The cathedral, the bazaar, and the planetarium

Why the subject line "The cathedral, the bazaar, and the planetarium"? Well, in my recent Afterword I used skulletarium, but that, I fear, spiraled the casual reader too quickly into far realms. The new subject line gets the raw metaphor out as the text for a link, eh? The first two, of course, are rooted in older times. The planetarium brings us to a new sort of location ...and structure. The metaphors stay homey and live. No reason why that dome shouldn't be Bucky's geodesic and tensegrity, something made only of "bondings" and changeable skins, and even Spitz' dodecahedron c'n give way to the finer grained icosahedrons or thirtysys-three, though a human brain is no such simple system. Simultaneously, the gather of minds and what the minds produce in our images or, as St. Ezra (Pound) called 'em, vortices.

The cathedral, many workers and craftsmen working together under architects, contractors and money-men. The bazaar, a "disorganized" gather of crafts folks in their shops and stalls, eh? Maybe hoping for salvation ...or the miraculous appearance of a "stranger" who will change their threads to golden thread that c'n be sold to pay for their sewing thread and supper. So, on the hill overlooking the city with its cathedrals and shops and stalls, looking outward (and inward) is this new building, this "planetarium" (tracker of gods' movements), this tensegrity floating above the city.... Or, do we subsume both cathedral and bazaar? Have we planetaria, not planetarium, overlooking our dark ages city? Is the larger tensegrity, human Universe, a "netting" (or knitting) of planetaria floating above the ziggurat, where Dante's voyager, at the end of Paradisio, looked up and listened for a response...?

I handed Google "skulletarium" to see if my new letters were indexed. Of course they were not. Too soon, and not likely to be anyway because only the first of a group is linked to the main archive page. The spider would have to hop about in a "nest" of letters. This one will be linked (with the subject line as the link text) from the archive page (http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/fires.htm) so "The cathedral, the bazaar, and the planetarium" is going to be indexed in some early reindexing. Search cathedral and bazaar and you'll get planetarium. From the 13th century to the 21st.

I was delighted. Not writing to me about the Amerish, about the ins and outs and stumbles of systalk other currents in our decades of talk, but just talking out there on the net, confident that your listening readers will know "what you mean." In 2002, maybe that "filed under" c'n become "linked into" or one of half a dozen other "tensegrity terms." (For a model, remember how a Web scroll is made. Unlike a printed page, illustrations, even pieces of text, are linked in. Each printed copy is built of linked in parts. Even databases are files in metafiles or, more likely, in directories. All is linked. Tensegrity. The "tenses" of a new speech -- or at least writing.)

Raymond, in his The Cathedral and the Bazaar, talks about how he's working some memetic engineering on his readers and the mythologies of whatever. Hmmmmm. It's a side issue. But he does, too, refer to Arthur C. Clarke's comment on sufficiently advanced (beyond the examiner's) technologies appearing to be magic. So, I've got to do something about "memetics" before going on into the letter's reason for being, to talk about that "platform for education".

Where'd the meme and memetics come from? Forget some recent book. Look to an old, old cliche: Ideas have lives of their own. There's the whole works all coiled up in a simple sentience. No academic stodgying up of a light thought that captures the magic (spirit) of what's going on.... Idea out of the Greek idein, "see". An idea, then, is a seed (a past participial form of "see").

But, as worked out, it attempts to conjure. All human activity, and that's all there is, drops out of conSIDERation. Now the magician, or engineer, c'n creep back in. But only to fool the poor guy stuck in the metaphor. A catchy tune is a meme. It hooks minds as its hosts. Uhhhmmmm. A guy, or gal, of course, who's going to write catchy tunes, invent 'em, intuit 'em, ...better not slog down into an engineering frame of mind. what in minds makes the 'catchiness" that catches some tunes but not other. The catchiness isn't, as memetics suggests, in the tune. It's in the mind. The tune is shaped to that mind.

