Week 9 – Monday
March 3, 2008
The discussion on “carnival” today is intimately tied with our reading from Cobb last week. Consider this remark:
In rock concerts we enter liminal time and space, we enter a ritual of anti-structure that has some capacity to cleanse our interior consciousness and enable us to imagine new was of being. The great mix of sounds, images, emotions….that swirl around one at a musical festival can be disorienting in a productive, rejuvenating way.
Like the medieval carnival, the contemporary rock concert represents the temporary triumph of an alternative way of being. And the experience very much seems to meet Tillich’s definition of revelation:
…one has been turned inside out, seen for what one is, then returned to normal consciousness aware that reality is somehow different than one had imagined it to be.
