For the next six weeks our publication will be examining the theme of intensification as creative response to cultural crisis. Intensification implies a new way of seeing—not at objects but through them. Transparency is a mode of perception that involves us in the world and permits that world to speak to us, perhaps with us as we also learn to listen. It may apply to any creative, artistic, intellectual or physical activity.
The cultural philosopher and poet Jean Gebser used the word “intensification” as a marker for growth, being, and presence. Distinguishing it from mere expansion, which implies an event or process that can be measured or quantified, Gebser saw an intensification of consciousness as one that led us back to our own primordial and spiritual natures and forces us to pierce through the limitations of the rational mind. Intensification implies clarity, transparency—seeing through without the need to dissolve the boundaries that constitute our lived experience—and most of all, diaphany.
For the next seven weeks—as the political election heats up and our world’s political and ecological crisis continues to come into focus—Metapsy will explore this theme through writing, artwork, and mixed media.
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I have a piece that will be ready to submit that may be of interest. The piece is a hybrid of fiction and memoir and concerns racism, homophobia, violence and ecstatic utopian visions. It is set in Harlem in the nineties and focuses on how an interacial couple deals with the angry presence of their ancestors who are seeking for justice that they did not receive. This painful lack of fulfillment in their own time and place gets transmitted through dream and fantasy to those who are sensitive in the next generation which disrupts the quality of our relationships and turns to nightmare.
Anyway that is one way of putting it. I hope this will be useful to the ongoing development of the journal. I have enjoyed the conversations here. Thanks again to the editors for the helpful framing of the next cycle of the journal, which helps to catalyze the imagination in the midst of so much bickering, backstabbing and evasion displayed in this awful political season. Some of the heat of that turmoil is heard and felt in the Unguided Meditation, which is an odd kind of juxtaposition of voices, heard and half heard, on the run, not sure where any of this is going. If we press the start button I believe we will have another interesting cycle of war and peace and maybe something in between
