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  • From: "souscayrous" <souscayrous@wanadoo.fr>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: RE: Out of Control
  • Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 22:11:12 +0100


> To appease the summarians and the linguiphiles both, I'd encourage
you to persevere with your verbal abundance *and* perform the summary
Charles requested.

Charles, Sean, why waste words to capture other words that would have
captured a moment past?
All words lie, that is their function, they are the symbolic absence of that
they would presence. To name leaf is not enough, other words must always
follow others, and yet others in the effort after the particular, the
quiddity of the moment. Is it oak, pine, poplar or mimosa? Fresh with
spring or autumn russet? Hoar frosted? Mist sodden? Insect eaten? Traced
with a recondite virus pattern? Have you ever seen identical leaves from
the same tree?
And Sean, however deft your touch with the prospectors pan, as you sift the
coarse ore of human language between general and specific, all that will
ever remain is fool's gold. Wittgenstein was the disciple of Russell but
even he could not enclose meaning.
Aye, and Godel's theorem too!

NB Contact me offlist if you wish to pursue this thread.

Souscayrous




-----Original Message-----
From: S.K. Harrison [mailto:skh23ca@yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2001 10:35 PM
To: permaculture
Subject: Re: Out of Control

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

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