The Mythic Journey of a Changeling

There are many such tales in the archaic moorings of our collective memory, but one in particular that seems inclusive if indeterminate: Once upon a time there was a creature that came out of the darkness with a only a faint memory of water, and sand, and cold, and fear to discover that its very life depended on telling a story about its origins—of which it had no clear memory, and its destiny—of which it had no certain knowledge. What more fabulous to conceive than this creature which, having lost its tail, dreams of growing wings? It is a being whose nature transforms itself and the world it inhabits but, for all this, keeps running up against its own limits: neither Ape nor Angel, it remains a creature caught between, looking through a fractured mirror at possibilities always just beyond reach. It is a changeling creature, a child seeming stolen from the gods

The Recovery of Archaic Truth in Literature: Light and Darkness in the Perception of Space in the Human Imagination

While the appeal of both inner and outer space of world and consciousness presents an inexhaustible source for the artist and writer, primitive memories remain in the archaic makeup of human beings that continue to haunt as well as enchant the human mind. The archaic mind is evident not only in the once-upon-a-time of fairy tales, but in the acute awareness of existence itself—the closest we can get to the first order experience of the human creature to the wonder and terror of its birthing reality. This essay considers both ancient myth and reflective imagination in the work of modern thinkers and poets such as Nietzsche, Freud, Dostoevsky, and Rilke, as well as contemporary writers within oral traditions such as the Lakota writer Leslie Marmon Silko and the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott whose cultural traditions and works draw on mythic themes and archaic consciousness

Technology: The Future of Our History

In a public lecture delivered at the University of Cincinnati, Larry Kimmel meditates on the changes that technology is producing in the way humans think of reality and their role in that reality

Crossblood: Literature and the Drama of Survival

Native Americans have witnessed the disappropriation of their lands and suffered the destruction of their way of life, yet have found strength to endure, to preserve their identities as a people through the communal character and power of their language and stories

The Dialectical Convergence of Rhetoric and Ethics: The Imperative of Public Conversation

Man is a rule-making, rule-governed creature—he is, as Aristotle put it, an animal defined by and within a community of speech. The two disciplines of ethics and rhetoric and the cultural activities they engage are instrumental to this defining activity of human life. If moral life is riddled with ambiguities, theoretical understanding of it is no less plagued with an ambivalent relationship which rhetoric and ethics have to each other, despite their mutual concern with the practical affairs of human beings. To argue a necessary convergence of rhetoric and ethics for an understanding of moral life, it is ironic and paradoxical that the primary models of convergence are the two original thinkers who created the divide. Despite their celebrated differences, Plato and Aristotle share a common belief that the structure and functional activity of speech constitutes individual identity and public community. Their complex discussions of rhetoric and ethics is analytically relevant to contemporary “problems” of relativism and the conceptual tangles of privatism

Poetry, Life, Literature

The question and theme of the poetry of life reaches deep into the essential questions of human existence. In the sense that poetry is the central core of literature, it is essential to the meaning of our lives. This question does not necessarily place human life, nor indeed biological life at the center of inquiry. We will examine the sense in which life itself is poetry, and great literature--in this essay we will refer only to that--is recognized by its capacity to capture and express that poetry. When it does this it penetrates to the heart of human accord and resonance with creation, and so merits the title “universal” or “immortal” literature. A better description would be: fundamental, essential poetry

Telling Stories

In what follows I will be using Native American culture and literature as the primary focus for a discussion of storytelling. For this culture, the life of speech and the presencing of meaning through the sharing of stories are vital to the very existence and identity of a people. Momaday\u27s remarks about the nature of the relationship between language and experience surely are not limited to the lives of Native Americans. His accompanying claim that we cannot exist apart from the moral dimension of language is no less applicable to our own culture, but showing the importance of an awareness of this condition requires a bracketing of the cultural insensibility that pervades the routine of our lives. The interest of this paper is not in Native American culture or literature as such, but what lessons it may have for a dominant culture which has forgotten the sense of, or lost the genius for, telling stories

Human Kind in Literature: The Ideals of Fiction - The Fiction of Ideals

The prophets of suspicion have done their work. Ours is a time of profound skepticism and open cynicism with respect to both the profession and promise of ideals. Too often in the name of some seemingly worthy ideal, we have been led individually and collectively to the deepest and most devastating evils. Religious ideals of the sanctity of life and universal charity sour into zeal and foster self-righteous exclusion and persecution of the non-believer; political ideals of social and economic freedom calcify into operational ideologies which justify enslavement and genocide; moral ideals which acclaim a healthy community authorize censorship, repression, and bigotry

Notes on a Poetics of Time

The idea of a poetics in contrast with an aesthetics of time is intended to focus on the creative possibilities of imagination in configurations of time. An aesthetics of time focusing on sensuous experience is a certainly a basic resource of creative imagination in literature. But the concept of a poetics of time, taken from the root meaning of poiesis in classical Greek thought—to make, or to bring forth—enables an inquiry into conceptions of human life and thought brought forth in various creative configurations of time in literature. This essay will analyze some of the ways in which poetic imagination opens and structures time and space to extend the possibilities of human experience and understanding. Aristotle investigated three different kinds of human intelligence which he designated in terms of poiesis, productive intelligence concerned with the possibilities of imagination; praxis, practical intelligence concerned with predictive action; and theoria, theoretical intelligence concerned with exact explanation. It is useful at the outset to point out that each of these modalities of human intelligence makes a legitimate claim to a configuration of time: all are true in the context of their appeal to a different need of human life and culture. Our focus on a poetics of time, then, is an attempt to see the range of creative possibilities open to imagination in the configuration of time

Paradox and Metaphor: An Integrity of the Arts

Art is movement, movement is life. Surprisingly, the spareness of paradox in art promotes a fullness of life. We must first speak as simply as possible about art as a fundamental human activity. Only then can we hope to say something of consequence about the so-called “fine arts” — which may be misleading as a description. In substance, the reference “fine art” simply means useless art: “fine” as being free from utility. Art is imaginatively productive, it makes something, whether painting, poem, or partita. But this making has no independent utility, and its character as a work of art is such that it is neither used up nor utilized as a means to something else