Kevin and I have been doing the shuttlecock tango again. It is a mental model that seems comfortable while at the same time having the aggravating energy of an improvisation–we never seem to know what is bid or how the game must be played. It is clearly an infinite game. This has prompted me to tumble around the idea of re-wilding in terms of my own networks and my own mind within those networks. I think that the abstract notion of complexification enters into the ‘equation’. Kevin and I are constantly reshuffling the deck and inventing new card games much like Bill Watterson does in “Calvin and Hobbes”. We are playing Calvin-ball!
OK, where was I. I went down an effing rabbit hole there, but I am back. In a way this post has followed the path of a re-wilding. It’s like scuffing through snow in a blizzard: footsteps there then gone. Here’s the gist of the path:
I ended up responding to @dogtrax (Kevin)
who was replying to @telliowkuwp(me)
who was responding to @yanyi___ (some dude I brought into the game totally unbeknownst to him. but he asked for it by writing that post, OK?).
I know how inside baseball this looks, but a beg your indulgence. This is a real-life example of re-wilding a network.
Here’s my original poem put inside a multi-media shell.
Kevin responded to this with his poem here.
We might be forgiven
for imagining such
desolation; rows
of buried words
from the margins
of a writing life
Few enough believe in
the depth and reach
of a hard-fought poem
story essay script
scribble code note
Often, it’s only
our lonely scribes,
ones whose fingers
dipped the ink
or pressed the chisel
for inscription,
who make us think
Here’s my response to his response to my response to @yanyi___
Backatcha
We might be forgiven
for imagining such desolation.
Forgive me. I am only pushing enough words
back to the fencerows to make room for more pasture.
And also true, there are so few believers
in the hard scrabble,
cage match,
“elbow from the sky” narratives we are selling.
Too, too true, also:
you are never alone with a pen.
You always have enough bloody ink
😉
if you know what I mean.
Constant recursion? Iteration? All that, but mainly a rewilding of the isolated creative impulse. Like a rabbit in the hedgerow, our path is complex and, therefore, unpredictable, unmanageable and illegible into the future. I realize that not many are willing to untangle what we have woven. In the end all I want for you, dear reader, is to be able to find someone to help you re-wild your own narrative and stance in the world. Algorithms are the opposite of re-wilding and we all know where those gate leads us toward at the stockyards.
Permalink //
This has been my on-line goal since starting my blog in 2005 and launching a website in the late 1990s.
“In the end all I want for you, dear reader, is to be able to find someone to help you re-wild your own narrative and stance in the world.”
You and Kevin have something special going on, within the #clmooc group, which itself is special in how it keeps people from different places connected to each other.