A Space Without A Goal
Sixteen
It's steam engine time come steam engine time.
It's time.
The web's a symbol. A symbol that it's time.
Let go.
Try Writing Space by Jay David Bolter, ISBN 0-8058-0428-5, available directly from the publishers, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in New York. Especially the final chapters. It resists the aphorism treatment. I've tried. Too much. Too rich. Some of the wisest thinkers rate that book as one of the very best. A little expensive, and not easy to get hold of. Michael Joyce wrote somewhere that Jay David Bolter - a classicist who writes about how the fabric of made interconnectedness, hypertext, changes the way we think (he does rather tend to mix things!) - is a gentle man - supporting evidence that serious thinkers thinking along coherent lines have been following a gentle path.
Try Writing Space. Jay writes in a style that's easy to read, too.
Intelligence, highly awakened, is intuition. Gentler thinkers are more intuitive.
If you follow your intuition, you follow truth.
The truth's gentle, as it happens.
Intuition is a sense of what feels "right", whether you're teaching tai-chi or producing U2.
"[Bolter's thesis] is that the way we organize our writing space is the way we come to organize our thoughts, and in time becomes the way which we think the world itself must be organized." - Brian Eno
Everything's connected.
Try Kevin Kelly's Outta Control.
"Evolution is a technological, mathematical, informational, and biological process rolled into one. It could almost be said to be a law of physics, a principle that reigns over all created multitudes, whether they have genes or not." - Kevin Kelly
Kev gets it. So does Ogilvy, de Kerkhove, Barlow, Ray, de Landa, Hillis, Abraham, Sheldrake, Levy, Varela, Harman, Pribram and Wilber, to name a few. The same jigsaw. Different pieces.
Mike Heim, who wrote "The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality," teaches tai-chi.
One sage describes the people he knows, who "get it", as having a "look" in their eyes. An alertness.
To exist, share.
Derrick de Kerkhove's Skin of Culture, ISBN I-895897-45-9. An easy read. Cool guy, too. He's a Professor in the Department of French and Director of the McLuhan Progam in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. He's perhaps further along than the old guy.
YA might skip Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine. Fat and impenetrable. To precis: All is One.
"Living Without A Goal" took me two reads. Found it tough. It's a whole book on this idea. Big idea to get your head round. Found Kevin tough, too. They're gentle people writing big, intelligent books that tie the pieces together. Describing the tend toward the sublime is tough. It's a big idea, a change in perception in reality.
Good news. The gentlest people have been the one's talking about how interconnectedness is upon us.
A sense of intuition is a sense of what is gentlest.
A hiccup. You gotta want what's healthiest for all, for your intuition to work.
Your intuition won't connect you to a "fragmented" reality.
Separateness is meaningless.
Your sense of intuition won't help you hurt others. In other words, it won't help you hurt yourself. All is flow.
To be intuitive, be gentle. To be gentle, be intuitive.
The being is the doing.
Be gentle.
The center is empty.
Everybody's different. Be yourself.
Intuition is a sense of the truth.
Let go. The truth is within us all.
The web is a vacuum.
And everything tends toward the sublime.
Let go.
Mix it.
Chaos is good for ya.
Let go.
To exist, share.
I'm prepared to look stupid.
Why?
To exist, share.
We're all symbols.
We are defined by our relationships. We are connected to our destiny.
Exist. Share.
Let go.
If you "get it", you have a responsibility to help others get it. There's no need to lecture anyone. Simply be kind. Be cool.
There appears to be a huge generation gap when it comes to getting to grips with this. The biggest I've ever seen. Just about everyone who gets it is saying all but a few get it once they're outta their twenties. And they mean almost no one.
Most thinkers are looking at the "wrong" reality.
Just about everything we have been taught, is incoherent.
Be good to your fellow man. Be good to all things.
There's nothing magic about it. It's a state of mind. Cyberspace, connected mind, is a state of mind.
Be flexible.
Choose fluidity over fixity.
All is flow.
Word on the ground is that things are happening quickly.
Do not resist.
Don't fight. The fight to fight is lost.
Let go.
We don't control the order of chaos. We have no control to lose.
John Chris Jones' Design Methods, third edition, Van Nostrand Reinhold. ISBN 0 442 01182 2 UKP 34.50 PB
"I perceive now that what I call design methods, 1970 and 1980 versions, cannot progress much further without confronting a social impasse. Specialisation, that is the name of it. We have surely to pass through or round or to melt this icefield now that technologies are becoming so pervasive and so dangerous and industrial it seems to have gone wrong. Was it ever right? ...but I don't quite believe this argument. Isn't it too specialised in itself, too moralistic, and somehow divisive? ... The technologies and the social forms may be deadly but I must find a way to write this that does not put me in opposition to everyone but speaks of the whole and of the particular, of the sun and the goat, whatever that means." - John Chris Jones
Behold the resurgence of myth.
"the book was supposed to open the question of 'method' in the process of design thinking and instead was received as a canonical methodology, it became institutionalised as the way to teach design technology. Much the same misappropriation happened with christopher alexanders 'pattern language'. Specific reference to design of large-scale complex systems such as computer software. Other relevant keywords migh be cybernetics, self-regulating systems, self-reference, internal self-organisation, emergence. These themes follow through directly to jcj's later work, which takes on a much more intuitionistic, poetic, artistic approach to the same issues." - Jonathan Moberly
"i did not realise that people would see what I write as letting go but as you elaborate the idea i see that it is indeed close to what i've been thinking and doing for a long time. [NR's itals] i've not read any of the books you quote but i'm reminded of other writings (e.g. six books, or ten and particularly of john cage's writings from whom i've learnt much)." - John Chris Jones, email to Nick
"Oral people are in a condition of permanent associative thinking...Such a cognitive set-up is very conducive to analogies and myth formation. A myth can only work if it lends itself to many human situations and many interpretations without losing its basic structure." - Derrick de Kerkhove
Read Derrick. He disconnected. He sensed where to reconnect.
Myths are flexible narratives. They're easier to connect to.
A Space Without A Goal: the home of the intuitive aphorism.
We're connected, you and I. All is one.
We are all responsible.
It's easier to be responsible when you know you're a part of an interconnected universe. Goes with the turf.
Our problems only seem difficult to solve because we're judging them, and our willingness to solve them, through the wrong lens. Solve by leaving stuff alone.
Let go.
"All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." - Marx on modernity
December 4th, 1995
For Francesco