Abstract
This chapter explores the art of silence as a dialogic practice using Chado, the cultural practice commonly known as the Japanese tea ceremony. Introducing Bachelard’s concept of poetic instant, I suggest the art of silence as a dialogic practice. Then, I use Turner’s concept of liminality to illustrate the ritual process of dialogue. I discuss how the poetic instant suspends the flow of time and enables the tea participants to give a full attention to experience the here-and-now, where novelty emerges as creative imagination. In a given poetic instant, the silence in Chado is a zero signifier, suggesting that the ritual silence in Chado can be seen as a microgenetic process of the human becoming triggered by poetic instants for creative imagination.
This chapter was developed partly from my presentation entitled ‘A cup of humanity’: Dialogicality through the way of tea for the symposium: Rethinking dialogicality: Art of silence and inner dialogue on 30 September 2010 at the 6th International Conference on the Dialogical Self, Athens, Greece.
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Murakami, K. (2017). Dialogue as Poetic Imagination in the Way of Tea. In: Lehmann, O., Chaudhary, N., Bastos, A., Abbey, E. (eds) Poetry And Imagined Worlds. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64858-3_15
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