Bøger af Marvin Bram

There are persons among us whose presence produces significant change in others. There are experiences, perhaps literary, or philosophical, or musical, that produce significant change in others. What can be said about such persons and experiences?

Most of us have a conception of "civilization." It usually includes hierarchical political and economic institutions and cultural activities like writing and reading books. We have a hazier conception of "precivilization," of the world before hierarchical states, corporations, and books. Our picture of human beings before the advent of civilization often shows them to live diminished lives. Finally, we tend not to think very much about the relationship between our five thousand years of civilization and the at-least thirty thousand years of precivilization. M. Earth takes up the two great orders of human life, civilization and precivilization, so as to correct their definitions, and relates the two orders to each other in order correctly to situate our own time in the course of history and to suggest a humane way forward. These aims are pursued in three forms: in a play, in two stories, and in three essays.

Predilections investigates a set of preoccupations in a variety of literary forms. The preoccupations include the possible historical relationships between Homo Sapiens Sapiens and Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis, the present relationships between humans and dogs, the relationships between writing systems and modes of thought, and the nature of time. The literary forms in which such preoccupations as these are taken up include essay and novella, stage play, traditional poetry, and non-traditional poetry. The non-traditional poetry is "contrapuntal": two strands constituting a single line are written to each other as well as to the reader; they are read simultaneously, in the way the treble and bass clefs of a piano score are "read," played, simultaneously.

POLYSEMY introduces a poetry that stands to traditional unilinear poetry as a Bach fugue stands to a simple melody. In the case of a Bach fugue, more music than is notated in its score is experienced by the listener; in the case of this new poetic form, more meaning than is contained in its written words is experienced by the reader.

Employing the methods of symbolic history, Marvin Bram explores the human condition in poetic, prose, and dramatic forms. His poems are "contrapuntal," asking for an ancient kind of meditative reading. The prose pieces take up matters to which symbolic history, a discipline created by Professor Bram, is uniquely suited. These and related matters are given new contexts in a play, Ancestors, and two screenplays, Songs of the Morning Journey and Higher Education.

The term "negative capability" was coined early in the nineteenth century by John Keats to describe a state of mind. To be in the state of negative capability is to "become" other persons, other entities of many kinds, and to live inside those others, in so doing enlarging one's own consciousness. It is preeminently the state in which poetry is possible. NEGATIVE CAPABILITY begins with a play, "Keats at Thirty." John Keats died at twenty-five without beginning his life as Shakespeare's true successor and without the love of a woman worthy of him. "Keats at Thirty" gives him his first great dramatic subject and exactly such a woman. A second play, "Equifinality," examines the possibilities of negative capability and the multiverse hypothesis for the lives of three friends in our own century. "Equifinality" is followed by a long story, "Nora Klein and World Peace," in which a young woman gifted in negative capability uses her gift to create a language of peace and an institution that embodies that language. Three essays follow, which provide a rich historical context for negative capability and go on to suggest policy initiatives that apply negative capability to a host of contemporary institutions. The aim of NEGATIVE CAPABILITY is to stimulate the enlargement of the reader's consciousness through drama, story, and essay. Enlargement is personal pleasure; at the same time, enlargement is one's contribution to a humane society.

A History of Humanity is the definitive symbolic history of the world. The methods of symbolic history revolve around (1) an account of the human endowment taking up thought, feeling, and behaviour from fruitful new perspectives, and (2) a correspondingly new account of global history from the point of view of the degrees of retention, surrender, and deformation of fundamental elements of the human endowment over time. Among the new perspectives informing the account of the human endowment are semiotics, neuroscience, and palaeoethnobotany. They combine the classical modes of analysis: social anthropology and social history, political anthropology and political history, economic anthropology and economic history, and cultural anthropology and cultural history, that are gathered and unfolded under the aegis of symbolic history, bringing to the narrative a unique clarity. Original source materials from the Neolithic world and from South Asian, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Western civilizations illustrate and challenge the narrative, which is unbroken but not dogmatic. Both the narrative and original sources are accompanied by a two-level marginal commentary: the first keeps the reader located in time and space, while the second brings insights from other observers of the world to the reader's attention. The aim of the commentary is to help the reader think about the human world, without, however, closing the question of the nature of the human world.

""If you study the past, you won't repeat its mistakes."" That's a hopeful sentiment, but as a formula for moving forward humanely, it's largely useless. A useful appeal to history would adopt the old saying, ""The farther you back up, the better you jump forward."" But the past to which most historians appeal doesn't go back far enough. The long time coming will be the time of living full lives as individuals while living in harmony with others as communities. Everything we need to do to bring that world about we've already done. We must only add humanity's prehistory to its history. It may come as a surprise that all the elements of a humane future can be found in this expanded timeframe, but it's the case. When we synthesize the life-serving aspects of the deep past with those of the recent past, we'll much shorten the time before the world we deserve comes into being. THE LONG TIME COMING attempts such a synthesis.