What strikes me is that we tend to find it quite reasonable to respond to the Enormity of the destructive forces we face today and focus on the effect this has on our mood. I find this to be entangled with the series of assumptions and habitual accommodations we make through all the ways we make judgements in this culture. It appears to reflect the primacy we give to maintaining our attitudes over engaging with what is.

Does this come from our sense that we are at the mercy of our emotions? Is it because we form our identity around how we feel? Is it an ultimate sign of our sense of entitlement? “How I feel is more important than the consequences of how I act.”

However we arrive at this position, it forms another layer of enormity. Perhaps the most significant enormity we face. Significant and also perhaps causative. It’s possible that the rest derives from this.

I keep returning one way or another to how we dis-integrate. If integration is having access to and vital connection with as much of what is as it is possible for us to have, then disintegration is the breaking off of parts of this potential and losing access and connection. The dangers of dysfunctional delusions – as much as we are tied to having an “operating system” of conditioning between us and what is, we are tied to delusions. It’s just that some delusions align with our reality and lead us to behaving in a functional manner, while others send us farther and farther into dysfunction.

The dangers of these dysfunctional delusions are veiled by the way we are insulated from the effects of our actions. We are coming off a time when we’ve had the greatest level of insulation we’ve ever had. This has led us to adopt and hold onto behaviors that would never have been possible before and will no longer be possible again. In the meantime they hold us over the edge of the precipice that is the enormity we face.

Our identification with these delusions, culminating in the one that claims how we react, how enormity makes us feel, is more important than its consequences, leads us away from integration. Funny how the myths around freedom, self-expression, and niceness all push us to honor our feelings above all else.

In the end he asks, “How can someone … avoid the fate of the con man?”

I’d like to take a stab at that. I’d like to say the answer is simple, though it’s not likely to please “the skeptic.”

Sincerity.

Sincerity. “Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made!” says the ad man. What is missing in this approach is that sincerity is not something turned outward, but a relationship we have with our selves. Sincerity focused outward is false. Sincerity cannot function except as an internal relation. Even then it is fraught, but the possibility for it to be true exists.

I’ve been awed by realizations concerning sincerity that have grown out of my practice of Qi Gong. The weight of sincerity appears to be what carries Qi. It is certainly what animates one’s movements and what focuses one’s attention. The discovery of such clean and clear sincerity practiced on its “home” ground within the body and mind is astounding. A silent clap of resonant truth.

This applies to the beggar/artist. In the story he has arrived at his actions sincerely. He has no prejudice towards any result, and he is present in the unfolding of what occurs among and between them all. The question then becomes how to maintain that sincerity? This is a question of maintaining and returning to the sincerity of action that was there in the first instance.

In this way sincerity is tied to creativity. His creative leap and his openness to possibility led to the celebration of conviviality. Continuing this relationship between sincerity and creativity he can continue to be honest and not fall into the con.

How can we recognize sincerity?

It’s not a question of sensing that an attitude of another is telegraphed to us via a judgment about them. It is a question of finding our own sincerity and then discovering that we have a sincere response to another welling up within our selves. This response isn’t tied to any verifiable level of attributes of sincerity in the other. It relies on our own sincerity, and the way we then respond creatively to a situation. In this way we paradoxically do not interrogate the sincerity of another. Their sincerity is a matter for themselves alone and we can not know it with any certainty. We can be fooled, but only if we are primarily concerned with whether they are sincere. When we focus on our own sincerity the rest takes care of itself. We may take in the “products” of an insincere person and respond to them in a creative way that meets with our sincerity. Or we may find that feelings of conflict with another inspire us to look more deeply at our own response.

Sincerity may be the way in which we are free of striving. It is the deepest expression of humility in the sense of groundedness. It is a strength we feel coursing through us that is available to us but cannot be dominated. As soon as we attempt to “use” it, it disappears.

Our dissatisfaction stems from our confusion. Our expectations compound our confusion. The sheer wrongness of this position holds us as if hypnotized, paralyzed, and unable to take in what the other, what the world, is showing us.

We value our confusion, or at least we prefer to hide it from ourselves – it is certainly clearly visible to others! – over finding our own way to clarity.

In our discomfort we press on with impatience and shut ourselves off from any avenue for change. Any avenue for true change which can only occur as we open ourselves to the world and put ourselves in a position of relation, awareness, accommodation to what is.

*

This came to me following an incident in which I watched a fellow push on into increasing frustration under the guise of helping another. It illuminated something I’ve found to be the source of so many wasted opportunities for connection, for mutually beneficial situations to grow out of a moment of disconnection.

One of the things that alienates me the most from everyday society, at least as it presents itself to me, is this sense that so many will seemingly do anything to keep from having to confront the need to change, to find an insight into where they have fallen into one of the many traps around us. The dynamic seems to be that an identification of the self with a pose is held to be more important than finding more effective ways to engage with others, with the world. In saying this I am aware that this applies to me as much as anyone. I know that it must. But here is where I feel the disconnect. I don’t believe that many of those I interact with share this doubt, or laudable uncertainty about themselves. This realization is alienating and dispiriting. I look for connections, for dialogue, to counter the effects of isolation, the first being this very inability we have to see our own blind-spots, our need to help each other out of the dead-ends these lead us to.

In studying the confusion I bring to communicating what I am about, what I…

I’m brought to a halt by the next word, “want.”

I’m finding a confluence between my reading of Krishnamurti and Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. The former is an influence familiar to anyone who’s followed this blog. Hyde’s work was recently recommended to me by Andrew Taggart.

Andrew recommended The Gift as a valuable investigation into the question of a gift economy. It goes into the history as well as the mythology, and the poetics of the gift.

In many ways I’m attuned to what Hyde is writing since it connects with my own instincts about the sources and conduits of value, whether artistic, practical, or philosophical. It offers a way for me to break through a stumbling block I’ve suffered from my entire life. It’s most simply defined as a sense that my “production,” whether artistic, practical, or philosophical has tended to pile up without an outlet while in return my needs have not been met by my own efforts.

This is a serious and profound discontinuity! It weighs on me as a sign of failure, an existential failure to thrive, one that is avoided by anyone who’s been able to support themselves consistently on the fruits of their efforts and seen their work rewarded in ways that show that they have benefited others. This lack has been my greatest dissatisfaction.

I’ve long had intuitions based on the lives of certain artists and writers who were never able to resolve this issue in their own lives. Vincent van Gogh’s Letters to Theo may be the best elucidation of what it can feel like year in, year out. I have discovered my circumstances are not simply the result of a personal fault, but that there is much more at stake. From my own experience, and from the clarity we see arising around us out of the extremism of the will-to-power striving to turn everything into a transaction and denying the value of any other form of relationship but adversarial plays at domination. I’ve realized this is a question we all face if we are to carve out a place for any other sort of value.

Hyde has given me corroboration that there is a broad question at stake. I’m also finding how his thesis relates to Krishnamurti’s work. Hyde points out that what gives a gift its power is that we relinquish control in its presence. When we are talking about the gifts of ability, of clarity and eloquence, we are in a realm where we increasingly discover that what we are capable of producing is directly related to our willingness to let go of control and allow some form of grace to express itself through us. When we talk about the gift in its social environment, as a way to form and maintain cohesion while seeing that needs of fundamental importance to individuals and their society are met through the functioning of gifts we again see that it is how gifts direct us to let go of any will to control them and reward us for opening ourselves to their grace that matters most. The key to their function and to their efficacy lies in this quality. We set our gifts out as if offerings set adrift on the sea. We accept gifts with an awe and sense of wonder that cannot be met by any simple arithmetic of quid pro quo. The gift teaches us, it maintains our focus on our being within mysteries that are beyond our direct knowledge and any possibility of our direct control.

This last bit, I’ve found to be a tremendous gift in and of itself! Call it a form of absolution. It shows us that the drive we have to strive, to dominate and control, our selves and others and the world, is misplaced and unnecessary. It continually puts before us the mystery we want to push away and replace with an illusion of causality that makes what happens somehow our responsibility, one we then attempt to meet by doing violence to ourselves and to the world. Here is the lesson in all the mythological stories warning us against hubris.

Krishnamurti counsels that we cannot eliminate dissatisfaction without ridding ourselves of conflict and that conflict is the direct and only possible outcome of creating divisions.

We cloud up when confronted with the clarity of this equation. I think this has to do with the reaction to our own confusion I began by describing above. Whether we want to follow this down a psychological trail ascribing it to Ego, or just see it as the inevitable result of our conditioning, any conditioning that programs us into following reflexive reaction over accepting direct engagement with being the inevitable conclusion is the same.

Krishnamurti, and much of the core of Buddhist practice as we’ve come to see it within Zen for example, is presenting the alternative to remaining trapped within conditioning, even within the conditioning of following his or their theories or suggested practices!

A seeker asks the master, “What should I do if I meet the Buddha along the road?”

The master answers, “Kill him.”

This story is told in many variations, the point is that we don’t arrive at Zen by worshiping any guide, no matter how revered, we must destroy their presence within us to make room for the results of their insights to manifest themselves in us. Krishnamurti spent a lot of effort dissuading his followers from forming a school or a cult around him and his teachings after he died for this very reason.

These show a direct kinship between the gift and escaping the traps of conditioning. We could say that quid pro quo is Latin for the programming that creates conditioning. Hyde and Krishnamurti both show us that setting up a scaffolding of intention is faulty. We chose a particular result as the right one. We set out upon a specific path to achieve it. We are to be rewarded with earnings due us as a result of our striving after that goal. We will know when we have reached our goal and we will then be at peace. Here is the language of our programming, the foundation of our conditioning, and the source of our discontent.

Again, we return to the dynamic laid out at the beginning. What do we do with our discontent, our dissatisfaction? Most likely we maintain our allegiance with our own confusion and redouble our efforts to push through to a desired end – even when, as in this case, this is precisely what has led us to discover our confusion’s source! Even when we are confronted with the mechanism behind all of our discontent, and it is questioning the basis of all of our striving after results and carving up of the world and ourselves into factions and divisions, we tend to refuse the conclusions staring us in the face and return to what we are used to.

Gift is self-correcting. Any hidden agenda we attempt to plant within a gift, or advantage we claim from it destroys its value.

This is not an arbitrary rule, some form of initiation trial established to maintain some willful authority over us. We often tend to see it that way if it presents itself. The phrase “Indian Giver” is a perfect example as Hyde points out. This is the attitude within the delusions of striving and quid pro quo reacting to the other found within another who deals with us from within a gift relationship.

I’ve long said that authoritarianism is easy to decode, frightfully simple! Just turn what they say on its head and discover the truth! So it is with the epithet, “Indian Giver.” It claims that the “savage,” unable, or in his laziness, unwilling to meet the demands of property with due respect is doing violence to order by giving and expecting that others will also do so freely. The Pilgrim Father making such a pronouncement is blind to the violence of property, the way it tears asunder the fabric of interconnection that makes up the world. To him this violence is sacrosanct and cannot be noticed let alone questioned. Instead he aims his scorn at those who are puzzled by his shameless acts of domination. His willful misunderstanding then ascribes his own motivation to the other. He accuses the “Indian” of bad faith! He insists that the other must have the same motivations he does, the endless striving after quid pro quo. He then abhors in the other his projection of his own fault.

The rules of the gift are not the ones that are arbitrary, willful, and damaging. Those are the rules underlying the system we live under, the system that is destroying us and the world. The rules of the gift are a reflection, a way of embodying and engaging with the mysteries of life. They show us a way to find and maintain practices that bring us to a release from dissatisfaction and the traps of our striving. In this way they maintain us in what Zen calls a right relation to what is.

This relation, something that may come upon us at any time, that may stay with us, or leave if we lose our way again and fall back into striving, is the ultimate gift. It gives us our lives, and gives us the way to be here in our life. How can any dissatisfaction be worth the loss of this gift?

Now, that is the question.

Algorithms. While teaching a week-long course in half-model making and marine drafting I came across a tangible definition of an algorithm. In drafting we use splines, long, thin wooden battens that we bend around control points held by lead weights called ducks or whales. The shape, density and grain of the wood influences how it bends and the character of the curve it produces in each case. So not only the points we chose, but the batten’s character affect the result.

