Countering Tendency

by Richard Reeve on September 10, 2009

in AziMuth

Field of sunflowers...
Image by Kel Patolog via Flickr

Regardless of your field, ruts deepen. And eventually they will cause you to get stuck.  The subtlety whereby habitual actions can blind us to creative options can be surprising, and options exist at every point along our journey.

If leaving from point a, I follow my tendency and automatically head in direction b, I’m ignoring the fact that I could have gone another way. While 359 other degrees of direction are theoretically available to me, limiting my choices to the four or twelve options analogous to the directions on a compass is more realistic (too many options can cause a different type of paralysis).

Often our tendency is to assume the most direct route is the most desirable. The problem with such an assumption is that only the most desirable route is the most desirable route, regardless of length.

Recognizing the entire field of one’s endeavors is an idea Charles Olson applied to his poetics.  As he explains in his essay Projective Verse:

“From the moment he ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION – puts himself in the open – he can go by no track other than the one the poem under his hand declares, for itself.  Thus he has to behave instant by instant, aware of some several forces just now beginning to be examined.” Charles Olson, “Projective Verse”, in Selected Writings, pg. 16

Olson’s practice of writing, which can be carried over into different fields of action, was to maintain an awareness of three distinct forces at play while he wrote: typos, topos, and tropos.  Time and time again this triad emerges in his notebooks as well as in the marginalia of the books he read.  And like a captain of a ship in the middle of the sea that needs to recognize the winds, the currents, and seasonal variations and patterns, Olson attended to the typology of the emerging work (note: archetype), to the topography or manner in which the emerging work related by extension to the world, and to the particular twist or turn that seemed to be cast in the manifestation at hand, for as we find upon further investigation “tropism (from Greek, tropos, to turn) is a biological phenomenon, indicating growth or turning movement of a biological organism, usually a plant, in response to an environmental stimulus.”

(hmm…I didn’t expect this arc to emerge when I began…cool.)


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  • On some level I wonder what it matters what path you go down.. as if to say even being stuck can have its value, that it could simply be a matter of finding ones self in a place where one can not perceive the value. I was thinking about this recently in relationship to the idea of death and rebirth.. that in essence it's just a reconfiguration of the same old stuff.. that where you find your self, on what path, has much to do with the configuration of conscious awareness.. and even.. when we talk about paths, to what extent are we speaking internally versus externally.

    I confess to being more focused on the internal in my life.. the over all objective is a wholeness I may never find in this life time.. but any path seems to be a part of that whole.. and this way that.. lets say as a part of some sort of psychological issue.. that this can push us down paths that.. are our little psycho dramas or whatever.. that this can be like a working out of a part of some puzzle.

    Growing up I felt stuck in a too womb like world.. where things like say drug and sex ed that seems geared to save you from gathering too much wisdom.. so at some point in college I thought.. ok lets explore some of this.. lets individuate a little.. while a certain amount of self destruction was a part of that path.. that seemed dwarfed by the value of the adventure of it.

    In any event, for me at least, the key is try to keep an ear open to the deep inner voices.. that having the right sorta sensitivity here can steer you through anything.. The trouble is when something blocks that sensitivity.. and how you approach that problem.

    If you're sensitive enough you are at least aware of the blockage.. of what's going on on some level.. and you sorta change your existential relationship to you're own awareness at least.. and so seek solutions.

    That's usually how I handle ruts to.. It's exactly as you say.. you decide you're going from point a to point b, for got that at least have of what its all about is the adventure.. and party way through you're like.. having trouble pushing your self.. and because I'm not terribly disciplined I can go goof off for a little while.. or just say "ok, what do I want to do now?" I look at the whole.. the whole that is my goal.. and I figure anything that leads there is progress.. and what I find quite often is that the problem is, to move further along on this path, I really need to move further along on some other path.. that the development of that will help the going over here. So maybe 6 months from now I come back to it and make it work.
  • You live a countercultural reality which I believe is the dawn of the
    culture to come. Riding our interest through time and space...so

    whaty kind of economic system could bring that posture to the masses?
  • Oh dear lord you ask a complicated question, one that I think is at the heart of what's getting wrestled with in some of your posts.

    I tend to like both Marx and like.. free-market-isms.. but I think its pretty clear that free market fundamentalism, to echo Cornel West, is kinda a mistake.

    I like to think of business as an amplification of natural human processes, so markets are just echo systems, but I think there's something in a sorta constructed layer that acts as an intermediary between the echo systems I'm speaking of and business.. which basically has to what how the echo system gets quantified into a conception of a market. As the rate of flux in the echo system / rate of change generally.. increases.. I think the only way a business can manage that is to deal with the intermediary layer.

    One method that does this.. hyped to no end is "the wisdom of the crowd." Individuals not having the same change management issues as large organizational structures.

    What I'm sorta wondering about is a possible future of social networking for granulizing organization.. a way for individuals to come together and collaborate on various projects.. sorta a self organizing business model. This is perhaps not so much a shift in economic systems as a shift in how we relate to the economic systems.

    In terms of mass adoption... I think its that normal think where you have early adopters.. and then it slowly spreads out, perhaps Seth Godin Tribe-a-ly.

    My feeling is that if you take a Jungian view of who we are as people.. how we function.. the degree to which we are forced to function differently then is our nature.. that's almost like an entropic force working against our potential.. and to the extent to which an economist might say "basically the economy is a big machine for realizing potential" then I think you could argue on a systemic sorta level it has to go there.

    But it's complicated.. and no doubt something that would take a long time.
  • I've come to the realization that it's only by asking the difficult questions that we get to the heart of our dilemma. To question the status quo does not take much effort, but to question the structures our own "security" is tied into is where we need to show more courage as a culture.
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