How I Learn

Back in Kitsilano

October 2009

eyes getting old

I want more light

in the corners

…

slow burn rust

the iron’s strength

bled off

…

rock rubbing

circles in sounds

still here

…

blackberry morning glory

tangle still some small

dried berries

…

getting older

nails & hair grow faster

as thought slows

 …

morning soft

strained like tea the

tannins stiffening

…

late day light

autumn yellow fading red

eyes extinguished

…

listening closely to

the space between each raindrop’s

continuous sound

…

tea water molecules

random drive sequencing

shared warmth

…

vague expectation

that water tastes of traces

other than water

…

lying in

the morning bath water

until its tepid

…

lying in the morning bath

until the water is tepid

getting up

…

first back twinge

lying out on the floor

waiting again

…

washing each glass

the water hot to scald

held up to the light

…

some mornings

the colder the water the cleaner

the skin dries

…

after a few seconds

the water runs colder

filling a glass

…

rain spaced morning

time finding some other

method of sequencing

…

eating an apple

drinking apple cider

eating an apple

…

hair shorter

seen thinning

skin clean

…

trying to say

something simple enough

it need not be said

…

tea in the night blue cup

so dark its transparency

swallows itself

…

From Wittgenstein

“to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life” PI 19

The miracle of the world

Expressing nothing within language

Is the existence of language itself

The existence of language

Wonderment at the existence of the world

Our shared debt

Some form of continuance

…

dead wasps

a few dry leaves

bitter tea

…

some word for another

some thing for something else

an equivalence held

November 2009

the rain lifted

morning caw sounds

eyes heavy

…

a few hours after

the water rested in the glass

a layer of dust

…

I hear rain

although I hear rain

I hear rain

…

skin shared

after long separation

sharing breath

…

eating white rice

a trace of plum then

eating salt plum

…

Mulamadhyamakakarika

.

we speak together or

do not speak

and not speaking speak

as we neither speak nor not

.

the cold in the air is part of the rain

or not, just cold, just rain

when there is neither cold nor rain

and the cold not cold the rain not rain

.

some evenness in the numbers

not produced or destroyed

neither permanent nor annihilated

this smoothness discrete in

its difference over unity

having come and gone in the same movement

.

your hand moves to touch

is still

between our space its movement

allows time or not, to exist and not

…

when feet get cold

in November rain it’s hard

to get warm until spring

…

late November

still some apples too high to pick

and happy birds

…

cobwebs taste sticky

and basement dust fills with its own light

spiting out

…

rain weight constant

into the soil’s variable depth

the roots tighten

…

the sun not tired

of shining shines across

the cloud white

…

the boxwood cold

broken and distorted spent

the summer growing back

…

rain continuing

into the day made tight

and so on

…

hbnh

(from a tag cloud of this text in November 2009)

air along breath

clean cold dust

glass hard ice

.

known may ride

river road salt

sand shape shared

.

skin snow soft

south theme turning

water white wind

…

December 2009

.

sky still waiting

for snow to break

the balance

…

drinking water

from a wine glass

no taste of wine

…

drinking water

from the tea cup still

a trace of tea

…

after heavy rain

and melt the tap water

tastes of here

…

rain blotting

the frost a few minutes

and it’s gone

…

(may the year rest as it circles)

Priviliged Hands

This post is dedicated to the great Dutch marine biologist Geerat Vermeij who wrote a book with this title. Vermeij is blind and knows the world through touch, smell, taste and sound. He has trained his hands to recognize thousands of marine organisms, especially those of the littoral.

My own hands are clumsy and dull, but I learn a great deal through touch and by watching the hands of those much more skilled than I at work. One of the great pleasures of my time in Boston is that my wife Yoshie and I live in a very small walkup in the South End. When we are in the apartment at the same time we are close to each other and can see each other working. Yoshie works with her hands. She makes small, intimate objects by knitting wire forms then weaving in found materials - strips of paper from packing, plastic, bits of metal or heavier wires. Sometimes these are dull colours to give the wire patterns ground. Other times, the found objects can be magpie bright. The forms capture the movement of her fingers. Quick, deft movements, like a bird in flight, then sometimes slower, almost stopped, as she applies strength. The objects themselves are light and strong, supple and alive in the hand. Held up to the light they reveal something of their structure. Holding them in my own hands I remember the movements of the hands that made them. One more way of stitching together time. Hands hold a privileged form of memory.

As I travel I try to touch as many things as possible and remember textures and temperatures. We (or I) lack a rich language to describe texture. I wonder if one could create some kind of visual notation for touch, much in the way some modern composers have created new, more textural, ways to score music: grain, roughness, swirl, sharpness, continuity, concavity, figure and ground as felt in the finger tips, heft in the hand, static and friction, or slip and glaze. The touch of something that crackles. Wondering how to hold flow in ones hands. To know the tension in a string is to know how to touch movement.

Some things touched:

Slimy kelp

The warm rough head of a Jizo at Nishiaraidaishi

The haft of our favourite cooking knife

Yoshie's feet

An old metal bolt, some rust, about three kilograms

Crack in a rock face trying to hold

Rope burn as the sheet runs out too fast

Old chain grease with road grit

The smooth grid space of the keyboard

Orange peel

A fish still alive dieing in ones hand

A dog's soft ears

A child's hand

The same child's hand, years later, bigger and stronger than my own

Dust on the pages of a book

Smooth then rough bark of an Arbutus

A sweaty cheese

Paper cut

Oiled skin

A broom handle, a rake's

Clay soil

Sandy soil

Peat

Bulbs

Hands are the skin over muscles tied by tendon to jointed bones. Arthritic knots. Fine hairs showing the tension. The shape of a hand is its memories.

