Reflection 270: Nursery Rhymes

Copyright 2012 by Steve Perrin.

We learn to engage the world around us in earliest childhood, starting in the womb when our mother is our environment, and then expanding on that beginning when we are born. Sooner or later we encounter nursery rhymes, which help us consolidate loops of engagement we have begun on our own. Take this one, for example:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.

Imagine engaging with the stars! But even though we haven’t a clue what they might be, we gape nonetheless at their splendor because they’re unlike anything else in our experience. In this case, that little star is probably the planet Venus, apt to be the most striking object in the western sky before bedtime. That point of light fills us with wonder and curiosity. As children, we aren’t likely to compare such a sight to a diamond in the sky. That would be be the voice of our culture speaking. But the salience of the sensory impression alone would arouse us, kindling consciousness at the same time so that both the image and the rhyme stay with us for a lifetime.

Mirror, mirror, tell me,
Am I pretty or plain?
Or am I downright ugly
And ugly to remain?

Shall I marry a gentleman?
Shall I marry a clown?
Or shall I marry old Knives-and-Scissors
Shouting through the town?

Here is youthful curiosity again, looking toward the future at the possibilities for engagement it might offer. The issue seems to be driven more by wonder than anxiety: what will be my lot in life when I grow up? The one approaching the mirror is asking what fate has in store for her, not what she can bring about for herself. Old Knives and Scissors would be every bit as worthy as clown or gentleman. Being pretty, plain, or ugly is not under her control; it is destiny’s call. The culture she is growing into is preparing her to accept her fate however it turns out. In the meantime, we all know that we all can affect our fates by how we choose to make ourselves happen as we go.

1. He loves me.
2. He don’t!
3. He’ll have me.
4. He won’t!
5. He would if he could.
6. But he can’t.
7. So he don’t.

The numbers here count petals being plucked from a flower. The issue is decided when the last petal is reached. This simple procedure of keying answers to a finite number of questions is a crude device meant as an aid to reviewing indeterminate issues. The point is not to settle the issue but to bring possible solutions to the forefront of attention. The benefit flows from playing with the engagement itself in a lighthearted manner as if it could be settled once and for all. Turning life decisions into simple routines is a means of dealing with underlying uncertainties.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses,
And all the king’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

This rhyme is a reminder that some engagements come to a bad end. No matter what resources you bring into play, things will never work out. Keeping in mind an image of Humpty as an egg drives home the message: some things are best scrambled.

Jack Sprat could eat no fat,
His wife could eat no lean;
And so betwixt them both, you see,
They licked the platter clean.

The message here is that complementary engagements promote harmony amid diversity. It’s OK for people to be of different persuasions if they all fit into the big picture.

If you wish to live and thrive,
Let the spider walk alive.

This rhyme embraces the engagement between people and those of the arachnid persuasion, assuming the prescriptive weight of a proverb or aphorism. Committed to memory, it reminds us at sight of a spider that it takes many creatures to build a world, including weavers of intricate webs who happen to eat insects.

A robin redbreast in a cage
Sets all heaven in a rage.

Again, the voice of conventional wisdom aimed at little ears for rote memorization as a guide to subsequent restraint.

Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday,
That was the end
Of Solomon Grundy.

This rhyme reinforces recitation of the days of the week in proper sequence by linking it to the natural order of life events. This is the old mnemonist’s trick of pegging a random list of things to an order internalized through repeated experience such as a stroll along a familiar street or the arrangement of familiar body parts. The drama and fun here come from the compression of major life events into the span of a single week, making the sequence of days all the more memorable. It helps to have all the lines end with the same sound and share the same rhythm. Ever after this rhyme is learned, engagements will seem naturally to accord with the days of the week.

Mary had a little lamb,
It’s fleece was white as snow;
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.

It followed her to school one day,
That was against the rule;
It made the children laugh and play,
To see a lamb in school.

And so the teacher turned it out,
But still it lingered near,
And waited patiently about
Till Mary did appear.

Why does the lamb love Mary so?
The eager children cry;
Why, Mary loves the lamb, you know,
The teacher did reply.

Engagements have rules, it turns out. Lambs are OK at home, but not at school. The tale is more about the lamb than Mary, but it is Mary’s attachment for the lamb that gives the story punch. The narrative unfolds from a brief description of the lamb to telling what it did one day, what happened next, and ends with an insight as to why things went as they did, brought home by a simple question. This rhyme is a paradigm for building a story that has characters, action, consequences, and a message. Rhyme and meter help make it memorable for use in future engagements or writing assignments.

Six little mice sat down to spin;
Pussy passed by and she peeped in.
What are you doing, my little men?
Weaving coats for gentlemen.
Shall I come in and cut off your threads?
No, no, Mistress Pussy, you’d bite off our heads.
Oh, no, I’ll not; I’ll help you to spin.
That may be so, but you can’t come in.

Another narrative based on the age-old rivalry between mice and cats. This time, the mice aren’t fooled by Pussy’s soft words, providing an example meant for children to take to heart in conducting their own engagements. How others choose to engage with you may well differ from how you would choose to deal with them, providing a model for future reference when needed. Many nursery rhymes and other early readings depict situations in which children should learn to be on their guard without someone being around to warn, “Now be careful.”

Who are you? A dirty old man
I’ve always been since the day I began,
Mother and Father were dirty before me,
Hot or cold water has never come o’er me.

This unexpected answer to an ordinary question achieves a humorous effect, but it rouses consciousness from its customary slumber, priming awareness to perk up at the thought of dirty old men (or, indeed, women). I can hear kids mouthing this rhyme as they head for a bath, reveling in the virtue of cleanliness as the rhyme advises by default.

I do not like you, Doctor Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.

This rhyme makes no forward motion at all, despite a modest show of trying. It would be humorous if it did not reveal so set a mind. The humor here is like laughing at someone stuck in the mud. It illustrates a disdain for ridicule or non-engagement. Something about you, Doctor Fell, turns me off; I can’t get started with you. There’s no telling what the problem is, or how it began. My advice to those whose engagement is blocked in this way is to look into themselves to see if they can’t identify the problem. It’s there waiting to be discovered.

I’ll end this brief review of nursery-rhyme engagements with the challenge Doctor Fell poses for us all. To engage or not engage, that is the question. Whatever the cause, a good part of it lies with each one of us. If we are to get beyond the childish level of engagement we picked up in our earliest days, we must do our share of the heavy lifting required.

I will leave it at that, As ever, y’r friend, –Steve

Reflection 267: Heeding the Call

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin

If everybody recognizes and takes upon himself the duty to which he is called, genuine life will result. The civilization of an entire nation cannot be based on anything else. –Kathe Kollwitz, Diary

Heeding that call is the essence of individual life for it is nothing but the call heard only by those qualified to engage a particularly challenging situation. Those who don’t hear it need not apply.

The quote above comes from Samuel Putnam’s introduction to The Portable Cervantes. It begins:

I am not only allowed to finish my work, I am bidden to finish it. This, it seems to me, is the meaning of all the talk about civilization. It can exist only where each individual fills his own personal sphere of duty.

In so engaging our affairs, we complement one another because no two of us receive the same call. You do your part and I will do mine; all together we add up to a cooperative culture of unique individuals. Each of us doing our part—if it is to work at all, that is how the world must work.

It is no accident that that idea introduces The Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote De La Mancha, a work contrasting the as if world of elegant imagination with the world of purported reality, a conflict which artists endure every day of their lives. To be ourselves, we must engage as we are in the raw, not as others would polish our manners to make us palatable to their tastes.

There’s a lot of that kind of polishing going around, which I call pseudo engagement, fake engagement, false engagement—or out-and-out deception of self among others. The real prize is to hear the call from inside, not outside. The call not to please but to be. Since we have but the one life to live, whose life will it be? Who is to be the master of our engagements? Since we are the ones to die, if we are not master of our own vessel, whose life are we leading?

