How To Work

Transformative Behaviors

2009-05-08T09:23:00.002-04:00

"Let's talk of a system that transforms all the social organisms into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included... something in which the principle of production and consumption takes on a form of quality. It's a Gigantic project." - Joseph Beuys

One might also say, looking back over the past decade, that the Harvard and Warton MBA cliques are bad art movements.

What's that about the "best and brightest?" What would Nietzsche say?

VaR

2008-10-13T21:29:00.005-04:00

I recently got asked by a headhunter to consider a job as a project/implementation manager for a company that specializes in VaR, or "Value at Risk." That's high finance talk for software that risk departments in investment banks and other financial institutions use to evaluate the extent of the damage they could bring upon themselves, considering their current strategies. You load up all of your positions and it tells you how risky your portfolio is, and perhaps suggests ways of hedging your bets with others so that your investments might be safe and sound.

During the interview I asked a bit about what went into it. At first I was thinking, wow, this might be my opportunity to find out first hand about strange attractors and self-organizing systems, but the interviewer, an MBA and PhD in mathematics (because you have to be in order to understand this stuff) assured me that VaR uses normalized calculations, just very complex ones. I lost about 95% of my interest at that moment, but I was still curious, so we went on.

He was most confident that in all but very rare cases the calcs could pinpoint and closely predict riskiness, and even alleviate most of the risk due to chaos (the unexpected), by helping to stabilize everything that was easily assimilated into knowable and predictable patterns. This was a few weeks before the financial markets imploded.

I'm sure that Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia, Fanny and Freddy, for instance, were all using some sort of VaR system to help stave off their own tribulations.

But when I think again about Laura Ward's "Whistle Me Higher" (see previous post) and all of the figures that may have been taken as indicators that may have suggested financial peril (i.e. gambling casinos, radioactivity, pandemonium, superstition, the sweeping up of toxic money by people in breakout suits), I am left wondering: who's got a better system? True enough, like all art, Laura's work is a bit of a Rorschach, something like the Delphic Oracle pouring out of the mouth of a Python Priestess high on geologic gasses, later interpreted by a throng of specialized priests.

There are many oracular parallels throughout the history of the world, everything from the reading of tea leaves to the bumps on one's head. The Tao De Ching, for instance, grew out of a practice people in ancient China had of turning over tortoise shells in order to seek a correspondence between static visual patterns and those being lived. Nowadays we have complex visualizations of numerical data, (i.e. graphical display) which attempt to convey information in a way a body can understand, alongside explanations that, after all, mathematics is built upon embodied metaphors, bringing us oddly back to where we had begun, with a little added perspiration (and perhaps precision).

Add to that the concept of expertise that Malcolm Gladwell puts across in Blink, or the theory that our neurologies enable us to make complex statistical-based decisions on an unconscious level, and you begin to gain a kind of insight into the possibility that the somewhat mystified and mistrusted operations of art-making may not be, in many ways, too different from those more reliable domains, such as the sciences.

This does not say that one should listen only to Laura, and ignore the complex, though normalized, mathematical formulas. But we might attempt to think, and experience, for ourselves and learn to weigh both into our judgements, in whatever proportion seems fit for the context. In other words, use the statistics the machine can give you, but also those that we give and receive as a system of biological machines. True, there is much that is quite primitive in there, but tempered by our other facilities (i.e. those that have built the complex mathematical models to begin with), we might find we have a much bigger net to catch things in.

It comes down to being able to pay attention to, and integrate, more varied data. And also to develop a kind of optimized paranoia for detecting patterns in emergence.

Welcome Back

2008-09-29T21:51:00.005-04:00

It's been nearly a year since the last time I posted here. I have no excuses, not really, but I have been hard at work learning Tai Chi Chuan, with my sifu Tom Chan, who says he will make me a sifu by the end of the year. Oddly enough I have learned quite a bit that would be relevant here, and as soon as I figure out how to describe that I'll let you know.

Another thing. A few months ago my wife Kathleen and I went to see an old friend's dance company do a show at The Theater for the New City. We were pleasantly, enormously, surprised at how far Laura Ward's work had come. While I always admired her quirky inventiveness, disturbing playfulness, her sense of surprise, as well as a number of other qualities, her most recent piece, called "Whistle Me Higher" was not only on par with the best dance performances I've ever witnessed, it was an amazingly ambitious collision of mythos centered around the experience of Las Vegas. Not only is the city the great cliche gambling and entertainment capital, but it is not far from sacred native American and nulcear weapons testing sites. All of this comes out in the show, with sparks flying where they strike each other like flint on steel. Petite dancers in glittering patriotic garb grin manically to throbbing electronica, winding at times with lounge and parade tune overtones. There are occasionally theatrical breaks where a woman and man in breakout suits sweep away piles of fallen dollar bills amid fallen dancers, who get carted away in wheelbarrows. The two exchange poetic and philosophic dialog, sometimes strewn with scraps of clinical hypnotic scripts, suggesting, of course, a culture of the entranced, in which any verbal exchange wavers between directive and guesswork.

I had lunch with Laura not long afterward, and asked her how she managed the whole thing, from conceptualization, to composition, choreography, music selection, costumes, set design, you name it. What I found out was that Laura has developed an incredible prediliction for a kind of project management that you just don't see in people trained by professional organizations. It sounded similar to the way Charles Mingus described leading his band, where the core themes and spirit of the work was embodied by the participants (an amazing collection of performers, I need to mention), who worked out the details through their own impetus.

It's hard to imagine how something like this could be translated to the ordinary job world (even Laura works a day job, or rather day jobs), but it's a much different process than the task list and Gantt chart way of doing things, and it's got me thinking that there has to be a compromise, at least, or so many ways to organize and lead from inception to completion, if only we studied the way we actually did things, tracked the intinsic path of our minds and bodies, and designed a methodology around that. I would want to learn project management from Laura, rather than the PMI, even if they do get Colin Powell as a keynote speaker.

Re: The Uses of the Humanities, Part Two -- Stanley Fish

2008-01-15T09:15:00.000-05:00

My response to Dr. Fish's blog post:

When I was pursuing my MFA in creative writing (poetry), which involved creative and critical writing, I inadvertantly became much better at unrelated work, i.e. business analysis and financial software QA. In fact I’m much better at what I do than most of the MBA’s I know. Go figure.

I don’t think I was the odd man out, either. I think you can easily see this as a pattern, if you look closely enough.

The problem is that it’s impossible to draw a direct equation, as one might more easily pretend to with business education, for instance.

But maybe even Alby Einstein wouldn’t have had some of the dreams he had without a background of the things that were happening in painting, for instance, and without those dreams, where would relativity come from? After all, these dreams were visual, and where did he learn to see things like that, all the atomization of objects of the impressionists and cubists, the motion of futurism, etc.? Just a thought. Just a perhaps. We don’t know where ideas come from… And you can’t survive unless you have them every day.

At least most people can’t.

Intelligence was never a straight-forward process. And anyone who is looking to justify a particular activity by the most simple equations available to one (i.e. science yields tech breakthroughs, while business ed. yields better business), isn’t very good at intelligence to begin with.

In the end, there shouldn’t be a need to justify funding for the humanities. It’s very short-sided to think along those terms. It’s like saying, “let them eat cakes…”

Announcement / Request

2007-10-05T23:40:00.000-04:00

Somewhere along the line I decided that in order for this venture of mine to have real heart and soul, it needs to stick one leg into something more experiential.

I am looking for volunteers. I would like to interview people who think they manage their work / creative (and family, if possible) life balance exceptionally well, and those of you who don't think you do a very good job at all. Actually, I'd love to talk to anybody within the full spectrum in between, but I'm focusing on the extremes, for obvious reasons.

If you are willing, or at least curious, please email me at cae_fu@pipeline.com (my email address began as a typo, and I ran with it).

Also, if anyone is interested in attending workshops in downtown Brooklyn dealing with these issues, by exploring one's own experience and the experience of others, and who is unafraid of experimenting with simple hypnotherapeutic techniques, please contact me as well.

This would be absolutely free, at least to start out, except for the possible expenses needed for a space to hold these sessions.

Lysergic Acid Diethylamide

2007-09-30T21:36:00.000-04:00

Besides the usual suspects, those social effects associated with the 1960s counterculture, i.e. lots of questionable metaphysical speculation and sex, one of the things I've read that was supposedly a direct result of the psychedelic era is the huge explosion in information processing that's taken place, especially since the advent of the personal computer. Things like object oriented programming and the Internet as we know it today were, according to some, not possible until a bunch of the right sort of folks (those with a peculiar com sci predisposition) had shifted their neural processing, ever so slightly, in a way that allowed for a particular brand of visual logic that could be shared by a community of researchers and dabblers, and who would carve out the world we are living in today. Hence, the primary skillset driving this change was a highly attuned visual imagination, something traditionally associated with artistic ability.

