a couple with urgent, anxious looks in their eyes
enter a vegan cafe;
their basset hound companion lies down in front of the cafe
to wait, as if she were accustomed to this routine

the couple brings in a wheeled baby carriage
piled high with old, worn plastic bags full of what i guess to be used clothes

they sit, squeezed together, in one huge overstuffed chair by the door
and kiss, then order, carefully, from the menu;
he pulls out a newspaper with a bunch of ads circled
and they talk about them, pointing in various directions at the street
to show where, relative to the cafe, the addresses in the ads are located

the cafe worker who brings their food knows them
and they chat for a few moments;
he proudly puts his hand on his partner’s stomach
and she smiles and blushes

he is wearing a pair of sad, threadbare gloves
as he counts out the coins for the bill
reaching twice into his pocket to ensure he has enough

as they leave, the worker congratulates them;
they feed the leftovers to the basset, who eats them enthusiastically
and then the woman takes the newspaper with the circled ads
and walks off in one direction
and the man takes the basset’s leash
and walks off in the other

V

at a table near the back of the cafe
a young woman sits reading;
she is wearing a cap with cat ears, and a striped jacket with a cat’s tail,
and a giant black felt hat with a slip marked “5 1/2″ tucked in the band

at the next table a woman and her young daughter are eating vegan nachos
and the girl laughs and points at the cat-woman
and is shushed by her mother

the cat-woman smiles and winks at the little girl
and then signals her in mime — a raised finger “wait”
and then the finger curls in and wags slowly “come over here”
as she pulls an ocarina out of her bag
and begins to play a haunting tune

and the little girl, delighted, begins to dance among the tables

VI

a man with a sad smile comes into the cafe
and sits, alone, at a table for two,
pulling out his laptop, logging in,
tapping the keys slowly, hesitantly

a kris delmhorst song comes on the cafe’s music system
and he quietly sings along:

he’s smiling broadly now, a giant grin from ear to ear
but if you look closely, you can see
his face is streaked with tears

For over five years I have been working on a novel tentatively called The Only Life We Know. The novel is set in the year 2200, a century or more after the crash of our civilization. It presumes that in 2009 we are at or near “peak everything”, and that all of the activities that have accelerated up an every-increasing curve since 1800 (or in some cases before) — consumption of land and natural resources, human population, pollution emissions, and production of more and more stuff, most of which ends up in landfills or worse — will soon follow a similar sharp drop down the other side of the normal curve, such that in 2200 we will be back to pre-industrial levels, 90% below today’s. So in my setting in 2200 there are only 500 million people left on the planet, a population that continues to drop gradually. The economy is subsistence and local, since there is no cheap oil to enable significant long-range transportation of goods or people.

But it is the opposite of the popular, violent “Mad Max” scenario of post-civilization collapse. A study of history indicates that, unlike inter-civilizational wars, post-civilizational collapses are generally quite peaceful, although they do entail in their early-collapse stages a lot of death (mostly from starvation and disease), suffering and turmoil. Most civilizational collapses (read Jared Diamond or Ronald Wright) have been mass exoduses, as people flee fragile, unsustainable centralized locations in search of land, food and water to make a new, community-based beginning. They are, on a mass scale, a “walking away” from complicated systems that simply no longer work.

My novel presumes that, as a decreasing number of humans fan out into the countryside, they find much of it degraded, but (especially in more Northern areas) they discover plentiful unused land suitable for small collaborative settlements, with solar power and permaculture providing a new sustainable way of life (I am hoping these recently-rediscovered technologies will not be lost along with our civilization’s soon-to-be useless oil-dependent technologies).

And, as the buffers between communities get larger (with diminishing population) and transportation and other social interaction between communities become rarer, I sense that what will happen by 2200 is what we discover in most isolated gatherer-hunter societies: A staggering degree of cultural diversity, with a de-homogenization of language, adornment and behaviour, to the point that adjacent communities may be so different as to be nearly unrecognizable to each other.

The principal driver for this will be de-urbanization, a hollowing out and abandonment of cities (also very common in civilizational collapses), since cities are inherently dependent on outside resources and hence are inherently unsustainable. We won’t go back to the Wild West or slavery or feudalism, though; instead we’ll go forward to a world that combines ancient indigenous wisdom with today’s and tomorrow’s (to the extent they can be tweaked to be sustainable) innovations — gliders, hot-air balloons, grafting of plants, straw-bale construction, human- and solar-powered looms, cameras, recordings, and other creative, artistic and scientific devices.

The original plan was to bring this out in a series of short stories within the novel, each about one such culture, narrated by a young nomad travelling between them, and interspersed with a gradually-revealed story about the civilizational collapse that preceded this new beginning. I envision a proliferation of new local languages by 2200, completely different forms of art, wildly divergent spiritual beliefs etc., in each community, and I had intended to present these in the novel through conversations between the travelling nomad and the citizens of each community, and her observations and reflections about these communities.

