Wasan Dialogues

A project by Breuninger Stiftung

[wasan-dialogues]

a walk of gifts

a wasan island found poem

an architecture of time to open and explore …

just walking, step by step

there are no elders here, no boundaries

the art is everywhere we choose to look,

visible and invisible, we are pregnant with it now

it longs to clean us out, it knows the way

the way back home is fertile with that dirt

the time is now, we need to make the space

to be indigenous

— Ben Wolfe

[wasan-dialogues]

Art and survival

A poem by P.K. Page, contributed by Ben Wolfe

Address at Simon Fraser (excerpt) by P.K. Page

If we’ll but give it time, a work of art ‘can rap and knock and enter in our souls’ and re-align us — all our molecules — to make us whole again. A work of art, could, ‘had we but world enough and time,’ portray for us — all Paradise apart — ‘the face (we) had/before the world was made,’ or, to compound the image, vivify Plato’s invisible reality.

But is there time enough? This turning world we call our home, or notre pays — could become inimical to humankind — humanunkind as cummings might have said — in fewer years than I have walked this earth.

So, what is there to tell you? Only this. ‘Imagination is the star in man.’ Read woman, if you wish. And though we are trapped in the body of an animal, we’re half angelic, and our angel ear, which hears the music of the spheres, can hear the planet’s message, dark, admonishing, as the archaic torso of Apollo admonished Rilke, ‘You must change your life.’

Art and the planet tell us. Change your life.

[wasan-dialogues]

Sounds from the Boat Ride

[wasan-dialogues]