William Irwin Thompson & Womb Politics

What's WIT got to do with tumors in the womb?

Here is a character deeply rooted in the feminine principle. A noble precious penis person with a tenderness of being that is so palpable I can summon it now, as easily from the memory of being in a large chattering group with him at a San Francisco pizza joint, as listening to him wax lyrical beyond my waking ability to understand the words.

"He spends his time contemplating such nuances of thought as the relationship of birdsong to light changes in a sunset, the mythic levels of meaning in the fairy tale of Rapunzel, the relationship of oral sex to the development of consciousness, and the rain dances of chimpanzees. He is a cultural historian, poet, and mystic, weaving his imagination deep into the fabric of scientific theory." David Jay Brown of William Irwin Thompson, Mavericks of the Mind and Voices from the Edge www.mavericksofthemind.com

William Irwin Thompson was Ryan's most revered professor from his college days in Syracuse some 30 years ago. Thompson crafts so much beyond my ken, his writings were for a long time largely over my head. Yet I always experienced him deeply as kin. One night Ryan and I were both reading in bed, legs entwined. I was reading Clysta Kinstler's The Moon Under Her Feet Ryan was reading William Irwin Thompson's The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light. As I went to put my book down, my eye caught the dedication…to William Irwin Thompson, inspired by The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light.

On another occasion, we all trooped along to the dean's house following Thompson's SF CIIS lecture. The dean and Thompson, plus Michael Murphy of Esalen Institute, quickly launched into a conversing convergence so rich that it felt to me like supping nectar ~ I was the hummingbird. A rare occasion, where I had nothing to add but my scintillating attentiveness.

Another time, we were gathered for a special weekend, in Fritz Perl's (father of Gestalt) old house at Esalen with Thompson and Carl Abraham, in part celebrating Abraham's newly published book, Chaos, Gaia, Eros. And we did feel, as Thompson articulated, in the lively presence of the luminaries of the human potential movement... which included Maslow of course, another of my 'heroes'.


"...listening to the "voice of the earth" singing underneath the din of industrial materialism.":

The hope for such rapid and thoroughgoing cultural transformations is now more possible than ever because we presently live in a "noetic polity" based on the continuous exchange of ideas and instantaneous flow of information crisscrossing virtually the entire planet.

We must finally bring the freedom of our imagination to bear on what the shape of things to come may yet turn out to be because only the imagination is really big enough and wild enough to entertain the unthinkable possibilities beyond the ideas and information that currently rule and define our world.

The Gaian Politics of Lindisfarne’s, William Irwin Thompson, A Lifetime Achievement Review by Ralph Peters, EarthLight Magazine #47, Fall/Winter 2002/03 URL: www.earthlight.org/2002/essay47_peters.html

Noetic: derived from the Greek word nous, meaning something close to "intuitive ways of knowing."