But I recently started thinking about another way to do this, that would get around the challenges of trying to depict such completely alien cultures and languages using written text in our very limited and culturally constrained 21st century languages. What if, instead of presenting this future in a novel, I presented it in a film? And what if, instead of writing a screenplay with dialogue that has the same problems of language as a novel, the screenplay had no words? What if, in other words, it were presented as a kind of two-centuries-later update of the cultural documentary Baraka (a Sufi word meaning “the weaving of life together”)?

For those not familiar with this film, or with the films that inspired it — Koyaanisqatsi (Life Out of Balance) and Powaqqatsi (Life in Transformation) — Baraka is a set of twenty sequential visual vignettes, of about five minutes duration each, set in places around the world, depicting different aspects of the human condition. It has no plot, no actors, no script (in the conventional sense) and no dialogue.

The picture above from this film is of a girl from the Kayapo tribe in the Brasilian rainforest. It could easily, I think, also be in my film set in the year 2200.

I have been working with a cinematographer friend, Danielle Seville, to scope out how we could make this film. What I envision is starting with a set of premises about life in 2200 — mainly, that it would be peaceful, joyful, sustainable, and diverse, a world where (like humans did before the invention of tools and technologies) we scavenge much of what we need — except that in 2200, we will scavenge largely from the abandoned relics of the “civilized” world. It will be a world of sufficiency but also one of great comfort and spiritual rediscovery, as we will have re-learned how to live in the natural world, in concert and in balance with the rest of life on Earth.

image of post-civilization world from afterculture

To try to imagine such a diverse future world is, I think, beyond the capacity of any one person (I’ve certainly tried, as hundreds of pages of discarded text from my novel attest). So instead, what I intend to do is to bring together a group of very imaginative people in a Creation Event and have us work collaboratively to develop the imagery, future cultures, music and sound the film would capture. I envision having artists and anthropologists and students of indigenous cultures past and present among the collaborators. I can see us sketching out and improvisationally acting out the scenes in real time, wordlessly, in Open Space. We’d have make-up artists and henna artists and tattoo artists and body-painters and animators and photoshoppers developing models of what we would look like and how we’d behave, using the participants as their canvasses. The Creation Event would itself be filmed.

And then it would be my job, working with Danielle and her team, to craft a screenplay with “scenes from the future” that captures all of these ideas, and then to assemble a team of improvisors (not actors, really) to wordlessly act out these brief scenes.

Part of the challenge will be to capture the reconnection of the human species with all-life-on-Earth, with scenes (like the image above from Baraka) that position us in the context of a rediscovered natural world, one that envelopes and welcomes and towers over us (rather than one we try to control), and offers us food, shelter, water, meaning, love — everything we ever needed. Much of the film, then, will not portray humans at all, but rather the natural places where we will then live, and the creatures we will share those places with, in sacred balance.

That’s the idea so far, anyway.

Pssst! Hey, you! Mind Figment Processor That Believes Itself To Be ‘Dave’ (M-BID)!* It’s us, the Complicity of Dave’s Organs (CODO). You know, the ‘real’ Dave you have deluded yourself into believing ’you’ somehow embody.

Why are you sitting around making our fingers write blog articles when you should be contacting that woman ‘Kira’ who you met at that party a couple of weeks ago? We’re not getting any younger you know. The chemistry was wonderful — pheromones sparking, pupils dilating, facial flushes, sweat glands pulsing — no question that the Complicity of Kira’s Organs (COKO) and us were vibrating at the same universal frequency.

Don’t be put off by the fact the Mind Figment Processor That Believes Itself To Be ‘Kira’ (M-BIK) hasn’t replied to your last e-mail. M-BIK is kinda slow like you; it hasn’t really figured out that what it should be doing is merging CODO and COKO repeatedly and addictively in order to replicate our DNA.

What is holding you back? You know you want to. We’ve been pumping out testosterone, phenylethylamine, dopamine and norepinephrine ever since we met them. You think COKO are aesthetically beautiful, and you are somewhat infatuated with M-BIK intellectually (OK, OK, we know you have some doubts about some of the ideas that it has espoused, but give it a break, it’s still young).

So adding that to the erotic and emotional connection, which we’re looking after, we’ve got a royal flush here. And don’t doubt for a second that it’s reciprocal. You saw the way they looked at us. And M-BIK’s initial messages to you were gushing, if a bit slow in coming. Yeah, we know, we’re impatient — if we had our way we’d have just got down on the floor and started as soon as we and they met. And we’d now be one, completely addicted (oh, OK, call it what you want then, ‘in love’), merged, and mingling bodily fluids several times a day like jackrabbits (those COJOs have it so easy)!

