To our knowledge, the oldest apocalyptic prophecy — that is, a prophecy of an end of the world — comes from ancient Persia or Iran. That prophecy says the world one day will end, frightfully, in fire.
If we take stock in prophecies and — pardon the word if you’re a believer — mythologies, the meteor that passed by our planet last Thursday (what a coincidence — Thursday, Thor’s Day, Thor the god of thunder) was truly frightful or frightsome or frightening, choose your inadequate shade.
It was equivalent, on impact to hundreds of nuclear bombs of vintage Hiroshima 1945. Impact would have been truly impakto — cosmic impakto. Mercifully, the meteor was too far away in space.
A thing like that — call it the thing — feels to us far-away both in space and time. Prophecy comes to us from a dim, immemorial time, and we catch and pass it in turn to a far, far away future. As prophecy. But when it is science so ably brought before, to, our eyes and ears on video (read Discovery Channel), the thing should become disturbing.
It doesn’t. Not quite. Why? I think because it is unthinkable — our minds refuse to, cannot, accommodate it. The thing is unthinkable. As we say the unthinkable. A good alternative word is ‘unspeakable.’ No way to speak of it politely and sanely it seems to me. But yes there is. I’m thinking of the American poet Robert Frost’s very short poem which says ‘Some say the world will end in fire,/ Some say in ice.’ The poet says, in the poem, that he favors fire, but adds that ‘…ice/ Is also great/ And would suffice.’
This brings us back to the Iranian prophecy which says the world will one day end in fire.
One reason why that prophecy ought to make us shudder is, with the advance of science and technology, it has become a reality.
During the Cold War, especially the 1950s, it was called The Bomb. What an ironic phrase, Cold War. We read, in the 0s, that one megaton bomb exploding a mile above will set all of Europe on fire. The prophecy of ancient Iran is impressive because the prophet had only magic and dream and intuition and poetry. Not much in the way of hard facts, no science and technology beyond, say, David’s slingshot.
But prophecy need not be merciless.
Obtaining also in mystic circles, I guess still Persian in provenance, is the understanding that the prophecy’s fire need not be that from meteor and bomb; it may be the metaphorical one in the heart. One day the world will be consumed by love. The real rapture.
So looking back on it — last December. There we were somewhat anxious somewhere in the deep zones because of that Mayan edition of the thing it will arrive on Dec. 21, exactly a week from our birthday, going forward of course and thank goodness.
By serendipity Lady A. gave us Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris
to see and it turned out to be as good an antidote to apocalypsis (I’m coining it) as any, in fact perfect. Perfect as Dulcinea del Toboso. For one thing it’s comedy — and Woody Allen comedy. Meaning light. And I’d say Woody Allen at his lightest, mature, understated.
But I’m not writing to review it.
Without being sci-fi also, and without being twilight-zonish, it manages to involve the idea of time-travel! An American guy in Paris in the new millennium finds himself, with no time machine, just the midnight bell ringing, in Paris in the 1920s. He’s a writer and of course, coming still in the wake and comet tail-end of the 20th century, under the spell of modernism and the 1920s — Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, Picasso, Cole Porter, Dali, Buñuel.
The film deserves to be reviewed even on our humble scale (as if the Internet were amiss on that!) but we are short of spacetime so here’s just to relate it to the Apocalypse or Armageddon or the Rapture: it is nostalgia so keen we, along with the guy, are whisked back to a one-man’s Golden Age maybe even more.
I personally was and still am entranced by Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast
when I read it. The Great Gatsby
also. And Cole Porter, of course. You do something to me.
Midnight in Paris is the first five or ten minutes of it Paris the city in lyric, melodious colors, and outright melody playing nonstop till it’s, the music’s, end — which in a way, again, whisks, transports us back to Allen’s first directorial work, Interiors
, which gimmicked or tricked by its total absence of music.
Time travel, the idea, rules out the idea — of the world coming to an end. That’s not really huge, just long. Part 3 next week?