I offer up the first video evidence of language magic happening! Blame all the shakiness, and poor sound quality on me. I myself will then turn around and blame the altitude (Albuquerque at 5000 ft! I took lots of naps!).
“Where Are Your Keys?”: the Language Fluency Game from Willem Larsen on Vimeo.
Evan Gardner and I have done a lot of brainstorming over the past several months, troubleshooting how to kick-start the revolution and begin spreading his language fluency game, “Where Are Your Keys?”. Now we finally have a solid plan.
If you’ve kept up with the saga of WAYK, you’ll know the kind of revolution we hope for by increasing access to this game. We’ve decided upon a way to communicate the game, via the internet, in a youtube-like format using lots and lots of short single-technique videos. In collaboration with fellow players joining in, who will also send in their own videos of techniques they’ve pioneered (owing to the open source nature of the game), we’ll propel the game forward.
We have our eyes focused on the open source PHPmotion software on which to build a “video wiktionary”, and have a web developer ready to go.
If you’d like a way to support this project, have the option to participate in the “behind the scenes” usability test run this Fall, and get a whammy of a discount on a year subscription to the paid portion of the site starting in January 2010, then send $100 to the paypal account evan_gardner at yahoo dot com. Keep in mind, we only have room for 50 ‘early-adopter” subscribers at this time, and we will register early subscriptions first come, first serve.
If this inspires you, I look forward to seeing you online this Fall!
Recently (yesterday, as a matter of fact) I received a comment here from a physicist named Travis, who wanted to point out a couple of errors he perceived in my article on Animist Language.
I don’t know Travis; he doesn’t know me. But I’ve waited for him (or whoever would do the work that he has finally done for me) for a long time. I honestly can’t believe it’s taken him this long.
Often in describing the benefits of non-civilized animist languages, I’ve used (inspired by Dan Moonhawk Alford’s work on “quantum linguistics”) the ability to describe quantum mechanics well as a proof of a language’s ability to describe the world accurately, with integrity. English can’t really do this; many animist languages can. But as Travis points out, the language of mathematics describes quantum events more effectively than any other language out there.
I’ve never felt truly comfortable with using quantum mechanics to support my observations about language. I don’t fully understand it - I have, at best, a layman’s approximation of the theory. I certainly can’t speak with any authority on it, and by using it I fell into the trap Travis mentioned - I have appropriated it for ends unintended by the scientific community. Really, it has always served more as a rickety rope bridge for folks raised in modern scientific culture to reach the place I want them to see, even if only for a moment: the place of a truly, completely, living world. Quantum physics seemed to suggest something more magical going on than that conventionally held by the “common sense” of modern civilization.
But the reminder that mathematics so successfully describes quantum events leaves me with a problem. As a language, mathematics so fully objectifies its subjects that it barely even needs them anymore. What does one plus one equal? How can you answer that without knowing what “one” I mean? “One” what? Well, you can answer me, quite easily, without knowing “what”. And as Einstein said, “to the extent mathematics is true, it does not refer to reality…to the extent it refers to reality, it is not true”.
I wish to ever-improve my ability to speak about reality in a truthful, life-generating way.
This brings me to a fundamental problem. We have, before us, an incommensurability between the countless substantive models of animist inquiry (what you might call non-civilized science) based on an assumption of a living and person-ing world, and modern scientific models based on assumption of a dead, mechanical world (of which quantum mechanics makes a good example). Incommensurability means, according to Thomas Kuhn, (thank you Wikipedia) “the proponents of different scientific paradigms cannot fully appreciate or understand the other’s point of view because they are, as a way of speaking, living in different worlds”.
Kuhn, in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, wrote
When paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look into new places.
Combine this with Karl Popper’s observation (paraphrasing here) that “truth” doesn’t mark the result of scientific work, but rather that “the search for truth” fuels the work itself, and you have the likely story of what happened and will continue to happen to us as inquiring beings.
How do we evaluate “truth”?
