[cont’d from Widening Conversational Scope: the Preamble]

Let’s look at a description of the kris, according to authors Walter Weyrauch and  Maureen Anne Bell:

…In all cases, it is the aggrieved party that must request the kris…the elders of the tribes then hold a meeting and select one or more men to act as judges…the senior judge is surrounded by the members of the kris council, who act as associate judges…Generally, five or more men from both sids, usually the elders, form the council. In the United States, the council may have as many as twenty-five members…It is now acceptable, if unusual, to have the entire family present for support…When members of the audience think the witness is not being truthful or responsive, they hiss or make jokes. In some delicate matters, such as adultery, the public and witnesses can be excluded. At a kris, only Romany may be spoken, and participants discourage lapses into English by shouting and hissing…

The scope narrows!

…Furthermore, arguments are often presented in a special oratory that differs grammatically from ordinary Romany and resembles a legal jargon…

The scope narrows even more! Learning a special oratory presents a major speedbump to participation.

…Witnesses may speak freely about the case, for the Gypsies believe there can be no justice without hearing the matter out to its fullest. Exaggerated claims and ornate stories referring to folktales and mythology are common….

Of course my ears perk up at that part. Also notice that suddenly, the scope has begun to widen.

…the parties or their spokesmen may speak freely and at length about their grievances. Similarly, the witnesses may present their testimony colorfully and expansively. In short, they may refer to past events, use exaggerations, and try to gain the favor of the judges and the audience. The presentation of facts does not focus on clarifying a single issue…the gypsies appear to be concerned primarily with the presntation of a complete picture of events and evidence, even at the expense of what non-Gypsies might call due process and the rights of the individual. The litigants air their grievances before representatives of a tightly knit group who will most likely be very familiar with every aspect of their lives. Audience members come from the same community as the parties, and thus follow the proceedings with an intense sense of  participation and a strong desire that jsutice be done. This attitude may lead to spontaneous offers of testimony, as well as expressions of approval or disapproval from the audience…Participation by the audience is expected and encouraged by custom. Members of the audience, although not formally called as witnesses, may feel justified in expressing views. Whether their contribution to the proceedings is based on personal observation or opinion does not matter…

And it widens some more!

Because the Roma narrow the scope of partipants (who may attend the proceedings), they can then widen the scope of information exchange. They can create a community conversation that works:

…The vindication of individuals’ rights, as understood in a non-Gypsy context, is not of the utmost significance in a Gypsy kris. Instead, the reestablishment of peace in the group is the proceeding’s prime objective…Individuals will view themslves as members of a larger group that has been treated in accordance with the law, even if they lose the case. A feeling that justice has prevailed pervades…

Of course, if ‘losing a case’ means you come into accord with your neighbors, then you have actually won it, from a systems/community point of view. You may not have gotten what you wanted to begin with, but you got what you needed in the end.

In the articles A Community of Rewilding Means Adults Maintaining Accord, and When the State Assigns Blame, I started a line of inquiry I want to continue here. Using the examples of the Gypsy Roma, as studied by the essayists in Gypsy Law, edited by Walter Weyrauch, I saw that an intact, relatively animist, tribal people successfully retained their identity and cultural vitality amidst the constant daily horrors of civilization’s growth economy. How do they keep their connection to Family, to Tribe, in the face of the commodifying machine who sees them as yet unapportioned human resources?

I have identified a contributing factor to this survival (and thrival!), in the kris romaniya. The kris works as a community hearing in which respected and experienced folk ‘judges’, after hearing wide-ranging testimony, essentially brainstorm a resolution that their community will support. The judgement has no other enforcement than the willingness and social pressure of the community itself, hence the importance of experienced and wise judges who can find these kinds of resolutions.

At the kris romaniya, participants can speak (according to Gypsy Law, also known as the romaniya) only in Romany, the Roma language related to Sanskrit. The audience and community will shout down any use of English. Pay attention to this: the kris has narrowed scope here. If you cannot speak Romany, the laws do not apply to you, and yet you also cannot apply to the laws. No non-Roma can attend a kris.

The Roma in fact accommodate the legal system of the state as best they can, for crimes between Gypsies and non-Gypsies. They also have a fair amount of cultural skepticism toward’s the state’s legal system, not seeming to particularly expect fairness or benefits from engaging it. They probably see it more as a natural predator, or a storm, a force which they must accomodate and adroitly bystep to survive, but one which they cannot ’stop’ or ask for fair treatment as they would from a Roma. They simply  adapt.

I say all of this so we can get to the meaty bits, namely: how the community and the krisnatori (folk judges) use the kris to accomplish all kinds of goals, goals that a court of the state (say, an average American court of law) would find way beyond their scope.

Animism means choosing to see the personhood and kinship in all things.

I use the word Animism a lot, so it makes sense to clarify the meaning it carries for me. Though originally coined by Christian anthropologists to describe the ‘nature worshipping’ behavior of indigenous peoples (with the further common clueless addition ‘they believe everything - animals, rocks, sky - has a ’soul”), a community of thinkers, authors, activists, scientists, artists and philosophers (including myself) have embraced it and invested it with deeper meaning.

Animism, essentially, means acknowledging the personhood and kinship of all Life, human, non-human, animate and ‘inanimate’. In the words of the Lakota, Mitakuye Oyasin, “We Are All Related”.

Personhood, therefore, means person-ing, the behavior, feelings, and values of a person. All people value the sanctity of their borders. All people want appreciation and respect.

Kinship indicates the inescapable interrelatedness of all things. Where does breath end, and the body begin? Where does stone end, and my body begin? Does the fire in all the cells of my body, differ from the sun that put that fire here to burn? An interdependence of Personhood means nothing else but Family. This means breath, stone, fire, all people and my kin.

Animism essentially means animating, a way of relating to the world that fully experiences and acknowledges the personhood and kinship of all things. This has nothing to do with belief; this has to do with attitude. I don’t have to ‘believe’ something ‘is’ [sic] a person, I only need treat that other as I would treat a person, and then I watch what happens. You animate by making a choice; the term animist simply indicates a person who often makes this choice.

We became beautiful, successful, grieving and praising human beings, by seeing the world this way. We didn’t get confused for a couple million years, only now to figure out that in fact the world ‘was’ [sic] dead after all. The community of life selected us to survive, helped us, cooperated with us, over and over, because of how we saw the world. Because of how we treated the world.

