Category Archives: Kenneth Warren

Pre-Probe – Generating Paradox

Cross Format - Cube-O-Probe

Cross Format – Cube-O-Probe

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 PracticeGenerating 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.

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Anchoring Humane and Loving Support of Knowledge Seeking and Sensemaking in the Public Library

Public Library Hierarchy of Care
Public Library Hierarchy of Care – Classes

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:

Maslow

Integrates the Spiral Dynamics in the background of Ken and my appreciative, constructivist, experiential and ‘critically conscious’ (P.Freire) precepts,

Spiral Dynamics Values

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.

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Heaven & Hell & ‘Showing’ Generative Metaphysics

4square-metaphysics-1

My and Ken’s Heaven and Hell Mandala format provides a fine format for juxtaposing generalizations, or first order conceptual classes, or just about anything which can be brought into relations.

4square-metaphysics-2
In these examples the heavenly quadrant represents where the pairing and tension is heavenly, or hellish for me. The combination of foreordained supra-natural, or supernatural, is hellish for me to deeply think about.

4square-metaphysics-3
The foreordained natural monism is another conception of mechanical determinism.

4square-metaphysics-Bateson-Set-2
Here I’ve superimposed markers for analysis, and, identified orders using the terms of the Reduced Bateson Set.

Betwixt tautology and creative heuristics, contrary to the suggestion of the marker, creative heuristics resolves toward unity. Why? Because any such heuristics are only, merely, the instantiation of the deterministic mechanics.

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New squareONE Tool: Cube-O-Probe

Cube-O-Probe

Intention: What are clues to the positive and negative aspects of using the Cube-O-Probe?

 

 

[Above: random Cube-O-Probe “roll” nailed to the Heaven & Hell Mandala. In this form for interpretation, the Heavenly opportunities are betwixt the cubes in the upper right quadrant, and the Hellish obstacles are between the cubes in the lower left quadrant. These two conventions are explicit conceptual anchors given to the heuristic means of the tool. Less explicit would be what Ken and I call the flickering aspects in the other two quadrants.]

I invented, with assistance from Kenneth Warren, two new squareONE tools over the last several months. Both have applications in discovery-based self-knowledge. Additionally, the Cube-O-Probe has already been given a trial run as a method for adducing insight about organizational development. As it turns out, the Cube-O-Probe is organically integrated with the earlier tool, Calhoun/Warren Heaven & Hell Archetypal Assessment Mandala because the form of the Mandala provides a very sharp interpretive format for the roll of the cubes.

The ‘Archetypal Assessment Mandala,’ as this is being written, is being beta tested  by intrepid volunteers. It was rolled out to participants at Ken and my program Repairing the Opposites, Doubling Stars, Turning Swine Into Pears, that we presented at the Analytical Psychology Society of Western New York December 12th.

I am working on a post to explain how I came to liberate astrology from the confines of space and time, and also free astrology from its deterministic meta-theories. In doing so, I could add on additional cubes to the new tool the Cube-O-Probe. Those add-on cubes increase the original set of cubes based in masculine, feminine, mythological archetypes, and psychodynamic polarities (or dichotomies,) and, the explicit so-called oppositions of the typological constructs taken from Dr. Jung and variously identified by John Beebe and John Giannini.

These new cubes, based in a matrix devised from the basic developmental psychological positions given by the twelve houses and twelve signs–think of the signs as a Y axis, and the houses as a X axis–implicate those positions and also the polarities given in the astro-psychology to be food for reflection/exploration/self-discovery.

The Cube-O-Probe is anchored to my theoretical wondering about the role of generative inducements for praxis using polarities in personal meaning-making. In turn, this has to do with freeing practical means for self-knowledge from linear and stage-based regimens of self-seeking. Both these ‘second orders’ of experiential learning aim at providing spontaneous ‘third order’ methods for self-recognition and self-development, or, alternately, for synchronic (insight-based,) individuation.

 

 

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Imaginal Cybernetics, the Demonic Daemon, Deep Play

Hermes

Part One of Two

First you pour the water in the pool. Then you dive.

I’ve dived into the recent hours of intense creative dialog with Ken Warren. We’re preparing our presentation cum performance at The Society for Analytical Psychology of Western New York on December 12.

Peras-Swine

I’ll get to its description in a moment. First, let’s wander.

Systemics and cybernetics can be viewed as a metalanguage of concepts and models for transdisciplinarian use, still now evolving and far from being stabilized. This is the result of a slow process of accretion through inclusion and interconnection of many notions, which came and are still coming from very different disciplines. Systemics and Cybernetics in a Historical Perspective, Charles Francois, Systems Research Sciences and Behavioral Systems Research Sciences, #16

In short, directed at the above from 1999, Blow that shit up. Ken and I discuss our stuff, and we very seriously marry our paired, then dancing, intuitions. I could identify and then name and then post the essential contexts that inform our brotherly shamanism–and this would interest me more than him–yet most of those contexts are deliberately unstable.

Why? “inclusion and interconnection of many notions, which came and are still coming from very different disciplines,” souls.

We’ve been playing very hard in the overlap of our entangled sensibilities. We also play in the medial space described by the overlap, but, this medial space is outside our ‘pure’ overlap. Near where it’s bounded by the overlap we understand each other, but as our intuitions drift farther away from the overlap, or as our individual impulse reconnoiters closed to the unsharable territory in the other person’s homeland, he or I become tourists.

venn

Yes, the medial aspects cross too. (Ken might attend to this using astropsychology, where I might propose a matrix of classification.) Still, the more one of us leaves behind both our home experience and the means that implicate our individual understanding of our, by definition, non-mutual experience, the more we traverse the medial boundary away from our core and toward the other person’s core.

Why do I mention this sort of map? For one thing, it’s a good example of third order social cybernetics, a framework I am in the process of hatching.

The two of us know something about what goes on betwixt us in our co-creative conversations. And we know that much just comes up from out of some nowhere, from the, as Ken would say, foamy depths.

What we know on our own obviously is a differential knowing, it regards my knowing being different than his knowing. That is not a trivial point. At the same time, we all the time drag one another into the medial territory for the purpose of revealing the so-called second-to-third orders ‘secreted’ there in the borderlands. The borderlands are where the action is!

Here’s the call for our program.

Repairing the Opposites, Doubling Stars, Turning Swine Into Pears
An experiential and imaginal exploration of relationship as individuation and daring-do

What is any human system of relationship in relationship to, and contextualized by?

Is there deep value available in transforming important partnerships, friendships, and, pairings into sites for adventure?
How does activation of the Trickster archetype revitalize the approach of the single, yearning person?

Using experiential learning, archetypal inquiry, and deep astrology, the principles of IN4tuity present an evening’s worth of games centered on the participatory psyche and sparking self-knowledge. Ken Warren and Stephen Calhoun use analytical psychology to bridge esoteric and cybernetic expertise. Their wild blend on this special evening aims to animate a circus of interactive exploration and discovery. Come prepared to play. Come ready to capture an epiphany or two about you and one other, even if the one other has not yet been met.

Pear. In Greek and Roman mythology, pears are sacred to three goddesses: Hera (Juno to the Romans), Aphrodite (Venus to the Romans), and Pomona, an Italian goddess of gardens and harvests.

The ancient Chinese believed that the pear was a symbol of immortality. (Pear trees live for a long time.) In Chinese the word li means both “pear” and “separation,” and for this reason, tradition says that to avoid a separation, friends and lovers should not divide pears between themselves.

In Christianity, the pear, rarely used except in paintings of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, symbolizes the fruit of Mary’s womb. St. Augustine remembered his first sin to be when he stole a pear. His original sin was mimetic with regard to the original sin in The Garden of Eden.

Stephen Calhoun is the principal of squareONE: experiential toolmakers. He recently became one of four worldwide learning partners of Experience-based Learning Systems, and, he is a founding member of the Experiential Learning Community of Practice.

Kenneth Warren is the founder and editor of House Organ, a letter of poetry and prose. BlazeVox recently published his selective history of American poetry: Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch: A Guide to the Homeric Punkhole, 1980-2012.

I created the program in this way: 100% intuition, spontaneously, on a hunch. By 100% intuition I mean, following loosely from psychologist John Beebe: 50% extroverted intuition, and 50% introverted intuition; and by the latter I additionally mean, unconscious/occulted/demonic and of unknown origins.

Next step, to discuss with Ken what it is that is interesting to us both, and so find our hook in this 100% mutual intuitive build, a co-creation now consisting of half conscious and half unconscious interests brought together from our two different sides.

I am just about ready to adjust the program’s call to reflect what it is we will actually try to pull up, and pull off. Up to this point, Ken and I haven’t discussed my original program intuition at all.

What we have been discussing is the birth of romantic relationship, the initial soulful foray toward another soul, and, the paradoxical status of self-knowledge in both the light and dark zones of initial (and initiatory,) relating.

131. But if thou shut up thy Soul in the Body, and abuse it, and say, I understand nothing, I can do nothing, I am afraid of the Sea, I cannot climb up to Heaven, I know not who I am, I cannot tell what I shall be: What hast thou to do with god? for thou canst understand none of those Fair and Good things, and be a lover of the body and Evil.