I put it that way because after thirty years of self-reflection, I can say that the only life worth living is the one directed from the inside in response to that call from the depths when it comes. If our engagements result from our working for a living to make enough money to live a comfortable life, we are engaging as others would have us, not as we must do out of personal necessity. What then do we stand for but willing enslavement to those more powerful and aggressive than ourselves? Imagine discovering on our deathbed that we have sold our individuality for a pittance to those who have no idea who we are. Willingly, we have ceased to exist.

That is why I place so much emphasis on loops of engagement to see if you can’t recognize your own before you inadvertently give it away, as is requested of each of us every day of our lives.

One effective way of making sure that you don’t give your personal authority and adventure away is to go to college to find out who you are rather than to pick up a discipline for making a living, or to find a mate, or to learn how to party or even manage sizeable credit card debt. The proper course of study in college is yourself since, whatever else you do, that’s who you will have to live with for the rest of your life.

The way to study yourself is through study of other selves, like Captain Ahab in his engagement with the great white whale; like Don Quixote in his engagement with his squire, Sancho Panza, and his noble lady, Dulcinea; like Socrates in his many engagements with his peers; like Raskolnikov in his engagement with an elderly woman and a police inspector following up on that affair; like leading characters in Shakespeare’s many plays; and so on. We learn to see our own engagements as reflected in the engagements of others, whether real, performed, or imagined.

That is, we learn about ourselves through comparison with others whose engagements are laid out clearly before us for examination and discussion. And closer to home, we begin to study ourselves in figuring out why we said this to such a one or did that to another. Through self-reflection we begin to grasp how we feel, what we value, how we see and understand, and to couple all that with what we decide to do about such matters. If we can take the role of our own most intimate teacher, we are set for a life of nonstop wonder and learning without limit.

Of course we can accomplish all that by taking a job sweeping floors, sorting mail, or washing dishes—while getting paid to learn from such a program. It all depends on what we are out for, what we hope to achieve by hopping from one stepping stone to another and the next beyond that. We get good at what we do in this life, what we pay attention to, and are determined to do better. That is, to learn about our loops of engagement by engaging with one thing after another. That, basically, is what education has to teach us in proportion to the attention and skill we put into each lesson. We learn what we reach for, not what others force down our throats.

My fee for delivering that homily is ten dollars. Don’t worry about it, I’ll put it on your tab with all the others. If you can’t pay in this life, I’ll collect in the next one. Your credit is good. As ever, I remain, y’r friend, –Steve

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Reflection 262: Clear as Mud

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin

I have mud on my boots. On my pants. On my jacket. On my hands. Today, I know about mud because yesterday I put in a new mooring for my rowboat in Muddy Cove. The chain on the old mooring was worn, so I had to replace it, along with all the shackles that hold it together, and the buoy I attach my outhaul system to. Now that the job is done, I can stand on the shore and pull on a rope and have my boat out on the water dutifully respond to my will.

Here’s a photo of my boat at high tide.

And here’s Muddy Cove at low tide yesterday, with my bootprints in the mud.

The white buoy is the new one; the muddy one farther out is the old one I couldn’t undo the shackle on.

Trying to undo rusty shackles left in the mud for five years is hard because I couldn’t see what I was trying to do. The pins had been wired so they wouldn’t loosen up on their own. Using the braille method, I tried to cut the wire, and finally twisted it off, but then couldn’t turn the pin which was rusted fast. So I left the old buoy for another day when I have a hacksaw in hand.

It’s not only that I couldn’t see what I was working on, but moving around in the mud was so hard that I really had to exert myself to do the simplest thing. Shifting one foot took both concentration and strength because in lifting my boot, I was really lifting a huge clot of mud stuck to it by the vacuum hermetically binding me to the medium I was walking in. At each step I had to twist my heel sideways to unscrew myself from the gunk underfoot.

Being both functionally blind and barely able to move, I found it a tough job. But it had to be done, so I applied my full awareness to the task and eventually got it done to the best of my abilities under the circumstances. Such is consciousness. When the going gets tough, the tough grow determined and deliberate in paying particular attention to their engagements.

The point I want to make is metaphorical, so I won’t labor over the image any more than I already have. Consciousness is achieved through great personal effort. We have to put ourselves out in order to perform meaningful actions in the world—which often prove muddier than we imagined they could be. Expressing ourselves through appropriate engagements with our surroundings takes our best effort.

Yes, there are two kinds of people, those with open minds willing to do the work, and those with closed minds who know the right answer beforehand and go through the motions of applying rote solutions to complex situations.

We achieve alignment (or syzygy) between our sensory impressions, our understanding of a situation, and the actions through which we apply ourselves in solving life’s problems—we reach that desirable state only through sustained application of our mental capacities to work toward creative solutions using every skill we possess.

The alternative is to lay rote or ideological “solutions” onto novel situations so we can take credit for trying, at least, if not succeeding in settling one issue or another. The various peoples of the book do this all the time like so many missionaries citing chapter and verse as if every problem had been solved once and for all in days long before any of us were born, or the situations we face came to the fore. But memorized answers are often wide of the mark when applied to the modern circumstances of our lives.

“Go forth and multiply” is no solution to problems raised by there being too many of us living too high on the hog for too long a time at too great a rate of consumption. Mouthing the old words leaves us where we were in the old days, when what we need is solutions to the problems of today.

Old ways of doing things tend to muddy the waters when we are faced with novel situations. Only through application of creative consciousness taking modern circumstances into account can we see clearly toward a viable future. Habitual or outdated solutions to problems in business, finance, politics, religion, education, and other fields of endeavor are often no match for problems we fail to anticipate because our attention has been diverted in the meantime.

The Arab Spring and Occupy movement of 2011 were conducted by citizens rising to full consciousness and seeing the world in a new light. Seeing problems where others saw only business as usual, things as they should be.

Supple exercise of full consciousness is the only way to keep abreast of the times as they evolve into a slew of altogether new situations. If unable to walk on water, we must develop skills, attitudes, and strengths for braving the mud when we need to.

Ironically, schools teach only solutions to old problems, those that teachers can understand because they have lived through them. Formal education teaches to the past. It is in the experiential grasp of the students themselves that new learning should be sought.

I advocate for introspection and self-reflection as guides to the future. That’s why I am writing this blog. Which is much like walking through mud, but I see no other way because firmer ground lies on the far side of our current understanding of ourselves. If we don’t face into our own minds and experience, who indeed has the credentials for leading us into the future? Who else will place the buoys we need to moor ourselves to?

Striving, always striving ahead—that’s what it takes. Nothing less than our full, conscious attention. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. I say, let’s do it. As ever, y’r friend, –Steve

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Reflection 254: Chaos in Orion

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin

NASA’s picture of the day illustrates baby stars creating chaos in the Orion nebula. Well, you know what trouble babies can get up to. In this false-color image from NASA, here’s what it looks like:

The universe whirling around in a tizzy. Kind of beautiful from a distance. I start with this image as an illustration of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, because that’s how I feel about the film—both beautiful and terrifying at the same time. If you visit Orion or the film, you’d better hold onto your hat.

In summary, the husband dutifully cares for his Alzheimer’s-stricken father while the wife wants to take their daughter out of the country to get a good education. As many couples are, both are wrapped up in deeply meaningful yet incompatible campaigns of engagement. From that tense beginning, the plot quickly grows much more complicated when a hired daycare-giver and her husband get involved, and we see the plot unravel through the eyes of two children. The point the filmmaker makes being that the parental commitments and engagements  are the context in which the two girls learn how to be human, so of course it is only natural that they pick up the ways of their parents.

The film plays against the background of modern, urban life in Iran, suggesting that the whole country is torn in its engagements, everyone living a solitary life without hope of relief. Chaos in Iran much as it lies at the heart of NASA’s false-color Orion nebula.

It was the best of films, it was the worst of films because so powerfully engaging. When I woke up the day after, I ran through the plots of Shakespearian plays, of Virgil leading Dante through the windings of hell, of Don Quixote’s endless troubles, of the Iliad and Odyssey, of extant Greek drama. Deep affection decaying to ruin and misery—we love it and always have as a reminder to stick to the straight and narrow. It’s like having a Greek chorus wending in the background, reminding us that they’d warned us from the beginning not to get involved.

