The Chimaera and Human Nature
Greetings dear Reader,
The human psyche is layered. Often fragmented. Various, contrasting parts fighting for control and dominance. For supremacy. In our current times, it seems to me that, not only are we entirely ignorant of these various parts, but our Ego, in its arrogance, thinks itself alone on the battlefield. It has already won. And every time one of these forces pokes at it, sometimes quite sharply and painfully, it looks around blindly and concludes that ‘oh well, it must be me.’
What am I talking about?
I’m talking about alchemy. About a different way of perceiving our inner world. Why is this important? Well, I’ll let Jung answer that question:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
If current politics, history and modern culture are telling us anything, it seems to me they’re saying that we live in the age of the Ego. We have killed the Christian God a while ago, and we didn’t notice that with His death, other aspects of our collective experience of what it means to be human, also passed on. Well, at least in the West. Ever since then, we’ve marched forward with an oddly militaristic and absolutist conviction that we’re going the right way and, even more peculiarly, that we do, indeed, know where we’re going.
The Ego, by its nature, seeks to feel safe. To ensure survival. Solving problems and asserting control is its way of achieving that. Pesky, unconscious, chaotic impulses don’t sound like anything too safe. So, without a transcendental, spiritual guidance (or narrative), how does the Ego respond to them? Well, it will say they don’t exist. Or if they exist, they’re problems to be dealt with in the same way it deals with all other problems: by solving them. Well, trying to, at least.
This constant trying to fix, control and manipulate reality results in one of the current age’s main maladies, which we’ve termed ‘anxiety’. I don’t know anything about anxiety, I’m not a therapist. I’m an artist and, I like to think, a little bit of an alchemist.
Alchemy, among its (too) many other aspects, is about splitting apart and merging back together. Solve et coagula. While this can be applied on a chemical level, I like to see it on a psychological one. If we were to really look at the various aspects of human nature we’d find quite a varied, and sometimes not so nice, collection. While discussing them all is beyond the scope of our little chat here, I wanted to drive your attention towards one of them: the animal.
This digital artwork of mine is inspired by Gustave Moreau’s work from 1867, with some personal additions. While Moreau’s work is an example of Symbolist art, I wanted to use it to give a visual representation to everything you’ve read about above. The Chimaera is a creature composed of different animal parts merged together. Psychologically, we could say that it’s a representation of contrasting elements of our psyche. What I really liked about Moreau’s work was the lady next to the creature, holding on as it’s about to fly, clearly off a very tall cliff.
What does it mean?
I interpreted it as acceptance and trust. Not only we have to accept that Chimaeras exist in the deepest layers of our unconscious minds, but we have to trust them, to welcome them and stop waging our invisible wars against them. To the Ego, this is preposterous, absurd. ‘Engage with our animalistic natures? It can only lead to ruin, both ours and that of others.’ I don’t speak of indulgence, but acceptance. We can’t control anything that we’re not aware of, and even less something that we fear so much we’ve dumped at the bottom of our subconscious.
Only by embracing the whole, we may take flight into the future.
Thank you for reading. Blessings,
A.Morariu
DerectumArt
