A meandering post with apparently no ending at the ending. Those with
aversions may please delete.
Dear All Learners,
"-When meanings are at play."
In my limited orbit of life's experience this beautiful phrase from Fred's
website article on KNowledge Management is almost an arising from the
realm of tacit to formal by way of floated metaphor. Thanks Fred, I wil
share any images with you that arise within and appear without;-)
I expect some of you here may know;-) the story that J.F.Kennedy was fond
to tell ....of how little Irish boys would, in order to overcome boyhood
fears and rise to boyhood challenges throw their caps over high walls,
entailing that such a projection requires a 'follow through', lest a
family beating ensue when they got home. Edges, walls are 'fascinating
things' if they are 'things' at all. Now, as witness London last evening,
some young Irishmen continue as young men to throw other 'things' if bombs
be 'things' too in order to realise other 'follow throughs' and avoid
other beatings. You know;-) Fred, Rick, and Mr.French that I see,
somewhat dimly, foggishly in the paragraph above a slippage, one between
past, present and into a future possibility of resolution.
Another metaphor? The chicken and the egg. In the case of the roundly
termed Irish troubles (the Irish people call the current and ongoing
campaign 'the troubles') the question arises of, who started it? Oliver
Cromwell? The Potato famines? The Easter Uprisings? Bloody Sunday? The
wisdom of Solomon seems required daily by leaders in that realm. (At this
point I could digress into Hannah Arendt's reflections upon the power of
forgiving and forgetting...but I will not...who want's to know about such
a power here...what possible relevance could there be to both forgiving
and forgetting to a learning organization? And anyway, you'd need someone
like Fred, or Rick or Mr French to imply-inform-tell you which came
first... wouldn't you?) That damned 'chicken and egg' syndrome.
"Without exploring there is no seeing." Koestler. One of the first things
I ever wrote here was to explain I think to At de Lange how I, as a child,
had an earliest memory of being left at school and in the first afternoon
break period sat on a sloping grass lawn back set fixed into the grasses
and eyes flickering but fixed upon the transiting clouds. That is a
metaphor of my 'every day' that followed and will ever follow. Not just
for me I suspect. It took forty two years to read that Maxwell the great
scientist experienced and wrote almost exactly the same sentence. If just
one teacher had told me that...that it is not incompatible for a scientist
to dream flat on his back and that to stand on the shoulders of giants it
is not necessary even to stand at all, but just to dream. But what came
first, the dream or the reality? The chicken or the egg? Many generations
of years after Maxwell Gerald Edelmam said, "You and the world are
embedded together"
"Clouds drift so naturally." Many years ago I went through an extended period
of unemployment, the steel works were closing, the mines were closing, and
sometimes I used to take any work... like taxi driving...it was a kind of
natural drift between being strangled as I drove over a flyover at 1.00 am by
a drunk on the back seat who was upset at the delivery of the
information/knowledge that no hostelry could service his need at that time
for spiritual oblivion ( --thankyou Scott-Peck for that insight --:) and
watching repeatedly an old couple who had all but grown into each other walk
round the streets of the locality 'hand in hand' (they would have been in
their eighties I guess) until one day I never saw either of them again, as
if...and I see so few people as couples walk hand in hand these days. I don't
suppose at that 'structural coupling' means or extends to such a 'trivial'
human interaction...unworthy perhaps of this forum's august ;-) consideration?
Well, part of what follows I wrote as a gift to a friend....just a very
trivial thing...but in the last few days we (Anona and I) have learned that a
young man (nephew) who lived most his life in a 'tacit' grief through the
lack of a less formal grasp than just a 'holding hand', let his life slip,
willingly into a newer oblivion than that we reconcile ourselves to every
morning. All the mornings are the one morning with Jamie now and for which
part the next is thrown my best distance and I do believe, dear Jamie you can
read this;-) like Benjamin Franklin believed it too.
In my minds eye, which is by way of being cosmic today, I retain the vision
of hundreds if not thousands if not millions of tiny children walking through
the kitchen of Alicia de Lange silently watching and taking into themselves
something that, if I could just paint once, by any manner or means, it might
assist some-one some-thing and that is contained partially in the notion
expounded by another, to wit...that it is not just through the lack of light
that we cannot live, but through the lack of warmth that we continually die
among each other and often by each other. My wondering makes me ask about the
nature of the 'coupling' between light and heat, a light touch?
Benjamin Franklin wrote, as an epitaph to himself that he senses that what
was compiled in human imagination is not lost on death. "But the work shall
not be lost."
Those who study the esoterics of quantum<>qualia this, that and the other are
starting to tend to a similar view. The cloud of unknowing descends every day
upon us all, mired within the soup of life. "-I must, before I die, find some
means of saying the essential thing which is in me, which I have not yet
said, a thing which is neither love nor hate nor pity nor scorn but the very
breath of life, shining and coming from afar, which will link into human life
the immensity, the frightening, wondrous and implacable forces of the
non-human." Bertrand Russell.
Francisco Varela along with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch co wrote the
following passage.
"Let us provide another example..." ((of the world as not 'pregiven' out
there, but enacted through a history of structural coupling -Andrew's
note))..."from the comparative study of colour vision. It is well known that
honey bees are trichromats whose special sensitivity is shifted toward the
ultraviolet. It is well known that flowers have contrasting reflectance
patterns in ultraviolet light. Consider now... which came first, the world
(ultraviolet reflectance) or the image ( ultraviolet vision)? Most of us
would unhesitatingly answer, The world. It is therefore interesting to
observe that the colours of the flowers appear to have coevolved with the
vision of the bees."
