POSITIVE SHADOWS

prometheus light of blind foresight

m. evans

“In one short sentence understand it all; every art of mankind comes from Prometheus.”

Aeschylus (Prometheus Bound II 506-7)

The original myth of Prometheus, as father of mankind, emblematically embodies the vision of a great designer. He is the primal artist/craftsman and his creation, man, is the precursor of all human creation; the design to which all design is designated. Aeschylus presents Prometheus in the remaining part of his original trilogy as a suffering visionary creator, a champion of mankind, a prophet who foresaw that his gift of fire would help man to create, as he instructs them, and to follow in his likeness. Foreseeing the hardships he would have to endure for the longevity of his creation, he was able to incorporate Zeus’s torment into the divine creative spirit of man. The evils that fell upon man from the jar of Pandora are transformed, through Prometheus’ final gift, into forces capable of inspiring creative action. Death provides us with the will to live, hope provides us with the will to aspire, sickness provides us with the will to health, and forgetfulness provides us with the will to remember. Psychological defences give rise to mechanisms of repression, a way to displace or defer the void and instead replace it with new creative productions. These mechanisms of psychological repression make available an understanding of tropes of creation, tropes that employ the design artistry of imagination, imagination lit by the primal gift of fire. “Tropes or defences (for here rhetoric and psychology are a virtual identity) are the “natural” language of the imagination in relation to all prior manifestations of imagination.”1

Prometheus, etymologically meaning foresight and metaphorically denoting the “carrier of Light”, may be considered emblematic of an enlightened designer, enlightened in the consequence, force and power of his creation. He was an individual amongst the gods, a visionary whose struggle against the tyrannical power of Zeus held fast the individual conscience that reason and wisdom will one day prevail. Being a Titan, he is immortal, and thus the excess of his suffering returns an even stronger conviction, perhaps only available to the infinity of time, in the final revelations of reason and wisdom. Prometheus designed mankind for the site of the eternal now, a space from which projections of the future may be imagined and introjections of memory may be recalled. Prometheus travels in the space of anticipation, before the present, but reifies the present by way of transporting/carrying the future to the present. He carries the light of the future (the future thereby being in constant darkness) into the present; however, his gift of ‘blind hope’ also conceals the darkness of the future and instead allows us to conceive of a future in the face of its ultimate promise – complete darkness/death/void. The constant return of a new vision of the future elevates the imaginative force and reason of our convictions beyond the inevitable sufferings of mortal life. “The only imaginary being, resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan;” that we suffer in life due to the torments of Zeus, delivered with foresight due to Prometheus giving us the forbidden fire, is owing to the spirit of Prometheus, “the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends.”2

1.Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003. p.69. 2.Percy Bysshe Shelley, Preface to Prometheus Unbound,

With the constant transformation of the present by the light of the future our relationship with the future is constantly affected by memory. Memory is forever in dialogue with imagination in such a way that every memory we recall is transformed by our present, as is every imaginative projection. One is incapable of projecting future imaginings without remembering in sympathy with them. It is with desire that we cast imaginative projections into the darkness of the future, and it is desire that reforms our memories of the past.

There exists here a conceit of light; a concept of being centred on a deception. In Prometheus Unbound “we are told that in our life the shadow cast by love is always ruin, which is the head’s report, but the heart [] goes on saying that if there is to be coherence at all, it must come through Eros.”1 To love is also the ability to repress the fear of death, the ability to cast a light into the darkness of the future where ultimately we know our ruin lies (in death), this is blind hope – the action of a daemonizing trope of hyperbole. Or as Thomas Hardy in his last poems (1927) He Resolves to Say No More and We are Getting to the End posits, rejecting any vision of hope:

We are getting to the end of visioning The impossible within this universe.

The impossible within this universe is lost to those who have no way of reforming their past, nor a way of desiring a future.

1.Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003. p.22.

Prometheus designed man with an internal and necessary contradiction: the ability to blind himself with the light of desire from the bleak impending darkness of inevitable death. This ability or power is a defence, an interjectory defence against the evils set upon man by Zeus via Pandora and a projective defence that can reform those evils in antipathy with desire. The vessel of destruction (the jar) carried by the vessel of desire (Pandora) is received by man along with Prometheus’ final gift of blind hope as the ‘finishing touch’ of a perfected vision of design. Man becomes the destructible with the power to immortalise himself (spirit) through desire (see book of Shadow Portraits), a process which may be repeated again and again, developed, formed and reformed in a myriad of guises, transcendent to all inspired and informed forms. The scene of life as catastrophe is the only stage on which the creation of a meaningful life can be formed. This contradiction juxtaposes the competing forces and in the successful cases of the strong or deep, reveals the competence man has in wielding wit (knowledge – art and science) for which Zeus sent his handmaiden. Where the vessel of destruction is broken and its evils unleashed, the vessel of desire which carries them must be employed to contain and confine them. Desire becomes a way of containing the evils destined to plague man and instead wielding them in such as way as to inspire creative forces. Their capture and contraction by desire limits their destructive power whilst maintaining the force of their possibility.