Anyway, a recent bright spot in human thinking, like memetics, c'n be a degeniusing tool in creating and maintaining our "dark ages" even as our cube-caught space is. A major contributor to our industrial age "dark ages" is our illusory thought that we've moved to a post-industrial age caught in the term information age.... Information is a product handled by one or more industry. Age shifts shake up the plate tectonics. From the agricultural to the industrial involved all the "plates" (paradigms) breaking up and shifting and reforming. We've indeed got a major shift going on now, though keep in mind that every thinker in every "time" thinks e's time is one of great shifts and transitions. The bored aren't thinkers. What's the primary shift? We're looking under the hood of reality, the only reality we contact through our senses. Reality is subjective. Even the objective aspects of it are. We create our Universes -- though, of course, we don't make them out of nothing. (No solipsism here.) Anyway, we're beginning to look down into our workshops, at how we make our experiences and the structures rooted in them. We're entering the cognitional era.

I suppose you'd say a poet was a memetic engineer by birth-right. Hey, poet translates as maker. So, poem would be the made-thing, whatever the poet makes. But I like poetics because it holds a clue. The makings. Some old shaman out on the part of the "reservation" where the reservationists don't go 'll tell ya. The makings are in the kit of the gent, or lady, who "rolls e's own". The tobacco grows wild, then, it c'n be cultivated. The paper is an industrial age product. The spit is what the common human c'n bring up from e's innards ...to seal the paper. Then, ...there's the "rolling dance of the fingers". For a maker, that's "fingers" down in the cognitive innards, So, what kind of maker is the poet? I've called e experience maker. I did a poem back in the seventies, The Experience Maker. It's in Return of the Shaman (http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/The_Experience_Maker.htm). Don't look in it for anything too solemn or that'll give you power over other people. (Well, I know you won't, but like my whole three million plus words of letter, this'll float around.)

A few "keywords" or "-phrases" from your last paragraph in your June 27 email that kicked me into all these musings.... I ended segment 3 of the four part response with the paragraph (quoted at the top of this letter as epigraph). My response: Amen. I was, of course, tired. April was cooking up some dinner. so I let it go. In the fourth and last section, Afterword, I went on into other unopened doors. Now, I c'n pick up at that paragraph. I do not take back my Amen! I just go on from there.

I've staked out the branching points. Slack, which I see, in the planetarium, as more than time captured from a day job, though there's a start with that. For moonlighted cathedral work or for bazaar work ...yup. But for planetarium work a deeper parallel activity has to be daydreamed up. The real slack comes from freeing up time from your "day thinking", your "day imagining", not just your "day job". It's not so simple as learning other ways of thinking embedded in other languages, which you'll always "translate" in your head or, with long encounter, in your (acquired) reflexes.

Self-teaching.... I think Carlos Castaneda exteriorized some self-teaching. Interiorly, he split himself into teacher and student, don Juan and Carlos, ...spun tales of self-teaching, with the "self" serving as both teacher and student, and with an overseer structuring the relation, the situation, and the language. This is why those looking into interior activity talk of internal dialog, not internal monolog. Actually, it's day-dreaming or as somebody, free of the clock, put it, wake-dreaming. We usually use it to rehearse arguments we lost into winning ones. But, no reason not to teach our selves, even as we might teach others. Even teaching others, we don't, if we're decent teachers, know it all before we start. Teaching is a voyage of discovery. I mention again the Sixth Hour in my Waking the Poet where I set up for and deliver a mini-lecture on the daydreaming place (a location, again).

Exposers of Castaneda filled volumes with chapters and papers on where he "got" materials that show up in the self-teaching wake-dreams. Or inconsistencies in dates. Well, there's an art to daydreaming. And Castaneda is involved as active overseer. Throughout the books, study chapter titles together with content. Nothing obviously anchoring those titles. Different nomenclatures seem used. Because it's published? I don't think so. It's all part of multilevel self-teaching.

Then, there's what Castaneda might easily not know, that's inherited from wrapper materials he found and the language. Take the jimson weed ritual. A root is prepared and, then, sections of the root are further prepared. The distance from the joining of root and bush seems to determine the phenomena encouraged to occur. Anthropological knowledge transferred to Castaneda's story? Maybe. But beyond that sort of knowledge, suppose that the bush is topside down, root up, like the "trees" on a computer screen, root at the top. that analogues a human nervous system. The bush growing down into the body and he root up in the "head". Those distances connected to phenomena begin to suggest their inner connection -- where in the brain-stem, basal ganglia, thalamic-hypercampal, or cortical (traveling) areas the phenomena are "produced". Transferring anything through the daydreaming place brings to bear powerful "looking glasses".

