Dwelling in a creative endeavour

Abstract

This paper discusses the notion of inhabiting one’s lived world as a creative endeavour, a space opened up and simultaneously occupied by the intrinsic human impulse to articulate and expand an intelligible habitat. Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, together with his other essays on drama and Baudelaire, provide the preliminary paradigm for the notion of dwelling within a constellation of mutually enhancing technological and artistic articulations of habitable space. The notion of inhabiting the interconnected features of an incessantly formulated environment is also investigated in the light of Martin Heidegger’s relevant essays ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ and ‘Building Dwelling Thinking,’ wherein an articulated world arising out of its creative struggle with an undifferentiated mass of earth also serves as a self-engendering (infra)structure of worldly being, whose differentiated and related phenomena provide the contours of our dasein, our throwness in and belonging to a context of human care. This phenomenological viewpoint is further supported by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s observation, in his essay ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,’ that the artistic object emblematizes a ‘way of inhabiting the world,’ or that the artistic endeavour continues our prelinguistic and corporeal engagement with a lived world. This paper aims to show how creative, habitational, and ontological terms come together in the complex notion of a lived world, an intelligible environment whose interacting phenomena and intersecting mediums can be more clearly elucidated when their world-making capacity is observed in purely artistic contexts, such as poetry. Poetic examples from world and Maltese literature are used to demonstrate how the creative effort that places the artist in a meaningfully articulated setting is also the fundamental principle at work in making sense of an intelligible habitat. The artistic endeavour shares with this lived habitat the basic need for a meaningfully situated being, a dasein that inhabits its own creatively structured space as both world and significant being.