What The Bee Knows

“What the bee knows gives taste to the honey but isn't found there. The bee's knowledge concerns the invisible realm, at once inner and outer. There, The Spirit dwells in its many manifestations, and there The Soul travels in search of spirit. The bee knows of spirits, everyday spirits, for the most part, and occasionally a great spirit, Spirit in capitals. This is the formless essence of The Invisible, its absolute Authority beyond The Law. At its heart, the formless cohabits with each and every thing, and with the totality, surrounding it like a nimbus, an atmosphere. At least, this is the image that the mind seeks to steady itself in relation to The Void, where it meets its nothingness. So much is this deep wisdom that P.L. Travers conveys in this classic work of hers.

Bees access the primordial knowledge in their circulation through The World and its flora. It provides their pollen. They gather it and return to The Hive, a fact Nietzsche likens to our greed for information. They are one with The Wind, which listeth where it bloweth-which is to say, spirit. They are initiates to ancient culture whose constatements are preserved in myth, legend, fairytale, and folklore, as an excess of charge or moving force that exists over and above the telling. By recognizing the cosmoses that P.L.Travers recreates and the knowledge they  contain, we pay homage to the bee, who can take it in more directly. We humans require an indirect approach in order to bypass a basic incredulity, Heraclitus says. This means lies for us moderns and post-moderns in myth - directly understood.

Myth takes The Soul on the circuitous journey to spirit, located at the mysterious and empty center of our being. There, story and tale can do the work they were devised for, to transform the tough, resistant coat of intellect into a sensitive opening to groundless existence.

In this regard, P.L.Travers remains a Master. She allows the myth to circulate beneath the skin and to penetrate deeper layers where its effect is more subtle. There in the fertile darkness in which Eros is engendered, as Hesiod tells, stories blend together with everything that exists. There, all desires seek to know themselves, for this is also Plato's realm where Eros dwells, a great spirit whose other name is the life-force that moves her retellings and reflections on tradition and a source of meaning.

Knowledge in The Deep empowers the human spirit to rise and soar so that it is just a little lower than the angels.

What the bee knows is not far from the spirit expressed through these essays and stories. The ring of P.L.Travers' words comes from an age of great and grave imagination. It exemplifies the complex weave of characters that play a role in one single unfolding creation: the world. Each day is a day in the Great Year, where words she has written count. The Year and the Day contain the beehive, the many lives of it, the almost countless cells of life. Their wanderings are mimicked by the bees' flight, which is the very trace of the knowing spirit-of that of knowing spirit. P.L.Travers gift to us is the record of that mysterious trace of a limitless Source.

-  David Appelbaum