Friday, February 04, 2005

Night be for NCOR (civil entry)

Well tommorrow I go to give a "guerilla" workshop at NCOR the national conference for organized resitance.(its a kind of activist's convention). I am going as a part of a group of Twin Oakers, some of whom go every year and who, by now have got it down to the point where we print out our own handbooks advertising our own workshops. I was asked to write a couple of paragraphs describing the workshop I intended to give. This is what I wrote:

Dancing around the Tree of Life: Toward an Individual-Personal Self-World Order.

"Violence doesn't work, non-violence doesn't work either; maybe Healthy Culture will work"Piankhy Thompson

"Truth is the first casualty of war; it is also the first condition of Peace." --Piankhy Thompson

We all live in, are infected by, and suffer from, a sick Culture of Apart-ness. This culture, like all culture is comprised of Cosmology, Identity, Ritual, and Infrastructure. In the case of the dominant culture this means; a Cosmology of Apart-ness, an Identity-Politics of Apart-ness, Rituals of (inner and outer) Apart-ness, and Infrastructures of Apart-ness. Education (formal and informal) is the transmission of culture, and in our case it is the transmission of this sick culture. The factional political paradigms or our time (including anarchism, socialism, communism, feminism as well as, capitalism, libertarianism, nationalism, etc...) are all symptoms of, rather than cures for, this condition of sick culture. As such, none of them have any potential at all for changing anything that matters in any sustainable way. We have no time for this.

Since sick culture is the problem, it follows that Healthy Culture is the solution. So what is Healthy Culture and how does it manifest on the collective, political Level? Glad you asked. That happens to be the topic of the guerrilla workshop I intend to give at NCOR this weekend. Specifically I will talk of an extremely small, but vital and replicable, Cultural Pilot Project that is going on in the cultural microclimate of Twin Oaks Intentional community in Virginia, involving the practice of Healthy Culture; its cosmology of Togetherness (Integral Science), its Identity-Politics of Togetherness (Individual-Personhood), its Rituals of Togetherness (Life-Dance rituals) and its Infrastructure of Togetherness. The workshop will hopefully be more of an Individual-Personal improvisation rather than a rigid public/private presentation, with a minimum of one-sided communication and as much practice as theory. Hope to see you there.

I can't imagine many people at NCOR (or Twin Oaks) wanting to hear this kind of thing, but then I can't really imagine anyone else really wanting to either, yet it needs to be said, and pretty much to anyone who will listen. Since I get a free ride up to D.C. and back every year, and since it feels at least possible that some number of people who go to NCOR really have good will and are really wanting, not only outward, but inward transfromation and healing, I go. Maybe some of them are interested in my contention that you cant have one kind of healing without the other nor can you pursue one without the other in mind, determining how that pursuit happens

Well, I hope I end up being ready for this workshop when the time comes for me to give it. I have a bunch of symptoms (i'll discuss this more in another entry) which, have narrowed down to being either Love-sickness or Mad Cow Disease. (actually I'm pretty sure its the former). Anyway, I've never had it before and its throwing me for a loop. Its a pretty impossible situation--with the subject/object of my affections I mean--and so the end result is just misery. I feel like i'm suffering some kind of ongoing amputation; ridiculous and sentimental fantisies of impossible success and failure are are forced into imagination as though by bunch of sadistic third rate alien playwrights. I feel like someone has slipped me a mickey or paid some hougan a kings ranson to do me in from afair. Some bodies got some body hair of mine or something... Must be some kind of nemesis kicking my ass over the hubris of thinking I could...I dont know what. Any way, as you can see, my mind is not as focused as it should be on the task at hand, which is not so much to give the work shop but to make a guesture of inner and outer healing with this civil step of my Life-Dance. A big reason for tthis distraction is that the person I am love-sick over (who knows that this is the case) is also going to be at NCOR, and perhaps even at my workshop (I dont know what would be worse; her comming or her not comming)

Anyway, it occurs to me that it might make sense to share thsi sorry state of affairs with my audience as apart of the individual-personal introduction to myself that I usually begin with. Maybe I can get myself to do some thinking-on-my-feet about how to, think about and deal with such feelings in the context of healthy culture as one Individual-Person trying to befriend another as such. I dont know if I can talk about it that way though, it would be like trying to give a lecture about open heart surgury while your own chest is gaping open like the mouth of some howling beast. Maybe I'll just cry or be so incoherent as to insight pity...I feel a little woosey even thinking about the whole thing.

well, the worst that can happen is...well, I dont want to think right now about the very worst that could happen because it almost feels like that would be that things stay the way they are. But outside of that I think I am ready for anything, even if its being put out of my misery by a bunch pissed off and offended activists "activating" upside my head (although I really expect only to experience emotional violence and maybe not even much of that--I dont think "uni-partisan activists are all that bad;I have a soft in my heart for 'um really). I do dislike cultural, gender, and other forms of us-and-them "war-mongering" for the purpose of currying this or that kind of favor with "the People" or even with the girl across the bar. But its just par-for-the-course in a sick culture; activists are certainly not the only ones who do this kind of thing and there hearts are probably in better places than most...

Well, I'll probably finish this entry when I come back in a few days, if I suvive the whole thing. I dont like the fact that I feel pretty indifferent right now about whether I do or not, but there it is...

posted by: piankhy | 10:21 | comments