Emile: Zeus, you're up early again and I'm still tired, .... or is it that you go to sleep as soon as I reach my most alert mind-state? I know you're dying to get back at me again with more of your Walter Lippmann, stuff ... "To every human problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and WRONG."

Zeus: Emile, ... you keep writing about inversion, ... 'Upside Down Man', ... 'polarity flips on teams', 'Inverted Perspective', ... how about writing about your own perversion.

Emile: You mean 'inversion'.

Zeus: Well, in your case, 'inversion' is 'perversion'.

Emile: God you are a pain, ... I am not even bloody awake yet.

Zeus: Yes you are, .. you've just got your understanding of awake and asleep inverted, ... you should have listened more closely to Heraclitus.

Emile: Ok, i give up, ...what have you got for me?

Zeus: I've been playing around with bits of your recent email dialogue, ...for example, here's the note you wrote yesterday, the one to Missy and Larry, when they said they couldn't follow your quantum physics rapping;

>dear missy and larry,

>it was just a dance step anyway, ... to try to tease, charm and amplify

>the dance music as it emerges from the silence, so that it can rise above

>the chatter of the doctors of science and the doctors of doctrine, .. and

>perhaps induce them to join in the music-making dance, as well.

>keep groovin,

>emile and zeus

Emile: .... yeah?

Zeus: Well, now look at that this bit from Missy and Larry's note the day before yesterday;

> ...i was reminded of the statement of Pope Pius XII in the

>Encyclical Humani Generis in1950, For the faithful cannot embrace

>that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed

>on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation

>from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number

>of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be

>reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents

>of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin,

>which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which,

>through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.[18](underline

mine).

>I do not know that you have ever had the opportunity to read the Letters of

>Teilhard to his friend Pierre Leroy. They were published in 1976. They are

>some of his letter written between 1948 and his death on April10 in 1955.

>Just four days before he died he mentioned that the General of the Jesuits

>would not allow some of his work to be translated into German. The reason

>given was that such idea should not be allowed to continue - or words to that

>effect.

>At the time he was residing at one of the Jesuit residences in New York. I

>wanted to quote from these letters, but the owner of the copyright would not

>give me permission.

Emile: ... yeah, I found that one really interesting, because it was this idea of original sin, with its implication of being born a defect and having to redeem oneself, that struck me very early on as being totally unnatural and a complete turnoff, ... and Missy and Larry are pointing out that this is why the Church is holding out on 'evolution' because it would conflict with the 'sole-sourcing' of man from Adam, and if that occurred, it would dissolve the notion of 'original sin', and the 'redemptive' role of the Church. ... at least that's my interpretation, ... not to put words in the good father and his dog's mouth.

Zeus: .. keep on the intuitive roll there Emile, .. I know its difficult for you, ...

Emile: ... oh yeah, ... and if you are not starting from a 'problem to fix' mode, then the whole Aristotelian 'causal' framework starts to fall from its primacy, ... and you have to shift over to 'purpose', as Nietzsche pointed out; ... "The belief in cause collapses with the belief in purpose', and that means that one will have to 'flip over' to being purpose or 'attractor' pulled, rather than seeing everything in terms of a 'problem to be fixed'.

In that case, ... one would no longer be enchained to 'being a sinner who must do penance', ... but one would be free to fly into the future, to embrace whoever one was meant to be and not be frozen to the past, ... a slave to making amends for some imagined, all-tainting-and-tarring crime. The way of nature is to 'fix mistakes' not by going back, not by dwelling on the past, but by going forward optimistically, with the resolve to make things right in a new way, ... as in an expanding sphere which subsumes itself, ... like Mary Oliver says in her poem 'Wild Geese';

You don't have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains

and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air

are heading home again.

Wherever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting _

over and over

announcing your place

in the family of things.

* * *

Zeus: Yes, Mary 'got it'.... nature and evolution as the BECOMING attractor, the creative dance into the 'not-yet' ... but I haven't finished my story yet.

Emile: Carry on, ... you will anyhow.

Zeus: In your note to Missy and Larry, you said; "...so that it can rise above the chatter of the doctors of science and the doctors of doctrine, .. and perhaps induce them to join in the music-making dance, as well". What I am hearing you say there, is that, not only are the doctors of the church allergic to 'evolution', ... so is Aristotelian science, .... and so are the 'doctors of science' allergic to evolution, and you seemed to put your finger on 'why' in your 'Sounds of Scilence' note, when you said;

>That was it, thought Emile, ... that was what was troubling them, having to actually

>confront the possibility of never knowing, ... never being able to know, ... and thus

> never being able to 'control'.

Emile: You're saying that 'Adam' and 'creation' provide this feeling of material certainty, of solid footings, and that this is what people are loathe to leave behind, that we couldn't embrace the thought of being an emergent cosmogenetic blossoming, so to speak. Not so elementary in my mind, Sherlock, .... I don't see how that's a hard-wiring type of thing, .. .. Mary Oliver didn't have a problem, it was all gravy when she broke her chains, and the aboriginals and the Celts too, ... the Celtic knot symbologies have no beginning and no end.

Zeus: You know as well as I do that man builds structures where the 'message' is encoded in the structural organization, so that as you participate you assimilate the message experientially. No words need be spoken, ... it comes in terms of symbology, and the values we attach to the symbols. You are always talking about this in your, ... or I should say, 'our' essays, like repeating Joseph Campbell's or whoever's statement that man would more appropriately have been named 'homo symbolicus', and .... your asking people what happens if you walk into a mosque with a leg of pork under your arm, or through Israeli Customs wearing a swastika armband. Whether it's the most well-intentioned guest from mars or whoever, people will teach them something when they do this, ... and that teaching will be stimulated simply from the geometric arrangement of symbols. If you don't get your symbols arranged in the politically correct order, ... look out, cause the whole community will be giving you the finger, or worse! All knowledge does not have to come from books and speech, .... horses are traditionally trained with a whip and some throw-stones. But to submit to that training, you must be made feel that you have a problem which has to be corrected, ... to feel like your base-case is 'defectiveness' and 'ignorance', ... that you're so defective, you're ignorant of your own defectiveness, ... so lesson number one that is given is to lift your supposed veil of 'ignorance' so that you can embrace your own innate defectiveness.

Where your evolutionary ideas lead, Emile, is towards the starving out of this idea of a person being 'a problem waiting for a cure', ... and replacing it with 'a flowerbud who, in reaching out for blossomhood, becomes the blossom it was meant to become. It is this self-referential notion of 'co-evolution', non-sole-determination, you are trying to 'let out of the box', which frightens and disturbs people who have been brought up thinking in terms of 'explicit knowing', 'facts' and 'cause'.

