Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/31/2024
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location
4010 JFSB
Category(ies)
The Humanities Center welcomes Charles Inouye, professor at Tufts University, as this week’s colloquium speaker on Thursday, October 31 at 3:00 pm in 4010 JFSB. His presentation will look at how Haiku poetry helps us connect directly with the world around us, removing the distance that modern thinking often creates. We hope you’ll join us. Refreshments will be served.
“Is it possible to be thankful for things and to things at the same time? Symbolic representation (as essential to realism, positivism, instrumentalism, and so on) inserts a symbolic, interpretive distance between us and the things of the world. The practice of haiku removes it. This brief, lyrical form asks us to “draw nigh” to things in order to directly feel their power. It addresses a harmful contradiction of modern thought: how we depend so utterly on things yet regard them negatively (as inert, soulless, and in need of our symbolic representation and technological manipulation). By restoring an animistic view of the material world in which we live, haiku help us grow closer to God by encouraging us to approach the things of creation. Contrary to realism’s distancing assumptions, things are filled with spirit, intelligence, influence, and power. We can learn to access this power through what I have been calling “thing therapy.” As Matsuo Bashō taught, if you would write about bamboo, go to the bamboo. “Thing and self are one.” (Butsuga ichinyo ). We Latter-day Saints believe that because all things have been given a portion of God’s spirit, to know a tree, rock, or fish is to know God. To appreciate the created is to understand (and come to respect) our world’s loving Creators.”
