Evolving Systems: July 2009 Core Group Meeting

I am listening in on this conversation from New Brunswick, where I am (also)  vacationing, where today I visited the very striking natural sandstone formations known as the "Hopewell Flowerpots"--and learned something, Arlo! about the geological processes that continue to shape them: how the ocean floor once rose up, to create mountains, how the water and wind then sculpted those formations...continually overturning the divisions between land, water, air, as each element works to remake the other.

 

Looking out, it's actually sometimes hard for me to tell whether I am seeing land or water or air, a confusion that seems to me, today, to be less optical illusion than evocative representation of nature's ongoing erasure of distinction, an erasure that was very much on my mind and retinas when I came across  Mark's posting. So now I want to lay alongside his striking observation that we neglect "different differences" my current strongly-felt sense of nature's indifference...

to such differences. The natural forces @ work here, in the maritime provinces, are very powerful ones, and they seem in opposition to all the constructions that humans continually build, and as continually try to maintain. But of course they are not really "opposed" to us and not working "against" us...we are the ones who create those oppositions.



Betwixt and between trying to make sense of such sights, I am also reading local authors, and am deep now into Helen Nearing's Loving and Leaving the Good Life. She writes after the death of her husband, the radical economist and activist Scott Nearing, and makes it seem a very small stretch when she quotes Gandhi: "sorrow over separation is perhaps the greatest delusion. To realize that it is a delusion is to become free. We love friends for the substance we recognize in them and yet deplore the destruction of the insubstantial that covers the substance for the time being. There is no death, no separation for the substance."

Death as a human construction....put that one in your pipe and smoke it along w/ me, along with Nearing's sense of a universe "too magnificent" to "concern itself overmuch with personalities," her invitation to "live in the entirety rather than in our own puny selves."

More later, perhaps, on her attempts, and "mine"? to live life without the "I," with the ego muted...
 

Emily Dickinson wrote once that she dwelt "in Possibility--a fairer House than Prose." FOR YEARS (til quite recently, when Alice corrected me), I have been telling folks that, like Dickinson, "I dwell in Disappointment."

I think that I have just been hoisted on my own petard. The OED says that "disappoint," which comes to English from French, combines "dis-" with "appoint" (from  à point--to the point, to bring matters to a point; to agree, arrange, settle).  So to "dis"-appoint (or to be disappointed) is to refuse to come to the point, to go in different directions, "apart, abroad, away." To dwell in disappointment, then, might mean to be willing to go off point, to have an open mind. Not to be so goal-directed.

Not a bad goal for me....

an opening, as Alice says, into possibility, into the sort of joyfulness and playfulness that might come from being free of the fear of disappointment, from the confidence that disappointment won’t kill.

Okay, so I WAS a little disappointed that our first meeting didn't attend to the three texts we'd read, because I think all of them--Sontag in her refusal of interpretation, as shielding us from the full-frontal assault of art; Feyerabend, in his refusal of methodology, as limiting the scope of what science might see; and Stallybrass, in his rather different refusal of originality, as neglecting the cultural commons in which we all work--were offering us possibilities for how we--this rag-tag gathering of very different sorts of minds and hearts, investments and interests--might move collaboratively together toward...

who knows what?

Since we met, my own adjacent reading has led me from William James to those who learned from him. I've been spending some time this week w/ Gertrude Stein (who took seven courses from him @ Harvard), and I'm figuring out that--having studied w/ James how the mind makes associations (and can learn, with experience, to alter them)--she put his science into practice in her art, writing words and paragraphs that seem @ first to be "non-sense," or which make their sense through sound rather than through habitual meanings. She thereby unsettles our usual modes of using words, our unthinkingness about how we make meaning, and invites us into alternative interpretations (I wonder what Mark, who recently staged one of her plays, thinks of this idea?).

Anyhow, I have a sense that what we are doing, collectively, is something quite Stein-ian: trying to avoid reiterating old habits, trying to escape some closed systems (of method, of interpretation, of thought), trying to search for a way to enact a conversation that might be more interactive, and therefore inevitably more unpredictable, in its outcomes. Placing ourselves in conversation w/ representations made by others of who we are (as Stein, photographed here by Man Ray, adjacent to Picasso's portrait of who she was, seeming to call her flesh-and-blood self into account...)

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.