Emile: You may have a point there, ... when I was reading the Pope's 'Fides et Ratio' encyclical, at one point I thought I was reading from Parmenides, and the birth of exclusionary logic, .... though it was the Pope himself, saying;

"There is today no more urgent preparation for the performance of these tasks [the defense of human dignity and the Proclamation of the gospel message] than this: to lead people to discover both their capacity to know the truth (124) and their yearning for the ultimate and definitive meaning of life." ... "Nor should it be forgotten that the specific contribution of philosophical inquiry enables us to discern in different worldviews and different cultures "not what people think, but what the objective truth is."(93). It is not an array of human opinions, but truth alone which can be of help to theology." ... "Hypotheses may fascinate, but they do not satisfy. Whether we admit it or not, there comes for everyone the moment when personal existence must be anchored to a truth, a truth which confers a certitude no longer open to doubt."

Zeus: Yes, the Pope, ... Parmenides, so you say, ... Aristotle, all painted with this same brush of absolutism, ... and how often have you tended to the same 'infallible perception' in aspects of your own thinking? When you first looked in, quite accidentally, on Missy and Larry's website, ... you saw all that 'religious stuff', and when you got to the part about the 'angel dog' named 'Missy', ... you were amused, and had written off the validity of the whole source, ... you were operationalizing that 'thing-categorizing then excluding' approach which you so scorn when you see it in others. But you hesitated, .. it was me that held you back,... until you smelled a sense of humour, and were inspired by that rarity of spirit which no bonds of political correctness can contain, .... so strongly were you attracted by the 'geometry' which you felt coming from the writings, that you splashed at the edges, and then dove in beneath the superficiality of the words, ... words which are always emotionally coloured by our personal experience, and here you are now, ... quite willing to refer to me by name, your own 'intuitive' 'mother of rationality', sharing my existence openly with others, instead of hiding me ashamedly, .... openly embracing me now, .... just as Missy and Larry embrace in public. So I'm quite happy with the progress, and I won't speak of the obvious, that Larry came up with a feminine association, 'Missy' and he always gives 'Missy' first billing whenever he signs off. I'll just leave that with you for now, for your later reflecting, because I want to continue with our 'story' here, and dig a little deeper into the thinking of our 77 year-old, ageless duo, Missy and Larry, and how it informs us on this 'gate-keeping' of our fundamental conceptions of reality, a gate-keeping which is enforced through symbolic management, by the continued vigilance of the doctors of the church and the doctors of science, who ensure that the external clockwork God is fully and regulary wound.

So, the ticking you are reaching out and threatening to shut off, is the objective reality of man's own making. You have your ontogenetic space-time reference to pull you into the future, but it takes time to 'tune-in' to this, right?

You recall the two citations which Missy and Larry sent you a few days ago? ... both of them speak to this issue of space-time-referencing, .... one was from the book 'Quantum Theology' by Diarmuid O'Murchu;

Quantum Life?

Aristotle believed that nowhere on a line drawn from the smallest atom of hydrogen to the most complex human creature is it possible to say where nonlife ends and life begins. Contemporary scientists have not advanced much further; they perceive living systems to be highly complex and do not tend to employ descriptions, definitions, or even use the word "life." Throughout the present work,1 I use the word in a generic sense to denote the "power of spirit" which seems to underpin the creative vacuum (see pp. 70, 102-3) potentiating field influence (described in chapter 6), which in turn empowers the propensity for self-reproduction and self-renewal. I suggest that human life is a dimension of the greater whole, not an exalted form superior to all others, and I suggest that the divine is to be perceived more as a co-creative, synchronistic life force, rather than a mechanistic, clockwork God operating from without (see Margulis and Sagan, 1995, for further elucidation of these ideas). [Diarmuid O'Murchu, Quantum Theology, Endnote 7, p. 210 (Crossroads Publishing, 1997)]

So maybe, as you normally argue, a person like 'Aristotle' shouldn't be written off as one homogeneous 'thing' on the basis of his formalizing of exclusionary logic, ... there seems to be more there, which doesn't split time and space apart so absolutely, .. ... And then there's also Missy and Larry's quote from Teilhard de Chardin, from just before he died;

"A God Who is not The Energy of Cosmogenesis (since this is the fundamental

thing that I believe) and a Catholicism which refuses to accept its place as

the 'phylum' wherein the highest kind of discovery of God can be made, is

meaningless to me." Teilhard de Chardin in a letter dated March 28, 1951 to

his friend Pierre Leroy.

And finally, there is Missy and Larry's 'sum-up';

The Energy of Cosmogenesis

is

Creative

Creativity

Creatively

Creating

the

Cosmic Dance

into the

NOT YET.

Larry Hein, S. J.

July 1, 1998

Emile: Wheeewww! Now that you put it like that, Zeus, ... it's kind of amazing what one can find 'under the hood' of a 77 year old Catholic priest, .... if I ever am in a church, I'll definitely be tuning into the sermon for encrypted messages. What a quandry to be in, ... to try to be loyal to one's 'brothers' and to one's traditions, and to one's ontogenetic self, to the Cosmic Dance, ... all at the same time, .... to know the balance.

Zeus: Sounds like the spot where you find yourself right at this moment, right?

Emile: Shut up, ... smart ass!

Zeus: Ok, now we're coming to the point that I 'woke you up' for, ... and when I tell you, ... don't you mention that word 'counter-intuitive' again, or I won't give you a moment's rest for a week.

Emile: I'll behave, ... let's hear what you got.

Zeus: Think about this. ... in an associative way, of course, ... the doctors of the church and the doctors of science are both hung up on absolutes, right? Dennie, with all his world-ly experience, seemed impatient with you and suggested something in his last note, ... do you remember?

>I'm not sure that Emile should be surprised by the scilence that has

>greeted his outburst in the scientific journal, "Complexity".

> It's like you have burst into a church and declared to the assembled

>congregation that their whole mode of conduct made no sense. That their

>characteric way of conducting themselves, the Napoleonic search for certainty,

>the mode of the observer and the voyeur, their hierarchies, their rules, their

>procedures, their structures, their artifacts, their things, was leading to a

>distinctive form of myopia or blindness.

> You were, as I understand it, proposing an alternative Tolstoyan world of

>immersion, of participation, of innovation, of creativity, of discovery. You

>were celebrating the contingent condition of everything they believed in.

> But the very accuracy of the aim of these ultra-sharp Apollonian arrows has

>the characteristic consequence for the recipient of being immobilized.

> "More had he tried to say, but she in fear,

> Fled on and left hime and his words unfinished..."

