This is the first session of a two-part dialogue exploring how climate change features in the imagination and how we might imagine ways to address contemporary ecological and social challenges.
We will ask a number of questions: Is the climate crisis also an aesthetic crisis? Are we suffering from a scourge of literalism and technocratic idolatry? How might poetry, the imagination and myths help us make sense of our contemporary situation and challenges?
Dialogue 1.
Dr Rowan Williams, Alice Oswald, Dr Valentin Gerlier. Hosted by Alan Boldon
Dialogue 2.
Alice Oswald, Dr Valentin Gerlier, Ansuman Biswas, Lisa Autogena (tbc). Hosted by Alan Boldon
Please join us for an online dialogue about the nature of the imagination and how we might engage imaginatively with the climate crisis. Much of our public discourse regarding climate focuses on technical descriptions of our situation but neglects to attend to the psychological, poetic and spiritual dimensions of global crises.
In his essay on Aesthetics and Politics James Hillman says that we are unlikely to be moved by statistics:
“The motivation must come from below the superego, from the id of desire. We must first be moved by beauty. For then love is aroused. When you love something, then you want it near, not to be harmed. What evokes love? As has been said in many places and felt by any one of us. It’s beauty. Beauty astounds and pulls the heart’s focus toward the object, out of ourselves, out of this human-centred insanity toward wanting to keep the cosmos there for another spring and another morning. This is the ecological emotion, and it is aesthetic and political at once.”
“One of the primary gifts of the imagination is justice. To imagine is to pay fair and inward attention to something else - a kind of ecology of the mind. Beauty, as a form of revelation, is essential but what it reveals is really the presence of other selves.”
The two-part dialogue will open out ways to think and imagine into our contemporary challenges and will lay the ground for follow up online workshops and an in-person retreat.