In the Poet's Words

These words came to me after spending some much-loved time with the words of two particular poets: William Blake and Fernando Pessoa...

In the poet’s words

There comes...

No purity of amusement
No tidy rhythms
No market-crafted sentiments
No American Idol
No expert designs
No legal precision
Nothing that is ever spotless

Never any satisfaction...
For clarity-desires

***

The Nazi
Hated all
In the poet’s words
But (and why do people so often forget?)
He loved hygiene

Honorary Title: Master of Sanitation

Perhaps the original sin of the Nazi
Was a desire to produce...

(An insistence upon producing)

Cleanliness

And the second sin

A bureaucratizing of that desire

***

Beyond...
In another world
Far from those
Carefully formulated
(Anti-biotic)
Policies and procedures

Amidst a mess and a beauty
A messy beauty
Amidst overgrown vines
Uncut grass
A littered shoreline
Amidst all those un-see-able creatures
And (even worse)
Those see-able creatures
Crawling wiggling swarming
In the dirt beneath the feet
In the water we refuse to drink

Amidst such abundances
(Such undesired excesses)
We find again
And again and again
Something
Which is Alive

We accidentally uncover
Life
Overflowing
Twitching and squirming
Evading our pills and our bleach

And in this uncovering
We come to see
That the Alive
Is laughing
(And not with us)
Laughing at us
At our futile insistence

Yes...
We stumble upon
Life-Laughing
Life-Moving
Life-Loving

We fall into all of that

In the poet’s words

Our Princes Are Dying (and one Queen)

In memory of just a few who gave so much to the field of Family Therapy...

by Lynn Hoffman

I could not bear to hear of Gianfranco’s death,

While trying to help some roadside travelers,

Or the death of his good friend, young Guido Boscolo.

I could not bear to hear of the death of Tom Andersen

Our beloved patron from the Arctic snows.

And I could not bear to hear of the death of Michael White,

Another angel here in human guise.

Harry Goolishian, Steve de Shazer, Insoo Berg, had warned us, going first

And there are some in the wings, waiting, that I have heard about,

Too many, too soon, too dear,

A mid-life massacre,

But living on in our immense regret.

I pay my grave respects to all of these,

And am reminded of John Webster’s “Dutchess of Malfi,”

In amending the deathless phrase that closed the play:

Cover their faces

Mine eyes dazzle,

They died young.

A Revolution of the Alive

Pessoa at his favourite coffee shop -- with loyal friends.

A new love is introduced into my world...

Upon a recent trip to Portugal I was given a book by the poet, Fernando Pessoa. He is this new love! His words!

Pessoa is a most intriguing person. He wrote much of his poetry from the perspective of several other characters, he called these characters Heteronyms. Yet, within the words of each of these persons there is a feel of Pessoa also being present, never a sense of him ever being truly distinct from these various characters.

Within Portugal, and most certainly within Lisbon, Pessoa is a national treasure, a hero. Yet, his heroics are of the ordinary-people kind. In my (very new) reading of Pessoa, I never had any sense that he was directing his writing toward academia, or even toward any higher or prestigious class. Certainly an unusual poet, for his words were rarely written as his own, and, at this point in time, his words are certainly not his own, for they are now the people’s words, they are Portugal’s words.

My favourite of Pessoa’s heteronyms was named Caeiro. Pessoa himself claimed that he (Pessoa) was a disciple of Caeiro. Caeiro’s words were simple and lovely, gentle, and it could be easy to stay in this quiet place. Yet there is a power which awakens with his words, and this power quickly becomes disruptive and political. While we are not looking, Caeiro overturns tables, long standing tables, tables of religion and science, mystical tables, metaphysical tables, tables of power and control, he overturns them all, sending the golden coins and the transcendent thoughts scattering down those cobblestone streets. He was a prophet of sorts, awakening hearts, minds and bodies to something we might call “nature.” Not that nature was separate from humanity, separate from mind – not at all. For Caeiro a levelling democracy occurs, wherein the full diversity -- people, flowers, the wind, the sea, the donkey -- all is nature. However, it must be emphasized that while Caeiro used the term nature, he also disliked the word, for it was never sufficient, and all too often, through the way people used language, it became a singular and unifying thing -- and this was anathema for Caeiro.

A few of Caeiro’s words...

I believe in the World as in a daisy
Because I see it. But I don’t think about it
Because thinking is not understanding...
The World was not made for us to think about
(To think is to be eye-sick)
But for us to look at and be in tune with...