So what’s up, M-BID? Why aren’t you calling M-BIK?

[CODO responds] Hmmm… well, the reason we speak of people as plural is because we are. We could do an organ-count if you like. The brain that you muddle-headedly believe ‘you’ reside in is just one of us, and a slow-witted (thank gaia for instincts!) and unsophisticated (compared to our digestive system the brain is a dope) one at that. We are. You just think you are.

As for whether we’re too old to merge bodily fluids with COKO, get us close and we’ll see. We’ve had a few million years to learn how to get past your ‘things’. We know, and so do COKO. You just think you know. It’s possible the social conditioning that you and M-BIK have been subjected to will prevail when we get together. But we wouldn’t bet on it.

And we have no qualms about letting you have time and space to discover whether you and M-BIK can develop the kind of intellectual, aesthetic, sensual and emotional connectedness that you call ‘love’, and if so whether it will endure. We just want to mix our DNA with COKOs’ now, and, if we get the chance to do that enough times, we’ll generate enough oxytocin and endorphins in our bodies to keep us all together long enough to give that connectedness a real chance. And if it turns out the connectedness you think you need isn’t there, or won’t last, well, we’ll all have had a lot of delicious, intoxicating fun in the meantime.

So what do you say? Stop telling our fingers to type more of this conversation, and start telling them to type out COKO’s e-mail address or phone number. What do you th…

——–

* For those who haven’t read Stewart and Cohen’s Figments of Reality, here’s its thesis, which is essential to understanding (and hopefully appreciating) this story:

   So this story is about Dave’s body — the complicity of Dave’s organs (CODO),  speaking to his mind — Mind Figment Processor That Believes Itself To Be ‘Dave’ (M-BID).

——-

Another visionary insight encapsulates our current position:

‘I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather….In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or is dehumanized.’ (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832).

Participants’ own ‘gathered’ responses to ‘World Poverty’ (detail)

[Amy:]: Andrew and I were invited to co-design and co-facilitate a pilot event called The Monticle Challenge, in Toronto. The story there is that it was co-originated and funded by a Canadian entrepreneur,  Billy Liu who left China with one way ticket to Canada from his father when he was still young and his business partner.

Monticle (small mountain) was formed by Lampo Communications Inc. and a group who donate their time to the service of youth in society. I first met Billy at a Buddhist temple in Toronto, on a course we co-facilitated for youths several years ago. As Andrew and I both mentor young people here in the UK we decided to fund ourselves for this trip to Canada. It is an investment worth making in a world imperfectly readying itself for Perfect Storms.

Much of our own experience of how organizations deal with the challenges of this age, particularly in the tri-sector, leaves Andrew and I speechless. Dave unfolded another story for us; of how the latest US legislation for addressing Climate Change has been ‘watered down’  accommodating the prejudice of the anti abortion constituency in America so that now largely useless legislation can be passed. To a massive extent, fear, bloated egos and self interest riddle the interventionist culture.

“ The dark and gathering sameness of the world” 

The music darkens

“The young people who connected at Amy’s retreat felt it, and like the climate scientists, they were overwhelmed by their realizations, by their recognition of what conservationist Terry Glavin calls “the dark and gathering sameness of the world.” They were compelled, as they explored this, to cry out, as one, we were here! as if this message had to be expressed before it was lost — back, perhaps, into the quiet desperate dissonance, or forward to the world where the actions and words of humanity will, once again, no longer be seen or heard.”
– Dave Pollard

[Amy:] When Andrew and I first met in London he was working with a work of art that he’d held for many years; Gorecki’s Symphony No.3, “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” which he felt contains a deep ‘future message’ drawn out of the past.

    [Deep underneath the Gestapo headquarters in Zakopane, inside Cell No.3, on 26th September 1944, the then 18-year-old Helena Wanda Blazusiakówna scratched a prayer on one of the stone walls that imprisoned her. In a voice of gloom, Helena asks her Mother not to cry for her. Out of the darkness, the ringing radiance of the opening theme returns as the soprano calls out to "Mamo" (Mother). In music which weaves subtly between misery and hope, the great current of love in all its joy and pain melds together mother and child, child and mother.]

Andrew started the day using the phrase: ‘playing with the brushes on the back of my hand’, as a way of encouraging the young participants to pay deeper and unfamiliar attention, allowing this tool to become an extension of them- connecting with the brush, listening to the brush as it ‘speaks’ and feeling it’s contact with their skin, turning and tuning into the textures, quality, sensations of contact….