132. For it is the greatest Evil, not to know God.

133. But to be able to know, and to will, and to hope, is the straight way, and Divine way, proper to the Good, and it will everywhere meet thee, and everywhere be seen of thee, plain and easy, when thou dost not expect or look for it; it will meet thee waking, sleeping, sailing, travelling, by night, by day, when thou speakest, and when thou keepest silence.

Part One of Two

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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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Master and Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

The last two paragraphs from Iain McGilchrist’s Introduction [pdf] to his book The Master and the Emissary

There is a story in Nietzsche that goes something like this. There was once a
wise spiritual master, who was the ruler of a small but prosperous domain, and
who was known for his sel?ess devotion to his people. As his people ?ourished
and grew in number, the bounds of this small domain spread; and with it the need
to trust implicitly the emissaries he sent to ensure the safety of its ever more
distant parts. It was not just that it was impossible for him personally to order all
that needed to be dealt with: as he wisely saw, he needed to keep his distance from,
and remain ignorant of, such concerns. And so he nurtured and trained carefully
his emissaries, in order that they could be trusted. Eventually, however, his
cleverest and most ambitious vizier, the one he most trusted to do his work, began
to see himself as the master, and used his position to advance his own wealth and
in?uence. He saw his master’s temperance and forbearance as weakness, not
wisdom, and on his missions on the master’s behalf, adopted his mantle as his
own – the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about
that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a
tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins.

The meaning of this story is as old as humanity, and resonates far from the
sphere of political history. I believe, in fact, that it helps us understand something
taking place inside ourselves, inside our very brains, and played out in the cultural
history of the West, particularly over the last 500 years or so. Why I believe so
forms the subject of this book. I hold that, like the Master and his emissary in the
story, though the cerebral hemispheres should co-operate, they have for some
time been in a state of con?ict. The subsequent battles between them are recorded
in the history of philosophy, and played out in the seismic shifts that characterise
the history of Western culture. At present the domain – our civilisation – ?nds
itself in the hands of the vizier, who, however gifted, is effectively an ambitious
regional bureaucrat with his own interests at heart. Meanwhile the Master, the one
whose wisdom gave the people peace and security, is led away in chains. The
Master is betrayed by his emissary.

(SC) My associate Kenneth Warren brought McGilchrist’s work to my attention. One of the first so-called turns a new publicized model goes through is for it to be stripped down and reattached to the folk estimations (or constructs,) which emerge when a representation of domain-specific research is loosed into the public source. Put differently: the representational concepts transform into hypotheses, and then people deploy these possible explanations in new, and untested areas and experiences.

This ad hoc meta-abduction pulls experiences and situations and potential matches and mappings back toward the explanation; and explanation held by human awareness. This entanglement could describe aspects of a social complex. It’s important to comprehend that it is first embodied, next emboldened, then reembodied; and that there is a parallel biosemiotic operation. A sense given by this view is that the transformation of domain-dependent concepts into something else altogether–where the concepts are made to visit new domains–is more complicated than the transforms caused by concepts being metaphoric or analogues.

A practical possibility, then, is that, for example, an ecological space such as a room or building, may be designed with the model in the designer’s mind.

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Thinking About Libraries

Strategic Planning

Learners share the graphic results of Go Fish

I’m thinking about public libraries again. Kenneth Warren has engaged squareONE learning to help design and guide a strategic planning inquiry for Wadsworth Public Library. We began the interactive part of the process with a staff day this week.

It went really well both from my perspective and given the appreciative report of the library’s Director.

sq1 model

POSTER: squareONE’s model plus the Kolb Learning Styles

I created a bunch of materials for the walls. I showed them, but I didn’t tell much about them.

Context-Inquiries-Dichotomies-1

Context Inquiry-Dichotomies-2

These dichotomies reflect the result of our initial inquiry made with the Director. Cut into cards, they constitute an  evocative device for exploring questions, challenges, and routes for further inquiry.

When I think about public libraries, I’m thinking about their deep human system and how it nourishes development and education throughout the human life cycle. Of course, how a given library does so reflects the unique human system of that particular library.

When this project is completed I will have lots more to say!

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Conference of Neighborhoods (III.)

Peter Sis Conference of the Birds

illustration by Peter Sis, for Conference of the Birds (Attar)

III. The Future of Heights; Conference of Neighborhoods (part three of three parts)

The Lakewood Observer model has been going strong in Lakewood for almost a decade and has proliferated to encompass numerous Observer projects. The Cleveland Heights iteration is seemingly very healthy.  <em>The Cleveland Heights Observer</em> is excellent. I’m delighted the civic journalism and civic self-knowledge project has taken root here.

The following video rambles but does so in intriguing ways.

2013 annual meeting, with speaker Peter Pula of Axiom News from future heights on Vimeo.

Susan and I go out to dinner every Saturday night. Even when we lived in Shaker Heights we were drawn seventy-five percent of the time to the many warm and tasty restaurants of Cleveland Heights, eateries lined up conveniently in the districts of Lee and Coventry and Cedar-at-Fairmount roads. I remarked to my wife that Cleveland Heights seemed to me to have realized the baby boomer boho heaven. By this I mean how it has happened that the equation of liberalism and livability and professional careerism has been answered by the large cohort of fifty and sixty-something empty nesters who have staked their hearts and claim to many neighborhoods in Cleveland Heights.

Of course, I know this characterization is not even half true. I understand at least from my years of summer garage sale questing, traveling through the variety of Cleveland Heights neighborhoods, that my home town is a percolating, teeming, diverse concoction.

I haven’t decided to begin to really train my attention on a compelling civic project, but I am paying attention. The neighborhoods of Cleveland Heights radiate distinctive, positive vibes. Generally, my home town’s people express lots of devotion and commitment. This shines through, and does so even as Cleveland Heights  continues to grapple with all sorts of challenges.

I have an inchoate fantasy about what might happen if there was some forum or mechanism for Cleveland Heights neighborhoods to dialog and confer with each other.

But if we understand the nature of the personality, and the way that it is operative in history–steadily in small increments, intermittently in potent quantities–we shall be ready to take advantage of a singular point when it occurs. There is even a special touch of encouragement in Maxwell’s dictum that the higher the rank of existence the more frequent the occurrence of singular points. (Lewis Mumford, p232, The Conduct of Life)

Nowadays I sense the potential for singular points emerges from long chains of fortuity, something like civic affection, and, daring to know now, and know now for the sake of tomorrow.

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Roots of My Urbanology (II.)

Lakewood Totem
Totem For Lakewood; 2010 S.Calhoun

II. Roots of (My) Urbanology (part two of three parts)

In 1972, my mother suggested that I might find Lewis Mumford interesting. Although I was mostly concerned with–in 1972–squeezing through various doors of perception, I managed to wander through Mumford’s The Conduct of Life, along with Huxley and Laing and Watts. The Conduct of Life was written in 1951. (I suppose hardly anybody reads Mumford anymore.) A few years after returning to Cleveland in 1992, I remember revisiting Mumford in a series of conversations with my mother about Cleveland, cities, the de-industrialization of the Mid West, and, the curse of Ronald Reagan. She insisted I read The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. (1961!) I did so. I re-read Mumford’s The City in History. I explained to my dear mother what I meant when I described Mumford to be a constructionist mystic.

In the fall of 2005, again due to the result of a remarkable fortuity, I met the Director of the Lakewood Public Library, Kenneth Warren; (to myself I noted: heck, a constructionist mystic!) I learned of the Visionary Alignment, the Lakewood Observer Project, and soon enough–even though I was a wash-a-shore–was in the thick of it. At the outset, among the suggestions I introduced to the Observer crew was a ripe and dangerous speculative question:

What would it be like to live in a city devoted to knowing itself better than any other city ever has known itself?

I didn’t really get at the time that I was both implying a name for the practical learning process of the project being unfolded by a handful of intrepid Lakewoodites and Observers, and, idealizing a highly charged constellation of conflicting fantasies about what is the very stuff of civic knowledge-seeking and civic knowing. The name/process is simple: civic self-knowledge, but the charging of the civic constellation is altogether complex, entangled, and, as we soon enough came to understand, is plain difficult.

Community, know thyself? Really? Plug into the circuit and call forth shadow, and every variety of impossible dream, and quixotic obstacle?

LAkewood prism
Lakewood Prism (demographic analysis schema)

(from a presentation by Kenneth Warren, – Lakewood Future Tools – Understanding Lakewood: Communities and Memes; March 2005) See also the pdf, Community Capacity.

