7.31.2009

The Age of Wishfulness

The Age of Wishfulness is winding down. The genii is running out of oil. The lid of necessity is lowering as the power of oil to hold it at bay begins to lose force. This is both a great tragedy, and a great opportunity, though not in the knee-jerk positivist way we have grown accustomed to finding “Silver Linings” behind every adversity. It is a great tragedy, because great suffering will come of this. It is a great opportunity because, the yearning for truth will lose its hallucinatory unreality; once the age of wishfulness loses its hold, it will no longer be an aberration to doubt that something-for-nothing is not a basis for living our lives.

One of the greatest challenges I find in these days, now that I’ve dropped a self-imposed censorship of my views, has been a difficulty communicating with many people I would expect to be natural allies, bright people; who have been connected, and have made successful careers. They see the same problems arising, they look for ways to proceed. Yet, when I attempt to break through the levels of wishfulness that encase their life experiences, and cushion their world views, they balk. The natural tendency in that situation is to back-off, soften the message, find a more palatable route towards making connection. The idea is that only once that connection is made, no matter what the level of co-option required to reach it, only then may we be able to slowly bring them around.

I’m beginning to doubt this tactic, to doubt the entire premise. It smacks of enabling. It makes no sense to me anymore. When the greatest difficulty lying between where we are, and some action that may lead to a better result than would otherwise occur, is the sleep-walking attitude of the most capable people in face of deep existential crises; then how can coddling that sleep-walking be part of an effective course towards removing this block?

We see this attitude everywhere. It has grown out of the infantilization at the heart of consumer culture. It reflects the level to which narcissism has been elevated into a defensible norm within this culture. Lest anyone think I am unfairly targeting their particular brand of consumer culture – one of the most widespread symptoms of this trend has been a defensive self-victim-hood embraced by the nominally powerful to cover over their inability to act effectively – I consider all of the worlds cultures today to be acting as subsets of an over-all consumer culture. Whether a particular group is benefiting or subjugated, their assumptions are all grounded today in the tenets of consumerism. Boosters and opponents, all in a merry dance around a world view they will defend or oppose in a polar attraction, in their own minds at least, until reality has beaten the notion out of them.

Most, hell, all of my own contacts have been on the booster side, among people who have in large part benefited, as the term is normally applied, from the leading edge of consumerism. I’ve been in this clad myself, would not have survived to adulthood, would have been literally inconceivable without the oil century. Within my circles, it is rare to find anyone with whom I have not had this problem.

I attribute my own perspective to accidents of birth, and certain traumas of early life that gave me a particular combination of qualities and experiences; that have shaped my viewpoint, my instinctive perspectives, from an early age. Many of those early experiences could have been fatal, either physically or psychically. By some accident, and luck, I survived them. What this has given me has been of great use to me, although so far none of that “shows.” It has led to years of self-induced marginalization that by some accident again, has helped me to see through the too-good-to-be-true. It has given me a long experience in not having “my way.” This has led to a high tolerance for the unpleasant, and a low tolerance for wishfulness.

Communication, we use that word to describe a panoply of activities that coalesce around the act of transferring information from one person to another, one group to another, one expert to the masses. As with so much of our language it has been burried within the consumerist mindset. It is a profession, there are courses, and experts. As with every other honest human impulse that has come under the consumerists’ sway, it has been co-opted and twisted away from its honest meaning, and reduced to jargon.

A tenet of “communication” as a subset of “marketing,” the greater good to which it has been subsumed, used as a tool; is that we make it easy for a “target” to hold onto their assumptions. The desire is to modify behavior at some level below the cognitive so the target is manipulated, either unknowingly – the ideal – or at least, unwittingly. To frontally question assumptions in one’s listeners is to court disaster. In the complex physics of propaganda and manipulation, there are countless paths. We may annoy, cajole, entice our way to success, but the laws of the enterprise don’t allow for open challenge.

