FROM WARRIOR TO WIZARD
Borrowing these terms from Stephen Gilligan's depiction of human evolution according to what he names archetypes, I can't resist drawing some parallels with our impulse towards art as well as what I perceive of the actual world.
It goes without saying that any representation of the world I make here will be entirely and totally subjective. How could it be otherwise? At every moment I observe a world knowing that it's "only" mine.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves!
First of all, we were talking about the warrior.
This is the armor, sometimes noble and sometimes aggressive, that seems to run through my reality, when I hear the news of the day, when I accompany more and more men or women in hypnotic sessions, exhausted by feelings of blockage or lack of fulfillment in their lives. Also when I observe myself, sometimes impatient or rebellious, sometimes very intensely in circumstances that are often very common.
And observing this warrior, the one who has gone through so much to get here, the one who is ready to draw his sword, as they say, to reach the Himalayas, provided he has been promised it, this Don Quixote who fights until he no longer knows for whom or for what... Watching him, I can hear the war stories and the cries of shock, legitimately, wanting to fight against violence, even if it means adding even more violence. Will it ever end?
When will we stop fighting each other? These are the inner cries of our warriors, like the exhausted firefighters who exist as long as the fires exist.
How can we not be saddened by injustice, by stories that repeat themselves and the pain they rekindle, even from afar? How can we not grow tired of it and, sickened by our own fatigue, end up resenting even the swallow that passes nonchalantly over the sky, unaware of anything?
Here we are on the brink of what French philosopher Cynthia Fleury calls "resentment" in her detailed and pertinent study of the individual as well as the collective.
This particular feeling, which points to our undigested frustrations, like an age of bulimia where we no longer have the time or the right to live out our emotions, one after the other, would overwhelm us all if we didn't have within us the drive of a warrior going to the front, whatever the cost. Here we are at the heart of a certain "performance" system.
CHANGING TIME
Just as we move from summer to autumn, when the foliage of the trees dies, naturally, without the tree feeling any shame, embarrassment or resentment, so our own rhythm slows down as night falls earlier in our thatched cottages and the cold invites us to slip under our comforters. Without even noticing the change of season, the change of rhythm...
The warrior, without warning, has laid down his weapons! By force of circumstance. In this world of ephemeral forms, bodies come to an end. At some point, consciously or unconsciously, the body stops. Or transforms. A belief has taken root in me since many recent explorations of the human soul: life always works out for the best, even when it seems terrible! Even where it would seem worse. Just as a tree grows by twisting, but grows all the same, to avoid a post in its growth, our mechanisms sometimes take circuitous, not to say twisted, paths to allow life to grow. Sometimes to the point of death itself, i.e. regeneration...
This is the realization that signals "healing" if ever there was one. It is the turning point from warrior to magician. Until we meet the magician, we're still not out of the woods, I'd say...
So what is the wizard?
Art is not an end in itself. But is there any end to life? Nothing that I know of that is not to be accomplished. The expression "to fail" or "to win" one's life are so many optical illusions that run through our stories and divert us as long as we still believe in stories...
But, more profoundly, when an individual, and even more so a whole society, no longer has a good enough reason to fight each other, to struggle and to want to re-establish what has not been and therefore will not be, there is a new horizon, that of the warrior who, kneeling on the ground, seems even greater by his presence.
Between past and future, the present takes over.
And if we still doubt for a moment the vital nature of art in each of our lives as human beings, it will be here the demonstration that there can fundamentally be no healing without art, and no art without healing.
However, I'm not talking about the presence of art as something to be added to all the others in our social system. No, I'm talking about the ability - indeed, the necessity - of each of our cells to constantly create, renew and invent. I'm talking about art-being, just as French author Christiane Singer defined love not as a feeling but as the very substance of life.
It's not a question of wanting to be an artist, as the song would rather crudely put it... But to realize that there is no breath without music, no gaze without landscape, no soul without song. And that, just as a child knows so well how to unwrap a gift he sees in front of him without asking any more questions, we have this immense gift within us that is impossible for us to see, but possible for us to unwrap on condition that we go through the Other in whom we see the gift.
This Other can be music...
To all the everyday magicians that we are,
I wish us a wonderful November!
Hélène TYSMAN
