Here are two star-crossed lovers awaiting the ”next” resurrection amidst the silence of the disappeared. Massimo, he looks rather like Max Wall on a bad night, shuffles on to the stage: where is she? he demands of the audience. Only to be met by a wall of silence. Not like the roar of the crowd in the packed velodrome as Queen Vic trounces her old rival, Anna of the bright yellow skinsuit. With supreme effort bodies can be made to disappear; we can lose them in the vastness of the Atacama desert, drop them into the ocean. With supreme effort bodies can be trained to seemingly impossible levels of performance.
How amazing it is that my mind can (with a few wobbles) travel from Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light to scenes from the London Olympics. It is remarkable how the human frame can tolerate such extremities. The women who continue their search in the Atacama desert for their loved ones’ remains, fragments of bone, in the shadow, so to speak, of the telescopes ranged at the heavens, peering into the origins of the universe, attempting to tear the veils that hide reality. The women insisting on their right to remember what Pinochet’s regime attempted to obliterate. I can’t help remembering that Pinochet was a great hero for Madame Thatcher, who similarly wanted to dispatch socialism to the grave, to leave not a trace . . . but just look at the monster she gave birth to.
But the miracle, one might say, out of all that corporate world of bottomless corruption, rises the Olympics, helped on its way by the amazing Danny Boyle's Opening Ceremony. Yes, one can feel a certain sympathy with Iain Sinclair’s unwavering antipathy to the Games, to what he described (on Channel 4 News) as their hallucinatory delusion imposed on us, but there are these amazing women and men who with single minded dedication are arousing heights and lows of emotional connection as we weep in our cornflakes.
Meanwhile Massimo and his puppet Evita, a bag of bones, it’s true, but here they are singing a Neapolitan love song, to the rather poor accompanying scrapings of a violin and yet another old man playing the spoons. This is the sort of resurrection we can manage. At least Massimo looks happy enough, transformed as he is by the words he sings, the gaunt flesh of his face almost transfigured. Actually it’s not bad for an old man. Let’s give him a round of applause; perhaps even invite him to join us for supper. Hopefully not the last supper.
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