Along my own travels, I've also noticed that musicians (people obviously tending more toward auditory than visual inclination) often have a tremendous intuition for data processing as well. I worked with a couple of concert level pianists, who were about the best programmers I've known. One was so close to being among the very best performers in the world that he gave up playing altogether, for a number of years, out of grief. The other was even odder, he could read in about nine different languages (most of which he taught himself) and was rumored to belong to some cultish spiritualist organization. I had a tape he had given me of one of his compositions, that he had played himself, with a few string players, something that reminded me of Debussey or Ravel, not anything overtly challenging (afterall, he was a COBOL programmer) but rich enough to inspire strong admiration on my part.

During this same period, the models of cog sci have filled out as well, going from Miller's, Gallanter's and Pribram's sequential TOTE (Test-Operate-Test-Exit) model, to complexities like Conceptual Blends, Emergence, Self-organizing Systems, etc., and even a term like "cognitive" has mutated from something akin to explicit rational thinking to a hydra-headed and self-reflexive analog system functioning mainly on the unconscious level.

But none of this should be taken too seriously. What we have here is no more than the current mythology. In fact, it might turn out that our current notions of complexity in the sciences are nothing but our recent scientific worldview trying to take into account those phenomena that only superstition could talk to previously.

Where once we had day and night, light and dark, Apollo and Dionysus, we now have conscious and unconcscious processes (not 'minds', anymore, btw).

I'd like to point out, however, that just because the sun shines on things, and makes them more available to the eye, doesn't necessarily make the world more sensible. Rather, the enormous amount of information that becomes available can in itself become a source of delirium. The god of poetry and medicine was (is?) just as much a drunkard as his wino brother, therefore. And the proof is that his spokeswoman, the Python Priestess of Delphi, often communicated in word salads which took a team of specialists (priests) to unscramble.

Once a poet, always a poet, but people usually don't think of Apollo as a Surrealist (or schizoanalyst).

What this comes down to is that there may be no such thing as gods and goddesses, darkness and lightness (other than relative perceptions), order and chaos, or even a conscious and unconscious mind. There are certain types of thoughts, perhaps, that are possible to be processed consciously, but they tend to be the simplistic kinds. The purpose of the conscious mind may not be thinking at all, but only awareness, and using the thoughts derived at from other functions to guide us.

The only way something becomes conscious is through distortion, overgeneralization, and filtering most of the information out. This is how we begin to distinguish polarities, such as black and white, Israel and Palestine, work and the rest of life.

One should remember, as well, that the Sun is only a star that's close enough to seem to take the night away.

That Gray Place

2007-09-13T22:00:00.000-04:00

Truth is I don't know if it will ever be possible for you to feel great about your job. It's reallly kind of a sticky situation. I, myself, would much rather be spending my time reading and writing poetry, perhaps even pushing large boulders uphill, than doing what I do at work. The whole idea of it gives me a terrific sense of horror at times.

Other times I get caught up in some of the things I do when I'm there, helping people, solving problems, getting an idea across successfully. Granted, I'm not generally helping people in ways that are life-altering, nor are the ideas and solutions I'm offering earth-shattering. But the fact that those things can happen, somehow helps me get through the day. And besides that, it puts a roof over my family's heads and food in our bellies. Leave it at that.

But I can't leave it at that. Beneath this drab exterior is a person who is obsessed with changing the world (though rarely does he do anything to express this obsession, not outwardly, I realize). Maybe it's only really about being desperate enough. I'm not asking much, but I do at least want to ask, how might one change one's day job, so that a chain reaction goes off in one's life. And how might one set a chain reaction in other people around us so that little by little the virus is spread, and somehow we are living in another world?

It happens. We're obviously not living in the same world we were living in say 50 or 100 years ago. Everything's changed, the music, the technology, the way we transport ourselves about, even the way we treat other people, at least as far as our institutions go, or at least as far as they're supposed to work.

What I asked you to imagine last time I posted was perhaps quite a difficult task, I realize. Perhaps not even difficult, maybe absurd is a better word. Yes, quite loony and off the wall, I'd say. Mad as f@#k. I know because I've been trying it too. I'm along for the same ride your on, if, in fact, there is anyone out there at all, anyone listening in to the maniac behind the blog curtain.

On the surface it sounds like kind of an odd, but not too abnormal request, to consider what it might be like at one's day job, if you could transform it into a world that you would really want to live in. But how could such a thing be? Not for most of us. For most of us, it is the biggest compromise of our lives, possibly what makes it a lot less meaningful and pleasurable.

But from another point of view, this is what it takes. It takes a terrible leap over the chasm of unreason and into the land of the absurd. It takes something akin to dementia, schizophrenia, but not dementia or schizophrenia, but something opposite of that. This is what I believe Deleuze and Guattari are pointing at, to some extent, when they talk about deterritorialization, becoming a body without organs.

What I'm offering is not self help, not something that will especially improve one's performance, but just as easily self hurt. More likely neither, but a form of experimentation that is hopefully outside the categories of either side of the dilemna, something to do instead of.

This doesn't mean that there is no chance of a kind of satisfaction to be derived from such efforts. But these satisfactions will be different from those one ordinarily plans for and achieves by rote, or not.

These are not the satisfactions one already knows and can plan for, nor can expect in any way, shape or form. This is what you do not yet know how to experience.

Utilization

2007-09-05T21:29:00.000-04:00

Now that we've got a little bit of a tool box to call on, I want to perhaps suggest a little thought experiment. First something to get us started. I'd like us to think of how we might apply the categories of both Mr. Dilts and Mr. Burke to things we've talked about before. On the Belief/Value or Purpose level, I'd like to propose that we think back to Jean Genet, and the way he transformed every event of his prison life into something sacred and beautiful. The fact that his environment, and his actions as well, were in utter contradiction to the way we generally think of Christian paradise and saintliness, only makes his story more poignant, meaningful and real for us. He had such a need to live in a world permeating with love and the miraculous that he in essence made it happen.

On the level of Capabilities or Agency, we have the Curves or Strategies one uses to negotiate one's environment and to initiate behaviors. There are innumberable varieties of these, everything from tracking the spoon coming to your lips with your eyes, to making necessary adjustments with your hand, arm and neck to get it into your mouth, one for deciding how to judge whether the food you are eating is worth the effort, several for deciding whether this post is worth your time to read, a bunch that you use just to read it, which overlap with other curves that you use to make judgments about what is plausible or entertaining... I can go on forever.

What is significant here is to attempt to find some alignment between the Agency part and the Purpose part. Since there are a lot of things that you do with your mind, with your entire nervous system, in order to get through your day, there must be a few things that somehow correspond with what, in your heart of hearts, you'd like to believe is true about yourself and the world, as well as what you value.

Chances are, there is no task in particular, in your day-to-day work life, that serves your deepest core desires. You answer a phone, make copies on the copier, keep notes at a meeting, clean up after people, drive nails through wood, but none of this really has anything to do with that stuff that hits you now and then, when you hear a story from a friend, or even through the media, and it chokes you up, either makes you sad or suddenly misty, as if you were reminded of something you had meant to do in your life but had forgotten.

But there might be something in the WAY you answer the phone, or drive nails, or yell at the copier, or treat someone in need with tenderness, make an off-color joke, or snap the last stroke of a spitshine, that conveys something of that impulse.

Here is your assignment. All I ask is that you try for no more than an hour, no less than ten minutes, at some convenient time, if a convenient time happens to arise, to imagine what kind of world you would like to live in, not so much on the global scale (just yet) but within an environment you are familiar with, say your job for instance, and how you might paint that space with significance, as Genet would, in order for you to feel as though you were living in that world. And then imagine what things that you do, on a routine basis, and how, that might communicate to someone that you were part of that world, or that you were creating that world, just by living that way. And which things don't you do, that you could do, and how you would do them, knowing what you know about the world you are living in and want to live in, and what things, if there are any, might you even perhaps, if necessary, be willing to make tremendous sacrifices for, and not only for yourself, but out of a belief that it would bring something of great value (if that is possible) to those in your community, who you are a part of, and to those even beyond that.

Remember, there is no commitment involved in this. It is purely for entertainment. But what you entertain in the process may have a lot to say about the difference between where you are at the present, and who you could be at any moment.

Myth vs. Reality of Process

2007-08-28T22:15:00.000-04:00

So on one hand, we have what we say about what we do, and on the other hand, we have what we actually do. Generally these are short on resemblances, especially in the significant details, which really tend to make the difference. If this was not true, there would be no such thing as a field of psychology, since the implication of such an area of study is that there are aspects of the psyche, and of behavior, that need close study.

