2016/11/29: Tradition and Things That Don't Fit with Jonathan Pageau

Today I'm talking to Jonathan Pazzo, who I think is touched with more than a little bit of genius, and he's a québécois artist and a carver sculptor. I'd like to start by letting Jonathan tell us who he is and what he does.

Okay, so yeah, I'm an icon carver, which means that I make carvings for churches and for people of traditional images. So I get commissions, and I work within a traditional language of Christian art, meaning that for about five years now, I've been working full-time. Before that, I actually lived in Africa for seven years, working with artisans there, trying to help them in their business practices and their design skills. So I have a very kind of strange and varied background. I studied fine art at Concordia University here in Montreal in the late '90s.

Oh yeah? So how many full-time icon carvers do you suppose there are in Canada?

In Canada, I'm the only one. Actually, in the entire world, we're very few. I actually know most of them.

Um, yeah. Well, it doesn't sound like a very easy thing to monetize. So how in the world did you go from being an art student trained at Concordia to being a carver of icons?

I studied painting and drawing at Concordia. On the surface, I was doing really well. I actually finished first in my class. But there was a malaise the whole time I was working there because I'm a Christian. I grew up a Christian and I was trying to figure out how that would connect to my art practice. So I was looking, trying to figure out symbolic languages in painting and trying to find ways to talk about bigger questions, metaphysical ideas in my paintings. But I didn't have the language. So I was really just groping around, almost blind. And at the end of my time at Concordia, the professor who was supervising me, she basically said on the very last day, she said, "What are you doing here? This is not the place for you." After that, it kind of left me dangling, you know, and questioning a lot of things.

So what sort of education did you get at Concordia?

All the fine arts programs, now in I think pretty much, it was 100% based on contemporary art practices. Very few universities, very few programs teach technical skills or teach you how to draw in a classical way. So they're not really teaching anything; it's hard to know exactly what they're doing. I guess ever since the 1960s there has been this idea in the art world that technical skills and ability just aren't that important and that the important thing is to find your, I would say, your political voice. But it's very strange to me that this has occurred because it seems to me that before your voice is anything but an off-color croak, you have to become a disciple of a discipline and an apprenticeship, and learn the tools and trades of your craft and learn how to be an artist because there's a technical end to that.

I mean, this is really almost an image of the world as it stands now. The purpose, or the stated purpose of modern especially postmodern art was to free the artist, right? To break away all the things that were holding the artists back in terms of rules and in terms of just the way things were presented. But what ended up happening is that there were no more legitimate, objective or strong legitimizing structures around the art. The only thing left was politics and relationships and status, basically.

So, you know, one wonders—there's a big literature on creativity and its strong lease—which I know very well. My lab designed the Creative Achievement Questionnaire, which is used, it's been used in hundreds of studies now to assess lifetime creativity. I've spent a lot of time looking at the measurement of creativity and also trying to understand creativity. The literature strongly suggests that when you impose restrictions on people, it actually makes them more creative rather than less. Because part of what creativity is, is the overcoming of obstacles. You know, imagine someone who writes poetry in the Haiku format. Well, it's very, very restrictive and obviously arbitrarily so, but the fact of the restriction is partly what makes the poetic form possible.

The same thing is true if you think about playing a game. There's far more things that you can't do when you play chess than there are things that you can do. But there's still an infinite number of variations of chess games. So this idea that there's a dichotomy between structure and rules and creativity is perniciously false and contradicted by the evidence. And when you start to explore the art world in the way it works, there's an irony there: it purports to not have boundaries on creativity and structures on character, but they're actually extremely strict and they're hidden there. They're kind of this pernicious thing underneath, where you actually have to present things in a very, very precise way for it to be able to enter into the legitimizing structure of the gallery.

