Looking Ahead

I just advised Koski to attend Bridges, as he was already leaning, and to get to the SNEC event about looking back at Black Mountain College, where Ken Snelson and a lot of the Catlin Gabel people went to school.  Asheville is near Hendersonville where I used to camp out in a trailer with the maternal gypsy grandparent (gypsy more in lifestyle then per "some secret" gene only gypsies know about).  I could potentially get there.  Gathering for Gardener is another one I always plan to attend.  Had I gone the first year I was invited, I could have met him.  Now I'm like Muhammad Ali felt about Ho Chi Minh: "if only I'd gone earlier, we could have met."

I mention Ho because I've again be revisiting that historical period, rereading about Nixon's secret bombings and the campaign against the dikes.  The idea that lying in the short term would not catch up with one was apparently accepted among the "real politik" crowd of the day, which is all narrated from a back stage point of view these days in that we see everything.  Here's Jane Fonda on her way into Hanoi, looking out the airplane window.

What is it she sees?

I couldn't put it down and it was only like $6 one of Indiana's few well stocked bookstores. I gratefully acquired it and went on reading to the end.  The bottom line is she's got a brave heart and her relationships with the young men of her generation helped keep some cultural cohesion going, whereas the Dr. Strangelovey types, Blue Meanies (many of them DC-based) had simply gone off the deep end and lost touch with humanity.  They'd been abducted in a bad way you might say, whereas our abductees generally benefit (insider joke).

The apartment on Chavez is starting to see more action, as the former chairman of Pythonia had intended.  Michelle has organized one of those PyLadies events where men are allowed by invitation as guests, but don't get to run the show or even collude to do so.  Sometimes women feel undermined by men, who compare notes behind their backs in mysterious ways, but then that feeling is mutual.

Coming to a balance within oneself is the age old wisdom on this one.  If you're up to something positive, then there's no real guilt in being "caught" in the act.  It's like when Santa Claus is tip toeing around the tree and the lights go on.  "Hey, just doing my job, gotta run!".  Who'd wanna get in his way?  Psychiatrists, sure, but who else?  Anyway, the trainer will pitch her tent at Steve's, who is off in Spain or somewhere.  He doesn't like to see perfectly good resources going to waste.  That's an engineer for ya.  We multitask for a living.

I found out about Catlin Gabel's ties to Black Mountain when I was extended an invitation to one of their Thanksgiving gatherings at the Oregon coast many years ago.  I met some dear people and later went with more family, namely Dawn and Alexia (Tara was not born yet).  I was later to enjoy more correspondence and visits with Kenneth Snelson himself, with whom I associate that college.  I forget when Thinking Out Loud came out on public television, but sometime after these Thanksgivings.  Lots of Black Mountain in there too, including interviews with graduates.

My mom tried to switch me to Catlin when I was little.  She was freaking out about New Math which just seemed too off the rails (not what she remembered from math class).  They must have had a different site back then, as I remember a large stone staircase (I went with her).

This was prior to our exodus from the US entirely and my transplantation into the British education system, in the context of Rome, Italy.  New Math wasn't really happening there either.  Rome was a lot about geometry though.  Those geeky Greeks had really been into it, and the Romans weren't half-bad engineers.

I'd climb the dome of St. Peter's to the copula with my friends, getting a sense the architecture.  I could see where a geodesic of whatever class would have its advantages.  Black Mountain was where Bucky drew enough strength to come up with working prototypes.

Walter Bauersfled and Alexander Graham Bell are sometimes cited for having dug deeply in the same soil that Fuller did later.  That's true, they did.

The Fuller School as a noospheric (and biospheric) story wherein great minds think alike thanks to some zeitgeist or Holy Spirit (the term used in Synergetics) -- which doesn't mean you can't have competing models and/or complementary approaches.  Logie Baird TV was not the same a Philo Fransworth TV.  Betamax is not Blueray.

I'm still connecting some dots with Earlham College as well.  Middle America (so-called by some) is ripe for more bizmo fleets in my estimation.  These need not be emergency vehicles in a big hurry to get anywhere fast.  Driving at speed limit is fast enough.  Bizmos need not be rushed, are more like gypsy caravans, on the move but not under the lash of some harsh taskmaster.  More like Quakers in some ways (unprogrammed).