Having lived our entire adult lives, and having been brought up in the infantilizing precincts of primary and secondary education; we have not only become accustomed to these rules, but we demand that they be maintained. We have lost the ability to face any challenge to our assumptions, and not see in it a direct attack on our very cores. However resilient we might feel, whatever strengths we might have, we react as though such a challenge would destroy us, as some kryptonite to which we have no immunity.

People dying of hypothermia relate – those who have survived – that the hardest part is resisting the wish to just fall asleep. The most pernicious affect of the cold is a sapping of the will-to-live. Self-preservation evaporates, and the greatest goal imaginable is to fall asleep. This is an immensely powerful instinct. It may be one of the final mercies built into a biological entity, that when struggle is no longer useful, this wish for sleep takes over. A final mercy when it is reached in truly fatal circumstances, but a tragic waste when it is jumped to as a hasty conclusion when there is still much fight left in us.

What is true in the solitude of one’s final moments is also in effect within the feedback mechanisms of groups. The ancient Greek idea of Pan, that he spread a delirium of frantic paralysis, a thrashing of activity that replaces effective action, is real. It is to be feared, its effects can be worse than the crises that may have brought it on, yet it is a powerful force that takes great effort to resist. That resistance needs to come from within, it is a trait that one must develop, it is a sign of maturity.

The received wisdom is to avoid panic. We are instructed not to cry “Fire!” in a theater. Such an attitude has its places, but if there is a fire?…

The admonition to avoid panics is convenient, if one stays within a manipulative stance towards others. If other people are objects to us, then it is in our interest to sway them to our will, and panic is, by nature, uncontrollable. Fetishizing the avoidance of bad news, to avoid panic; is useful in the deepening and maintaining of infantilization within a group one wants to manipulate. The panic of panic, the cultivation of an aversion to the very notion of the unpleasant as the negative side of a value judgment that puts the protection of our wishes as the ultimate good, does maintain a malleable population, up to a point.

We are at the edge of a precipice for the constituency that has built up around the accident of access to a convenient and abundant source of fossilized energy. Those who have made their lives within a successful accommodation to those conditions are in the most difficult position vis letting go of the habits of mind and action, that have worked so well in the past. It is unfair – there are worse things – to impute nefarious import to their actions as they resist abandoning what has worked in the past. But however it is characterized, the result is an effective block against moving forward, and adapting, and accommodating to the new realities that will make themselves felt, whatever one’s wishes.

Anyone who’s been in a dysfunctional relationship knows how much energy gets sucked into the vortex of mincing around the minefields of delusion put up by the addict. The mechanism here is the same, and I think, the answers to dealing with it here should also be the same. Bring the delusions to light. Make the delusional uncomfortable in the maintenance of the lie. Don’t engage in any attempts to argue the point, as though it were a reasonable position to hold delusional views, but firmly resist such engagement since it only perpetuates the power of the delusion. Act as though it is a lapse of reason, and a relinquishing of responsibility to maintain delusional thinking, and reward engagement that puts the delusion behind you. Expect to be treated as an adult, and treat the other as one too, as a subject, not an object.

There is so much to be done, so much that can still be done. Each moment that passes, doors close, we lose potential fields of action, our horizons of potential close in. The longer we struggle harder to maintain our desires to be wishful, instead of learning ways to be thoughtful, mindful, pro-active, adaptive; the greater the tragedy ahead. It is wishful to expect something-for-nothing. Abandoning that attitude will not remove obstacles, or eliminate bad outcomes, but it will help us be able to face our challenges as actors engaged in the outcomes of our fates, instead of mere objects on which greater forces play out at their whim.

Scratch through the prickly, brittleness of the wishful, and you just might find the effective action of the potentially heroic. Not as that term is qualified within fantasy, but as it has always played out in reality; when people have stood up to their plight, eyes open to what is at stake, and made truthful efforts on their own behalf. This, sadly as with so much else, needs to be debrided of the noxious effects of recent fantasy, and wishfulness; before we can see what it really means to be heroic, against the tawdry debasement that currently passes for it.

