Monthly Archives: October 2010

All All There

[flashvideo file=http://www.squareone-learning.com/video/FreePlay.flv /]

Dave says to me after the game,

It was all there. What a great game.

I affirm this,

Yup.

Actually, whatever “it” is, my guess “it” is all there every weekend, in the Free Play softball game. Except, to say this is just to flash the glib idea that the necessary social, affectual, situational, structural, phenomenal elements are always placed, found in their place, in every outing.

No, as much as this is true, what really is the case is that we together build something on the order of a ‘production,’ every week. Like a musical or dramatic production, our production every week is utterly distinct, unique. Some of our softball symphonies are truly evocative and moving, while other times the production is much less so. Hey, from my odd perspective, our games are never lame, and are always interesting.

(What’s lame? My deteriorating skills!)

The relationship between common and necessary global features with the never predictable or necessary local elements is what frames a view of: the complexity-of-enactment elicited by the simplicity-of-genre. (I just cracked myself up.) It’s very creative, when you come down to differentiating the structure from the how-and-happenstance, and, by definition, its integrity within the complex humanity of the players.

Hey, kind o’ like music.

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Two Batesonian Teaching Cartoons

Okay. I mentioned I had this darn insight many years ago: something like a Batesonian metalogue–which are sprinkled throughout his books–seems to be discoverable in the deep structure of particular Sufi teaching stories. This old insight has evolved and this is due mostly to my original apercu not really being the actual case.

I would put it differently now. There is in this kind of story a hidden potential for shifting one’s “base” way of experiencing their being-in-the-world. (This is but one way of putting the experiential ‘trap door’ contained in such stories.) Whereas, Bateson never specified a comprehensive set of applications which could be said–had these been specified–to be implicate in his research and articulation of his understanding. He never, as-it-were, surfaced those kinds of robust edifying activities.

To hold these two different aspects from two different ‘realizations,’ together, nevertheless, reveals similar practical objectives. One simple way to suggest this is to bring in the metaphor of peeling the onion. Certainly this does fine duty with respect to the technology given by the Sufi teaching story. After all, the teaching story is surely a technology for peeling the onion. On the side of Bateson, similarly, but less tried and tested, there is an implicate technology focused on supporting a deep, counter-habitual, and no less subversive ‘environmentally-experiential’ learning.

Now I’m reviewing my archive of teaching cartoons to see which ones elicit these similar aspects.

Stephen Nachmaninovitch’s seminar was terrific. I’m not going to talk too much out of school, except to make a couple of observations. Later, I’ll highlight Stephen’s resources.

He brought Bateson into his mostly experiential presentation in very subtle ways. He insinuated a handful of ideas by softly integrating each into the composition of his program. From my perspective, it seemed he was ‘making ground’ for negative capability. I suppose I’m sensitive to this, so it was striking. Those of course are just my terms.

Among the bright Ph.D. candidates in the room, many seemed to find their way in a situation aiming to be expansive rather than one aimed to feather their (likely) laser-directed professional aspirations!

This leads to my other observation. There is, in the context of the professional academy, a very ripe circumstance for this kind of instigation. There were many moments during the seminar when I was chuckling inside because so many ‘givens’ were coming under a lot of pressure–except this was entirely by deep and indirect implication. This seemed almost tacit, yet obvious too.

And, at the same time, Nachmanovitch was very selective. He interjected Bateson’s sense about the problem with nouns-with reification-with flattening, but didn’t then highlight this applies to ideas as well as people, places, and things. All he said was that this applies to people, places, things, and ideas. It seemed he was seeding a handful of experiences and frames and allied concepts. Briefly, at the end, he wrapped this all up in a mildly didactic closing.

It was masterful for what he didn’t say; for what he left to ‘roam on its own;’ and, for trusting his students to discover what they will. As Bateson would have it: he didn’t close off possibilities.

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Minding the Mind

My favorite (Gregory) Batesonian teaching story, reconfigured and originally via Idries Shah.

A frenchman is teaching another french rudimentary english.

“So, the word for froid crème glacée is ‘cold ice cream.’ ”

“What’s the word for chaude crème glacée?”

“Oh, they have no need for it, so there’s no word for it.”

Although I have an acute memory, I can’t recall which friend of mine did me the favor of bringing the work of Gregory Bateson to my attention. It was a long time ago. (Maybe it was Chris Irion? Pilcher?) I dug into Bateson’s Mind and Nature thirty years ago, when it was published. In another sense, it only matters as a fuzzy starting point. It was definitely in 1996 that I returned to his opus in a re-doubled effort to make some further connections. This was due to meeting my mentor and squareONE partner Judith Buerkel in 1995. During this first meeting it turned out Bateson was our mutual touchstone. Bingo!

