Making sense of the space between

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

These are the words of Vaclav Havel, still inviting us to consider what it is to ‘make sense’.

Our skills of sense-making, our sensitivity, our creative attunement, are deeply needed in all aspects of our interconnected lives these days. Children sometimes exhibit these abilities better than those of us who have successfully, conscientiously and sadly adjusted to a less sensitive, less painful mode; those of us who have, by accident or design, dulled our senses. Yet, on balance, we have education systems that are struggling to prepare children and young people even for our current circumstances. There’s some kind of idea that the children, and the future, can be fixed.  Some requirement for our children also to be dulled, to stop reminding us what we have become.

So, if you are an elder, or perhaps simply ‘older’, how could your influence better serve the ones who follow? 

 

As William James said, ‘Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.’ For me, a here-and-now conversation that crosses generations might be helpful, so that whatever wisdom the elders have mustered can be re-crafted in relationship with the wisdom of youth.  This is not the same as just the elders having their say, or just the youth. It is what can happen at that precious, intricate place that we call a frontier – a frontier between the known and the not-yet-known. The foundational place of the poetic.

But to do this we all need to invite and not impose. We need to imaginatively give up on any details we imagined.  Our praxis can't dictate terms for others.

 If you will be disappointed by the lack of an outcome that was never in your gift, however needed and sane it seems in our troubled times, then you may need to hope in a different way.

 

So, my resolutions for 2018: to travel in that different hope, learning to speak and to live more poetically.

And bombs fall and children die and people make art and cry and try though the whole of the thing seems so badly awry and we stand in between what we know and we don’t and we just have to stand though it sticks in the throat and we still have to stand, stand through hope to no hope then stand on again, find a way, more than cope.  

But it’s not that we’re sad. More bemused by the joke that we still haven’t got what it takes to not croak. And you’ve got to admit that there’s joy to be had in the smallest of gestures: it’s really not mad to laugh for a reason no others can see, to be what the moment just asks you to be. To do this because humankind can be kind.

This is how it is in a liminal time.

© Julie S Allan January 2018

With acknowledgement to pioneers of the human spirit, awareness, connectedness and creativity including Nora Bateson, Margaret Wheatley, David Whyte, Philip Pullman and Sir Ken Robinson for words along the way.  I don’t claim to represent their views.

Poetry in Motion

Asking increasingly beautiful questions is a a fundamentally beautiful practice that poet David Whyte encourages.  His salon series, which I joined for the past year in a small company of others, was an oasis for such explorations.  Academic pursuits, like other institutionalised endeavours, can lack life's full juice - a caricature that's all head and not much else - yet poets can provide a wellspring even there. And it's vital that they do.


Taking my academic research to a Higher Education Academy dissemination event early this year, a senior academic whose name I am sorry I didn't write down, responded enthusiastically to my interest in poetry. And, to my relief, so did others.  He asked me, "Have you read Seamus Heaney's The Redress of Poetry"? I had not. "I was lucky to hear him speak.  You should get it."  So I did.

The HEA event was something of a redress itself: a chance to glimpse exceptional attention to enthralling enquiry, enquiry finding space in which to keep breathing itself alive during troubled times for thinkers of any stripe, academic or other-wise. And in Heaney's Redress I found what I had been going on about, only put much more elegantly:

"I wanted to affirm that within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic; to affirm also that each form of knowledge redresses the other and that the frontier between them is there for the crossing." (p201 Kindle edition).

This was implicit, he wrote, in a poem from a sequence called 'Lightenings' in his 1991 book Seeing Things.  Heaney had been considering the experience of being in two minds, of finding harmony, or not, when worldviews seem to exclude. He seemed to me to say that there might yet be fruitful redress through which different futures could be brought into being, and different relationships forged, whatever the prevailing institutional circumstance. The poem was this:

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

Were all at prayers inside the oratory

A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep

It hooked itself into the altar rails

And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

And struggled to release it. But in vain,

"This man can't bear our life here and will drown,"

The abbott said, "unless we help him." So

They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed

back

Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

If you think, as I currently do, that organisations are conversational creations, and leadership perhaps like-wise, then you may too be heartened to consider the sort of conversations and beautiful questions that redress might enable, and might enable redress. 

If the aridity is, however, permitted to reach tongue-stilling dimensions -- as I sometimes lose heart and believe to be true -- I then wonder what form of rain dance is needed.

It's a question for us all. What poetic practice is ours to offer, to serve good sense and wiser ways?

Seamus Heaney The Redress of Poetry: Oxford lectures. Faber and Faber.  This text contains ten lectures given while the author was Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1989-1994).

David Whyte can be found here.