When we change the world we experience (because of our beliefs about the world), we change what questions we ask, what we see as “real”. This change in attention and questions changes our language itself.
For what does language embody, but a set of directed attentions and questions about the world?
The language of mathematics doesn’t seem to produce more observant, successful, human-habitat-preserving thinking or behavior than any other modern language. Obviously for what it specializes in, it does quite well.
I submit that a language worth having, worth speaking, worth hearing, not only produces accurate (reproducible) observations, but also observations which encourage attention on that which increases the survivability and fulfillment of humans and their more-than-human community.
As far as I can tell, modern scientific language, and the technologies it births, has accelerated the destruction of life and sanity more than any other force in history.
Therefore, to Travis, and to all the quantum physicists out there I have offended, I humbly apologize, and give you your quantum physics back.
When I listen to you tell your story
I embrace the possibilities you describe
and take the limits under advisement
Your possibilities show that somebody, somewhere, actually did it…
your limits show that somebody, somewhere, at one time, couldn’t…
I gallop after possibilities
rather than remaining behind to survey the particular borders
of what I, or you, or others
cannot do
What happens when you place the ability and responsibility for learning and teaching into the hands of the people with the passion to learn?
What happens when you blur the line between teacher and student, until it no longer exists?
What happens when “Those Who Can, Do, and Those Who Can’t, Teach” becomes “Those Who Can Do, Teach, and Those Who Can Teach, Do“?
What on earth does this mean for schools, colleges, universities, the institutional life of education?
If you know me at all, you’ll know I bear little love for the institution of schooling, and the lust for “schoolifying” everything. Formerly, if you wanted to learn something, you found somebody doing it and you apprenticed with them. Now if you want to learn something, you hit your web browser and google up a school.
What happened to us, as a culture? Well, you can read John Taylor Gatto’s the Underground History of American Education for the full story, but in short, we fell asleep, and woke up in school, and stopped questioning where and why it came from.
Once you take authority away from the institution, and put it back in the hands of the doers, where does that leave institutions?
I believe a role does remain for these institutions. For a long time, as the various permutations of fluency games improve and cohere, they’ll need the guiding hand of those with the skills, and with some understanding of the pedagogical challenge at hand. It will take a while to fully transition from a culture of expert pedagogues to a culture of self-teaching play. Because Evan and I have first aimed at language education, I think we will see some rapid culture change there once we get the ball rolling. Everything else will come in its own time.
Perhaps eventually the schools, colleges, and academies will transform into cultural and community centers, places with the space and tools to facilitate experimental and exploratory play in the fluency of different skills. Hotbeds of light-hearted conversation and commensality, perhaps they will have a role for quite some time to come.
In any case, let’s begin. Whatever happens, we know where we started. Right here.
When it comes to culture change and personal growth, I notice folks often (naturally, according to the conditioning of our culture) asking others to “go first”. But why not apply new tools and understandings to ourselves first, until we’ve mastered them? Why not “go first”, ourselves?
For example, take the practice of Nonviolent Communication. When I first started practicing NVC, I “helped” conversation partners out a lot by “correcting” their NVC use. After indulging this kind of arrogant mischief for quite a while, it finally occurred to me that correcting others behavior presented a massive wall to trust, understanding, and peace. In essence, by correcting them (without their request to do so), I spoke “violently” (in the parlance of NVC). From that point on I made it a practice of applying the observation and empathic skills strictly to myself and my own needs, assuming that others would benefit from the clarity such practice produced in me. I discovered the truth in that assumption as my skill improved.
Funny enough (or not so funny, depending on how you look at this) I practiced the same short-sighted abuse of new tools when learning Don Miguel Ruiz’ “Four Agreements”. You could find me lecturing my girlfriend of the time on how she hadn’t adhered to “Don’t Take Anything Personally”, or one of the other Agreements.
Honestly, I have done this with many of these kinds of personal and communicative tools, over the years.
