Life in
Life in Conversation
:- Doug.
Life of Conversation
:- Doug.
Archive for the 'Conversations' Category
Gestaltic
Metaphors are gestalts; when we enter we find a beginning, a muddle, and an end. Gestalts are clusters, bundles, bunches of doings we take in as one whole, inseparable, working as one. A conversation is a gestalt; so too a family, a pond, a movie.
:- Doug.
Metaphorical Chickenman
Metaphors are like Chickenman: They’re everywhere! They’re everywhere!
:- Doug.
Which moves?
Now we are moving
and conversation is still
Now conversation is moving
while we are still
Which moves through
with beside under around
If you can tell you grow
:- Doug.
Burr on pant legs
There is a dose of cultural cohesion in those metaphors that survive and propagate easily. This makes sense in conversation. We see it often when as a group we feel excited from some new idea we have generated. This new metaphor has become a burr stuck to our mental pant legs.
:- Doug.
Thinking differently
Does speaking differently help us to think differently? Does using different metaphors?
:- Doug.
Withholding words can speak
Quaker practice helps show how withholding words can grow us, can communicate.
:- Doug.
Rather, seek reactions
We ought not seek outcomes. In a world in process there can be no ultimate outcomes. Rather in human affairs we can seek reactions. Reactions always bring other players’s energy into the field. Ahh, dog-kick again!
:- Doug.
What social networks produce
Social networks, like cells, produce both structural components of themselves and carriers of energy, information, or catalysts. But social networks do this at two levels. First, social networks produce bridges and gardens and cities; and they produce energy and ideas to share with community. At a different logical level, social networks produce first, more conversation, and second, meaning.
:- Doug.
of many folds
of many folds
this page
unfolding unfolding
of many words
scraped and flaked away
of multitudes going
where? am I?
:- Doug.
Peeling down
Peeling down what I say
what I write
reveals less of that what
and more of me
and then? Am I who. . . ?
last layer?
I too contain multitudes
:- Doug.
Why separate?
Why is it necessary to separate our group from yours; why is it necessary to make war?
:- Doug.
A 6-hour conversation is too short
Just how much time do we need to converse about a significant question? Clearly, if the issue involves lives and has taken decades or more to develop, then a 6-hour conversation is inadequate. What would be appropriate to even get all the cold and warm data into the room, let alone start working on ways forward? How many conversations?
:- Doug.
The territory just past here
Hearing is far from passive. To hear someone is to take them in, allow their internal thought process to inhabit yours, even to the point of displacing yours. So it often is uncomfortable. You suspend your cherished notions like a mobile on a string above your head, while you try on his and hers. Those might even kill your darlings.
But if this were all, we had not begun thinking. Nor hearing. What lies in the territory just past here?
:- Doug.
Boundary posts of the unknown
My task in studies is to work out some boundary posts of the unknown.
:- Doug.
It will bite better
Today, in my reading (Book Two, p 397) Armstrong is speaking of the profound mystery by which concentrating on feeling results in the project becoming more functional. This is perhaps a mystery of good conversation in that the conversation accomplishes good. In what ways? For one, good feeling toward the others in the conversation, toward other humans, other living things. For another, it helps us find things that actually will work because we will be able to help others accept the ideas. But in the sense he means, that feeling leads directly to function? We would actually use something more which is more inviting to us. If a tool fits my hand, it will be more effective in its working—I will aim it better, it will bite better whatever it is to bite, it will strike more accurately, and more efficiently. If it is a building and I do not feel comfortable in that room, do not see the use for that room, I will not use it, it will not function. Those all contribute to understanding the effect of the mystery. But they do not get us beyond mystery.
:- Doug.