In Computer Aided Design, we also use “splines.” These are virtual battens that are algorithms in the sense we’ve come to know them through computer science. They are a complex equation that programs a certain influence into their operation so that they inflect a curve between a series of points in a certain way.

There is a direct connection between the physical tool and the virtual one. I’d like to look at the similarities and the differences to illuminate the consequences of relying on either.

Algorithms are a series of decisions programed into a tool. In an actual tool, whether a batten or a hand-plane, for example, the way the tool’s qualities interact with our use affect the quality of our output can be seen as equivalent to what a mathematically derived algorithm does within a computer program. Our lives are increasingly shaped by the results of the way these algorithms effect our interactions with conditions and circumstances. Economic decisions, buying and selling, and casting predictions and divining correctives, are now done at gigaflop speeds by complex algorithms interacting directly with each other beyond the reach of any human operator.

To some this is breathlessly touted as another step towards the Singularity! I see it as the embedding of intention ever deeper into loops that elude our ability to monitor and respond.

Let’s look at the use of that wooden “algorithm” in drawing a curve. We decide on an overall width, the beam of the vessel. We establish an overall length. We refer to curves drawn in cross-section and profile view before attempting to lay out this plan view of the boat’s sheerline, its edge of deck, or rail. We set up our ducks to hold the batten and we fiddle with their placement. There are certain points we decide we must hold. Others, we decide we can relax or inflate to give us a curve that appears to meet our intentions. We sight the line. We then draw it, in pencil. This process continues in a round-robin working about the three views as we hone our shape and reconcile the views, making sure that what we see in cross-section is accurately reflected in the other views so that we are establishing a truthful three dimensional object. – A false one would have curves in one view that would not lie on the surface described by the other views.

Throughout this slow, meditative process we are constantly pondering what the boat will be called on to do, how it might interact with the water in varying conditions, how the volume held within it might be useable for its crew. We are always working with a keen awareness that accuracy is elusive and that we must work to maintain it. This is literally true of the pencil lines we draw, whose widths when scaled up to full-size could be as much as an inch wide. It’s also true in a deeper philosophical sense as we are navigating the space between intention and perception and possibility of outcome. We are within the mindset of the submariner’s creed.

Say not, “This is the Truth!” but “So it seems to me to be as I now see the things I think I see.”

Working in this way we keep in sight the need for humility. We also remain on the lookout for signs of grace, for the serendipity that signals a confluence of factors both in and out of our intentional control that might lead to something greater than what we expected. In the end, we are involved in a practice. We are dealing with an aspect of life within an outlook that keeps us open to what life has to offer and to the gulf between mere intention and what actually occurs.

Now let’s jump into the virtual world. First of all there is accuracy to burn. The mathematical certainties of binary computation guarantee that location, any quantitative measure we input into the system, will have an accuracy of computation well beyond any practical level of usefulness. In modelling a boat for instance, we are working to tolerances of ten thousandths of an inch! Our economic calculations are also breathtakingly accurate. That is, the sketchy figures we input with little sense of what they might mean, or whether they reflect any reality at all, are manipulated precisely. This leads to the fallacy of accuracy. We are overwhelmed by the sheer volume, speed, and precision of the manipulations possible. We respond by generating meta-algorithms to manage our algorithms and these proliferate until we are working well beyond the limits of our perceptual and intentional abilities. We reach a point where we no longer have any traction with the phenomena we are purportedly attempting to analyze and shape.

How does this affect our relationship with intention?

I’ve written on the limits of intention and the possibilities of action without striving, living within a different relationship with intention than what is commonly considered the only way to act. What I’ve been finding – both in following insights and living within practices that bring me in direct contact with the limits and uses of intention – I’ve been finding that I’ve increasingly been acting from within a relationship to intention that restricts intention to a narrow and limited sphere. I’ve been finding that intention is useful to aim attention, but that beyond this, action is directed by the interplay of perception, attention, and the ongoing iteration of actions that appear to well up out of some necessity beyond my ability to analyze or control. I’ve found that instead of limiting my effectiveness and making me more “passive,” this relationship with intention has brought me greater effectiveness and a more direct connection with a wellspring of action that is anything but passive.

Within the average expectations society presents us regarding intention it has a much broader, more central role. There is a conflation of intention, and the striving it leads to, with a misunderstanding of causality and its subsequent results. We are continually striving to control what we do and what is done to us while we are continually confused by what we consider unintended consequences when the actual outcomes of our actions don’t line up with the results we’ve wished for. Our response to this condition is most often to double-down and “try harder!”

Our blindingly fast and inhumanly accurate algorithms are at the leading edge of these attempts to try harder.

If we give intention a primacy it does not actually deserve. And we then bury intention within virtual tools that work so quickly and so far beyond our capacities to understand them, making it impossible to follow what they are doing; then we are leveraging the power of our intentions, while at the same time, we are insulating their affects from our ability to make judgments about their consequences.

This falls directly within the dynamic of all power relationships. The fallacy of power is that it amplifies our strengths, when in fact, it depletes our strength while masking this effect until it is too late to adjust. In this way our reliance on virtual algorithms is just the latest in our flailing after power as we wish it will be able to save us from our weakness. The weakness that is the direct result of striving after power.

Our misunderstanding of the effects of power lead us to over-value intention and insulates us from their results as consequences build to a breaking point. The promise of efficiency we chase after in the effort to leverage our striving strips away the time and space in which our interactions with our tools creates a dynamic inter-relationship between us, our perceptions, our actions, and their results. In their place we are left increasingly blinded to our consequences as our new, hyper-tools, working in a virtual space and at a rate of speed beyond our ability to experience, take what should be, what would have been if not but for these tools, a passing intention that we could modify as its consequences became apparent, and turned them into the equivalent of “Doomsday” machines. As in the parables of the Genie, we are at the peril of having our wishes come true, with a speed and a power that is guaranteed to make us regret it, but assuring that we will only recognize it when it is too late.

These algorithms give us the promise of Utopia, a literal – or shall I say – virtual, no-place. They insulate us from the world while they magnify the effects of our intentions. They dazzle us with Utopia and make dystopia that much more likely. All for the price of maintaining a hubris that claims the right and abilities to dominate everything and subjugate everything to our ill-considered desires.

Mahan was a rather astute strategic analyst of his day. John Boyd was a towering figure who’s work has yet to be fully digested by anyone. This makes it doubly tragic that we end up seeing him solely as “the man behind” the Rumsfeld/Cheney putsch.

What is so exciting about Boyd’s work, is exactly what has been left unexamined. He brings the conditions required for strategic thought into the age of Quantum Physics, but as he laid out the basis for not only working within the realm of strategy and tactics he also laid out a critique of the entire realm of strategy and tactics. To adopt the former without considering the profound implications of the latter has been a tragic error that will continue to leave us exposed to dangers of our own devising until we put some concerted effort into fleshing out what he has actually brought to our attention.

Ambiguity is central to Boyd’s vision. It is not something to be feared but something that is a given. Being creative organisms, we should welcome it and make use of it. The world is ambiguous. It is uncertain and unknowable in detail when we must decide what to do. We never have complete and perfect information. We are never completely sure of the consequences of our actions. Our decisions and actions are hypotheses to be tested against this ambiguous environment. The best way to succeed in it is to revel in ambiguity. Rather than fight against it and attempt to learn or know all, we should accept it and use it to our advantage. We do so by adapting to the circumstances around us and perfecting our ability to deal with incomplete information. Though anchored in moral conviction, we should remain fluid in our actions, being unpredictable and adaptable to unfolding circumstances.

This quote from one of his memorial sites lays out a fundamental question posed by Boyd. That anyone could read this, take it in, and then with a smile of smug satisfaction claim this thinker as the “mastermind behind” the current wars boggles the mind! Sure there is Rumsfeld’s “Known unknowns, and unknowable unknowns,” here; but where, in any of what those guys did with Boyd’s insights, is there any sign of having understood what “moral conviction” might mean in a world in which we are immersed in ambiguity?

This has been a prime example of willful misunderstanding by those who worship power and are unwilling to face the consequences within their own sense of how the world works as they confront and attempt to absorb thinking that draws them in for its power even as it counsels them to look past the pursuit of power as a means to survive and thrive.

The writer mentions “perfecting our ability to deal with imperfect information.” What does he think that means? This is a classic case of pushing ahead with an attitude that is contradicted by the thrust of what one is attempting to absorb and as a result turning the new insight on its head. There is no “perfecting” possible in this case. The point of “dealing” with ambiguity is to get over the expectation that there is anything to perfect at all! What he is wrestling with here is that Boyd has made clear that we need to match our expectations to our limitations. When we can’t know everything we must stop acting as if our “Plans” have taken everything into account. That much they give lip service to, but beyond this is a call for humility, for tuning what the writer again coarsely paraphrases as “moral certainty” – how can such a concept survive in contact to the thrust of Boyd’s insights? For tuning our moral compass to the incontrovertible necessities of ambiguity and imperfect knowledge.

…Boyd begins with the premise that the business of life is life. Life cannot be lived unless the organism survives. It can be lived better if it prospers. Hence, all organisms’ first priority is to survive and prosper. This is best done by acting in such a manner that you can provide for your own sustenance independently of others. You cannot control their actions, motives, and performance. Self-reliance is better than alliance. This being the case, the chief aim of an organism that seeks to survive and prosper is to achieve and maintain its independence, its freedom of action. There are times, however, when this is neither possible nor desirable. Some symbiotic relationships are prudent if not mandatory. In some cases, existence itself is dependent on such a relationship and at that point, since survival is the highest goal, it is a necessary element of continued life.

The emphasis is mine, but how does anyone square the circle, thinking that this man’s work would be best used to fight oil-wars with a “coalition of the willing” and establish a domestic security state that treats its citizens as potential internal terrorists if they disagree with those in power?

This is a case of the “Church Fathers,” unable to squash their Galileo and then attempting to fit his new framework into their own. Accepting whatever appears tactically useful and ignoring or completely missing the foundations of what he’s discovered.

Unlike the smug certainties of those who have taken credit for “interpreting” John Boyd, Boyd himself was keenly aware of the difficulties posed by a partial and fleeting familiarity with what he was doing. He worked by creating a series of presentations – in another sad tale of misappropriation, these have become the ancestors of the Power Point…. His thinking progressed by editing and extending these briefings. They were soon day long and by the end multi day long events. Of course his bosses and handlers were too busy to sit through that much time listening to a mere colonel so they would insist on précis and outlines. He spent most of his political capital making sure that no one got a shortened version, or even a printed version. If they wanted to hear what he had to say they had to sit there and follow his train of thought as it went through all the development and complexity of viewpoint required to have any chance of understanding what he was trying to get across.

In this he was a pioneer in an experiential form of thinking, learning, and teaching that is still rarely used. He sought to embed his insights within the process from which they grew and to sensitize his audience to how critical this process is if we are to gain anything from this type of thinking and not fall into precisely the traps his present-day fans have been stuck in. Boyd, for me has been an instrumental influence in my own instincts in this direction. The form I use in my essays grows out of my sense of Boyd’s work.

Boyd’s life was tragically flawed. He was a tremendous intellect, actually an embodied intelligence, so much of what he did was achieved by respecting his physical responses to intuitions that he would follow intellectually wherever they led. But he was raised poor and after joining the military at the tail end of WWII, he struggled along the path of the autodidact, rising to a colonel’s rank from an airman and inserting himself into the center of power without any advantages and without playing politics. He paid for this in many ways. He was never accepted and never felt that his work was taken seriously. His private life was a mess. He carried many contradictions within himself and seemed to have been aware of how much of his own thinking he was incapable of following through to its conclusions. He combined personal courage with the bravado of a combat pilot, but everything about his approach to his work came out of a ruthless humility about where the conclusions of his work might lead. He resisted any efforts by himself or others to predigest or frame the implications of his work a priori.

His life was an example of the gulf between the privileged and their inability to reach beyond their own ease, and the crucible of having no easy path and no easy certainties to buoy him up as he went ahead.

