The palm at the end of the mind
Subtitle: relatedness, religiosity, and the real
By: Michael Jackson.
Publisher: Duke University Press; Duke University Press Books
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Durham
Language: eng
Number of pages: 238
ISBN-13: 9780822343592; 9780822343813
Subjects: Jackson, Michael, -- 1940- -- Travel; Existentialism; Philosophical anthropology
Description: In many societies, and for many people, religiosity is only incidentally connected with texts or theologies, church or mosque, temple or monastery. Drawing on a lifetime's ethnographic work among people for whom religion is not principally a matter of faith, doctrine, or definition, Michael Jackson turns his attention to those situations in life where we come up against the limits of language, our strength, and our knowledge, yet are sometimes thrown open to new ways of understanding our being-in-the-world, new ways of connecting with others. Through sixty-one essays based on sojourns in Europe, West Africa, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, and taking his cue from Wallace Stevens' late poem, "Of Mere Being," Jackson explores a range of experiences where "the palm at the end of the mind" stands "beyond thought," on "the edge of space," "a foreign song."
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The real; title: Only connect; title: 95 Irving street; title: Reconnecting; title: Missed connections; title: Tertium quid; title: The dead; title: Mind the gap; title: The genealogical imagination; title: The penumbral; title: After midnight; title: Second skins; title: On not severing the vine when harvesting the grape; title: Corrupted con-texts; title: The broken heart; title: Incarnations; title: The matrixial; title: A letter from Athens; title: Emily's journal; title: Beginnings; title: The pain in painting; title: Paths; title: Parallel lives; title: My lunch with Arthur; title: The wellness narratives; title: Night; title: Outside the window; title: "What really matters"; title: Knots; title: Marina del Rey; title: In limbo; title: In media res; title: In Wellington; title: The enigma of anteriority; title: Survivor guilt; title: Ventifact; title: Measured talk; title: Heaven and hell; title: Manifest destiny; title: The nature of things; title: The road of excess; title: The eternal ones of the dream; title: Strange lights; title: Recognitions; title: The other portion; title: It happens; title: Ships that pass in the night; title: Café Stelling; title: Value judgments; title: The bottle imp; title: Marginal notes; title: A storyteller's story; title: Big thing and small thing; title: Sacrifice; title: Prince Vessantara; title: The girl who went beneath the water; title: Ill-gotten gains; title: Is nothing sacred?; title: Return to the Café Stelling; title: Metanoia; title: The place where we live.