An Evening with William Irwin Thompson

Join us this week as we converse with Thompson in a mind-jazz session.  We will likely flow through time, touching on cave art, ancient texts, and postmodern politics in one breath, and the Vedas, Rudolph Steiner and Marshall McLuhan in the next.  As every breath is a prayer, so art, science, and the mystical are but light reflected from the facets of Thompson’s finely cut diamond turned this way and that. 

“Because we have separated humanity from nature, subject from object, values from analysis, knowledge from myth, and universities from the universe, it is enormously difficult for anyone but a poet or a mystic to understand what is going on in the holistic and mythopoeic thought of Ice Age humanity. The very language we use to discuss the past speaks of tools, hunters, and men, when every statue and painting we discover cries out to us that this Ice Age humanity was a culture of art, the love of animals, and women.”  (From The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light)

PRODUCER: William Irwin Thompson

William Irwin Thompson was born in Chicago in 1938, moved to Southern California in 1945, where he grew up to graduate from Los Angeles High School in 1957 and Pomona College in 1962. He received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at Cornell in 1962 and a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship to do his doctoral research in Dublin in 1964. He received his doctorate from Cornell in 1966 and published his first book, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916 in 1967. In 1972, his second book At the Edge of History was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 1986 he won the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award for his novel, Islands Out of Time.

Thompson has taught at Cornell, MIT, and York University in Toronto. His interdisciplinary interests are indicated in that he studied anthropology, philosophy, and literature at Pomona, and literature and cultural history at Cornell. He has served as visiting professor of religion at Syracuse University(1973), visiting professor of Celtic Studies at St. Michael's College, the University of Toronto (1984), visiting professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (1985), Rockefeller Scholar at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco (1992-1995), and Lindisfarne Scholar-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York in the autumn of each year from 1992 to 1996. In 1995 he designed an evolution of consciousness curriculum for the Ross School in East Hampton, New York and still serves as a Founding Mentor. Thompson founded the Lindisfarne Association in 1972 and served as its Director until 1997; he has retired from

Lindisfarne and teaching and now devotes himself to writing essays and poetry; he contributes regularly to the Wild River Review. Review.( http://www.wildriverreview.com/

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