7.26.2009

Horizons…

As I was setting up this blog, I got to the box on the form asking me for the title. I had not given this much thought. The jump from intention to action had been quick, following a long gestation; but in that moment, I had rushed on ahead of myself. I picked up Strunk & White, on my desktop where it always sits, a talisman and guide for many years; a memento of when I had been lucky enough to meet Mr. White, years ago in Maine, and sit in his kitchen soaking in who he had become late in his long life as a writer, looking for hints, the residues of something that might help me find my way on a path I held, even then, as a hidden aspiration for myself.

Opening it at random, looking for inspiration as some will turn to the Bible, or the I Ching…. Nothing jumped off the page at me. I began to suspect it had been silly to ask them for this kind of sign. After all, they had scrupulously fulfilled their intention that this work be a guide to form, they specifically steered clear of influencing content. I was glad to see they had done this so well. Elements of Style’s refusal to give me an answer was firm, yet polite, the kind of nudge Mr. White intended with all he wrote.

So I turned to my current notebook, and tried there; flipping through the most recent pages. It jumped out at me. I had a moment of recognition on seeing the phrase: Horizons of Significance. I’d come across this term in one of Michael Wesch’s videos on YouTube a week, or so, earlier. That he would have shown me my title, just as his inspiration had been pivotal in getting me to the point of starting this blog; I took as a good omen. His final nudge had been when he said that social-networking on the web is just a few, short years old, and that there “are no natives here….”

The term came to him from Paul Taylor’s Ethics of Authenticity. I looked into Taylor’s book, I’ll probably write something later on his thesis, and its connection to the wider project this blog is intended as part of; but for now, the key was the way this phrase meant something distinct to me, and something I find so important. I had an immediate recognition of this, its alignment with my own considerations had so many implications on first hearing it. So, for now, I’ll limit myself to what I’d like it to mean, and not follow a more scholarly exegesis of its sources and past meanings.

The twentieth century acted out upon the discovery of relativity, by falling into a deep crisis spiraling out from the over-all loss of a single, over-riding sense of authority. It has always seemed to me this was a petulant, adolescent response. Finding that life holds deep and radical contingency, it was as if everyone just threw up their hands, and declared as a result, nothing had meaning, nothing mattered anymore. It seemed little energy was ever expended on developing a mature perspective, while a lot went into acting out dramas of reaction at every scale from the most internal and personal, to the widest and most public of stages. Orgies of self-destruction and aggression were carried out under this banner. What seemed most centrally lacking through all of this was a sense of what I see so well expressed as looking at the horizons of significance. In a clear and quiet, a-histrionic way, this perspective lets us ask questions, and find answers; without short-circuiting, diving into nihilistic reactions, as we have, since Nietzsche had his insights, and Einstein made his discoveries.

Horizons of significance seem to me to be just the way to steer through the tensions brought on by contingency, and build on my underlying conviction of the centrality of a viable notion of truth. I’ve often thought back to Melville’s conception; life as a rope made up by twisting the strands of necessity, free will and chance. These elements of which a life is forged in a process that makes something greater of its parts, through a search for truth and meaning.

This sense that process, not outcome, passage, not destination; are most important is well suited to this form; the blog. If I trace a path from Melville to Wesch, from Ishmael to Gary Brolsma; it seems there is a common current running towards a connection between a search for personal authenticity, and a path – taken in humility – leading towards greater connections between disparate people. This current carries a common yearning, and gives us a tool for its possible incarnation; by helping us focus our searches for truth, truths and meaning; while we interact with others within a broader sphere, one without gate-keepers or inter-mediators, and their external agendas.