(Lakewood Ohio) Place-Making with Good Neighbors on the Lake
· Flow =Quality of Life
· Increase the flow states in the community.
· Refresh the conventional sense of local living in Lakewood by engaging good neighbors.
· Cultivate the habit of good neighbors listening to one another.
· Activate through the Lake a sense of the liminal among good neighbors, that is, the threshold of physiological or psychological response to the unique energy that permeates the people and place.
· Make Lakewood permeable to new experience, ideas, mechanisms and structures among good neighbors
who are joining society to economy, conscience to knowledge.
· Obtain commitments from good neighbors to act on projects that will stretch beyond circular, selfjustified egocentric gated communities.
· Know there is a beginning point and ending point to each good neighborhood.
· Realize that a commitment to sustainability is shift in consciousness; it is not about constructing a pretty
fence.
· Understand that places and institutions can get high-jacked by interests that lie outside the particular community, i.e. absentee landlords, absentee corporations and absentee public employees.
· Construct IEDs – Improvised Economic Devises
Ken Warren, Lakewood Visionary Alignment

During the summer of 2006 I happened upon my current research focus, serendipity in adult development. Under the auspices of The Lakewood Observer and Lakewood Public Library, I devised a small project. I would quickly teach street anthropologists to conduct a survey, and then from their gathering of this data set, build out with them a very constrained ethnography focused on a single question, What brought you, [the subject,] to live in Lakewood?

For two weekends a dozen or so of us fanned out through Lakewood and conducted this survey. We then spent an afternoon debriefing the results. We never assembled the final work product, but, in reviewing the surveys on my own time, I realized an amazing quality threaded itself through many of the survey results.

I can capture this quality in one of the answers to the signal question.

My husband and I came to live in Lakewood because he had just taken a job at the hospital in Fairview Park and we were in a very temporary sublet in Rocky River. One day, at the grocery store there, I asked the gal at the cash register if she knew of any good resources for tracking down nice rentals in Rocky River. Before she could answer a woman standing behind me in the checkout line tapped me on the shoulder and told me that her sister had a first floor, two bedroom apartment available in her Lakewood house. I jotted her sister’s number down and we moved in the very next month.

Not only were the surveys littered with similar narratives, but having my nose pushed close to such stories compelled me to consider my own.

So: I had to reckon with the robber in 1974 who made it all possible by trying to kill me.

In other words, I discovered my interest in the problem of serendipity in adult development by reflecting on my apparently fortuitous encounter with a robber in 1974. This reflection itself was inspired by asking residents of Lakewood what was it that brought them to Lakewood to live.

Keynote: communities collect the results of serendipity.

(Technically speaking: communities aggregate the product of intricate conjunctions of agentic, environmental, and temporal fortuities.)

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Leave-taking is as necessary as the homecoming (I.)

Coventry Homes

I. Home Coming (part one of three parts)

I dig Cleveland Heights; I’m from Cleveland Heights. My wife digs Cleveland Heights too, and we count ourselves blessed that after the challenging circumstances of my mother’s illness and passing, we moved from the apartment in her home in Shaker Heights we rented from her for almost five years  to our new home in Cleveland Heights.

This new home is almost exactly one mile from my first family home on Ormond Road, and a tad more than a mile from the succeeding family home on East Overlook Road. It is the first home Susan and I have owned together and comes after twenty years of our being renters, most of the time in various neighborhoods of, yup, Cleveland Heights.

Personally, as an independent researcher recently concerned with the role of constructive fortuity, or serendipity, in adult development, it is worth noting three of many fortuitous events that staked me to my home town. The first was a family emergency that brought me back from Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1992, and the second was the teamwork of two realtors, and the intuition of one of them, to show us our current beloved house on the great Cleveland Heights street of Coleridge Road. Our house here is five blocks from where I went to elementary school between 1959-1961. The third lucky event is bookended by the aforementioned two: meeting my future wife and partner Susan as the result of a fix-me-up sponsored by a mutual friend. This first meeting unfolded at a September party on Grandview Road in 1993, in, sure, Cleveland Heights.

For Susan and I Cleveland Heights is congenial ‘to-the-max.’ Yet, a final fortuitous event was primarily instrumental in both my leaving Cleveland Heights, and, eighteen years later, returning. On a Thursday afternoon in June 1974, a guy walks into the record store I was assistant manager of, Music Madness. It was located next to the old CH Post Office on lee Road. He found me alone and more than willing, at gun point, to give him the contents of the cash register, and walk with him to the back room office, and give him the rest of the day’s cash. Then, after a frustrating for-us-both few minutes during which I tried to–by myself–tie up my hands, he beckoned me to lay down on the floor and once prostrated, he next shot me in the back at point blank range.

(Good ol’ Cleveland Heights; Lee Road could be a bit like the wild west in the mid seventies.)

I got the hell out of my home town, and took the bus to Vermont by the end of July.

Nevertheless, the way the very long chains of contingency, necessity, and fortuity operate to constitute the foundation of future events, the leave-taking is as necessary as the homecoming–is, in actuality, its required precedent.


Cleveland Heights news and Resources (these links will remain in the sidebar)

Cleveland Heights vCity Data
Cleveland Heights (City Hall)
Cleveland Heights Historical Society
Heights Observer
Future Heights
Sun Press
Cleveland Heights (Plain Dealer)
Cleveland Heights Patch
Coventry Village
Cedar-Lee

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Nothing that might not happen in a universe of fortuity

Dharma Wheel (Calhoun)
[Dharma as Chance, 2012 S.Calhoun, digital construction]

After we had dinner at Cafe Tandoor, I stood up, put on my coat, and turned around to see right behind me all along hanging on the wall all along was a beautiful, intricate Buddhist tapestry depicting the Dharma Wheel. I chuckled–synchronicity.

Earlier Susan and I had lunch with her cousin and her cousin’s husband–oh, yes at another Cleveland Heights cafe, The Stone Oven–and we spent a couple of animated hours describing chapters in our four different lives. Of course, having lunch together joins those four lives for a moment. I would add as joining those lives ‘again,’ but in truth this lunchtime meeting-up constituted my first extended visit with this lovely couple.

People who know me obviously already understand discussing deeply anything is one of my favorite things to do. I’m not always careful to avoid jawing too intensely about my own interests. There was for a spell something of that in our moment together. Luckily, Susan is expert at reigning me in. Still, I took advantage of the situation to first explain a bit about my research focus, and then deploy my interest as a possible launch pad for discussing what happened in our lives; what’s the story; and, ineluctably and implicitly from this, how did we get to this moment?

Fortuitous events may be unforeseeable but fortuity does not mean uncontrollability of its effects. Paradoxically, people can bring personal influence to bear on the fortuitous character of life (Bandura, 1998). They can make chance happen by pursuing an active life that increases the number and type of fortuitous encounters they will experience. Chance favors the inquisitive and venturesome, who go places, do things, and explore new activities. People also make chance work for them by cultivating their interests, enabling beliefs and competencies. These personal resources enable them to make the most of opportunities that arise unexpectedly. Pasteur put it well when he noted, “Chance favors only the prepared mind.” At a much earlier era, the philosopher Seneca, portrayed seeming serendipity as “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” The harder one works the luckier one gets. Even the distinguished lay philosopher, Groucho Marx, insightfully observed that people can influence how they play the hand fortuity deals them, “You have to be in the right place at the right time, but when it comes, you better have something on the ball.” Personal development and engagement in a wide range of activities gives people a hand in shaping the courses their lives take. Albert Bandura (2011) But What About That Gigantic Elephant in the Room?

Fortune strikes. In ‘explaining myself’ I made a bit of a hash of some of my explanations, going meta in the case of defining the word fortuity, and, just getting my synopsis of the plot of The Three Princes of Serendip mixed up with another tale. I shall now recover both elements.

Wheel of fortunes

various Wheels of Fortuna

First, let’s lean on the Oxford English Dictionary.

fortuity a chance occurrence.

1. a chance or accidental occurrence
2. fortuitousness
3. chance or accident

f. forte by chance, f. fors chance

1712 Addison Spect. No. 293 ?4 The highest Degree of it [Wisdom] which Man can possess, is by no means equal to fortuitous Events.

Fortune

ad. L. fort?na, related to forti-, fors chance, and ferre to bear.

1. a.1.a Chance, hap, or luck, regarded as a cause of events and changes in men’s affairs. Often (after Latin) personified as a goddess, ‘the power supposed to distribute the lots of life according to her own humour’ (J.); her emblem is a wheel, betokening vicissitude.

fortune (n.)
c.1300, “chance, luck as a force in human affairs,” from Old French fortune “lot, good fortune, misfortune” (12c.), from Latin fortuna “chance, fate, good luck,” from fors (genitive fortis) “chance, luck,” possibly from PIE *bhrtu- and related to base *bher- (1) “to carry” (see infer).

The social history of chance in human life is fascinating. One of the meta aspects is: how the fortune teller delivers advance notice of future fate, and, in doing so, brings the future backward to its beginning. This is a modern way of describing the time-honored effect of having one’s fortune told, and clearly the bridge to having the future foretold is a single step long.

In a modern sense, the notional beginning is radically different than it was way-back-when, say, during the eras during which fortune telling is common to most cultures.  (There’s much which could be told about this subject.) The beginning, in the modern (or phenomenological) sense, is at the point the foretelling breaks the heretofore hidden chain of future events. A fortune teller creates a new beginning by bringing to the surface and into the light events in the future. From that moment on one knows their fortune; and, knowing one’s fortune paradoxically changes/cannot change every/anything!

mertonandbarber

Merton and Barber’s work provides a cornerstone in book length form of the surprisingly small academic literature about serendipity. The literature itself is mostly entered in the fields of social psychology (Bandura, Krantz, et al) and sociology of science (Merton, Barber, J. Austin, et al.)

