December 2007 Archives

I added the italics. Fascinating, huh? Way out there on the edge of "hard" scientific knowledge is acknowledgment of the edge of social scientific knowledge. "We first produce the world by symbolic work and then take up residence in the world we have produced" (James Carey, "A Cultural Approach to Communication" p. 16).

I love His Dark Materials, the trilogy by Philip Pullman. I extracted quotes galore from Book I, The Golden Compass, and Book II (The Subtle Knife) “You must play the serpent.” Seems I didn't get around to posting selected quotes from Book III - ah, still on the "to do" list! :-)

Should I watch the movie? In another life, perhaps I only see the film and never read the novels! "Your alter ego is simply a prediction of the so-called concordance model of cosmology," says Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at MIT in Boston, Massachusetts (in the "stranger" article linked above). A critique of "the simplest known model that is in general agreement with observed phenomena" notes that more is still unknown, or unconfirmed, than is known. Most of the physicists who will engage me in conversation long enough will acknowledge that, as much as seems to be known, we still do not know that something else won't turn up and change everything. :-) Nonetheless, they (like the rest of us humans) work with what we have.

"Senor Martinez fell into my Spanish as passionately as into a beloved's arms. Not that he'd previously been parsimonious (according to Jack) with his ungrammatical English, but his Spanish was a force of nature that now gushed out of his mouth like water from a blocked pipe.

...

'And you're the one who will be my translator?' he said to me in Spanish. 'Then please tell Senora Eva that her eyes are as blue as the Mediterranean.'

'Senior Martinez says he's dying to try some paprika chicken,' I said. 'But I suggested the stuffed carp.'

Eva handed him her menu. 'Please.'

'I speak of love, not food.' He pushed it away and fixed her with a tender look.

'I can't persuade him,' I said. 'It's gotta be the chicken.'

The Gypsy musicians had appeared . . . 'Tell Senor Martinez this is a real Gypsy tune, not for tourists.'

'I translated and Senor Martinez sighed eloquently, his hand at his heart. 'The Spanish and the Hungarians are very much alike. We have the wildness and also the sadness, what we call duende. We have both ben conquored peoples, we have the souls of Gypsies and the heads for business. That is why I think I can sell our beautiful bathroom fixtures here. I believe they will be understood. And now you have democracy. Hungary, I salute you!' He raised his glass. 'Down with fascism!'

'What's he saying?' asked Eva.
'He says he wishes the paprika chicken would hurry up. He's starving!'

But Senor Martinez was a single-minded man when it came to the similarities between Hungary and Spain, and the possibility of a spectacular union, plumbing and otherwise, between them.

'While the Gypsies made wild music over our shoulders, Senor Martinez outlined a theory of history. 'Both Christian Spain and Christian Hungary fought agasint the infidel Arabs,' he said. 'We stopped the Mohammedans from overrunning Europe.'

'But surely you must admit, Senor Martinez,' I corrected him, 'that the Moors in Spain created a brilliant civilization of poetry, philosophy, gardens. Not only did they have the first lighted, paved streets in Europe, they had the first sewage system in the world. Plumbing. Senor, they had plumbing.'

'The Reconquista was Spain's finest moment,' he disagreed.

'What's he saying?' Eva demanded.

'He thinks the Turks have gotten a bad rap,' I said. 'He says, Really, what's so bad about a culture that drinks coffee and sits around in bathtubs all day?'

'The Turkish infidels?' said Eva, shocked.

'What does Eva say?' he asked.

'She says she wishes these Gypsy musicians would take a hike. They're starting to remind her of a Luftwaffe raid, except there are no bomb shelters.'

Senor Martinez stared at me a moment and then spoke in laborious English, with a pleading glance at Eva, 'I am think Senora Reilly is have fun with me.'

'Oh no, Senor Martinez, you're wrong about that. Believe me, I'm not having much fun at all.'

Eva whispered, 'Cassandra, don't tease the poor man s much. He's paying for our meal.'

'Cassandra, you are being just the slightest bit rude, dear.' Jack smiled wickedly. 'See? There's my mother speaking.'

