Closing Time

Thank any and all of you out there for reading and supporting this blog. My thesis has been completed, and I received my Barrett the Honors College degree. Of course, they claimed that my thesis title was something about business on my degree, but that’s neither here nor there.

I have moved my blogging tendencies to http://www.mitchlillie.com where you can find all sorts of musings even MORE random than this thesis.

Please continue Dividing, Planting, and Growing as you always do.

Paz,

Mitch Lillie

Best Of Dividing, Planting, Growing

Aggregated here are what I feel are my ten best posts from the past semester in chronological order.

Eve of Evolution – Internet theory meets Art theory. I like the way Benjamin’s ideas still apply in many ways to Internet theory.

Image/Illusion – How web authors (re)present themselves. I like this post because it examines how we usually don’t look for a face on a website, but perhaps we should.

Pilgrim or Tourist? pt. 2 – It’s like heaven inside your mind… Chosen because it’s probably the toughest question I tackle this semester.

Why, share! – Data-basics on user-created databases lend insight to the everevolution of information.

Transmissions – Poetry from the pre-life noetry

Blogger’s Block – Potshot to Sullivan: Everyone’s lazy. Chosen because it’s my ass-saving cop-out post.

Bioluminescent Mushrooms - Like totally heady man. I like how this post challenges presumptions.

How to Risk it pt 1 – The build-up and my best effort at creating suspense.

How to Risk it pt 2 – Like Van Halen’s “Jump” playing in your mind (almost heaven). My action-adventure post.

Speed Reading – Fix your column width. I like the idea of engineering the internet to people.

Thanks for a great final semester, those of you who were more or less forced to read my blog for class. You provided some very insightful and funny comments to my posts.

Blog posts were very helpful. From virtually any computer, virtually, I could publish my thoughts briefly. The theoretical backgrounds were at times tedious and it shows as they are often my shortest entries. As a writer, I think I am best suited to this style of writing, though as I mention in Blogger’s Block, I do get lazy from time to time. In fact the extreme mutability of the internet almost begs more writing than pen and paper, and in turn more “blocks” to imagination. The only suggestion for improvement of ENG 494 would be to encourage students to seek out  their own ‘net theories. That, and urge a linearity of topics for the blogs.

Multimedia Planning

For my multimedia project, I want to take a different angle.

Rather than tend toward traditional text-based media and then alter my content for the web, say by breaking up the text and organizing it via links, I want to create a supersaturated composite of information that is as logically frustrating as it is visually stimulating. I aim to capitalize upon readers’ short attention span by maximizing the fragmentation of my data/text.

The inspiration for such a creation comes from Radiohead’s older sites, archived by the band themselves here. My personal favorite is their oldest site, featuring a black background, and strange text/images woven into a labyrinthine mesh of corporate backwater.

While I agree with Nielson’s assertion of “links as guideposts,” I feel there is a certain futility to this semiotic system. Web signs point to other web signs but never to physical spaces, only their digitized replicas. As a result, the Internet is a house of cards held together only by itself. I want to compose a space that reflects the futility of finding direct information on the web and the entrapment of the device as a neverending tunnel.

This is not to say the Internet does not have useful aspects. Rather that I want to use this project as an artisitic criticism of the unusefulness of the Internet.

Speed Reading

I undoubtedly feel the symptoms (or benefits) of Sarah Perez’s assertions about Gen Y – there is no mistaking that this is my generation. When I read her paragraph about skimming even the shortest blog entries, I had already skipped a few paragraphs. She caught me!

Regarding Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid?: I feel that my very superficial speed reading training lends some credibility to what Carr says is happening to the way we read and think. The central tenet to most speed reading programs argues against “deep reading” in favor of rapid skimming. The argument, which was first made by Evelyn Wood in the 50′s, states that the brain absorbs more information than we think it does and thus we need our hand to keep our pace up. While this form is “disengaged,” as Carr puts it, it is nevertheless a valid form of absorbing reading. Instead of our hand to keep pace, we have only the speed of a mouse click.

