Blind Navigation

• Metaphors of Training in Gestalt Therapy by Brian O'Neill, 5/18/97
  
  

Brian,

Richard Wilbur’s early and exquisite metaphor on "Mind":

Mind in its purest play is like some bat

That beats about in caverns all alone,

Contriving by a kind of senseless wit

Not to conclude against a wall of stone . . .

. . . And has this simile a like perfection?

The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save

That in the very happiest intellection

A graceful error may correct the cave.

With the metaphor for training that I am suggesting here, critical experimentation is permitted. It is recognized that the fertile void is "the blackest air" (from another stanza in the poem), and that the student is "blind" to the potential – yet still the navigator in his own environment. With this metaphor one emphasizes the creative adjustment of error, of flying through infinite concourses of phenomenological danger and, yet, in the flight of it one finds one’s way in the field – and one "corrects" the cave.

Richard

• Blind Navigation and A Particular Meaning to Reality by Brian O'Neill, 5/21/97