The preceding verse was read by Jon Krakauer as he introduced the man featured in the book, Three Cups of Tea, about the establishment of schools, primarily for girls, in northeastern Pakistan. I was moved, reading about the realization of such a monumental project, on the flight to Israel and during a rainy afternoon in the Old City, Jerusalem.

I am reminded, on the day after Benazir Bhutto's assassination, of the people who strive for good lives, who wish to co-exist without hostility.

The Intuitive Acupuncturist firmly pressed all five of her fingers around my tan t'ien: "You've got to feel that you're connected, because you are!"

Tan t'ien: "refers specifically to the physical center of gravity located in the abdomen three finger widths below and two finger widths behind the navel." Interestingly, the IA also mentioned the ming men, the location in the small of the back facing the tan t'ien. The ming men

"stands for 'the door of life'. Kai Ming Men means open the life door to stay alive. Ming Men as an acupuncture pressure point is located on your spine where is the most concave spot. To open Ming Men refers to convex “the small of the back” and make it bow out."

Posture is important, with awareness of location within the body: "Ming Men is simply an area where, due to channel confluences, a person may be strengthened or weakened."

I want to make a contiguous leap, now, between individual centering and group centering. Just as a person needs to balance around their own center of gravity, so do groups. Just as persons need to determine with their own consciousness how to relax into their purpose, groups have to establish some consensual acceptance concerning collective mission and task. I do believe we can do it!

...the difference, according to Heidegger, is pain.

"Diviners," writes Dennis Tedlock, "Stay close to 'the rift of difference,' as Heidegger calls it, even a small difference. They leave us between two points, or at both of them, and sometimes three." (1983:254)

Today, my online life has taken me along this path:

1) Wanokip (facebook) posted a story on shopdropping, about which I blogged for future students (homework!): "even radical ideology gets commercialized"

2) after categorizing, I followed the tags to see what others' (strangers) have been up to and found this: “‘Definition of God’ - and it still leaves us with the job of living with each other through the unity of mystery”

3) which sent me back to facebook to comment to another friend who has listed his religion as "pseudopagain pantheist" - I've been trying to wrap my mind around the difference between panentheism and pantheism. According to wikipedia: "A panentheistic belief system is one which posits that the one God interpenetrates every part of nature, and timelessly extends beyond as well. Panentheism is distinguished from pantheism, which holds that God is synonymous with the material universe." Hmmm.

4) then, I returned to the "job of living together" post with all those cool quotes and read the comment after, which led me to: shoreless oceans of incorruptible wealth

5) which, I have to say, is overly religious for me yet still rich with the kind of sentiments I hold, to wit, the final line of a poem:

The moon matters, too. :-)

Today is a full moon (99%). "Campus Lady" (whoever she is) says,

"...the Moon, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Pluto will align into the shape of a Pentagram. This is an auspicious time. The Sun is arriving at the same time Pluto makes his grand alignment with the Galactic Center. Jupiter only visits this area every 12 years. And Pluto only shows up every 250 years, and he does not stay long This alignment is the beginning of a 26,000 cycle. Then you add the Full Moon. This alignment only happens every 6,500 years."

She exaggerates somewhat - probably using a bit of regression to assume simultaneity.

The coincidence of a full moon and winter solstice is not so rare - on average once every 29 years. The last perfect match was in 1999; the next one will be in 2010 - and then there will not be another one until 2094!

Within minutes of each other I watched and listened to Steve's rousing (northern) seasonal greeting from (as he says) "a happier time, before Vietnam, the Civil Rights, and all the "horrors" of our "modern" world," and Tamer's reminder of other realities: snapshot of a modern horror.

Meanwhile, the economic news is better in Bethelem this year, tourism has increased since a sharp dropoff after the second intifada in 2000. The increase of visitors is, however, a qualified "good": the occupation is as real as ever.

Maks, Pete, Renee and I rode the planet's furthest tilt of precession, toasting the equator with cups of Holy Land Port Wine.

