From: Gene Fowler

To: Kirby Urner

Cc: Ed Applewhite ; Ken Sawyer ; Gary Stonecipher

Sent: Saturday, August 21, 2004 2:12 PM

Subject: The Once & Future (and current) "Dark Ages"

[ I'm writing this "third email" for completion (of a process) and if it's not worth some difficult untangling, it's easily skipped or skimmed as (possibly obscure) poetry... Keep in mind that conceptualizing is the primal "fine art" and allow that I may come up short as an MFA and long as a Grandma Moses.... I'll likely post (in my archive) the three-part eletter with the parts interlinked. This third part will be the entry point followed in a read-through by the second and, finally, the first. Eventually jumping around in the whole, and out of it, will be the "way".

]

I always come back to wondering—what are these dimensions we live among. Often, I've done this wondering in a "coffee house"...

QUESTING

Among the tables
in Caffe Mediterraneum, air
is brittle, pebbles
of sound shatter
light into
a strobing pulse beat
and I look through this toward the women
hunched over tables, cups
protected by circling arms, or
flopped into chairs
or perched on them.
The air thickens and dries between strobing
flashes, light is momentary
tunnel openings - and to send
my voice through would be to see
it arrive as a twisted, garbled howl,
not discrete, shaped
phrases.
To walk from one table to another
is to become tunneled through, shattered,
one with the dehydrated air.
Locked into my seat, I look
through the dazzling flicker of tunnels
at faces, their flesh gathering and drawing apart,
squeezed and stretched and pock marked by
the pulsing light -
and the forest I hunted through
is now alien to me.
I've forgotten how to visit
the maiden in
the clearing.

In my second letter, I "went over" systalk (new namings for the polyhedra) and numerography (number and geometry birthed together in our human hand with it's global mapping and relating capability). I pulled those "topics" into the new workspace created by thinking in terms of "open sourcing" concepts. In this third letter, I'll do the same with the up/down vs out/in question and our human quickness at coordinate system switching and, by using Bucky's hammer-thrower, explore the precessional roots, the human roots, of the xyz-coordinates (as opposed to the apparent rooting in a perverse liking for the cube and its "properties" or a faulty sense of how stability is achieved).

Before getting into this two parter (see boldface section headings below), I ought to tell you that this comes a long time after my first bounce of Bucky's tale of out/in (and around) and up/down (and, though hidden, around) and the reflecting of a choice by such namings as outstairs and instairs). I'll retell the tale in the first section below and introduce planetary and personal coordinate systems and switching "on the fly".... You can read a far more complete working up of the thinking involved here in a paper posted on my archive the title of which I borrowed for my subject line above: The Once & Future (and current) "Dark Ages". I wrote this in 2003 and while I hadn't thought of "open sourcing' concepts, you'll find an interweaving of subtly shifted concepts, formed in this, our cognitional civilization, spreading over and through our pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial "wave" (singular). I'll quote a couple or three paragraphs in my two chunks of letter below (so you can get the flavor), but I won't recreate the deep reweavings. I'll give you an outline (in headings and sub-headings) below my second section and above my signature-block. The link is

You've guessed it. This is thinking outward from Cosmography, particularly the "dark ages" framework, or, better, systemwork holding it together and giving it purpose....

All this [the paper and this letter] is just to loosen up perceptual habits, and nothing is offered as anything beyond being a way of looking at something. No Truths. No Discoveries, though some, perhaps strange, dis...coveries.... The great enemy is amnesia and particularly amnesias producing fogged areas in our storehouse of experiential learnings. For instance, we forget, right down in our cognitive basement we forget, that we live at the bottom of an ocean. We look down into oceans and wonder about beings living in all that pressure...

SKYSIGHT

Sky ocean so clear
i can see a star lying on the surface,
and coming down
one sinking hawk.

In/out/around vs up/down/...around: In this third great wave of spreading civilization, a "cognitional" civilization following an "agricultural" (and "cultural") and an "industrial" (and "industrious") waves, the individual, the quantum-packet of humanity, is taking e's (his or her) place as a key energy in Universe.... Unlike Buddha's dreaming of individuals becoming passive spectators and "merging" with the sea, or Great River, "milky" way, of humanity, the shapes of individuals in the generations being kept only as a controlling threat of how an "ego" might be reborn if the melting hasn't been adequate.... a less melancholic or born-later Buddha's dreaming might involve leaning back from e's personal computer or communicator or coordinate system to imagine that Great River as a flowing of live coordinate-handlers interacting, interaccomodating and inter-a-whole-bunch-of-other-things so as to flash brief and longer-lasting networks, systems, figures in ever-changing fore- and backgrounds....

