8  A thanksgiving:- thank God for those who have resisted the pressure of Flatland knowing, especially the Stars who lead us to doorways to the ineffable

Thank God there are some writers, just a few, who manage to speak to several or all of our chief concerns as holistic educators, and even point to the ineffable.   Through them we can start to sense the truth below the surface and then start to excavate, for the truth and beauty and goodness of holistic education.  

Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value.  Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom

            (Baha'u'llah:  Gleanings, Page: 260)

James Taylor in his Poetic Knowledge; the recovery of education

seeks to reveal a neglected mode of knowing and learning, which from Socrates to the middle ages and beyond, relies more on the integrated powers of sensory experience and intuition, rather than on modern narrow scientific models of education…….

"Poetic knowledge" is not the knowledge of poetry, nor is it even knowledge in the sense that we often think of today, that is, the mastery of scientific, technological, or business information. Rather, it is an intuitive, obscure, mysterious way of knowing reality, not always able to account for itself, but absolutely essential if one is ever to advance properly to the higher degrees of certainty. From Socrates to the Middle Ages, and even into the twentieth century, the case for poetic knowledge is revealed…..

POETIC KNOWLEDGE  The Recovery of Education  James S Taylor

We don’t have time to explore  all of the truths touched on here by Taylor;

restoration of an earlier way of knowing, what incidentally Karen Armstrong calls the mythos as opposed to logos, the nature and importance of intuition,  the dominance of what Wilber calls ‘flat-land’ thinking and so on but before we move on we should note the distinction in, ‘"Poetic knowledge" is not the knowledge of poetry…’ – the knowledge spoken of here is something we are in, and which is in us.

Perhaps the stars we are getting glimpses of can also actually make all of

those concerns  -  mystery, story, learning and teaching, being human, making meaning, knowledge and knowing  - reverberate together, and shine on us with the brilliance of our own star, the sun.   Do they all speak, all reverberate, here in Seamus Heaney’s poem called ‘Personal Helicon’.

Mount Helicon is a mountain in Greece, that was, in classical mythology,

sacred to Apollo and the Muses. From it flowed two fountains of poetic inspiration.

The poem describes how childhood experiences become part of the

metaphor for Heaney as a poet.

 Personal Helicon    for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells

And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.

I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells

Of water-weed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.

I savoured the rich crash when a bucket

Plummeted down at the end of a rope.

So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch

Fructified like any aquarium.

When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch

A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call

With a clean new music in it. And one

Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall

Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,

To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring

Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme

To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.                     by Seamus Heaney

Joe Pellegrino comments;

Heaney is here presenting his own source of inspiration, the "dark drop" into personal and cultural memory, made present by the depths of the wells of his childhood. Now, as a man, he is too mature to scramble about on hands and knees, looking into the deep places of the earth, but he has his poetry. This serves as his glimpse into places where "there is no reflection," but only the sound of a rhyme, like a bucket, setting "the darkness echoing." This is the final poem in his first volume, and, together with his first poem in that volume, "Digging," acts as a bookend to the collection.

                        Joe Pellegrino     http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/heaney/heaney.bio.html

Did the earth move for you?  Or in this case did the well, the well-spring, move – in the making of experience a vital re-creation and even an ontological transformation?   I shiver again at the thrill of that meaning that shook me when I first read the poem .  Generally speaking meaning made is a mix of the subjective and objective, the personal and the public but the effect of ‘punch-lines’ like I  rhyme/ To see myself, to set the darkness echoing is so powerful and in a sense pure that it simply lets your heart expand.  You can become more as a result of the resounding  effect of such a poem.

I can sense the change it wrought in me just as I can feel the rough stone that he, and I and we all, have leaned on at some time.   Remember what Taylor says about ‘poetic knowledge’ it ‘relies more on the integrated powers of sensory experience and intuition’.  Remember Wordsworth’s view that poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity. 

Philosophy and poetry as complementary doorways

I want to suggest that poetry and philosophy within the kind of teaching I have been describing are complimentary not opposites.  Here is a definition of philosophy that I quite like;

Philosophy is the attempt to gain systematic insight into central and perennial human concerns: the nature of reality, the nature of thought, the nature of experience, and the nature of value.

http://www.augustana.edu/academ/philosophy/index.htm

But surely poetry, and as I shall argue the mystical, also aims to gain insight into reality, through, experience and value.   We need to pay more attention to those who can write across the poetry-philosophy space.  One such writer, supremely so, is the Jewish rabbinical writer and social activist Abraham Joshua Heschel – and for us he does this in his book Who is man?.

Heaney much earlier in his career wrote what is for me one of the key statements that acts as a doorway to understand the ineffable heart of holistic education – it is a kind of mixture of philosophy and poetry.  Here he is speaking of something very deep in our business of holistic education;  the transformation of energy to meaning, and presumably the opposite as well.   He says;

“I began to write poetry in 1963, craft-ridden, but compulsively attracted to those guardians of technique like the water-diviner and the untutored musician, (wo)men whose wrists and fingers receive and uncode energies into meanings.   To learn their ease and grace in the half-way station between the cellars of self and the courtyards of the world around them has been and will be my study so long as I continue to write.”                 

Seamus Heaney p101 Corgi Modern Poets in Focus No 2 Ed Jeremy Robson 1971

Doesn’t that wonderful statement make the elements of Holistic Education mystery, story, learning and teaching, being human, making meaning, knowledge and knowing  - reverberate together.   Can we not feel the connectedness and inter-relatedness of knowing and doing, of spirit and form, of respect and self-assertion, of the subjective and objective?    And the point that we come to is that the known and knowable needs the ineffable and beyond the ineffable the mysterious.  Education to be holistic has to predicated on the inter-dependence of the mysterious and the knowable.