There were just over a dozen folk at the UMass Sunwheel this overcast morning. The air was crisp; happy. :-) My new factoid from the lecture provided by a graduate student from UMass' Astronomy Department has to do with the relation of the sun's orbit and the length of one's shadow. At maximum tilt away from the sun (northern hemisphere), the angle (declination) of the sun's highest point in the southern sky (calculate the azimuth) is so low that shadows lengthen. So, take me at 5'6" and the angle of 23.44 degrees ("today's" measurement according to a solar standstill applet). Plug these figures into a shadow length calculator and my shadow extends a wee bit over twelve feet and eight inches. That's two and a third times my actual height!

Anuj, Don, Rajiv, Zixu (!) and Min filled out our cozy group. No one was kilt by any of my food, although Pete's mini-mushroom pies garnered the most praise (my roast chicken held its own).

Conversation ranged from US politics (Huckabee?!) to automobiles (Toyota or Honda for longevity; and do your own mechanical work!), loads of other topics I cannot, err, recall), and a bit of philosophy as we counted down to 1:08 a.m. If we are living in a virtual world - a world of our own creation - does it matter or not how we play the game?

The primeval scene:

"The problem is not that light needs to be created, as in Genesis, but that it is hidden, enclosed in blue-green quetzal feathers (lv.26). In the Popol Vuh, the movement from hidden light to a false dawn to the rising of the morning star and of the sun itself is a lengthy allegorical counterpoint to the movement from incomplete or false approximations of human beings and their speech to a fully articulate and religious humankind. in Genesis, the story of light (first day) and of the heavenly bodies (fourth day) is all over before Adam is even created (sixth day), and the nearness of the divine is signaled not by light but by wind."

Scientific background: an astronomy of the seasons. "The dates of maximum tilt of the Earth's equator correspond to the summer solstice and winter solstice." Watch a quicktime movie of the earth's annual wobble. :-)

Tedlock continues (pp. 269-271):

"The first quoted dialogue in Genesis - and here we come to the bottom of the hole, the canyon that separates the Judeo-Christian and Toltec-Quichean cosmogonies - is the disastrous dialogue between Woman and Serpent, and in the second dialogue God vents his wrath upon Adam. In the Popol Vuh, dialogue is a positive force, necessary before the creation can even be conceived, and it is the first step beyond the meaningless murmurs and flickerings of the primeval scene. The Heart of Sky - or 'they' who are the Heart of Sky - come to the deities of the sea (lv.36-41):

'They spoke now, then they thought, then they wondered
they agreed with each other, they joined
their words, their thoughts:

then it was clear, then they reached accord in the light,
and then humanity was clear. . . .'

"Here we have the description of a dialogue, and the first direct quotation in the Popol Vuh comes from the same dialogue. The first sentences of this first quotation are not commands but questions: 'How should the sowing and dawning be? Who will be the provider, nurturer?' (2r.6-8), and the discussion goes on from there. . . .

"In sum, the continuing growth of creation requires not a series of commands from a single source but an ever-widening discussion . . . in Quichean (and Mesoamerican) thought, dualites are complementary rather than oppositional, contemporaneous rather than sequential . . . the creation moves not according to the gusty wind of God's will and the clandestine questioning of a miserable serpent, but according to the increasing light of a widening dialogue."

I was challenged (by Robin), during my comps defense, concerning what I gain from distinguishing between dialogue and dialectic. Established philosophy considers the dialogic a subset of the dialectic. At the most abstract theoretical level, this is no doubt the case, but - as I tried to argue - the way academics use the term "dialectic" leads more to the re-creation of already-established hierarchies of relationships rather than to any kind of change in them. Constant labeling of "the dialectic" or application of "dialectical" to particular patterns reifies those patterns, re-constructs them in social reality.

The distinction between the dialogic and dialectic is apparent - and relevant - phenomenologically. Just as we discussed in class last night concerning categorical distinctions between "the everyday" and "the performative" - the crucial factors are agency and knowledge. In the everyday, we operate within the boundaries of accepted dialectics, take these as given and unremarkable (even if they suck). In the performative, the boundaries themselves are brought into view. No one knows what is going to happen as an effect or outcome of the performance. Will there be uptake? Fallout? Reification? Change?

