A dark light in a mobile phone

The third and final season of Dark was released on 2020 in a chaotic world that received it with the open arms of a confused reality. The first season, which I started to see that year, started every chapter with a count down toward the end of the world while the news and every media echoed such a mood for every other viral, unseen, feared reason in a cascade of gloom and doom. In hindsight, it was not the end of the world, because it wasn't, right?. Or have we entered, unaware, in a sleep walking, hypnotized post world, a massive, live, streaming macro-societal impersonation of a falling domino?

Today, the sun rises through the dusty window as any other day, impervious to our worrisome questions, but every now and then, the fragility of our existence betrays our routines, a threat shows its presence, sometimes in the guise of climate change, sometimes as the phantom of a new pandemic, sometimes in the guise of a technology Armageddon. These are the coordinates of our current nightmares, if anyone (still) doesn't know.

In those days time dissolved itself into an endless, meaningless repetition, danger always looming around while you received the announcement for the curfew times on your phone. Being hidden in the darkness that surrounds the transitions between afternoon and evening, watching the screen, without going out, reminded me, reasonably or not, of some days of childhood and those feelings of the fear and a foggy, ethereal sensation of uncertainty. Of a time when we thought of parked cars as potential bombs, and the random shutdowns of electricity every time as uncertain signals of the beginning of the end for us.

It might be for that very same reason that somehow I found relief in the convoluted story that is Dark, where an inevitable, fateful end of the world starts in an isolated German village dominated by the fuming giant chimneys of a doomed nuclear plant. Watching the episodes in another language, incomprehensible but for the subtitles was an apt companion to those days in which the truth of our lives was spoken unintelligibly, wanting to be translated, mediated by the news, the posts, the messages.

The mind works in mysterious ways, consecrates the inevitability of the repetitive finding here and there the idea of patterns, iterations, loops and cycles like discovering hidden structures that go round and round like those medieval men depicted in the wheel of fortune of an old manuscript, unaware of the reasons for their changing fate, like in the pages of Garcia Marquez' "Cien a?os de Soledad"(One hundred years of solitude) where you could not avoid the subtle but tangible sensation, shared by some of the less impervious characters, that in the tumultuous flow of time, there was an unassumed, shy undercurrent of things repeating, bathing yourself twice in the same waters, because everything that was, will be, just like in Dark, one of the characters keeps shouting "It will happen again! it will happen again!". Isn't time circular?

A window open, an empty chair. Darkness and isolation, confusion, discussion. Like, share, embed. Click, swap. Sleep. Restart. For it was a long season of everyone playing a dutiful, boring, ingenious game: what if you have to do what you do for a living but without leaving your home?

Well, not everyone: if you can ask that yourself you were of the lucky ones.

My experience was nothing when compared to the thousands that saw their world turned upside down, maybe forever, in those life-changing days. Many of them are not here anymore. I guess, charts, graphs, data visualizations and maps know better. Experts know better. Politicians know better. Doctors know better.

Somebody has to.

Someone at least. Somehow. Somewhere. Statistics, an expression of clinical, scientific perplexity. Logarithmic rate. Linear rate. Actual deaths, cumulative cases, new cases. Raw numbers, per 1,000 persons. Doom-scrolling, day after day, a social media newsfeed that became a continuous obituary of relatives, friends, friends of friends, colleagues or neighbours, appearing in them with the inevitable sensation of the unexpected destiny call. A ferry full of passengers passing by the flaming hills surrounding the Aegean Sea, a train engulfed in a wildfire in the middle of a heated land. The sign of the times. A prepper's time. Is this it? Some people were less apocalyptic, but changes were happening anyway, accusations made, theories criticized, science demoted here and there, and fear spread because of this or because of that.

Seated like a online all-knowing judge, quietly scanning the screen in one afternoon of the high summer of the desert, in a high consuming air-conditioned room, watching some videos, reading some snippets on the mobile phone, that black, shiny and slippery slab to which we link each one of us to the times of our existence, when outside, I still wear a mask these days. Of course I wore one those days. I am vaccinated, this information alone still is something that does not tell you much, or does it says a lot? the cultural wars, the ideological divides engulfed every topics pandemic-related from the start, dividing people into passionate and opinionated sides. Will be this a crucially public information to disclose from now on, or, as Novak Djokovic implied, is it strictly personal and will be deemed irrelevant?.

I didn't write, paint, draw or made anything of value in those days, just plainly going from one day to another, losing the feeble grasp of time, thinking of what will happen to forget that and review over my past.

At that moment, it was difficult to know. Because maybe all this is (was) to be considered akin to Fukuyama's end of history, a completion of sorts, the end of a kind of world, the end of our understanding of the world if there ever was something reliably to be called like that. True. True? Uhummm.

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Notes.

1) Walter, Tony; Moncur Wendy and Pitsillides, Stacey. How?massive deaths were deal with, ritually? Does the internet change how we die and mourn?

2) Van Buskirk, Adam. Collapse wont reset society. 11 April 2022. Palladium Magazine.