Be it life or death, we crave only reality.
Henry David Thoreau
The sky is not blue. Neither is the sea.
Homer spares no detail in describing armor or wounds, but he is sparing in his use of color. On the way to Troy, neither the sky is blue nor the sea is blue. The sky is lit by the pink fingers of Aurora, the sea is the color of wine and black blood, rarely reddish or purple.
Joyce takes advantage of the arbitrary use of color to emphasize the gulf that separates Ulysses from the Iliad or the Odyssey from the blind man: the sea of Dublin Bay, stagnant, incapable of adventure, is the color of snot.
On the way to Troy, they sail a heady sea, as if from its depths to the crest of each wave, and from shore to shore, that sea were an enormous crater. Able to take advantage of the inexhaustible mixture of water and wine, or so it seems, the heroes go to war as if to an adventure, to a feast. An ironic flip side to the imminent events: wounded, dead, or corpses covered with flies, many of the guests will soon stain the earth and rivers with a mixture of colors dominated by blood.
…standing in front of him, he deflected the bitter arrow: he pushed it away from his body like a mother chasing a fly away from her sleeping child, and directed it to the place where the gold rings held the belt and the armor was double. The bitter arrow pierced the tight belt, the work of a craftsman; it stuck into the magnificent armor, and breaking the plate that the hero wore to protect his body from arrows and which had defended him so well, it scratched his skin and black blood immediately spurted from the wound. (Canto IV, 127)
There the cries of the dying and the boastful shouts of the killers were heard simultaneously, and the earth flowed with blood. (Canto IV, 446)
Achilles… jumped into the river… and began to strike left and right: at once there arose a horrible clamor from those who were struck, and the water ran red with blood. (Canto XXI, 17)
Achilles laid hold of his sharp sword and struck Licaon in the collarbone, close to the neck; he drove the double-edged blade right through him, and the Trojan fell to the ground, his blood flowing and wetting the earth. The hero took the corpse by the foot and threw it into the river to be carried away by the current… (Canto XXI, 114)
These episodes, especially those involving black blood mixed with river water—black and white, moving, cinematic, like shots from a Japanese action movie—are reminiscent of red-hot scenes from real life.
Badly wounded, he spills a tablecloth of blood among the cups and plates, which clatter, clink, and spill; celebrating the violent surprise, the diners die of laughter while the gladiator agonizes. As soon as the body is removed, the banquet continues, without the confrontation between those hired to entertain the occasion ceasing for a moment.
This is described by Silius Italicus in Punica, ca. 92, whom Montaigne quotes in 1580. Half a century later, Giovanni di Stefano Lanfranco gives shape and color to the scene in 1638: Gladiators at a Banquet. Is this painting inspired by the reading of Punica or Montaigne? Or perhaps by the first complete Italian edition of the Essays, translated by Girolamo Canini and published in Venice in two volumes by Marco Ginammi in 1633-1634, just four or five years before it was painted?
Those who, like Casanova, rented apartments to watch the quartering of Damiens, enjoyed the spectacle as a tragedy; banquets with gladiators, fashionable entertainment during the Second Punic War, offered a more immediate contact with violence and death, with bubbling, mutilated bodies piled on top of the crowded tables, so that the patricians would not hesitate to celebrate the comedy: the more dead and the more dead the dead, the better.
Disturbing, the staging and action elevate gastronomic satisfaction to ecstasy, as if the irreconcilability between life and death were suspended by the usurpation of the self by others, facilitating the outsourcing of people, even oneself;
Interactive and participatory, although not so much, the show aims to tame death, shared by the proximity of the bodies of those who die and those who, without taking any risks, survive enraged, unscathed, reflected in the fallen as in broken mirrors;
Scenes where nothing is obscene and everything happens for/by/before/with/in front of the guests, who lend themselves with absolute immunity and without any shame as co-stars;
Is this perhaps an ancient happening? A happening without a happy ending, except for the audience? Were those who killed and died musicians and poets? Instruments, keys, notes? Harmonies, chords, rhythms, rhymes? Are the anonymous choreographers, directors, and actors who, more than two thousand years ago, improvised with swords and their cuts, montages of random, unrepeatable events, without any desire to create a new artistic manifestation, as was done in the 1950s, precursors of John Cage and Allan Kaprow?
Unique, unalterable, alien to itself, time conjugates the surfaces of space; it awakens and nuances colors and shadows with the fire of the sun; it lightens, darkens, heats up or not, curls up or not, passing from here to there, sustained in its never and always now; it thus suggests forms, figures, even abysses to the senses, so that they may guess, in successive amazements, Euclidean sketches and meeting points even at the vanishing points. There is wine-colored sea and also rivers, tablecloths, chitons, and wine-colored togas.