‘first contact’

We drew this inspiration on the day, working out a previous co-creative collaboration, at INTEGRAL REVIEW June 2009 Vol. 5, No. 1, 156 Leung & Campbell: Playing With Brushes on the Back of My Hand from which this is taken,

As a context that is “generated by the immediate presence that binds together a conscious “self” with a conscious “other.”  the interhuman offers a key dormant dimension of inter subjective experience that learners discover through I-Thou meeting: When two individuals “happen” to each other, there is an essential remainder that reaches out beyond the special sphere of each-the “sphere of the between.” In an essential relation the barriers of individual being are breached and “the other becomes present, not merely in the imagination or feeling, but in the depths of one’s substance, so that one experiences the mystery of the other being in the mystery of one’s own.” The interhuman involves relating to others as partners in a living intersubjective event, bringing about a context where I-Thou relationship may emerge.

Buber’s characterization of the interhuman signals describes a subtle way of the being with others from the condition of presence, presence-based realm where former barriers or boundaries between self and other soften, offering an existential referent in that it enables the self and the other to become more immediate, tangible and real. Buber’s work offers a helpful insight into the transformative potential of addressing one another through deeper presence in the inter subjective encounter, which can give rise to an ontological shift in the context of our inquiry and learning within educational settings. By implementing contemplative second-person approaches that are not only aware of the relational and sacred implications of I-thou encounters with our students, but also committed to enacting the interhuman as a primary concern, I believe Buber’s contributions to intersubjectivity can shed important light on one of the necessary preconditions for collective contemplative methods informed by the deeper ontological realms of the interhuman sphere of the between.

We stood in the round and as as a whole, looking at a large collective ‘map’, made of painted waterways of semi visible water, no colour…they had made their first right mark…Splash, splat, …lines, curves, clouds, symbols, a few words – love appeared in wrinkled sheets, as trees remembered rain…then we gave them the three primary colours to run through the sheets with, brought together now into a new global flag, a flag of their disposition.

Waterways, flag and subsequent small group work, with primary colours

They moved into groups of six or so, making paintings in one of the primary colours, images of whatever comes. They were also encouraged to engage emotionally in each other’s work, while also now talking about their own ….Joining in some of the groups we were keen to encourage them to look upon their output as a part of themselves.  We were in awe of some of these images- the sensitivities…A: ‘What do you see in this picture?’ P: ‘A boat in a storm…’ A: ‘How does this relate to leadership?’ P: ‘Well, it’s about knowing what to do when things are stormy..’ A: ‘Is being fifteen sometimes stormy?’ P: ‘Yes….(nods all round)..’ A: ‘Do you always know what to do?  ….I guess life can be quite confusing sometimes…’ hmmmm… A:’ So, maybe leadership is not always about knowing what to do…’ P:’ Maybe….courage….’

    Courage is not the towering oak
    That sees storms come and go,
    It is the fragile blossom
    That opens in the snow
    — Alice MacKenzie Swaim

Untitled: A Boat in a Storm

(top): First set of images (left), and second set of images (right), framing the first set.
(bottom): Detail: girl her with hand on her heart. ( The word courage comes from the old French cour for ‘heart’ )

“In your heart of hearts” — Dave Pollard

[Amy:]: In a Reos Partners film of work with policy advisers to the Dutch Government, some of whom Andrew worked with in London, who face their own amassing systemic problems, there is a telling clip/. It’s of a senior adviser who works directly with the Prime Minister. Her group made a little hand made model of a typically ‘complex problem’. The woman explains in the film that she sees some hope  in their little co-creation – pointing to the paper figure of a man in the tableau, which has a little paper heart pinned to his chest, she says, “.., I am close to him, I am hopeful now because I know this issue is close to his heart.”

Once again, participants laid down their work- the collective of images hit me in the guts- my voice was shaky with emotion…we spoke a little more about ‘art’- what we were seeing was not about whether the output was ‘good’ or ‘bad’- we suspended that judgement, what they’d created and co-created was the expression of a intrinsic part of each of them- every picture was a unique expression. One round of images were produced by swapping and painting each other’s pictures…there was an exponential change in complexity and- coherence….again some of the images were breathtakingly powerful.

Primary images (left) and Untitled : Red Guts

‘Turning to the sharper end of the brush’ — Andrew Campbell

[Amy:] The afternoon was spent exploring ‘pointed’ global issues. Andrew said to them that, while they ate lunch, two thousand more children had died of starvation. They were then invited to write down key words and phrases associated with war, poverty, water and sanitation, flooding, global warming…unprompted, they produced mini scenarios …[In our keenness to integrate the two days, we had a longer than expected interlude, when their instructors told stories of 'foreign humanitarian  adventures'] – so that their focused energy dissipated somewhat, as if air had been let out of a balloon- we thought that as facilitators we had ‘lost it’. I remember sitting on the stairs with Andrew saying ‘…what matters is now- NOW…what’s gone is gone…what matters now is that we still have a small amount of time and a lot can happen in that Time…’

We reconvened the group, and we saw that during the afternoon break they’d covered their skin in the paints they’d used on the paper. Some looked like urban guerillas, warriors, others like South American – Amazonian Indians. It was a  spontaneous emergence, wherein the medium has joined themselves as their living skin.  

