The Scope

Each month Words in Edgewise brings together some of the most exciting and intriguing artists and academics performing, presenting and sharing their work in a variety of disciplines and media at Eastern Edge Gallery. “It’s like a good old fashioned variety show with equal parts sequins and tweed!” The Scope will be featuring a fresh video of past presentations each week.

Morgan Murray: Screw Everything, Make it Better

Screw Everything: Commentators and philosophers claim we live in a postmodern world where God has died, metaphysics have disappeared, and all that is left are particles of dust, connected by nothing to nothing. Slowly we, the dust, are being blown away by our own apathy, succumbing to our own cynicism, slipping away into nihilism, into nothing. Everything becomes nothing. Everything is lost.

Yet, things persist. Life goes on. We sit in traffic, sipping our Iced Capps as the ice caps melt, day-dream about who’s screwing who on As The World Turns as the world burns. What have we really lost? Have we lost everything, or have we just lost our way? Can something be made of all the nothing that’s seeped in and taken over? What is to be done? Can we make it better?

Make it Better: The apathy, cynicicism, and nihilism that characterize our postmodern world are the result of a crisis in value. This is a moral and ethical crisis. A crisis of trying to decide what is worthwhile and doing it in the face of immense pressure to give up, give in, and go on sitting in traffic sipping Iced Capps and day-dreaming about As The World Turns.

In this study of Václav Havel’s “living in truth”, Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of reposnibility, Paul Ricoeur’s paving the way for the hermeneutic screw, and other revolutionary thinkers, a program of contemporary morals and ethics, a strategy for everyday life, emerges to highlight the persistance of hope, togetherness, and responsibility, which makes making it better make sense.

Descendent from lumber barons and homesteaders, Morgan Murray grew up on a farm in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains just down the road from four-time World Figure Skating Champion Kurt Browning. He graduated valedictorian from his tiny high school, with honours in Canadian Studies from the University of Calgary, and is now a Fellow of the School of Graduate Studies at Memorial University where he is working on mastering the humanities—all of them. In the meantime and in between time he has lived in the Czech Republic, Montreal, northern Quebec, and now St. John’s, where he writes for various publications, morganizes and hosts Words in Edgewise, and is the founding editor of Magpie magazine.