Rhapsody and Redolence: The Crystal Decade
Ebook
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.
“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.”
—Cyril O’Regan, professor of theology, University of Notre Dame
“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.”
—Danny Fitzpatrick, editor, Joie De Vivre Quarterly Journal of Arts, Culture, and Letters
“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.”
—William Franke, professor of comparative literature, Vanderbilt University
“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.”
—D. C. Schindler, professor of metaphysics and anthropology, Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family
“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.
—Micheal O’Siadhail, poet, author of The Five Quintets and Desire
“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.”
—Joseph Terry, co-founder and managing director, Sophia
“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.”
—Matthew Levering, chair of theology, University of Saint Mary of the Lake
- Title: Rhapsody and Redolence: The Crystal Decade
- Authors: C. J. Scott, Caitlin Smith Gilson, Steven E. Knepper
- Publisher: Cascade Books
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9798385202324, 9798385202317, 9798385202300
- Resource ID: LLS:9798385202324
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-25T21:21:05Z
Carol Scott is professor emeritus of art at University of Holy Cross, receiving several endowed professorships. She is a gallery artist at Gallery 600 Julia in the prestigious Arts District of New Orleans. The City of New Orleans selected her work for their permanent collection. Carol served as vice president of the Women’s Caucus for Art. She has had numerous one-person shows, exhibited in galleries, museums, won awards, and is collected nationally and internationally.
Caitlin Smith Gilson is professor of philosophy at University of Holy Cross, New Orleans, visiting professor of philosophy at Pontificia Università della Santa Croce, in Rome, Italy. She is author of multiple books and associate editor of The New Ressourcement journal through wordonfire.org.