I'm going to "revisit", as I've done often since the mid-sixties, Bucky's "take" on the up/down and out/in terms. Many feel an uneasiness as they listen to Bucky's play with terms involving planes coming in for landings and stairs metamorphosing from upstairs and downstairs into outstairs and instairs. Some of these locate it as hairs on their necks standing up and figure this "angularity" is their brush with genius. Others, acknowledging the indisputable genius, mark this particular conceptualizing as an attendant "eccentricly" spinning into nowhere in particular. I'll give away a little of the fun of replaying all this, by saying in advance that what we're dealing with here is not an "old" set of assumptions and taking on a "new" (or equally old, but forsaken) set. We're dealing with personal and planetary coordinate sets and the human power is being able to "switch" between these, and among others, including other "personal" ones. Anyway, let's play.

Bucky draws a couple large humans on a small earth. It's obvious that their axii are tilted relative to each other's. Their downs converge at Earth's center and their ups diverge. They are like two fingers making a v, which is what's drawn in the Arabic glyph for two). I pointed out that number (count, size) and geometry (trigonometry)) are borne together in the human hand, bound into patterns by our skill at pointing, pointing to, pointing out, pointing through.... So, our common here and divergent theres model this. Our language, too, sings of this. We think of words as passive things. We plug them into "frames" (hardly "systems", let alone dynamic systems). We use the, for instance, to push things out to observing distance, to make things objective. So, the here becomes there. The now becomes then. The is becomes this and the at becomes that.

Our two giants are, indeed, bound into the planetary coordinates, gravity binding us to that common crotch and our anti-gravity muscles thrusting us out from the center, but, personally, lifting us upright on Earth's face. Even from a-top our ziggurats, we (i.e., Dante) look up, not out as we will in time when we think of going among all those huge goings-on out there. Why? because we're in our personal coordinate systems.

So, we're just us, writing emails, talking over coffee house tables, sitting among others in various sorts of rooms listening to Bucky talk, watching him, from Allegra's coaching, gesticulate.... He speaks of the pilot coming in for a landing. Our imagining mind, in the background, cringes and back-stories. Our pilot damn well better not be coming in toward Earth's center.... No, e comes "in" toward a point, a dot, a center on the horizon that then grows larger and becomes an airport. As the airport becomes clearly visible, the pilot begins to lose altitude, while still traveling, mainly, horizontally. He begins to "bring it down" or, as a coordinate-handler, to "set it down". The imagining mind snaps back. Then, it's off again. Before the plane left. On the tarmac. Then, taking off from the tarmac. "Taking it up" to, oh 30,000 feet... Even a rocket lifting off in Florida, going up till your bending back (to watch) neck gets a crimp in it and you have to rub it out.

Bucky is still talking (and gesticulating) and he's talking about the U.S. president, on the radio to an astronaut in orbit, "How is it up there?". Through those of us listening, chortles run. We're those huge figures on the small Earth, looking out, but still not seeing the fall-off "out" beyond the contour of our horizon disk. Actually, we're looking up in our imagining, though the president is looking down into his microphone as though thinking that by squinting he might see the astronaut through it. Actually, the president has asked the right question. Earth's surface and the orbit are two spherical shells. It's fine to think of one as farther out from the center than the other but equally fine to think, from between them, of one as "above" the other and the personal relationship of president and astronaut in terms of up and down. To grasp this, we turn back to Bucky as he speaks of our usual talk about going upstairs and downstairs, how it might make better Einsteinian sense to say outstairs and instairs. Well, if you're Arthur Clarke writing Fountains of Paradise ...yes. Otherwise, you're inviting confusion. and that confusion rests on a far "deeper" confusion.

