Under "the Gates" in Central Park, 2005. Photo: Michele Laporte
Copyright 2009 William Irwin Thompson
The Seagull
Seagulls
are glad that humans are such slobs;
they hawk the littered red brick and cobbled streets,
beneath the low clouds and above the billowy trash
of Starbucks napkins and tumbling paper cups
or toddler-dropped french fries and red pizza crust.
They easily rise to the sky or descend to the street.
Perhaps, mon cher Baudelaire, the albatross
is not our semblable emblem anymore.
Now the seagull is our prince de nue'es,
at once the sky's clochard and the streets' habitue'.
Thompson became nationally known for his best-selling book, At the Edge of History,
which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1972. He received
the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986 for his science
fiction fantasy novel, Islands Out of Time. As a cultural historian, he is most widely known for his book, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture. As a philosopher of science, he is known for his three books, Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science, Gaia, A Way of Knowing, and Gaia Two: Emergence, the New Science of Becoming. (See "The Gaian Politics of William Irwin Thompson" in Earth Light Magazine. http://www.earthlight.org/2002/essay47_peters.html) In 1996 he published Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, followed by an expanded paperback edition in 1998, and in 1997 he published Worlds Interpenetrating and Apart: Collected Poems, 1959-1996, followed by A Diary of Sorts and Streets in 2007 and Still Travels in 2009.
Lindisfarne Fellows House
Lindisfarne Chapel
In 1972, Thompson founded the Lindisfarne Association as an alternative
way for the humanities to develop in a scientific and technical
civilization. Lindisfarne became an association of scientists, artists,
scholars, and contemplatives devoted to the study and realization of a
new planetary culture. Lindisfarne began its activities in Southampton,
New York in 1973, moved to Manhattan in 1976, and, finally, to
Crestone, Colorado in 1979 where today the Lindisfarne Fellows House
and the Lindisfarne Chapel are under the ownership and management of
the Crestone Mountain Zen Center.(http://www.dharmasangha.com/index.html)
In 1997, Thompson retired from the presidency of the Lindisfarne
Association, but he still meets with the Lindisfarne Fellows at their annual meeting at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe.
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. 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://www.ross.org/podium/default.aspx?t=36398&rc=0) Thompson
has now retired from teaching and lives in Maine and devotes himself to
writing essays and poetry; he contributes regularly to the Wild River Review. (http://www.wildriverreview.com/index.php). (contact: towit@williamirwinthompson.org).
Thompson, lecturing at Lindisfarne, Southampton, NY, 1975 (Photo, Nina Hagen)
Lecturing at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, 1994. (Photo: Bill Anderson.)
