Monthly Archives: June 2014

Bambino Communicates

Free Play June 29

Our foray into animating mostly aging bodies for the purpose of continuing the autopoietic experiment set course on a perfect June day.

Last week featured a walk-off comeback, but Sunday’s game echoed the game two weeks before, the bottom of the order of the visitors–the visiting team being the team I place Mark Jr. on–came through again with lots of seeing-eye hits. To make the self-organization of the mismatch possible, Jedi Matt arrived late, after Pete, “shirtless, above average first baseman,” and automatically was placed at the bottom of the home team’s line-up.

Bambino!

Bambino!

Driving away after the game, I slowed down to complement Jedi Matt on his five hits in five at-bats day–including a homerun, and he in his modest way, reminded me he is over two weeks, ten-for-ten. I have to emphasize modest too: for the twelve years I have been playing Free Play Softball Matt has not once become entangled in any drama, any vaunting of any outcome, and, even his reminder about his performance carried with it no inflection of self-aggrandizement. Yes, Jedis are like this!

Katz, the greatest junk ball hitter of all time.

Katz, the greatest junk ball hitter of all time.

Where is this ball headed?

I tease Katz, asking him when he arrives,

Which Katz is showing up today?

The effortless fielder and crafty hitter has been showing up recently.

3-autopoietic-systems

Niklas Luhmann suggests new framework for understanding society that society is an autopoietic system, in other word, society is the nexus of communication. He insists that the element of the society is communication, not actor nor action.

Purloined from Naruse, Iba; Ecosystem as an Autopoietic System Considering Relationship between Ecology and Society based on Luhmann’s Theory [pdf].

(Being a cybernetics kind-of-dude, any event that constitutes a difference making the difference is communicative; this includes all such events in the closed system of a softball game. Example: a hit or a catch encapsulates the embodied psychic intention; so a hit or a catch enacts the communication in the physically permeable agentic structure of the game’s social system. A game structures the possibilities for emergent instances of communication and so a game instantiates events that reflect, and briefly ‘incarnate,’ the foamy, non-substantial, psychic intentions.)

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Degrees of Becoming

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

God keep me from ever completing anything.

Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!

(Herman Melville)

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Explorer 2

A portrait of Eliane Radigue, produced by the Austrian IMA (Institute for Media Archeology), which observes Eliane in her workspace, operating the ARP and talking about the process of composing and recording.

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Explorer 1

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Inside the Psychologist’s Studio With Albert Bandura

Dr. Bandura wrote one of the few and most important papers on serendipity in adult development; except the paper, Exploration of Fortuitous Determinants of Life Paths (pdf), traffics in fortuity rather than serendipity!

“Perceptions are guided by preconceptions. Observers’ cognitive competencies and perceptual sets dispose them to look for some things but not others. Their expectations not only channel what they look for but partly affect what features they extract from observations and how they interpret what they see and hear.” ~ Albert Bandura, Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory, 1986

This quote provides more than an echo of William James. Bandura occupies an important spot in the Jamesian ideational lineage.

He’ll turn ninety next year.

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chaosmosis: the emergence of order from chaos, engendering new autopoietic entities

Aesthetic paradigm
1. In Guattari’s work, as opposed to scientific paradigms, paradigms that are schizoanalytic, rhizomatic, and chaosmic, involving processes rather than structures.

psychoanalysis, which claimed to affirm itself as scientific, […] has everything to gain from putting itself under the aegis of this new type of aesthetic processual paradigm. [CM 106 CM=Chaosmosis]

2. A schizoanalytic approach to clinical treatment which, instead of describing the psyche in terms of structures or stages, views the production of subjectivity as a creative process.

Grafts of transference […] [issue] from a creation which itself indicates a kind of aesthetic paradigm. One creates new modalities of subjectivity in the same way that an artist creates new forms from the palette. [CM 7]

3. The creative capacity of chaosmosis, the emergence of order from chaos, engendering new autopoietic entities; this ontological process is exemplified by but not limited to artistic creation.

art […] engenders unprecedented, unforeseen and unthinkable qualities of being. The decisive threshold constituting this new aesthetic paradigm lies in the aptitude of these processes of creation to auto-affirm themselves as existential nuclei, autopoietic machines. [CM 106; see also 112] – J. W.

