Collaborative Genius

Dear Colleagues & students of
Language, Fiction, & Liberal Art

(As usual: nothing here below is practical,
instrumental—useful, really. Pertains to no
civil obedience, transgressions or lower levels
of Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs We Have With
Us Always; and so nothing to be counted.
Priceless: liberal art stuff like that.)

Collaborative Genius




Imaginary Landscape #24

24 performers on
12 radios twisting
24 dials to tweak
and twiddle the
sounds (pianissimo)
of silence and noise
and wonder whether
any news from noise
might emerge and
from where?
radios?
twisters?
rheostat tweakers?
Ears of the beholders?

Where do you locate meaning?
Significance? Put your finger
on it. Index.

“to let the
sounds speak
for themselves
rather than be
vehicle for man
made theories
of expression &
human sentiment”
John Cage’s IDEA
behind “Imaginary
Landscape #24.”




Aleotoric, he called it. Chance music
where the structure is chosen by
various random processes.




I CONFESS: I call my “classes” so-called
Courses Without Borders, Aleotoric
& CHAOS-friendly so group genius might
could speak for itself. Emergent signification
breaking thru industrialized filters of
expression and human sentiment.

“Intelligence loves patterns and bulks at Random,”
writes Douglas Hofstadter & so IT is exercised by
the random: worked out in Gold’s gym of the Mind
when patterns that soothe are confiscated, removed
from the scene. “Huh?” “What the…?” “What the
hey….?” Expostulations in Real School going on.

Real School (schola) is a wonder full waste of time
and so Faux School (industrial, institutionalized) can
not easily tolerate, bear, harbor, endure, contain, host,
entertain or put up with Real School.

Real School is like BB Wolf to Faux School, like a
thief in the night, some suicide bombing terrorist:
there’s no way Real School and Faux School can
Just Get Along—see I to I. Got to CHOOSE my
mustard: Real of Faux.

I feel bad that many of my Faux Schoolers can’t afford
the “leisure time” (L.schola) it takes to do Real School,
but I don’t blame them. They are conscientious & GOOD
students. With acquired study skills. The grade gun is
leveled at their temples and they like it like a lover. To
drop externalreinforcemental studies and leadership
programs suddenly is to rip the door off the monkey cage;
strong winds keen & whip driving rains. There’s no
re-course but to huddle in the back corner and groom.
Terrifying. Awesome.

I try to build insulation,
transition, moat maybe:
to separate the Ice Cream
Parlor from Hell with no
contamination to either
realm, but I can not do
it unilaterally, by
proclamation,
damnit.




A view of the Screams Ice Cream Parlor from the west.