RAVEN PEDAGOGIES – LEARNING TO (BE)COME HOME
BY THIEU BESSELINK
(the scale of these times)
Every radical pedagogy contains within itself the image of a journey.
A journey away from, and back home, awakening in us new organs of perception, or provoking the heart to choose a different path. But what image can emerge from a disrupted home? We share in the overwhelming sense that people, forests, rivers, and seas revolt everywhere across the Earth, signaling the dying of a world. The profound shift in understanding and agency that we need to restore a right relationship, can only come from a pedagogy radical enough to get us lost – and found again.
All ages and cultures have known such pedagogies, adapted to the localities and challenges they grew from. They have been embodied in different ways: from the archetypal shamans of the land, to contemporary forms of social resistance. Many may offer valuable perspectives and important inspiration for contemporary pedagogues and societal stewards that seek to navigate the end of the world.
When lost, we are in trickster territory. Elders know this. The experience of being lost is the great in-between that marks the space of transformation; but also of the undoing of patterns and structures that we hold dear. A delicate space I would like to learn more about to see how it can provide starting points for a vital approach to learning in end times.
My search for pedagogies that can accompany our current times has taken me into vastly different territories, geographical and otherwise. I have stayed in the Amazon to learn from indigenous cultures who have both lived the end of a world and cherished ways of transgressive learning and becoming. All without formal schools. I have also experimented with learning labs in universities and cities, and sought the wisdom of place to bring together a meaningful and real-world curriculum from the contexts we find ourselves in. I have no answers that can turn the tide, not in the least because ready solutions seem a thing of the past. But I’d like to share points of departure that are guiding me at this moment, in the attempt to connect my students and myself to a deeper sense of agency and belonging in the context of a quickly shifting reality.
Pedagogy of time and place
Pedagogy of disruption and play
Pedagogy of attention and imagination
Pedagogy of kinship and complicity
Pedagogy of drawing a circle around the gathering
Pedagogy of Raven assemblages
Pedagogy of agency and power amidst uncertainties
Pedagogy of transformation and transgression
Pedagogy of story as home
(see below...)I turn for guidance to trickster teachers. These people and mythological figures are the ones who keep the questions alive. They create a holding space; they tend to the fire around which we gather, where we remember the stories that created us, the dilemas that make us come undone; a moment in time where we seek to expand our imagination past its own limits and burn ourselves clean to make room for something new.
Unlike the modern teacher, they do not provide a stable worldview but function as a scout and accomplice in times and places of un-knowing, dwelling in the liminal spaces and in-between realms of reality. The shaman, drawing on the trickster figure, opens up a path of uncertain course, and gathers around a totem of kinship between all species. The archetypal image of the shaman, throughout its many different local shapes and functions, is a profoundly practical figure, very much like the crafty profession of the teacher. Theory and cosmology are all well, but how do we actually grow down into the reality that we inhabit? Become curious when we are stuck? Foster a climate of mutuality and support? Heal what is broken, or break out of what is stifling? Sooth or burn?
Perhaps they have answers beyond theory. An expert in end-times is Raven, a trickster god we find in many indigenous cultures, from the Amazon to the North Pacific and East Asia. In some stories he accidentally creates the world and releases the sun to the sky after he had stolen it from a protective god. In others we learn how his mischievous adventures got him black, as he used to be white. Tricksters “inspire us in life with their experiences, always learning and transforming with their learning, and being the inspiration for others in understanding the various bumps and bruises of life as well as the great leaps of faith and change that come from making our choices.” He is considered the first shaman, a boundary dweller, a demiurge of transgression, inter-existence, and creativity.
We know the Hero’s journey after Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell pointed to a recurring mythological reality that teaches us about common patterns in the human experience. The trickster, however, is perhaps even more ubiquitous and certainly amongst the most popular figures in traditional societies. Where the Hero’s journey is a story of order, the trickster’s adventures embody multiplicity and change. Perhaps our time asks us to learn more from trickster (rather than hero) qualities.
