I recall one of those rare college visits with Uncle Ollie. Actually, as I recall, I had just finished my undergraduate years in Vermont, and was on my way south and west on an internship pilgrimage, to see what and whom might feel right for me.
We had been discussing political science as analogically equivalent with permaculture design. He thought the only substantial difference between what each had promise of becoming was whether we were discussing network relationships between DNA-biosystems only, or interrelationships of DNA with Elder RNA.
We pause, drawn into our silence together. Then he asks me how I see him. “Who am I to you?”
I can’t think how to respond, other than as Uncle Ollie. He doesn’t seem to fit into any category that comes to mind. I can see Mummins, which was a term that began together behind her back, but then came out of its closet, usually to her amused, more playful, response. I could see Mummins in Uncle Ollie, but something more ambivalent too, defying my capacity to label.
In my silence he offered, “I see myself as an intelligent old man-woman who is curious, but also timid, about death as the absence of egocentric memory and identity.”
“I see an old man doing his best to invest his remaining healthy time in Earth’s remaining healthy time. Urging co-investment in our EarthTribe’s remaining healthy time. So, yes, I try for expanding my compassion into ecologically, politically, economically cooperative healthy development, Exterior community landscape Plan A, meeting and greeting and doing my best Plan B Interior personal landscape, until Plan B becomes nothing more or less than a mirror of Plan A.”
“Other than the old man part. I see you this same way, doing your best to adapt your relationships (political) and your transactions (economic) to your ecological exegesis of DNA’s natural ecosystemic story, logos, mythos, permacultural designs, social-political science.”
That was when I first realized that I see Uncle O-Liver as an old wise transgenderish polypathic listening and loving icon of deep ecological learning history. History about which I too have always found mysterious and perhaps even a sacred side of Earth’s ecosystemic Regenerative = HumanelyCooperative Design.
Strange. He asks me how I see him to show me how he sees me. Or maybe not. Perhaps he really does invite some feedback from my PostMillennial future. I hope so. That’s most certainly what he has coming, as do we all, I guess.
0-Liver’s lifestyle was far too ambiguous to say he was a Democrat or a Republican, or even a Libertarian or Green, although those latter two, together, may have been closer to his view that Earth’s evolutionary evidence points to a political science of active love-synergy as CoOperatism, like economic and political socialism, except using our global networking capacity to reverse power hierarchies toward cooperative decision-making authority at the lowest level of ecosystemic responsibility for each other, and ourselves, of course. And, even responsibility for each other as mutually subsidiary-cooperative sharers in Earth’s Plan A ReGenerative economy and politically deep ecology of health and eco-therapeutic safety.
“You know, health, happiness, prosperity for all of Earth’s ReGenerating Tribes and ecosystems? The stuff of which our Elders established constitutions of cooperative economic and political intent?”
It was neither his intent or desire to start yet another political “non-party” as he called them. Across the board, combining all paradigms, areas of expertise and deductive specialization, across all this vast metaphysical complexity of languages and dialects, he argued for a Commons of Health-As-Wealth Value, often rather too passionately for the comfort of his academic colleagues. “We already have all the information, precedent, evidence for cooperatively sustainable evolution through ecological balance we could ever hope to achieve, using (0)-sum and –centric Fullerian Synergetics.”
During his one and only debate as U.S. Senate candidate, the incumbent asked him, “Isn’t this zeroistic cooperativism you attribute to Buckminster Fuller’s political philosophy actually just a cover for your own Taoist hidden agenda?”
“Well, yes and no,” Uncle Ollie responds. “Yes, if anyone residing in Connecticut remains unaware of my own Taoist way of exegeting history and cultural evolution. But, no, for those who see Fullerian Synergism as ecologically equivalent with Taoist nondual dipolar Zeroism.”
Apparently, he scored alright with that response, perhaps a bit too ahead of his time. But, not so far ahead that everyone assumed he was as insane as Donald Trump, but in the opposite direction.
Anyway, I don’t think CoOperativism or nondual Taoist ZenZeroism, or even Fullerian Synergy lost that election, but it wasn’t yet enough to win it either.
Now, of course, these basic principals of thermodynamic permacultural design are facilitated and reinforced throughout our deep ecology learning systems, on line, in homeschools, and in what’s left of the premillennial Education-As-If-All-Earth’s-Lives-Matter preschools through universities.
One could hardly become a political scientist today, or a public policy designer, much less a popularly elected public office-holder outside a personal and professional commitment to DNA with Elder RNA co-intelligent design of healthy bio- and ecosystems.
History, according to 0-Liver Glory, begins with the “Word.” Influenced by Christian wisdom literature, but with his/her own twist. That is, yes, history is our story of relationship but not just any relationship. Rather, history is the story of relationships between analogies, exegesis of eisegetical ecologies, of sound and dialectical events, of symbol and reenactment.
Analogy, then, precedes logic, or rationality. Pre-linguistic history was attraction of relationships to what felt good, what appeared beautiful, graceful, to what sounded confluent, melodious, harmonic. So, wisdom’s connection to beauty and goodness is primordial to wisdom’s connection to Truth, and even metric systems.
Although he agreed with Pythagoreans that older than linguistic history was the evolutionary emergence of culture, the earliest story-telling and legend-building of collective memory was probably kinetic communication, forms of dance, embellished with humming, chanting, singing, signing symbols that evolved into rituals. From rituals to sacraments. From sacraments to metric symbols. From metrics, including geometrics, symbols evolved toward linguistically-rooted icons.
Immortality of cultural history emerges through co-creative intimacy, confluence as well as dissonance. Tribal fame becomes synergetic accessibility and vulnerability within each moment’s integrative opportunity to share meaning and purpose.
Comments always invited, and appreciated.
