Paul Newman: From Money to Myth

It may seem to be a departure to be talking about Paul Newman in the context of Breakout Creatives.  But he was an artist, and one aspect of his art is what I want to consider for a moment.
My wife Carol and I have inaugurated our own Paul Newman film festival recently.  We are watching the older films:  Hud, The Hustler, The Long Hot Summer, The Color of Money.  Butch Cassidy and The Sting are in the wings, but since we know practically every line of these movies, we are hold off on including these right now.
Just a note:  I am really struck by the oustandingly POOR quality of DVD collections of Paul Newman's oeuvre.
Back to the idea.  Many of Newman's films were about money: what it takes to get it, the status it confers, the game that builds around it.  And then the movies portray a character that goes through that gauntlet and comes out the other side, not reduced to some naive morality, the Jimmy Steward line, but a far more complex picture.  He comes out at a mythic level of life, where morality is not transcended, but it is of less consequence than taking on a life that is being fully lived, expanding to the fullest range of engagement, freedom and self-generated vitality that our mortal way has to offer.  Even it that means taking on the Bolivian Army in order to make way to the next adventure.
Newman portrayed money as a gateway to a transition that some will elect to pass through, and others will simply not venture.  Staying in the money world alone corrodes the spirit into resentment and cynicism while transcending it may mean death, but it means also stepping into freely chosen mortal vitality.
Did he personally see life and his art in that way?
I don't know, of course.  But I think so.
Remember this: The profits from his line of good quality foods go to support camps for kids with fatal diseases.  The profit from selling stuff helps kids, whose mortality is crushing them, to participate in life's self-generating care, joy and vitality to the full extent that they can.  He opened a path to that portal from money to myth  that all of us can pass through.  (If you own a Keurig coffee maker, try the Paul Newman Extra Bold brand!!!.)
Artists always found ways to help people migrate from the oppression of power, money and wealth to the liberating dimensions of living.  That was the original role of symbol, rite and eventually religion, a role created by the artist (until it was usurped by tyrants who donned the robes of liberation and created the priesthood, theocracy and modern monotheistic power-religions).
Newman portrays this great "arteous" passage in many guises:  as romantic release, as playful liberation, as tragic failure.
In whatever way it turns out, he portrays this passage. And, he makes the passage real for us:  the artist's touch at its best.

Outrageous, Inequality: An Autoimmune Disease

Below I repeat the opening lines to a blog entry I made on www.abqseeker.blogspot.com

I am repeating this in order to draw attention to this situation that stands to destroy our culture.

Breakout Creatives of all types have to step into the fray to end this rampant disease of mind, heart, individual, family and culture:

"Read this quote carefully.  I am going to break it up into discrete lines, like a poem, to make the impression that you must take away from it even more vivid.

It is taken from an article by Malcolm Gladwell (Blink and The Tipping Point) in The New Yorker Magazine (October 11, 2010).  It concerns Barry Bonds, who played for the San Francisco Giants (from 1993 - 2007), and who may be one of the greatest baseball players of all time -- whose career ended in disgrace because of the steroids scandal in baseball in 2006-9. After breaking Hank Aaron's all-time home run record, he was not offered a contract to return to the Giants and no other team offered him a contract.

He is the son of Bobby Bonds, who played for the same Giants from 1968 - 74.

That generational thing is important.  Here is the quote:

[Barry Bonds] ended up making more IN ONE YEAR

than ALL the members of his father's San Francisco Giants team made

IN THEIR ENTIRE CAREERS

COMBINED.

People, this is not just a travesty (considering, for instance, how much we pay teachers), it is an auto-immune disease of our society.

Instead of attacking greed, our society now promotes and advances it.  Instead of greed being contained, it has become a worthy goal."

In the forthcoming issue of Leader Pathways I write about how leaders break the mold of zero-sum models of human interaction.  The crisis of income inequality I cite here and in the Abqseeker blog is one that leaders have a special contribution to make.  They exemplify what building communities and true national wealth is all about.  

Our politics have veered so dangerously off track -- giving voice as being legitimate -- to counterfeit and frightfully stupid notions and the idiot mouthpieces for it (Beck, Palin, Boehner, McConnell, et. al.) that such inequality is actually being fostered.  It is a sinking ship mentality -- and one not like the leader of the Chilean miners who insisted on coming up last -- but one where behavior that pushes other back on the sinking ship while they take all the lifeboats. 

As recent articles in the New Yorker Magazine have pointed out, the effort to attain this state of affairs has been going for decades now.  In the current issue, the breakthrough of the nut cases in the Republican party has finally occurred, in the form of Rove, Tea Parties, etc.  Libertarian voices only want government to protect their right to greed and the gains they make by devoting their lives to it.  

Breakout Creatives, step up and stem this disease.  

Artists, write, paint and compose (ala Springsteen) about the eclipse of hope such greed sets loose in people's lives.

Prophets, write and make clear the concepts of social viability that are being demolished here.

Mystics, pronounce your precepts that show the utter venality of this mentality.  Another way, maybe a whole other system has to be imagined, envisioned and articulated.

Leaders, create organizations that demonstrate how the greater good is only made possible when people give to something greater than their own private enrichment.

