I love the visualization. Part of its charm is in realizing that it is a snapshot, a 2D slice of the body of #rhizo14. In a way it is the smoke from the fire and the wake from the ship, not the fire and not the ship. I am only vaguely aware of the 4D presence that is the growing tip and the blooming buzzing perfusion that is the felt whole of #rhizo14.
We will be long gone in the ether and without a care in their world.
I am reminded of the story here:
The nun Wu Jincang asked the Sixth Patriach Huineng, "I have studied the Mahaparinirvana sutra for many years, yet there are many areas i do not quite understand. Please enlighten me."
The patriach responded, "I am illiterate. Please read out the characters to me and perhaps I will be able to explain the meaning."
Said the nun, "You cannot even recognize the characters. How are you able then to understand the meaning?"
"Truth has nothing to do with words. Truth can be likened to the bright moon in the sky. Words, in this case, can be likened to a finger. The finger can point to the moon's location. However, the finger is not the moon. To look at the moon, it is necessary to gaze beyond the finger, right?"
I am so glad that you get this. I wrote a post recently that was a short video of a glass of water overflowing in my sink. I put it on YouTube and then shared it via Vialogues so that others could just play with it. Jenny M commented that she didn't get it. There wasn't really anything to get, but it was kind of her to play along. We are homo ludens.
I think we can view the visualization as part of carnivale and your post as part of it. It doesn't really end if we continue to act with the idea of it in our heart. Carnivale is an irruption of life. Your post is an irruption, conscious and alive and aware. There is a larger Carnivale.
Perhaps it is not the books themselves but the power we grant them just because they are books. There are lots of reasons why we did this: they were the best technology available for carrying information, they are the tools of power for status quo and revolutionary alike, they have are now the traditional, default method. Yet we are at the beginning of an age which has other methods that are even more ubiquitous. The mobile device is becoming preeminent because it not only carries words but also images, moving and static, and sounds, ours and others. It is immediate and easily reproducible.
Are we going to ignore or throw away our books and so throw away our history? Doesn’t our past inform our present and future?
No, we are not going to do that, however we are going to put them in their place. To situate them in the power context, into their new community alongside images and sounds and the digital hierarchy of tools.
Iain MacGilchrist’s book – The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.
Yes and what has been the instrument of that power grab--books. Cormier's distrust comes from the valorization of yet another master of the holist part of our mind. Books are colonizers aren't they?
We need books, but we also need to engage with them critically. We need text, but we also need to be able to see its limitations. We need abstraction, but we also need embodied learning. We need to exercise both the left and right hemispheres of our brains.
I say give books the comeuppance they deserve. Who is the boss of the mind? Mine is reactionary sloganeering here, so let me be less molotov. I, meaning my whole self, am the boss, the master. I am weary of being told and of accepting as writ (holy irony that) that the written word is supreme. I find myself revolting (please no Henny Youngman jokes) against words by my frail attempts to use tools that are decidedly not books--zeega, vine, photography, video, soundcloud, augmented reality--to wrestle control from literacy and return to orality.
On your side Scott would agree that it is not books who are at fault. Please let us not shoot the messenger. It is our use of books and our abdication to their organization, to their legibility that is our downfall.
Reader Response theory comes to mind here too. I see where this is both coming from and headed but my own attitude is, like anyone else's, still very much influenced by my personal reading history.
I was an only child and, in a time when families moved much less than now, we moved often because of my father's work with a geophysical crew. I didn't spend entire school year in one place or even the same state until the 5th grade -- did not fall behind because my mother taught me to read early and my father made maths fun with cards, dice and dominoes. Add that all that up -- books spoke to me, were my family and friends. FYI Terry, my father was a storyteller and master punster
I don't always feel that way. Sometimes I feel it is a guiding hand, but after two of these rhizo things I am beginning to think of it as a shving hand in a cattle chute. The chutes only appear down, but the binaries still suggest two paths: objective/subjective, content/no content, dave/no dave and whatever the hell the other one was. This is not rhizomatic teaching.
Not really too sure about this. He creates a binary and expects us to reconcile it. And then where does that takes us as far as a rhizomatic practice is concerned? Not very far at all.
If Dave is the Gardener,then the way he weeds is to point to the weed and say, "Isn't that interesting?". Irresponsible? Unethical? Bait and switch? Not sure. Personally, I am much more drawn to Heraclitus and Voltaire. For the latter the world is in flux and idiosyncratic as can be and for the latter he has Candide say, "That is very well put, but we muct cultivate our garden." We must be our own gardeners.
Dunno, the videos seem pretty scripted to me. He has an agenda and wants to get it out there. The community has been guided by each week's prompts, using it as a jumping off point but not really going too far from fold. I wanted to see much more rebellion and spontaneous, adhoc-osity. I tried, but no one paid me any mind. Par.
Of course it is the gardner who decides between the weeds and “flowers”, sets the parameters of the garden, and ultimately decides who lives and who dies – but that is my next blog post.
I agree that the gardener controls but I think it is illusory. Who plucks the gardener? Who tends the gardener? Who weeds the gardener? The gardener lives in a larger system that subsumes the garden, a larger Garden. The gardener thinks he is managing the complexity that is the garden. Fools paradise for a sock puppet?