But, invariably, we do get involved or engaged. We have no choice but to live our lives in the now, not to hearken to some mythical order of the past as it has become fixed in our minds as the way it’s supposed to be. But foolishly we commit much of our time to rebuilding the past as we imagine it was rather than facing into the novelty each day presents as a sure sign the future will be something other than we have ever known.

In the film, the arbiter is a hectored magistrate who is to decide the fate of the conflicted father, mother, and daughter. Is the girl to go with the mother in hopes of getting a better (non-Iranian) education, or is she to stick with her father in performing the ritual duties imposed by the past in caring for a member of an earlier generation? Is the Orion nebula to be locked into an earlier stage of its evolution, or is it to unfold as a nursery for young stars—with all the chaos that will stir up in its corner of the universe?

Put differently, will Israel strive to live up to a myth codified in the seventh century B.C. during the Babylonian captivity, or will it acknowledge that modern times have moved beyond the point where that might even be possible because the so-called holy land is no longer what it once was? Will the peoples of Palestine graciously step aside and make room for the Jews as a fact of modern life?

The problem being—in Orion and elsewhere—that everything is shifting, changing, moving on at every moment, and we have the choice of mooring our lives to a fixed myth of how they should be lived—or of getting with the universal program of change and evolution built on the ruins of the past, while opening onto an ever-new vision of reality each day of our lives.

Are we educable or stuck clinging to a version of the past that never was? Can we accommodate to a future we have never imagined, or must the truth conform to what we already believe?

To grow into the future, a birch tree must tear its own bark to let its cambium layer expand in meeting the needs of a hungrier tree. Baby stars in the Orion nebula condense from and feed on the universal clouds of dust that preceded them. To live is to die to the selves we were yesterday. If we live in the past, we become dead to the present as husks of who we once were.

Engagement requires a commitment to the events of today, not a recommitment to how it was yesterday. To be alive is to move with our times, not against them. If we opt not to keep up, we fall behind, leaving the universe to go on without us.

Imagine discovering peoples on Mars living according to scriptures set down some 1,400 or 1,900 or 2,600 years ago, commemorating ancient events as if they were current. What would we make of them? In each case, creatures of the lost lagoon, in denial that anything of note has happened since their cultural clocks stopped so long ago.

Meanwhile, the Orion nebula just keeps doing its thing, changing into a new form as dictated by the forces acting upon it today.

If we cannot fit ourselves to the flow of days and events bearing upon us, can we claim to be alive to today? Consuming Earth’s limited resources to live in the past is a luxury our planet and its peoples cannot afford. Yes, we are reluctant to let go of past ways, but at the same time are aware of being drawn forward in spite of our yearnings and attachments. That’s life—for Orion, for birch trees, for characters in films, and for us. But if we elect to hold on when we need to let go—to separate from the selves we once were—we are in deep trouble having consequences for everyone around us.

Loops of engagement fit us to the now, not the then. If we use them to cling to the past, we are moving backwards, not forward. When entire cultures dedicate themselves to keeping the past alive, they embed themselves in amber as fossils in a cardboard box on the shelves of a museum storeroom.

Do you smell something musty in the air?

Well, that’s where I am today. The question is, where are you?  Y’rs truly, –Steve

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Reflection 251: Education!

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin

Last week I showed a PowerPoint featuring eagles, herons, harbor seals, and sandpipers to the afternoon program at a local grammar school. All the photos of wildlife I showed had been taken within a mile of the school. I told the kids that they had the same opportunity to see what I saw if they’d get outdoors and look around. They were a great group, paid attention to every slide, and asked excellent questions.

On my way to the school, I’d seen first one great blue heron take off from the shallows along the river river, then another right behind it. Typically, great blues arrive from the southland on the first of April, but they were early this year. Driving home afterward, I saw an adult American bald eagle fly over the road just ahead of me. My message in the talk was that in order to see such sights, you have to take the initiative to look around and engage your surroundings right where you are.

The one question that really got to me (even though I didn’t field it very well when I heard it) came during the sandpiper section from a soft-spoken boy who asked, “How can you tell the difference between all those kinds of birds?” I said something to the effect that I worked at it because knowing my wild neighbors was important to me, and I’d kept my eyes open for opportunities to get to know them better. But driving home, that boy’s question stayed with me. We learn the names and characteristics of things that are important to us—things we engage with—such as tools, super heroes, makes and models of cars, brands of ice cream, TV shows, celebrities, singers, and as in my case, birds and other forms of wildlife. I engage with every bird I see, and try to get to know it by name.

I had set up a teachable moment in that boy’s mind, and, driving along, I thought about how I could come up with an answer worthy of the question. We get good at doing things we pay attention to because they matter to us. Paying attention is the key, noticing in this case how birds are similar to one another, and how they are different. And having names for the different groups we can sort them into. The trick is to build on skills the kids already have and work from there by refining and expanding that foundation. Every student in the room knew the difference between, say, a robin, a crow, and a chickadee when they saw one, though they probably hadn’t thought about how they came to know what they already knew.

That’s what I could point out to them, how they already knew how to tell a crow was a crow and not a robin or chickadee. Size mattered, color, voice, habitat, way of moving on the ground and in the air, what they ate, who eats them, where commonly seen. Once they had grasped that, they could make a list of things they’d like to know about a bird to be able to identify it. They could move on to other common birds in the vicinity, and then to ones they saw only occasionally, like migrating warblers and hawks. Then they could pore through bird guides that set down the kinds of things we want to know in systematic order, and the kids could come to understand that order so they could make easy use of it.

I telephoned the woman who’d set up the afterschool program, and asked if we could have a follow-up session to address the question of how to provide a framework that would help kids learn more about birds on their own. She thought that was a great idea, and would speak to school administrators about how we might fit it into the schedule. Or if not that, how we could cover it in the summer camp offered by a local nonprofit. The wheels are turning, trying to build on a challenge a particular student wanted addressed.

That, to me, is how true education takes place. Adults rising to the occasion of addressing issues that students feel are important. Which requires teachers to listen to students and not strictly vice versa. Learning is a matter of give-and-take, making educated guesses, learning what the possibilities are, trial and error in the field, with as much practice as you’re willing to put into studying a guidebook and watching birds.

We learn about situations we get ourselves into, and in which we want to do better the next time. Enjoying the effort as a kind of adventure helps us improve our skills over time. Which is very different from completing homework that others assign to us. It’s the homework and fieldwork we assign to ourselves that really matters. If we want to get good at identifying birds, we first have to set that as our goal, then carry out projects and exercises that help us grow into the skills we want to learn.

If we want to learn how to use chopsticks, we have to be willing to work at learning that skill by actually eating—poorly at first—with chopsticks. It helps to eat food that comes in small chunks suited to being levered into our mouths. Learning to feed ourselves has strong survival value, so we’ll eventually catch on, particularly when we see others modeling the skills we’d like to get good at. In learning to play the guitar, it helps to admire those who can play the kind of music that we like.

In learning new skills, motivation is essential, close observation of others performing those skills, willingness to practice, and patience in keeping at it until our skills match theirs. Slowly, we grow into the person we’d like to become. That is, we make ourselves happen as who we’d like to be.

Self-transcendence is driven by urges inside every one of us, different in each case. The lives we create for ourselves are proof of the effort we put into being who we are moment-by-moment. Being the person others want us to be is a form of service to them. Being who we want to become fulfills the most basic freedom we are born to. We didn’t ask to be born, so can only rise to the the occasion of our birth by setting goals worthy of our human potential.

The job of educators, as I see it, is to engage with their students very closely in order to support their setting worthy life goals and choosing projects to enhance their development while, at the same time, making sure they explore the full range of their options, and become aware of possible dangers and limitations. Then to speed them on the course they set for themselves—and get out of their way.

