- We carry the foundation of the future in our actions, and satisfy the
purpose of life itself by being companioned sources and receptors of
insight and shared wisdom. - James N Rose
Dear At and fellow Learners,
['Maman, ne pleure surtout pas.'] fragment'
'Warming up the old so as to understand the new; such a one can be a
teacher.' A Confucian successor.
In the introductory notes to Goreski's piano concerto No.2 a 'moment' of
creative 'inspiration' is recalled in the composers discovery of an
inscription (a prayer) of a young woman, engraved into the walls of a
Gestapo torture chamber, the prayer was to and of two kinds of a
'mother-figure', the one corporeal and the other not. I am not going to
quote it all here, if you CARE to learn of it then you may go and buy the
recording and listen for the music. It has the 'darkbright' chords of
HOPE.
In that 'form and content' of hope I happen to believe may well
qualitatively rest our wisest shared future.
There may always be some terra-firma in this unfolding of/in the
groundless world for the nontrivial expression of 'hope' because that is
something we can all create, out of nothing even in the uttermost
darkness.
Hope I see as Darkbrightness
'He who has light within him does not any longer stumble in the
dark...¦'(St John)
'Shall I teach you about knowing? To regard knowing it as knowing it, to
regard not knowing it as not knowing it - this is wisdom.' A Confucian
successor
People sometimes speak with me of 'letting go'.
It is in the regarding.
I am personally sick at heart of the 'arrogance' of the 'hard men' (sic)
of science and business 'snatching' the still warm hearts and other
'vital' organs of our very own children in the 'dead of night' without
either parental knowledge or permission so to do; I am also sick of heart
for the many people who, as I write incubate within themselves CJD (Mad
Cow Disease) which informed sources now cautiously prepare the British
people for an epidemic that is possibly to dwarf that of HIV in a 'wave'
ten or twenty years time hence, held at bay in some great delayed 'loop'.
The bi-products of technology have made us as surely sick as they surely
claim to cure via the products.
When will we truly learn?
I am also sick at heart that the geneticists are working away at producing
human milk production in cows systems to 'dry' it and sell it to unknowing
African children in tins against all the canons of supposed current human
decency.
-" The symptoms of tired behaviour are well established; it isn't the
bleary eyes or the dropping jaw, it is the imperative 'to make things
simpler' in order to operate. We do this by polarizing issues into black
and white, right and wrong, no greys or in-between; we do it by
stereotyping people and situations to fit them in familiar boxes which we
know how to deal with; we shorten the time horizons and postpone all the
difficult decisions until another day. The tactics work - for us (for a
while) it is the organisation or those around us who suffer the unintended
consequences." Charles Handy
Maturana says that, 'lack of love has made us sick'.
Homo Sapiens Amans.
A FITTING human design? Is that a coat you could wear? A coat 'shot' not
with gold and silver but of 'love and care' braided to wrap around your
self? You and coat braided into one? Can you afford to buy such a coat?
Where might you find such a coat? If you have to make it, it not being in
the Superstores for sale where will you hunt for the threads? What will
sustain us in the search? What supple fingers will knit such a weft and
weave? Is it a coat 'fit' for dreaming in? Is it a coat 'fitting' to wrap
that little girl in her cell waiting for her final hours in this
dispensation?
'On her unborn in the vast circle
Concentric with our finite lives;
On her unborn, her name uncurling
Like a young fern within the mind;
On her unclothed with flesh or beauty
In the womb's darkness, I bestow
The formal influence of the will,
The wayward influence of the heart,
Weaving upon her fluid bones
The subtle fabric of her being,
Hair, hands and eyes, the body's texture,
Shot with the glory of the soul.'
RS Thomas
Recall that we learn from the past, in the present for the future.
We must entertain many pluralities.
Listen, if you will ;-)
The Master (Confucius) said, 'If the waters are shallow lift up your
robes, but if they are deep, well then plunge yourself in!'
Is that not how loving feels?
We all write long and short according to a multiversity of reasoning and
unreasoning, it is not so much about long and short though is it? It is
about depth too isn't it?
