FootprintsintheWind.com

The waking dream I had of my parents the night they died showed me that reality is more than we allow. Given that on the surface this is not a conversation, what does it unfold that can benefit our conversation? It changed me and my approach to living.

True, conversation can change us and our way of living. But to say we need more imagination does not get us there. It does not tell us how to imagine. Books have been written on creativity, a cousin of imagining. One thing we don’t yet know: we can get us together and use some process to imagine, but how do we imagine, together?

:- Doug.

If we are trying to assuage some need by talking, what need is it?

:- Doug.

“What we are doing is finding out what it is we are doing.” John Cage in Musicage, p 169. He appears to be speaking of conversation. How much of conversation is of this nature? Observing this cropping up in one of our conversations, what is the next step we can take to add to the life in this conversation?

:- Doug.

[Whispering:] Perhaps it would be best if I wrote my book on water.

:- Doug.

It’s not always peace and sweetness that will have the best effect on our conversation. It might be wrestling.

:- Doug.

What are the phases of well-shaped conversation? Is conversation shaped like a funnel?

:- Doug.

What is our responsibility in and to conversation?

:- Doug.

How might the fifteen transforms apply to conversation, if at all? What is good shape in a conversation? What to local symmetries look like?

:- Doug.

My focus is with theoria and praxis. Spreading it to a wider population is my work only as to the next one or two.

:- Doug.

Do people converse differently based on their age?

:- Doug.

Even now, I seem to have run out of steam, so will let things rest for today. Energy is necessary to conversation as it is to writing and thinking. So are ideas, and we can sometimes run out of them, or out of the energy to figure out where to dig a little deeper. So maybe there are fresh energy and new seeds available by using, like Cage, random acts of chance. ‘Tis a maze.

:- Doug.

What are the question areas being opened? Can we do over a conversation? Why is conversation so desultory, peripatetic? Why do we pick out the real person over hours and meetings, but not in a few sentences? How do we end a conversation better? How do we get to complete? What prompts us to pick up the same conversation? How do we get to group mind, good or bad? Why do we lose our orientation and intentions in conversation? Why would people resent it if we tried to keep the conversation on subject? What would make it easier to see what is going well in our conversation and surround, and where to build on this good, true, and beautiful?

:- Doug.

This is slow going, and on purpose I need to slow it more. Rather increase the times (and speed?) of going deep.

:- Doug.

There is a lot of good in our surround and in our conversation—let’s look for it, see it, and grow it, perhaps making just a little better something next to it, something that was almost as good before we got to it.

:- Doug.

John Cage used chance operations to create his art. Often, we find ourselves using chance to carry forward our conversations. We know not where they will go. Even if we want them to go southeast, soon they are headed northeast and before we catch up southwest, and we never get to southeast. Sometimes we just abruptly stop. Other times we are complete. What’s going on?

:- Doug.

Reading the interview of John Cage in Musicage is difficult. Frustrating even. No single thought is carried for three pages. Little goes to depth. Why in conversation do we jump around so? This is a more profound question than it appears.

And then, over the course of several hundred pages a sense of the person and the person’s art emerges from the waves.

Eventually we know when the conversation is at an end. But how? Often we run out of steam. A few times we feel complete. To continue would undo.

Then another day we find ourselves renewed, picking up where we left off, carrying it deeper.

Is this pattern showing us how an individual mind works? It it revealing how two people act as one mind? Or three of us, or a whole people?

How deep goes the mystery?

I can’t take a lot of this transcript in one sitting. I need many breaks. At the same time it invigorates, dusts me with fresh directions of thinking to pollinate me for new ideas.

:- Doug.

What if we re-“wrote” a conversation? Tried it all over, moved parts around, used new words, different ideas, fresh subjects for the conversation, unusual subtexts? Uncooked the potful?

:- Doug.

We need peacocks: the cocks and hens to get to work picking the insects and grain off the ground, arranging the site; the peeks to look ahead, see the bigger picture, show off to gather a larger flock, consider the moves ahead.

:- Doug.

A common project allows not just focus but graduality.

:- Doug.

So what are we doing with conversation? What do we not know to do? To not do? There are no quick answers. This will take real work: thinking work. If we are to meet with another, what is the opening? What do we bolster? Certainly not peace for the sake of peace. Nor arguing. It needs to be life and love of life. If that is our guide, we might progress. It becomes difficult in the particular, in the presence of one another, in this thing he said or did not say. We have to guess for our setting what builds up life in this moment, and accept that we may get it wrong and have to go back, smooth over.

:- Doug.

How do we help a conversation?

Conversation involves us
does not need us for it can substitute others
but then it is a different conversation

So the question might better be, How do we take our part in conversation? It goes beyond etiquette, for we are not just behaving properly, we are here to make life.

Smoothness is not the end, but more life is the stretch.

:- Doug.

This morning I have been a little down thinking there is nothing we can do to make conversation better, it just has to unfold on its own. We can only allow. Allowing I surmise is about not getting in the way. Doing then is getting with the way. Perhaps.

So that starts the answer to me: it is in the movement, the dance, where life is attended. Not in the nodes. Not in the centers, perhaps not even in the whole.

:- Doug.

For all the good OST does its main good is to get people together, talking. But it says nothing of what happens in the talking, how they talk, what they say, the nature of conversation. I wonder whether the other engagement methods do any better? Do they all walk us to the door but never open it?

:- Doug.