So under his guidance we will be searching for a visceral form of learning that pulls us out of lifeless concepts and repeating patterns of one-dimensional knowing and powerlessness. What does the teacher as shaman, as trickster, teach us about how to remake this world? What could be the initial steps towards raven pedagogies?
THE END OF THE WORLD
The Anthropocene seems to give a language to describe the end of the comfortable (and human serving) planet. That world in which we can unthinkingly build a material security upon the bodies of so-called others: ancestors, marginalized, colonized, future generations…
In 2019, lost in the confusion of a cosmogonical bewilderment, we were all simultaneously thrown into a planet suddenly and swiftly losing shape. Like the quickly accumulating images of the Anthropocene, the pandemic shows us the naked world as the modern project dreamt it: globalized, totalizing, and divorced from itself. Full of externalities buried in “faraway” places, with comfort and illusory security built upon mountains of dissolved fossil dinosaurs mixed in with quickly disintegrating realities. When did we start hoping that by displacing people, waste and cost, our ‘centre’ would hold? The story that holds our world together has unravelled and is loosing its meaning.
The suddenness of the pandemic stands in shrill contrast to the slow undoing of the vital relationships in the Earth’s ecosystems, but neither of them we saw coming. We chose the models that simply didn’t see them. Or worse still: we knew and saw, of course, and, yet…
So the economic religion of the modern world was shaken to get a taste of what it means that the earth is alive, is limited, is fragile, and resides in local webs of radical co-dependencies. The objective fact and the universal truth, the human-centric world, the linear time, and the rational cause-and-effect seemed so clear and real. But how could we know, if we were so far removed from the roily experience of home on Earth, outside of laboratory conditions?
Are we the product of enlightenment? What, to speak with Bruno Latour, is rational and enlightened about a society that makes a forecasting error so massive that it prevents parents from leaving an inhabitable world to their children? Why do we not recognize this image of ourselves?
And so we are suffering from a dying cosmology. The end of the world, prophesied by Mayan calendars, is not the end of life (even though we are on a fast track to the loss of most lifeforms on earth), but the end of meaning. The world ended before, many times, and for many peoples, species, and cultures. They all made place for white and enlightened worlds, which now plunge into the soils of the unintelligible.
At the time that Raven gave us fire, the light of reason, and technologies to build our world, the boundaries between nature and human continuously moved. But after we conveniently denied the goddess agency, nature became a force to be defeated, rather than a sister to listen to. Both in European and Eastern histories, Raven tricksters have been recast as wreckers of havoc during periods of agricultural expansion. They became bad omens, and chaotic forces of nature that need controlling by the human hand. Like the condor they eat carrion, clean up the dead bodies. But death and decay have no place in the modern world. Neither does the erratic behaviors of nature.
There is no way back to a faux romantic past, of harmony and community. And no way forward to a state of universal knowledge, equality and progress. What to do with these topologies of exile when there is nowhere to run to?
We are all becoming refugees from an uprooted world. Collapsing ecosystems and wars make for large amounts of people leaving hope and home. But everyone is fugitive, with no place back to go, as traditional ways of life are no longer available to us and the future is unimaginable within our current cosmology. We enact the rituals and concepts that are not our own, and are acted upon by global ideas of progress. In native cultures tricksters are allergic to anything seeing itself as complete, whole, essential, distant, or independent. Raven breaks in, shattering worlds. Whether remnants of a colonial machine, or the dark magic of political propaganda and advertising, the trickster that got us in this mess needs to find us a way out.
Anthropocene of kinship
The story of the Anthropocene offers a way to conceive of ourselves with agency and humility. When Paul Crutzen used the term to describe a new geological age – where mankind became the dominant force in the ecological and geological development of the Earth – he could not have foreseen the political and cultural significance the term would acquire, irrespective of its scientific acceptance. It throws up various images that drive us deeper into the dying cosmology we inhabit, but perhaps also offers a way out.
The first image that comes to mind is that of humans living beyond their means, evoking the preacher in us to condemn our sins. At its best this is a reproach to stay within the planetary boundaries, and at its worst it may evoke a self-hatred and nihilism out of which no beauty can arise.
