----- 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.
Unfortunately that appreciation was hindered by the
therapeutic approaches I learned in regular society which tended to tear me away
from my birthright in the name of "separation and
individuation." Those therapeutic processes masquerade as
awareness processes but they are unfortunately totally verbally grounded and
know little about the non-verbal awareness skills required in my
business. The West has pretty well ignored those
skills. It was the super verbal tyrant processes like the
Nazis, Communists, Socialists and the Capitalists today that relegate such
things to the realm of subjectivity and even superstition.
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. Howard Gardner is also working, to some degree in the
area of what he calls "Frames of Mind." "Mind
Frames", as you know, are the various types of perceptual and expressive modes
that constitute systems in the life of a normal individual's pedagogical
processes. What the Aztecs called deep Metaphor and what
Sternberg at Harvard has been exploring as Practical IQ
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.
(That is the way that I read Steve's
defining things, however I experience people in banking and economics as being
tied in a similar fashion, as other written religions, to the sanctity of
numbers. It is forgotten that whole civilizations, including Rome
and the Incas, functioned with trade and a full cultural and scientific life,
with almost no numbers or things like zero missing from their numbers. )
In politics, such verbal orientation is called
neo-conservative here and neo-liberal outside the US, however, at its heart
it defines reality and logic as verbal and everything else as not
real. That is why, when the conservatives could make no inroads in
the ordinary life or in the life of what they call the "liberal"
media. There are ample documents and writings from the Chicago
School where they admit as much. They even toy with the idea
of a revolution to create a separate state where their verbal "scientific"
universe will be their culture. However, they went for
the courts and have been so successful as to capture the Supreme Court and
install a President in spite of the elections.
This verbal, digital culture is so pervasive that
it has even crawled into the Cherokee culture and changed the Cherokee language
to fit the rules of English driving those keepers of traditional culture ever
deeper into the backwoods and out of the possibility of mainstream
thought. The same was true of the Yemeni Jews who for 2000 years
were the keepers of the ancient cantorial traditions that were found, for 2000
years in the West, only in the Roman Church under the guise of Gregorian
Chants. Like the Pope's hat borrowed from the Mithrians, the chant
was lifted from the Jews with the authorship being buried since they didn't
like Jews much. It was the establishment of the State of Israel and
the bringing together of the scattered traditions that caused the "discovery" of
the Jewish roots of one of the Jewels of Roman Catholic orthodox
tradition. However, as Steve points out, all of the Middle Eastern
religions are "word bound." The idea of chanting or meditation
as found in the East or in the 300 million Indigenous peoples of the world, is
unreal to all but the most advanced of the scholars in the three Middle Eastern
and thus "Western" religious traditions.
I find it no accident that the principle person who
has worked against the Meditative religions on the Supreme Court (Antonin
Scalia) is also a member of Opus Dei, the "secret language" hyper-traditional
wing of the Roman Catholic Church as was the former head of the FBI who stalked
Clinton for eight years and didn't do his job in stalking
terrorists. It also makes absolute sense that the super-mole Hanson
was also a member of the same Opus Dei chapter. My point is not
anti-Catholic or even anti-Opus Dei. I am in favor of
preserving the past and I love to hear the chants done in Latin as they were
performed for two thousand years. As an Artist, I don't go for
revision at the expense or suppression of the traditional or
conventional. However, when you do the old you must be sure to
represent it holistically and not filled with the kind of backward Romance that
I mentioned in my Lawrence Levine quote a couple of days ago.
I see so many children today who
are completely astringed in the name of that same verbal
religion. I'm using "religion" in the sense that Paul Tillich did
as "what you are Ultimately Concerned with in your life." (The
Dynamics of Faith, Paul Tillich) Because the
indoctrination is so total, beginning at the ages of three and four with
television and because parents are forced to work so much away from their
children, I must agree with Brian that, with the exception of some pockets
of culture where the parents can't afford the TV Nanny and haven't learned
to read, today's children are shaped not by familial traditions and
their own perceptions but by society traditions and what they are told they are
feeling rather than the actual feelings themselves.
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." 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."
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. There is so little
that is possible to truly write in a score that the Jazz writers of today write
only the simplest ideas feeling that too complicated a score destroys the
music. When Elaine Comparone the harpsichord virtuoso, wrote
out several jazz scores and played them from the notes, what she got was Baroque
music. The music was in the swing, not the
text. I contend that we are limited by what we read and that
our imagination is destroyed by being forced into the strait-jacket of
writing. That we need to return these devices to the "tool"
category and open our senses and reflect on our experiences not as anecdote but
as the base of all our genuine knowledge.
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc.
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
