letter to my daughter

have i talked to you before? this question makes no sense since there are no readers of this blog yet. but i really mean it... so many people i have talked to in life, but never really. below is the mental context of my jibberish, a writing that first rocked my understanding of personal human contact about a decade ago: (i can't find it online, so i'm just gonna cut and paste from the PDF i've carried around digitally for years... the author is an educator, john taylor gatto. this is probably infringing all kinds of copyright laws, but no worse than all the music i "borrow").

i hesitate to play the tiniest violin in the world, but since i've been in nyc i haven't had any spirit talk, which is neither good nor bad, or better yet, it's both great and terrible (much more exciting interpretation of the blind watchmaker jerk that is Everything). most of it is expected, as i haven't had time to connect with new friends yet, and conversation requires more than mah self. but, the dissappointment is in the fact that i don't ever seem to have time to connect with patients... too busy serving them, which certainly is a high priority for me, but i end up feeling pretty drained most days. as per the article (eloquently summarizing some of my beliefs in how people can even stand each other), spirit talk is rejuvenating. i've based too much of my expectations on the bounty of life/truth/justice that i felt at commonground clinic, where i had so much time to talk to the most disenfranchised, supported by people who believed in the real. ofcourse ofcourse ofcourse this is waaaay too early to feel my expectations have been squashed, so i'm pleasantly/mostlycalmly hopeful... but i DO like to get my darkness out in words (instead of floating bad vibes), to see it for what it's worth...

also, as something to explore later, i see some parallels between spirit talk and my favorite buddhist philosophical tripleconcept:
emotional generosity = compassion (the opposite of anger/hatred)
problem solving = good deeds/good actions/karmic work (the opposite of desire)
exploring the mystery = meditation (the opposite of ignorance)

and, to end my editorial before the article, my favorite part: A few friends willing to stargaze with you from time to time forges a subversive society very difficult to condition or to intimidate.

enjoy!


From: Gatto, J.T. (2001) A different kind of teacher.
Berkley Hills Books: Berkley, CA (pp. 213 – 224)

The Art of True Conversation: A Letter to My Daughter

Dear Kid,

I was talking with an old friend last night about some
difficulties his son was having adjusting to being grownup,
when I realized with a start we were traveling in
styles of conversation so disparate that our talk wouldn't
help solve the young man's problem. My friend was selfexpressing
and doing it quite well. With care and
precision he was rendering critical analyses and
judgments at high speed, marked with intelligence, but
like all judgmental discourse, clotted with unexamined
values and assumptions. To complicate matters I was
hooked, as usual, in a mode of talking designed to
explore the mystery of where the kid had misstepped;
why, and what payoff his present self-destructive course
was delivering -- for I believe strongly all behavior has its
goal and if the goal of "bad" behavior can be determined,
better substitutes might be possible.
But the final, unsolvable dilemma was that my friend
misinterpreted my part of the dialogue as competition.
Because of his necessary habit as a businessman, he
unconsciously assumed he and I were in some sort of
contest to determine who had the soundest strategy. An
undertone of right/wrong made free testing of ideas,
"probes;' in McLuhan's useful metaphor, impossible.
Rather than pushing out ideas for inspection, deferring
judgment, asking questions to clarify, we were forced
into caution by the powerful compulsion of keeping
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score on each other. This had to be a pure waste if the
son's trouble was indeed what we were really talking
about.
The frustrating situation I've just described happens all
the time, of course. It probably happened to you recently
whoever you are.

