I simply want to take up what you say, to repeat a point I
try to make on this list every now and then.
The perception of 'positive' as 'good' and 'negative' as
'bad' is a product of abstract positivist thinking (also known as 'denial'). It
comes from the effort to eliminate the archetypal 'Shadow' -
the infinite depth of 'mother space' (darkness) - from our conscious
thought. This very effort is what I think leads to profound conflict and
discrimination, associated with psychological, social and environmental damage
and distress. One of the most stark naked illustrations of positivistic
thinking, and its tragic implications, can be found in the following famous
quotation from 'Hamlet':-
'To be or not to be, that is the
question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune, OR to take arms AGAINST a sea of troubles and by OPPOSING
end them'
From a natural inclusional understanding of
nature, where all form is flow-form - an energetic configuration of space in
figure and figure in space, this infinite depth is inescapable, irremovable and
vital to our very capacity to live and love in a dynamic cosmos. She has to be
welcome in our hearts (see attached poem, 'your welcome'). The 'negativity' that
positivistic thinkers associate with her is nothiong less than the 'receptive'
('loving') quality of space.
Smooth stories of self that elide the vulnerability of our
soul-fullness as energetic configurations of space in space deny admission to
Shadow and set our teeth on edge against the sea of troubles that we
envisage in life as a 'struggle for existence'. They are fundamentally dishonest
and saccharine, as well as perversely alienating.
If we think in natural inclusional terms of 'positive' as
'responsive' and 'negative' as 'receptive', both are good and vital in their
complementary ways. What creates conflict (and, dare I say, true 'evil', the
inverse of 'live') is the negation of negativity ('othering of other') by a
rationalistic 'false positivism'
Perhaps the extent to which positive and negative are used
in modern culture to denote 'good' and 'bad' is symptomatic of its condition as
a positivistic, compassion-killing, 'culture of denial'.
Energy flows both ways, simultaneously and always, as a
dynamic balance of 'flow' and 'counterflow'.
When we recognise the infinite depth that does not
stop anywhere, but thickens and clarifies with the natural ebb and flow of
energy, we can find the receptive capacity to love the erratic
nature that burns in our hearts.
Warmest
Alan
----- Original Message -----
From:[log in to unmask] href="mailto:[log in to unmask]">geisha
rebolledo
Thank you , all this is very good!!! I was
thinking on this type of narrative but I felt I needed to tell the other side
of the story. However, it is difficult to narrate, because it has to do
with the way we interpret the situation, and there might be many other ways!!!
we might be seen as negative instead of positive narrators!!! and so how
is the enrgy flowing ???thank you again!!! geisha
I have just read Andrew's 'Creativity Works' and enjoyed it
greatly. I came across the phrase "Life's narrative wreckage' and
wondered if anyone would mind explaining it to me. Thanks Jack for
replying to my question about educational values. I will respond
soon to what you said. Thanks for spending the time on it.
Dear Brendan and all, I use the idea of 'life's narrative wreckage'
to emphasise the importance of resisting telling a 'smooth story of self'
which omits some of the difficulties encountered by practitioner-researchers
in improving their practice and gaining academic legitimacy for their
knowledge. It emerged from reading Maggie MacLure's 1996 article with the
extract below:
Telling
Transitions: Boundary Work in Narratives of Becoming an Action Researcher
Author(s): Maggie MacLure Source: British Educational Research Journal, Vol.
22, No. 3, Post-Modernism and Post- Structuralism in Educational Research,
(Jun., 1996), pp. 273-286
"Lather (1994) has noted that the narratives of
educational research (and not just action research) are usually victory
narratives. She wonders what it might mean to rethink research as a 'ruin', in
which risk and uncertainty are the price to be paid for the possibility of
breaking out of the cycle of certainty that never seems to deliver the
hoped-for happy ending. Are the transition stories discussed above victory
narratives? If so, they are not vainglorious ones. But I wonder whether it is
worth considering other ways that interviewees and interviewers might
collaborate in the telling of life stories. The aim would not be to try to get
more coherent and 'disinterested' narratives, as Woods (1985) or Butt et al.
(1992) want to do. The point might be to resist resolution, to live 'at the
hyphen' as Fine (1994) puts it, between those boundaries that are inevitably
implicated in narratives of becoming an action researcher. Might we be
cyborgs, hybrids or tricksters, whose business is to prevent solutions to the
problem of getting safely across the boundaries of teacher/ academic,
personal/professional, being/becoming?I f we tell our lives, and expect to
hear them told by others, in ways which constantly try to overcome
'alterity'-that incalcu-lable Otherness that deconstructionists argue is the
forgotten 'origin' of the core self-can we be sure that we are not acting on
behalf of those institutions whose business is the 'colonisation of the Other'
(Spivak, 1988)? Couture (1994) suggests, playfully but nonetheless seriously,
that action research within the academy might be just such an enterprise. He
imagines the university as Dracula, feeding off the virgin souls (selves) of
teachers who offer themselves up in the name of reflective practice. Couture
fears that action research works by consuming the ungovernable alterity of the
'client', producing a state of amnesia, and leaving in its place 'this dead,
smelly thing called teacher identity' (p. 130)-a simulacrum that silences
resistance and erases the memory of other, fractured and conflicting
possibilities of identity. If he is right, what must we have forgotten in
order to tell these smooth stories of the self? For instance, about the
impossibility and the necessity of leaving the 'island', or the Garden, of
teaching, and the discomforts of being 'haunted' thereafter by the spectre of
practice; about the way in which the poles of the 'inside'-'outside' dualism
reverse themselves, valorising first one term, then the other, in a movement
which is never fully or finally arrested." (MacLure, p.
283)