Hope — and — Conscience
The strive to take responsibility for this world, and work to make it more livable, more loving, more free
And the self-questioning thing that holds you back from making unfixable mistakes along this way

hope & conscience COLLECTION

This collection is a powerful message that I was a bit (or maybe not a bit) ashamed to communicate clearly. It is a very personal thing and personal pain. This story starts on the 24th of February 2022, when Russia, my motherland, started the full-scale invasion in Ukraine.

To this day I cannot fully process my thoughts and feelings of the months that followed. That day, I was crushed. I cried from fear for my Ukrainian friends, from sheer horror that I saw on my social feed. I had stupid hope that this is something so obviously wrong and terrifying we will make it stop. I went to protest that day and all the people who I met there were the same who had been protesting against the tightening dictatorship for years before. There were a lot of people. But there was no awakening.

I went to protest again, though I was already very scared. Things were quickly becoming much worse than before. In a few days on another protest I was arrested together with my husband and friends. We were released and left the country two days later.

Stories from IG @e.elanic, spring 2022

I will not go into detail of forced and urgent emigration. It didn’t even feel important, these emotions stayed somewhere in the background while I was fully occupied with what was happening in Ukraine and the spiral of madness Russia went into. My friends, colleagues got shelled, were forced to leave their homes and become refugees. My other friends were also leaving their homes one by one. I was running in circles trying to put our life together and find us a place to settle. Guilt was eating me alive, not because I believed I had not done enough but because of basic empathy. I became a volunteer helping people evacuate to safer regions of Ukraine and further to Europe.

I had quite feverish "I have to fix this now" mindset and it was in no way healthy. I guess it was inevitable though. At the same time, a lot of people around me tried to publicly cope with the same things. Some of them made me furious with how obviously wrong they were in the way that they allowed one to do nothing. Just say the world is doomed if such horror exists there. Or that "that country" can never be saved. Profit, now you get to lie on your couch with a wiser-than-thou face.

One narrative that got me even more furious than usual was that "There is no more hope" (for humanity, for Russia, for Europe, for "the civilized world", whatever). Well if this is the case I don’t know what you are doing here still alive? Why watch this hopeless world burn, relieve yourself from this horrendous fate.

Anyway, this anger was futile but I had to make a statement. So, the first half of the collection goes from here. Sorry for the long intro.

It seems for me that Hope is the start for any purposeful action a human can take. And taking the Hope from people is the most evil and destructive thing one can do. If there is no Hope, there is no purpose to live, no purpose to do literally anything to make life better. To convince someone that an action is hopeless, is, as a Russian politologist Ekaterina Schulmann says… to serve the Devil.

Russian Orthodox Church in Bogolyubovo

Joan of Arc by Albert Lynch, 1903

Antique french enamel cross

I didn’t want to make a simple Christian cross though. First, I am not religious. Second, Hope is more for me than just belief. Hope is a guiding star, Hope is your tool to shatter darkness. And so I combined all three — a cross, a star and a sword.

What I also liked about a cross is that it has a strong connection to the body. It is sign that is worn and squeezed in hand in times of uncertainty and despair, giving strengh, will… well, hope. It is an amulet, a very loaded symbol — and we needed it.

Angel at the top of Alexander column

Lea Jones

vintage postcard

But if were to make a statement that the work of making the world better is worth doing, Hope alone would not be enough. Hope can blind, can make one so passionate they become uncritical, insensitive to the costs one is ready to pay. It has to be balanced with a voice that says: "Watch yourself. Haven’t you gone too far?".

So I went on looking through Christian symbols, and for now I want to talk to you about Angels.

The Hermitage, St. Petersburg

I am infinitely in love with canonic angel depictions, the earlier the better. The Orthodox churches are a great sourse of material on that. I adore the fact that they are not meant to be pretty, or human-like, or basically… make any… sense? A tetramorph, depicting four Evangelists, three of them as beasts and one as human, why not. A set of burning wheels with wings? Also why not. All of those plus full covered with eyes? Absolutely.

"As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces. This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like topaz, and all four looked alike. Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel… Their rims were high and awesome, and all four rims were full of eyes all around."

Ezekiel 1:15−21

You might have noticed, just like me, that in a lot of these depictions angels are covered with eyes. Canonically this is correct, angels have excessive sets of additional eyes regardless the level of their human-likeness. This works also for other creatures! Like the adorable beasts from the Apocalypse of Saint-Sever I give you further in the gallery.

The Eye in Christianity does not only serve the purpose of angel’s decoration. In fact, it the Eye — the All-Seeing Eye, the Eye of Providence — so, the Eye of God. The masonic symbol too, of course. This is where the image of an eye inside a triangle surrounded with rays of golden light comes from.

The All-Seeing Eye of God, Jonah and the Whale. Collection of Russian iconography in Poland

Souls in purgatory and the five Sacred Wounds. Between 1700 and 1799 (?). Wellcome Collection

An apron with freemasonry symbols

Engraving by J. Biggen, 1798

When I thought about the idea of an always-watching eye, my mind turned not to some external cosmic powers but to the power of human consciousness. There is only one thing that can watch us whatever we do or think or feel and this is us ourselves. It’s our conscience that will torment us when we want to ignore the society’s moral compass, act on our personal dark desires other than the common good… or will it? I have seen far too clearly how it’s blind and silent in some people and circumstances.

Conscience is a complex thing. I have witnessed people running away from its sight into the darkest forest of human psyche, coming up with the most twisted, grotesquely complex constructions that would shield them from its burning touch. I have also witnessed people torturing themselves to exhastion when they found themselves in a situation with no right choice, and whatever they did, however much they gave away, it never seemed enough.

And so I thought that the Eye has to close too. Sometimes because it just is, and sometimes because it better be.