Crafting Gentleness

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

David Ervine: A Gentle Warrior, RIP

I was talking to a documentary maker yesterday and mentioned the phrase 'the politics of gentleness' in the conversation. There was the usual look of pleasantly-surprised intrigue followed by a furrowed brow of puzzlement. What struck me, though, was that the first person he mentioned when he thought of forgiveness was David Ervine, a Northern Irish politician who died a few weeks ago. This was a little strange, as David tends to be one of the first people I think of as a paradigm of what I mean when I speak of an attitude of gentleness, and yet not someone that I imagine many people would choose to represent gentleness.

David Ervine was a man who called a spade a spade and always spoke from a place of honesty and integrity. He lived a life in a cauldron of violence, had often lived by violence himself, but his later life was lived in deep respect for others and their lives, their stories, and what they valued, and with a deeply personal and helpful political engagement with the situations in which he found himself. I'm glad that more than me think of him as a gentle man. Thanks, David.

Waiting to update the site

If anyone is wondering why the index page of the site hasn't changed for a long time it's because I have been having problems with my FTP client and with bugs and viruses and things. I have changes that I want to make to it which I will get around to soon. One of the key ones is a wee section on what I mean by 'gentleness', which someone pointed out I didn't have anywhere! Oops. :)

Monday, February 26, 2007

Free Hugs

Wow. So simple. So powerful. Thanks for this one as well, Soooz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3x_RRJdd4

Julia Butterfly Hill Interview

Thanks to Soooz for drawing my attention to the following interview with Julia Butterfly Hill:

http://www.bigpicture.tv/videos/watch/069059b7e

Thursday, February 22, 2007

"But I think my weapons are well chosen"

In the funeral pamphlet Ewen also included the following quotation from the writings of James K. Baxter

"I do not relish the role of david confronting Goliath, who numbs the soul wherever he touches it. But I find myself curiously, perhaps absurdly, cast in that role. And the five water-worn stones I choose from the river to put in my sling, are five spiritual aspects of Maori community life - arohanui: the love of many; manuhiritanga: hospitality to the guest and stranger; korero: speech that begets peace and understanding; matewa: the night life of the soul; mahi: work undertaken from communal love; I do not know what the outcome of the battle will be. My aim may be poor. But I think my weapons are well chosen."

More information on Baxter's life and work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_K._Baxter;
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/baxt.htm;
http://www.library.auckland.ac.nz/subjects/nzp/nzlit2/baxter.htm

"The Path of My Exodus"

A statement from the funeral of Ewen Derrick, a friend of my parents who lived in New Zealand. He had time to prepare this statement before his death. Ewen left the priesthood, but continued to work as a lifelong community activist. Although I had known him as a child, I met him again in 1990, but I was still too young to appreciate the man. I find this statement to be one of hope and perserverance and humanity, and Ewen's life of community work and social activism remains an inspiration for me:

"It takes a lifetime and longer to extricate one's self from the established institutions and to find new ways of establishing some less empty form of expression for the living faith. Metanoia (change of heart or direction of life) is not an act of the will. It is the unwillingness to continue. The unwillingness is not an act but an experience. One has no choice but to leave. ... This dissociation, however, is more easily formulated than achieved because no social space or field exists outside the powers that be and the existing institutions are there are the moment of one's metanoia. One does not know what is going to happen. One has no blue print for action. The trust is that this sub-zero situation is bound to create new ways of life. This is our Faith. Anon."

I've been reading Ewen's book Community Development and Social Change (Auckland District Council of Social Services, 1995), and would heartily recommend it. I'll post excerpts from it later on.

I would not personally say that 'no social space or field exists outside the powers that be'. For me, such a statement might lead us to invest too much value in the claims of those who consider themselves to be the powers that be (PTB). But that sense of dissonance, of being able to continue no longer in a situation that negates how you happen to be and aspire to be in the world, that I can identify with, and it seems to be the theme of the week on the blog!

