Reflexivity

There are some wonderful layers of meaning conveyed by Rosa Lee in this music video, which is performed bilingually, in spoken English and American Sign Language.

“All I Want” opens with a literal translation of the English lyrics into a manual code that is not ASL. There is a transition – see if you can spot it – when Rosa Lee switches from the artificially-constructed signed code for spoken English into the fluid, natural rhythms of American Sign Language.
Then, the burden is placed on the English words to accommodate the rich, beautiful meanings she produces with ASL. The reversal is sweet. Can you perceive the difference? Now, imagine that you grow up with a code. There are rules and structures and boundaries, some of which make some kind of sense (or you create some meaning so that they do ‘make sense’), some of which appear isolated, with no obvious relationship to anything else. One can spend a lifetime bouncing off the elements of such codes. Perhaps the bouncing is motivated: a seeking for coherence, a search for niches where meanings are more transparent, a compulsion to re-discover relationships that passed one by in the slew of stimulus.
Life happens. Some people adapt to the code, either following its logic (or the logic they assign to it) or learning how to use the code to their own advantage. They play the game. Some play well, others not so well, but at least they feel they are in it, a part of society, a member of humanity.
Living happens. Many people are fortunate to grow up within a language that is whole, or have the organic neurochemistry to pick one up later in life. This does not mean their family is necessarily happy, or that society doesn’t have problems, or that culture solves everything. To live is to grow: bigger, smarter, faster, more lean, more mean – more kind, more generous; or less selfish, less demanding, less stubborn; more fluid. Individuals grow, but language is the medium for shared growth. Through language we learn together, teach each other, test ideas, discover errors. Language lets us breath inspiration into the world, infusing community, bridging differences, building commonality.
Thanks, Rosa Lee, for showcasing language’s glory.

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Some thirty stalwart spirits braved the edge of Hurricane Hannah to begin building “Belchertown’s own pyramid.” Sailing knots secured the tarp which – propped up by two ladders – withstood the night, protecting us from the downpour and thrilling us with sounds of rain and wind as we christened the cairn near midnight with Wrongo Dongo. Howls mixed with cheers in a cacophony of exuberance as we embraced the spirit of ritual, blending our voices with nature’s infinite chanting. I was asked for a convocation (see “Other Use“); all I could muster was Thank You. I felt calm and peaceful in our candlelit circle, humbled by and proud of my friends.

In all important respects, we gathered as we always do – indulging delicious food, drinking comfortably, talking, dancing, teasing, touching, teaching and calling each other into being. I learned so much, as I always do. Everyone oriented to the ceremonial element in their own way. Some recalled significant moments of shared interpersonal interaction, acknowledged difficult aspects of private histories and/or future challenges, and speculated on the symbolism of our individually swirling energies encapsulated by nature’s capacity for storm. Others lost themselves in dance, told tall tales, lampooned themselves and others, played tricks and carefully watched for the precise moment to deliver a perfect pun. Most of us did some of everything. We take our fun seriously, without letting fun completely overtake the serious.

There was power in our utterances last night and this morning. Dorothee educated me on linguistic minorities in France and the Belgian Flemish/French controversy (more on these later!), and Nick proposed jazz as a uniquely unreproducible medium. The confluence of these topics with my upcoming research woke me right up (or was it the Turkish coffee?!)
“Oh yea, that was in quotes,” Don said, walking by a few minutes later as Nick explained, “I don’t want my life to be an open book, I want people to question me.” We were talking about how online social networking could remove mystery from our lives by producing a vast field of ambient awareness (another longer-term side effect of ambient awareness could be the evolutionary loss of certain cognitive skills associated with fact-based memory). An iPhone provided entertainment for awhile, its accelerometer on display with Newton’s Cradle . This put me in mind of the results of a recent “mind map” of local and global trends affecting a particular organization’s anti-racism and social justice activities, in which nearly all trends were described in terms of increase (more more more and faster) instead of decrease.
How did we get from the accelerometer to air-conditioning? I cannot recall, but the comment reminded me of Christopher Dickey’s claim:

as air conditioning conquered the lethargy-inducing climate and Northerners by the millions abandoned the rust belt for the sun belt, the past wasn’t forgotten or forgiven so much as put aside while people got on with their lives and their business.

Somehow nostalgia for the “old days” of answering machines (when you received your telephone messages only when you got home at the end of the day) got intertwined with the luxuries of heating and cooling . . . The Chosen One mused, “we’ve had heat for a long time, it’s harder to make cold.” Indeed, air-conditioning as we know it today is a phenomenon of only the last century: for millenia humans have known how to keep ourselves warm, but only “yesterday” have we figured out how to make ourselves cool. (Uh oh. Global warming is here, now.)
When Brandon left is when it hit me. Some of these people I really may not see again. Dhara reminisced about meeting me at bowling her first year here. She and Henk had been the ones to unveil the group present. (Rumor Mill: going viral. First batch original orders for t-shirts and bumperstickers should be placed here.)