Ahab was a warning, an example of the long line of monomaniacs to come over the 150 years after Melville wrote him into being. The “Numa Numa Guy” is perhaps a sign of a resurgence of Ishmael’s spirit, the outsider looking for something, using his trials to find meaning, in ways those more conventionally “connected,” have long ago lost, along with any curiosity or appetite for anything beyond their comfort and its perpetuation. His silliness is not simply another symptom of the trivialization of everything, but can be seen in this light as a radical foolishness, in the way a Pan or Dionysus was foolish; signs of the need for humility in the face of great mysteries, a sign that a pose of seriousness is often a greater barrier to understanding than foolishness held in good spirit, embraced authentically while truly reaching out to others.

I hope to take a more sober path myself, more out of temperament than from any sense of superiority over the silly. There do seem to be many champions on that front all across YouTube’s broad horizons. I hope, here, to be able to strike a tone that allows for a quiet exploration of these themes, running up and down the scales, looking for ways in which the various horizons of significance can bring harmony to a life of striving for meaning, while navigating the contingencies placed in our paths.

7.21.2009

Imagine that Power wasn’t a zero-sum game.

This should be easier than it seems, Power isn’t a zero-sum game, not real Power.

Let’s set up the parameters of a conceptual equation; Power exists in an unstable relationship with Control and Faith. Those who have no Faith in anything beyond themselves – we are talking about actual, not professed Faith – also, unsurprisingly, feel a strong need to maintain Control, or since this is an unsustainable wish, they hold onto a fantasy of Control. To achieve it – to make a short term stab at the fulfillment of their desire, they strive to accumulate Power. The kinds of power they see, and want, and grab hold of are all various forms of manipulation, and coercion; to be deployed against anyone or anything they see as a barrier to fulfilling their desire. We tend to think only of this when we think of Power. It is zero-sum. It exists along graduations between polarities, with adversaries at either end; one side holding more or less, or both holding the same Power as they struggle against each other. What one side gains the other loses, in relative terms at least. “The Balance of Power,” the “Struggle for Power;” these are the ways we characterize such dynamics.

But we can imagine another Power that is not zero-sum, that is in fact the opposite of it? The more anyone has, the more everyone has. How does such a prodigy come about? Let’s look at the variables in our equation. Lack of Faith leads to the other kind of Power. Faith – well placed – allows this kind to flourish. Within one’s self, among one’s peers, in one’s community; it is possible to look at each individual as an autonomous being, an autonomous actor within the relationships, and dynamics we inhabit. If conditions can be created, and maintained, that foster the growth, and development of this kind of Faith; then we find we can act in ways that bring a growing level of Power to all.

There are opposing presuppositions behind the contrasting views of Power. These lead us directly to the one sought after within each set of preconditions. They also directly influence the effectiveness of the chosen form; its effectiveness to accomplish the desired result. Here-in lies the rub! This is not an appeal for abnegation, but an analysis of which form of Power has the greatest possibilities of success.

Zero-sum Power presupposes that for “Me” to get what “I” want, others must lose what they want. It also presupposes that what “I” want is feasible. No attempt is made to challenge either supposition. These are treated as “givens.” That others have failed, following this path, is either ignored or put down to their having used less overwhelming force than “I” will muster, or because they were not as clever, or as ruthless; not as “Powerful” as “I” will be!

Power backed by Faith presupposes that what “I” want, others may also want, and have an equal right to. It presupposes that “I’ will need to test what “I” desire against what is feasible, continually. In contrast to the history of failures of zero-sum Power, it is buoyed by examples of people who have achieved the seemingly impossible by following this path. Instead of feeding Hubris in attempts to bluster through, one learns to rely on humility as an essential precondition to success.

These are two poles on a continuum of Power relations between people. Actual situations lie somewhere within the area bound by these examples. They can be seen as trends within the dynamics that actually take place within, and between people. The greatest value in examining these examples lies in our recognizing which way our own attempts at achieving results may be trending. Are we falling into the traps of Hubristic Power? Are we striving towards a greater reliance on the Power of Humility?