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

advice for creative types

This letter to columnist Cary Tennis was posted on 2/6/07 on Salon.com. I do think there is more personal choice involved in embracing what lies beyond the quotidian than the author imparts; creativity is within everyone's reach (the notion of "genius," as a gift bestowed on a lucky few, is a western romantic myth) because everyone imagines. Plus, "paradigm" is a rather static and deterministic way of characterizing habit. Nonetheless, I think those who foreground creativity in their lives can probably empathize with the author's experience to some degree.

Enjoy!
Amy

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Cary,

Thoughts on creativity and punishment --

Thomas Kuhn bequeathed to us the concept of paradigm shift in 1962. Kuhn's ideas quickly became boilerplate, but there's an element of his thought that bears on this issue of creativity.

Paradigms are like a set of spectacles that allow information to be sensed (and thus sensible) and thus interpretable. Here's the key point: People standing in the midst of a given paradigm are unable to perceive information that paradigm doesn't explain. The majority of people obey the demands of the paradigm and don't have any problems with that.

Creative people, in whatever field and context they work, have the gift of being able to glimpse, discern and interpret information outside of [a] paradigm. This gift will always cause pain because that sense of "vision" allows them to see what others cannot. The gift will always cause pain because it tends to create isolation. Creative people live in worlds that are not sensible to most of those around them. The stable, dominant paradigm obeys the laws of self-preservation and will always seek to repress unknown and destabilizing information.

The practical effect is that creative people are frequent recipients of stout beat-downs from bosses, bureaucracies and buffoons. ("When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." --Swift)

I am an award-winning teacher with a file full of student thank-you notes that attest to how profoundly my work has affected their lives. Our new program director, with the full cooperation of our grandmotherly humanities department head, fired me from my assistantship on my first day of classes. I had waited 15 years -- largely because of previous traumas inflicted by school -- to pursue my master's. I had to clean out my desk and stand on the side of the road with my boxes of books and wait for my wife to pick me up in the August heat. The subsequent legal wrangling revealed a Rovian capacity for deception and punishment on the part of right-thnking liberal-arts administrators whose shelves are filled with books by Foucault, Kohlberg and Belenky. Eventually, some other people with the same books on their shelves, but who understood and valued the depth of what I was doing, hired me back and it all worked out.

Creative people, take heart. Restrain your self-pity. You don't have a choice. How else would you live? If you could conform, you already would have. Keep your eyes glistening and your intelligence white-hot (as Rumi advises). Nurture yourself with relations with like minded people, beware the impulse for self-medication, cultivate elders who have cut trail in front of you, mentor those coming behind you, and growth what the Mohawks call "seven thicknesses of skin" because you are going to need it. This is the way it has always been.

Betrayed and Wiser for it

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

"Rather, I see it as my task to expose the roots of hatred ..."

"We are so used to perceiving everything we hear in terms of moralizing rules and regulations that sometimes even pure information may be interpreted as a reproach and thus cannot be absorbed at all. We justifiably resist new exhortations if moral demands were frequently imposed on us at too young an age. Love of one's neighbor, altruism, willingness to sacrifice - how splendid these words sound and yet what cruelty can lie hidden in them simply because they are forced upon a child at a time when the prerequisites for altruism cannot possibly be present. Coercion often nips the development of these prerequisites in the bud and what then remains is a lifelong condition of strain. This is like soil too hard for anything to grow in, and the only hope at all of forcibly producing the love demanded of one as a child lies in the upbringing given one's own children, from whom one then demands love in the same merciless fashion.

"For this reason, it is my intention to refrain from all moralizing. I definitely do not want to say someone ought or ought not to do do this or that (for example, ought not to hate), for I consider maxims of this sort to be useless. Rather, I see it as my task to expose the roots of hatred, which only a few people seem to recognize, and to search for the explanation of why there are so few of these people."

Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: The Roots of Violence in Child-rearing (1987)

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Hippossibilities

I was just reminded of the following story from a couple of years ago ...