Now we have a choice. The community of life has received great injury from how the culture of modern civilization has seen it. Even now this living community makes natural selections that determine our fate. Perhaps, from a perspective of enlightened self-interest, we can choose to appreciate and respect the personhood and kinship in all things once more?

It saddens me that modern humans would need a metaphorical gun pointed at their head, in order to offer the basic courtesy of a relationship founded on acknowledging the other’s personhood. I actually hope that if you do choose Animism, if you do choose to treat the living world in a beautiful, grieving, and praising way, you do it not from fear, but from a love of Beauty.

It only takes a choice.

Now we have a paradox to wrestle.  The mindset that sees a verb ‘to be’-based reality, itself sees simply removing ‘to be’ as the course of action. In the ‘to be’-based mind, if I cut out ‘to be’, then it will no longer ‘be’. Problem solved, right?

I think Albert Einstein called this trying to “solve the problem at the level of thinking in which it was created”.

Recently I discovered something that made me see these issues in a whole new light. But we’ll have to tackle this from a couple different angles.

I found a new voice articulating these same issues in Calvin Luther Martin’s The Way of the Human Being. He refreshes the fundamental point:

The reality of non-locality: the physicists discovered the truth of this only within my lifetime; the Yup’ik Eskimos and other Native Americans have known its truth for millennia. When I lectured on quantum theory at the seminary, Sarah Owens confided afterward that her grandparents had told her as much.

And then proceeds to articulate another aspect of that point:

I am reminded of eastern woodland Indians in colonial times, blaming Europeans for their drunkenness, since it was they who furnished it after all. Or even blaming the beverage itself.

Oscar illustrated with a curious analogy. He said that when a man fires up his steamhouse (which is like a sauna) and invites the other men over, and they arrive and he begins pouring buckets of water on the fire, they accuse him of “throwing them out.” No! Oscar protested. “He’s not grabbing them and tossing them out! It’s not his fault! Think about it.” His voice is earnest. “It’s not that man’s fault they’re running out of the steam; it’s the steam’s fault! The steam is sending them running out the door.”…With alcohol, the western mind fingers the imbiber, Yupiit blame the vendor (or the drink).

So, the Yupiit, inheritors of animist language and logical systems, a non-’to be’ verb culture, observing the world in that quintessential animist way; focusing on animating relationships, on clear observation, on active verbs.

For a long time I’ve seen in the Gypsy Roma a still somewhat intact, relatively animist culture. They speak Romani, a language related to Sanskrit, and thus one of the family of modern, Indo-European languages, the classic (though not sole) perpetrators of Aristotelian  errors of “isness”. Their language possesses the verb ‘to be’, the linguistic tool that aids the conceptions of these errors making them easier to say and think, thus easier to embody and spread.

However!

Animist cultures clearly exist on a continuum. You don’t wake up one day, as a people, and discover you’ve all started following the teachings of Aristotle. Even for indigenous communities that have adopted Christianity, they can continue to see that faith through an animist lens; this almost surely fades over time.

So I offer up the Gypsy Roma as a culture of people who, though possessing the ‘to be’ verb (which made participation in the caste-based and highly stratified society of India possible), still continue to keep animating thought alive, in the form of their cultural idiom, even if not in the structure of their language itself. From Gypsy Law, edited by Walter Weyrauch, Ronald Lee writes:

While the Rom accept the dangers of drug abuse and forbid the use of illegal drugs, they generally do not consider alcoholism to be a problem. This results in situations where alcoholic Rom get into fights and other situations at group gatherings where acts are committed or words said which lead to problems that must be settled at the kris. If the guilty party committed the offense during a blackout, he then cannot remember what offense he committed or is accused of committing. His defense is then to admit his guilt and say Lya ma e rakiya — “The whiskey took me.” This will be acceptable as a defense since the Rom believe that visible or invisible forces can act on their own to influence actions of people. The action is not described in the passive, as it is in English. For example, if a Rom falls into the river and drowns, they will say: Mudardya les o pani — “The water killed him.” If he is accidently electrocuted, Mudardya les o ilektriko — “The electricity killed him.” Thus a Rom does not get drunk; the whiskey takes control of him and compels him to commit some act he would not commit if he were sober…thus the force, not the subject, is guilty. This can be seen in the following: If a Rom is killed in an automobile accident but the vehicle is still in good shape, it will immediately be sold to a non-Gypsy. The car, in the eyes of the Rom, has become a mudarimasko mobili (killer car) and has become bi-baxtaló (a bringer of bad karma). It was thus not the Rom’s careless driving or the fact that he had been drinking before the accident that caused the accident, but the car which has killed him.

The challenge for a modern mind lies in seeing that the Roma, the Yup’ik, and all intact indigenous peoples, as animist systems-thinkers who exist because of their ability to think ecologically, have identified relationships as the priority. Whereas the modern mind sees this as ignorant and childish, prioritizing a truly naive cause and effect paradigm, arguing over ‘facts’ (that even scientists, the faithkeepers of this modern world, know as a fallible notion - modern scientific exploration and thought, from statistics to quantum theory, continues to reveal this).

I think, if you’ve made it this far, you can handle the next idea. Martín Prechtel, author and speaker on intact indigenous cultures (having grown up with a foot in both worlds himself), asked an audience recently what they considered the opposite of the verb ‘to be’. The lack of the verb ‘to be’ doesn’t really count as its opposite, so he had pointed at some deeper truth there. “‘Description’,” I suggested to him, opposed ‘to be’.

“Sure,” he replied. “To de-scribe, to bring writing to life, rehydrate language and take it away from the page. Sure. But what, even more than that?”

Silence in the room…

“Story?” I offered.

“Yes. I believe Story is the opposite of the verb ‘to be’,” he said, grinning.

If Story opposes the verb ‘to be’, as Martín proposes, and not the simple and linear-minded excision of the offending verb itself, how does that change our attitudes toward English, and modern languages? What lies next for someone who, with informed consent, wants to speak a language that creates life and liveliness, that frees their natural identity, that allows them to walk away from hierarchical and civilized modes of enslaving thought, into the embrace of Village, Family, Land?

I don’t know. Let’s figure it out together - perhaps we’ll start by jamming Story, and see where it takes us. What do you think?

