To see a world in a grain of sand. Poetry & philosophy for a civilisation in distress
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Published 2024-08-09
Valentin Gerlier and Mark Vernon return for another conversation about the manner in which we humans are gifted with symbolic as well as cognitive imaginations. They ask why we keep returning to poets such as William Blake and William Shakespeare, how the wellspring of a civilisation is found in its mythos, and whether a literal age might be recovering the age of sense of transcendence that is also immanent.
In short, they ask why seeing a world in a grain of sand, and not just a grain of sand in a grain of sand, might matter.
Their first conversation, Heaven in a Wild Flower, can be found here - • Heaven in a Wild Flower. Plato, Cusa,... .
All Comments (5)
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Yes, I love philosophical language because it is "always flirting with the unknown", contemplation of the dynamic mystery of Creation.
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I like definition of devotional poetry ( as in the form of a Ghazal ) as " both the pain of separation from the beloved and yet the beauty of love in spite of that pain.” It suggests that we can never be fully united with the object of our love, but that our experience and first hannd knowledge of that love is all the same ‘complete within itself'
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Wonderful ! I'd like to contribute a thoughtful word or two...
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The Poetic arts would have us feel our understandings, not just think them out like equations. Can we truely see the world without the imagination? Without a poem to interpret it? The poetic form forces us to reimagine our own ideas beyond objects or rules or the maxims of philosophy. The greatest poems ring like questions asked to a living being instead of a law or rule to be followed by society. It seems this loss of poetic interpretation and practice has left us with only legal and clinical responses to our lives. This philosophy & poetry topic reminds me of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’s thoughts on it that always makes me laugh: “I cast my net into [the Poets] sea, and meant to catch good fish, but always did I draw up the head of some ancient God. Thus did the sea give a stone to the hungry one.”