The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary


Tu v dome:
Ladislav Durko – piano
Ali Kobzova – voice, violin
Bronka Schragge – cello
Ozo Guttler – drums
Martin Sutovec – banjo
_______________________________
text original:
The Heart asks Pleasure – first –
And then – Excuse from Pain –
And then – those little Anodyness
That deaden suffering –
And then – to go to sleep –
And then – if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor
The privilege to die –
Emily Dickinson 1830 — 1886

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Some Days You Eat the Bear, and Some Days. . .

Free Play Softball

Except for the inveterate rebels, everybody took off their hat to let the sun light up their face

Buddha softball

Life is like heady wine.
Everyone reads the label on the bottle. Hardly anyone tastes the wine.
Buddha once pointed to a flower and asked each of his disciples to say something about it.

One pronounced a lecture.
Another a poem.
Yet another a parable.
Each outdid the other in depth and erudition.
Label-makers!
Mahakashyap smiled and held his tongue. (Only he had seen the flower.)

If I could only taste a bird, a flower,
a tree,
a human face!
But, alas, I have no time.
My energy is spent deciphering the label.

(h/t Anthony DeMello)

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Fathers

Crede Calhoun

Stephen, Crede C. Calhoun, cousin Crede Merchant-Prashkar, Crede H. Calhoun

One of the few photographs in existence–with myself and my father in it as adults.

My dad loved to skipper and race Highlander sailboats.

Highlander Crede Calhoun

Ol’ 954

I did not like to do so, and would not after the summer of 1967; the summer I turned 14. On the other hand, the summer before, his strong hand grabbed my arm and plucked me from my spot sleeping in the bow on the spinnaker just as the boat buried its port rails and capsized on a brisk late June racing day. Thanks, man!

I inherited his almost perfect nose. We were about the same size too. And, many have remarked over the years that my dad and I share a ribald sense of humor. I suppose I got some of his very big brain. Among many differences is a singular one: psychology terrified my father in about the same huge portion that it fascinates me.

The photo above was taken at his 75th birthday party in 1999. I learned a lot about my dad’s influence on young lawyers, sailors, and, witnessed his movie star’s charm in action too. It was very moving. After returning in 1992, by 1993 I got to spend quality time with him on occasion. Susan, myself, his third wonderful wife Joanne, and pops, would get together for dinner. Joanne inspired him to really make an effort to reconnect with his sons and my mom in the aftermath of his eldest son’s and our brother Tim’s, death in early 1993. She worked magic. This led to many memorable holiday seasons.

I’m a deep diver, and Crede my dad was a sailor. His comment to me on one face-to-face in his home office in 2000, the year before he drowned in a sailing accident, was, “Hey, as long as you’re happy, and you should be–because Susan is great!”

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

Poet Tim Calhoun

Tim Calhoun

My fraternal (duh!) twin brother Tim the day of his college graduation in, I think, 1986. He is father to my nephews Jesse and Nathan. He’s the only Calhoun son to graduate from college, which is statistically surprising because our parents reflect a Haverford/Bryn Mawr romance. (I once was told I look like a college professor!) Tim was a poet and he loved his kids with all his might and mighty heart.

Crede my brother, Crede my dad, Jesse my nephew

Crede my brother, Crede my dad, Jesse my nephew

Three generations of Calhoun male folk. My younger brother Crede–yeah, lots of credes–and his wife Carol McMahon Calhoun are parents of daughter Caleigh. She’ll be 14 soon.

Crede Calhoun

Grandfather Crede holding Caleigh, September 2000

Great dad and mom–brother Crede and sister-in-law Carol–and spitfire daughter, make for a fantastic future legacy: my parents had three sons and so Cails has a big job to help individuate the family’s deep feminine future.

Stepfather

Yesterday a stranger in a parking lot told me, “Happy father’s day.”

“Thank you.”

Susan’s son is my step son but I have never ever played the role of surrogate father. He’s got a great dad, and Matt is a terrific man.

I did on one occasion give Matt advice. I told him, and did so trying to frighten him, that “if you fool around too much you’ll end up like me.”

He gave me a horrified look.

advice. . . seemed to have done the trick!

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Experience, Chance, Discovery, Insight, (and Amputation.)

2-SLIDE(Slide #2)

Experience, Chance, Discovery, Insight

An interactive presentation and group exploration of the element of serendipity and novelty in programmed experiential learning, centered on a learning experience and discussion about the interplay of fortuity, learning style, sympathy/antipathy, deep meaningfulness, and, symbolic cognition.