By the time I began to experiment and practice the Haudensaunee’s three “Peace Principles” as communicated to me by Jake Tekaronianeken Swamp, I think I’d finally hit on it. I accepted these principles as a gift for myself, and they would benefit others to the extent they changed my behavior in more life-affirming ways, rather than how I lectured and corrected others in their use.
American culture elevates the ‘word’, especially the written word, to such a high level, that it commonly eclipses the purpose of the word: to communicate understanding, to change behavior, to have a real impact in the world. Often words talk to words, without any of them sullying each other by affecting the “real world”.
I stand here to say that my life has grown far more satisfying once I lost interest in explaining my philosophy, in favor of benefiting from it.
In fact, could someone come to understand your values, and learn the tools of communication you use, simply by experiencing you using them? Not through your articulation of them, nor purchasing the book that explains them, nor through diagrams on white boards, but simply from observing you as a role model?
This sounds an awful lot like “mentoring”, doesn’t it?
Perhaps you will allow me to challenge you: can you take your top, most dearly held values, or your favorite new tool of growth or communication, and embody them for a month without explaining or articulating them to anyone else, enough so that an observant person could discern these unspoken values, tools, or focus of growth?
A pretty cool idea, I think.
What presuppostitions does “disagreement” hide? Do “agreement” and “disagreement” help (or hinder) conversations, decisions, and understanding?
For a long time now, whenever I hear someone say “I disagree” to me, or someone else, it always sticks in my craw a little bit. I haven’t quite understood why; certainly I want folks I converse with to feel free to tell their own stories and speak about their experiences.
Marshall Rosenberg, developer of Nonviolent Communication, helped me to understand that one can violently appreciate just as easily as condemn. To call me “right”, “perfect”, to grade me with an “A+”, implies that you can also grade with an “F-”, and call me “wrong” and “flawed”. The dark side of positive labels rests uneasily behind the euphoria that such labeling produces.
So how does this apply to agreement or disagreement?
If you say you “disagree” with me, than that indicates you’ve heard me, understood my story, and come to the conclusion that it doesn’t match your own attitudes and opinions well. But what if you don’t understand my story? Only I can say whether or not you’ve heard me; only I can say whether or not I feel that you have gone the distance in understanding me so that I can relax and allow that you have a good grasp of my experience.
In other words, how can you disagree with something you don’t understand yet? You must understand it before you can agree or disagree.
But then, what about when you decide that you agree with me, before you understand me? Has this ever happened to you, where someone responds affirmatively to an opinion of yours, then takes off running, saying all kinds of (in your mind) off-base things, that they think express your opinion too?
So, do agreement or disagreement even matter? They seem so extraneous to the goal of understanding each other. Do we mean anything else by these words, other than the ham-fisted application of judgement and labels?
And what about those conversations where you argue for an hour, and then at the end realize you both “agree”? The waste of energy and emotion over…what?
I’d like to hear about your experiences with agreement and disagreement. When have they helped? Hurt?
I wanted to keep you updated on where learning innovator Evan Gardner and I have lately had a chance to share his viral language fluency game, “Where Are Your Keys?”.
On April 29th, Chris Sims and Elizabeth Hendrickson hosted us at the Agile Learning Games Party; we had a great session of WAYK along with playing some other fun Agile teamwork games.
On May 2nd we played WAYK at Portland’s BarCamp 3, again somewhat of a techie gathering. Another amazing session! I’ve discovered that along with everybody enjoying themselves, a session of WAYK always creates one or two “believers” - folks who see the same possibility in the game that we do. We also discovered a lot of connections between software and domain languages, and ‘normal’ languages (such as French, English, German, Chinese, etc.). WAYK has a far broader application than first glance!
Both Evan and I have committed to finding such opportunities to share WAYK, so folks can get a taste for how the game works. If you have any ideas, please contact me: mythic dot cartographer at gmail dot com. Of course, we prefer local events, but if you can give us a hand, we can hit the road too.
For those that missed it in my sidebar, a must-see - this guy has some teaching magic!
An excellent start for getting into the Riddler’s Way.