First, there's simple language confusion. When writing about systalk, I pointed out that tetravertexion dragged in this sort of confusion when substituted for tetrahedron (which doesn't go away when the new name comes in). Why? Because the next two terms, the octa- and hexa- of the two sets mirror image and drive a user (of the four names) through the looking glass. Hexedgion doesn't have that confusion as a design flaw (in our "open source" conceptualizing). We have this sort of confusion if we try to use outstairs and instairs for our more usual namings. Like the pilot's "in", our stairs "in" will relate to a building's contained center. Outstairs, whether running up or down will, likely, take you out of the building or possibly, by extension of use, out of a volume of space or area of activity. So, it feels wrong and, the listener who feels that will have one or another of the attitudinal balances I mentioned above.

Stairs ...give us a place to anchor what's going on. Bucky takes us into a planetary coordinate system as we listen to him. From there, it's natural for a lively imagination to grab hold of up/down-stairs and play with out/in-stairs.... We loosen up habitual, in fact, automatic, conceptualizing-as-we-go and experience artistry....

It's be easy to say that resistance is because we're locked by habit in an "old" xyz-coordinate system and having a little trouble moving in a "new" 0-grav/rad (or whatever) coordinate system. But that misses what's going on. Bucky puts the in/out/around system in the body. We reach out, pull in, or just hug (reach around) something. If we take our two giants on the small Earth and reduce Earth to a point (in the solar plexus, we have this model. The xyz-system, on the other hand, is that (the at) wobbly cube held out in front of us. In the next section, I'll use Bucky's hammer-thrower, and a sense of the whirling dervish, to show the x-y-z system being birthed in our own solar plexus or our dynamic centering, but first...

When we hear Bucky telling the "tale of the stairs" we imagine an actual stairs and we view it from the top or the bottom and look, mainly, down or up.... Habit? Or reference to a coordinate system that's appropriate. And what coordinate system? Okay, it's our personal coordinate system. Or our human coordinate system. We aren't spheres though people's tendency to become spherical is, currently, a national problem in the U.S.. Our coordinate system is essentially a cylinder. It's not a stretched out cube. It's stretched out (up/down "dimension"), but, and this is key, circular in cross section. Our pointings, sightings "line up" three dimensions: Up/down, left/right and forward/back.

It's not habit, but scale (and context) that "bothers" people about outstairs. Our experiential learnings allow us, not only imagining in order to follow a lecturer's tales, but in life, to switch coordinate systems "on the fly" in order to handle the situations "at hand". If you look at a stairs from a distance it's just a corrugated something, a "brane" of some sort. Add to the distance and it smoothes out. A spiral staircase might snow-flake on you.... Any headed "in" toward Earth's center is ...well, a labyrinth of some sort and dangerous. Surely volcanic odors waft out from that darkening navel....

To give you a taste of how language is shifting, here's a one paragraph section from the paper I've linked in at the top and outlined at the end of the next section.

You’d have a devil of a time walking around among those four planes even in a “let’s pretend” and, at best, would forget when to duck or how to keep track of measurements from that far off plane. But we’ve tied the 3D in with our personal coordinate systems, too, which is why Bucky thought up/down was “cubical” (it’s actually, by his definition, precessional, which also involves 90-degree shuntings). Bucky thought we could conveniently replace up/down with in/out. By reexamining experience, we find that we were ignoring our human skill at switching coordinate systems, cueing ourselves as to when to do that. As riders on this planet, we’re very much aware of cosmic or nodal coordinates (where your in/out relative to “centers” is useful), but as stretched out beings, we have personal coordinate systems that are better regarded as cylindrical. So, we’ve up/down, forward/back, left/right dynamics. In fact, this “shunting” system probably pushed us toward our “apparently” symmetrical (hence cubical) coordinates as reference-lines (directions) and, as we moved about, planes. The cylinder explains why precession, and not perpendicularity, (probably) led to our three-plane corner and resultant 3D-space. The cylinder is “circular” in the horizontal—all the way out to the apparent edge (it’s a contour) of our horizon disk. We’re sort of flat (well, curved) land “circle”-beings riding on a giant “sphere”-being.

We can adopt the planetary coordinates in a very different domain. It's suitable for talking about networking behavior. Little workstations around a large mainframe CPU in a room may have led to the comic notions of uploading and downloading that reminds of up North and down South resulting from the way we hang maps. We outload to and inload from the network, sitting in our center, and, maybe, offload onto to removable media.

