Introduction to My Work
A market like the web is a market of machines or programs. What is the machine or program I am offering? I call it “the great instrument of orientation.” The instrument actually belongs to all of us, for we all have one, one we have ignored, and largely lost. That is, we have largely lost our capacity to see where we are going, which is what orientation is all about. Animal life began when the tunicate or sea squirt made the change from sessile plant to moving larva and got itself a neural network to find its way. Interestingly enough, the sea squirt dissolves its brain when it reattaches in the sessile form.
In place of orientation, we have what Allen Tate called “the most dangerous program in western history,” (from“Three types of poetry,” in Essays of Four Decades), or isolated will, trying to do the work of the imagination. By isolated will, Tate means a will to bring about a known result, like extraction of oil from a property. It is isolated, and isolating, because its purpose is carried out independently of all other considerations for that property. In other words, it ignores the whole situation. America has led the world in the design of such machines, or programs. We are a veritable collection of techniques, materials, and diversions. We have a vast set of them for each business, or profession, or administration, proliferating daily, and available on http://www.
What is the danger? The danger is the one in every person I meet, patient, neighbor, or colleague – each becomes a shapeless jumble of one hundred loose ends, whose steward he or she is turned into – each becomes his or her own list. The center is lost, and the means run away with us.
Thoreau warned of this150 years ago in Walden, and Shakespeare 400 years ago in his tragic equation of Puritan will destroying the Goddess of Complete Being (Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Ted Hughes, esp. pp. 157-162). Our idealism has turned into a mechanical idealism, of the head running things (Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence).
Life by the list brings about a way of earning $, as an operator of one of these machines or programs, at the expense of everything else. I have recently had two dreams about our situation, as I complete my outline of my tenth book, The Great Instrument of Orientation.
The first dream I call “The Button.” I dream I am a neurosurgeon trying to perfect an operation for the button in the center of the brain. It is about the size of a button on a shirt, but with a horizontal slot in it, rather than the usual four holes. The trouble with this button is that I can bring the left end of the slot into focus, but this dims the right end of the slot, and vice versa. I find it extremely frustrating, and puzzling, but wake up knowing I have to find a way to do it, and I will do it, by working on it every day until the I get the operation right. Of course, it is a metaphor of operating on what is wrong with all of us, in which our exterior seeing dims our interior, or our interior seeing dims our exterior.
This dream was followed by a second dream a week later which I call “The Goddess of Complete Being.” I dream she is up on a rooftop dressed all in white, but she comes down from the roof, and is divided between a white upper body, and a dark lower body. Dressed all in white alludes to the abstraction of thought that becomes typical of us, when physical details go unnoticed. William James wrote that “ . . . people with this mind-set have minds that resemble white night-gowns,” (p. 71, A Little Book of the Human Shadow, p. 71, Robert Bly), The dark lower half of the body refers to a poem by Rilke, taken up by John Dominic Crossan in The Dark Interval.
So, the great instrument of orientation is a counter-machine for giving us back our own center, which is “The Button,” and “The Goddess of Complete Being” who is equally white and dark. The five powers of this instrument are discussed in the Door County Program for 2007 at the conclusion of this website, and all the preparation for this instrument in nine previous books is amply available by clicking on to selected chapters.