If you live in the Pacific Northwest and homeschooling/unschooling interests you, check out this soon-to-arrive event:
LIFE is Good
NW Unschooling Conference
Red Lion Hotel ~ Vancouver, WA
Memorial Day Weekend, May 21-24, 2009
Why would I qualify the timeless, ever-renewing relationship of animism with a modern, calendrical, millennial marker? Why might a person, wanting to create more life in the modern world, use the phrase “21st century animism”?
In my continuing discovery of Christopher Alexander’s work, from his books the Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language, published three decades ago, to ones published in the 21st century, the Nature of Order, and Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets, I’ve had a growing sense of the important, even vital, contribution Alexander has made to what I call the Rewilding Renaissance.
For a long time now, I’ve felt dissatisfied by the “sack-cloth and ashes” approach to redeeming ourselves in the community of life, and finding once again a place where we belong. I’ve seen many folks I work with in outdoor education, disappear into clothing of muted earthtones - muddy browns, grays, fading greens and blacks.
This way of dressing says a lot to me now; for now I believe that in order to survive, and thrive, as a human people, we must learn to make beauty. That, in the most real and practical sense imaginable, survival means beauty. I don’t mean ‘pretty’; I mean deep feeling of profound beauty, a ‘rusty beauty’ of the depth of everyday life. Look around you at the forest, at the seashore. Everyone you see has arrived at their beauty - the waves, the wind, the dry grass, the call of birds - because they have survived, because they have fit in and adapted to the natural demand that we all live a beautiful life, or perish.
Some of the folks I worked with would object when I’d bring up the idea of a “renaissance” of Rewilding. To them, it made them think of paintings, sculpture, music, rather than primitive skills and wilderness survival. I would always respond to this by jumping up and shouting “exactly!”.
In this spirit, I have the first of a series of quotes from Christopher Alexander to share, that I think further flesh out what it means to have a Rewilding Renaissance.
From Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets:
I have become convinced that a [woven] carpet [as having reached their pinnacle in early Turkish village carpet weaving], when it is a good one, reverberates with some kind of primitive and archetypal force, that it has in it some kind of being, that it connects with some primitive, almost animistic “soul of the world” — and that the carpet must be judged, in the end, according to the degree to which t does, or it does not, make a connection with this force.
In this sense, it is in its power, very much like the great bronze castings of the Chinese Shang dynasty, which establish an almost magic force, by establishing themselves as beings, in some realm, which connects us to itself, to which we are connected, which is an absolute realm of beings, and whose functioning is almost entirely animal-like, spirit-like, not matter-like, almost conscious — it is as if the thing, the bronze, or the carpet, establishes itself in my own belly, as a voice, speaks with my own voice, exists with my own force, and forces my awareness of an ultimate mother, or an ultimate creature of which I am a part — and which exists in me.
This nearly animistic view of carpets is consistent with the recent discoveries, already mentioned, that have centered around the tradition of prehistoric art in Central Anatolia. The essence of the view which lies behind these discoveries, is that what we naively call beauty, and what we experience as artistic force, lies in the creation of an object which speaks directly with my own inner voice, that there is, at the heart of all things, a single voice of universal blackness and thickness and light, that speaks in all tongues, and that holds all force into itself.
A carpet, when it holds the almost magical force which all carpet lovers recognize, holds this force, because, to some degree, it embodies this original voice, lets us see this original animal force that exists in ourselves. I believe the same is true, of every artifact. As a builder, I am trying, every time I make a building, to reach a connection with this force, and to make a thing, which fills us, with this animal and animistic force. The force, though primitive, and almost alien, is that underbelly of ourselves, which makes us human. Though unrecognizable, and almost taboo, because it is by turns violent, lustful, peaceful, and absurd, is nevertheless that thing which, to the degree it comes to life in us, makes us live innocently as people in the world.
