The Best Australian Essays 2015 Read Free Page B

everything it has given us, but recognise that reason is not a free-floating faculty that leads inevitably to the right answer, and ultimately on to Utopia. That illusion, a vestige of the same Enlightenment that produced Goya, met its comeuppance almost as soon as it was proposed.
    In France, the comeuppance came in the form of the mob, the guillotine, the Terror. In Spain, it came in the form of the Inquisition and the Peninsula Wars, both of which Goya lived through.
    The twentieth century did everything it could – everything we would wish not only undone, but unimagined – to prove that the divine faculty of reason was no match for human baseness, and was in fact more than willing to put itself in service to such baseness.
    And the twenty-first century, on all the available evidence, seems bent on reiterating the point. Idealistic revolutions – in Egypt, in Libya, and elsewhere – are still being twisted into travesties of their original, often noble impulses. Powerful nations, meanwhile, blatantly betray their most loudly trumpeted ideals, perpetrating torture (with dogs and hoods, repeated near-drownings, anal penetration and unstinting humiliation), and then redefining torture with Orwellian shamelessness and utter impunity. They are surprised at the hatred this stokes.
    A deeply troubled teenager in Connecticut, the offspring of a ‘gun enthusiast’, is somehow allowed to spend most of his waking life playing dementedly violent video games and given free access to a whole arsenal of murderous weapons. In the wake of what ensues, the talk is of evil, and gun control, and care for the mentally ill. But none of it is remotely commensurate with what happened, minute by minute, in those classrooms that day, or with the trauma and grief that the surviving small children and their families still live with today.
    It is called ‘unimaginable’. But Goya knew the reverse was true. It is all too imaginable, and it is stupid, grotesque and humiliating, is it not?
    Back in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Goya was extremely quick on the uptake. Reason, to him, was precious – and not only precious, but beautiful. In his art, he endowed images of its betrayal with a visceral charge, a haunted revulsion.
    â€˜The unique power of his work,’ wrote the art critic John Berger, ‘is due to the fact that he was so sensuously involved in the terror and horror of the betrayal of Reason.’ He was an artist, after all, and art is a sensuous, not a rational medium.
    Goya was never interested in making his art embody reason, decorum, hope, or anything approximating utopian thinking. He was far too alert to humanity’s dark side. His most reasonable pictures are by far his most boring. Isolated from the others, they can make him look third-rate.
    What he wanted to show us, with an eagerness and urgency that still scalds, was the remorseless, terrifying stupidity of irrational violence. Seeing it, I shiver, and occasionally think of something the Italian Curzio Malaparte wrote in ‘The Skin’:
    I do not like to witness the spectacle of human baseness; it is repugnant to me to sit, as judge or as spectator, watching men as they descend the last rungs of the ladder of degradation. I am always afraid they will turn around and smile at me.
    Goya was afraid, truly afraid, of exactly this smile, as all of us should be. It is the imbecilic smile one sees on the face of his ‘Dancing Giant’, who capers about freakishly before a terrified huddle, as two heads howl monstrously in the background. And it is the smile one doesn’t see but involuntarily imagines, just faded or about to break out, on the face of his ‘Seated Giant’.
    You may wish to see it again before the show closes. Then again, you may not.
    The Boston Globe

The World Needs Female Rock Critics
    Anwen Crawford
    Don’t tell anyone, but I don’t own any albums by the Rolling