Five works to explore conflict

When I was asked to look at conflict through five works, very different images came to mind: a watchman who chooses silence, a goddess lowering her gaze, a spinning top that keeps turning, a man left in the shadow of an embrace, and Francis calling even death his “sister”.

Works separated by time, language and worldview, yet each still speaks to me through my own experience.

I am not looking to them for five explanations of conflict. I am more interested in lingering over what each one makes visible, and the questions it continues to leave with me

I. Agamemnon, Aeschylus

When the war ends, but something remains

For a year now, the watchman has kept vigil every night on the roof of the palace at Argos, waiting to catch sight of a blazing fire: the agreed signal announcing the fall of Troy and the end of the war between the Greek princes and the Trojans.

And then, at last, the long-awaited light appears: the war is over, and Agamemnon, king of Argos, can return home victorious!

But the joy quickly fades: after the excitement of the good news, the watchman chooses silence. «A great ox» weighs upon his tongue: something terrible has happened while the king was away, and the atmosphere in the palace is thick with dark foreboding.

Everything is still to happen, and yet the grim premonition already extinguishes the light of the announcement, smothers the joy of celebration and leaves no room for hope.

The sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia and the outrage of returning home with Cassandra as his captive will soon be answered in blood through the plot devised by Queen Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus.

The conflict, understood as war, is over, but the consequences of Agamemnon’s actions and the desire for revenge against him envelop the characters’ silences like a black mist.

A sense of impending death hangs over the palace, even though Agamemnon is still alive.

Their mouths remain closed, but do those silences not speak more loudly than the joyful message carried by a faint light in the distance?

II. Mourning Athena

When strength lowers its gaze

In the great hall of the Acropolis Museum in Athens, among countless other magnificent works of art, there is something mysterious about a small stele depicting the goddess Athena: as though in a play of mirrors, the divinity herself, her head bowed and resting on her spear, is in turn looking at a small stele whose inscription cannot be seen.

I like to read it as a funerary monument, perhaps commemorating a young Athenian hoplite killed in war: a life sacrificed on the altar of the military and economic expansion of the Attic polis, which at that point in history was approaching the height of its territorial power.

Looking at Athena, it is the detail of her closed mouth and her bowed head resting on the spear, no longer a weapon of war but simply a support for doubt, uncertainty and weariness, that opens new paths of reflection.

Athens, a symbol of Western culture, is at the height of its splendour: conflict disrupts the balance, and something escapes the simplicity of a narrative that celebrates life and death. In my reading, the goddess seems almost to sense what is about to happen and reflects on the end of Athenian civilisation.

Struck by unexpected events, inexplicable within the limits of human understanding and therefore even harder to accept, the embodiment of strength pauses to reflect, lowers her proud gaze and becomes aware of the transience and illusion of her own power.

What do we read, then, in that bowed head: defeat, disenchanted astonishment, an inability to understand, perhaps bitter remorse for the harm that has been done?

III. Inception, Christopher Nolan

What continues to live within us

Dreams sinking into other dreams, like a fragile house of cards in which falling seems almost inevitable, with the very real risk of becoming trapped inside. That is how the film comes back to me.

Among the different layers of conflict between the characters woven into the story, the most compelling is the one between Cobb, the protagonist, and the image of his wife Mal, who continues to inhabit his dreams. In the search for an authentic life within an oneiric fiction, the conflict between the disenchantment of waking life and the seduction of imagination ultimately overturns every level.

Lost in the fabric of my own life, I too often struggle to distinguish dream from reality. In the scene that struck me most, Mal slips off a shoe and lets it fall into the void, believing that in doing so she is finally entering authentic life. Instead, she falls forever into the trap of the dream.

And it is precisely in that scene that I can almost touch the impossibility of distinguishing illusion from reality, dreams from awakenings. I sense that the dream, which exorcises my fear of losing my wonderful wife forever, imprisons reality within an eternal memory: like a malevolent despot, my waking dream also conditions the genuine joy of experiencing every change in the flow of life.

