V I S I O N A R Y    E D U C A T I O N
 Thomas Lowe Taylor
 
 "The task of the teacher becomes that of preparing a series of motives
 of cultural activity, spread over a specially prepared environment,
 and then refraining from obtrusive interference."  Maria Montessori,
 Education for a New World
 
 ***************************************
 
 ONE:  NOTES FOR AN EVENT
 
 
 "Question:  Well, why do you go to another culture to get your myth?
 
 Charles Olson:  Well, you knock me out if you say that.  I just
 thought I bridged the cultures.  (He laughs)  I don't believe in
 cultures myself.  I think that's a lot of hung up stuff like organized
 anything.  I believe there is simply ourselves, and where we are has a
 particularity which we'd better use because that's about all we got. 
 Otherwise we're running around looking for someone else's stuff.  But
 that particularity is as great as numbers are in arithmetic.  The
 literal is the same as the numeral to me.  I mean the literal is an
 invention of language and power the same as numbers.  And so there is
 no other culture.  There is simply the literal essence and exactitude
 of your own.  I mean, the streets you live on, or the clothes you
 wear, or the color of your hair is no different from the ability of,
 say, Giovanni di Paolo to cut the legs off Santa Clara or something. 
 Truth lies solely in what you do with it.  And that means you.  I
 don't think there's any such thing as a creature of culture.
 
 I think we live so totally in an aculturated time that the reason
 we're all here that care and write is to put an end to that whole
 thing, put an end to divisions of all sorts.  And to do this, you have
 to put the establishment out of business.  It's just a structure of
 establishment.  And my own reason for being, like I said, on the 
 left side and being so hung up on form is that I feel that today,
 as much as action, the invention...not the invention, but the
 discovery of formal structural means is as legitimate as, is for me
 the form of action.  The radical of action lies in finding how
 organized things are genuine, are initial, to come back to that
 statement I hope I succeeded in making about the imago mundi.  That
 that's initial in any of us.  We have our picture of the world and
 that's the creation."
 
 * * *
 
      Though it is in language that world becomes palpable, it is in
      utterance that it becomes sacred:  in a literal focus of energy,
      breathed and voiced, explosions from the lungs in a mixed
      expiration, tongue-acted.  So speech and song as a combination of
      act and making: word-act, what I come to see as voice-flesh-act.
      That is, from the imitation of imagination, speech is cryptic. 
      Though reminiscence rounds it off into its structural value.  A
      syntax of this very process would yield to the actual distance of
      things. Up against speech-language, in its sequences, we have
      laid consciousness as an open pool, set like a mirror before the
      ear to catch word.  The empty space of consciousness as mother of
      will / laid within the man-organ, against the seriality of his
      acts. A serial persuasion yields personal diameters; out of the
      choice-field would lie patterns of equal response. Personal
      voice:  out of process rather than necessity, a private /
      impersonal.  Or as it becomes known (again, out of nostalgia), in
      the sense that knowing is rather like memory, as open processes
      eclipse the personal, the vocal-private-impersonal impels through
      relation: that is as the topics eclipse their own
      verbal-oral-cultural plasticity, out of one's vernacular
      singleness, speech-acts come to structure the growth of the
      conscious. To go back, then, to the initial sequence of
      perceptions, rather to ride through the birth-act, is to honor
      the house (body), to give moment or shape to the desire for
      understanding: however broadly one finds his own personal spread
      down before him, there seems to exist another boundary, out of
      future-time, boundary-like.  Or to get around an apparent
      objection to mysticism, to posit the legibility of the
      "passing-beyond" as a form of serial language implicit in the
      relation of series to consciousness, right?  The thing is done,
      is getting done, and one knows it, has it there before him. The
      true character of observation might then be understood as
      extensions of consciousness (rooted) though there is, located
      maybe, somewhere, a double vision (a re-view), more a double
      consciousness, an inverse of awareness, like guilt or the other
      way around.  Our legacy, anyhow, to see it twice and have it come
      in between the act and process, a pornography of the forms. The
      beloved, somehow personalized, and then photographed.  Or our own
      preoccupation with medium (flesh-blood-speech active, muscular,
      breathed).  So it distinguishes as a coherence between image and
      act and the poetic at its current state. Surely the
      passing-beyond relieves poetry from its cryptic isolation. 
      Cultural enterprises seem to be allowed.  Now, vision, inherent
      in any consideration of "the quality of the act" might then
      consist in the manipulation of symbols.  There is a suggestion
      (of this) in the introduction to Theosophist Annie Besant's
      Thought Forms.
 