Note, as well, that after thousands of years of documented study, there are continuous refutations of positions formed just a decade or so before. Not only does it seem as though we've made little progress, but it also seems as though we continue to not do so.

That is why, when we come to need a practical model to decipher our behavior, or the behavior of others, so that we can make use of it, and build upon it, we generally have to rely on metaphors of some sort. Some metaphors are more useful than others in this domain, because there is a methodology for their use. Others seem more plausible because of parallels in other fields. For instance, Robert Dilts, another big-time NLP guru, designed a metaphor called Neurological Levels, loosely based on Gregory Bateson's reinterpretation of Bertrand Russell's "set theory."

According to set theory any set of elements cannot be a part of itself. For instance if there is a set called X, and Y and Z are are the elements of the set (i.e. X = {Y, Z}), then no way can either Y or Z be equal to X. That would be an illogical recursion, or something like that. A set, therefore, is on a higher order level than its elements, or rather, a higher logical level.

A system, for instance, is on a higher logical level than the elements of the system, just as it is often much more complex in behavior than its elements. Another way something can be on a higher logical level is if it is about something else. For instance, an explanation is on a higher logical level than the thing that's being explained. There can also be an explanation of the explanation, and so forth, i.e. theories about theories about theories. This isn't as complicated as it sounds, or it might be, but it's also much more common than you think. Anytime you say something like "I like what you said about that book," you are making a statement about a statement about a statement. In some ways it can be a very powerful way of thinking, since it allows you to, not only make choices about what you are thinking, and how, but also about how you think about how you think about something, and so forth.

It can also be dangerous, if you confuse levels of abstractions with others. A common trait of schizophrenia, for instance, is confusing a metaphor for the real thing, in other words, "flattening the abstract into the concrete." For instance, if one said something like, "you're poisoning me with your ideas," it can be a joke, or it can mean that certain of the ideas the other is expressing are irritating the speaker. But a schizophrenic may actually believe that the words spoken contain a lethal substance, which affects oneself physically. To some degree, we may all fall for this fallacy, but we have the reality testing abilities to negate it for the most part.

In Dilts' Neurological Levels, it is assumed that the higher levels somehow rule the levels beneath them. For instance, his hierarchy is:

A. Identity
B. Beliefs/Values
C. Capabilities
D. Behaviors
E. Environment

Therefore, Identity determines Beliefs and Values, which determines Capabilities, which determine Behaviors, which controls, to some extent, the environment. The chain of causality in the model is a bit more complex than can be handled in this space, but one should at least be able to understand how beliefs and values are a part of identity, and how behaviors can be determined by what one is capable of.

While it is arguable (and sometimes argued) that their are logical inconsistencies with the model, people have found it useful for explaining parts of human experience for practical purposes.

Kenneth Burke, a notable literary critic, who later became interested in analyzing actually communication and social systems, developed an analytical system which on first glance has nothing in common with Dilts' model. What is often described as his theory of Dramatism, uses the following categories to study communication behavior, or, as he puts it, Symbolic Action: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency and Purpose.

It just so happens, however that there is a strange correspondence between Dilts' and Burke's systems:

Dilts -- Burke
Identity = Agent
Values/Beliefs = Purpose
Capabilities = Agency
Behavior = Act
Environment = Scene

What does this have to do with work? Nothing. But anytime I see a parallel between two completely different sets of ideas, I think, right away, that there must be some underlying structure, whether innate, or cultural, which I've just bumped up against. In this case, I feel that either set of categories can be useful for thinking about your experience at work, and at play, whether you'd rather use the metaphor of the theater, or mathematical inclusion. Why not use both, in that case, since the opportunity is there to arrive at a binary coupling, from which a third set of your own can be derived. And how would that enable you to change the way you think about what you do?

"Sleights of Mind"

2007-08-21T09:19:00.000-04:00

Here is an interesting NY Times article from which you can infer some of the difficulty one may have in describing one's own mental process. Part of the problem is that the left lobe of the brain specializes in making up explanations, but even more basic than that are "the limits of cognition and attention."

Still, it is possible to create something useful out of what we can patch together, guess at, experiment with. It is not necessary to create actual tracings of reality, only a useful map.

And in constructing such a thing you are doing something similar to making art, to begin with. But what will give your efforts the integrity it needs to be useful is working at and learning the craft.

Following the Curve II

2007-08-19T22:10:00.000-04:00

Part of the reason our detailed descriptions for subjective experience can sound so surreal is because there really isn't any language to describe that class of experience. Another reason is that it takes the minute gestures of thought apprehending itself in midstream, kind of like using a microscope to study itself. In a sense, it just wasn't built to do this type of work.

It also belies a quality of sensory experience that many of us may consider from time to time, though we don't often comprehend the consequences: that the senses do not in fact take in and represent for us a completely uninterpreted representation of the external world. Color, for instance, doesn't exist outside of what is made possible by the structure of the eye, and the calculations of the neurological system. What comes in through the eye is only a collection of information that our bodies need resort and reorganize in order to construct the images we recognize. Depending on what we are paying attention to, and how we are thinking, the information will be distorted differently. In particularly extreme situations, even time can be shorted and lengthened dramatically, as when one is in an accident, or are responding to an emergency.

To a certain extent, even language can further influence, not only what arrives from our senses into conscious awareness, but also how the shapes images, sounds, et al, are packaged before they make there way to the brain, through the pre-arranged sensory grids cultivated by language, such as geometric shapes, for instance, which get sent forward from the brain into ocular receptors, or get trained into the sensory motor system as patterns to filter for.

In short, our senses and nervous systems do not represent the world for us as it is, but in ways that may be useful for us, the same way mathematical formulas do not give us the world as it actually is, but in a way that we can predict and act upon it.

Since we need to rely on the same systems to describe what we are doing when we think and act as we do to think and act, it is impossible to represent what we are actually doing. But we can track some of the qualities of this behavior, and use them to delineate patterns that can be reused, and combined with others. Early in the history of NLP, the originators and developers came up with the notion of "strategy elicitation," in order to create models of what people do internally to produce the results they do. For instance, by using this methodology, they found out what made good spellers different from bad spellers, and could then teach the bad spellers how to do the same.

While tracking mental processes through a sequence of sensory modalities has its obvious limitations, it can often be useful to extract simple curves, which are often clustered together to create more complex models.

From another perspective, Jonathan Altfeld has used his knowledge and experience in Expert Systems (a field within Artificial Intelligence) to create a methodology based on Boolean IF/THEN logic, which he calls, Knowledge Engineering-TM, that is adaptable to more complex systems, and parallel streaming. The content of IF/THEN statements, or rules, can be very open ended, and can be made of multiple rules themselves, and may run on multiple logical levels (i.e. there can be rules about rules, and rules that can be guided by higher level rules).

All of these systems have been invented, and didn't exist out in the world, per se. The point I'm trying to make is that a symbolic system, outside of ordinary language, is often useful for doing this kind of work, so that one may keep a record of what one does, and when. Once you have a record of what you do when you are playing music, for instance, you can then experiment with using some of the same patterns, or appropriately altered, in other contexts, such as one's day job.

If I were to quickly summarize Jill's writing experience (see previous post) in terms of NLP Strategies, I would say that she begins with the visual experience of staring at the blank screen (Ve -- visual-external). The absence of anything on the screen allows her to begin paying attention to feelings in a particular way (Ki -- kinesthetic-internal), which she mutates through an experience of synesthesia to an imaginary sound (Ai -- auditory-internal), which lines up through some other type of process (needs further elicitation) with words and word phrases (Ad -- auditory-digital), which she will type onto the screen. The notation would look something like this: Ve->Ki->Ai->Ad. Just knowing this much is often enough to replicate the pattern in another person, or in the same person in a different context.

A more complete model will, of course, bring into consideration the sensation, both visual and kinesthetic, of spreading herself outwards past the boundaries of her body, as it will also take into account the feedback produced in the tactile sensations of keying the words into the computer, as well as that of the images apearing on the screen. Perhaps the word images influence the internal imaging she is using to guide the semantic aspect of her writing. This may sound rather complex, but we are talking about things that occur within fractions of a second, and that will continual to cycle, in a pure process sense, over and over again, though the content can change, and the results can be infinitely varied.

Which brings up the issue of quality control, which is often guided by a strategy, or strategies, of its own.

For almost everything you will want to do, you will never need to get as complex as the above implies, though depending on how precise you need to be, the degree of complexity can grow exponentially. In the end, you will weed out almost everything and leave only the most relevant details. It is usually best to remain simple, unless completely necessary. Sometimes it's something as simple as a single link or two that can make a huge difference across contexts, as can be inferred from reading about the spelling strategy.

