Dear Mr. Harrison
the problem of the Ufos is, as you rightly say, a very fascinating one, but it is as puzzling as it is fascinating; since, in spite of all observations I know of, there is no certainty about their very nature. On the other side, there is an overwhelming material pointing to their legendary or mythological aspect. As a matter of fact the psychological aspect is so impressive, that one almost must regret that the Ufos seem to be real after all. I have followed up the literature as much as possible and it looks to me as if something were seen and even confirmed by radar, but nobody knows exactly what is seen. In consideration of the psychological aspect of the phenomenon I have written a booklet about it, which is soon to appear. It is also in the process of being translated into English. Unfortunately being occupied with other tasks I am unable to meet your proposition. Being rather old, I have to economize my energies.
Today, I grabbed by DSLR and took some photos of the early spring ground at locations where ‘complexity’ of the certain sort my symmetry-based photographic art is founded upon could be found and captured. The above image is a quickee.
Here it is, although I hope you’ll follow the link and check out my gallery.
ARTISTIC STATEMENT
Creating visual pieces is a musical process. My guiding intentions are to learn by doing experiments, discover unique territories by implicating factors of serendipity and novelty, and, enjoy my adventurous creative process.
My art’s goal is to first grip the viewer, and next draw he or she into exploration and into surprising experience. This comes to a fine confrontation between apprehensive sensibility and artwork in my recent symmetry pieces. These have been described as approximating the effect of a Rorsach pattern. Yes!
Pareidolia is the psychological phenomenon where people see recognizable shapes in clouds, rock formations, or otherwise unrelated objects or data.
It is by my artistic intention that I aim to evoke a moment of psychological discovery to be waged in the representational folds of the symmetry pieces. So it is: I hope for the viewer to inhabit an evocative experience of Pareidolia.
Echoing both my research interest in serendipity in adult development and my musical aesthetic as an improvising composer, the raw exploration involved in seeking out a compelling artistic production is deeply woven betwixt intentional technique and generative/stochastic procedures. The aim is to capture an opportunity for myself and viewers of pure experience.
As pianist Paul Bley aptly said of jazz, ‘it is composing in real time.’ In my visual realm, I compose in serendipitous time.
People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.” I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds. Carl Rogers
One cost of my understanding that the most golden opportunity is being with/doing with people, is uncovered when I learn what the other’s perception is of this primary urge of mine. Additionally, I could catalog the rationales for other person’s disinterest, or, otherwise, for someone not wishing to step toward relationship.
Sometimes a person who has rebuffed my offer might wander back to where our two atmospheres and breath-making intersect, and this seems to offer the playing out of a beginning, grief, authenticity.
Writ to the scale of practice, questions about the varieties of relationship remain under-appreciated. Often considerations of relationship are subsumed by regard for communicative elements, yet this can come to filter such considerations, and do so to the point that understanding of communication comes at the expense of understanding relationship.
The definition of a relationship depends not merely upon the skeleton of events which make up the interaction but also upon the way the individuals concerned see and interpret these events. Thus seeing or interpreting can be regarded as the application of a set of propositions about the world or the self for whose validity depends upon the subject’s believe in them. The individuals are partially free to interpret their world according to the premises of the respective character structure, and the freedom to do this is still further increased by the phenomena of selective awareness and by the fact that the perceiving individual plays a part in creating the appropriate sequences of action by contributing his own his own action to the sequence. (Gregory Bateson, Juergen Ruesch, 1951, The Social matrix of Psychiatry)
In stepping back from most bare bones conceptions of relationship, the multiple operational loops of dynamic construal and “intra-enactive” responses come to be revealed. Who are you? It is the most penetrating question possible.
I love Nora Bateson; but, I don’t know her so I have to be more precise.
Plus: it is complicated because as much as I do not know her, and as much as I deeply understand to love that which one does not know begs a profound question about what one intends to mean in using the active form of the word love, it is nevertheless by virtue of some shared concerns that this problem of deep feeling for is resolvable.
There is way to go into this, into the ‘this’ that is the flux of the meta-problem, to assert love, and, what I term the playful problem–the problem being played–that yields to the promise of precision.
