Hey Dan,
On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 2:49 AM, Dan Glover <[email protected]> wrote: > D: > From what I gathered, he was talking about quality. He explained that > when he sings it sounds completely different than when he watches the > video and hears himself. That seems right. We have to understand that > the self image is always going to be different than the image people > see of us. > > I heard a fascinating TED talk on this the other day. Some guy explained that he'd always been a social leper in school and then one day he saw a picture of himself and thought, "l look like a dork". He looked in the mirror, he looked fine. Looked at his picture, he looked ugly. So he figured out that the mirror image was showing his hair, parted on the left side, because a mirror reverses your true image. So he parted his hair so it looked dorky in the mirror, on the right side but hopefully looked good to other people. And it worked! Some neuro-linguisticist came on and talked about how we communicate mostly with the left side of our face. Our smile is bigger on that side and everything so covering it up signifies a closed-off personality and opened up is an invitation to commune. Fascinating, eh? Oh, and in the end, the guy invents a mirror cut in half and set at exact 90 deg. angle and when you look in it, you see exactly how you appear to other people. Dan: > There is no 'objective' self. What we see and hear is a conglomeration > of our personal history coming to bear upon the moment. Even in > watching a video we all see and hear something different. > > J: I would say we are being-in-4-levels and the self is a 3rd level pattern. We derive a sense of self from our society - starting with Mom. Dan: > Still, I imagine he's a lot like me. In order to gauge my writing I > often compare my stuff to other writers. I've been doing this long > enough that I blow most amateurs out of the water. And I don't mean > that in an egotistical way. It's just that after writing a few million > words my skills have evolved beyond what they once were. On the other > hand, when I read some of the greats I can see where my skills are > lacking. > > J: I don't really think of myself as an interesting writer, but I have had a lot of interesting experience and so that helps. Kerouac wasn't that much of a great writer as he was a great live-er, met a lot of interesting people and then his live-er gave out. I don't have any ambition to be a great writer but I have a need to express what is inside of me. Not in some trivial, social-media way, but ideas and concepts and meaning. But nothing is interesting unless it's a good story. Some people are born into the story and some people the story is born in them. It probably evens out in the end. Dan: > In the same fashion, when my friend says he sucks I suspect he's good > enough that when he sees and listens to amateurs like himself they > cannot compete with his style but when he compares his music with > professional singer-songwriters, he becomes aware of his limitations. > > J: I feel bad about that. We live in an age of the magnified talent - the system seeks far and wide for the best of the best and then tweaks their image to perfection. Who can compete with that? Not ordinary people. You have to be driven and who wants to be driven? I'd rather do the driving, thank you. > John: Most great schools of art were exactly that - schools. > Groups of individuals. D: > Hmmm. I tend to disagree. A school may appear to be a group of > individuals but the value that holds that school together is rooted in > culture. Remember how Robert Pirsig describes the university in ZMM? > > J: Ok, here's a good topic . I agree that a school is a product of culture, but you can't have a culture, without individuals. Any more than you can have any social pattern without biological being and support. An ongoing matter of discussion, the way the levels interact. Platt has hung his hat on the idea that the 4th level is the Individual level and I think the point could be made that pure intellect is pure individualism. But the best label i can imagine is, "the high country of the mind" Usually it's a lonely climb to get there, but not necessarily. . It's better to have a team, if you can find one. More chance of surviving and avoiding the loony-bin. > > > > > > Dan: > > > > > >> It is my opinion that if a person is working upon creating something > >> new they must do it with zeal, not just when they feel like it. If you > >> are the type of person who is compelled to do something, then you > >> don't need a kick in the pants. But if you are playing around the > >> edges, working when you feel like it and saying the hell with it when > >> you don't, then you need that boot up your butt. > >> > > > > John: ... that's a tricky one for me. "When I feel like it" is an > > important issue to me. But honestly, I have a comfortable writing > routine > > in the mornings when nobody is