Long time readers here will note that “e-prime” refers to the use of English when completely avoiding the verb “to be”. This removes what Alfred Korzybski, father of the General Semantics movement (and coiner of such gems as “the map is not the territory”), called the errors of identity (”she is a woman”), and of predication (”she is beautiful”); the e-prime discipline also removes the progressive tenses - tenses that actually come in handy quite a bit. “I am walking”, “I was thinking”, etc. ‘To be’ acts as a helper verb in these situations, a purely coincidental (in my mind) construct in English, differing from other modern languages. Progressive tense makes no errors of identity or predication; it gives tone and image to the verb, a sense of “ongoingness” rather than “abruptness”. We lose this progressive tense in e-prime purely because, if we continue to use as it stands, the verb ‘to be’ creeps back in bit by bit. You can’t easily remove ‘to be’ errors unless you remove all occurrences of the verb, innocent or not. At least, many have tried, but it substantially extends the learning curve, so much so that I don’t know anyone that successfully speaks or writes in e-prime that keeps the progressive tense use.

Admittedly, I know precious few people who speak or write in e-prime - the sample size could stand some enlargement for accuracy sake. I accept volunteers!

Now we come to ‘e-primitive’, the understanding that most, if not all (I have yet to find an exception!), intact indigenous languages, lack a ‘to be’ verb. On investigating this further I discovered that these animist and indigenous languages additionally prioritize useful non-Aristotelian observation (and therefore quantum, afactual, and highly in accord with modern scientific values of precision in language). Of course Aristotle made famous (though did not invent) the notion that objects in the world have an “isness” and essence. Thus we have the idea today that the “janitor” has little emotional, intellectual, or spiritual life outside of scrubbing toilets; movies like “Good Will Hunting” play up the cognitive dissonance that ‘genius janitors’ create in our impoverished Aristotelian minds.

These animist (animating) languages prioritize verby-ness over nouny-ness, some going so far as to having no nouns whatsoever in the language. This means if we modern folks look at a photo of a man in suspenders and flannel with an axe chopping down a tree, we see a logger, whereas an animist sees a photo of chopping. They see a photo filled with activity, we see a photo filled with a role.

“Is” light a particle or a wave? In English, this creates a crippling paradox, rendering quantum theory an obtuse and mysterious quagmire to this day. In animist language, we ask “does light particle? does it wave?”, creating a both/and answer that creates no paradox, because it removes the error of identity: “is” light a particle, or a wave?

Animism (or, because “ism” really hides another ‘to be’ verb, better to say animating thought) happily accomodates the non-locality (”changing this particle in my hand, will change that particle five miles away, instantaneously with no clear connection between them”),  flux (”everything constantly changes”), and vibrational (”everything verbs constantly”) understandings of quantum theory. David Bohm, a physicist and intellectual, once proposed (in his book “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”) creating an entire mode of the English language called the rheomode (”flow-mode”), entirely composed of verbs, to support sane, clear conversations about quantum reality.

Animist languages have done this since humans first started speaking, and only stopped for reasons of hierarchical efficiency - to put it bluntly, personal freedom and a lack of a rigid box holding your identity hostage, makes it hard to finish the construction of pyramids. We need these restricting and suffocating roles (foreman, high priest, mason, president, guard, pharoah, police officer, teacher, artist) to keep the hunter-gatherers from wandering off and finding more fun things to do. Sorry about that. Anyway, enough of your weeping, look at all the great pyramids we built! We’ll give your Village and Family back (not to mention the holiness of your relationship to the constantly grieving and gifting Land from which you originate every day) once we finish this last pyramid. Well, maybe just one more pyramid after that (heck, we just got to the skyscraper-shaped pyramids)…and after that (three words: pyramids in space!)….and after that…

So, decisions, decisions. We have reached informed consent time. Some, figuring this out, still want to build pyramids (we still haven’t build the spaceship pyramids yet, like the USS Enterprise - c’mon people, let’s get to it!). Some, once the light bulb goes on above their head, feel pretty had by the whole enterprise (pun intended). They want to stop. They want to come home to the arms of Village, Family, Land. They want their freedom of identity back. Some run off to learn primitive skills with enthusiastic friends in the wilderness, only to find they brought the rigid boxes with them; that in fact, these rigid boxes extend beyond roles and on to other side-effects of enslavement, such as a belief in good and evil people, right and wrong behavior and belief. A clue: usually we see the other guy as the wrong, evil one. Sad fact: the more sensitive ones of us see themselves as the wrong, evil one. Watch the tragic fireworks.

To head off these kinds of tragedies, some will decide to change the way they think; knowing language drives their thinking, they’ll start exploring the use of e-prime and e-primitive. English without the verb ‘to be’, modified for ‘verby-ness’ over ‘nouny-ness’.

Now I finally arrive at the whole point of this article: but what if taking a razor to the English language and excising the verb ‘to be’ constitutes yet another attempt to use the ‘to be’ mentality itself to solve a problem?  In effect, ‘to be’ pulls a bait and switch, extending its own life by pretending to kill itself!

This kind of thing can keep me awake at night, let me tell you.

[continued in Part II]

[continuing from Parts I and II]

LEVEL THREE

“SCENE FRAMING”

Skills: Learning the core scene framing of the game, slowly adding rules in piece by piece. Any numbered step here could constitute an entire game session, as each Heart and Mistaken in the group co-frame a scene. This works iteratively with the warm-ups. Each group will go to LEVEL ONE and warm-up (switching to more challenging games if needed), touch on LEVEL TWO by playing ‘See Me’ to refresh their memories, then move to their current step of focus in LEVEL THREE.