The remarkable Xavante continually invent "new modes of interaction with dominant society." Anthropologist Laura Graham argues their creativity is a direct outcome of the Xavante's unique cultural form of performing dreams. These communal, marked performances reify the knowledge of Xavante empowerment and agency in the world. In effect, the Xavante confirm a dialectical structure that places themselves at the center of everything that happens - not as victims but as the cause of the circumstances. Their internal dialectic (of socially constructed, language-based, narrative performance) provides such a source of cultural (group) stability that the Xavante can engage in dialogue with a world of constant, unpredictable, and bizarre change. While we (outsiders to the culture) may perceive larger dialectical relationships that (in our version of reality) lend a dubious cast to the Xavante's perception of reality: the fact of the matter is that

The Xavante insist on dialogue with the rest of the world: keeping everybody guessing. :-)

The relational liminality is the relevant difference between dialectics and dialogue. As long as we operate in a dialectical frame, we have confidence in structure. The form of the relationships is more-or-less known - even when we are caught off guard the logic is accessible. Our identity remains intact, and we can go on according to established habits and rhythms. If we enter the dialogic, however, the phenomenology shifts dramatically. Now, the future is wide-open. Not limitless, but the limits are beyond familiarity, the awareness of risk exceeds perceptions of safety.

At this point, conclusions are unapprehendable.

"David M. Walker, the Comptroller General of the United States and head of GAO...was not satisfied. In a speech today [December 17, 2007] at the National Press Club, he said, "If the federal government was a private corporation and the same report came out this morning, our stock would be dropping and there would be talk about whether the company's management and directors needed a major shake-up." Walker urged greater transparency and accountability over the federal government's operations, financial condition, and fiscal outlook." Some Progress on U.S. Government's Financial Statements But Significant Problems Remain from YubaNet.

The GAO's view: Major Management Challenges at the Department of the Treasury

I was playing the other day. Often people ask me, "Why" (especially in relation to some thing I propose to do) and I often return the favor, "Why not?" The presumption behind the first "why" is that things are good enough as they are, why rock the boat? The presumption behind the second is that things could actually be better. The hinge has to do, I wager, with the unpredictability of change. Things could be better, or they could be worse! If the risk appears 50/50 (or more like 10, 20, or 30 "better" to the corresponding fear of 90, 80, 70 "worse") then we're led to the most common outcome, premised upon things being tolerable enough as they are, thank you!

In other words, why get all tangled up?

The homonymality of not/knot struck me with inspiration the other day, as I realized part of the question of "why" is a concern with winding up in a knot. I'm thinking not only of the most obvious, literal knot - all twisted and tied up together, but dynamically, in terms of social relations and time, i.e., dialogue or discourse?

My mind has been abuzz all semester with the concepts of physics as a means to illuminate group dynamics. This is not a new interest, by far, but as I become more familiar with definitions and principles, I become increasingly convinced that sociality can be described with similar concepts, albeit with somewhat less reliability. :-) Ain't it grand that life and human individuality keep us always guessing?!

"Mathematicians also study knots, but they have different concerns [than those who study the literal versions]: which knots can be untied without cutting the rope, how many different knots are there and how can we tell if two complex knots are the same or different?" - Gnomen, h2g2

The challenge in human relations, no doubt, is to discern which knots to try to untie, and which knots to create and re-create, ever more securely.

An ambivalent anthem and a quasi-clone?

Zizek's critique of 'Ode to Joy' as the European Union's choice of anthem is on the mark.

The exchange in the comments between dmclaney and elver about the signing of the Lisbon Treaty, United States of Europe finally created, are a mirror (with a different cultural text) to some of the media critiques produced by students this month. In particular, Evan Grabelsky's "The News Media: The War on Journalism" and "com375"'s "The Non-Reality of Reality TV." Most of the news coverage I encountered involved Gordon Brown's avoidance of the ceremony to sign incognito. (Reminds me of Governor Howard Dean signing Vermont's Civil Union Bill in a private, closed door ceremony.)

The question (as always) is what to do about our recognition of the problem? Bela presents an example of organized activism that is making a difference: "If the technology and the heart come together...." ElR6 follows the theme of cyberoptimism with " Communication and Global Consciousness."