Following the Curve

2007-08-19T15:20:00.000-04:00

For the most part, people who do things well will make something up if you ask them to tell you how they do things. A few people will tell you that they don't know, and that would be a more honest answer. This is because most of what we do is so automated, made up of innumerable learning experiences layered on top of each other, compressed and streamlined, that most of it happens too quickly and beneath the surface of consciousness. But that doesn't mean it's not possible to back into it.

Think of just one thing that you do. Keep it as simple as possible. I will illustrate will a fictional example, but something could very well be a curve, a cluster of curves, or as Jonathan Altfeld describes as a system of rules or beliefs.

Jill sits down at her desk and flips on her PC and then her word processing software. She stares at the black screen and begins to daydream about what she might want to write today. She turns her attention toward her mid-section and the feelings she has in that area, and those spreading outward toward her arms, her fingertips, and begins hearing what they may be as voices, murmuring wordless, at first. She barely notices the sensation, partially visual, partial somatic, of part of her self flooding outward toward her sides and back, a kind of hallucination that she is filling the room, and that here identity is getting mixed with the surround objects. She can almost feel the phone, which is several feet away, and monitor seems to grow larger before her. As she begins tapping on the keyboard the sensations in her chest stream out into her fingertips and the murmuring becomes one word, or a phrase of words, as she types.

While this description may sound as though it boarders on madness, or just science fiction, it is similar to what some people do when they write. This description is actually a composite of parts of how a few people have described their process. When we do different types of work, we use our senses differently. It is very similar to someone going into a trance. It actually is a trance, but a self-induced trance state that one learns to induce through trial and error. Call it meditation, if you will.

Later we will learn how to interpret the process and how to utilize it in other areas of our lives.

Ingredients of Craft

2007-08-07T21:42:00.000-04:00

I've just about finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. It finally came out in paperback, and was discounted 20%, so I thought it was time to dip in. Like so many other things I've read over the past few years, its main gist is how the unconscious mind can be trained to make complex choices and evaluations, given the right experiences. This should not be a surprise to anyone who's paid more than a minimal attention to processes of learning, for instance anyone who has had children, and who has watched them learn to walk, to speak, wield silverware without hurling bits of food in a broad and undefined radius, or who has recently had necessary learning crunches of their own, and suddenly found what was once agonizing become near effortless.

According to Gladwell, part of the trick, along with having numerous learning occasions to draw upon, is limiting the information that is available to what is truly relevant, and using this smaller subset to discern useful patterns. What turns out to be relevant, however, is not always so obvious. It is also not so obvious which information is less than useful, and what may actually pollute the process. He makes an example of how many more women were hired to play for symphony orchestras once a screen was used to blot out visual information. Evidently, a formidable appearance would make lesser players sound better. For many conductors, seeing a woman would make the playing sound weaker, less robust, though the same conductor might hear quite a different performance from behind the screen.

Any of you who have practiced a craft, somewhat well, or who have survived working, even "done well for yourselves," whatever that might mean, have learned to make complex judgments on the unconscious level, just like some of the experts in Gladwell's book, or those modeled by Bandler and Grinder & Co. You may not have developed an expertise to the level of Milton Erickson, Yo-Yo Ma or a Michael Jordan, but you can speak the language, read people to enough to survive, or to understand what they want or expect from you and meet those expectations to a degree. Otherwise, you'd be nowhere.

There is a class of people who think they are responsible for everything, who believe they have all the magical skills that make the earth spin on its axis, and who believe they should be treated special for it. There was an article in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago about them. A few CEOs thought that their skill sets were so extraordinary that they should be rewarded anything the might possibly demand.

I'm not even going to comment on that. All I can say is I've been in some organizations whose leadership has dragged them through fairly sudden and intensive reorganization, obviously not having the slightest idea what they were doing, and I have witnessed near miraculous response from unknown people on many levels. I've seen these people do what I thought was impossible, or at least unreasonable, without even appreciating what it was they had done, themselves. If you're not paying attention to the details, it is very easy to imagine that you're accomplishing magic just by willing it to occur.

You might build things, or you might sit in a cubicle sifting through information. You might help people deal with their alcoholic siblings, design cartoon characters, haul refuse, check IDs at dance clubs; whatever you do, you have the job you do because you do it better than others would. There are an infinite number of micro-skills (curves) you are probably overlooking.

A pianist, for instance, in order to produce something we generally recognize as music, has to have a tremendous amount of control over the speed and pressure she applies to each of the keys, the time she waits between pressing each key, the recognition of intervals between notes, harmonies and discordances among notes played together, or overlapping. And all of this knowledge must be coordinated across the entire nervous and endocrine systems, the muscular and skeletal systems, since musical patterning is as much biological and chemical as it is mechanical and aural.

If you were to study the patterns of an experienced trash collector, you'd find something on the order of black belt neuro-physical skills. How else would such a person be able to endure long hours of lifting and dumping without destroying his or her body and leaving more of a mess behind than he found. It's extraordinary, the precision and coordination needed to maintain oneself over time, not to mention the intuitive knowledge one must have of objects in motion, which might very well surpass those of a college level physics professor. These are things we generally take for granted.

Whether the discussion is about work, or something you do for pleasure, there are more curves at play than you can possibly count. It might be in your better interest, therefore, to discover those that are more useful in either category, and expand upon them, nurture and experiment with them. The easy part is that they are often set in motion by sensory definable cues, such as imagery, sounds, scents and feeling.

The Craft

2007-07-09T22:35:00.000-04:00

William and Liam have both recently left interesting posts about the history of mysticism in Spain round-about the 13th century, a time when Jewish, Christian and Muslim mystics riffed off of each other's work in pursuit of the divinity. Much of what we know about of western mystical practices stem from this time and place. It was a time of rich flowering.

It's arguable, too, that much of modernism has been sort of a secularization of the mystical tradition, with its phenomenological and ontological interrogations of experience. But as the decoding process continues, our friends the Marxist critics will say, so does the acquisition of its fruit into market practice. Where once we had a guru and a disciple, or a maestro and an apprentice, now we have an executive coach nd his client.

This need not be as painful as it may sound. The coach often teaches the manager how to behave himself. Sometimes this benefits the employees.

Where once there was a mandala, now there is a pie chart, a target. Where once there were narrative frescos filled with mythic beasts and heros, now there is a performance chart.

Things ain't what they used to be, that's for sure.

I don't know anyone who has an executive coach, not that I know of, though most people I run with aren't executives. No mentors, no coaches, no Merlins or Obi Wans to guide us, we rely on our stupidity to keep us on our habitual course.

As if the river would kill us if we moved a little to the left or right.

Most of those Spanish mystics were likely not working full days either. There is a whole history of people living off of others' efforts.

Sometimes the workers would organize. Different versions of this were more effective than others. Notice that many UAWers are out of work and out of luck, but the Masons... don't they run everything now? And I believe the Masons started out as masons.

Along with the mystical, this economic pattern was another thing modernism tried to take on.

But what do I mean by "take on?"

In broad and simplistic strokes: Fauvism and Expressionism attempted to translate the unsayable in terms of emotional experience into form and color; Cubism broke vision down into composite parts in order to study it and its relationship to consciousness; Dada and Surrealism played with the shattering of belief systems and the construction of new ones, searched for buried treasure in chance operations and the unconscious; Abstract Expressionism attempted to trace the basic impulse of thought and emotion in a trail of paint, sound or language. I could go on. Anyone who has dabbled in mystic practices, whether it be ceremonial magick or Tibetan Buddhism, should see a relationship here. These are all ways to break out of one's current framework and experience life differently. In other words, they are ways to break with the isms of identification, everything from the way one sees depth and colors, to the "ego" or self-identity itself.

And of course, Marxism attempted to help us break free of our identification with a particular class, an economic class. A liberal democracy, as we supposedly practice in the U.S., was supposed to help as well, but its critics claim that its reliance on a capital-fueled engine to power itself inevitably stratifies class to near medieval levels.

I don't know whether to agree or disagree with that. All I know is most of us have to work, and because of that, work has to change. Over time, it demands more of us, and in the end is making us less intelligent. Powerful and stupid. Not a good combination.

But you can't wait around for someone to change work for you. No one has any interest in making your life any better, making you more intelligent and capable. Not really.

One reason why you and I may not be as successful at creating our own realities as Genet was, is probably because we are not as able at the craft, whether that craft is writing, dancing, or counting one's breaths in a lotus position.

I don't want to preach; these things in themselves will likely lead you nowhere in the long run, but they may provide you with momentary lapses which might help you form a different relationship to yourself, and even with your work. I say work, in particular, rather than something else, because it is often the context in which you need these lapses most, where you most likely need to be able to set yourself free.

And freedom, like all things, is imaginiary.