Rhetoric: A Lost Art
Beginning with Aristotle and the Greeks the Western
world saw the study of how to speak and listen
effectively as the quintessential human art. They called
this pursuit "rhetoric;' and though the meaning has
degenerated in contemporary dictionaries into "the art of
persuasion;' that's an accountant's way to regard this
central and peculiarly human undertaking. Korzybski
and the general semanticists in this century, came to see
the constellations of rhetoric as a sine qua non of sanity
itself. Without accurate maps of each other we are
condemned to wander in an infuriating wilderness.
Petrarch, Erasmus, Machiavelli, and other great names in
the pantheon we call Renaissance humanists found an
intimate link between rhetoric and moral growth. If you
can't figure out the instrumentality of how the other guy
is talking, you can't benefit fully from his experience or
help him much with your own. However socially poised
you appear to be, you are condemned to be one of the
isolani, known only to yourself, knowing only yourself.
My friend and I had a missed connection in rhetoric last
night we couldn't adjust our wave lengths. For all the
good we did his son we'd have been better discussing
Phil Rizzuto and the Hall of Fame.
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Social Talk
At baseball games and parties, in offices, bars, and on the
street most of the talk we exchange with each other is
social. Its varieties need to be matched up fairly closely
among the talking partners or there is certain to be
misunderstanding, hard feelings, and frustration. If one
speaker is problem-solving, another is self-expressing
(under the general guise of problem-solving), a third
displaying his wit and joy at being alive, and a fourth
playing for keeps by competing with the other three,
trying to force a scorecard on the players, then you have
emotional chaos, a type of chaos increasingly common
among Americans who find themselves strangers to each
other.
The appearance of sociability in such a situation masks a
real condition of social starvation, one in which
everybody goes home feeling lonely, angry, unfulfilled,
too often to try again the next day in the same way, until
finally company itself seems hardly worth the bother.
If you’re able to recognize the main kinds of social talk,
and I , and you understand the utilities of each sort,
you're in a better position to steer away from the shoals
in a social ensemble and to exit the situation quickly
when other people don't know how to participate. The
first thing you need to understand are the various values
to be gained from social talk. There are just two: to
endow yourself with significance or to endow others.
You do the latter by listening intelligently, asking
intelligent questions, making intelligent and
compassionate suggestions.
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Five Flavors of Social Talk
1)Probably the commonest variety of this type of
conversation is self-expression. Whether rendered as
opinion, criticism, commentary, pontification, or
whatever, it is really a way grownups say, "Me, me, me,
me, me, and me!" In graceful doses it's useful to give
your friends a fix on who you are, what you find
important, what your code of values is proclaimed to be.
Your behavior, of course, is the reality of your value
code. The disparity between what you say you believe
and what your actions say you believe is intensely
interesting to people who must associate with you; in fact
they should assume it measures your personal honesty.
2) Almost equally common is the practice of recreating
information (often distorting it into disinformation): the
weather, prices, bits of gossip, rules, headlines,
reproducing editorial opinion that originated elsewhere,
etc. Because so much information is in some measure
false, even a short term evaluation of what you purvey
establishes your reliability. Doesn't work to protest, "But
they lied to me!" because your selection of sources of
information to credit is a crucial measure of who you
really are.
3) Probably next in order of frequency is competition as
the purpose of conversation. You need only sit in an
executive lunchroom or watering hole a few hours and
eavesdrop to realize that whatever the seeming purpose
of the group's conversation, the actual purpose is to
establish who can dominate, who's second, who's last.
"Winning" arguments, or preempting disproportionate
time establishes aggressiveness and ambition in most
cases; seldom is the triumphant party's case to be relied
upon as "truth."
4) The grand bestower of significance on others is
expressions
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of curiosity. Whether verbal or nonverbal, it's the main
way we confer the vital gift of importance on the people
we talk to. If people don't ask questions about your life
(outside the perfunctory) many things are measured:
compassion, good will, concern, caring, and self (as in
selfishness vs. selflessness).
5) Finally, I think, the last important component of social
conversation is entertainment, by which I mean largely the
power to see the world with humor and wit. The most
cursory examination will show humor to be a refreshing
questioning of literal, everyday reality. All kinds of
humor, it makes no difference which, tell you .social life
is an illusion, a game, and however seriously one
pursues the objectives of the game in times of trouble,
tension, etc., it is always possible to step back and see the
game, to place things in proportions that are proper.
People whose humor is available to others consistently
will never describe some action or threatened I action as
"ruining their life." They know better. The ability to
entertain in social conversation (when not a form of selfexpression)
is a statement of one's ability to know reality.
Humorless people are often recklessly bad judges of
reality.