1. Start each Scene Framing session with “Long ago, the People were Dying at the End of the World…” and light a candle, end it with “But all that happened long ago, and now there are none who remember it” and blow the candle out. Designate someone to safeguard the telling of each phrase, session by session. You can keep a fresh hold on Polaris’ setting even if you’ve decided to go the Quick Play route, by selecting a section from the first part of the book to set a tone for your Scene Framing, continuing over your sessions till you have read all the material you’d like to the group, a little bit at a time (the design in Montsegur 1244 inspired this thought).
2. Introductory Scene Framing. Each Heart and Mistaken co-frame a gentle, introductory, collaborative scene for their character. One or both can choose or discuss Who, What, and Where to help frame the scene. Start each scene with “But hope was not yet…” name introduction, and then “And so it was…”. End each scene with ritual phrase “…and so it was.” (read Between Scenes, pg. 56-57, to prep for next session).
3. Scene Framing II, adding only the conflict phrases “But only if…”, “…it was not meant to be”, and “…and that was how it happened”. Every Heart frames slightly more contentions scenes with their Mistaken (read pp. 61-64, 75-77 for conflict phrase rules).
4. Scene Framing III,  inviting the Moons to join. Provide a one-sheet of names and relationships to write in the Hearts’ cosmos and have the Moons play. Add in the ritual  phrases, “…It was no matter”, and “…We shall see what comes of it” to use on the Moons (read pp. 77-78 for Moon advice, but ignore the stuff on Themes and Values just yet - also review relevant conflict phrase rules pp. 70-73).
5. Scene Framing IV, adding in the ritual phrases “And furthermore…”, “…You ask far too much”. Read the exhausting themes rules on page 73, and review the conflict phrases pp. 70-73).
6. Scene Framing V, congratulations! You now get to ROLL A DIE! Add in, “It shall not come to pass” as part of your pool of ritual phrases. Starting using the Experience rules. Give, or notice, the value for each Knight’s Ice, Light, and Zeal. For info on these things, read pg. 82-85.

LEVEL FOUR

If I have done my work (and you yours), you went from zero to finish shepherding a group of storyjamming newbies, enjoying every step of the way, and not even coming close to losing anyone to text burn-out or rule-fatigue. It should have felt like play, play, play the whole time, with 95% of your time spent creating increasingly meaningful fiction rather than talking about rules and handling the mechanics of the game.

In LEVEL FOUR you think about how to make this schema even better and more applicable to your play group. And you get to write one up for another game in which you want to take your group from ignorance to literacy enjoying every step of the way!

[this continues a series on learning the game Polaris - please refer to Part I for context]

LEVEL ONE

“WARMING UP FOR PLAY - BUILDING TRUST - GELLING THE GROUP”

Skills: Turning off the self-censor, listening to other players, seeing the shared dream, building on other players’ contributions. Many of the activities below come from a handy aid called the ‘Juicers’ deck, made by Creative Advantage. Each activity has its purpose in parentheses after the name, and I usually run them in the order listed. This really marks a starting place for a group of absolute, rank beginners; one can up the level of trust, intuition, and creativity manifold by later choosing more difficult games.

1. Name Story  (gets people talking, hearing the sound of their own voice)
2. Firing Line (learning not to censor)
3. One Word at a Time (upping the challenge of not self-censoring,  building)
4. Yes, and…! (higher challenge not to self-censor, building)
5. Character Circle (seeing together, building)
6. Color, Advance (not censor, more building and interaction, slightly modified from original version by using characters from ‘character circle’, and accenting the ’scene framing’ skill)
7. Counting (listening)

LEVEL TWO

“SETTING, CHARACTER, SITUATION”

Skills: Brainstorming, Consensus decision making. I have shortened this section, which I’d make much longer for other games (like Primetime Adventures), because Polaris has a ready-made setting that inspired you to play the game in the first place. Watch this space in other incarnations for really cool stuff on brainstorming, and skills that will bolster the kind of setting/situation/character creation one sees in games like Shock: Social Science Fiction.

1. Distribute One-sheet of Names, Themes/Aspects, Demons, and Oracles. (Short and sweet for Quick Play version, shorter than in the various Polaris appendices. Less choices, the better. For a chattier set up, dedicate the whole first game to character and situation creation - the rest of LEVEL TWO will assume Quick Play goals).
2. Make Three character concepts, Pick One (Timed - 2 minutes to make three concepts, 10 seconds to pick one - facilitator picks one for those who haven’t chosen).
3. See Me (modified version of ‘Character Circle’ - player announces their character concept/name/themes/description in 30 seconds, starting with the first Polaris ritual phrase “But hope was not yet lost, for … still heard the song of the stars”, and the group says what they see, collaboratively making the character until they reach ‘I don’t see it’).

[continued in Part III]

I thought I’d start walking my talk and actually provide an example of how to make a game not only learnable and accessible, but also enjoyable at every level of ‘tutorial’ play. In a sense, all play then becomes a tutorial stage, because once you master the present stage you can always make the game more complex by adding another. You don’t have to…but this does give hope for some games that bet the farm on complexity, but lose a lot of players because of it. Complexity doesn’t make a game unplayable; the lack of a workable play pedagogy makes a game unplayable (or at least, played by less people).

I have a indie story-game I love, called Polaris (”Chivalric Tragedy at the Utmost North”), by the much esteemed Ben Lehman. I recommend this game. I love reading the evocative text and looking at the ornate illustrations.

Problem: I have played this game maybe five times, all single sessions, all but two in convention environments, and I still don’t feel at all confident in the rules of play (and only really enjoyed a single game of any of those - the one with Lukas, Jordan, and Ogre at Indie Hurricane 2008). In fact, five sessions barely manages to count as one long-term story. For some reason, for me and my group, we just can’t learn the game as it stands. For my entire core group, our experience of the text ranks far higher than our experience of the game.

So I decided to make Polaris the subject of an experiment, of which I will write down the rough structure here.

GOALS:

1. To play an honest-to-goodness long-term game of Polaris, learning the rules until I know them without thinking.

2. To more generally change how I interact with the learning curve of all indie games, so that I spend at least 95% of my time playing and enjoying them, not flipping through books for rules, discussing the pros and cons of how and when to apply them, and generally reducing the overall non-fun handling time of game materials, like dice, text, and cards.

3. To constantly increase the amount of playing time in which I/we create fiction, and constantly improve the quality of the contributions to that fiction.

STRATEGY:

Some of this applies to just to Polaris, some more generally to all games. Even the Polaris-centric bits, if you poke at, you’ll see they have a pretty general application. I envision a stack of POLARIS GAME CARDS, each one having the stage below written on it, with a short description, and maybe a page reference. Once you slap a card on the table, the entire group knows what to work on.

[Cont’d in Parts II and III]

I measure the success of a story by noticing how much it sticks with me, changes my perspective, helps me solve problems in my own life. This means the story itself has ’stuck’ to me on many levels; it has moved (literally, moved, wrenched, pushed and pulled) me emotionally, engaged me sensuously, hit major themes and major points on the Arc of Meaning, referred to by mythologist Joseph Campbell as ‘the Hero’s Journey’, and leaves me with a sense of abiding mystery and ‘no final answers’.