[In Native Tribes, face and body painting has been used for artistic expression since ancient times. The art of transforming ourselves is a universal phenomenon. Just as we sought to vent our artistic impulse on a cave wall, we painted on our faces and bodies. Amazonian Indians have said that in this power to change ourselves we demonstrate our humanity, set ourselves apart from the world of the animals.]

It is easy to dismiss such ‘fragile insights’, especially with youngsters. Andrew’s friend, the scenarist and former Reos adviser Napier Collyns and his associate Schwartz co-founders of GBN would argue otherwise. See their piece, How is America going to end : The world’s leading futurologists have four theories, by Josh Levin in Slate Magazine. “The big picture: If you want to glimpse the future, seek out remarkable people and open your mind to loony-sounding ideas…Schwartz happily plays the emcee for the end of America. He speaks more quickly and authoritatively than anyone else, and he’s the one patrolling the line between what’s crazy enough to destroy the United States and what’s just plain crazy. His first idea: racial warfare.”….

We invited each person- if they felt so moved- to commit to one single thing they will do in the context of everything they had done that day…

lining up and signing up to act

At the last moment we stood together for the last time, and each person was invited to say one thought, something to close their day. As we stood looking at all the artistic expressions of ’selves’, we asked the group what they would like us to do with their work…several people offered suggestions- a couple of people picked up their pictures to take home…then one person said:

‘It would be good if you could keep it for the future…it’s like….saying to others….we were here…’      

The proof of gold is fire

    “It is said in the Confucian tradition that the mark of any golden era is that children are the most important members of a society and teaching is the most revered profession. Today, fear, anxiety, overwork, and under-appreciation characterize a great many professions, but few more so than teaching. Realism tells us that the journey to regain our sanity regarding children and teaching will be a long one. Passion tells us that the path to the future is the one we tread here, now. – I say to sustain teachers is to sustain us all— for who are we at our best save teachers, and who matters more to us than the children?”  

– Peter Senge, author, The Fifth Discipline.

If enough of us say it, and begin to act on it, then at least our collective realizations might move forward from exclamations of “we were here” to proclamations of “we are here”

 – Dave Pollard

   
Post script:
While we were in Canada a friend sent Andrew a picture from South Africa (below) which he never saw until his return. The little boys are members of a family in a small community who struggle daily with hunger, lack of education, AIDS and the bitter cold. He had coached     the project leader, Pauline pro-bono last year, and gave them some little money. The boys are seen wearing warm coats, prior to which they had only t-shirts, like the ones worn by the Monticle Challenge youngsters, in temperatures of minus 2. The idea is to help establish a     garden and an orchard for fruit. On the very same day that the image and message below arrived in the UK, Andrew and I were sitting together in a café in Toronto, waiting for Dave to pick us up. On the music system Coldplays’s anthem, Lights Will Guide You Home, struck up. Through the thin walls of their tin shack, their only abode and a world away a bright beam of light shines through onto the older brother’s new coat. It is exactly the same shape as Billy’s project logo.
 

Lento

…But what Amy was talking about was something even deeper, more present, and more visceral. My first direct sense of this came from a couple of recent face-to-face conversations with climate scientists and conservationists. They were attempting to talk rationally about what needed to be done in light of the constant barrage of new and startling information about the pace of events precipitating climate change and what would be required to mitigate it and adapt to it. But what was clear from the undertone of their discussions, their expressions, and the anxiety present in their answers to questions, was that they are absolutely terrified….

– Dave Pollard

The world is a tangle, who will untangle the tangle?

‘We Are Here’

My friend Dussault always said of people like me “a generalist is someone who doesn’t know enough about anything to know enough about anything.” He was a believer in becoming expert at something, anything — the very best in the world. That, he believed, gave you a foundation, a context for learning about everything else, and most importantly appreciating how little you know about everything else. He argued that without such a foundation you see everything superficially, and as a result you impute meaning, and connections, where there are none.

Last year when I visited him, he had been studying a variant of poker called Tableau. Here’s how he explained the rules:

Dussault insisted that, once you’d played this a hundred times or so, and studied it (he’d programmed the computer to play against him), you’d learn a strategy that would allow you to win, on average, three times as often as players playing a merely diligent game. The strategy involved holding back a good card to play in the final round in the intersection, turning over cards that overlapped with the opponent with the strongest hand showing, and expecting a high three-of-a-kind, on average, to win the pot. If certain cards were declared wild, he said, the strategic player’s advantage was even greater. He claimed that casinos now resort to using cameras and advanced photo recognition technology to ban experts in gaming theory, because they had to confess that expertise conveys such a knowledge advantage that the casino, even with the odds rigged in their favour, can’t match. He argued that banning experts from casinos is as unfair and unreasonable as banning Google from the Internet — because they’re too good for the competition to keep up.

