Dilicrit - Heads or Tails1

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As I have said before, those who hide any differences or deviations are purified

by those who cannot conceal it. The later do that by absorbing those differences or

stains and carrying them away forever2

so that the former can remain stainless. In

other words, with the total elimination of the differences that we projected onto a

minority of people, we perpetuate the illusion that we ourselves are not different from the

majority of them. Therefore, in a paradoxical and perverse way, while mankind tries to

eliminate difference, it perpetuates it.

To do that, some people are chosen as escape-goats of the human-kind. Their

fate is to carry mankind malign traits, and as the dead dont talk, die in the desert, be

stoned to death, or yet, be burned alive in flames or kilns, subjugated, enslaved, made

an outcast, and so forth. As escape-goats are persons that differ from the majority, we

are comprehensibly terrified of being pointed out as different and thus become escape-

goats. At the end, to save our skin, we point out, stigmatize, and reject all those that

differ from us.

Still, we cannot always hide our differences by projecting them, and at moments,

we get face to face with human reality, fragility and finiteness. We may take this as a

real calamity that can finish our lives. However, is it so?

Difference and movement

Just as a coin, difference has two sides. If the one discussed above is gloomy,

the other one is bright. Lets see. Difference puts things into motion, proposes the new,

initiates disturbance, questions and destroys that which one that is already established.

Finally, it opens room to creation and modification.

An everyday example of difference related to movement is the water that

streams down rivers and falls in cascades because of the differences of the level of the

ground in its way. As a result, the motion of the water caused by the fall can be used to

generate electricity.

To enlarge even more this array of advantages, if it was not for differences it

would be impossible to identify people trough their finger-prints; we would have to forget

all about human, animal, mineral and vegetable variety; and discard the evolution of

species, the several urban and natural landscapes, as well as the cultural, linguistic,

architectural, and artistic diversity that enrich life and make it interesting. After all, total

2 Maringela Guelta, a visual artist, art-therapist and philosopher, told the origin of the term escape-goat to me.


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equality would make the world extremely dull and immutable. Life would not offer us any

surprise or challenges. Boredom would reign. Ultimately, there would be no movement,

and death in life would be a fact.

Even in religion difference is praised. For instance, Kali, the Hindi goddess of

death, as all Hindi deities, has simultaneously positive and negative features. I think she

embodies the positive aspects of difference as she kills old lives and bears new ones.

A similar thing happens with Shiva the god of dance. He destroys ancient and

worn out worlds to create new and fresh ones, and then, he imprints movement to life. In

other words, through dance and movement, he creates the cosmos.

Limit as essential to creation

I do not regard limit as something that can be overcome. I believe that a real limit

is something given. For instance: if we can stay underwater for a longer time, run faster

in less time, or jump from ever higher altitudes, in all these cases we are not breaking a

real limit, but rather extending our belief that the human body is capable of much more

than of what it actually is.

This way, the best diver does not stay underwater longer than a globefish, the

best runner cannot beat a cheetah, it is impossible for an air pilot to fly as well as a hawk

or even a beetle, and in proportion, a flee jumps much higher and further than any

golden medallist jumper. Therefore, in all these cases, no records were broken. I believe

that this is because the human being is always enclosed in a limited body. Actually,

bodies are limited things, and each one of them has its specific limits.

In the visual arts, especially in drawing, we can see that the limits of a given

shape are given by its outline. Without an outline or limit although indefinite it may be,

there can be no shape, and not even the perception of it. For instance, a blot can only

be perceived because of limits, since they highlight the stain from its background.

Without this blurred separation, we would not be able to see it at all.

In nature, everything also has a limit. According to Gestalt, we are not able to

imagine the world without limits. Sky, clouds, raindrops, puddles, creeks, rivers, and

seas are demarcated by it. In other words, if those forms are distinguished this way,

then limits are form.

I believe that the starting points of any given creation are the limits that reality

imposes upon the creator. Perhaps, this is the only real and concrete departing point for

a creation. For example, the size of the drawing paper; the theme of a choreography;


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the number of lines available to an article; the pre-requisites of a research; the budget

allowed to a given work; the material available for it; the ingredients required for a dish;

the existence or not of oxygen in the atmosphere; the environmental conditions of a

given place; the creators skills; the cultural and historic context that surrounds him or

her; all of these determine paths and choices.

Limits are also essential to order, and in turn, order is essential to creativity. As I

think the human creators emulate the divine ones, I feel free to give another example

drawn from religion. When we study different religions, we see that all the myths of

creation tell the story of the way chaos is changed into cosmos, which is ordered and

organized. In the Christian Myth of creation, God started his work by establishing

conditions to life. In other words, he organized the original chaos. Then, he set darkness

and light apart by creating limits to each of them. Afterwards, he did the same with water

and land until he colonized them with living beings. Shiva, as stated above, created the

world by setting things apart, or by ordering them through dance and movement.

