Under "the Gates" in Central Park, 2005. Photo: Michele Laporte
Copyright 2012, William Irwin Thompson
Neuroscience I
The act
of intentional will comes late—
after
the neurons demonstrate
each
voluntary intended act
is a
facet of an unseen tesseract.
Consciousness
is an afterthought—
the bill
for the meal you’ve already bought.
The
waves of the sea
do not
touch the sky.
There is
more to me
than
meets the I.
Neuroscience II
My
windows frost over
in
winter’s ice-bound night.
I
shift my focus to
the
intermediate
realm
of ferns and snowflakes,
just
as at midnight I
shift
my mind away
from
the physical world
to
daimon, angel, djinn.
If
all this is brain-based—
mere
hypnagogic trance—
then
think of it an art
much
more interactive
than
gallery displays,
operas,
or concerts.
You
believe whatever
you
want. I desire
whatever I believe.
Thompson was born in Chicago in 1938, but 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.
Pomona College
Cornell University
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, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ross_School). 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. (http://www.wildriverreview.com/).