Probably there are ways to counteract the shallow coverage of mainstream media, but we can't isolate only the media as the enemy. The cumulative effects of consumerist socialization are dulled awareness and self-absorbed insensitivity. Not to mention the desperate weaknesses of institutionalized education. A radical notion proposed by a friend the other night included not teaching history until the eighth grade. Why? "It's in third grade you learn that blacks used to be slaves. What are you supposed to do with that information?"

This is the central question. What are we 'supposed to do' with all the information we have?

Recently (December 12), I received a joke over email:

A driver is stuck in a traffic jam on the Tehran-Ghom Motorway.

Nothing is moving.

Suddenly a man knocks on the window. The driver rolls down his window

and asks, "What's going on?"

"Terrorists down the road have kidnapped Ahmadi Nejad. They're asking
for 100 million tomman ransom.

Otherwise they're going to douse him with gasoline and set him on fire.

We're going from car to car, taking up a collection."

The driver asks, "How much is everyone giving, on average?"

"Most people are giving about a liter."

I googled the unfamiliar name and came up with Iranian President Ahmadinejad! A few images came up as well, including an obviously irreverent one from May 3rd, 2007. The text accompanying the doctored image is challenging, too. People are paying a price for practicing freedom of expression: twenty students were arrested on December 7th.

My buddy Steve has sent two announcements the last few days concerning U.S. Representative Julia Carson (1938-2007).

Confronted with barely-veiled racial prejudice in the halls of Congress by a peer who did not recognize her, Carson queried, "What's your point?" Thus sums up the Indianapolis Star, in a special report called "A warrior for the city."

I paid no attention to state politics the years I lived in Indianapolis, being invested in the cultural and linguistic politics of the Deaf Community (which was a pioneer in the revolutionary bilingual-bicultural movement in Deaf Education), and working on issues of access and ableism in the lesbian community. Hence, I learn of "Julia" in retrospect, and am particularly drawn to the news story because of its invocation of "war" by labeling her a warrior.

"Her weapons of choice are blunt talk and a dollop of charm," the Congressional Quarterly's Politics in America once said of her.

Weapons. Words as weapons counterposed with "charm." I am not disputing these characterizations nor their utility as skills, what I am puzzling over is if/when we can learn (or teach ourselves) to speak of such determination and ferocity in a way that honors the power of negotiation, period. (Tary and I started a conversation about "centering" a few weeks ago.)

"A lot of people get elected to positions and forget that they serve all the people," said John M. Thomas, former president of Community Action of Greater Indianapolis. "She never forgot that."

Steadfast memory. Conviction. Blunt talk. These are the tools and skills of those who seek foundational peace, of those who intend with each word and every action to change the most basic operations of our institutions from subtle mechanisms of privilege/discrimination to equitable and just treatment of and for everyone.

I do wish I had known her. :-)

"Let me ask you a question back," I told him.

"Has it ever occurred to you to wonder if the history we teach our children is a lie?
After a moment of stunned silence, he said, "Good Lord, Jason. I hope you're joking."
"Why?"
"Surely that's manifest."
"It isn't to me."
"You've been there, Jason. We were there together. It's all lies and bullshit till graduate school. Why else have graduate school?"
"That's very cynical."
"Is it?"
"Suppose I were to tell you that the lies don't stop in graduate school?"

I respect this writer, Paul Rogat Loeb, quite a bit. He wrote a short piece on civil rights and heroism that I often use with students, and have been slowly working my way through his book, The Impossible Will Take a Little While.

In this piece, Hillary Clinton may be haunted by ghosts of '06, he compares Hillary Clinton's campaign finances/funding practices in 2006 with those of both Barack Obama and John Edwards. She does not come out well.

Dell Hymes writes (2003):

"It might be a fair summary to say that Dennis is concerned most of all with the moment of performance, and I am much concerned with the competence that informs it. Dennis trusts most of all the speaking voice, I evidence of recurrent pattern." p. 36

Hymes places the above discrete distinction in opposition with a polemical distortion:

"...the equation Tedlock : Hymes = pause : particle" (p. 37).

