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 | Invitation to ContributeContributions (texts, and other small items, real and imaginary) are invited for inclusion in a time-capsule to be buried somewhere outside Helsinki, Finland October 4/5 2003. In the first instance, they should be mailed or e-mailed to me in Nashville. See below. Images and texts will also be posted on a dedicated website. The theme of this Event is NOW. Now: An EventHold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past. (Joyce) What, then, remains for Man? Perhaps ... to give the highest possible significance to ... those moments when 'the light of sense goes out, but with a flash that has revealed the invisible world'. (Leishman) A pebble is thrown into still water, and concentric ripples radiate outwards. Perhaps everything depends on the depth and scope we allow to the Now, or the Now allows to us.. If we skate across its surface, Now will seem but a vacancy. But if we slow it down, allow it to fill up and intensify, perhaps Now will become the promise of experience itself. This Event will celebrate, elaborate and intensify the Now. Assembled over time, the items collected will be brought together at a Helsinki NOW for conceptual conflagration, imaged and posted on the web, and buried in an earth-time-capsule.
* 'small' would exclude umbrellas, accordions and operating tables (unless imaginary) Announcement: Art Event for HelsinkiI want to bring together a collection of objects, words and images focused on the theme of NOW. Lautreamont imagined: "... a chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on an ironing-board in an operating theater." But instead of glorying in pure chance, I want chance to play its part in weaving together a manifold of layers and levels and perspectives that together constitute this NOW. How can an indexical be a theme? And yet is not art just what eludes the thematic? Would such art be 'about' NOW, or would it say (or shout or whisper) NOW? If every now takes place somewhere, or across certain connections, Helsinki will be one of the coordinates. NOW - the philosopher can show us that there is no such thing, that it does not refer to anything. We may say that the now is a fiction. The philosopher would be first to say this. Perhaps the physicist second. But perhaps that is also a clue to the kind of event that a now can be. At the same time as we conjure up and construct a multi-petalled now, proliferating the linkages, is it not the distinctive power of experience to reduce this complexity, to allow a simpler open time-flower to bloom. Such an enclosed limited now may be a fiction, but might it not be the kind of fiction that even in its fictionality curls back and affects the real. This event will be consummated by a burial and by a commemoration, through text and images, on a dedicated website.
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  David C. Wood | Professor of Philosophy |
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