If only imagining it within yourself, with no witness besides yourself.

And once you can accomplish this, to believe it is true, you may begin to have interesting reactions from others around you.

But don't say a word.

The Royal Road

2007-06-22T21:33:00.000-04:00

I remember reading Genet some years ago, and thinking he was the most exquisite model I had found for a way of living inwardly. He had been introduced to me previously by some very intelligent people, whom I had much respect for, as something akin to a god. I was curious. I expected something good, but I was skeptical. When I finally got around to opening the remainder copy of The Miracle of the Rose I had gotten for probably a dollar, I was truly ensnared. I understood why Sartre made him out to be a saint.

Yet he was a common criminal.

But not just any common criminal. Every event he wrote gets transformed from its base elements into an ecstatic epiphany or ritual. The chains around him become a garland of roses, being defecated upon is wielded into a form of blessing. All the oppression of prison is transformed into a backdrop of profound significance. The symbology is richly Catholic, but in essence pagan. It represented the most sincere and successful way of changing the meaning of things in a way that was useful to the individual, no matter what the situation one found oneself in. I wanted to follow in kind.

It was around this time that I decided to stop obsessing about being authentic and to actually escape who I was. I had been in therapy for a few years, and trying to be myself, the way I saw it, wasn't really doing me much good. I wanted to leave myself behind.

I couldn't act as Genet had. He had all his years of living at the hands of the state, in homes of unwanted children, in reformatories, in prison, where he had learned to do what he had to do. Compared to him I was a very straight up and down guy from the suburbs slumming in the city, trying to make the scene, working an uncool dayjob.

I didn't need to reinvent the world the way he did. I probably needed to feel disgusted with myself, more than I needed his kind of freedom, though I thought the opposite.

But at times, and I know this must happen to everybody -- you too -- something would happen by accident, and I would find myself in what might be called "Genet Space." The world would suddenly be spun upside down, and I would see things from a completely different perspective. I'd feel radically different, and for no reason at all. And even my uncool dayjob would be changed into something else -- an opportunity to observe and live among people, find a strange reverence for their struggles with exhausted hope and their scars. And often, I would feel like a spy of sorts, gathering information that I would make use of some day, for what I don't know.

We all need a way of escaping ego, or self-definition, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, to deterritorialize, find a line of flight, exit one's familiar plane of consistency. But this often takes more than mere imaginative play. It takes something beyond fantasy, something that made my attempts at escape nothing like Genet's. It takes giving something up. But that giving something up takes a curve of a very special sort which we keep thinking we don't have or don't know how to use. It's a gift we hide from ourselves out of fear of loss.

And be honest. For those moments, you can honestly say, you were missing nothing. So you can ask why do I resist so, to liberate myself of the heaviness of daily life, from these imagined encumbrances that make me so sick of myself?

Maybe because you love it.

Revolving Themes

2007-06-12T13:03:00.000-04:00

My wife got back the other day from visiting the public school our 4-year-old Liam may be attending next year, and was reminded how public school can in many ways be suggestive of prison. Many parallels range in areas from aesthetics (construction and decor of the buildings) to the way time and behaviors are structured. I thought back to my reading of Jean Genet's The Miracle of the Rose, and sure enough, the correspondences were many, everything from the minutiae of gestural communication among inmates, to the rituals of inclusion and exclusion. This made me wonder whether certain structural settings implicated particular types of interpersonal behavior, social patterns, and how, for the most part, the torture of these settings were manufactured by a group effort on the part of the participants.

I was also reminded how these same patterns are later dragged into work, since the time and space orientations are somewhat similar as well. We therefore repeat the habits we were supposed to have grown out of, though anyone belonging to a working organization -- whether a corporation, non-profit, or even educational or arts institution -- for more than a few months, will notice the same kinds of social cliques forming, and will note how very often it is NOT hard and intelligent efforts that determine how one fares, but the maneuvering of these groups like small clans staking out territory.

Hence, the greater part of what makes work what it is, as an experience to be had, to relish or disdain, is one's relationships. Let's face it, relationships are what set expectation, so much of what one actually needs to do -- those work curves, or confluences of curves -- is directly dependent on the same. Therefore, communication is a major part of everyone's toolkit.

Going back to a recent post, those of you (supposing there are people reading this blog) who may think I was kidding when I mentioned that curves are actually NECCCs (well I was sort of), could use an explanation of what I might have meant at the time.

Neuro-subjective: since on one level all of our cognitive behavior takes place in neurology, that is the brain, the nervous system in general, and its relationship to the rest of the body, particularly sensory organs and nodes, and on another level we experience this phenomenon only in their results, rather than operations, we use the term to highlight and clarify experience.
Environmental: the context within which the subject exists.
Co-Extensive: the subject and environment are not separate, but inter-penetrable.
Confluence: many factors coming together to shape behavior.
Curve: you already know.

A good source of work-enhancing curves therefore might just be found in the writings of Jean Genet or Nelson Mandela, for that matter. Genet because of the reach of his imagination in painting over the obvious with something much more personally delightful, and Mandela for his ability to use the situation to his best advantage.

Another great source, of course, might be Joseph Beuys.

The Curve

2007-06-04T21:34:00.000-04:00

Lisa Belkin, columnist for the Times, does a piece every week or so called Life's Work. Her most recent entry, entitled Time Wasted? Perhaps It's Well Spent, discusses various theories about how many hours we actually work per day, ranging anywhere from a third of our workdays, to a mere one and a half hours per day. That's good news for any of us who guilt over taking any personal time during to do anything but work, in fact some of you are going to feel somewhat vindicated by those estimates.

One of the problems with any analysis of this kind is actually defining what work is, or what can be counted as work, vs. what might not make the category of operations that lead toward satisfying the objective or task. Sometimes the task itself is so ambiguously defined that almost anything will do.

Sometimes it's not so ambiguous. For instance, I once worked at UPS loading 18 wheelers, for shipments to various ports around the Northeast. If I wasn't physically handling boxes, either stacking them in the trailer or breaking up the jams on the chutes, it would very easily be possible to say I wasn't working. When I did lawn and garden maintenance, there was the same lack of ambiguity, as well as when I was house painting. There were times, however, when I began working as my own employer, that I would stop and look at what had to be done, sometimes for a few minutes, and in a way that was work as well. I was planning, and making decisions about what to do next.

For over twenty-five years I've been working in offices, and depending on what type of job I had, just sitting and doing nothing could very well be counted as being work, because I was thinking, and as long as I was thinking about a problem I had to solve, on the job, I was still serving my employer. But who could tell if for one moment I was thinking about a system design, or politics, or poetry for that matter? It may be true that if I were only thinking about poetry for the majority of the time I sat in the office, that my performance would suffer.

That might be true and it might not. The fact is that when I did my MFA (I was still working full time), I was actually quite productive, for me. One might say that thinking about poetry as much as I was gave me an edge. It helped me see things in ways I ordinarily would not have seen them.

The thing is, the brain learns and solves problems isotropically. What that means is, that the brain might be working on several problems at the same time, some at work, some related to personal or social issues, some related to hobbies, sports activities, etc., and it will often find or form a general pattern to solve all of these issues at once. After all, in formal terms, meaning the way we process information on a cognitive level, our processes may be very similar across contexts. We create blends and blends of blends, and the source material maybe be very different in content than the context of its use. And we reuse patterns across contexts ubiquitously.

From NLP we have what is called a strategy, something I've mentioned in earlier posts. Basically, a strategy is a simplified behavioral pattern identified by a sequencing of sensory links. It is assumed that the brain, actually the entire neuro-linguistic system, utilizes its input and output channels (sensory organs) to process information. In other words, thoughts are made of visual images, sounds (including language), and feelings, either proprioceptive, tactile, or emotional, for instance. An example might be seeing a face in a crowd, comparing that face with images of faces in memory, which associates an array feelings, other memories and a name. Even NLPers admit that diagramming these events in a linear notation is an over-simplification, since there are many ways to process images and sounds, and innumerable feelings we are capable of. So they began to catalog all the various qualities each sense might have, so that one can tune a description of a strategy with more precision than three, or even five, variables allowed.

But even so, what we do with our sensory-motor equipment is difficult to track and often comprises a number of things in parallel; in fact it is rather a field-work of flows. Instead of a term like strategy, I prefer to use curve. That is because an object moving through space will travel in a single direction unless acted on by a force, either externally or internally. Something new has to come into the system. You then have a curve, rather than a straight line. Life is made up of very complex curves, or choruses of curves.

The term is actually short for Neuro-subjective/Environmental Co-extensive Confluence Curve, or NECCC.

Most important to our discussion is that a curve is the way we get things done, or resist getting things done, either at work or anywhere.

