223
VERBALIZATION OR VIOLENCE
LIFE magazine, in October, have a section devoted to
Africa. The article states that Africans express their
emotions to many situations in the form of dancing. These
are dances in which the whole group appear to participate.
The article stresses their sense of rhythm.
It would appear that the most natural way for mean to
express his emotions is through some physical means. In
Africa, with its mild climate and simple social structure,
dancing appears to be a harmless and effective means of
emotional outlet.
It would appear that as long as people lived in small
self-contained communities there were many ways that man
could express his emotions through some harmless physical
group activity.
In an agricultural village, before modern noisy
machinery, a great amount of the useful work also provided a
physical outlet for man's emotions.
Singing has been part of a natural way in expressing
emotions. The Welsh are an example. To be effective as an
emotional outlet, the songs need to be traditional in
character and related to their activities and aspirations.
But when man moves to the City he is deprived of the most
natural means for physical expression of his emotions. In
the past, some cities were like little cities within a city,
and emotional communication was easier to develop. However,
in a modern city a sense of community is easily lost.
The Greeks were a city people. The cities were small.
The cities jealous of their citizenship. Outsiders were not
quickly accepted. However, Athens as it developed
commercially and politically, became too big for the sample
form of city state. They took special steps to encourage
harmless forms of emotional expression. To prevent Athens
from being isolated from the countryside, they divided the
whole country into political units called "deams". Each deam
consisted of a section of Athens, a section of the suburbs,
and an area of the countryside. Each deam perpetuated its
own traditions. If they did not have any, they made them up.
As a further outlet for emotions, the Greeks had an
annual three-day drama festival. The plays dealt with the
every-day life of the people, and emphasized the tragic side,
and exaggerated it. The audience participated in such a way
that there was a great outlet of emotions for everybody
concerned. Of course the Greeks expressed themselves in
other ways, through their work and play, and other artistic
means. However, the Athenians used language itself to a very
high degree as a vehicle of emotional communication and
expression. Kitto tells us that the Greek children literally
memorized all of Homer. This background of intense
memorizing of poetic works closely related to the life of the
people and their history does certain things. It is probably
the best way to learn a language, and probably the only way
to provide a facility of speech while still young. It meant
that the subconscious minds of everyone were saturated, in
certain areas, with common visual verbal and emotional
experiences. This tremendously enhanced their ability to
communicate with each other.
The Greek citizen lead a busy life. He wore simple
clothing, ate simple food. In the morning, a typical citizen
would do his farm work. In the afternoon, when he walked
into the City with his friends, he could do some other work
or participate in government activity, for the Greek citizen
was the government. With all these, he enjoyed conversation
and there was plenty to talk about. For this Greed citizen
who did his own farm work and helped to govern a great city,
also participated in building the world's most beautiful
building - the Parthenon. For this greatest of buildings was
not build by large contractors with overseers and slave
labor. According to Kitto, the work was done by literally
thousands of small contractors. A farmer and his son, and a
hired man or two and a slave, might contract to flute on
column by bringing ten loads of marble from the quarry. This
great building was not so much a triumph of architecture, as
a triumph of communication. Therefore, instead of studying
Greed architecture or Greek literature, we should study how
the Greeks developed this ability to communicate, and we
should imitate it. It is a lesson we should learn soon, for
when masses of people collect in cities with no real
community structure, with little opportunity for expressing
emotions in a physical way, either creatively or harmlessly,
it may be a question of verbalization or violence.