'We must remember that most people are not for or against anything; the
first objective of getting people together is to make them respond
somehow, to overcome inertia, To disagree, as well as agree brings us
closer.' Marry Parker Follett
Human behaviour is strange because we are so incredibly sensitive and
complex. Social interaction as 'emotioning and languaging' as Maturana
understands it in my reasoning is, according to Prof. Dawkins (a chap who
knows a thing or two) the main probable reason for the exponential
'ballooning' of the human brain and complexities of mind's operation. (See
his book 'Unweaving the Rainbow').
A dark chord and a bright chord and one day I would hope to read on this
list a solution to the problem of how one might weave these two threads
into one without injuring/diminishing either.
Two young people, both only twenty. She is gentle and caring and he is
gentle and caring but neither has benefited from good 'soft' learning so
both proceed more on instinct than learning. Chaos, noise and confusion
filled his life as a child and so his solution is to use a knife upon the
living flesh.
But his only tortured and silent 'compassion' is to turn the knife upon
himself, so his body is witness to self loathing, not 'Occam's razor' but
some warped effort at a 'creative collapse'. He carves into himself to
release a soul buried under the noise of a modern collective imagination
gone wrong. Can we even commence to understand the sheer sensibility
operating in such a man? Her compassion was to care for him and to assist
him in the finding of another way for 'self expression'.
Love.
But as ever it seems in the daily grind of closed loops the strain on her
very finest sensibilities too is such that she has to leave him. SNAP.
An act of differing courage and compassion?
The gentlest learning in leaving?
There are many ways to search for the soul and his is just another.
A 'grand' immergence?
This anyway, like it or not, is his 'tacit' wisdom expressed as
self-learning. And since I too cannot help him I cannot be any cleverer
than him.
And I am not.
I am simply differing.
And I am not fit to teach him anything or lead him anywhere.
Maybe he has read somewhere of mystics who 'flogged' themselves or
scientists who practised with experimental drugs on themselvesā^Ą¦or
primitive peoples for whom the most wanted death was in agony.
Now I have discovered this text by Maturana. I do not have his permission
to quote it at this length. But all contributors to the paper are
mentioned at the tail. His 'credo' I believe is similar to At's and to
many others herein, so I happen to believe it is 'love' and it is in that
which I put my faith that I have his 'permission' and also because the
word 'love' is like a thread through this text and I have nothing better
to offer to this contribution and I do not think he desires anyway to hold
it in another place when it might sit here too in his replete multiversa.
'Nature, the world, society, science, religion, the physical space, atoms,
molecules, trees... indeed all things, are cognitive entities,
explanations of the praxis or happening of living of the observer, and as
such, as this very explanation, they only exist as a bubble of human
actions floating on nothing.'
-'We humans are loving animals, or we still are. This means that love is
the grounding of our human existence. Perhaps our species name should be
called Homo sapiens amans since we have, or we still have, the physiology
of loving beings at all ages. In fact, if we look at our individual human
existence we can still see that what we search for in life is love, and
all that we do in life, we do it to obtain love: we want to arise in our
relations with others as legitimate beings that do not need to justify
their existence with respect to them; we enjoy caring for others and we
want to be cared for; we enjoy being caressed and we want to caress; we
like to cooperate and do things with others for the pleasure of the
company, and we like others to do things with us through the pleasure they
have in doing so; we suffer under competition even though we have some
sort of joy in the vanity of winning; we feel denied in relations of
demand and exigencies, but we like to participate through invitation; we
feel well in relations of trust and confidence; love is the first and more
powerful medicine, and the doctor cures through love with the help of
drugs and surgery only by creating the conditions for the body dynamics of
self healing, not the reverse. Indeed love is the emotion that constitutes
social life, and it is in social life where we exist as human beings and
our human beingness is systemically conserved. We humans are loving
animals, and our intelligence and creativity in the domain of human well
being depends on our being loving animals. Thus, as we said above, all the
emotions that entail the negation of the other, such as ambition,
competitiveness, envy, or aggression, reduce intelligence. The only
emotion that expands intelligence is love, and this is so because
intelligence has to do with the acceptance of the legitimacy of the other
and the expansion of the possibility for consensuality that such
acceptance entails. -
cont. in next mail
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