 * * 
 
      Visionary education, as it takes place, relies on event-process
      as a voiced convenience.  A consciousness of means which does not
      quibble, that is an inner dimension which carries the focus down.
      Where is the focus?  In the parallel?  Where are you placed
      there?  No contest. OK, no value anywhere but in acts.  First,
      and then this whole business of the literal miscalculation (being
      literal about the literal), as regards acts; seems to arise from
      closed process and a notion of ends-as-such.  Open process would
      carry the serial out beyond, that in each is pre-scribed the
      consequences of the succeeding act; therein resistance, to
      recognition even, though that's the point, that what is voiced is
      a state of being and that there are other states.  To declare a
      hierarchy flaws the act.  Into value, again, as choice.
 
 * * 
 
      So right there, even, at the matter of word choice (the "numen"
      of selection), there is a hesitation at going-back-over-it,
      perhaps an inability.  In these terms, whose monolog? The
      succession of acts and successively inclusive states of response.
       The "new" language appears as-such, to examine the quality of
      the new, or of initiation, or birth.  Literal act, however, in
      its crudest form, intervenes, almost to obscure the means of
      relief.  I mean, the quality of acts (as perceived), both as a
      referent to possibility and as an impulse to memory.  The dynamic
      of it, again, qualifies.  Hence, inversion, to both succession
      and space.  No error:  allusion (to accept responsibility) is a
      gesture toward the actual.  In acts, too, a residue. Aphorism,
      too, almost like afterthought. "So, is it not the play of a mind
      we are after, is not that that shows whether a mind is there at
      all?"  (Olson) Whose? Now, the relation to the ceremony includes,
      even departure, there, into private voice (song?), to allow the
      overtones to define certain categories of being.  After the fact,
      of course; the experience precedes the model.  What's up, through
      the line and through love, is the perpetual condition of voice
      and relation enacted, consciousness embodied in its proper
      uni-verse (one song).  And speech as afterthought, that lag, is
      only problematical. So to continue.  Through the matter of
      evidence and hesitation, the voice affixes itself to the person
      under hand, and all that precedes speech falls into its proper
      antagonism, the repetition of initial acts, preceded by their
      causes, out of such flux as continues to move away, out of
      "sight" in either direction.  Loss.  But not error; slippage,
      perhaps, but not necessarily means. Energy is too vague a term,
      since its balance (expense) is a motion.  Ok, fine, the thing
      cannot be described, or worse than that, can.  The forces are
      organized.  And then wait.  What is that? The condition?
      Awaitment, I thought, past the cultural into our proper sphere,
      the top of the head, still soft.  But we leave, we are always
      leaving, and the situation is left, expressed, its vernacular
      obedient to cause.  Final.  Context in another yearning after the
      sequential.  But hurrying on, in a pace toward the familiar.
      Foundations are behaviors, too, aligned as easily as true speech,
      so the problematical and quantitative means of information are
      expressed.  Not to trouble anything, but as a temporary locus of
      the image, or the vision.  Or the impulse of a shadow, declining
      into prejudice, requiring periodic affirmations. I think this all
      precedes utterance altogether.  There is a space present in it,
      identified, allowable, but which is (becomes) qualitative, and to
      that degree resists its own definition, which is neither self nor
      identifiable description.  To say that it is meant would give to
      the speaker (whomever) more than he has offered.  But an impulse
      to information seems important.  Naturally (equivocally), it is
      better in a crystallized form.  And the inhering of that, the
      distance from the subject, to drive it back, out of its own
      accretions, not quite to the point of control, sadly enough, but
      to its resistance; then, in naming, at least, there, to the
      exact, to the actual syntax or immediate sense of the thing,
      assuming (for once) that however one starts, he would head-in to
      the center.  That is, if all points are equidistant from the
      center, and if all lines are (serially) straight lines. And so
      on. If it is not to presumptuous to get ahead of process, it is
      at least an exploration, of going nowhere.  The cold point.  But
      then, one would want to experience all things, it is said; but in
      what order?  There must be none at that cold point.  A most
      unsequential, unmoving location. A notion of "mental events",
      however roughly it is laid out, would prescribe the center.  It
      is visible in every of our moments. (shared)  Referent, implied,
      assumed.  So pace delivers.  The community is already there,
      visible.  And the cold point (of relaxation) is a welcome fix,
      the word gets out.  THEN: the metabolic pace. Speech styles,
      accretion of acts, all assumed behind the methods of behavior,
      multi-ordered.  No single declaration of distinctness, but an
      allowance (faith, "traditionally") that this leap across synapses
      was conceived originally (though that's loaded) as possible. 
      Toward the good, with all the cynicism necessary for a
      maintenance of literal miscalculation.  Or error (what has not
      yet been conceived:  Otto Rank). Participation mystique:  in
      language, between the spoke and the unspoke, there is not much
      distance, and to value speech is not necessarily to honor the
      oral.  OK, that's neat, if nothing else:  contradictions of the
      parable reveal us (to restate it).  But the
      oral-cultural-historical comes out of where we were, and if you
      trust yr memory that much, you're better than I am, the last
      second is rushing back from me.  No pinnacle.  But private speech
      in an impersonal setting has a drift which encounters some
      familiar shapes, though one could preoccupy himself with
      identification.  The thing is up and going, pushed hesitantly
      along by the acolytes.  They may be in it for the money, but
      they're pushing.  Even out of the American locale, some poetry
      persists; certainly the vision, inclusive and temporary,
      initiates here, from outlasting the dialectical into the serial
      mode, where an accretion of detail drives the old context of
      muscular breath-acts back into a sharp focus.  The diminished
      visual (the work was done, finished about twenty years ago, just
      go to the George Eastman House) reaffirms, frinstance, Chagall
      and Albers.  They belong to the same age, and so to the rest of
      us, for that, anyway. The free act, thanks to some reminders from
      the surrealist writers as against Miller's agony of separations,
      as against some thoughts about chanting the text in unison
      (reading?) and a tendency to begin to be able to notice the
      shifts. The processes of transformation without idealizing time
      any more, would inhere within acts.  A pornography of
      consciousness would only delay decision but not postpone
      indefinitely.  So the terms for weight would allow passage along
      from the familiar through to the formulary and into the private. 
      Which is transparent enough already.
 
