The “fertile void” is the central concept in a poetics. It echoes the Chinese concept of “dark enigma” (see Zhuangzi) but it refines it through the modern discourse on nihilism, which holds that the “argument from nothing” has a fertile “side” — as for example shows in the ancient argument over “creatio ex nihilo.”
As discussed in many volumes but most systematically in the three-volume work concluded with God and the Between, William Desmond’s “metaxy” is an image (derived from Plato but discussed by Eric Voegelin and Simone Weil and others in the last century) that sums up the picture of reality of which “the fertile void” is the origin.
“The given world is saturated with qualitative texture and value. .. It is the artist who is the servant of this surplus immediacy, but we are all unknowing guests at this feast in our being embodied. ” William Desmond in The William Desmond Reader 205
Notice the use of key words: given, saturated, qualitative, servant, surplus, immediacy, guests, feast, embodied. These are theme words for a new poetics..
promising & exciting! I look forward to seeing how poetry can reshape our understanding of no-thing!
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Reblogged this on Ecotone poetics.
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