Visual Response to 'Ishmael' :posted 12 july 2007

Niccic

Reading the novel 'Ishmael' was a bit of a life changing experience for me. Ishmael teases the idea that the world was made for man, and that man is here to conquer and rule the world. This rule is meant to bring about a paradise, as man increases his mastery of the world, however, he is always failing because he is flawed. Man doesn't know how to live and never will because that knowledge is unobtainable. So, however hard he labors to save the world, he is just going to go on defiling and spoiling it.

The book points out that when we decided there was something fundamentally wrong with humans, we took evidence only from our own culture's history- "They were looking at a half of one-percent of the evidence taken from a single culture-- Not a reasonable sample on which to base such a sweeping conclusion."
Ishmael says:
"There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact, in which they are the lords of the world, they will act as the lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now."

 

I wanted to visually express some of the ideas that were reinforced in me from reading the novel. This is what I came up with.

 

All images and text © Nicholas Cassey.