Monday, December 11, 2006

...And we all sing along like before


I went to Pompeii recently, well I say recently, I mean over the summer. At the time I thought it was awesome - a whole city, buried during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on August 24th, 79 AD, painstakingly excavated and restored. The most of amazing thing being the petrified forms* of the hapless Pompeians frozen at the moment of death - the face they greeted the reaper with, preserved in terrirfying detail.

But as I walked round the once bustling centre of this ancient city so old, even at the time of the eruption, that the chariot wheels had worn groves in the solid stone streets, it started to dawn on me that we hadn't moved on one bit.

There were court houses, parks, police stations, swimming pools, council offices, stadiums, cemetaries, inner-city slums, rich suburbs all beautifully preserved with their "beware of the dog" mosaics and playboy mansion style erotic art on the walls. I could feel myself slipping deeper and deeper into despair as I realised we're just rolling on in exactly the same fashion - decadent chariots replaced by bazzed-up Subaru's, gladiatorial conflicts replaced by football and tv, law and order all based on the same antiquated system. Unbelievable - how can we live through so many generations and not realise we're making exactly the same mistakes again and again, except now we're doing it on a global stage, with no Britain or Americas to escape to.




Cave Canem - Beware of the Dog










*Actually the bodies weren't found petrified - when Guiseppe Fiorelli was leading the excavations back in the 1860s, his team kept finding voids in the solidified ash filled with human skeletons. Fiorelli noticed that the inside of the voids bore the imprint of the clothing, jewellery and tortured expressions of the victim and therefore gave the order that he was to be informed the moment another such void was discovered. He would then rush off and prepare a vat of plaster, which could be injected into the hole, thus recreating the form of the doomed pompeian in all their petrified befuddlement.