In my investigations of Boyd, I find him to be at a confluence between Einstein, Quantum Physics, and David Bohm on the one side and Gandhi and Krishnamurti on the other. He has taken the abstractions of the theoretical physicists of the Twentieth Century and embodied their insights in the “seat of the pants” mode of the natural pilot. He has also, in this way similar to David Bohm, taken the implications of this new physics and brought it around to meet with the intuitive and empathic, compassion-centered work of Gandhi and Krishnamurti.

In his day to day efforts – he worked in the Pentagon for Chris-sakes! He never spelled out those latter connections explicitly, but they are there implicit in all his work, and this even shines through in abstracts like the one I’ve quoted above made by one of those who refuse to see where his implications lead!

I never heard of John Boyd until a quarter century after his death. I also never came across David Bohm’s work, or Krishnamurti, until just a few years ago. They all were active throughout the years of my youth, but I never came across any meaningful reference to any of them. Even now, Boyd I see as having found a certain popularity, but I’ve not found anyone writing anything about what his work might actually mean to us. Bohm and Krishnamurti have smaller fringe followings than the most obscure UFO conspiracy. It’s as though they never existed for the most part. Toss in Rupert Sheldrake, whose latest book has just come out and who I also only read in the last five years or so, and a great swath of my personal “Pantheon” is in an almost total functional obscurity!

I could smolder under the feeling that they have all suffered under a grand conspiracy to keep valuable information out of our hands. As much as I can sympathize with those who see conspiracies all around us, I’d rather see this as a sign of the power of the failing framework to hold onto a hegemonic hold over our attention through the sheer volume of its inertial mass. A central lesson of John Boyd’s work is in how much friction must be overcome, how much we have to learn to trust what we actually embody if we are to break out of mass delusions.

At the bottom of John Boyd’s actual legacy is a challenge to us to come up with a synthesis of the way his implications destroy the traditional rationale behind strategy and tactics. His work does not give us a jet-age version of Lao Tzu.  He opens up an avenue to exploring the legitimate pursuit of the use of force in ways that do not condemn us to suffer the unavoidable “unintended” consequences inherent in the ways we deal with power. I don’t know what this will lead to, or what we will find there; but I do know it won’t be the farcical and tragic “lessons” his present followers have inflicted on the world!

I keep returning to the realization that whatever is profound is also very close to what appears trite, even obvious. That it takes a certain plodding, a high degree of resistance to boredom, and a willingness to stick with the kind of habits of close observation and patience and shifting from close-up to wide-view – such as a gleaner might use, or a beach-comber, or what it takes to spot whales on a barren horizon. It’s not just a habitual contrarianism that leads me back to a plodding form. I see no other way to find what I’m looking for and definitely cannot separate the finding from the passing along.

The subject of this post is an example. Life is between. Duh! John Lennon’s, “Life is what happens while we are making other plans.” Is catchier. Even that doesn’t inspire so much as it tends to frustrate in an amusing, bemused sort of way.

But I’m not after bemusement. I’m looking for ways not to avoid frustration, but to push through it. Not to shove it aside, but to sort through it and find all that is of value that clings to it so thoroughly we usually just toss it aside as we look for more exciting stuff!

In Cat Lupton’s new blog, The Place Between Stories, she begins by talking about how she has felt caught between,

“The muddle was trying to learn to live with, and accept, the condition of no longer having a defined role or purpose, while pestering myself anxiously on a near-daily basis about what the f*ck I was doing with my life. The frustration, one I know others share, was with the whole kitbag of assumptions that lay behind the questions I was being asked: that ‘doing’ or ‘working’ or fitting neatly into a box labelled ‘this’ are the normal, default means by which we must explain and justify our presence in the world.”

This is both a personal condition and a general sense many of us have of where we find ourselves as the old stories collapse into irrelevancy and we tire of the futility of holding on. Its doubts nag us and bite at our heels as we find each new apparent avenue for change closing off, or at least occluded even as we reach for them with whatever enthusiasm we can muster. For me one example of this, one that has me locked in its dilemma, is the way spending time following others on the web and writing for these outlets I’ve worked so hard to establish for others to read my take, has left me between the feeling that this is the only way to counter my isolation and feeling that this is just another trap to make me a cog in the ongoing Spectacle. I attempt to balance on the precarious edge between the pull of a rather empty and dispiriting “real” life and what may only be a compulsion – but maybe not! – to take in the wider world and make my voice heard in a wider sphere.

I’ve taken way too long to get over an inheritance of a distrust of the life of arts & letters versus the active, practical ways I grew up in. That no one was particularly successful – just enough to get by – at being practical, at making, at doing around me then always fed my resistance, but it never released me from these doubts that to simply write, or draw, or paint was somehow an abdication and not a proper choice on its own. This has kept me in what has always felt like a false position of pushing to convince myself and others that I could do, and do well, while what I have always longed for is in so many ways just this. To spend my time listening and looking for inspiration and then following it within the exquisite impracticality of artistic expression and philosophical contemplation.

A middle ground, that of teacher, has always been there just over my shoulder. I had teachers on both sides of my family. My worst and best moments have been within schools. I’ve held some of my own teachers as the greatest influences on my life, and I’ve long had a tremendous respect for what this calling offers and expects of its practitioners. As a result, I’ve never looked to follow the accepted paths to such a life. I’ve also gladly jumped at the random opportunities that have come my way. Teaching a week-long class four years in a row at MIT, and teaching a weekly class of Qi Gong at my local YMCA now, have been among the high points of these experiences.

My mother used to repeat that when I was asked what I was doing as a young child, absorbed in some small world held close to my face, I would say, “I’m teaching myself.”

This has held true longer than any other story for me of who I am or what I do. I spend most of my energies “teaching myself.” This differs from “learning.” It also differs from most of the ways people attempt to teach others.

This brings us back to here. To this point on a screen as I type. I’ve found that teaching myself and teaching others anything that seems worthwhile needs to happen at the same time. What I distrust and even rabidly loathe about pedagogy is the hubris that these can and should be separated, that we can accumulate something worth teaching and then pass it out in some efficient, wholesale method without losing all that might have been of value there. Not only for those we are teaching, but for ourselves.

Life is between. I’m both learning that, “teaching myself” about it; and passing it on – at the same time. I’m struggling with my own limitations as I glean what comes to my attention and I cannot separate that process and what it illuminates from whatever might be of value in relating it to others. The call I feel to dialogue is a yearning after reciprocity in this process, to enter into dialogue/dialogues is to proceed in company, to collaborate at teaching ourselves as we learn and teach each other.

Life is between. So is this process. It’s not there in schools as they are now instituted, unless by accident. I’ve been fortunate to have been in two schools where this happened because they were new, and because no one involved really “knew” what they were doing there, and so this actually occurred on a regular basis, although this didn’t stop anyone who “mattered” thinking these were marginal, trivial places that didn’t do what schools are intended which is to anoint a new generation for positions of power.

I continue to find myself in between this yearning to teach, myself and others, and the intentions and expectations of schools. This even applies, rightly or wrongly, to various calls for new schools being made around me. It harkens back to what I miss from the closing off of the old Bohemias. They were, perhaps, the closest to this model of a community of exploration, although they were never fee of the siren call of fame and power for those who could distinguish themselves on a wider stage.

Life is between. This is the subject of so much of what I’ve written about over the years. It is certainly where I find myself, repeatedly. Caught somewhere between where I thought I was going and where I rightly or wrongly perceive I find myself.

Back to John Lennon here. Of the wry smile and acerbic whit!

How do we live life between and communicate it at the same time? How do we wrest circumstances from the cracks? How do we make a life and have a living, share value and feed ourselves and each other?

Whatever the answers to these questions, we are left with the truth that life is between.

Filed under: Creativity, Critique of Culture Tagged: Authority, Creativity, Crisis of Expertise, Futility, Hubris, Humility, Trust, Value, Writing ]]> http://horizonsofsignificance.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/life-is-between/feed/ 3 antoniodias http://horizonsofsignificance.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/self-mastery-not-self-control/ http://horizonsofsignificance.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/self-mastery-not-self-control/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 19:12:40 +0000 Antonio Dias http://horizonsofsignificance.wordpress.com/?p=3726 ]]> The title of this post is a nod at an earlier post, Mastery, not Control, in which I laid out a case for distinguishing between these two terms and showing the consequences related to each. In the end, that post did rely on distinguishing self-mastery from the will-to-control. This is still the case here, but what I’d like to clarify is how self-mastery is distinct from what we know of as self control, not versus any form of control, but the ways in which we expect to be able to – and feel the need that we must – control ourselves or fall into some sort of chaos or evil.

The term master, mastery, has almost as many abuses done in its name as has control or coercion. There have been attempts to lump them all into the same category, often by those who prefer the sound of it and want its aura to reflect well on their nefarious acts. The prime example is a master on a slave plantation. It tickles their vanity to be seen as a master, instead of as a kidnapper and abuser of those he’s managed to steal away from living their own lives. Their usurpation of the term is just one last bit of viciousness carried out against language to help support what is intolerable.

Master, mastery, as I’ve used it refers to the traditions in mostly Eastern practices, but also within arts, crafts and guilds, to designate someone who has a high level of proficiency, a mastery, over a complex and demanding set of activities that amount to a way of life engaged with something of merit. Central to this definition is the way in which a master has found out how to handle themselves as much as how they’ve learned to manipulate things or others.

I would carry the same distinction down into this intra-personal level and say that self mastery exists as an alternative to what we may call self control.

Many of our religious and philosophical traditions and schools put a high store on self-control. To be brief, I liken these to the same set of motivations and assumptions and expectations that lead to the desire to exert force upon others so as to coerce and control them. Within this type of framework there is a profound lack of trust in anything for and of itself. The striving to manipulate and the fulfillment of intention is seen as the only thing between us and a shapeless chaos or an active evil. This urgency is then the rationale of self-justification to use anything and anybody as a means to an end that is held above all question. Carrying on this sort of “War on Everything” within the self as well as outside is just a natural outcome of this way of projecting shadows and reacting to the internal as if it were attacking from the outside. In the end, we don’t so much reach the conclusion that we must control ourselves as we must control others, as it is that since we see, even our internal processes only as they reflect on us unconsciously from outside that there is no boundary, that the battle is everywhere.

At the heart of mastery as opposed to control is the importance of looking for and dealing as directly as possible with manifestations of our own internal shadows as they are, without getting caught up in their projections onto others. This is a process of modifying habits and assumptions and changing attitudes and expectations before looking for answers and acting within the world. This is criticized as being a passive process, and we are urged to strive after power because of the insistence we feel to have answers, to feel certainty, and hold these demands to be of greater importance than having a sense of what is, what is true, what is necessary, even what is useful. We are urged to keep striving as so-called unintended consequences to ill-considered and misplaced action pile up around us. This downward spiral of going from bad to worse is then turned on its head and presented to us as Progress!

Any level of proficiency at an art, a craft or practice shows us how futile such an approach is and shows us glimpses and glimmers of another way to proceed. What we recognize in someone who has truly mastered an art, a craft, or practice is the way they are centered and only act when there is direct utility in an action. Their ways may appear mysterious and often go counter to the kind of rote copying that is so highly valued today under the magical spell of technology. We may not be able to grasp what they do or understand how they do it, but there is something there that cannot be mistaken for anything else.

While the qualities we admire in a master may lead us to desire mastery, we are met at every step with resistance to our wills. Our intentions, our desires are repeatedly shown to be worthless, less than nothing in the face of what we attempt. In any form of mastery the first and hardest step is coming to grips with frustration and the depth of the illusions of ease and control we otherwise find so flattering to our egos. The entire path seems constructed so as to thwart ego and push us to confront our vulnerability when we would prefer to flatter ourselves and feel cocooned in an unearned exceptionalism.

Through this all, as we undergo a profound and joyful disillusionment, we find that there is a flow into and out of what we have seen as our self that puts a lie to any concept of ownership over our accomplishments or justification for any extrinsic rewards. We discover that it is only through an acceptance of and trust in precisely that which is beyond any illusion of intentional control that we make any sort of progress towards our goals. As we proceed even the idea of having goals, of thinking of means and ends instead of immersion and interpenetration loses its appeal. Arriving at mastery one probably loses any ambition to achieve it! At that point we are probably close to what it was we saw in the masters we first saw and admired.

