Mythopoetics+in+the+English+curriculum.+A+dialogue.

//Welcome to our Mythopoetics page.//

 //You’ll find here a draft of the paper we’re intending to give on Monday (though on Monday we’re hoping to be more conversational and less scripted). There are also some poems and brief prose extracts written by Rilke, which capture an aspect of what we’re exploring.//

 //We’d love any responses or questions or feedback you might have before our Monday session. Just go to the DISCUSSION page and either join an existing discussion or start one of your own.//

 //Rachel and Steve//

=Our draft paper - Mythopoetics: A Dialogue=

Steve:
For the past year, Rachel and I have been talking together about the value of stories, and the value of imagination, in the lived lives of English students. We were provoked by the idea that students, teachers and curriculum writers are “myth makers” in that we work with – and within – the stories that make up our lives.We’ve all had the experience in our classrooms of a student challenging us to justify the time we spend on novels and poems. “What’s the point?” we hear them ask. “What’s this got to do with my life?” And, in this era, where English tends to be seen as the subject most concerned with standardized testing, literacy rates and communication skills, it’s not always easy to come up with a convincing response, no matter how deeply we intuitively value working with stories and poems – the mythopoetic. In some ways the draft of the new National English curriculum doesn’t help much. On the surface, at least, the emphasis in it seems to be, to quote, “how to adapt, create and communicate effectively, and interpret and use information more fluently and critically". You have to read quite carefully before you find references to the ways in which an engagement with literature shape personal identity or can expand a reader’s experience. Both of us have felt uncomfortable about what we saw as a devaluing of the mythopoetic in the classroom and the curriculum. We want to foreground imaginal knowing, which is, to quote Timothy Leonard, a way of knowing that “moves the heart, holds the imagination, finds the fit between self-stories, public myths, and the content of cultural knowledge.” And we wanted to find ways of articulating a mthopoetic sensibility more strongly – for ourselves and for our students.

Rachel:
In a book that we decided to read together, //Like Letters in Running Water: A Mythopoetics of Curriculum//, Mary Doll writes: //What exchanges occur between beings in the classroom are complicated conversations, called curriculum, the root of which is flux. And the way into the flux involves imagination, what writers concern themselves with best. // Steve and I were drawn to Doll’s idea of the imagination bringing us into worlds that were not static. But I quickly got irritated with Mary Doll. She seemed to be advocating some kind of post-structuralist reading against the grain, wanting to promote texts that are open-ended and unsettling. To me though, she seemed caught in a double-bind because she was always arguing for what **she** considered to be right and true.

Steve:
Rachel doesn’t like ideas of ‘right’ and ‘true’, and occasionally we would argue about this. But I, too, was troubled by a sense of hidden dogmatism in Mary Doll’s book, with her confident interpretations of what various stories meant, a bit like a spirit-killing English teacher insisting that her interpretation of a text was the only one possible. Still, the idea that mythopoetics was a central part of an English curriculum, and that the fact that there wasn’t a strongly enough articulated case made for its importance, encouraged us to keep talking about it, to try to find words that helped us to understand and describe its value.

Rachel:
We circled uncomfortably around this for some months. And then, one afternoon, the personal and the intellectual unexpectedly collided for me. My right retina spontaneously detached, my left one tore, and for a while I was left partially blind. As a shadow moved across my vision, I couldn’t help but feel “shadowed” also: imaginatively, psychically, intellectually.

Steve:
An epigram in the second part of Doll’s book reads: //My left eye was cloudy. . . but my right eye was clear. It was like two sides of my nature//. This parallel – between what was happening to Rachel, and what we were reading in the Doll book – unsettled and interested us both. We began to talk more about what literature helps us to see.

Rachel:
I recalled the words of Rainer Maria Rilke: //Work of sight is done,// //now do heart work// //on the pictures within you, those captives;// I suggested that we could return to Doll and turn our reading of her around. We’d been reading her a bit like the way we sometimes encourage our students to read texts, to find and critique the author’s message. We were irritated with Doll, but at the same time enjoying the exchanges with each other as different passages provoked thoughts or got us telling stories to each other. Perhaps we needed to think about ourselves more as fellow story-tellers. I felt the need to do the heartwork: to locate a truth about mythopoetics and its place in the classroom but also to find my way of recreating it. The need for reading to be embodied, that is - interconnected with our physical lives and existence – has always been important to me. I reject the idea of the reading and studying of literature existing in some rarified metaphysical space. Steve and I switched our emphasis from analyzing and critiquing Doll’s book to telling each other stories about our schooling and reading, in an effort to experience more deeply the effect that this difficult-to-define mythopoetic element had had in our own lives.