More about that at a later time.

How of What / The Imposition

2007-05-22T22:10:00.000-04:00

discussions of "work" that disregard its fundamental nature as the extraction of value from bodies are of limited interest to me.
--J Clover

I'm not the best source to come to for perspectives on the history of work. I don't know how we have gotten to where we are now from our hunting and gathering days, though I have a vague outline of an event chain. This chain passes through some grueling times, times when the work was grueling for some but not for others, other times when there was hardly any work at all, and then some better times perhaps. Even now, we may feel the shadowy grip of medieval structure, a kind of audacity of property owner classes to keep large segments of the population bound to their cubicles and factory posts, predominantly through fear. At such a time when so much can get done with little human effort, it seems more cruel that some of us to be expected to give so much for so little, and lately the rift between the worlds inhabited by social classes is at an all-time width.

At the same time, we don't dislike work, we rather like it, if it appeals to us. But let me explain.
When I use the term, work, I don't mean the imposition that is put upon us, this state we find ourselves in brought about by the culmination of many factors, in which a huge obligatory effforts are handed off to us to perform. It's been that way since we drifted from our simple self-sustaining hamlets and had become part of larger communities that were drawn together to protect us.

What I mean by work is not the imposition, but the way we meet it. With every what we are offered, we give back a how. This is a most significant point. We don't all just work the same way, we are offered a task, and we solve it our own way. This is true even when the task requires very precise duplication of a set routine, as in certain types of factory work, or open heart surgery.

Whatever it is we do in that encounter is generally a hodgepodge of things we learned since we were very young. There are so many little pieces, so much taken for granted, that it's impossible to trace. For instance, when communicating with speech are writing -- which is a big part of most of our work -- we don't have to bother with how we understand the meaning of each word, or the syntax, just as many of us don't have to bother with how we know how to type on a keyboard, or walk, for that matter, or merely stand up. Work involves all these things, and much more, in various complex arrangements.

Processes that are not work also involve very similar arrangements. It's very hard, on this level, to tell things that are work from things that are not work, such as art. We might say that work is purely our encounter with the imposition.

But it's also arguable that leisure and even art can be thought of at times as encounters with the imposition as well. We play hard, to survive working hard. We might write poems to stand up to it, or flush it out of our systems.

There is really no definitive boundary. People play when they work, and work when they play, and it would be hard to find a moment while working when someone wasn't being creative in some way or other, at least as creative as many of the poems you'll find in most of the popular journals, either on the Internet, or on the shelves of bookstores and fancy magazine shops.

To really understand the difference between work and art, for our purposes, you will have to make an accounting of both, and we begin on a very somatic level. Let yourself take on the postures and feelings of both experiences, one after another. What does it feel like when you are working, as in a typical sense of work, and the same with doing art? Compare the physical sensations of both, the parts of the body these sensations inhabit, the way you breathe and carry yourself.

This is generally much easier with some coaching, or in a mild hypnotic state, but see what you can manage.

If you can begin to articulate the differences between these two states, your working state and your artworking state, you have not only begun to understand on a purely formal level, let's call it actual, what a work process is vs. what an art process is. You have also begun your initial steps at integrating the two.

In other words, things may soon begin to get very confusing.

Huh..?

2007-05-19T21:55:00.000-04:00

A close friend recently suggested that what this blog is all about is an attempt to salvage or justify all the time and energy I've spent working, when I may have prefered doing something else, instead.

That may be true to some extent, but this is also about articulating the revelations one encounters once one realizes that there may be, and may have been, no other way. It's easy to dream, but many things need to come into confluence in order to create the right conditions to, let's say, publish one's novel with enough critical and commercial appeal that one might land oneself a tenure track job, or get paid handsomely enough for a screenplay to be free of working, in the typical sense.

Yes, I agree, teaching is work too, but teaching sculpture, if you are a sculpter, is very different from writing business system specifications, or answering tech support calls.

But having had to work teaches things that luck may not, and I think, at this point, after over twenty-five years of fulltime work, I'm an expert. Not only am I an expert at getting things done, but I'm also an expert at not getting things done, and being efficient, inefficient, of creating the appearance of doing a great job (sometimes actually harder than doing a great job), and numerous other operations and subterfuges one must learn in order to survive work.

The conclusion I draw more often than not is that it is best to do the best job you can possibly do, since that is really what makes things easier. The better you work, the better you get at working, and after a while it's almost like cheating. You have all these skills you're not even aware of, and you get things done in half the time, or less, than it might take someone else.

This is common sense, and not a very hard conclusion to get to. Sure, but one has to know how to work in order to accomplish this. Hard work is not enough. Very hard work is not enough. These are things some people never learn. I was actually quite stupid at it myself, and very resistant to learning as well. I didn't wanted to have to work, I wanted to be discovered. Right.

Like most work, this blog is also a fiction. Because there is no one way to work, and there is no possible way to do as I suggest. There is, in actuality, really no difference between work and anything else we do. But we don't generally live in actuality.

In order to do as I suggest, to approach your work with some of the same forces you approach "art," you have to leave all the meaning of what you are doing and why you are doing it behind, at least for periods of time, so that you can track what you are doing in purely formal terms. For instance, NLPers suggest that if you map out the linguistic, sensory-cognitive and subjective physiological processes you go through when you are either making art or doing work, you could figure out ways of supplanting parts of each into each other. There are those who even believe that if you simply pretend to believe you are making art when you are actually performing tasks at your day job, that you will make huge shifts in the way you do them.

Of course, as I said above, this is all fiction. But then, so is work, in a sense.

It would be completely up to you, if wanted to make yourself an experiment.

I'll say this, the better your refine your skills, and learn to approach your work creatively, the more subtle you will become, and the more values you will be able to satisfy at once. It is even possible to learn to reap satisfaction from activities that you shouldn't be able to reap satisfaction from. Think of it as a form of yoga, and doing -- using -- the work that is absolutely the worst suited to your disposition may actually be the most ideal work for you to do, from this perspective. That is if you wanted to take on a project of this sort, this magnitude.

I think it was Gurdjieff who said that you can learn more from a polished floor than a famous painting, if the floor was polished by someone with knowledge. Think of that knowledge, not as mystical knowledge, as he may have suggested, but an integration (and therefore, simplification) of multiple, and possibly conflicting, complexities into one's subjective arsenal.

Still, it may not make life any easier.

From the Series "How to Work"

2007-05-17T17:21:00.000-04:00

1.
It doesn’t follow that with the best intentions
The best results, the greatest satisfaction follows.
Not that we would deny those dreamers of dreams
Big and small, that what they hoped to achieve
May fall into the most propitious assembly.
A picture doesn’t get taken just by gazing out
Into space; nor is space made by closing one’s eyes
And imagining the world within a two hundred
Square foot apartment. Things have to be done
Not always the things one might expect, but something
Must be struck from the ground, the sky, the sea
Some action following the deft delirium that
Completes the venture from one set of futilities
To another, takes you swimming with it, if only
To feel the gliding of events, since it is probably
As important that we feel them as they feel us.
And the inevitable sacrifices dicing up our hearts
May then yield a strange kind of growth that surprises
Mildly, but well enough to feel our pores breathing.
That’s what they set out to ask us about, and all
The pictures standing next to the casket were of things
Taking effect, and lacing into the seemingly unending
Triumph of the fixity running uphill against itself.

2.
You may be pregnant with an action or idea
And for a long time that is how you’ve been
Somewhat hopeful, alarmed, discomfited
Until someone bursts into your cube asking
How many centimeters are you now ready to push.
Nothing can be done, nothing stand in your way
Though you might need to wait for it to roll
Over on you, with big nyloned legs and steel spokes
Because in some ways the completion of a thought
Is like digestion, other times the unearthing
Of an ancient weapon, while laying down
A foundation, feeling the desire to impregnate
The earth with your boundaries, rigid descriptions
Of that which cries for trampling over. And so
The mice come, and the flees and the ants and worms
Tearing apart what you thought was your piece de resistance.
And in a cubical alone a single matador
Bows to his reflection before booting up. The sequence
Has gone live and the impetus is buried in the facts
Of development. Rude impositions strike to make
One better than merely a tool, but a value
Or valued asset among innumerable flag stations
The stones vacationing along Broadway, waiting for
A peculiar kind of usage to redeem them: insertion.