I have no philosophy: I have senses...

If I speak of Nature, it’s not because I know what Nature is,
But because I love it, and that’s why I love it,
For a lover never knows what he loves,
Why he loves or what love is...

As Gilles Deleuze argued for the immanent, for a world where nature is able to speak, on its terms, within its on uncountable diversity, and as Gregory Bateson turned toward what he called the grammar of the Creatura, so also Pessoa... Through Caeiro he calls forth a world where we cease to assess and calculate, we cease to encapsulate, to reduce to simple terms, and we experience life as close as possible to where it is encountered, in the way it is encountered, with a language which sees, and in turn, loves.

Nature becomes not a singularity, but many things, many possibilities which must be experienced in their own unique presentations, and not even as things enfolded under the singular umbrella of nature itself.

And also people, all those people we meet, they too are part of this nature (or this un-nature), they too are to be encountered, engaged with, experienced, discovered to be in relation with us -- and, in the end, they are to be loved. No more assessments, no more words which reduce and minimize the beautiful and even tragic complexity which we all, as people, carry with us. No more of that professional gaze which Foucault so carefully unpacked for us. But for Pessoa, for Caeiro, the motivation for this change never emerged from an abstract place of social justice, neither did it come from a commitment to environmental, cultural, gender activism... No his politics emerged from the poet’s engagement with rocks and trees, with children and oxcarts, with herds of sheep, with grass and sea and sunlight. These things of the Alive, moving upon the land and waters of Portugal... it is these things which really turn over the tables, that send our assumptions tumbling down those hilly streets. And, it seems to me, that Pessoa, through Caeiro, would have it no other way!

Just a few more of Pessoa’s words...

I look and I am moved,
Moved as water flows when the ground slopes...

Only Nature is divine, and she is not divine...

Looking Down

A poem. Inviting a look into the common, the small, even the mundane, where the abundance of Alive emerges in pure splendour.



I notice that those who walk
Upon this rocky beach
Mostly look down

Not up to the imposing scenery
Of sea and sky and mountain

But down
To the time and surf worn rocks
To a myriad of scuttling and hiding creatures
To varied mysteries washed up as tide and currents halt upon these stones

Perhaps abundance is more intimately encountered
Beneath one’s feet

In vulnerable unnoticed detail

MEMORIES OF TOM ANDERSEN

photo by Janice DeFehr

By: LYNN HOFFMAN

I first met Tom during a seminar in 1979, run by Philippe Caille, who was teaching family therapy at the University of Oslo. He had heard I was in Italy and asked me to come to Norway. So I stayed with his family and then met his students, about eight of them, including a group from Tromsoe that included Tom and Vidje Hansen and one other man whose name I only remember as “Odd.”

On the morning of the seminar’s second day, Tom’s group was conspicuously absent. The meeting was half over when the three of them crept in, very apologetic, with Vidje wearing cracked glasses. They explained that they had gone down to the waterfront the evening before and found a boat, in which they spent the night “celebrating.” That morning, getting out of the boat, Tom stepped on Vidje’s glasses. They were incredibly sorry. But Tom, even at his most apologetic, was clearly a star. He had gone up North to the “Red University” in Tromsoe after he got his medical credentials, and was teaching there when I met him. He seemed to be much entangled in professional politics and complained about the antagonism shown him by the establishment psychiatrists in the South.

At the time, I was teaching at the Ackerman Institute. The Milan team had been invited to show their work to us the year before, and I had become an instant follower. So I formed my own team: it contained Peggy Penn, who was just coming out of her internship, plus the late John Patten and Jeff Ross, two neurolinguistic psychiatrists from Payne Whitney who had heard of us and came along just as we needed them. By this time, Boscolo and Cecchin had started a training center and were holding international summer workshops in the Italian lakes. The team organized by Peggy and myself went to the very first one, which (I think) was held on an island called Montisola in Lake Garda. Karl Tomm brought a team from Canada, and Tom’s Tromsoe team was there too, plus a scattering of people who were not in teams.

Throughout these meetings, Tom seemed to me like a person who was finding his true family. Peggy became a special object of adoration for him, and he clearly worshipped Boscolo and Cecchin - well, we all did. I will never forget the night Tom decided to carry a very heavy Luigi in his arms (I have a photograph of that) and sprained his back so badly that Vidje had to tie his shoes for a week. When he met Harry Goolishian, who joined the Milan Meetings at a later point, he became an instant son. Me he called his “little sister,” and would always take my arm in his when crossing icy patches of road.