Check out the New Video Tutorial

Be sure to check out the new video tutorial on YouTube.  In it I say why the Breakout Creatives Project is important to you.  It's only 6 minutes and features a new tag at the end -- not to be missed.

See the New Video Tutorial

Breakout Creatives: The Long Way to Difference

What's the "Difference"

What makes Breakout Creatives different from others?

 “Difference? ”Hmmmm. Very judgmental, isn’t it?  And who the hell am I, or you, or anyone to mark someone as different.  When it comes right down to it, all the ways we have of marking people as “different” really serve to make us feel good about ourselves:  “She may be smart, but I am the one making money,” for instance.  These ways of making differences usually is based on a quantity of something:  more intelligence, more money, more beauty, more athletic prowess than….; and then there usually follows some kind of reward for there being a quantitatively greater amount of something that is in play.

So, in that vein of thinking, are Breakout Creatives more…. of something, and so others, are less?

No.

They have just the same amount of “stuff” – talent, energy, ambition, smarts, fears -- in various combinations as do others.  But what is different about them is their attitude toward their orientation.  An attitude doesn’t add any amount of quantitative capability to anything (although a positive attitude may engender something, and a negative attitude might detract, and in either case might result in quantifiable differences) and one’s orientation is not even a matter of one’s ego, but just how one takes up a position, place, a direction in one’s life.

So there is a difference.  But it is twice removed from what is quantifiable.

The Attitude: The Resolve to Aspire

What is different about Breakout Creatives:  Attitude.

It is their attitude toward their orientation to their lives, work and aspirations that is different.  

Their Attitude:  An openness and affirming resolve; their orientation: a look outward,toward the as yet not in “existence.”  And so they aspire to something that doesn't exist yet.

That difference makes absolutely no difference to anyone else, unless it inspires someone; and it is a difference that while positive, does not result in there being “more” of something that has a price tag, or is quantifiable.  Breakout Creatives are different in ways that don’t matter to others (or that at best irritate others for their strangeness, obtuse obscurities and non-participative refusals), unless they too feel a yearning, an aspiration that they too want to treat with resolve.

What is really most important to note in all this is that their attitude flies below the radar of the given world, and sets in motion the kinds of musings and wonderings that just might take hold and make a difference that does matter, down the road.  But this process does not take place in any of the ways we have been trained to recognize achievement or newness.  Instead, Breakout Creatives do what they do with complete innocence, seemingly oblivious to even the need for recognition – although they feel and often resent the righteous indignation that is thrown their way by our venerated guardians.

What I am saying here is that to appreciate what Breakout Creatives offer, we have to look at “difference” differently.

  Maybe, these people are really living in ways that, true, we don’t understand; and maybe, maybe most certainly, they don’t understand either.  But, what if affirming a different orientation to the way our living transpires and shapes itself offered something?  Or, think of it this way:  how else but in such an attitude toward strangeness does anything that affects the human endeavor come about?  But to ask that question is already far ahead of us.

Maligned 20-Somethings: An Evolutionary PHenomenon?

I think of an article in the August 21, 2010 issue of the New York Times Magazine about 20-somethings.  These people live at home longer, don’t form relational commitments until later in life – than people of preceding generations did.  The implication of the article is that these people require a longer gestation period for becoming adults like us, like what we think adults have always been and are supposed to be.  And so, one psychologist characterizes this period as “emerging adulthood.”

Now, for me, this all makes sense.  When I am in my “adult mode,” that is.  Maybe because these kids spend so much time with video games and texting, the “real world” of hard bodies, flesh, feelings and obligations takes longer to get comfortable with.  And because the brain isn’t fully formed, the emotions spurred by strangeness become fear, and fear locks one into passivity.  

But in my mode as a mentor to breakout creatives, I find this article and its premise appalling.  

I ask, why is it that we have to approach people who are "different," with the presumption that our way is the "right" way?  And what I mean is, why can't we at least ask whether or not something might be in the works with this generation that we ought to pay attention to, learn from, and examine for seeds of a new nuance to the human endeavor.  

My Own 20-Something Years.

I think of my life in those years.  According to the norms of those times (the 1960’s), I left home, went to college, the army, grad school, and so I was out on my own – and between you and me, my life was a mess every day.  But I didn’t retreat home, I slogged on getting jobs, getting fired, starting businesses, falling in and out of love and relationships.  It was ugly, but I was out there!!!

Now, here’s the trip-up question: What if I was wrong to embark out into the “world” this way?  What if my insistence of charging into the world was actually deadening and wounding of some other kind of life that my psychic/somatic being was being called to take up?  What if staying at home (I cringe at the thought, really) and allowing a slower gestation would have helped more (maybe if college was 6 years, and grad school was 10)? But then, I think there really was a “value” in going out into the world unformed:  into this chaotic soup of a psychic fog came lightening bolts of “reality” that formed ways that could be submitted to test, experiment, judgement (my own most of all).  Do the stay-at-home 20-somethings get that?  Does that matter?

 What I am saying is, what if it were the case that evolutionary possibilities now underway in the human fold require longer gestation to take shape and these young people are acting appropriately (albeit deviantly) for the sake of the emergence of a new capability?  What if all that testing and experimenting of mine really deflected, defeated and dissipated that impulse toward something outside the circle of certainties?  What would have happened in my work if I had been more patient, tolerant, heedful with regard to the very forces that resisted being conventionally molded, smoothed and rendered functional?

