The ‘truancy’ approach embraces the wait

‘The ball I threw while playing in the park, has not yet reached the ground…’ 

This approach sets up the need for a deferral, a dwelling time as a way to open up further possibilities in our thinking and allow understandings to reveal themselves. It suggests that we need to find ways to detour and explore the hinterland of an idea in order to force procrastination and hold off hasty judgement. 

Allowing insight to unfold

What does Thomas’s dream-like image suggest to us? The thrown ball (presumably from a time in his past when he was playing as a child in Cwmdonkin Park) seems to be defying gravity and time itself. As an adult writing this poem, Thomas recognises that he is still waiting for it to come down. His reminiscences on the profound significances of his early life are well known. So perhaps here, he is using the ball as a suspended image for the freedom of his childhood. Although we only experience this liberated state for a short time, it continues to have an impact over the course of our lives. In which case, in this metaphor, life has been arrested in mid air, still in the process of discovery. Through this he might be suggesting that we can only ever have a gradually unfolding understanding of the psychological impact of childhood on our later life. It will still have a deep effect on us, but we might not yet know how. This idea opens up how small events in our past might become increasingly significant over time. We can at best only slowly feel our way through the unforeseen nature of the impact it may have on us as adults. To gain a clearer understanding of this process, we will have to embrace the wait. 

In this way, the image seems to imply a renunciation of closure, of death or perhaps the opening up of a yet unexplored hinterland? This brings to mind Emily Dickinson’s, ‘When it comes, the Landscape listens – Shadows – hold their breath.’ A metaphor that offers us the same pause, the same sense of anticipation, suspended. For her it was a certain slant of light that offered, ‘internal difference, where the meanings are.’  We can only find ourselves or any reasons for our existence when we allow time itself to reveal meaning to us. The two images share a similar sense of an offered stillness that grants us distance and patience to think. In another of her poems, ‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,’ Dickinson considered the advantages of ‘slanting’ the truth to make it more digestible and palatable for us. For her, it’s as if we cannot bear too much direct truth.She is urging us that it is safer to accept the gradual light of insight creeping in on a winter afternoon as the sun sets, as Thomas urged the need for the hesitant pause to reflect, before the ball reaches the ground.

In their own ways, Dylan Thomas’s startling image of the ball in the park, or Dickinson’s landscape of shadows holding their breath, illustrate how metaphors such as these serve to enlighten us on how to see the world,by offering us the chance to think about ideas in different ways. We are being urged to suspend thought and to allow deliberate time for us to dwell a while. Such metaphors provide us with transformations into new meanings that, like the flightpath of the ball, seem to never end. This suggests that not only is our lingering eye more able to see the connections and differences between things that are already known and understood, but that the process of lingering offers us the space to more easily cut between the known and the unknown. By holding off the direct rush to judgement we are allowing other possibilities to open up to us. 

Hidden analogies and unfolding awareness

There is a slow patience and stillness that is central to talent and insight. We need to allow ourselves the opportunity to pause for thought, perhaps even force ourselves to procrastinate. Another way to frame this is that such pauses can enable us to glimpse any teetering likenesses or new routes that may be hidden in the shadows, that we may have accidentally overlooked in our rush to conclusion. The way we acquire new knowledge and inhabit any associated networks of understanding often unfolds gradually. Any hesitation can be taken as an opportunity for a ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’, a drawing back in order to leap further. The benefit of such slow analogist thinking is that it serves us to either shrug off or incorporate apparent contradictions and hopefully to acquire in exchange a wider picture. Such delays can become a way to open the doors to hidden analogies. For our minds to wander more freely, our imaginations require the chance to engage in a variety of ways, to be allowed to explore new routes into explaining what is not yet known. When we allow ourselves this wait time, when we embrace detours, we set up a productive hiatus, which Koestler regarded as an essential mechanism to gestation. 

This is not a case of benign tolerance of lateral thinking, the unusual, or the idiosyncratic. There is no shortcut to understanding. Sudden insights are not offered to the ignorant. As Lloyd Morgan the British psychologist believed, it is important to ‘saturate yourself through and through with your subject…and wait.’ He was not alone. Richard Feynman (Nobel Prize, Physics 1965) has explained that his investigations into electromagnetic fields benefited from the opportunities of both analogist thinking (for him, playing with a cork in water) and slowly exploring the hinterland of other images where ‘normal’ rules are applied differently. James Black (Nobel Prize, Medicine 1988) strongly affirmed the benefits and importance of daydreaming and allowing our minds to go into free-fall into hidden places where thoughts are swayed. Similarly the famous case of Giuseppe Tartini, composing the Sonata in G Minor Trillo del Diavolo (Devil’s Trill) while in a transitive sleep like state, (he pictured giving the Devil his violin to test his prowess as a musician; when he heard him play a beautiful solo that surpassed all he had ever heard or conceived in his life). This is remarkably similar to Coleridge’s experience of composing Kubla Khan in a similarly hazy space). 

For many inventive scientists and artists, this ‘out of time’ meandering consciousness is seen to be an essential breeding ground where new ideas are born.In modern times it is probably accurate to say that we have come to see that scientific ideas evolve as part of a gradual process with no goal or endpoint at which we hope to arrive at a perfect truth. It is a story of unending rethinking. All of which reinforces the importance to our thought processes of postponements, truancy and resisting immediate conclusion.