Painting the relationship
Too often, people take for granted their relationships — both with themselves and with other people. Relationships are fluid and constantly changing. They are deeply affected by society and by culture. Yet how often are these relationships examined? How often does a person realize that his perspective affects his relationships, and that by changing one’s perspective, one can change one’s relationships?
Art can help understand the nature of the relationship. 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 at least in some type of sexual contact, 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 isn’t this what people do all the time? Isn’t the case that we are all guilty of placing some type of mask or shroud over our true selves in order to hide ourselves from the other? In modern relationships, even in sexual relationships, each party comes to the table masking 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.
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 is why so many marriages end in divorce, and why people get tired of their friendships and marriages over time. They become tired of the masks they have chosen to wear. They were never their true selves; and as a result, they reach a point where the pretense becomes too costly to be worth it.
What a horrible thing — the idea that we must shroud our individuality in order to find friendship or sexual relationships. But this is considered normal.
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, but 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 all people, if they care to look deep enough, have aspects of their personalities that they would otherwise choose not to look at. Just as this young girl confronts a dark picture of herself in the mirror, so do all people have a “shadow” that they repress.
Every person believes they are a wonderful, just, and good person. Every person has constructed a wonderful picture of their personality that makes them always right. This is natural, and probably helps keep people sane. Yet this picture of perfection is in tension with reality — the fact that, eventually, a person may entertain certain dark thoughts that don’t comport with this fantastical picture of absolute goodness. These dark thoughts are buried and repressed — the “shadow” of every person.
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 would only do good things and never harm anyone, the fact of the matter is that every person is capable of dark thoughts, not-so-good deeds, and even unspeakable atrocities if put in the appropriate circumstances. This is an undeniable fact that is constantly ignored. It is ignored because it is an ugly, but very real truth.
Those people on this world who are the harshest judges, the most vocal critics of those who have made mistakes, the most in favor of draconian laws and punishments — these are the people who have repressed their shadows to dark inner places, and who remain constantly afraid that their shadows may one day emerge. They are hypocrites who fear to be exposed, for every person makes mistakes. Every person deserves a second chance. Those people who insist on human perfection, who would chase witches to the stake — these are the people who are in deep need of self-examination and therapy.
An honest relationship with one’s self means confronting the shadow and recognizing one’s failings as an inherently imperfect being, as an entity that could never possibly adhere to every law or social norm provided by society. Instead of denying the shadow, the shadow must be integrated and accepted, and even loved. Only by embracing the shadow can a person begin to completely love himself in all of his beautiful aspects. Where there is separation and division, there can never be genuine love.
The impacts of a repressed shadow were noted in another Picasso painting called The Charnel House, painted in 1945:
(larger version here)
The Charnel House was being painted just as footage of the Holocaust was reaching civilians. It is a bleak painting.
One can see figures in the painting — a dead family lying near or underneath a table. There is 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.
The world of The Charnel House is a world of horror and death, and in that sense it resembles the themes 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, without capacity for harm or error: a fundamentally false world.
The Charnel House is the consequence of that repression. By never confronting the shadow, a person erroneously concludes that they are good, and always good; and their enemies are wrong and evil, and always wrong and evil. The world is divided into black and white, us versus them, right and wrong. In turn, this leads to atrocities of unspeakable horror, all committed in the name of “good.” Do you think the Crusades were waged in the name of evil? Do you think that Hitler believed he was wrong? Do you believe that Truman thought it was a bad idea to drop atomic weapons on Japanese cities? The inevitable consequences of a repressed shadow.
People often wonder what it would take for peace to come to the Earth. Peace is a journey which begins at the individual level, at the level of the relationship. When individual relationships are at peace, then the world will be at peace. Do you see this? There is no need for 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. Rare is the person who correctly understands that the crusade for peace and justice must begin in one’s own mind, with one’s own flaws and with one’s own personal demons. This is where real peace begins. It is the last place most people want to look.
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