Steve’s first story:
Here’s one of the stories I told Rachel. My wife and I are having a drink with our neighbours. A number of families from our street are there. The kids are playing out on the road. “So what do we all think about the Government’s idea of a levy to pay for the flood damage in Queensland?” someone asks. He turns to us, an eyebrow raised. What do I think? I see, in my mind’s eye, television footage of a river of water with cars floating on it. On top of one of the cars is a family, with people on the bank looking anxiously on. I see shots of farmers on roofs, and groups of townsfolk carrying sandbags to bolster a river bank. What do I think? I remember wondering how people managed for days on end, without proper food or sleep. What do I think? I have no thoughts about the levy. Just feelings about how powerful the forces of nature can be, how little and weak we humans sometimes seem, and how resourceful too. I feel a tightening in my throat, though, as the guests began to answer. They know the right answer. The levy, it seems, is a terrible idea. Short-term thinking. Ignoring the bigger issues around climate change. Everyone knows that. Why didn’t I see the obvious as clearly as others did? I feel myself disappearing from the conversation. I became an English teacher because I sensed the discipline being something of a refuge for what, in my better moments, I thought of as a poetic sensibility. Keats’s words were balm, when he urged a friend to be unafraid of ‘being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason’ I start thinking gloomily how the English discipline as a refuge for a mythopoetic sensibility is under threat. The language of science has quietly infiltrated the English discipline. We ask students to prove their points, to provide evidence, to be objective and write in the passive voice. We encourage our students to see through texts to underlying agenda rather than to use texts to experience other imagined worlds. The typical Head of the English faculty in a secondary school is now the person who can manage the timetable and understand the mathematics of the various Years 11 and 12 marking systems rather than the teacher whose passion is to introduce her students to the imagined worlds and throbbing rhythms of Homer and Shakespeare. We English teachers have lost our way, and we’ve lost our way because we have lost touch with the essence of the English discipline. We are a mythopoetic project, not a pseudo-science.

Rachel:
I thought Steve was being melodramatic. What’s wrong with having an answer? He talked as if English teachers ever had “a way”, as if there ever was an “essence”. I thought that if we were going to talk about “soul” and “truth” then we at least needed to agree not to refer to them in the singular. It’s good that we no longer have discrete boundaries between the disciplines. Keats said that we would “unweave the rainbow” if we understood the physics behind it: but I think there is beauty, questioning and poetry in science and its language too. And thank goodness a competent Head of Faculty is also a competent administrator. There’s nothing small-minded about good administration. Who wants a metaphysicist who appreciates the “throbbing rhythms of Homer” but can’t turn on a computer or balance a budget? I don’t think that English teachers, curriculum writers and administrators need to reject or minimalise the need for accountability, for testing or for equitable standardization. We just need to remember that this is not the reason for the existence of our discipline. We need to weave our creative, storied imaginations into essential practicalities. I liked Steve’s story. I thought about how talking about flood levies shrouds a deeper, more difficult narrative. It’s difficult to imaginatively embody the life of a man who has just watched a family member being swept away in a swollen river. It’s important to engage with real world policy issues arising out of natural disasters, but also important to dwell quietly within that experience. I asked Steve for another story:

Steve’s second story:
It’s 1958, I’m 11 years old and at boarding school in Melbourne. One night after lights out in the dormitory I share with about 20 other boys, I pull the rough wool blankets over my head and switch on my torch. As quietly as I can, I open a packet of Twisties and turn to the first page in the book I’ve chosen to read, //Robbery Under Arms//, by Rolf Boldrewood. I’ve been looking forward to this moment all day. Bed is always a relief from the bullying and loneliness I feel, my parents thousands of miles away on a diplomatic posting, my heart aching from the separation from my mother. I am not sure what I’m looking for as I begin to read that first page. Distraction? Consolation? I am excited, though, partly through the thrill of breaking the boarding school rules, partly because my bed now feels so cave-like and safe, and partly because the pages and print and the soft blue leather cover are so pleasing to the eye and touch. I begin to read the opening paragraphs: //My name's Dick Marsden, Sydney-side native. I'm twenty-nine years old, six feet in my stocking soles, and thirteen stone weight. . . Most things that a man can do I'm up to, and that's all about it. As I lift myself now I can feel the muscle swell on my arm like a cricket ball, in spite of the – well, in spite of everything.// I am instantly in the thrall of this story. For the next month the horrors of the day instantly evaporate each night as I open the book at my place and continue to read the story of Dick and Jim Marsden, on the road with the charismatic bushranger Captain Starlight or at home on the farm with their wonderful mother (who missed her sons so much when they were away, and wanted them home!).