> until poor Daphne was turned into a tree.

> A dragging languor spread, her tender bosom

> Was wrapped in thin smooth bark, her slender arms

> Were changed to branches and her hair to leaves;

> Her feet but now so swift were anchored fast

> In numb swift roots....

> The paradox of it all of course was that:

> "And still Apollo loved her; on the trunk

> He placed his hand and felt beneath the bark

> Her heart still beating, held in his embrace

> Her branches, presses his kisses on her wood .. etc etc

> In other words, scilence.

> Well, I think Emile should stop pressing his kisses on the dead wood of the

>scientific world.

>... Find another channel and medium for your message, as you

>already have. But don't be surprised.

Emile: Yes, i remember, ... Dennie's remarks are surprisingly poetic and profound, and they make me draw back and reflect. In this case, I wrote back and said that I needed to be in the spaces between conflict and that I could not walk away and still 'know' or have access to 'the tension which informs'. Yes, what I should have said to Dennie, is that I must be surprised, as this is where the learning is for me. If I knew all he knew and he, me, ... what a bore!

Zeus: Exactly, .... now let me remind you of your most recent surprise, the reaction you received from Ernst, the Director of Strategic Studies at the computer corp., when you forwarded him your 'Inverted Perspective', and he copied it to several of his staff with the following cover;

> What do you think of this?

> I met Emile 4 or 5 years ago when he was a senior guru at Mogul Oil.

>He is a non-linear system thinker par excellance. I find his "immersion"

>argument appealing, though operationalization of it will require some

>doing. He and you would get along famously. I'm sure.

Emile: Yeah, that blew me away, ... he's thinking in terms of building 'smart hat' technology!

Zeus: Well, what do you expect?, ... that's the business he's in, and not everyone wants to spend their life trying to transform trees back into nymphs, ... not everyone can afford to,.... it doesn't put food on the table.

Emile: Good point, Zeus, ..... I am beginning to see what you mean by 'my inversion 'IS' my perversion'. I started off thinking that 'business' WAS the 'problem', ... now you are suggesting that 'business' Is the 'way'. ... coool, zeus-dude.

Zeus: Business caters to the needs or wants of the people and leaves the determining of what makes sense in terms of 'ethics' or 'morality' or 'harmony' to the people. You yourself have maintained that there's no point in chasing down the supply-side in the drug business unless you have at the same time, a viable process in place for shrinking the demand.

And you keep quoting Prigogine on the fact that the belief in certainty on the part of science is a religious belief, so Dennie and you are both right, ... Dennie is right in saying 'don't be surprised', ... because it's clear that the 'scilence' you are hearing is coming from your challenging of scientific DOGMA, ... but your surprise is 'the connecting', if you see what 'I mean', that is if you get the meaning of me, your intuitive aspect, .... bringing into connection what's outside with what's within, ... an external experience coming into embrace with an internal feeling, .... as above, so below, .... you're the expert on 'spheres within spheres', right?

Emile: I see, .... as did 'the blindman when he picked up his hammer and saw', .... my external experience came in and shook hands with its counterpart in inner purpose, .... very sexy, Zeus.

Zeus: Yes, well if that aroused your imagination, just hold onto it as we move along, ... Business doesn't care whether its up or it's down, as long as people come with money, right? On one level, you may have found that attitude 'wanting' in terms of purposiveness, even though you do not 'judge' things in terms of 'ethics' but look for 'harmony amplification'. Of course, business does not exactly 'amplify harmony' either, ... at least not in the short term, ... but do you remember what you said about the advantages of non-judgemental yet non-purposive process, in the footnote to the essay which you spoke from at the 'Knowledge Advantage II' conference in Chicago?, ... if not, I'll remind you;

. . . . . .

Footnote: The "Ignorance Advantage" of Digital Organisms:

Digital organisms approach their work with the same sort of unquestioning trust that characterizes relationships within the most adaptive of teams. It can be likened to a child's innocence or the innocence that an adult might only experience in a dream state. In this state, information is taken in without question, bypassing, in the case of mature adults, banks of bs filters built from years of defense against a barrage of bad information and bad advice. So it would appear that "innocence", in one sense, implies full bandwidth receipt of information.

Innocence without consciousness, simplifies into ignorance, which is perhaps the more appropriate attribute for this full bandwidth quality in digital organisms.

What do these banks of reject filters do to the pristine, flat response of innocence? My own experience with geophysical filters has taught me that if you want to remove 60 hertz noise, in practical terms you are going to have to cut out a swath from 55 to 65 hertz. This gives an exposure to the loss of valuable information in the "shadow zone" which surrounds the unwanted input.

In the context of information and knowledge, the implication is, for example, that legitimate archeological data which may be interwoven with stories about "Bigfoot" may be discarded, or more generally, legitimate scientific data in the shadow zone of myth or mystic themes may not make it through our involuntary bs filters. Unless, of course, it is "innocents" who are engaged in these learning exercises. Deterministic chaos which is giving rise to much of today's complexity is neither myth nor mysticism, but a phenomenon consistent with the laws of classical physics. However, the "mysterious" emergence and subduction of "morphs" associated with it, are in the shadow zone of our bs filters.

Compounding the problem with the fidelity of our input filters is the fact that complexity often comes in the form of subtle, low level signals. The difference between a virtuoso performance of Chopin and a mechanical rendition is not in the high order bits. Such signals may be difficult to pick up if the input spectrum with bs filters in, looks like a gap-toothed haircomb. That is, reject filters seriously degrade the fidelity of subtle signal components.

In times of greater stability and less complexity, we needed only focus on the strongest signal components; the high order bits, or "the bottom line". So the paradox that our human intellect seems frighteningly slow to adapt as we race forward on a collision course with complexity, might just relate to our industrial age input filters. Digital organisms, which share our appreciation of crisp logic but not our lost innocence, are in the process of building and demonstrating a better complexity mousetrap, and are going to have to be heard.

In fact, since they have no guilt or sensitivities, their behaviors are far more unconstrained than our own, and since they are not conscious, we do not have to take their word for anything, we can simply cut them open and examine what makes them successful or unsuccessful. And if we "listen" closely to their current message, what they seem to be saying is that complexity is bringing us an opportunity to kick the four hundred year old Cartesian, "management by parts" habit and come home to a more natural, less mechanistic engagement with the world.

. . . . . . . .

Emile: Well blow me over and call me Zeus, ... allow me to shake hands with my newly discovered business-come-digital-organism brothah. Zeus, you inverting trickster, you are making-over my 'guilty' into my 'innocent', ... and not only that, you are telling me that business is the bandwagon into a better future!