The Nepalese mantra gracing the cairn is, as best I understand it to date, a kind of paean to precious knowledge and pure beauty. We have created physical evidence of passing this way; and less tangibly we have left our marks upon each other – bits of spirit inspiring compelling turning and calling us on, always with the invitation to return. “It’s good,” Franz said today, “to be a little bit bothered by each other.” Yes – such is the evidence of communal connections: they persist!

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The first act of will is to decide that time does not matter.

Immersed in the presence of this new language, I forgot that I was here for a reason! “We know you love your metaphors,” Rachel teased before I came. The other roommate just laughed.

Lauren described my fourth rock balance as “precarious.” Ah – momentarily I recognized myself. “Taut control,” said Andy Goldsworthy in an excerpt of a video we watched, “can be the death of our work.” As the workshop ended, during the closing circle, Rita recalled Lila’s introduction of Hermes, the god of boundaries and the travelers who cross them. (Hermes is also the god of thieves: what greater boundaries are there to cross than those imposed by custom and law? (shhhh!))

I had forgotten. Our teacher, Lila Higgins, spoke first in the closing circle, describing the cairn she’d built a few days earlier at the crossroads leading to our final rock balancing site,



and her delight in communion with the unknown balancer who had rebuilt it in the days since. Listening to her, my consciousness was nudged to remember: I was here to mark the current turn in the trajectory of my life. Then, after others including myself had spoken, Rita recalled Hermes. How had that god slipped my mind?! It seems I had achieved – if only for a short while – the intention expressed by another workshopper,

We watched videos of Bill Dan building rock balances, and also of George Quasha. My mind required time (exposure, continuity) to shift from its usual operational state-of-consciousness (ahem) to this altered perceptual state “charged with an air of contingency” in which time has no substance. For hours at a stretch, I experience only concentration and sensation: ripples of subdued emotion (annoyance, tenderness, impatience, resolve, fear of failure, renewed commitment) and yearning for that satisfying moment when the rock finds its place.



Will my intellectual work emanate a similar resonance? I hope so. I have felt similar types of ‘click moments‘ in the past. Trusting them has led me here – to this junction, where I discover conviction deepening without reducing uncertainty.



Carter Ratcliff introduces the artistic ethic of George Quasha (who is inspired by John Cage) with words that likewise describe the ethical center of my action research goal:

More photos of rock balancers and some rock balances produced during this workshop are on this page at Lila’s rockbalancer site.
See also hickoree, rebranca46 (Rocks Balancing), and bebalance (Super Balance: Birds, Bottle, Bricks, Birds Again…).

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Meanwhile:
On June 24, 2008, the FCC passed some historic legislation (Florida Deaf Network), a corporate PR release was repeated by the Deaf Network of Texas, and all kinds of other folks. I didn’t locate too many variations on the report, or much follow-up discussion on this topic, although I did locate

• info on some legislation in Congress concerning improved access on the internet (which would be cool)
• a critique of Obama providing segregated media for the Deaf community (not so cool)
• some non-corporate info on The FCC Rule and Order for TN and Emergency Access
• and a federal announcement posted on the FCC’s Disability Rights Office homepage.

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The new UMass Journalism Department weblog documents the disturbing trend in hard news staffing/investigative journalism, linking to an article that contexts the decline of trained journalistic staffing in the age of technological expansion. The embedded example of the linked reference source is powerful and poignant, but while an individual Palestinian enacted terror in Jerusalem, the Israeli military held an entire Palestinian town under curfew in an attempt to minimize civil protests against more construction of the wall.
I received an email Monday: “Urgent!!! International Support Needed In Ni’lin.” An email report yesterday from the Ni’lin Popular Committee Against the Apartheid Wall clarifies that the curfew is over but not – as claimed by an Israeli military spokesperson – because of negotiations or mutual agreements concerning the issues at stake.
Here is where reporting gets tricky, huh? The intention to illustrate a very basic point plays into a much larger – and problematic – pattern, in which alternative perspectives on particular dilemmas are represented disproportionately. The fact of the created media/news statistic (a percentage of reports roughly “pro” Israel and a percentage or reports roughly “pro” Palestinian) perpetuates the majority-minority stances already rooted in historical trajectories, thereby centering the discourse on the most sharply defined edges of the conflict instead of – what I, personally, would like to see journalism do more intentionally – creating representations that allow people to shift from entrenched positions because alternatives are opened up.

