel guides and helps to move through it. The sight served us to hunt, and the voice to stop hunting, to no longer depend on sight, to settle down. Libraries, villages, relationships: these are different ways of defeating the specter of the image.
But the image, in screen time, has taken over again. Today people don’t even want to hear what an image has to say. They think the picture has said it all. That is worth a thousand words.
See the image of a nuclear fungus. The portentous incandescent almond tree that throws its crown to the sky and devours everything in the path of its shadow. I read news and more news about the bravado of Russia and NATO, cross-threats where the civilized side (us) loses respect by matching the slavic doberman showing his teeth and foaming at the mouth. News about the purchase of iodine in pharmacies and public address equipment for catastrophes proliferates, and I wonder how much damage the images have done us, at this point, if it seems that we are no longer able to anticipate the narrative behind it.
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During the Cold War there was a type of fear deactivated later: nuclear fear. Books were published, films were broadcast, comments were made in homes and offices. Pushing a button could make human life impossible, it was known, it was feared. So they knew each other well the consequences of an atomic debacle. If the leaders followed through on their threats, there would no longer be anyone who could threaten. It was checkmate. The 10 tips to survive the atomic winter are false.
From the confusion comes out with stories. I wish that television and platforms would return to that old telefilm of the time, ‘The day after’. It wasn’t much, but it told what happens the day after the fabulous explosion.