Sustaining Culture in a Dark Time

March 14, 2006

We work in the company of others (philosophers and farmers, artists and scientists, as we variously require), and we work in the dark. The historian Daniel Boorstin has remarked that ignoring the past in making decisions is like trying to plant cut flowers. Likewise, to ignore the future, when “we’ll all be dead,” is to ignore the present. Here perhaps, at this gathering, we can at least aspire to that alternative space I’ve been addressing, one that is at once inside and outside, a part and apart, much like the workings of our various arts, a space of circulation and exchange. In opposing the profoundly destructive designs of those presently in power, we might consider the architecture of what the poet Robert Duncan once called the ” symposium of the whole,” a site where the other is addressed and not demonized, and where reason and imagination conjoin. Maybe that is the tonic from which the scale will arise.

[cosmopoetica, culture, poetry, art]

Tags: Art, Philosophy, Poetry and Poetics, Writing