I've been thinking a lot lately about search and serendipity and bricolage. Really. How they're related. I'm never quite sure what I'm looking for, but I find all kinds of interesting things. Does my looking for something long enough bring whatever it is I find into being? Is a certain kind of curiosity really a form of invocation? Sometimes it seems so. Or is what I eventually find an entirely different thing than I thought I set out looking for? Don't answer all at once. Or too quickly. Let's explore. Let's search around a bit.

When I was a kid I used to hunt for lizards in Silicon Valley. Only it wasn't called Silicon Valley back then, because there wasn't any, except at the beaches. But there were lizards if you looked for them. Under old boards in bean fields. Under burlap sacks soaked with rain then baked back into the black adobe. You had to be still for a while. You had to notice everything. Because you never knew what might happen next. Hold that thought.

Application of unusual tools, methods and technologies; creating experimental products; Bricolage; multiple iterations and testing.

the above quote and all subsequent indented passages are taken...
from: Minimal structures: From jazz improvisation to product innovation by Miguel Pina e Cunha
source: Organization Studies
1 September 2001
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2001 Walter de Gruyter und Co.

So there's search. But there are various kinds of search, and some of these "kinds" are more unalike than they are similar. That's part of the challenge of searching. Figuring out what you're looking for, and whether the things you turn up are really things-of-a-kind. Or not. But you can't know until you find them, and you wouldn't be searching if you already knew where they were. Am I right, Dude? This is where serendipity comes into it. The happy accident, the stochastic glitch, the cybernetic analog of grace. That changes your direction. Sometimes changes your life. But let's not get too heavy too soon. We're talking about search. And don't worry for now that this is an extended koan. Don't try to understand too hard. Maybe it's just cut-up poetry. What did Freud say? "Evenly-hovering attention." Yeah, that's what we need here. Bear with me.

A working definition of improvisation may be taken from jazz music, where it entails composing and performing contemporaneously. Within organizations, it can be described as the conception of action as it unfolds -- acting without the benefit of elaborate prior planning. It is generally understood in terms of fortuity, serendipity and the unexpected discovery of solutions, often in times of crisis. Some commonly cited examples include: Honda's success in introducing 50cc bikes into the US market; the actions of crew members to save a ship whose navigation system had broken down; and the rescue of Apollo XIII by NASA scientists working with unfamiliar concepts...

Float your evenly hovering attention especially over this bit here: because there are so many different ways of doing things, the way you do things determines not only the results you see, but how you see them. Which translates to: what they are. Yes, Grasshoppa, it's getting very subtle in these postmodern woods. You're in so deep now you can barely see the trees. So let's come back to earth for a minute.

I used to be a carpenter a long time ago, before I got into what you might call naive computational linguistics. Long story for another time. And one day I needed to sink about 6,000 screws to finish a job that was pushing the drop-dead completion date. I thought about buying a screwgun, an expensive tool I was sure I'd never use again. But I bought it and it did the trick. We finished the job on time, got paid, got drunk. Forgot about everything. Yee-hah! And then a funny thing happened, which was that I started to use this new tool for all sorts of things I'd never imagined I could do. Different ways to put things together. I became a cabinet maker. I bought a computer. I went to Tokyo and got myself hired into the hottest artificial intelligence project on the planet at the time. Yeah, just like that. With no background, no formal education, no credentials. Knowledge engineering struck me as another way to put things together. When I discovered that it didn't work, I started writing. Words, sentences, pictures, stories. Bricolage. Little bits of stuff you pick up along the way, having no earthly idea what they might be good for. Then encountering situations where, oh look, that bit might fit right here. How cool. And this thing that looks like a Dada bicycle pump might make a good paragraph ending.

In the past, the literature on product innovation focused on well-planned approaches which followed a clearly-understood structure based on a rational-functionalist paradigm. However, it is becoming increasingly evident that this model is inappropriate in today's highly competitive business environment.