 

Body Memory

The deepest learning seems to be physical, bound into muscle and bone, printed on the skin, and found in the repeated firing of nerve patterns. I dream that my bicycle learns from me, in the way my riding style and paths tune its vibrations. I know that my body learns from my bicycle. The deeper I can embody abstract thought the better I remember it and the wider the web of associations it can weave. Makes me wish I was a dancer, or at least a musician.

Now that it is spring, and I am riding longer and faster, I am noticing body memories from other sports in how I corner my bike or try to read traffic patterns to avoid the most dangerous places on the road. Dodging my bike to the right around a car that has suddenly lurched into my path I sometimes lead the turn with my right shoulder. The feeling is almost like running gates, something I did a lot in winter on skis, more than twenty years ago. The same balance and confidence I feel on skis I also feel on my bike, and the same ability to feel the terrain and react quickly is one of the things that keeps me safe. Riding faster, into a wider turn, I stay square on the bike, but drive to the left with my right leg and right shoulder, like carving a turn into ice. Of course you can't carve a turn into ice on a bike, but on a good road the feeling is the same. My years skiing all sorts of slopes in all kinds of weather help me stay up on my bike and have tuned my peripheral senses and tied them to my reactions.

The physical link between skiing and cycling is, for me anyway, very much short term and in the moment. But there are other body memories I call on when I am managing LeveragePoint (where I am CEO). When I lived in Tokyo in the 1980s we had a Yamaha 26 sailboat and spent a lot of time on the open water outside and beyond Tokyo Bay. One thing I like about sailing is that the present can become much longer. One spends time watching the sky for cloud patterns, feeling how the tide run is changing the current and working out how the wind and waves will shape up over the next hour, three hours, day or week. One lives in an extended present. Accidents at sea are often several hours (even days) in the making and happen when one doesn't bother to think ahead. Sailing into Tokyo Bay it was always important to work out the trajectories of the ships (it is a very crowded seaway), time the tide (especially if there was a low and the wind was coming up) and find a safe way through. One lived in the present and the future at the same time. I sometimes try to be in this mindspace when I am making decisions about the company and where we need to go. There is a lot of immediate pressure, especially with a new company in a transforming economy, and one is tempted to respond to the immediate needs and issues, many of which turn around survival. But I find I make better decisions if I bring my mind and body back to a state similar to that I am in when sailing. I try to keep in close contact with the present, following the instant messaging threads, watching the issues emerge on our development tracking system, following our CRM, and most importantly talking to people. But my goal is to track the present in the context of our future trajectories, and make immediate decisions that will, bit by bit, take us into a better place. At a small company, the big strategic moves are made in the tactical decisions. Each of these small decisions is committing us to a future that is always coming into being.

Body learning also helps me make abstract concepts real and to embed them in memory. I am reading Brian Rotman's book Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being this week. He reinforces the importance of gesture and diagram in mathematical thinking (he is channeling Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Chatelat here) and the close links that exist between the body and the abstract. I see this everyday walking around the office and looking at the scrawls on the white boards and in people's notes. (I ran into Bruce Chew this week, Bruce is one of the wisest people I have ever met, in a room that has four walls of white boards, he had worked his way around three of them and was delighted to still have one more left.) The transformation of these visual gestures into code, and then back into vizualizations is a big part of what LeveragePoint does. Part of Economic Value Estimation's power lies in the simple and easy to read image of relative value that it provides. Over the next few years we will be trying to make these vizualizations even more powerful by keeping them simple, and making them into shared gestures that people can use to think together.

Creating a simple set of gestures can be a great mnemonic. For example, I find Kevin Lynch's five pattern's of urban navigation to be a very useful frame for thinking about navigation in general. To help me to remember these, and to explain them to other people, I have come up with a simple gesture for each pattern:

• Landmark: A 'thumb's up sign'

• Neighbohood: Hand spread, palm down

• Border: A chopping motion with the hand

• Pathway: A sweeping motion with the index finger extended

• Node: Hand spread, palm up, pointing to the palm with the index finger of the other hand

One can even string these gesture together in a sentence. The Charles River is a Barrier on my way from the South End to MIT (chopping motion with my hand), but Harvard Bridge provides a Pathway over (sweeping motion with my hand, index finger extended), and leads to the Node of Kendal Square (hand open, palm up, pointing to the palm with the index finger of my other hand), a Neighborhood that I like to explore (hand open, palm down, sweeping motions of the hand to suggest exploring the area).

It will be interesting to see how body learning transfers back and forth from virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft, especially as user interfaces like the Nintendo Wii become the basic way we live in these places. The potential of these worlds for a physical form of learning may be the key to their rapidly growing popularity as places for people to learn together.

In any case, I am going to try to become more aware of the role that my body, physical memory, gesture and shared motion play in my own learning and that of my team.

A final thought from Rotman,

"We listen, it seems, not to speech sounds as such, not, that is, as isolatable sonic entities, but to the movements of the body causing them; we focus on what happens between the sounds, to the dynamics of their prepatory phases, pauses, holds, accelerations, fallings away and completions - the very features of gestures we attend when we are perceiving them."

from Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves, Duke University Press, 2008, page 23.