Evolutionary What?  ... Facultative Development.

"What? " you say. "These lazy, lost, disconnected, texting mutants are avatars of a new evolutionary development?  Are you kidding?  Is that a real thought?" 

Well, yes it is. 

Hear me out.

In the world of Breakout Creatives, we envision a process called “Facultative Development.”  We think it is possible that the development of new psycho/somatic capabilities for discerning, organizing, expressing and learning did not end either with the rising of language or the instituting of Reason (in the West especially).  But that new capabilities, that discern modes that actually generate what we take to be God or our given state of Nature.  Ways of engaging moments when great cosmic energies coalesce and constellate into more complex states, even to life.

So, what if we stepped back and wondered if whether this generation might be developing something new?  By orienting toward images, by cutting language loose from formality and books, by allowing strange and diffuse emotions to work around before getting pinned down into conventional forms – what if this heralded some new mode of discernment and marked the longer gestation of a more complex faculty? 

What if we didn’t enforce our standards on them?  What if, instead, with the possibility that Breakout Creative forces are alive and well, right in those messy bedrooms, we fostered an affirming attitude toward this orientation of theirs and helped them engender a formation of something new?  And what if we don’t know how to help foster this new way – being ensconced, as we are in our rationally economic-driven habits; and certainly these young people don’t know what is happening or is going to unfold from their forming beings.  What if we, and they, just have to wait, and admit that we just don’t know what, if anything is going on here; but maybe?

People who embrace breakout creativity challenge themselves with questions such as this.  Now that is different.

Begin...

"Read these poems to yourself in the middle of the night. turn on a singl lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture... has momentarily stopped...."

Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem.

"Make up you own ritual for courting the muse or creating the right conditions for inspiration. Fix up a place in your home or office to be your creativ space. think about setting aside a certain time each day to create. You don't have to commit to it yet; just think about what wold be a good time for you. When during the day do you feel most creative?"

John Dillon, The 20-20 Creativity Solution

There are two main streams of parody of American Life now current. One is the decrepit male, boorish, ignorant, lazy, clueless, as sexually obsessed and vulgar as he is inept and sterile. The other is the harried careerist, chasing after some socially sanctioned dream job that really sucks the characters dry. Both ring true from my experience.

At a different level, but also disheartening, I recall my work at a top notch Silicon Valley company as a leader mentor. My mentees were mostly graduates of graduate programs at Stanford and MIT. Not one of these 30-somethings had read a major book, in any area, since leaving school. Their reading consisted of the newspaper, the web and technical/business books. And, for good reason. All had insanely demanding jobs, young families and 2-hr plus commutes. What chance does good reading have against those demands? Not much.

So, the Breakout Creatives Project faces a hurdle, right out of the box: it takes time, study, attention, discipline, a love of being vulnerable to new ways of envisioning one's world to even appreciate other breakout creatives' works, no less produce ones of one's own. In my leader mentoring, I have realized that people only have so much time, energy, attention span or even desire, to engage aspirations that involve developing skills of character and attentive responsibility. If it can't be done with a mental trick... maybe another day.

Yet, I sense a deep yearning out there, among all those deep-minded and large-hearted young leaders I have worked with. And I feel it elsewhere in conversations with those who would be artists, mystics and prophets. For all the screaming of the comedians, the outlandishness of performers, the rage of slam poets, the fake passion of pundits, there is an implicit message: something is trying to find its way into our lives that is now thwarted at every turn. These faux dramatizations intend to capture and deflect this undercurrent and turn it into cash. But, that current is there, beating like a heart, pumping what, if it does not nurture life becomes bile.

There is no other way, my friends. You have to turn off the machine, switch off the noise. My friend John's 20-20 solution -- 20 minutes in the morning, 20 at night, is a technique for beginning to do the generative work. Then, after that preparatory time, the work begins: the difficult poem, the dense and obscure tract of fiction or non-fiction, that challenge passage of music, that idea that can't seem to be pried loose and into language.

Where can you "find" the time? (The construction of that notion is preposterous when it is put into writing -- and so is the idea it expresses:  time/Where/find...??). You can't. It can't be "found," as though it was "there" waiting for you. The only question is John's : When are you most creative? And then claim it; take it; protect it; you --- give it life by activating with the most challenging work you can accommodate.

The Breakout Creative figures we study have given over their whole lives to these demands, and paid a price. Most of us compromise. Even the great American poet Wallace Stevens worked in an insurance company (as did Kafka). Part of the mentor's job in working with people like us, who struggle with this demand, is helping them reconstruct one's waking hours. Do you want some help?

But then, after the conversation, you, alone with your thoughts, immersed in the demands of your work and family, smothered by the cultural imperatives of an overly extroverted work ethic, all inundate you. Still, it's up to you.

The good new is that the writers, artists, thinkers, poets, musicians and actors we cite in our project are so superb, if you give yourself over to them, they will reward you. If you make appointments with them, regularly, and give them your deepest attention, they will give you strength to go onward into your breakout creatives work.

But, begin.

Aspiration and Mentoring: The Child's Wonder

“Childhood did not speak out, but it did possess; manhood does speak out, but it is missing something.” Max Kommerell (quoted by D.F. Krell in Death of Empedocles; p. 278.)


