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alesnick's picture

GRIST: making thoughts-in-process public

Paul and the Internet had a wonderful relationship. How often I heard him say, "Would you put that on the forum?" And if I did, there would be a response from Paul -- inviting, playful, curious.  Paul was deeply committed to the generative potential of open-ended transactional inquiry, and found the Web a wonderful setting to put that commitment into practice.  He was imaginative and tireless in nurturing online dialogue and in inventing communities and pedagogies to support it.  Working from his theory of generosity -- that is is fundamentally not a matter of giving what one has, but of interacting with others via the presumption that they (and one oneself) have valuable things to contribute to the process of creating and recreating meaning -- he did not toil to listen, but instead accepted and encouraged "thoughts-in-process" as welcome, necessary grist (one of his keywords) for inquiry.  For me, some of these online exchanges were revelatory.  In one, from early in the Evolving Systems project, a few of us got to talking about what the cosmos says when it talks to us in its own terms (Paul's formulation). I asked What?  Paul's answer: "Notice that I am bigger and stranger than anything you have yet imagined based on your experiences to date.   And the more you experience and imagine, the bigger and stranger I will get." When another colleague questioned this claim, asserting that the cosmos is silent, Paul replied, "Yes, 'rare and wondrous moments when we can feel ourselves at one with this silence' are to be valued as the closest we can get to "hearing" the cosmos at any given time.  But I wouldn't advise just waiting around for them.  They depend on hearing the chatter of art, science, day to day life, and on chattering onself."  

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