Footnotes to Crossroads Dispatches

the poetical, heroic ideal in the Middle Ages

 

Stumbled across in my research into Medieval Spain, the book The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga.

The cool thing about this book is he looks at history from the point of view of the ideals of the period, as evoked by literature and ballads of the time, including the ideal of chivalry as a way of inspiration and optimism in a dark age.

There's an online copy of the book at http://www.scribd.com/doc/44043728/Huizinga-WaningMiddleAges.From pages 36-39:

"Thus, always and everywhere in the literature of the age, we find a confessed pessimism. As soon as the soul of these men has passed from childlike mirth and unreasoning enjoyment to reflection, deep dejection about all earthly misery takes their place and they see only the woe of life. Still this very pessimism is the ground whence their soul will soar up to the aspiration of a life of beauty and serenity. For at all times the vision of a sublime life has haunted the souls of men, and the gloomier the present is, the more strongly this aspiration will make itself felt. 

Three different paths, at all times, have seemed to lead to the ideal life. Firstly, that of forsaking the world. The perfection of life here seems only to be reached beyond the domain of earthly labour and delight, by a loosening of all ties. The second path conducts to the amelioration of the world itself, by consciously improving political, social, and moral institutions and conditions. Now, in the Middle Ages, Christian faith had so strongly implanted in all minds the ideal of renunciation as the base of all personal and social perfection, that there was scarcely any room left for entering upon this path of material and political progress. The idea of a purposed and continual reform and improvement of society did not exist. Institutions in general are considered as good or as bad as they can be; having been ordained by God, they are intrinsically good, only the sins of men pervert them. What therefore is in need of remedy is the individual soul. Legislation in the Middle Ages never aims consciously and avowedly at creating a new organism; professedly it is always opportunistic, it only restores good old law (or at least thinks it does no more) or mends special abuses. It looks more towards an ideal past than towards an earthly future. For the true future is the Last Judgment, and that is near at hand.

It goes without saying that this mental disposition must have greatly contributed to the general pessimism. If in all that regards the things of this world there is no hope of improvement and of progress, however slow, those who love the world too much to give up its delights, and who nevertheless cannot help aspiring to a better order of things, see nothing before them but a gulf. We will have to wait till the eighteenth century -- for even the Renaissance does not truly bring the idea of progress -- before men resolutely enter the path of social optimism; -- only then the perfectibility of man and society is raised to the rank of a central dogma, and the next century will only lose the naivete of this belief, but not the courage and optimism which it inspired. 

It would be a mistake to think that the medieval mind, lacking the ideas of progress and conscious reform, had only known the religious form of aspiration to ideal life. For there is a third path to a world more beautiful, trodden in all ages and civilizations, the easiest and also the most fallacious of all, that of the dream. A promise of escape from the gloomy actual is held out to all; we have only to colour life with fancy, to enter upon the quest of oblivion, sought in the delusion of ideal harmony. After the religious and the social solution we here have the poetical.

A simple tune suffices for the enrapturing fugue to develop itself; an outlook on the heroism, the virtue, or the happiness of an ideal past is all that is wanted. The themes are few in number, and have hardly changed since antiquity; we may call them the heroic and the bucolic theme. Nearly all the literary culture of later ages have been built upon them.

But was it only a question of literature, this third path to the sublime life, this flight from harsh reality into illusion? Surely it has been more. History pays too little attention to the influence of these dreams of a sublime life on civilization itself and on the forms of social life."

 

 

so I hammered the story into a nice, smooth, straight line. I threw out the magic - Chuck Palahniuk

A friend scanned and sent me the Reintroduction to the latest edition to Invisible Monsters (named Invisible Monsters Remix) written by Chuck Palahniuk. Palahniuk explains how he was finally able to release Invisible Monsters in the experimental, nonlinear format he originally envisioned.

