Walter Logeman: Journal
I’ve been listening to Dr Dave Shrink rap radio interview with Raul Moncayo. I found the whole thing pleasant. Yes, weird, but it was pleasant because it resonated with what is in my head a lot of the time, not the same content but the same questions – the same discourse.
I also listened to the earlier Wise Counsel podcast, less pleasant but more stimulating.
Links follow
NVC Non-Violent Communication, how to identify needs in self and others and how to speak without shaming, blaming and criticising is one of the four or five disciplines that I’d like everyone in the world to know how to do.
Language is important, but as Moreno said:
The analysis of language, useful as it is in itself. does not lead to any change in behavior. It has to be followed up by methods of action learning which train the pupil to think and act below and beyond the boundaries of language.
That’s why I think there are four or five disciplines, but none of them sufficient alone.
The radical democracy of organisms « Future Primitive Podcasts:
Mae-Wan speaks with Joanna about “quantum jazz biology”, the transition phase we are experiencing, the organic revolution, science/art/life…
Listen to the audio.
The science here and the politics might be a bit dubious, but for all that there is a lot here to take on board, I can see how it relates to group work and couple work.
The environment impacts on the Genome
The social anarchy of nature
Quantum Phases and Quantum Coherence:
Quantum coherence implies all that and more. Think of a gathering of consummate musicians playing jazz together (‘quantum jazz’) where every single player is freely improvising from moment to moment and yet keeping in tune and in rhythm with the spontaneity of the whole. It is a special kind of wholeness that maximizes both local freedom and global cohesion.
I wrote the post about art before I heard this! It is a scarily synchronistic!
What Is Life? – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
What Is Life? is a 1944 non-fiction science book written for the lay reader by physicist Erwin Schrödinger. The book was based on a course of public lectures delivered by Schrödinger in February 1943, under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies at Trinity College, Dublin. The lectures attracted an audience of about 400, who were warned “that the subject-matter was a difficult one and that the lectures could not be termed popular, even though the physicist’s most dreaded weapon, mathematical deduction, would hardly be utilized.”[1] Schrödinger’s lecture focused on one important question: “how can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?”[1]
In the book, Schrödinger introduced the idea of an “aperiodic crystal” that contained genetic information in its configuration of covalent chemical bonds. In the 1950s, this idea stimulated enthusiasm for discovering the genetic molecule. Although the existence of DNA had been known since 1869, its role in reproduction and its helical shape were still unknown at the time of Schrödinger’s lecture. In retrospect, Schrödinger’s aperiodic crystal can be viewed as a well-reasoned theoretical prediction of what biologists should have been looking for during their search for genetic material. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, credited Schrödinger’s book with presenting an early theoretical description of how the storage of genetic information would work, and acknowledged the book as a source of inspiration for his initial research.[2]
Statements and actions for a cause or revolutionary change are needed, but not art. Art can be revolutionary even while its creators are reactionary in their words. Art is art because it expresses something of the unconscious.
I make politically trivial sketches, Thousand Sketches, (Like the image above) but I think they are ok, even somewhat progressive. I think it is because they are steps on a path into my own unconscious and that is the collective ethos, zeitgeist, at the same time. I don’t know how deep I go. I let the pen do the work, stuff comes unbidden, I trust my life has its roots in the culture and thus something of the culture will emerge.
It is a struggle not to judge it as crap. It is as a result of my scribbling that I discovered an affinity with the abstract expressionists, who do not rank high on the political awareness scale, but I think their roots (check out Mark Toby) in calligraphy and the spontaneity of the body (Pollock’s dance as he paints) may be a way to tune into zeitgeist. It had to do that or it would not even have been capable of being exploited by the art world.
Pollock’s statement “I am nature” makes sense to me. He does not need to look at the world and then paint it, he is nature. Social and political dimensions don’t need to be painted from the outside, they will emerge… with luck through spontaneity, ie the absence of fear and judgement. They will not be pure expressions of one class, art is too specific for that. Art is a slice of time & specific contradictions under a microscope, a probe into what is going on. The interpretation of the data is important, but before interpretation is possible it has to be mined.
These thoughts came up well before finishing this item on Reading the Maps:
Reading the Maps: Alan Brunton and the dream of a revolutionary art:
In a country where the Greens are considered a far left party, and where socialism is presently regarded as an alien political tradition, how can any coherent political programme hope to be popular, or even comprehensible, without being, from a radical left-wing perspective, ‘cowardly’? And in a country where large numbers of people still expect poetry to rhyme, and still consider any visual art movement more recent than Impressionism to be an elitist fraud, how can any self-respecting artist disavow incomprehensibility? Could, say, Colin McCahon or Rita Angus have created their masterpieces without daring to be, for a large segment of the population, incomprehensible?
The Century Of Self Part 1 (of 4) Happiness Machines:
The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud’s ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn’t need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar. His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses.
I’ve been listening & reading a bit about emotions, language, tools and the mind. Nothing describes it as well as the idea of roles, and Moreno’s role theory is rarely mentioned. A role is inclusive of feelings thoughts and action as well as all context and relationships.
The following is an interesting discussion, but it is crying out for a role perspective.
Philosophers Zone – 2 October 2010 – The Extended Mind:
Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? Some philosophers are now arguing that thoughts are not all in the head. The environment has an active role in driving cognition; cognition is sometimes made up of neural, bodily, and environmental processes. Their argument has excited a vigorous debate among philosophers and this week we discover what the fuss is about.
The quote from Locke below describes an idea I have long held. I did not know till today that John Locke had it 100s of years ago. It is relevant to me as I work with the psyche, or spirit as he calls it, as the main stuff of my day to day work. The psyche is, in his words, “abstruse”, and there is no way to talk of it other than through forms that reflect ultimately “sensible ideas” ie idea that relate to things we can experience with our senses.
Hence we use dramatic terms like Oedipus complex, and geographical terms like depression. Talk of the psyche is form of poetry and metaphor to describe the inner side of action, make sense of action.
Locke ECHU BOOK III Chapter I Of Words or Language in General:
The five instruments:
Word documents on this available here.
Five elements of Spontaneity:
From J. L. Moreno (But where?)