But therein lies a potential problem in online reading. One cannot simply scroll through articles as fast as possible – one needs to pace one’s self and work up to higher and higher speeds. Not only this, but we can and must use the customizability of the internet to suit our rapid reading needs, concerning ourselves with such seeming minutiae as column width and color. But perhaps even these are just vestiges of our dead-trees-as-text past, further boundaries to be transcended by Gen Z.

How to Risk It, pt. 2

Long canoes, like the one above, are the most popular form of transportation along the Rio Napo. Before motors had reached the area, locals would drift downriver, using long poles as guides for the hollowed-out canoes. To return to their destination, the Napo Runa (runa being a Kichwa word for “people” or “man”) would use the same long poles to push the canoe upriver, a very strenuous and time-consuming undertaking.

Having arrived at the Field School via bus, I was very eager to harness the power of the river for transportation. Some of the other students and I banded together one Saturday to do just that using some spare inner tubes provided by Professor Swanson. In the interest of safety, Professor Swanson requested that we use life jackets, which was to be a very provident recommendation. He also warned us of a large whirlpool on the left side of the river that we would need to avoid.

The object of our quest was Misahuallí, the literal end of the road in our part of the jungle, where we would catch a cab or a bus back to our camp. We knew the trip would take a few hours, so being the science-minded Western students we were, we made a few modifications to our transportation. Mesh bags were filled with water bottles and sunscreen and tied to a rope, which was attached to one of the tubes. We had our doubts, however, about how this bag would fare as we passed through some of the rougher rapids. Tying all five tubes together, we thought, would allow us more stability through the rapids and ensure that rogue currents would not split us up.

Our crew was comprised of newfound but strong friends. Veto was a go-getter, a true Eagle Scout (unlike your author, who is only an Eagle Scout in title). He spearheaded many of the efforts at engineering our ride. Liz and Emma were studying GIS (Geographic Information Systems) at the field school, and were both eager for a relaxing day on the river. My roommate Anthony also joined us, whose nature I felt was the most buoyant. We all collaborated and decided together on the best ways to navigate and survive our first kinetic trip down the Rio Napo.

On a day not unlike this...

Partially cloudy days were rare in the Amazon: the sky was either a black downpour or sunny. Around 10:00, as soon as we put our tube craft in the water, a shadow passed over the sun. We hoped for better luck.

Though cloudy, our trip was going nicely. The river’s ripples splashed gently alongside our tubes, providing the perfect chill to another week in the jungle. Once we had to get out and push the craft back into the main river current, but our trip was mostly easygoing thus far.

Finally we came to the point where Professor Swanson said there was a whirlpool. Paddling and kicking furiously, we avoided the choppy, oceanic waves, only to corner ourselves into a less deadly but nevertheless stagnant pool. We initially thought we could ride the current around and be pushed back into the river, but to no luck. We had few plans so whirled carelessly for a few minutes.

But simply taking the tubes out of the water and walking around the whirlpool was out of the question. Dense jungle and slippery rocks surrounded the area. We did find a place to take the tube craft out of the water and sat on a large boulder in thought.

The boulder was at the immediate edge of the whirlpool; if only we could just sneak around the two-foot rapid spilling over our boulder, we would be back in the river’s main current. But our massive, loosely tied craft made this difficult. Nevertheless we resolved that this would be our plan.

We positioned one of the tubes in front and decided Emma would get in it; the rest would push the other four tubes off the rock and into the rapid and then jump in. Maybe it was our newfound relaxed jungle mindset or perhaps just our Saturday giddiness, but something was negatively affecting our logic. In retrospect, it was not the best of decisions.

Before we were ready, Emma, sitting in her tube, was pulled from the whirlpool and into the rapid, where our rope held her in a precariously balanced position. Rushing, the other four of us quickly jumped in our tubes and passed over, or rather through, the rapid. Suddenly the wall of water seemed to grow in size and bucked Veto, Liz and I from our tubes, plunging us into the chilly water. Panicked, I made an attempt to come up for air, but only managed to get a single eye above water level. The rope-tube structure was holding me under and preventing me from breathing. I could feel Veto’s struggle next to mine, though he wisely pushed himself out from beneath the churning water to safety. Yet again I tried coming up and was denied by the rope and tubes.