Many years ago, I stood behind an attractive single woman in a line waiting to be served take-out. I was single at the time and I knew she was single because this all took place at a restaurant I worked at as a manager, and I had casually learned that one of the owners had chatted up this gal and teased out that she was single.
I am not intentionally a flirt, and tend to be shy around strangers. I am not in the least bit forward. Yet, standing there right behind her, she no doubt unintentionally dangled a hook.
“I love ice cream!” she said to no one in particular.
I said “Hmmmm,” loudly enough to cause her to turn around.
“Don’t you love ice cream?” She asked.
Several beats passed, as if a snare drummer was swishing brushes near us.
“Ice cream. I enjoy it very much. It’s just me and I’m peculiar on this point, but I reserve my love for people. At least in the main I try to do so.”
She gave me a two part look, the first part was a tilt of her head, and then she nodded in reflective affirmation of her original sentiment.
“I love ice cream!”
As it turned out, on another occasion I asked her out on a date and her response was memorable and droll.
“Stephen, I’d love to go out on a date but I have just begun seeing a gentlemen.”
Love is one of the most sifted through of the several primary objects of my contemplation and meditation over forty years. Moreover, I fiercely love: my partner, and my friends. Each instance of loving interpersonal relationship also constitutes a unique subject matter, field, opportunity for praxis, site for creation and collaboration, and opportunity for (in non-particular order,) play, demonstration, mystery. If I have loved someone once, I love them forever.
Of course there are the gradients which mediate the overarching gross classes: attraction, interrelationship, devotion, surrender. These windings comprise an ecology of love.
For example, Ms. Bateson is attractive on, at least, several crucial counts: smart, open to learning, optimistic, soulful. The other aspect in my Big Five is: kind. My guess is Nora is also kind. She looks like a kind person. At the lowest level my estimation here is deeply informed by my anima problem. At that level, this is the low level difference (making a difference,) too.
So, from all of this, the cut of precision recognizes that my love flows firstly along the partially unconscious line of this anima problem, and is motivated first energetically, and then, as a result of praxis, or learning.
There is no interrelationship or devotion or surrender involved. Call this Second Order Love. Other elements are subsumed by this second order, but these elements are essential too. These include the body of Ms. Bateson’s work, and the body of work of her father, Gregory Bateson.
I love Gregory Bateson too, but with him the attraction engages the Father Complex, engages Jupiter.
Nora and I share lots of concerns.I bet she’d dig my experiential tools! I playfully deconstruct, for example, social cybernetic systems, using very surgical methods rooted in various ecologies.
The ecology of love is just one of those ecologies.
Precisely then: I love Nora for distributing her soulful ideas and embodying with optimistic energy her mission to send such messages. In the system of my own loving, this is an extremely limited vector for my possible feeling, but it is much much deeper than my ‘like’ of coffee ice cream.
Every second a voice of love
comes from every side.
Who needs to go sightseeing?
We came from a majesty,
and we go back there.
Load up.
What is this place?
Muhammad leads our caravan.
It is lucky to start out
in such a fresh breeze.
Like ocean birds, human beings
come out of the ocean.
Do not expect to live inland.
We hear a surging inside our chests,
an agreement we made in eternity.
The wave of that agreement rolled in
and caulked the body’s boat.
Another wave will smash us.
Then the meeting we wanted will occur.
version of Rumi by Coleman Barks (from: Rumi. Bridge to the Soul)
Tuesday’s presentation went smoothly. The discussion was lively. I was especially gratified that two of my closest friends from outside the experiential learning community showed up.
In preparing the presentation, I learned a bunch going back through Kolb’s writing about his theory, and then careening down a number of intellectual side streets, most of which concerned philosophizing about dialectics and polarities.
Also, I read some terrific scholarly work by Peter Ochs about C.S.Peirce.
During the presentation I introduced a very deep tool. The tool, The Cycle of David Kolb’s Cycle is both an experimental learning device and, by far, the most Batesonian and ‘biosemiotical’ tool I’ve, so far, conjured.
Going forward, the trick will be to successfully promote people trying the tool out. Many people just cannot get outside of their box/trance to try something wild, deconstructive and based in getting inside: symbols and a ‘semios.’