Spirit Talk
If you can practice the five forms of social conversation
skillfully, you are indeed blessed. You'll certainly be
sought after by all. And if that's all your conversation is,
you'll also slowly petrify. After tens of thousands of
practice sessions with each form their limited structures
will be maddeningly familiar to you. You'll be led by
your own mouth round and round in circles, on paths
you've
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traveled many times before. No lasting satisfaction will
derive from any social encounter, no evolution, no
growth. The future will be exactly as present and past
have been~. Out of social conversation, if that's all there
is, comes the barrenness and sterility of middle age.
Especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, where rhetoric was
discarded by the philosophy of the Reformation, many of
the young look at this interminable future of elaborate
social conversation networks that industrial societies find
vital to "business culture" with disgust. There is some
fundamental and radical difference between the
important talk of youth that makes love, friendship, and
significance reasonably easy to reach, and the social
conversation of older people, in particular of selfimportant
older people, that makes it apparent these lifeand-
death qualities are very difficult to obtain in later
life.
I hope you'll reread that last idea. It will help you
understand why attractive young people in the United
States, almost exclusively the sons and daughters of the
prosperous, kill themselves in record numbers these
days. Teenage suicide, occurring as it does in the classes
who have "made it;' is mute and powerful testimony to
how sterile and inhuman a destination "making it" really
can be. When children prefer death to the life of the
future as they see it being lived by their fathers, mothers,
and family friends, it's time to find the problem not in
them but in us. I think the most important difference
between the good lives of children and the lives of postchildhood
people in the United States is the three flavors
of conversation I want to call "spirit talk."
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Anatomy of Spirit Talk
Just three streams of conversation are infinitely
renewable, always fresh, always appropriate, always
valuable -- the possession of even one of these in your
conversational repertory will keep you alive. To own all
three is to be truly rich, self-sufficient, able to appreciate
what a great gift life is.
1) The first of these kinds of spirit talk is the most easily
obtainable and instantly rewarding. It arises from a real
human need to be emotionally generous. It's fairly easy to
spot people who aren't emotionally generous (though
often such people are materially generous) because they
gravitate to positions of power.
They may have a constitutional need to interfere in the
lives of others, perhaps even claiming the interventions
are in your best interests - even if you don't realize it
now. Not all power positions are military, political, or
industrial; social workers and schoolteachers, for
example, customarily are small canvas power brokers.
You can be in such a position and still be emotionally
generous - constantly encouraging all those around you
to reach for their best, and supporting them when they
fall short without recrimination or lecture. It's not
impossible, just unlikely in my experience. Those who
manage both power and emotional generosity are a most
valuable form of genius, and a fairly scarce breed as
well.
Emotional generosity shows best and most reliably
when the going is tough. Sweet, helpful, socially
gregarious "nice" people who are quick with a kind
word when you don't need it but scarce when your back
is to the wall are obviously not the kind of emotionally
generous conversationalists I mean.
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The idea of emotional generosity to a degree that
strengthens, ennobles, and exhilarates you on the giving
end was caught well by the French thinker Simone Weil.
She found even the thought of individuals so emotionally
generous as to be able to help the afflicted “ ... a more
astounding miracle than walking on water, healing the
sick, or even raising the dead." Conversations in which
you support others who behave horribly, without
concern that your efforts are scorned or betrayed, or in
which this miraculous kind . of affection is not returned
to you, are the therapeutic portion of spirit -conversation.
If you have little of this in your makeup it might be
something worth exploring.
2) Conversations where two or more people join in
intense, high-focus interchanges in order to solve a
problem, whether that problem is how to increase the
sales of a business, air pollution, or to decide on what
ethical grounds Phil Rizzuto could be admitted to the
Hall of Fame, are incredibly interesting and satisfying
whether you succeed in solving the problem or not. All
lasting human connections - marriages, friendships,
partnerships, living communities - are only possible to
those who constantly solve and re-solve the problem of
entropy, the drift toward boredom, the mistaken belief
there is nothing left to discover in each other.
When nature is left to take her course, relationships
always dissolve and disintegrate. How many times does
that have to happen before you become unable to invest
much intensity in any sort of human connection because
you expect, from experience, that even the most exciting
beginnings must end in ennui? The answer is - not many.
If you learn to make the search for solutions a part of
every human encounter, you'll find the lightweight
crowd beginning to avoid you, it's true; on the other
hand those engagements