 

Wikipedia’s treatment of The Three Princes of Serendip is fine.

“In ancient times there existed in the country of Serendippo, in the Far East, a great and powerful king by the name of Giaffer. He had three sons who were very dear to him. And being a good father and very concerned about their education, he decided that he had to leave them endowed not only with great power, but also with all kinds of virtues of which princes are particularly in need.”

The father searches out the best possible tutors. “And to them he entrusted the training of his sons, with the understanding that the best they could do for him was to teach them in such a way that they could be immediately recognized as his very own.”

When the tutors are pleased with the excellent progress that the three princes make in the arts and sciences they report it to the king. He however still doubts their training and summoning each (of his sons) in turn, declares that he will retire to the contemplative life leaving them as king. Each politely declines, affirming the father’s superior wisdom and fitness to rule.

The king is pleased, but fearing that his sons’ education may have been too sheltered and privileged, feigns anger at them for refusing the throne and sends them away from the land.

The lost camel

No sooner do the three princes arrive abroad than they trace clues to identify precisely a camel they have never seen. They conclude that the camel is lame, blind in one eye, missing a tooth, carrying a pregnant woman, and bearing honey on one side and butter on the other. When they later encounter the merchant who has lost the camel, they report their observations to him. He accuses them of stealing the camel and takes them to the Emperor Beramo, where he demands punishment.

Beramo asks how they are able to give such an accurate description of the camel if they have never seen it. It is clear from the princes’ replies that they have used small clues to infer cleverly the nature of the camel.

Grass had been eaten from the side of the road where it was less green, so the princes had inferred that the camel was blind on the other side. Because there were lumps of chewed grass on the road the size of a camel’s tooth, they inferred they had fallen through the gap left by a missing tooth. The tracks showed the prints of only three feet, the fourth being dragged, indicating that the animal was lame. That butter was carried on one side of the camel and honey on the other was evident because ants had been attracted to melted butter on one side of the road and flies to spilled honey on the other.

As for the woman, one of the princes said: “I guessed that the camel must have carried a woman, because I had noticed that near the tracks where the animal had knelt down the imprint of a foot was visible. Because some urine was nearby, I wet my fingers and as a reaction to its odour I felt a sort of carnal concupiscence, which convinced me that the imprint was of a woman’s foot.”

“I guessed that the same woman must have been pregnant,” said another prince, “because I had noticed nearby handprints which were indicative that the woman, being pregnant, had helped herself up with her hands while urinating.”

At this moment a traveller enters the scene to say that he has just found a missing camel wandering in the desert. Beramo spares the lives of the Three Princes, lavishes rich rewards on them and appoints them to be his advisors.

This story is where the word serendipity came from.

Serendipity

[f. Serendip, a former name for Sri Lanka + -ity.
A word coined by Horace Walpole, who says (Let. to Mann, 28 Jan. 1754) that he had formed it upon the title of the fairy-tale ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’, the heroes of which ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’.]

The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. Also, the fact or an instance of such a discovery. Formerly rare, this word and its derivatives have had wide currency in the 20th century.

I’m reminded of the equivalent story that stands as the counter-factual, Sura 18, “The Cave,” verses 60-82; the adventure of Moses and Khidr. Syed Abu-Ala’ Maududi’s commentary crystalizes the truth (for believers of a certain kind) that serendipity is but a veil.

The story of Khidr and Moses has been related in such a way as to supply the answer to the question of the disbelievers and to give comfort to the Believers as well. The lesson contained in this story is this “You should have full faith in the wisdom of what is happening in the Divine Factory in accordance with the will of Allah. As the reality is hidden from you, you are at a loss to understand the wisdom of what is happening, and sometimes if it appears that things are going against you, you cry out, ‘How and why has this happened’. The fact is that if the curtain be removed from the “unseen”, you would yourselves come to know that what is happening here is for the best. Even if some times it appears that something is going against you, you will see that in the end it also produces some good results for you.

Kizzy and SonnyKizzy and Sonny. Kizzy (from Kismet) was a stray kitten that found her way to our back door. I would guess our back door is the best back door for a stray to come up to! Sonny’s story is not dissimilar. While visiting the veterinarian with our two older cats, we noticed a kitten on the counter in the waiting area. Hard to miss! We learned somebody had left three kittens in a box in the parking lot the day before. With that the aid plucked a bluff colored kitten out of a waste basket full of shredded paper, and told us, “This one is spoken for!” Soon enough he was spoken for, and so Sonny comes home, learns to fly, and, becomes the central character in yet another story of serendipity.

Kismet

(Turkish from Arab., qisma, ‘share, portion’).

The allocation of whatever occurs, hence the acceptance in Islam that God determines all things: see QADAR.

fate. XIX. — Turk. — Arab. (Pers.) ?ismat portion, fate, f. ?asama divide, apportion.
kismet

fate, destiny. The word comes (in the early 19th century, via Turkish) from Arabic ?ismat ‘division, portion, lot’, from ?asama ‘to divide’.
.

Westinghouse Dharma

Explaining my research is dull compared with eliciting person’s recollections of decisive serendipities in their own life. Yesterday I surely made the set-up a bit too complicated, yet we got the meat of the inquiry soon enough. As it always happens, whether or not I am informally or formally documenting these recollections, the recounting brings to the light of day spectacular, decisive chance events.

(This inverts the fortune teller’s strategy!)

Yesterday I learned of a decisive: lark road trip passing a corporate sign reminding the ‘subjects’ of a past employer and so providing the spark to investigate job opportunities–somewhere nearby the sign itself–and then subjects are accelerated through a hiring process–as in: hired on the spot.

This led me to remark, “It’s good to keep an out for the big “W” sign, the W standing for wisdom.”


Several sources for further exploration:

1. Explorations of Fortuitous Determinents of Life Paths
Albert Bandura (1998) A Comment in response to:

2. Taming Chance – Social Science & Everyday Narratives
David L. Krantz (1998)

published in Psychological Inquiry

3. Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Perspective
Albert Bandura (2001)

4. The Structure of Serendipity
M. DeRond (2005)

Books:

Chase, Chance, and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty
James H. Austin

Luck: The Brilliant Randomness Of Everyday Life
Nicholas Rescher

Serendip at Bryn Mawr (my late mother’s alma mater-go figure)

The structure of what I term constructive fortuity has not been worked out in any robust way, to this date. In noting this, it is also true that the popular literature on serendipity is mostly a literature about luck. It has grown exponentially over the last several years. Such books tend to mystify the subject matter as much as clarify it.

My own musings and reports are always attached to this item here on the blog. Strategic Serendipity.

(It’s not a goal yet, but I would like to help derive a structural model from the qualitative reports–perhaps beginning with a taxonomy of constructive/structural elements, with these given to explicate dynamics such as micro and macro cruxes, orders of contingency, and other stuff–and not ending with formalizing the model because mathematicizing it is way beyond my abilities.)

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Hole ee Waters

Kenneth Warren

Now Available!

Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch A Guide to the Homeric Punkhole, 1980–2012 Kenneth Warren

“The title of Ken Warren’s selective and provocative history of
American poets and poetry over the past thirty years comes from an
incident partially narrated in Tom Clark’s Charles Olson. The Allegory
of a Poet’s Life [318] in which Gregory Corso makes a disruptive
appearance in Olson’s afternoon seminar on myth, 1964. I say
“partially” because as a member of that class and a witness to the
events of that afternoon it seems to me Clark omits a few important
facts, e.g. that after challenging the assembled students to match him
in reciting from memory lines of Shelley (or perhaps by extension any
poet) and hearing only universal silence, Corso began pointing out
with increasing intensity that “we are all on death row” and that he
was “Captain Poetry”. Finally he turned to Olson: “Aren’t I Captain
Poetry, Charles?” “Yes,” Olson replied. “Then what should I do?”
And without missing a beat Olson said calmly and with some humor,
“report for duty.” David Posner, the Curator of the Lockwood Poetry
library, never stepped into the room – the fracas happened after Corso
had fled Olson’s class. It did not then and has never since seemed to
me that Olson asked Corso to report to him, though the exchange might
be interpreted so; rather, I took Olson to mean report to Poetry.
Certainly that’s what Olson was teaching. And it’s worth mentioning
here because Ken Warren’s work over the past three decades, both as
editor and publisher of House Organ (an occasional magazine in which
some of these pieces first appeared) and as a freelance essayist and
critic outside academic writing, constitutes the sort of discipline,
dedication, and persistence which Poetry has demanded from him, not as
a maker of poems but as a friend, an ear, a receptive mind.”

– Albert Glover, editor of Letters for Origin, 1950—1956 by Charles
Olson, (Cape Goliard, 1969)

“Kenneth Warren thinks the world through the poetry of those poets who
have thought the world through their poetry. When working on Olson,
for instance, Warren travels every path opened by this multitentacled
explorer, and goes farther, with the poet, to the places he suggested
but pursued only in part. Warren is one of the few and great readers
of American poetry who accompanies poets on their missions and takes
their work to where their “sunflower wishes to go,” serving in this
way not just Poesy, but the regions Poesy herself aims for. Warren is
the philosopher-friend of poets who imagine the sublime, a fearless
companion who serves out their sentences with vigor, aplomb, and even
delight. He is a masochist, a poet, and a star.”