In brief therefor, (mine) they reciprocally brought forth each other as
particles within a whole that brought forth the both as one.
Varela quotes Lewontin, " We do not further our understanding of evolution by
general appeal to "laws of nature" to which all life must bend. Rather, we
must ask how, within the general constraints of the laws of nature, organisms
have constructed environments (organisations?) that are the conditions for
their further evolution and reconstruction of nature into new environments."
My interpretation is that the one (LI) is enfolded into and unfolds from the
many (OO or LO).
Maybe somehow, in some act of flexible imagination, like throwing a cap over
a wall some of you can discern some learning going on between ("inter-est") =
("between-being") Arendt.
Is such a throwing, as you imagine it, a creative collapse, or the precursor
to a creative collapse?
"Freedom gives birth to suffering. Spirit is freedom, a freedom fused with
Logos. An illumined freedom assuring triumph of purpose. Spirituality
illumines freedom, and informs it with purpose. Spirituality is also freedom
united with Love."
No-one here will know who wrote those words;-)
Nor these, Teepee.
Take the furthermost twigs of any tree and bundle them and they will form a
circle approximately equal to that of the trunk. They need the
'approximation' as free-space in which to sway and dance gently in both the
softest breezes and the greatest storms.
Now we are together under the tree?
"Andrew, Francis and his new friends put up a hut in the clearing, a simple
structure of branches to which they attached wattle mats, frameworks of
sticks woven and covered with clay daub. Then they threw themselves into
their new existence - helping in the fields, building, preaching and nursing.
Caring for lepers must have been the severest test of 'taking up the cross'.
Leprosy then, as in the Bible, covered a wide variety of diseases because
early symptoms resembled those of many other complaints - syphilis,
gonorrhoea, and ergotism or St Anthony's fire. True leprosy thrives in humid
conditions and since it passed on by prolonged physical contact Francis, who
nursed lepers throughout his life, may well have caught it. However, the
disease is related to and competes with tuberculosis, whose bacteria are
stronger and generate immunity to the rival disease. Francis was therefore
probably protected by consumption. The extent to which he exposed himself is
vividly shown in an episode, which occurred when a companion called James,
who devoted himself to lepers invited one to eat with his colleagues.
Although Francis admired his compassion he also disapproved of it, because it
was against every regulation and caused those nearby to shrink away from
them. He therefore rebuked James in front of all those present. Immediately
he regretted this, especially for hurting the feelings of the leper, and
confessed his lapse of charity (caritas) to Peter of Cantanio. By way of
penance he went straight to the leper, sat beside him and placed between them
a bowl from which they could both eat together. The leper had sores and
ulcers all over him, and the fingers with which he fed were eaten away and
bleeding, so that whenever he dipped them in the dish the blood ran into it."
The late 'dreamer' Francisco Varela thinks that AIDS will be best cured, like
other social ills besetting us, via the re-incorporation of our modern day
'lepers' (drug addicts, crooks, dare I say 'political leaders' in a powerful
downward thrust to blind respect;-) into the very living enacting body tissue
of society. WE, I purport, must learn to drink in poverty and distress and
disease, and we must lean over, and we must sit within touch distance and
smell distance the poverty stricken and stop telling ourselves it is all
"ok". St.Francis will become ever more important in our new predicamental
lives of the new millennium, the curative properties of diffusion in the
whole; because it is the sick and the poor who hold the keys to our
salvation, so we ought to, better to, listen-up. (For 'sick' and 'poor' read
self as well...by all means;-)
Drift
I was all at once with both Francisco and St.Francis in my garden and I
heard magnified in the bell housings of a great flower-head the noise of a
bee, we three enquired of the bee, 'Sir, why did you choose that flower?'
And to our astonishment the flower replied, 'This Bee plus me are part and
parcel as 'we' that are you<>three as a co-dependent arising, d'you see?"
Let me for a moment become controversial. I do not believe that the gurus,
corporate chiefs et al, the eminencies of published books, articles and
papers are doing anything much more than passing hats around among
themselves living closed lives and living in shared and by and large
closed communities, call them churches, corporations, colleges,
communities of practice or pretty much anything else.
Summary
Here's all the above in a nutshell for those with important issues to
resolve for themselves and on behalf of others...and before you read it
for heaven's sake think upon the humble bumble bee and the flower's
trumpeted head...
"Only geniuses preserve their infantile voracity for -becauses, and the
naive hope that there are real answers to every question...the future
lives out of the questions of coupled fools and children and those who
will forgive and forget."
Some of you having trudged so far in this forest of verbiage deserve a
little reward, a clearing. It has a sting in the tail. But knowing me
you'll know that.
I sense then a cooled stylised fear (via my owned tacit understanding aka
'reading between the lines' Polanyi... aka 'looking around the corners'.
Jung and 'Getting there before you all.' Freud ---the list goes on and on
and----) in this place and among all you and that lives and moves in
this, (you will tell me if I am wrong)...
" Usually we know nothing of the ultimate orientation or of the outlet
towards which we travel, and the stream sweeps us to a formula of life
from which there is no returning. Every descision is like a murder, and
our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves
that will never be." That is what those clouds at age four taught me, and
which at eighty nine Bertrand Russell saw again.
First then we get killed ourselves, then we go out and pretend we have the
secret of better best life to sell to and among others?
I invite you all to spend your days forgetting what you think you know and
were taught and to create in what arises in a garden of remembrance for
uncoupled forgetting?
Love,
Andrew
(For Jamie)
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