Christina Florkowski
Forum Replies Created
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Groups
There are several aspects of the user interface that make using this site difficult. As has been mentioned elsewhere, response time is very slow. (Perhaps this is only an issue for those of us not in the UK.) So the fewer clicks to a destination is better.When I enter a group, the first page I am taken to is not the discussion. Instead, I get the page listing the users in that discussion. It should be a simple configuration change to take me directly to the group’s discussion. (I am surprised this isn’t user-configurable.)
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There definitely are issues with this platform. I have tried using the feedback form, but get unsatisfactory responses. A few members have created an outside chat group in What’s App in order to get around the cumbersome interface here.
Recently, we discovered a more serious issue. Everything posted here is world-readable. If you would like to test this, log out of Channel McGilchrist, then do a Google search on the two words Rembrandt and my last name Florkowski. On the first page of search results you will see a link to the private area of Channel McGilchrist and be able to view my post.
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Years ago, some users created a Group about platform issues – it is the User Experience Group
https://members.channelmcgilchrist.com/groups/user-experience-issues/forum/Could someone from the support team check in to this group regularly so that we can solve some of these issues?
members.channelmcgilchrist.com
Discussions – User experience issues – Channel McGilchrist Members
Discussions – User experience issues – Channel McGilchrist Members
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Not limited to the experience of Art, this passage from Jacques Lusseyran has much alignment with what I am reading in The Matter With Things.
( @manuela, – this is also connected with the question I had in our exchange when I asked if there was a human capacity available to be developed, to be practiced?)
Being attentive unlocks a sphere of reality that no one suspects. If, for instance, I walked along a path without being attentive, completely immersed in myself, I did not even know whether trees grew along the way, nor how tall they were, or whether they had leaves. When I awakened my attention, however, every tree immediately came to me. This must be taken quite literally. Every single tree projected its form, its weight, its movement—even if it was almost motionless—in my direction. I could indicate its trunk, and the place where its first branches started, even when several feet away. By and by something else became clear to me, and this can never be found in books. The world exerts pressure on us from the distance.
The seeing commit a strange error. They believe that we know the world only through our eyes. For my part, I discovered that the universe consists of pressure, that every object and every living being reveals itself to us at first by a kind of quiet yet unmistakable pressure that indicates its intention and its form. I even experienced the following wonderful fact: A voice, the voice of a person, permits him to appear in a picture. When the voice of a man reaches me, I immediately perceive his figure, his rhythm, and most of his intentions. Even stones are capable of weighing on us from a distance. So are the outlines of distant mountains, and the sudden depression of a lake at the bottom of a valley.
This correspondence is so exact that when I walked arm in arm with a friend along the paths of the Alps, I knew the landscape and could sometimes describe it with surprising clarity. Sometimes; yes, only sometimes. I could do it when I summoned all my attention. Permit me to say without reservation that if all people were attentive, if they would undertake to be attentive every moment of their lives, they would discover the world anew. They would suddenly see that the world is entirely different from what they had believed it to be. All science would become obsolete in a single moment, and we should enter into the miracle of immediate cognition.
–Jacques Lusseyran, pgs 32-33 from Against the Pollution of the I
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I realize that the passage I shared might require a bit of Lusseyran’s biography in order to appreciate it.
Jacques Lusseyran (19 September 1924 – 27 July 1971) was a French author and political activist. Blinded at the age of 7, at 17 Lusseyran became a leader in the French resistance against Nazi Germany’s occupation of France in 1941. He was eventually sent to Buchenwald concentration camp because of his involvement, and was one of 990 of his group of 2000 inmates to survive. He wrote about his life, including his experience during the war, in his autobiography And There Was Light.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lusseyran
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(Part 1of response)
Appreciation to @manuela and @bobeng for the conversation today. Being about to talk about humanity’s purpose (as a species and as individuals) with others (who aren’t automatically dismissive of the notion) was helpful. It allowed for a little exploration. I hope we can return to this theme in the future – if only to follow Manuela’s inspired seed planting.On the question of whether the buffalo followed – or were the followers – I offer this short talk by Dr. Lyla June Johnston.
