John Berger: I’m no longer observing them, they are observing me.

John Berger meditating on natural beauty and political action, from Confabulations

https://www.newstatesman.com/2014/12/swimming-and-seeing

I swim on my back and look up at the sky through the framed glass roof. A vivid blue with white cirrus clouds at an altitude, I’d guess, of about 5,000 metres. (The Latin for “curl” is cirrus.) The curls slowly shift, join, separate as the clouds drift in the wind. I can measure their drift thanks to the roof frame; otherwise it would be hard to notice it.
The movement of the curls apparently comes from inside the body of each cloud, not from an applied pressure; you think of the movements of a sleeping body. 

This is probably why I stop swimming, and put my hands behind my head and float. My big toes just break through the surface. The water below holds me. 

The longer I gaze at the curls the more they make me think of wordless stories, wordless stories like the stories fingers may tell, but in fact here stories told by minuscule ice crystals in the silence of the blue. 

Yesterday I read in the press that 20 Palestinians in their homes were blown to pieces in Gaza, that the US has covertly despatched 300 more troops to Iraq to defend its interest in the oil refineries, that James Foley, an American journalist held hostage by Isis, was filmed during the ritual of his execution by beheading, and that 35 illegal immigrants from Afghanistan, men, women and children, were found suffocating in a shipping container on a freighter that had just crossed the North Sea to dock in London. 

The cirrus is drifting northwards towards the deep end of the pool. Afloat on my back, motionless, I watch it and chart with my eyes the pattern of its undulations. 

Then the assurance the sight offers changes. It takes me time to understand how. Slowly the change becomes evident and the assurance I receive becomes deeper. The curls of the white cirrus are observing a man afloat on his back with his hands behind his head. I’m no longer observing them, they are observing me. 

A conspiracy of orphans

From John Berger, "Confabulations," on why he writes the way he does.

From childhood, "I treated all those I encountered as if they too were orphans like me.  And I believe I still do this.

"I propose a conspiracy of orphans. We exchange winks. We reject hierarchies. All hierarchies. We take the shit of the world for granted and we exchange stories about how we nevertheless get by. We are impertinent. More than half the stars in the universe are orphan-stars belonging to no constellation. And they give off more light than all the constellation stars.
"Yes we are impertinent.  And I guess that I approach and chat up readers in the same way.  As if you too were orphans."

Sabbatical Reading: Corder on Rhetoric -- Argument is Love

Hillaire Belloc: Sharing a legend illuminates and satisfies the recipient while it amplifies the subject matter.

Reading a book about Catholicism, with an eye toward enchanting my agnostic life.

A Legend is "a story told about some real person, real virtue, or real spiritual experience, and of such a quality that it illuminates and satisfies the recipient while it amplifies and gives further substance to the matter to which it is attached." p.161 

"Legend fell out of fashion, was abused and ridiculed and at last almost lost [because] men fell into a habit of measuring everything exactly and neglecting whatever could not be measured." p.162. 

"Legend has taken a terrible revenge.  For in its absence men have been condemned to Myth, which is the dogmatic affirmation of something false." p.163 

--Hillaire Belloc, Essays of a Catholic, 1931,

It feels like the purpose of teaching in the humanities is to encourage students to connect to legends and to see their lives as legends waiting to begin.

The Original Title of Permanence and Change

The Original Title of Permanence and Change

In that spirit I wrote a tract, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, which was "such a book as authors in those days sometimes put together, to keep themselves from falling apart." Since I was in a con- siderable motivational quandary, my book was on the subject of motivation. Thus fittingly, its original title was Treatise on Communication; but I changed the title at the request of the publisher, who felt that it sounded too much as though the book were a "house organ."

From COMMUNICATION AND THE HUMAN CONDITION edited by Lee Thayer

Burke on the Delaware River

KB:

I hope to say more about the relation between technology and ecology, by reference to an acute battle between promoters and environ- mentalists, involving a vast technological project on the Delaware River, in an area near where my own home is located. The project, if it finally gets official political sanction despite the opposition of most people in the localities directly affected, will alter their ''human condition" quite drastically. But many scientific experts, and much apt communication by the local press, have entered the fray valiantly. An editorial in a local newspaper, referring to a similar controversy in a distant area, quotes an official who said :

The more protection projects-such as dams, levees or channelization- built with tax money, the more new buildings are built on flood plains. This results in a need for more tax-paid protection. More darns, levees, and channelizaiions.

That is to say, if an area is naturally subject to floods, there arises a demand to "conquer" the area by technological means of flood control. But as soon as such means are resorted to, people promptly move in, to the extent that they go beyond the controlled area. Hence, having turned a bit of nature into real estate, they feel that nature should behave, and they judge it as an "act of God" when the new fringe unprotected by the flood control gets flooded. Whereupon there is an outcry for more flood control. Add to that the proposition, "no construction without destruction," and you immediately see the likeli- hood of developments whereby the extension of such projects leads to new "side-effects," owing to the fact that all such technolot,ric enter- prises can introduce complicating factors, in radically altering the "ecological balance" of the areas directly or indirectly affected.

