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"...what is the quintessence of dust?"
by C. Krydz Ikwuemesi.
What a piece of work is man!
how noble is reason ! how infinite
and admirable ! in action how like an angle !
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty
of the world ! the paragon of animals!
And yet to me, what is this quintessence
of dust? Man delights me not.
That was Shakespeare expressing his mixed feeling about man
through one of his fictitious creations, Hamlet. Like most of
his peers and other great thinkers in history, Shakespeare
obviously stood in awe of man – himself. He extolled him; he
eulogised him; yet he could not understand him. This plurality
of emotion about man culminated in a pessimism in Shakespeare,
although he was not a misanthrope. I shall return to Shakespeare
and his misgivings later. Meanwhile, I should come to man and
the vagaries of his existence.
Man is a phenomenon which may never really be understood in its
entirety. Inspite of several studies, researches, and
innumerable religious quest by man in an attempt to unravel the
mystery of his own being, man remains a stranger unto himself.
After almost a century of the anthropological enquiry into the
nature of man and culture, and inspite of the unprecedented
religious revivalism going on around the world today, the
question of the origin of man and those of existence and being
remain largely unanswered. Without being uncomplimentary to
modern universal anthropological efforts, and with most profound
respect to the visionary authors of the Christian scriptures,
one continues to wonder why more apes have not evolved into
full-fledged men in recent times and whether Cane, that covetous
brother of Abel was a hermaphrodite to the extent that he
possessed auto-reproductive powers which gave birth to the
ancient world with its attendant astounding traditions and
civilisations.
It is not my aim in this statement or in the entire exhibition
to discredit any school of thought or religious convictions. My
concern is to raise crucial questions about existence which
concern man to draw attention to both the facts and fallacies
surrounding the genesis of man, so that some of the unresolved
questions about the issue could be revisited and pursued to
convincing or at least, more plausible, conclusions.
No matter how we choose to see him, the mystery called man may
never be fully understood, at least, in our lifetime. For like a
flower, he blossoms in the morning of his birth; at noon he is
worn and battered by the acidic face of the sun; in the evening
he is frozen and withers in the morbid face of death. But within
that short interval he strives to achieve so much; to leave his
footprints on the sands of time. Depending on the strength of
his efforts, these footprints are either fossilised or swept
away by the tides of time. What else captures so strongly the
absolute meaninglessness of human life than this un-credited
statement quoted in Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation:
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
creeps in this petty pace
from day to day,
To the last syllable of
recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have
lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out,
out brief candle;
Life’s but a walking shadow;
a poor player
That stuts and frets his
hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more:
it is a tale
Told by an idiot; full of
sound and fury,
signifying nothing.
The author of the Book of James might have felt the same
hopelessness when he admonished his audience (somewhere in
chapter 4) thus:
…What
is your life? For you
are a mist that appears for a
little time and then
vanishes.
A critical look at the human condition in many parts of the
world would lend credibility to the above outburst of pessimism.
From the richest communities in the material world down to the
poorest, all are basically places of misery wherein repeated
birth and death take place. In between these two states of
being, man also suffers the evils of disease and old age. These
states are also attended by other forms of evils which
characterise the material world: hunger, war, poverty, accident,
oppression and other forms of injustice. Within the bonds of
those harsh realities, the life of man is basically a quest for
happiness, for perfection, and eternity which he seldom finds in
the real sense,
Yet even in the face of the apparent misery which circumscribed
life, the beauty of man as the epitome of creation cannot be
denied. He alone gives meaning to creation and through his
various faculties nature finds expression. In this connection,
the statement by Leon Battista Alberti stands in contrast to
Shakespeare:
To you is given a body more graceful
than other animals, to you
power of apt
and various movements, to
you most sharp
and delicate senses, to you
wit, reason,
memory like an immortal god.
Like an immortal god! Those are very sweet words spoken by an
architect who was aptly impressed by the achievement of his age.
Of course, in 1400, there was every reason for the Florentines
to feel like immortal gods. After all they engineered the
Renaissance; in an attempt to discover the lost glories of
man, they rediscovered man himself. How I envy those
immortal minds! Dante, Bramante, da Vinci, Michaelangelo,
Raphael! But do
I really feel like an immortal god? I don’t know. Yet I find the
humanist positivism of Pico della Mirandola (Alberti’s
contemporary) equally enchanting when he writes:
…I (God) have placed you at the very centre of the world, so
that from that vantage point you may with grater ease glance
round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you
a creature neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may,
as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself
in the form you may prefer. It will be in you power to descend
to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through
your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose
life is divine.
