Dance Across the Palate: Rubem Alves' Theopoetics and the “Good Fruits” of Interdisciplinarity

Abstract

Dance Across the Palate: Rubem Alves' Theopoetics and the “Good Fruits” of Interdisciplinarity Katelynn E. Carver When I am at my most receptive to the world around me, when I am most attentive to the universe in motion; when I am most responsive to the Lure, as Whitehead would say, I can see only feasts within experience, only the ways in which coinciding is not coincidental, but instead a fact of the relational existence of which we partake. It is a banquet of unknown quantities that we have to try, to taste: a potluck. We take from the table only as we bring to it. We get what we put in. My mother always said that when making a salad, you want as many colors, as many textures, as many tastes as you can fit. You want it to be beautiful. You want to it be delicious. As it goes with salads, so it goes with the world. The theopoetics modeled by Rubem Alves, particularly in The Poet, The Warrior, The Prophet, not only utilizes the image, the metaphor of a feast, but further presents as an entire work like the banquet table, like the salad: a rousing, nuanced manifesto that serves the insights of poets, diplomats, sculptors, theologians, neurologists, economists, and philosophers of anything from mathematics to science to language—just to name a few—and weaves them, metamorphoses them, “cooks” them and creates from them a multifaceted experience of what theopoetics speaks to at its core: a revelatory, participatory shaping of the divine. When we consider the prevailing dialogue surrounding the field of theopoetics and its practical applications, however, a crucial gap at the table emerges: its cross‐contextual engagement tends toward the theoretical and/or analytical, whereas the praxis of theopoetics finds its articulation most frequently in theologically attenuated terrain. How we apply theopoetics to lived experience outside of theologically and religiously oriented environments of various natures features less prominently in the emerging literature. Matt Guynn suggests that “theopoetics often provides opportunities for,” among other things, “a kind of conversation.” L. B. C. Keefe‐Perry further observes the function of theopoetics as “[engendering] dialogue and [promoting] a radical acceptance of plurality regarding personal experience of the divine.” I believe that such a divinity, encountered in a multiplicity of ways, is likewise imbued with copious amounts of poetic license; hearkening Kazantzakis, by using words such as “divinity” and “God,” we are collectively referencing the “highest circle of spiraling powers,” the “deeply felt emotion” that “stirs the heart profoundly.” Considering first the dialogical, intersubjective matrix of human interaction, and second the multivalent understandings of what “stirs the human heart” and constitutes the kinds of experiences of the divine that theopoetics is concerned with, the question now confronts us: where might we apply a theopoetic approach to the interrelational context of human collaboration and exchange across the many contexts in which the divine might stir the soul toward creativity, novelty, and meaning? How do we add more contrasts, lend more beauty to the feast? Alves finds that “truth lives on the reverse side of what is familiarly known.” Perhaps the mistake we make in seeking is to look too far from the familiar. Perhaps the crux of the inquiry at hand—where can theopoetics benefit a situation of interpersonal cross‐contextuality?—is to look in the mirror, closest to home: Scholarship. Specifically, the current academic climate of division and extreme specialization, which at its worst discourages active collaboration across fields of study. Now, look at the mirror like a window. Go through the looking glass. The truth on the reverse side of what is familiarly known. What if we began a conversation; a conversation about how a great many things might succeed in stirring the heart profoundly? Alves defines theopoetics as “empty cages,” evoking a chaotic melee wherein that which is freed from the cage interacts and expands at will; he contrasts it to a “discourse without interstices,” implying that theopoetics, by comparison, is concerned with the interstitial spaces, the void in between. So what if we began a conversation, about how the divine dwells in all kinds of liminal places and maybe, just maybe, we will find new truths...