Dear Learners.
'Art is entire and complete in each of its forms and manifestations; we do
not need to add up the different species to make a whole.'
Thomas Mann
I once spent a fruitful day watching a highly integrated human being
facilitate for a large group of senior business people. I know that this
person seeks to work at the highest levels of praxis in every sense.
So, if you asked me to define in one word the quality that marks an
'artist practitioner' I would count the word 'rhythm' high.
Why?
Because it creates situational possibilities for greater creativity for
those one works among. It makes space and motivates inclusion.
The mere apprehension of rhythm in another calls us to move ourselves,
like an invitation to dance. It speaks also of preparation in and for a
life.
It speaks of deep designing. It works invisibly in the imagination. It is
a commanding quality in any art form. It is in its execution a
manifestation of the deepest congruence of humane values. It is like
breathing. It is light and almost invisible and it works like an
undercurrent does.
It is not a copying of life's emblems , a mechanical reproduction of life
but rather a symbolically (integrative) creative 'organizational aspect'
of and toward our 'sense of life'.
On the other hand, to be inauthentic, misaligned and incongruent in daily
life's 'art and practice' is in anyone and irrespective of disciplines, a
sign of loss and decline of their intrinsical life force .
In a broader social sense I wonder if the notion of a quest for a LO is a
surrogate one among us, for the loss of another spiritual home 'en masse'?
What aspect is it after all that 'organized religion' once provided that
is now still desired as a kind of 'supplementary provision' by 'business'
and is it the 'business of businesses' to offer to take some note and care
of this neglected aspect of man's fundamental needs?
I often feel the spirit of David Bohm reverberate around this list. The
spirit of a scientist, artist, humanist and IMHO a deeply spiritual man. I
sense rhythms in his way of expressing that runs deep, like those in deep
streams, rivers and oceans. He chooses to point our attention to the need
for spiritual sustenance to assist us in finding, ' -the experience of
unbroken life, all relationships, as one totality, not fragmented, but
whole and undivided.' This too has rhythm in it for me.
For you?
This also has rhythm for Bohm, ' Love God with all your heart, all your
spirit, and all your might.' In this he senses that he discovers a
'calling' to learning, of a life of 'self-knowledge, whole and
harmonious', -with everything calling for a broad gesture, opening arms,
spreading of posture...¦ready to dance with/in life.
Bohm sought truth in the notion of a 'fitting universe'. Truth is
'fitting' in Bohm's lexicon.
Into what does this fitting fit?
This is a question arising daily for the mind of most but perhaps
especially the painter, poet, novelist, choreographer, architect, or
graphic designer. Also for the day to day colleague? Let's say so.
'Fitness' is in one sense a formalization, in most arts this may be viewed
as a 'lower form', one often classified as of 'embellishment'. This offers
up 'beauty', which is 'fitting' for a Bohmian design;) and it also offers
a sense of making the surface more visible, a surface distinguished as a
'field' for potential meanings to be drawn up and out of. Rhythm as
tendency unifies a surface as a pattern and so can enhance immediate
orientation toward meaning and understanding on one, albeit 'gestalt'
level. It 'concentrates' in the eye of the beholder.
It is congenial too. How many organisations treat congeniality as a valued
'in house' commodity?
Recent investigations in England have discovered (uncovered) hundreds of
Neolithic sites of horizontal stones set into the ground and carved with
an array 'rhythmical' designs. Scholarship has yet to discern the probable
meaning of the 'symbols' and 'signs' but they seem to point to a unifying
principle in terms of patterning. Some, Professor Darvill proposes seem to
'represent sun, moon and stars and others, like chevrons indicate trance
like states.' In any sense they are rhythmically 'marking the landscape'.
Is landscape inside or outside?
Equally ancient rhythms are those of the aboriginal peoples of Australia.
They too are replete and full of over-all rhythms that cross-link motifs
and perhaps span many hundreds of years, so that one artist fits his
design into the flowing energy rhythm of another? Time is spanned by this
rhythm?
In every case there is the underlying urge to organize the visual field as
a whole. And to point us inevitably beyond the borders or margins of that
immediate surrounding surface, as if the rhythm so planted as a fitting
design may otherwise slip over the edge, so taking us to or implying new
places and possibilities...¦a form for liberation within constraint. A
primordial comfort zone?
