Dear At and Learners,
I took it away to France and read it, read it and read it again, once I
almost got to the end. I brought it home and re-read it and once I got to
the end. Then I read it allovertheplace. Then I left it alone. Then it
started to come back. Then I went and read and read and read about
complexity;-). I thought back to the events of earlier this year when
there were expressions (sic) of discontent, I waited in vain then for open
dialogue, I waited to see the people who were obviously so articulate,
caring for the good of the greater whole and silently vociferous off-list
to bring their treasures to the table that both invited and yet divides by
it's very nature, I waited for them to bring three corners so I could add
one, or they bring two and I add two, or they bring one and I bring three,
but as ever it seems it was that you have to bring all four here and then
they sit on your table calling it a chair, or chop it up calling it
firewood, or they fall over it calling it an impenetrable obstacle to the
greater progress they represent in absentia. I considered again and again
many lengths (extensive) hither and yon, the lengths of my posts and
others, there was no great sustained length, not even anything that
precocious;-) in the form/content having back read most of the list before
I even came and almost again after the summer. How cruel of Captain
Complexity to flit into the portal too late, much too late. Who apart from
you and I and maybe a few interested others here know of that Scarlet
Pimpernel's clandestine double-entendre? Who else knows what lengths he
will go to make his very credulous pointy points...who puts who up to what
on these lists, let alone who invisibly puts up with what and for whom on
this list? Mmmm.
I am not so credulous as to think this evening that spontaneity here is
just that. No siree! Like the great American Democratic machine, it ain't
all what it appears to be. The 'beauty' of that sister 'balance', that
strange attractor 'truth'. At the end of the day it is down to what, it is
down to the flap of a butterfly wing ( those familiar with the origin of
that statistical entity will see the connection) or in that case maybe the
passing wind of a Blakean flea. Pip. pip and Tallyho!!! The American
economy is a 'bubble fit to bust', so far as this economist understands
it, it is overvalued by a factor of forty ..a bubble was never so ready to
burst...when the people awake to what is really going on.( ...please back
reference my last posting;-), as we in the UK have just done to the
profiteering on the railways. Another minuscule movement shakes the very
ground of an economy. We have today the first and fourth largest economies
in the world brought politically and infrastructurally to some edge or
other by this phenomena of 'complexity' and over-tight couplings. Well, I
seem to have digressed. The young'uns are having a bad influence on my
brain;-) Well, for what its worth and in terms even Bucket
appre/comprehends I hold to one single image to keep the dance of LEP upon
LEC in my higher lobal capacity long enough to make it formal, crystalline
to share. I often wondered why a continent of snow flakes would never
produce a pair<>identical. It is for the precise same reason no two things
can ever become/be identical. For me the snowflake is the supreme and
elemental expression, sign and symbol that banishes that bloody = sign to
the edge of my personal cosmos. Only man is so completely stupid as to
spend a life time of irreversibility in something like a state of pure
miracle while destroying all but almost everything in the pursuit of
something that does not 'exist' in the whole of spontaneous creation. You
called it a dance and I have no argument with you there At. Though I am
sure it is a song and dance;-). Why do we want to work so hard to replace
the freely given miracle of spontaneous ever renewing life as
materialspirit for the detritus that the dollar brings. When you next see
chocolate think upon the slave boy in Africa who said this in a 'piece to
camera', "Tell the people who eat chocolate for their pleasure they eat my
flesh." (He was daily whipped with the buckle end of a belt on a cocoa
plantation) I wonder what we are going to do with all these dollar bills
when what they buy with them is less sustaining than the paper they are
printed on. I have found too few 'free men' since joining this dialogue. I
think they are there, on the edges, they have been and gone I know that,
they have left testimony in their unique and irreversible ways. I wrote
before and I write again more publicly this time, that I believe there is
a close correspondence between such actions as writing publicly, in or out
of spontaneity, irreversibility and death. Perhaps there is fruit there? I
leave it hanging to be picked. So we are free. Are we? Free from what and
free to what? Free from whom? I am starting to see how the 'not so open as
we believe' spaces, like western democracy, gets rigged, and in the storm
the hanging begins apace. The inner fabric shears. We are, I sense, close
to being undone. No wonder you treasure Love (Agape) beyond all measure.
We will get better only by those means that know no measure nor
equivalence. I can see the attraction of the whole. I can determine the
view and value of the edge of my spinning web. And how gut wrenching that
everyone has to spin his or her own. "The conception implied in the
treatment of this experience is that the work of art, which anyone is free
to create, has a unique quality, that is that of clarifying and
concentrating meanings contained in scattered and weakened ways in the
material of other experiences." John Dewey --Leaf falling leaf, life. -- A
final evening thought for the hard men of the world to whom my soft
wondow;-) is eternally open, and come in, come in so that I may eat upon
you, feast upon you and incorporate you;-) do not be afraid 'hard men' of
both east and west. Last year I travelled 'up north' as we say 'down
south' to see Bucket's old dad, "Oscar". A streetfighting kind dog. Not
large but not knowing that a fond and pugilistic kinda animal. He was old
and going blind, he's spent much of his life in a concrete yard living and
walking on concrete. I'd first seen him in the back yard at cold damp dawn
steaming like a pile of rags on an upturned log after a night of pouring
rain. An indifferent dog. Anyway, we went for a last walk together,
through the local streets he's not been out on a 'trot' for years...we
came to a field and I really wanted to walk with him through the grasses
just like I do with Bucket most days...but seeing the soft green stuff he
baulked, halted. Would not go. I had to pick him up and carry him. That
tough old dog was afraid of the soft curling grass. Well, don't you laugh
at that old half-blind dog because I see lots of clever people, fully
sighted scared of that 'soft green grass' fast pursuing and/or snorting
instead at the rolled up green dollar bills. OK I end where something else
began for me today. "Elevating the simple creates both meaning and
beauty." Oscars gone. Are we gone and not known it? As for me At, your
contributions made me more surely elutriated by the very turning of the
leaves;-) I am gone, but remain; you'll get the point I am sure.
Love,
Andrew Campbell
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