The four seasons have broken away from the order set by humanity. They have definitely abandoned us, I think as I fold the thick sweaters that I have not needed this year either. I keep the coats in silence and feel that kind of small sorrow that connects us with childhood. Another winter without too much cold, a spring devoid of raincoats and umbrellas.
The aesthetic narration of the landscape has been interrupted and I feel as my own the orphanhood of those garments that have come in and out of a bag without seeing the sky. Its function has been cancelled; They have stopped participating on our stage, and we have not been able to count on them despite their impeccable cut. We have not walked its beauty.
We look for candles that smell of the countryside after it rains and we turn to the classics, Vivaldi, or the painter Cy Twombly to remember the four seasons and perceive the contrast between cold, humidity, heat or the breeze, sensations that are increasingly erased. of subtlety because of the climatic catastrophe. In Twombly's painting dedicated to winter, the words –present in the other seasons– evaporate under a white mist and the scant yellow hanging from a dark green makes us tremble with deathly cold.
The Virginia-born artist signed it at the end of the 20th century, but its atmosphere seems ancient, as unreal as the artistic composition of his Baroque predecessor, Nicolas Poussin. This wanted to reflect the prodigious power of nature: "Benign in spring, rich in summer, fertile dark in autumn and cruel in winter."
Commissioned by the Duke of Richelieu, he conceived the work as a philosophical reflection on the natural order through scenes from the Old Testament. Like Twombly, he painted it in Rome, and it is noted in his biographies that he suffered from hand tremor. Both artists faced the colossal challenge of defining the cycles of life, and surely they never imagined that this cosmology would end.
The changing landscape began to be threatened with death in the eighties. Bruno Latour explains it very well in Inhabiting the Earth (Arcadia): what is related to the climate had ceased to be a deductive science, as the old philosophers affirmed, quite the contrary, it became a science "made of physics, chemistry, numerous models and algorithms, and at the same time they depend on buoys in the ocean, satellites, geological samples”.
With all this information, it was announced that the unstoppable increase in CO2 would increase the temperature of the planet. And despite its verified data, nobody wanted to believe it, much less the ambition of the great world. Environmental experts were stunned as a creed of exaggeration, even fake news, spread among politicians and statesmen.
Voices of children arose, perhaps claiming at the age of innocence could be more convincing. Greta Thunberg ended up being hated because of her vehemence, how much her journeys on long-distance trains around Europe annoyed, at a time when speed is the watchword!
Francisco Vera, a thirteen-year-old Colombian boy, occupies television sets these days about the desertification of Doñana. He affirms that he became aware of the climate crisis when the Amazon burned, and invites us all to be climate activists.
They are young people who do not lose hope that adults will stop stealing spring and winter from them; they do not want to be expropriated from the four seasons.