Another image is that of a technological fantasy, seeing opportunities for great progress. New solutions will clean up the mess that old solutions created, we can invent our way out of extinction: just by accelerating the way we were thinking before, just applied to different questions. But it was solutions to begin with that got us in this predicament.
A third image is a romantic view of human’s connection to nature and the desire to re-enchant life. As a reaction to a highly technological, individualist, and economically driven culture, the appeal is understandable and, like the other images, brings valuable elements and insights. The difficulty has been to practice such connection beyond a poetic language and doing the dirty work of dealing with our demons head-on.
Which brings me to the mytho-historical stories of archetypes that embody a more ambiguous reality. The Raven trickster figure embodies the human of the Anthropocene, being the driver of change through his appetites, promethean inventions, and naive adventures. Raven doesn’t make the world a better place, nor does he manufacture the world he wants. There is no morale behind his action. The world he creates is always circumstantial, by accident, or impulsive, and he always needs to deal with new circumstances and unintended side effects of what he himself engendered. He never dwells for long in the comfortable space of the predictable.
In that sense, he is showing us that our stories do not work. And that it matters from what thoughts our knowing comes, what stories tell our stories. (To think, for example, that the story is about carbon emissions is to miss the origins of these emissions, which represents a way of thinking that is inherently disconnected).
Raven seems to offer a different approach to the questions of the Anthropocene. For many indigenous cultures, times like these are typically preserved for spirits of mischief, and healing the rifts is a matter of practice. The Raven as a totem is tightly connected to a morality of inter-existence, the continuum between human and non-human ancestors, the ancestral bond between all species: that we are all other life also. Their masks are both human and bird, the one implicated in the other.
They remind us that the living world does not lend itself for control and clean managerial responses. On the contrary, in Seeing like a State James Scott shows the dangers of administrative systems, the belief in technology, and the weakening agency of society by a centralizing tendency.[i] The moral ecology of the trickster includes the imperative of practical adaptation and creativity, of deep interdependence and resilience.
This forgotten archetype may be an antidote to top down solutions, centralizing control, and commanding truths or technological dominance. Instead, everyone is called to shift-shape and adapt, cultivate the agency and practical wisdom to pull ourselves out of the swamp by the hair through local knowledge and embedded learning. The situated practices of an emergency.
TOWARDS RAVEN PEDAGOGIES
Times of undoing and disjunction place a special kind of strain on the human soul. They challenge our sense of direction, meaning and belonging, and with that comes great misguidance, mental affliction and conflict. At the same time they have the ability to awaken a fresh awareness and urgency in us, but this does not come easy.
What confuses my students are the same questions Kant formulated in his Critique of Practical Reason; what can I hope for? What can I know? What should I do? And what does it mean to be human? On such an existential level that they often struggle with (climate) depression, burned out, or a deep existential angst.
No matter whether we eat animals or not, separate our garbage, there is something much deeper and much larger that envelops us, and it resists solutions, categories, and clarity. We are beyond saving, because what is worth saving is still being born. What seems safe, is no longer serving. So what knowledge and skill should we master, if the very notion of success means the destruction of everything we hold dear?
Why raven pedagogies? Because we need more ravens that are able to know and act in radical ways, grounded from the root. Perhaps less from Kant’s universal metaphysics and more from what has deep meaning in the experience of the particular and relatedness. This you do not teach, but you participates in. Tricksters make other tricksters, by the sheer virtue of their practice. They do not teach, but live. We search therefore, for pedagogies that bring us alive and give us agency to know our place in the world. Not just skills and concepts, but ways to become. Raven pedagogies would be practice oriented, relationship oriented, cultivating our abilities act from a different place. They are seeking to alter not what we think, but how we think, the source from which we do, and what we are aware of. In other words, they are about all those things that often remain invisible, even beyond words. I imagine them as an ever expanding and varying series of practices and orientations that help make the invisible noticable, the unsayable perceivable, the undoable doable.
Raven pedagogies are then first and foremost pedagogies for the soul, if with that we also mean that imaginary organ through which we perceive the world and the unobvious dimensions of reality.
