Section 12: TRACK 7

Track 7: Tragic Beauty

Linking imagination, memory, and the multifaceted power of language can move the world. For Whitehead, the aesthetic cannot be torn from the ethical. Some sessions will include fiction, but primary focus will be on poetry as elegy: lamenting losses while celebrating natural diversities of life and environment. To proceed responsibly in creative change, we must grieve. Literature’s felt aspects, human, natural, numinous, offer not just pleasure and refreshment, but preserve causal efficacy. Particularly poetry’s images, music, and crafted, complex associations deepen the Sea of Feeling. Because language determines how futures unfold between us, literature is primary in expanding rather than shrinking language in the public realm. Sessions: readings by local and international poets and writers; fiction/poetics/theory (propositions and causal efficacy; Whitehead and Transcendentalists); experience/discussion of literary creative processes.

Other Tracks in this Section

• Track 1: Anima Mundi: Listening to the Art and Soul of Nature
• Track 2: Aesthetics East and West
• Track 3: Design for Social Innovation: How to Use Design Thinking to Think Through Big Challenges
• Track 4: Eco-Acoustics: The Powerful Ecologies of Music
• Track 5: Film and Hope: The Power of Film to Awaken the Mind
• Track 6: Imaginal Communities: the Power of Place in Art and Story