It's like the message that I was trying to work on and the structure of contemporary art just didn't fit together. So at some point, I gave up on art. I had to work, you know, I had a studio, and I closed it down. I just destroyed all my paintings. It was actually a moment of kind of spiritual crisis for me. And it's in that moment that I discovered medieval art. I discovered traditional Christian art. And when I discovered traditional Christian art, it was exactly what you were saying before. The forms of Christian art were kind of developed as a community. A Christian community developed these forms that were actually extremely powerful and created like a cosmic map, basically. So you could use these images as a type of algebra to create a sacred language. And so discovering that, I just felt like, yeah, it gave me so much possibility. You know, you're going back like 800 years, 900 years into the history—even farther than that—back into the history of traditional art.

So you say you discovered Christian iconography, and I also know that you're an Orthodox Christian, which is a strange thing for a québécois. So I don't know, you're a pretty rare bird. Maybe you could say a few words about the discovery of the iconography, how that came about, and also how it is that you converted to Orthodox Christianity.

Well, I mean, those two things are very intricately related. During university, just like a lot of people, I kind of got into an intellectual and spiritual crisis. I was reading de la Bugia and all the postmodern theorists, trying to wrap my head around this—like, what does this mean for me and what is going on? And it's in that kind of crazy time that I started reading the Church Fathers and reading more traditional authors, people who talk about traditions in different cultures, and realizing that this was really the solution for me, at least. It was the solution to kind of get out of the chaos that the modern world had kind of fallen into.

And so it came with the art, so looking at the art and seeing the patterns emerge and seeing that those patterns in the art were the same as you find in Scripture and the same that you find in liturgy and the same that you find in the stories that are around us—even stories that aren't actually Christian—to see those patterns emerge is what really caught my attention. In the beginning, I wasn't necessarily going to be Orthodox. I could see the patterns coming through and I was trying to figure it out. I couldn't find them in my own meter, which I grew up evangelical, and so I was looking for it. I couldn't find it. I looked at Catholicism, but finally I felt that I'd been looking at Orthodoxy. I felt like Orthodoxy was the type of Christianity that had preserved the most of that ancient worldview and was still living it today. So it's a living tradition.

When you say you went back 800 years, in a way that's true, but it's not true for the Orthodox, because they continue to perpetuate those forms until today. I mean, not that they didn't go through rocky times, obviously it's been crazy for Orthodoxy as well, but for some reason they've been able to constantly revive their forms. You know, and today it's a thriving part of Christianity.

Well, you know, this idea of this return and the continual revivification of traditional forms reminds me of two things. It reminds me of the old Egyptian stories about Horus and Osiris. Horus is the Egyptian god of vision and attention, so he's the Egyptian eye and the falcon. After Horus defeats Seth, who's sort of the Egyptian precursor to Satan, and reclaims his throne, he goes down into the underworld to rescue his father Osiris, who Seth had chopped up into pieces. When he's down in the underworld, he gives Osiris one of his eyes—which Seth has torn out—and then brings him back up to the surface. They rule Egypt together, and the union of Osiris and Horus was like the Pharaoh's soul.

There's an ancient idea, it's expressed in more places than in Egyptian mythology, that it's the duty, it's the sacred obligation of someone who's awake to journey to the underworld and revivify the corpse of his father. That not only unites the individual with a living culture, but also makes the culture alive, because of course culture, in some sense, because it's the product of the dead, is a dead entity. It has to be continually revivified by the living.

And then you see that echoed in a more modern form, oddly enough, in a Disney animated movie: Pinocchio. Pinocchio is the story of the struggle of a puppet, a marionette, whose strings are being pulled by forces that he does not understand. It's the story of his struggle towards individuality and rebirth. A number of things happen to Pinocchio. He has to learn not to lie; he has to learn not to be a neurotic victim because that's actually one of the temptations. It's his agreement that he's a neurotic victim that places him on Pleasure Island, where he is in danger of becoming a jackass and a slave to totalitarians.

Interestingly enough, after he leaves Pleasure Island, he goes to find his father but he can't find him. A note from the Holy Ghost essentially tells him that his father is at the bottom of the ocean in the belly of a giant whale, and the whale is also a dragon. So then Pinocchio has to go down to the bottom of the ocean in his half-jackass form and rescue his father from the belly of the whale. He does that by mastering fire.