Learning is always personal and experiential. Teachers can promote and encourage the process, but they cannot deliver it to their students via books, lectures, videos, or presentations. Teachers can be guides and models, but not passers-on or imparters of wisdom. Experience is something we reach-for and live, not get as a gift. When I was in basic training, my sergeants did their best to turn me into a killer, and I gave them an A for making the effort—but they failed. They set me up to poke my bayonet into a straw dummy while yelling, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” but I recognized the exercise as metaphorical and that I was only going through the motions. I became a still photographer in the Signal Corps and spent my days lugging a camera, not a rifle, which was the best use the Army could have made of the skills I brought with me when I was drafted.

Education by command, authority, and fear is always a failure because it entails mind control, not learning. If any vestige of understanding is achieved, it is only a thin layer that will quickly rub off. I think of all the capitals I memorized in school, the national imports and exports of every country in South America, the Presidents in serial order, the differential equations. Now gone with the wind. Since getting my first camera for a box top and a quarter when I was four, I have worked at developing my visual skills, and made a living at it. Now that kind of film photography hardly exists any longer, so I’ve had to go digital, which I’ve done on my own.

Self-directed learning always morphs into the next big challenge, and the challenge after that because we keep growing into new versions of our selves until we die. Lifelong learning is directed by our self-governing loops of engagement. Those loops serve as our primary means for following our bliss. Once we figure out what resources are available, and how to make use of them, we can learn anything we put our minds to. We don’t need teachers, schools, or colleges; we simply live our own lives.

That’s my second take on the grand topic of education. I’ve barely scratched the surface, but the essence of my argument is that schools need to teach to the inner student, not the external demands of a society built to satisfy the views of a ruling elite.

Thanks for listening. And for being yourself to the hilt. –Steve

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Reflection 250: Education?

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin

Education (from Latin educare, to lead out) does not mean burdening students with homework; it means drawing-out that which is already within them. When students walk in the door on the first day of school, they are chock-full of vivid, unsorted experiences from the lives they have led up to that instant. Which so-called educators largely ignore in their rush to turn out dutiful workers, engineers, soldiers, and voters suited to the needs of businesses and corporations, ignoring the needs of the students themselves as creative members of a civil society.

Most grownups sincerely believe that the trouble with young people is that they do not yet know what their elders have learned from personal experience. Historians are convinced that students must be steeped in the study of history, scientists believe it is essential to study science, mathematicians tell us the world needs more and better mathematicians, writers argue for an essential grounding in literature. Geographers, artists, politicians, mechanics, athletes, nutritionists—all advocate for immersing students in their particular field.

Meanwhile, who advocates for students grappling with the myriad issues they bring with them to school, but which go largely unaddressed?

Education is firmly grounded in a trickle-down methodology by which what is good for the teacher is seen as being good for the student, relieving teachers of any responsibility to address the myriad issues that drive student learning and motivation.

Strange business. If students are to benefit from their education, they have to trick the system into providing engagements meaningful to them as individuals, not the system. They have to outwit their teachers by going through the motions while gleaning tidbits of personal interest and value on the side.

The upshot is that students are caught in an intense classroom conflict between their concrete personal needs and the abstract needs of a society that sincerely believes it knows what it wants, but gets it at the neglect of those it claims to help.

No wonder schools are in crisis all across the nation. With teachers and administrators looking down on their pupils as inferior beings, while students are looking up to adults for guidance and leadership, there is no meeting of minds where true engagement can occur, true education take place.

The result is unmet objectives on both sides, frustration, and a sense of conflict and enmity instead of caring and affection.

The solution? Before students can learn about the world, they must come to understand themselves and the lives they have led up to now. Then they will gradually be able to apply that inner understanding to challenges beyond the ones they have already met in their personal lives. As a result, growing larger and more competent by developing skills valued as productive in the adult world while at the same time achieving a sense of basic, personal growth and satisfaction.

The secret is that every student is previously engaged with a personal curriculum in living their lives as they do, at home, in the streets, with family and friends, now largely dominated by technologies that did not exist when their parents were young.

If student skills and needs are not addressed from the get-go, who, exactly, is being educated? No one. No one, single, unique human person. Myths and ideals cannot be educated for they are fixtures of the mind. Only real, flesh-and-blood people can undergo learning, and they do so by pursuing the urgings of their own motivations, not by being told what to do by others under the influence of motivations of their own.

To grow beyond their former selves, students need to augment the brain connections they have already formed by building upon, not denying, them. This requires suiting education to the needs of each student, not layering a Uniform Standard Curriculum upon him or her.

What we do best in our schools is domesticate children so they will be trained to the society we have built around ourselves. We turn out servants of businesses and the all-encompassing economy we believe in so profoundly as the highest of all human achievements. Our aim is clear. If we want our children to make a living so they can support a family, we make clear to them what they must do to make the same mistakes we made so they turn out like us.

A parent’s job comes down to helping with homework assigned by strangers—teachers, administrators, distant school committees, remote schools of education. Those who claim to know better than they (parents) and their children do themselves.

Yes, I know this is a gross caricature, an out-and-out cartoon. But loving teachers who know their pupils and work for, not against them—such teachers prove my point because they must be subversive in getting around the system that pays their salaries. Imagine teaching to the student and not the test! Another alternative is for parents to turn to home-schooling their own children. These teachers and parents are exceptions to the system as it is now established and argued across the land.

When I was a kid at this time of year, I learned about watersheds by climbing the hills ringing my small town and getting sopping wet playing for hours in the runoff streaming down the slopes. I made dams, channels, boats, and waterfalls with my cold, bare fingers, using twigs and stones, loving every minute, doing something I had waited all winter to do. I didn’t read about watersheds on an intellectual basis, I lived them in my most intimate experience. It was no accident that in my 50s and 60s I wrote about watersheds as nature’s water receiving, storing, and distributing systems, systems that make life of all sorts possible in myriad basins around the Earth. Terrain, water, sunlight, gravity, and photosynthesis, that’s what watersheds are about.

Writing up 60 hikes in Acadia National Park in 1998, I drew on my life experience with watersheds to portray water flowing off the hills of Acadia through the soil, high ground to low, leaving dry habitats on the summits, creating damp reservoirs in surrounding valleys. I accounted for the distribution of plants from one region to another, and the distribution of animals that fed on those plants. This was something I had lived my whole life, not something I had been taught. In my life, no one I ever met thought it a good idea to even mention watersheds, much less engage with them right where I was. I did that on my own. And that doing, that engaging, has made me the person I am today for it has shaped my mind to do more of the same wherever I find myself.

In the same way, I have always been mystified by the workings of my own mind, and have set myself on a course of investigation to learn as much as I can about my unique, personal consciousness. My method of study is empiricism of the innermost kind. What I know about consciousness, I know despite my education. In graduate school, I wanted to know why two different people standing next to each other could be drawn to different aspects of their surroundings, and have different opinions about what they experienced. The developer pictures a golf course where I see a wetland. I could find no courses dealing with human interpretation, so did independent study in getting both my so-called master’s and doctor’s degrees—in education, no less.

Writing this blog, I am my own man, opening myself to you as your own person, hoping to connect in ways I cannot imagine, to engage in ways both you and I find meaningful from our respective points of view. I don’t know any other way to live than to be myself to the hilt. A risky venture, but reflection after reflection, at least it’s my venture. And adventure.

That’s what engages me and draws me out. The question of all questions is, what engages you and draws you out of yourself? As ever, –Steve

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Reflection 240: One of a Kind

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin

What are we but primate mammals with a gift for remembering, recognizing, and recreating (or imitating) situations and sensory patterns we have met before? We call ourselves wise, but wisdom resides first in the ways and beliefs of our families, groups, and cultures, not ourselves. We do our best to learn how to act in everyday situations, and those actions—however skilled—tell who we are.

When aroused from its habitual stupor by surprise, novelty, or concern, consciousness translates our motivated awareness into planning and making a fitting response.  We once thought we were little more than stimulus-response chains on legs, but now we accept it as given that aside from our routine or habitual actions, consciousness can intervene in that chain, allowing us to tailor our actions to our situations as we construe or interpret them. This allows us to moderate our actions in light of our personal experience under the particular circumstances that prevail at any given moment.