      The final act is just that:  initiatory.
 
 
 * * *
 
      "A sentence is in fact a transfer of force, from object to object
      by verb."
 
      But to get the matter firm, it is where Olson lodges, in the
      active, actual man, especially possessed of speech where it lies
      in, holds to and while the seeker comes to his means, the quest,
      and in others, communes, it is in the active man that speed
      commends itself to its proper relation between consciousness and
      the community, that in the words chosen and in those spoken that
      a man is, and is shown in his immediate and particular state. 
      And without making any substitutions for myself, here, that if we
      have come to know this double of consciousness, that we would go
      toward a double vision in which the parts collide and coalesce
      and reapportion into the new constituencies. But the activity,
      what is this proper activity itself, out of the personal and
      celebratory, into what context for the numen "did I choose my
      life?" and if so..." how, and to what advantage, if it lies in
      that, to know." The retrievable, then, has its shape in what is
      familiar, as the guide who comes in the form of the butcher in a
      black apron who is going to cut you up to look for the shaman
      bone.  Neither in Artaud nor in Cage do these new constituencies
      lie, but in the doubled vision and the triple sequence, or
      movement from voice through exploration to (into) consciousness. 
      "That trope, man", Olson calls it. I am the event, it goes,
      center of the focus, hot point and registration of all that I
      come to and through the event of self and process, conjunction as
      it were, come to speech. "For truth is only the measure of the
      process thought.  And thought is functional.  You can't not
      'think'.  As you live you think." That the law is: that has
      meaning which is itself to itself, as prime relation and fact of
      being-consciousness.  And at no loss or gain to the species, by
      that which has us operating, so to speak, at function-levels
      according to state or will-to-action.  But in no way diminished.
      Now to work this out of the mundane, or what will I do about it,
      is right, exact, public sentiment about the real, inhering to
      some new end, inclusion.  Exact.  To have the series start with
      encounter.  And what is general here is not method but complex,
      and (to head around) precisely that which exhibits, as
      "erudition", a false value which is attached to reason, dictates
      behaviors in proportion to the old term "blindness", as in-seeing
      and mute.  But of that relation (of self-in-self) as a
      physicality, or assumption, the completeness of being presents
      it, the matter, as a law (way). Thus the peculiarity of the
      present: What should we ask for?  The turn, out of the new
      consciousness, having moved across, on the literal from figure to
      symbol, where the distinctions clarify drift or chance; anyway,
      there is a quality to "image" which refuses elusion, the
      structural persists and as evidence and means comes to strength: 
      what there is to see has the reflected meaning of its allowances.
       The mirror runs in either direction. Certainly, what we have
      known as cultural events retains a focus in the particular, like
      the residues of musical experience. But the literalness of
      authority, when processed out, seems to have become less static,
      and as one is in motion, one can get a hold of the thing at last,
      to ride.  The least hesitant consequences of the act.  Or, like
      looking around. So, I think we are least considered on the matter
      of speech models and oral series, where it comes to the matter,
      speech-active man, of relating the real, the palpable, world (out
      of language) and the literal fact of it, in consciousness and of
      the whole movement through illusion (via skill), at least in us
      as focused or registered participants.  I mean like getting hold
      of the whole thing and of running, it, there's nothing to that
      but the doing of it, and that if in the doing of it something
      becomes apparent, then beyond all necessity one wants to follow
      it (curiosity and desire); in the union of act (speech and
      thought) does the permanent bond inside "that trope man", us as
      doer and done thing, but spoke.  And to honor. "Life is the