If every time and place requires their own pedagogies to mend the human experience to what is relevant and meaningful, I like to share these starting points that are helping my students and I cope and learn.
At the basis of this lies the fundamental experience of self as instrument. In the end, it does not matter as much what words we speak, and much more who we are when we speak them. I don’t mean the politics of identity, but I refer to the work we do ourselves to be where we are. This means we can no longer separate the whole self from the person that is learning or teaching.
Pedagogy of time and place
I do not teach to make the world a better place. A place may instead, when held in our attention, open a better world in us. By immersing ourselves in the rhizomatic relatedness of everyday life in a place, a web of kinship emerges that is capable of telling a unique and universal story through which facts and experiences become personally meaningful and societally embedded. Learning from place – and learning as place – give us a way to look beyond disciplines, hierarchies, and linearity.
Place as teacher does not mean to be unconcerned with global questions, it is just the view that global issues are local in their essence. The goal is not to make universally true statements, but to grow deeper into the reality of our embeddedness. Understanding how, but also practicing that we are always already dwelling together. The practices for this are all the ways we get to know a place intimately, experience it, become part of it, and for it to become part of us.
By making place the carrier of our curriculum, we decentralize our own perspective and ideas. Raven knows that the delusion of humanity’s centricity is not merely an affliction of the western world. It is baked into the very way we make sense of the world, and therefore makes its way into our mythologies. Let this decentralized cosmology be the context from which we learn about the world.
In that light, the city becomes our curriculum, and the Earth reveals her secrets if we learn to listen to the knowledge that life embodies. It will become apparent that there are no simple answers. That we need to listen and immerse ourselves in a place, its complex dynamics and multiple layers.
Looking for regenerative practices by which students and place can evolve together, you discover that these practices are profoundly local, embedded in the land and history of a people and connected to the landscape, plants and animals they developed with. They get their meaning through their own stories, which weave a particular culture to its place.
When we worked in Sicily with Cumo and Utrecht University for instance, to help develop a thriving ecology, economy, and community, it turned out to be the Asinaro river basin that gave life not just to the plants and animals in the region but also its culture, economy and social ties. All towns shaped around the river basin for thousands of years, spinning stories from the land that feed and bind its people. Just because the river is forgotten, overgrown, polluted and diverted doesn’t mean it is not still this potential source of life.
By learning from the river, we got to know the workings of the local economy, the customs of its people, the history and mythology through which a community sees itself, and how the plants and animals live and support each other. We got to know the people, from the almond farmers that cannot compete with the global market to the refugees that were stranded ashore, the politicians fighting for drinking water, priests caring for the abandoned youth and the teachers with their hopes, dreams and capacities for change. We were able to see the river with new eyes, weaving the many stories of the people, institutions, and species that depend on it together. Finding the patterns that give life, and the patterns that destroy, from water management to the political dynamics of the town, agro-ecology and cooperative institutions for a culture as institutionally abandoned as the Sicilian. Over the course of a year we encountered our own biases and frustrations, organized a festival for the river, built community, deep relations and so much more.
Understanding place is a door to belonging, and developing a much needed systemic sensibility. And only when we belong to a place or time, we care for it, experience responsability in it. Learning to be at home has then become as fundamental as reading and arithmetic. As Margaret Atwood writes in her poem:
“I planted my flag here. How could I not have? I claimed a home, when what I longed for was to be claimed, to be claimed by a place, to have Place say to me, come home, little one, rest here.”
So, too, a classroom or a school can be a place to be at home, rather than a stepping stone in a career. How can school be a form of deep community? Not Simmel’s Gemeinshaft of homogeneity – and still more than his laisser-faire Gesellschaft – but rather one of kinship with care for difference?
Pedagogy of disruption and play
A primary goal of Raven Pedagogies is to distract our cognitive meaning-making machine, becoming open to new sensations and impressions. Becoming requires a disturbance of the ordinary, a slowing down to process it, and a space where the novel can be integrated.
