The Human Conflict by Colin Russell Shomo
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
- Gandhi
Short preface by said author: My father has an analytical mind, he also dropped out of high-school. I believe I have inherited his affinity for late-night epiphanies and ramblings; I am all too familiar with such actions. I have also inherited problems, though not the same problems, as my father did. I will not attempt to draw a specific correlation between his lack of a diploma to what problems I face; for I myself have only a sort of lyrical sense on mine own trials - I understand them utterly while simultaneously they are obscure to my knowledge, if that makes any bit of sense. Now, I believe that man boils down to this: he has a gift and a problem, both of which are constructed sky-high when into this path he is hurled, and their fathers had respectively the same problems and the same gifts, though objectively these gifts and problems are one in the same; I use the terms father and man to refer to mankind and not the male sex exclusively, mark you. So the fight between casting one’s gift into the world or smoldering in the flames of life is the fight between good or evil, this is the demeanor of life, godless or not. In your own lifetime whether man’s fight seems one of victory or defeat all depends upon that in-deferent, atlas-eating politics of the human condition. But what should be understood from this is that their has never been any more evil than good, or vice-versa. There is only more good or bad revealed than, bad or good; good hides in the shadows as well. My goal is to cast light on such goodness.
Let us think, my friends, as Plato does , of a thin curtain, perhaps a large sheet of wax paper, though less translucent, that is draped in front of our world. Behind it there are shapes, think as simple as a triangle or rectangle, that which behind there is a bright light, casting shadows are put into our world. * Plato ends here. Anytime that I think of art, speaking with only it’s three basic forms: Literature, which includes only poetry and prose, Music, and Visuals, or aesthetics, including painting, sculptor etc, I think of these shadows. Art is one of the shadow of beauty, it is also the most simple of shadows, simple not at the level one needs to comprehend it, but that it is the least diluted of the shadows. Because of this, art is the next best thing to the true forms, and infact the only distinguishing characteristic between true beauty and it’s shadow, is the fact that it is something man mustered; however it is organic to human nature - more to this later. Now being a man, having his inherent sense of pride, I believe that this the most best part about art. The fact that it is a creation of man gives the human mind the opportunity to relate with his past, in that throughout his history art has always existed to some degree. In each epoch at which art is a created individuals bring human experience into their art. The yearnings and pursuits, the conflicts, the sentiments - everything that person is going through is always found in a poem or story, a panting, or in music. Now these feeling in relation to the epoch he finds himself in create conflict. Hamlet, Madame Bovary, Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield, Raskolinkov, the list is endless, and the characters are most always rejecting and rebelling in some against their society. The conflict between the character and the setting is of course the writer’s own feelings. The external conflict must not be seen, in this context, with fictional characters, but the writer who creates them. That external conflict can be seen as society keeping the person away from his birth right - the cultivation of one's soul with these forms. Just like the turtle must travel to the shore to live on we must live our lives according to our intellectual conscience. The soul is of course always seen as an intangible spirit - I'm not even positive it exists I merely use it as a tool to think, and as it works like a dream, as you can see, you who actually read this, for now it exists to me. So the soul, in the traditional, invisible spirit within us, goes naturally to one of these shadows of beauty. Now love, fortunately, cannot be driven away by the masses, nature of course has always carried the brunt of man's glowing fire. But, what everyone, it seems, fails to see, is that art, a harmony between human experience and expression, is drowned out more than any of the two. So what it is missing, what, I think, is the cause of man's eternal woe is this lack of expression and creation. A human is divided, in my view, into three parts: the soul, the body (the organism's natural responsibilities), and the mind (sense, intellect). Now - and this may seem extreme - the soul is the fulcrum point of the other two. To create and comprehend art one needs a body to empathize with art through experience and a mind to comprehend or create it. I mentioned woman (myself a male), and nature as other forms of beauty a soul may encounter; but - this is the only cynical bit - because a simple life