In this post I want to slowly introduce the use of archetypes as a means of seeing clearly and, in a very connected way, suggest the use of poetry as the language for clear seeing.
The Poetic Potential
We are not accurately represented by Descartes’ view that the body is a machine, disconnected from the mind; we are clearly not satisfied by situations and interactions in our lives that disregard our emotional and spiritual needs; we more and more intensely yearn for what has been termed a holistic approach, or, better still, a wholistic experience of and interaction with the world we live in. This is where poetry can come to our rescue, acting as a bridge between two shores; on the one side is the land of reasoning, of science, of logic while on the other side is everything we cannot quantify, our emotions, our gut feelings, our spiritual needs, our love. On that bridge stands the shamans, the poets, the archetypes.
(The Golden Gate Bridge from the website “The Best Travel Destination“)
Consider the movie “Awakenings” starring Robin Williams as a physician in a hospital struggling to understand and communicate with survivors of an encephalitis epidemic which live with locked-in-type symptons (awake and aware but unable to communicate). At one point one of the patients manages to briefly communicate with the physician and simply refers him to a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. The following poem called Der Panther – The Panther:
The pacing past the bars, the steady stare,
A tiredness grown so nothing holds him here,
of a thousand iron bars he seems aware,
a thousand bars, no world beyond this sphere.
With supple strength, with soft and gently mode
he turns in smallest circles about his flank.
It’s like a dance of power around a node,
his great volition standing stunned and blank.
Sometimes his eyelids rise so he can sense
a picture spread across the moment’s chart
descend through limbs of sinew, silent, tense
and thinning, fading, cease within his heart.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, translation by Gerald Duffy
(This is a different translation than the one in the movie Awakenings, but it is one that I appreciate more and that more closely follows the same cadence as the original German poem. See Gerald Duffy’s video).
What better way for the patient to help the physician to clearly see what it was like to be living in that condition?
Seeing with Archetypes
A poetic way of seeing others can bring us to a more accurate representation of who they truly are at the same time as bring us into empathic contact with them. The patient is neither literally a Panther nor literally behind bars, yet to describe him as locked-in, or comatose, or paraplegic in no way brings us close to understanding them.
The archetype of The Caged Panther: a potential of strength, power, balance, agility of motion and grace locked and confined to a small space in which it has been pacing for so long that it’s essence, it’s life has become numbed.
Set aside 10 minutes each week for poetry. Read a new poem and commit it to memory. Recite it to yourself. Let it shape the way you see the world.
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