A Growing List of Resources and Inspirations

Annotations were written in 2016. Resources are chronological in order of discovery.
(The list continues, the annotations are still catching up!)

August 2015 - December 2015

*Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.

This book was the opening into my current research on cultural transformation. In chapter seven, “Usury: A History of Gift Exchange,” I was fascinated to learn that “interest” was just as much of a factor in gift exchange as it was in commodity transactions. What makes gift exchange different, what makes it  generative rather than extractive (c.f. Owning Our Future) is that the interest in a gift relationship is not reckoned or quantified, it continues to follow the gift, in constant circulation within a community. In contrast, the interest in commodity transactions is taken out of circulation in the community and held by a single person. I became fascinated with the differences in the properties of gifts and commodities as described by Hyde: gifts are unique, unquantifiable, and create relationship and betweenness; commodities are homogeneous, quantifiable, and exist without a context.

*Theatre de Complicite. "The Encounter.” Theatre performance, Edinburgh, Scotland and Bristol, England, August 20, 21, 23, 2015. September 21, 2015.

This performance is the most profound, beautifully  crafted piece of theatre I have seen in my life. It filled a space of aching hunger for me—for theatre that had been given the time to evolve, that was deeply thought out, that with such a light, precise touch that fully envelops the audience. It was the most ambitious, intelligent, and compassionate piece of theatre I have seen, invoking swirling stories in the vast “reservoir of the unconscious” which McBurney brings onto the stage using audio recordings from many voices and times. With the use of a binaural microphone and headphones worn in the entire audience, McBurney tells the story with the intimacy of telling a story to his children in bed. In the beginning of the play, right before he tells us that “the stories we tell are fundamentally important,” McBurney reminds us that “fiction allows us to arrange ourselves in groups of over 130.” This number is incidentally very similar to the maximum size of a gift community.

*“Simon McBurney on And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, The Book That Changed Me, The Essay - BBC Radio 3.” BBC.

I listened to this radio essay on a train and revisited it several times thereafter, going as far as to create a transcription of it and map the structure of the storytelling. McBurney created the essay in a similar manner to the way he structured The Encounter, weaving together several stories in different times, layering them in concentric circles so that they resonated and echoed within each other to the listener. Within this radio interview, McBurney describes the core of his approach as an artist, clarifying those gestures which later in the year were to make The Encounter a piece of theatre crafted with such incredible care… McBurney says “The clearer the imaginative construct, the more real the piece can become…which is why poetry, not just verbal poetry, but the poetic conjunction of what we see, is essential in theatre.”

Theatre de Complicite's "The Encounter."

*Theatre de Complicite. “Symposium on ‘The Encounter.’” Edinburgh, Scotland, August 21, 2015.

The Complicite symposium shared a wide range of perspectives from the voices that went into creating The Encounter. Speakers at the symposium included Ian McGilcrist, who discussed the right and left hemisphere in his book, The Master and His Emissary, science writer Rita Carter, who I learned would be conducting an experiment in audience response when The Encounter was touring in February. Complicite’s artistic director Simon McBurney, who created The Encounter, also briefly spoke and then answered questions. I asked a question-that-wasn’t-a-question about “the poetic” and McBurney answered me with the John Berger quote, “the role of [the poetic] is to give shelter to experience,” which was soon to become very important in my process.

*Berger, John. And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.

My interaction with Simon McBurney led me to Berger’s book, but once I began to read Berger, I realized how influential this book was for my own research into the gift. Berger’s writing about poetry and language hugely resonates with the fascination I have with the poetic and how it can be used to connect to the world through the imagination. Berger’s writings on home have also been deeply influential to my process. He writes about home as the place where the vertical and the horizontal meet in a way that is structurally equivalent to how Hyde writes about the circulation of gift, Berger just follows the position of the human in the relationship instead of the gift. Berger also writes about migration, how in uprooting ourselves we lose the sense of continuity with the whole and become distinct beings. Berger places love and separation in direct opposition to each other, ending his book by saying that the only way to return to a state of home is to bring the entire world to a place of solidarity.

*Nachmanovitch, Stephen. Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art. Los Angeles; New York: J.P. Tarcher, Inc. ; Distributed by St. Martin’s Press, 1990.

Free Play has been intensely influential for me as an artist and greatly informed my practice in the orchard. Nachmanovitch’s description of innovation as an act of surrender something larger than yourself resonates deeply with Hyde’s description of the gift. For me, Free Play contextualised the world of the gift within the work of the artist. One of the most profound concepts, which threads its way through this book is the artist as “a vessel or conduit through which a transpersonal force flows.” This idea of flow is also discussed in The Gift, when Hyde quotes D.H. Lawrence, “not I, but the wind that blows through me,” and in The Soul of Money, when Twist describes an encounter with a woman who says that “money flows like water. Aligned with this concept of flow is the mantra that threads its way through Free Play, that the artist is able to truly create only when they have “nothing to gain and nothing to lose.”

*McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

McGilchrist, who spoke at the Complicite symposium I attended and was interviewed by McBurney for The Encounter, describes the divisions of our world through the contrasting perspectives of our brain’s two hemispheres. McGilchrist is the first to place the binary I had intuited as existing within the hemispheres of the bring, the right hemisphere perceiving the world as an interconnected, dynamic, living whole and the left hemisphere perceiving the world as a series of static, machine-like parts to be controlled. These hemispheric differences in perception are clearly aligned with the differences in world view of the gift versus that of the commodity. McGilchrist goes further, explaining that these two world views are not equal, but rather, the left hemisphere’s world view is a corruption (literally a “taking to pieces”) of the right hemisphere’s way of seeing the world. In order to for learning to happen, that which has originated in the right hemisphere as a whole and been deconstructed by the left hemisphere must always be reintegrated into the right hemisphere. This is a beautiful description of “praxis.” The word McGilchrist uses to describe this three-step process is Aufhebung, an untranslatable German word used by Hegel to describe the natural process of “sublation.” The concept of Aufhebung has been very influential to me, especially after I learned through subsequent research (c.f. Money, Language, and Thought) that the word originally was used to mean “monetary interest” in the writings of Martin Luther.

*Eisenstein, Charles. The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. Third edition. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2013.

A mentor recommended this book to me and I read the whole thing in one sitting on my flight back to the US. This book wove together all the threads of my previous readings into a real world context for making change. Addressing the same binary as the other books, Eisenstein invites his reader to transition from a “story of separation” to a “story of inter-being.” He describes how we are living in an age where the problems are so great that they can only addressed if we “live in the gift” and have faith in our interconnections with each other. He knows the only through this radically trusting way of living in the world can we create change that is deep enough to make a difference.

*Eisenstein, Charles. Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, & Society in the Age of Transition. Berkeley, Calif.: Evolver Editions, 2011.

I had read Sacred Economics several years ago and revisited it this semester after reading More Beautiful World. Sacred Economics echoes and in some cases even cites Hyde in its description of the gift, linking the gift to the concept of the sacred—something that is unique, interdependent, and creates lasting relationships. But, unlike Hyde, Eisenstein asserts that, when used in a a certain way, money can be sacred too when it is “the implement of a story, an embodied agreement that assigns roles and focuses intention.” Eisenstein also goes into greater detail about the concept of the commons, even suggesting that instead of returning to backing our currencies with gold, we should back them with our natural resources.

*Kelly, Marjorie. Owning Our Future the Emerging Ownership Revolution: Journeys to the Generative Economy. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2012.

I was introduced to Kelly’s book by Bill Barberg, the CEO of Insightformation, the Collective Impact startup that I began to edit for during this semester. Kelly describes the difference between ownership that is extractive versus ownership that is generative in a very similar manner to the way that Hyde describes the difference between the gift and the commodity. Kelly’s book starts in very concrete terms as she describes the events that led to the sub-prime mortgage crisis and she includes several illuminating graphics illustrating the way our economy operates. In the second section of the book Kelly describes examples of companies and individuals who are creating “generative” businesses that address the question, “what kind of economy is consistent with living inside a living being?” Kelly also describes a philosophy of emergence as opposed to control, which also intensely echoes with the gift/commodity binary. In Kelly’s description of emergence, which is a concept from systems theory, she invokes architect Christopher Alexander’s description of the “quality without a name,” which deeply resonated with Hyde’s description of the gift and McGilchrist’s description of the world of the right hemisphere.

*Alexander, Christopher. The Timeless Way of Building. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Although Christopher Alexander writes about architecture, what he is saying can so easily be extrapolated to describe theatre. I’m reminded in his writing of John Berger’s description of the poetic as a “shelter to the experience which demanded, which cried out” (c.f. And Our Faces). There has always been a resonance between theatre and architecture, between the poetic and building—my mentors’ teacher Jacques Lecoq pinpoints this when he says that as theatre creators, we must be “architects of the inner life” (c.f. The Moving Body). Many of the concepts that Alexander introduces in his book are similar to those of the gift as described by Hyde. The “quality without a name” that Alexander describes is, like the gift, something that cannot be made, but only generated. There is an element of giving up control and surrendering to that which already exists. Alexander uses an almost eerily similar turn of phrase to that of Nachmanovich’ “nothing to gain and nothing to lose” in Free Play when he describes that quality without a name as those moments in our lives when we have “nothing to keep, nothing to lose.”

January 2016-March 2016

* Alexander, Christopher. The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe. Routledge, 2004.

Although Christopher Alexander begins with architecture, what he is saying can so easily be extrapolated to describe all living processes. I’m reminded in his writing of John Berger’s description of the poetic as a “shelter to the experience which demanded, which cried out” (c.f. And Our Faces). There has always been a resonance between theatre and architecture, between the poetic and building—my mentors’ teacher Jacques Lecoq pinpoints this when he says that as theatre creators, we must be “architects of the inner life” (c.f. The Moving Body). Many of the concepts that Alexander introduces in his book are similar to those of the gift as described by Hyde. The living process that Alexander describes is, like the gift, something that cannot be made, but only generated. There is an element of giving up control and surrendering to that which already exists. Within this recursive, iterative process of creation, something beyond our control can emerge.

*Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House, 2011.

Graeber’s book on debt presented me with an alternative way to look at the relationship between gift and commodity, which he describes as a relationship between social credit systems and interest-based systems. He describes capitalism as “the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest.”  Just like Hyde’s description of the gift and McGilchrist’s description of the world of the right hemisphere, this ancient credit system still in being during the mediaeval era was bound up with “the collective stewardship of fields, streams, and forests, and the need to help neighbors in difficulty…markets were seen as a kind of attenuated version of the same principle, since they ere entirely founded on trust.” But the most revelatory statement of Graeber’s book is his claim that debt and war are inextricably linked, in fact, Graeber’s very definition of violence is “human beings so entirely ripped from their contexts.”

*Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1997. Print.

David Abram, philosopher, anthropologist, and slight-of-hand magician, has been deeply influential in how I see the imagination and theatre in the context of a more-than-human world. Abram describes how shamans in indigenous cultures perform the role of intermediaries who situate themselves on the boundary between the human and the more than human worlds. It is this porousness, this permeable, intersubjective quality, that enables us to imagine and feel things larger than our own experience. The magician, like their audience, has to go on the same imaginative journey in order to create an inexplicable world.

*Harding, Stephan. Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia. White River Junction, Vt: Chelsea Green Pub. Co, 2006. Kindle.

Stephan Harding describes the concept of “deep ecology,” which brings the theme of animism to a deeper level. As I learned about “deep ecology” I started to make the connections of how you could teach children in a deeper way by combining an animistic ecology with embodied Lecoq practices.

*Weber, Andreas. The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling, and the Metamorphosis of Science, New Society Publishers, 2016. Kindle.

There is so much to explore in this lush book by German biologist Andreas Weber. This book is deepening and confirming my intuitions about the world in ridiculously synchronistic ways. Weber creates a discipline called “poetic ecology” that aligns completely with the way I have been exploring the poetic in theatre. I need more time with this book to give it an annotation—or an essay—or several essays, that can truly do justice to the way it has resonated with my being!!!

*Schumacher College playlist. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL20E1A0CEF47BA709.

I spent a lot of time absorbing these lectures from Schumacher college, which span holistic ecology, economics, sacred activism, ecopsychology, neuroscience, and many other topics!

*Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson.. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. A sentence from Weber's Biology of Wonder, "the unknowable can only be understood through metaphor," has led me into the world of embodiment and cognitive linguistics. Here I'm finding another way to look at imaginative structures and to explore how even our most conceptual discourses are deeply rooted in the body and the sensorial reality through which we orient ourselves.

April 2016-February 2017

Annotations still in process. Check back in a few weeks for an updated list or look at bibliography below.

(In)complete Bibliography of Core Resources

(One task this semester needs to be to list and annotate all of the youtube lectures and audio interviews I’ve absorbed also. There are a lot of annotations from things I’ve already encountered but haven’t documented. Retracing of that will need to be done as part of my academic work.)

Adler, Janet. Offering from the Conscious Body: The Discipline of Authentic Movement. Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2002.

Akomolafe, Bayo. “Bayo Akomolafe.” Bayo Akomolafe Blog. Accessed February 9, 2017. http://bayoakomolafe.net.

Brown, Stuart L, and Christopher C Vaughan. Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. New York: Avery, 2009.

Buhner, Stephen Harrod. Ensouling Language: On the Art of Nonfiction and the Writer’s Life. Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2010.

———. The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature. Rochester, Vt.: Bear & Co., 2004.

Eisenstein, Charles. The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, 2013.

Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.

Keeney, Bradford. Shaking Medicine: The Healing Power of Ecstatic Movement. Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books, 2007.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013.

Levine, Peter A. In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2010.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 1984.

Rosenberg, Marshall B. Speak Peace in a World of Conflict: What You Say next Will Change Your World. Encinitas, CA:
PuddleDancer Press, 2005.

Schumacher College, and Pat McCabe. “The Earth Talks: Indigenous Ways of Knowing - with Pat McCabe.” November 4, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiDmB0ICVsM&app=desktop.

Tarakali, Vanissar. “Towards a Psychology of Unlearning Racism: A Case Study of a Buddist Unlearning Racism Course for White People.” Dissertation for Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in East West Psychology, California Institute of Integral Studies, 2006. https://www.dropbox.com/s/fdf209po1f8cv5f/Vanissar%27s_Dissertation.pdf?dl=0.

Weber, Andreas. Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science. New Society Publishers, 2016.

Weller, Francis. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, 2015.

Wohlleben, Peter, Tim F Flannery, S Simard, and Jane Billinghurst. The hidden life of trees: what they feel, how they communicate : discoveries from a secret world, 2016.