I think it is a thoroughly defensible position to state that within a larger context, and over greater time frames, no attempt to achieve mastery through zero-sum Power has ever succeeded in its objectives. Also that the corollary is equally true. This is not really a Paradox or attributable to any outside agency promoting the good and punishing evil, although I make no claims on the existence or lack of any such entity. It simply fits the conditions.

The crux lies in competing views of self-interest. Striving for the aggregation of force as a desirable form of Power can only be maintained if one has a limited view of one’s self-interest. Usually this is as a result of confusing desire and will for true self-interest. To maintain that misplaced identification one must begin to close off from reality, first denying internal realities, then once firmly along the slope of this trend, ever greater external realities are ignored until a point is reached where the attempt fails of its own weight. We tend to see this “defeat” as a sign that the “other side” has “won.” I would say, and think, that a deeper view will show the defeat was internal, whatever the external agency of the “last straw” might have been. Why else do they call it tragedy? All such cases fail. The small ones quietly, the large ones spectacularly.

Power that grows the more it is shared works because its practitioners are following a path on which they constantly test their realities, and their sense of where their true self-interest lies. When this is done using all ones faculties, and with growing Faith in its demonstrable results, it will lead one along a path of convergence between an ever sharper sense of the effects of externalities, as they are coupled with an ever more nuanced sense of one’s true self-interest. Such a path is open ended. It has trends, not destinations in mind, and it is open to the unexpected in ways that let us reach goals beyond our imaginings. Not as wish fulfillment, but as tangible, actual results.

In an effort to limit the imposition of constraints into how we see the terms of this conceptual equation, let’s just say that what is meant by Faith, is an open ended, and non-limiting definition. The one delineation I feel is essential is that we not confuse, wishes, fantasies, even hopes for Faith. The nature, the end and the embodiment of one’s Faith is open to wherever one’s striving for authenticity will take them. So long as there is a striving to differentiate Faith from its easy simulacra. There is no magic in this, no dogma, these are pragmatic suggestions. Unless one is operating under conditions of a living Faith that is tested, and kept vibrantly in mind; the equation breaks down at some point. The challenges of maintaining a stance vis-a-vis Power and Control will corrode and corrupt without the protection of such a Faith to act as a corrective. It is only through such Faith that one is able to maintain a posture conducive to letting non-zero-sum Power take hold.

To round out our definitions, let’s look briefly at Control. As with Faith, when one allows an easy simulacra of what Control can mean to take hold, the result is a striving for zero-sum Power. When one sees clearly the limits, and place of Control; then one is open to non-zero-sum Power. The key difference is the relationship between one’s conception of Control, and the place of Will. At the risk of adding yet another term to be defined, briefly, if one sees the results of Control as being identified with the desires of unadulterated Will, then one is on the slope to zero-sum. The corollary is in seeing that there cannot be that kind of Control, only a fluid approach to influencing externals while steering and guiding one’s desires to maintain relationships within some wider sphere.

It may be that this attitude can be seen as the underlying commonality between the possibilities of what Faith may mean. This is about a Faith that relies on maintaining a relationship with what is, while guiding one’s expectations/desires along paths that lead to a wider fulfillment of what can be found within a radically considered exploration of true self-interest.

One final condition. These matters cannot be understood, or reduced to any linearity of thought or action. Any attempt to do so will short-circuit the complex dynamics this conceptual equation is meant to symbolize. This thinking cannot be brought down to any one case or set of contingencies, it must be held loosely in mind as the flow of events moves on. It provides no single place to stand for all time, just a form of crucible in which the catalytic actions of the day can be discovered, and acted upon in preparation for the next set of operations. Without developing a comfort, and even a Faith, in a multi-focal reality, and one’s ability to navigate it; there is no escape from the zero-sum.