The most primitive motif of creative man; 'containment and release'.
I have just seen a large, old tench (fish) that is drifting in the eddies
of a stream, lifted and flowing today (dancing to his own rhythms) in the
currents from yesterdays rain as the stream fills.
The river may in one's 'distance of disinterest' sense be closely defined
and inert, or rather like a sheet of Chinese scroll paper, but the closer
we move to the river's edge the more we discern the valuable contortions,
not just of breadth and depth, but for example the effects of new growth
vegetation have upon this flow, according to the season. All the ancient
fish knows is somewhere stored for safekeeping in the back of his
undifferentiating head. The river is his software system streaming in
front of his ancient unblinking systemic eyes and everywhere amid the
'bits' is the undercurrent, the rhythms of the rivers memory that call to
him as clearly as any MS 'Welcome' or a terse 'Goodbye'.
Ancient technology!
Ah, so what? We have lost the thread...¦
Well, if the fish and the stream are as a 'totally fitting design system
imbued with necessary and truthful rhythm', then they can perhaps elevate
our understanding of the 'placement and purpose of rhythm' in our lives
and maybe then design it in and maybe then artistry and maybe even richer
meaning, a currency with real added value, into the tapestry of our
organizational life?
In more coherent and grounded cultures the rhythmic designs of living
things, say Bison for Neolithic man and Fish for Aboriginal man just so
rhythmically evoked were counted as real. Even when the beast portrayed is
manifestly at rest, the entire field of the image; its 'total environment'
is expressive of integrated 'total life'. The whole design desires to
express life.
Many actual 'borders' serve the same function, even very abstract designs,
'Borders must move forward, and grow as they move.' 'Move forward' and
'grow'? How might a rimming border grow and to what end such a defined
decidedly 'dodgy' and edgy rhythm?
How does a border grow bigger than the edge it adorns?
(Now I see a person as a border at the edge of an organization...¦but I
digress)
It is possibly through the rhythmic (serial) repetitions that it extends
itself, virtually infinitely rather like strands of DNA, both are the very
semblance of life.
When I have worked with people in organizational life, drawing, painting
or writing I am continually astonished at the superior rhythms they
contain, although they are often consciously blind to their own capacity
for beauty production.
Some thinkers have called life 'the seeking of permanence as a pattern of
changes'.
Rhythm seems to me to be the aim of all life at all times if not its
achievable goal, in which it must, it knows somehow even unconsciously
even when articulated by the 'greatest artificer' as a fish, fail in that
particular endeavour.
We will always seek out rhythm, even where it does not likely exist,
because it is life calling out to life. It desires to know if you will
engage in the dance that is life, or as Peter Senge calls it, the Dance of
Change.
'The dancer's body is ready for the rhythm.'
Paradoxes abound.
'The visual arts govern a world of space, and it seems to me that the
profoundest sensation that we derive from space is not so much that of
extension as of permanence. On the most primitive level we feel space to
be something permanent, fundamentally unchangeable.'
The duality is 'movement in stillness', 'motion in permanence'.
How beautiful.
In Taoism perfection in life is sometimes expressed as 'Tranquility in
Disturbance'
Some recent cognitive science research holds the view that 'nothing' may
be the only enduring 'something'.
In a co-dependent and forever shifting existence what else is there to do
but 'sing and dance'.
Perhaps it is what we do best.
Perhaps we are far from home and are only just realizing it.
In the gold mines of South Africa the men customarily sang on the way to
work, they danced in a 'complementary way -by stomping' and this brought
them courage, hope and unity. The managers would let them sing on site,
but not 'stomp dance'. They thence developed a new form of dancing they
called the 'tip-toe' dance. The big and the small dances of creation never
end. Look, Listen...¦Feel for the rhythm, life.
Soul takes shape in movement.
Feeling is a form of vision.
'Do not dance to the music, just dance the music.'
Albert Cozanet -Reflections sur la musique et sur la danse.
Who is for the dance today?
Best wishes,
Andrew Campbell
--Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>