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“Judgments based on intuition seem mysterious because intuition doesn’t involve explicit knowledge. It doesn’t involve declarative knowledge about facts. Therefore, we can’t explicitly trace the origins of our intuitive judgments. They come from other parts of our knowing. They come from our tacit knowledge and so they feel magical. Intuitions sometimes feel like we have ESP, but it isn’t magical, it’s really a consequence of the experience we’ve built up.”
Gary Klein

“Ever since I had an accident in which I broke a finger and couldn’t use the typewriter for a few months, I have followed the custom of my youth and gone back to writing by hand. I discovered when my finger was better and I could type again that my poetry when written by hand was more sensitive; its plastic forms could change more easily. In an interview, Robert Graves says that in order to think one should have as little as possible around that is not handmade. He could have added that poetry ought to be written by hand. The typewriter separated me from a deeper intimacy with poetry, and my hand brought me closer to that intimacy again.”
Pablo Neruda interviewed by Rita Guibert

Reading through my old tweets makes me think that perhaps I’m not as brain dead as I sometimes believe. What is clear is that ill health does take a toll. Much of that toll is in terms of the energy to do things. Composing something within Twitter’s 140 character limit, while some times frustrating in its brevity is often doable within my energy ration. Writing anything more substantial seems to take on the characteristics of attempt to climb Everest.
I hope at some point to have recovered enough to make some sense or get some insight in to what my experience over the last three years or so means to being human. For the moment all I can say is that I am still hopeful that my energy levels will rise and that instead of the blank spaces that have come to characterise this blog we will have words, lots of words and that some of them may mean something to you.

“Abstract
Banished from the field of true knowledge, as defined by classical philosophy, mêtis does nonetheless pervade Greek mythology and social practice for a millennium, disappearing for good from both oral and written discourse after the 5th century AD. Homer’s epics represent a dual source that permits the reconstruction of the ancient Greek mêtis. Indeed, they reveal some of its aspects by narrating, on the one hand, the activities of cunning gods, among who, besides Zeus himself, we find prominent Athena and Hephaestus, who, by no fortuitous coincidence, are also the gods of technology; and, on the other hand, mostly human practices, and among them those of a human being cunning par excellence, namely the polumetis and poikiloboulos Odysseus. In this paper, mêtis is considered to cover all cognitive processes that are necessary for man to face adverse or confrontational situations against powerful adversaries in unstable and complex environments, about which there is neither documented knowledge nor the possibility of rigorous analysis. In modern terms, it corresponds to design — as a cognitive process employed by all those devising courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”
“Mêtis and the Artificial” K. P. Anagnostopoulos and S. Chelidoni
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IN HOMERIC EPICS
History of Mechanism and Machine Science, 2009, Volume 6, XIII, 435-442, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-8784-4_34
http://www.springerlink.com/content/q2573702402x4203/

“The man of metis is always ready to pounce. He acts faster than lightning. This is not to say that he gives way to a sudden impulse, as do most Homeric heroes. On the contrary his metis knows how to wait patiently for the calculated moment to arrive . . . Metis is swift, as prompt as the opportunity that it must seize on the wing, not allowing it to pass. But in no way does it act lightly (lepte). With all the weight of acquired experience that it carries, it involves thought that is dense, rich and compressed (pukine). Instead of floating hither and thither, at the whim of circumstance, it anchors the mind securely in the project which it has devised in advance thanks to its ability to look beyond the immediate present and foresee a more or less wide slice of the future”
“Cunning intelligence in Greek culture and society” by Marcel Detienne, Jean Pierre Vernant

