Today Dave Pollard reprints a recent speech by Bill Moyers in which he implores the world to use its heart to see what is unfolding around us. Moyers ends the speech thusly:
On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: ‘How do you see the world?” And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: “I see it feelingly.'”I see it feelingly.The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist, I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free – not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need to match the science of human health is what the ancient Israelites called ‘hocma’ – the science of the heart…the capacity to see, to feel, and then to act as if the future depended on you.
This capacity to see from the heart lies at the core of what it means to sense the emerging future. And seeing from the heart means sensing the patterns of our emergent future in the grains of sand that are our present, right now, right here.
Johnnie Moore put it nicely yesterday when he asked “is your future in your present?”
In talking with Sonny Diabo last week, I learned that recovering this capacity to see may well be the one emerging Aboriginal leadership capacity that distinguishes 21st century leaders from those who have gone before. The utter domination of scientific materialism (along with the empirical measurement craze of the last couple of centuries) has relegated this ancient skill to the bargain basement bin of divination and idealism. The result has been a civilization where we shut off our human responses to the world and trust our senses only if they are confirmed by some mediated third party
Seeing the future in the present consists of two parts I think. It first means “seeing feelingly” or apprehending the truth of the world as it appears in front of us. All of the forces and the obstacles and the obfuscations that stand between our eyes and what is really happening. Seeing with the heart is the only way through this mess, to truly sense what is upon us.
Second, the capacity for seeing involves what Sonny describes as “getting my foot in the door.” In other words, there is a subtle ability to discern opportunity in all of the mess of the world. Sonny’s work these days consists of being and Elder to several processes across Canada that are purporting to make a difference for First Nations people. Among his two pet projects are Aboriginal Head Start, and long term care. He decided to throw his commitment into these projects because being born and dying are our deepest connections with the spirit world and the experiences of the first and last years of life are the most important for defining what it means to be Aboriginal. He sees this clearly, and sees the processes he is working on like doors that are opened a crack. He sees those cracks as potential, which he can help realize by supporting them as an Elder. And for him, once he has sensed this “”rightness” he sticks his foot in the door and does not let it go. For to simply witness these opportunities coming and going is not his game. He is there to extract the most he can for Aboriginal people. There is no decision to be made – he simply stays in the knowledge and belief that holding space and keeping it open allows the potential he sees to become manifest for everyone.
At the Art of Hosting workshop last week, my dear friend Toke Paludan Moller had a realization that he shared with us. It is that at every moment we are together as humans, collaborating, creating and enjoying ourselves, we are embodying something of the future we want to see. In our very act of being with one another, we are saying “this is how it should be.” Toke asked the question “what if the way we are together is the future?”
Questions like that force the eyes and heart open to seeing the world feelingly, in a way that allows us to see where we are and to seize the future contained in the Now, to seed it and grow it.
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With thanks to new friends met through the Art of Hosting this week:
With regard to external factors, I don’t envision any other single factor like friendship with admirable people as doing so much for a monk in training, who has not attained the heart’s goal but remains intent on the unsurpassed safety from bondage. A monk who is a friend with admirable people abandons what is unskillful and develops what is skillful.
From the Itivuttaka collection of Pali suttas.
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I have been engaging with Lenore Ealy since the Giving Conference in Chicago. She turned me on to Richard Cornuelle’s work which seems prescient in many ways. This paper, De-Nationalizing Community (.pdf) is a short but very interesting read. It weaves together anarchist and libertarian perspectives arguing that the idea of community has been appropriated by government. The paper generated a really interesting spark of mutual interest between Lenore and I. We come from very different political poles and through our conversations I have been losing my grip on political spectrums, compasses and other typologies, which can only be a good thing.
So in the context of this slippage I have been thinking a lot about the role that government plays in our lives. I wouldn’t say I’m a libertarian and I think there is a need for government to provide services to citizens. But the anarchist in me wants to attach a warning to those services, like the warnings on cigarette packages: use at your own risk.
I don’t trust corporations to provide services either, and I’m not advocating privatisation of community resources. That’s what appeals to me about Cornuelle’s paper. It’s not a perfect solution but it is thought provoking.
I already unschool my kids, and I’ve pretty well unjobbed myself. I was thinking of finding a new doctor (my former GPO has gone into a community based ob-gyn practice…yay to her!) but recent interactions with the medical system has convinced me to actually avoid getting an MD and, unless there are dire emergency circumstances, not going anywhere near a hospital. I have a good homeopath, and I’m active and eat reasonably well. If I can at all avoid it, I’d rather spare myself exposure to iatrogenesis.
In general I think that government services are the worst possible option for people who are really in need. I don’t know why this is, as most of the people who work in government are generally there because at some level they care in a way that drives them to join the public service. But as a whole, it’s as if some dark-side of emergence takes over when government goes to offer a service. Whether it is welfare, education, child protection, health care or infrastructure, we tend to receive services which are offered on a shoestring budget by overworked people with little time for personal contact. If you need those services, it’s great that they are there, but god forbid you should ever need them.
In general efforts at reforming public services are very long and drawn out affairs which have very little impact for the amount of energy they consume. In many cases it is easier to actually do it yourself, be that homeschooling children, constructing community housing or starting community-based child welfare agencies.
Still, I feel like government needs to provide services to those in the direst need. And I feel especially that corporations and profit making ventures have very little place in public services. The question is how can we best use collective resources (such as tax dollars) to support the best possible sets of services and community initiative to ensure that no one falls through the cracks without creating a situation where people come to depend on government to the point where individual and collective volition evaporates.
Thoughts?
