Explaining the icon of St. George slaying the
dragon to a 4 year old is amazing. Explaining the icon of St. George to a 10
year old is excruciating — “Yeah, but dragons don’t exist, do they?”.
Do they?
When someone tells you that dragons don’t exist
or that monsters don’t exist, what is it they are saying? When gazing at the
icon of St. George, which intuitively has to be one of the most satisfying icons
to gaze upon, it reveals a truth so profound that despite the fact that
“dragons don’t exist”, it is still one of the most popular icons and St. George
is one of the most popular saints.
When we say “dragons don’t exist”, usually what
is meant by “exist” is some kind of measurable, reproducible phenomena.
“Dragon” then becomes a zoological specie, like a dog or a cat that could be
separated into sub-species, bred and genetically modified. But to believe that
such measurable categories in the world are the only ones that “exist” is not
only untrue to the highest degree, but it is also an image of the mental
tyranny of our scientific age that anyone could be so blind to believe this as
they live out their lives.
What if dragons or else monsters in general are
simply not the same type of “thing” as dogs or cats or apples? What if the way
a dragon exists has less to do with the difference between a tiger and a rabbit
and more to do with the difference between a friend and a stranger? The
difference between a friend and a stranger is not a measurable, reproducible
phenomenon, yet it is one of the most real experiences a human being has. A
friend is a real category of existence, but there is no “zoological” friend,
that is I cannot point to someone that would quantify “friend” for all the
world in the way a cat is a cat for everyone. Friend is a category of human
engagement. And in a similar vein, encountering a stranger is encountering an
undefined person, we could say the undecided in human form. I would like to
suggest that a dragon and more generally a monster, is the category of the
unknown itself in animal form. Ultimately a dragon is an image of chaos, the
place where knowledge and categories reach their limits.
That a dragon is an image of chaos is not a new
idea, it has been proposed by thinkers from extremely diverse areas, including
Orthodox ones. But usually it is implied in saying things like “dragons are an
image of chaos” that dragons are a kind of fable, a kind of metaphor. I am
saying dragons exist, or rather almost exist. They are as real as a stranger is
real, as an alien is real, real in ways that show us the very limits of
existence itself. It is silly, for example, to say that UFOs do not exist. Of
course UFOs exist, they are unidentified flying objects. Now the way we
portray, imagine and project certain cultural forms and narratives into these
UFOs is another matter, an important one which shows us how humans engage with
the chaos and the unknown. Just like we can experience a UFO or a stranger, we
can definitely come into contact with a dragon. And I think the story of
St-George and many other traditional stories of dragons are built, are constructed
in a manner that helps us understand “what” a dragon is. This is the reason the
story of St. George perdures despite all the myth busters trying to take it
down.
But we need to give the myth busters their due.
So now, just as a thought experiment, imagine a terrible dragon threatening a
city and eating its children. St-George comes and kills it. Imagine now a
scientist arriving with all his instruments to dissect it. After several weeks
of analysis and peer-reviewed data, the scientist informs the silly people of
the town via some academic journal, that the dragon was not a dragon, but
rather it was a giant siamese-twin crocodile(s) with elephantiasis and rabies.
The paper is quite long, in fact it details how each deformity on the giant
siamese-twin crocodile(s) with elephantiasis and rabies is related either to it
being siamese, it having elephantiasis or rather having come with time from its
own violent self-destructive behavior due to its rabies. Some scientists begin
to argue over the cause of certain of the deformities and soon someone holds a
conference and the organizers publish a book stating the different views on the
matter.
The question is this: which is more real, the
dragon or the giant siamese-twin crocodile(s) with elephantiasis and rabies?
The giant siamese-twin crocodile(s) with elephantiasis and rabies does not
properly account for the terrifying experience of monstrosity, and though the
dragon has been dissected and tamed in a way, the experience, the narrative
which impacted the very identity of that village is an encounter with a dragon.
And also, it would be absurd to rewrite our zoological categories to make way
for the exceptional category of the siamese-twin crocodile(s) with
elephantiasis and rabies. Just stick with dragons.
In the icon of St. George, the dragon is shown as
an impossible hybrid, combining mammals, lizards and birds. As I have explained
elsewhere, hybridity is the chaos which appears on the limits, in the
in-betweens of categories, the exceptions. It is the very experience of the
monster. The strange and exceptional are very important things and are
categories which include many spiritual mysteries. Strangers in the Bible and
in our tradition can secretly either be angels or devils. In the story of
Abraham, the three strangers which come to him are angels and an image of the
Trinity, but in the traditions surrounding the Nativity, the unknown shepherd
tempting St. Joseph is secretly a devil. This is the nature of the ambiguous, it
can hide either extremes.
Sadly in a world of only taxonomic categories,
there is no room for the peripheral, the exception and the strange. Everything
must fit, or else. This has caused both the mad permissiveness and unilateral
openness as well as the totalitarian identity of absolute exclusion which
characterize the duality of modernity. Both extremes cause each other and so
can only swing from one impossible extreme to the next, either attempting to
account for and justify every exception or else tracing an absolute border
between us and them. In such a world there is no other option, either
everything must fit, or else Occam’s razor comes a slicing. But in a world with
room for dragons, the natural hierarchy of being is allowed to both include the
rule and leave an undefined space for the strange and exceptional, the monster
even. There the dragon can almost exist.
As long as the dragon does not eat our children.
And there are those of us now who intuit that the dragons have started to
devour children.
Luckily we will always have St. George to protect
us.
Source:
https://www.orthodoxartsjournal.org/dragons-almost-exist/
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