Serendipity and the Sociometric Matrix

Just read a post on John Frame’s blog on Serendipity.

Mank

… a strange force called synchronicity, or the coming together of things at one moment in time by that non-linear force called synchronicity. I argued how synchronicity might be related to the two greatest films in Hollywood and one of the most famous books in American history.

Lovely stories about great movies follow.

It made me thing about how drama work… how in psychodrama we use synchronicity – we don’t call it that, but we refer to making the sociometric matrix visible.

Synchronously I was just uploading my 1999 thesis to this blog.  I read it through the other day and I was quite pleased with it.  I am working with trainees who are writing psychodrama thesis.  And it seems to do what I teach now.

Have a clear topic  and audience.  The central “thesis” needs to be present throughout.

Imagine the task of the group leader when faced with diverse individuals and how this might conflict with the desire to have coherent group life.

Join me as a systems thinker, becoming aware of the inter-relationships in the group, to be able to use the imagination to see the life of the group and the life of individuals.

In art, poetry and psychodrama things come together…

The-group-and-its-protagonist-Walter Logeman

Shine – Joni Mitchell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtFVIesWLpc

Listening to and loving the beauty and weird acceptance of all we hate.

Especially:

“Shine on lousy leadership”

Ha!

Shine

Joni Mitchell

Oh, let your little light shine
Let your little light shine
Shine on Vegas and Wall Street
Place your bets
Shine on all the fishermen
With nothing in their nets
Shine on rising oceans and evaporating seas
Shine on our Frankenstein technologies
Shine on science
With its tunnel vision, tunnel vision
Shine on fertile farmlands
Buried under subdivisions
Oh, let your little light shine
Oh, let your little light shine
Shine on the dazzling darkness
That restores us in deep sleep
Shine on what we throw away
And what we keep
Shine on Reverend Pearson
Who threw away
The vain old God
And kept Dickens and Rembrandt and Beethoven
And fresh plowed sod
Shine on good earth, good air, good water
And a safe place
For kids to play
Shine on bombs exploding
Half a mile away
Oh, let your little light shine
Let your little light shine, shine, shine
Shine on worldwide traffic jams
Honking day and night
Shine on another asshole
Passing on the right
Shine on all the red light runners
Busy talking on their cell phones
Shine on the Catholic Church
And the prisons that it owns
Shine on all the Churches
They all love less and less
Shine on a hopeful girl
In a dreamy dress
Oh, let your little light shine
Shine, shine, shine
Let your little light shine
Shine on good humor
Shine on good will
Shine on lousy leadership
Licensed to kill
Shine on dying soldiers
In patriotic pain
Shine on mass destruction
In some God’s name
Shine on the pioneers
Those seekers of mental health
Craving simplicity
They traveled inward
Past themselves
Let their little lights shine
May all their little lights shine

Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Joni Mitchell
Shine lyrics © Crazy Crow Music / Siquomb Music Publishing

 

Flyer for the Earth Crosses Opening

 

Earth Crosses

Greater Goods, 105 Orbell Street Christchurch
October to December 2020
Opening evening thursday 15 October 6:30
Opening presentation by Walter Logeman at 7:00

Six prints are on display from the Earth Crosses project I have been working on over the years. These images may bring you down. There is an invitation to depth and to grapple to find your depth. Down to earth.  Definitely there are opposites at play. Or maybe you see an opening?  

You are invited to the opening!

 

Walter Logeman
I make digital images, I think of them as sketches, but they look more like paintings. This began with a personal challenge to do a thousand in one year. 2006-7 http://thousandsketches.com . My work is from my hand and from my heart.  If I like it I save it.  My style has evolved.  Initially I had a hundred styles, now it is all about texture, colour, shapes and composition. I want them to have life and reflect life. 

I’m a slow, self taught artist who began this at the age of 60. I am a psychodrama trainer by day. I am emerging, more than a decade later, as I age, into a more professional phase of image making. More recent images are on my blog: https://psyberspace.walterlogeman.com/category/art/ 

Making the digital physical is itself an art.  I take care to create high quality prints.

Walter Logeman
October 2020
walter@psybernet.co.nz

Download the flyer

 

WordPress vs WordPress

I now have two blogs

http://psyberspace.wordpress.com

and this one

https://psyberspace.walterlogeman.com

I tried to migrate to the commercial arm of WordPress to get better service in blog management — this one on Dreamhost, the WordPress.org one  got corrupted a few times. What a mess.

But I can’t abide the new Block interface on WordPress.com. Now I will investigate DreamPress here on Dreamhost. Hopefully my Classic plugin here will survive all the transitions.

Moving over the last 6 months of posts back to here went ok.  If it all goes well I’ll soon just have one Psyberspace blog!

Cheers, Walter

 

Dialectics

Recently I the podcasts I listened to all came up with discussions about dialectics.

