I am reading Designing Regenerative Cultures by Daniel Wahl and chapter one is about questions.
I am all about Questions…. Asking a question is an art. It is the art of machine learning, of the oracle, of the tarot, of the dissertation. Asking questions opens the world – it is the art of Socrates.
Here is what TS Eliot has to say on the matter from the book:
“Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? […] What life have you, if you have not life together? There is no life that is not in community, […] When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city? Do you huddle close together because you love each other?” What will you answer? “We all dwell together to make money from each other”? or “This is a community”? Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger. Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions. T.S. Eliot (1934)”
Excerpt From: Daniel Wahl. “DESIGNING REGENERATIVE CULTURES.” Apple Books.
I may write this like a Nietzsche book or Wittgenstein notebook – random fragments.
I was supposed to publish this last week I think or maybe two weeks ago. It is hard to keep time organized. Perhaps because I am reading ani*mystic or perhaps because I am moving – or perhaps it is florescent lighting which is definitely a mind control substance.
I was talking with Aya about what chapter I was on, and Aya told me that had missed a chapter. Boo Ka NA – this is Mandarin for NO! But maybe yes. I looked through my last posts and see that I blogged on chapter 2 twice and quite frankly I don’t care. Aya says glitches are ok -this is definitely a glitch. Some say that glitches are where spirit comes through – so this series of posts is about glitches.
I loved the end of the chapter: “Where animals really come from”.. It reminds me of the visionary experiences of Malidoma Some. And I can get behind animals coming from the invisible world – that certain forms take shape in water and wind and then are given bodies and blood. Dreaming creates animals – this is why bigfoot exists. Joking not joking.
Aya’s latest post made my heart stop because I love complexity theory. Complexity theory is about how there are different kinds of computational problems that can be solved in a certain amount of time. It is also about how different kinds of computational problems can be solved in a certain amount of space. Programmers like to say that we/you can do anything. Well, this is not true.
There is a structure to computation. Just like an oak cannot be an elm, P cannot be NP. AND the space I need to do both is different.
“Wednesday as a being beyond you and your limits. simultaneously now and eternal.”
In this chapter, Gordon talks about space and threads and knots and making. That space is constructed from everything that happened in it and everything that will happen. Aristotle’s politics begins in the home – the oikos. The home is a microcosm of the polity – the city state. The home is also the origin of economics – oikonomics. The science of homes. When I think about economics and ecology (the logic of homes) -I now thing about these knots and timelines – what are the patterns of the home like so many different types of complexity of computer algorithms.
As Tolstoy said every family is unique (or many every unhappy family – wink wink).
I once had a vision of a weave. The weave of the universe. I was the space between the warp and the weft. Nothing. Darkness. The Void. Was I dead? I was NOTHING. But I thought I am a mother, and my mother is someone so I am also someone. This is not to say that parenthood is the only way to verify existence, but for me I guess it is important. We are the (w)holes in the fabric.
“i want to know what a number is to a sparrow, to a lizard, to a monkey” – so writes Aya in her latest blog post about Ani*mystc. She also includes a beautiful image of mud that cracks in threes.
This chapter to me was a story about what it feels like to live in relation with the spirits. I was going to say numenous, but to me that has a disembodied quality. Gordon in this chapter is in relation to embodied spirits that most people do not see, like the dragons of the nakshakras (the lunar mansions).
What is it to look at a cloud and to see a dragon? An image is worth more than 1000 words because we can always look closer. Imagines have infinite depth, infinite associations, and infinite scales.
Gordon talks about the difference between true and real. This struck me as profound. It is the difference between epistemology and metaphysics OR logic and metaphysics. The true is something that is internally correct for its system. The real is something that works for us. Who cares if something is true if the system it is not correct for is not the ecosystem.
To everything there is a season. So says Ecclesiastes. A time of water dragons and a time of fire dragons. In my last post I wrote about number and cycles. But time is not just number, time is not clock time, time is a feeling. We could say time is an emotion, or a moment in the emotional wave.
