Dear Susie,

As ever, your response is most insightful.

The poem came into my mind whilst waking on Sunday morning. Ted helped me 
to soften it a bit before I posted it. It is linked also to another poem 
called 'Recreations' (pasted below), which I wrote a few a few years ago, 
as well as a painting, recently added to my website at 
http://people.bath.ac.uk/bssadmr/art under 'natural inclusion'. 'Play' in 
all senses of that word, is very much in the foreground of my thinking 
about 'natural inclusion' and evolutionary creativity. I link it to the 
much overlooked phenomenon of 'neoteny' (retention of juvenile 
characteristics in adult form and behaviour) which has been associated with 
such macroevolutionary transformations as the emergence of vertebrates 
(from juvenile sea squirts), monocotyledonous (grasses, lilies etc) plants 
from dicotyledonous (broad-leaved) plants and, indeed, human beings as 
neotenous apes. In 'forbidding', 'belittling' and 'excluding' play 
(isolating it in the 'pen' or 'playground') I think there is much potential 
for 'child abuse' in our educational systems. And there is also the 
connection between my own experience of being 'singled out' as an 
academically 'gifted child' and how this relates to my 'Achilles Heel 
Syndrome'.

The poem was also, frankly, inspired by abusive treatment to which I have 
been subjected whilst trying to share 'inclusionality' with another list, 
ironically called 'friends of wisdom'. One member of that list never fails 
to demonize my (and Ted's) offerings (most recently the ones about 'climate 
change', which I also shared with the b.e.r.a. list, and to which you 
responded in 'wise fashion'), accusing me of being an 'inclusionazi' 
seeking to dominate the discourse, and describing me publicly as 'silly', a 
'lunatic', a 'crackpot', a 'preacher', 'utterly irresponsible' etc. In one 
of his more recent epistles, claiming to have successfully critiqued 
inclusionality (what he actually critiqued was his mistrustful 
misrepresentation of inclusonality), he told me to 'grow up and stop 
looking up my own arse' (apologies to members of this list, I am merely 
reporting the language actually used). At the heart of his abuse appears to 
be a profound attachment to dialectic argument and notions of 'free agency' 
and pluralistic 'free association' (a very different kind of 'fragmented 
plurality' compared with that envisaged inclusionally in terms of 
'complementary differences), along with a dedication to ruthless 
attributions of blame, guilt and shame upon others, cast in terms of direct 
causation. {aside to Jack - I would love you to put on clear record your 
views of inclusionality in relation to propositional and dialectic logic}

It has been difficult for me to 'respond receptively' to such expressions, 
without precipitating further abuse and accusations. Silence also is 
interpreted as an affront or as evidence of defeat: a real 'no win' 
situation. How does one get out of the loop of such vicious circular games 
of 'reciprocal denial', at the heart of which is the rationalistic logic of 
the excluded middle, which by its own rigid self-definition excludes and 
rejects the fluid logic of the included middle (inclusionality). Hence the 
deliberate 'teasing' paradox in the poem that you noted where there is an 
implicit differentiation (but not absolute demarcation) between 
rationalistic and inclusional forms of 'reason'. Inclusional reason can 
incorporate and transform rationalistic reason (the 'discrete objectivity' 
or 'exclusionality' that still passes in most people's minds for 'reason' 
or 'rationality'), but exclusionality, by self-definition, cannot 
incorporate inclusionality. Rationalistic reason leads, in my mind, to 
child abuse, both literally and metaphorically. Moreover, it doesn't help, 
in my mind, to address what appears to be our current global environmental, 
social and psychological crisis, by going around finding 
objects/individuals to blame.

Already you see how difficult it is to express this in verbal (definitive) 
language without getting tied up in knots. Hence the poem, as a form of 
not-to-be-taken-literally reflective expression which gives vent to my 
feelings without getting caught up in loops of reciprocal denial that seek 
to alienate and miscast the other in a burgeoning culture of mistrust.

This is why I think it is so important in 'living theory' to include 
accounts of the origin and perpetuation of mistrust, and how we may be 
liberated from its powerful loop by holding open and not abusing the 
possibility of trusting relationship. In my terms 'all you need is love, 
love, love is all you need', but to understand what 'love' means in a 
culture of denial that loves to impose barriers to love, takes some 
'doing'.