– Andrei Codrescu, author of Whatever Gets You Through the Night: a
Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments (Princeton, 2011)

“If you have any interest in poetry, the poetry that matters, Ken
Warren’s Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch needs to be your constant
companion. It is a critical examination of the past thirty years of
poetry ( plus some film & music), and it’s a language event in itself,
a poetic mirroring of the occasion for its writing of not only what’s
new but what’s news worthy. The list of writers, essential but too
often ignored, is impressive: Kerouac, Snyder, Corso, Wakoski, Acker,
Eshleman, Doubiago, Eigner, d. a. levy, Susan Howe, Hirschman, Oppen,
Tarn, as well as cultural figures like John Cage, Simone Weil, David
Lynch, Bo Diddley, and including the major revision of the Charles
Olson and Vincent Ferrini relationship, the importance of Jack Clarke,
teacher, scholar, poet, all set in the human context (the Homeric
subtitle) that makes even the archaic contemporary.”

– Joe Napora, author of Sentences and Bills—1917 (Wind, 2011)

“If Kafka is correct, when he says that impatience is mankind’s worst
sin, then the high accomplishment of Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch can
be taken as a lesson in virtue. The divine madness that stirs at the
surface of these pages, written across a span of thirty years, recalls
Coltrane’s intent “to start in the middle… and move both directions at
once.” Here, those directions point to Olson, on one end, and to Jack
Clarke (the author’s teacher at Buffalo, along with Bob Creeley), on
the other. More than an extraordinary taikyoku that reviews certain
“avant-garde” trends in American writing—from Reagan to the Tea
Party—the present collection, arranged in a-chronological sequence and
organized along a fourfold axis, shows a mind in the process of
self-discovery—at the intersection (“hole”) of what Henry Corbin, in
his writing on Ismaili gnosis, has described as linear (“Punk”) time
and cyclical (“Homeric”) time. The effect is like reading Jung’s
recently (re-)published Red Book, and finding echoes in it of Pere
Ubu’s Datapanik in the Year Zero.”

– André Spears, author of Fragments from Mu (A Sequel) (First Intensity, 2007)

Born in New York City in 1953, Kenneth Warren is the editor of House Organ, a quarterly letter of poetry and prose. His two collections of poetry are Rock/the Boat: Book One (Oasis Press, 1998) and The Wandering Boy (Flo Press, 1979).

· Paperback: 460 pages $16

· Binding: Perfect-Bound?

· Publisher: BlazeVOX

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-063-7

I’ll have more to say about my close friend’s hot-off-the-presses opus after I wander through its lands.

The function of active imagination in Analytical Psychology provides intuitive impetus for my artistic representation of persons qualified to be those with whom I have acquired a lot of shared soulful experience. Ken qualifies. Here’s his symbolic totem.

Archetypal Totem for KW

Archetypal Totem (on a active imagination and in-sight of Ken Warren

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The Untamed Monad in the Happy World

Scholem-Corbin-VirginiaStreet

extremely rare photo of Gershom Scholem & Henry Corbin loving time on Virginia Street, Lakewood, Ohio

But if the “root” and possibility of Declaration always goes back to the topology of Being itself, what fundamentally Declaration “sees” that authorizes its hazarding concrete steps toward the possibility field it originates and seeks to get underway, is in every case Being itself. The topological feature of Being that is relevant here, would be its propensity to take on appearances. …one can profess neither Thomism, Scotism, nor Augustinianism, and yet ‘valorize’ these theological universes positively, and, without taking up one’s abode in them, keep an abode for them in oneself…

The more perceptions and representations of the universe each monad integrates, the more it unfolds its own perfection and differs from every other. (Chuck Stein – Parimenides Project; Notes on some passages from Henry Corbin’s Avicenna and the Visionary Recital)

Sacrament of Heresy
The Sacrament of Heresy

The Village has set sail for the future, like all of unanchored America, set sail or set adrift, take your choice. A visit to the Village always provokes a crisis of nostalgia in those who have moved on but do not want the Village to move on. (Herbert Gold The Age of Happy Problems)

KW sends my way a deep feed. Miller hails from that great Wood shed of outsider genius. What Herbert Gold did for the outsider in the Wood with Birth of a Hero in 1951 Miller is doing now with Atrocity Parade. Michael A. Miller describes his work:

Atrocity Parade amplifies the sadistic trivia of day-to-day existence. It’s the hymnal and prayer book of society’s heretics. In its angst-riddled pages, post-goths, thrashing bohos, crumbly artqueens, liberal-arts grad students, and all other phyla of overly-ripe, choleric day-job hostages will find asylum.

Commentary. An iconoclastic notion of an active, and interactive urban anthropology could propose that the most determined modes of inquiry would both tease and dig out, first, the overt story, and, second, the covert story. Thirdly, in driving this inquiry beyond and beneath these promotional tales the goal, to borrow from Stein, would be to appear in the possibility field. So: the investigator arrives, body and soul, in the field where the possibilities, say–creative kinds, are unfolding in real time.

This is really to invoke anthropological inquiry as praxis, yet without carrying into the act of enjoining the field, any pretense of objectivity. Another way to put this is to suggest the observer is landed in the poetic Topos; is faced with the fleshy, pulsing, ‘outerward’ cast manifestation of the inner dealing. Asylum here is hideaway, shelter, and possesses both outer and inner wards.

To play with this forming projection would be to sit in a window seat, or on a public bench, or at the park’s picnic table, and intently watch the scurrying about of patients and personnel–as if sidewalk and street were hallway. Them you could ask, as Miller has done.

The, a, City’s deep creative life, in someway, always implicates a daring observer willing to participate. The Sacrament of Heresy seems to me to surface an inevitability, a necessary fluid–moist in the archetypal sense–turning of the conscious citizen.


hat tip to Ken Warren for the pointer to Herbert Gold. I sense with Gold a northcoast Lafcadio Hearn type.) I discovered, evidently, Gold is still alive and has turned or will turn eighty-seven this year. At the bottom of the brief Wikipedia article are links to recent writing on the web.

I love this:

“So I guess you haven’t read one of my actual texts.”

“Not personally. Like I explained, I’ve got a lot on my plate these days.”

That was okay with me; or at least okay enough while, like the gathering clouds of the thunderstorms of my Midwestern boyhood, rage accumulated in my vengeful heart—this is the typical inept poetic strophe of a confirmed author who doesn’t need precision anymore because he has already arrived in the marketplace. Bewitched, Bothered, Begoogled; November 2004; News From the Republic of Letters.

Gold is onto, here, one of the primary rationales for seeking stories in the hideaways.

The excerpt from Stein comes from an email Ken offered, January 5, 2006, about visionary knowledge platforms.

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Brief, Not Very Olsonian Reflections: The Prize

On Saturday I was chosen to cap a conference, Soul In Buffalo; A three-day free conference aimed to celebrate and explore Charles Olson’s legacy and extension through A Curriculum of the Soul.

This honored closing position expressed a counter-intuitive programming choice, because I am not an Olsonian. Yet, obviously, since I wasn’t going to weigh in at the end with poetry, poetics, research, or scholarly fireworks, I was, nevertheless, given the opportunity to bring some other set of capabilities to bear on the proceedings.

What I could do and what I did sort of manage to do is bring the conference to a close on wings of experience and play and collaborative grappling with a very simple creative problem. Taking this creative problem first, I asked the group to participate in a squareONE tool, Hunting and Gathering, and use it to bring several explicit things into greater focus, and, as well, bring whatever the process might evoke into their collaborative field of experiential play and creativity.

The more conceptual group playing with the Gods

I will tender the explicit things momentarily. What might of happened references what is my usual way of facilitating Hunting and Gathering. This usually happens within a slice of time able to support my gentle guidance of an experiential process to its important goals. Those goals exist on a continuum stretched on one end between learning with enough gravity to support testing or further experimentation, and, on the other end, learning which is galvanizing to the point of an a-ha.

Yet, this time out the time slice ended up being compressed to about an hour. As Idries Shah once put it, “time takes time.” So, with this lessened time I quickly had to make a few strategic decisions. This has happened on a few occasions in the past, but I have never intentionally turned a finely tuned process into a grand experiment–as I ended up doing on Saturday.

I framed, (or ‘primed,’) the group’s experience by introducing several factors, in the form of musings. I told the group I wasn’t an Olsonian, but had come to this conference by virtue of remarkable serendipities having to do with encounters with friends-who-were Olsonians. Then I very briefly pointed out that soul might have something to do with creating together via relationships, and using as its raw stuff the discoveries found in exploration. I hoped the experience I was offering would drive some into the experience of soul in real-time. And, my personalization brought up what seem to me an essential feature of soulful working together: its human contingencies are fragile, and yet, are loving too.

(I recognize here my prejudice too: deep soul is very human, rather than very esoteric!)

