#Rhizo14:
active isotope, a radiating brand, a pin-prick."What brings you here my friend?"
Strong feelings? Passion? Anger? Excitement? Hunger? Thirst? Curiosity? Navigation misplaced, mouse mistaken?
Massive, Awesome, delighted, enchanté to meet you thus!
Read with me a while, if you will. My sense will only be written forwards but understood long afterwards, backwards.
My apologies, I offer no sensible solace, only light entertainment as my passion dawns on us.
"Man is in love and loves what vanishes, what more is there to say?" Y.B. Yeats |
We will be long gone in the ether and without a care in their world. I have enjoyed much good company, have shared some laughter but when all is said and done are we just a non-event?
I prefer myself in movement, in action thus. This much I can do. We have curious work to do my friends. Still Hungry? Chaos is a lure for gaze but hard to digest.
Had enough?
What do you do now? Who do you speak to for what reasons? For light entertainment to pass their time? Your time is their money.
God we need fun, what more is there? God we need poetry, when they only give us time for prose.
Don't dream too long.
Fear, breeds fear. There are terrifying people who have terrifying dreams who care not for you or I. They are darkly entrained in a time of uncertainty. They will give you all the damned certainty you care for. Rules, regulations, rewards, punishments, purges, the eternal life meme. These people, these chief Ants are on the rise my friends, they sense their time is coming once again. They will stop at nothing. Flee not from freedom.
#Rhizo14 is carnival.
This event, these few days are joyous, a moment to dream, to discuss, to...alliterate. Marginal rather than massive, open ended rather than open, on-line is not enough... for courses run their course. The carnival is illusion, we dress up, we turn the world on its head, we celebrate and then we go back to the drear of their deal. The new deal they have for us is un-negotiated, unread, undemocratically, but minutely detailed in their (our) small print. They have a lesson plan: no child left behind. Behind what? The Jesuits were always right. Get them when they are young, malleable. Mad yet? Have you no thirst for adventure, the wide open spaces? Stand up! Buck their trend, our chaos is their corral.
Excited? Take a space, deconstruct their ranch, organise together a new reality. The instructions will be stolen from our reality TV. Cheat their certainty. Sing, dance, skate, build, design, haggle, imagine a community in which you would care to live. School is out, let us put away childish things, childish fears. Organise.
They fear a mob.
People care, people are generous, they would love a better lot for them, for us, they are awaiting a lead not a promise. We are not all maggots.
#Rhizo14 was a network
Some one, somewhere set it in motion. We did much together but let it not stop at this. He made some sense of this chaos. He didn't do it for them.
Build the communities in which you can be free when the carnival is over. I look forward to your news my friends.
My time here is nearly at its end.
(grinds teeth as reposts on desktop machine comment already lost on phone)
ReplyDeleteLovely post - so lyrical and expressive. It chimed with me because of my current 'puzzle' that I will be expressing later in a far more prosaic fashion.
Anyway , one thought, the Great Ant of Facebook beguiles us with with its smoothness and lets us have fun, meanwhile concealing the constraints it imposes on us in pursuit of its real goal, our creativity in return for its economic benefit - but more of that later
I love the "beautiful, terrifying mob" in the visualization. Part of its charm for me is in realizing that it is a snapshot, a 2D slice of the body of #rhizo14. In a way it is the smoke from the fire and the wake from the ship, not the fire and not the ship. I am only vaguely aware of the 4D presence that is the growing tip and the blooming buzzing perfusion that is the felt whole of #rhizo14.
ReplyDeleteParadox. A finitude (#rhizo14) creates an infinitude (something greater than #rhizo14) that is only partly glimpsed in Hawksey's visualization. I am reminded of the story here:
The nun Wu Jincang asked the Sixth Patriach Huineng, "I have studied the Mahaparinirvana sutra for many years, yet there are many areas i do not quite understand. Please enlighten me." The patriach responded, "I am illiterate. Please read out the characters to me and perhaps I will be able to explain the meaning." Said the nun, "You cannot even recognize the characters. How are you able then to understand the meaning?" "Truth has nothing to do with words. Truth can be likened to the bright moon in the sky. Words, in this case, can be likened to a finger. The finger can point to the moon’s location. However, the finger is not the moon. To look at the moon, it is necessary to gaze beyond the finger, right?"
http://www.myrkothum.com/the-meaning-of-the-finger-pointing-to-the-moon/ comment by Terry Elliott
"Chaos is a lure for gaze but hard to digest." Chaos is too big to eat. I say swim in it like a fish, breath it, do the full catastrophe in it. Grow in it now and beyond.
"God we need fun, what more is there? God we need poetry, when they only give us time for prose."
I am so glad that you get this. I wrote a post recently that was a short video of a glass of water overflowing in my sink. I put it on YouTube and then shared it via Vialogues so that others could just play with it. Jenny M commented that she didn't get it. There wasn't really anything to get, but it was kind of her to play along. We are homo ludens.
"#Rhizo14 is carnival."
I love the idea of Carnivale. I think we can view the visualization as part of carnivale and your post as part of it. It doesn't really end if we continue to act with the idea of it in our heart. Carnivale is an irruption of life. Your post is an irruption, conscious and alive and aware. There is a larger Carnivale.
"We are not all maggots." Yet in the end we are all food for the maggots. In the end our words and ideas and memes are the wakes from our ships. So be it. Let the maggots dance! Let us celebrate our wakes.
Yeats and Lady Gregory http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COp1B8mFrQw
ReplyDeleteWell you seem to have found yourself at the centre of Middle Earth! But I thought there wasn't supposed to be a centre in rhizomatic learning :-) Feeling confused again!
ReplyDeleteAll is centre
DeleteI guess I never commented at the time so here I am, in the present (or the post's future) writing about the past (or the post's present) and thinking: Once again, your writing has engaged me in thinking like no other. Thanks, Simon!
ReplyDeleteKevin