Voice of the Matchmaker: Poetry-making and Policy-making (Part D)

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Part D of Poetry-making and Policy-making: Arranging a Marriage between Beauty and the Beast (1993)

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Summary

Is there even the faintest recognition in our times of the need to make use of poetic disciplines in response to the challenges we face ? Surprisingly there is. The recognition comes from those who recognize the limitations of scientific disciplines in dealing with the complexity of the world problematique -- and specifically with the limitations of the human mind, or of any particular language, in comprehending and encompassing the subtle dimensions amongst which a dynamic balance needs to be maintained.

For example, the biologist/anthropologist Gregory Bateson, in explaining why "we are our own metaphor", pointed out to a conference on the effects of conscious purpose on human adaptation that:

"One reason why poetry is important for finding out about the world is because in poetry a set of relationships get mapped onto a level of diversity in us that we don't ordinarily have access to. We bring it out in poetry. We can give to each other in poetry the access to a set of relationships in the other person and in the world that we are not usually conscious of in ourselves. So we need poetry as knowledge about the world and about ourselves, because of this mapping from complexity to complexity." (Cited by Mary Catherine Bateson, pp. 288-9)