In my new work on mysticism and media, I find myself venturing into areas of literacy that are at once old, a recollection or origins and lineage, and for me shockingly new, a movement beyond divisive, perhaps pointless polarities. If we are souls, if you accept the premise that we are more than matter and flesh – a premise I accept; many here may not – then it follows that we could treat our endeavors, our creations, whether literacy itself or the machines and mechanics of multiple literacies (book, TV, computer) in a metaphysical context. This would be grounded in the evolution of the sole mind, which is toward the community of souls, loving and liberty. I am haunted by these questions: Could there be, with our simultaneous convergences and agents of traditional literacies and cyber-literacy, a grammar of the cosmos? Where word and image may yet be perceived together in a reunited whole? And could there be a literacy or grammar of silence, of the gaps, of the stillness beyond words and images?

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Let us say that inside Living Literacies we have the opportunity to make and mark our space and time. We are here to let voices speak, images play – to be not at the mercy of systems that do not serve us, that we think beyond our control. We’re here to be informed, to inform, to be inside restless metaphoric forms, to enform – a neologism for our event – to envision, to be torn away from preconceptions, to be those selves who could always do more.

Our ethical act – all of us who united, however briefly, to make Living Literacies – is to bring literature, image, conversation, philosophy, polemic, speculation, and dream, book and E-whirl, singing voice and formative and formidable lecture, into one vibrant place. To paraphrase James Joyce’s description of his Ulysses, this event is not about something, it is something.

Over these days we won’t set limits for ourselves. Civilizations and cultures must be known for their crystalline range of colour, for their tolerance and love for the light though innumerable, individual prisms. We may catch the trace of the uncapturable, the mystery, between the lines. And though surely there will be no agreement here – in fact, I anticipate much disagreement – I hope that there will be that light between words, light behind images, some vision somehow striking us from somewhere beyond the walls of this theatre.

The hidden history of literacy is the soul’s route: light between words, light behind images.