Dia De Los Muertos

Dia De Los Muertos - A Family Altar - image ©Eneas de Troya

 

 

I could make comment on the Prime Minister's statement in Parliament this afternoon regarding the upcoming English Covid lockdown and how the waffle and self-denial continue, over eight months into this pandemic; or how he appears to have not noticed that we are now in November, stating that the Test & Trace figures will hit 500,000 by the end of October; All Hallows Eve, ie Saturday last. But I won't, as today is The Day of the Dead: Dia De Los Muertos. My Deck of the Week last Wednesday reflected this with cards designed by the Edgy Brothers.

The festival is a public holiday in Mexico and throughout the Latin world. It is the day when the souls of the dead are welcomed back by their living relatives with food, drink and celebrations. In 2008, it was included on the UNESCO List of The Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. In Spain and most of Latin America the festival is celebrated on All Saints Day, the 1st. of November.

I mention all this because it strikes me that a significant portion of humankind is losing touch with not only its ancestral past, but with its recent history; choosing to believe in fictive constructs, either inferred from the cyber-communal, hive mind or falsely intuited through lack of real informational context. Either way, the end result is the same: world-views formed by supposition, falsity and/or prejudice.

We see this writ large in the United States and the UK, amongst others; where the truth is being made subservient to the expedient. That much is read and the backlash is sure to follow as soon as the economic realities hit home for enough people. But the most disturbing example of this tendency I've heard in recent times was in a piece on Radio 4 in the middle of last month. Apparently, many young, black South Africans consider Nelson Mandela an historical 'Uncle Tom'. A generational shift in attitude perhaps, but given the tragic history of that country and its relatively recent release from Apartheid, a sadder indictment of societies generally I can't imagine.

It is easy both to imagine or to witness histories being rewritten by the powerful and the corrupt - Orwellian societies existed long before Orwell and still do exist to an extent, but when the populous reconfigures its own position in history in ignorance of and without regard to that history, I think we are all probably doomed, as they say, to repeat history. We would do ourselves no harm and a good deal of service to look to our own heritage; the heritage of the unconnected and unhistoried. The heritage of the very people who actually made the world possible for the self-appointed ruling classes, whose own histories are written and passed down, painted and built, with fortunes created by those whose histories have gone to the winds, unsung except in those largely oral traditions and passed down from generation to generation; those very traditions now in danger of atrophy and dissipation: truth lost, maybe for all time.

So all hail the spirits of our ancestors; celebrate and keep their and our narratives alive and preserve values that matter and maintain a perspective on life grounded in the real. A fact in isolation is just that: a datum. Without context it is meaningless outside of a pub quiz. Truth really does lie somewhere in the interstices between facts. Happy Day of the Dead, everyone.