Welcome to the wonderful world of Virtual Accomplishment. This is the section of the Journal where our excess ideas are printed and archived -- but the phenomenon is even bigger than that. In addition to making these ideas available to everyone to use, cannibalize, or gain inspiration from, we are giving them, in a sense, Reality. Just as in a novel a political faction or a new piece of machinery need only be described to have a "virtual" existence, so, too, here our ideas need only be described in detail, and they will "virtually" exist. In this recurrent feature of the Autodidact's Journal, all our musings are true. -- TP
Well, it looks like I got suckered into doing yet more work. I must admit, however, that of all the things I could be working on, this one suits me the best. Virtually accomplishing things is a subject I can grasp fully, and even possibly revel in.
Some of you might be like Tom: always ready and willing to go whole hog on a really exciting project. I trust that you won't find this section of the Journal to be an embodiment of laziness or ineptitude, rather an indication of just how clever we are: we can come up with so many things to do that there isn't enough time or energy to get them all done.
Others reading this might be more like myself: Always hearing of interesting ideas, always making lists of what we'd like to do, always wondering when we could do any of them. Here's your chance to at least show others that while you might not be visibly overly productive, your mind is still an ideas machine.
Let me take this opportunity to beg for contributions. We can't exist without your input! This first issue might seem a little in-bred when you look at the name(s?) of those who have contributed. We want very much to expand and to have our thoughts be drowned out by yours as you begin to let us know what your imagination has spit out recently. So get writing. (You know who you are!)
I'd also like to take the time to thank those who have contributed for making the effort to share with us all those projects they've had floating around in their heads. Without their input, this section of the Journal would have remained blank -- perhaps appropriate considering the title, but boring none the less.
Also, the (quick and dirty) titles are all my fault. If you would like a specific title, please feel free to mention what it should be. I am going to try and keep an index of articles by title, author and issue, so if your title isn't enough to give the reader a quick idea of your item, or if it clashes with another, I might expand or alter it. So there. --Jon Slenk
Imagine a concert, as above, held in a movie theatre without seats? I'd like to see Led Zeppelin II just like that, for instance. The guys in a room, on a large screen above a dance floor. Simple, straightforward, awesome in effect. Just the songs.
This could be combined with a live music soundtrack -- wouldn't have to be too complex to be a lot of fun.
As always, one could write a formal theory describing this situation, or write fiction about characters for whom this situation is the case.
Murals can be introduced into the hallways. Paper-mache sculptures of cat-tails can be strategically placed. Once this large system of make-believe is consistently introduced, hopefully the inhabitants of the building will begin to take part and think of themselves in the terms of the metaphor, and add to it and modify it.
The ultimate goal of all this is to encourage the inhabitants to think more creatively, and to give them a system in which their creativity can find a contributory place. The amount of doodling done idly by any large group of people in an office building is significant, and it is a shame that it is all thrown away and that all the energies put into it are dissipated. Given a large, systematic metaphor like this, it is hoped that doodling and idle creativity, if based on the overall system, could contribute to the overall system.
Exactly how is not clear and would certainly depend on the particular situation, but the simplest way would be to have a place to collect doodles, to do the equivalent of posting them on the refrigerator. Periodically when they have reached a critical mass they might suggest some new activity or action which can be carried out by the people (or a subset of the people) who have produced it.
This situation might better be carried out by a cooperative house.
Other metaphors include differing ecosystems, geopolitical organizational models (such as a Medieval Geopolitical model in which the housemates are the Heads of State and the groceries and objects are their lieges and fiefdoms -- this could apply more directly to a large building but couldn't be counted on to produce good internal morale! -- unless of course some completely unorthodox power axes are chosen), cellular biology models, free-body diagrams of aircraft in flight, etc.
Better yet, think of things in this way: reading of Greek ethics, of the works of the Pre-Socratics and the Stoics and the Cynics, reveals an ideal state of discipline in which the individual is independent and very self-contained. However, that was much easier in the 5th-century BC polis than it is today, when one's simplest acts as a consumer influence advertising decisions and marketing strategies ("vote with your pocketbooks"), one's appearance is symbolically interpreted in many subtle ways (cf "Dress for Success" books, not to mention the Designer Clothing phenomenon). The point is that we are in a large, fragmented society with many identifiable strata to which one clearly belongs and gives external evidence.
Marketing and public policy are now made on a mass scale, not on an individual scale, and each of us belongs to many groups and subgroups via our purchasing decisions and (to a lesser extent) our interaction with media -- all of these actions are contributors to trends among the masses, and it is on the level of these trends that the real important decisions of society are made. So why not think of the set of our memberships in various societal strata, and our actions as seen from that perspective, as the Real Us, and our conscious individuality as just a subordinate portion of the Real Us? Why not think of our actions within our complex social system (seen from the statistical-distribution, crowd-scale perspective) as our Real Self, which is not self-aware, and our Conscious Mind (seen from the individual, human-scale perspective) as performing a function for it just like the subconscious mind plays in our ordinary conceptual scheme of things?
In other words: participation in culture whose control mechanisms all operate at the level of large groups is to conscious, integral individuality as conscious mind is to subconscious mind.
More Americans, then, since they have this surprisingly sophisticated understanding of a way to solve problems and work closely with others and mature in outlook, should put it into practice in other fields besides music. Americans should start forming Baking Bands, or Alternative Household Organization Bands, or Self-Sufficiency Bands, or Child-Raising Bands, or Literature-Consumption Bands, or Lifestyle Bands, or Religious Bands, or Art Bands, or Improvisational Theater Bands, or Oral History Bands, or Meditation Bands ... better yet, now that the point is made, it would be interesting for groups of people to get together without pinning themselves down to any particular task like the ones mentioned above (although particular emphases would be good things) and think of themselves as Bands which produce days, weeks or seasons that are lived in a particular way, rather than albums. The Ultimate Live Performance Bands.