Finally, adequacy rather than originality stands for creativity. It is not creative to

do whatever one wants whenever one wants. That would be to act like a character

created by a Brazilian author that decided to repair nature that she arrogantly deemed

wrong. So, she made pumpkins grow in tress as big as that fruit, transformed the cow

udders into taps to facilitate milking, and created earthworms with legs. Of course her

intents proved to be wrong, and everything went back to normal at the end of the book.

Therefore, rather than being wasteful or greedy, it is creative to do exactly what is

necessary. Putting the same thing in a different way, to be creative is to be elegant.

Then, it seems relevant to ask: What distinguishes chaos from order? If the

creators order and organize things, does he or she not have any limits or impose them

upon themselves? Can order exist without limits? Is freedom equal to the complete

inexistence of limits? Can one really be creative by disregarding every single limit?

Facing limits

One can say that sensitive and creative persons never avoid them. In fact, they

tackle them face to face in a courageous attitude. So did Picasso. When he was young,

he would draw a bull thoroughly; in his maturity, though, he would synthesise the shape

of a bull with very few strokes and lines.

Equally, if we take a close look at one of the paintings by Rembrandt in his

mature years, we see just blots of stained paint. Nevertheless, if we look at them from


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some distance, these blots reveal blazes, transparencies, jewels, and draperies as rich

as the ones he used to detail tirelessly in his youth.

Goya is not behind them, either. He was known as the best European painter of

his time. The originality and emotion that flow from his paints, and the freedom of his

style, highlight his work at the end of the eighteenth, and beginning of the nineteenth

centuries.

Despite his huge production, only after he was forty, he created real original

works. An event very important to this change occurred in 1792 when Goya got severely

ill. In consequence, he got temporarily paralysed, partially blind and permanently deaf.

Neo-classicism in vigour at that time, aimed to deny subjection to any matter by

praising highly the purity of form and ideal order. In opposition to it, perhaps because of

his confronts with the fugacity and imperfection of human life, Goya chose to face the

concrete reality of matter instead of denying it. Then, through his art, he fought

darkness, tyranny and imposture, the unexpected faces taken by the French Revolution.

According to Goyas visual messages, the Revolution turned into darkness, since

Napoleon fought blood-thirsty wars and dominated most of Europe in order to spread

out the freedom it professed. By accepting the finiteness of matter as well as the

apparent restriction caused by suffering, Goya said that we overcome the cosmic

powers or violent happenings of history because of our spiritual dimension.

Restriction, constraint, and limitation?

Certainly reality imposes limits, but unlike we usually think, they are not coercive

nor prevent us from dreaming or expressing our dreams. On the contrary, limits

consolidate creation. Ostrower states that like the margins of a river, or the coast of an

island or continents, limits allow us to explore the deep water safely because we will

always be able to return to the safe ground whenever it is necessary.

That agrees with Goyas beliefs when he stated that the creative human beings

must not deal only with beauty, but with human life as a whole, be it beautiful or hideous.

He could assert that once he witnessed beauty turn into ugliness exactly because of this

error. He saw that matter and things created from it, last for a certain time before

wearing out and rotting away. He found out that death and suffering are inevitable facts

of life. He recognised that loneliness is everyones burden.

Trough his work, he showed us that the independence of ones ideas and their

power lies in ones ability to accept and learn how to deal with that existential yoke. So,


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limits are also closely linked to ingenuity, ability, real mastery of a technique, maturity,

and true freedom. (Ostrower, 1991)

The same thing applies to Gods creation. Consider a river: when it finds a

blockage, it does not stop flowing; instead, it simply goes around it and continues

flowing in another direction. Along its way many things may happen, and a little stream

that trickles down from icy mountains, can reach the plains far below, run through a thick

rainforest, receive waters from several other rivers, and grow to gigantic proportions like

the Amazon. Consequently, rather than stopping the river, the blockages define its

course. In floods, though, several of these blockages are like disregarded by the

overflowing water. The river, then, goes out of its course, and does not run inside its

margins anymore. In that case, we have the marshes, and often destruction and death.

Final Considerations

When we create, we simultaneously deal with the immutable reality together with

fluid dreams and wishes. Reality without imagination becomes bear and crushing

whereas imagination without reality is no better than madness and insanity.

I conclude that, if difference stands for limits, and limits for forms, limits are

essential to the creative process as they are about giving shape to something.

Consequently, limits, form, and creativity, even if apparently apart from each other, areas close among themselves as the head and tail sides of a coin.

I also think we must urgently review our values concerning limits and differences,

once they were built up along a sick history. Through them, we oppress and annihilate

those who are different from us. Through those values, we project our dark, negative,

violent, stupid, fragile, evil, ignorant, primitive, side onto our neighbours. Then,

it is time we stop throwing stones at otherpeoples glasshouses and take exactly what

we mostly want to hide upon ourselves. It is time we begin to think, backed up by

several examples that just as tails and heads are the reverse of each other, so aredarkness and light, health and illness, life and death, and so forth. Only by accepting our

imperfections or ugliness, we can find out our strongest power, and our immense

beauty.


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