Everything about self mastery is different from what we are doing when we attempt self control. From within a situation in which we are beginning to break away from the heavy burdens of abuse and the coercion of others, it may be difficult to tell the difference between an injunction to work on practices that lead to self mastery, and see these as some trick to maintain power and keep it away from us. When we suffer a lack of power, especially as a result of having been dominated in some way, or damaged, or both; it is so hard to accept that the answer to all our problems doesn’t lie in amassing as much power as we can possibly grab. This churning of the abused into the next round of abusers happens at every level from the personal to the global stage. This is what we call History.

A side note: the word history doesn’t really have anything to do with what belongs to some him. It is a form of the word story, the h and i sounds are there in the latinate as part of the word story, not as an attempt to give it a masculine ownership. There is a certain ironic poetic justice in making it seem that it refers to “his” story, but that only creates an added layer of confusion. It’s not the maleness of history that is the root of its troubles, but that it is this churning of domination – by whoever achieves it – and the cycling of yesterday’s abused into tomorrow’s abusers.

What we miss when we rush to gain what we’ve felt we’ve lacked in power is that gaining in power does not bring relief. The more we rely on power the more we are fearful and the more we feel convinced that our lack can only be met by gaining yet more power. Power corrupts in this way. It makes us weak and makes us susceptible to its wiles and willing to do anything to increase our share. While we are caught in this maelstrom, we are getting progressively weaker and progressively removed from any connection with the reality of our situation. This is the drama playing itself out all around us.

The road to mastery leads to self mastery. But it does not lead through increasing violence and distrust against our selves. Within self mastery is tremendous restraint, but it is not coerced, by anyone. In mastery we chose to let go of things, like anger, and ownership, and ego, not so as to punish ourselves, to coerce or control ourselves in the way the powerful would have us respond.

We let go out of trust. We let go of false notions of responsibility, of the ways intention and ego-drive lead us to feel that the world revolves around us and what we want. We let go so that we can be, and in being we have the only viable chance of acting in ways that are useful and not merely futile and fraught with unintended consequence.

“Stop everything, these men are doing good work!”

The above was a passing detail in an online apologia for a lack of feminist sympathies from someone I follow, but won’t name here. It brought me to an agonizing halt.

In this statement the concerns of half the population, transcending race and poverty, religion and location; are brushed aside with the help of a breathless assumption that overwhelms any value there might otherwise have been in the overall argument. This assumption is in two parts, and it is central to what I see as the entanglement of the will-to-dominate that exerts a continual force acting to return all of our efforts to make substantive changes back into the old model, even when those efforts are intended as a radical departure.

“Stop everything!” Put this statement into the mouths of others, especially the mouths of those we disagree with, makes it a petulant cry. This is the danger of urgency. Urgency follows an insistence on the rightness of one’s intentions so as to pave over any objection and demand obedience. This is a classic defense of domineering behavior. Those who take it upon themselves to act because only they know what needs to be done; only they have the will, the courage, the knowledge; only they have the authority to act, and therefore they will act as they see fit, no matter what.

The second part, “these men are doing good work” is another jumble of entitled assumptions that cause the blood to run cold on hearing them. Anyone who’s been the recipient, the “beneficiary;” of well-intentioned domination will instinctively recoil. First, there is the strong accusation of jealousy as the prime motivation behind any resistance to an assumed mantle of authority. It rejects out-of-hand that there might be a valid objection, on any grounds.

This is a classic case of reversal. The dominating mode is fueled by an inability to recognize when one is projecting an inner turmoil onto another and reflecting it back on one’s self. All garden variety right-wing paranoia begins and ends here. The attacker’s worst self-doubts projected onto their enemies. This is domination acting through manipulation. It insists that the other has no right to their own motivations. It insists that the dominator is the only one who can make valid or useful judgements. It insists that the other accept an inferior position to maintain any lines of communication however false and one-sided they will be if the other accepts the bargain.

From there, the statement cascades down a series of damning attacks posed as righteous justifications. “…(T)hese men…” are the victims of an attack. They are of true heart and good intention. Not only that, but what they are doing is necessarily good, judged so by the only ones capable of making that judgment, one of their own.

Put it all together and we have someone who should, and probably does, know better falling for the demands of urgency and the allures of manly action posting a statement he would probably see through and repudiate if it were made by another in a different context.

I may be a curious champion of feminism. I’m, to many of the few who have ever heard of me, probably seen as an older, privileged white male who is unafraid to spout off and seeks authority wherever he can find it. On the other hand, I see myself as a marginalized individual of a minute ethnic extraction who has suffered and been shaped by male-based domination and its aftermath in both my personal and social lives. We all have great gaps between how we are seen and how we see ourselves.

I look for connections between private conditions of abuse and our cultural predicaments that derive from a similar, even identical, mechanisms affecting us in a broad cultural context. In this, I’m far from original. I haven’t discovered these connections or exhaustively outlined their delineations. What I do is an act of witness, an attempt to gather insights as they occur to me for my own use and in the hope of being of some use to others.

I’ve never been comfortable in “male” society. My reactions tend to be more often from a viewpoint that might stereotypically be considered “feminine.” This struggle has shaped me in significant ways. It has kept me from wholeheartedly accepting a “masculine” role and chasing after the kinds of success this might have brought me. This has been as much a handicap I’ve been unable to overcome as a consciously chosen “virtuous” path. In the end I have come to see this as a gift in that it has held me to develop a patience and an acceptance that otherwise might not have been available to me.

I don’t see that what we have suffered under as male domination is in any way limited or identical with being or identifying one’s self with any particular gender. There are tactics that might be considered acts of attempted female domination. I reject these as well, whenever I see them, whether I’m the one doing them or the one receiving someone else’s attempts at coercion. All acts of coercion are dangerous and counterproductive. These labels, of male or female, directed at such actions may, in some narrow sense, be useful; but they tend to hide the way caricatures of gender identity do more harm than good. Domination is domination is domination. Patriarchy is one of its forms, but not its only form.

I want to unravel the way all power-based coping mechanisms, at whatever scale, are dangerous. Their alleged benefits are short-term and illusory. Their long-term results are deadly to all involved. We nod knowingly when we hear that “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” but I think we fail to see that this is not just a moral injunction to be “good,” but a warning sign of actual danger we ignore at our own peril.

What is behind the set of conditions that would bring someone to say what I’ve quoted above is a sign of the ease with which we can all succumb to a slippery slope, falling for the delusions of power. Testosterone may be a contributing factor, but in the end this is also a distraction. Fear knows no gender. Fear and the resulting anger and self-justification leading to an intoxication of the will is a risk for us all.

From here it’s possible to see what valuable insight might have led to such a horrific statement. There are two points in doing so. First, dropping the antagonistic/defensive stance that fuels our own belief in power is necessary, if we are to enter into useful dialogue with others. Any strong identification with an us versus an other leads to a blindness, and a rote response driven by fear. Responding in kind will always escalate. Insisting on our right will only implicate us in the further proliferation of antagonism and lead us to look for ways to extend our own dominating impulses. Words can be deadly, but usually they have to be codified into laws or directives to action before that happens. To avoid treating an example of speech as the equivalent of a physical attack is difficult, especially when we are sensitized to verbal triggers, but in the end, this is one of the reasons we need to develop inner strength, so as to be able to stop these cycles and have them end with us.

We are all damaged goods. We are all, have all been, victims of abuse and domination. We are all capable of falling into virulent behaviors that act to perpetuate abuse across the generations. Without forgiving ourselves, and then others, even those who are causing us harm, we cannot expect to break out of these cycles. Retribution, revenge, even cries after justice can, and most often do, leave us trapped firmly believing that power and domination are valid so long as we agree with those wielding its dangerous forces.

Every tyrant, whether of a household or on the broader world stage has always seen himself justified to act as they did. This is something we ignore at our own peril. Hubris awaits anyone who feels they are the ones who can wield this distinction successfully. In the end, this is precisely what makes the original statement so damaging. To end up agreeing with it so as to allegedly “fight” it, is a common enough error, but exactly the kind of thing we need to avoid. It puts us in the same role of defending an indefensible position when what we intended was to critique a form of perceived coercion from another. Was he wrong to see obstructionism in those he attacked? Perhaps not. The wider question that cannot be addressed without getting past this volley of accusations is whether there might not be some valid core to that obstructionism.

Urgency insists. Urgency will not be obstructed. Righteousness is there ready at hand to take us to its defense. Yet we are surrounded by the “fruits of urgency.” “Unintended” consequences abound! If there ever was a time for – if not obstructionism with its own pettiness and infighting, but for counseling restraint – I think this is it!

This is my overall disillusionment with pragmatism. Behind it all is what appears to me to be a thinly veiled justification for the intoxication provided by willful action. It has never led anyone beyond the limitations of unintended consequence. It is part of the illusion of progress. Tying it to gender, even though there’s certainly circumstantial evidence for the case, is equally a delusion. It is more closely tied to the mechanics of fear, and is equally damaging when done from a “feminine” perspective. I cannot but distrust any attempt to garner consensus based on fear for this reason. Fear may be a powerful motivator, but it is in its appeal as a power that it derails our focus which would be better spent developing the inner strength to resist fear’s entreaties. This is what leads to fear’s most pernicious dangers.

*

It may be difficult for those both male and female who are accustomed to finding some modicum of success acting within an atmosphere of negotiation, wrestling after domination, to see what is wrong with that behavior. The world is rough and tumble. They are being pragmatic, realistic. I suggest, and have gone into reasons why at length over the course of this blog, that they look at the mess we are in and look closely at the causative links between these mechanisms and our current predicaments. Our crises of leadership and expertise are at root crises that grow out of our inabilities to see any other way to interact.

The most profound hurdles we face are right here, that we find ways not to continue to insist that this failed methodology be applied again and again only with different parties “at the top.” Any of us, whatever our gender or other circumstances, we will fall back into the old traps unless we find the strength to relinquish these methods and the attitudes of privilege and entitlement they support. At their foundation this includes recognizing our own intentions, even our own desires for self-preservation, are uninsurable. It is such a sign of how far we have strayed to have to make this assertion and not have it seen as a matter-of-fact. Whether we like it or not, whether we align ourselves with whatever power we might amass, this has always been, and will always be, just another desire with no more weight than any other. There are no guarantees, only illusions of entitlement and wishes after exceptionalism.

The very “inefficiencies” of setting aside the tactic-of-power are where true strength lies. If we accept this, then the entire edifice of urgency and the pressure behind insisting our intentions come to pass through domination can melt away as errors in judgement, not the result of “trying to be nice.” In the silence, in the space this opens within us, and hopefully among us, we will find some way forward that does break the old cycles. It may or may not get us what we think we want, but that has never been the real issue.

What it does give us is the possibility of healing and of experiencing sanity. This may be momentary, it may be a way to find grace as we succumb to the inevitable. It may take us, or someone, through these trials and on into another time. We don’t know what it will be like. We cannot say the same for the alternatives. We know full well what continuing these patterns – not in some abstract social order made up of inimical others, but within our selves – will lead to. We are witnessing the results of this strategy playing out all around us.

Intelligence knows no gender, is probably not limited to any particular life forms, it might even exist among what we consider inanimate objects. It behooves us to use our moment of clarity to rally whatever intelligence we may harbor and work to break these old patterns. Domination is domination is domination.

To be able to say,

“This ends here. This ends with me, within me, to the best of my ability.”

Would be an accomplishment!

It may be the only accomplishment available to us.

It is certainly the first step.

If we are to break the chain.

I tend to welcome these periods. Without the chance to notice the tug of futility it’s easy to get caught-up in enthusiasms that might entertain, but will not bear fruit.

This past year has put further focus on our need to find a space, internally and in the world, from which we can be and act. The current buzzword for this is “occupy.”