If you’ve read my articles here on Dream Interviews, you’ll noticed that dreams do all these things. They punch you in the gut with fear and ecstasy, fill your eyes, ears, nose and body with sensations,  and dance you through a series of scenes that measure an Arc of Meaning, in a sense Acts I, II, and III of a dream-life play. And of course, the dream leaves you with ‘what the hell did that all mean?’, a sense of deep abiding mystery (and perhaps not a little frustration and confusion).

In fact, in thinking about ways of teaching and encouraging storytelling, I’ve noticed that folks who recall a vivid dream already demonstrate incredible ability of recall and texture of the story, as if they spent all night hard at work memorizing a long, complex, bizarre folktale that they want to effortlessly perform at the drop of a hat.

Think about this.

Our dreams (and our dream-selves) have us figured out to an extent that they can do this to us. With no conscious work on our part, they burn their story into our being, and leave us giddy to tell someone ‘about that crazy dream I had last night’.

I have started to feel that this particular someone has a much better model for teaching storytelling than I do. Of course, dreams apply so individually and idiosyncratically that they usually don’t carry meaning to the often unimpressed listeners. And some out there do not remember their dreams (and others may think they do not even have them). So how do we apply the lessons of dreams to improve our storytelling?

One of my favorite effects of dreams comes from their unwillingness to tell or explain anything. That sense of mystery that they can impart has such a powerful impact, it can leave me with a sense of magic and divinity, even concerning the most mundane subjects. Modern storytellers, on the whole, just don’t seem to get this need for mystery as well as old myths and folktales.

For example, I believe that among devotees of the Star Wars storyline, the explanation of the mystical and all-pervading Force as sourcing from small mutualistic organisms in our blood called ‘midi-chlorians’ caused almost universal disappointment and frustration. I often heard the rationale for these feelings as the fans considered it a bad explanation, or it didn’t make sense, or it just sounded stupid.

I never heard anyone say, as I suspect, that George Lucas’ true transgression occurred when he tried to explain the Force at all; that, in fact, no explanation suffices for the Force. It dwells in a mythic space of story where, to explain something, means to kill it and pull it out of that space. I think the fans, consciously or unconsciously, knew this and reacted emotionally and viscerally in the defense of something meaningful and alive to them.

Part of the new tide of indie story games involves an effort to create setting and situation on the fly, out of a small number of evocative and inspiring story elements; pictures, poetry, snippets of story. To the extent this works, I believe it works because of the awareness of mystery and the discovery of more mystery to come. To ever end on an answer will kill a story, in my opinion. In my experience it certainly will kill a conversation, create dead ends in a spiritual life, and alienate the other in a relationship. Questions and mystery really matter when caring for and creating story that really matters too.

At the Story Games forum recently Nathan Herrold asked why so few (if any) indie games attended to ‘the Return Home’ part of the Hero’s Journey? That time of integration and reflection of the adventure and challenges abroad; that time of noticing how self has changed, and how home changed too. Lord of the Rings does this wonderfully when the hobbits return to the Shire in the chapters starting with ‘the Scouring of the Shire’. Odysseus has a similar experience when coming home from his journeys.

Integrating and reflection on what we have done and where we have gone can really challenge us, and I see us as a culture of people who live according to the motto, “get over it - move on with your life - find the next adventure”. I think by including this Return Home (a parallel to Act III in a dream) in our storyjamming life, we can create more meaningful stories that ’stick with us’. By also not explaining, by leaving mysteries open-ended (or at least always ensure solving a mystery opens a new one), we can keep magic and awe in our tellings.

Look out there, at the bookshelves stacked with volumes concerning conversation, mediation, discussion, dialogue. You can find endless methodologies, models, and structures to learn and implement in your work, family, and personal life. But where do you start?

For a while now,  for myself, I’ve tried to boil down basic conversation and listening skills (what I call “clarity skills”) to a simple enough core that anyone can immediately use them. I want them to work for everyone, and I think to do so, we must design this core as a container that inspires the kind of behavior we want, rather than asking the players to go study up on conversation techniques. Much like a game of tag - sure, practice will deepen your satisfaction of play, but the game works, as it stands, without needing better players. And the rules naturally create the kind of play (behavior) that we want - running and giggling, in this case.

At Rewild.info, a forum I’ve helped moderate for a couple of years now (two years this Spring), we’ve used a discussion guideline to protect members and keep conversations satisfying.

The guideline goes:  Tell Your Story, Ask a Question, and Interpret Generously.

For the most part I have found that this suffices for guiding almost all conversations. Many of us participating at Rewild.info have noted the unusual air of congeniality there. I believe it stems not from the innate virtue of the people attracted to Rewild.info, but from simple, clear ground-rules laid down from almost the beginning. The “your” in Tell Your Story really matters, and it seems work on its own. To further explain it, if you begin to tell how someone else feels, or what they think, or to give advice, you have definitely begun telling their story, not yours. And likely they will disagree with you.

I made the ground-rules so simple because I knew the Internet complicates and obscures communication excellently. Blame anonymity, blame a lack of non-verbal cues, but we all experience it whenever we surf.

After a couple years of watching the guidelines do their magic, I now feel confident enough to recommend them to other forums and formats. In fact, I believe they suffice as a way to begin to learn to talk to each other in gatherings of all kinds.

An even simpler version of these rules exist (yes, color me shocked!). Steven List describes the ‘Circle of Questions’ at his blog. Please note in the comments some enlightening additions my mother Diana (who I interviewed in a podcast not so long ago) made.

I’ve noticed that most groups of modern people cannot handle even the apparent simplicity of a talking circle. I say apparent, because I see a talking circle as a far more complex group process than it appears at first glance, challenging and working participants on many levels. I see this often overwhelm participants (especially as talking circles grow beyond a dozen or so participants). If you just want to teach group listening skills, I’ve seen them work great to that end. If you want to address an issue, or achieve a different kind of group goal, you need a more focused process tool.

For myself, generally speaking, I like to pick one small ‘edge’ to work on at a time, one area where I know participants will have a hill to climb and may do some huffing and puffing before they get to the top, but they won’t arrive exhausted. If you have a similar value guiding your decisions, then I encourage you to start simple with something like the Circle of Questions.

