Notes From the Field
Preface: Just Start Anywhere
“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” – Staying with the Trouble Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna J. Haraway
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For some time now, I’ve been on a tour of people, places, and projects. I’ve experienced more diverse group dynamics in distinct cultures than can easily be recalled. At this point the memories exist more as a repository of patterns describing energy and information flow – beings, doings, and stories that propel a co-evolutionary process.
It’s funny, these silly little bundles of meaning-making-being-doings sing. Their songs are self-similar, and familiar, as if played from a shared book of old nursery rhymes accompanied by predictably absurd folk limericks – they can’t quite seem to access novel combinations of notes and chords, rhythm and lyric – the deep improvisational jazz of becoming.
If there were a consistent refrain echoing out from the heart of these cultural bodies, it would be what I’ve come to call the threnody of relationality. It seems nearly everywhere I go, I stumble upon a visionary brood of alternative-community matrix hackers struggling to crack the code of what I’ve titled The Seven Cs: Conflict, Competition, Co-existence, Coordination, Cooperation, Collaboration, and Co-creation.
For me, it’s pretty much become the regenerative futurist version of the navier-stokes equation.
So much so, that I’ve come to visualize and intuit multivariant simulations of these processes: how trauma influences the state of being, which cascades into doing, and how story shapes doing across clusters of human actors. How communication turbulence twists up the energy, until these being-doing-stories are looping and spinning like eddies in whitewater river rapids. And how, without the capacity to dance the Tao, they eventually get tangled up in each other's vortices. How the trust and transparency decreases, the friction increases, and how cultural entropy raises across the entire system, until all flow slows to a complete halt.
And, once all the stories are good-and-knotted like fishing line at the bottom of the channel, crisis will often fling itself right into the center of the river and hook onto everyone’s attention in an attempt to drag and move the stagnant energy in any direction possible. Or better yet, sexual energy will flood in, out of sheer desperation, in a last ditch effort to reboot the entire cycle by force like the erratic jolts of a frantically placed relational defibrillator.
Just for the record, I’ve never seen an eleventh hour Eros Hail Mary play work as a cultural pattern for restoration and sustained reconnection. I find, more often than not, the libido of an egregore tends to further erode the structural integrity of the relational ecology and make the whole thing very sticky, while bringing new life into a complicated web of precarious, co-dependent relationships.
Meanwhile, the unconscious of the whole cultural soma tends to jog alongside the riverbed, tracking and waiting to spring into action, like a collective shadow lifeguard primed to fish out clumps of broken relational networks — rescuing messes of litter and detritus only to bury it in the umbrage of the forest before the water ever has a moment to settle, regain clarity, and reflect.
There’s a word I learned from Nora Bateson some years ago, schismogenesis, meaning the creation of division or the genesis of breakdown. It’s always had an abrasive fracturing shard-like feel, like the sound of snapping bonds and the crumbling disintegration of social structures. I find failed communitas to feel more like pond sludge, a slow moving muck that pulls in sticks and leaves, a muddy relational debris that builds up overtime, and sucks up all the oxygen until it produces enough hydrogen sulfide to kill off the vitality of the entire ecosystem.
It can really sneak up on you.
I heard somewhere once that most fatal carbon monoxide leaks come from inside the house.
So who’s, or what’s… inside the house?
Let’s Explore This Together and Find Out.
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