As vessels of experience, each of us is unique in the universe. Our genetic makeup is unlike any other. Our childhood learning is our own, as is our subsequent education, our job history, our values and emotional life, the details of our autobiographical memory, and so on. Like our immune systems, our minds are crafted by the lives we actually lead, so are each one of a kind.

When we come to act, it appears we are acting for ourselves alone as motivated by self-interest and and a lust for self-preservation. But if that is the case, we haven’t learned very much from our situated presence among seven-billion brothers and sisters. In truth, when we act, each of us acts for our entire human family. And beyond that, for all species, for Earth our homeland in space, and for the universe that has delivered us to this particular era and location.

If we haven’t learned that by now, for all practical purposes our conscious understanding is foolish if not worthless. Yes, we are individual molecules in the darkness of space, looking to one source of energy or another, ever jockeying for life and position. But if we take life to live life, we are acting on our own without considering our absolute dependence on those around us to give us a place among themselves. We are in this life together, and always have been, back to our original parent in the big bang, the ultimate source of our existential being.

If an Israeli takes water from a Palestinian who then dies of thirst, the surviving Israeli lives at the expense of his regional, planetary, and universal brothers and sisters. Unwittingly, such thievery happens all the time. But to commit such a crime according to a deliberate plan is no better than the U.S. killing and displacing millions of Iraqis for the sake of the oil beneath their feet, or a band of offended Muslim jihadis destroying Buddha statues in the Banyan Valley or capitalist enclaves in lower Manhattan.

When I act, I act for you; when you act, you act for me. When I am conscious, I cannot afford to think only for myself, anymore than you can for yourself. Consciousness is our joint responsibility. By myself as a wanderer in the desert I do not exist. We live our lives collectively, in pairs, families, communities, regions, nations, and our respective planetary populations. Consciousness is a gift to us all—the ability to modulate our actions in light of our understanding of the whole.

If our education treats strangers with different ways of doing and being as lesser creatures than ourselves, it is dangerous to the degree it is incomplete in giving us a a distorted awareness and understanding of the whole.

The charade of the Republican primaries in the 2012 election cycle reveals how dangerous self-centered politics has become in each candidate believing he has the answer for everyone else, and if we would only be conscious in his particular way, we would be collectively better-off. Such arrogant posturing would impose the hopelessly limited and impaired consciousness of one individual on our nation and its world.

The only viable political system must respect and speak to our diversity, not make clones of us all. Policies must be all-encompassing, as good for you as for me. Which is why I advocate the study of personal consciousness before our understanding ossifies as a one-size-fits-all program of mind control.

For myself, I give no one the right or the power to dictate how I am to employ my mind and actions to their liking. That way lies the police state, trickle-down economics, a penal system in which deviant minds are put away in solitary confinement to engage solely with six surfaces made of concrete.

How about you? That’s it for today. –Steve

Reflection 205: Book Synopsis Part 3/5

Copyright © 2011

Here is a synopsis of the next three chapters in my upcoming book, KNOW THYSELF: Adventures in Getting to Know My Own Mind. –Steve Perrin

Chapter 7, Loop of Engagement. I reach out to the fabulous world (which I know primarily through stories I have heard or tell myself) by making gestures meant to produce a desired result, and the world in turn responds by reaching in to me through my senses, both my actions and perceptions contributing to the vital exchange I known as personal experience. This ongoing loop of engagement binds me to my surroundings on levels depending on my reflexes, assumptions, habits, or full-fledged conscious awareness. The deeper into consciousness I plunge, the greater the effort I must expend to conduct my mind’s business. I propose that the end of consciousness is action in the world appropriate to the situation I am involved in at the time as best I can construe it. Being connected to the fabulous world through engagement in an ongoing loop between my active and receptive acts from birth unto death, I learn the results of my efforts soon enough, hopefully in time to ensure my efforts are appropriate to my current situation.

Chapter 8, Situations. Situations are the arenas or playing fields of consciousness. I can’t be aware of everything happening within or around me (much less in the fabulous world), so I deal with those aspects I judge to be germane to a particular matter I am involved with. As a result, my consciousness is situational by nature because my mind takes an active role in structuring what it judges to be of concern in order to propose an appropriate response. The greater the detail considered, the greater the effort I must devote to making such a response. If a tiger emerges from the undergrowth ahead of me, there isn’t much time for debating what to do. In such an emergency, survival requires maximum action, minimal thought. In routine situations, I park my mind in habitual mode, and do again what I have done countless times before (sharpen pencils, play solitaire, slice a banana, make the bed). Judgment whether I am in a novel or familiar situation is paramount when survival is the issue.

Chapter 9, Speech. Speech requires fine muscular control of jaw, tongue, lips, and breath, not gross control of torso, arms, or legs. It is a highly efficient means of consulting others without committing bodily resources prematurely. Speech allows a trial-and-error response before we commit ourselves to bold action. It is no accident that most education is conducted in the idiom of speech. Testing: one, two, three, four. But when decisive action is called for, essays or bold promises are apt to be wholly deficient. In daily life, written speech aids such as calendars, schedules, agendas, and to-do lists are often useful for organizing and planning future activities when we have the luxury of time before having to commit ourselves to a plan of action. Where do words come from? I feel them emerge from kernels of awareness deep inside my ongoing engagement with a particular situation, and specifically, from the feelings or tensions which govern my attention and loop of engagement.

Next post: synopses of chapters 10, Values; 11, Goals; 12, Projects.

 

Reflection 200: Letting Go

(Copyright © 2010)

This blog is an extension of a project I started in July, 2006 in a summer research seminar led by the Quaker Institute for the Future at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. Each member worked for a month on a project in an atmosphere of communal discernment, making several presentations to the group, offering comments and suggestions in an atmosphere of mutual trust. My project was a Power-Point promoting resolution of conflicts over marine issues on the Maine coast. How, I asked, could people come to mutual agreement on issues they approached from divergent points of view? My conclusion was that human consciousness is such a personal matter, there is no way fully to appreciate another’s perspective. Mapping our life experiences onto our respective worlds as we do, we effectively live in parallel universes ruled by different assumptions, customs, rules, and desires, making agreement about anything extremely difficult.

Which didn’t advance my project idea very far, if at all. Following the seminar, I put together several more detailed presentations, each falling short of my ambitions. It struck me I might be working in the wrong medium, so took to blogging about consciousness as an alternative route to the same goal. After 199 posts, am I any further along than I was? Yes and no. I have developed several new ways of looking at the problem, and broadened my respect for the difficulty of what I am trying to do, which I see now, comes with the territory of being human. Consciousness is a very flexible tool for overcoming short-term difficulties, but it is less helpful in the long term because rooted in the practical here and now, not the necessarily conceptual then of the future.

In effect, at the same time they are the bases we stand on, our past ways often prevent us from taking new positions in unfamiliar situations. And every new day is an unfamiliar situation (if it’s not, it’s not a new day). Changing our ways requires we give up old habits of making ourselves happen in the universe. If we can’t slough the skin we present to the world, then it’s bound to become dry and disfiguring. Is that what we want—to cling to what we’ve already become? Or can we keep up with changing times by incorporating new factors into our makeup?

On that note, I went back to Reflection 1: Dying Crow, to see where I was when I began this series of posts. Here’s the “snippet” of consciousness I dealt with in October 2008:

I am driving along a country road and see a dead crow ahead. No, not dead, a dying crow—its wing feebly flapping the air. A shadow on the edge of the shoulder showing signs of life. What should I do? For me, this is a worst-case scenario. I can’t just drive by and leave it to suffer. I am aware of strong feelings welling within me. I don’t want to stop and wring its neck, but what else can I do? I’d rather keep going. I am conflicted. Then, as I approach the dying crow, I see it differently—a trash bag blowing in the wind. Yes, definitely, a black plastic bag agitated by the wash from passing cars. Relieved, I drive on.

Categorization, that’s what I was dealing with. Mapping my values, attitudes, and experience onto the world—and getting it wrong. I caught myself in the act of falsely projecting my fears and assumptions onto an innocent phenomenon—a dark, shifting shape by the side of the road. In that instant, I confront not a dying crow but my own consciousness remaking the world to suit itself.

