RODO

The hero

Being a hero is something that, nowadays, hides behind an image of superiority and fictional power given to a character that bases his life in good values. However, in reality, we consider a hero someone very far from being magical, as long as he keeps the view of life through the best of values and in benefit of humanity and nature. Indeed, is a concept that is being constantly used in our era, since the creation and recreation of stories happening to a heroic character have been boosted up by the raise of cinema and the world wide spreading of literature works. We all dive into hundreds of different stories with a meaning that is brought to us by the protagonist, who lives an adventure and returns with the learning at the end (in a more complicated or simple way for the viewer or reader’s understanding).

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This analysis was first given and fully explained by J. Campbell, an American mythologist and writer of the past century, in his works around the concept that’s been alive in men’s mind and in the necessity to write all through humanity’s history, as he calls monomyth. The pattern he extracts from stories written by the most ancient recovered works to the most recent, explains the stages that the protagonist goes through until the end. This pattern could be seen from far as a change that undergoes a person in life, in which he changes by circumstances and achieves a higher state of knowledge after, transforming the end of this in the next beginning for a different change. Is the cycle that man lives in to grow in body and mind until death.

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In the paintings, this fight with our own self is represented by the image of the hand, a part of our body that we use to work, to create, to reach, to hold on, as the depiction of humans’ strength. In the first sketches, a hand is displayed performing an action of opening or breaking, in representation of the change of circumstances, and the acceptance of the call for the adventure described by J. Campbell. He describes this concept in myths as the main character is driven to live an adventure that will change him, and bring a certain truth to his life for him to grow and return to the starting point with a teaching, parallel to Plato’s metaphor in the allegory of the cave. Darkness is presented in the paintings as the phenomenon described by the psychiatrist Carl Jung as collective unconscious, which brings up the reality of the unknown hiding behind a door, behind ourselves, or in our inside, relevant to all as human beings.

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In the main painting, called ‘’The hero’s journey’’, a hand is represented in the foreground in a surrealistic style. The fingers are broken as walls, and let see an empty dark inside from where stairs are born and go up to the sky. In the middle of the palm there is a dark key hole. The background is presented as a natural cliff landscape. The image came up from the idea of the concept of hero as the one who sees the door to his main adventure in life in his own self, as the already mentioned collective unconscious, in his own hand, and that is a journey entering his inner darkness and achieving light walking up the stairs. There are four different types of stairs as a representation of the variety of ways that exist for this matter. Furthermore, the stairs themselves stand for the possibility of walking them up or back down, as the human reaches light and, hurt by the enlightening, hides in his inner darkness again to propel himself back up to a further step, or even to a different way up to the sky. This visualization of the concept is also related with the ancient Greek philosophical dialogues written by Plato, more certainly in the ‘’Allegory of the Cave’’.

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‘’And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any one of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck around and walk and look towards the fire light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen in the shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision - - -What will be his reply? As you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them, will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?

Far truer.

And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take refuge in the objects of vision which he can see and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?

True, he said.

And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent and held fast until he is forced into the presence of the sun itself. Is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities.’’

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As exposed in the allegory, human beings are considered blinds to truth, as they live in the darkness of a cave, where they are protected of any damage but deprived of knowledge. The inner drive in our nature to learn the operation of the world leads us to leave the cave, but when this is done we are first hurt by the light and cannot see anything properly, until we become used to it, which is a metaphor for how we are hit by a former encounter with a truthful fact. The assumption of something new allows us to grow as slowly as our eyes become used to a more powerful light than the one we are usually surrounded by, and once we have reached this level of knowledge we return to darkness changed inside, facing the disbelief of our equals who haven’t found out that certain truth. The strength of a hero relies in being able to overcome the pressure of society against this pain and embrace the pursuit of truth as a way of life.

 

‘’Now Zarathustra looked at the people and he was amazed. Then he spoke thus: “Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and overman – a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still. What is great about human beings is that they are a bridge and not a purpose: what is lovable about human beings is that they are a crossing over and a going under.’’