LS Re: Martin has it!


Martin Striz (striz1@MARSHALL.EDU)
Wed, 10 Dec 1997 06:00:49 +0100


Mark,

Your third paragraph below is a good idea. It's kind of like
the struggle of Dussenbery and his subject-based
anthropological studies vs. the object-based studies of Boaz
and the mainstream anthropologists. Who does Pirsig side
with? Obviously he tears the 'objective' anthropologists to
shreds, saying you can't study people from outside their
context. Well you probably can't teach people from outside
their context, too.

To put together a pedantic essay with a
syllogistically-riddled and overly-rational argument, like I
tried to do before, is a mistake. I'm glad I never finished
it. In retrospect it was immoral for the MOQ. Pirsig doesn't
write like that because he doesn't care about speaking to
the philosophers, his context is towards the common folk.
And that's exactly how he writes. (The oral tradition was
for common folk, too.) If you want to teach people you need
to get down and dirty on their level, you need to understand
where they are coming from, where you are coming from, and
what connections can be made. I doubt you can do that with a
question-and-answer list designed for 'everyone.' You know,
whatever 'everyone' is in the first place. All you'll get is
a bunch of rejections about how baloney it all sounds.
Trust me, my on-going debates with Mike Hardie are a
testament to this fact. They just say, "It sounds weird.
Okay, let's talk about something else." If you want to get
them to see it, it takes a little more work than a list. It
takes, say, two books totalling over 700 pages, which happen
to be published in 1974 and 1991. :-)

Many truths to you,
Martin

-----Original Message-----
From: Murdock, Mark <Mark.Murdock@Unisys.Com>
To: Multiple recipients of <lilasqd@mail.hkg.com>
Date: Saturday, December 06, 1997 11:51 PM
Subject: LS Martin has it!

>>Martin wrote
> But as far as we are concerned, do you actually think
we've figured
> out our value-based metaphysics completely? No. If you
write a
> principia, don't expect me to follow it, expect me to
break it down
> over time and improve it. And again. And again. :-)
Yes, and you have just described the art of storytelling.
Exactly the
method of drawing meaning from experience that the
forerunners of the
Greeks subscribed. Think about that. They could have
written down
their stories, they had language. There was a reason, a
motivation for
not writing it down.

Writing or recording experience objectifies it. The
narrator is
figuratively killed, and only a ghost speaks (sound
familiar?) Quality
is best communicated through experience, not intellectual
constructs
like FAQs and books. So if you want to communicate ideas
about Quality,
why not choose the structure of the narrative best suited
for it?

Writing MoQ down is really an SOM idea. Our metaphysics
lives and
breathes. The story content is a static value, but it is
the live
telling of it that maximizes the dynamic influence. If we
want to start
to propagate these ideas, we should seriously consider
breaking all SOM
convention. Devote the site to the rebirth of the art of
storytelling.
Read stories, retell them. Remember that the story is not
an objective
thing, it has no owner, it is subject to your quality event
while
telling it, play with it, change it to suit your audience,
only remember
the "moral" of the story. Meaning will be conveyed. These
oral
traditions are at the heart of ancient civilizations that
didn't drive
to the brink of global thermonuclear destruction. This is
the legacy of
a Truth-based metaphysics.

Something magical does happen when we start communicating
this way,
folks. We start seeing each other as humans again. We feel
for each
other, and develop compassion for one another. That's good.

>
> Many truths to you,
> Martin
>
> P.S. I'll be taking a class on genetics next semester. It
should be
> interesting.
>

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