SISIFOS

ART AS A THERAPEUTIC TOOL

SITE SPECIFIC INSTALLATION
CREATED FOR THE PUBLIC SPACE
AN INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH PROJECT

Before Hippocrates initiated medical science, the main therapeutical methods in ancient Greece had a divine dimension. Their main feature was the idea of a contact with the afterworld which would offer answers and cures. It is a seemingly distant dimension, which today appears to us as dominated by the darkness of what is irrational and forever lost. 

In truth many common elements in the pre-scientific therapies still survive and prove decisive when we wish to consider a world that is different from the scientific one, in order to cure the maladies that afflict us, as well as – and perhaps most importantly – the ones that burden our souls.  

We still share many things with the ancient people and always will. Not because of their supposed superiority but due to the eternal gaze of those who decided to fight against the biggest obstacle to our fulfillment as human beings. That is the hybris, the arrogance of individuality, the vanity of individualism, our presumption in not feeling part of the whole of animality, of the nature in which we are immersed, of the cycle of life and death in which each one of us is thrown into simply because we are living creatures. This is the sensation you will get if you participate in the healing experience prepared by Angelos Christophilopoulos and Maria Karathanou in their latest project Sisyphus.  

But let us start at the beginning. In an era seemingly lost. And let us ask ourselves how healing took place.

Here is a summary of the scholars’ reports.

The patients were accepted in the sacred sanctuaries of Asclepius, son of Apollo and were prepared at first by means of an appropriate diet. After that they were accompanied in dark places, holes dug in the ground, uncomfortable and cold burial recesses where they lay and waited. Then the physician’s voice broke the silence: a voice laden with sound, formulas, verses and monotonous chants that prevailed upon the meaning of the words. The physician’s aim was to make the patients lose contact with reality and enter another dimension, often leading them to sleep or experience a state of loss of their conscience, a state of ecstasis in which they abandoned their physical body and lost the sense of their individuality. Sinister sounds, sudden flashes, darkness and coldness all contributed in creating an atmosphere of catabasis that could push the patients to terrorizing, horrid, abyssal visions, as well as unusual, disturbing or illuminating dreams. Once the patients came out of this state they narrated their experience and visions and dreams to the physician who consequently decided on the cure. 

Some of these rituals described by the scholars may be laughed at and dismissed as archaic and lost but we would be wrong in doing so. I am not talking about a contest between scientific and alternative medicine today while we are trying to unveil the ancients’ secret. Our aim is not to revive experiences that are now outdated. What we are interested in is understand their power or better still: their eternity.

In fact, what the physicians desired most occured at the moment that the patients were physically and spiritually prepared and had to face the harshness of an abyssal state while their senses were fully stimulated and their psychological conditions led them into feeling lost. Nietzsche, using Schopehauer’s words called it the loss of the principium individuationis. More simply we can say it is the loss of the sense of our individuality, that prevailing state when the experience of death gains the upper hand. Dying before dying – that was the goal for the ancients that remains still today: a vision, a pain, a set of perceptions or in short abandoning themselves to a dimension in which individuality makes no sense any more letting everything else it is composed of prevail. The everythingness or the nothingness in which they will end up when they die, the everythingness or nothingness to which they will return when their individual physical body will be no more.   

Dying before dying means in fact experiencing our irrationality as individuals and profoundly perceiving the animal domain of which we are part, that great infinite cycle of nature which all living creatures have to follow from generation to generation. Pay attention: we really are talking about all living creatures. Meaning not just the animals gifted with logos, i.e. human beings but also those that do not use speech or reason. Yet the experience of a death that precedes death is given only to those gifted with logos, those who can use logos and can be deprived of it.

It seems strange to talk about these things. Yet it is right here that the greatest game of human beings is played, the greatest and most current today, the one that we can experience through Sisyphus. 

Actually it is an experience that is not at all lost or past or obliterated by time. One that only us humans can bring to light. The issue is simpler that we think.

Before dying the experience of death is allowed to almost all of us, unless we are unlucky enough to die really young. The fact is that we all know from a very young age that we are destined to die. We know so because it is narrated, said, explained to us. In spite of the fact that it is impossible to explain the rationality of a prospect that is thrust open only to close again, adults speak to children and – using more or less adequate words – try to tell the truth even if they are compelled to withhold the innate truth. The movement of logos here is superb. Speech communicates but at the same time distances. It states clearly the fundamental truth of life i.e. death but then pushes it away in order to help the child not give up in front of that abyssal revelation.