[tags]libertarianism, anarchism, richard cornuelle[/tags]
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The last of three parts on music.
We are talking about improvisation as a method for working with or being in groups – developing a set of practices that refine one’s ability to think on one’s feet and to see full opportunities in small hints (Blake’s “world in a grain of sand“). Improvisation, especially in a collaborative environment, produces material that would never otherwise arise.
And yet, it is worth pointing out that great improvisation is not simply making stuff up on the spot. Consider this from Becker’s essay:
When I used to play piano in Chicago taverns for a living, I dreaded the nights when guys who had been playing dances would come in, after their jobs had ended, to sit in with our quartet. In a traditional jam session, we would play well known tunes and everyone would have a turn to solo, improvising on the chords of the song. Why did I dread it? If there were, say, four horn players sitting in, in addition to our own, every one of them would play the same number of choruses. If the first player played seven choruses of “I Got Rhythm,” the other four would all play seven; I would have to play seven, whether I felt like it or not; the bass player, if his fingers help up, might play seven, and the drummer too; then people might start trading four bar phrases ad infinitum. That could easily add up to sixty thirty-two bar choruses of a song whose harmonies are not very rich (I was fond of songs, like “How High the Moon,” that had what we called “interesting changes,” harmonies that changed frequently and departed from the original tonality). Remember that the pianist mainly plays accompaniment for all these choruses and you can see how someone who had already played for several hours might feel like falling asleep as the procession of choruses–not very interesting ones, usually–went on interminably.It wasn’t always that bad. Once every several months, a lot of things, varying more or less randomly (although my colleagues and I often went in for theories that involved phases of the moon), would come together right, and the results would be extraordinary, we thought and felt. Usually that didn’t happen, and everyone involved was bored, not only listening to the other players’ choruses, but even to their own.Why was that? For one thing, most improvising was not quite so inventive as the language we used (and that most people still use) made out. In one way, it was in fact spontaneous, created at that moment, and not exactly like anything anyone had ever played before. But, in another way (as Paul Berliner has amply demonstrated), every one of those seven chorus solos was basted together from snippets the players had played hundreds of times before, some they had come on themselves, many slight variants of what he had heard on records (of Gillespie or Parker or Getz); among these collages, especially when it was late and we had heard it all over and over again already that night, one of us might do something that sounded to our ears really different and original, even though it might well be something we had spent a week working out in privacy rather than something invented on the spot.
Soloing in this context, the height of improvisation, does not happen out of the blue. The preconditions for excellent improvisation include:
- Practicing options and thinking about how they might work in performance
- Studying material and knowing the tradition and context of what you are doing.
- Being aware of etiquette of improvisation and understanding when to give an take.
- Being grounded in theory so that your improvised contributions make sense within the field of meaning.
In short, improvisation demands a set of highly refined personal practices that create the conditions for a perfect eight bar solo. The material payoff is miniscule in proportion to the amount of preparation, but the quality of the result can often be extraordinary, wildly out of proportion to any investment in practice.And there is another condition to take in account too, and this is tremendously overlooked. Improvisation happens on a ground which is prepared and maintained by tedious repetition and grunt work. The pianist endlessly comping chords is actually holding a harmonic space open for the freewheeling contributions from the soloist. This work is critical and it is hard. It is hard to sit through the slog and remain in the background. One wants to do something different just to keep things interesting, but to do so would change the field for the soloist. So this is the last practice of improvisation, the accompanist’s yin to the soloist’s yang: quietly maintaining the filed of play, holding space, inviting contributions and allowing people to be free while you remain both fully present and totally invisible.
In planning, facilitation and all kinds of group work, this lesson is perhaps the most important. It allows for a quiet space to be opened amidst the noise of messy brainstorming and creative endeavour. In every high performance engaged in generating amazing things, there is someone patiently comping the chords.
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Another post on music, this one inspired by a great essay on the etiquette of improvisation, by Howard Becker:
Collective improvisation–not like Keith Jarrett, where one man plays alone, but like the more typical small jazz group–requires that everyone pay close attention to the other players and be prepared to alter what they are doing in response to tiny cues that suggest a new direction that might be interesting to take. The etiquette here is more subtle than I have so far suggested, because everyone understands that at every moment everyone (or almost everyone) involved in the improvisation is offering suggestions as to what might be done next, in the form of tentative moves, slight variations that go in one way rather than some of the other possible ways. As people listen closely to one another, some of those suggestions being to converge and others, less congruent with the developing direction, fall by the wayside. The players thus develop a collective direction which characteristically–as though the participants had all read Emile Durkheim–feels larger than any of them, as though it had a life of its own. It feels as though, instead of them playing the music, the music, Zen-like, is playing them.
This is largely the experience I have making music when I gather with others to play traditional Irish tunes. In the traditional Irish session, the players sit in a circle, and call out tunes on the fly, changing from one to another as the tune sets evolve. It never takes long to get to the flow state described above, where small variations in the tune suggest other things.
When the session is really humming there is a chemistry that arises between the musicians. I have often thought of this state as one in which all the individuals in the group take a significant emotional investment in the music and place it outside of themselves, in the middle of the circle, like a glowing ball of energy that we all try to keep aloft. It feels on the one hand solid and on the other delicate and vulnerable. It can trigger powerful emotions, and I remember one session where, in the middle of the tune Over the Moor to Maggie (mp3 here), I had a sensation of 1000 suns exploding in my chest. I was weeping tears of joy at the immensely generous space that had opened up in between us.
This is one reason why I think that music, even played by people with a most elementary of technique, is a wonderful practice ground for all of the other areas of collaboration we face in life.
Tomorrow: the things you have to do to invite other to improvise.