Tsunami-orphaned hippo adopted by 100-year old tortoise
AFPAugust 19, 2005

NAIROBI (AFP) - A baby hippopotamus that survived the tsunami waves on the Kenyan coast has formed a strong bond with a giant male century-old tortoise, in an animal facility in the port city of Mombassa, officials said.

The hippopotamus, nicknamed Owen and weighing about 300 kilograms (650 pounds), was swept down Sabaki River into the Indian Ocean, and then forced back to shore when tsunami waves struck the Kenyan coast on December 26, before wildlife rangers rescued him.

"It is incredible. A-less-than-a-year-old hippo has adopted a male tortoise, about a century old, and the tortoise seems to be very happy with being a 'mother'," ecologist Paula Kahumbu, who is in charge of Lafarge Park, told AFP.

http://news.mongabay.com/2005/0819-hippo_tortoise.html

Friday, February 09, 2007

A few thoughts from Edward de Bono

"Logic is the tool that is used to dig holes deeper and bigger, to make them altogether bigger holes. But if the hole is in the wrong place, then no amount of improvement is going to put it in the right place."

"It is not possible to look in a different direction by looking harder in the same direction."

"Rejection is only exchanging positive discrimination for negative domination, and instead of weakening the dominant idea it may even strengthen it."

"The water in the well is not defined by the shape of the receptacles that are used for withdrawing it."

Philosophical stuff

Wordiness Alert! If you don't like wordy philosophical discussion you might do well to avoid this one!

This is from an email exchange I have been having with an Advayavada Buddhist. It gets a little abstract at times, but language is never paramount in any of this. It's about possibly finding multiple ways to talk about what it means for me to experience relationship. There are many simpler ways to talk about relationship, of course, but my father is a philosopher and theologian, and my early training in thought was in long discussions with him about life, the universe, and everything, so occasionally I enter this register of language and play around a little. The how of relationship and attitude, how I am with people, is still way more important to me than the subtlety of language, and still way more challenging as a practice.

The way I think of it is that uncertainty is a constant and variable aspect of our experience, and that any attitude dominated by the expectation that uncertainty can be or should be eliminated leads us to grossly misrepresent that experience. So, when any so-called 'path' is designated as 'truth' in a certitude sort of way as, for example, a necessity to be followed, I feel it often tends to invite people to the promise of the elimination of uncertainty, which I understand as being very unhelpful. (I once attended an aikido dojo in Santa Barbara which was really an aiki dojo - the 'do' ('way') you got to work out for yourself!)

The more we ascribe to the elimination of uncertainty, as I understand it, the more distant we allow ourselves to become from the presence of agency and possibility in our lives. The more we ascribe to the elimination of uncertainty, the more likely we are to find that mind/body, thought/thinker dichotomies resonate with how we would like to make sense of our experience.

For me, paths of gentleness (not 'the path to gentleness') simply happen when

(i) we can work out how the elimination of uncertainty pervades our lives in many many ways (discernment/ awareness) and
(ii) work to diminish the power of those architectures of thinking in our attitudes and relationships.

For me, in true (mar dhea) (Irish phrase close enough to '...not!') gentleness there is no sense of 'beyond ourselves' but a richer participation in relationship and a more helpful and more appropriate political engagement with the available possibilities of everyday life and embodied hope (that is not located somewhere else).

I think the word 'totality' can perhaps be misleading, offering for many people some promise of perfect unity or perfect harmony. If I find the word leads my own thinking to that place of meaning I will avoid it, as it leads we where I know I do not wish to go. I think we do well to remember the histories of totalitarianism across the planet, and the lengths people often go to defend their totalities.

For me the 'thinging' process in and of itself, the declaration of the 'existence' of something, tends to be a subtle act of arrogance that infers that my experience is exactly equivalent to reality and that others must simply recognise that reality. For me, that speaks of a deep (often so deep as to be hidden from one's awareness) disrespect for the experiences of others. Instead of worrying about what does or doesn't exist, I am more interested in dynamics/process and how experience(s)-relationship( s) work(s).

