Dark Roots and Murmurings of the moon: Voicing the poetic in living (in) inquiry

Abstract

This rendering is inspired and excerpted from my doctoral research in schooling communities in post-apartheid South Africa (Swanson, 2004)[i], offering a textual performance that begins to attend with poetic voice to the critical, the human, the storied, the ecological, and the political, in search of a soulful disposition towards the world. Embodied and spirited in ideals of democracy, reconciliation and justice, this disposition is not an attitude to the world that projects onto it such ideals and values, but seeks to consciously and purposefully live out their possibilities with a contentedness of the discomfort of their improbability, while residing in a world with a hopefulness of a world that could be. It is the advocacy of a poetic disposition that offers a humanity of presence and conscious commitment to conscience as a guiding principle of a living (in) inquiry. And in this sense, I embrace poetic inquiry as a way to offer a voice of resistance to the Form, the Structures, the Knowing that render the shadows ‘real'. A poetic disposition of inquiry offers a way of attending to the world that lifts the heart back into its abiding place.