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Mike said that, talking (to himself?!) as he entertained a couple of neighborhood girls by trying to figure out one of their toys.
Yesterday was full of tugs. I spent the afternoon and evening enjoyably, after taking a much longer time than usual to blog (and cook! shhhhhhh). Being on the periphery of two kidnappings with happy endings left me full of vicarious emotion. For the last three days I have been feeling a bit de-centered, as if there’s “a disturbance in The Force” (!), or – as the new roomie said, I am “out of alignment” with myself. My thinking is slow, difficult; my self-consciousness heightened. I speculate that I’m experiencing fallout from being (now) in a timespace different than expected (on land rather than still at sea), or the process of absorbing recent life lessons, or the malaise that lingers from old wounds . . .
I know I don’t have the jazzy hectoring tone considered most successful in writing on/for the web. The thing is, I don’t want to play into that collusively heeyyy cowboy insider attitude that Jack Shaffer promotes. Yet, I appreciate that friends do (sometimes, smile) actually read the blog and (rarer still, hence precious) give me feedback on my writing. Building “indexes” over the past few days must have put me in a summative mood, because I carried that mode into writing about Alf’s freedom instead of just blogging the moment. Perhaps I’m feeling it more necessary than usual to justify my existence (I got flamed!), to explain the reasons for my choices, or otherwise try to articulate how I perceive things going together? I am also prepping to teach, and I never (ever!) stop learning.
Even though I’ll probably never capture the tone of our times, my mind resonated with resemblances to another angle of Caleb Crain’s reflections on online literary style. In particular, he writes (and I insert comments):

I’ve kept a blog for several years (ditto), and although its readership is tiny (mine too), I of course notice when the hits rise and fall. (I should pay more attention!) I seem to get more readers when I post frequently, when I write about people or topics in the headlines, when I have been drawn into a conflict, and when I write something that speaks to a self-image that a group of people share. (Hmmm, it would be interesting to know if any such patterns are evident here in Reflexivity.) Over the years I’ve gradually revealed more personal details (we differ in this); I still reveal very little, comparatively, but enough to entitle me to say that I feel a tug there, too. Perhaps the tugs that I feel are a better data source, come to think of it, than my blog’s underemployed hit counter. If I were to interpret those tugs, I would say that writing on the internet tends to be more popular when it satisfies the reader’s wish to be connected–the wish not to miss out.

Funny – is Crain suggesting an internal (his own) or external (from others) tug to reveal more? Where (with whom) does the wish to be connected originate, and can it be cultivated as a social/relational force for institutional/historical change?
Only if we act on those wishes.

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Wall-E was conceived in 1994 and born fourteen years later. That’s a long gestation! One could argue that Wall-E was born “whole” – completely developed, a finished product, an artistic, aesthetic entirety in and unto itself. Notwithstanding the creative genius, technical sophistication, and pure brilliance of the hundreds of people who co-constructed the film, to deem it done would be a disservice to its communicative potential. Sure, the story is told with such self-deprecating humor one can readily overlook its grim source material. Heterosexual gender stereotypes persist, and the future appears predominately white – but these representations are mere gloss to the base commentary of global capitalism’s devastating effect on the planet’s ecology as it remains predicated on the twin engines of advertising and consumership.
I mused yesterday (on Facebook), about what A.O. Scott describes as the essential genius of all of Pixar’s films:

“…this idea of an identity crisis – of a main character who is torn between the demands of his group identity and his own aspirations, ambitions and dreams.” (Pixar’s 4th Dimension)

My question, based on communication theory that privileges the ritual nature of communication as the primary shaper of our social (economic, intellectual, political) worlds, asked if Pixar is “determining the human condition for a generation or three?” To be precise, they are not doing this alone, but their reflection of our current situation (as illustrated in the consciousness concerning what makes us laugh at ourselves and each other) both acknowledges and reinforces other social trends. For instance, to what extent does Wall-E’s clumsy and determined adoration for Eva, and Eva’s haughty disdain turned affection, foreground the relational needs of people to belong and be cared for over the group needs of humanity to suck up and deal with the costs of conceding the direction of our future to impersonal institutions, such as war, law, finance, war, the profit imperative…
The interpersonal overlays the intrapersonal dilemma Scott argues is central to Pixar’s successful main characters, whether they are natural rebels or reluctant heros, which is the necessity of

“finding a synthesis, or a compromise, a way of acknowledging who you are as a matter of where you come from, but also being able to express who you are as a matter of who you want to be.”