The initial published edition was "hammered" to fit the mold of The Way Things Are (in that case, within known and trodden The Publishing World). Palahniuk explains:

"Back then, neither Monica or I had been published. We didn't want to make trouble. We just wanted for people to love us.

So I hammered the story into a nice, smooth, straight line. I threw out the magic."

I replied to my friend: Happens so often: we throw out the magic to conform.

Well worth reading the entire Reintroduction where Chuck Palahniuk explains his storytelling vision for the new release. I've included the scanned pages below:

Download Invisible-monsters-remix-1

Download Invisible-monsters-remix-2

Download Invisible-monsters-remix-3

quixotic accelerator -- proposal for 2012 Zero1 Festival ARTHere

Revised ARTHere Proposal for MACLA's Peapod Adobe Youth Voices Academy in San Jose, CA. The program is for local youth 13-18 years of age.

Title:  Quixotic Accelerator

Description:

Imagine a crossroads of time and space where merchants and sellers from all multiplicities come together to trade. Their voices hark back to when and where people made their living by living their making. For instance, 1938: Dave Packard and Bill Hewitt bake their hand-painted oscillators on the kitchen oven (while working out of a garage). 2012: San Jose youth tinker, experiment, and unify entrepreneurship and arts through an "accelerator"[1] which blossoms over the course of the installation. 

On opening night of Zero1 Festival, the youth-driven microeconomy emerges at the site of former mercado, improvised together by found and gifted items (for a visual aesthetic, download PDF in the style of Roberto Fernandez' studio whom was inspired by the favelas of Buenos Aires). A simple urban game with transmedia storytelling and role-playing elements invites merchants and buyers[2] into a quixotic pop-up mercado that allows youth to engage their imagination in offering historical, futuristic, make-believe, tangible (basically anything they can conjure up with their heads or their hands) goods and services. Even when the youth aren't actively participating  in person during the full length of the installation, their recorded voices describing their regalos animate the market in their stead. 

Based on the regalos that each teen wishes to express and share, we will work individually and as a team to bring the full mercado to life virtually and physically within a hands-on, experiential "accelerator/incubator"-styled workshop. We will learn how to make the best of the individual, team and community gifts, enthusiasm, resources, mentors and allies we have immediately available and can tap into. In the words of Bob Dylan when asked what was the secret to his success: "I was doing what I could with what I had where I was."

We will take the stipend offered, and use it as seed capital. For instance, perhaps one teen wishes to use their illustrations on a silkscreen-printed T-shirt. They track down and source the materials, and borrow or rent the equipment (there is a screen printing press within a block of MACLA). He may request $100 from the mercado pool of money and show the team that it's plausible to earn $300 in sales. Another teen might sell original MP3 songs and spoken word poetry in our corresponding virtual [2] mercado. She affixes a QR code to the back of a card stock postcard with the lyrics scribed on the back and offered for sale on opening night. Each of the regalos arise from the participant's own innate gifts and self-directed choices; cooperation, and collaborations may form between the youth (one may illustrate a CD cover, another mix the music) and/or allies in the community (by providing advice, raw materials and/or loaning equipment). 

The details of this project open-ended in this description purposefully as the goal is to embrace the objectives and dreams of the youth collectively in a collaborative fashion.

[1] Accelerators and incubators are homegrown Silicon Valley phenomena that aren't always representative of the wealth of indigenous talent that lurks beyond the den of software engineering. Beyond the traditional milieu of venture capital and the support ecosystem it fosters, lie waiting new adventures in culture-making ventures that are self-sustaining for the makers, inventors and artists and a generative, synergistic ecosystem in its own right.

[2] Youth may design their own art currency to use during the mercado, encourage bartering, or other forms of exchange. As both exploration of what exchanges are and/or work around legal requirements of online marketplaces such as Gumroad and Etsy. (The accelerator workshop will address fundraising as well as alternative/complimentary currencies.)

