The story follows Bruce Ross, who grapples with feelings of isolation and displacement from his loved ones and society. Despite appearing well-adjusted, he struggles internally and fails to recognize his battle with depression, believing it only affects others. This narrative explores the often-overlooked realities of mental health, highlighting the disconnect between outward appearances and internal struggles.
The lectures collected for this book focus on transpersonal expression – heightened states of feeling, emotion, and deeper regions of the psyche, from the Paleolithic (so-called rock art), to the medieval (Solomon Ibn Gabirol), to the modern (Rilke), and postmodern (Haruki Murakami). This study suggests the psyche is hard wired for spiritual experience, for aesthetic and ethical expression, and that transpersonal expression in literature and the arts is a universal human exploration of perhaps a fundamental ground of being. The focus of the chapters provide evidence for these mysticism in Gabirol, Rumi, and Rilke; reckoning with suffering in Murakami’s postmodern fables; spiritual failure and grace in the triptychs of Bosch, Beckman, and Bacon; epiphany in Basho, Suthorn Pho, and contemporary world travel haibun; altered states in Romantic ballet; metaphysical space in Ra’anan Levy’s painting; epiphany and social communion in Paul Theroux’s travel writing; sustaining the world in modern Aboriginal art; the nature of «big mind» consciousness as internal space; visitation to the heavens in world petroglyphs and pictographs; «absolute metaphor» in traditional American haiku; and spiritual spaciousness as a key element in haiku.
This book assembles lectures and essays on literature (William Wordsworth, Walter Benjamin, Chinese mountain poetry, Friedrich Nietzsche, the Tao Te Ching), art (Paleolithic cave art, Vincent Van Gogh, American landscape painting), and Japanese poetry forms (haiku, haibun, tanka) that were originally presented and published between 2000 and 2007. The essays identify strategies to counter the so-called postmodern condition. Matters of will, ethics, and consciousness are examined in comparative contexts with the aim of formulizing models of enlightened states of being and their aesthetic expressions. This study focuses on Wordsworth's rainbow epiphany; Walter Benjamin's «aura» and «monad»; Chinese mountain poetry's cosmic emptiness; Nietzsche's Hyperborean; Paleolithic cave art's transpersonal expression; Van Gogh's «dizzy heights» of natural beauty; American landscape painters' depiction of the sublime; haiku's absolute metaphor epiphany; and tanka's connection between natural beauty and erotic feeling. The collection is a re-examination of Ralph Waldo Emerson's «fundamental unity» between humanity and nature, as well as an examination of often-unmediated affective experience and its expression in this context through literature and art.
This collection of lectures considers the postmodern «hermeneutics of exile» that disrupts our humanity and estranges us from nature. There needs to be a redefinition of our relation to things and of subjectivity itself through new or recovered spiritual and phenomenological ontologies such as evidenced in Kabbalah and Zen Buddhism. Overtures to this end are explored in contemporary American nature poetry, American Transcendentalism and its deconstruction, Russian émigré literature and the art of nostalgia, Kabbalistic poetic responses to the Holocaust, Hasidic metaphysics and its artistic expressions, and Zen Buddhist poetics of presence in Japanese and American haiku and haibun.