Rhapsody and Redolence
The Crystal Decade
- Arts & Literature
- Publisher: Cascade Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2024
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Publisher's Description
This is a work of doing, of poesis, an enacting philosophy and theology through immediacy. It seeks to call to mind our original interrogative stance in Being, as did the Eleatic poem, the dialogic power of Plato, even Heidegger's indwelling. Should the philosopher want to recover philosophical wonder, then this is the road to be traveled; thought needs raw unmanageable experience. Ordered thought dies without the first eventful taste of time briefly eclipsing Being, and Being thrusting time back down into supplication. Without this confrontation, the very measure of humans as the horizon between time and eternity, closer to angels, but neither angel nor fully animal, our thinking becomes ideological and self-enclosed patterns of attrition. The ten cycles of poetry--God, Sex, Surrender, Death, Time, Art, Prayer, Love, Rosary, Suffering--intend a new kind of philosophical and theological thinking. Here, the poet begins from the unrepeatable courtship with the intimate new, with the blushed and chaste forever-firsts of existence as Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in actus. In this new kind of philosophizing, love is the architect of the game. The poet has no chance of winning against the designer who can remove the pieces.
Endorsements (8)
“Rhapsody and Redolence is an astonishing achievement. This collaboration between poet-philosopher Caitlin Smith Gilson and artist Carol Scott issues in a text of extraordinary ambition and deep experiential excavation of the largest themes imaginable.”
“To encounter Carol Scott’s art is to know that strange exhilaration of stepping through an overlooked door on a familiar street and into a world vertiginous, enchanting, alive to the ceaseless throb of wonder.”
“Piercing and poignant, a rawly sensual poetry that also raises awareness at a theoretical level of the metaphysical underpinnings and resources that make original language possible at the limits of expression.”
“So many things converge in this book that are rarely found together: visual art and poetry, high philosophical reflection and fundamental human feeling, pious contemplation and sensual urgency, and—not least—the original activity of two genuinely creative spirits. . . . We owe the authors a debt of gratitude.”
“This book is unique. . . . [The] constant awareness of finitude, ‘every day is the last day of our lives,’ and the fascination with time and death is offset by an overflowing sense of erotic and mystical abundance where the worldly and unworldly blend in an outpouring of challenging, impressionistic poems.”
“Here, betwixt word and image, is found a singular invitation to dance and wrestle, to die and come alive—all at once—in rhythmic meter to an existential psalter that captures the simultaneity of transcendence and immanence.”
“I can’t think of other artists whose works pulsate with the joy and energy of being, and with the ‘pouring forth’ or shouting with joy of sheer grace, that I find in Scott’s best paintings, of which there are many.”
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