3.
If you go out to hunt and gather you must engage
Your mind, though it be a soldier’s whore, a fenced in
Field of weeds, a box of rotten chocolates, evil
Design and paranoia engendered in the very tissue
Of the medulla oblongata. And all the funk
That grows out of it hence. But you have grown
To appreciate this mess and even revel in its works
From time to time, though you may be inclined to wish
You had an off switch, and so years of meditation
Practice has gotten you very far. It seems, according
To recent research to thicken the tissues of
The neo-frontal cortex, which is good news
For anyone wishing to stave off Alzheimer’s
But maybe not for those who rely on you not being
So thick-headed. Because meditators, you may have found
Tend to be the center of their universe, and that’s
Good, for the meditator. One also needs to have
A fundamental understanding of language and its
Relationship to the body, and its actions. Thoughts
And physiology travel together as their work
Is systematically entwined, according to Dr. Grinder
And Dr. Bandler, and their student, Mr. Dilts
And that whole army of thera-priests and trainers.

4.
There is really no distinction between work
And play, it is true, but who wants to play the same
Game over and over again, and who wants to
Play with those who demand that one plays with them
The game they want to play without recourse
To one’s own desires. That is why, while playing
One needs to hold silently in one’s mind another
Set of rules which make the game another game
And for which one can keep one’s own score
And change them when one wishes. After all, most
Kids who want to play, who really want
The same game played every time are lacking
In what it takes to see and need to be shown how to
Play, if only through the subtle gestures of hypnosis
Over a longish period of time until they as well
Begin to move in stranger directions
Than they have been used to. The whole world is like this
And so the world may be our target audience
Since some less than benevolent despots will tend
To play at making gruesome their games must mutate
Into another set of rules that don’t include mutilations
Of any kind, or sapping the spirits of their players
Dragging off to work unsubtly needing an off switch.

5.
When I say one must hold in ones mind another
Set of rules, what is it that I mean, since there
Is actually nothing to hold and nowhere
To hold something, but this is an act of imagining
And that is work too, perhaps one’s primary
Work, since most of us don’t even, if we’re laboring
Manually, build something to completion
And even beginning demands imaginary work
Of saying to oneself, what will these bricks look like
When they become a wall, how will the ruddy rising
Be offset by the verdigris of the garden
The azure or the boiling gray of the sky. What will it
Feel like to lean against its shady face while the sun
Remembering fleetingly in a fairer season
The intense rays of heat striking down on your defenseless
Head and torso, your dripping limbs. Recreating
Those sensations and recombining them with the world
As you have found it today, that is work as well
Though possibly not the work you credit yourself
With doing. And if you are one of those who like myself
Spends hours tapping on a keyboard and yapping
On the phone in a cubicle, imagining a world
Then there is even more work to be done. So do it.

6.
To imagine a world in which columns and rows
Of data exist in tables, and coordinates
Drape over space so that the postmaster
Can find you when it’s time to send you the bill
And even money somehow valued by the interaction
Of those columns and rows, manifestos
Of circuitry that are made manifest through observation
Through wincing and caring, so that any real information
Is actually held in your muscle tension, images
In the brain, phantom sounds and inner babble
Bundled together to create a world of value
Of the places you need to be at particular times
During the day, vs. what you’d really like
To be doing. When you multiply that by several
Billion, allowing for variation of some expanse
The inter-currency effect is that you have a world
Economy, beginning with you and your bundle
Of nervous energy accumulates over time
And maintained minute by minute by your every
Action, expectation you’ve learned and feel you need
To have, to be who you are and what is that
But all you know, having little choice in the matter
Needing to dispel as much conflict as possible.

7.
The whole body enables the brain to think—we are
The minds appropriate to upright quadripeds
Not disembodied Cartesian sailors floating
On an ethereal sea. It is the mind of two eyes
A nose, a mouth, two ears, hands that give our thoughts reach
Two feet that feel out for us a place to stand
And work is designed around an animal who thinks
He is one thing but lives as something else entirely—
Rectangular keyboards, for the hands and chairs
Which cause tension and disk compression
It is up to you to fill the gaps and this should
Be done not by some recognized distributor
Of ergonomic salvation, but by one’s own
Efforts, since it is both the body and the mind
Traveling as a unit, that is ill from too much work
And not this and that. Not pieces not fitting together
As we often find ourselves amiss and incompetent
We have designed a world in which we work
Around a metaphysics trying to disown
How lust and love of music both drive and distract
The operations we partake in, hurrying from
One state to the next as if a plasma of some sort
Was surging through electric cables in a desert.

Strategies Again & Again

2007-05-15T21:48:00.000-04:00

For a lot of us, the time we have left after work, and the time we wish to spend with our families, is in short supply. Often we are exhausted after a day of work, and a couple of hours of eating and tossing the kids around acrobatically, or whatever it is you do. Maybe there are dishes, or recycling. Perhaps you go to the gym. There may be no time or energy even to socialize, like one used to, especially when you are responsible for others' wellbeing, and there may even be an absence of time to do art, if that is your inclination. Instead you watch TV, perhaps, or read magazines full glossy photos of pies and celebs.

I know a lot of people in this situation, even people without kids, whose daily struggles to subsist drain them so, that they haven't the impetus left to get going. There are those, either by luck, or by choice, who have never been the types able sponsor or promote themselves well enough to score that residence at Yaddo, the university job, make the right connections, in the right way, that can help set up a "situation" beneficial to the work they wish to make, though their work might well justify such special treatment. I think that goes for most of us. And most of that group's work will slowly dwindle off to practically nothing. I've sadly seen it happen to many.

In some ways this blog is about how to not let the dwindling happen, but it's also an attempt to turn the machine on its axis, so that the things in life that are generally prohibitive of art, might actually arouse its activity, not only its activity, but to perhaps even promote some of the neurological (or spiritual if you prefer) states that ideally go along with the process of making art.

Note: I am using "art" as a general term. My main focus is writing, and especially a kind of poetry that isn't quite traditional, and isn't quite the avant garde, perhaps it falls in that slot in which Ron Silliman proposes the "third way" poets live. This is the place where you are no longer upholding tradition, and supposedly not really breaking any new and significant ground either. It's kind of an insignificant position to be in, at least from an art historical angle.

Of course, time changes the way we see everything, and it's hard to know exactly how the Rorschach grid of art crit will tune its radar in coming years. Think of Emily Dickinson, Kafka, even someone like Henry Darger. So if you are in the position to judge your work, not harshly perhaps, but with tepid enthusiasm about what it might be or mean within that big ocean of works in general, think again, or rather, don't think.

Obviously a great way to manage some of this stuff (call it experience) is to engender some of our art process into other areas of our lives. This would at least keep one in practice, and keep the energies flowing in a way that would enable more productivity. It would also make some of the things we need to do, but are not so happy about needing to do, more pleasant, or at least more engaging and relevant to aspiration.

I only consider this as an option because I've seen it happen, to some degree, in a few people I've had the good fortune to have known. In most cases these have been people who have been quite oblivious to what they were doing, and have rarely been able to grasp what I was saying when I tried to point it out. I've also been around some of them enough to observe in them what seemed like better quality living during the periods they did this to a greater degree.

But the problem is, if you don't really know what you are doing, either when making art, or working your day job, that is, what you are actually doing on a detailed subjective -- for the most part unconscious -- level, i.e. your strategies, how could you possibly make choices about what to do when? That's the tricky part.

Blinkishness

2007-01-30T16:23:00.000-05:00

If, as Lacan liked to say, the unconscious is structured like a language, what does that say about work?

And what does that say about the relationship between poetry and project management?

Plastic arts and manufacturing?

Work is designed to feign realishness. For those of us born into a "working class" milieu, we rely on the concretism of work to ward off the threat of annihilation. But this pseudo-modernist, psycho-babble, is just more work desperately trying to justify itself.

It's arguable that work truly doesn't exist at all, only a phantasmal partition among activities, some of which maintain the shadow of scarification rites, stretched out and sanitized over time.

True work is only something that you do. Like standing up and sitting down. Like breathing and shitting and sleeping.

Strategies II

2006-12-08T22:04:00.001-05:00

Strategies: the gold you bring with you to the workplace, the Kunst in the Kapital = Kunst formula. But don't fear, I'm not going to paint the scene overly rosy for ya. Strategies are a double edge sword, since they are also the habits you carry around that aren't so useful, after all. A strategy can also be the thing that wakes you up in the middle of the night terrified. Or a strategy might make you succumb to certain unhealthy or antisocial behaviors. A strategy can make you feel bad.

Or it can make you capable of amazing things. In fact, in NLP lingo, strategies are the same as capabilities.

Another thing to consider is that the sum of your strategies result in your complete life experience from day to day, they result in your beliefs, and your feelings as well. They are your world.

When little Johnny was much younger, still in high school, he had a terrible array of strategies that made him feel awful most of the time. He was living in a very gloomy and unlit tunnel made up of his accumulated beliefs and ways of reacting to the world. We don't need to elucidate the source, or the details of this tunnel, just point out that it existed, in him, or in his relationship to the world and himself. It was considered very dangerous for people with emotional state management issues like his to experiment with particular types ofpsychototropic substances, for instance, but that's just what he did. And you know what, he felt much better often afterwards, and was more interested in things around him, even things he was subjected to at school. Go figure.