As cliché as it sounds, my life jacket surely saved my life. I cannot remember what happened after my second attempt at air; I came to floating head-up in the river about 20 feet from the tube craft. I was still gasping for air as if my body could not trust or believe that it had survived despite itself. I soon learned that the other travelers mistook this gasping as signs of a serious neck injury. We all began laughing deeply in that nervous manner, glad to have fooled nature once again.

Some 30 minutes later we arrived in Misahualli, though I would have preferred we arrived immediately after the accident. Relaxing with our oversized beers, we eventually reverted to nonverbal communication, to smiling and sipping away our next hour, sitting firmly on the concrete patio, glad to be dry.

I felt very calm and aware for the remainder of that week. We had constructed the river as a means to a recreational end, a novelty to be explored and exploited by our tools and resources. But the Rio Napo was reminding us that it, too, is powerful, perhaps even that we were a form of its own recreation, a feeble group of floating humans giving themselves to the river as clay begs hands to mold it. I had learned how to risk it, to ignore danger of death, and embrace all experiences, no matter how close to drowning they may come.

How to Risk It

A year or so before leaving Ecuador my friend Quinn lent me a book: Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. I was interested in the title and the reviews, but didn’t expect much. I had just come back from Europe, and had found it difficult to connect with a culture while traveling. Everything I experienced there touched me, but more as a frantic surrealist art experiment than any kind of communing (Many of the cities were, after all, “communes”). Nevertheless gaining a meaningful or even spiritual connection somewhere “foreign” has always remained my main goal, even if any bond did have its obvious flaws during a four-week trip to Europe.

But what I found in The Snow Leopard was something deeper: while I rode the Eurail between visits to major European cities, Matthiessen walked among ever more remote Tibetan cities, albeit with porters. The two experiences differ in terms of what Hakim Bey calls mediation. Mediated experiences are those that control or focus one’s attention to a specific agenda. In this light, my jovial trip to Europe changed to a rather predictable indoctrination of euro-centrism. While Matthiessen had to accept some mediation in using porters and even in writing self-consciously about his journey, the effect was much more pronounced in my own trip. I had to learn to travel, and live, like this man.

When I made it to The Cloud Forest, I had already decided to travel to Ecuador. I was looking for guidance on how to handle the area I was about to enter. But the reach of Western civilized mediation has encroached further in this novel: Matthiessen travels through the Amazon Basin in a British cargo ship and later in a plane. True, he could never have walked through in the way he did in The Snow Leopard, but he left room for improvement: why not settle down and immerse rather than dabble from behind a porthole?

But The Cloud Forest is by no means inaccurate even if it was a rather restless pursuit. The rest of Matthiessen’s journey takes him all over South America, but I am most attracted to the select few Amazon passages perfectly capturing the ambiance of the jungle. Describing what I called “the orchestra” in my own journal, Matthiessen represents silence and noise equally:

“the jungle seems strangely silent, even when the air is full of sound; the sounds are like sounds from another sphere of consciousness, from a dream, and then suddenly they burst singly on the ear: the tree frogs and cicadas, the shattering squawks of parrots… and the eerie flutterings of birds whose appearance could scarcely be guessed at, all of these competing with the little squeaks and cries uttered by my companion, who, receiving no intimation of our insignificance, did not have the proper respect for this sort of cathedral”
(38-9)

Each species plays its part in this composition; Matthiessen is not far off when he likens it to religious spaces. The trees loom like pillars and inspired greater awe in me even than Notre Dame. While the latter was a planned construction, these trees, this life just emerged out of itself.
The sedentary lifestyle of the field school is something I thought would allow me to have more moments like Matthiessen’s, where I could feel the lukewarm embrace of the jungle. I say “sedentary” referring to the fact that we were based out of a single area rather than moving from city to city. I nevertheless found myself involved in very strenuous jungle hikes between periods of resting, listening to engaging lectures by Professor Swanson, or eating and talking. Life moved in smooth, rain-moderated cycles with equal parts activity and rest, awe and contentment. I felt as if I had begun living in the dream world, the origin of the sounds heard by Matthiessen.
I had the sense that Matthiessen missed something in The Cloud Forest that he communed with deeply in The Snow Leopard. The circumstances of his boat travel, in the light of his months-long trek through Nepal, just seemed too safe, too sterile. I felt that perhaps what was lacking was the threat of death from one’s environment, the giddy danger of taking a risk. I thought I would try risking it.