I continue to pay for an unwillingness to jump on bandwagons, though it might only seem that way. I may simply be paying for the effects of marginalization and an inability to gain effective traction. What I mean is that I continue to be unwilling to support any movements that continue to spring up and glare brightly before passing away again. I don’t believe movements are viable or something we should be looking to have. Their placement of an idea before reality and pressure to manufacture and coerce consensus to maintain that fixation on a fixed idea, no matter how broadly stated, or inclusive in its intention, is a recipe for mass delusion. The details don’t matter. There is no finding the right recipe.

Movements that do spring-up, even the manufactured ones like the visible caricatures on the right, like the Tea-party, an attempt to harness and dress-up a lot of truly deep and dark nastiness and make it palatable in a time when those behind the status quo are betting on riding a brinksmanship tight along its hairy-edge as a way to get just a few more days, weeks, months, maybe even years out of their advantages before it all comes crashing down. Notice how everyone from members of Congress to Greenpeace is happy to trade on the fear of imminent disaster for another donation, a little more reluctant allegiance to get them through another fund-raising quarter. These movements, all movements, do register a sense of the yearnings in society. However poorly they may be addressed these yearnings are real. They are facts we must contend with.

We hear a lot about how a political “spectrum” shifts. Of course what is being considered a spectrum is just a narrow section of a manageable and therefore apparently “controllable” line between two points that are supposed to delimit what is possible, let alone imaginable. As this shift has inexorably moved to the right, we tend to think this is because the right has gotten more extreme. What we fail to realize is that this was hardly possible. The hard right has been extreme all along. Its tenets have always been to carve away any other and exclude them from their conception of shared humanity so that their put-upon followers can practice their righteousness and be saved. There cannot be anything more extreme, or more consistent, if we look beneath the veneer of blandishments and self-justifying propaganda that seeks to gloss over its true heart. What’s happened is that the other “end” of this “spectrum,” the Tweedledum to their Tweedledee, has become increasingly indistinguishable from the right.

The far right, with their perfect-pitch at describing their reflection as they criticize their foes, has for a long time now characterized the left as “fascist.” The claim has become less and less ludicrous. Not for the “reasons” given by the right. To them anyone who gets in the way of their hunger for domination deserves condemnation simply for not having the good-sense to simply die and get out of their way! It’s that what the left wants is becoming harder and harder to distinguish from what the right wants. What has been passed off as the entire spectrum of what is possible is increasingly coming to resemble a single point instead of a broad difference of opinion. They all come down to an increasingly brittle demand that control be exercised. They only differ in the details, who they see at those controls, not in what the outcome might be.

A while back I saw Obama as possibly our Gorbachev. That, with this presidency, the system itself would be strained to its limits, and it would be shown that even with the best of intentions and a mandate to change, the system that produces our “leaders” would be incapable of resolving our predicaments. That this would lead to the collapse ad absurdum that the Soviet system went through after Gorbachev. Just to show how any attempt to be overly “pessimistic” will usually be outstripped by events, it is beginning to seem that Obama is more a Brezhnev than a Gorbachev. He is more a willing apparatchik than a sincere reformer, and he is working hard to formalize the extremes of his predecessors in the hope that this will solidify control in the hands of those with power. That this is met with barely a flutter of concern from a marginalized “fringe” is a sign of how the distance between right and left has closed, leaving us, what?

*

Space. We need space. We physically require a space to place our body and a space to act so that we can maintain ourselves. We also need a mental, emotional, and imaginative space in which to interpret our contact with reality and find ways to carry on as our needs run into constraints and the needs of others. This is perhaps our fundamental need as organisms. Hell! even mere “matter” requires space to exist, without space, it collapses into singularity, as in a black-hole, not that other neo-technic-apocalyptic fantasy of eternal “life” inside a computer….

Colonialism, not just the kind that’s been going on within Capitalism, but the kind that’s been going on since the city-state, has always been, at its heart, a struggle to destroy the agency of others so that their space can be taken as our own. As this persistent and progressive – progressive as in infection, not the ascendance towards utopia – progressive effect has worked like gravity. It is now threatening to swallow up all our available space in its voracious maw. We are left with the distinct possibility that there is no space left, although we are misled by current-events if we think the singularity of left and right is the sum of all possibility. That it is not, and never was. The trouble is that these effects are so large, so massive in numbers, that they do leave us little space, even to attempt to examine what the true limits of possibility might be.

At this year end all my concerns revolve around space and the ways in which it has contracted, even as I’ve discovered ways to tend aspects of my own needs for it. Working with the benefit of various practices that allow me to gain strength and to disillusion myself of the siren-songs of power has given me a reservoir of internal space I never had before. This has been met and effectively – if we take the condition of my ability to be useful or have influence on events is any judge – by the contraction of the space in which I can maneuver.

This contraction is both actual and perceptual. Actual in that all our room to maneuver is contracting as the status-quo continues to collapse and take social liquidity with it. This liquidity is in part what we consider “economic” constraints, though that term is now about as useful as astrology! It is also, and more importantly, the wider ways in which consent and cooperation are allotted within a society that have narrowed. Since we’ve put so much effort of late in forcing all social activity into the economic model, it is no surprise that this leaves little robustness and resilience left in any alternatives to it.

Along with these real effects there are the perceptual effects that are, in fact, a result of growing disillusionment. We are habituated to seeing this as bad news. This is good news. As we become aware that false choices are what they are and not the panaceas they are made out to be, we are actually more likely to find some way forward that has a chance of gaining traction. This comes down to leaving the optimism/pessimism pendulum behind and rediscovering what hope really entails. John Michael Greer has a good essay on this running currently, Hope in a Cold Season. This has been a central theme of mine since I began writing Shoal Hope. Unless we can peel away the accumulation of wishing that has clogged our conception of hope, we will remain in this fibril state of vacillation and spasmodic flailing we find going on all around us.

Useless vacillation is the result of double-binds. It can be the result of layered double-binds that add up to a Byzantine web of constraints and false pathways that become a labyrinth. Perhaps it’s time to shift from a mode of detection of double-binds, and a desire to avoid their traps, to the type of activity required to navigate a labyrinth.

This has only occurred to me as I write this. This is why I write. These meanderings, which I can now recognize as characteristic of labyrinth-travel, do not show their results before the fact. Without forging ahead we are stuck in vacillation and a senseless desire to choose before we can know what the choices are.

Well, this is too new to be resolved here and now. New, and at the same time, so obvious! That is the way things appear, afterwards.

But still, this does give me a new way to look at the question of space. It places the spaces available to us within a context I had not considered so directly before. Instead of wishing for a clear space in the open, we may need to accept that the space available to us are within a labyrinth. This realization is a disillusionment, with all that dynamic implies, ultimately it is a liberating result. It also requires a different attitude and mode of action. It may just allow for better traction, since it puts focus and attention on an actual condition so that we are not hobbled by the nightmares of unintended consequences as we think we are doing one thing here, while we are in fact doing something else, there.

I was going to go on to describe how the apparent open spaces of the internet were just as ephemeral and fraught as the public spaces being fought over in the Arab Spring or Occupy____ events. This is still true, as far as I can see, but now with this inkling to re-examine them as parts of a labyrinth instead of as illusory openings, I’ll hold off.

I had no sense of opening, the kind that might only be optimism, or that might actually be a sign of hope, as I began writing this. It may seem a rueful measure to celebrate this, at the end of the year, but at least for now it will have to suffice!

Welcome to the labyrinth!

But this fragment may be of use as it is. It was intended to go before the last post, to be precise in ways that won’t seem that important once a little more time has passed, water under the bridge…

We are strongly motivated to pursue ease. What if ease, instead of being a prospect of clear sailing, is really a sign that we are ignoring more than is good for us? What if loosening of constraint is not a lessening of difficulty but a symptom of our ignorance of how things are?

As we approach the winter solstice with thoughts of ebb and flow and cycles and change coming to the fore – and having reached the two hundredth post for this blog! – here is a recent poem addressing the questions of cycles.

Southeast Wind in November

Clouds and rain in November feel dreary,
the ending of a year
approaching like an illness,
not boding well….

But a southeast wind making landfall from off the sea,
a luminous overcast stretching across the sky
threatening cold sharp needles
of rainfall in its darker passages…

The water not simply grey, but cut and scratched with
silver tending green, and hinting at deep violet
– like an angry lover’s eyes, hard –
yet underneath, a passion that cannot be contained.

Gulls, ducks, an occasional Horse-head Seal,
going about their day
inured to the cold,
indifferent to damp & wet.

The glorious Fact-of-the-World shines through,
it isn’t all about us, our mood,
our insistence to project in here out there,
not simply there to stand-in as our mirror.

Beginnings & endings are arbitrary. We force them
on the World like months onto a calendar
insinuating a caesura where none exists,
fabricating a break where there is nothing but continuity.

A southeast wind on water insists if we pause to listen.
This moment is. Not as a costume, nor a mantle upon air,
water, and sand; a thing entire in itself. Just as each bright shin-
ing day is not, either more, or less true while it is here.

Our rituals of the shore; pausing, watching,
strolling without purpose other than to look down,
look up, look out over this moment
in which we are immersed.

Ages of cycles and variation, of waves, of wind,
of sun and rain ride here as though perched atop
each wavelet approaching the shore,
each drop of rain, pelting us and dripping away.

We call such moments a “time out.”
A curious inversion of when we glimpse foundations
we mostly ignore and take for granted, taking
the World as mere backdrop for our striving.

Southeast wind in November, blowing
in over water, icy rain
insisting on our
attention.

Antonio Dias 11.10.11

This poem came to me in the Provincelands looking out from Herring Cove Beach. It speaks to the urges we have to place beginnings and ends where cycles only place an ever changing ebb and flow. We also want to make this moment a repeat of something in the past, or we are busy rushing off into the future and don’t see what is here right now. Countering these urges requires effort, and there are times like these, the end of another year, forebodings on so many fronts as we look ahead into the coming year. It is – I was going to say, easy – to want things to be easy, or at least easier for a change.

I find this urge is in the way of so much of what needs to be done. We seem to be at the bottom of a hole lubricated by all the ease we’ve craved, all the ease we’ve found, on our way here. This brought Sisyphus to mind.

We see the Myth of Sisyphus as a telling of how difficulty is a curse, perhaps related to Eve’s curse in the Garden of Eden. For the Existentialists, this story was the exemplar of the absurdity they found at the base of Modern Life. We should revolt. Have another drink, light another cigarette, and get on with it! Let’s celebrate the absurd and imagine Sisyphus happy!

What if there were something else there? What if it’s not absurd to imagine Sisyphus happy? What if it’s a sign of his wisdom that he is happy?

For Sisyphus his efforts are greatest when he is pushing his rock up the hill, least as the stone falls back down. Ease would dictate that he look forward to its falling and begrudge the effort of raising it back up. He doesn’t differentiate. It is a cycle, continuous and like breathing. Do we begrudge the exhalation, only favoring the rushing in of air?

The pressure of futility is strong here! The subject is so careworn and obvious, and writing about it here only adds another grain of sand to the desert. If it weren’t for desperation I wouldn’t have the strength to make the effort.

Key words: choice, icon, desperation; these lead me on. I have to write about the questions I come upon, and I might as well do it here! At least that’s been the working hypothesis.

How do these three terms come together and how do they illuminate something about our condition?

We are outdoing Tantalus when it comes to getting what we asked for when it comes to choice! Overwhelmed with the quantity, we remain starved for quality – at least that’s how I justify my continued search. Facing increasing constraints, impending and already here, I find myself hungry for what is still available and that seems to come down to someplace to attach my continued yearning for… completion?

As with all the shadowed yearnings we have that are somehow entangled with the particular traumas of our personal histories and the trajectory of our own conditioning; we find them elusive. They exist as in a dream. They are dreams, and they only cross-over into consciousness imperfectly, with great looming holes in their logic and gaps in our awareness. That’s the way this one is for me. I continue to have the imagery of a production line ending at a warehouse crammed full of product that never sees the light of day. That’s how I have seen my work for decades, and that’s how I continue to see it, when I allow myself the indulgence.

I say indulgence because it is one, to assume to step outside one’s life and make pronouncements about its value. Also the way this particular analysis, this imagery, makes me out as a semi-tragic figure. Even if the factory metaphor is a bit dated and makes the rest of me think, “It serves him right! That’s what he deserves for attempting to flood the world with product!” I mean, isn’t this a big part of the problem? Too much stuff? If we are flooded with false choice, why would increasing my efficiency at offloading my stuff upon the world mark an improvement?