An excerpt: “Many people think that we followed the buffalo, when in fact the buffalo followed our fire. In this manner, we anthropogenically expanded buffalo habitat as far south as Louisiana and as far east as Pennsylvania.“
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(Part 2 of response)
William Kentridge is the South African artist that I mentioned. He works with charcoal as a very fluid path to animation. Charcoal feels right, not only because of its malleability, but also for Kentridge’s themes relation to Apartheid. This video contains excerpts from one of Kentridge’s films.
https://youtu.be/m1oK5LMJ3zY?si=rvW5YEs2Zn3ngRFp&t=6
till next time,
~C
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Something seems to be amiss with Channel McGilchrist. @manuela‘s last message in this discussion from two days ago is now missing. And the reply I thought that I posted, apparently never got posted.
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As we were settling in for the conference on Friday evening at CIIS back in March, Iain took to the podium.
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Iain tells a joke at the conclusion of ‘The <yt-formatted-string force-default-style=””>Beshara Lecture – the Coincidence of Opposites</yt-formatted-string>‘
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNNMTEJ3KWQ&t=3783s -
Thank you to @janschloesser for sharing that link.The drawing and awareness practices compliment things that reading The Matter With Things spontaneously brings up for me.
https://innerwilds.blog/p/solving-mcgilchrists-big-problem
innerwilds.blog
Solving McGilchrist's Big Problem (or, fix right hemisphere imbalance with these 7 weird tricks?)
He never really gives ideas for WHAT TO DO about hemisphere dominance; luckily, I'm here for y'all
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Hello Bob,
I cannot disagree with your comment about this platform being cumbersome. But I confess to misgivings about breaking off onto another app – especially without trying first to see how/if this one that Iain’s team has provided could be made to work. -
Hi Peter,
That July 4th in @manuela‘s post is in the listing of dates for 2025.~Christina
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In that interview, Burnett shares one of ‘The Twelve Theses on Attention’ developed by some of the Friends of Attention. These have been translated into several languages.
https://friendsofattention.net/documents/12theses
friendsofattention.net
Twelve Theses on Attention | Friends of Attention
Twelve Theses on Attention | Friends of Attention
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This past week, another friend suggested I listen to Ezra Klein’s interview with D. Graham Burnett – a name I remembered from the New Yorker article. (In fact, it was the New Yorker article that led Klein to interview Burnett.) Burnett was one of the original ‘Friends of Attention’ some of whom then developed the ‘Strothers School of Radical Attention’. Toward the end of the Klein interview, they share one of the exercises done at the attention labs at the Strothers School in which they listen to a short piece of music four times. For each the four, a mood of listening is suggested. For the first, ‘Just listen.’ For the second, ‘Recall’ (What do you remember?) For the third, ‘Discover’ (What are you hearing for the first time?) And for the last, ‘Don’t listen.’
It is impossible for me to listen to this interview and not wonder if there has even been an intersection with Iain’s work. (Though it may be that a tangible worldly connection is not necessary for an influence to have taken place.)
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What a great conversation today with Manuela. We were able to follow-up on Iain’s Q&A on Thursday and even spoke about conversation itself. Manuela noted the importance of silence in a conversation which resonated deeply with me. The absence of silence (in my experience) can indicate that participants are largely reacting (associatively) rather than responding to each other. With her hands, Manuela mimicked perfectly the superficiality of a ping pong-style conversation. And what can the silence bring? An opening for something larger to enter the conversation. Thank you, Manuela!
And there was much, much more. Too much to try to summarize. But I promised I would share some links, so here goes.
A friend recently shared a New Yorker article written by Nathan Heller. While the topic of attention is of interest to me, I found the article written as if to blur the line between fact and fiction, and maybe even a bit manipulative. Still, a sense that maybe there is something here.
There is this quote in the article:
Catherine L. Hansen, an assistant professor at the University of Tokyo (snip) “When I look at the world, I feel that something is being lost or actively undermined,” she told me. “Sometimes it feels like attention. Sometimes it feels like imagination. Sometimes it feels like”—she thought for a moment—“that thing you wanted when you became an English major, that sort of half-dreamed, half-real thing you thought you were going to be. Whatever that is: it’s under attack.”>>
(My response to Manuela continued in the next reply.)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/06/the-battle-for-attention
