Care Culture

Alexander Rothaug, Poetry

Alexander Rothaug, Poetry

CARE CULTURE

BLOG.TOBYSHORIN.COM

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I write about technologies of culture, community formation, and meaning-making. Currently that means exploring the history of psychiatry, and emerging movements in mental health, wellness, and spirituality.

The current work continues some of the themes I developed between 2016 and 2024 on my old blog, Subpixel Space. For a list of essays relevant to my current thinking, check out the Favorites list at tobyshorin.com/archive.

Newsletters go out occasionally, whenever I publish a new essay or talk. At the current pace, that’s once every few months.

The painting is Poetry by Viennese painter Alexander Rothaug (1870-1946). It depicts a classical stone ruin in a forest, overgrown by ivy and grasses. On a stone bench sits a female figure with a lyre, likely Erato, the muse of lyric poetry. She extends her hand toward a deer and a blackbird, who appear enraptured by her presence. Despite the decaying ruins, the scene teems with life and motion.

I have chosen this emblem for the blog because it seems to me that the question of spirituality today is similar to the question of poetry: amidst the detritus of classical civilizations and the rummage room of modernity, how are new meaningful wholes to be made? The practice of poetry is a kind of magic, which creates new wholes out of nothing. And poetry is itself a technology of healing; to write poetry is to make oneself more whole.

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