Zeus: Emile, ... for chrissake, ... put on your smart-hat so you can start dancing to your own music, ... what am I here for?

Emile: Yeah, yeah, .... but bloody hell, Zeus... what a mad and motley combo, ... delusionary doctors of science and religion and a business community capable of pure, unadultered ignorance, and me not even knowing what I know and tripping over it all the time. That's why I zeussed-out that Missy and Larry had hit the mother lode with their 'autistic' God model, or 'universal ordering principle' as I would call it. Bringing this into confluence with my, er 'our', own thinking, the Self-Educating-Autistic-Collective (SEAC) model is surely the antidote for Acute-Systems-Inquiry-Deficiency-Syndome (ASIDS), and business, whose ignorance, or innocence, whichever you prefer, will be the means of ...

Zeus: Scuse me!, ... might I propose, ... 'SEAC'ing-Relief from ASIDS, ... What Most Doctors DON'T Recommend', ... by Zeussie and Emile

Emile: ... jeeesh!

Zeus: And don't you be surprised if you see some lace undies in the laundry basket, either.

Emile: .... Shut up, will you, you little jerk-off, ... I've got to get some sleep. ... That's it, .... snore gently, ... little trickster-fool that you am.

* * *

Emile could no longer breath, ... he was being buried alive, sinking deeper and deeper into the bar sands at the mouth of the flooding river. All light vanished and the crushing weight of the overburden on his now prostrate body was joined by a viciously intense darkness and silence, taking him towards some final 'crunch' point where he would no doubt be flattened like a cockroach under a bootheel. As all hope drained out of him, ... in the last flickering of awareness, he sensed a tiny lightening of the load, .. a reversal?. This half-imagining hesitated momentarily, and then blossomed out into full-fledged trend and thence on into a furious reversal of the burial process, ... and before long, Emile was once again liberated into the turbulence of the flood and was now being carried seaward at a high rate of speed across the nearshore bars and rocky current-swept subcrops, towards the shelf lip and, hopefully, into the relative safety and calm of deep water. Tumbling uncontrollably in the current, Emile could catch glimpses of rocky barriers ahead, standing between him and the deepwater calm like a line of thugs intent on retaining a hostage, ... a lethal gauntlet that would have to be navigated, ... if that was the word for it. Before he had time to map out a strategy, for all the good it would have done, a violent jolt brought him to the dim edge of unconsciousness, and he felt himself descending, ... not into the waters on the seaward side of the rocky outcrop, as hoped, but on the 'inside face' of the shelf-edge barrier, pulled by a down-welling current along the sheer rock-face of the submarine outcrop.

Emile no longer had any sense of time, and was losing his grip on the boundary between reality and fantasy, ... as he gave himself up to the downwell and finally settled quietly on the bottom. In this strange 'flow-saddle', there was a sense of creepy movement all around him, .... and as he looked across the seafloor, thick fingers of green algae began emerging from the sand and silt, growing like tomato plants in time-lapse photography, ... rising up and around him until he was deeply enclosed within a green algal forest. And,... just above the now towering, swaying algal trees, was an obscure, shimmered giant-form whose lone eye was looking down at, and approaching him. Emile saw his protective algal canopy being greedily devoured in the creature's attempt to get to him. Within moments, Emile was sucked into the gaping mouth of the beast, narrowly missing rows of razor-sharp teeth which grew like stalagmites and stalagtites from the floor and ceiling of the cavernous mouth. In a swirl of algal bits, sand and silt, Emile was spun about until all sense of orientation left him and blackness came.

After some undeterminable interval of time, a musical tinkling and a pleasurable, calmness flowed into his mind and body on a rising tide of consciousness, .... and now, directly above him was the sparkling and tranquilizing view of the undersurface of the deepwater basin, an immersed diver's-eye view of the insides of millions of windwaterwavelets dancing in the summersun, .. filtering down through limpid waters to greet him as he floated on out 'beyond' the barrier reef.

* * *

This epilogue is intended to give the reader a 'director's perspective' on the past series of essays culminating in 'What Doctors 'DON'T' recommend, .. an 'architectural' picture which frames the whole-and-part message of these essays in terms of 'real life' issues, outlining and describing the various 'communication' devices which have been used in writing their writing.

First off, the reason for the above opening to this epilogue, which is an emulation of the practice which Jean Morel has used (Quebecois - Abenaki friend and fellow frequenter of Bar des Pins), imagining one is a grain of sand in the flow of nature as taught him by his uncle at age twelve, ... is to demonstrate the qualities of the inverted, 'immersed' observer perspective, as distinct from the more common (in our culture), 'voyeur' perspective. To Jean, this immersed perspective, which he has 'practiced' all his life, is a way of keeping one's senses honed for tuning in to the tacit, co-evolutional relationship one has with one's surroundings; i.e. keeping one's 'self' evolving in harmony with one's environment, a process consistent with the pre-teen lessons taught to him by his Abenaki grandmother, ... lessons which are too complex to be described even in the dual french-english language capability which he and his grandmother possessed, ... although the dual languages provided an advantageous 'steroscopic view' of the tacit geometry which comprised the traditional aboriginal messages, which helped to inform him on their 'geometrical' nature.

Secondly, these essays are about real life, ... my life and experience, and those of the people I have been meeting along the way. Clearly, there is no way to represent one's full experience in explicit words, ... the 'voyeur' story one recounts in descriptive terms of what you see 'out there', cannot fully incorporate what you are at the same time thinking and feeling; i.e. the feelings 'in here' about what you see, and that is the most essential aspect of one's experience. In order to communicate the full experience, one has to 'give voice' to one's full thoughts and their inter-relationships with one's tangible observations, ... hence the devices, in these essays, of 'Emile' who expresses both what he sees and thinks, and more recently 'Zeus' who brings out the intuitive or associative-connective reasoning, via his dialogues with the more rational Emile, needed to weave everything together into a consistent fabric.

Understanding 'communities as complex systems' --- and here the term 'community' can be taken to mean family, team, company, partnership or any 'peopled' organization --- requires one to account for three modes of perception and inquiry. The essence of perception is the differentiation of 'movement' and all movement is a relative thing, involving three entities which can move; i.e. 'subject', 'object' and 'containing environment', ... or, in the Zen parable of wind, flag and mind, 'immersing fluid', 'immersed object' and 'observational mindstate'.

We know that space-time is evolving continuously and irreversibly, and this 'evolutionary movement' effects everything; i.e. the object, its surroundings and the observer's mindstate, ... a mindstate which keeps changing as the observer keeps experiencing. Because of relativity, the assumption that either subject, object or containing flow is fixed for the duration of a particular experience, is an approximation which 'colours' or 'warps' our perceptions, ... a 'warp' which we will have to manage if we are to understand 'communities as complex systems'.

