Timothy Morton, Paul Mellon Distinguished Fellow Lecture 2024

Philosopher, writer, literary critic, and professor Timothy Morton gives a lecture at Skowhegan. Morton begins his lecture by reflecting on what it means to create a meaningful life, and how this is predicated on the possibility of meaning less. For Morton, beauty (which he sees as a fundamentally trans phenomenon), ambiguity, and irony are the ultimate anti-facist death rate chemicals. Morton tells the participants that how they treat each other is how they will treat the biosphere. For Morton, if someone wants to destroy the master/slave template, they also have to destroy the subject/object template which is a function of that. Morton then starts doing meditation exercises with the participants throughout the lecture, and explains how meditation has allowed him to become a pollyanna where he can try to see the good in everything and find overlaps in people rather than contradictions. Whenever Morton is reading, he approaches the pollyanna methodology to also find the gateway to utopia in the literature he reads. Morton then starts reflecting on grief: how grief is the past correctly deployed as a kind of inner body work to give the future a massage so it can be different, and how grief is the one thing in the world that is bigger than one’s ego. For Morton, the anti-chamber of grief is panic which comes from the word pan that means everything. As soon as panic sticks to someone, the grief will come, and eventually the body will learn to relax. Morton ends his lecture by telling the participants that everyone needs to grieve more, and grieve more collectively.