The sharpest suggestion I made was this: whatever learning comes to happen may be referenced in his or her reflection on a personal intention I had them generate. However, in my strategic alteration of the process I understood going in to it, I would never learn anything about their learning.

The love network group working and playing.

What unfolded was pretty damn amazing, even by my experienced standards. I do not debrief my work for all the world to read and see, but it is enough to tell of a quickening vibration that rose like heat waves off a desert.

The Prize.

I had split the group into two sections and both worked on their collaborative graphic. The differentiation of approach, as I felt it and as I mused over the ‘consequence of approach,’ was very telling about challenges not much spoken of in the two days of stunning contributions I witnessed. The general challenge is about how various bodies of work come to persist, be sustained, grow, and, in the soulful turn, come to have positive effects on the growth of consciousness as this is individually rendered in the alchemical cooker of devoted, unsparing, deeply humanized, relationship.

oiled snake
psychedelic reverb
straight no chaser

spot your choices

still have to live
alive among
each other

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Soul In Buffalo November 18, 19, 20

Charles Olson

Charles Olson Teaching Spirals

A three-day free conference will celebrate and explore Charles Olson’s legacy and extension through A Curriculum of the Soul, a series of poetic essays published as fascicles by Albert Glover and John C. (Jack) Clarke.

Riffs, Research and Resistance

With Albert Glover, Daniel Zimmerman, Michael Bylebyl, David Tirrell, Michael Boughn, B. Cass Clarke, Victor Coleman, Steve McCaffery, Stephen Baraban, John Roche, Andre Spears, Joen Napora, Stephen Ellis, Alan Casline and Kenneth Warren.

Nov. 18 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. Poetry Room at UB, 420 Capen Hall

Nov. 19 & 20 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. Karpeles Manuscript Museum, 453 Porter Ave.

squareONE toolmakers, as in yours truly, will be providing the tool Hunting and Gathering and using it to go playing with gods–in an experiential playing, and digging, and reaching, for soul; as the last event on Saturday. (See below)

Schedule – Soul In Buffalo

Thursday November 18 – Poetry Room at UB – 420 Capen Hall

11 – 11:40 A CURRICULUM OF THE SOUL: AN INTRODUCTION – Albert Glover

11:40 – 12:00 A CURRICULUM OF THE SOUL: AN ACCOUNT – B. Cass Clarke

12:00 – 12:45 THE COST BENEFIT RATIO: AN INQUIRY – Albert Glover,
Pat Glover, and B. Cass Clarke. Moderated by Alan Casline

12:45 – 1 Break

1 – 1:20 WHAT IS A SOUL AND WHY MIGHT IT NEED A CURRICULUM – Michael Boughn

1:20 – 2:00 IN THE OFFING – Daniel Zimmerman

2:00 – 2:40 PERSON AND TEXT: A CONVERSATION – Michael Boughn, Daniel
Zimmerman, Michael Bylebyl and Victor Colman. Moderated by John Roche.

3:00 – 3:10 POETRY IN FATHAR – David Tirrell

3:10 – 4:00 READING FROM A CURRICULUM OF THE SOUL – Albert Glover,
Daniel Zimmerman, Michael Bylebyl, David Tirrell, Michael Boughn

Friday November 19 – Karpeles Manuscript Museum – 453 Porter Avenue

11 – 11:30 THE MUSHROOM – Albert Glover

11:30 -12 ROOTDRINKER RESONANCE – Alan Casline

12 – 12:30 – JACK CLARKE”S HOMEWORK – Charles Palau

12:30 – 1:00 WRITING THE CUR(S)E: THE MISSING PROJECT IN PROJECTIVE
VERSE – Joe Napora

1:00 – 1:30 Break

1:30 – 2:00 BRITISH SOUL AND ITS CURRICULUM(S): NOTES ON OLSON AT
KENT – André Spears

2:00 – 2:30 A CURRICULUM OF THE SOUL: JOHN THORPE – Stephen Ellis

2:30 – 3:00 NATURE AS SCRIPT – John Martone

3 – 3:30 OLSON, MAYAN, ETHNOPOETICS, LANGUAGE SYSTEMS AND SAINT
AUGUSTINE – Steve McCaffery

3:30 – 4:00 OPEN SPACE DISCUSSION – Steve Tills

Saturday November 20 – Karpeles Manuscript Museum – 453 Porter Avenue

11 – 11:30 WHAT’S UP IN A NUMBER, 23 SKIDOO, AND GERRIT LANSING’S
ANALYTIC PSYCHOLOGY – Robert Podgurski

11:30 -12:00 BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND TA’WIL: ROBERT CREELEY, JACK CLARKE
AND POETICS IN BUFFALO AFTER OLSON – Kenneth Warren

12:00 – 12:30 JACK BE NIMBLE: ON JACK CLARKE’S GLOUCESTER TRANSLATIONS
– Stephen Baraban

12:30 – 1:00 DUNCAN AND JOEL, THE ECOLOGY OF THE SOUL – David Landrey

1:00 -1:30 Break

1:30 – 2:00 ONE HERO: APOLLONIUS OF TYANA – IMPLICATIONS FOR THE
SOUL: A CONVERSATION – Kitty Jospé

2:00 – 3:30 PLAYING WITH THE GODS: A MOMENT FOR EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING
IN A CURRICULUM OF THE SOUL – Stephen Calhoun

3:30 – 4:00 OPEN SPACE MUSIC WRAP-UP – Kevin Doyle

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The Sting And its Habitus

The election September 7, in northeastern Ohio, “NEO,” marked a dramatic turning point in the region’s model for self-governance. A new county charter was passed in 2009. It was a rush job, and its opponents either argued to retain the current, corruptable, structure, or, study the issue of optimizing county governance longer. Ironically, a prominent exponent from the latter group, Ed Fitzgerald, won the Democratic slot for county executive.

The new set up is an experiment. How many Cuyahoga County residents voted to bring their candidates to the final round in November? …something like 17%.


src: Visualizing the Invisible. towards an urban space (Read & Pinilo, eds.)

One of the ways I enjoy myself is to drive around Cleveland, sometimes get out and walk around, stick my noise in an unobtrusive way in the various neighborhood, especially those of Cleveland proper. I was raised on Cleveland suburban east side. After living 18 years elsewhere, I came back for good in 1992. One of the first things I took up upon my return was visiting all the local libraries. Cuyahoga County is home to two of the country’s largest library systems, and, one of its best single suburban libraries, (in Lakewood.) So, I got around. For the first time in my life, upon coming back, I acquainted myself–deeply–with the “lay of the land.” I dug into the history. (There’s an excellent compendium of historical and biographic articles about Cleveland too. I read the hardback, but the materials are online.) Later, between 2004 and 2006, with Ken Warren and others in Lakewood mentoring me on new ways to look at the urban space, I became a student of the, (if you will,) the grain of the city.

When I wander around residential neighborhoods, one question dominates: ‘What do the folks who live here do for a living?’ This is directed at the individual houses. In each house lives people, so what do they do? Garage sale season is petering out, yet the garage sales provide a good opportunity to learn a little bit about what people do.

I mention this because, for me, a city is a place where people, in effect, live to be able to do.

My usual soft response to reading the bright ideas for development promoted by candidates and institutions is to wonder if the authors have any reasonable ideas about what is the current baseline. In other words, do they have any idea what people are currently living to do? Here?

Cleveland has been de-industrializing for fifty+ years. I listened to the two city club debates, one for each party. It was depressing. I didn’t expect any of the candidates to speak directly to the causes of the region’s predicament. I’m not even confident the ambitious men and women know much about those causes. One thing I feel is that the corrupt spoils system is the tip of the iceberg of a legitimized spoils systems, and, this was the result of failed neo-liberal experiments promoted over decades by lots of big fishes swimming in the shrinking pond.

The situation is nowadays straight-forward: what do you do when you know your region is going to keep on shrinking? One thing is, you can figure out how to do so humanely, if not elegantly. For example, if you acknowledge this fundamental fact, then you have a lot of houses to tear down and a lot of parks and urban farms to build. Example: the transportation infrastructure is no longer commensurate with the current dynamics.

“Part of what you have to do is think about ways to use land that help improve the quality of life but don’t involve actual building.” Alan Mallach, an urban planning expert at the Brookings Institution, How to shrink a city. Not every great metropolis is going to make a comeback. Planners consider some radical ways to embrace decline.

The sting in history’s tail is the profound unreliability of the past as a test for the future. “Trauma” via Post-traumatic.urbanism.com


See also:

Urban Plight: Vanishing Upward Mobility – Joel Kotkin

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Open eyes and own the civic space

Term it the Observer Paradigm.

It’s multiplying.