[3] The virtual market will make available the mercado to a global online audience who may not be in San Jose for the 3D festivities. It will use a group Tumblr blog (with each separate post representing an item for sale with links to Gumroad  (digital goods, such as songs, poems, illustrated stories, graphic design of a T-shirt, sketches, etc.) and possibly Etsy (for tangible goods like handmade herbal soap or T-shirt). Each tangible regalo (even performances of dance at the mercado) can be tagged with a QR code that links to virtual mercado.

Artist / Group Bio: Evelyn Rodriguez is a writer that is not going to let her computer engineering degree rot. She once was a startup CTO. She currently envisions narrative Internet games that dissolve the theatrical fourth wall. Her website is evelynrodriguez.typepad.com

Type Of Media: Social Practice

Budget:  The spirit of this installation is resourcefulness and improvisation. We will learn to leverage our current resources, establish partnerships with allies that might be able to help with raw materials or in-kind donations, etc. 

I propose that  we use the $750 as seed capital, and each team member proposes how they might use a portion of that (as described in main proposal). For instance one teen might request $25 for card stock and photocopies. She estimates she can sell 50 postcards for $2 each tangibly for profit of $75 (this doesn't include scanning of the cards for virtual sales). The others will make suggestions and approve the use of the $25  from the pool of $750 for the mercado. I am willing to make the purchases on behalf of the students; but it is up to them to direct the use of the funds so that we don't just spend the allotment but earn it back to demonstrate how self-sustaining ventures operate. We can discuss how MACLA will distribute the profits, but I suggest allowing the kids to keep their profits minus 20% (to thank MACLA for the use of the Academy space and to sustain future workshops/installations).

In general, the $750 will be used efficiently to buy raw materials primarily that are used to make goods for sale.

There may be small amounts that might need to be bought (if cannot be found or gifted) such as paint supplies (to decorate booths), speakers soldered to inexpensive MP3 players (I've priced these at average $6 each) to mimic the voices of the merchants (when the kids aren't there, their recordings play), etc. Items such as these that might need to be purchased (rather than scraped together) should total less than $200. 

In addition, I want to mention that the virtual, online mercado can be an trial mercado  they can use to 'beta test'  their final offerings or offer additional merchandise than a 3D booth might allow for prior to the grand opening of the 3D installation. Sales of a few digital goods they've already made  or can quickly make (for instance, a PDF of a short comic book they created could be priced at $1). These profits can also be used for seed capital of the 3D mercado.

Questions for staff:

I am very open and flexible in terms of collaboration.

I am gathering a list of mentors and allies that might be able to assist us -- from providing advice (for instance, one youth might want to email a real person who sells foods and coffees such as coffee shop owner Nancy Coupal of Coupa Cafe) to others providing raw materials. I'm not sure how your organization works with the youth in terms of outside contact. What I can do is perhaps a Skype or phone call or emails from the Academy where we make our requests to these external mentors/allies (part of this is to teach them that they can learn how to rely and partner within an ecosystem of support from other entrepreneurs and artists). I guess what I am asking is if in their spare time they would be available and interested in making phone calls and email messages to people they might want to reach out to for extra assistance.

I have several acquaintances and friends that are available to volunteer in person. For instance, one friend [redacted for privacy] has a background in interior design, and has worked with many corporations including [redacted] to design and construct office spaces. Her father [redacted] is a well-known restaurant owner and entrepreneur. She has volunteered to help facilitate when we are in the "construction" phase of the 3D mercado for 1-2 days. It is not necessary to have additional volunteers, but in the spirit of also teaching that entrepreneurship is also about an ecosystem of mutual support, it might be a good experience.

I'm still formulating how the accelerator is structured, but I think about 1.5-2 hours per day for about 12 days is necessary; ideally, we have a break of 3-4 days between as I find it is useful to have a break when doing new, creative projects. I envision about 15 youth participating in the workshop and creating the mercado.

I would also suggest a field trip to TechShop one day, and/or another to the Friday Farmer's Market in San Pedro Square to see a few people who make and sell their wares in person. I'm not sure how or if field trips are possible with the youth.

