I’m interested in a ‘symposium of the whole’ as a proposal for living together according to an idiorrhythmic ideal; a situation in which everyone can think, talk, and eat together in their own way, at their own pace. The image is seductive, yet difficult to conceive; what does the symposium look like, sound like, how does it exist in space and time (I think it’s easier to hear than to see, how does this relate to its dimensions)? This difficulty is formal, representational; I wonder how to organise such a symposium, what sort of committee would be required, who’s invited. Jerome Rothenberg and Diane Rothenberg make their selections, offering an image of the symposium as a ‘range of discourses’ that can be contained in a book. The problems with anthologising as holistic methodology are well known, it’s impossible to include everything. Herein the seductiveness of an image; there are no material limitations to stall us. Roland Barthes’s study of ‘novelistic simulations’ in How to Live Together leads us from image to narrative, and it’s clear that different approaches to organising our symposium suggest different ethics. Poethics might be a better term, insofar as it implies composition, supporting the fluid metaphor of idiorrhythmy; Denise Ferreira da Silva can help us think through this. Rather than a programme, we could devise a score for movement, parallel, and interruption, a veering arrangement of proposals ventured by the committee and only partially summarised in my report (it seems the symposium exists beyond its conception, is already taking place). Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘carrier bag theory of fiction’, especially as it’s demonstrated in Always Coming Home, makes a case for holism as narrative structure. I find myself conflating the ‘symposium of the whole’ with the ‘carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle’, ‘a whole which itself cannot be characterised either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process’. Storytelling as a collective practice in living, in affirming life and death. Given Le Guin’s self-conscious attempts to unlearn an anthropological mentality and to think with Native American history, knowledge, and practice, I’m keen to read her work alongside Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s theory of ‘grounded normativity’: ‘Grounded normativity houses and reproduces the practices and procedures, based on deep reciprocity, that are inherently informed by an intimate relationship to place. Grounded normativity teaches us how to live our lives in relation to other people and nonhuman life forms in a profoundly nonauthoritarian, nondominating, nonexploitive manner.’ In telling the story of our symposium, we experiment with the decolonial potential of world-building, bringing the whole into being for as long as we can hold tension in relation, withstand the pressure of our fantasy of a ‘bag of stars’. An early meaning of ‘whole’ is a body that’s unharmed or recovered from injury; implicit in being whole is the inevitability of woundedness, if it hasn’t happened already, it will. Le Guin reminds us that ‘The image of the other’s pain is the centre of being human.’ Our wounds may lie outside our bodies, our healing too.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3