Banksia

When I trace my hand it’s 

Naturally the right that 

Picks up the pencil and marks

The page with tracing lines.

Dominance ironically results 

In the right being erased

And the image on the 

Page emerges as a

Mirror to that

Determination to define.

The wordless left:

An empty space

Inside the boundaries 

That seek to contain 

And frame and

Control.

The spirit of the Law,

A Terra Nullius,

Which we try to contain 

Within the legal letters that write

Who belongs where.

The vast openness 

That Banks and Cook 

Traced as they sailed

North labelling the

Flora and Fauna.

…

An educational mentor

Reminded me regularly that

“Values are Caught

Not Taught.”

“Create the right space” 

He said, 

“Model respect,”

Which he did,

Walking gently through 

The world. 

…

We wear paths 

In the landscape.

Tracings 

That define

Us

And circle 

The soils

Too beautiful, 

Too soft,

For words.

“Whereof one cannot speak

Thereof one must be silent.”*

Tracing our words

We map the edges 

Of the known world.

*Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. 

Banksia

This poem is my attempt to grapple with ideas in two remarkable books: Sand Talk: how indigenous thinking can change the world by Tyson Yunkaporta and The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist.

The book that began it all was McGilchrist’s and I came across his writing after hearing an interesting story. A couple of years ago, the judges of the High Court of Australia (that’s the court that interprets the constitution) were grappling with the problem of how they interpret the “spirit” of the law in contrast to the “letter” of the law. On the one hand, they have the documents that lay down understandings with a semblance of clarity through the reified language of the law; on the other hand, they have their understandings of the context in which laws are created by humans who make sense of the world in more than just words. The role of judges is to interpret the law but the words on the page don’t necessarily represent the entirety of the intent of the law makers who wrote them - particularly if you consider that much of our thinking and understanding is non-verbal. 

So the High Court judges looked around for someone to help them think through this problem and found McGilchrist. They invited him to Australia to join them for a study retreat. McGilchrist is a psychiatrist: at various times he has been Clinical Director at Bethlehem Royal and Maudsley Hospital in London, a researcher in neuroimaging at John Hopkins University, and a lecturer in English at Oxford University. The core argument in his book is that individuals have two basic modes for engaging with the world which correspond in loose neurological terms with functions in the two hemispheres of the brain. The one is when we put the world into words; the other is when we look for patterns and relationships. Describing the latter function he writes:

Another way of thinking of this would be more generally in terms of the ultimate importance of context. Context is that ‘something’ (in reality nothing less than a world) in which whatever is seen inheres, and in which its being lies, and in reference to which alone it can be understood, lying both beyond and around it. The problem with the ‘attentional spotlight’, as conventional psychological literature calls it, is that this isolates the object of attention from its context - not just its surroundings, but the depth in which it lives. It opacifies it. Our vision stops at ‘the thing itself’. The price is that this sheering away of the context produces something lifeless and mechanical. In a famous passage in the Meditations, Descartes speaks of looking form a window and seeing men pass on the street. ‘Yet’, he reflects, ‘do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men.’ It is not surprising that, shorn by the philosophical stare of all context that might give them meaning, the coats and hats that Descartes sees from his window walking about in the street could be animated by a machine. They have become fully opaque; the observer no longer passes through them to see the living person beneath. He no longer sees what is implied. However, the attention of the right hemisphere, concerned as it is with the being in context, permits us to see through them to the reality that lies around and beyond them. It could not make the mistake of seeing the clothes and hats in isolation. (p.181)

Words show us what is, context show us what it means. Through an exhaustive review of neuropsychological research and a detailed journey through the history of philosophy and art and literature, McGilchrist shows how an increasing separation between words and context is a hallmark of Western civilisation. He argues that this has made societies increasingly bureaucratic and structured and decreasingly adaptive and engaged. The letter of the law is engulfing the spirit of democracy.

Which is pretty much what Tyson Yunkaporta argues too, but in a very different way. 

Yunkaporta is an Alpalech man from Western Cape York in the north of Australia and a lecturer in Indigenous Knowledge at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia. In Sand Talk, he explores the contrast between western thought and indigenous thought; how each frames the world and responds to its problems. He writes about “haptic” or embodied knowledge and argues that:

The only sustainable way to store data long-term is within relationships - deep connections between generations of people in custodial relationship to a sentient landscape, all grounded in a vibrant oral tradition. This doesn’t need to replace print, but it can supplement it magnificently. (p.167)

I don’t know if McGilchrist and Yunkaporta have ever met, but if they did, I would sure like to sit by and listen to that yarn. 

Yunkaporta writes often about hands - as mnemonic devices, as the physical conduits of thought - and I think it is from him that I picked up the metaphor of hands in my poem. He doesn’t write in his book about James Cook or Joseph Banks, the Captain and gentleman botanist of The Endeavour which sailed up the east coast of Australia in 1770. Both characters fascinate me. I’ve read Cook’s log in the remarkable book H.M. Bark the Endeavour by Ray Parkin and Patrick O’Brien’s insightful Joseph Banks, a Life and neither Cook nor Banks strike me as the kinds of people who would have wished for the environmental and cultural destruction their mapping unleashed. 

I see myself as part of that unleashing. Particularly my work as a teacher. In a literal sense because so little of the education systems I have been a part of even begins to show respect for indigenous knowledge, but in a more subtle sense because the needs of our world to engage respectfully with one another and the environment are not well-served by education. 

The right hand of knowledge is constantly telling us how to live, without a counterbalancing respect for an alternative sense of embedded being. 

In education this tension is particularly represented by the predominance of exams. One potential countervailing mechanism is what is known as “Capabilities” in some curricula and “Approaches to Learning” in others. Capabilities or ATLs are attempts to value student's attitudes and approaches to knowledge but the challenge is that we don’t seem to know what to do with them. When we try assessing them, it feels wrong; intuitively, I think, we realise we’re making them subservient to the exam culture again. They end up remaining token elements at the fringe of education. 

I think McGilchrist and Yunkaporta nudge me towards a different way of thinking about education in general and Capabilities/ATLs in particular. I need to find ways to better honour process, engagement, connection and enjoyment without resort to numbers and definitions. In education, we need to build a culture where the sharing of a child’s story has a greater value than the grade it is given. 

Brian Henderson, the Headmaster I worked for at Woodleigh, showed us that “values are taught, not caught”. When the beautiful natural environment of the school had too much rubbish, he would wander around at recess chatting to the kids and picking up papers. I found it impossible to watch him do this without picking up a few myself. Students would see, and a culture develop. In education I think we need to spend a little less time working out what to teach and a little more time working out who to be.

When Brian retired, the school gave him a gift: the naming of a new cultivar of the indigenous Banksia. I didn’t remember this fact when I wrote the first draft of this poem and it was only after looking back through the poem and remembering that Joseph Banks gave the bush its European name that I remembered Brian and found a name for the poem. The thing about a poem is that it can embody a kind of haptic knowledge greater than prose. It’s a space for meaning inviting the reader to open potentials and trace their own paths as they look sideways for meaning. As a teacher, I've never been able to work out how to give a grade to poetry.