Fathership: Lakewood Observer Lakewood, Ohio
Progeny:
The Heights Observer Cleveland & University Heights, ohio
Parma Observer Parma, Ohio
Collinwood Observer Collinwood in Cleveland, Ohio
Euclid Observer Euclid, Ohio

soon (?)
University Circle Observer, University Circle in Cleveland, ohio

This new vision of time and space, which will be the theoretical
basis of future constructions, is still imprecise and will
remain so until experimentation with patterns of behavior has
taken place in cities specifically established for this purpose,
cities assembling–in addition to the facilities necessary for
basic comfort and security–buildings charged with evocative
power, symbolic edifices representing desires, forces and
events, past, present and to come. A rational extension of the
old religious systems, of old tales, and above all of
psychoanalysis, into architectural expression becomes more and
more urgent as all the reasons for becoming impassioned disappear.
Formulary for a New Urbanism (Formulary for a New Urbanism . Gilles Ivain
Internationale Situationniste/ #1 1953)

(Okay, maybe not so much the psychoanalytic part…)

Better: “Residency on the ley line allows for “the vertical circuit termed “intuition” to walk-in, drop-in to the epiphanic foot traffic, which pedals the metals of electric mojo circuits plugged into water mark.” (KW. March 2005)

urban poetics
Urban Poetics isn’t intended to be straightforward. It’s intended to be curved out of time. That there is a place right now for an imaginal apprehension of an urban lifeworld has to do with a practical exemplification of culmination. This reflects a concrete tale. The tale begins with a fifty and fifty-one; a meeting of 101 years. A meeting drums-in-hand around the fire dancer with the snake dancing underneath. There is in all of this the necessary memetic triangulation.

The thrust of the begun urban poetics is initiated in a dialogical dao. The glossary refines terms and new ways of transmitting spontaneous intuitions about living in the spiral domains of Lakewood and the cosmos. Seers and Sirians envelops longer effusians and miscellanies. Sound breeches wail collages of communal, civic, concrescent, oceanic audio.

Urban poetics is aimed to surprise and trigger evocative consternation. Here the eonic Lakewood teaching story is comprised and busted through the waves. ( from a draft of the never instituted Visionary Alignment Blog. circa 2006)

Situationist tribal poetics.

18: Ken explains it to Puck; kind of…

[Another party is in progress. It’s costume party. To the side of a stocked buffet, are a man dressed in a Bishop’s frock with cap, and a man in a brown rabbit suit, with the head held under his arm. The party is in full swing.]

Puck: I’m worried about him. The play seems headed to overload. We’ve instantiated a matrical lens;
stability-mastery; individuality-belonging being one such lens.

Ken: Let’s just say the he is on the throne. The Virgin Dirt Bag of Reason tries to dethrone him, each production time, no less, with skeptical probes into the city’s faith in the virtue of its underpart – the brand. The Virgin Dirt Bag of Reason persists in trying to subvert influence of Charis’s passion for the city into the critical circuit of Carthage.

Puck: Sure, I get it. It’s like Burroughs. You know the quote, “Animals talk. They don’t write. Now a wise old rat may know a lot about traps and poison but he cannot write a text book on DEATH TRAPS IN YOUR WAREHOUSE for the Reader’s Digest with tactics for ganging up on digs and ferrets and taking care of wise guys who stuff steel wool up our holes.”

Ken: Yes, consider this. Life conditions are, indeed, changing, here and elsewhere, some for better, others for worser. As life conditions change one meme cannot be co-opted by another’s message and playbook. Transcend and include is generally recommended. Easier said than done. To do so consciously and avoid blind spots is risky and near impossible.

Puck: He’s in a fix. The deep point of creative destruction and re-sanctification–besides realism cognizing the mysterium; being obedient–is, as you know, one can’t skip the steps the natural order and its aspirations.

Ken: Right-o! A dictator may be neither necessary nor necessarily deposed by the old hippie guard. But history is filled with cries of betrayal. That’s the reality of life on the planet of the apes. Every action is an OP from the horizon of psyche and politics which just doesn’t go away.

Puck: Basically…self-evident, right? But I wonder if Bear can take much more. He’s more than popular. Too popular. I’m…worried.

Ken: Why worry? The mandarin has no skin in the game of the chthonic conservative ta’wil that pushes back from the black hole of consciousness. All will be well. The worm turns…

Puck: Okay…alright, I get that…sure. I believe it is so, so I believe the fact of churn is the wolf in the bathroom. We might gently pull at the different threads but we would be re-raveling too: the indira web of the odyssey. For me it’s auspicious mutual collusion as you say joking the cosmic mean.

Ken: Yeah, the perception of negativity isn’t anything but a correct inference made from my push back. That it’s fleshed out incorrectly isn’t surprising. You avoid this so I’m interested –always– in your counsel, kimmosabe. After all, the second and third order strategic locus comes about when we animate.

from unpublished or produced screenplay, Tao Job.

Making a difference in the civic space using language is difficult. For one thing, in the experiential recipe is Shadow, and, in its transmutation to letter there is descriptive cloaking.

The standard notion of the way fantasy works within ideology is that of a fantasy-scenario which obfuscates the true horror of a situation: instead of a full rendering of the antagonisms which traverse our society, we indulge in the notion of society as an organic Whole, kept together by forces of solidarity and co-operation … Here also, however, it is much more productive to look for this notion of fantasy where one would not expect to find if in marginal and, again, apparently purely utilitarian situations. Let us simply recall the safety instructions prior to the takeoff of an aeroplane – are they not sustained by a phantasmic scenario of how a possible plane crash will look? After a gentle landing on water (miraculously, it is always supposed to happen on water!), each of the passengers puts on the life-jacket and, as on a beach toboggan, slides into the water and takes a swim, like a nice collective lagoon holiday experience under the guidance of an experienced swimming instructor. Is not this ‘gentrifying’ of a catastrophe (a nice soft landing, stewardesses in dance-like style graciously pointing towards the ‘Exit’ signs…) also ideology at its purest. (SLAVOJ ZIZEK, The Plague of Fantasies)

Walk into the fire? Follow the worry to its source?

Way back in 2005/06 I thought there could be a workaround. At the time, it seemed possible to send journalist researchers into the community and task them with the project of differentiating the tribal matrix, and its verticality (history) and householder horizons (survival strategies.) Then I tasked myself and then I fell off the stone!

It could of looked like this:

Now, so many years later, the impossible energies have been tamed and become procreative. Initial experiments in development,

have become templated and scaleable.

The action, for me, is on the civic forums attached to the civic journalism. This has been replicated at The Height Observer, but not at the other Observer sites. I don’t know why. In the exchange of experience and affect and non-anonymous poetics the civic heart plugs into its sanguine flow.

Still, as the experiment multiplies, and this somewhat well kept secret sustains its pulse, the prospect for bottom-up civic coherence matures.

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Mining Under the Common Ground

Separate truths
It is misleading — and dangerous — to think that religions are different paths to the same wisdom [excerpt Boston.com April 25, 2010] Of course, those who claim that the world’s religions are different paths up the same mountain do not deny the undeniable fact that they differ in some particulars. Obviously, Christians do not go on pilgrimage to Mecca, and Muslims do not practice baptism. Religious paths do diverge in dogma, rites, and institutions. To claim that all religions are basically the same, therefore, is not to deny the differences between a Buddhist who believes in no god, a Jew who believes in one God, and a Hindu who believes in many gods. It is to deny that those differences matter, however. From this perspective, whether God has a body (yes, say Mormons; no, say Muslims) or whether human beings have souls (yes, say Hindus; no, say Buddhists) is of no account because, as Hindu teacher Swami Sivananda writes, “The fundamentals or essentials of all religions are the same. There is difference only in the nonessentials.”

This is a lovely sentiment but it is untrue, disrespectful, and dangerous.

The gods of Hinduism are not the same as the orishas of Yoruba religion or the immortals of Daoism. To pretend that they are is to refuse to take seriously the beliefs and practices of ordinary religious folk who for centuries have had no problem distinguishing the Nicene Creed of Christianity from the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism from the Shahadah of Islam. It is also to lose sight of the unique beauty of each of the world’s religions. Stephen Prothero is a religion professor at Boston University. This article is adapted from his new book, ”God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World–and Why Their Differences Matter.”

This essay of Professor Prothero is amazing in a bad way. My criticism is simple: there’s a substantial and subtle literature concerned with the claim he’s arguing against, yet none of it enters into his argument. This huge hole swallows the glib attack he issues in this essay, an attack careless in its presentation of categories and domains, and, an attack launched against more than a few straw men.

It’s as if Prothero feels he can fool the discerning reader. Normally I would dig some and see if the author is through-and-through a charlatan. Here my guess is that he isn’t, but not from anything found in his intentionally misdirected essay.

He writes here about very intriguing questions. In comparing religions with one another, in what ways does this show similarities? What are those similarities about? Should the evidence show that some, or all, religions overlap in particular ways, are there, then, valid generalizations to be inferred from the specifics of any overlap?

Furthermore, such an inquiry about common features is itself framed by a variety of disciplines, and each brings different interpretive and discipline-bound practices to bear on the question. Outside of this there is also a worthy literature brought forth by non-academic experts, and, as well, there is also a long history of this very inquiry. One aspect of this history is that it evolved from the point where specific religions come into contact with each other, and thus was evoked by the curiosity of some religious persons about the possibility of commonality. This comes about long before the frameworks of modern academic disciplines existed.