Erich Janstch, in 'Design for Evolution' has discussed an architecture for maintaining an awareness of, and managing this problem of the relativity of motion of wind, flag and mind (containing 'ether', object and subject). Clearly, where our perceptual approach assumes a fixed containing flow and fixed subjectivity, we are in the traditional 'objectivity' mode of science and rationalism. Where our perceptual mode assumes the containing flow (environment or immersing ether) is fixed and lets the subject and object 'co-evolve', we in a 'role-play' mode where we must use our judgement as to the 'correct' collaborative responses to situations. Where our perceptual mode does not assume any fixedness on the part of wind, flag or mind (containing flow, object or subject), we are 'beyond judgement' ('beyond good and evil) in 'evolutionary consequence' or 'harmony amplification' mode.

Again, in order to understand 'communities as complex systems', we must understand what kind of perceptual mode we use to observe the system, and that will most certainly influence our understanding of system behavior. Not only do we need to question our perceptual mode, ... we need to ensure that it complies with physics, since modern physics (relativity and quantum physics) has some important things to say about the observer relative to the observed. One of the fundamental assertions of quantum physics is that the observer cannot be outside of the system, referencing his observations to a clock outside of the system, because there is no 'outside' (everything is connective). This means that an 'immersed observer' view is the only 'quantum physics compliant' perceptual option.

Saying that we must be in immersed observer mode and use no fixed clock reference, in the terms of subject, object, and containing flow, is another way of saying that we cannot fix any of the three and build upon that base for our understanding of the system, but that we must work on a relativistic basis; i.e. we must assume that our subjectivity is evolving, the objective state is evolving and the environment which contains us and the objective state is evolving. Our job is then to bring all three into a meaningful (harmonic) whole-and-part unity. This translates into Jantsch's 'tuning in to evolutionary consequence' mode of perception and inquiry, the 'highest' of the three mutually enclosing levels (i.e. the evolutionary, role-play and objective levels are like spheres within spheres, proceeding from largest to smallest).

What does all of this mean with respect real life understanding of 'communities as complex systems'?

Let's take a real life example, which is going on right at this time, ... a friend of Jean's, Antoine, is in a deep depression, ... on the edge of suicide, ... an all too common occurence for males in this province. Antoine is in his early fifties and is coming to the culmination of a ten year project in which his aim was to redevelop a hierarchical and polarized workplace situation into one of people-based empowerment. He was a (non-management but labor-side) leadership figure representing the workforce in this undertaking, which has been very successful, ... so much so that the position he has been occupying has become meaningless and unnecessary, as was his intent from the beginning.

One thing, I would draw attention to here, as being different in Quebec from some of the other regions I have lived in, and which doubtless relates in some measure to its world class status in male suicide rates, is that there is more of a calmness and fatalistic viewpoint about suicide, and people like Antoine seem far less likely to look to religion, or to chemical lobotomization or mind-numbing, as a defense against suicide. It would appear that those in depression want to rediscover their lives, or 'get out'.

From the point of view of the 'architecture' presented above and in the 'What Doctors DON'T Recommend' essay and the whole series of essays in the five year sequence, the source and nature of Antoine's problem is clear, but finding a way forward is non-trivial. First, let's discuss the hypothesized source of the depression, and later some ideas on the solution (which are going on right now, in parallel in real life).

We're all familiar with expressions to the effect that a man 'becomes his position'; i.e. when he is promoted into the position of 'boss', he not only starts acting like 'the boss', he starts believing he 'is' the boss. He is essentially allowing his 'self' or 'subjectivity' to be defined by his job or 'work object', ... the opposite mode to an artist, for example, whose subjectivity more fully determines the 'work object'.

This is a subtle and insidious state of affairs which may have more or less serious consequences for the individual, depending on (a) how seriously he takes it and whether or not he has a more artistic life outside of his work life, and (b) the extent to which he can avoid discontinuities, or circumstances permit him to avoid discontinuities which undermine the ersatz 'self' he has 'reverse engineered' from the 'work object'. In Antoine's case, he fully devoted ten years of his life to the challenge, and took it very seriously indeed, ... he became the reciprocal of the organizational goal he set out to achieve, and as the organizational objective 'fleshed it's self out', it was courtesy of flesh from Antoine's 'self'.

Let's go one step farther in illustrating this phenomena of an 'object-engineered self'. In reconciling my 'community as complex system' approach with the sciences of complexity in general, a process which the journal *Complexity* has given me some voice for discussing, it is apparent that there is a serious difference between the approach I have been taking and the mainstream approach being used. This difference becomes apparent in the light of the above perceptual architecture (an architecture which is beyond the investigative bounds of most scientists, who ply their trade as always, even though there is repeated suggestion that 'complexity' is somehow bound up in perception). We can look at this difference via an excerpt of a (not yet acknowledged) letter-to-the-editor of Complexity;

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

John L. Casti,

Executive Editor Complexity,

1399 Hyde Park Road,

Santa Fe, NM, 87501

March 1, 1999

Re: Chaos Emergence, and Life (Vol 4, no.2)

The application of the ideas of complexity and chaos to social systems, in addition to raising questions on the relative themes of 'chaos' and 'emergence', as brought out in the above-cited article by Harold Morowitz, brings out the question of relativity per se.

While the top-down application of complexity and chaos understanding in social systems can be relativized to 'social purpose' (e.g. the cultivation of whole-and-part social system harmonies, or the suppression of whole-and-part social system dissonances), 'bottom-up' rules or meta-rules development would appear to be innately problematical in a relativistic context.

For example, Professor Morowitz notes that 'This stability [of the earliest organisms] over eons is to show just how anti-chaotic is this emergent property called life.'

Even in turbulent flow space, we may find some zones of long term stability, such as the skin effects alongside boundaries, however, behaviors in these zones fall far short of portraying the overall morphodynamic history of the system. For example, the historical patterns of chaos and emergence in the evolutionary history of animate life is scarcely evoked by that of the basic organisms mentioned.

This raises the question as to what degree agent's rules, meta-properties, meta-rules and system tiers, extracted from scientifically amenable observed problem spaces, inform us on complex behaviors in socially-relevant problem spaces. In other words, to what extent can we expect our understanding of scientifically selected complex phenomena apply to complex problems of social relevance?