In the background, unquestioned yet foundational to the story – and to our era – is the competitive quest to be a) Bigger n Larger than everyone else, bolstered by belief in a technological utopianism: we will design the machines that will save us. Unfortunately, rescue exceeds the human lifespan by several generations. Wall-E (with many more lives than a cat) displays a peculiar mix of curiosity and lonliness; not only is his directive to remove centuries of accumulated industrial garbage, his iconicity as a janitor is deliberately deployed to display an optimistic strand of pure dumb luck as the ultimate savior. He also lives out – tolerantly – the risks of examining objects closely: they tend to stick – often unfashionably so. This is how and why I suspect a pop cultural effect from Wall-E could be marshalled along with the many other contemporary strategies (overt and incidental) of innumerous people to alter some of the predictable trajectories of history.
Because here’s the thing – despite everything Wall-E loves to dance! (Cute: hula-hoop and headphone vignettes.) (Dancing features prominently in friends’ recent gmail status messages: “Where the Hell is Matt?” and “Chocquibtown – Somos Pacífico“.) And he never takes himself too seriously – or at least, in seriously fulfilling his directive and embracing his nature, he copes with the inevitable fallout of various experimental attempts (balls, firehydrant). Pixar provides a personality template based on a way of being that has become popular, enshrining a cultural coping strategy we can turn toward the problems we face or use to mock them.
The thing is, whichever we choose, it’s gonna take some time before we can measure the results.

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Ah, I’ve been divesting myself of things: all those things that accumulate in living space and cause a need for storage.
But I like things; I even want them. For instance, this work of art: A Dream World Glimmers in the Background of the Soul, by Carrie Marrill.

I struggle most to let go of items having strong associations – values, memories, ambitions, affections . . . it is less the thing and more what it invokes that I hesitate to let go. Will that ineffable quality come back? Can I find this particular inspiration again? Do I need the peculiar juxtapositions of that unique object in immediate or future moments?
One can never know for sure.

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I was finally invited to an event at The Farm.


I went without a pen, notepaper, or business cards. What was I thinking? Conversations morphed one into another I tell you the truth I love the smartness of my friends I wish I could bottle hold embrace inject their mindfulness through my skin to the bloodstream zapping consciousness with energy and acting out through my words thoughts actions to change heal cohere a movement to . . .
Sigh. But who can fight all the time? Comfortable denial is appealing – I mean, come on – we have so much fun together! It’s gotta be balanced – I agree that the crazed pace of activist fronts perpetuate the very systems they mean to change, palliative bandaids on open wounds. From the porch we admired lightening arcing across the sky, calling to mind photographs captured by technical artists. Do you notice how often, now, conversation turns to natural disasters? These are not the idle conversations of yore about the weather….last semester a student (surfing the net, ahem, during class time) was compelled to announce, “There was just a huge earthquake in China!” Friends in Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas have thunderstorms and twisters constantly on mind, coping with floods and power outages. This is it, people! The beginning of the everyday evidence.
My plan to let blogging go was not to be. I scrounged a pen and scribbled notes throughout the evening. They are incomplete, scattered. As ever too many brilliant comments deserve notice and most have already slipped away (Laura!) – the effervescent quality of liveness when the energy of language binds us each to another in shared moments of experience. I asked former blog victims to warn the new ones. The Belgian Generals vanished instantly, but not after a stimulating conversation about solid helium and the problems of superconductors in which I tried to explain what I’ve been learning about the language of math, and was told a physics insider’s joke: “What’s a particle? An equation.”
Matt expressed mild interest. To whom and how do we invest the time to email, text, and/or call? So much communication is possible to us now – do these methods add quality or merely aggregate? What mode or type of sensory perception connects us to people – with or without talking? I value these text-based communiques so much – my most special people are, or soon will be, thousands of miles away. “Bogota, baby, Bogota!”
Confusion percolated through the danceable: minimalist reggae with some kind of elements of hip hop, dubstep, two step, grime and for one specific Muslim Gauze. AfroBeat inspired dancing ensued, a combination of aggression and ecstasy ~ how indeed do we turn what Butler discretely (once and only once) labels “the male problem” into constructive displays and nonviolent discharges? The Big Picture tips the normal (traditional, customary) mode of news from quantities of text with tiny pictures to huge photographs and minimal text; revolutionary lyrics tickle the edges of consciousness obscured by the sounds of rhythm and kinetics of motion… I talk with friends about relationships past, present, imagined my own included what have I learned from regret? The key lesson articulates itself for the first time: “Feel the emotion the first time!“ Because if you don’t, that precise emotion will come up again later and it will be wrong, misplaced – a here-and-now interaction wrenched/distorted by the there-and-then possibly even another person replacing the one in front of you. (Perhaps, ohmaybebaby I’ve cleaned the slate dispensed with the backlog caught myself up to the present giving more/better chances to present/future dances.) [Note: someone may not wear a purple dress to any more weddings!]

How many directions do we look? What does our collective gaze encompass? What sense do we make of what we see? Comments about a now contacted tribe in Brazil disturb: sarcasm our only antidote? The alternative is politics. Sure, hope fleets by, ungraspable never to be contained but is this not also the essential quality of life?

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