From this quote we muse on the theme of aspiration. What a strange thing aspiration is. Here is a longing and a yearning that burns so forcefully as to take command of one’s life, and yet it can promise no assured outcome, can announce no assured goal, and yields only the urge to sustain itself, a life of aspiring.


Sources of Aspiration

That is why I find this quote so intriguing. Looking at aspiration from this perspective we can think of aspiration as flowing from exactly this difference between the child and the adult. Aspiration we can say, has three sources: childhood and family dynamics; genetic formations of the psyche; and adult trauma. None of these factors necessarily give rise to the inception of aspiration. Instead, aspiration arises when a certain attitude and orientation toward those events is taken up. This is an attitude, of course that sees in these circumstances not reasons for giving up or excuses that justify self-justifying abuses, but opportunity; then this attitude ushers to the forefront a great wealth of energy to engage those opportunities.


Whence the individuality and uniqueness of one’s aspirations, however? That is where this quote strikes me as most telling. As a child grows, what was once a fluid and open psyche, full of wonder, concentrates into an ego, dominated by customs and rules. This concentrating of the child’s psyche can be thought of as a “contraction.” The great and flowing expanse of the child’s psyche contracts into a “smaller” but more capable “mind,” constructed of concepts, categories directed toward social and professional skills, moral actions and specified ambitions. The ego of the adult thus leaves behind a vacated “space.” Where once there was a realm filled with energy and activity, there remains only dust, ash and remnants of now diminished energy.


For most, that realm is so diminished that it exerts no force at all on the dominating adult psyche; however, for some, the dust is kept in circulation by a reserve of energy that does not so easily dissipate. So, for these people, there remains in effect an “aural” realm that surrounds the functioning ego (and super-ego) that still exerts a pull and affects the functionally focused ego state of the adult. This aural realm still comprises and emits the feel that wonder once elicited, the naïve, dynamic, fanciful and dramatic ways it seemed the world worked, and also reprises the sense of powers of one’s living that cannot not be daunted by alleged impossibility.


Aspiration arises when this aura is allowed some leeway to affect the adult, making transformation possible and even desirable. When the aura is allowed such sway, all the events that promote aspiration take shape. One’s biography of a troubled or challenging childhood (and difficult parental influences) can become a story of the simple joys of daydreams, wanderings, experimenting excursions and burgeoning interests. One’s supposed weaknesses and confusions and difficulties at resolving seemingly impenetrable ambiguities can become gateways to one’s creative powers. Traumas have a way of loosening the grip of generalized convention and send a person into a deep self-examination for different sources of strength, into a resolute search for new pathways.


The Mentoring Moment


Here’s where mentoring comes in. The aspiring adult feels the pull of a great conflict. On the one hand, lurking in this person’s being a call to something more expansive and more encompassing in his or her life. Yet, as an adult, this person is no longer amenable to the naively open wonder of the child, and instead demands competence and effectiveness in the functioning social, economic and historical world. The conflict stops movement in both directions: no longing, but no advancing of competence either. The person is stuck, in a quandary. To leave the aspiration behind seems to be a deep personal betrayal; but to act naively and precipitously seems irresponsible, if not down right idiotic.


The mentor forms a bridge between the two demands so that a person can commit to aspiration in a way that is both competent and effective. How does the mentor do this? Not by offering advice, counsel or coaching. The mentor listens. The mentor takes the time to hear the yearnings that call out from that aura and validate them for the mentee. Then the mentor helps the mentee to envision a way of living that can viably answer the call. The mentor does not help the mentee form a career path or consolidate skills that will be necessary. The mentor does not dispense “life advice.”


Instead, by listening, in a lively and engaged silence, the mentor helps the mentee appreciate the role and way, the shape of a life that once again embraces that aura, now being heard as the adult’s aspiration. Only the aspirations of the mentee’s own voice are heard, and so, for once, that fragile and barely alive aural realm can have its way.


Note, it is not “strengths” and talents that are emphasized by the mentor. Paradoxically, those very places, ways and states that are often decried as weaknesses or distractions from attaining one’s goals and ambitions become the places where aspiration can take hold. In the mentor’s eyes, it is exactly the pulsing aspirations from this great aural realm that has not allowed the adult psyche to harden into imperatives. This still beating pulse from the enlivening aura has stemmed the "mind's" progressive hardening; the welter of energies that flow in the mentee’s life still can have some affect.


These may cause confusion and make for a person's "weaknesses," but peel away the crust of the ego's hard shell, and the mentors finds aspiration's faint voice straining to be heard. What in the eyes of the society at large can appear as “weaknesses,” as faults that prevent “success” can, when channeled into a vision of aspiration, become a vast field of deep energies that offer vitality, if not validity to one’s decisions.


The Companion to Aspiration’s Call


Aspiration thus responds to a call that is at once mystifying and unsettling, and also irrepressible and irresistible. It cannot be denied because it emanates from one’s own decisions. It is not the “shadow” or “dark side” of one’s decisions that so speaks. It is instead, the affirming power that lingers in the wake of abandoned wonder. It is not even the “light” of a revelation or insight or realization of meaning or mandate. Instead it is a voice, random tones that instigate longing in the most specific and yet obscure of ways. Aspiration has to respond to what no longer speaks in an intelligible language, but what only can be answered by setting out on a lifeway, setting into motion a commitment to being a person who has a calling, after all.