In the following, I was responding to someone's contribution where they said that they live in relation to a sense of 'totality' as the entirety of existence becoming over time.

So, do you conceive of this 'totality' as a sense of relationship or as an abstract entity-in-process of sorts? Personally, I gravitate towards the sense of relationship, whereby it's less about thinking in terms of the entirety of existence and more about working to settle into an attitude of relationship in which I find no need to aspire to any 'totality' because the experience of relationship for me makes that sense of 'totality' a non-issue.

I suppose it's the sense that I have that relationship (or the entirety of existence becoming over time, for that matter) isn't terribly interesting to me. What's interesting to me is how relationship happens, and, more importantly, how I myself participate (in and through the disposition/attitude I craft) in the constitution and calibration of relationship. In short, I'm less interested in identifying a 'what' and more interested in using some sense of 'how' as a guiding aspect in my relationship(s).

For me, it's only really the 'how' that I can be significantly responsible or accountable for (and, if I'm pushed to it, I'm not sure that there's much more than the 'how' in our experience of experience, if that makes any sense?).

The other person in this conversation that I was having had referred to 'experience beyond our common-place experience', by which he meant 'a deepening of our experience of existence or, if you wish, a transcending of our everyday experience to enclose (as much as possible of) the entirety of existence'.

See, for me, these are contradictory dynamics. For me a deepening of the experience of experience predominantly calls forth a deeper presencing of oneself in what (how) happens to happen, not transcending our everyday experience, but embracing it warmly, listening more deeply, settling into experience like the settling of a pint of Guinness, coming to less and less inappropriate participation in the cause of more helpful relationship.

I have no desire to enclose the entirety of existence, indeed, personal and political 'enclosure' is the focus of a good half of my academic work, by way of critique. For me, the verb 'to enclose' can easily speak of an attitude that is anathema to an attitude of listening and deep respect for the how of happens.

He also made reference to the the two-truths doctrine of Madhyamaka: conventional truth and ultimate truth. You can find a brief outline of the ideas at http://web.ukonline.co.uk/buddhism/uposa.htm#truth or, more specifically in relation to Madhyamaka, http://www.euronet.nl/~advaya/

I once discussed the issue of language such as 'ultimate', 'absolute' and suchlike with a buddhist monk from Tibet, who agreed with me that these English language terms tend to grossly miscommunicate the heart of the meaning to be found in the hearthsong from which such ideas arose in the first place. The English language terms have a distinctly different colour from the earlier concepts; longer, darker shadows; heavier gravities. They speak to experience in extremis (for me, they speak to the elimination of uncertainty) rather than to an embrace of the everyday, of differently-experienced common uncertainties.

Similarly, the concept of the 'elimination of suffering', a quite frequent pan-buddhist mantra, doesn't ring all that true for me, for so much of my life (most) isn't about suffering as such, but about uncertainty of varying degrees, often simmering quietly, often murmuring gently, often whispering warmly. If I dedicated my life to the 'elimination of suffering' rather than the negotiation of uncertainty or the crafting of experience I feel I would be wasting an awful lot of transformative energy! :)

In my own language (or at least in the most abstracted version of my language which I don't tend to use all that often) I like to think of the constant and variable play/balance/imbalance/resonance between the experience of being-in-common and the experience of difference-in-common; the being-in-common aspect being for me how I might otherwise think of the always-already available possibilities of 'presence' and/or resonance; the difference-in-common aspect being how I think of the dynamic variabilities of conflict, place, person, change and so on. I'm not sure if that makes sense to anyone? In this way, being-in-common for me is not about common ground as much as it is about the common experience of experiencing experience (which is experienced differently by each of us). Starts getting a little wordy after a while! ;)

Being-in-common: for me, we don't share experience, or experiences, but we do share the experience of experience. This is more than wordplay for me.

