online: 7 september 2002

6 september 2002 despecialising


14:28 Fragmentary thoughts before walking:

cell 2/2
(in a matrix that I am hoping will structure a piece of fiction)
calls for 'education through art' (and industry)

and integrations of

art/science,
teach/learn,
education/job/life,
mind/industry/using.

individually most of these names are divisive - so how to transcend and integrate my remembered experiences as a 'science fiction' ?

perhaps the answer is in
avoiding,
abolishing,
or out-growing
the need for paid and specialised teachers, artists, scientists, students, workers, priests, doctors and nurses, thinkers, academics, poets, engineers...
and all the modern specialisations?
('Modern' meaning agricultural or industrial.)

(except that some (such as design and art) being integrative by nature, are bridges?)

the key being to do without hierarchy! (and without differences of status and wealth)



16:30 A seat facing eastward on a Friday afternoon. About a dozen cross-country runners pass, not hurrying, running close together and looking fit and well in the sunshine. I perceive them as a unity - arms, legs and bodies moving rhythmically as one with each other and with the open grassland and the trees - which shimmer and sway in the wind.

It's not often that I happen to perceive people and their surroundings as a single organism - a mode of (relaxed) perception that I learnt from Edwin Schlossberg thirty years ago when we were filming not far from here. He asked me to look about with the intention of letting the interactions of people walking, fields, wind, light, etc. 'become one'. I was surprised to find that, simply by ceasing to 'recognise' these things as named and separate objects, I could suddenly see the whole scene 'as one', as a single composition of connecting and moving parts.

As I wrote that sentence a yellow and crumpled leaf touched my face and my hand as it fell from the tree above. Looking about me I see dozens of fallen yellow leaves in the grass - I'd not noticed them before and I'd not realised that it is already autumn, which is I suppose one of those imagined entities that we must forget if we want to see 'reality' as a connected whole.

This afternoon I was thinking about education and life and art and industry and work and jobs and leisure and even time and money and all the other imaginary things that are made to appear real and separate by our ways of thinking and speaking and organising, industrially... the things that have I believe to go before we can be liberated from what is wrong in industrial living, 'as specialists' paid to perceive and manipulate things in isolation, one at a time.

Yesterday I was asked to help some film makers match English subtitles to a film of a young man speaking or singing Welsh rap on a hillside. I was actually paid to do this highly specialised task but I did not feel I was among specialists. The three people who were organising and making the film seemed to me to be acting very flexibly and with little or no sense of hierarchy or conformity - and the words of the rap were certainly critical of 'the system'... I wonder now if my wholesale (what an industrial word - is it 'holistic' - or is it 'reductionist'?)... is my 'wholesale' way of condemning all paid and specialised work as destructive of life incorrect? (That question could be the clue to the whole thing!)

It's time to continue walking and to pick some blackberries (for an egg and blackberry pie).




digital diary dates

homepage

© 2002 john chris jones

You may transmit this text to anyone for any non-commercial purpose if you include the copyright line and this notice and if you respect the copyright of quotations.

If you wish to reproduce any of this text commercially please send a copyright permission request to jcj at publicwriting.net.



essences of? lifework: relating desingings to people and people to all archive: reenlivening constant efforts to realise this (drop particular efforts as specific to past situations