It’s hard to answer these without falling back on “Fairness!” and getting “my due!”

Everything points to what I do being a compulsion. Single-minded effort that is not deterred by a lack of external reward is not a sign of great virtue, it’s a sign of madness! How is this not just a desperate attempt to find external justification? To find gratification in the gratitude of others? Isn’t this just a way for my Ego to double-down and maintain its sense of superiority?

This brings us to desperation, but we haven’t looked at icon yet.

An icon is a powerful image. It’s an image that is so compelling that it ends up not only standing in for what it represents, but replacing it in our consciousness. The icon becomes the object of our veneration. We are so susceptible to this! Our visual natures are wired to fall for this trick, combined with our yearning after short-cuts, anything to avoid having to think anew. It’s so much more efficient to fall back on something precooked, and icons are perfect for this. They come with readily recognizable names and taglines and short punchy stories. One needs only to invoke them and there is an immediate sense of being filled. Perhaps not with meaning, but at least with something that can easily pass for it, sort of….

Artists work in images. Icons are images that have caught on socially and grip our imaginations. Artists yearn to be seen. Icons are a ready path to attention. All this meta-analysis does get tiring! – Yes, even to me! – so why not just go for it?

Mental health and social, cultural health. We humans are incredibly adaptable. We can “fit-in” in such a broad array of cultures and social circumstances. Then, some of us are more adaptable than others. Some have been nurtured in ways that bolster their abilities in this regard and others have had their abilities strained or even stripped from them by circumstance. We tend to see mental health as a one way adjustment. Those who are unfit need to adjust so that they do fit. This has been as far as psychology has taken the question in most cases.

One of the seminal insights I’ve become aware of has come from a variety of sources who are now questioning whether this is right. Whether cultural sanity may be at stake, and the ways in which maladaptive personalities may give us a way into seeing the faults in a culture’s sanity that those who have adapted more smoothly may not be equipped to handle. This is a central concept of Derrick Jensen’s work and is there at least to some extent in the work of most people who are radically challenging the sanity of our broadest cultural assumptions.

I find that I take this concept as an opening for me personally. I find it carries me past the blocks that continue to resist my further integration within a system I find insane. I find that the same mechanisms and behavior chains I became sensitized to as a child are operating in the general culture to maintain its dominance over us. I find the same blindness to consequences, and refusal to admit anything’s wrong even as profound and horrific changes make those consequences more and more apparent. I find my obstinate resistance to bend to the weight of received common-sense to be an advantage when it comes to continuing to challenge what many just accept, because they see it projected at them from all sides.

All this is why I do what I do, but it doesn’t confront whether I am doing anything worthwhile, or of value. This is where we come to desperation. This is perhaps where the psycho-drama of my conditioning meets the continual blind spots in my awareness so as to keep me stuck reliving this image of an internal fecundity cut off at its outlet and jamming up within me unable to connect with those around me.

This is an accurate picture of where I stand on this solstice day. I am aware that much of my personal difficulty touches upon a wider difficulty we all face at this time of growing constraints and looming consequences beginning to fall due. I do not feel like a lone romantic figure in this. I don’t picture myself as a victim in any singular way to this. It does not at least directly feed my Ego to be such a figure. For good or ill, this knowledge sharpens my resolve to feel that my ultimate usefulness – That is my deepest yearning, to be of use to something worthwhile, to be connected, to reciprocate and feel integrated into a larger whole… – That my ultimate usefulness is in teasing out the tangles that reduce us to this state and look for ways to focus attention on these questions.

Questions, not answers. I do firmly believe that it is in living within the difficulty of questions, and gaining an acclimation to what can be the vertiginous condition of not having ready answers, that this is the most useful trait we can have, especially now. This connects with my sense of the way we have been disconnected from life by displacing our yearning to some utopia and wallowing in dread over some apocalypse. This connects with our predicament as we suffer from a surfeit of choice and hunger after a sufficiency that seems forever out of reach.

“There’s a fine line between clever and stupid.” So said the sage Nigel Tufnel. This applies here as it does in so many places. There is just enough space between the desperation of compulsion and the desperation of survival to what I find myself doing that holds me to this course even as I continue to monitor the dangers of following it too far, and too blindly.

Of course, wisdom is neither clever nor stupid, though it may appear closer to the latter when we don’t have its favor.

Say not, “This is the Truth!” but “So it seems to me to be as I now see the things I think I see.”

These continue to be my watchwords. All of my efforts are mediated by this admonition. Even when the way is less than clear and the waters are rough and our craft is leaky we need to continue to navigate. But there is more than just a premonition of the release of a sweet oblivion in a recurring yearning for the point where the illusions of choice fade away and there appears only one way forward, and we take it without struggle or doubt, not because we find it preferable to some hypothetical option out of an illusory cornucopia of choices, but because it is the only way forward.

We’ve each had some sense of this if we’ve ever been in a life-or death situation. It comes after, or instead of, fear. There is an inkling – one that cannot be confirmed or denied this side of death’s wall – that from that moment on the outcome, our outcome, our fate, is no longer the matter of a struggle, but the result of what happens, simply what happens. This includes what we do, but we don’t do what we do then in the common sense of trying, and striving, and betting on this or that favor, we just do. And it is either enough or it isn’t. But at that point we are just there and the reality, and our wonder at its fullness, and the exquisite satisfaction we feel just being is more than worth all the trouble.

I keep waiting for this opportunity to present itself. I keep thinking that the insanity of civilization stems from our cultural inability to see that this is what life is, and not recoil from it. Our stories, our icons, even our desperation stems from this unwillingness and an overwhelming desire to cheat life of its import, if only this will allow us a moment of ease that we are only due when we are ready to accept life for what it is; an immersion in what is, finding the joys and satisfactions – not in choice – but in necessity, and having this attitude open us to satisfaction and satiety.

We are early on in the disaster of looming consequences. There is almost too much time to consider. We are primed to see ourselves as victims. It’s funny how within the cornucopia of false choices we surround ourselves with, this appears to be the one place where choice is missing.  But it is there. We are not victims of our lives we are the actors of our lives.

Ideally, and perhaps this has the fault of all ideals of being impossible by their very nature, we would live our entire lives this way in some balance of groundedness and awareness of our precarity. Satisfied and challenged in just the right proportions. But we don’t have that luxury. We are not heirs to that kind of culture, do not have that legacy behind us to nurture us and optimize our chances. What we do have is this moment of clarity in which to orient ourselves and prepare for what is coming. Not by dreading and planning and scheming and hedging our bets, but by adjusting ourselves so that we can salvage our birthright, as living aware beings to find at least a moment of presence where we simply are without concern over choice, not in thrall to any icon, and not blinded by desperation.

After a long and perfectly understandable delay the Future We Deserve Project begun by Vinay Gupta about a year and a half ago has resulted in a book!

Here’s a link to the site.

I wrote two essays for this project. It will be interesting, for me, to read them in the context of the anthology and after the steady hand of Cat Lupton‘s editing.

It is heartening to see this project come to fruition! Collaboration has many pitfalls and to be successful requires belief and tenacity from those who drive it. My Thanks to Vinay, Cat, and Noah Raford for seeing this through!

We also have an unsettled relationship with inevitability. Our inability to agree on questions of inevitability are at the center of the great crises we face. Our inability to agree on, not only what to do, but even on whether these predicaments exist, is a marker of the tremendous impasse we are caught-up in! Our conceptions of inevitability are quite personal, though conditioned in ways that are beyond our direct control. We each have had our own experiences of inevitability, and they form how we relate to the entire notion. Inevitability connects with responsibility. When we acknowledge inevitability we are at least opening up a space for questions of our own culpability.

Conspiracy and inevitability collide. Some say that we construct stories of conspiracy to make sense of random acts that have hurt us deeply. We want to feel these events were inevitable, constructed out of understandable if murky specifics that lay out someone’s culpability and preserves our sense of order while maintaining our personal innocence. We can map this motivation onto any conspiracy and it will roughly fit. But just because there is a psychological necessity for a certain mechanism doesn’t mean that there is nothing else there. But it does say something about our relationship with certainty.

A conspiracy takes a mystery and explains it. It places blame and elucidates a chain of causality. These are deep human needs. This doesn’t discount them, it just states a fact. We need to understand our world. We need to feel that we know who is to blame for bad things happening, and we need to feel that our understanding of the way things work can be validated, even when confronted with mystery.

Inevitability is a sensation akin to deja vu. It is a feeling that given a set of surprising events culminating in a notable outcome that we would have expected nothing else if we’d been privy in advance. It’s a way of climbing atop a shifting and perplexing reality and putting ourselves in command of it. This is the common notion of hindsight, itself a rough-shod treatment of the potential for Epimethean understanding.

“Of course! How else could it have ended!” we say, at least to ourselves, and we’ve countered the effects of surprise and girded ourselves, as we come to expect further repercussions. At least now they won’t hit us by surprise! Of course, whatever comes next will most likely be a surprise as well! We don’t have accurate foresight. Our hunches might play out, but the particulars will always be beyond our divination.

Divination. That gets at part of this. The word describes acting as if we were divine. It is distinct from a claim of omnipotence. It doesn’t declare that we are all-powerful, but it does respond to our wish to be all-knowing.

This essay has me struggling with what sounds to me like too pat an explanation of conspiracy and inevitability. It sounds like the kind of reassuring crowd-control messages we hear to disregard the man behind the curtain and keep ourselves enthralled to the Mighty Oz!

There is something false about countering our desire for explanation that results in conspiracy stories by taking up a stance that is outside of our human limitations and attempting to know better than we do. It is an attempt to usurp power from us, or more accurately, to re-establish or retain power over us by a force that is, while not greater than we are, at least more powerful than we are.

If it were a level playing field – Oh! such a dangerous set of words strung together! – and it was all of us on a level, and only the gods who played at omniscience and omnipotence, there would not be a problem. Our various attempts to deal with uncertainty and powerlessness would rub against each other, but none would dominate.

This isn’t the case. While some conspiracy stories are quite probably fabricated by the powerful to gull and confuse the weak. Others are constructed by the weak to gain a sense of control in relationship to the powerful. In all cases conspiracy stories are consumed by the weak. Perhaps this is the cause of our discomfort at admitting our credence.

This is what makes any attempt to explain them away, either specifically, or broadly, as I might seem to be doing here, is corrupt.

Yes, corrupt. Corruption is a relationship with the truth that puts truth at the mercy of some other agenda. Truth is treated as a means to an end. It’s not that the corrupt always lie. It’s that they lie even when they are telling the truth.

I remain fascinated with conspiracy and have a firm belief in my ability to detect inevitability. I’m aware this admission is taken as a sign of weakness. I’m also aware that these aspects of myself act within a greater context of my relationship with uncertainty and I use these factors as often to bolster my sense of unknowability as I do to confirm what I think I do know. I see the power relationship involved in these dynamics and use that to get a lay of the land, to detect the slope of the field, to see where the power lies and who is paying and who is benefiting from the sacrifices of others.

I can get drawn into the power of a story of conspiracy, or be bolstered by a sense of inevitability while maintaining skepticism about the details. They are like myths and legends. They are true. They can, and when they grow directly out of a condition of powerlessness, they are about truth in and for itself, not as a means to some other end. In this they have power and give us strength against those who are ruthless.

Our credulity regarding conspiracies is a first step towards sincerity. We approach the edges of cynicism and recoil. While the powerful and corrupt pass easily through cynicism to a profound nihilism – something they attempt to project on those they fear. Sincerity can only be approached with humility. It is despised by the powerful. They’ve lost the chance and hate those who might still reach for it.

Sincerity does not ask for certainty in the end, although it can grow out of a yearning for knowing. It’s a yearning for knowing that doesn’t just stop at gaining an advantage but goes on through to exploring the limits of what is known, what can be known. Al of these are there in the turmoil of mixed thoughts and feelings we immerse ourselves in when confronting any mystery. For us today, these are most often told in the form of a conspiracy, they bump up against our sense of what is inevitable, including a deep foreboding that there are immense consequences that the dominant public story suppresses.