Back to search. What many people mean by this term is hunting for answers. Quick, get me Google! I need to know the current market price of bulk-imported Brazilian weasels because Gen-O-Byte just patented a process for using weasel stem cells to generate new frontal lobe tissue, and if we could just inject some of that extra brain material into our um political leadership... Look, just trust me, we corner the weasel market, it'll be motels on Boardwalk and Beamers for everybody. Right. Find the data to populate the spreadsheet, the fixed-field database. Find the -- ta-da! -- Right Answer. This is what schools teach our kids to do. Which is why so many of our kids do drugs. Hell, I did. Who could stand that kind of boring existence without drugs. I mean, unless you're a natural-born suit. Or just plain weird, like me in my stone-cold sober twilight years. Anyway, that's not the kind of search I'm talking about. Serendipity doesn't exist in that scenario because any result conflicting with the forgone conclusion is perceived as noise. This is anti-learning.

Knowledge of the productive process is helpful in creating an ability to use whatever materials/tools are on hand and to apply them to the task in a manner similar to the art of bricolage... Constant experimentation and trial-and-error have the potential to achieve individual and organizational learning.

Search that's not anti-learning, not about discrete data points and perfect-fit puzzle pieces, tends to be all about learning. It's about stumbling across seemingly unrelated ideas that sometimes turn out to be strangely related. Like everybody's favorite 150 year old Ralph Waldo Emerson essay on self-reliance and the rising tide of pathological narcissism in America today. Like the pedestrian platitudes of New Age mystic wannabes and the racist occultism that fed the Third Reich's twisted imagination. Like the behaviorist and psychoanalytic roots of late 20th century mass marketing.

Some of these connections just can't be... well, connected. Can they? Well no, of course not. Not as long as you're looking through the wrong end of the right-answer telescope they can't. That old "rational-functionalist paradigm" referred to in the quote above is a major reason -- perhaps the major reason -- business has taken so long to get its collective head around the net. And the web. And blogging. And file sharing and podcasting and all the other vectors of human conversation that are still coming out of the freaking woodwork. Because none of it is based on finding the right answer. What it's based on is linking to the next question. What it's based on is curiosity. Tinkering with bits of stuff and funny tools to put that stuff together into entirely new and heretofore unimagined kinds of stuff.

bri-co-lage
n.
Something made or put together using whatever materials happen to be available: "Even the decor is a bricolage, a mix of this and that" Los Angeles Times.

[French, from bricole, trifle, from Old French, catapult, from Old Italian briccola, of Germanic origin.]

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright© 2004, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

OK, so the usage example sucks, but you get the idea. And how do I know this? Simple. You wouldn't have read this far if you didn't.

NOTE: All the images in this post were randomly generated by TYPOgenerator, seeded in each case with the word "bricolage." As to the floating text you see here, I found the code in an HTML file automatically translated by google from a PDF. The resulting effect looked nothing like the original. It was, ambiguously underscoring the point of all this, much more interesting. Mandarin Design ran an item on this yesterday. I've hacked the code further since, and -- as it says of itself -- I invite you to do likewise. So to search, serendipity and bricolage, perhaps we should add recursion.

Don't ask me why, but I recently picked up a copy of Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last Days. I think it was mostly because I was intrigued by the popularity of this series -- now up to 12 installments -- and what it says about America. What it says, in the words of the early Dylan, is a hard rain's a-gonna fall. To be briefer than usual, what it says is not good news.

The 12-part Left Behind book series, co-authored by prophecy scholar Tim LaHaye and novelist Jerry B. Jenkins, is a phenomenon in the emerging genre of Christian thriller literature. Today's release of the series' final installment, "Glorious Appearing," will mark a nine-year ascendancy for the books, which have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide...

from: 'Left Behind' apocalypse finale hits bookstores
by Mary M. Byrne
source: The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 30 March 2004
via: HighBeam Research

I discovered an excellent bit of blogging on the series by slacktivist ("reality based since 2002") titled Left Behind: Pretrib Porno, wherein Fred Clark does a close reading. I've only read the first couple chapters myself, but this bit from slacktivist starts with page one...

The first words of Left Behind are "Rayford Steele," the protagonist's name.