This space I like to see as a playing field, charged with intention, care and curiosity. In such a space, magic can happen that disrupts the ordinary world. Whether this is a ritual space, a playing space, or sacred space, it knows a magic circle inside of which the rules are different and assumptions are suspended. The mise en scene of a disruptive pedagogy involves setting oneself up for experimentation, failure, wonder and surprise. This change in our perception of the world can come about simply by focussing attention on everything we cannot see. The performing arts know this space very well, where gestures can somehow appear more real, and strangeness provides an opportunity for wonder. This in turn creates a readiness to learn, and open up to new ways of seeing, feeling or being
Pedagogy of attention and imagination
Envision a slowing down to the point where we can behold a phenomenon, sensation or an idea long enough and close enough to then expand it with our imagination. Right after a transgression of thought, disturbance of habitual being, or just as an intentional delving into the more-ness of things. This creative act surfaces new dimensions of the subject matter, as well as of the Self, to experience the inter-esse, or inter-existence: far beyond consuming information, this slowing down and extending ourselves with the heightening of our senses, involves an active imagination to sense and communicate with what we study. This is how the medicine man knows the healing properties of plants he never saw before; it is how someone can bring out the best in you by the sheer quality of her listening; or how we are able to sense the room as teachers when we enter and intuitively understand its unfolding needs.
The creative and artistic, as a birthing act, points at what does not exist yet, what might not have an accepted place and meaning in the world as it is right now. Using play and imagination by way of re-worlding, experimenting and experiencing different ways of being in the world, can be a valuable starting point for pedagogies for the end of the world.
This I believe is necessary. This I believe is at the same time what makes a raven pedagogy hard to institutionalize. Tricksters resist institutions, and institutions fear tricksters… with good reason.
Pedagogy of kinship and complicity
Raven teaches kinship between all beings. As the world ends, we are here together, and fall apart together. And Raven shows us that our relatedness and morality do not end with our fellow humans, but concurs the relationship to deep time, all beings, all places – something the modern mind has unlearned to encompass.
In the performing arts there is an invitation to risk oneself, to put oneself forward, vulnerable and sensitive, into a creative act of the moment, witnessed by a community and with uncertain consequences. It’s a willingness to be seen by the other, and the willingness to witness.
The edge of our development lies in learning for togetherness. Not for the act of being together, but an ontology of togetherness: such that we can imagine an economy of togetherness, a law of togetherness, a technology of togetherness.
Pedagogy of drawing a circle around the gathering
For the Raven trickster, ontologically, the teachers, students, place, and community are one living organism. When you enter the room, you can feel the mood of this organism, and how it is different today than it was yesterday. Perhaps it is feeling ill and needs attention; perhaps it is excited and needs a way to channel and express this energy. The teacher here is like the farmer sensing the surroundings and the weather, day after day, becoming receptive to the subtle changes that give away the state of land, plants, animals, atmospheres. The same, however, could be said of the students that step into the circle. Learning as a community does not have the strict separation between student and teacher. Students, like any one, can act as tricksters; catalysts of insight and change, of relevance and inspiration.
It is not enough to have a functional building or meeting space. Spaces become layered through stories, gestures; a vulnerability in which we can be touched – like by a tragic song or the sublime force of nature. For a moment we can lose our sense of self while the feeling of our diminished significance does not go paired with a demeaning feeling of humiliation and insignificance. In fact, we are drawn to participate in the beauty. All that comes with its own perils of seduction, but a risk well worth it to educate our soul.
Pedagogy of Raven assemblages
The tension that exists between the trickster and community can be incredibly fruitful. Raven is both a community animal and a lone explorer. The shaman, Hermes or Loki typically live on the edge of the community, but are an integral part of it. It means that every individual has their own journey, and their own capacity to change the whole. Our practical understanding of this dance between the self and the many is in its infancy still. We tend to either fall into a thick and cult-like groupthink, or an instrumental encounter between separate souls. What is this togetherness that is neither romantic nor strictly functional?
