The disappearance of fireflies reveals something more perilous than a world devoid of insects: it speaks to the vanishing of beauty. Manuel Rivas (born in A Coruña in 1957) proposes that beauty be regarded as the antonym of immorality, and thus the antidote to evil. Because the problem is that evil exists. We will not pause to debate whether it is a pathology or a raging devil. The fact is that the effects of evil are real and terrible: the disappearance of something as beautiful as fireflies as a consequence of unbridled progress is a reality and a metonymy of the disappearance of life: “Each of us, every person, needs a firefly to alert us to what is vile, what is unacceptable. A light that thinks and feels. The one that tells us: ‘Do not settle. Do not get used to it!’”
From the outset, it should be noted that getting used to the skin of the world that Rivas portrays is almost impossible, for one of his defining traits is the speed of change. In other words, what we must become accustomed to is that very speed, which he characterizes as a tyrannical narcissism that seizes the levers of power. That is the origin of the State of Malaise, the dystopia we are living through, and it is closely connected to all forms of denial: simply turning away from evil to imagine oneself innocent while feeding the pigeons. This book, this The Revolution of the Fireflies, is a pessimistic work, a place where at the same pace as the world changes, Rivas lays out all the consequences of evil, ranging from the personal and psychological to harm inflicted on the planet. In that sense, it is an enriching exercise in associations that takes us from Cain and Abel to Cunqueiro or George Steiner. And, of course, indispensable vaccines appear within the work and in Rivas’s spirit, such as the one represented by John Berger. “True identity is destructive excitement,” writes Rivas, summarizing the current moment he traverses and leaving us with the sense that we will not be able to reconstruct the puzzle, because what has been imposed, definitively, is pernicious chaos, pain, and vertigo. Rivas aims to shake the apple tree to see if any apples fall, to unsettle us, and he warns that we can adapt or integrate another way of not suffering hell, a path that demands continual learning: “to seek and to know how to recognize what is not hell in the middle of hell. Once detected: make it endure, give it space, cultivate it.” It is not incidental that there is so much reference to a life akin to that of the gardener or the horticulturist, because they are the ones who teach us to guard against pests and to respect fireflies.
In essence, what Rivas aims to do is refresh Thoreau’s notion of civil disobedience. To achieve this, he makes use of words, and not in any ordinary fashion, because the succession of words constructs ideas, builds thought. His faith rests on attaining a civic grammar. In a sense, this essay leans more toward a protest song than to scholarly erudition, but it is clear that protest song offers the best vehicle to present that sentipensante spirit to which Rivas alludes, since we must not only know the lyrics but also the music, more necessary than ever in the face of pressure and danger, before what he calls The Machine of Making Despair. Against evil, one must choose beauty, which is so intricately bound to dignity: “Clear fear and place at the heart of the world, in every community, schools of creative excitement and nurseries of nature. The pollen of a new abundance.” So be it.
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Author: Manuel Rivas. Title: The Revolution of the Fireflies. Publisher: enDebate. For sale: Todos tus libros.