Dialogue Under Occupation: December 2007 Archives

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!

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:

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.

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.

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. :-)

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.

"...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."

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.