in nature was incompatible with the body from the first human, in that nature has been largely destroyed in man's instinctive avarice, and woman are more pleasing to men in their anatomy, (or vice versa) art is left undefiled, and impossible to defile. The symbiotic comradeship between the body and mind have caused these errors. Chemically man's body wanted more this more that. He used his mind to problem solve and everything has evolved from there. Parking lots and the whole bit. Nature has suffered from this, obviously. Art is all that is left untouched by man. A poem, a sonata, a painting are all left un-touched. Now, when the mind is used to extend oneself through knowledge, namely through the humanities - philosophy, literature, language and history - and the body is used for a experience, a deed which is easily done, to say the very least, and not to drink to elevation, to eat to dullness or, the worst of over-indulgences, television, art can be created as naturally as breathing. I spoke of art., literature specifically, as having conflict the reoccurring theme. This is the soul of one who has what was above described, speaking of the human conflict. You see a crystal magic of sorts occurs, the Muses shine bright and are perfectly real, the Holy Spirit flows through one’s body, is clearly visible, virtue an asset that can be seen as trying to grasp water as it flows from a cup, is grasped, is tangible… when one dedicates his body to true experience, love, fear, and his mind to the shadow of beauty, art, once again, love; then is something utterly generic is fabricated in the blink of an eye. Children pose an extraordinary example to what I speak of. Playing with blocks, a child is eager for an adult to play with him, for one’s mind naturally grows into the ability to construct elaborate structure. Just like the creation of art one needs simply to linger in it’s shadow for an exorbitant amount of time; an artist’s growth is this simply. However society obstructs this path; the blocks are carried away, eventually, and one must make due. Now this ideal in relation to this epoch is quite stark. During times of great war and change art is subsided; but, of course when such circumstances are moderate, at least to the individual, art is aggravated. But when a deluge of swift moving convexities take the world by storm art is hampered. Take the second World War as an example: although art was not utterly non-existent, it was not in the lime light of the public’s eye. The Body and the Mind were utterly preoccupied with tragedy, death. Just the same for our time: the sense, the body is constantly agitated and the mind is forced to dedicate itself to work. So the circumstances are every bit as severe as circumstances were in the second World War or other such times; in fact they may be worse as in war the enemy to the soul is usually visible; not the same for our times as the enemies are not only great and many they are ourselves, human nature - of course an organism will over-indulge when it has the chance, and the natural accumulation of knowledge creates technology, and technology is exploited in democracy and free-market and entrepreneurship to appeal to our senses, which the acquisition of better, more stimulating assets requires a hard working job. Such is the state of Western society as of today - October 2007. Our lives are founded half-conventions and half-lies, as Dylan Thomas says. Half-convention in that a man must acquire an arduous task in order to provide; a half-lie in the television, appealing to our sense, assaulting them, - poor nerves! - and keeping them down. We have only ourselves to face and no one is left to blame. For if I have learned anything in what little knowledge of history I have acquired is that we are all in the place we are, as Hitler, Alexander, Charlemagne or Napoleon was. by chance. Now, I do believe the world has some pattern, nature or demeanor yet to be discerned by the philosophers or scientists. Why were you, reader, born to this mother, that father? Can you say? Why were you not born in some past epoch? Can you say? And the luminaries I mentioned are mere dependent variables of the controlled variable enacted in the beginning, once again, a mystery with no culprit. Of course one can aspire, or do his best, to make some sort of impact based on his or her individuality; but what person inspired that person to do that? And would not that person exist as mere enigma to the nature of the universe, and was he not created at that specific time and place and society in that, once again, some luminary I mentioned above did this or that and changed history, and they, once again, were a variable dependent on the controlled? I really despise using an over-wrought analogy, but human history is of the same nature as when a solid object is dropped into a body of water, creating ripples and waves; who dropped the rock and where the shore ends, or if the shore has already been reached and the wave is receding back to us, a probable thought, is unknown. - To be continued. -
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