As we are surrounded by an ever-increasing awareness – whether sought, or just run into, as conditions evolve out from under our preconceptions – our awareness of limitations surrounds us. As we find more and more areas where we individually or collectively have less and less actual power to make changes, there are beginnings, merely whispered affirmations, that within each of us lies a resource of power that has no limits if it is pursued honestly. There is a power to transform reality through the actions of the human mind, starting with individuals and spreading and rippling throughout networks of individuals – call these communities – that can lead us to make such far-reaching alterations of how we see and interact with the world in ways that can make profound changes in our lives, and our world.

Those who are impatient, always looking for short-cuts, ways to “game” reality; they have lost touch with what it means to live. In their rush to some preconceived result, they will scoff and be-little the effort required to actually engage in life. They have their rationalizations, their abbreviations go so far as to abbreviate the importance of life itself as lived; we see this in any ultimatum: “Better Dead than Red!…” or any call for Martyrdom. Whether they put some narrow value into supreme priority over all the others, or whether they are so impatient with this life that they can only see value in some wished for after-life, they continue to jump to the conclusions that their way works, against all evidence, even as that way destroys us, and everything worth caring about, all in the name of saving it.

This is not the old argument for pacifism, though there was much truth in it. There need to be found ways to deal with emergent situations that may require overt, physical action against others. But such an option has to be seen for what it really is, not a reach for the most powerful option, but an admittance that we have already gone far towards losing the fight. There is an entire discipline held within this change in perspective, enough to employ at least one Pentagon worth of people in its realization, but in such an organization there will be a striving towards the positive, instead of the pursuit of a petulant destruction of everything, in the name of the will of the few.

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world."

"Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

Margaret Mead

7.18.2009

First words…

Pete Culler always said, "Experience starts when you begin…"

I've written for thirty plus years – not counting school – and most of that time, I've written for myself, or a single correspondent. My first foray beyond that was writing Designer & Client. It has had a limited run, and has perhaps, as part of my "career" as a boat designer, confused as many people as it has enlightened. Neither the book, nor the career, was about what its ostensible subject implied. They were instead ways for me to interrogate the world, and learn how to be effective in it. I used the realm of design, specifically boat design, as a theater of operations. In it, one is within the realm of free choice, at least as much as is possible in this world of contingency; while in its practice one can find traction for the widest net of inquiry, from the hardest of sciences to the most ephemeral of subjective experiences.

Unlike Fine Arts, where I began – perhaps more accurately the other pole of a lifelong juggling act between engagement in action, and engagement in reflection and subjective response – designing boats, pleasure boats that people don't have to have, but want; was a way to explore the links between desires and wishes, and all that the cruel hard world can throw in their way. Within it, I found, rather quickly, that the biggest limitations were not the physical, or even the economic realities that impinge on such projects, but the lack of imagination endemic within the overall enterprise as it is currently performed.

People, even after they have made the hard decisions necessary to embark on having a new boat, find themselves so tied to conventional expectations, not only of the narrow parameters of how and what, that are so contingent on outside forces; but most significantly by their own most private and subjective sense of why. I discovered, and was then ultimately frustrated, by the way we all tend to jump from a hard earned freedom of operation, a place where we can own our choices, and make of them what we will, to close ourselves into stultifying traps of conformity – even in such a space of "play" – simply because we view the navigation of free choice as too daunting, too uncomfortable; to sustain ourselves in that uncertainty long enough to arrive at a more fulfilling destination.

Relatively recently, I've begun to write fiction. On a visit to my hometown of Provincetown (there is only one, look it up!) in 2002, at the height of the deepest national hysteria since my childhood fifty odd years ago; I saw something there, a quiet abiding tolerance, long familiar within a community of self-exile from a world with little patience for this virtue. That was the germ of my first novel, Shoal Hope. In a way it would be convenient to say its writing was "channeled" through me, certainly parts of it felt that way, but any muse that takes six years to "dictate" some four hundred pages could be considered quite stingy.

