Reply to comment

I’m writing to share some questions I’ve been thinking about in relation to this thread and following our last meeting:

Is dissatisfaction the primary driver of change for humans?  What about opportunity?  Harmonic association?  Aspiration?  Why does it matter? 

What does it mean for gifts to circulate “freely?”   When Hyde writes about gift exchange, he focuses on “the labor of gratitude,” the idea that to acknowledge and receive a gift requires that the giftee become strong enough – in essence, change or grow in power -- to be able to take in and pass along the gift.  It’s not easy; it takes struggle and time, as well as risk and daring, in that to change is to brook loss and uncertainty.  Bob Dylan: “He not busy being born is busy dying.”  I used to think that this song meant: Being born = good and dying = bad, but today I think both are dynamic and necessary. 

Publishing a good paper in an academic journal can be difficult in a way that publishing one to a web site is not, but the work of writing and of reading a good paper is challenging no matter where it is published.  The gifts of freely available materials are not easier to become eligible to receive and conjoin into circulation than rare and costly gifts. 

In relation to the evolving systems core group, I personally am comfortable waiting for a “base story,” to use Bharath’s term, to emerge.  My sense is that we can uncover such a story for our group, in dialogue with the times, people and places with which we are presently interacting.

To Bharath’s question whether power relations always condition thinking and acting, I am inclined at this moment to say no, although I usually say yes, because I am reading a book of educational philosophy by Sharon Todd, called Learning from the Other:  Levinas, Psychoanalysis, and the Ethical Possibilities of Education.  Along with Hyde and his book, The Gift, I would like to recommend parts of this book and perhaps Todd herself as visitors to us.  In the book, Todd argues that social justice education requires that people learn FROM, rather than ABOUT, others, and that we learn to listen in ways that do not dominate, exhaust, or seek to translate into comprehension other people’s languages (and those of our unconscious, or otherwise conscious, selves).  Learning ABOUT others involves us in relations of power, but learning FROM another doesn’t always do so. 

An example Todd gives is the film Jupiter’s Wife, by Michel Negroponte, a documentary about the filmmaker’s relationship with Maggie Cogan (not the last name she uses, but I am “giving her” it, because I don’t like representations of relatively powerless people as lacking family, and thus political, names).  Maggie when he meets her lives in Central Park with 4 dogs.  I just watched the film and I recommend it, as well, for our group.  Todd says that it’s an example of learning from another in that Negroponte doesn’t primary try to understand or to help Maggie in instrumental ways, although he does both along the way.  Instead, primarily he listens to her and invites her language, he follows her around, he looks up people and things from her past and listens to them (and gets us to), and he shows her “working on the complexities of her own life in her own way.”  Both modes of response/interaction (instrumental and receptive) are challenging and fragile.  He tries not to romanticize her homelessness but also does not portray it, or her “history of mental illness,” as a knowable problem needing or able to be solved in one particular way or the other.  He shows Maggie as vulnerable and strong, both physically and mentally -- in a lot of pain and confusion and also connected with joy, knowledge, and love.  And not determined by her mental or physical situation, or by her past.  The film ends with his voice-over saying that when he first met her (two and half years earler) she dreamed of living on a horse farm, and she still does.  I don’t think that his listening to this dream, this hope, and his making it the finale of the film, can best be understood in terms of power relations and I don’t think it’s romantic fluff, which it might have been had Negroponte not labored to receive Maggie’s language as a gift.  (Which is not to say I always believe in him apart from power issues  – for example,  I find his treatment of Maggie’s body in the film problematic because it seems male-gazy, even though in other ways it’s more open-ended.)

This is getting  long, so I will just say I’d also like to explore the idea of disappointment, appreciating Anne’s marking it.  In Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, ChogyamTrungpa writes about a Buddhist response to disappointment, saying that disappointment is one of the central features of human life.  I had never thought about it as so central until I read this book.  But if it’s so, maybe we should focus on it more.  Maybe, to respond to Bharath’s query, joyfulness and playfulness come from a freedom from fear of disappointment  -- not freedom from disappointment itself, which is inevitable, but freedom accompanying a certain confidence and strength that disappointment won’t kill one or one’s dreams.