T-Lymphocytes

Playing with the letters, where MYTHOS (myth) takes its proper place of Théasis (viewing), THÝMOS (the thymus), or perhaps THYMÓS (rage), makes its appearance, and inevitably the artist raises the “game” into drawing.

And so the T is born. But what is the T?

In Philosophy, the T is the space of opposites. The scales, we might say, where good and evil, or perhaps the hero and the demon, coexist, so that one day we, the souls, coming out of our earthly caves, may find out who we really are. In Medicine, “T lymphocytes” are the cells that carry memory imprinted on them…. Coincidence? Aristotle said that “chance is ignorance of the facts”… The ignorance of who we really are, beyond names, jobs, roles….

….“Red thread tied, on the spinning wheel wound, give it a kick to turn around, let the fairy tale begin….”

This is roughly how the tale of the Hero Theseus begins, who, with a ball of thread, the MITOS, set out to find the right path to slay the Demon Minotaur….

We grew used to hearing mythology as a simple, shallow little fairy tale, just enough to put us to sleep, and in our lethargy we lost its essence.

We built great cities, colossal, labyrinthine, to hide the voices of our inner child. We handed out roles, values, jobs, powers, names, attributes, definitions, aphorisms; we arranged our small lives in little boxes and, ready at last, “protected”, we let ourselves drift with the passing of time….

Where the first pulse of life began to become an embryo, all the information, all the codes, our passports were already prepared for the journey of birth…. Our first breath, the first cry, our first bodily needs, the scent, the first memory, of the nursing mother…..

All of us have a second chance, as we grow up, to become Heroes, even the Demons….

All children are little angels, without sins, without bloodstained hands, without twisted minds, all pure and ready to enter Paradise….! All of them? So the tyrants, the rapists, the murderers, even they were once children?! The heroes were children too, and, as children, did they dream of becoming heroes?!

It is habit that shapes our lives. It is reality that passes us by, or rather passes through us, and leaves us as incomplete spectators. We play games of strategy and power, we become superpowers, and so we learn that everything is just like a game, and that the only real thing is our own small personal share…. the money, the nice house, the degree, the family, you know, all those proper things we are programmed to do: to buy a car and of course, but of course, to become Heroes!

This, I believe, is how the last dragons and dinosaurs were wiped out. The king of the land would say to his would-be son-in-law: if you want my princess’s hand, kill the monster that burns our crops and frightens my taxpayers. And off went the beardless boy to chase his dreams, wiping out the flora and fauna that were “a nuisance”, becoming the good one, the perfect one, the Hero; whether he was the worst or the best person in the world, nobody cared….

But History is always written by the victor, simply because the vanquished is not quite alive enough to write it!

So, after the annihilation of the Monsters, the Behemoths and the Demons by the “small”, the “tiny” Heroes of the fairy tales, some saw the injustice and, considering the necessity that drives all things along their paths, concluded that for all of us to be able to coexist on this planet, we, the small ones, must “protect” the Monsters, Demons and Behemoths.

As the curtain of oblivion opens, light rushes into us and blinds us if we are not ready to accept it as our true nature; and the truth is that all of us carry both roles. All of us, that is, are potentially both Heroes and Monsters, as great as we are small; it is our choices that, in the end, “define” us.

Put simply, we could say that in the pairs of opposites chosen for this exhibition, this record, the Heroes are the various forms of power over the Demons and Behemoths, seen with a sarcastic eye, simply because reality is so extreme!

All the pairs come from mythology, which, it seems, steers our lives always and everywhere!!!

Text: Athanasios Beroutsos, 2016