The mentor is the companion to this commitment as it is forming. The result of the mentoring engagement is commitment. The mentor supplies a gaze, not quite a language, in which the new ways demanded by the call gather together into an intelligible and sustainable way. It is as much the silence of the mentor, emulating the voice of aspiration itself, which is offered. That is, the mentee once again takes possession of a great sense of the spirit of aspiration and wonder. Together, mentor and mentee bring out a person of aspiration, one who speaks out, possesses and competently brings forth a vision of a more expansive and more encompassing human endeavor.

Where Thought Breaks Off

In his famous poem
Stefan George make us see,
"Where the word breaks off,
No thing may be."

More humbly, this to me
Sadly seems so clear:
Where thought breaks off, only
Money, God, or War appear.

E Equals M C Squared

Though we may look solid, round and square,

Deep, deep down, there's nothing there.

Einstein's E=MC squared says to me,
Everything is made of energy.

Slowing to less than the speed of light
The stuff collides, connects and forms a site.

You ask, How then do we come to be,
Out of stuff so empty, to such complexity?

We come by love o'er reaches and twain
We attract and swirl, as in a hurricane.

Atoms to molecules, molecules to cells
Gather we do and bodies swell.

And so it is with minds and brains
They swish and pop as feelings change.

Ideas come, and thoughts pass by,
Great storms of images spark and fly.

We ride on wisps with wings of light,
We feel, act, speak and dream at night.

So rejoice in MYSTICS who illumine the way,
In ARTISTS who mark our places to stay.

Rejoice in PROPHETS whose words make worlds real
And LEADERS who ignite the people's zeal.

Things of air, we become again
And onward we go to no now, where or when.

Beyond earth and sea and plain
as E=MC squared, we venture again.

The Kurzwell Follies: The Fallacy of Technological Salvation

In the Business Section of the New York Times (June 13, 2010) an article caught my attention. Entitled “Merely Human? So Yesterday:  The Singularity Movements Sees a Merger of Technology and the Mine,” the article describes this movement’s pretention to offer a way to what they consider to be a new stage of humanity.  “They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process.”  

They envision a “time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and live will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.”

The Breakout Creative Project also envisions some kind of species-level transformation; so how do the two visions compare?

Here I will note three points where the Breakout Creative Project emphatically diverges from the Singularity movement’s core conceptions (as described in this extensive article).

Three Fallacies:

First: Its “Utopian” nature.  I define “utopianism” as a mental exercise that  deploys instruments of one kind or another (scientific, political, religious) to implement one overriding idea that purports to “solve” humanity’s ills.  Human history is replete with such monomaniacal dreams and at least since the 17^th Century, these dreams have relied on the wonders of technology and science, in addition to religious fantasies to accomplish human redemption. In this case, the “quasi-religious answers to the fountain of youth” have to do with ameliorating the ills of the body and mortality.  Other utopian ideas have focused on race or class as indicators of superiority.  In all cases, they end up creating distinctions between have’s and have-not’s, and privileging one group over another.  

One commentator remarks, “It is rich people building a lifeboat and getting off the ship.”  The danger of such a thing happening permeates all utopian notions.  (In another article, in the Book Review section, for example, Justin Vaïsse describes the decline and increasingly rigid and nationalistic course of the “neo-conservative” movement – a fate of all utopian schemes, we believe.)

Second: “We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzwell, the ingenious and peripatetic icon of the movement. Such a vision betrays its mechanistic core.  Biology consists of a complex and integrated assemblage of mechanisms in organisms, which both stabilize and repeat certain processes, and also evolve and adapt to changing circumstances, within a range prescribed by the constituents of the mechanisms.  The movement’s idea is to extend the operational range of these mechanisms with nanotechnologies, genetic manipulations and pharmaceuticals.  

One movement avatar expects to live to 700.  We ask, why stop there?

In the Breakout Creative world, the envisioned transformation does not occur on the level of the biological, but on the level of the total psychic/somatic mode of engagement humans (at least, but not exclusively) have with all of occurrences that burst and sparkle around, amid and through us.  That is, the Breakout Creative project entails the development of new faculties that more closely approach moments of pure emergence that are not yet resolved into any mode, biological or other and yet give rise to all such modes. 

No mechanism suffices here; what we envision does, however entail a wider grasp of what we call “thought.”  Thought is not calculation and mechanization, but real open and opening engagement of one’s whole being, that touches upon how the language of nature and the cosmos “write out” what cannot be anticipated or expected at all.

The facile notion of biological extension simply exploits the fantastically rich and varied means by which combinations of existing entities in nature can endure and be affective.  But in the mode of “thought” (and not mere calculation and rationalization) we have already opened a non-biological dimension.  Thought places the human in contact with moments of emergence that have not been comprehended, no less translated into a biological form.  The drive toward art and new modes of science, such as self-organization and quantum physics did not originate in the biological realm, but in thought.

I love the comment cited in the Book Review section of the Times (also June 13, 2010) in an article entitled, “Random Acts of Science” (I love that title) by Paul Dirac, a true Breakout Creative figure and a founder of modern quantum physics: “quantum mechanics was the first mathematical theory in science in which the discoverers did not fully understand the meaning of the terms in their own equations (p. 25).” Welcome to the world of the Breakout Creatives Project.