I laughed at him, saying playing 100 games of poker was far short of Gladwell’s 10,000 hour (five year full-time) threshold for developing expertise. I read him Bill Tozier’s brilliant paean to generalists. I told him I’d rather be “part of the world that links things together” than the world’s best at doing something. We’re pattern recognizers by nature, I argued. A little knowledge isn’t a dangerous thing, I told him, its what allows us to see how something over here might be applied way over there, in a way that no specialist, steeped in his or her narrow area of expertise, would ever recognize.

He snorted. “Almost all the patterns you perceive will be red herrings,” he replied, “because you don’t know enough to know whether you actually understand what’s going on either here or way over there. You’re just playing, like a child rearranging a dollhouse, presuming to suggest that the result of that caprice is somehow a potential breakthrough in urban design”. He reminded me that, when I was younger, I had argued that perhaps the “big bang” was an optical illusion. I’d put two chess pieces on my record turntable and had him hunch down and look at them from the side as it spun. “Look!”, I said sarcastically, “the two pawns are accelerating apart! Oh, now they’ve stopped and they’re collapsing back together again!”

“Delightful fantasy,” he’d laughed, “but utterly, staggeringly ignorant of the science of astrophysics. I imagine with this breakthrough you’re ready to tackle cold fusion next!”

“No,” I’d replied. “I thought I’d take on the absurdity of string theory instead.”

“Ah, well, I’m with you on that,” he’d said. “A bunch of dilettantes. Virtual theorists run amok. No understanding of the real world, that bunch. Probably the same clowns who think the brain is like a computer”. He was getting heated.

I told him that I thought it was arrogant to believe we can ever become an expert in, or deeply knowledgeable about, anything important in a world in which everything important is complex, fundamentally unknowable, unpredictable. The best we can do, I asserted, is pay deep attention to as much as we can, as broadly as we can, and look for patterns, and then talk with others about them to see if we can arrive at any congruence on what they signify, what they mean, what opportunities and threats they present, and represent. I said that I’d often talked to experts about some of my ideas but they were, in my view, presumptively and prematurely dismissive. They were only interested in talking with people who confirmed what they already believed.

He sighed. “There is some truth to that,” he said. “This is, however, more a matter of what you rightfully call ‘imaginative poverty’ than it is a reflection of their ’specialized incompetence’. A principal purpose of research, and of knowledge generally, is to identify and pose important questions, and this requires not only deep subject matter knowledge but also imagination. Most self-described experts these days have, alas, the former but not the latter. But to have unimaginative people with deep knowledge meet imaginative people with superficial knowledge is hopeless, because the former won’t entertain the possibility that the superficial ideas of the latter might prompt areas of important exploration, while the latter can’t understand why their ideas are naive and unworkable. This is one of the reasons there is essentially no innovation going on in almost every area of human endeavour. The people with knowledge and the people with ideas can’t and won’t communicate with each other. Our society is at an intellectual nadir, exactly when our collective creativity is most desperately needed.”

“So is what you’re suggesting,” I asked, “that we generalists have to pick up the slack, and learn enough about the subjects we have interesting ideas about, to be able to substantiate that these ideas are not naive?”

“I doubt that’s practicable,” he replied. “You just can’t learn enough about all the things you have ideas about.”

I waited for him to suggest an alternative solution but he seemed nonplussed. Finally, I asked “Perhaps what’s needed is a collaboration of more than two. The idea-ist to float a naive possibility, the expert to assess its practicability, and some intermediaries to enhance it, challenge it, bless it, give it some tempered credibility?”

“Sounds clumsy and cumbersome,” he said, dubiously. “How does it work in business meetings, Open Space events, collaborations, facilitated sessions? How do good ideas get researched or imagined, and what happens to them when the crowd gets hold of them?”

I thought for a while. I suggested that good ideas, when proffered unsolicited, generally provoke no response or interest at all. The prerequisite for entertaining an idea, it seemed to me, is an acknowledged need or problem. The more bold the idea, the greater the sense of urgency and importance of finding a solution that’s required to entertain it. And even when an idea is entertained, it generally won’t get any traction unless it’s easy to implement — unless there is an obvious line of sight from idea to realization.

