Gathering Days

Gathering days are days when one can only eat things that one has gathered. The concept first came to me at my school in Laos, where I noticed many of my students were becoming increasingly accustomed to the market-bought veggies and meat constantly available. I realized how our school was inadvertently unhinging students from a living connection with the land, despite teaching the importance of this connection in class. Upon returning to Canada, I became aware of how much less I knew about the wild beings that live here compared to those that surround me and my hut in Laos. I could only identify a handful of wild edibles and didn’t really have an understanding of when and where they grow. I’ve decided to institute “gathering days” here in Canada. I will start by doing them once every lunar-month, two days before each full moon. This practice will connect me with the lifeforms around me, with their changes throughout the seasons, and with the presence of the moon (which immediately becomes unnoticed upon entering a city). Down by the lake, I’ve noticed a great deal of chicory, touch-me-nots, and wild carrots, which will serve me well with the crabapples and mullein tisane next Sunday. I will have to begin making preparations for the winter too.

a paradigm shift on the concept of paradigm shifting?

Metaphysical, ontological and epistemological frameworks destroy not simply by their being lived out as false beliefs. None of them are believed fully enough to be internalized into the workings of the body that completely. Rather, they destroy through the compromise they reach with the body, and by the incongruence between belief and action that ensues. This is another reason why “paradigm shifting” and some of the presumptions of “transformative learning” based on thought-down experiences are along not enough. To illustrate this with a simple example: when the paradigm of determinism swept over us as a culture, it did so incompletely, for even its staunchest allies acted out their daily affairs without ever really doing away with the causal “I”. Nevertheless, as a cultural phenomena, determinism became accepted in technological, futuristic and economic spheres, and in ethical considerations generally, to the extent that our actions based on abstract and reasoned modes of thought were lured by determinism’s enthralling logic. The assumption that changing thought alone is sufficient is erroneous for the same reason that ideal is generally: solitary power is placed on thought, which is in fact but a recent player in the game. The body, the heart, and the context have their own modes of being which, although interactive with thought, are certainly not subordinate to it.

eteragogy?

“Pedagogy” and “andragogy” are both inappropriate terms for an ecological perspective on our learning and teaching relations with others. First of all, there is no separation between ways of educating adults and children. More importantly though, these terms mislead us into perceiving education as a uniquely human affair. They cut us off from the rich and continuous learning interactions that go on between us and other life forms. Terms such as these have a self-validating nature about them: once we internalize that learning relationships do not occur between us and other species, then we go about our daily lives ignoring those very beings that would be in dialogue with us were we open to it. I have been toying with new sorts of words and think that something more like “eteragogy” or “heterogogy” (or perhaps even “biogogy”) would be more inclusive for reorienting education to being about all humans, all life forms, all interactions. "Etera" is Greek for "other" or "another". It refers to the interactions one has with every other interacting being -including with oneself. I accept that we often live our day to day affairs in a curious dialectic with ourselves: always within us one who leads and the one who is led. What is always at issue is the fact that I am in interaction with someone else, something "other" than the "I" who is conscious of this interaction.

I think it is suitable enough to keep the suffix “gogy” for now - when we interact with others, we really do lead them to believe or act in this or that way, whether we do so consciously, willingly, or otherwise. This leading may be in directions unanticipated than our original intentions.

the difference that makes a difference

When Bateson writes “the interaction between parts of mind is triggered by differences”, what are we to take this to mean? The first thing that would likely leap to you is the thought of an axon firing once it had acquired sufficient stimuli to cross its threshold. There is a line drawn such that passing it is considered a “difference”. It works in this on/off way, translating what is only a difference in degree into a difference in kind. The nervous system also codes differences in degree, but only after the signal has proved important enough to be coded in the first place. Variations in intensity are thereafter indicated by the frequency of firing. From Bateson’s point of view, it is that initial threshold that is crucial though, it discriminating the “difference that makes a difference”.

Bateson claims that that which occurs within the nervous system is but a minute fragment of what we should consider “mind” and that triggering by recognition of difference can occur at various points, not simply those within neurons. For example, a flock of animals may choose to migrate after the food supply has dipped below a threshold and any changes before that point are not deemed by them as relevant. In playing a musical instrument, the difference in the sound of the note just played leads one to play the next note.

Teaching may also be thought about as trying to create a “difference that makes a difference” -a pedagogical experience that becomes impactful enough to distinguish itself from the amorphous slurry of experiences that occur in every person’s life. As cultural workers, we also hope to make this difference when aspire to cross beyond a threshold, or a “tipping point” in our activism or advocacy. Our options and our strategies can be informed by the implications of this wider view of mind.