And that goes to the third concern:  Its notion of exponentialism.  This is another version of 17^th century science fictions of gigantism and Frankenstein, but now tamed and put to the service of human… something.  This is an idea whose time really has to go away. Exponentialism means that change along an already defined and identified trajectory increases by multiplying by factors of itself, rather than by an external and constant multiplier. 

Nature and the cosmos do not work this way.  

Nature works by accumulations of factors accreting to the constitution of an entity to the point where its structures are no longer sufficient to sustain its own weight, density and meliorating, complicated contrivances.  At a certain point, the increasing complexity of the entity gives way to a symmetry-break occurs, and the first entity (from atoms to galaxies and organisms) completely disperses.  Under the right conditions, some components of the old entity mix with and encompass (completely foreign) new, freely available energies from the surrounding milieus and may even self-organize into a new entity.  The factors from the previous entity may carry forward into the new structure, and so some manner of continuity is maintained from one side of the symmetry-break to the other – or not. 

Thus the movement even misappropriates the idea of “singularity.”  This is a notion that comes not from exponential accumulation, but from symmetry-breaking.  It envisions an “event” as comprising a moment of dispersion, loss and epochal division, not the establishment of a process we control or guide. 

The hubris of this mal-appropriation of the idea dazzles me.

In the Breakout Creative Project we envision humans as a species that drives toward instigating its own symmetry-breaking – and most decidedly not its own biological preservation. Humans are willing to die to strike out toward uncharted frontiers. We envision a drive that is not oriented toward immortality, but one that embraces mortality as a model for giving way to more expansive and encompassing ways of engaging cosmic, natural and earth-generated energies.  We take our cue from the earth, as in the notion of “humility.”  The idea of continuing human biology flies in the face of such a reverence for the mortality that gives rise to any and all modes of singularized beings throughout the universe.  

Again, their arrogance amazes me.

Wrong-Headed 

As I see it, this is just another example of the pre-mature and wrong-headed appropriation of the great mystic notion of humans as direct expressions of cosmic potencies. In this case, the still-alluring 17^th Century conceits of the omnipotence of Reason, the Mind, and Science is rushing to the solutions it is capable of, and not doing the longer, harder, more patient and expansive work of discerning what a great cosmic impetus really demands of us, offers us and may portend as a path.

The notion the Breakout Creatives Project envisions is one in which humans develop new faculties, new orientations, new manners of engaging what occurs.  Technology may, indeed will, abet this effort.  But the end point is obscured and left open:  we envision a symmetry-break occurring that forbids prediction, or even remembrance of a former way of being human (just as we now have no way to relate to the minds of our forebears of a millennium ago). 

We sense that the drive of being human has nothing to do with immortality but has everything to do with ever more approaching that moment when actuality itself emerges and we open whatever we have been in order to embrace, celebrate the occurrence of what comes forth.

 

No Apologies; But Deep Gratitude

Readers comment about the difficulty of following some of the ideas presented here.  They are abstract or conceptual or philosophical.  Lay readers -- mentors, creative types, friends of the project -- find the notions here strange and hard to follow.
I cannot apologize, and I have to ask readers to do the work, follow what they can, and/or ask me to do a better job clarifying the ideas.  But I can't do away with these ideas.
Why?  Because breakout creative figures are about aspiration, and such a mindset and lifeway has to be appreciated on its own level.  Aspiration is about what is coming and doesn't exist yet, and still commands the decisions and values of people who hold them.
The breakout creative project intends to do a these things:
1.  Inform and train mentors to support these aspiring people.
2. Foster conversation among the creative types, and so increase communication and amplify the potential reception and effect of their work.
3.  Provide each type with a defining picture of their "mindsets," such that they experience the difficulties they do, and they are able to envision the breakout worlds they do.
4.  Provide each type with a sense of how their mindset connects with the larger human endeavor;  and that is, to grasp how this kind of creativity came to have around it the expectations and preferences it does -- as a matter of evolution and history.
5.  Most importantly, to help these figures and those who care for them and support them to see how this work is generative, making more alive and acting closer to the heart of what makes the human endeavor the difficult and yet commanding way it is.
To do this, we are forced to consider how it is that breakout creatives' values and life choices and needs do not track with the mainstream -- and how those who aspire to be "creative" need to deviate from the norming, leveling, dulling routines, prescriptions and "common sense" notions that prevail.
And so our ideas have to be "out there," and then get difficult to explain.
Our ideas cannot rely on common sensical, technical and managerial notions, but they do rely on deep research into what great thinkers and creative people are envisioning for a more expansive and encompassing human endeavor.  Nothing presented in this project is a matter of pure speculation, but comes from a deep study of people worth studying.
Self-organization and generativity underly all our work -- and so departs from cause and effect logic, or theological ideas of "presence" or mechanistic notions of "personal development."  Instead, we have to see how we grow through a process of gathering recollections that accrete and amass until a "symmetry break," a new frame of openness to life exerts itself.
Then contemporary work in philosophy, literary criticism, social thought, biology and neuroanatomy, new research in history all come into play.
I attempt to synthesize these influences into a narrative about each figure that accomplishes the objectives listed above.  This narrative is difficult because it uses new ideas not yet taught in schools in order to give substance and veracity to the feelings and drives that constitute aspiration.
This blog will focus on some of the seminal ideas used in the project in hopes of providing another stab at clarity.  The rest is up to the reader.
My deep respect and admiration, and deeper appreciation and gratitude is offered to each and every one of you who does try to stay with me.  My deepest respect and care is offered to all those who want to join with all of us who share the need to firm our aspirations into thoughts an actions that will open the human endeavor to the new horizons it craves, at the core of its being.
Please tell me what ideas you would like to know more about.
Please read the drafts of work published in the public folder (see www.breakoutcreatives.net.
Work with me.