Prometheus’s withdrawal from his creation after the reception of his final gift makes way for mans own creations – or rather, makes possible mans self-creation. The “breaking-apart-of-the-vessels” (vessel of destruction) must be achieved by man to set the scene of life as catastrophe upon which he can create himself in a meaningful way, developed through desire. Man’s self-creation is his contribution to Prometheus’ work; a work that is never finished, can never be finished.

An accent of excess is encountered with mans creations. Constantly haunted by a repressed lack, man must constantly re-affirm the continued possibility of becoming, of filling, of overcoming the void. The scene of catastrophe, upon which his creations populate and safeguard the interpretation of meaning, echo of lost precursors. Previous creations, portraits of the spirits who have come before, fall into the backdrop of catastrophe and their interpretations start to reflect in the interpretations of desire constructed anew. The revisionist of this scene encounters a sense of despair. His own contraction or withdrawal from his creation and distanced view reveal the influence of precursors and herald its future place in the past. The scene of despair, the place of the revisionist, must be overcome by the artist of the future, a future that must find in and through the works of precursors a way to be early.

Again and again, the repetitive creations of the imagination, as both works of defence and desire against the darkness of death and void, fill the pages of history and furnish scenes of instruction. The revisionist, as an early artist, can employ the work of precursors in such a way as to never require their own vessels to be broken. The scene of despair drives the revisionist to create a place for the return of the precursor, where the vessels of destruction and desire may stand intact as vital presages of new possibilities. The ultimate trope of hyperbole is that employed by the rigorous revisionist, a trope that utilises the desires and spirit of the past to contain, and even suspend, the destructions of the future. The scene of despair alights in a new delight, the delight of having introjected the possibility of the past and united it with the projected possibility of the future.

These photograms, “light” “writings”, exhibit poetically the phenomenon of light passing through a vessel and its impression caught on photographic paper. Photography captures the impression, the traces, light has left on light sensitive paper. Glass allows the light to pass directly through it however the engravings, a type of scaring of the glass, impedes its travel and the result, as a photogram is a negative of the photograph, is a whitening on the surface of the paper. “Light” “writings” are the negative or the reverse of lights’ impression. What is dark is where light has touched and affected, what is white is where it has been obstructed. In photograms light writes backwards.

Light passes through the vessel without breaking it, transparency is a condition championed by modern aesthetics. One can see through, be reflected by, be securely encased in glass, and as a material it exhibits both strength and delicacy. Vessels of glass need not be broken for enlightenment to pass and to write in hindsight what it has encountered along the way on the sensitive papers of history and memory. To view history, to recall experience, we look backwards; the photogram is a representation of this.

To view precursors, their spirit and its multifarious forms, as transparent is to view through them with a light capable of penetrating their defences and revealing their secrets. Where the light of knowledge is finely tuned an x-ray of the underlying sentiments of a precursor become visible along with their inspiration. The many insights published and expounded on the spirits of artistic movements, their lineage of becoming, their meanings and their generation foreshadow the impressions these acts will mark in the future. I have mine, as every artist has theirs echoing through them. An artist, as Kurt Schwitters remarks, is the most sensitive of beings, we are vessels of many materials that reverberate with the echoes of many influences. The art I aspire to producing is that which need not break its own vessels but that saves through revision the precursors that have suffered and endured the breaking and revising of their own.

The scene of catastrophe, as an image of both creation and destruction, gathers together the many incarnations and substitutions, displacements and repetitions, births and becomings of meaning. In short, the scene of catastrophe encapsulates all interpretations of meaning, all perspectives of meaning. Upon this stage meaning finds its force through a kind of regression, “a reversion to earlier phases of development” that poetically and magically become active through reinterpretation. The metonymy of meaning suffers through a continual, almost obsessional, separation from origins that is doomed to keep repeating itself. This doom however, which sees the continual fragmentation of meaning, “prepares the ruined way for the over-restituting movement of daemonization, the repression or hyperbole that becomes a belated or counter-Sublime.”1 To tune the light of knowledge in such a way as to reveal the ‘ruined way’ is also to reveal the immortal and primary origin from whence it came. With the vessels of destruction and desire intact the belated becomes early. The motives, fears, defences and repressions, dreams and desires of the Promethean vision become prophetic images for the returned, as if Prometheus’ original creation were recreated with his future already a memory.

1.Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003. p.99

Mankind can contribute to the Scene of instruction – upon the broken vessels of others so he need not break his own… to save the precursor.