It is also obvious: there is a fundamental issue begged by any theism, no matter how particularized a theism is in practice or by a its founding assumptions. This is simple to articulate: if there is a God of “All” is not this God then a God of all spirituality, irrespective of whether a particular spirituality is granted primacy or is heretical? In other words, if God of this sort does in fact exist, this God would ultimately be the God of religionist, heretic, and atheist alike. From this, if this is true, one would expect commonalities.

There are four modern perspectives, among many, which frame different possibilities for important, maybe crucial, inquiries into commonality. One is the Analytic Psychology, given by Carl Jung. Here spirituality is viewed as a phenomena of introspective consciousness. From this, (largely) personal religious experience and development is the nexus for an inquiry into, as-it-were, possibly like-minded objectives of self-realization. There is in this, a prospect that human consciousness, as a matter of its psychological constitution, in specific keys lights upon objectives that are similar or identical, yet only does this in the precise domains where this phenomena may exist, and this is located within these precise domains in specific religious traditions.

Two is the integral perspective on human development, given its most detailed elaboration by Ken Wilber; (and Wilber’s elaboration following mostly from the thoughtful work of Jean Gebser.) Integral thought expands the nexus of inquiry along a spectrum of developmental lines. Similar to Analytic Psychology, it is encumbered by fundamental assumptions about the universal nature of human aspiration. Taken as an outlook, (and “in-look,”) the Integral perspective provides a loose framework for investigating procedures for self-realization–procedures embedded in particular instrumentalities found in different spiritual and religious practices.

Third is anthropology, a modern discipline geared toward differentiation of human phenomena. Commonalities would be rigorously qualified and vigorously contested as a matter of methodology, yet, the idea that commonalities could be universal would remain a worthwhile anthropological hypothesis. This is especially so if such a hypothesis is unfolded in the context of evolutionary anthropology. Here the framing starts from the idea that religions may be dramatically different, but that human nature is not also wholly different.

Fourth, and is the argument posed by Frithhof Schuon, and echoed by a specific ilk of traditionalists and (somewhat) outsider experts, such as Mercea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, Jacob Needleman, Rudolph Steiner, and others. Schuon described the over-arching aspect (and nexus for inquiry,) in the title of his book, The Transcendent Unity of Religion. I going to gloss the deep subtlety of Schuon’s argument and suggest his philosophical perspective basically holds this: where there is religion, there is also found a domain of aspirational practice where experience of the deep relationship between man and divine cosmos necessarily abides the idea that the cosmos is set up to evoke this relationship. It could be said the nexus of inquiry that necessarily follows from there being a God of All, is such–that a universality of religion in this aspirational domain is necessarily entailed by this primary assumption. Thus, given that there is a God of All and everything, we might expect to find similarities ordinated by God’s, if you will, “set up.”

(Schuon is superior to Karen Armstrong, with respect to being a source for beginning an inquiry at the abode of this nexus.)

***

Prothero doesn’t introduce any of these four vectors for inquiry into his didactic essay. For me, in not doing so, his argument is damaged out of the gate. If we break down the entire spectrum of human religious behavior, it could be incumbent upon an investigator to account for the behaviors oriented around the idea of the unity–in precise domains–of some/most/all religions.

But Prothero is mostly disingenuous in employing straw men and his attempt to wrangle an argument out of several category errors, the most grotesque of which is found in his silly statement, “To pretend that they are is to refuse to take seriously” (yada yada.) Since the point of finding similarity is to differentiate similarity from that which is dissimilar, there isn’t any ground to be gained by pretending that subtle arguments for similarity revolve around thinking different Gods (or theisms,) are said to be the same. This isn’t to say that there aren’t people who think this, its just that this is a definitive straw man.

(To the side of all this there is a contest of theisms. The ripe question for proponents of a distinctive theism within the context of the various Ambrahamic religions is simply enough, for example, ‘do you, as a Christian mystic pray to a different God than the God the Muslim prays to?’ In this the possibility of a negative answer holds another variation on the prime question about sameness and similarity. On the other hand, this is another way of wondering to what extent God owns a home team!)

The meta-inquiry is one concerned with a description, differentiation, and conceptualization of domains of human religious behavior and phenomena. This would work to tightly qualify the domains and then sort out apparent similarities. For me, anthropology, especially given the lens of an evolutionary framing, is the least inflicted by confirmation bias and tautological precepts. Still, Schuon and Dr. Jung opus, at a minimum, are worthwhile for their sophistication and depth, even if there is (for me) no slam dunk.

As it clearly appears when considering the fundamental question of the Divine Will as with other major instances of metaphysical exposition and spiritual expression, Schuon’s esoteric perspective can be best characterized as a science and discipline of objectivity that situates each reality at its own adequate ontological level and within its overarching metaphysical or cosmological context. In doctrinal as in methodical matters, Schuon’s thrust lies in a lucid perception of realities that considers both their metaphysical and archetypical meaning as well as the specificity of their plane of manifestation. Thus, in pure metaphysics, the esoterist avoids the pitfalls of confessional, anthropomorphic, and moralist expediency and sublimity by focusing on the dimensions, modes, and degrees of the theophanic unfolding of the Real. He does not confuse metaphysical realities with their partial or distorted contours as envisaged through human biases, nor does he project the limitations of human moral categories onto the Divine Order. At the same time, he perceives the roots of all spiritual, aesthetic, and moral phenomena in the Supreme, and he accounts for their meaning on the basis of the Divine, thereby describing the multileveled and multifaceted Unity of Being. In spiritual matters alike, esoterism reaches to the essential through the veil of superimpositions and accretions, while elucidating the partial legitimacy of mystical emphases, excesses, and subjective or collective detours. As such, esoterism is nothing less than the most direct and comprehensive language of the Self. jean-Baptiste Aymard-Patrick Laude, Frithof Schuon, life and Teaching; 2004 SUNY Press)

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Diplomacy


DIPLOMACY
It had been ordered that the execution should take place in the garden of the yashiki (1). So the man was taken there, and made to kneel down in a wide sanded space crossed by a line of tobi-ishi, or stepping-stones, such as you may still see in Japanese landscape-gardens. His arms were bound behind him. Retainers brought water in buckets, and rice-bags filled with pebbles; and they packed the rice-bags round the kneeling man,-- so wedging him in that he could not move. The master came, and observed the arrangements. He found them satisfactory, and made no remarks.

Suddenly the condemned man cried out to him:–

“Honored Sir, the fault for which I have been doomed I did not wittingly commit. It was only my very great stupidity which caused the fault. Having been born stupid, by reason of my Karma, I could not always help making mistakes. But to kill a man for being stupid is wrong,– and that wrong will be repaid. So surely as you kill me, so surely shall I be avenged; — out of the resentment that you provoke will come the vengeance; and evil will be rendered for evil.”…

If any person be killed while feeling strong resentment, the ghost of that person will be able to take vengeance upon the killer. This the samurai knew. He replied very gently,– almost caressingly:–

“We shall allow you to frighten us as much as you please — after you are dead. But it is difficult to believe that you mean what you say. Will you try to give us some sign of your great resentment — after your head has been cut off?”

“Assuredly I will,” answered the man.

“Very well,” said the samurai, drawing his long sword; — “I am now going to cut off your head. Directly in front of you there is a stepping-stone. After your head has been cut off, try to bite the stepping-stone. If your angry ghost can help you to do that, some of us may be frightened… Will you try to bite the stone?”

“I will bite it!” cried the man, in great anger,– “I will bite it! — I will bite” —

There was a flash, a swish, a crunching thud: the bound body bowed over the rice sacks,– two long blood-jets pumping from the shorn neck; — and the head rolled upon the sand. Heavily toward the stepping-stone it rolled: then, suddenly bounding, it caught the upper edge of the stone between its teeth, clung desperately for a moment, and dropped inert.

None spoke; but the retainers stared in horror at their master. He seemed to be quite unconcerned. He merely held out his sword to the nearest attendant, who, with a wooden dipper, poured water over the blade from haft to point, and then carefully wiped the steel several times with sheets of soft paper… And thus ended the ceremonial part of the incident.

For months thereafter, the retainers and the domestics lived in ceaseless fear of ghostly visitation. None of them doubted that the promised vengeance would come; and their constant terror caused them to hear and to see much that did not exist. They became afraid of the sound of the wind in the bamboos,– afraid even of the stirring of shadows in the garden. At last, after taking counsel together, they decided to petition their master to have a Segaki-service (2) performed on behalf of the vengeful spirit.

“Quite unnecessary,” the samurai said, when his chief retainer had uttered the general wish… “I understand that the desire of a dying man for revenge may be a cause for fear. But in this case there is nothing to fear.”

The retainer looked at his master beseechingly, but hesitated to ask the reason of the alarming confidence.

“Oh, the reason is simple enough,” declared the samurai, divining the unspoken doubt. “Only the very last intention of the fellow could have been dangerous; and when I challenged him to give me the sign, I diverted his mind from the desire of revenge. He died with the set purpose of biting the stepping-stone; and that purpose he was able to accomplish, but nothing else. All the rest he must have forgotten… So you need not feel any further anxiety about the matter.”

— And indeed the dead man gave no more trouble. Nothing at all happened.

Retold by Lafcadio Hearn – Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things
source: Project Gutenberg (full text)

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