We have lived continuously in a civilisation and culture that has developed harmoniously since at least the beginning of the modern era. It is an energetic civilisation, fascinated by the possibilities offered by technology and the pragmatically applied rational gift of categorising and ordering everything it encounters. When we try to confirm such a coherent, simple story in images, things get complicated. Let us try to juxtapose two allegorical images, i.e. images that reveal the essential features of some action. It will not be, for example, the human tendency to talk, to chatter, to communicate. Let us take the ancient allegory of “Talkativeness” from Cesare Ripa’s late 16th century work “Iconologia” (for the first illustrated edition of 1603). Ripa writes of it as follows:
“A young woman with her mouth open, dressed in a garment of shimmering colours;
Her dress is embroidered with figures of cicadas and tongues,
On her head she has a swallow standing in its nest and singing; in her right hand she holds a crow…”. (C. Ripa, Iconology, translated by I. Kania, Krakow 1998, p. 453).
Simple and obvious, isn’t it, as symbolic meaning usually is?
Now let’s look around for a contemporary image suitable for an allegory of talkativeness. Let’s make it the first on the list, everyday, obvious, ubiquitous.
Try to convince an alien who is just studying our civilisation (or its AI) that these two images refer to the same eagerness to engage in communicative behaviour. An eagerness that is common to both the 16th and 21st centuries.
It is our cognitive duty to look carefully at images, at moments of everyday life, because they reveal what contradicts the polite fairy tales of the wise books. Modernity is a time of leaps, of breaks with continuity, of very rapid adaptive change on a level so banal that it has long gone unnoticed. Even by clever crows.