I remembered a story he told us about his father being held in a German prison just across the border with Russia. When his father finally came home, Tom was six. During the family’s reunion, the father made much of Tom’s older brother and sister, but ignored Tom,who must have been very small when he left. The little boy went outside while the family celebrated and went to work digging up the back garden. It took him six hours. Nobody noticed his offering or praised him for it. The story left me with an understanding of Tom’s intensive efforts on behalf of others. In fact, he seemed almost offended if you thanked him, and literally brushed any attempt at praise away.

The teams meetings morphed into a yearly celebration. They took place at first in the Italian lakes, then moved on to Ireland, to Britain, and most recently to Norway and Finland. Starting with Boscolo and Cecchin, the later ones were usually organized by Tom and took place in Arctic settings. They had an always changing cast of characters revolving around a more slowly changing subgroup. In the mid-eighties, a benevolent inspiration propelled Tom to the forefront of this expanding web. Tom came up with a variation on the Milan team that his group called a Reflecting Team. Instead of the observer/observed structure that turned the team into expert researchers and its clients into objects, its shape became more like a small democracy, with the family included respectfully as equals. I wrote a foreword to Tom’s book (Anderson, 1991) on this development, and I always liked my first sentence:

One could call this a book, but one could also call it a description of a new flying machine.

I think the various forms of reflective conversation have indeed moved us to a Fifth Dimension. There is something about this net-making style that avoids prescriptions or structured interventions. It depends on serendipitous discoveries that come from mutual exchange rather from any one individual. In light of recent Internet-inspired writing like James Surowieki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds,” this may be a blessing. The innovative group of people out of which the discovery of the reflecting team emerged had a special genius. No one person ever became the big guru, as so often happened with schools of therapy that had a founder. As a result, our floating band never calcified into a fixed shape, but kept sending out roots or shoots from which new and unexpected modes of theory and practice blossomed forth..

And this “growing edge,” as Carl Whitaker once called it, is well established now and never rests. Thanks to the work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatteri, rediscovered by my Canadian colleague Chris Kinman, I am seeing the emergence of a new guiding metaphor, the Rhizome, that replaces the System. System talk was useful in its day, but was limited by its base in the technology of control. Rhizomes are linked to the natural world, and bring a looser and more adventurous element to the table. Go to Kinman’s blog at christopherkinman.blogspot.com to see how he has built on what he calls the “rhizome experiment.”

I used to compare family therapy to crabgrass, because it had a subversive streak, and would pop up in the neighbor’s yard if eradicated in one’s own. Now I think that we are living in a “Rhizome Century.” The Internet, itself a rhizome, is bringing us a shape-changing horizon as powerful as the Gutenberg Bible. We are also seeing a movement toward ways of organizing that are less centralized and less hierarchical than we are used to, typified by outfits like Google, Amazon, eBay, craigslist, and Skype. A brilliant new book, “The Starfish and the Spider,” by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom (2006), puts their central idea succinctly on its book jacket, and I quote:

If you cut off a spider’s head, it dies; but if you cut off a starfish’s leg, it grows a new one, and that leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. Traditional top-down organizations are like spiders, but now starfish organizations are changing the face of business and the world.

Tom’s work and writing prefigured this new decentralized world. His therapeutic iconoclasm undermined the top-down structures of the so-called helping professions, and his practices explored the subversive or stifled voices so often hidden in the body. One of Tom’s favorite phrases came from Harry Goolishian: “You never know what you mean to say until you say it.” Finding not only the meaning but the place in the body where the meaning resided was for Tom an essential part of his work. The other essential was to find out who should hear that meaning and make sure that they heard it.

I know that many people have heard and treasured Tom’s meaning, and they will carry it with them on their own journeys. With the help of a new flying machine.

photo by Karren Green

References:

Anderson, T. (1991) The Reflecting Team. New York: W.W. Norton

Surowiecki, James, (2006) The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Anchor books.

Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom (2006) New York, Penguin Books

Thought on a Wing...

We were born before the wind, also younger than the sun, ere the bonnie boat was won, as we sailed into the mystic...