“Kairos is the time of tactical appropriateness, of shifting priorities and objects of attention from one qualitativel differing moment to the next. This is time as humanly experienced; ”in the fulness of time,” the emergent ”not quite yet,” the ”now” that once arrived feels right. It is a brief strip of right time, marked at its beginning and end by turning points. It is not simply a particular duration in clock time. Yet every kairos strip of time has a location in kronos time.”
(This passage is from the opening chapter of Frederick Erickson’s “Talk and Social Theory, “page 6)
“The mètis is that form of practical intelligence, using conjectural and obliqueknowledge, which anticipates, modifies and influences the fate of events in adversity and ambiguity. When abstract generalizations (episteme) are unable to handle a changeable and unpredictable situation ; when know-how (techne) does not have any grip on a chancy and fluid reality; when practical wisdom, drawn from social practice (phronesis) does not come with any solution to a mutable and unsure event; here comes the fourth dimension of knowledge, that no treaty could teach, that no words can fully contain, a knowledge of short-cuts, of sagacious envisioning, of perspicuous intervention, even more mutable that the situation it has to cope with, discreet, operative, conjectural: the Mètis.”
(And this one is from Philippe Baumard’s “Oblique Knowledge: The Clandestine Work of Organizations”)

“…Something like a paradigm shift  is emerging in Western society, a movement away from the whole rationalistic, macho, goal-directed take on  human nature  that we inherit from the Enlightenment . Towards what exactly? Something much more fluid and adaptive, and something which makes much more use of the unconscious.  But there is a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ way of drifting your way through life : indeed the aim of one of the world’s  most important philosophies, Taoism, is to teach — or rather encourage —   the ‘good’ way of drifting.”
Sebastian Hayes

…. but these entries are worth repeating.
Two crises collide
One of the the things that make it so hard to see what is going on now is that we are living through two crisises. The first is the chickens coming home to roost of a thirty year old experiment in implementing somewhat naive free market phantasies. The second is the flock of giant canaries that are telling us that our two hundred year old experiment in carbon fuelled industrialisation may be drawing to an uncomfortable close. The paradox is that maybe the solution to the short term crisis lies in setting out to solve the long term one.
March 23, 2009
A flock of giant canaries
Chicken Little may be right and the sky is falling down, but I think what is more likely is that we are seeing a flock of giant canaries gasping for breath. The turmoil in the financial markets, the surge in the price of oil and the floods in the USA and India can all be seen as warnings that our two hundred year old experiment is moving in to toxic territory. My biggest fear is that we will recover from these shocks too quickly. (This does not mean I have no sympathy for the hapless victims of these shocks who simply want to get on with their lives, I do.) But I am concerned that just as the lessons from the oil shocks in the Seventies were swiftly forgotten, we may find that as things return to “normal” in two or three years time, we will forget the message from our giant canaries that if we want to retain the benefits of our current ways of life we will have to change the way we organise and manage our life on this planet, starting now.
September 17, 2008

It seems like a good idea to repeat this entry from July 2008. We need to remind ourselves over and over again, this is a financial crisis created by a financial sector that has been rescued by the state, not a crisis cause by the extravagance of the state, as the apologists for the kleptocracy would have us believe.
“The current crisis has been caused by the greed of a few, and the policies they have foisted upon us all. It’s time to blame them, and make them pay back. The facts are on our side, even if the conventional wisdom of the pundits hasn’t caught up yet. It’s our job to push these simple notions in the open, so that policies can change.”

So here I am staring at a screen that is as blank as my mind. Curiously, this is something of an advance. For some months now I have barely written anything at all apart from the odd twitter and facebook status. My explanation for this, in so far as I have an explanation, is that I do not know where I am and therefore have nothing to write about. This, of course, is a nonsense. I know quite well that I spend much of my time in our new flat a short walk down from our old home on the top of Crouch Hill. So, in a purely geographic sense, I know quite well where I am located. It is in an existential sense, this sense of location dissolves. I haven’t a clue where I am. At times I fear that my destiny is to be a charming invalid stumbling through each day. At other times I have faith that I will become fitter and be able to make a more positive contribution. But a contribution to what? Staring at this once blank screen that is the question that confronts me and to which, at this moment I have no answer. There are some words here now that didn’t exist before and, maybe, give some clues to what the next step should be. So for now this act of putting down some words and transferring them to my blog represents some first tentative steps towards putting some purpose back into my drift. Where it will go I do not know, but at least it is some positive movement.