home. When Lu is home, I can't write. > Even > > if she says she doesn't mind, I can't do it. I feel the psychic weight > of > > all the things that need to be done, all the chores that accumulate and I > > know there are writers who can write anywhere and under any kind of > > distractions but god help me, it ain't me. > > Dan: > I remember reading an interview where Robert Pirsig tells how he > rented a room in a flop house where he went to write from midnight > until 6am every day. I think we all need a kind of routine like that. > For me, it's working at night from 10pm till 6am. So whatever works, > works. Chores? What are chores? > > J: Heh. A flophouse would be ideal, but even when I was off by myself, living in my camper I wasn't able to write. I thought about that comment in Lila - you think you're buying all this time and solitude but there's always a hundred things that need doing and you get stuck on a river bank with a crowd. The best time to write is when I'm at home and nobody else is around. > > > > Dan: > > > > > >> > >> Not many people will do that for you. They'd rather see you fail. I'd > >> like to read that book of yours, John. > >> > >> > > J: I've been thinking of serializing it. It's a very strange thing to > me > > how hard it is to finish. How the task grows with the doing, the more I > > write, the more there is to write about. Unlike digging a hole are > > rebuilding a carb (another thing on my to-do list btw :-) > > D: > An old trick of mine is to always start with the ending and then go > back and begin the story as close to that as possible. > > J: Hmmm. Not just writing down how it all ends, but actually writing the ending? That's a good suggestion. I'll try that. > > > > > >>[John] > >> > When I think of the delimiter between the organic and the inorganic, I > >> > think of choice. An amoeba makes rudimentary reactions that express > >> > avoidance of sulphuric acid but inorganic crystals have no choice. > This > >> is > >> > just a subjective observation but by seeing things from an MoQ > >> perspective, > >> > it seems to me that all the levels can be seen as escalating levels of > >> > available choice. Another way of saying that is escalating levels of > >> > self-ness as any organic "thing" is a self-contained organism 0 a > whole > >> > that is non-existent as a simple addition of parts. The whole is > only a > >> > whole when it's constituent parts are organized into a certain > structure > >> > that makes a whole, and replicates. Life replicates while inorganic > >> matter > >> > just degrades to lower levels of being, energy wise. Organic patters > >> seem > >> > to defy the rules of entropy in some ways. > >> > >> Dan: > >> I've been doing a bit of research of my own for one of my new projects > >> that has to do with cowboys and Indians but that is beside the point. > >> The Apache believe they and the land were created together. > > > > > > John: Much like the Christians. But people don't like to be reminded of > > their muddy genesis. > > D: > I was under the impression that the Christians are relative newcomers > to all this. Too, if I remember my bible, god created the heavens and > the earth well before he saw the need for human beings, right? > J: and all the animals, exactly. He made man out of the dust but then he didn't make woman til man noticed he was alone, and she was the crowning cherry on top, the last thing created. The mythos in the bible is a lot more interesting than the dogmatic interpretations of the religions that tout it. For instance, it's said that God created woman out of a rib, but the actual word used in the original is womb. Thus the story goes that at first, man is self-creative and alone, but he's unsatisfied with this state of affairs so God splits him and takes out the self-creative part and personifies a longing for otherness that is an analogy of God Himself. Without longing for the other, duality is impossible. (snip for brevity) > John: Well here I was using the term self in a very broad way. A better > word might be "identity" Life is tied up with an identity, as formed in > time. > But I think the broad understanding of MD ought to be corrected on to the > meaning and importance of the self. Just because something isn't > fundamental, doesn't mean it's non-existent. D: > The MOQ says there is no self independent of the patterns. That isn't > the same as saying the self is non-existent. > > J: I agree completely. I would say that there is a special aspect of self-ness that every level uses as the basis of its patterns. Isn't an evolution itself, an evolving pattern of self-hood? I think it's very telling that Pirsig says that DQ enters human affairs through an individual, not a committee. However individuals are products of and relative to, a community. So it's definitely a two-way street, society and intellect. It's a code of art. Thanks as always, Dan, John Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