Anyway, a coordinate system is just a mapping device. Increasingly since the seventeenth century, people have been popping loose from the notion that such systems (and number, mathematics) were the essence of nature. Actually, "essence" is an okay term. It translates into English as is-ness. And "is" is just a categorizing tool.

In my section-head, I said up/down/...around to echo in our personal coordinates the out/in/around of the planetary or network coordinates. This will be the key to my next section. But, for now, we've a foldable structure. We can, of course, wheel within a cross section of our cylinder. But we can also collapse it into a crouch and somersault "around", roll like a ball forward as well as like a log laterally, but the secret is that we don't just roll ...we're engines and coordinates are, anyway, just our aiming devices.... We always manage to get around, one way or another. We are interoperative coordinate-handlers in this mighty river....

The hammer-thrower and the dynamic xyz-coordinates: "Synergetics is not designed to prohibit or preclude our use of xyz reference frames...." That's you, in note 9 of your "The Invention Behind the Inventions" In Synergetica Journal, Volume 1, number 1, 1991. A long time ago. In a kind of oppositely trajectoried, but not oppositional statement, I'll say I'm not writing this letter to rehabilitate, let alone reestablish, "old" frames of reference. (You know what I think of the flat-Earth concept "frames of reference", anyway, preferring "system of referents".) What I am doing—and only to loosen up our perceptual habits—is to show how the xyz-coordinates did not originate as a static "frame of reference", but grew dynamically and, using Bucky's "system of referents", precessionally out of our individual bodily experiential learnings. I bother because labeling this core original sin and attempting to alter it at the wrong level, in the wrong way, or with the wrong contextual anchors might have more serious consequences than just the surface confusions than outstairs and upstairs, or octahedron and octavertexion (which matches the hexahedron or cube). This is why, when writing directions for seeing the hedra or syses, I have the "student" project. We take the object. Then, we project ourselves into, pr, better, onto one of the surface corners, noting framers on both sides, imagining another framed area coming into the corner beyond them, framers beyond them ...and at some point two being one to curve, or better, angle, space (or space time).

Bucky brought the planetary or spherical coordinate into the body for a listener, or listening reader, and owned the push (radiation) and pull (gravity, mass attraction) by using our reaching, pulling, or shunting into an embrace. I'd guess he felt our own core, which birthed the xyz-system, and he was being more personal than when talking about construction and geometry. His two giants on the small Earth, using gravity to create a common down and divergent ups, came from the same observation as that which told him what would happen to a pyramid if you got it into orbit where gravity, like air, was "thin". Moving from the pyramid there (the here) to the giants' bodies (almost here) was ...well, waking his "felt" core (our true here). So, he goes the rest of the way and talks about out/in/around in terms of our use of arms vectoring, reaching out, drawing in, reaching even around, embracing, using a partially-shunted, half-tensioning pulling around, almost the hammer-thrower's throw.

Ordinates and coordinates are impersonal. Parts of "frames of reference" rather than (dynamic) "systems of referents" (everything moving relative to everything else). These are "lines of reach" and "lines of sight" and, yes, we don't always anchor them at a center. Take the glyph 2, the v sign with two fingers. The pointing out of which we get trigonometry and the sextant. Two lines of sight out from here at the center of the palm, the horizon disk. We can run a line of sight across the two tips, a chord to the arc of horizon. So, we can make our tetrahedron or sixsys "out there" and relate it to ourselves "in here".

So, "around" is, at least latently, a "pulling around" or holding in if we are the wanderer in question. And to take that farther, as we wheel in our hammer-thrower's circle, the cross-section of our cylindrical personal coordinates or coreachings, coseeings, comeasurings, throwing by releasing, ...we creating planes, or planeing. I can't help seeing textbook drawings of the planet's orbiting sweeping out those differently shaped areas that all have the same measure in the ellipse where the more obvious things, like speed, are not consistent. We start with planes, not lines, we make our corner first and, then, we sense the "edges" we'll call ordinates....

I'm running low on time and energy (because I'm getting along, you know) for this re-working. So, though I'm getting warmed up to re-sensing, re-experiencing and reimagining all this, I'm going to cop out. I'm just going to drag in a two paragraph section from the online essay which yield up its title to be my subject line here. Actually, it came right behind the "Let's pretend" I used in the first section. Remember, I'm only loosening up our "on the fly" (or moment-to-moment) conceptualizing and the language we use to contain it, anchor it, make it make sense. The quote picks up with the cylinder-coordinates...