It sounds like a porn star's name -- and in a sense it is. The Left Behind series is dispensational porno, but it's more than that. One of the most disturbing things about this book is the way LaHaye and Jenkins portray men, women and the relationships between them...

Our porn star hero, Rayford Steele, interacts with women just like any porn star does -- minus, of course, the sex. It's all about dominance, exploitation, titillation and the stroking of -- in this case -- egos.

The character Rayford Steele is, like the authors, no longer a young man. Younger authors might not have been compelled to give their protagonists names -- "Steele" and "Buck" -- that seem such a blatant assertion of male virility...

If you're thinking I'm reading too much into all this, that this theme isn't really as present in the text as I'm making it out to be, consider the opening lines:

Rayford Steele's mind was on a woman he had never touched. With his fully loaded 747 on autopilot ...

That's more than just subtext.

As I said, excellent stuff. Save you the aggravation of actually reading these atrocious books. They do, however, have a sort of macabre fascination. For me. But then I used to get off, in a manner of speaking, watching Jimmy Swaggert and those guys do their evangelical fire and brimstone thing on TV. Back when I had a TV. It was like watching Mondo Cane, if any of you remember that. In essence: Shocking Practices of Primitive Weirdos. Wouldn't be considered quite proper these days, but it's far better than déclassé cult faves like Reefer Madness. Uh... hmmm... how did I end up here?

Anyway, there's also a Left Behind site, but naturally. The section on Prophecy is a definite don't miss. And hey, don't be afraid to bring the kids along! What were they thinking. Dear God. There are now forty (40) volumes in the Left Behind kids series. Here's the opening of the most recent, Triumphant Return...

VICKI held tightly to Judd as the Global Community's Unity Army rumbled through the streets of Jerusalem. She hoped they were simply putting their tanks and soldiers into place, but Carpathia's army could attack at any moment.

Vicki had felt a sense of adventure coming to the Old City. Jamal and Lina, Judd's friends from a previous trip to Israel, had taken them in. They had also met an old man named Shivte and his wife. These rebels were trying to hold off the GC army -- something Vicki believed was part of biblical prophecy.

As you can see from the Prophecy page grafik, below, the series includes a lot of Tom Clancyesque action scenes in which the evil doers get shot all to hell. You could say.

The seemingly unstoppable Left Behind series has drawn wide media attention, and the evolving efforts of religion houses to publish higher-quality [???] novels are bearing fruit in critical acclaim and more review opportunities. Evangelical Christian novels have broken out to general fiction bestsellers lists and achieved prominent display in general-interest bookstores... General trade publishers are luring top authors away from Christian houses, which themselves are planning expanded fiction lists and hunting for more good novelists and fiction editors. Jewish, Catholic and New Age publishers are also getting into the act. [question marks mine.]

from: New Genres, Emerging Audiences by Jana K. Riess
source: Publishers Weekly, 21 August 2000
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2000 Reed Business Information

And so in closing, I'd like to echo those famous words of Paul McCartney on Monkberry Moon Delight...

I figured after that last one we needed a little break here. So hey, here's... These are actual visitor stats for the CBO blog. Labels and links have been assigned according to merit. If you click on Geeks & Freaks at work, be sure your speakers are turned way up loud. Thank you for your patronage.

10:30pm Update: re the guy in today's Geeks & Freaks link, above (if you clicked it), MSNBC Breaking News posts this:

You go, Gary!
'Numa' takes Web by storm

Dance to Romanian tune cracks up the world

Featured Thursday on NBC's "Today" show, the video has already gotten more than a million hits on one Web site, according to one report. On MSNBC.com, "searches for this kid absolutely dominate our site search today," according to producer Will Femia....

...said the New York Daily News. "The highlight may be the moment when he flicks his tongue at the lens. Or maybe when he raises one eyebrow twice over his wire-rimmed spectacles." [yeah, the eyebrow thing was definitely our favorite.]

"You wonder for a second when you're watching it, is this for real," Joe Levy of Rolling Stone magazine told Matt Lauer of the "Today" show. "Is it a phenomenon? Oh, yeah. Are people richly amused? Oh yes, very much so." So much, pointed out Lauer, that Brolsma's handiwork made VH-1's "Best Week Ever" list.