Notice: Blog Change

Dear Readers,  All of you, wherever you are.
I am restoring this site to its original purpose of providing articles on key concepts of the breakout creative project.
Topical remarks that had been posted on this site have been moved to 
abqseekers.blogspot.com
Please excuse any inconvenience, but some readers have asked for short and pointed articles on the ideas of the project, aside from the larger works either posted in my public folder or in the works.
For an index to all my work, please go to:
www.breakoutcreatives.net


Thank you.

We Need a New Psychiatry

   Louis Menand’s article “Head Case,” in the March 1, 2010 of The New Yorker asks,  “Can Psychiatry Be a Science?”

     There is no simple answer to that question.  Freud’s whole life was devoted to making psychotherapy into a science.  The immediate fragmentation of his work into multiple schools gave an indication of how fraught with ambiguities such an effort is. To make psychiatric treatment a “science” requires definitions of diseases, their origins, etiology, diagnosis and treatment that are as materially based as those applied to the treatment of physical diseases.  Instead, psychiatric efforts are dogged by ambiguity, litanies of expanding “syndromes,” some of which supposedly relate to the same “disease.” The derivations of these syndromes, as collected in the “manual” of psychiatric diagnoses, called the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), turns out to be more indicative of social norms than “material” conditions of disease. 

     This is no surprise.  Anyone who is familiar with the termination of persecution of witchcraft or of the wider acceptance, in some circles, of the deviant behaviors of artists, for instance, knows how social norms shape our perception of what constitutes a mental “disease” or “disorder.”  Of course, the increased diagnosis of ADD, for instance, indicates a (compensatory? – we always need our demons) shift toward increasing ascription of deviance and less toleration of disruption to the machinic processes we think of as being normal.  For the philosophers, Foucault’s Madness and Civilization speaks exactly to this issue (while his The Birth of the Clinic speaks to the social basis for the identification and treatment of what we now call disease – creating two moving targets in this discussion). 

      I see the whole discussion as stemming from a huge category mistake.  Grant that the medical diagnosis of physical diseases has merit and is effective – a proposition that also seems to be contested by holistic and homeopathic orientations.  Medical treatment of physical tissues is made possible because physical tissues are relatively stabilized into somewhat machinic, repetitious sequences and relations (still vast, not fully demarcated or understood) for which triggers and modulators, if not effective blockers, can be found. 

       Treatment by pharmaceuticals or surgery or rehabilitation is effective within prescribed ranges.  By contrast, psychic processes are completely relational and self-generating, differentiating and auto-stabilizing from moment-to-moment.  Even so-called “normal” behaviors are set in motion by complex, variable and only partially stable (within a range of internal and external limits and thresholds).  Thus, there is no firm basis on which a “disease” can be labeled (other than neuronal dysfunction or atrophy or over –production) in a way that is analogous to physical disease.  This is a largely mistaken route engendered by an over confidence in the materiality of the “mind-brain” connection. 

     This overconfidence is precisely the “affliction” that quantum mechanics and relativity and their offspring overcame in the realm of physics.  Freud’s model suffers from exactly the classical presuppositions of materiality, action/reaction and absolute space that marked the (Newtonian) physics of his time.  

The model of self-organization, the model of psychic/somatic self-generation and ordering holds great promise for re-orienting our comprehension of the mind, just as quantum physics offered whole new vistas of comprehension and engagement with the physical world. In this model (see Theren and Smith, Stuart Kauffman, Varela or Kelso, for example) there are no fixed mental parameters, only the massively collective self-organizing dynamics of self-forming engagements.  

     If Freud had the self-organizing model to appeal to, for instance, he could have cited the drive of the psyche to generate new awareness out of free flowing energies (in language and in abundant physical connection) as being constrained into certain channels, instead of having to defend “material” forces (Newtonian point-to-point constellations of motion) such as libido, sex drive and even the death instinct. 

        Instead of contemporary “anxiety” or even “depression” we might be able to embrace highly differentiated modes of engagement of an organism grappling with radical self-organization on more or less moment-by-moment bases, as opposed to “fixing” a body of machinic processes that is “supposed to” behave in prescribed ways.  From there, we could engage in ameliorative actions that all parties work through so as to foster the greatest expression of those energies, without stigma, without drugs, but with genuine prospects for “health” of that being, We could engage with each other as beings living their ways into ambiguity and community. 

       This would be a new psychiatry, a generative one for all involved, to be sure. 

       We have far to go.