Fundamental to this dance around the fire is that the creative process starts with practice, not the theory. From there we gather experiences. With Kierkegaard, ‘life is forwardly lived, backwards understood.” The practice incites and inspires. One person brings in a creative act, a question, or experience, and reveals herself at this particular moment of the journey. It inspires another to wake up, step in, or build upon. A place, an encounter, a source, a text.
The mysterious teaching through togetherness is poorly understood, and begs for us to explore its potential in our schools and cities.
Pedagogy of agency and power amidst uncertainty
In times of crises, to fall to the ground is precisely the right thing to do, as where we fall is where we will find who we are and where we can go. That is power. What Raven calls power, is the agency we can gain by which we can take meaningful action. To know what we are doing, and why. But also, knowing how not to panic when falling. How to – as I learned from my work with choreographer Jack Gallagher – to fall without losing integrity.
A pedagogy of agency involves creating the conditions of trust and courage by which people set in motion their own unfoldment. Tricksters are transformative teachers, but what they transform is a lack of response-ability. So she teaches to take ownership of their own course of development. This is a stark contrast to the way we institutionalised education, which starts from the premise of subject matter to be covered, rather than potential to be uncovered. The development of agency is not the same as letting students do what they want, as many progressive movements may advocate. It is much more doing what it takes to develop a will in the first place.
The trusted space in which this can happen is a place where we can make our own mistakes, and get ourselves in trouble, without losing the support of the community. We do not coerce, mislead, or program, but intervene with tact. Tact is practical, but not repeatable. It depends on the context what intervention is required to provoke power and right relationship. To do the right thing in the moment, and make from that crucial moment a pedagogical moment. A turning point. It happens in a moment, where the teacher seizes the circumstances for the turning of an impulse.
We tend to understand ourselves as powerful because we can use our technique to make things happen. But we see society through the lens of progress, a story of technology and convenience. For Heidegger the essence of technology is that it turns all possible phenomena into becoming a stockpile of ‘standing reserve’. A tree into a resource of timber, a fish into a commodity, and thereby it obscures the workings of things. We only see the shallow shell, the shiny outside of all beings as things that are reduced to their thinginess. The dead black bodies on which we build nations, the child laboured clothes, the resource consuming windmills, the forest killing internet services. Technological society is a material society that above all else, and paradoxically, is disempowering. Where a tool seemingly gives power, and it does in the hands of a craftsman, it is the totalising logic of technology that pushes human agency to the background. Walking the predefined algorithms that dominate our institutions, workflows, and communication.
A Raven pedagogy has the danger of pushing us to promethean hubris, but at the same time rips us out of the shining surface world of usability and makeability. I had to take my students for three days into the wild before learned structures, expectations, and patterns came down. – at times a bewildering experience. Having fought with nature for so long, it is hard to recognize the ‘enemy’ as ourselves. The practice of alone time in nature is ancient, and I see no reason to change it. After that we were no longer teachers and students, but became humans around a fire, a literal one this time, studying under the university of the tree. It not only brings a quality of attention to our own intentions, thoughts, or emotions, but also removes many of the mediations of technology and society to have our very own experience of being.
We live in a time of mass self-deception, of gargantuan mis-identification. About who and what we are, how the world works, and what our place within it is. A pedagogy of agency makes us see behind the veil of shiny objects, deep into the relationships between things, and allows us to act upon it. Take position. To gain one’s own understanding and to act from a place of moral authority – what Kant called ‘Sapere aude!’ The courage to gain your own understanding, is to do with this power to act in freedom from habitual patterns of thought and realities that society imposes upon us.
Pedagogy of transformation and transgression
Raven understands that everything is a crossroads, an assemblage of transient encounters. He masters the transitions, and breaks or repositions the boundaries that society creates or where our own psyche doesn’t cross. As scavenger, he lives in the middle world, like humans do, and brings the dead to the other realm. More importantly, Raven controls the liminal space between states of consciousness. Between day and night, conscious and unconscious, life and death.