PHOTO CREDIT: Popup storefront hand-decorated by designer Poketo.

ADDITIONAL: Pinterest inspiration board (primarily for visuals of the 3D mercado installation in the 398” x depth 226” x height (to ridge) 123” room. 

Introduction to "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho

Re-read Paulo Coelho’s introduction to “The Alchemist” and I am reminded again how much I love it.

I'm preparing to facilitate a workshop for Latino urban youth ages 13-18 years old on transmedia storytelling where I am going to encourage them to share their gifts and dreams with the world. I thought about how even when adults ask "What do you want to be when you grow up?" it's asked politely already hemmed by familial and culturally-condoned expectations. This book popped into my head as a possibility for an all-ages inspirational tome to pursue what calls you, and express that voice.

p.s. I'm taking a version of that workshop and making an online "summer camp" for all-ages too. Stay tuned.

Anyhow, here's the full Introduction to the book.

I remember receiving a letter from the American publisher Harper Collins that said that: "reading The Alchemist was like getting up at dawn and seeing the sun rise while the rest of the world still slept." I went outside, looked up at the sky, and thought to myself: "So, the book is going to be published in English!" At the time, I was struggling to establish myself as a writer and to follow my path despite all the voices telling me it was impossible.

And little by little, my dream was becoming a reality. Ten, a hundred, a thousand, a million copies sold in America. One day, a Brazilian journalist phoned to say that President Clinton had been photographed reading the book. Some time later, when I was in Turkey, I opened the magazine Vanity Fair and there was Julia Roberts declaring that she adored the book. Walking alone down a street in Miami, I heard a girl telling her mother: "You must read The Alchemist!" 

The book has been translated into fifty-six languages, has sold more than twenty million copies, and people are beginning to ask: What's the secret behind such a huge success?

The only honest response is: I don't know. All I know is that, like Santiago the shepherd boy, we all need to be aware of our personal calling. What is a personal calling? It is God's blessing, it is the path that God chose for you here on Earth. Whenever we do something that fills us with enthusiasm, we are following our legend. However, we don’t all have the courage to confront our own dream.

Why?

There are four obstacles.

First: we are told from childhood that everything we want to do is impossible. We grow up with this idea, and as the years accumulate, so too do the layers of prejudice, fear, and guilt. There comes a time when our personal calling is so deeply buried in our soul as to be invisible. But it’s still there.

If we have the courage to disinter dream, we are then faced by the second obstacle: love. We know what we want to do, but are afraid of hurting those around us by abandoning everything in order to pursue our dream. We do not realize that love is just a further impetus, not something that will prevent us going forward. We do not realize that those who genuinely wish us well want us to be happy and are prepared to accompany us on that journey.

Once we have accepted that love is a stimulus, we come up against the third obstacle: fear of the defeats we will meet on the path. We who fight for our dream suffer far more when it doesn’t work out, because we cannot fall back on the old excuse: “Oh, well, I didn’t really want it anyway.” We do want it and know that we have staked everything on it and that the path of the personal calling is no easier than any other path, except that our whole heart is in this journey. Then, we warriors of light must be prepared to have patience in difficult times and to know that the Universe is conspiring in our favor, even though we may not understand how.

I ask myself: are defeats necessary?

Well, necessary or not, they happen. When we first begin fighting for our dream, we have no experience and make many mistakes. The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and get up eight times.

So, why is it so important to live our personal calling if we are only going to suffer more than other people?

Because, once we have overcome the defeats—and we always do—we are filled by a greater sense of euphoria and confidence. In the silence of our hearts, we know that we are proving ourselves worthy of the miracle of life. Each day, each hour, is part of the good fight. We start to live with enthusiasm and pleasure. Intense, unexpected suffering passes more quickly than suffering that is apparently bearable; the latter goes on for years and, without our noticing, eats away at our soul, until, one day, we are no longer able to free ourselves from the bitterness and it stays with us for the rest of our lives.