In Reflection 4: Crash, I did exactly the same thing in seeing a swept-back, metal TV antenna gleaming in sunlight as a crashing airplane. In Reflection 6, I saw a complete stranger ahead of me on the sidewalk as my friend, Fred, because he was dressed as Fred would have dressed and walked with a similar gait. Erroneously mapping concepts onto my immediate surroundings, that’s where I began this blog. I didn’t use the word “categorization” because it wasn’t in my working vocabulary, but I see now that’s what I was dealing with.

In Reflection 3: Mia Culpa, I tell of looking for a jar of mustard—and not finding it anywhere—even though I looked right at it several times in my search. What could happen to a jar of mustard, a fixture in my very idea of kitchen and refrigerator? What did happen was that it was lying on its side, presenting a round, red top, not the half-full, bent-sided jar I had in mind. Wrong gestalt. I had the wrong image of what I was looking for. The pattern I was seeking didn’t exist because it had morphed into an unconventional view I didn’t associate with mustard. One of life’s minor situations, and an occasion for learning about my habitual search strategies. Categorization, again, gone sour. Casting trite expectations onto my little world, I came up empty-handed and still hungry. 

In Reflection 5: Sunflowers, I told of going upstairs to get something, and not seeing a bunch of huge sunflowers in a vase that I passed within six inches of while both coming and going. I was so fixated on whatever I’d come after as to be functionally blind. “Do you like the sunflowers?” asks Carole. “What sunflowers?” says I. Again, a void in my personal space because, for me, sunflowers weren’t the issue, so I wasn’t looking for them. And I don’t seem to see what I’m not looking for. Expectancy, attention, and categorization are key in how I map my mind onto the world, making the world I construe for myself absolutely my personal world. Anyone coming right behind me would construct a different world based on her expectations, attention, and habitual modes of categorization.

All of which have consequences. In Reflection 10: Diagnosis, I told of going to an eminent doctor who, thinking I had cystic fibrosis, put me in hospital for a week of tests intended to confirm his hunch. Except they didn’t. He released me, not having a clue what I had (which, as it turned out thirty years later, was celiac disease all along). Diagnosis is how we decide between our options for categorizing particular patterns that interest us. It is a way of getting hold of the pattern so we’re sure it’s this one and not that one. Putting a name to a pattern of symptoms, we then apply the standard remedy or customary course of treatment. Who are we? Diagnosticians, every one. Or cartographers, bent on mapping our expectancies onto phenomena that matter to us. Then acting (rightly or wrongly) on the basis of the diagnosis we have mapped out.

In Reflection 37: Terms of Endearment, I blogged about giving names to persons or things that change our lives. In hindsight, I see I was dealing with an aspect of categorization by relying on prior experience in becoming conscious of something new:

In naming loved ones, babies, pets, boats, towns, mountains, and constellations in the sky, we give meaning to particular phenomena in our experience, while at the same time, giving concrete form to values which are important to us. Naming is a simultaneous giving and taking within consciousness, a giving of ourselves and a taking-in of the world, claiming it as our world.

Naming is applied intentionality, a defining characteristic of consciousness:

Looking for, seeing as, consciousness of—this is how we fit the world to preconceived plans. We take those plans with us wherever we go. We bring the world into being as a variation on the intentional order we carry in our heads.

Scary, to think that how we name our children and our pets reveals who we are. But there it is: consciousness projecting itself onto patterns in our heads, and those named patterns becoming features of the world we wrap ourselves in. Other cultures, other people—other quilts for consciousness.

Throughout this blog, I have tried to deal with metaphor as a variant form of intentionality, also deliberately applied. Intentionality is habitual categorization, representing a personal style of mapping concepts derived from prior experiences onto patterns that emerge in everyday life. Which is exactly what categorization does for us in giving meaning to sensory patterns and relationships. When personal meanings are an issue, metaphor tells the world emphatically how we see it in light of our experience.

Humor, too, reveals categorizations by setting up a conceptual framework or situation that is fulfilled by a specific punch line, resolving a tense situation (because of frustrated or confounded expectancy) in an apt yet novel manner, eliciting laughter—our stock response to nonthreatening surprises.

Categorization is a basic feature of consciousness that surfaces in almost everything we do. Human understanding is a form of categorization—of lending character to the world based on how we choose to depict it from our point of view. The bulk of this blog, it turns out in hindsight, deals with aspects of categorizing as a key aspect of mind. Dying crows, crashing planes, missing mustard jars, strangers mistaken for friends, sunflowers not seen, naming, metaphors, humor—here in each case is meaning-making in action, the human mind at work trying to find sense in its relevant universe by mapping abstract concepts from the past onto sensory patterns in the here and the now.

It was Gerald M. Edelman who gave me the word “categorization,” which he distinguishes from the philosophical sort by calling “perceptual categorization.” In the Glossary to Wider than the Sky: the phenomenal gift of consciousness (Yale, 2004), he lists perceptual categorization as, “The process by which the brain ‘carves the world up’ to yield adaptive categories. The most fundamental of early cognitive functions.” Reading his works this past winter, I realized he and I were talking about similar aspects of mind using different words. In addition, Edelman suggests not only a neural substrate, but an evolutionary or adaptive origin as well, both of which lie beyond my limited experience. Seeing categorization as the central core of consciousness, I switched to Edelman’s way of thinking, trying to work my way into the concept, which keeps growing larger and more encompassing in my understanding. It provides a fitting culmination to this blog, letting me tie much of what I have written together—a major categorizational shift in my way of thinking.

I call this next-to-last post (I am retiring for now) “Letting Go” because one part of categorization I haven’t dealt with is how we grow to become more discriminating categorizers by letting go of, or transcending, the limits imposed on our seeing-the-world by the narrowness of our lived experience. If conflict resolution between those who see the world differently is an issue, then I believe the best solution might be to let go of our conflictive selves in order to grow into larger persons with broader abilities to find meaning in the patterns we see in the world. It’s OK for Jews to be Jews, Muslims to be Muslims, atheists to be atheists, people to be who they are because they cannot reinvent themselves as someone else. Clearly, this requires self-transcendence of us all. If our categorizations become hardened because written in stone for all time, we are incapable of waking up to a new day. When, in fact, every day is given us as a new challenge because the past no longer exists. It is up to us to keep up with the sun and the seasons by renewing ourselves to meet the challenge of today, not those of yesterday, or thousands of years before that.

I say we need to discover more humor in our rigid categorizations by rising above ourselves and looking down, seeing ourselves as characters in a story (or is it a joke?). That is, of letting go the chains we wrap round our minds as if we were creatures, not of the instant, but of all time, ever the same because we are trapped in our minds and cannot get out.

Did Moses know it all? Did Jesus? Mohammed? Shaping ourselves in their image by repeating words ascribed to them, we become cardboard cutouts of so many smiling waiters or waitresses bringing trays filled with mugs of beer to assure our satisfaction and happiness. As if a particular brand of beer—or religion—held the answer to all questions. As if loyal or even orthodox adherence to the past was the way to the future. As if we knew now what the future will bring, and it will be as we describe it, without fail. As if each day was not new, but only an opportunity for us to cram it into the mold of the past to fit concepts we have in mind because that is the only way we can reliably know who we are. As if we were not flesh-and-blood humans but creatures of stone, much like the terracotta warriors of China.

In truth, consciousness has the power to reinvent itself in response to the situation each of us finds him-or-herself in today. We may not be able to beam ourselves into new bodies, but we can transcend the limits we put on ourselves yesterday and the day before. Indeed, it is we who bind our minds with steel bands lest we think a new thought or dream of casting-off our old, worn-out personalities and tired ideas. They are already dead; all we need do is let go and shed them as our former selves. It is not written anywhere that who we were is who we are for all time. That is a trap laid by unsupple minds to catch themselves changing and growing into new selves more suited to the new day. It’s as if people were holding their breath, stopping their blood from flowing, not thinking new thoughts. Not daring to live.