This is not just an ascent from Plato’s cave, to ever increasing consciousness, a gradual understanding of the world. It is not an ever higher form of learning, but a depth of experience, a fall from mastery into the pit of confusion. We do not only learn from the light of reason, but also from the darkness of our traumas, the demons that lurk in the underworld, or the subterranean life that keeps plants growing strong. Traveling down there is a prerequisite… and there we not only face our fears and vulnerabilities, but strengthen ourselves through them. How many tools do we posses to walk our rites of passage that mark our old self dying and a new one waiting to emerge?
Transformation does not occur without the loss of what was before. Whether that was the way we thought, or who we thought we were. Rites of passage that acknowledge such fundamental change is important. I often see students struggle to find the words for what happened or changed in them. Ritual and finding a story or language become increasingly important as the change is deeper. Creative expression, and crafting and listening to stories help integrate these experiences.
Pedagogy of story as home
The language and stories that envelop us form what Heidegger called ‘the house of being’. Through it we experience the world. It is how we create the universe in which we dwell. Understanding how we do so, and not being fooled by the idea that if there is a word for something it must be real, is an essential part of trickster development. In this respect it is good to realize that Raven lives in the rhizome. For Raven the world is not at all composed of ‘things’ with predefined properties, names, concepts and qualities, but a scramble of open-ended relationships and possibilities. Whatever is, came to be through an endless interplay of other things and is embedded in a dense web of relationships. Nothing is independent. For the modern mind, and modern science, this poses the deepest problem, because all of a sudden, there are no things in themselves, with clear causes or origin that can be isolated, studied, and proven. By seeing the tree as a thing, we disregard everything else that makes up the tree or could be the tree. The home it provides for birds and insects, the life processes and entanglements with other plants and soil life, etc. Creating stories that tie us deeper to our locality, in kinship with everything else, is the task of the anthropocenic pedagogue.
In a regular academic context language needs to be declarative and proclamatory, spinning abstract arguments that produce ever more layers and concepts between ourselves and the world. It is directed forward towards the discovery of truth and knowledge. The non-productive language of the trickster and his pointless adventures seems to turn in circles. But in doing so it offers a free space from which new and deeper relations can arise. The objective is not to find truth, but to grow deeper into the reality of what we are a part of.
The practice of telling stories and thinking together in dialogue, doesn’t serve Raven to analyse for universals, but to originate realities within our community and the localities where we find ourselves. Nor is its primary function to make sense of the world, although it does that too. Sensemaking seems far too goal-oriented for a Raven trickster. Instead, the very fact that we tell, and that we share is radical and foundational as they contribute to the embodiment and situatedness of knowledge.
This is the most relevant, life and death, kind of knowledge that decides whether and how we are in the world. Stories that open up meaning, that show rather than tell, and circle around to reveal a rich middle. This open-ended state may seem horribly unbounded and frivolous, but it brings to the surface what matters and more importantly, it creates kinship. It also creates art.
AND NOW WHAT
I used to place more emphasis on the nihilistic aspects of the Raven trickster, or at least its convention-breaking and disruptive sense of play. Now I feel drawn to its ambiguous but healing presence…
But now: what?
I get this strange feeling in my underbelly. Excited and afraid of what I will find. Which of my wounds and what of my ignorance will surface? Will I be able to carry these sensitive souls through the trouble that awaits them?
I draw another circle afresh,
I invoke Raven again…
Dr. Thieu Besselink is educator, urbanist, and practical philosopher. He runs experimental educational programs at Utrecht University and develops urban labs with government, community, universities, art and business. Thieu did his PhD with prof. Richard Sennett and is founder of the Townmaking Institute for urban commons. He received the European Leonardo Award for his work in education and societal development.
Note: The sobremesa* with Thieu Besselink was co-hosted by artist Antonio Vega Macotela, who was also the chef for this conversation. We were also joined by Zsusana Szkurka, a Hungarian-Mexican psychiatrist, author and illustrator.
In the aftermath of said sobremesa, Thieu and Gabriella took several walks, drank several bottles of wine across months, met in different cities, and Thieu slowly created (and discarded) several drafts, plus had time to shift from one patron trickster to another – and all of this as a different type of drawing of a circle, within a prolonged, spiraling, conversation: from that first sobremesa during lockdown to this moment of a last edit – that then became this essay.