Front Porch Repulic recently published a piece of mine called “Where Can Wisdom Be Found? Gambling Pigeons, the Quest for Wisdom, and the Irreducibility of Poetry”. It’s a meditation on Job 28 and what that poem has to teach us about the quest for wisdom by means of its own poetry.
Here’s a taste:
While the search for mere information, raw data, can often be constrictive, the hunt for wisdom is meant to be expansive. My sense is that Job 28 calls us to a larger environment, summoning us to the quest for wisdom in which we will expand the boundaries of our own perception and current understanding. Wisdom is not found in mines, or in the places of the deep, and yet the implied exhortation is to mine for it, to hunt for it, to go in search of it. If we too are meant to be miners for wisdom, hunters for the real thing, how then do we do it? This poem has something to teach us about that quest and so too, I believe, does poetry as an art form. As a beautiful poem in its own right, Job 28 points beyond itself to the power of poetry writ large.
The poem itself performs the very quest it commends, seeking with image and rhythm, structure and rhetoric, for the heart of wisdom. As we have seen, so much of the poem speaks of the quest for wisdom, mining for it, seeking it, learning that wisdom cannot be found where gold and silver are found. While speaking of searching in vivid terms, the poem performs its own searching. Throughout the chapter, our poet speaks of mining and then acts as a miner. This poet, and all great poets, are spelunkers, repelling into darkness armed with little more than a headlamp.
You can read the rest here.