Is it too much to read this as a quintessential instance of the dilemma of quantum mechanics? Do these two erudite scholars represent the indeterminate two-sided-ness of language as energy ("moment", "pause") or language as matter ("competence", "particle")?

The other dynamic I'm observing in Hymes' wonderful chapter, "Use All There Is To Use," is a play between "dialectic" and "dialogue." I am not sure if his narration follows an alternation pattern - it may. :-)

• discussing oral and written languages: "Here the dialectic between original and adaptation is acute" (p. 46).
• re. the creativity of given storytellers in a particular historic circumstance: "The resources in such moments are not one's voice and audience, but experience reflected upon, experience and stories acting upon each other" (p. 73).

This puts me in mind of a conversation a few weeks ago in class, about how graduate students can learn the academic system enough to succeed in it (as in finish with a degree) without being coopted by it (i.e., maintain resistance to certain forms of hegemony).

One cannot avoid co-optation. Whatever forms of resistance practiced are absorbed dialectically by the institution by a social version of Newton's Third Law: "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." The discrepancy that often prevents recognition of the equality of opposing force, is that there are not equal and opposite effects. The harder we resist, the harder the institution pushes back. Since it is way bigger than us, we usually get squashed.

I say "usually", because there is an art (that can be learned) of switching from the particle-based dialectics of "reaction" to the time/energy-sensitive dialogics of "effect." Social change occurs when the reactions of equal and opposite forces are met with an alternative that breaks the dialectical pattern. Storytellers who adapt their narratives to fit the social circumstances operate in vertical, contiguous time; those who insist on the same narratives (or discourses, as the case may be) operate in metaphors, substituting one dialectic for the next (no dialogue).

Dialogues can become patterned too (just like story narratives), enacting representations of larger discourses, repeating the social dialectic just as effectively as the repetition of unchanged stories. When one recognizes this is happening, it's time to change up again. Institutions are not designed to adapt to such live fluctuations; hence the individuals who practice them are always and forever at risk.

"The Babel fish," said The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow, and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequences with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them."

A quarter of a century behind the curve, but right on time for me: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. (Also online at h2g2.com)

"Ah," said Arther. "This is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that I wasn't previously aware of" (1979, republished 2005, Del Rey, p. 49).

Zaphod says quietly:

"I only know as much about myself as my mind can make out under its current conditions." (p. 144)

Don't Panic!

"Perhaps I'm old and tired," [Slartibartfast continues], "but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied . . . . What does it matter? . . . I'd far rather be happy than right."

"And are you?" [asks Dentarthurdent].

"No, that's where it all falls down, of course" (p. 193).

"...who demonstrates patriotism today—the critics who stand fast by our foundational values? Or those who would ignore our traditions by reaching quickly for the base and the brutal? No real patriot today, no citizen who is concerned about the fate of our fellow citizens in uniform, can be silent on this issue."

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can. i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it.

Ok - so "new research" is apparently untrue, although there is something to be said for "the role of letter order on reading." Matt Davis has compiled an impressive corpus of equivalents in at least thirty languages, along with references and commentary from original and follow-up research in this area of word-form research. The number of letters in the word has quite a lot to do with whether the mind can grasp it.

This is the challenge.

Non-violent resistance, as a synonym for peace activism, still centers "violence" as the standard. The force of much anti-war talk revolves around violence as the anchor, providing energy that feeds momentum. I have been puzzling over this discursive looping for a long time: all talk is subject to perpetuating something. That "something" is wildly out of our control - because "it" is always mediated by interpretation.

I have been guilty, way too often, of getting caught up in layers of interpretation ("processing") instead of maintaining discursive intentionality. In a dialogue, both/all parties recognize the inevitable looping, making conscious choices about a) when to discard the historical baggage and b) how to create the present interaction on preferred terms. Shared recognition is, I think, key to successful shifting. Recognition is not the same as acknowledgment: acknowledgment (disclosure) will be important on some matters to establish trust but is not always necessary. If depended upon overmuch, distrust will grow in response to apparent evidence that recognition can never be assumed.