The Cain and Abel story is perfect illustration of this eternal adversarial relationship. Strangely, the human being is simultaneously both contradictory characters: the good guy and the villain, and is always in conflict. When the ‘controlling’ bureaucrat takes over, we become the emissary of the banality of evil, a left-brained tyrant but it’s also true that we are also capable of perfection and self-sacrificing nobility. Abel, on the other hand, is like the the right brain, which represents the embodied world of depth and wholeness, already perfect in itself. In the tension between these two poles - the best and worst of our own nature - our naïve innocence versus our experienced bitterness-the sparks of creativity are born.Ĭain could also be said to represent the left hemisphere of the brain, which Iain McGilchrist says is associated with anger, aggression and a certain narrow efficiency. Abel’s perfect unity with God and yet his tragic innocence is also part of our potential path and nature. The best artistic representation is a synthesis of high and low, great and small combining innocence and experience, divinity and spit, the prosaic and the poetic, song and image, the fleshy word and the ineffable spirit-or the shadowy Cain of existential doubt and the noble Abel who ‘makes all the right sacrifices’ and is favoured by God.Ĭain’s self-pity and resentment, his murderous desire to destroy all that is good (his brother)-his ‘anger with God’ so to speak - lives in each one of us. Perhaps we can say that the artistic project is, in essence, the attempt to bridge these two worlds: to bring the divine down into the mundane, but also offer the mundane up to the divine. In every moment we can chose to be Cain or Abel, we can take the high road or low road we can chose narcissism or generosity, mediocrity or greatness, discipline or resentment, the lie or the truth, honesty or nasty subterfuge, the red pill of truth or the blue pill of the dream we can chose to be inadvertent and evil or transparent and life-affirming.Ĭai n and Abel symbolise two different and opposite worlds: the world of the ‘broken’ and the world of the ‘whole’. The old story from Genesis is a perfect representation of this schizophrenic split in every man. They are divine and disgusting, blessed and cursed. Human beings are profoundly Cain and Abel both.

Images of cain and abel