Only the ultimate dilemma remains: perhaps I am Cobb, uncertain whether to remain captivated by an image inexorably tied to the past, or to face a reality that also means change and awakening from the dream. Who could answer, when all that remains before your eyes are the final shots of the film, in which the spinning top keeps turning and we do not know when, or whether, it will stop?

IV. The Return of the Prodigal Son, Rembrandt

Who remains outside the embrace

Although I have seen many springs by now, I have still never managed to visit the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg: a dream I hope one day to fulfil. For now, I have to content myself with admiring Rembrandt’s famous painting through the images available to me.

My first reading of the work has always led me to admire the grace with which the Dutch painter portrays forgiveness as a balm for all the miseries of life, in the sublime joy of reconciliation and the certainty that nothing is ever truly lost in human relationships. I find myself revisiting the moments when, as a father, I tenderly forgave my children, but soon everything is overturned when I remember the times when I was the one who had to take the kneeling position in the foreground.

Before any great work of art, however, a hurried glance risks overlooking essential details capable of calling our first reading of the masterpiece into question.

Behind the luminous embrace, in the shadows of the painting’s background, almost as if afraid of disturbing the scene, the figure traditionally identified as the elder son witnesses the reconciliation with an expression that is difficult to read. What might he be feeling? Joy for his brother, or a sense of exclusion? Or resentment for all the times that embrace was never given to him, perhaps because the father’s love was taken for granted? Can a moment of sublime communion exclude someone whose heart is beating in the shadows behind us? This question reaches me deeply and makes me kneel once again…

V. Canticle of the Creatures, Francis of Assisi

Calling sister what we cannot avoid

I am fascinated by the thought that one of the earliest texts written in the language I speak was composed by Saint Francis shortly before the end of his life. As if it were one of the very roots of the culture in which I am immersed, body and soul. Yes, the body…

At the end of the Canticle, Saint Francis speaks of the End: he praises the Lord for those who know how to forgive, who endure sickness and suffering, and then «for our sister bodily death».

The saint himself is approaching this final moment of his life: what strength, if not divine faith, could allow him to praise God for pain and death, even calling death «sister»? Evil is not erased: in his fragility, Francis contemplates it in all its terrible reality, yet, like a flower, gratitude to God and the hope of redemption emerge from suffering through the divine gift of eternal life.

His Canticle does not eliminate the pain of existence; it inhabits it and redeems it through a gaze that reaches beyond humanity. The material body remains exposed to suffering and death; in Francis’s faith, however, even death can be called sister and crossed in the hope of resurrection.

Could the path towards the sublime and the hope of redemption pass precisely through the surrender of the self, of my desires, my speculations and my judgements?

Five works, five different ways of lingering within conflict and the questions it carries with it.

But a more unsettling possibility remains: that a conflict can end without ever truly being left behind.

It is through this crack that Indro D’Orlando’s perspective enters the map.

OFF THE MAP

V. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

When the war ends and the conflict remains
by Indro D’Orlando

I have been too deeply hurt, Sam.

Frodo tells his faithful companion.

It is a simple yet powerful sentence: the war is over, evil has been defeated, and yet Frodo has not healed.

In the War of the Ring, Tolkien portrays in his masterpiece a conflict that cannot be resolved through military victory. The true war takes place within the characters themselves: it is the struggle between the desire to dominate and the ability to relinquish power.

The Ring makes this inner conflict visible. Even those who fight against Sauron can be tempted to use his own weapon, persuading themselves that they could wield power «for a good purpose». Boromir, Galadriel and, above all, Frodo reveal how thin the line can be between fighting evil and allowing oneself to be transformed by it.

The destruction of the Ring brings the war to an end, but it does not erase the wounds the war has caused. Frodo returns to the Shire without ever being able to recover the peace he once knew.

The outer conflict has ended; the inner one continues.

When, then, can we say that a conflict is truly over?

Continue the journey

Before leaving this map, the journey moves into a different space: from works of art to the workplace, where conflict takes on an everyday, concrete form.

We are not talking about the same thing

Coming soon on L’Agorà.