The Project
“Thunderbolt steers all things.” (Heraclitus)
There are some subjects that have a powerful resonance, in spite of their somber essence, their awful feature. This resonance has a multiplicative, expansive effect, like a rock that stirs the surface of still waters when being thrown. Extinction is a whole suggestive universe, full of possibilities that start from the individual sphere and reach humanity, the universe itself. Religions arose from the perspective of annihilation, universal destruction, the extinction of life. Scientific hypotheses on the subject often emerge, estimating the time of our existence and the unfeasibility of the future for our conscious minds. Several philosophical systems offer speculation about extinction and its haphazard idiosyncrasies. However, perhaps it’s possible to go further, beyond all these cultural layers. If we imagine that universal extinction is only a kind of first step. And if the extinctions, in the end, are parts of a large sum, isolated units in a history of suffering, agony and eventual happiness that would have no end. And if every process of destruction, long and excruciating, is like the beads of an infinite necklace.
That infinite necklace of renewed beginnings and devastating destructions, from extinct existences resurrecting to a new extinction, was imagined by the French revolutionary and political theorist Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881). Man of action, Blanqui participated in numerous uprisings and revolts that constantly shook the French Republic at the nineteenth century. He was, like crowning to his long life of revolutionary, imprisoned in the feared prison of Fort Taureau. In the last years of his life, on that unhealthy fortified island, he wrote a short pamphlet, L'éternité par les astres (1872). It was a small essay of a scientific, astronomical, and cosmological nature, quite distinct from other works by the author as Instructions pour une prise d'armes (1866), a guideline on armed insurrection for the nineteenth century. In L'éternité par les astres, Blanqui formulates his own version of the principle of the eternal recurrence, with the whole universe having the function to generate diverse but finite scenarios from physical components, in fact the atoms, equally uncountable as the sands of the beach but still finite. Extinction, in this context, was a mechanism, a shape of the universe gaining its consistency, an exercise of endless repetition, a whole that in fact are infinite universes, infinite worlds with distinctions of time and space ranging from the infinitesimal to the absolute. Blanqui's odd pamphlet became an obsessive reading of authors as different as Walter Benjamin and Jorge Luis Borges.
In 2015, Blanqui's cosmogonic ideas inspired a story, "The Extinction Hymnbook" by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel, published in the compilations The Gift of the Kos'mos Cometh! A Homage to Night and Kosmos and Lanterns of the Old Night both published by the publisher Ex Occidente Press, in Bucharest. The visual power of this brief narrative (highlighted, for example, here and here) seemed tremendously suggestive and a script of notation was elaborated. Based on this script, the artist and illustrator Fabio Laoviahn created the images of this nightmare that transcends history, humanity, the individual, the human body and reaches the raw material, so distant but so equal to the matter of dreams.
Extinction will be the first part of the "Cosmic Visions" trilogy, to be complemented in the future with the other obscure visionaries works and/or biographies, who sought to understand and spread their ferocious prophecies.