Difference-in-common: the experience of experience for me is one of constant and variable change and constant and variable difference. Neither change nor difference are terribly interesting to me; the effects of particular kinds of change and the consequences of particular kinds of difference are, however. Difference-in-common is for me the condition of always-already participating in the play of influences and power, where power is not understood as control, but rather understood as the ability to vary the experience of oneself or another. Thus I don't think that people can helpfully be thought to give or receive power. Rather, I understand that we can all come to a greater awareness of the ways in which we always-already exercise power in that play of influences, and of the ways in which we can exercise power (agency being that ability to do so) in less misrepresentative and more helpful ways to become more present, less inappropriate, less anxious, more mindful, and more gentle in our attitudes

As it happens, I have often thought that my undualistic thinking in terms of being-in-common and difference-in-common (yes, there are two categories here but I don't think of them as being separate - think yin and yang) lines up more or less with what I have since found in writings on conventional and ultimate truth/reality in Buddhist writings, respectively. It's just the translations of Buddhist texts into English that I mistrust, and it's unfortunate that I can't speak/read Tibetan, to pick a language, but I have found some helpful exigesis in Shambala magazine occasionally on some of the richness of meaning implied by various terms in their home contexts. For me these undualistic terms are mere starting points for a deeply political and deeply personal project of hope and gentleness and hope in gentleness.

Random Gentle Reference #1

The RGR segments will rely on internet search engines for free association exercises on the theme of gentleness :)

There's a band in Melbourne, Australia, called Gentle Ben and his Sensitive Side ...

http://www.spookyrecords.com/Gentle%20Ben.html

(You can listen to the songs three times for free)

To know and keep true love ...

"No matter how often we turn our minds and hearts away - or how stubbornly we refuse to believe in its magic - true love exists. Everyone wants it, even those who claim to have given up hope. But not everyone is ready. True love appears only when our hearts are ready. A few years ago I was sick and had one of those cancer scares where the doctor tells you if the tests are positive you will not have long to live. Hearing his words I lay there thinking, I could not possibly die because I am not ready, I have not known true love. Right then I committed myself to opening my heart; I was ready to receive such love. And it came.

"This relationship did not last forever, and that was difficult to face. All the romantic lore of our culture has told us when we find true love with a partner it will continue. Yet this partnership lasts only if both parties remain committed to being loving. Not everyone can bear the weight of true love. Wounded hearts turn away from love because they do not want to do the work of healing necessary to sustain and nurture love. Many men, especially, often turn away from true love and choose relationships in which they can be emotionally withholding when they feel like it but still receive love from someone else. Ultimately, they choose power over love. To know and keep true love we have to be willing to surrender the will to power."

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2000)

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Gentleness lecture

Hi, I'll be giving a lecture for Roinn an Bhealoidis/the dept. of Ethnology and Folklore at University College, Cork on the 23rd February. It will be entitled:

He(d)gemony, Enclosure, and the Politics of Gentleness.

I think it's sometime around 12pm.

Not altogether sure what I'm going to say, and I'm currently leaning towards talking without notes, just having a chat with people about some ideas that are interesting to me. Usually that approach has worked best for me. (With a bit of advance preparation to clarify for myself what is actually interesting/important to me!! Always a good idea anyway :)

If I'm really daring I may put a soundfile of the talk on the site, but I'm not feeling really daring right now :)

Finally!

I finally got my marking from last semester finished. Hopefully my blogging will get back to a decent level again!

Friday, February 02, 2007

Hi from Minnesota everyone!

Sorry for the long silence! The ice here is white Anthony, you can't miss it!
Drive carefully, glad to hear you have dusted off the guitar again. Keep playing.
This is mainly to let you all know I am still blogging, from the other side of the world for now.
I see wild geese flying overhead nearly every day. Gentle birds in a harsh climate. Exemplary.
Missing my garden, carrying a houseplant around from room to room for now - until I can find some soil to work again, and grow my herbs and veggies and flowers. Peace for 2007.