Interestingly enough, in the Pinocchio video, he's assimilated to the Christian symbol of the fish in the belly of the whale. Geppetto catches a bunch of fish; he thinks to eat them and then he catches Pinocchio and confuses him with a fish. He doesn't realize that having caught Pinocchio, he's caught his own salvation. Then they work together to get out of the whale's belly.

But there's this very old idea that, especially in chaotic times when everyone's turned into a jackass and a tool of totalitarians, that the way forward is to journey to the deepest possible recesses of a reality and revivify the father. Something everyone needs to know—and there's something, I mean, we'll see as our conversation continues, you'll see how for me, at least, this goes—is that for me going back into the Christian tradition and reconnecting with the Christian tradition has actually opened my eyes also to the world around me.

So those patterns that I find in my own tradition, the patterns that are kind of feeding my life, once they're integrated now when you look around you, you see them appear everywhere. The world is actually made of those patterns, and you can recognize those patterns in contemporary culture. You watch a movie and you can see that these are the same patterns. But the best way—it's like the danger is to do it in an innocent, simply in an intellectual way. I mean, that's kind of our danger. So connecting to a tradition, you know, becoming Orthodox and living it through liturgy—like liturgy, when you go to church and you participate in the liturgy, you're physically engaging in the sacred patterns.

It's interesting, you know, the Christian emphasis on the resurrection of the body, which is of course something that modern people have a very difficult time with. I mean, people can perhaps swallow the notion that the soul is immortal, but the idea of the resurrection of the body is something that just seems beyond the pale. But there's a logic to that insistence, and the insistence is that there's something sacred and necessary about the body, and that it can't be forgotten when discussing both the spiritual and sacred matters.

So, it's definitely the loss of the body that's part of what constitutes part of the rootless nihilism that characterizes the modern age. And I learned that partly by reading Carl Rogers, because one of the things that Rogers talked about was the necessity—Jung talked about this a lot as well—the necessity of bringing the body into alignment. With Rogers, it was more with the voice. He claimed, for example, that you could feel with your body essentially whether or not your words were aligned properly with your being.

And certainly, I've learned that that's true and that you can learn to determine when your voice is making you stronger physically and when it's making you weaker physically. A very, very useful thing to pay attention to. One of the iconic figures that you've carved and that you're interested in is St. George. I've been very interested in the figure of St. George. I think that the story that's encapsulated in St. George is certainly one of the oldest stories known to mankind. It might be at the core of the oldest story, because basically what it does is present human beings—the individual—in a battle where society and the individual are being threatened by the re-emergence or emergence of a carnivorous reptilian predator.

I think the roots of the St. George story go all the way back to the time when the distant ancestors of human beings were living in trees and being preyed upon by predatory snakes. That's about 60 million years ago, back when there were still dinosaurs. By the way, an anthropologist named Lynn Isbell at UCLA has done a series of studies showing that the reason that human beings have such amazing vision—because we can see better than any other animal except for birds of prey—is because our vision evolved to help us detect predatory snakes in particular as they crept up on us through the underbrush. And she established that by noting that there was a powerful correlation between the prevalence of predatory snake predation in primate populations across the world and the acuity of primate vision.

It's also the case that our vision evolved, just as the story in Genesis suggests, because of fruit, because we see colors, because we can detect ripe fruit. Genesis insists that human beings got their vision because of snakes and fruit, and that seems exactly right from an evolutionary perspective. But you can imagine the idea—the St. George story. There's a dragon that re-emerges from its lair underground, and it's an eternal dragon, an immortal dragon, and it threatens the community. St. George goes out to fight the dragon in single combat, and as a consequence, he frees a virgin from the snake's grasp—just like Harry Potter does in the second Harry Potter volume when he goes down underneath Hogwarts to free Ginny, who's the virgin, Virginia, from the grips of the basilisk.