It was only then, after a more mature effort to really deal-in, that Bateson’s understanding came to deeply inform my outlook, and to comprise a large facet in my favorite lens. The interesting nexus for this was a weird insight evoked by my trying to make coherent the weaving together of three things, the Sufi teaching story, my new (at the time) fascination with others’ theorizing about experiential learning (this via Mezirow and Kolb,) and, my revisiting Bateson (via his last book, Where Angels Fear. Toward An Epistemology of the Sacred.) About this last visitation, the bookmark stuck a third of the way through the book–when I picked it up again–marked where I had left off nine years earlier.

Judith basically told me to woodshed! Ultimately, we grappled with how to underpin our applications–what was to become the tool kit for squareONE. We spend a lot of time discussing the practical import for our work of our different Batesonian outlooks. We both thought Bateson was an adept designer; (although this is a novel sense about Bateson, who overtly was an anthropologist, psychologist, philosopher, and naturalist.)

Anyway, my insight at the time, excitedly delivered at our weekly meeting at Arabica, was this: it was apparent to me that something like Batesonian metalogues were embedded, even secreted in the structural folds of many Middle Eastern teaching stories. Judith responded: “They’re folded in everything.”

I’ve been revisiting Bateson once again over the last month. This, however, comes long after I added my experience and understanding of his understanding, (well, some of it,) to be, basically, the fundamental facet of my favored lens. By which I mean: some synergy of dynamic ideas-in-interplay make up the essential background frame for my intentional observations. Funny how lens and frame come together!

I use a ‘reduced set’ roughly taken from Bateson. Perhaps it would better to say appropriated from Bateson. I’m not a Batesonian because I’m eclectic, disorganized, not masterly, and, an ol’ hippie. Yet, in another sense, I often turn the world around to experience its different sides using my idiosyncratic (sort of) Batesonian lens.

If I assert that I’m dedicated to being a student of my environment, then in the background of this claim is this lens. You should know this to know where I’m coming from. I’ll have more to say about this soon.

I’ve recently had reason to woodshed some more and revisit the work of Gregory Bateson. I was invited to participate in a seminar at the local grad school. Stephen Nachmanovitch, author of the terrific book Free Play, musician, and student, friend, colleague of Gregory Bateson, is to give a lecture on something to do with experiential learning and play.

Getting back to one of my main people has been fantastic. The Explorations Blog is going to go on a Bateson trip for a spell. Stay tuned. I’ll wrap with a review of resources I’ve discovered out in the shed.

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Self ‘Splanin’

“What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?” Lacan

I’m not qualified to be dog catcher, but if I ever threw my hat in the ring, I’d have a ton of explaining to do. As it is, I polish my pebbles, such as they are. Part of me can relate to the hapless Christine O’Donnell, erstwhile serial political candidate. She’s led a life of grand experimentation. Isn’t this time-honored?

I give her credit for making the journey from dionysian dalliances to arch catholic prudery in one incarnation. She’s offsetting all those who did it the other way around!

Yet, her’s is a lonely cry. I’d fit her appeal, (this–in both directions,) to the Gen-X paradox: fragile sense of new age entitlement born by the cultural contradictions given by desiccated capitalism.

This television ad, with it’s kiss of a tag, “I am you.” is delightful and reflexive and thoroughly post-modern. It’s political kitsch too. In the USA, as a matter of common and public practice, we don’t usually psychologize, let alone psychoanalyze, our politics. (This is something the French do, oui?) But, with even a minimum sensitivity to the inner contexts, it’s simple enough to see the political appeal resting hopes on collective urges and demiurges and wish and phantasy. Magical participation and projection tell almost the entire story of why we collectively tend to reward parental self-help and self-efficacy over complex experience and wisdom.

Ms. O’Donnell beckons here. Much more than Sarah Palin, she wants it both ways, to argue on behalf of the saintly main street commonsense, and against the pointy-headed, credentialed elites. Yet, her mendacious reconfiguring of her vitae reflects an almost lusty desire to be recognized and loved by those same elites.
Minor goddess Lamia
Lamia (‘Devourer’). A beautiful Libyan woman loved by ZEUS. Every time she gave birth to a child, it was murdered by Zeus’ jealous wife HERA, until at last Lamia went mad with grief. In despair, and deeply envying the happiness of every mother more fortunate than herself, she took to snatching and eating their children. She turned into a monster with a hideous face, which had the added peculiarity of removable eyes that she took out whenever she wanted to go to sleep. Lamia became a nursery bogey-woman, a child-eating ogress used by Greek mothers and nurses as a threat to encourage good behaviour in children. (Cassell’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology}

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