Demand More

One of the things I enjoy about modern art is that it can really depict so much of what typically remains invisible in everyday life. Something that is often taken for granted and overlooked is the nature of our relationships, both with other people and also with ourselves.

Take The Lovers, for example, a piece by the artist Rene Magritte:

(larger version here)

Two people, a man and a woman, are kissing each other. They are presumably in love or having sexual contact (they are, after all, named as lovers in the title), yet there are two shrouds covering each person’s face. The painting strikes the viewer as ridiculous — why, after all, would two people in love with each other want to cover their faces when they are kissing?

But this is exactly the point Magritte is trying to make. In modern relationships, even in sexual relationships, each party comes to the table hiding his or her true self. Relationships are seen as a long and draining bargaining process where the needs of the other party are constantly ignored or belittled. Neither party is prepared to make the necessary sacrifices that must go into nurturing a healthy relationship; on the contrary, the parties involved seek to extract as much as possible from the other side. Healthy relationships (sexual and otherwise) require the lowering of interpersonal barriers and the production of a natural give-and-take, something that can only come when the needs of the other person are elevated more than the needs of the self.

The shrouds wrapped around the faces capture the fact that even in intimate contexts, we choose to remain separate from others. Where there is separation and division, there can never be genuine love.

This piece, by Pablo Picasso, entitled Girl Before a Mirror provides a compelling analysis of our own relationships to ourselves:

(larger version here)

The viewer sees a girl looking into a mirror, but her reflection is totally different — the girl is vibrant and young, the person in the mirror dark and old. The blonde yellow hair and pale face contrast sharply with the dark purple, pink, and black of the woman in the mirror, who appears to be shrouded and hooded.

Through these colors, Picasso articulates the point that each of us, if we care to look deep enough, have aspects of our personalities that we choose not to look at. Just as this young girl confronts a dark picture of herself in the mirror, so do we all have a “shadow” that we repress. In our own minds, each of us has constructed a pleasant picture of our personalities and egos, of who we are, our essential beliefs, and so on. Yet sometimes we feel certain motivations or entertain thoughts that don’t fit in with this picture in our heads, so we chase them out and bury them deep down, in the hopes that by banishing them we can escape them.

Carl Jung wrote of the shadow, “Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” He noted, “How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious?”

While it suits most of us to believe that we are all god-fearing people who could never harm anyone, the fact of the matter is that every human is capable of unspeakable atrocities if put in the appropriate circumstances. An honest relationship with ourselves means confronting this shadow and recognizing our failings as inherently imperfect beings, because only by integrating the shadow can we begin to completely love ourselves in all our aspects. Where there is separation and division, there can never be genuine love, even of ourselves.

And this integration of the shadow is itself the road to compassion — when we realize that given the right context, any one of us is capable of participating in holocausts, genocides, or other horrors against fellow humans, we can come to love those who commit evil and see their basic humanness under their terrible acts. Hate the sin, love the sinner.

It is interesting that Picasso chooses to paint a girl looking at her shadow as opposed to a boy. I can only conjecture that it might have been easier to paint with a woman as the subject matter, because the task of painting the shadow of a man would have to take into account that most of the atrocities committed by the human race have in fact been at the direction and execution of men. It may take an artistic genius greater than that of Picasso to not only depict the male shadow, but to even confront this basic fact.

Picasso, however, did attempt something like this in another manner in a painting called The Charnel House, painted in 1945:

(larger version here)

The Charnel House was being painted just as news of the Holocaust and footage of the destruction of World War II was reaching civilians. It is a bleak painting. The figures are supposed to represent a dead family lying near or underneath a table. It is possible to make out a pitcher and plate of some sort on the table, but they are barely sketched out or attended to, perhaps intentionally forgotten as a way of underscoring the way everyday life becomes out-of-place within the context of total war. The stark whites, blacks, and grays used by Picasso mimic the black-and-white news footage of starving and mutilated bodies found in concentration camps and battlefields. The jumbled heap of body parts (the viewer can make out feet, bellies, mouths, eyes, and hands) are arranged in a pyramid structure that resembles another famous work by Picasso, Guernica. Two hands, especially, seem to reach up to the heavens in one last futile gesture.

Many of us are indoctrinated at an early age that in the aftermath of World War II, people were filled with hope that nothing that bad could happen again, and that all the world sat down in San Francisco and came up with the United Nations to preserve peace and ensure freedom throughout the planet, and so forth. But in the context of The Charnel House, there is simply no way to claim that human atrocities ended in 1945. When World War II ended, most of the world was probably in a state of distended shock. Millions of people had just died, some killed with poison gas in specially made death factories, while others were killed more “conventionally” with bullets, bombs, and various other incendiary devices. A new force of nature, the nuclear force, was actually unleashed against hundreds of thousands of civilians.

This was not a time of hope. Anyone with a functioning brain and heart would have been shell-shocked by years of seeing the ugliest in human nature at work, the naked quest for power and dominion unleashed through the rawness of war. And it was not the work of devils and gods, but of everyday, normal individual people.

This is the world depicted by Picasso in the The Charnel House, and its themes are intimately linked to those of Girl Before a Mirror. Girl Before a Mirror is the personal conflict that few of us choose to address, the illusions we construct so as to live in a pleasant fantasy world where we are good, decent people, where everything will be all right. We deny an essential aspect of our personality in favor of a mask (or for one of those shrouds worn in Magritte’s painting).

But this repression of our shadows, that part of us which is capable of terrorizing and inflicting harm on others, is ultimately quite debilitating. By never confronting this aspect of ourselves, we fail to see it in other people. The lust for power and greed can be sugarcoated in ways that will make most people think that nothing is out of the ordinary, that indefinite detention, torture, and war is OK, and that authority is always right. We make ourselves willingly naive to the wrongs committed by others.

We also never completely love ourselves, and by dividing our own personalities, we similarly divide the world into clans, races, nations, and religions, distinguishing the common human consciousness in arbitrary and unnecessary ways. Where there is separation and division, there can never be genuine love, of ourselves or of others.

The greater the repression, the darker the shadow; and then, one day, our fantasies are mercilessly popped by the realities of a world where power and greed contort the human fabric in ways that lead to great levels of death and suffering.

People often wonder what it would take for peace to come to the Earth. These paintings underscore the truth that peace is a journey which begins at the individual level. Only through self-examination and personal growth, through the calming of the inner conflicts that come with the shadow, is it possible for peace to be cultivated. We don’t need a world government or new laws or any other structure or organization to achieve peace — peace is the natural outcome of a planet where every individual has taken the time to know herself and to end the individual struggles she might have both internally and with other people.

This is why achieving peace is so difficult: it begins with each of us.

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