If awareness is our greatest attainment, then these struggles with conspiracy can be seen as the acts within a troubled sleep, a sign that someone is on the verge of awakening, on the brink of awareness. As opposed to Propaganda which deals in masses and the moods of the herd, these interactions are individual. They confront us one at a time. We slowly begin to acknowledge a common humanity with those whom we would otherwise never cross-paths. It is a first step on the road that the poet William Stafford was referring to when he wrote,

“Here’s how to count the people who are ready to do right:

One.

One.

One…“

Reading accounts of life in preindustrial contexts is often a lurching experience. We find so many instances where we are used to, “And we started her up and motored on through!” Where, instead days weeks, even months or years, are spent dealing with a discrete obstacle of distance, or adverse conditions such as wind, or current, or altitude; we expect to simply power-on to get what we want, when we want it. The same holds true regarding getting things done. Instead of a few clicks and the delightful expectation of an overnight delivery, we read of the grueling effort required to make the simplest thing.

Continue at Stone Soup…

Vinay Gupta wrote a piece recently, The Subtle Art of Precarity. It’s a nice article, and an interesting neologism, precarity. It relates to a familiarity and even comfort with being on the edge. His thesis, one I’ve long ascribed to, that as we get deeper into collapse the crises of leadership and expertise drive, and are driven, by the growing irrelevance of those held up as examples of either. What’s particularly frightening, especially to a child who grew up with an alarming concern that the adults around him were not doing their part, is that as these failed leaders and empty experts become increasingly irrelevant their hold on power appears to be getting more virulent. Not only is the bus driver senile and possibly drunk, but he’s also chaining himself to the wheel and accelerating to avoid capture!

So, since the main thrust of Vinay’s article is already familiar to me – It’s great to see the subject brought up at all! Don’t get me wrong! – what I tended to focus on was the way I am peripheral even within this circle of edge-living outsiders. Granted this is a group strengthened and held together by bonds of friendship built upon propinquity and frequent contact, social and professional; but I’m no stranger to them, as they are not to me.

So, to begin discussing this subject, I must confess to a continuing sense of aloofness and even exile from connections I had high hopes for only a short time ago. I must hastily accept a fair share of responsibility for this! I’m perhaps incapable of joining in properly with just about anyone, let alone when dealing with people who tend to be three thousand miles away! Still, I do feel excluded, whether that’s fair to anyone or not, whether it’s from just cause, or merely by accident.

And this position, this position of being outside the fringes, has been a state I’ve been in, comfortably or no, all my life.

Whether this extends extra credit to me as being über-precarious or not, or whether this brands me as such an extreme crank, or closeted Narcissist, that I cannot enter into any other relation; is, personally, a looming question, one I have to find some way through.

In following my mother’s example, a blend of crippled Narcissism resulting from a horrible childhood, way beyond anything I ever suffered – I do appreciate the way my parents were able to somehow edge their way back from repeating the extremity of the ways in which they must have suffered as children! – and a brave honesty that has always been willing to court any retaliation when she finds herself disagreeing with the powerful; I’ve felt a blend of these two impulses in my own instincts over the years. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle one’s motivations. At a certain point, we need to set aside the effort and just get on with things, if only to allow enough time, and hopefully circumspection, to elapse before we make another effort.

The part I keep getting stuck on is a sense that no matter how much in every day life I abhor conflict and go out of my way not to openly offend, when it comes to my writer/thinker persona as it appears here and elsewhere to my small public, I don’t want to make anything any easier, and do not go out of my way to grease the ways and make nice.

This could be a load of self-serving rubbish! If there’s anything to what I write that isn’t just a load of crap it lives or dies on my ability to turn my respect for the power of delusion on myself!

In a spirit of intra-personal dissensus, I have to give myself some benefit of a doubt on all this. The greatest power of self-censorship – I ought to know, I’ve done it enough over the years! – lies in maintaining a distrustful and hostile relationship with one’s own inner voices. I’ve long focused on disentangling these false-flag attacks on the self by the forces of Ego as it looks for a way to maintain control and dominance over a crippled and addicted self. “At least it’s a self I own!” claims the Ego, as it cruelly watches us sink lower and lower under its depredations. I do firmly believe that it is in untangling our inner sources of coercion and domination that we can begin to find ways to act in the world without falling back into the age-old traps of tit-for-tat.

None of this is that much “fun!” It’s not a sexy topic. It doesn’t lead to team spirit, or any form of easily digestible optimism. To me these are part of what’s important about doing things this way!

The result, at least when I’m closed off to my own failings in the matter, is that I equate being off the edge of the outside with staying true to the core of where I see my work to be.

Of course, this puts me into a bind, a meta-version of Groucho’s dilemma, rejecting membership in any club that would have him! In this version, I not only reject, but seem to preempt any invitation from being extended my way! Or at least that’s how it often seems.

I bring this up now, I hope for more than just fishing for pity to put alongside and bolster self-pity. I don’t feel pitiful! I do feel awkward about casting allies and well-met companions as potential villains! As I would say to anyone else in a similar situation, it’s not about them!

There are myths we all live by. One of these is that effort and quality will be recognized. Another, that springs to mind to perennial outsiders raised on Vincent’s Letter’s to Theo among other tracts, is that one can die unrecognized, and that external reward is a result of fickle luck, when it’s not openly courted in a direct campaign to sell one’s self out. These two views clash. One voice whispers continued gentle encouragement while the other flirts with leading one to court isolation as protection and proof of some hidden inner greatness. Over time, holding such a bind in balance without falling to either side can be an exercise in strengthening negative capability, or it can result in missing signs of some other way of going forward that sidesteps these barriers. At times like this we’re never far from Odysseus and his winning smile, his willingness to trick the Fates and go for broke!

In a time when Hubris has given itself a royal black eye, it can be difficult to accept a call to push ahead with renewed confidence! Especially, as I continually caution against the limits of confidence and the ways it can trick us into over-reach!

What this allusion to Odysseus brings to mind is the need behind my drive, from beyond the edge – no matter how accustomed or even comfortable I may be there! – is my need, and my greatest frustration, to have dialogues that allow me to share insights in a back and forth manner so that all parties can gain understanding not only of the other, but of our selves. It’s this image I’ve long held of wanting to use my instincts to look where the others are not looking, to form a part of a team of lookouts, each scanning different parts of our shared horizon, each able to warn the others of what they are invariably missing for good or ill – simply because we can each never have a full 360 degree view!

Don Corleone always counseled, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” What about giving this a different twist?

How about, “Consider your enemies with dissensus, and find friends who will tell you what you need to hear.”

Being outside is essential. If our attention is co-opted we are lost. But, being outside, we must find ways to be together; or else we will each succumb individually to the pressures of conformity or the bottomless pit of invisibility.

One of the hardest lessons my mother long ago put in front of me, has been to distrust easy friends and to hold onto difficult ones. This notion is at the center of what precarity means to me. This ties into the upside-down dynamics that surround us today. To find trust, and share it. To carve out space for life-affirming action. To make a living in ways that are not aggressively destructive. In all of this precarity is a virtue, though one tangled up in all sorts of potential traps, some external, and others internal, at least to someone habituated to alienation while always aware of a deep need for some form of healthy assimilation.

Bohemia was a kind of “Nature Preserve” that modern western culture began setting aside in the Romantic Period. By the turn of the Twentieth Century it reached its zenith in Paris. By the 1940s the concept had begun to unravel even as it reached what has become the iconic Bohemia for our time, the Greenwich Village and SOHO of New York since the fifties and sixties.

Bohemia was a conjunction of elements that provided a safe haven in which self-identified outsiders, artists, could come together and form a community of purpose. It required the possibility of propinquity for people to gather who lacked wherewithal. It provided them with access to high culture, museums, performance spaces, patrons, and a press. It also gave them an inspirational contact with nature, whether simply the venerable light of Paris, Venice, or New York; or, as in Provincetown, a wondrous light within an encompassing natural setting that was still within reach of artists lacking in means.

There was also a conjunction of social realms. In New York, and Provincetown, as well as elsewhere, there was a combination of an old Yankee sensibility with an influx of southern European immigrants who helped buffer and create a space of tolerance between the old guarde and the influx of outsiders. In Greenwich Village this part was played by the Italian immigrant population in the old village. In Provincetown, this part was played by an influx of Portuguese immigrant fishermen and their families.

In Paris, and other earlier European Bohemias, this role was played by poor country-folk who were entering the cities in large numbers and filling out slums and providing a base of day-to-day living on which Bohemians could attach themselves. In all of these cases, the working poor showed a tolerance to the outsiders, in large part because they were outsiders too. Also because, as the working poor, they had little time or energy to spend on xenophobia. As much as we are led to believe it’s the poor who are bigoted in this way, it tends to be the better-off who have the energy and time to indulge these fantasies.

The part the Bohemians themselves brought to the picture was a dedication to working out questions of meaning and staking their lives on the outcome. These were times and places where for a significant concentration of people a significant portion of their efforts was dedicated to searching for meaning – as if this were the most important thing in life. Their environment, on the edge between high-class/high-culture old guarde enclaves and the cheap and welcoming – at least tolerant and not hostile – poor ghetto, allowed them to pursue these aspirations under rather optimal conditions.

What happened? Well, to Bohemia, as with the rest of humanity, the Twentieth Century happened. As I’ve gone into in my reflections on Berger’s Moment of Cubism, World War I exploded the opportunities that had presented themselves in the first decade of the new century. In every respect, physically, psychically, emotionally, and intellectually the reverberations of that conflict and its echoes through the decades following effectively gave us all a nervous breakdown while eroding the quality of the world we inhabit.

Specifically this effected Bohemia in a few significant ways. First of all, so many died or were destroyed in the trenches of 1914-1918. Those who survived had to deal with the trauma of what had happened. To the self-identified Bohemian, who tended to be a “canary in the coal mine” as a relatively high-strung, aesthetic being; this was catastrophic. The collective manias of the post-war years, Prohibition, the Stock Market Bubble, the various isms, political and artistic that strove to channel and control artistic expression as the broad movements attempted to control the new “mass-humanity;” created a situation in which the old Bohemian Project derailed in a number of ways.

The cult of personality and personal fame – which Warhol predicted would end in what we have now, the “Information Age” in which everyone is famous for fifteen minutes, or at least can try out for the “X-Factor!” or “Hell’s Kitchen!” – began to take the most obviously brilliant survivors of Bohemia and place them on a pedestal, both blisteringly Narcissistic, and corrosively directed towards personal enrichment. This reached its apogee with the Rock Star. For the rest, the easy conviviality of the old working poor enclaves decayed into true ghettos of the dependent poor as they scrabbled along chasing after “funding” to replace the more relaxed patronage of the recent prewar past.

By 1950, as New York began to take off as the ultimate Bohemia, it was ripe to be co-opted by everyone from the CIA to Real Estate developers. By the seventies, it had become a series of “business plans.” Strategies for great wealth for a few, either as star artists, or those who turned-over the newly chic old slums for the ride of re-gentrification of the major cities. The rural enclaves of Bohemia, Provincetown, the Hamptons, Woodstock, or Taos; followed similar trajectories, with tourism and rural gentrification playing-out their roles.

What now? Places like Detroit seem poised to follow the old pattern as best they can. Only the general collapse has caught up with all such dreams. There is little chance that the old vision of Bohemia, whether as seen in 1912, or in its toxified simulacra of 1985, will emerge again anywhere.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries artists could ride demographic waves and position themselves at these high energy junctures where the conditions were right for their blossoming. Today there is some of the spirit of the 1930s in New York and elsewhere. There was a sense among those struggling to keep going after the crash of a becoming humility. Artists, working on in straightened circumstances because they must, and not as a ticket to be punched on the road to fame and riches. They made do, and sacrificed to keep going, and they felt a renewed affinity for the poor surrounding them. This is hard to imagine today as we are pitted against each other, the effete elite versus the red-neck pharisee.