For instance, take the neuron firing as a negative example: all mental systems seem to have built-in mechanisms that prevent such differences from occurring as well. This is evident by the very fact that a threshold exists in the first place. If these mechanisms are gauging "relevance" too high, that part of the system becomes insensitive. Habit forming drugs, to which the body quickly acclimatize, require increasing doses to “make a difference” and thus desensitize the body to the substance. However, these mechanisms can operate as negative feedback as well as positive feedback. For example, humans within cultures become insensitive to experiences that question the cultural framework, and this insensitivity may itself be a part of the cultural framework itself. For these people, it may require a great deal of repeated stimuli to actually reach a threshold that is significant.

bateson's block

Gregory Bateson insisted that developing our aesthetic sense through the arts was necessary for us to get in touch with our more-than-rational selves. He pointed out that the workings of our “mind”, which he understood as the information circuits that pass through and beyond us into the ecosystems within which we are embedded, does not operate in a linearly causal manner. The conscious/rational mind is a rather recent invention in this system, and one that often disrupts the larger mind that our body and non-rational selves have evolved to gracefully inhabit. It does this by positing very short-term and local goals for itself, goals which appear linear, but only because the conscious mind is incapable of grasping all the implications and chains of pathways that come out of the action. When engaged in art, we allow ourselves to influence and be influenced by our artwork in a continuously recursive, albeit non-logical way. This provides a miniature feedback loop that compares with the larger one that we are also continuously engaged in. It also shows how a process of perpetual non-logical adjustment creates beauty, the same sort of beauty that has emerged in organisms and landscapes. However, it is clear to me that developing our aesthetic sense, on its own, is not sufficient to make our larger mental circuits sane. Many artists are known to be self-absorbed and hardly considered socially or environmentally sensitive in their actions. Bateson is therefore correct in attempting to teach the importance of his ecological perspective along with his claims that we develop our aesthetic senses, undoubtedly recognizing that either one, on its own, is likely to cause a great deal more damage than good. But here lies the paradox that so chilled him: this plan, is it not... planned? And if I deliberately don’t plan it, then isn’t that also, in an important sense, a ... ?

the ultimate pragmatist

Some indigenous explanations of worldly phenomena were accurate enough to not be abandoned over centuries of belief. These same explanations, through an important sort of self-validation, ended up maintaining the very truth of their claims: to the extent that humans living under their belief came to act in certain ways, the natural world expected it and indeed acted back in turn. It is in this way that Joe Sheridan says indigenous myths complete ecosystems. The level of accuracy demanded by modern science, which by its nature must perpetually revise itself and lead believers to successively new and unforeseen ways of living, is unlikely to be necessary for the existence of life on earth. In fact, one might say that there is an optimal level of accuracy that leads to a perfect combination of predictability, while simultaneously creating patterns of human behaviour that complete the ecosystem. Myths probably hovered about this level, as the stories changed themselves over generations of re-telling. Nature is the ultimate pragmatist here: the validity of a “truth”, to paraphrase Dewey, is judged by the consequences of the actions that lead from it –and an absolutely accurate prediction that causes the destruction of our life support system just can’t be considered “true”.

a reconceptualization of Heidegger's ready-at-hand

This is my feeling:

For Heidegger readiness-at-hand is distinguished from other ways of being in that it refers to the immediately available, immediately incorporated, pre-understood way in which things around us are used by us as we go about doing things in the world. It is a class of beings that functions as a verb before all else: this cup is in the process of being for the purpose of drinking coffee as I hold it to my lips. According to Heidegger, to make statements such as “this is a cup” or “the cup contains coffee” require us to jump outside of our unreflective interaction, to fix our concentration on it as thing, and to noun the verb. This is what he calls an ‘ontical’ manoeuver: the cup stops cupping and becomes a cup. It is now present-at-hand. It has become an object of the past instead of a thing in the now and can be subjected to modes of understanding such as the scientific method and other ways of categorizing. In real life, we constantly jump between having things be as verbs and be as nouns, and according to Heidegger, we run into considerable difficulties when we think that things nouning are more primordial than things verbing. For him, nouning, or being in the mode of present-at-hand, is just one way of their verbing. Heidegger’s fundamental point (should be, I think) is that being is a verb and so has at least as many modes as there are forms of conjugation, which are, after all just different ways of grasping its constitution.
Unfortunately, Heidegger’s choice of words, das Zeug, which is what something that is ready-at-hand becomes when we conceive of it as present-at-hand, has often been translated as “equipment”. I think this divorces this mode of being unnecessarily from Nature and has led to a lot of confusion. Zeug expresses our process of recognizing what is ready-at-hand as ready-at-hand, it is the reflective step that nouns the verb. It is not something fundamentally connected to technology. Tinospora crispa, a jungle vine commonly used across South and Southeast Asia, is associated with various medicinal including lessening the effects of malaria and waning children off of breastfeeding. When Lao people use this plant it exists as ready-at-hand and when they realize that they are using it, it takes the form of das Zeug. Forest foods, trees for shade, rivers for washing, trees for wood vs. trees for fuelwood – all these accompany medicinal plants as being ready-at hand in cultures that still interact with wild things for their livelihoods. The reason why we can become absorbed in technology and its’ circle of references is because we already have the ability to interact with different things in nature in this way. These networks of signification are always developing in these people’s ready-at-hand natural worlds. In fact, that something is ready-at-hand for something else is totally pervasive: we see that the tree, while being shade for us is simultaneously being house for bird. The growth of the technological network of signification that Heidegger talks about replaces the ecological network of signification eventually shrowding it out completely from our way of being-in-the-world.