Having disinterred our dream, having used the power of love to nurture it and spent many years living with the scars, we suddenly notice that what we always wanted is there, waiting for us, perhaps the very next day. Then comes the fourth obstacle: the fear of realizing the dream for which we fought all our lives.

Oscar Wilde said: “Each man kills the thing he loves.”

And it’s true. The mere possibility of getting what we want fills the soul of the ordinary person with guilt. We look around at all those who have failed to get what they want and feel that we do not deserve to get what we want either. We forget about all the obstacles we overcame, all the suffering we endured, all the things we had to give up in order to get this far. I have known a lot of people who, when their personal calling was within their grasp, went on to commit a series of stupid mistakes and never reached their goal—when it was only a step away.

This is the most dangerous of the obstacles because it has a kind of saintly aura about it: renouncing joy and conquest. But if you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World, and you understand why you are here.” 

Paulo Coelho

Rio de Janeiro

November 2002

Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

 

Money is congealed energy and releasing it releases life possibilities. - Joseph Campbell

"Money is congealed energy and releasing it releases life possibilities.

. . . I got back from my student years in Europe three weeks before the Wall Street crash. . . I'd earned several thousand dollars--which was a lot in those days--and that was what I had until it disappeared. I didn't make another cent for five years. I found that, if you had no responsibilities, you could live wonderfully without any money. In fact, I thought anybody who worked for money was a fool. I took a vow never to do anything for money. Now, that does not mean that when I do something for somebody I don't ask for money. I want as much as I can get, but that's the secondary part of the game. My life course is absolutely indifferent to money. As a result, a lot of money has come in by my doing what I feel I want to do from the inside. If you do that, you are doing things that attract money, because you are giving life and life responds in the way of its counterpart in hard coin.

Being as I was, and given the field I was interested in, I had a certain disdain for people who gave their lives to making money. Now that I have made money, in dealing with it I've had to be in touch with people whose business is money, whose whole life has been in that field, and I've had an interesting and surprising experience: I've met some magnificent people.

Money experienced as life experience is indeed a meditation, and letting it flow out instead of hoarding it is a mode of participation in the lives of others. There's a beautiful thing that can grow out of a life devoted to money tha surprised me.

In the living of life today, money is a facilitating energy source. With money in the tank like gasoline, you can get places you other wise couldn't go.

. . . From what I have seen in the history of the arts in New York, when money is poured on something it flowers. With money there has to be a flow. I had a beautiful experience of a man with money when I was a trustee of the Bollinger Foundation, which was founded by Paul Mellon, an enormously wealthy man. He and his wife had been in analysis with Carl Jung when the war came and they had to leave Switzerland. They asked Jung what they could give him in the way of a gift to express their gratitude for what he had done. He suggested they establish a foundation for the interpretation and study of symbols. That's whay they did, and it is an example of a lot of money being put to the right use. The influence of that Bollinger Series on on the literature and science of America has been enormous.

. . . When you put the money in the wrong place, it can be devastating. Where is the money [and its associated intent to prioritize, value, attend to] going and where is it coming from in the economy of a nation, the economy of a city? You can turn a flowering culture into a desiccating culture just by wrong channeling. What factor in your own consciousness are you going to favor in the spending of the money? For instance, I have a seventy-five-dollar book coming out. Some people will say that is expensive, but those same people will spend one-hundred-and-fifty dollars to have dinner in a restaurant with another couple. So, is the money going up here in your mind or is it going down there in your stomach?"

- from Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion, edited by Diane K. Olson

This is a companion blog for longer excerpts to cite transcriptions from books. The main blog on inspiration, imagination, innovation, improvisation, creativity, and the Call is over at Crossroads Dispatches by Evelyn Rodriguez. Since, I mentioned Campbell in this one, you may also be interested in the art, myth and alchemy blog called Fertile Verge.