Similarly, can we truly say; 'Strange as it may seem, noise sometimes operates counter to chaos, which frees us from worrying about insects flapping their wings in Katmandu.'? If so, ... frees us from worry relative to what?... science-selected problem space behaviors? What if the insects infect someone who later comes in the door behind us and infects us while we are still looking at, and documenting, the innocuous insect behavior?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Do you see the point? The scientific study of complexity is in voyeur mode which leaves the observer outside of the space he is observing, where his 'self' or 'subjectivity is not at all 'in the game' .... is not questioned. The scientific observer is thus making his observations relative to the established field of science, with respect to the unquestioned role of science and scientists. By excluding his 'self' from the investigation, he is effectively fixing his 'self' or 'subjectivity' in its current state, and therefore holding it back, not only from forming a co-evolutional part of the 'solution to' or 'understanding' of complexity, but also holding it back from its natural evolution.

Now scientists are a highly respected and fairly well paid bunch, so there are benefits from anchoring the definition of 'self' and studying complexity relative to this fixed base, ... but my point in the letter is that this is precisely what is precluding us from an understanding of 'community as a complex system'. Not only that, but because we are continually unearthing 'solutions' which are commercially exploited, without knowing if, or how, they may contribute to 'dissonance' in the system, we are breeding pathological forms of complexity. Pogo knows about this, ... 'we have seen the enemy and it is us'.

But it's not just scientists who tend to do this, its the rationalist male 'way' of the Western culture, ... it's the 'anthropocentric rationalist male way'; i.e. to go into 'voyeur' perceptual mode which leaves the observer external to the observation space, a decided 'no-no' from a quantum physics and relativity standpoint. We cannot 'freeze' our subjectivity and still expect to be able to understand complex systems such as couples, teams, families, organizations, communities.

Why not?

By fixing our subjectivity where it happens to be at the moment, ... as implied for example, by scientific traditions of voyeur hypothesizing, experimentation and replication of results, we are essentially allowing the tangible, material world to define us. In other words, we become the virtual reciprocal of what we do. We 'become our positions' as the proverb goes.

There is a problem here since 'we' are not matter; i.e. our center of consciousness is not 'material', nor are 'we' definable in explicit terms, ... instead, 'we' are tacit and relational. There is no spot in the body where our 'center of consciousness' can be located. Medical experiments have shown that there is no one spot in the brain, which contains the center of consciousness, and great amounts of brain can be excised without destroying the seat of consciousness. More recently, the psyche and soma have come to be seen by biochemists, as a distributed psychosomatic network involving in a unified way, the neural, immune and endocrine systems, and comprising a network whose boundary with the outside world is innately undefinable; i.e. there is no obvious boundary between the 'self' of the individual, and his reciprocal space; i.e. the collective.

At this point in the epilogue, it seems time to state the inevitable and obvious. All of these essays in the series have been about 'inverted perspectives', .. the inverting of 'ends and means', the inverting of the polarity of teams, ... the upside down man, the inverting of voyeur perception (downward and inward looking perception) to immersed perception (upward and outward looking perception), and so on, ... even to the point of inverting rationality to madness. In ALL CASES, the reciprocal relationship has been characterized within an inclusionary parent-child relationship, where the one has 'contained' the other in the manner of spheres within spheres (the radius of the outer sphere (the more complete concept) being greater than the radius of the inner sphere), and by the yin/yang interplay between the two.

Thus we are not speaking of 'either/or' when it comes to madness and rationality, ... we are speaking about madness being the mother of rationality and the evolutionary interplay between the two being what's 'natural'. Since this point may be less obvious than the other invertable dipoles, we can borrow from Martine Dodds-Taljaard's philosophical researches on this, citing Sheridan and Foucault. To avoid disturbing the current thread, of stating the inevitable and obvious, ... I'll append the full, slightly-edited statement [1], and only insert the essential message 'inline' to this discussion;

'It is not by confining one's neighbours that one is convinced of one's own sanity' - but that is precisely what happens - Foucault says: " We have yet to write the history of that other form of madness, by which men, in an act of sovereign reason, confine their neighbours, and communicate and recognize each other through the merciless language of non-madness."

"The real heroes (Sheridan says of Foucault's view) are not the sober, white-coated scientists patiently pushing back the clouds of ignorance and painfully revealing, little by little, the true nature of madness [he could be talking of reality as a whole here too], but rather those literary 'madmen' who, repudiating the language of reason, crossed over into the territory of 'unreason', and in a language beyond and prior to both, testified to an experience that lay, not beyond the boundary of true humanity, but at its heart."

* * *

The inevitable and obvious 'ordering principle' which brings all of this talk of inversion into a harmonic, whole-and-part unity, is that 'we' are 'of the spaces' and that 'space' (aka 'ether', quantum field, electromagnetic field, experience encoded in the relational organization of 'things') is the 'mother' of matter.

I am not saying anything new here, simply underscoring what has already been said by science and psychology; i.e. our 'self' is 'of the spaces between matter' and it interconnects which space as a whole, ... 'space' such as is characterized both metaphorically and in reality by complex electromagnetic fields which pass through all matter (i.e space is inclusionary) and which possesses far more energy than the energy equivalence of all matter in the universe.

Now we can see the value of Jean's 'sand-grain' exercise, because for the self to remain in harmony with its contiguous and simultaneous greater self, ... space in general, ... immersed-observer perception is necessary. It is with (relational) respect to one's containing environment (the surrounding space) that the 'self' must be defined and evolved.

NOW we can see the hazards of Antoine's reverse engineering of the self by the 'work object' as occurs through voyeur perception. That is, as the containing space evolves (as the overall ensemble of space and matter undergoes ontogenetic development), it is essential that the 'self' which is 'of the spaces between things', stays in harmony with its 'mother space' and is not frozen or petrified by being referenced to an abstract, man-made tangible structure, such as 'work object' or 'goal'. When Antoine has succeeded in eliminating the need for his job, ... if he has meanwhile 'become his job', then he has effectively eliminated his 'self', and his pain and anguish, emerges from this dissolution of his self, and his disorientation with respect to being able to redefine himself in terms of his containing space. Had Antoine practiced the 'sand grain' exercise all his life, ... he would likely have maintained a rapport with his containing space and therefore lived a 'double life' as many of us do, ... humoring the 'self-defining' pressures coming back on us from our positioning in rationalist society (from work and/or from the expectations of family, friends and public) and trying to live our 'immersed' lives and to keep our 'selves' evolving in concert with our immersing space.