In further discussing this with Diana, I see some things to add. Apparently, beyond a dozen or so people, the Circle of Questions begins to lose effectiveness. Also, keep in mind the rhythm, set by the facilitator of the circle: they tell the first story, then ask the first question of the person next to them, and then step out of the circle as this wave of ‘first story, then question’ ripples around the circle two times, taking its own time. In this way the Circle of Questions encourages openness and teaches curiosity as you first tell your story, and then ask a question.

Check out Diana’s book (with coauthor Esther Derby), Agile Retrospectives, for more process that focus group discussion and decision making in a productive way.

I left a major point out of the previous article on the comparison of the Romaniya, the Gypsy moral and legal code, to the modern state system of adversarial fault-finding.

If the following notion doesn’t blow some circuits in your head, I need to take another vacation, because I’ve lost my touch:

The Roma maintain their self-sufficiency precisely because they live accordingly to tribal remedy law; a community mandate to “make things good again” when dischord emerges, rather than strictly punishing and rewarding. This means learned and wise adult resolutions work because the adults seek to discover what decision the community will support. This means they work together and brainstorm until they hit upon the necessary remedy.

The state justifies its existence by intervening into disputes, and assigning punishments and reward that no-one in the community need support; the state has force of arms to back up its decisions.

The state therefore blocks the self-sufficiency of cultural groups, and provides a foundation for its existence. By convincing us to believe in Right and Wrong, blame and punishment, the state cripples our ability to think in terms of community balance and harmony.

Like all great marketing schemes, the state has fabricated something for us to worry over and sells us its solution in the same stroke: justice.

Without the state, we would have to revert back to remedy law.

For many tribal peoples, including the Roma, they have chosen as a people to find that balance between existing in hierarchy, and maintaining their freedom as wild, free families.

What do you think of when you think of adults? What do they do? How do they carry themselves?

How about in an intact, and indigenous culture? Does that picture change at all?

It does for me. In our culture we have the ‘provider’ side of adulthood down, but we seem to have long lost our traditions of agreements and community collaboration.

In Gypsy Law, Romani Legal Traditions and Culture, editor Walter Weyrauch has assembled a group of essays that address the heart of this subject, using a cultural group that has role-modeled a sustainable and vital adult tradition of collaboration and agreements for centuries now. Alternately demonized and romanticized, at the heart of Romani culture sits something extraordinary, invisible to modern eyes because it in fact impacts the mundane flow of day-to-day life the most; an unarticulated, yet ever-present system of religious (and therefore to indigenous minds, legal) strictures that modulate behavior and prepare the ground for community disputes and dischord, called the Romaniya.

For this essay I’d like to focus in on one piece of this vast and ever-evolving (yet also unchanging and the most ancient of traditions - deal with the paradox, you can do it!) web of laws held and passed on by the community elders. I’d like to single out the legal proceeding and communal adjudication known as the kris. A kris forms whenever two adult parties have irreconcilable differences and need some more powerful tools to find a resolution (and often, some kind of reparation).

In the United States of America, any typical courtroom in any legal context operates using a very important guideline: in a community of highly diverse religious traditions and values, from cultures all over the world, you must narrow the scope of the proceeding, and the kind and source of information, or total chaos will result.

Whether or not you agree with this notion, it defines our legal system, the system that, barring radical and fundamental cultural change, we do have to deal with as part of the bargain of living in the modern world.

The Roma (Gypsies) flip this idea of narrowed-scope. At a kris court proceeding, no complaint, story, comment, or rant from an adult belonging to the community lies outside the scope of the proceeding. Every kris acts as a chance for adults to voice the current crop of imbalances and issues at play in the community; this can seem like a stream of non sequitors, irrelevant to the stated reason the community convened the kris in the first place. And the spokesman for the different parties, what you might call ‘citizen attorneys’, act more as mediators.

So, in a state-controlled diverse context of highly varied values and traditions, we narrow scope to help find a resolution. In an egalitarian and communal context of very similar values and traditions, we widen the scope of information kind and source.

Note that each has a narrow scope, but of a different kind. Non-Roma (whom gypsies call gadje) do not attend a kris; the community excludes them. The Romaniya does not, in fact, apply to non-Rom, so they simply do not belong and have no say. So Roma narrow the scope of a kris by only including adult community members, and find their own kind of efficiency.

If you know anything about Open Spaces Gatherings, you may have just had quite the revelatory moment.

The Roma, amongst themselves, use the kris for every intra-Roma dispute that they can; issues of theft, adultery, and rare incidents like murder, they try to convince the state legal system to allow them to resolve. When the ‘crime’ or dispute has occurred between Roma and gadje outsiders, then they use the state’s legal system. They have interfaced in this way, between egalitarian Roma community and majority hierarchical state culture, for several centuries at least, and only have more success with this balance as they go along.

As a cultural critic I cannot help but note one other contrast between these two cultures, and of the balancing act it illuminates.

The United States legal system, along with narrowing the scope of information allowed, also employs an adversarial paradigm. The system applauds and supports the discontent of two parties, and assures them that, in the end, the state will announce one party ‘Right’ and the other ‘Wrong’, and divvy punishments and rewards accordingly.

The Romani legal system uses a paradigm of remedy; the kris endeavors to answer the question, “what must we do to make this situation right again?”, as opposed to “who do we blame, who do we punish?”. To stay clear, the kris does allot fines and other penalties at times, but it prioritizes the return to community balance over such solutions, and uses penalties and fault-finding in accord with mediation and peacemaking.

Boiling it all down, in one hand we have an adversarial system of narrowly-focused information exchange between parties of different values, and in the other a peacemaking system of widening-scope communal information exchange between parties of very similar values.

Ironically, I don’t see the state’s legal system as more efficient and less time-consuming; I emphatically see evidence of a situation quite the opposite, where the days or week of a kris court end in a resolution satisfying to the community, where state trials can last months and years ending in a resolution that truly satisfies few or even no one (anybody who gets paid from it probably feels pretty good).

For regular readers of the College of Mythic Cartography, I hope to tie a whole assortment of parallel threads together in this. In a culture of people who don’t actually listen to each other, but rather just wait for their turn to talk, we have very little experience when it comes to making systems of agreement, collaboration, and conversation that works. This whole field of knowledge really has just begun to open up with real possibilities.

