Looking at the latest events, as paintings should be looked at, a few steps back; the matter is to ponder. Halloween, the universal holiday, has become a wild celebration for many young people. In a reason for everything. As much as ancestral Celtic roots are argued, Halloween is a shameless imposition of the market, leisure and business of a global celebration protected by the multinational. Costumes, metabullshit and a whole therapy of bad taste. In other words: a stammering carnival with manufactured uniforms – except for the posh ones on Instagram – in Chinese department stores and bazaars. A pollster's idea would be to ask these same young people, equipped with all the manga-type frightening therapy, for the castañada, the panellets, or for All Saints' Day or for the Day of the Dead, they would probably only find asylum in Google. And we, the elders, in the shame of not having been able to transmit pieces of our heritage and our ancient memory.
It's natural, but it never ceases to amaze: traditions, even superstitions and beliefs, religious or pagan, have to share cultural space with video games and everything else, you know, that is presented as new and emerging. It's a different world. There is no jumping back. Halloween is a day of fear with witches, monsters, deceased cut-outs... and with the curiosity and pretext of death. But of a kind grim reaper, somewhat frivolous and sophisticated, funny... and, in its drift, an alternative joke to the tragic idea of existence and transcendence.
Something very different from the rivers of citizens, of good people, that flow through cemeteries, to the impossible and moving reunion with their own who are only in memory and emotion. A floral explosion – this spring year – in each niche, in the sign of each life that was. Entire families, children who did not know whom they are going to visit. The rumor of respect. From the first desolation. From loss to memory and the memory of time. The silent and secret dialogue with the dead who laugh at always being together. And so alone. Halloween is something else. Nope?