Crazy Times in Exo-Memory

    In the spirit of Louis Black, here is a news story that for sure fell between the cracks: according to an article in the New York Times, Feb 28, 2010, “Week in Review” (p. 3),  a fiction writer has copied huge passages from another author into her novel and still calls her work “original.” Another fiction writer cited in the article is unapologetic about wholesale appropriations, while another is “creating” a whole book that consists only of such quotations. This is really taking Tom Lehrer’s idea “plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize and always call it research” to another level.

    My reaction: a qualified, “go for it.”  This may actually be a positive turn in the creative endeavor.  Here is why I think that:

    Maybe the human “exo-memory” is now becoming more and more being freed from ownership, and is now more open for engendering more expansive human creativity. 

    Exo-memory includes all our cultural productions and artifacts, but it entails much more than that.  It comprises the actual contents of the memories of individuals, peoples and humanity itself – memories that used to be locked up in individual minds, conveyed only through creation narratives or in the secret rites of peoples. Humans have evolved in concord with their abilities to place objects that encompassed “meanings” for the people out into the external world.  These objects started as tools and artifacts, then became words and narratives, then icons, and then moved into writing – commandments, narratives, poems, dramas and histories, and then philosophies.

    As Leonard Shlain points out (The Alphabet versus the Goddess), great shifts in the sense of what it is to be human, and how to order human life correspond to developments in being able to disseminate this vast and expanding and enriching trove of externalized memory to wider groups of people. Merlin Donald, the evolutionary cognitive scientist, also marks the onset of the truly human “mind” as occurring when humans were able to place symbols and artifacts out into the public as means of defining a people (Origins of the Modern Mind). After at least 5 millennia of concerted effort, with the advent of the Internet, our collective exo-memory is “out there,” ready to be plumbed, dispersed, proliferated and launched into creative futures.

      What is new in these authors’ claims is that purely human “artistic” activity -- tied neither to material observations of nature nor to divine pronouncements -- is now seen as providing constituents of genuinely creative engagements. Human creativity is now placed right there, at our fingertips, in just human form, as just a fiction or a “fact,” or an image, forming a new, tentative, provisional and risky platform for the next engendering. 

      Using purely human productions as a basis for presenting “creative art” is not without precedent:  Warhol and Duchamp were already casting every day objects into modes of presentation (on canvases and pedestals) and contexts of display (galleries and museums) that was once reserved for works aspiring to “high art.” These icons of “pop” art were presented as paradoxical, ironical and interrogatory; they posed a challenge to weary, exhausted, secularized experience.  Maybe, by claiming these authors’ compilations of existing writings described as original works, help us ask different questions: are we adequately sensitive and awake to the creative powers the human endeavor encompasses; and are we ready to embrace the vanishing, ephemeral, useless quality of these powers as all we have?

     Let’s face it, as the music industry and the publishing world are experiencing first hand, the proliferation of creative works, spilling out beyond the reach of the gatekeepers has changed our relationship to human creative efforts. And the dangers of the liberated proliferation of human expression are also apparent. The web echoes and amplifies suspicion or ignorance-based rants; these pathologies become entombed in halls of mirror websites and cable channels where they become rarified and rendered more amenable to death-dealing extremism (as holy writ, as is the case in much of the internet-spawned nut cases that collect in religions cults and tea party- like political movements).  Sadly, as Shlain points out, this kind of infantilism with new media goes hand in hand with the proliferation and freeing of exo-memory into ever-wider populations.

      But…, maybe., despite these inevitable slippages and dangers, maybe this new mode of “originality” in literature marks a different kind of “listening” to each other than has occurred before. Previously we trusted the words of each other only if there was some “divine” element to it, or if the words had been “blessed” by being in accord with a set of prescribed principles or marks of “genius.”

      Publishers squirm, or feel a death rattle coming on. What this plagiaristic, derivative creativity means for copyrights is anyone’s guess.  But then the private appropriation  (or the institutional variant of this) of art has always been a (necessary evil) barrier to a more expansive and more encompassing sense of the human

And so…, maybe…, despite these dangers, maybe… these developments harbor the potential to mark another great shift in the enrichment and deployment of human exo-memory, in its comprehension and use – on a par with the fusion of writing and the printing press: maybe we now are appreciating how the human endeavor provides the landscape and material, the energy and the trajectory for shaping our destiny as a species. 

     Perhaps it marks the realization that we humans live at our best, when we bootstrap.  We are at our best, not when repeat received wisdom or codified, given “natures” but when we hearken to our own creativity and listen for the freshness and vitality that is brought forth thereby.  And then, take what we have heard in order to generate the next endeavor. We get to take our conversations as invitations to our aspirations and creativity, right there, right where we are, right with our most challenging of acquaintances and our most generative of friendships.

     …maybe…

My Books

Blog Friends,
My books are available on Amazon.Com.
Access them by author:  Michael H. Shenkman
or title:
The Arch and the Path:  The Life of Leading Greatly
Leader Mentoring:  Find, Inspire and Cultivate Great Leaders.

Older books that might be harder to get, but that are still listed include:
The Strategic Heart: Using the New Science to Lead Growing Organizations
Value and Strategy: Competing Successfully in the Nineties

Also available on request:
Mystics Among Us -- my recent publication on mentoring and appreciating the new mystics who work right at our sides and whom we sometimes undervalue.
This publication is still in draft form and is free to those who request it.