I’ve recently seen a connection within the old folk tale, Stone Soup, of a possible way forward for the artist. The beggar in that story is driven by dire necessity and through creativity lights on a way that brings those around him, trapped in the isolation of individual and household poverty and misery, and shows them a way to find their strength in the sufficiency they can still muster if they join together. The community he inspires integrates them back into something greater than their own fears, and gives them reason, and an outlet, to celebrate life.

This vision has nothing to do with what Bohemia fell to be. It takes us beyond any wishing to get back to a set of conditions that were only marginally and for a brief moment a viable alternative, trapped as it was even in its fullest flower by the forces of mass-culture and the pursuit of domination and control. By placing the artist in context with the fundamental human condition of finding sustenance, community, and meaning; this tale clears the way. It is another illumination for our singular moment of clarity.

Craft, like Art, has been in exile for a long time, put in a ghetto where it’s been held at the mercy of wealth. In a way I suppose we should be grateful, they might have disappeared entirely without patronage; but on the other hand, if it hadn’t been for the creation of poverty and its spread due to the predations of “wealth generation,” Art and Craft might have remained vibrant, integrated aspects of life.

One of the most dispiriting concerns I have – in a time of plenty in this regard! – has been the way so many who should know better continue to confound Craft and Technology. The epitome of this might just be the halleluiahs surrounding the advent of the 3-d printer. I don’t share in this enthusiasm.

The Link to Fine Lines:

Craft is Technique with Context

Every oppressor has layers of self-justification to protect them from shame at what they routinely do, or allow to be done in their name. Resistance, especially armed resistance, does nothing to penetrate this armor. If anything it only makes it stronger, more effective at insulating a perpetrator from responsibility for their actions. Opportunities for indignation at the effrontery of an opposition proliferate. Questions of physical self-preservation come into play and cloud matters even further, trumping any curbing influence shame might provide.

But, when violence is not resisted, when it is instead met with compassion, the justifications for that violence begin to crack. If the pressure of non-violent resistance – which is, in essence, providing the oppressor with ever more transparent opportunities to choose between escalation in cold blood (since no opportunity for them to feel themselves threatened is provided) or to begin to feel the shame welling up inside them at what they have been doing.

An abuser’s first reaction to being exposed is to double-down, to up the ante, to force the other to stop “making them do it!” If the non-violent stance is maintained, that fury has nothing to beat against but itself. This wears it down and wears it out over time.*

*

*In practice, we may have surpassed a watershed of efficiency at destruction and oppression that may not allow classic non-violence the space to work. As the means of oppression have become more efficient – this is truly the end of any quest for efficiency – the time and space and scale of an oppressive act and its ability to impress itself on the oppressor as something to be ashamed of has been disappearing. When all it takes is a dissociated act, like pressing a trigger or a button, that results in mass death and violence and destruction at a distance, both physically removed from and emotionally distant from the perpetrator, this dynamic has gone out of balance.

An early and potent example was as, I think Gunter Grass may have mentioned, giving machine guns to potato eating peasants in World War I. This created a condition for mass-death that had been unprecedented. The trivial nature of the physical act needed to kill at a distance, and the lack of a developed sense of ethics sophisticated enough to see past it, virtually guaranteed vast carnage. It’s a short distance from there to the Holocaust. This isn’t to say that those who established those conditions, those putting such powerful guns in those hands, were unable to sort out their responsibilities. Although in practice few, if any, ever did.

This is an order of magnitude of destruction and moral distance beyond any of the instances of what Gandhi himself had to deal with in confronting the British in India. There, there was time. The effects of outrages got out to those in whose name they were being perpetrated. These outrages were, as bad as they were, relatively contained, and not so horrendous as to permanently alienate those involved to the point where they felt they had nothing to lose by continuing. The same could not be said of the European Holocaust, where efficiency ruled and where denial was protected within the wider struggle of total-war.

These are open questions. Still even we have room to doubt whether the retaliation against such a powerful aggression with total war might have been the best or only response….

*

The trump held by the non-violent is in their compassion. Eventually shame and guilt overwhelm the oppressor and they eventually turn to the compassion offered them as the only chance to redeem themselves.

This process could be said to be a struggle for respect. It begins with a lack of respect by the oppressors and ends when they turn to the oppressed to restore their own respect in themselves.

An interesting question this poses is whether this is a classic power-play by other means, or is it something else?

Is a “War for Respect” just another example of the “War on Everything?”

A way into this question appears when we ask, “Why is there this struggle for respect?”

Respect is not your common commodity. It can’t be bought. It can’t be coerced, though it can be sold – and thus lost – and we do say it cannot be liquidated like a commodity without destroying it, here’s to you Malcolm Gladwell! It is outside the realm of negotiation. Reluctantly given respect, grudging respect, is no respect at all.

If it can’t be traded, like a spoil of war, “What is it good for?”

You could say it lends authority, but then again, not as a form of authority that can be cashed in. It is an opening into trust. Through trust it leads to the possibility of dialogue. It is a mutual declaration. We do not respect those who don’t respect us back.

Is this a quid pro quo? Can we play grudge matches over respect? Probably not, not and still maintain any.

Respect, regard, these are forms of attention. “A worthy adversary” does demand respect, even if just because of a temporary, even accidental, power imbalance that makes them dangerous. But, they do not hold our attention beyond the circumstances that posed that threat. We don’t trust them. We are wary of them. We might negotiate with them, but unless something fundamentally changes, we wouldn’t consider entering into dialogue with them. For that, our attention would look elsewhere, to those we do regard with respect in a way that breeds our trust.

Is it possible to maintain an adversarial stance towards an opponent in a struggle and still develop or maintain respect? This is asking, “Can there be a path from conflict and negotiation through to respect and trust?” This is asking perhaps the greatest question around the possibility for a radical dissensus.

Dissensus asks of us to withhold ultimate judgement of those we are opposed to so that we don’t fall into the trap of righteousness. It implies the possibility of a relationship of respect between those who would otherwise see each other as enemies. It even implies that in a one-sided asymmetric power relationship that, even if we find ourselves on the weaker side, we will remain open to the possibility that we are wrong.

This essay seems to be returning to where it began. This last implication of dissensus brings us back to Gandhian non-violence. It implies that we trust even those who we have every reason to distrust, as they are our oppressors. We trust that by giving them every opportunity to vent their violence on us, unopposed by mirroring violence, we are breaking the cycle of justification. We are trusting that this may lead them to find their compassion.

The key here is in the qualifiers. “This may result in…” Not, “This will!”

In this, it is a radical stance in favor of the truth over desire.

I would rather live than be killed or maimed, or have all that matters most taken from me. But, if I realize that this cannot be assured, that there is no added certainty of this outcome to be garnered by renewing a cycle of violence, then this acknowledgement of my vulnerability – to myself – is the beneficial heart of all that proceeds from acting out of empathy and compassion.

This is another case of seeing through the rationalizations that pass for pragmatism and finding the lazy justifications that prop them up so that they may be seen as what they are, lies.

Nothing can be done that is truly effective without first finding, developing, honing; an instinct for truth.

Is this not justification taken to another level? Is there a difference between this stance regarding truth and a pose to uphold righteous indignation?

I think there is. Justification implies a willingness to accept whatever emotional intoxication is required to maintain a desire in the face of a countervailing truth. It insists on the Egocentric view and rejects anything that sets aside the primacy of “I.”

Is it possible to be in a dialogue within a state of dissensus? Can parties who disagree, even to the point of violence from at least one side, be in dialogue in some meaningful way?

Theses are the questions, not only surrounding non-violence, but the questions that may lead us through the stagnation and paralysis of our time.

One interesting example is that there are two sorts of selfishness at work within us. We have the selfishness of the organism which simply is the way any organism meets the challenges of its environment; and we have Egotistical selfishness, which is a product of our conditioning within an atomized culture that draws us into neurotic behaviors. Ego will try to convince us that it’s all “human nature,” and thus immutable. Or that we should be ashamed of our organism’s selfishness so that Ego can take advantage of that disequilibrium to keep us in some form of addiction.

So much of what we confront today comes down to a crisis of trust. This starts “at home.” we find it hard to trust that our organism has capacities beyond our immediate understanding. We are habituated to a false necessity to dominate and control our selves. This Ego control, the “I” we insist is driving, has its own agendas, as can be brutally clear when it chooses to take us to our deaths or abject misery in pursuit of an ideal or an addiction. We have lost so much of our ability to simply trust our organism.

Practices that help us develop mastery, practices of art and craft, creativity and dialogue – think of dialogue as relationship that is not based on negotiation but on a fellow exploration of what it is to be alive. These all lead us towards gaining trust in our organism.

As with any trust dynamic this involves both gaining belief in something without the need for constant verification and also a series of inspirations and deeply felt connections among the parties involved that strengthens belief and strengthens the capacities through which that trust operates to bring benefit to both sides. Dealing with trust in our own organism works in this way too. We can think of one party being our organism and the other our Ego inflected sense of self. As the latter gains trust in the organism it loosens its manic grip.

It might be that we can live totally within the sphere of the organism. This might be theoretically possible, it may have been true before civilization…. At this point these don’t really matter. We are laboring under a set of conditions in which the balance is skewed very far towards the illusions of Egotistical control. Any movement towards an increase in trust with our organism puts us in a less delusional relationship with our situation.

A quick delineation of terms. We must have illusions, they are our “User Interface” with the World. Our illusions can be more or less delusional. The two terms are not interchangeable. The way I see our work in front of us is to find ways to fashion a different set of illusions that are not as hopelessly delusional as the ones we operate under now.

Our organism and its abilities to navigate our reality are greater than those of this veneer of Ego control we’ve given ourselves over to. Our organism has half a billion years of evolution to draw on and every cell in our bodies, besides whatever other forces elude our current understanding. Our Egos are stuck within a fixed set of programming that has attempted to hijack a certain amount of our brains and limbic systems in a deluded insistence that it can control and direct us from there.

Who would you trust?

I suppose this thought came in connection with the focus on how our emotions are internal. As much as Ego would like us to believe, “They made me feel bad!” There’s only one being who can do that for us and that is us.

“But the Spectacle! is external right? That’s what it is, the parade of external stimuli that keeps us from attending to anything else?”

Yes, it is, but it’s not as straightforward as we tend to believe, at least as I’ve looked at it.

Granted, there are spectacular events and aggressive stimuli all around us. These are THE products of this post-industrial age. The bane of this Information Age is that we turn everything into Spectacle. My own personal “unintended consequence” is that even this site feeds the Spectacle. – must make a note: Gotta do something about that!

But we do have control over attention, it’s the only thing we have, in the end. As much as we’d like to think the Spectacle draws us to it, it’s really we who draw ourselves to its distractions and stimulation.

This may seem like a fine distinction, but it helps put things into perspective. There’s a loop we’re habituated to. We are addicted to stimulation as a toxic simulacra of satisfaction. We crave it and look for it. We can feed it with ready packaged “entertainment,” or with what’s called “news.” Lacking these, we can feed it with direct experience, the stuff of our lives. The difference between doing that and living is in the motivation. When we take whatever we come across and feed it into the maw that is Spectacle – used here as short-hand for our hunger, not its raw material – we denature life’s experiences, taking them from the fabric of our days as we interact within the moment, and turn them into stimuli to feed an addiction.

This seems to be another way into the suspicions I’ve long had concerning optimism and pessimism. We can’t seem to stay clear of one or the other of these states. We’re always looking for something or someone to feed these to us, either so we can be happy or so we can have someone else to blame for our feeling bad. When we are on this roller-coaster we are treating all that life brings as if it were Spectacle. The focus is in how something makes us feel. When we are living without these addictions to stimulation, to intoxication as a replacement for satisfaction, we remain aware that how we feel is a habituated response, a particular kind of conditioning that is more or less useful and is under our control.

In a world in which very little is under our control, it’s astounding how we are so willing to abdicate this control in favor of illusions of control that surround our fascination with power. Ego and its habits are responsible for this. The illusory forms of control feed its appetites. Control over how we feel – unless we attempt to use internalized domination by repressing or indulging our emotional responses – requires us to put Ego in its place. As the trajectory of every addiction shows us, Ego will gladly trade Hell-on-Earth for the chance to maintain its illusions.

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