Duh... I just noticed that that was posted to MSNBC on February 17, so I guess I'm er um a little late with all this. Oh well. We here at CBO nonetheless concur. The kid's a genius. He should come out of hiding (evidently, he is in hiding) and meet his admiring worldwide fanbase!

If you read my previous post here, you may recall that I'd searched the Highbeam document database for

narcissism "new age" race

A totally open-ended fishing expedition, to be sure, but the intersection of these three concepts forms the core of the book I'm working on. The Margaret Talbot quote above comes from the first document my query turned up, and I was more than a little turned on to find it. This article touches on many of the topics I've been scoping out for three years now. Here's another bit from the same piece...

Tell a committed recoverer that there might be problems in the world more urgent than identifying the color of his parachute or the precise source of her "issues around owning her feelings," and you were likely to be thoughtfully reminded that you must deal with your own stuff before dealing with everybody else's. Besides, one's own stuff is a pretty spectacular quantity of stuff. The self is not easily appeased. It is jealous and demanding. Who, for instance, has taken the inner journey and not returned with a humbling awareness of all that needs to be done to the outer package? (One might turn one's Fitness Workout into a Quality Meditation, for example.) Anyway, we will not improve our politics until we have improved ourselves, right? And so the romp of narcissism might begin; and might never end.

I'm going to guess Marianne read that review of The Healing of America -- how could she have missed it? -- because the quote below is from the revised edition of the same book, now titled: Healing the Soul  of America: Reclaiming Our Voices as Spiritual Citizens. Emphasis mine.

What we most need to be free of now is our tendency to distract ourselves from the pain of the world, our tendency to isolate rather than join with others, our own selfishness and narcissism... [p.62]

Williamson's first book was a blockbuster, selling over a million copies in the four years between its initial 1992 publication and the 1996 reissue. Oprah bought 1000 copies -- on her show -- which probably didn't hurt any. The book, A Return to Love is based on A Course in Miracles, a pseudo-scriptural channelling of Jesus Christ by a couple of disaffected -- some might say loony tunes -- Columbia University psychologists (pictured at right with a link to their story). The biggest miracle of all, of course, is that droves of New Agers could be gullible enough to read this vapid swill, much less structure their lives around its flaky principles. "The Course takes a sort of Ayn Randish view of the supremacy of the self," notes Talbot in her wonderful New Republic  hatchet job, invoking an example from the Course's Lesson 253: "My Self is ruler of the universe. It is impossible that anything should come to me unbidden by myself." (I wonder how they'd explain this blog post, then?)

Given this now US-endemic I-create-my-own-world worldview, it starts to become clear how narcissism just might  be something of a problem. The solution chosen by Williamson and untold numbers of New Age "mystics" is to deny all legitimacy to the Big Bad Ego -- which is never really defined; it's that "Western" thinking, you know? -- and by sleight-of-mind (or mindlessness) redefine all that this selfsame ego desires and demands as unquestioned entitlements of some supreme inner deity.

...a young woman must fly free, away from Mommy and Daddy, away from the dense conventions of the world, away from childhood and into the arms of the Goddess, who awaits her. A hysterical depression can then become a magnificent adventure.

A Woman's Worth, pp. 43-44

Quite conversely, it seems to me, what we're seeing here is hysterical "spiritual" adventurism leading many unsuspecting souls toward a life of magnificent depression. After the Goddess, the Zoloft scrip. Or worse: a racially motivated form of fascism flying under the radar of religious tolerance. Can I prove this? Not yet, but it's happened before. A couple of books I've been looking into are especially instructive in this regard. One is Madame Blavatsky's Baboon. The other, more scholarly, is Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism. Both focus intensively on Blavatsky, whose racialist Secret Doctrine can be found in the New Age section of any Barnes & Noble store. And then there's this intriguing bit I just now dig up:

Common characteristics of fascist movements >
Decadence and spirituality

Some of the ugliest aspects of fascism -- intolerance, repression, and violence -- were fueled by what fascists saw as a morally justified struggle against "decadence." For fascists, decadence meant a number of things: materialism, self-indulgence, hedonism, cowardice, and physical and moral softness. It was also associated with rationalism, skepticism, atheism, humanitarianism, and political, economic, and gender democracy...