The basilisk is the thing that turns you to stone with a single glance. And Harry Potter is revivified, by the way, by the Phoenix's tears, and the Phoenix produces a rebirth, right? Because the Phoenix is a symbol of death and rebirth. So the St. George story is embedded right in the depths of the Harry Potter story. But I think it's predicated on the idea that human beings—men in particular—forever have been fighting off the predations of the natural and the social world. The idea that you free the virgin from the grasp of the serpent is that women have preferentially chosen to ally themselves with and mate with men who are capable of facing the reptilian predator.

So it's the basic evolutionary story of mankind that human beings learn to fight back against predators; maybe to even find them in their lair instead of waiting for them to attack. And that women, in their gratitude for that—in their gratitude for the protection of infants—there's often images of Mary raising Christ up out of the way from a predatory reptile, right? That's in reference to the Genesis comment that this, that Mary will bruise the head of the serpent with her heel. It's an extraordinarily deep story; it goes deeper than just the idea of the serpent because the ultimate serpent, in some sense, isn't the one that lives in the external world.

The ultimate serpent might be the one that's in the heart of your enemies, or if you make a metaphysical transformation in your thinking, even beyond that, the ultimate serpent isn't even the one that lives in the heart of your enemies. So it's not the natural snake or the crocodile or a predator like that; it's not the vicious barbarian that's come to the gates of your castle to steal your belongings and make off with your women. It's the snake that lives in your heart.

Yeah, and that's why Christianity accepts this, insists on the association between the snake, the Garden of Eden, and Satan. I mean, I think that if you think of the world in terms of a macrocosm and microcosm, the idea that certain structures repeat themselves at different levels of reality, you know, that's like music, right? Then you can think of this idea of a world as having, in the middle, you know, a tree or a cross or something like an axis in the center. As you move away from that axis, which defines the space basically like a flag or something like a post, as you move away from that center, you're moving further and further from what it defines, and you're approaching chaos, basically, right?

You're approaching chaos, which is within the negative sense, chaos. In the positive sense, it's also potential—it's the potential from which that world will grow. So on one side, it threatens the inside, if you will, and on the other side, it is the potential by which that thing will grow. And so again, in the Virgin in St. George's story, there are actually several versions of the dragon and some virgins. The most known versions say St. George will kill the dragon, but there are lesser-known versions of the story where he actually tames the dragon and turns the dragon into his pet. You know, there's versions where he tames it, then kills it. There are different versions of the story, but it's to show this idea of as you move out, sometimes there's something on the edge that appears on the edge, and you can't define it.

It's this chaotic thing; it's the dragon—in the traditional way of representing it, it isn't just a reptile. It's actually a hybrid creature. It usually has a mix of lizard, and it has hairy feet and wings. So it is, it's this, yeah, it's a monster. It's a monster; it's an amalgamation of things to be frightened by but also treasure, because the dragon doesn't only guard virgins; it guards treasure. It's in contact with what you fear and despise that the treasure is to be found.

Your notion about the center point, say with the flag or the cross, reminded me of the way children react with their mother and their home. What a child will do when he or she is exploring the world is make contact with the mother, and that's in the center of the household. So you could think about it as the mother embedded in society. The child will comfort himself with contact with the mother and then go out into the world to the point where his fear overcomes his exploratory tendency.

And then on the edge, he'll play and further his psychological development and his mastery of the world. And then when he wears out and maybe goes beyond his limit, he runs back to the center point for comfort. And then the next time he goes out, he can go out a little bit farther. That structure basically is the structure of everything. I mean, you know, it's the structure of society; it's the structure of family. And like you said, it's also the structure of an individual, where on the edges of our person we have these desires that exist on the edge of our person. Those desires are very dangerous because they can lead us into a lot of mess, but they're also the tools by which we further ourselves.

Like those, that's very similar against Jung's idea of the incorporation of the shadow and also in Nietzsche's idea of beyond good and evil. I mean, Nietzsche meant by that, at least in part, beyond the conceptions of good and evil that are basically thrown up by nothing but cowardice, right? So you try to make yourself into this little restricted thing, basically the union persona, and you define yourself as good if you never go outside that little box. But to be truly good, you have to go way outside that box.