Integral Theory in the Jungle

Flashback to last March: I was getting both nervous and excited about my upcoming trip to the Field School. While other students (read: non-Humanities majors) had laser-point ideas about what types of data they were looking for, myself, Fernando, and Andrea were in a strange territory. Is humanities-style research suitable for a “field school”? Would it be appropriate in the cultural settings? These concerns, mixed with those I have already brought up in the Pilgrim or Tourist? posts, were both confusing and challenging.

I was feeling the push to define my studies as legitimate, just as how the New York Times reported many university departments (including mine) are having to do. Of course, I could have collected local folklore and analyzed it, or perhaps examined the strange confluence of Christian and native animistic religious beliefs. Say I could have collected my own impressions in a work of travel writing. (I did a little of all of these things in the end) Or I could have foregone my humanities background and pursued GIS-based research with some of the other, more aimless students. But something was missing in all of these approaches – they did not hold sufficient substance to be relevant either to me or to my society. Nor did they have the merit of scientific inquiry that “field research” seems to necessitate. Each of these pursuits could hold some value, but I felt like that value would be fulfilled in by the students who were most adept at pursuing them. Lacking any specialized talent like some of the other students, I began looking for other answers, or rather other ways of asking questions, which could synthesise all of these approaches into one.

Around this time last year, I purchased Ken Wilber’s The Integral Vision to find new ways to ask research questions. Wilber’s book, his least dense and most introductory, is a mash-up of Alex Grey-esque illustrations, rhetorical questions, and Integral theory.

I was drawn to this particular book because, unlike Wilber’s other books such as Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, The Integral Vision is void of heady, dense language and perilous philosophical treatises. The book, which is small and portable, offers Wilber’s particular vision on Integral theory.

Integral theory presumes all concepts as holons, or composites of parts which make a whole, which is then in turn embedded in another whole. An atom is a perfect example of a holon. While a “complete” structure from electron, proton, and neutron parts, atoms also form the building blocks for larger wholes known as molecules.

Each holon has two basic axis of relativity: an interior/exterior axis and an individual/collective axis. These two axis make the four quadrants fundamental to Wilber’s Integral theory. Below, Mark Edwards slightly alters this model, portraying interiority as energy, exteriority as “form/structure,” individuality as agency, and collectivism as communion. In any event, this graph is much simpler than Wilber’s actual version, which can be found in an essay here.

from Mark Edwards's Through AQAL Eyes

The way I understand Integral theory is as follows (perhaps Wilber’s essay above explains this better). Each quadrant is a way of looking at the world. The upper left quadrant can be understood as individual and interior, thus it is a highly emotional, subjective viewpoint. It is concerned with senses, feelings, and impulses, but also the logical synthesis of those inputs. In my writings, this perspective is represented in my day-to-day feelings and reflections on those feelings.

The upper right quadrant represents an individual and exterior view on life. This quadrant is concerned with the study of behavior of individuals, which can happen through one’s self or through others. Much of what I have written about Bartolo, Tod, or anyone else at the field school would fall into this quadrant.

The lower right quadrant represents a collective and exterior perspective. All realms of sociology fit here: this quadrant examines how individuals organize themselves into groups, races, and nations. My thoughts about the rewriting of the Ecuadorian constitution, and its greater respect for indigenous rights, would certainly fit here.

Finally, the lower left quadrant examines cultural patterns from a collective and interior perspective. While the lower right quadrant puts some distance, however small, between subject and object, the lower left quadrant looks at culture from a participatory standpoint. My personal participation in the “work party” and planting ceremony would fit in here.

In such a new field such as Integral theory, it is had to say if my studies were definitively “Integral” or not. At the very least, I tried to take as many approaches to the same questions as possible.