Rachel’s story:
Steve’s stories about made me think about my own early encounters with books. I lived on the northern-most edge of the Perth suburbs as a small kid. We were a mile from the ocean and surrounded by bush and sand dunes. In my first year of school, when I was five, my teacher, Mrs Newton, read us //The Faraway Tree//. I was entranced with the story of Silky, Moonface and the gang of children with rude-sounding names. Most of all, I remember my fascination with fairies and my obsession with getting into fairyland. At age seven I remember co-opting my friend, Tracey to stand with her foot in a hole in a tree stump for several hours. I convinced Tracey – and I’m sure I was convinced myself – that this hole was a secret entrance to fairy land. If she put her foot in the hole for long enough, she would shrink to the size of a fairy and would be able to enter another world. In one sense, my early experiences of reading and literature allowed me something literacy educators enthuse about: through words, I was able to re-envision my surroundings. I learned early to step beyond the literal and the rational. I never doubted the existence of magic. I still don’t. But, the effect of our game now, it would seem to me, was to displace us from our surroundings. We no longer perceived ourselves to be playing in a patch of scrub at the front of our house, sticking our limbs into a blackened eucalyptus stump. A patch of drought-dried grass was a fairy ring; magpies were flying fairy carriages; specks of dust and pollen, backlit with sunlight, were floating baby fairies, newly born. This meant that I had little idea about or interest in where I truly was, stuck on the edge of a hot, sandy city in the late twentieth century. When I finally got to England, at the age of twelve, I remember the relief and the recognition: **these** were real trees, **this** was what flowers were supposed to look like! Edward Sapir, the American linguist, wrote: //“We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”// What would it have meant to have really noticed the wallabies grazing on the hill near our demountable grocery market? Or to have seen the birds and the teaming insect life as my friends, rather than imaginary fairies ?

Steve:
Rachel’s story took us back to the tensions in this project. I wondered: Is this whole mythopoetics project a yearning for what isn’t, a wish that life were different, a reaction to the fact that the perfection we long for is not part of the human condition?

Rachel:
That wasn’t it, at least not for me. The new National Curriculum includes the cross-curricular perspectives relating to indigeneity, sustainability and the Asia-Pacific region. We can imaginatively explore these perspectives through English and through the mythopoetic in a way that other disciplines can’t. It seemed to me that Steve’s experience of reading //Robbery Under Arms// was not just an escape from the real world. It might have taken Steve outside his individual experience but it also brought him more deeply into it. He understood more about his own life by the time he’d finished reading it.

Steve:
Understood? Maybe. I couldn’t have articulated the knowledge that I had. It felt more like a consolation, some deep down sense that I wasn’t peculiar, that my experience was a part of the human experience. I guess this is why ever since I’ve found myself drawn to the Romantics, the depth psychologists, the philosophers who suggest that what our senses tell us is only a part of the bigger picture. It’s why I’ve recently been loving the poetry of Rilke.

Rachel:
Writing and talking does this, too. The connection between my lived life and my imagined life is through the stories that I tell. We are, said Rilke, ‘the bees of the Invisible’. I don’t think, though, that mythopoetics are the opposite of the real, earthy or practical. At best, we weave our imagined, fictional lives into our daily existence and this is what I want to encourage my students to do. These binaries are elitist and wrong.