It is of course the same movement of logos that is repeated inside each and every one of us. We all know that we will die one day but it is our own reasoning that pushes away the thought. Otherwise everyday life would be impossible. Projects would be impossible. Any expectation would be impossible. We cannot live our lives repeating to ourselves that we will die. We are conscious of it logically but it is the same logic that helps us keep the thought at stake.

Outside logos as speech and logic, the experience of death is something different. It is not an understanding. It is not a knowledge. There is no logos that pushes us towards it or away from it. Simply because, it is an experience. It is what happens to all of us when we have to come to terms with a mourning, an absence, the void, death, living death.

There are many ways to experience death. Some are overwhelming. Others annihilate. Others are so fast that it seems one has not experienced them. But whether it is expected due to a long illness or caused by a quick and unexpected event its supreme power will always be felt. And no matter the power of the experience our logos will always try to rationalize it excluding it from the things that can be said often through the use of a very simple word: “inhuman”.

And yet there is nothing more human than death. It is death with the upheaval it provokes as its fundamental feature that dictates the exact opposite to those who experience it. There is nothing as decisive as death. Life and death are tied together. Death is the meaning of life and life is the meaning of death. 

This is the animal kingdom. The dimension of beings thrown into a finite condition in which days go by to make individuals stronger and as they do they then weaken gradually only to perish in the end. Beings condemned to live only in order to die. As in the famous riddle of the Sphinx solved by Oedipus: beings that use four legs in the morning, two at lunchtime and three in the evening.  And the more legs they use the weaker they are: while their voice remains the same but is of no great use. For the only thing that serves is the experience of death we have before we die. An experience that can transform us. Pushing us into living with a new awareness.

We know well how mourning changes profoundly those who experience it. Yet as mourning is not the only way of experiencing death, the ancient physicians tried to create the conditions that would make such an experience feasible even with artificial means. So that patients could confront themselves with their finite nature and be reborn into a new life.

A kind of initiation therefore (not by chance comparable to what was experienced during the Eleusinian Mysteries), a path that lets the patients look at the abyss and be reborn into a new life for the time they have left. A path during which they lose any spatiotemporal coordinates, any sense of their own individuality, they perceive their mortal animality and realize they are just finite beings, one of the billions that walk through this time and space.

Here is the cure needed more than ever for the individuals of a Western world that suffers from opulence and vanity. The cure that will allow death to gain the significance that has been stolen from it, obscuring it, hiding it, making it a taboo issue. The cure that makes us all, feel as part of that great nature of which we can only feel the breath. The cure that will allow us to avoid  the illness of individuality.   

It is a healing path of loss and repossession which obviously cannot be prescribed by modern doctors. But one that can be proposed by artists, intellectuals who reflect on logos and know how to dismantle it, writers, photographers, creators capable of showing individuals their place in the cycle of births and deaths.

It is them who can use the words of Heraclitus and Parmenides, two of the greatest healers of ancient times that are traditionally viewed as opposed to each other, almost enemies. It was Heraclitus and Parmenides who showed the way to what is common to all of us and who opposed the malady of individualism and vanity with fierce and superb insults.

Parmenides said:

«[…] Μortals knowing naught wander in two minds;

For hesitation guides the wandering thought in their breasts,

 so that they are borne along stupefied like men deaf and blind.

Undiscerning crowds» [1]

Heraclitus said:  

« Fools when they hear are like the deaf; of them does the proverb bear witness that they are absent when present». [2]

Matteo Nucci

Translated by: Anna Maria Markentoudi

---

[1] Excerpt 6. Diels – Kranz, The Prosocratics, vol. A, Papadima Publications, Athens 2011, p. 462

 « […] where ignorant mortals wander / divided, embarrassment in their breasts / it rules their unstable thinking and they paralyze/ deaf and blind at the same time, bewildered, crowd without judgment».

[2] Excerpt 34. p. 346: «Unwise are those who, if they still hear [the right thing], they look like deaf people˙ as the saying goes for them “ present – absent”».