I believe, that just as we can work with community energy by changing the games we play, just as we can choose our culture depending on the kind of experiences we want, we too can choose how to resolve disputes and remedy dischord by learning from the Romaniya and applying some of its principles.

I struggle with throwing too much into my explanations of things. I enjoy wandering the places where all kinds of craziness overlaps, and so you may find this subject involves far more than just ‘improv warm ups’ - hence why I call it “working with energy” rather than just ‘warm up games’.

I believe you can’t move human energy where you want it by forcing it, explaining to it, or blocking it.”Moving” energy really means opening space for the energy to go. In some kind of odd way, human energy fills the container you put it in, like water. So, by changing the shape  and structure of the container, you can really shape the energy of relationships within your group.

Think about this! The implications! I have a five year old friend who just discovered exclamation points, so in his spirit I won’t hold back. To wit: you change relationships within a group, not by changing the people within the group, but by changing the shape of their container!! This means you no longer look for virtuous (or flawed) behavior, but you simply play games that change the shape of the container the group dwells in, according to your needs.

I find this ridiculously cool. If you’ve listened to my “Yes, and…!” podcast (and read the corresponding article), or my interview with Lisa Wells, you know how no matter how simple the intuition/improv game, it has an incredible amount to teach and a broad applicability.

So you can use these games and this understanding, as principles, to subtlely shape any container you find yourself in with another human being, when you find the space disintegrating into something that doesn’t support healthy interactions. Nonviolent Communication sessions, decision making processes, project retrospectives, all these ‘containers’ comprise themselves of many sub-games and understandings, that you can further support using improv/intuition games (whether fully, or just in principle).

Now, many, many people use improv/intuition games with insufficient understanding of how they work. I don’t claim any expertise myself, but I’ve had some very good mentors and seen how skilled folks work the games. An improv game doesn’t work like a magic bullet - you don’t just play “yes, and…!” a couple times and consider your problems solved. Don’t use them as one-size-fits-all icebreakers, and pick them out as random candy to distribute. These games require attention and intention.

Each improv game has a diagnostic function, and an energy moving function. Every time you play a game, you look for how the group handles it. If they seem unready or overwhelmed, then you know to back up into simpler and more fundamental games. I had this experience just the other day over skype, in my mythweavers storyband. I’d never done improv games “over the phone” before, and yet I knew we needed some way to further cohere as a group. So I gave it a shot, and discovered I had run the games exactly backwards (which tells me a LOT about our group, what we needed, and what we hadn’t gotten yet). I first ran a game called “color, advance”, where I had one person (A) tell a story, while another person (B) yelled ‘color!’ for more details periodically, and yet another person (C) yelled ‘advance’ for plot progression. They struggled with that, so I knew to back up (diagnostics! don’t blame the group, change the shape of the container!). So I backed up to “Word at a Time”, where in order each person added a single word to an ongoing story, as quickly as possible. They struggled with that too. So, I backed up yet again, played “Firing Line”, where two folks took turns calling out words to a third person, who immediately responded with the first word that came to mind. I noticed them handling that pretty well, so once they had a definite rhythm we next went back to “Word at a Time”, did great, then finally back to “Color, Advance”, doing great (you can find a handy card deck that contains all or most of these improv games Creative Advantage, or look in Viola Spolin’s book).

Huh, you know? Simple.

Except for of course the unbelievable limits that skype places on what I would normally do with a group (way more body movement and interaction, way more emphasis on eye contact), I feel like we can at least work up a decent enough container to consistently get better-than-average moments out of our skype storyjamming. In a way, playing over skype feels like blindfolding the group, which I might do for an improv game anyway; so maybe in the end it has a lot of potential!

The model I normally follow to warm up for storyjamming specifically, looks like this:

Follow the energy - all groups need something silly to start with, more tired or distracted groups need more silly games than usual. Silly doesn’t mean ‘easy’,  just silly (think ‘musical chairs’). Once energy has really begun to fly around the room, after a couple different silly games, use that energy to fuel more focused games. When their focus burns out, go back to silly and fun. Then back to focus, amping up the level of focus challenge each time we return. Look for mutual group eye contact as a sign the group has begun to feel ready for bigger challenges. End with a fiendishly difficult group mind diagnostic game, like ‘Counting’.

Even more concisely put:

A) Follow the Energy

B) Build energy with silly fun, use that energy to focus until burn out, then back to silly fun until ready for next level of focus challenge.

C) End with a group diagnostic game that demonstrates group unity.

Now about that ‘level of focus challenge’ - this part has a very open-ended nature. You can’t run out of ever-deeper levels of focus challenge. Think about the play you want your story games to create, and tune the warm-ups to get you there. If you want to go all the way to method acting and beyond, well, why the hell not. I think it’ll surprise you what you can achieve, and how quickly. However, don’t rush things either; really, only time limits you. The group will get as far as it can get in each session. The quicker you want to create group cohesion, the more time you must spend watching and opening space for the group energy to move into. Ironically, the more in a hurry you feel, the more time you must spend playing; you could warm up for a couple hours if you really wanted to get to magical places fast.

Which brings up the last point. Do you need to play these games, to create the storyjamming that satisfies you? Certainly some folks have very satisfying and consistent play without ever hearing of these improv games. I’ve had great story jams without them, but not consistently, and I think I know why; I play with new groups all the time, and only recently formed my core group. Folks with great consistently play tend to have tight, intimate core groups with long histories. I think these tools solve the problem of building brand-new groups to a high level of cohesion quickly, creating a space for satisfying play to happen fast and consistently. I also think these warm-up games find one’s blindspots, and iron them out, making each player personally improve over time.

So, as they say, Go Play!

I’ve noticed when jamming story with new folks, that we often have a lot of hesitancy, self-censorship, and creative blocks to work through - and conversely, lots of trust to build between us. Often because of how I explain storyjamming to others (resuscitating oral tradition, telling meaningful story worth caring about, weaving dreams back into story to create truly magical experiences), I think they come with even more nervousness than they might otherwise, thinking they really need to do it “right” and create something “good”. Well, oops on me. Someday I’ll come up with a better way to inspire folks about it without also removing their sense of play and experimentation.

