Abstract

In the modern West the heart has been divided. It has become either the mechanical pump of empirical medicine or the sentimental heart of Valentine's Day. Notwithstanding this binary division, there lingers in the collective imagination a sense that there is more to the heart than simply "my pump" or "my feelings." This intuition is an invitation to a journey; it is a calling to return to a lost place. ;The theme of returning emanates from the Odyssey, arguably the ur-epic of the Western tradition. The many turnings of the polytropic hero, Odysseus, re-collect the metanoia, the many turnings of the imaginal heart. ;Like the heartbeat itself, this journey requires a two-fold motion. Mimetic of the systolic-diastolic heartbeat, the journey to the imaginal heart is a fluctuation between two epistemological forces: the critic and the witness. The critic is a searching motion, a hermeneutical approach. It calls upon rational process, a critical interpretation of what has gone before. The witness, on the other hand, is a more receptive motion, a phenomenological approach. It calls upon a poetic process, a reading of the soul of the world that has been lost to enlightened reason. ;Although the method of the journey is epistemological, its goal is ontological. The search is for the imaginal realm, that domain of being which was lost in the Cartesian division of subjective and objective. In this great chasm of Western culture, much has been lost: embodied place to abstract space: complex rhythm to mechanical motion; storied time to clock measurement. ;Like Virgil in the Divine Comedy, the hermeneutical guides in this study lead back to a phenomenal and poetic realm. The journey of critical inquiry moves into the realm of the witness and a poetic encounter with the more-than-human world. The setting for this encounter is a coastal wetland. From a disregarded mud flat, a phenomenal presence speaks of a heart lost to us, yet which lingers in the Sufi tradition and the pre-Scholastic West. Neither the heart of positive science nor of sentimental humanism, it is a paradoxical heart, one found in the fluidity of stillness