Furthermore, NOW we can see the Achilles heel with science's approach to understanding complexity; i.e. it's being focused on material-behaviors which are secondary to the quantum space-behaviors, ... an understanding which is innately predestined to be 'incomplete', as a result. The behaviors of 'space' simultaneously effect both subject and object, ... 'mind' and 'matter', ... thus it is insufficient to 'fix' the role of the scientist or his subjectivity as he looks out, voyeur-like, at the 'problem space' or 'phenomenal space' as we might more realistically express it (i.e. avoiding the flatspace notion of 'problem-solving' which implies departure from an equilibrium state and instead embracing the notion of 'harmony-amplification' which needs no fixed, equilibrium reference base).

Meanwhile, what about the struggling Antoine, and others? How can such tacit architectures as just described be shared, so that a person who has temporarily lost touch with their 'immersed space' perceptual and harmonizing skills, bring these back into their awareness?

Jean (pseudonymn) and my' discussion with Antoine (pseudonym), which necessarily had to stay in co-resonant phaselock with 'where Antoine was at', got nowhere because of Antoine's intense state of rationalism which has him eschewing anything with a seemingly religious tinge or a purely theoretical tinge. The effect is that Antoine rejects anything I have to say about complex systems theory because the holistic (whole-and-part harmony etc.) aspects of complex systems ('tuning in' etc.) 'smell' like religion or mysticism. The difference is, of course, that the inclusionary reasoning used in complex systems (self-reference etc.) is part of an overall unified system of reasoning whose justification is not 'God's word' or 'the spiritworld told me so', but the measure of unifying connective order it brings to our experience. In other words, the hypotheses in these essays on 'community as complex system' lean on the same type of inclusionary reasoning as described by Einstein in 'Geometry and Experience' and without which, as he states, he could never have come up with the theory of relativity.

Jean and I are fully in agreement of the architecture of the system (containing space in primacy over subject or object-behaviors) and how Antoine has fallen afoul of it. Jean has gleaned his view of the architecture from his 'tri-lateral' education; from the Abenaki traditionalist wisdom as taught to him by his grandmother, assisted by the stereoscopic view provided by the duality of their English and French language and cultural (collective experience) lenses. My own understanding of the 'architecture', has come through the process described in my essay 'Inside Story' (http://rampages.onramp.net/~emlumley/inside.htm).

What I have very recently discovered, is a congruent architecture in the less offensive (to Antoine) field of integrative arts and architecture. My dialogues with the architect of this architecture, Donald Kunze, of Penn State Univ. indicates that we both do, indeed, have the same conception rendered, in his case, in terms of art and architecture (the study of architecture), and in my case, in terms of physics and philosophical models of perception and inquiry. The suggestions that we 'have a fit' can be implied from our early exchanges this week [2] which we intend to follow up on as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, I have copied off the internet, two key architectural papers by Donald Kunze; i.e. 'Representation' at http://wgn111.ce.psu.edu/representation/representation.html, which gives the general background of 'immersed' versus 'voyeur' perception options in an artistic setting, and the space-over-matter architecture paper, "Kats, Heroes, Brides, and Other Native Speakers of the Language of Boundaries" (revised version, March 9, 1999) which is at http://art3idea.ce.psu.edu/yale/default.html

The second paper is not easy, because in all these cases, we are talking about the inverting of our thinking from 'the tangible in the primacy' to 'the tacit in the primacy', and by 'tacit', I am meaning the relational aspects in the space 'between things' which is not just 'between them' but which immerses and is inclusionary with them; e.g. the madness or imagination which contains the rational. This is non-euclidian space-time country, which Kunze refers to as 'intransitive space', e.g.;

"Isn't that what we need? Some way of keeping track of where and how we move around spaces that, because of their incorporation of time, are intransitive? Or, alternatively, how we move through times that, because of their use of space, are also intransitive? Such a mathematics would make us able to map a logic that has, up to this point, been invisible. This logic is not logic so much as it is the fundamental quality, "invisibility." Just as Merleau-Ponty demonstrated the presence of the invisible within the visible, we might look further for some means of gauging this presence."

The beauty of Kunze's approach is that his explanations are in terms of literary works which may be more familiar and less threatening of off-putting than quantum physics etc. concepts, such as the work of Nabakov ('Pale Fire'), The films of Hitchcock such as 'Rear Window', the film 'Wizard of Oz', a cartoon strip, 'Krazy Kat' etc. While the 'boundary language' mathematics may be tricky, it is congruent with the 'sphere within sphere' geometries alluded to in these essays and shows how both the imaginary and the real can reside in the same 'space' (a multi-level space), or in the 'poche' of intransitive space, as Kunze refers to it.

Whether or not Antoine will read and/or assimilate this material is an open question, as is the corollary question, ... if he does, will he make the connections with his own 'self' architecture? But this is, in any case, what is going on in real time, behind these essay writings, ... behinds the words and images orchestrated by Emile and Zeus.

To summarize what has been said in this epilogue;

..... There are three basic elements which we must consider, in a relational way, in coming to an understanding of 'community as complex system'; i.e.... the subject or observer, ... the object or observed phenomenon, ... and the containing environment or 'ether' which not only surrounds the objects in space-time but co-occupies the space of the spatially-extended objects (in the inclusionary manner of, for example, an electromagnetic field surrounding a material magnet but also permeating it).

Since this whole triadic system is continually co-evolving, and since relativity says that we cannot say that any of the three constituents provide a fixed or 'absolute' base for referencing the others, we must allow allow all three to 'roam' as the system co-evolves. This means that we are prone to error if we 'fix' our own subjectivity; i.e. if we cease questioning the nature of 'self' and begin to take it for granted or allow it to be 'reverse-engineered' by our 'work object'; i.e. to let ourselves be reciprocally defined by our work, by the expectations of our work-culture or social culture. Instead, we must ensure that our 'self' is in harmony with the whole triad, the mother of which is the pervasive 'space' which occupies inter-object space and co-occupies the space occupied by objects. In order to maintain this harmony, we must maintain our ability for 'immersed space' perception and response.

Antoine appears to have lost touch with his 'immersed space' sensing and responding faculty, by allowing his 'self' to be defined, over an intensive ten year work project, in terms of the reciprocal of his work, ... a definition of 'self' which is now being eliminated as a result of the successful completion of his work. In essence, until Antoine can 're-tune' to his containing space-time dynamics, he is 'lost in space'.

* * *

Return to '98/'99 Update Page and Index of Essays

[1] March 10, 1999 Email Communication from Martine Dodds-Taljaard

Let me quote some lines for you from Alan Sheridan's book - Michel Foucault: The will to Truth. 1980 Tavistock Pubs. London and NY.

