Monday, November 03, 2008

Norman Fischer at Antigone Bookshop!



In 40 minutes I introduce poet and Zen Teacher Norman Fischer at a reading he's giving at Antigone Bookshop, in Tucson.

Here's an excerpt from his talk called "Language and Dharma":

“I suppose you could say that language is humanity, because human consciousness is language-making consciousness. Language is so close to us we cannot understand what it is. We are in language as a fish is in water: for the fish there [is] no such thing as water, water is just the way things are, you can’t get outside of it and call it water. I have been wondering about language almost all my life and I cannot understand it at all. It is probably the case that I am no closer to understanding language now, after all these years of exploration, than I have ever been. Still, I am always writing about this effort to understand language in my poetry. It seems to be my chief topic: can we know what language is, can we know what we are?”

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