From COMMUNICATION AND THE HUMAN CONDITION edited by Lee Thayer

[S]imulation accelerates learning, enables knowledge transfer, allows extraction of meaning from myriad complexities, and provides experiences

From "Making visible: Using simulation and game environments across disciplines" by Melinda Jackson

"[S]imulation accelerates learning, enables knowledge transfer, allows extraction of meaning from myriad complexities, and provides manipulative experiences unavailable in the normal physical space of a classroom environment." [16]

"[G]ames exemplify good pedagogical practices and salient aspects of how people learn: Human learning occurs in context, is active, is social, and is reflective." [17]

"Simulation and game environments enable new forms of knowledge interac- tion previously unavailable within the normal curricula. A radical swing from passive to active learning occurs and the learner perspective shifts from third to first person, or even from singular to plural.

"Problem structures and solution processes can be investigated, experimented, interpreted and applied. The student is literally “immersed” within concepts, principles, systems and variables.

"Time and place can be manipulated. Slow processes can be sped up to view longitudinal outcomes; fast processes can be slowed to view incremental pro- gression. Hazards can be manipulated safely. Inaccessible regions can be tra- versed. The macro or micro can be zoomed in or out for differing viewpoints and details.

"Nuances and subtleties, critical ideas and misconceptions can be uncovered. Engaged within relationships and interdependencies, causal factors, quanti- tative and qualitative variables, students develop deeper meaning and lasting understanding." [18]

BEYOND FUN
Serious Games and Media
Copyright By Drew Davidson et al. & ETC Press
2008
ISBN: 978-0-557-00750-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008936773
http://etc.cmu.edu/etcpress/

 

 

 

Kenneth Burke on Dinner

Kenneth Burke on Dinner

Consider a happy gathering of family and friends, seated about a table, joyously partaking of a meal ample and expertly prepared. Invariably, whenever I experience such a time of merriment and sociality, an uneasy outlaw imagining crosses my mind. I think of certain underlying biological ordeals that made the occasion possible. Not only is the succulent roast that is being carved a sacrificial victim. Even if you were the strictest of vegetarians, your salad would be a once living thing that was probably still in the process of being killed, even as you dined.  

From COMMUNICATION AND THE HUMAN CONDITION edited by Lee Thayer

Kenneth Burke on Crabs and Killing

Kenneth Burke on Crabs and Killing

Or I have worried about a moral problem of this sort : I had heard it said that crab meat is at its best if the live crab is put in cold water that is brought slowly to a boil. In great moral indignation I put forth a protest: "Can't people at least renounce the slightly additional modicum of gustatory pleasure that would be lost if the victim were spared such slow torture by being killed suddenly, through immersion in boiling water ?" Whereat a man with a wholly different view of the situation told me: " If you put the crab in cold water which you bring slowly to a boil, it shows no agitation whatever. But if you drop it into boiling water, for a time it flails about piteously." According to this notion, my method would be the crueller one.


For possibly the crab might somehow adapt itself to the slow development of its condition from cold to hot, by going into a kind of protective trance.


Then, moving to another level, I wondered : "Suppose that, which- ever way I chose, when using it I thought about it and in a sense became fascinated with the thought, differentiating my position from that of the sacrificial victim, even while imaginatively putting myself in its place." The situation would now be somewhat analogous to the distinction between a child thoughtlessly tearing apart the wings of a butterfly and a child who might do so with the deliberate intention of making the creature suffer, possibly to compensate for some punish- ment or disappointment that the child itself had suffered. I can't readily think of cases in which a child would tear apart the wings neither thoughtlessly nor as compensation, but to the ends of monetary profit. But I can imagine the fantasy of an adult who, if the market conditions were favorable, might patent a mechanical "educational" contrivance by which children could "have fun" tearing apart the wings of butterflies. His interest would be not in the sufferering, but solely in the profit.


Not being scientifically informed as to just how a crab does behave when being brought slowly to a boil, or how good the market might be for a mechanical toy designed to rip butterflies, I offer these specula- tions purely as a kind of Aesop's fable.


My main point is that we have this much to build on: Organisms live by killing.  

From COMMUNICATION AND THE HUMAN CONDITION edited by Lee Thayer.

Sabbatical Reading: Corder on Rhetoric -- We are all storytellers in conflict with other storytellers

Sabbatical Reading:  Corder on Rhetoric -- We are all storytellers in conflict with other storytellers

What should Education Look Like

I've been reading Walter Gropius on education. I like this bit.  He means it for the designer, but I have long been thinking about liberal arts majors as design majors.

Sabbatical Reading: Corder on Rhetoric -- When Our Stories become Our Arguments

Sabbatical Reading: Corder on Rhetoric -- Language and Our Stories

Sabbatical Reading:  Corder on Rhetoric -- Language and Our Stories

"'Etherealized' via electric media we become discarnate minds"

From McLuhan & Nevitt:

"Etherealized" via electric media we become discarnate minds.

Sabbatical Reading:  Corder on Rhetoric -- We are all storytellers

Knowledge has grown disinterested in inner experience

Sabbatical Reading

“Intelligence, in a hurry, has done its best to limit reason to a calculating kind of consciousness:  knowledge, as a result, has grown disinterested in inner experience, even going so far as to ignore its intrinsic authority” -- Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe (2009)

What is Communication, notes by IA Richards, from the Magdalene Archives

Generative and animated, as well as alive to ordinary discontents and longings"

From Susie Orbach, Bodies

We endeavour to make it possible for others to be in their lives and their bodies and to feel them as generative and animated, as well as alive to ordinary discontents and longings.