One thing is certain: rigidity of consciousness is a catatonic state of mind that locks the living world into a dead cartoon of the world as it might be if we but opened our eyes. What are we to do? Release the past from the chains we’ve put round it and let it go. I am not—and cannot be—the child I was, or the man I hoped to become. I am wholly other because I have given myself to my environment as it flows through my senses. I am none other than a creature of my time and place on this planet. I turn with the Earth so that I can be fully what it makes of me. That way, I evolve. That is the only way I can enjoy the ride—which is the trip of a lifetime. My lifetime. My days as a conscious son of the Earth.

No, they don’t teach that in school. Everyone is too anxious to leave young minds up to chance. We invent curriculums and standardized tests, which are mental chains in themselves. Think of the irony of a gang of unique kids being herded into one end of the education system and cranked out as a uniform standard product at the other end. What has been lost in the process is the quality of individual uniqueness, sole fount of imagination, invention, and ultimately, survival under ever-changing yet unique circumstances and conditions. That is, our humanity has been stripped away because, by biological definition, each of us is unlike any other.

What a difference it makes to conceive of yourself as a unique being instead of a replica of everyone else. That way, you can reinvent yourself as you choose and don’t have to live up to the identity laid upon you by the expectations of your peers. Are you living for them? Is that how it is? They are your guides and masters, your controllers? Your life is an extension of theirs? If so, that is because you have already surrendered and are dead but don’t know it.

Let go of all that. Open yourself to discovery. Let the world in through your senses, not those of celebrities, columnists, loud talkers, or pundits. Activate your own mapping skills so that you live in your own personal territory, not the cell assigned to you. That territory is in your head and belongs solely to you. Never trade it away for any reason. Live by your own wits, not the dictates of others. Open yourself to the sensory patterns flowing around you; immerse yourself in them. Deal with the patterns of your time and your place on this Earth. Then lay meaning on those patterns as best you can account for them. And act on those meanings to see if they are accurate or not. If not, try again—something different this time. Not always the same as if you were a stone warrior, a true believer in the single, true faith.

That’s what I mean by “letting go.” Really, becoming yourself and fulfilling the potential you were born to. Is there any other way to live? Evidently there is—many of us dragging in chains our whole lives, thinking thoughts approved by others in advance. And consorting only with those who categorize their sensory worlds as we do, because it is much too dangerous to stake out individual territories for ourselves.

With the result that we are not truly alive, or truly ourselves, but are some kind of zooid living out a life sentence, hoping it will end soon, without pain or mishap. Which means not taking the risk of making ourselves happen in the world as if each of us were an individual capable of independent action, thought, and responsibility. Trapped by outdated ideas, we live in the old days, as we have been taught. Discovering freedom requires us to let go of all that. We have the mental equipment to do it. And a methodology for knowing ourselves as categorizers and sensory pattern detectors (go back and read this blog if you missed that part) who make their own worlds. Mental chains are a challenge meant to be mastered—as Alexander undid the Gordian Knot.

 

Reflection 198: Of Heroics & Aesthetics

(Copyright © 2010)

I am ever the hero of my own little drama as I act it out in my head. It can’t be otherwise because I am the author and sole interpreter of the script as it is revealed to me (that is, as I make it up minute by minute). My life is a performance of my story, first concocted in my head, then performed on the virtual (from my point of view) stage of the unknowable world. Picture me behind the door of my mind—the one with the star—posing in my dressing gown before a full-length mirror, mouthing the words I am rehearsing for the grand performance I’m to give in a few moments. If you were lucky, you’d be in the audience. Too bad you can’t make the show because you are rehearsing your own performance before your own full-length mirror in a different dressing room, also with a star on the door.

We are heroes to ourselves because we can do no wrong. Even when we commit stupid or cruel acts, we are automatically off the hook because, no matter how others see us, we appear blameless to ourselves. Self-interest is our only motive, so by definition we have to be right because we can always justify what we do. It is they, those others, who are at fault—they just don’t understand.

Each a hero in her own eyes; what a wonderful system. Perfection itself on two legs, facing the world, looking about for yet more heroic labors worthy of our talents and strengths. Whatever feats others may perform, we can do better. Why waste time pretending to be modest if in all honesty we’re the greatest? I mean, what-is-the-point? Wink, wink; nudge, nudge. If corporations ever got on to the power of categorization so they were able to set the terms in which we all see the world, there’d be hell to pay.

If we manage to do no harm by living our span to the fullest, then a self-assertive life such as I have described in those first three paragraphs amounts to a comedy. But despite our good intentions, we are never as innocent as we claim. Others do without basic necessities so that we may live higher on the hog than they can imagine. Eyes straight ahead, we are only dimly aware of the ruin in our wake. With an automobile, I have killed pheasants, dogs, cats, frogs, salamanders, butterflies, dragonflies, and thousands of others. I have been trained as a killer by the U.S. Army; I don’t doubt that my training was successful on occasion, even well after the fact. But there I go again, blaming my training, while the true killer is the self that I am whose hungers demand to be fed.

Our myopic perspectives and insatiable appetites render life more tragic than comic. Think of the innocents slaughtered in our name (beef cattle, chickens, pigs, goats, and thousands of plants, many of which bear genes similar to our own). We live at far greater expense than we know or choose to bother ourselves about.

All because we categorize and sort the world for personal gain as we imagine it, without consulting others in advance. Selfish and glib, that’s what we are. I know, I am one who has shaped the world to his advantage as long as he can remember. Not deliberately or knowingly, perhaps, but effectively that is how I have lived my life. Following my nose, which means following the dictates of self-interest and personal advantage. The difference between me following my nose and Bernie Madoff following his is he’s in prison and I’m not. Or if I am in fact behind bars, those bars are the steely cage around my consciousness, armoring the very wits by which I survive.

I use such imagery to describe the categorizing aspect of consciousness because we cannot avoid casting our most self-serving concepts upon sensory patterns representing what we can know of the world. With the exception of messages from great corporations, those phenomenal patterns do not come to us presorted and pre-categorized; it is we who bend them to our purposes by seeing them from our unique points of view as recorded in our personal histories of concept formation, cleaned and gutted of telling details, hollowed-out for general utility later on, leaving only husks, not the essence. Categorization—recognizing the “true” nature of things—is not an impartial act; we are invested in what uses we can make of a thing for our personal advancement, so bestow categories on it that will serve us well later on. A spade is not just a spade nor a rose simply a rose; in each case they are functionally what we make them out to be. A spade can kill, a rose ingratiate us with others who will owe future favors.

Machiavelli didn’t come out of the blue; he was the product of his own urge to survive. So, too, de Sade. And Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War, who wrote, “All warfare is based on deception.” I say all survival is based on deception, particularly of the self. To us, our miscategorizations always appear fair and just. The self is in full command of its resources and does not submit to casual scrutiny. You have to infer its self-deceptions from its actual deeds. That makes it all the easier to confound its dictates with truth or reality, subject of my last post (Reflection 197: Backing Off).

Our entire neural apparatus intercedes between the self and its grasp of the world. Our senses don’t deliver the world-as-it-is to our doorstep, they bring us images transduced and reformulated by our sensory system—the world being at least once removed as translated into the neural language of action potentials and flowing neurotransmitters. Which memory scans for familiar patterns in order to categorize what we hear (see, touch, taste, smell) in terms of concepts made meaningful by prior experience. At every step of our life journey we reinvent ourselves and the situation we’re faced with based on patterns we’ve encountered before and the concepts we’ve derived from them. The world as-it-is-in-itself never enters our minds.

No matter how subtle, most categorizations are heroic distortions for personal gain in being consistent with biological values inherent in the self—namely you and me. Our meanings lie ready, waiting to seize on familiar neural signals. The perceptual side of consciousness is concerned with sensory patterns and relationships, and so is more cordial in being ruled by curiosity about, and interest in, what’s out there than by survival at any cost. Categorization answers questions raised by curiosity about the world, but personal aesthetics first decide what’s relevant and what isn’t. I don’t mean aesthetics focused solely on beauty; I mean picking up on sensory patterns and relationships apart from any meaning they may have for us. That is, sensory signals as not yet—but soon to be—recognized and categorized. Such as the tonal makeup and rhythms of a familiar voice or piece of music; the shape, size, color, and motion of a familiar bird; the feel of our fingers wrapping around the steering wheel of our family car; the scent of Spanish rice as Mother used to make it.