The opposite of decadence was "spirituality," which transcended materialism and generated self-discipline and virility. The spiritual attitude involved a certain emotional asceticism that enabled one to avoid feelings of pity for one's victims. It also involved Darwinian notions of survival of the fittest, a belief in the right of natural elites to upward social and political mobility, and accommodation with members of the upper classes.

"fascism" Encyclopaedia Britannica
from Encyclopaedia Britannica Premium Service
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=219379

And finally, this eye-opener regarding the famed comparative religionist, Mircea Eliade...

The conclusion that Eliade's work is deeply enmeshed in its fascistic roots is a difficult one to put forward. After all, he founded an important field, the history of religion. He wrote many important and influential books, not only Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, but also Yoga: Immortality and Freedom; The Sacred and the Profane; and Cosmos and History, among many others. He edited the monumental Encyclopedia of Religion and founded important journals (one with the former Nazi sympathizer Ernst Junger). These books form part of the basis for the intellectual claims of New Age religions and the revivals of nature religions. If Eliade's claims are racist and fascistic in origin -- while, as we know, these new forms of spirituality claim to be apolitical and ahistorical -- then we need to reflect profoundly on both New Age assumptions and the forms in which they are expressed. [emphasis mine]

from: Fascism's mythologist Mircea Eliade and the politics of myth
by Tony Stigliano
source: ReVision, 1 January 2002
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 2002 Heldref Publications

All this mystical princess blatherskite may seem on the surface to offer nothing more than simple wish-fulfillment fantasy, but lately it's taken a distinctly political turn. Williamson's bio mentions that she "co-founded The Global Renaissance Alliance (now called The Peace Alliance), a worldwide network of peace activists." I've got nothing against peace, but check out some of the rhetoric from her Healing the Soul of America [p. 263, emphasis mine]...

If you are interested in ways to take part in the mystical revolution  of American political consciousness, contact the Global Renaissance Alliance U.S.A.

Founded by myself and author Neale Donald Walsch, the Alliance provides every citizen the opportunity to engage democracy with soulfulness and love. Our national network of Citizen Circles is an exciting field of political possibility, and we hope you'll join our efforts to turn harmony, cooperation, sharing, and reverence for Life into dominant political values.

Just more New Age hooey, you say? Check out the members of the United States Congress who are endorsing this play for a "Department of Peace" -- and be afraid. At the renamed Peace Alliance Foundation, I read this: "The Alliance will identify and create a national database of these groups, organizations and individuals, thus bringing forward the components of the new culture that already exist." That national database link is in the original HTML. Click it to see the kind of demographic data this group is collecting -- and be very afraid. One day soon, the U.S. could have its very own New Age Christian Taliban -- if it hasn't happened already.

If you opt to join Williamson's Miracle Matrix, you'll get -- among other mystical goodies -- "My audio blog, where I'll be periodically posting my thoughts from the road." Spiritual podcasting. I suppose it was inevitable, as is so much else in these desperate End Times. But, now I can die happy, assured that I have indeed seen everything. if you click through to that page, be sure not to miss the mp3 "free sample download." Then you can die happy too!

Oh yeah, and here's her blog. The XML even validates; this is no amateur-hour effort. Of course, I immediately subscribed. Predictably, a recent entry says, "Mary Oliver is one of my favorite poets." One of these days, I'll write my own review of Mary Oliver, but probably not here. CBO is a Family Blog and I wouldn't want to saddle it with an NC-17 rating. So let me end instead with this inadvertently classic line:

"This is an all-hands-on-deck kind of moment on earth. It's not okay to be stuck in the smallness of our narcissism when our greatness is so needed."

Marianne Williamson
The Gift of Change:
Spiritual Guidance for a Radically New Life
November, 2004, p. 19