Andrew Sapiano, Mario Azzopardi, Karmen Azzopardi... the list of people who are leaving us grows longer from among those who stood out in the fields of culture and the arts in Malta for most of the lifetime of my generation.
It is only natural that as time passes, the protagonists of an epoch make way for their successors and the successors of their successors. What remain are the memories of their works and of what they sought to accomplish. Every generation witnesses the rise of artists and doers who project the ways of thought and creation which define that generation. Even when they seem to reject their predecessors, artists are in fact continuing to build on their achievements.
Their successors will do likewise. As in all human activity, the arts and artistic expression develop though a process which eventually brings together the negation of the past alongside the creation of new models with at the end, a reconciliation of the two perspectives.
It is one of the reflections that the departure of artists from way back brings to the surface.
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ELECTION CANDIDATES
I attended the final get togethers organised by some election candidates. They were well planned and well focussed. Obviously their scale varied according to whether the candidate was already well-placed politically or whether he/she were still at the start of a political career. The meetings mainly revolved around a presentation about the candidate and what were called “endorsements” by various guests.
I found there was quite a change from how such get togethers would be structured in the past. Then, the candidates’ activities would involve the holding of so-called coffee mornings, which would basically consist of bingo and cheese cakes; plus so-called dinner dances, where one would never be sure when the “dinner” was over and the “dancing” had started. People would come to these events to enjoy themselves “for free”. At some point, the candidate would make a speech. Those present would hardly pay any attention to what was being said but they would clap heartily.
One wonders whether the change in how such get togethers are being organised happened because of the Covid19 pandemic or for some other reason.
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HOW WICKED THE WORLD HAS BECOME
As a kid I used to hear it: you can still hear it today – the lament about how wicked the world has become compared to how it was in the past, when ah! life was much more beautiful, simpler, more innocent, more honest and so on and so forth.
This message was and still is being relayed, more than anything else by people in religion, but not only. It seems as if we carry in and with us an idea that we need to strongly sustain the myth of an original sin that has been inherited over the centuries.
And yet I have the feeling that today is hardly “worse” than yesterday, which itself was not at all more lamentable than the day before. Only, the ways by which we understand what’s wrong and what’s right have continued to change. Such understanding might have tended to mature more quickly, in line with the enhancement of communications technology, as well as become more subterranean and poisonous, because that is allowed by inherited customs.
The difference beween the good and the bad of all times is minute, except possibly in the ways by which they get done.