permaculture

["S.K. Harrison" <skh23ca@yahoo.com>]

In response to Souscayrous, Charles wrote,

<snip>
> provide a translation with your future posts? 
> Perhaps just distilling the meaning into a few 
> words at the end of your piece

(Charles and others, if you don't want to ponder
my flabberghast in its totality, please forward
to the third paragraph below for a summary.)

I'm delighted to hear this proposition. For the
past few months I've been playing with the broad
issues of generality and specifity in verbal
communication. As a result, I've been training
myself to get better at using language at its
most specific--from which use arises
applications--and then synthesizing that back
into more general statements which become
principles to question, test, refine and even
chuck. I love the interplay between the two
extremes.

Mollison talks about similar themes in the
designer's manual when he discusses pattern and
tribal knowledge. If I can remember, he asks us
to consider first the inability of many
contemporary people to retain knowledge. And this
because our knowledge takes the form of vast
numbers of words, numbers and other symbols
stored in huge print and electronic
databanks--often requiring specialized knowledge
just to access, let alone commit to memory. By
contrast, Mollison talks about patterning in oral
traditions, about the *summaries* of knowledge
woven into myth and song and art--forms easy to
remember for their rhythm and rhyme and general
fractal self-similarity.

So although I doubt we can live in a
technologically advanced world without the
complex base of knowledge we have, to some extent
we can mimic oral patterning by learning to make
verbal summaries--and preferably summaries with a
grain of imagination and style so people actually
will *want* to read and hear them.

Ultra-summary:
Read big, think simple, say little--all with
truth and grace.

In taoist fashion, here's an ultra-ultra-summary:
...


> Do you think that words can be weeds too - you
> know, the pretty sort of parasitic weeds that 
> have lots of lovely flowers and choke the life 
> out of the flowers and apple trees that they 
> take over?

Yup, I do think this. Charles, have you heard of
a field called general-semantics? It has some
elegant tie-ins to permaculture and to some of
the themes being explored on this thread.
Speaking in particular to your point about
language choking life, one of its foundational
principles reads "the map is not the territory."
To make that a little less obscure, read "map" as
the words we use and "territory" as the observed
happening about which we speak or write.

(Carry the analysis far enough and you'll see
that the words remain part of the map, which
makes language far more interesting than mere
navigator's marks. But then that's a whole other
thread.)


>
------------------------------------------------

Souscayrous wrote,

> The answer, Charles, is yes.
> Apologies: too many words.

Souscayrous, allow me to dispute "too many
words." To appease the summarians and the
linguiphiles both, I'd encourage you to persevere
with your verbal abundance *and* perform the
summary Charles requested.


--------------------------------------------------
In action and stillness,
in talk and silence,
Sean

_______________________________________________________
Build your own website in minutes and for free at http://ca.geocities.com