For background and context, read the first three in this series:
I went to the Indie Hurrican at Gamestorm 11 this weekend, a game convention. I playtested my fluency strategy (”bite-sized pieces”) for Polaris, and had some great results. This has helped me improve it. Thanks to Zach, Jim, Mark, Jennifer, and Gilbert; I hope that your passion for Polaris inspires you to play it with people you care about! Read on for the changes and clarifications in my method. I’ve left out a lot of details and page number references, as you can find them in previous versions.
GREETING/CONVENING
0. One-paragraph summary of the Polaris setting.
1. Give brief Road Map of how we will acquire fluency in Polaris: Warm-Ups, Character Creation, Scene Framing skills, and the Ritual Phrases.
WARM UPS
1. name story
2. firing line
3. yes, and
4. color, advance
5. counting
CHARACTER CREATION
1. Choose a name, one aspect, write on character sheet (using ben lehman’s polaris name/aspect handouts).
2. Character Circle/”I don’t see it”: semi-collaborative character creation. One person gets 30 seconds (or so) to describe their character; then, randomly (popcorn-style), everyone in the circle gets to add one piece of “what they see”, keeping a hold of the initial description, staying true as possible to it. The formula for adding a piece: “[character name] has [braids/big sword with runes/constant pain from leg wound, etc.]”, “I see [character name] [chasing jehovah’s witness/filing her nails compulsively/painting a masterpiece]”, “[character name] [dislikes/likes/loves/hates]”, etc. You get the idea. The group goes for about 3-5 minutes, then switches, unless someone pops the bubble by saying something that anyone else just can’t see fitting. The poppee must then say to the popper, “I don’t see it!”. They then move to the next player, who in 30 seconds also describes their character,etc. etc.. The goal: don’t pop the bubble, or put it off for as long as possible. Also, to get everyone repeating each other’s character’s names, so that we know them by heart.
SCENE FRAMING
CARD HANDLING: For each of the following categories, I slap down an index card with the ritual phrases on them. Between each card, as facilitator, I have picked out one paragraph or so of setting text for a player to read, rotating the reader of course. For each card, we go around the table giving everyone a chance to practice, resulting in 4 scenes per card (except for the session card and player intros, of course].
1. SESSION CARD: “Long Ago, The People Were Dying at the End of the World…”/”But All That Happened Long Ago, And There Are None Now Who Remember It.”
[SETTING: you might now read “moments frozen in time”, from the beginning of the book]
2. CHARACTER CARD: “But Hope Was Not Yet Lost, for [name] Still Heard the Song of the Stars…”
3. SCENE CARD: /”And So It Was…”/”…And So It Was.”
[SETTING: another paragraph or two, etc. etc. continue to do this between the rest of the cards]
4. NEGOTIATE CARD: “But Only If…”/”…It Was Not Meant To Be”/”…And That Was How It Happened.”
5. MOONS CARD: “…But It Was No Matter.”/”…We Shall See What Comes of It.” (moon vetos I)
6. ESCALATE CARD: “…You Ask Far Too Much!”/”And Furthermore…” (exhausting themes) (moon vetos II)
7. DICE CARD: “…It Shall Not Come to Pass!” (assign ice, light, zeal) (start to check experience)
FARE-THEE-WELL/REFLECTION
However far we got in slowly adding and mastering each ritual phrase in order, when the session ends, we always discuss how it went, talk about high points, look for improvements we can make, etc. I know that most groups will need a “cool down”, just like they had a “warm up”, and I haven’t quite wrapped my head around where I want to go with that yet.
For next session, I recommend starting at the beginning (keep the same characters if you want, of course), and adding in phrases as people demonstrate fluency, building them back up to where you left off. Don’t simply go “ok, we all mastered all those phrases last time”, DOUBLE CHECK, methodically. You’ll have fun reliving the process, and you won’t regret the chance to go over it again, I wager. Don’t think “we already did that prep stuff last time”; think “this counts as part of the game; when you play polaris, you start with this part”. Enjoying the step-by-step nature will become part of the fun of playing Polaris. And when you teach it to new folks, you won’t have to change how you play; just play as you always play, starting at the beginning.
