Following our consideration of meaning and space (‘Senses of Architecture’) and our work to discuss the measures of ‘Rhythm, Duration, and Presence,’ Modern Horizons invites proposals for 30-minute papers to be presented at our 2020 conference ‘Senses of Community’ to be held 23-24 October in Toronto, Canada. Proposals are due 30 June; full papers – to be distributed to all presenters – are due 1 September.
As we are with others finds its sense in our response, as it may be cultivated, to what is and is not felt as our own. In responding to – being responsible in and for – our own time, how do we move past simple affirmation and negation to a place of more subtle interest? In responding to – being responsible with and for – our own ethos, how do we move past simple assent and dissent to a place of caring participation and regard?
To ease the way into these matters, one may consider random demonstrations of participation and regard: in Gertrude Stein’s ‘Composition as Explanation’, she addresses how a work is made with time in mind, how composition – one might add comportment – proves essential to integrity through movements of drawing, placing, and holding together things which come to belong in time; in his remarkable work in communities in Alberta and across Canada, David Goa continues to demonstrate how a deep care for how the particular ‘genius’ of a cultivated tradition scans the ultimate and elemental aspects of our life together and brings forth ways of figuring how to hold as dear the persons with whom we live and die (articulated at length in the forthcoming Modern Horizons dialogue ‘David Goa in Conversation with Andrew Bingham’); in Thomas Mann’s work Joseph and His Brothers we see how formation of community may translate in time to inform modern integrity; in Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary we see how even apart from communal dwelling one may retain strongly the essence of one’s integrated heritage; and in Pedro Costa’s remarkable creative procedure while making Letters from Fontainhas and Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? we see a disinterested ‘making about’ may translate well into an interested ‘making with’ the very subjects of one’s work.
In comprehending how we dwell together issues of convergence and divergence, or of congression, transgression, and digression, or of accord, concord, and discord may draw our attention and, if seen through the prism of participation, may help in clarifying our sense of natural, made, and chosen communities, how we partake in particular, and how we feel the varying weights of natural rhythm and interested intrusion in what we hold in common, what we draw near in community, and how we form, transform, and deform our instinctual integrity.
This is a way of speaking about belonging and difference, and how one being with another is understood in terms of desire and joy. Preferring discretion and distinction to inflation and confusion, how may we draw from ideas of appropriate form and proper being to consider one’s own – our own – as the kernel of community? Is time and energy spent without intent part of how we dwell, are, and make together in concert, in communion? Does peace – as a focus of ultimate desire – form an elemental gladness informing the heart of community?
With these sorts of grounds, concepts, and ideas in mind we invite interested intellectuals, practitioners, and artists to submit paper proposals to editors@modernhorizonsjournal.ca by the end of June, 2020.