      success of a play of creative accidents.  It is in the principle
      of randomness seen (is) its essential application, not in any
      serial order imposed at random on either chance or accident (the
      new tautologies of the old Chaos) but in the factual observation
      of how creation does occur: by the success of its own accident."
      In speech, how the eyes focus and where and on what and to what
      intensity, where (also) the set of the face and the muscles, and
      in what event known and done but self and thing and what is
      spoke.  "The motive, then, of reality is process, not goal." The
      lag, to come through metabolism and chemistry to process, is to
      carry all that is weighty into an essential footrace.  So to run
      it out, out of time, to make space, through the vernacular, as
      spoke, (to Wordsworth, too) would be that allowance: past style
      and the dogmatic.  Use. The fashionableness of light: to make the
      broad turn out of history, out of conscience, is to locate some
      of these priorities, and closely.  In act in its proper sphere
      and dominion, and in vision where the mysteries are lodged, and
      in word, where patterns emerge and coalesce to newness (delight
      and joy).  Not only simultaneous, into speech-active story-teller
      and image-maker, but to go through necessary silences at the will
      and center of the community, to be the mean point, at the center
      of the descent, in the free-over-backwards-falling-flight, in the
      loss of space which is space, there are some questions which I
      come to out of repetition. "And my considered argument is, that
      it can only do this if it is the sensor of the set of qualities
      of which it is one part: that only if Beauty, Love, and the Idea
      are included by it, that no will can be 'free'--that is, both
      child and father of the beautiful, the good (as love), and the
      idea (as thought or truth). "But note the rest of the thought
      (the other half): the infinitive of being/becoming--is neglected
      or left out.  These four cannot be unstuck any more than the
      other two sets of four.  And the tensor of all three sets is that
      one thing you are throughout:  man.  Actual wilful man."  (Olson)
 
 
 * * *
 
     But to speak to the essential difficulty, "what am I doing", that
     if one takes in fully the preceding, and if the community, the
     commonality of the good, comes to be actually, the sum and total
     of its diversity, the whole business of the future and the
     inheritance might become more central. And again, in terms of
     these transformations we try to justify or understand, what comes
     to be lack or emptiness (void) are seen to be, literally, matters
     of immense developmental significance for (even) those of us who
     are unaware of the degree and immensity of the unknown of which
     our senses are made only dimly aware in their constituency in the
     physical process.
      Which gives the absolute its power.  Our will to be its part. 
      And as we coincide in our habits, we come to know our lives, it
      is this humanism which seeks expression in us. So: first, to
      know, that feeling is in the realm of the good, then to speak
      what we are, out of all our acts toward being, always toward an
      always more inclusive curiosity, in recognition of the other in
      our acts ("other" as the not-me, the unsequential ego) and to
      come to the essential in our relations as immediacy, as crux and
      crumble, toward the factual always, in our passages and
      unmentionablenesses.  To ring it like a bell. The common act of
      consciousness, and the root exploration of it follows,
      unjustified, wilful and compulsive, bears our close attention,
      and not out of the selfish but toward recognition of the
      locations of the data. The making of the universe, by my acts
      made.  Nor any presumption, to proceed out of the a-historical,
      the body, into salvage (to let something through or to see in
      metaphor, something of the qualities of the negative). In some
      seclusion, then, does this all take place. As the dream comes
      into utterance, takes life, there are all sorts of residues, a
      falling off, a skinning away to the essential nudity of a high
      diver, twisting past gravity, and the non-functional, to some
      essential twists and spasms, into the water--no splash. The
      representatives of consciousness are elocution (the forms) and
      transformation (the states).