In Reading the Dream the poet and scholar Peter Dale Scott has composed a poem in prose for our time. This is a work of art emerging from a passionate social vision. Scott examines our present state of post-secularity through the imagination of the past. Using devices such as the rational and nonrational, or the yin and the yang, Scott focuses not just on the reasoned current of written history but also on myths, beliefs, and even dreams. The author searches for moreness throughout the culture of the past. He reawakens the ultimate human quest for transcendence of ourselves to repair a political order in ruins. This book seeks to transcend the slow breakdown of our current global political order by returning to its generative cultural roots in enmindment (that is, both secular and spiritual enlightenment). It sees our emerging global culture as dialectical on interconnected levels: the tension between scientific (yang) analysis and non-rational (yin) hopes and dreams; the source of this tension in the bicameral human brain, in competing rural and urban ethical values, and in the master-servant relationship. Behind the screen-history of chaotic political violence, it revives a vision of cultural progress, in which the vertical imposition of political order from above is slowly supplanted by the emerging post-secular tolerance of cultural diversity, including both religion and science, from below.
This book is a unique meditation on poetry, history, philosophy, religion, and politics from one of the most important poets of our time. It is the result of decades of deep thinking about the fate of poetry in human history as well as the nature of our shared human condition.