The mapping of categories onto sensory patterns, and vice versa, are two of the major achievements of consciousness. Experience and awareness meet in constituting a current moment of engagement with our world. The salience or relevance of the signal can be in attention or memory, but categorizing a sensory episode as a meaningful experience is our doing in either case. We are fulfilled in being simultaneous pattern detectors and categorizers in that moment. When our personal histories coincide with the sensory now, we are on familiar ground and know our options for making an appropriate response to the situation we’re in. The past claims the now, moving our heroic-aesthetic self one notch toward the future.

We are so quick to draw categories from our quiver, we come to think sensory patterns come to us with meanings attached to them, as if they were meaningful in and of themselves. But even if we are in our everyday mode of categorization, we are the ones responsible for bringing sensory inputs and conceptual meanings together. The meaning isn’t in the music or the image, it is in us. Always in us. If the sounds of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony pour out of the radio and there’s no one to hear it, then the sounds go unrecognized, and the radio may be turned on, but Beethoven’s Fifth is not playing. If the sensory-pattern recognizer and categorizer is absent, then for all practical purposes the moment is lost. Think of a car skidding off the road, hitting a tree, killing the driver, with the radio playing relentlessly to his unhearing ears and lifeless body. Is the radio still playing? To one discovering the scene, perhaps, but not to the late driver.

Categorization takes time—on the order of a few tenths of a second. It is possible to live in the gap between pattern reception and the act of recognition that fits it to a category. We can prolong that gap as long as we please by focusing solely on sensory patterns and their internal relationships, dispensing with conceptual meanings as irrelevant—as we often do in listening to music without words, scanning the surface of a painting, savoring scents on a damp day in fall, and walking in woods or along the shore—giving ourselves to our surroundings instead of claiming to know them in advance.

As a photographer for the Information Service at Iowa State University in 1960, I used to photograph boxing matches and basketball games, giving my total attention to the action in the ring or under the basket. I was so engaged in my personal zone, I lived to anticipate what was about to happen because if I waited to find out, it was too late to click the shutter. Peering at the scene through the viewfinder of my camera, living in that space, when the match or game was over, I had to ask to find out who’d won.

Yes, sounds dumb, and it was because I had no use for speech and meaning. Just as when I visit galleries and avoid reading what the artist says about a painting or photograph, or even the label of what I am looking at. I don’t want titles or grand ideas, I want the visual experience, which the title or blurb takes away from me so that I know about the image without experiencing it for myself. In such a case, words are not the issue. They are someone else’s categorizations, and I have no interest in them. Later, perhaps, but not now. Not till I’ve pushed the experience as far as I can take it, exploring the image, noting the colors and their relationships, textures, shapes, angles, brushstrokes, making the image live in me so that I have a personal acquaintance with it. That way, I still see the world through my own eyes. Maybe later, I’ll bother to read what someone else has to say about it.

I still recall being disappointed when I led a group of eleventh graders on an excursion through woods where I wanted them to learn about their natural surroundings by touch, smell, sound—any way but sight (see Reflection 149: Blind Walk). Pairing up, one partner was to assure the safety of the other who, blindfolded, explored her surroundings by hand, ear, and nose. But despite my instructions, everyone made a guessing game of the exercise, the presumed object being to shout out the name of each object encountered. For them, the name said it all; sensory experience was beside the point. Which, I realized sadly, was the result of the schooling we run our children through in making them dutiful inductees into our culture. The label—the right answer—is of the essence; personal experience is not part of the curriculum. I was trying to awaken my students to sensory details they could use to enliven their writing, but had to work harder than I planned to get that message across.

Listening to music without words is one of the best ways I know of to experience the pre-categorical, sensory aspect of consciousness. Jazz and classical music work equally well; ballads less well because the words steal the show. The trick is to give yourself to the notes themselves as they rise and fall in time, noticing their duration, their tonal relationships, the quality of the different notes, the interacting voices of the instruments, echoes and repetitions, larger or smaller leaps than you expect, comparing where you think the music is going to where it actually leads, and so on. That way, you make each piece your own because you have lived inside it in your own consciousness, not merely followed along at a distance.

Abstract painting is a great medium for exploring visual relationships between different shapes, hues, values, textures,  sizes, and orientations of patches of color. It is such relationships that turn different patches into patterns of visual stimulation, elevating discrete sensory differences into an overall design which holds together because its internal workings add to something larger than themselves. Faced with an abstract by Franz Kline, for instance, seen from the right distance, the eye never stops ricocheting around the surface, darting to every corner in search of the next salient feature, knitting the parts into a stimulating and satisfying whole. Don’t take my word for it, words are irrelevant. Just give of yourself in free exploration and see what you find.

If we don’t explore sensory patterns before we categorize them as this or that, we may lose the opportunity because habit is apt to take over and short-circuit fresh perception altogether. I have mentioned in an earlier post the distinguished historian of science who put a print of Picasso’s Guernica over his desk—and never saw it again. We have to make a deliberate effort to notice sensory patterns when we have the chance, or they may well disappear as so much cultural wallpaper. I remember staying home from school as a kid because I was sick, and getting so tired of hearing the same old chestnuts favored by radio stations in Syracuse—in those days The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Rhapsody in Blue—that I still associate them with canned chicken soup and ginger ale. Try to really listen to Ravel’s Bolero and see how long you last.

No frill to me, aesthetics is the high art of noticing. Of really paying attention to sensory details wherever I find them. Of giving myself to life in order that life will give itself to me. When I don’t make the effort, life glides right past me like so many telephone poles by the side of the road. This is what I mean by “being there,” putting my values where my body is so that I engage what is truly going on from my personal perspective. Sensory exploration is essential to getting the most out of life instead of glossing it prematurely with a dismissive categorization. Seen one, seen ‘em all. No, each individual being or event is unique in the world, and must be experienced to be appreciated. If we are bored with life, we are bored with ourselves for not taking the initiative to first give of ourselves to our surroundings in order to elicit their response.

At the dentist’s office in Bangor yesterday, I read in Time Magazine the news that great things were coming to the so-called third world in the form of first-world TV shows finally getting the global audience they so richly deserve. I put the magazine down and though about the benefits of pre-packaged experiences going by so fast that they amount to missed opportunities for doing something personally significant on the local scene. 

Mass media are the enemy of human consciousness because they are meant to overwhelm us, not engage us. We can’t ask questions or say how we feel. Try writing a letter to Time or Newsweek about their opinionated coverage of world events and you’ll get back a form letter much like the one you get from your Representative or Senator saying how much your letters mean to them. As if words and categorizations were reality itself. In truth, the corporate mass media are dumbing down the world, separating persons from their individual opportunities to have local experiences.

It’s not that, as the voice of corporate America, the media pre-package experience so much as that they pre-digest it for us, too, so there’s nothing else for us to do but sit and watch flat screens the evening through after working all day in a cubicle watching other flat screens. We should be out raising flowers and vegetables; watching birds, spiders, and insects; milking cows; hiking or swimming in the wilds with our kids; using our minds to make something of ourselves instead of letting the corporate media remake us to suit their agendas. For-profit corporate personhood is an assault on the Earth and all forms of life. Corporations are not alive, and know nothing about living beings. Their sole purpose is to make money for their owners, which they do at the expense of not only their owners themselves, but of all living beings.

Heroic conceptual categorizations laid on us by corporations doing our thinking for us, coupled to lazy sensory-pattern detection on our part, is leading us all down the primrose path to global catastrophe. The solution is to reclaim personhood for those who are still individuals among us, destroying the very idea of mass media in the process. The only media that work are intended for individuals, not the masses. We will never do better than face-to-face conversations, personal letters, or phone conversations. That way, we reserve categorization to ourselves as called forth by the aesthetic patterns we discover in daily experience. Once we forget how to do that, the end is not only near, it is behind us, leaving nobody to listen as the pretty music plays on.