The power of images

Publish date 03-02-2023

by Gian Mario Ricciardi

José Saramago writes: «We are the memory». Umberto Eco reminds us that the degree of civilization of a community is understood by its ability to remember. Perhaps, however, many of us have forgotten it. The proof lies in the images that, even in this strange autumn, go through our days and give us strength, fix tragedies, passages of history and life: pandemic, war, crisis.

In the first shot you can see the military trucks that with the slowness of death leave Bergamo loaded with humanity torn away by the sudden illness.
They are moments collected in a scared, disoriented, frightened world.
Perhaps they recall the chariots of the monatti that Alessandro Manzoni fixes in the days of the plague of 1628 in The Betrothed.
But, in reality, they tell much more: they tell of a super-advanced world defeated by evil, a sudden and unknown evil, also the result of an exaggerated and unregulated globalization.

Well, three years later, are those trucks still in our memory? Like the doctors and nurses who died to save us? And also those desperate appeals of those who were about to be snatched from life? Everything, or at least in part, has been forgotten: the doctors and nurses who were once heroes have often been reported, the emergency rooms have no staff, most of us have canceled almost everything with a clean slate. «The pandemic is not over – says the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella -. You need a sense of responsibility." Maybe we should remind ourselves sometime.

In the second shot there is an invader, Vladimir Putin, who tries to take a land that does not belong to him, causing a reaction that has so far produced deaths, destruction, apocalyptic scenes. These are images that have entered everyone's homes since February 2022. In the meantime, many have tried to stop them, to transform them into scenes of peace and rebirth, but no one has succeeded so far. In Ukraine, winter is being added to the incredibly cruel war that continues, cold and frost are coming and millions of people will suffer and others will die.

Forgetting is not human. So here is the photo finish of the Cuba crisis with the world on the brink of war, John XXIII on the phone, sixty years ago at the time of the Second Vatican Council and, finally, peace.
Finally, the photographs of today's crisis with energy weighing in gold, raw materials skyrocketing, bonfires in the street to burn bills, people fired, shutters down, fear of the future.
On the other, the snapshots of post-war poverty, of Beppe Fenoglio's La malora, of hunger, the turned-up coats, the hand-knitted shirts, the shirts with worn and turned-up collars.
Even then we have, albeit slowly, come out of it and we are here.

Yes, they are the images filtered out of millions from our memory which, however, help us to live in days in which, however, it is so difficult and hard. They tell of the hope that it will not and will not go out.
Together we can try. A smile, as Pope Francis repeats, helps: in the pandemic, in war, in crisis.


Gian Mario Ricciardi
NP November 2022

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