> Ray Evans Harrell wrote:
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Brad McCormick, Ed.D. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> > "Thou Shalt Not Be Aware". "Honor thy father and mother"
> > was colonizing nascent souls long before
> > McDonalds ads.
> Brad,
>
> I would agree with you, especially since I didn't have a lot of media
> around on the reservation. The environment was under the control
> of a benevolent set of community elders all functioning out of the
> local Lion's Club. However, it was the interaction with other
> cultures and the discipline of Acting that made me study my own
> Awareness processes and to appreciate the journey of my parents.
Traditional forms of life in varying measures nurture and
distort/mutilate the child. My cdoncern is that insofar
as tradition is not subjected to critical reflection it is
an accident that a child gets born into a situation where
parental love gets expressed in A or not-A, e.g., in
encouraging the child to enjoy his or her body or in
ritual genital mutilation (for the child's own good,l
of course!).
[snip]
> If that were true the entire technique of ensemble team work crucial
> to ballet and to team sports would be built on lies and Peter Senge
> would be "barking up the wrong tree" with his ideas of
> the Organization that learns. However, they are not lies but
> simply non-visual and non-verbal. Holistic on a much deeper level
> than computers or science texts. John Warfield is doing new work on
> Belief and how it relates to complexity science. That particular
> version of pedagogy is the only place in verbal science that I have
> seen serious hypothothesization in these areas.
[snip]
People such as Gregory Bateson and Ray Birdwhistle have done
significanty work studying "non-verbal communication" (kinesics,
proxemics, etc.). The late Professor Louis Forsdale, at Columbia
Univ. Teachers College wrote a textbook that emphasizes
non-verbal communication....
>
> That "verbal religion" however, is so built into the media, politics
> and pedagogy of the American culture and has taken root so deeply in
> the courts that anything that is non-visual and non-verbal literally
> goes against the "rule of law" (their words not mine.) In religion,
> if it isn't "written" then it isn't religion.
One of the few things I remember from Deleuze and Guattari's
_Anti-Oedipus_ is their hypothesis that writing originated in
bodily scarification rituals, in which the culture literally
wrote its power into the young person's flesh.
[snip]
> Reading, which is in reality only ONE of the art forms, is elevated
> "to necessary for Godliness." The beginning of Indigenous Religion
> is not "Read what you will know" but "Observe and learn from
> experience and reflection."
"Observe and learn from experience and reflection" -- that
about sums everything up, provided it encludes the elders
sincerely encouraging everyone to subject everything they
say and tell them to do to the most rigorous possible
critical examination -- and also encourage them to
learn the ways of as many other cultures as possible
so as not to think their way is the only way. Blessed the
child born into such a culture, where he or she gets
far more approbation from the elders for showing the elders are wrong
than for anything else.
> Reading and writing has its place as
> one of the tools to memory but it is only a subset of performance and
> not the whole of reality. As my adopted Father who had a good
> library and loved to read, used to tell me: "Take all of the books
> in the world and put them outside for a couple of months and see what
> you really know."
Of course books are not the whole of reality. But perhaps they
*can* add an entirely new dimension to reality (see Elizabeth
Eisenstein's _The Printing Press as an Agent of Change_).
I do not dispute that much of the time, in fact, however, books
are used in ways that are constricting and not liberating/nurturing.
>
> I have hopes for computers that will become sensitive enough to work
> from verbal inflection and programs that, working with Holograms, will
> take us beyond words but I will never see that. The beginning of
> "seeing the need" is to realize how little we know about each other
> based upon this typewriter and the written text. How truly
> miniscule is the information carried in such primitive tools as
> writing, computers and books. And that shaping our children's lives
> by them is to limit their abilities to perceive and ultimately to
> destroy their creative imagination. Music teaches you that, when
> you compose.
[snip]
I disagree here. I cannot comment about poetry, since
I seem intractably "poetry-blind" (like some people are
"color blind"). But I have read books which were
transfigurative: Hermann Broch's _The Death of Virgil_
and _The Sleepwalkers_ are two.
I like the notion that "a picture is worth a thousand
words" needs for its completion the correlative
notion that: without a few contextually relevant
words, no picture says anything. The Mona Lisa
or a Wanda Landowska performance
could, in principle, be used by Osama bin Laden
to convey to a "sleeping cell" that the moment
had come for them to give the American people
yet another unwelcome surprise.
>
> Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
> The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc.
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> P.S. I don't know whether you folks are recieving these posts or not,
> since I am not getting them back and no one is commenting to let me
> know that you have gotten them. Or maybe I'm just "blowing in the
> wind." REH
Your messages seem to be getting through. I make it a
rule to have a copy of each message I send sent back to me
so that I know I have not been censored. You might want to
find out how to do this, too (I forget).
>
>
>
"Yours in discourse.... [and, yes, also in non-verbal
communication channels, too!]"
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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