"Good Man Yerself!"

See, it's only cause I articulate things through speech terribly so i have to encourage myself via the computer screen. I wish I spoke better, but here we go.

So I was on an impromptu, yet completely comfortable, at least for myself, double date with my lady, my cousin and his wife. We were at Lehman College up in the Bronx at a performance by the Dublin Philharmonic. Gabriel Byrne was surprisingly the subtle MC of the event, which has actually turned up as a fun allusion or road sign in my life. And as I watched the performance and tried to keep the weight out of my tired eyes, I came to an overall conclusion.

You see a few months ago, a barber from bushwick gave me a quick little anecdote as a response to organized religion: "It's 2008, we've moved on." And I was thrilled with that response because of the arrogance and boldness behind it. It underlined the factual elements of time while looking at that timeline to see how human ideals have shifted. Said so matter-of-factly and yet so poignantly it really struck a chord; and I laughed for awhile.

After watching the performance, and a good one at that of the Dublin Philharmonic, I came to a better conclusion of the barber's statement, or maybe just a more graspable or tangible explanation. The performance at hand was orchestral, and held value, a high value centuries prior, due to the actual practice. The practice meaning the abilities of those involved and the achievement of the actual doing and doing of it well. Life, and not anecdotal, but life in prior centuries was based on codified systems based on hierarchies:IE The feudal system in Britain and France, the caste system in India, and also colonization of old worlds by at the time, modern countries. All these worlds had powers that literally were able, slowly and dogmatically, to create value systems through ideologies, theologies, and disciplinary actions. Here was where the power created certain truths, or values based on practice. And only certain people could or were allowed to practice or were even valued for being able to engage the practice. So for the orchestra to have value, in generations past, it was the ability and the practice of the persons employing the practice, and that was the quality. In theory, the practice here garners regard and the overall value through the practice of the performer.

Now somewhat of a negative binary, due to the thinking of Descartes and Nietzsche, was birthed the idea of relativism, difference, and subjectivism. Into where we now find a hyper post-modern approach. No longer is the value set on the practice of certain energies, but the value is held literally by the individuals interpretation of not only the practice but of any "set" that can be deconstructed. Here a person can analyze literally anything versus a set of personal filters and gauge what is quality. No longer is there somewhat of eliteness to a practice where only a qualified individual with certain talents or capacities is valued for those talents and virtuosity, but the value is challenged by the individual observing whatever the practice maybe and assessing the values under systemic understandings.

To bring this back around, when watching the orchestral performance of 50 some odd individuals in a symphonic performance, I no longer have to value the people or the performance for what value there is in the practice or accomplishment; no, I can value it due to my own interpretation. I no longer say that the rigorous codified ways of performing found in orchestral codes were achieved, and by that, performance was either good or bad; valuable or blase. However, I can say, that the bagpipes resonated a sound that indicated something to me consciously or subconsciously that pointed to a value based on a personal understanding of what I find valuable, furthermore, palpable.

You can see the same shift in truncated timeline of another art form, poetry. According to codified structures of Petrarchan poetry, a sonnet consisted of two stanzas of a total of fourteen lines followed by a sestet. The whole poem consists of a rigorous codified system where certain parameters are met in order for the piece to be a qualified ranking sonnet. For this piece to be seen or valued, its goal or the goal of the author was not to challenge the system, but to elevate his abilities by the constraints of the system and that is where the grandeur was found. The public, or then the elite communicated to the public the value of the piece due to its ability to be precise in those constraints. Now, each piece held a subjective prowess resonating from the author; I don't want to misspeak in that sense. However the system was what quided the initial qualifier for value.

However, when it comes to modern poetry, there has been a total resistance to the system. Value is taken by the reader and then qualified in how the author can look past the former constructs of times past. Authors, individually, have their own forms that bind up their poems that later represent something to the readers which the reader can then assign where and how the value is found.

So when my barber friend, said, "It's 2008, we've moved on," what he was saying is that, the times for systemic thought and the realm of constructs "constraining" humans, has shifted. Now I'm not saying it's a good thing, or that on-overshift may have occurred, I just enjoyed his assessment of the overall movement in history and congruently in norms of thinking. And after watching the performance of the cast of individual performers united in sound, I was better able to see, then grasp what had happened in the last millenia.

And again, I don't want to devalue something that held value. It seems, that the constructs found in the middle ages were and are a product of the self described era of the "dark ages." Warrior culture was prominent and dissidence was erupting everywhere. Humanity was in chaos, maybe naturally, with one another, and as a correction of the evolution of humanity, this birth of urban coexistence came and with it brought systemic understanding and systemic values. It may, or may not have been needed, but whatever it may be, it seems to be a product of a very violent time period in history.

Well are we resorting back to that time? Are we overcompensating, and about to shoot ourselves in the foot and trample over all the ground we've made? I don't think so. I think that we may overcompensate for a quick second(understood relatively as an integer in the grand scheme of history), but we(humanity) will find a way to coexist and form a stronger and healthier interdependence on one another. It may call for disagreements and even blood shed, and in the end it may be the death of everything once gained, but unfortunately we do not have the ability to live outside ourselves into the future, but live with a quality that renders the past and hopes for the future.

So to that, we all say; "Good Man Yerself!"


Be Relentless,
Peace
Remoy