Van Morrison

I found myself taken by the wing of a gull today. The bird flew by, above me, resolute toward some destination of which I knew nothing. But gulls are always flying by. They are, as they say, a dime-a-dozen -- nothing special. This was not a rare bird, nothing unusual in its flight. The same silver-gray wing, the same bend in the wrist, the same lines and movements as I can see every day. Yet, I was stopped by its elegance. In some way, for just a moment, I was carried by the wing of a bird to a location not that far from immanence.

In response, I thought of two economies.

Yes... two economies!

One, an economy of restriction. Value rising with rarity, with inaccessibility. Value in Vancouver real estate, in gold, in barrels of oil. Value which arrives when something is seen to be uncommon, hard to find, dramatic, extraordinary. Value which emerges through an exception-to, a break in the the ordinary movements of time. It is not just an economy of restriction, it is an economy bent on transcendence.

Much of that which we consider economy, most of the institutional worlds we encounter are built upon such assumptions. Empires are built upon such assumptions. And, we are all inescapably tied to the exchanges of these restricted economies, whether we like it or not.

The wing of a gull is lost -- transcended -- in such economy.

Yet there is another form of exchange -- often called the economy of gift. In this economy value rises with plenty and regularity. In an economy of gift, an over-abundance doesn't drive values down -- rather values escalate as goods multiply in a repetition of exchanges. Values increase in expanding circles, and lines shooting-off toward untraveled realms. Yet these values have almost nothing in common with the numerical valuations of the restricted economy. Rather there is what we could call rhizome valuations, those built upon the continuous multiplication and movement of real goods flowing, from point to point, as gifts-exchanged. Such valuations are produced by means of calculations beyond numbers, computations emerging from and entering into something more akin to the mystical and spiritual. Such movements into the mystic do nothing to minimize the sensual-reality of such exchanges.

In the part of the world in which I live, the value at one time resided with the salmon, with the cedar, with the endless rain replenishing the mountains, with the expanses of the sea itself, with the sheer volume and power surging through the river. These very things which for thousands of years were identified as images of profusion, health and prosperity, now seem cheapened through the mechanisms of a restricted economy. The value of these goods is lessened precisely because of their very abundance, and, what is perhaps more disturbing, the value only increases as the abundance itself is diminished. It seems the limiting of abundance is built right into the requisite processes of the restricted economy.

Back to the wing of the gull. This simple event, a repeated and even mundane event, became a moment of splendor, perhaps even a point in time where something of the mystic brushed against soul and body. For in this wing, so easy to ignore, so easily obscured in its very commonality, beauty emerged, and, for a sliver in time, this beauty arrested me. In the flow of its flight the ticking clock stopped and an instance of something close to pure immanence was created. A bend in a feather, a bend in the wing -- as occurs endless times each hour -- turn the eyes to a world of gifts cascading through the everyday and the ordinary.

We show that we have attained maturity of understanding when we no longer go where rare flowers lurk under the thorniest hedges of knowledge, but are satisfied with gardens, forests, meadows, and ploughlands, remembering that life is too short for the rare and the uncommon.

Nietzsche

The Albatross

A Song...

Following are the lyrics to a song I wrote recently. I realized after I wrote it... it sings of the Alive, of our ongoing relation with the Alive.

Here goes...



Shine it in the living light
Where dogs and thistles grow
Hold it to a burning flame
It will singe you till you go
It bites, it stings, it overwhelms
It rides you till you smile
You hold upon, you hold on strong
It will hold you till your gone
Can you hold me
Till I’m gone

Dive into a sacred mess
A shit hole in the midst
Dive into a five-note scale
A siren in the mist
Yes it comes, and it comes again
It lays upon the brow
It scurries off and it scurries on
It holds you till your gone
I’m gonna hold you
Till you’re gone




















Chasing that ghost through a shaking time
Chasing the storm but its never gone
Something about it never seemed so fine
I’m gonna hold you
Gonna hold you
Hold you till I’m gone

Out upon an ancient sea
With endings close at hand
The albatross, he makes his peace
And he dares to hang around
He bites, he stings, he overwhelms
He rides you till you smile
You hold upon, you hold on strong
You hold me till I’m gone
I’m gonna hold you
Till I’m gone
Gonna hold you
When your gone

Shine it in the living light
Where dogs and thistles grow
Hold it to a burning flame
It will singe you till you go
It bites, it stings, it overwhelms
It rides you till you smile
You hold upon, you hold on strong
It will hold you till your gone
I’m gonna hold you
When your gone