In any case, even without any nervousness, hesitancy, or self-censorship, I think a certain bag of tools can create play and story above and beyond the norm, on a consistent basis. As introduced to me by my friend Lisa Wells, I call this bag of tools “theater improv games”, or better yet “intuition games”. These games do many things; but first and foremost they blunt our ability to self-censor and overthink our behavior, which only leads to good stuff. In our culture we so overcondition and overvalue our own ability to think, rather than actually ever using it all the way to the hilt at any one time, it reminds me of the problem some of my favorite physical fitness methodologies endeavor to address.

Lots of high-repetition, low intensity strength training, results in chronic fatigue, lowered immune response, and injury. Whereas savvily applied sessions of extremely high intensity, low repetition, and varied exercises create a very happy and fit body. I see this as present in our thinking too; I see us working over the endless minutiae of our day, grocery lists, to do lists, over and over in our head, rather than amping up our curiousity and problem solving skills so high that they burnt out and we get thrown into the only thing that can catch us - our right brains. Body, emotion, pattern and picture; awareness, acceptance, and action. They don’t often direct us modern folks anymore, but in certain situations we can create a space to let them out.

Different artists have different methods, and what I will say in a moment does not apply to everyone. But I believe in it strongly. In my world, you don’t plan Story; you discover Story. You don’t decide Story; you dream Story. In a way, Story chooses you. And the more you can get out of your own way, the stronger the signal coming through from the Story place. And to discover worthwhile Story, you need to warm-up those story muscles first.

Also, once a person masters the basics of storyjamming, I think we still need intuition games to maintain our skills. Like how a good martial-artist constantly drills the basics, or a good animal tracker always keeps a beginner mind, and keeps returning to tracking as if they’ve never done it before.

I have a strong footing in the “show, don’t tell” tradition, in all its permutations. As an educator, artist, family member and friend, I practice showing rather than telling. Everybody has advice on how you should live; few people show you what happens when you follow it (for better or worse, in my case). I believe people learn more wholly and concretely from someone showing them, rather than telling them.

For example, if I write a story game text which encourages players to play in the spirit of “yes, and…!”, I have very low expectations of my players to follow this advice (if they even fully understand it). But if I warm up a story jam by playing the game “yes, and…!”, where one by one we tell a possibly nonsensical story by contributing bits and pieces, one after another, starting with the words “yes, and…!”, then if the group performs well, I know they can and will bring this spirit into our story jam, even if I don’t tell them to. Think about that. I have changed the culture of our play, by playing a game that changes them.

So, to me, a way to design a game that has the “yes, and…!” spirit in it, involves making the “yes, and…!” warm up part of the game.

I’ve always experienced that systems (whether an institution, a game, a factory, or a society) produce what they do because of their design, not in spite of it. If you want them to produce something else, you don’t train the factory workers more, or publish more articles on virtuous behavior, you change the design of the system.

This has run long, and I haven’t even scratched the surface of this issue, much less addressed something else I really value: an organic model of influencing the flow of energy with these diverse and specialized intuition games to create a culture of relationship within a group.

We’ll get there.

Most of you know where I stand on nouns - I don’t like ‘em much. I have a much friendlier relationship with verbs. Verbs describe and animate; Nouns pigeonhole and create an illusion of certainty.

For example, I don’t often hear people argue about whether a person “wrote” something or “scribbled” it. But I often hear people argue about whether that person “is” [sic] a writer or not. You can extend this list infinitely to include arguments of all kinds about “is this an A or a B?”.

I think it improves one’s clarity of thought exponentially to toss this out as a valid subject for a conversation. Throw it in the compost. You’ll feel better, I wager.

So, can we categorize things usefully? I believe so. We just have to change the shape of the object that we call “category”, including all its various synonyms and idioms: sets, boxes, labels, and so on.

Right now, linguistically and in the common-sense logic of our culture, we believe that categories have solid borders. The next step of enlightenment (or as I prefer to call it, ‘clarity’) occurs when we notice the permeability of these borders (i.e. a person in the “riot cop” category quits her job and enters the “poet” category) in startling ways.

I believe the next step occurs when we stop seeing any borders at all, but rather clouds of points, each point indicating a specific subjective observation. For example, rather than the convention image of atoms as solid spheres, or like little solar systems with electrons moving in fixed orbits, quantum physics maps them this way:

[Thanks to image creator Blake Stacey, who describes this image as ‘How quantum mechanics sees a hydrogen atom: one electron “inhabiting” the space around one proton.’]

Now, let’s think of words as flags for marking a point of observation. So, for example, let’s say I assign the word “dog” to a certain animal I’ve observed. I’ve planted a flag, from inner cognitive space into physical space. Primary to this act: I have a relationship to that flag. I have feelings about that flag, because of the initial observation I made. Think of the red proton in the image as that flag, a symbol planted in the physical world. Now, everything around that, the electron cloud of probable location points, indicates all the further observations that I make  about the world that have some level of similarity to where I stuck my flag to begin with; the closer in, the more similarity, the farther out the lesser. Note that the electron and the proton do not share space; neither does my word “dog” inhabit any physical space. But the observation points cluster around the central point.

These observational clouds can (and do) overlap with clouds belonging to other flags. [Please keep in mind I’ve used the hydrogen atom image as a fun comparison; not all of this model of seeing ‘categories’ necessarily applies to the behavior of atoms!].

Now, instead of defining things according to whether they sit on this side of the border or that, we can define them according to their relationship to an abstract center we have created. Keep in mind that our flag doesn’t actually exist in the physical world; it models actual things we can observe, but doesn’t replace them.

Each person experiences flags differently; by their very nature, they must have a different relationship to this or that flag (you love dogs; I don’t - you grew up with dogs; I didn’t) that fundamentally orients how we think about all beings and observations that cluster ever more closely around that flag.

Nothing in this universe comes in neat little boxes; or at least, to believe so will only bring you a lot of grief. A flexible and relationship-to-a-center oriented way of organizing your perceptual world will increase your clarity of mind and cut out a lot of pointless arguments. Give it a shot!

Much like with Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication method, and with e-prime/primitive (of which I see this as an inextricable part), you may best spend your time translating others’ speech into this model, rather than explaining to them why “ur doin it rong”. I find that thinking and speaking in this way consciously will iron out fuzzy conversations without having to explain anything to anyone about electron clouds and center-focused categories.