The Poetics of Healing
“Words can alter, for better or worse,” wrote psychiatrist Jerome Groopman in The New Yorker, “the chemical transmitters in our brains.” Socially and individually, we ail when the language in which our lives are lived is ugly, brutal, instrumental, banal; we do better, each of us and all of us, our being prospers, when it is said (when we live our lives) in language that is kind, truthful, humane, rhythmic, intelligent and vivid. Poetry, at its best, is such language. It sets right in us, at a deep molecular level, what the bad language of prevailing discourses atrophies, traumatises, and deadens. The revolutions poetry starts and carries on are not so much social as molecular. As a patient of a psychotherapist I know said to her recently, “when I read Mary Oliver’s “The Journey,” my troubles dissolved.”
I’ll likely say some things like this when I speak on a panel that ethicist, intensive care specialist, and poet, Melanie Jansen has dreamed up at the University of Queensland on Thursday 24 August: Poetry & Philosophy in Health: Ways of Learning, Knowing, and Being. I’m heading north, along the Divide, to take my place alongside a young performance poet, some philosophers and surgeons, and an Indigenous nurse. As Melanie frames it, it is humans we practise health care on, and it is the humanities that help us understand the human in us all: how we suffer, how we heal, how we fashion meaning, how we makes sense, how we know, how we comprehend and go about our Being. So philosophy and poetry are going to be languages health practitioners could do with speaking.
The event is put on at the University of Queensland, at its St Lucia campus, by the UQ Critical Thinking Project. 5:30 to 7:30, Thursday 24 August. It’s a free event, but register at Eventbrite. Seats are limited, and numbers are building fast:
