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.
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.
