Uncertain journeys

Just some ramblings organising my thoughts about who I have been and where cybernetics fits into my life. 

I had heard Brian Eno via Roxy Music and Seen Robert Fripp play with King Crimson so when, on December 18th, 1973, John Peel played  the whole of  No Pussyfooting I was  both surprised and transfixed. I went out and bought the album the next day, the cover was fascinating but the music was familiarish but not what I expected. It was many years before I discovered the tape in the Peel session was an alternative version and had been played backwards, something that still feels like an entirely appropriate accident given the experimental nature of this kind of music. The structure and feeling of a sense of evolution drew me in and affected all my own music making ever since. 

Over the last decade my interest in management cybernetics has grown and has now become the focus of my EdD journey which I am two years into at the moment. I don't usually follow celebrities or music makers in Twitter but recently saw a retweet of a post by Brian that included an image of one of Stafford Beer's books, following him has been interesting, yesterday's post hit a chord with music making, gardening and storytelling. A link and an extract from the article that resonated is included below. 

http://www.moredarkthanshark.org/eno_int_edge-nov11.html

"Of course, I was also familiar with Cage and his use of randomness, and new ways of making musical decisions. Or not making them. What fascinated me about these kinds of music was that they really completely moved away from that old idea of how a composer worked. It was quite clear with these pieces, for example In C, that the composer didn't have a picture of the finished piece in his head when he started. What the composer had was a kind of menu, a packet of seeds, you might say. And those musical seeds, once planted, turned into the piece. And they turned into a different version of that piece every time.

So for me, this was really a new paradigm of composing. Changing the idea of the composer from somebody who stood at the top of a process and dictated precisely how it was carried out, to somebody who stood at the bottom of a process who carefully planted some rather well-selected seeds, hopefully, and watched them turn into something. Now, I was sort of looking for support for that idea. The term 'bottom-up' hadn't come into existence then. Chaos theory, complexity theory, so on, they didn't exist. I don't even think we had catastrophe theory then.

What we did have, though, was cybernetics. And I became very interested in the work of a cybernetician called Stafford Beer. In fact, I became friends with him, ultimately. Stafford had written a book called Brain Of The Firm: The Managerial Cybernetics Of Organisation, which came out, I think, in '72 or '73. And it was a very exciting book because it was essentially about this idea, again, unspoken at the time, of bottom-up organisation, of things growing from the bottom and turning into things of greater complexity."

What resonated was my approach to storytelling in particular bedtime stories with my children. I had two in the 80s and two more in the early 2000s. So many children's stories seem to have a predetermined plot, fairy tales  and folk stories in particular. That is to be expected when moral or risk lessons are part of the reason for the stories. The earliest bedtime story I can remember being told is one that I asked for again and again and according to my parents I usually fell asleep a few minutes into. I had been asked which story I wanted but instead of asking for a story from one of my books I asked for one about a boy and a train. It started with a boy waiting on a platform, then a resplendent green steam train appeared in the distance, eventually stopped at the station and I usually fell asleep as the boy climbed on board. In my memory i was not asleep I was heading off on all sorts of adventures. That notion of  "...the composer didn't have a picture of the finished piece in his head when he started." was right there in that story and can be traced in many aspects of my life. Long walks with neither map nor compass nor end point, kayak trips from when I was 9 that did have to end where they started but were wandering aimless journeys subject to the randomness of the sea and guided by the patterns on its surface, a refusal to learn to play songs but a love of creating sound journeys. An absolute belief from an early age that no sensible intelligent deity could have designed this world and all that is inn it and around it.

 I have always done free form stories for all of my children, I love the solo and co-constructed journey into the unknown. Some themes lasted years and most started with a "What shall we have a story about tonight?" 

Ants! said Callum, Billy ants! said Rowan and so the three billy ands gruff story started and kept going intermittently over 9 years.
A few years later a bear, a squirrel and a pizza led to stories about Luigi and his two helpers who made a fortune selling pizza in the early 1900s and moved to N. America where they bought a load of land out on the frontiers, went for a primitive life, made friends with wolves and many wild critters, brought a railroad to the nearest town, funded a hospital, an airfield and had adventures in darkest Africa and all sorts of things over the next few years.

Stories like those are of the moment, I always meant to record some live but never did. I have made a few notes to remind me of key players and landscapes but shied away from writing them down. I think the reason for that is partly that I might be tempted to 'improve' the originals and in so doing lose some of the essence. This brings me to my relationship with three key strands in my EdD.

Action Science...define 

Viable Systems Analysis, a process rooted in cybernetic principles but that assesses the distribution of variety in a system with the aim of making it more efficient. 

pattern language...define a system and catalyse future thought