This is Burning Man, by Brian Doherty

Some notes taken from a book about that experiment in a self-organizing culture and ephemeral city-springing, This is Burning Man, by Brian Doherty. And the subtitle is:

page 272
What I'm picking up from Larry's new dispensation [more anti-consumerist and political activism... BM used to be apolitical event] struck me as antithetical to what I originally found interesting about Burning Man--that it offered a seeking and celebration of creative expression and liberated experience as a key to brain change and a means to search for what one might call the sacred. There are times, though, when Larry and I are feeling the same things. "We are beings, created things," Larry tells me. "We're the products of genetic mutation, and we're infinitely variable. The world presents itself to us as an artifact with slots to fill. But everyone's gifts are unique and not necessarily apparent to the [people themselves] unless some circumstance calls them forth. The whole story of my progress," he surmises, "might seem blind and hapless. But there was from the beginning a sense of something real in me and the idea that it had to have a home out there somewhere. Intuitively, blindly, as chance allowed, I moved in that direction even if it didn't make any sense by the world's standards. The human world is like a flowery meadow, and the individual is like a weed--each one different. A wed is simply an unwanted plant. It's a human category. There's no such plant as a weed. But the human world is more and more a monoculture. Farmer Jones wants corn and everything else is a weed, and if you can't get with the corn program, Buster, then get your thistle ass out of here! That's the problem everyone faces."

As he looks around at Burning Man, Larry sees lots of weeds essaying things with no apparent practical purpose. "It's weeds, but it's their weeds. Who knows what that leads to? Maybe nothing. But unless people are given that opportunity they will never find out. If their judgments are always governed by the world's standards, they might never find that one thing they are brilliant at, that they were born to do, and that's the greatest tragedy of all--the quiet desperation Thoreau wrote of. That just means that they never discovered what they were meant to do with the transcendent faith that they were meant to do that something. And that's been the moral of my life."

There's a lot I could argue with Larry about, but not that.

page 273
[What is it?] This book, I hope, provides some answers to that question. It's a place for human beings to live vividly free lives and have--as Larry used to recognize--experiences that are fundamental, unconditional, marvelous, and worth a thousand lectures on why one ought not to shop at Wal-Mart. [Kind of giving Larry a jab on that last bit.]

page 274
Interactive is the buzzword for Burning Man-style art, defined by BRAF's Jessica Bobier as "art that blurs the line between artists and audience, with collaboration in the creation or the experience of the piece. Art that requires the action of a participant to complete the piece. It represents the opportunity for people to come together and incites them to interact with one another, whether directly because they are needed to make something happen, or just something so exciting it makes people gather, brings them together." It fits in smoothly with the old Burning Man dispensation: art that creates community, art that gives you an opportunity to have an experience other than spectating.

page 282
It didn't start out as an art festival. It didn't really start as anything but an act and an excuse to gather. "What is art, you know?" muses Michael Michael on the meaning of this train he's riding. "Why art at Burning Man? What is this art thing? There's something much larger here. Art is a vehicle, a symptom of something bigger occurring. It's spreading beyond the desert, beyond the playa. It's a way of being, of thinking, to change a person: That's the real story, the real thing that's happening."

The change--that knowledge within that you no longer have to be and think and act as you previously been and thought and acted if you don't wish to--is a mystery, and Burning Man has no monopoly on the technology of generating it. It can come in an instant like a thief in the night, like Christ, or after years of difficult discipline, like those spent with a yogi master, but what's important is that it can happen and that the technologies of change exist and Burning Man is very, very good at reminding people of that.

page 280
Chris Radcliffe: "You don't need to go to Puerto Vallarta and lay on the beach and eat fish and drink frozen daiquiris and read Jacqueline Susann novels. You can have a primary experience of existence instead of something processed and fed back to you. Someone once said to me, if you're being entertained, you're not having any fun. And that's perfectly right. What we were doing was a very primary thing."

The main blog is at Crossroads Dispatches; this is accompaniment blog for longer excerpts cited there.