Heroes Not Zombies

I had a day out in Aubeterre recently. It’s one of “Les plus beaux villages de France” (an official designation given to several French villages considered to be “the most beautiful”. I’ve been several times before but on this occasion there was a pottery festival underway. It’s striking to see just how different and distinctive each potter’s work is, laid out on the various stalls around the village.

However, this work wasn’t even on a stall. It was laid out on the upstairs windowsills of a house. The potter had a notice at ground level inviting you to look up and see if you could identify the different characters – several were listed – the thinker, the doubter, the sad one, the reckless one etc.

I love how the potter has managed to make each little person so expressive and I was reminded of Anthony Gormley’s “The Field”, one of my all time favourite works (search on my blog for “the field”).

I took a while to photograph them all and see if I could identify some of them. But you know what struck me after a few moments?

This is something we do. We pick out a characteristic or trait we have spotted in someone then we give them that label in our minds. We think of somebody as a complainer, as shy, as extrovert or as fearful. And the danger is we reduce them in the process.

We don’t do this just according to behaviours or emotions. We do it in other ways too….nationality, race, or gender for example.

Sometimes we do it with medical diagnoses. A doctor or nurse might refer to a patient as “the diabetic”, or “the heart failure” etc. Some people even identify themselves by their diagnosis, wearing a chronic illness as a kind of badge.

I get it. Labels and categories can be a useful way of starting to understand someone. But, oh, are they dangerous!!

They are dangerous because they reduce. They reduce the complexity of reality to categories, hiding uniqueness by turning individuals into “examples of”.

They are dangerous because they are judgements and “judgement stops thought”, as the general semanticists taught.

They are dangerous because they feed prejudices, oppositions and the tendency to see the world in terms of “us and them”.

So I prefer to look again at these little pottery characters and see them, not as different people, or worse, different types of people, but to see them as some of the aspects of the Self.

After all, we can all identify with a selection of these characters, maybe even all of them. We are complex, nuanced, multidimensional, vastly interconnected beings and within us all we can see different facets, different modes, different adaptive responses and different archetypes, all of which become activated for a time according to the events and experiences of our lives.

What we have in common are these themes, these threads, these archetypes, and what makes us unique is the fact that not a single one of them captures “who we are”.