Steve:
We kept trying to transcend this binary thinking but kept falling into it as well, as if the world can be understood either through the scientific/rational or the mythopoetic Rachel and I value the imaginative, the mythopoetic, for different reasons. But we agree, I think, that we don’t find mythopoetics ‘in’ the myths and poems and stories that we teach; that’s the error we keep making in English classrooms or in an English curriculum that privileges analysis of texts, as if the meaning of a text, it’s significance, is to be found by cutting it up and understanding its parts. Instead, one story sparks others, just as reading Mary Doll’s stories has got Rachel and me telling each other our stories, and thinking about our lives and about the worlds we inhabit. Worlds created by the imagination excite us, they create responses, they get us telling each other stories. They get us telling the tales of our souls. **Rachel:** I don’t know about that. I lose faith with this mythopoetic idea if I feel that it’s simply an individual indulgence, or if it’s insisting on some kind of universal truth that we ought to be encouraging our students to tap into. And yet I think that articulating curriculum studies through a mythopoetic lens reminds us of the qualities that English teachers value instinctively: we know that fiction offers us a door into a world beyond a one dimensional and easily understood reality. There //is// a mythopoetic zone: where we don’t resist contradictions and obstructions, where we can explore openly and fearlessly. It’s a zone where time has little meaning, which is perhaps why it’s so difficult to enable during a school day.

Steve:
Rachel and I are drawn to the mythopoetic for different reasons perhaps. But there’s a poem we’d like to finish with, one which we both love and which, we think, expresses beautifully some of what we’ve been wanting to say.

Rachel: It’s significant for me that Pablo Neruda was a politician, and that in this poem he speaks of how freedom, the sea, the planet, the non-human, non-political world, speaks through him and because of him.

// To whoever is not listening to the sea // // this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up // // in house or office, factory or woman // // or street or mine or harsh prison cell: // // to him I come, and, without speaking or looking, // // I arrive and open the door of his prison, // // and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent, // // a great fragment of thunder sets in motion // // the rumble of the planet and the foam, // // the raucous rivers of the ocean flood, // // the star vibrates swiftly in its corona, // // and the sea is beating, dying and continuing. // // So, drawn on by my destiny, // // I ceaselessly must listen to and keep // // the sea's lamenting in my awareness, // // I must feel the crash of the hard water // // and gather it up in a perpetual cup // // so that, wherever those in prison may be, // // wherever they suffer the autumn's castigation, // // I may be there with an errant wave, // // I may move, passing through windows, // // and hearing me, eyes will glance upward // // saying, "How can I reach the sea?" // // And I shall broadcast, saying nothing, // // the starry echoes of the wave, // // a breaking up of foam and of quicksand, // // a rustling of salt withdrawing, // // the grey cry of sea-birds on the coast. //
 * [[image:Neruda-715732.jpg align="right"]] The Poet's Obligation**

// So, through me, freedom and the sea // // will make their answer to the shuttered heart. // ~ Pablo Neruda ~ (translated by Alistair Reed, in On The Blue Shore of Silence)

= = =Extracts from some of Rilke's poems and letters=

=//1.//= //Sometimes a man stands up during supper// //and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,// //because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.// //And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.// //And another man, who remains inside his own house,// //stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,// //so that his children have to go far out into the world// //toward that same church, which he forgot.//

=//2.//= //I am so afraid of people’s words.// //They describe so distinctly everything;// //And this they call a dog, and that they call a house,// //here the start and there the end.// //I worry about their mockery with words,// //they know everything, what will be, what was;// //no mountain is still miraculous;// //and their house and yard lead right up to God.// //I want to warn and object: Let the things be!// //I enjoy listening to the sound they are making.// //But you always touch: and they hush and stand still.// //That’s how you kill.//

=//3.//= //Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just towards them … Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything. Everything is gestation and then bringing forth …// //Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap.//

=//4.//= //My eyes already touch the sunny hill,// //going far ahead of the road I have begun.// //So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;// //it has its inner light, even from a distance –// //and changes us, even if we do not reach it,// //into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;// //a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave …// //but what we feel is the wind in our faces.//

=//5.//= //With all its eyes the natural world looks out// //into the Open. Only our eyes are turned// //backward, and surround plant, animal, child// //like traps, as they emerge into their freedom.// //We know what is really out there only from// //the animal’s gaze; for we take the very young// //child and force it around, so that it sees// //objects – not the Open, which is so// //deep in animals’ faces.//

=//6.//= //I love the dark hours of my life// //which deepen my senses;// //in them, as in old letters, I find// //my daily life already lived// //and, like legends, distantly beyond.//

=//7.//= In 1916, Rilke wrote a letter to a friend: //The question whether art is to be experienced as a great forgetting or as a greater insight is perhaps only apparently to be answered in one sense or the other; one could imagine both might be correct, in that a certain abandonment reaching to the point of forgetfulness could constitute the first step to new insights, as though the shift were to a higher place of life, where a riper, larger awareness, a seeing with rested, fresh eyes, then begins. To remain in forgetfulness would of course be entirely wrong.//