Hi Alan,
Thank you for your story here... I feel it is relevant to my individual
experience and I would like to offer a blessing for each other the cuts you
have received.
What I have often wondered is, when we experience what feels like abuse to
us, whether there are two children in "play" ours and the others - that
abusive behaviour is behaviour that is stuck at some narrative that we
cannot grow through, and that becomes increasingly disabling the less we can
grow through it. I wonder too, if somehow we attract it... I am not wanting
to shift moral responsibility here, but seeking to understand this
experience in terms of flows.
There are two things about yours and Ted's approaches/wisdoms that I remain
curious about - one is that there seems to be an underling thought that
inclusionality brings with it some rightfulness.. I am not resisting this
idea but questioning it because if this is so, then it risks having built
into it a moral orthodoxy that has to be accepted with its architecture
(expressed in terms of quantum physics and natural sciences in some
instances, or appeals to the assumed rightfulness of "love" in others eg)
... And this risks fundamentalism... Can you throw a light on this for me -
both conceptually and in terms of practice? And I am not altogether
comfortable with critical theory as an alternative as this too can default
to objectivism in the last stand 9the relationship between the critiquer and
themselves in the act of critique).
The other thing is that matter of exclusionality by definition not including
inclusionality....if we take a Foucault type approach it would suggest that
in fact exclusionality must include inclusionality for it to measure itself
against... It does not exist without it. So somewhere in exclusional
behaviour is a knowing of inclusion, it is just that this knowing is
different to what we might want it to be. This is true for us who know
inclusionality, and often know it reference to exclusionality. We advocate
inclusion because of the pain of exclusion.
Perhaps a way of moving into the double loops, recursions, and no wins, is
to sense out the understanding of the shadowed knowing that the other is
responding to... This is what I understand Zizek's insight to mean - which I
quoted a while back and curiously no-one picked up - I think it is SO
powerful ... "what repetition repeats is not the way the past ³effectively
was² but the virtuality inherent to the past and betrayed by its past
actualisation"
I see this quote having many resonations on this list, and also in my own
living where I keep hitting the same struggle in different forms.
I think Zizek is true for all social unfoldings - possibly true for
biological? What I see you and Ted talking about is confronting the act of
"betrayal" and implying as you do what it is that has been betrayed
(inclusionality) - so when we meet betrayals does our practice imperative or
non-negotiable have to be inclusion in the sense of unconditional love for
the betrayal to be named, understood, forgiven and transformed into trust...
(are these formative shifts in betrayal what you would recognised too?)
If so and in reference to what I see you saying here, then individual
practitioners need a very coherent and commitment community of practice
around them to do this essential and vital work (in true senses of each
word).
This brings me to my second question: can inclusionality grow out of
exclusionality, or does exlusionality have to be "corrected" - which is how
I feel your and Ted's practices to be more aligned to. I experience your
responses to my postings, for example, as complementarities born from
corrections of my ways of expressing and seeing as discerned from yours. I
am enjoying it, and learning much, but this might not be so comfortable for
people who think they "know".
This matter would effect the quality and strength of any community of
practice that emerges through the Alan and Ted place hotspace. These matters
of quality and strength seem to be important to many of us here - and is it
would seem in other networks too.
Warmest
Susie
On 20/2/07 10:50 PM, "Alan Rayner" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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 Otherıs 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
> Whatıs 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 Heavenıs Sake, Father!
> Take a Look at Your Wife!
> Isnıt She Sexy?
> Get a Life!
> Be Your Self!
> Give Us Guidelines, By All Means
> But, Please
> Donıt 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
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