Metamorphosis. Every artist dreams of transforming a sheep skin, a papyrus, a stone or a petrified drift wood into a story to share. And in the process, to become what she or he always was.
… The heat is back to the desert and I found a cool corner to think, with my dog gently snoring under my desk.
And I recalled how for decades, at medical and public health conferences, I was introduced as a “storyteller” not a man who may have ideas about epidemics and human behaviour. Or human behaviour and epidemics. In a way, I had become who I always was – one who observes and finds a story to tell. By writing, photography, or mixing colours on whatever I could find to call a canvas.
Telling a story goes beyond reporting, though. It is a search that involves those shaping that story. It is how we transform a casual observation into becoming personal, for each reader or listener. In that sense, an artist is a chemist, mixing substances and elements in search of that transformation into a new one.
Interestingly, the oldest definition of chemistry is “Al Chemia” in Arabic, and the Western term Alchemy derived from it but took on a new meaning vis à vis the scientific patina of chemistry. Alchemy became that search for transforming lead to gold; common materials to precious ones; and, the analysis of the inner flow as secrets rivers run in each one of us.
It became synonymous with the obstinate search of the Philosopher’s Stone, a term cornered by a French bookseller in 1382.
And the world rediscovered the Greek word for changing shape from metamorphoum to metamorphösis and became the Latin equivalent of transformation. Centuries later, using the observation of a moth becoming a butterfly, social and clinical psychoanalysis was born when Jung and Freud found their way to tell a story based on the behaviour of those they observed.
… As a health care professional, I visualised psychoanalysis as a psychiatrist, holding a fishing rod, casting into those inner secrets rivers. A simple image yet a comforting one. Not in that the fisherman was allowed to have access to our secret rivers, but because of the fact that we all have those rivers.
However, and over time, I learned to wonder if those rivers know (or knew) where to flow. If the butterfly still has the moth in it. Hence if we just see a transformation in shape but not in nature and identity. In other words, that we discover the Philosopher’s Stone only when we realise that lead will remain lead even if we can transform its appearance to a shiny yellow.
In a less grandiose way, I came to believe that the Philosopher’s Stone can be bone, metal, cloud or water. That the wisdom we may discover in telling the story of our search, the alchemy of our own intellectual or emotional metamorphosis is in celebrating the heritage of the moth.
… The heat is back to the desert and my dog is snoring under my desk.
June 15, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
