Dialogue as Poetic Imagination in the Way of Tea

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.