3D-space and precession:

The cylinder explains why precession, and not perpendicularity, (probably) led to our three-plane corner and resultant 3D-space. This is a key sentence, or sentient-catch, in understanding how, in this new cognitional age, everything, however minor, however selectable, however anything, must be carefully reconsidered. And that doesn’t mean running through “old” thinking, or older “new” thinking, to see if it contains errors. It means getting along in a radically shifted contemporary context. Realizing (okay, that’s a way of “making real”) that we got our 3D space from a dynamic precession, not from a static but admired perpendicularity. How desirable could perpendicularity be, if it looms up in nature as a cliff you can’t climb (but can fall off). Anyway, I’ve a hunch the conveniently entered corner came first and the xyz-coordinates only later. We didn’t reify the system, but discovered it in (a static picture of) our pre-reified “reality” (experience).

Nature makes twelvesysfours or hexahedra with “variable” length “framers” and it does this, too, with sixsyses or tetrahedra, even if only because clumped matter-knots interfere with tensional tightenings. The geometer is fascinated by those “regular” (or perfectly tightened to snug, tuned)) systems and nature makes those, too, or close to them. In some “domains” they may become both more ephemeral and ethereal (or enspacialized, more “space” or “apartness” pumped in) and closer to the ideal—which likely means that the ideal is a limit approached as the “impurities” we call materials are squeezed out. One thing happening in our “spreading” cognitionally-based civilization, is that we’re becoming more and more aware that we’re full let’s pretend participants in all our conceptualizing and all our perceptualizing, too. We can’t watch our “cognizing” because it’s too fast and too complex, and, who knows, we may even repress (from our awareness) some of the goings on. Then, there is hardware, maybe even firmware, just plain not accessible whatever we do. But the simplest “reconsidering” here led not just to a reconciliation with Bucky’s interests, but an integration—through finding precession operative in our casting into Universe our 3D space-charting. An interesting thing to know about ourselves is when and why we switch coordinate systems (and are they systems in Bucky’s sense, in which a 3D-space would have to “complete” as a cube), how scale figures in, how, more generally, we cue ourselves to switch.

The Once & Future (and current) "Dark Ages" (a link on the Archive page, not a title on this scroll)

A "generic" four paragraph introduction that is at the top of all the essays in group of essays written in late 2003 all dealing with a cognitional age thinking about (in response to a question asked by a Stanford student) any insights I might have as to what I got from Bucky. If you've already read any essay in the group, you will recognize this beginning and can skip down to the essay title.

The Once & Future (and current) "Dark Ages" (title)

Text to the next heading which will be a sub-heading.

Reification of any concept darkens Universe

Choosing the real:

Let's pretend:

3D space and precession:

Planes and lines:

Non-visual imagining:

Dark Ages camouflaged in "dark light"

Euclid's point—has "heading":

Walking the walk:

An "altered conceptual environment":

Artifacts as schools:

Escaping from the Dark Ages

The care and feeding of wholes:

Multiple coordinate systems and "switching":

Taking responsibility for our conceptualizing:

Sunrise and sunset, sunsight and sunclipse, suntake and suncut ...evolving concepts:

Concepts in humans; humans in concepts:

Soft and hard "tracing" where your concepts came from:

How to build tools:

(Signature block)

"Answers at the End of the Book"

Who's e? And no, it's not dialect.

The Dark Ages "engine" exists in rigidly routine conceptualizing.

Gene Fowler

acorioso@earthlink.net
Poetry, Archives:

http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/fires.htm
21st century e-typewriter (homemade):

http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/ew_main.htm

In a first try at this letter, I got off into some other thinking aloud in prefatory note I thought would be a paragraph. I do run off at the mind.... I don't ever say nothing, though. Anyway, I include it here as an appendix of sorts.

Prefatory remark: All of you are probably familiar with, and tired of being re-taken through, Bucky's 1966 quest for post-Copernican replacements for two of our still-in-use kennings, sunrise and sunset. Unlike older ones such as whalepath, this pair is definitely vestigial remains of our "flat Earth" assumptions.