Sheridan says, that several blighters kind of inspired him (F) [for Foucault] - Hyppolite, Canguilhem, Dumezil, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and of course Nietzsche. His project or task, much like yours, was inversion - sabotaging [sic] the whole conceptual basis of psychiatry, for eg,. from within, in the name of its victims. [but psychiatry, is just one manifestation of the quest for rationality - yes? so that this is about unmasking the real nature of rationality and our belief in reason]. "The real heroes (sheridan says of F's view) are not the sober, white-coated scientists patiently pushing back the clouds of ignorance and painfully revealing, little by little, the true nature of madness [he could be talking of reality as a whole here too], but rather those literary 'madmen' who, repudiating the langauge of reason, crossed over into the territory of 'unreason', and in a language beyond and prior to both, testified to an experience that lay, not beyond the boundary of true humanity, but at its heart." {that piece is SO profound and beautiful to me - because he is saying that the strip-mined reason threw out the real world, where our humanity is bound up and imbedded, in the tacit and the latent, and the sphere of so-called unreason - just as you say, and that we have to explore the dark side too to see the light side, and who says which side is dark and which is light?] 'madness' is a phenomenon CREATED by reason - by positing all that fell outside it as unreason. here is a piece by F himself:

"Madness, which had for so long been overt and unrestricted, which had for so long been present on the horizon, disappeared. It entered a phase of silence (I think he is talking about the enlightenment era of the past 300 - 400 years when reason became 'all' and which silenced the voice of 'madness') - from which it was not to emerge for a long time; it was deprived of its language; and although one continued to speak of it, it became impossible for it to speak of itself... All this is not the gradual discovery of the true nature of madness, but simply the sedimentation of what the history of the West had made of it for the last three hundred years. Madness is much more HISTORICAL than is usually believed, and much YOUNGER too.... This experence of Unreason in which, up to the eighteenth century, Western man encountered the night of his truth, and his absolute challenge was to become, and still remains for us, the mode of access to the natural truth of man....The whole epistemological structure of modern psychology is rooted in this event, which is contemporary with the French Revolution and which concerns man's relation with himself. 'Psychology' is merely a thin skin on the surface of the ethical world in which modern man seeks his truth - and loses it." [ethical here means the general notion that this is concerned with how we should live, yes?]" Nietzsche, who has been accused of saying the contrary, saw this very clearly ... Psychology can never tell the truth about madness because it is madness that holds the truth of psychology ... If carried back to its roots the psychology of madness would appear to be not the mastery of mental illness and hence the possiblity of its disappearance, but the destruction of psychology itself and the discovery of that essential, non-psychological because non-moralizable relation that is the relation between Reason and Unreason. It is this relation that, despite all the penury of psychology, is present and visible in the works of Holderlin, Nerval, Roussel, and Artaud, and that holds out the promise to man that one day, perhaps, he will be able to be free of all psychology and be ready for the great tragic confrontation with madness. ....None of this psychology would exist without the moralizing sadism in which nineteenth-century 'philanthropy' enclosed it, under the hypocritical appearances of 'liberation'. It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty."

That he chooses as his themes for exploration, not 'what is reason' what is morality etc. as the others do - but what is that which the upholders of rationality DENY and vilify - like madness, and sexuality, etc. and those are the themes he explores - and much like i told you Toulmin said the other day [the 'modernity' philosopher Stephen Toulmin spoke at Stellenbosch University last week] - they are the latent sphere that carries the supposedly 'rational' - since they are all within the intuitive domain. So that as Laing and you and others point out - what is madness and perversion and all those things - are definitions of everything that falls outside the puritanical rationality drive - that seeks to retain only the essence, the pure, the structural, the acceptable, etc. yes? And in these few passages alone, it is clear to me, that he is doing the same thing that Nietzsche was doing and that you are doing - inverting the rationality and the logos - to an inclusive geometry, yes?

The language of the 'mad' is the language that is banished, which silences them - it is about what we 'may' not speak about, as you say. And so madness and what is acceptable, have a history, and is not some fact or state but a judgement, a 'judgement passed by one part of the human mind on another, one person on another."he quotes Pascal and Dostoievsky (F does in his book on madness) - and says D said that 'It is not by confining one's neighbours that one is convinced of one's own sanity' - but that is precisely what happens - F says: " We have yet to write the history of that other form of madness, by which men, in an act of sovereign reason, confine their neighbours, and communicate and recognize each other through the merciless language of non-madness."

Yes? the merciless language of pure rationality and reason - Sheridan says - 'what is significant in the treatment accorded the 'insane' over the last three hundred years is not an increase in scientificity, nor the spread of more 'humane' attitudes and methods, but the continuing allegiance paid to 'reason' and the complete failure to listen either to one's own 'necessary' madness (pascal) or to those labelled 'mad.' F says: "The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason ABOUT madness, could be established only on the basis of such a silence. I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence." --- Is that not the most beautiful inversion hmm? the archaeology of the silence.

* * *

[2]

>Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 10:43:39

>To: Don Kunze <dek4@psu.edu>

>From: ted lumley <emiliano@sympatico.ca>

>Subject: Re: Non-Euclidian Informational Representation

>

>

>don,

>

>i very much look forward to dialogueing further, whenever it may be convenient to you.

>

>and yes, .. one can imagine how lonely the cambridge math lecturer edwin abbott (flatland, 1884) and the german geometer hermann minkowski (1908) must have felt, as they came to the realization that we were intellectually stuck, for the most part, in a stark and abstract world of detached flatspace and linear time, and without a language available to share ideas on curved space-time continuums!

>

>thank you for considering my 'not-not' email.

>

>ted

>

>At 09:43 AM 3/12/99 -0500, you wrote:

>>Ted, I see that it will take me a little time to digest your rich remarks,

>>but I just want to say that from my first few glimpses I'm astounded that

>>you speak in terms that are so congenial, informative, and parallel to the

>>ones I developed in the "boundary langauge." I think you either anticipate

>>or go beyond what I've been thinking, and I look forward to answering some

>>questions I've had for a long time.

>>

.... snip ...

>>

>>But, I'm very anxious to go over your material in detail and find other

>>points of coincidence. It's very exciting to find that "one is not alone"

>>in the search for a non- or at least "less-" Euclidean way of thinking.

>>

>>Thanks very much

>>Donald Kunze

>>Ph.D. / Associate Professor of Architecture & Integrative Arts

>>Department of Integrative Arts

>>PennState University

>>215 Wagner Building

>>University Park, PA 16802

>>814.865.1750 (office) 814.466.7544 (home)

>>

>>http://art3idea.ce.psu.edu/ sleuth architecture, polythetics, and courseware

>>http://art3idea.ce.psu.edu/art3 "the third way to study art, architecture,

>>and landscape"

>>