Warmest

Alan

---------------------------------

RECREATIONS OF A PLAYFUL UNIVERSE

Oh, how we laugh!
When Some Thing
Touches Our Spirit
Tickles Our Imagination
Recalling Our Place
In a Playful Space

A common enjoyment
Of a Common Enjoinment
Recreations
Of an Ever Present
Folding

Dynamic Boundaries
Pivotal Places
Incomplete Surfaces
That make distinct
But Never Discrete

Unique and Special Identities
Possibilities Realized
That Can Never Be Bettered
And can never be Severed
>From a Context Within and Beyond
That Makes Us Content
Belonging Together
Adoring Our Differences
Inseparable in Our Incompleteness

Our Self-Insufficiency
That Unites Us in Love
A Receptive Space
A No Thing Place
That Keeps Us Coherent
Within and Without
Enveloped and Enveloping

No Need For Rules
No Need For Rulers
With Space in Our Hearts
To Include Other as Us
A Diverse Assembly
A Joyous Relief
Reciprocating Each Other’s Movements
Dancing in High Spirits


Oh, how we cry!
When Made To Deny
Our Union With Other
No Mother, No Brother
No Sister
To Assist
Our Passage
Through Pain

But a Father Severe
A Tyrant Authority
To Cut Us Off
Within Fixed Boundaries
In Isolation

Pretending Independence
Making Comparisons
Striving To Remove
What’s Not Good Enough
In Pursuit of Perfection, Control, Prediction

A rationalistic Ideal
A Uniform Whole
A Self-Sufficiency
Tolerating No Hole
No Breathing Space
No Place for Grace

Demanding Reproduction
More of the Same
A Perpetual Cloning
With No Room to Err
No Room to Wander or Wonder

A Solid Object
With Space Outcast
An Infinite Outsider
Offering No Possibility
Of Excitement or Joy

A Purified Presence
A Divine Right
Freed From Wrong
An Unreal Abstraction
Motionless
Emotionless
Random Disunity
Divine DisContent

A Need For Rules
A Need For Rulers
No Space in Our Hearts
To Include Other as Us
A Monoculture
A Dull, Flat Field
Where Conflict Abounds

So, For Heaven’s Sake, Father!
Take a Look at Your Wife!
Isn’t She Sexy?
Get a Life!
Be Your Self!
Give Us Guidelines, By All Means
But, Please
Don’t Hold Us Against Them

Stop Repeating Yourself!
Put Away Your Severing Knife!
Or, at the very least
Make a Hole that Heals
And Recreates -
Lets Us Play!


--On 20 February 2007 16:21 +1100 Susan Goff <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>
> Hi Alan
> I have taken a little time to get back to you about this beautiful
> reflection. Thank you.  I find the piece paradoxical, because it seems to
> refute reason and yet is reasoning in its form of communication. It seems
> to be saying that the way in which we are made to be reasoning beings
> brings with it the price of losing that which is light, rich, connecting
> and insightful (the being). And yet we can only know these things through
> certain forms of reasoning -- meaning recognising, piecing together,
> weighing up value, reaching understanding... By "rational pursuit" are
> you meaning the oppression of other impulses, not so rational but that
> are better guides/unfolding substances in our journeys? The poem leaves
> me saddened, seeing a child held back and down on a lonely road, all
> natural impulses willing it to something but there being nothing for it
> to be embraced by that feels like deep "m-other".  Can you open up why
> this poem, and why now?
> It feels like a lament for our discourses.
> As if you see such a lost child in there somewhere...
> I am happy to make the leaps myself and openly here -- I also know the
> value of creating the lily pads for companion frogs to leap between and I
> do not want to respond to you with demands for explanation. What you have
> written feels like a bridge built on a sigh.  Love
> Susie
>
> On 19/2/07 6:57 PM, "A.D.M.Rayner" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>
> Dear All,
>
> For your possible reflection.
>
>
> Warmest
>
> Alan
>
> -----------------------------------------
>
>
>
> Child of Reason
>
>
> I feel I cannot think
>
>
> Of My Self alone
>
>
> As wise
>
>
> For there can be no wise One alone
>
>
>
>
> I am not wise
>
>
> I am a child of suffering
>
>
> Whose childful yearning
>
>
> Is to lighten the load
>
>
> Imposed by those who goad
>
>
> Us on our way
>
>
> By means of fearful refutation
>
>
> Of all that they might seek to find
>
>
>
>
> I cannot grow up
>
>
> For in that adulteration
>
>
> I encounter devastating poverty
>
>
> A desertion of the spirit
>
>
> That pools us all together
>
>
> In the recreative communion
>
>
> Of our natural neighbourhood
>
>
>
>
> Can our rational pursuit
>
>
> Serve any better purpose
>
>
> Than to chase what we seek
>
>
> Further
>
>
> And further
>
>
> and further
>
>
> Away?
>
>
>
>
> If we were only to loosen
>
>
> Those unforgiving means and ends
>
>
> The hardline limits of denial
>
>
> By which we close down on our prey
>
>
> We could release the life that loves
>
>
> Our child's play
>
>
>
>