difference is happy

Faith, reason, imagination

Divine nature, rational nature, imaginative nature. In the first two are posited a set of immutable laws, hidden behind nature as it presents itself. We are set above and apart from nature, spectators of the work of the Creator or otherwise scientists observing it from behind the nature-culture divide. In the film Black Orpheus, we are invited into a different conception of the universe. To become actors in it. To re-invest it with our imaginations. The musician must strum his guitar every morning in order for the sun to rise. Nature ceases to be a ‘thing’, and becomes instead an ongoing process of creation of which we ourselves are participants. The world happens only by way of our art and music. The hackneyed conflict between faith and reason seems beside the point here. Perhaps it is rather about the diverse fictions (divine, rational, or imaginative) we live by; weeding out the ones with malignant effects, and cultivating those conducive to the further proliferation, rather than curtailment, of life. Art and ecology converge in the ontological creativity of the chaosmos.