But remember what I said in an earlier post: that strategies are made up of linked sensory processes, sometimes in sequence, sometimes looped or in parallel. To subtly change certain variables in one's inner sensory computations is sometimes enough to change the shape of the entire system. And the result can be so intense that it can be confused with a religious liberation of sorts. So watch out, be careful, don't dabble too much and stray from that bored and frightened little burrow you've found yourself in, or all hell might break loose.

And that's exactly what most of you have been doing. Me too, for so long, and still, quite often.

Your strategies are the gold you bring to your day job, they are what make the world go round. If I had my way, you and the rest of the world would recognize that: that you, and your wits, conscious and unconscious processes, are more valuable than all the oil fields, factories, monetary investments, ball parks in the entire world. They wouldn't be worth a damn, wouldn't be possible without you, valuating them, figuring out how to make them happen.

Remember that when you go to work each day. That's what you have to understand in order to start.

And lastly, strategies, for better or worse, are the ongoing poetry of our fictionalized selves and lives we lead.

Strategies

2006-11-15T12:57:00.000-05:00

What is modeling?

Anyone who has seen a group of Elizabeth Bishop's drafts of a single poem can appreciate the painstaking attention to detail she took. The first draft or two may seem an unimpressive blurb scrawled out over a page of notepad, nothing like the final masterpiece at all. At some point she might even begin mapping out the beginning and ending words of particular lines, leaving the rest blank, as if she were playing some sort of word game, rather than composing them through from beginning to end, as one might expect. Over time, and many drafts, the piece begins to take shape, until wammo, all the parts in the puzzle click, and voila, we have a gorgeous gem like "One Art." But the process is nothing like what one might expect, none of the flighty spontaneity one sees in the statue of Robert Burns in Central Park's (NYC) Mall and Literary Walk. It is, in fact, quite the opposite of John Ashbery's process, or at least his process as he describes it -- the cutting of the tape of poetry that runs through his mind at all times. Ashbery claims that he will not write by hand, but uses a typewriter, because he would otherwise miss something, he moves so quickly through his lines. It's paradoxical that Bishop is one of his favorite poets, but this is what he says.

It is paradoxical too, that what Bishop was after was a representation of what she called mind in action. She actually wanted to create the sense of a mind happening across its various discoveries, perceptions, choices and distinctions in time. Such a goal might be best served using Ashbery's methodology, we might think, just as Andre Breton argued in his manifestoes about the use of automatic writing.

During the mid 1970's Richard Bandler and John Grinder learned to replicate the behaviors of some of the most successful psychotherapists at the time, including the legendary Milton Erickson, by using mimicry. Instead of reading walls of theory texts, they simply imitated the therapists' "micro-muscle movements," i.e. the barely noticable flexings of muscles below the flesh of the face, as well as gestures of the rest of the body, in time, while observing their work. They would then pretend they were the person they had observed and try to get the same result, and often, they would. Not only did they learn anatomical behaviors, as one may expect, but also arrangements of complex linguistic patterns as well.

This may perhaps be explained by mirror neurons, a kind of nerve cell discovered during the early 1990's in Italy, and now the center of every discussion from learning theory to the causes of autism.

Only after learning the behaviors did Bandler and Grinder try to figure out what patterns they were in fact using. Once they did, they began teaching others, and their students all seemed to get more or less the same results.

Grinder and Bandler called this process of learning new behaviors modeling. Later on, they developed a short cut methodology which involved tracking the sequence of a person's sensory modulatities during a thought or behavior process. For instance, someone might see a particular image (visual), to which they have a particular physiological response (kinesthetic), which they would respond to by forming particular words (auditory digital). They would map this sequence textually as V->K->A-d. These sequences could be very complex, and involve loops and curlicues, and different qualities and intensities, and often were not actually sequences at all, but coded cybernetic processes running in parallel. They would often be very contextualized, meaning you might use one particular coding to decide what was real vs. imaginary when you are sitting in your cubicle, and another when you are out for a walk. They called these grouped processes strategies.

One of my favorite ways of tracking strategies was developed by Jonathan Altfeld, an NLP trainer, who at one point used a similar methodology to develop artificial intelligence systems.

Everyone is an Artist? Yeah, Right!

2006-11-14T09:44:00.000-05:00

It's becoming obvious to me that I don't really have the time to work on this at present, mostly because I work too much. But that's not the complete reason (or excuse), though something managing to represent completeness would be very involved. Leave it at this, that I have priorities, and many things competing for my time, not least of all a very demanding job, and most of all a family, including two wee ones. It may sound sappy for me to say that the wee ones, as well as my dearest wife Kathleen (not only the dearest but only wife), offer the opportunities for psychic combustion on the level of Shakespeare at every turn, but it's true, at least in a way. It, of course, depends almost fully on my engagement.

This is also true of work and art. When people whine at me (and believe me brothers [and sisters, as well], I'm with you on that) that their work is nothing like their art, that art is freedom and work is slavery, that work makes them miserable and art redeems them -- though they may not currently be making art because, in a way, it makes them miserable as well -- all I can offer is to say that they can try looking at things differently, just pretend perhaps, that it is different than one imagines it, since the way we imagine it is the way we imagine it.

What Beuys meant when he claimed that everyone is an artist, is to point out that a tremendous amount of creative activity takes place in our lives everyday, as is necessary to get through life, including work. And implicit in this creativity a particular style, a "style of life". You, worker bee, have little idea what you are up to. And if you were more aware, then maybe you'd have a little more respect for your efforts. Your efforts: these may be belittled by the opinions and expectations of others. But that's merely part of the game. You are an exquisite furnance of drama and activity.

Like it or not.

The Expanded Concept of Art

2006-10-26T22:42:00.000-04:00

Joseph Beuys' Expanded Concept of Art gives us a place to start. For the time being, I am going veer around the political ramifications involved in selecting this idea as a point of departure, though, I promise you, in the long run it will be impossible to avoid. But what Beuys gives us when he states something like ART=CAPITAL (or Kapital=Kunst) is a way of looking at our everyday activities under new light. He is implying that things such as art and work cannot be as divisively delineated as we may once have wanted them to be, but that they are, in essence, the same thing.

Beuys' classes at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art often had many times the number of students that his fellow professors would allow, and this often caused him trouble with his peers and the academy in general. But Beuys relished the conflict, which he felt in some way served his purpose of expanding on the concept of art, as well as expanding the number of people that were being infected with his ideas. Art was to go outside of the studio and gallery, in fact it already had. Everyday life in or out of work is ripe with types of behavioral effects commonly thought of as "creative," though the specific behaviors were not often thought of that way. After all, everyone is an artist, in some way or another, since we all survive from day to day somehow, and that takes some clever maneuvering and revamping of our ideas, does it not?

His students, therefore, were not training to become "artists," per se, not in the typical sense. Instead they left his class and went on to be business associates, teachers, social workers, what have you. Most art teachers would consider that a great failure, but to Beuys, it was the agenda. It was social sculpture.

It would be hard to imagine all the tools Beuys passed on to his students, and what it is that they had taken with them, if anything, that others working in the same fields may not have had. But we can begin to take an accounting of our own work, and understand what we have brought to it from whatever arts we may have involved in.

Is it only a coincidence, for instance, that there are so many classically trained musicians working in information systems technology? Or is there something in the cognitive training of a musician that seeds the ability to think in the same structures needed to think in computer languages. If so, what does this begin to imply about the relationship between our art and our work, and what does it say about the possibility that work and art, instead of hindering each other's progress, may actually be used to support each other, if managed intelligently?

For those of you who have creative ambition, but find yourself working in a field that is not of your choosing, might this offer a route to think upon? To me, it does. And if it can make any difference to my work, my life and my art, it may only involve changing the intention behind everything we do.

2006-10-18T22:23:00.000-04:00

Work is an array of decisions, conscious and unconscious, unfurling through time. Because the past does not vanish into thin air, but exists in the present, our work can be looked upon as a kind of "social sculpture" that gathers as we act.

Thoughts and operations: speech, gesture, gross movements: all particles of the artifact, but one we cannot separate ourselves from, as in the forming of external and static objects.

Well, you determine exteriority.

Work is the dance you cannot undance, or set yourself free of, by saying "I have not danced, but only tripped over myself when I was young. And now, my friends, I have this habit, this tic, which I call my employment."

How

2006-10-18T14:45:00.000-04:00

How we work is like an artifact we engender in time, or the residual footprints on a Tapies:

What is Woik?

2006-10-18T14:35:00.000-04:00

You should know as well as anybody.