“That’s about what I thought,” he replied. “That’s why I think the indigenous cultures have always had it right. Your job as an ideator is just to articulate the idea, as coherently and compellingly as possible, which is generally best done by telling a story. It’s not your job to research its plausibility, to become enough of an expert to know whether and how to make it happen. You just tell the story. Then the responsibility for implementing is left to each person to accept, or not. If the idea has wings, then people will do what they must to make sure it is implemented. No lists of who will do what by when. The experts will show up if the invitation is well-crafted and well-offered. And they’ll be open to new ideas if they sense, among the invitees, an appetite for it, a hunger. In which case, if it can be made to work, they’ll make it work.”

“Hmmm,” I said. “So what’s the trick for making the story compelling? And what’s the trick for knowing who to invite to hear it, and how?”

“Ah,” he said, smiling. “The recipe for a compelling story has a lot of ingredients, but no one formula. It has to be a story of passion, of overcoming a difficult challenge heroically, astonishingly. It has to have resonance, so that your audience relates to it, makes it their own. And it has to be real, credible, down to earth, neither too easy nor too difficult to believe. As for the trick for knowing who to invite, that’s easier: people who care. You can’t know that with people you haven’t met. When you tell them why you care, and look them right in the eye, you will know whether they care. The hard part is finding people who care. Not just people who say they care, who nod and shake your hand. If people don’t really care — about the issue, not necessarily about your idea to deal with it — if people don’t really care, you’re wasting your time. If they do really care, which means they also know, because we can’t care about things we don’t know about, which is why so many of us don’t want to know, then all you have to do is invite them together, and tell your story well. They’ll do the rest.”

I commented that this seemed like a lot of work. He told me it would become easier with practice. “No more than 10,000 hours,” he said, smiling. “Practice conversation, until you know how to pay attention, how to really listen, how to show that you care and what you care about and why, authentically, how to understand what the person you’re conversing with cares about and why, and how to connect with them in ways and with language that they understand and appreciate. Then you will know whether to invite them to collaborate with you, and how. And then practice telling your story, which is just another form of conversation, and which requires the same capacities.”

A short time after this discussion, Dussault contracted a painful and wasting disease, and he then became an expert in how to end one’s own life, and in his final practice, took his expertise with him. He left me a note, which read as follows:

this is my first attempt at translation of a creative work. i hope the author will forgive my misunderstandings and my clumsiness.
the poem is the first prize winner of the en route poetry prize for 2009. it was written in french. comments and corrections to my translation are welcome.

6:20
by judy quinn

december 6, 1998
you are already into the second chapter of it,
and not a word has been said.

you are just an extension:
the flower spike that opens and scatters its seeds.
your happiness is joyless,
your pain exposed.
you no longer belong to yourself.

sainte-justine, montreal,
just like at saint-raphael, san jose –
4:50, notes the nurse:
you make your way earthward
where even invisible things fragment apart,
one year pressed against the other,
your forehead pressed against the table:
to replace, says the book,
break apart, then replace.

towards those who, before you,
dressed up their web of illusions,
a picture of hands, lost,
bubbles trapped on the surface of a lake,
bloop, blip:
all these lives that once were yours.

they have plugged in their probes,
plunged into the restless waters.
you see nothing, but everything’s clear.
on the screen, a raised arm hails a taxi,
a lawnmower scrapes the sky,
let me out of here before the storm.

they have pumped the blood,
drawn back the doors, and remade the bed.
they played with your mother’s hair, and said:
it’s nothing, relax, this is normal,
everything’s perfectly normal.

5:03, notes the nurse, and leaves:
for millennia, our words depreciate each day,
the same lamp, carried from room to room
shines on each blinding day:
it’s been this way for millennia, she writes, and leaves.

your mother admires the houseplants,
the green unpleated drapes,
your father, sitting, his schoolbag at his feet.
an island that the merest word cracks.

5:53, december 6, 1998,
what separates the sky from the window,
your father’s bedside chair,
disappears,
the centrifugal force that glues us, skin to skin,
time has left the room.

one day, you’ll see, says your mother,
no one will have to be buried anymore.
and the nurse notes:
elevated pulse
bloodshot eyes
slight delirium
everything is perfectly normal.

silent bell-towers toll our distress.
dressed in green feathers,
under the worried eyes
of the stars, we will cease
all procreation –
my child
you will be born without me.

6:20, december 6, 1998
buried in billions of light-years of dust,
silent and sterile
a hand unblocks a plumbing pipe.
from black to red, nail polish
like the beginning of the cosmos.

