Karen L Houle writes in part:
>just a short note, after ed's poles:
>
>clocks (premodern) and
>big bangs (modern).
I appreciated what you write, Karen, and you are absolutely right.
Postmodernism would not affirm the big bang metaphor so easily at all.
However as a sensibility the clock with its regular, reliable patterns (laws
of nature) seems much more stable than living on a cinder in the midst of an
expanding explosion.
I would not quite put the poles the way you categorized them above. I would
say the premodern image would be something organic, an organic whole image,
a romantic balanced image, religious even. I'm not sure what to suggest.
Then the clock is the "modern" image. And the big bang if not postmodern is
a late modern notion. Much of what goes for "spirituality" today is an
effort to retrieve premodern metaphors. But this is not postmodernism which
in its refusal of the universal and the mechanical seems fundamentally open
to whatever comes in the future, contrary to the modern impulse through
science, which was(is) to control it. Ed K.
Ed Knudson Portland, Oregon
eknudson@xxxxxxxxxxx
Voice/Fax: (503)282-8303
Modem: (503)282-3477
------------------
>just a short note, after ed's poles:
>
>clocks (premodern) and
>big bangs (modern).
I appreciated what you write, Karen, and you are absolutely right.
Postmodernism would not affirm the big bang metaphor so easily at all.
However as a sensibility the clock with its regular, reliable patterns (laws
of nature) seems much more stable than living on a cinder in the midst of an
expanding explosion.
I would not quite put the poles the way you categorized them above. I would
say the premodern image would be something organic, an organic whole image,
a romantic balanced image, religious even. I'm not sure what to suggest.
Then the clock is the "modern" image. And the big bang if not postmodern is
a late modern notion. Much of what goes for "spirituality" today is an
effort to retrieve premodern metaphors. But this is not postmodernism which
in its refusal of the universal and the mechanical seems fundamentally open
to whatever comes in the future, contrary to the modern impulse through
science, which was(is) to control it. Ed K.
Ed Knudson Portland, Oregon
eknudson@xxxxxxxxxxx
Voice/Fax: (503)282-8303
Modem: (503)282-3477
------------------