This is the heart of “transformative learning”
the breaking in of another view,
over which we have no control,
of which we understand little,
but which asks us questions
and puts us in a position of listening.
adapted from Martin Palmer

“Masters in the Art of Living draw no distinction between their work and their play, their labor and their leisure, their mind and their body, their education and their recreation. They simply pursue their vision of excellence in whatever they are doing and leave it to others to decide whether they are working or playing. To themselves they are always doing both.” James Michener

1-SLIDE (Slide #1)

3-SLIDE (Slide #3)

The Experiential Learning Community of Practice (EL-COP) held their annual symposium yesterday. I participated and presented.

My presentation was an experiment in pulling a room full of learners through a very compressed phase of generating novel data, then forming an intention, then, instead of facilitation, taking questions and impressions, while offering to do the facilitation one-on-one.

As my colleague Ken Warren would put it, I implemented an amputation (of the facilitation.) I did this intentionally simply because I wanted participants to at least have acquired the set of data and developed their individual intention to learn. Hopefully somebody will take me up on my offer; although I will make some effort to compel closer colleagues to do so!

I spent several weeks back in February pondering whether I should: present research; do a mini demonstration, or, give the participants a shot at truly transformative learning by bringing them through half the usual squareONE process, and then offering to guide individuals through the entire process. I knew I couldn’t do a full group process in one hour; almost always it requires a minimum three hours.

Design Elements:

create an assembly of data
develop a personal focus
develop a charged intention-to-learn
explore a field of data
discover; then realize an objective; then propose a developmental action

(My presentation was the day’s capper. The whole Powerpoint moment was sucked into technological follies. I use Apple, I convert to Microsoft Powerpoint (from OpenOffice,) and stuck it on the USB thumb drive I assume can be read by a Windows laptop. Ooops, forgot to format the thumb drive for Windows. Plan B: use another participant’s MacBook, except it didn’t have the facility to import a Powerpoint. The result was I had to use the OpenOffice word processing document and couldn’t project the slides. Okay, here they are–all three of ’em.)

squareONE experiential toolmakers – home base

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The Primacy of Experience

The body of research undertaken to date is compatible with the position that the “feeling of authorship” is a conscious sensation that is, in principle, no different from the feeling of seeing the color red or smelling a rose. What are its neuronal correlates? What are the functional and neuroanatomical links between the brain centers that initiate action and those networks that generate the feeling of authorship? Would such a neuronal mechanism, if understood, resolve the apparent conflict between the hypothesis that the universe is causally closed and a psychological sense of freedom (“I am the author of my own actions”)? To what extent might bottom-up accounts of causation for such actions within the brain and nervous system be modified by top-down influences, for instance, expectations? How can higher levels of integration and personal volition—the subject’s beliefs, hopes, purposes, and desires—be said to initiate action? And, more generally, how might physicalist frameworks for top-down causation be conceptualized in the first place?

Furthermore: How can convictions about the possibility for self-actualization be squared with ideas of ‘causal closure’? Are such philosophical or scientific ideas based on compelling interpretations of the implications of physical science? Were there to be no such thing as actual libertarian free will, can there be actual, philosophically coherent, moral responsibility? Can non-reductive physicalism, affirming both the reality of the mind and the thesis that every physical event has a physical cause, break the logjam philosophically and possibly point towards fruitful new research agendas in neuroscience? How does contemporary philosophical theology engage with this area of inquiry in the neurosciences and in the philosophy of mind? What is the status and shape of active contemporary debates in philosophical theology that pertain to questions of volition and causation? Top Down Coordination and Volition – Templeton.org

Evan Thompson

embodied-Mindbetween-ourselves
Cornerstones

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Symmetry Series – The Dowser

The Dowser  - series

The Dowser — series – symmetry sketches from a photograph – S.Calhoun 2014

The source photograph, taken with an iPhone 4s, ProCamera app, is at the top. The manipulations were all done using the excellent stand-alone application (for Apple devices,) FX Photo Studio Pro 2.7.

I do not know if there is a keeper in this series. Still, the series reflects the fascinating metamorphosis of feel that simple alterations generate. The black and white bottom item looks like an old illustration in a children’s book.

Above it is one that might be worth doing manipulations within Photoshop.

