Welcome to Paint and Ashes

"It may be surprising to associate the diseased with the divine and culture with deformity. We do so want the gods to be pristine, models in marble on Olympus, pure as driven snow. But they are not without their shadows, their afflictions and infirmities. As they are beyond time (athnetos, “immortal”), so these shadows of disorder that they portray in their myths reappear in those human events that are not affected by time, that is, in chronic disorders. Since we are created in their images, we can only do in time what they do in eternity. Their eternal afflictions are our human infirmities. … I look to arts for understanding, to ritual for enactments, and to the lives of men and women of the past and how they came through. I need something further than community and civilisation for they may be too human, too visible. I need imaginal help from tales and images, idols and altars, and the creatures of nature, to help me carry what is so hard to carry personally and alone. Education of sensitivity begins in the back ward, culture in chronic disorder.”

Hillman, James. A Blue Fire. HarperPerennial 1991