I wonder, perhaps above all else, whether the uncle of my Grandfather saw Goya's firing squad of the 3rd of May 1808, and if so, what this image might have meant to him? Griff Maclaurin arrived in Madrid with the international brigade on the 8'th of November 1936, he was killed the next day in a field to the north west of the Madrid, defending the city from what history would ultimately prove to be inevitable. He Died, I imagine, in the only way he could have accepted; fighting fascism, fighting for freedom. Griff Maclaurin was a true heir of his age, a Modernist, he believed whole heartedly in the potential reformation and ultimate perfectibility of humanity. Like those who had come before him and believed as he did, in a true destination for humanity, he was a crusader.
Goya's Firing squad of the 3rd of may 1808 is beyond a cold image, the agony of the forms presented projects something of the fear of those it depicts. Though with eye's attuned to the reality of the violent form by more than 150 years of the photograph, the image beers an almost comic aura. This comedy, or more operatively perhaps; this irony, subtracts nothing from the image. To find oneself smiling slightly before an image of such violence serves only to intensify the themes portrayed. This particular ironic violence is somewhat of a keystone of Goya's oeuvre. It has a subtract, self evidential effect, furious almost in it's implication of the spectator in it's violence - helplessness, complicity.
In his time in Madrid, it is unlikely that Griff Maclaurin would have had a chance to visit the Prado but as an educated, left wing, middle class intellectual, certainly he would have had the inclination. I prefer to think he did visit, for my own purposes it is helpful to imagine a man who loosely resembled me, standing in this same room 87 years before me gazing at this very same painting before which I now write. A man the same age as me, and as far from his place of birth as I now find myself, but whose reason for being here, and whose near future could not be more distant from my own. My Grandfathers Uncle came to Madrid to fight and if need be die, for something so completely abstract and yet at the same time something more concrete than I could ever glimpse: Utopia. The last fight, a fight against, not only a systemic evil but an evil which bore a tangibility I now, in some twisted sense, perhaps long for - A true enemy. His solidity of belief, his faith, this near messianic optimism are things which to me, now only exist in a realm of pure romanticism. Yet believe he did, fight he did, and die he ultimately would, to be buried in an unmarked grave somewhere on the outskirts of Madrid, cruelly six feet closer to where his life had started.
Death, in what was ultimately an unwinnable fight, that would end in the brutal 40 year fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco.
I must though return to my point, to the beginning, to the spectre of my Grate Grand Uncle, the crusader, standing before this prophetic image of execution, of punishment, of retribution, of a now archived insurrection. A prior battle against true evil? I must imagine, as this is at last the only faculty I have here, what he might have felt when he stared at this spectre of reprisal against rebellion, against the very reason he stood in front of this image. It could not have been fear, and yet in the end, what else could he have felt? Perhaps anger, the furious helplessness of the spectator Goya's image fills me with now.
To me though this image in not a premonition, I stare not at an image resembling my own death as Griff Maclaurin did, but at an image of history, the history of the death of insurrection. To me the pain I see in these faces could not possibly become mine, yet to Griff all of those projected terrors would soon be his own. Though he did not know this, how could he not have felt it? The fear, painted so bluntly by Goya in the faces of those soon to die, must have been the fear he truly felt.
How brave one would need to be not to tremble before such circumstance, before the spectre of your own fate, of your own death. Before these words I now tremble - with the vainglorious feeling that comes from imagining heroic ancestry, at the aura of death, at the sadness of the passing of dreams and of the failure of revolution, and perhaps most of all at my own cowardice, my own lack of faith in comparison to his.
To say it is simply a condition of the age in which I now live, that doubt always pervades an age devoid of meaning, perhaps is fair. The defeat of the second republic is one of the great causes and symptoms of the meaningless age in which we now find ourselves. To lose the last fight, to come so close and to have it all snatched away, then to see the world fall into war and holocaust; what better excuse could there be for helplessness? What greater cause? But it is more than our defeat though, that feeds our malaise, perhaps in a way it is our victories. We have what we have gained, for the price of what we have lost, that much is clear. When history has ended, history can give no space to those who would seek to keep writing the story, this much too is proven.
How can it be that we look at this painting from two different worlds? Separated not just by some 80 years, but by a fundamental inclination to fight for something. How can it be that the fear I see is a fear I hope never to feel, yet at once it is the fear my Grandfathers Uncle found himself on the opposite side of the world ready to embrace? Fear perhaps finds it's opposite in hope, or perhaps hope finds it's opposite in theological doubt, is doubt fear? Or is it reasonable to doubt? Surely it is intelligent to be afraid; we have much to fear and little to hope for, this much I know. yet as I stand before this image I find myself further from an answer, a reason for this distance, transfixed by a longing, a yearning, I will never satisfy.
Reuben Moss
2/1/2011