This tool is especially random and sharply aimed to whack through instrumentalities. It aims to liberate more soulful abductions with respect to learning.
If you want to try it out, email me: sc.calhoun at gmail.com
Ken and I tossed the ‘Probe before our staff development moment at Wadsworth Public Library. It identified some factors to consider before our program. For example, Ken and I discussed how to keep the group coloring within the lines of our process for the sake of both clarity and effectiveness. It was good head’s up.
As a procedural heuristic device, the Cube-O-Probe sets a sunny top three cubes and a lunar bottom three cubes, with the two X-axis cubes mediating both above and below.
The above toss, spilled out prior to this afternoon’s program, is welcome as it suggests it would be wise to think about over-theorizing–going too far–in the direction of the normative theory in this afternoon’s virtual program (for the Experiential Learning Community of Practice, Generating Paradox. Overt and Covert Polarities in David A. Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle.
The other half of the lunar side carries a more ominous hint upon which to reflect.
Athena, owl, spear, shield with learning cycle of David A. Kolb
Please join me for my presentation tomorrow at 3:45pm EST. I’ve made some changes in the original description.
Ha! I invented a new experiential learning tool, The Cycle of David A. Kolb’s Cycle. I originally figured I would give it a spin with colleagues and other interested persons at the same time I held down the presenter’s spot in the quarterly meeting of The Experiential Learning Community of Practice. This experiment was placed in the original description.
But, then I recalled I am an ENFP, and a Reflective Learner in Kolbian terms, and, I was able to withdraw the projection that suggested I could turn the self-selecting participants into ad hoc experimental subjects.
Not so fast, buster!
I’ve nevertheless opted for an energetic presentation, yet, I dialed the interactive aspect down so close to the null value that all that will be retained, interactively speaking, will be the discussion in the second half.
(Below are links to pdfs of the slides and the tool itself. These will be public for 72 hours.)
Generating Paradox. Overt and Covert Polarities in David A. Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle
Given the theoretical-conceptual architecture of Kolb’s Learning Cycle, fascinating yet obscured conceptual relations subsist within the dynamic move from the organismic systematic theory to its application as a theory-in-use/applied model.
This experiential presentation teases out some of those relations by leveraging both the explicit dialectical relations in the normative model, and co-existing, emergent, yet hidden polar relations discoverable elsewhere near bye.
In this peeling away of layers of the conceptual ‘onion,’ two gains are anticipated: one, the active learner will experience reasons for de-reifying applied aspects of learning style, and, two, the learner may be inspired to expand his or her own experiential learning model’s practical reach.
Expect 45 minutes of presentation and 45 minutes of discussion and comments and questions.
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Where In the World? Workshop Series. Deploying Google Earth as a source of overhead urban images of sufficient complexity and character to further work via manipulative mirroring routines; and, also using Photoshop actions to further manipulate the look.
These three images, then, represent different experiments. My perspective is similar to that of the great jazz bassist Charles Mingus, who characterized his musical explorations as being “incomplete and unending workshops in sound and organization.”
These three experiments reflect screen captures of overhead views of a particular city that is known to me and would be a puzzle to resolve, for the viewer.
IN4tuity ventured to a public library client on February 16. For a half day experiential learning program our design leveraged dialogical inquiry and conversational learning in the whole system of the staff to develop a Hierarchy of Care for the library.
My insight starts from the well-known Maslow pyramid:
Integrates the Spiral Dynamics in the background of Ken and my appreciative, constructivist, experiential and ‘critically conscious’ (P.Freire) precepts,
and, with Ken guiding my own discoveries, synthesizes the ordered developmental categories given by the liberated astropsychology. (On this, see especially, Calhoun-2015, Glenn Perry)
The staff went to work in interdepartmental teams and identified and dialogued about their concrete experiences and learnings about care. During a group inquiry, the captures were written to the appropriate class in the customized pyramid. We ended up with a very rich, and very subtle, organizational Hierarchy of Care. And, we also added a new proven tool to our kit.
Today I squinted and visualized IN4tuity‘s fundamental thrust: to help anchor the humane and loving support of knowledge-seeking and sensemaking in the ecology of public library-in-its-community.
