Neolithic Moment - Time
ENG
You know, Onkr, I was thinking…
Look at the meat you’re eating.
If we leave it here, this, that once was part of a living animal, will rot and disappear.
You were once like little Guni, but now you look like a mammoth and one day you too will die and rot like the animal you ate.
Come see the river. Do you see the water?
The river is like time, Onkr!
The water of the river keeps flowing, always in the same direction, like time, which never comes back! And that goes for you, for me, for little Guni and for the animal you ate!
The point is: will we ever be able to swim in the river-time? Will we be able to go back and forth?
For example, if you could go back in the river-time, would you find yourself the size of little Guni?
Onkr! No!
Onkr! Swim! Swim!
Onkr…
Daddy died of metaphor.
ITA
Sai, Onkr, stavo pensando…
Guarda la carne che stai mangiando.
Se lo lasciamo qui, questo, che un tempo faceva parte di un animale vivente, marcirà e scomparirà.
Un tempo eri come il piccolo Guni, ma ora sembri un mammut e un giorno anche tu morirai e marcirai come l'animale che hai mangiato.
Vieni a vedere il fiume. Vedi l'acqua?
Il fiume è come il tempo, Onkr!
L'acqua del fiume continua a scorrere, sempre nella stessa direzione, come il tempo, che non torna mai più! E questo vale per te, per me, per il piccolo Guni e per l'animale che hai mangiato!
Il punto è: saremo mai in grado di nuotare nel fiume-tempo? Riusciremo a fare avanti e indietro?
Ad esempio, se potessi tornare indietro nel tempo del fiume, ti ritroveresti grande quanto il piccolo Guni?
Onkr! No!
Onkr! Nuota! Nuota!
Onkr…
Papà è morto di metafora.
The concept in Neolithic Moment is the principle of having a great insight or a complex idea, but the time is just not right. Or maybe the time is right, but there is still no way to explain the idea to other people. Quest For Fire certainly is an inspiration, but the movie is a 40.000 year ago situation and for this comic series I needed characters with a little more vocabulary, so it is placed circa 10.000 years in the past.
It fascinates me how knowledge evolves, the amount of effort involved in this process and how here and there in History we have people connecting the dots while others don’t even know about dots. There are no miracles in this journey, just a lot of hard work and thinking. But it poses another problem: how to articulate knowledge to others? How many Einsteins we had in the past or even now, but they were/are in the wrong place and wrong time, incapable of communicate great ideas to others? How many Milevas? How many opportunities for progress did we miss?
Another thing that inspired me to do this series is my own condition of non-Einstein. When I read articles on Physics or Philosophy, or certain parts of an Umberto Eco’s book about the Middle Ages, or when I try to understand poetry, in all this moments I feel like a caveman - and this also goes for a much less ambitious manual to assemble a toilet seat.
For Neolithic Moment one of the key elements is the text as subtitles, as a translation of character’s dialogues. This kind of approach is one of many aspects I admire in the work of Hal Foster with Tarzan or Prince Valiant. The great uncle Hal thought that the use of balloons were too invasive to his work and themes, so the text is presented respectfully apart from the drawing. It gives also a literary quality to the narrative, not in the sense that comics are less literary than, well, Literature, but in the sense of pacing.
This detached voice from the action brings a documentary atmosphere and give me the opportunity to the comical effect of “translating” the dialogues, a process that affects the reading rhythm, since it is almost inevitable that the primitive dialogues will also be read.
Blooming news
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