Joseph L. Kagle, Jr. Peace Essays

IN DEFENSE OF FLAME AND AIR

When you begin the search for that inner spark that ultimately becomes an inner peace with yourself, or at least a constructive inner conflict that leads to a place of peace, it is questions that start the peace journey. It is the passion (flame) and ideate (idea and image) (imagination or air) that keeps the journey alive. That was what it was like in the 1950s when the struggle was to find “a career.” At that time, it was not known that a career was only the outward garment for the inward journey to find a rewarding spot of existence, to find PEACE.

Sitting at the general University meeting at the student center in 1972 and listening to the students ask what the career surveys indicated, I thought back to my college days and my own answers to like surreys.  In my freshman year I said, “I want to be an engineer.”  That was until I failed chemistry.

In my sophomore year, my answer was, “lawyer”:  I had a great teacher in English, who helped me learn that the spoken and written word mirrors my soul and mind, and is not a means of getting the jam passed.  Because of him and the English department, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer.  That was before Watergate.

In my senior year, if someone had asked me what I wanted to be, my answer would have been “I don’t’ know, I’m looking.”

I never thought of being an artist.  I loved doing art so much that I never thought of it as a career, or as work.  Only after college could I have answered, “I want to do what I do best and love : to create dreams.” Is that a career?  On a survey, no.  If you can’t put a good solid name to a field of endeavor, in our noun-oriented world it doesn’t exist.

But look at what has captured the total involvement of people in the 20^th century the Kennedys, Dr. King, the work and world of Picasso, the Beatles, Gandhi, the mind-expanding possibilities of drugs, a search for peace, Woodstock, Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, Faulkner, Hemingway, Kasantzakis, Lord of the Rings.  And of course, we must look at war, pollution, crime, overpopulation, and starvation.  Warring or dreaming, a man is totally involved in an endeavor, or attempts to ignore it. Peace is a balance of these two extremes.

I look at the popularity of Lord of the Rings among young and old for my belief that the bridge across the generation gap is passion (flame) and imagination (air).  This is no “human” in “human being” without the two.  There is only existence with the flame of living.  I’ve heard the sentiments voiced in Man of La Mancha too often:

            “A man with moonlight in his hands

            Has nothing there are all,

            There is no Dulcinea,

            She’s made of flame and air…”

To live in a world where there is not the magic of grass growing or the pursuit of a dream (Dulcinea) seems intolerable to my mind.  A University is a place where those who have dreams share with other dreamers and the pursuit is worthy of being called a career.

For the artist, there must be some place to show the embodiment of dreams, the works of the flame and the air. This is called ‘a gallery’ or a place to show and tell. What I was finding out early in my artistic life was that the world was a “gallery without walls”.

GALLERY WITHOUT WALLS

A painting student asked his instructor, “How does one paint eyes?”  At the time the student was working on a painting that had as its subject the upper half of a seated figure.  The student was obviously having trouble painting the eyes of the figure. The instructor had as his policy not to paint on someone else’s work be it student’s or anybody’s.  The student asked again, “How does one paint eyes?”

The instructor answered with some hesitation with a question of his own.  “Would it be all right if I paint on your painting?

The instructor started to paint. He altered the position of the head, he changed the shape of the hair, he altered the color of the background, changed the position of the nose.  He added a few lines to the arm of the figure, scraped away some of the paint from around the forehead.  The student meanwhile watched as the instructor painted away on what was his painting. The instructor continued to change lines, add colors, take away lines, and alter the painting to both a “high” key and a “low” key. All the while the instructor said nothing to his student. More changing, more altering, more scraping.

An hour went by…

Then the instructor backed away from the painting looked at it for a few minutes added a few more lines and the laid down the student’s brushes and walked towards the classroom door.

The instructor paused, looked at the student caught the student’s eye and said nothing and walked out.

Looking for any solution may take the reworking of the whole to make even one piece correct. So it is with the peace journey. From 1970 through 1976, I taught at the University of Guam, teaching young minds how to adjust to the fabric of life around them and create images that reflected that awareness.

THOUGHTS THAT CAME FROM STUDENTS

IN THE SUPER COURSE ON THE ECOLOGY OF GUAM

Is art a necessity?   Y  E  S

Food, shelter, energy, love, justice, harmony, and art.  These are the ingredients for survival of an individual or a culture in the world.  For just a bare existence, food, shelter, and energy have been the standard ingredients that is, if we contrast “existence” with “living”.

Recently, ecological harmony has been given some note, but love, justice and art are still thought of as fringe survival benefits. One cannot find that inner spot where peace is possible without love, justice and art.

“They are all right once we have the first four things.”

“They can be added later.”

Legislatures produce money for food, shelter and energy, but are reluctant to give a penny for the others.  Let’s look at all of them:

1)      Food, the energy source to survive and grow – without it, our human machine can’t exist.

2)      Shelter, the house my personal space, clothing a place away from the elements, physical and psychological.

3)      Energy – one , the fuel to run our machines, cook our meals, and propel us over vast spaces; and two, knowledge, fuel for the mind’s energy.

4)      Love-sex and the freedom of companionship.

5)      Justice, a sense of right and order under this concept would come the great religions.

6)      Harmony, personal and ecological (maybe the same thing), a balance between man and his world.  A balance of all these seven parts.

7)      Art, an aesthetic sense, a feeling for beauty and a precarious order, truth, and the courage to jump in the unknown.  Cultural heritage, Roots, Science.  How man lives, as opposed to how an animal exists.

Any individual who selects from the stuff of the environment is an artist even if he never throws a pot or picks up a brush to paint.  He knows that art is necessary to living.  Art is not a cosmetic to clean up the dirty face of the world, although it is still being thought of in that way.

In that year, I taught a course where the students made their own classroom out of the materials they found in the jungle and the “so-called civilized” environment. To educate others, the students tried to get across the message on six TV shows:  “Wake up, Guam!  How you build your home is your home.”

They learned their important lesson in the form of a question: “By the way, what are the Greeks best remembered for, Sparta or Athens?”