Hari Kunzru, Into the Zone .

You will get introduced to ‘Teddy’ i.e. Theodor Adorno.

Its always sunny in the dialectic

Look on the bright side! In a country obsessed with positivity, Hari traces the path of exiled German intellectual Theodor Adorno to sunny California, where he gets stuck in traffic with the British writer Geoff Dyer. How this positivity relates to church and state? Turns out there’s a lot to complain about.

*

Revolutionary Left Radio

for some political clout.

The Principal Contradiction: Applying Dialectical Materialism

Torkil Lauesen joins Breht to discuss his newest book “The Principal Contradiction”. In this discussion, Torkil and Breht discuss dialectical materialism, how it is applied in real world situations, and the role that contradiction plays in it all. In the 1970s and 80s, Torkil Lauesen was a member of a clandestine communist cell which carried out a series of robberies in Denmark, netting very large sums which were then sent on to various national liberation movements in the Third World. Following their capture in 1989, Torkil would spend six years in prison. While incarcerated, he was involved in prison activism and received a Masters degree in political science. He is currently a member of International Forum, an anti-imperialist organization based in Denmark.

Find more of his writings HERE

*

The Partially Examined Life.

For a through philosophical analysis by people who can’t make up their minds about anything.

Episode 136: Adorno on the Culture Industry

On Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), plus Adorno’s “Culture Industry Reconsidered” (1963). How does the entertainment industry affect us? Adorno (armed with Marx and Freud) thinks that our “mass culture” is imposed from the top down to lull us into being submissive workers.

*

OK, listen to the lot and makes some comments!!

 

 

The Power of Intimate Relationships — A One-Day Workshop, October 10, Christchurch.

 

The Power of Intimacy

A Couple Therapy Training Day
with Walter Logeman

Saturday, 10 October

This one day workshop is for people who work
with individuals and/or couples.

I’m pleased to announce this one day couple therapy training. The focus will be on engaging the couple.

Right from the start it is usually ONE person who makes contact. How to address that initial difference? There are so many ways and so many different scenarios.

This is where a sociodramatic approach comes into its own. The life in the group will bring forth the collective wisdom. Yes, we trust the power of intimacy in the group for learning about the power of intimacy in the couples we work with.

And what if you don’t see couples for some reason?
Counselling, if the matters raised include a partner, means it is relationship therapy. How to work with the power of love in that relationship?

There is a lesson in the relationship to learn, and one partner can transform a relationship. It’s better if they do that together.

Go here to see more and to enrol:  Psychodrama.org.nz

 

This one day workshop is a lead-in to Psychodramatic Couple Therapy Training
https://psychodrama.org.nz/couple-therapy-training/  the next four-day event is Wednesday 18 – Saturday 21 November 2020, you can enrol now.

We are born into a pattern of relationships

We are born into a pattern of relationships.
This pattern influences us deeply.
It has a tendency to repeat and persist. 

This brief summary is the basis of psychotherapy, of the unconscious and we work with these patterns in psychodrama.  I’m  pleased with the crisp summation.  I’m  satisfied that it captures the relational nature of our being. The relationship nature of the unconscious, or self.  It is alive as this pattern “repeats and persists”.  And does so even as repair and grapple with the tendencies as they persist.

However the summation is not as soulful or as wild as the process.

Continue reading “We are born into a pattern of relationships”

Earth Crosses — Prints at Grater Goods coming up!

earth crosss postcard-vl1

A series of six prints on thick A2 cotton paper selected from

https://walterlogeman.co.nz/gallery-earth-crosses/

The Earth Crosses images are a series that began as my Thousand Sketches project ended. The last image of the 1000 was #1000 Departing Force and it is part of this exhibition.

The images are a dialogue between the horizontal and the vertical. Opposites. All the images in the series are square. The vertical, perhaps the landscape, has as much space as the horizontal, perhaps the portrait aspect. Think dialectics, yin yang. I expect I’ll get to elaborate on the opening night. (Date TBA)

Tena I Ruia

I am looking through my photos and found some recent gallery pics I love — here is one Tena I Ruia 1987

A painting for our time!!

If you are on a big screen – right click to get full Image in next tab.

From Wikipedia:

 

Robyn Kahukiwa (born 1938) is an artist, award-winning children’s book author, and illustrator from New Zealand. Kahukiwa has created a significant collection of paintings, books, prints, drawings, and sculptures.

Kahukiwa was born in Sydney, Australia in 1938. She trained as a commercial artist and later moved to New Zealand at the age of nineteen.

Part Māori on her mother’s side, Kahukiwa is of Ngāti Porou, Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti, Ngāti Hau, Ngāti Konohi and Whanau-a-Ruataupare descent.

Continue reading “Tena I Ruia”