Today’s storms have their own names: Armand, Béatrice, Claudio, Denise, Efraín, Fien, I don’t know. It seems that they only get baptized when they deserve it, that is, when they are intense enough to be baptized.
The truth is that biblical connotations cannot be avoided every time we are assailed by images of cities whose arteries have become waterways. The archetypal story of Noah and his ark is relived with the same violence brought about by the storms we suffer. The hint is inevitable.
For years, historians and scholars have debated the accuracy of the chapter devoted to the universal deluge. According to NASA scientists, the origin was a meteorite falling on a sheet of ice. According to others, the origin was due to the Etna volcano causing a tsunami that flooded the eastern Mediterranean coast, which is why Noah built a wooden shelter, the remains of which can be found on Mount Ararat. This image inevitably refers us to the film Fitzcarraldo, which Werner Herzog shot. Herzog himself tells in a book what it took to get the boat up a mountain. The book is titled Conquest of the Useless and was published by Blackie.
But the volcano theory mentioned above is full of fictional connotations and far from science, as has been successively demonstrated since German scientist Friedrich Parrot searched the area in 1829 and found no remains of Noah’s Ark mentioned above. Perhaps the closest hypothesis to truth is that known as the Toba catastrophe theory, when a volcano in Lake Toba itself caused the disaster on the island of Sumatra that reduced the world’s population. It happened about 74,000 years ago and this theory was proposed by the University of Illinois in the late 1990s and supported by anthropologist Stanley H. Ambrose.
At this point we can point out that any hypothesis about what happened is as fictional as the biblical story itself, the latest scientific interpretation of which comes from the hand of José Joaquín Parra Bañón, professor at the Seville School of Architecture, who has just published a book published in Atalanta. It is entitled Noah in Images and is written with lexical richness and detail. It takes Noah from the fringes of our Hebrew mythology and brings him closer to the origin of the world, the figure first painted by Michelangelo in the vault of the Sistine Chapel.
From here, Joaquín Parra Bañón projects a curious work in which the astronomer Julius Schiller merges with Le Corbusier to address the founding myth that built the Ark of resinous wood; an effective refuge against all catastrophes, the course of which is illuminated by a vast atlas of stars with Christian names.
The extensive iconography is extensively annotated along with the existing documentation of the episode through the centuries. In this way, Parra Bañón tells us how the medieval miniaturists, the Gothic illuminators or the illustrators of the Renaissance interpreted that what Noah created was not a boat but a house on board. There are many illustrations in the book showing this, but there is one that stands out. It is an oil on panel in which the beasts disembark, descend from the ark, “they sprout from the bowels of the ark like ants emerge in streams from the anthill,” says Parra Bañón in his commentary on Simon de Myles’ painting entitled El Arca de Noah on Mount Ararat, dated 1570.
The book by José Joaquín Parra Bañón is a very original work in which mythology serves as the basis for projecting the scientific approach, unlike most transversal works in which science and literature complement each other, the scientific basis being that which arises mythological projection.
Chronicle of Madness
The rain never disappoints when it comes to fiction. For the rain, along with the wind and the shadow, has been one of the attributes of great narratives since the first age of the world, when language ceased to be innocent and things began to have names. This is how our ancestors built myths; rational stories armed with symbols, enigmas whose solution is contained in the enigma itself. In the furthest reaches of our mythology, in the depths of our unconscious, lives the biblical story.
Without going any further, the chapter on Noah’s Ark takes us back to that first age of the world when the universal Deluge swept over the earth for 40 days and 40 nights. When the storm abated and the water receded, Noah released a dove, which reappeared after morning. He had an olive branch in his beak. The message was interpreted by Noah in the only possible way, which was that the waters had receded.
Filmmaker Werner Herzog gained momentum from this image, which is part of the collective unconscious. He did it with the ferocity of a dog digging its teeth into a deer’s leg. The blinding vision of a ship on a mountain had taken hold of him. It was his obsession. Accompanied by the voice of Enrico Caruso, the German filmmaker embarked on his adventure. Werner Herzog needed more than 40 days and 40 nights to lift the ship to the helm so that his film Fitzcarraldo was crowned as a grandiose cinematic delirium. Nobody got that far.
Perhaps Orson Welles had similar inspirations. Perhaps. The truth is that Caruso stopped singing when the ship reached the summit, and Herzog noticed the birds were screaming in pain. It was the lament of the ancestors that brought forth the echo of a thousand-year-old olive tree as the flood clouded the earth and the black raven amused itself by fertilizing each and every one of the birds that Noah protected with his beak in his ark.
The opening account of our mythology, written by Moses under divine inspiration, tells something similar, although upon examination everything points to the fact that Satan was the real author of this chronicle of madness.
the stone axe It is a passage in which Montero Glez, with a craving for prose, exerts his particular siege on scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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