Anyway, it's all daydreaming. But it's a huge and detailed record of self-teaching, too. It's only now that, maybe, I can refer to it without spinning a reader into a dizzying content. As Norm Moser, a poet-friend in San Francisco in "the old days" put it in the sixties, "Everybody's running around in the southwest screaming, 'Don Juan ...don Juan ...turn me on, don Juan!'". Focus was "in" Carlos. Now, fade don Juan's "self" down to just thoughts about what to read, study, or do next, or a few steps ahead, keep the focus in the "student" and you've more ordinary self-teaching, teaching of one or more of your learning "selves". Now, though, maybe you c'n sense the daydreaming within.... There is where you find the real slack.

...& the Internet.... The Internet (mostly Web) as platform? Those easily dismissed as unfriendly to computers speak of the need for regular classrooms, or two ended logs, for face to face for emotional exchange and relationship. There is that. And other things, too, such as working in full space-time with people and with things, with building, testing in "real" world.

There's something deeper, though. Our real learning is rooted in sensory-motor experience, our "cognitive mechanisms" all require those roots. Somebody leaning across a coffee house table describing climbing up a rock face doesn't punctuate the telling with smiley faces, but "puts English on" the words and twists your face into a laboring smile-of-effort. Even a paper on screen is for skimming and, then, printing whole or parts on paper that c'n be carried to the john, to dinner, or to the coffee house table where it c'n be read or worked into some conversation ...for listening reading. Or, you c'n lean back, let the screen go out of focus and do some reading and more "in the slack time" interiorly.

Education, platforms for it, in the here and now.... Cathedral? Bazaar? ...or planetarium? Some have said, all education is self-education. That, I think, realizes (makes real) the thinking that says its all rooted in interior activity. maybe a key question here is, ...what do we mean by "platform"? Where is the base? To stay in the metaphor. the platform would be the projector. that's be the "day thinking" and "day imagining" around the slack we've found. The jimson weed rituals and experiences Carlos engaged in. Or, to bring it back, my playing with the Arabic numeral glyphs to find how humans linked geometry (the pointings) and number (the countings). Here (of here and now) is, of course, the horizon disk. Given 1, the free point, there's no here, no from. Just to. 6 is the pointing from here. And the palm is the horizon disk. From it's center, the curled in thumb-tip, around the ball of the thumb, gaining angular momentum, and out along the pointing finger, curled over in the Arial glyph in this text. You know about tenses in English. It's a tensor filled language. The definite article pushes the object away for perspective for the far sighted. Push away here with the here and it becomes there. Jimson weed, Arabic numerals. Voyages of discovery in slack time. Oh, what about the now for, say, those old sea people with their pointings? Well, now was live time, we call it real time, today, and the kinds of then (the now) pushed out was out there in space, at night, in the heavens. You could think about tomorrow, maybe, or yesterday, but thinking, sighting was always now.

I'd guess, and end with it, that education's platform in the here and now is the planetarium. The problem for projects from the cathedral or the bazaar, with teams or hordes, is, in the long run, how do you get planetaria hooked up. Again, a clue (I think) is in the movie Contact. When the signals from Vega were hooked but heading for the horizon, other listening reader's, other planetaria in a sense, were called, give the results so far, and allowed to take up the tracking. Those were real time planetaria. No projections, just the heavens "there". The tracking was simple. All science and technology have histories of such "handing it over for carrying on" and this doesn't seem, as it stands, a way to get convergence in a team or horde. Counter-intuitive, in fact. Sure doesn't bode well for whoever, for whatever reason, wants to control workers or the gathered result.

So, I've raised a lot of questions and few, if any, answers. Hmmmmm. Well, as a poet, not a hirable anything, I've a lot of leeway. I'm not responsible for any answers. If I c'n raise loosening questions and maybe create a little slack ...I've done about all a poet can do. That's what those poems you can't get to go away, do ...along with the expected "showing" of a human being in a situation. I'll end with a question, and a link to the poem it's about. Why, in my Shaman Songs, in #10, would a poem seemingly about somebody's sense of a possible element in lives of a shaman-using people have an epigraph like: Each man's lust is a cult (http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/Shaman_Songs.htm#ten)