Wilding the Psyche
with William Rowlandson
Tuesday March 23rd 2021 – 6:30pm – 8:00pm
The recording from William’s talk is now available for purchase. Please click here for more information
My spectre around me night and day
Like a wild beast guards my way
William Blake
In this session we enter the Wild. We follow the fault-lines between landscape and wilderness, tame and wild, civilised and savage, wildness and wasteland.
We interrogate notions of the wild, how human relationship with the wild is encoded deep into the cultural matrix, how the wild is both what is feared and what is desired in this time of crisis, how the fear of collapse is commensurate with the fear of the wild, how civilisation opposes the wild whilst needing to embrace the wild in order to survive an increasingly wild climate.
We explore how theories and practices of wilding and rewilding are both traditional and recent, and how debates on wilding manifest this atavistic relationship with the wild.
We consider the wilding of the mind, the wilding of the psyche, the bewildering relationship with the non-human Other that speaks from the wild margins of the unconscious.
We consider the Wild in relation to the crises of the present. We pay particular attention to the fear of the Wild and the destruction of the Wild as operational factors in the creation of crisis. We discuss the Wild and projects of Wilding as strategies of hope for fostering resilience in the face of collapse and calamity.
The recording of this session is now available for purchase. Please click here for more information
BIOGRAPHY
Dr William Rowlandson is an entity currently operating as Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Kent in Canterbury. He is the author of Sartre in Cuba—Cuba in Sartre (Palgrave, 2017), Imaginal Landscapes (Swedenborg Society, 2015), Borges, Swedenborg and Mysticism (Peter Lang, 2013), co-author with Angela Voss of Daimonic Imagination: Uncanny Intelligence (Cambridge Scholars, 2013) and contributor to DMT Dialogues: Encounters with the Spirit Molecule (Park Street Press, 2018, ed. David Luke & Rory Spowers). Author of books and articles on Latin American cultural and political history, Cuban literature, Borges, Swedenborg, mysticism, psychedelics, the Imaginal, Faery, and the Daimonic. University Sustainability Champion, co-founder of Canterbury Climate Action Partnership (CCAP), gardener, composter, vermiphile, mycophile, drummer, proud tree-hugger, megalithomaniac and weirdonaut. Father of two girl entities. William’s contributions to this site can be found here.