Bucky wanted replacements as part, maybe, of a "tapestry of words" being woven which would carry an aura of a "rounded" and "arounded" Earth.... A sailor sees a ship's mast seeming to sink in the distance and if he's sailed that way, he knows it isn't sinking, let alone dropping off an edge, but is sailing on around Earth, crossing not an edge, even a polyhedral one, but a "contour" sketched in the same mental overlay as, say, an equator....

Most of you know I paid a couple months' rent for Hilary Ayer and myself by winning Bucky's 1966-7 Dymaxion Award for my post-Copernican, post-Einsteinian, post-Eisensteinian kennings, suntake and suncut. Leaving the agricultural and industrial "waves" of civilization below the surface and riding the cognitional "wave" of civilization, I took our attendings of these "events" as an Eisenstein might capture and re-member them in (now) a one-hand held videocam, with the implied "shutter" as post-Copernican dropping and rearing horizon, and the wave crests we call time zones as the Einsteinian dynamic fabric of space-time "felt beat" absorbed into the ...well, image, though it's all not just visual or invisible, but tangible or intangible, audible or inaudible.

We have more important, more deeply constraining "flat Earth" kennings fairly well hidden in our talk, our thinking.

An example: Frame of reference. You can try to bust it off a wall by saying, "Well, a framework, like a house before walls are nailed into place!". Kind of stinks. Therapists who pretty much worshipped Milton Erickson would go off to Arizona to discuss transcripts with him. They were young and hip and talked knowingly about reframing to shift a client's viewpoint and perspectives. Erickson didn't deprive them of their slang, by he always said, reassociate. You associate, dissociate, reassociate. Of course, playing with Bucky's syses, and language, wanting the ear to have a familiar handle, I generated (in the late sixties, system of referents.

So, frame of reference or system of referents. The auric "picture" of a frame "dissolves: into an auric "picture" (operating as a kind of river-bed for the flow of thinking or imagining) of ...well, a galaxy, perhaps. You know, we talk about "up North and down South" because we hang our map on the wall. You can break the spell by putting the map on a table. We've still a prime edge if there's print on the map, but we've no longer any relating of the up/down to the north/south. We break a "phase lock". Somebody who's conscious of this can "lay that map of a table" without taking it off the wall or moving away to visualize it. It's just a mental shift. You can "float it" in your system of referents. You can use "up" and "down" in reference to altitudes. Distances off Earth's sea-level surface, up or down, or out from, or in toward, Earth's center.

Let's use it. I guess the quantum physicists maintain superiority by saying that their point particle doesn't spin, therefore you can't ask for an image and must allow them their priestly holding of arcane knowledge. Actually, they went in with an image. How do I know? They named the goings-on spin. Not qxl. They say nothing can spin (or orbit) because a point-particle occupies one point. But a point is only a location. It has no size. It's just out beyond your finger tip.

So, you make smaller points so a "system" (or galaxy) of them can be in your particle. Phase lock the whole collection and now it spins. Phase lock only the axial points (locations) and others orbit. Either way, it looks like spin from far, far away. A system of locations. Or refined pointing. A frame of locations? flat @ for your pointing. To see how a frame of points becomes a system of locations, look at another of my essays in that group linked above. They all have the same first two or three paragraphs. Look for the title. You want "A pair of Fives". Just quick. Take a pair of fives (cards) tightly side by side. Just above and below that crack where the two cards meet make two more "points" to join the ten. Rotate the whole thing 90-degrees. Connect dots in the right way and right order and you have a 3D cuboctahedron or "vector equilibrium" or "jitterbug". A pretty fair dissolving of a frame into a system.... Galaxies aren't spheroid. They're flat and wheeling, spiraling, like the phase-space maps of pendulums.... They remind less of Earth than of a hammer thrower dancing on Earth. Thanks to Bucky, we c'n feel galaxies in the muscles of legs, back, shoulders and arms....

All this [the paper and this letter] is just to loosen up perceptual habits, and nothing is offered as anything beyond being a way of looking at something. No Truths. No Discoveries, though some, perhaps strange, dis...coveries.... The great enemy is amnesia and particularly amnesias producing fogged areas in our storehouse of experiential learnings. For instance, we forget, right down in our cognitive basement we forget, that we live at the bottom of an ocean. We look down into oceans and wonder about beings living in all that pressure...