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You are here: Home / Robert Long / A Poetics of Safety

A Poetics of Safety

February 6, 2021 by Dr Rob Long Leave a Comment

A Poetics of Safety

imageThe idea of Poetics captures all forms of knowing that are non-measureable, non- quantitative, yet are essential to the experience of living. We live our life in the in-between and rarely in the extremes. We daily experience the unresolved tensions between: finitude and infinitude, love and hate, forgiveness and revenge, entanglement and isolation, being and doing etc. In Socialitie, these tensions and discords are expressed in text by a hyphen (eg. i-thou). We write about this often in the Social Psychology of Risk (SPoR) as being in ‘dialectic’.

When we find ourselves in moments, when we cannot express; experience, emotions, feelings or understanding, we turn to Poetics. Poetics is often expressed in: song, dance, poetry, literature, art, music, metaphor, semiotics, para-linguistics and metaphysical expressions. These often help us in suffering to maintain the tensions in our being. In moments of ecstasy or deep depression we often turn to Poetics to try to say what we cannot say. We often experience this when we are at a wedding, birth or funeral. Our knowing in such moments is tacit, we look for expressions for what we know but cannot say.

When my eldest daughter Kerrie was married, she decided to get married in Tidbinbilla National Park just 30 minutes south-west of Canberra, in an area that had not been destroyed in the 2003 bushfire. My brother Graham did the ceremony and married Kerrie and Mitch with friends and family who came from all over Australia to share.

Everything was packed in cars and eskys (cooler boxes) and after the ceremony we set up tables and enjoyed finger-food, drink and celebration. My brother-in-law Geoff who is a wedding photographer, did his stuff and captured Kerrie and Mitch after their vows on a huge rock overlooking the valley below and of course, filled with symbolism standing on this rock, as people were away setting up for food and drink.

It was a time that Kerrie and Mitch shared alone with Geoff and later we shared in the photographs. The scene was spectacular and captured all that mattered to them.

The ceremony was very special too and this is the only time this has happened. Kerrie requested that as part of the ceremony that her brother and sister sing a song accompanied by me on the guitar, a song called More Than Words by Extreme. You can read the words and hear the song here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R-FGchhwLw . This is the only time we have ever performed together.

This song More Than Words captures the significance of all that is semiotic/Poetic, not that words are not important, but when we encounter the mystery of life, the indescribable and the awesome, words seem to no longer able to match what we want to say or express. In moments of tacit inexpressible feeling/emotion, we seek gesture and semiotics to speak for us; prayer and song are such semiotics.

The words of the song More Than Words are here:

More Than Words

Saying “I love you”

Is not the words I want to hear from you

It’s not that I want you

Not to say, but if you only knew

How easy

It would be to show me how you feel

Chorus

More than words

Is all you have to do to make it real

Then you wouldn’t have to say

That you love me

‘Cause I’d already know

What would you do

If my heart was torn in two

More than words to show you feel

That your love for me is real

What would you say

If I took those words away

Then you couldn’t make things new

Just by saying “I love you”

La di da, da di da, di dai dai da

More than words

La di da, da di da

Now that I’ve tried to

Talk to you and make you understand

All you have to do is close your eyes

And just reach out your hands

And touch me

Hold me close don’t ever let me go

Chorus

And so to safety: the care and helping of people in tackling risk.

In the face of a tradition that privileges engineering and mathematics, where is the discussion of all that is Poetic? When things are unsafe and when things go wrong, how what can engineering and mathematics say to us? Zero? Why is Poetics not a part of discussion in safety? When Safety most often speaks, it about loss, pain and harm? Isn’t it odd that Safety counts loss, pain and harm and then does hands it on to someone else to deal with? What a strange conundrum. And when things do go wrong, who would ever turn to Safety for comfort them, when all it speaks is: ‘safety is a choice you make’, ‘all accidents are preventable’ and ‘zero’?

This is why Safety never speaks of being a ‘helping profession’ and yet it loves the word ‘professional’, it just doesn’t want to ‘help’, because it doesn’t know how.

Wouldn’t it be great if the safety curriculum and AIHS BoK introduced the importance of care and helping in safety? Wouldn’t it be good to have skill development in the industry in listening, care and helping? Wouldn’t that make a surprising contribution to an ethic of risk?

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Dr Rob Long

Dr Rob Long

Expert in Social Psychology, Principal & Trainer at Human Dymensions
Dr Rob Long

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Dr Rob Long
PhD., MEd., MOH., BEd., BTh., Dip T., Dip Min., Cert IV TAA, MRMIA Rob is the founder of Human Dymensions and has extensive experience, qualifications and expertise across a range of sectors including government, education, corporate, industry and community sectors over 30 years. Rob has worked at all levels of the education and training sector including serving on various post graduate executive, post graduate supervision, post graduate course design and implementation programs.

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