 

 

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Cellular Mechanics

h/t CDM/Peter Kirn

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Unabashedly Stupid, Proud of It – and their ignorance is documented

climate change

Parade of idiots:

The electorate could be sorted by decisive cognitive faults, and I mean by this the ones that reflect a complete inability to allow a fact to take the place of nonsense.

Each of the following fibs eliminates from cognitive respect (in my mind) any person who advocates it.

1. There is no global warming
2. the earth was created 4,000-6,000 years ago.
3. (bonus) the earth was created before the stars
4. Intelligent Design is a scientific theory
5. a fundamental tenet of Islam is that all other religions are defective
6. (bonus) Islam is, normatively, a single religion
7. high rates of taxation always lead to higher unemployment
8. the Civil War wasn’t primarily about the issue of slavery
9. Social Security is bankrupt
10. Poor people are lazy

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Talking

Talking S Calhoun

Talking No. 4 (photograph + manipulation; S.Calhoun 2014)

African parable: A hunter went into the bush and found a human skull. The hunter asked, “What brought you here?” The skull replied, “Talking brought me here.”

Overwhelmed with his find, the hunter ran to tell the king. When the king heard the story he said, “Never in my life have I heard of a talking skull.” He summoned his wise men and asked them about this oddity. But none of them had heard of a talking skull, either.

So the king summoned one of his guards and said, “Go with this hunter into the bush. Find the skull. If it talks, bring it back to me. If the hunter is lying, kill him.”

The hunter and the guard went into the bush and found the skull. The hunter said, “What brought you here, skull?” But the skull was silent. So the guard killed the hunter on the spot.

After the guard departed, the skull opened its mouth and asked the dead hunter, “What brought you here?”

“Talking brought me here,” the hunter replied.

Candles in the Dark A Treasury of the World’s Most Inspiring Parables compiled by Todd Outcalt

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Close & Almost Error Free, But Never Perfect

naming

The good life is a process, not a state of being. -Carl Rogers

Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in. – Leonard Cohen

StacyHR-Juen-1

Stacy. The ball is headed toward the right center hinterlands of Field #8 “B.”

DickFPSB-June-1

Dick has one of the shortest, smoothest swings of any of our crew. It is a thing of beauty.

FreePlay-June-1

7-5 final score. One of the best defensive battles ever, even if it the perfect weather conditions were somewhat balanced by the uncut, five inch+ long grass.

What Is So Rare As A Day in June

And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays;
Whether we look, or whether we listen,
We hear life murmur, or see it glisten;
Every clod feels a stir of might,
An instinct within it that reaches and towers,
And, groping blindly above it for light,
Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers;
The flush of life may well be seen
Thrilling back over hills and valleys;
The cowslip startles in meadows green,
The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice,
And there’s never a leaf nor a blade too mean
To be some happy creature’s palace;
The little bird sits at his door in the sun,
Atilt like a blossom among the leaves,
And lets his illumined being o’errun
With the deluge of summer it receives;
His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings,
And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings;
He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest,-
In the nice ear of Nature which song is the best?
Now is the high-tide of the year,
And whatever of life hath ebbed away
Comes flooding back with a ripply cheer,
Into every bare inlet and creek and bay;
Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it,
We are happy now because God wills it;
No matter how barren the past may have been,
‘Tis enough for us now that the leaves are green;
We sit in the warm shade and feel right well
How the sap creeps up and the blossoms swell;
We may shut our eyes but we cannot help knowing
That skies are clear and grass is growing;
The breeze comes whispering in our ear,
That dandelions are blossoming near,
That maize has sprouted, that streams are flowing,
That the river is bluer than the sky,
That the robin is plastering his house hard by;
And if the breeze kept the good news back,
For our couriers we should not lack;
We could guess it all by yon heifer’s lowing,-
And hark! How clear bold chanticleer,
Warmed with the new wine of the year,
Tells all in his lusty crowing!
Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how;
Everything is happy now,
Everything is upward striving;
‘Tis as easy now for the heart to be true
As for grass to be green or skies to be blue,-
‘Tis for the natural way of living:
Who knows whither the clouds have fled?
In the unscarred heaven they leave not wake,
And the eyes forget the tears they have shed,
The heart forgets its sorrow and ache;
The soul partakes the season’s youth,
And the sulphurous rifts of passion and woe
Lie deep ‘neath a silence pure and smooth,
Like burnt-out craters healed with snow.
=James Russell Lowell

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Law And Thrones, Game of Order

Curated GOT parodies from 2013

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