Writing Shoal Hope was work. Long work and a study in priorities. It's difficult to set aside the time and energy required to inhabit the world of creating a fiction. Still, this was for me a great awakening. Finding a stride and a voice I didn't know I had in me. I'm now at work on a second novel – in that original germ of a notion, the idea came as a trilogy that would span the twentieth century as it was reflected in that place – the second book, half done now, is Hope Extended, Hope Denied. The third one, is still untitled, and not yet begun.

Having found the "long form," and then beginning to find a path to publication – first an enthusiastic supporter within the New York publishing world, and then quite quickly, an agent in New York; has not, as of yet, taken me to the outlet I was looking for. On top of the perennial problems of breaking out a new voice into such a hierarchical and conservative field as traditional publishing has always been – a bittersweet complaint, so much of the draw comes precisely from finding acceptance in a rarefied sphere that is so difficult to get into – there is an added twist, the inconvenience brought about by the collapse of business-as-usual across so many fields of endeavor at this same moment in time. This mini-Tolstoyian moment in my own life's trajectory "doesn't amount to a hill of beans…" in the wider scope of things. But for me, it has added another layer of creative tension, that I recognize so well, even as I may not welcome its return, yet again.

Once again, I've found the need to re-orient myself, and find a way around a major obstacle. As much as it would be nice to avoid this, it has been a recurring theme throughout my life, and it has always brought greater rewards than those it has closed me off from. This time, I've looked in two new directions. First, I've explored the dynamics behind the blockages I've found; looking for root causes, and points of effective action. This has led me to PathTree. For the moment let's leave that hanging. Secondly, and in increasing alignment with the first, I've been looking into Web 2.0 and its potentials and pitfalls, both as it applies to my own goals, and now also to PathTree's.

This isn't the first time I've changed course, and seemingly back tracked to accommodate a new technology and its implications, nor am I unique in this, it has become a basic fact of life over the last few decades. Back then, in the late eighties, it was CAD. It was a stretch to learn a new technology, and at the same time attempt to sway its internal habits and ticks – the kinds of things that lead to the generic and clichéd sameness whenever a new technique is taken on uncritically. I wanted it to meet my sensibility, one that had already been formed using manual techniques. In that circumstance, as in this one, there were the advocates for the old, and the advocates for the new. Each held the other in contempt, and only saw benefits on their side. I disagreed. I disagreed then, and disagree now.

This has been a long winded introduction, but this is what's led me, in this year of 2009, to take up the blog, and take up the other tools available in Web 2.0, and take my first splashes into these foreign waters. Unlike my earlier forays, this one is, at least potentially, very public. I cannot do this alone at a keyboard or with a notepad or drafting table or easel, accumulating output without a conduit for its dissemination. In this medium I am working on content and dissemination at the same time. It's the kind of alignment I'm finding more and more frequently, and that I see as a compass needle pointing towards a better direction.

Writing may be writing, but each form shapes how it is done, and what its significance will be. There is a lot I recognize in this form; the missive, the short essay, even the polemic all seem ready models for what this kind of writing can be. But, it is, or can potentially be, needs to be, something different; if it is to have significance beyond a mere activity. There is a freedom here that puts the relative and contingent strewn freedom of a designer & client into the category of the heavily constrained. Yet unlike fine art produced in a garret, it is a public act from start to finish. It doesn't have the long rhythms of inhalation and exhalation found in the long form. It's not journalism, or any sort of periodical writing in the traditional sense; there are no gatekeepers, no editors, no publishers, no deadlines.

Curiously, and happily, I'm discovering more and more that this is the kind of place I both want to be in, and find more and more to be the kind of place we perforce have to inhabit today. I welcome the struggles with accommodation and the carving of distinctions my involvement in this activity will bring.

Welcome my virtual – that is potential – and however disembodied, real readers.


Somebody once said that too.