Replying to LO23677
Dear Bruno and LO'ers,
Before I will react on Bruno's message, I should correct my own
contribution LO23671.
In my passion to reflect on the issue of rhythm in communication, I
consulted a referrence source containing a wrong citation. The title of
the poem of Christian Morgenstern was falsely cited and should be:
'Fisches Nachtgesang' , so it is a fish, not a spuce. It was right in my
memory, but after the consultation of the wrong reference work, my memory
was wiped out. My apologies.
But now Bruno's message. He promised to go in more detail, but he
mentioned and asked me already some preliminary questions. I will try to
answer them briefly.
Yes, rhythm is a measure of movement. This may be interpreted as a measure
of the forces in action, in physics it is defined as the potential.and
resistence. If someone creates a rhythm, one or both of these are
fluctuating. Bruno is right when he assumes that attractions and
rejections only refer to movement (not rhythm).
Motivation is the attracting force longing for a certain goal. It is like
the vacuum cleaner - dust is attracted and moves into the motivated paper
bag inside the aparatus. The dust is concentrated and sampled. A rejector
is like the other end of the vacuum cleaner - the blower. Dust will be
blown away, it will spread in all directions. A rejector in communication
is the 'blower' of messages, the sender. So with this very contribution, I
(in this particular case, it is in fact our host) am the rejector,
spreading this message to all directions. I will be very happy if there
are also some attractors for this message, the readers - you. Some of you
are more motivated to read and consume this mail than others.
Radio stations, authors, artists, commercials, they are all rejectors,
sending and spreading their messages. They all hope for some willing
(motivated) ears or eyes as consumptive attractors.
So words like motivation, curiosity, (learning) hungre, will, are all
signs of attraction.
The terms you mention (knowledge, ego, emotional locks) refer to
resistence or even barriers. There could be barriers around the attractor
preventing consumption, but they could also prevent a motion away from the
rejector, for instance because of reasons of self-protection. An angry
person who might easily become a rejector, or sender of mad and bad
messages towards a specific target or just in the blind to anyone around,
may prevent himself from doing such by his/her ego or knowledge. Sometimes
a sensitive attractor will still feel in such case the strength of the
rejecting force, but no movement. On the other hand, the (potential)
attractor may construct a barrier between him/her and the sender by the
rhythm of the delete-button, possibly driven by ego, knowledge or
emotional locks.
Rhythm of form is fairly easy to recognise. There is another rather simply
recognisable form-rhythm in literature. It is the rhythm of the various
lengths of sentences. Some short sentences with occasionally a long
sentence will make the text vivid, readable and of course, rhythmic. Every
professional writer knows this.
But I am not 'content' with calling the rhythm of form a meta-rhythm. I
hope I can make that clear.
Rhythm of the content does exist, but is more difficult te recognise.
Obviously, it is more a matter of feeling than seeing. Rhythm of content,
is a rhythm of the process. So in an organisation/company a rhythm of
content could be the fluctuations of workload, the dips and peaks , like
the waves of blood which is pumped by the rhythm of the heart. So Bruno,
the content-rhythm is a pattern of the process of movement. That is how I
understand it. But I agree with you that this rhythm of content could
trigger or interact with a rhythm in form, like the movement of the chest
when breathing. I don't know if the rhythms of form and content - possibly
not in phase - should have a simmilar frequency. I will not be surprised
if there are examples where both have different frequencies, and so, will
show a kind of interference pattern with its own frequency.
This thinking becomes complicated. Because what I do have in mind is a
situation with several attractors and rejectors active in one system. The
rhythm of form - as a result - is not a monotonous rhythm. You may think
of various periodicities of various organs in the human body: the
blinkering of eye lids, breathing, heart beat, menstruation cycle, food
cycle, nerve activities, peristaltic movements in the intestinal canal,
sleep and awakeness, etc. Really a vivid complexity, but what is the
overall rhythm? And as you have noticed, I intermingled form and content
rhythms.
The rhythms in an organization could be as complex as the single human
body. Since most organizations consist of several human beings, all with
their own activities, together with 'the' rhythms of the surrounding
environment, will cause something that may be compared with a rhythm
composed of the sounds of a twelve valve motor, flapping of a flag, samba,
chorou, tango, Japanese drums, krontjong of Indonesia, the base drum of
Peruvian indians and the bells of a horse-sleigh and the Big Ben, all
together.
Some will see this as the rhythm of chaos, living chaos. O mundo e cheiro
de ritmo, ritmo de paixao e ritmo de agressao. The world is full of
rhythm, rhythm of passion and rhytm of aggression.
I look forward to the next results of the rhythm of your thinking.
dr. Leo D. Minnigh
l.d.minnigh@library.tudelft.nl
Library Technical University Delft
PO BOX 98, 2600 MG Delft, The Netherlands
Tel.: 31 15 2782226
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Let your thoughts meander towards a sea of ideas.
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--Leo Minnigh <l.d.minnigh@library.tudelft.nl>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>