So if you take this as a worldview, I mean basically that has become my own worldview. It helps you to identify what's happening around you. So on the periphery of the world, there are these marginal things that exist kind of in the buffer between order and absolute chaos. And those things—they rear their heads up sometimes, and so we have to transact with them in different ways. Sometimes you tame them; sometimes you have to, you know, like a dragon, you have to kill it; sometimes you have to just ignore it, too. Like great monsters just have to be left alone, basically; they're too big to deal with. Yet you just leave them alone.

To me, this is really related to what you're going through right now. It seems like this is where we are right now in our society, our obsession with liminal things. Right now in the world seems to be a sign of something. You know the word monster actually comes from the Latin word which means to show, right? As a portent, we in French, we actually still have the verb motiver, which means to show.

Yes, yeah, there you go, demonstrate. Exactly! So the word monster is a portent of something. It's like a harbinger of change or a harbinger—that's something you need to pay attention to because something is happening.

So right now, if you look around, if you think of the social manifestations that are going on, like just take zombies, for example. That's the greatest example because a zombie is an in-between figure. It's something that is neither dead nor alive. It stands in between two categories. And so, in the case of the zombie, the zombie, because it is in between the categories, acts as a parasite. It starts to eat the interior, the brain, actually.

Exactly, yes! It's looking for meaning, and so it wants to eat the thing that's inside—it’s trying to devour it, right? That's part of the culture. Like the story of Oedipus and the Sphinx is a perfect kind of image of this. So the Sphinx appears as this undefined monster, right? It's a mix of a woman and a lion and a bird or whatever. It's this thing that appears. And so, what it is, it's a question. It's saying, "What am I?" A monster is a question, or it's an enigma. The person coming for it is faced with this enigma, and the danger—so one possibility is that you name the monster and you're able to integrate it. The other possibility is that you're eaten by the monster. Those two things are a real reality, right?

On the edge of things, so when you come to the edge of something, you have this image in traditional stories of the bridge. You come to the end of something and there's a bridge, and on the bridge, there's a monster. And so you have to face this monster because when you're on the bridge, you're in a dangerous place. You're in between, you're not in between categories. You're in no-man's land. You're in no-man's land, and so the monster comes and wants to devour you. So it can be either this idea of the monster asking questions—asking an enigma for you to be able to cross the bridge.

And so this is what's happening right now, right? There are some elements that come from the margins of society which are saved. The ones that I've been dealing with have been the people who don't fit into the gender categories. Yes, yes! And so we're in a situation where those manifestations of hybridity—right?—because if you look at the categories that are used, they are trying to be the category of multiplicity itself. Yeah, they're trying to be the category for the mode. That's why the categories are multiplying beyond name. They started with just non-binary, and now it's up to 70 online.

What it is, it's a decomposition—a decomposition of a category. You come to the end of something, and it starts to decompose. I know, and you're talking about the ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail. Well, this is my vision of it: when you first see that serpent, it actually looks like it's the tail that's eating the head. And then after a certain transition, then it becomes the head eating the tail.

So imagine a fruit falls on the ground. The ground starts to eat it; it starts to decompose. And once it's fully decomposed, then something happens—there's a flip. And now the seed starts to use the earth and eat the earth to become a tree. And so there's that moment at the end of something where there's a flip that happens—like an inversion—and then an inversion of an inversion that happens. It's a very chaotic time, and that's the moment where we are right now. What you're going through, like the finger that you put your finger on something very, very critical, and that's why there's so much noise about it: because you're standing right in that spot and you're pointing. You're telling everybody, "Pay attention to this monster! It's right there in front of us!"

You talked before with me about two biblical stories that shed some light on this, and you were talking about Abraham and the stranger. Maybe you could walk through that because I thought that was an extremely interesting analysis.