6:20, local time
peeps, diving flights,
the yellow pink of a summer evening’s heat –
the rain, the clouds of bees,
complement each other.

you are coming. we will empty the world.
outside the room
a tree sways in the languid morning,
the final outcome of the growing dawn.
a brown apple pressed against a face.

when you get free from the vice,
the one you weren’t even aware of,
when you have not cried, in today’s book,
you were already real enough.

for a first note:
nine out of ten, white, you
failed the colour test.

when you came, carrying on your skin
that whiteness from the time before
we each looked out for ourselves,
and the tree, and the rose.
this counterweight so sensitive to words
that without them, it would have fallen over.

you are this spot, as soft as infinite clay.
your eyes are the seal of renewal.

you expect heaven — do not seek it.
smell the soiled linen, the vomit and blood,
these diapers down here, nothing higher.
you would have to have been born
in another time.
here, they’ve placed a limit on our dreams.

once you’ve frowned, looked at nothing,
your black almond eyes, with no blue hue,
unable to tell your mother from a blot of ink
you already knew
that to live, you must forget.

omit what’s essential, don’t be concerned about it.
it’s a long trek. on the uneven road
you’ll get lost a million times, and a million times
lay down your dusty burden
looking for the break in the wire that holds your life
back at the starting line.

6:20 am
they tossed you on top of your mother,
the frozen ghost,
under the neon lights of the room
furnished to please the administrators.
i love you, and i want so much to love you
says your mother,
so much that i want you to live forever.
without asking, they picked you up again.

you will set up so many ideals,
says your father
and they will rise up against you
he says, for his own benefit.
there will be enough of them,
they’ll beat you back
and stay alongside the living.

don’t pay any attention:
everything is perfectly normal.

just born, mechanically,
you brought your lips to your mother’s breast
and sewed her back up with a web of drool.
your mouth is partly played.

you were baptized even before you were born,
this twisted name swollen
with a russian hero’s pride.
it carries the scent of the plains.

in the moment when the earth steals it,
a field of wheat at the other end of the world
grows and moves with the sound of your name.

they wish you to be noble,
but you will be nothing but earth.
they will prevent you from leaving.
you’ll be left alone.
they will regain their former whiteness.

don’t think about it,
it will be done for you.

head turned towards childhood,
your hand feels out eternity, and with the other
you hold death by its collar,
its body on the cross.

don’t think about it.

they barely had to wash you,
they wiped out your nostrils, cleared your lungs,
they drew from your mouth your mother’s voice
which called out the world’s promises,
then they threw her away.
they dug for the words that you threw out to her
without finding them,
threw them out with the water.
only one remained.
only one was never delivered.

they tagged you,
measured the rest of the night on your wrists.
weighed your future
with nothing but a sketch of your heart.
then they put you in a bell jar:
so wise.

perhaps they dreamed about
the sunken cheeks they gave you.
that they raised, meager offerings
from the bottom of a well.

these cheeks where laughter will take shape in you
will capsize boats which, within you
well before this december 6, nineteen hundred and…
at 6:20 am
dead planets drifted.

image: from salon.com

i’ve taken you so much for granted,
lovely forest on my doorstep,
strange hybrid of native and ‘introduced’ species,
most at early stages of succession from land once farmed
and then abandoned,
with a few plantation sections, row on row, original purpose unknown.

what did this land look like, i wonder
before the first human eyes encountered it
and the first human hands began its sad ‘improvement’?

how long now before the damage of our species is undone?

such messy wetlands are not meant for man’s endeavour:
swamp and mud and rotted trees pocked with holes for creatures
fit to glide with ease from land, to pond, to sky.

and in the winter, drowned in snow and cold so still time stops.

man the surveyor looks at this chaotic scene, and dreams of draining out the marsh for grain
and chopping up the fallen trees for fuel: we like our beauty ordered, tamed.

i’ve walked these deer-worn trails a hundred times, but still
i do not know the names that humans call these trees;
my guidebooks sit unopened, useless as the facts within them.

i wish at least i knew which ones belong and which are new, invasive,
hogging all the sun and rain and soil like managers hog time in meetings.

such a mystery you are to me, a tiny piece of grace in touch with all the life on Earth
in ways i can’t imagine, now i’m deaf to nature’s primal tongue.

i do my best these days to still my mind and listen, sense and give attention,
not to think of what it means or represents,
or feel the grief of gaia’s loss that haunts me everywhere:
but just to sit and be here, now.

though i cannot.

this is my first farewell, for soon i’m gone:
this land’s too harsh for my arthritic bones and weary heart.

you’ll always be a part of me, and i of you, my land, my love, my teacher too.
we’re so alike: untidy, neither natural nor civilized, a little sad, a little wild,
a little worn, untamed and proud
and every year
a bit more silent.

thank you for your voice, your gentleness with me,
the other creatures that are part of you
and all you’ve showed me of adapting and of wisdom.

i understand at last the message you’ve proclaimed
for all who dare to hear, since life began a billion years ago:
a whisper in the wind, a rustle in the rain,
a baby’s peep, a robin’s song, the turtle’s ancient swim to spawn,
the senses’ spell, the cry of love and joy
and being one with all,
and welcome always,
everywhere.

photos by the author, on a blustery day this past weekend, in albion hills conservation forest, beside and part of where he lives, for now