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that survive, and the new ones which pass through your
screens, folks capable of spirit-conversation, have a
wonderfully nourishing kind of conversation to exchange
with you. Both parties to your dialogue will remember
~what was said for a long time. They'll think about it,
dwell on it, worry it as a lively dog does a bone. They'll
look forward to seeing you again, and you them.
Notice the search-for-solutions mode of talk is
inexhaustible. Unlike the five forms of social
conversation, it's hard to put a limit on the power of this
sort of excavating to turn up pay dirt. People who are in
the habit this way generally find they physically wear
out and break off the dialogue long before the practice of
talking in this fashion loses its savor. If you're searching
for solutions with I '-' an emotionally generous partner,
it's pretty near impossible not to begin to feel excitement
in the undertaking.
3) The third flavor of spirit-talk is far and away the most
essential to understand, to grow and change constantly,
to evolve into the kind of calm, wise, courageous soul
you could scarcely even imagine in earlier days. I'll call
this mode of conversation exploration of the mystery, or
search for meaning, as a label would perhaps shed
additional light on the processes taking place.
If you aren't completely mechanized by the drab routines
of your life (and I am especially directing this to
"successful" people who appear to lead colorful,
interesting lives, but in their innermost heart are well
aware they function mostly as an apparatus, learning
nothing and teaching nothing, only accumulating and
outwitting others) you'll be able to recall a time in your
youth when everything seemed fresh, significant,
interesting, awesome - when life was seemingly larger
than life. You will have been told at different times those
feelings are
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the special province of children and must be put away in
"adulthood for practical reasons. You will also, no doubt,
have occasionally encountered someone who hasn't put
aside the fundamental , understanding that life is a great
mystery, that the planet whirling through space is a big
mystery, that the immense weight of the polar icecaps is
a mystery, that the unbelievable homing ability of the
giant sea turtle is yet another, ad infinitum.
What should your few years of life be "about?" What is
the value and meaning of family? Of loyalty? Of sexual
encounters? Why do you seek to "make love?" No job, no
patriotism, no religion, no disease, no one you'll ever
know and nothing you ever can be is as interesting, as
significant, and as capable of yielding enormous, lasting
pleasure to you as the relentless, unending pursuit of
mysteries.
"Practical" people, by which one usually marks the most
mechanical of machine-people, are content to delegate
the exploration of mysteries to their parson, priest, or
rabbi. One of those, in turn, will possess several
purchased anthologies of approved mystery-sermons
which will be rendered in mellifluous prose at
appropriate moments. In fact, such behaviors are a
dissipation of the mystery-search you need to maintain to
be fully human. The questions and observations, the
detection of mysterious patterns, linkages, odd emblems,
unexplained coincidences, must be an ever ready, everpresent
part of your intake and processing system, and of
your rhetoric.
If you can build a society of emotionally generous, search
for-solution friends who understand and venerate the
mystery
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search as the single most important aspect of intelligent,
satisfying life you've found the greatest engine possible
to sustain the wonder of childhood for a lifetime. Indeed,
if you can find two souls whose conversation is sprinkled
with insights about mystery, and whose curiosity about
your own insights is lively and eager, you own a treasure
whose worth is beyond valuation.
Are there really any answers to big questions? Of course
there are. They are private answers, as individualized as
your own fingerprint is from everybody else's. The
answers come slowly, and only after very, very hard
work, not by a priest but by yourself. When you own
even a part of an answer, the quiet strength you gain in
every attitude of daily living is a great comfort in times of
trial.
Am I maintaining the best, most satisfying conversations
are "religious" conversations? Not exactly. To begin with,
in my own experience, regular church, temple,
synagogue, and mosque goers are the least attuned to
mysteries of anybody. Often they’ve turned the key over
to a hired gun, a paid stranger. It doesn't work very well
in my experience, although a congregation is a wonderful
thing in itself. However saintly the experience of hearing
someone else tell you about mystery makes you feel, the
good feeling wears off quickly; you have to look for
yourself if you want it to last.
Constant awareness of just how very strange everything
is sharpens your conversational sensibilities wonderfully,
sends you poking into nooks and crannies of subjects for
clues overlooked, and makes you wary of prefabricated
arguments.
A few friends willing to stargaze with you from time to
time forges a subversive society very difficult to
condition or to intimidate, because the practice of
keeping alive the awareness that mystery is central to
human existence makes both the rewards and the
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punishments of others hold very little meaning. Or, at the
very least, become secretly funny. . I hope you'll think
about these things long enough to figure out who you
and your friends usually are in conversation, and
whether that's really who you need to be.
Much love,