COSMOGRAPHY
Re-Minding Our Place in the Universe

Joel Weishaus

 

"The old division of the Earth and the Cosmos into objective processes in space, time,
and mind in which they are mirrored is no longer a suitable starting point
for understanding the universe, science, or ourselves."(1)

 

 

Like their precursors, modern cosmologists draw meaning from an embodied sky. In this spirit, Cosmography invokes seven planets in our celestial neighborhood; plus The Sun, The Moon; and Terra Incognita, with its "revelation of hidden things."(2)

Each planet is named for a god the ancient Greeks brilliantly imagined. In the present era, many of these gods have become symptoms of humanity's cognitive and somatic distresses. In view of the Anthropocene's terrestrial glare, Cosmography is
primarily drawn from walking in a landscape where "nocturnal mysteries are (still) stirring in broad daylight,"(3)

Presented In the genre of Digital Literary Art, Cosmography includes my trope of invagination: fragments exhumed from the literary corpus and transplanted into the body of a living text. There are images, some animations, and notes for each of 200
texts that propose to advance us toward a more magnanimous transdisciplinary practice.(4)

 

1- R.N. Anshen, Introduction to B. Lovell, Emerging Cosmology. New York, 1981.
2- A. Faive, Access to Western Esotericism. Albany NY, 1994.
3- W.F. Otto, The Homeric Gods. Boston, 1964.
4- See, B. Nicolescu, ed., Transdisciplinarity–Theory and Practice. Cresskill NJ, 2008.

Note: Cosmography was designed on a 15" laptop with 1920X1080 resolution, and may not display correctly on smaller screens or at lower resolutions.
Versions of some of these texts were published in:
Thinking Continental. T. Lynch, et al. eds., University of Nebraska Press, 2017.
Landscapes: The Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language. Vol 8 No.1, 2018.

CONTENTS
    [Links]

 

DEDICATION

 

To Susan Alison Rowland: partner, wife, the love of my life.

 

Thank you:

Colleagues and students, Pacifica Graduate Institute.
Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico.
Department of English, Portland State University.
Center for Digital Discourse and Culture, Virginia Tech.
The Ojai Valley Land Conservancy.

 

©Joel Weishaus 2014-2018