However, it is evident that while Alberti, priding in the
glories of Renaissance humanism, chose to eulogise man in the
most mellifluous terms, Mirandola sees man as a co-architect of
his own fate and thus raises the issue of destiny. Is it
possible for man to direct his destiny? Or is life a chain of
predetermined events which unfold at the whims as caprices of
the God-head and other extra-terrestrial beings? It is my view
that mankind has a common destiny, namely to live well above the
means of every other creature in the material world and to
attain happiness and bliss thereof. But certain natural factors
and, indeed, some of the foibles of human nature make these
objects unattainable. This situation is aptly mirrored in the
Igbo expression, Uwa mu na Chim which is evidence
of the recognition of the duality of man’s destiny in Igbo
cosmology.
Uwa mu na Chim
World me and God mine
me and my god’s world/life
or
my dual destiny.
This means that man
does not have absolute control over his destiny. While he would
rightly take the blame for what I call artificial evil-hunger,
oppression, injustice, etc., death and other disturbers of
social equilibrium inherent in nature cannot be blamed on man.
For death is the unknowable chasm which separates here
from beyond. Even reincarnation fails to explain this
mystery. Otherwise, why does the incarnate not carry the
memories of the previous life into the experiences of the
present? To this extent, death becomes more callous and
calamitous, not just as a natural end (for it has never been),
but as a barrier, an iron-curtain drawn against a full
realization and understanding by man of himself and other
mysteries which are present in the universe. John H. Holmes puts
it more succinctly in the following words:
Theology, philosophy and science have all been called upon to
make their contributions to the theme. Poetry has offered its
voice and religion its faith, with the result that every corner
of knowledge has been explored, every depth of truth uncovered
and revealed. There is the possibility of course, that the veil
which hangs over every grave to divide this life from the
mystery that lives beyond, may someday be lifted to our gaze.
What optimism! But
is it so difficult to feel Holme’s undertones of helplessness
here? May someday be lifted to our gaze. Those are an
expression of concealed resignation. Man may try as he has
always done, but ultimately, it may not be in his power to
discover the full meaning and culmination of life. Until a time
comes when the present life and the so-called after-life are
merged in a continuum, theology, philosophy, science and all
other intellectual enterprises which insist on immortality of
the soul remain worthless, though relevant. For how can the
ordinary mind unravel and comprehend experiences shrouded in the
veil of time and eternity? These intellectual gymnastics, as
they are, may only help to remind us that this veil
is there over every grave, but they may never
be able to lift it to our gaze. An understanding
of being and existence, therefore, may then be predicated on the
elimination of death – the very death of Death itself – so that
the unborn, the living and the dead can be in perfect unison. I
must admit that the present exhibition suffers the same handicap
although it does not primarily seek to lift the controversial
veil mentioned by Holmes. In all, its fulcrum could be
located in three questions: who is man? What is man? What is the
destiny and culmination of man? These questions are posed in the
installationist painting that make up the second part of the
exhibition, which, embodies my personal search for truth and
happiness.
Some of my critics
would quickly locate the low points of this exhibition in the
fact that I “have not proffered solutions to most of the issues
raised in the exhibition”, especially in the second segment. But
such a position would merely represent a glaring case of
ignorance. For it is not within the beat of practical artistic
process to find solutions, within the bonds of such practice, to
the varied problems which confront mankind, more so, the
overwhelming question of man’s origin and his position in this
world and the otherworld. That may be the concern of pure
phenomenology and related discourses. The artist only raises
questions about what is and what ought to be, so that through
his work some of the realities of the human condition are
reappraised and revarnished while our wandering attention is
redirected towards the primal essence and purpose of Being.
Consequently, it is not an exaggeration for me to say that the
ultimate role of art is to survive society and thereby provide a
charming and insightful tapestry into which the story of man
could be woven.
This is precisely
the motive for this exhibition. Although I detest artistic
labels, I should state with a deep sense of modesty that the
present exhibition is but a child of a homocentric cast of
thought whose mould could be found in my admiration for Blake
and those men of the Renaissance. This state of mind
cannot be a feat in itself. For how could I direct my gaze at
the question of existence without seeing man is the very centre
of it? Man adds vitality to the material world. Protagoras was
right when he proclaimed that “Man is the measure of all
things.” This statement is reechoed by the African nationalist,
Kenneth Kaunda, several centuries later, when he insists that
“Society is there because of man”. But if man is the measure of
all things, what is the measure of man? And to return to
Shakespeare, what is this quintessence of dust? I
don’t know. But I’m afraid that the answer to Shakespeare may be
contained in the “possibility” hinted at by Holmes above.
Ultimately, the continued existence of death may well hold the
keys to the meanings of man and all the secret places of human
existence.
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