Okay, so I mean the way that in the Bible and in most traditional societies, the way that you deal with the strange—okay, the thing that comes from the margins, you know, it's the stranger—in a global way, it's the strange thing. The way we deal with that is through hospitality, right? The first way we deal with something coming from the outside and that doesn't fit into our world is through hospitality.

So in the Bible, we see a version of good hospitality and bad hospitality play themselves out. In the story of Abraham, Abraham receives three strangers, and he receives them into his tent, and he feeds them, and he gives that, you know, he receives them properly. And the strangers are also acting properly in his tent. You know, they're eating his food, but they're being respectful of the house. They're not stealing things; they're not, you know, trying to seduce his wife or doing the things that you're not supposed to do implicitly when you're in someone else's house. Because of that, the three strangers announce to Abraham that he's going to have a child. So Abraham is in his 90s, you know? He never thought, right?

They're angels, right? They're secretly, but they're secretly angels. That's what's important, is that in the strange—the strange is an ambiguous category; it can contain both extremes. It can contain both the angel and the devil, right? These three angels come to him and announce that he's going to have a child. So what they do is that the strange now acts as this potential that we talked about, right? So it's a fructifying agent.

In that batteries, it's always the case that like an orderly structure has to allow an element of chaos, an element of the strange into it in order to become something new and even to maintain its own survival because things have to become something new as they move forward through time, right? So in that case, the stranger becomes the means by which Abraham's marriage is instructive. So he grows; his family grows through this bright interaction with the stranger.

Okay, right? So now these same three strangers then they go to visit Abraham's brother Lot, who's in Sodom and Gomorrah. And then although Lot receives the strangers appropriately, the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah want to rape these strangers. At least they want to sexually assault the strangers and rape them, and angels blind the people around them, and they're able to escape. Because of the wrong interaction and that the sexual, the wrong sexual interaction between the stranger and the people of the city, the city is destroyed by fire. And then it leads even further; it leads to Lot having an incestuous relationship with his daughters.

So it's like the whole world just kind of collapses because there isn't a proper approach to hospitality. And, but you know, in that story, you see how it's active. So there's an intimation in there too: if the interaction with the stranger is handled properly, then everything becomes more fruitful. And if the interaction with the stranger upsets things, say, as basic as sexual interactions between people, then the entire society can become destroyed.

Exactly! And I'm using those two stories, but those two stories repeat themselves in all this. I mean, there's so many stories where you see that often it's not just sex; it's often food. There's sex and food—those are the two major ways in which we integrate the world. For example, like the story of Hansel and Gretel, for example, is a perfect example of where the desire to eat the people—to eat your guests, right? Or for example, their mother in the Hansel and Gretel story because she's too good to be true.

And you can tell that because she has a ginger—the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story, and you can tell that because she has a gingerbread house; it's made of candy. Yeah, and like a house made of candy is too good to be true. That's the social justice warrior over-emphasis on compassion. And inside she's just fattening the kids up, constantly taking care of them, but her fundamental wish is to devour them.

So like an example, and they sort of—one more thing—they've been abandoned. Those kids have been abandoned the predations of the evil mother because the family broke down; like it's the stepmother who tells the father, if I remember correctly, to abandon the children in the forest. Yeah, yeah. So it's the breakdown of the family that leads to the children being threatened by the oedipal mother, who's too good to be true, she's compassion that's gone completely beyond its tolerable limit.

Yeah, yeah. So, you see that, I think there's this—sorry, there's so many stories of how the relationship between a host and a stranger goes wrong. Like there's an Ethiopian tradition where it's almost an inversion of Abraham's story, where a Burghal man receives three guests into his home, and the three guests serve him food—which ends up being a human being, the net heat. So they kind of trick the host into becoming a cannibal, and then the host becomes like an out-of-control cannibal and, you know, he's eating people all over the place.

So you can see how the story can go both ways: the relationship with the strange. There can be a push from the inside, from the right-hand, let's say the order hand. There can be a push towards up that causes the chaos, but it can also come from the guest. It can also come from the stranger, which can push from his side or, you know, from their side and then create the chaos.