Too much wheat?

Today I think we would be less likely to use the aside, “while bloggers could not have brought down Lott on their own had Big Media not taken up the story.” More accurately, Lott’s story would never have been taken up by “Big Media” had bloggers not drawn their attention to it. Moreover, there is little distinction between Big Media and bloggers these days – every major newspaper has a slew of bloggers more or less at their command.

Even where bloggers throw off the chains of Big Media, old habits die hard – and the same equation always holds true: sensationalism=money. Celebrity rumor blogs have proliferated the ridiculous minutae of model/actress life more than tabloids and E! TV ever could. Everyone could be a journalist, but is often just more paparazzi.

Of course, the vastness of information available online is reworking how we think of sensationalism. My most popular post, by far? My explanation of my introduction to bonsai growing. The voyages of a psychonaut, philosophical treatises, even class assignments are dwarfed at the premise of something that I executed DIY-style.

Everything, more than ever, is available online. And, like “real life,” the majority of it is smut. But as the Internet’s scope ever widens, tools develop to help us distill the wheat (whatever that means) from the chaff – and even define what the “wheat” is.

Bioluminescent Mushrooms

Courtesy of Anthony Lacagnina

Courtesy of Anthony Lacagnina

Surrounded by vibrant plant and animal life such as the above moths, lifeforms encountered in the Amazon became almost a competition of dazzling one-upmanship. Of course, to call it pure competition would be to deny the awe that lasted me through nearly the entire two months. From the darkness of night came the strangest creatures, drawn to our lights for reading and playing spoons. Nevertheless, when a rumor began to circulate that shaman/guide/carpenter Bartolo was going to take us on a night hike to find bioluminescent mushrooms, this seemed to be the show-stopper.

One day soon thereafter, it was announced that the hike would take place that night. We thirty eager students (the vast majority of those at the field school) piled into pickup trucks for the short drive to Tod’s property where we would enter. As Tod unlocked the gate, he sarcastically told us, “Enter the enchanted mushroom forest.” He must have sensed how overblown this whole plan had become.

Once inside and a fair distance from the road, Bartolo lit a banana leaf cigar and blessed us with its smoke by blowing it onto the crown of our heads and through our thumbs. He explained this as a spiritual cleansing, but actually tobacco smoke covers the human scent, making us less vulnerable to insects and more likely to see larger mammals. Before we began walking, Bartolo bade us walk very slowly as we might have a chance to see night monkeys. But given the huge line and whispered translations, the message didn’t pass very quickly; it would be a pretty dumb monkey not to be able to hear 28 Americans in rubber boots anyway!

Nevertheless, we kept fairly quiet, stopping only twice: once to hear Bartolo’s story about survival in the jungle, and once to examine a plant which changes color from green to white at nightfall. The entire hike took about two and a half hours, and returned neither the howls of night monkeys nor the eerie glow of bioluminescent mushrooms. Nevertheless, as I noted in my journal from 18 June, “We continued to respect Bartolo, his teachings and rites, even as we cracked a few jokes about snipe hunts in English. For me, the experience was equal parts mystic and comedic…”

Though you might never get what you expect in the Amazon, I will give you some catharsis: I took the above photo of Brazilian bioluminescent mushrooms from here. While I couldn’t find any photographic evidence of Ecuadorian mushrooms of this type, I’m sure they must exist somewhere there given the vast variety of species. (Biologist’s input?)

Citizen Philosophy

While I respect and agree with many of the tenets of “citizen journalism” put forth in Citizen Journalism: From Pamphlet to Blog, I never really saw myself as a journalist. Is it journalism when one is writing about a different time and space from one’s own, digested by the cogs of mind?

To me, journalism only covers a small aspect of the knowledge being expressed in blogs. The vast amounts of information provided by the internet may seem like news, but painted depictions of Miyako festivals from 1928 are not new to everyone. Nevertheless these paintings (and my blog) represent a sort of specialized knowledge independent of time and space. There is just nothing newsworthy about it – so why not citizen ethnography or citizen… speech?