Too Much

Stephen Calhoun & Timothy Calhoun

Stephen and twin bro Timothy, 1958

I like to poke around stuff. I enjoy doing this a great deal. 

My mentor and co-founder of squareONE Judith Buerkel remarked to me,

You are curious about curiosity, so you’re set, really, for life.

What is novelty? What is a chance operation?

Attitudes and Biases

(1) Fallibilist; casual phenomenologist

(2) Batesonian monist; thus pitched toward the enactivist. embodied, biosemiotic, autopoieisis fusion; and, so, not very sympathetic toward the magical teleologies, or positivistic foundationalisms–although each earns an account.

(3) Contemplative, Radical relativist, and Deweyian pragmatist, dedicated Enactivist & Human Cybernetician, Syncretist, mystical frontal cortex at times–principal high level skill is intuition

(4) When necessary, nominalist and anti-realist; (that the eliminativist, whether a Churchland or a Rorty, can speak of ‘it’ is, nevertheless, nifty!)

(5) Paradoxes are supposed to be paradoxical

(6) Science is beautiful, good, and true within precisely defined limits

(7) Politically: a Digger and 21st century Fabian; although these are not positions or dispositions

(8) Committed to deep diving and negative capability and opening closed systems

My enthusiasms are sometimes intensely expressed. It is okay to tell me to blow less or blow more lightly.

Glori-the-dancingcat

Glori

targets

(1) Lifelong student
(2) Hippie & participant/observer
(3) Music, visual experimentation, seeing, creative generativity
(4) Experience in development, Constructivist Systems, Adult experiential learning
(5) Experience and image-based organizational development
(6) ‘Brownian’ wandering student of those sub-fields in psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology that are necessarily of concern to me.

Meta-Precis: People who have made the effort to know me well have suggested that ‘I am always doing research.’

C.G. Jung

What makes you tick? Heck, what is that ticking sound?

Local Effects

Homebody with a lot of remarkable and lucky outside experience.
Cat person.
Flower Power. Make Love, Not War. Garden. Smell the roses. Walk slowly.
My wife is the greatest person I know; jackpot.
My very closest friends spend quality time making challenging and deep efforts at heartfelt relationship, and, so, I love my friends deeply.

The circle of art holding the spark of independent perception and praxis betwixt the intention of the creator and the intention of the engaged observer/participant:

capture – cut – create – consummate

Looking for: potentials for bringing random arrangements into complex symbolic order.

Consummate: unique attention in the moment closes the circle. It’s by hope, Democratic!

Annette Messager: For me a work of art is directly linked to the secret. Art is like a secret, an epigraph. It is literally cut out of life. We must not try too show to much, to divulge everything, to unveil too much. We must give some small clues, even unnecessary clues. Art is a secret shared between the individual and the collective. In order to be touched by a work of art, it must first refer to the person who made it, a strong personality, and it must touch the collective, everyone must find something in this order.

Alternately, when attending to being, being present: art is a secret shared between embodied experience and the collective.

Stephen Calhoun, artist

Cast of Characters (2015)

Research preoccupation, started in 2005, has to do with fortuity, serendipity, and (what’s called) pseudo-serendipity. These phenomena are ubiquitous and occupy an elemental place within the field of human development. (Only humans experience serendipities as distinct from biological/ecological conjunctions.) I come at this as a self-somewhat-trained, interdisciplinary-geared and phenomenologically-minded, independent researcher. This is framed via a modest, informally developed, always growing, body of knowledge about social/personality psychology, philosophy, adult learning, and, anthropology.

Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson

My guiding research principal is: if something comes to be experienced it earns–for this reason alone–an account of some sort.

What about the confusions about the nature and efficacy and applicability and locality of truth claims?

Reification has use value, but theories are less true than the action of the models a theory supposes or proposes; and, the model only exists to provide a useful reduction commensurate with the actual, ineffable-in-totality phenomena.

 

2013 in water

People ask about my background and I tell them “music, and, being a hippie.” When I give this response to people in my fifty-sixty-something cohort, very often they relax and tell a story about when they too were a hippie. I guess this is a guilty memory for some, but not for me.

Paul Krassner:  My only sacred cow is that I have no sacred cows.

It would be impossible for me to under-quantify the importance of creating music and visionary images in my life. Musical being and experimenting are my outlook.

Creating my art is at once practice, principle enthusiasm, analogue and analogy, metaphor, and model.

I scooped up the moon

If somebody treats me as if the way they know the world works is also supposed to be–from their perspective–the way the world works for me, (and how it works for everybody else,) I am likely to challenge their faux-normative presumption, and, then be amused by their subsequent effort to fend off the obvious.

one, because you never know, and, two, because everything is at stake!

serve to lessen another’s suffering, no matter how small, medium, or big. Do what you can; almost invariably the request to help out is never a big deal.

“Follow the perfume, not the tracks.” – Shams

noguts noglory studios, Cleveland Hts, Ohio

creative laboratory

For in music the seer can see the picture of the whole universe; and the wise can interpret the secret and the nature of the working of the whole universe in the realm of music.”  Inayat Khan

tricks and cleverness

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