Time and Tide Triptych: Lyric of Lifelong Learning

Abstract

In this set of three poems, the author, a retired anthropologist, reflects upon his career of lifelong learning, a reminiscence of a kind enkindled by review of old fieldnotes and journal entries, a re-reading of old publications, or perusal of old photographs. He muses about influences shaping his vocation and evolution as a scholartist. He invokes three tutelary spirits—of archaeology, of intrepid voyaging, of artful renewal—to symbolize a likely less than miraculous but more than serendipitous progression from youthful naiveté to prospective generativity in old age. He charts a shift in research orientation from spatial to temporal concerns and in insight discovery from ethnographic to esthetic representation. The journey of discernment unfolds as a series of curiosity-driven, anxiety-tinged explorations undertaken as leaps of faith. He embraces his unstructured future with trepidation, trusting his love of learning to carry him forward, or, rather, inward. His hope is that the intellectual and emotional wherewithal acquired in a career of knowing others—his professional dimensionality—will lead him to a deeper understanding of self and time. A hope that the headstrong agency of youthful engagement will ripen to a ludic agency, a hedonic self-awareness summoning poetry to the hermeneutic quest.