Comedy Book One: Archival Resurrections

Comedy is a philosophical poem for the twenty-first century inspired by Dantes Commedia. It can be read as an ironic dream or fantasy that addresses the democratic idea. Book One Archival Resurrections explores the transindividual nature of human thought which autonomously expands while it passes through different minds in historical time. On a walk in Seattle the Narrator encounters his dead teacher who becomes his guide through a world inside his own head where he encounters people from his personal past and past philosophers poets and statesmen including Dante Christine de Pizan Spinoza William Blake Jefferson Hamilton Sally Hemings Frederick Douglass Lincoln Marx Oscar Wilde James Joyce and others. Part of the poem takes place in a library in the shape of an inverted cone the antithesis of Dantes purgatory. Later under the assumption that imagination is topological or plastic there are visitations to Blakes cottage in Felpham Lincolns White House Marxs London and Wildes and Joyces Dublin. Joyces Volta cinema is the gateway to Book Two entitled Cinematic Revolutions which will envision the twentieth century through its signature aesthetic form. Book Three as yet untitled will explore lived cityscapes as forms of life that gestate in themselves different possibilities for the future.