302. Poem / Song "It Don't Mean a Thing / If it Ain't Goin' Deep"

PDF of the poem below:

http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/itdontmeanathingifitaintgoindeep.pdf

This entire last week, all I had been doing is consuming chaos.

It's fun to meet new people, but it becomes demeaning after a while to be thrown into a giant room with 800 new graduate students. In my poem, I described this as a "melting pot of intellectual flesh." Your mind starts to question: (1) who do you want to know? (2) why? (3) what is your protocol for meeting people? I have probably met over 100 new people the last week--which is unprocessable to my mind, but there are a few people who have stuck out in my mind, who I am sure to resume contact with. These people stuck out because (0) they were part of the Young Lab cult--ya ya ya! go Human-Dimensions-of-Environmental-Change! Go Ecopistemology! Woohoo! (1) they were interested or involved in environmental media as well (2) they were left-handed, conceptual, generalists, and insanely intelligent (3) they had super bubbly (but by all means not sappy), enthusiastic, witty, intelligent personalities (4) they were the new incoming class of Bren students (similar programming), and (5) they were taking my scaling course with Dr. Sam Sweet--and I'll be dxmmed I found a geologist studying vertebrate fossils (WOOHOO! I FOUND A GEOLOGIST! I FOUND A GEOLOGIST! I love love LOVE geologists!), and (6) people who did not roll their eyes and give me blank faces when I told them that I invented a word called ecopistemology and that I was interesting in patterns of scale in biology and human-environmental systems. Wow. I hit a lot of walls, but I found a few who were following exactly what I was doing. I told Herschel (insanely intelligent Southpaw) that I was guilty of doing research that was "discovering the obvious," and he responded in quick wit: "isn't all of science about discovering the obvious?" And I was like "oh." So, not only was he following, he also made me feel less guilty for my pursuits of connecting psychology with the environment.

So my mind was selectively filtering the statistical pseudoautism of intellectual flesh and in the end detected and picked out a few humans out of the pile, which was part random luck of spatial proximity and frequency of encounter, but started developing molecular interactions and bonds. Emotional meaning and attachment seems to amplify upon each encounter and interaction. And hopefully soon, all the other humans just become and remain to be backdrop objects. Tuning in the necessary and tuning out the unnecessary. You can only be conscious of so much! My mind was foraging to create humanity around me while the rest just remains... desensitized backdrop....

Most people here are "starting" grad school and are infinitely expanding and exploring opportunities. This is the first time in five years (since I graduated from CCS UCSB in 2003) where all my expanded ideas have been and need to CONTRACT. Writing and compiling-organizing all acquired resources is a difficult task, and the view of my world this quarter will mostly need to be in my head and the head of Dr. Sam Sweet--among other scaling-obsessed scholars.

So I have slowly formed some rudimentary protocols of go-to people, as this macro-micro social experiment continues to unfold. And here is a poem to go along with the experiment. My emotions were uproarious this week. Thankfully the writing has kept me stabilized.

UPDATE ON ECOPISTEMOLOGY.

Oh ya. I think I have converted a few people to ecopistemology this past week. Ana Lyn implied as if this were some kind of religious cult. Come on! Isn't science a secular religion anyway? I have probably about 6 or so people who are willing to sign my petition for the existence of the word "ecopistemology." My lab-mate Jaime also is an ecopistemologist at heart. Wesley, though skeptical, has been my promoter. Same for my dad. Oscar approves of the word. My advisor, Oran, stated that he was open-minded, but he remains skeptical of neologisms. In short, he concluded that the proof of burden was in my own hands and that the word needs to exist on its own. My friend, Hector (linguist), said that inventing and propagating such a word is essentially making a "bold hypothesis," and I was like, "Really?" I told him this was an environmental media prankster joke as a satire on university mumbo jumbo lingo. I also told him that truth can only be told through the means of humor. So, is this a joke? Or is this not a joke?

283. Ecopistemology and Comparative, Multi-media Storytelling

Well, ever since I started attending the workshops of Shelly Lowenkopf in Montecito, my mind started to rapidly organize in terms of "mechanisms of storytelling." I started to realize that if I belonged in one line of human storytelling (literature, music, acting, film), I started to realize that the central organizing mechanism of human perception of Reality is through Writing (paralleled with my cartoon drawings mental mappings). If I belong within a "group" within any industry of storytelling, it would be in writing. I started to realize most of the rest of the characters are layers stemmed from writing, and those people are mostly puppets. If you want to meet pure intelligence and people who manipulate reality, best chill with the writers. Took me three years later to find myself rooted in writing once again. When I branch out into multi-media projects, I will say, first and foremost I am a Writer/Cartoonist. After that, I am a writer who composes and records music. Not, I am a "musician." After that, I am a writer who makes movies. Not, I am a "film-maker." I had such a hard time getting together some form of coherent body of information in "comparative storytelling," and I could only do it from the frame of reference of writing. Not film. Not public speaking. Not music. Not elaborate, multi-layered, three-dimensional graphic art. No. No. No. Just writing. The Backbone HTML code to the Reconstruction of Reality.

You know? It gives me some comfort knowing that since the dawn of human cave art-writing chicken scratch, humans have been writers and cartoonists (even musicians, but they had vocal cords for internal instruments, not electronic pianos). So, that's a few hundred thousand years? Million years? Paper and pencil have been around a while. But photographers and film-makers and million-dollar music studios only existed since the 1800s and 1900s. It makes sense to have a writer/cartoonist frame of reference, because the rest are recent inventions and more technology intensive. Evolution of storytelling.

I wrote a dozen or more pages on Ecopistemology and Comparative, Multi-Media Storytelling. Which I will ultimately have to say that (1) it is an essay attempting to define "what is environmental media and why do we need it"? (the whole scientists part of a system called society and planet Earth, scientists as chess pieces, simultaneously trying to analyze the whole game of chess, account for human dimensions of scientific practice and environmental change) and (2) it is written from the frame of reference of a scientist. Hence, I am comparing all forms of multi-media with reference to the practices of scientific writing and the acquired mindframe of a scientist. More specifically, field scientist (aka "fuzziologist").

276. ECOPISTEMOLOGY: I Invented a New Word, Only to Find that It Already Exists... or Maybe Not

Since I have this amazing track record of inventing something in my mind and then finding out a few moments to a few years later that this novel idea was independently invented by someone on the other side of the planet XX moments-to-years ago (aka I suffer from the "independent origins of common thought" syndrome), I am going to relish this split moment for inventing a word that will fly beyond "Commonsenseologist" that (though may be a joke) may possibly be legitimatized within the university. The word is called ECOPISTEMOLOGY, which is a combination of "eco" (house, relationships, interactions), "episteme" (knowledge), and "logos" (reason, the study of). So, ecopistemology is the study of the structure and organization of knowledge in concern of human relationships with the environment. Epistemology and western philosophy have historically been anthropocentric, and this is now the golden opportunity to be ecopistemological, especially since there is documented fragmentation of knowledge and lack of communication within multiple systems at multiple scales, from language systems, perceptual cognitive maps, and value systems within and among universities, government, and business.

This all started when Dr. Chianese (an English professor at Cal State Northridge) told me that I was into "shifting consciousness" and that I was "epistemologizing" and I didn't even know it. He also claimed I was a Gregory Batesonian, an "Ecology of the Mind" type of person. Mind-mirrors-environment are one in the same. I was driving along towards Isla Vista, when the word ecopistemology whapped into my head. I called my dad a minute later and we talked a lot about it. It's all a joke, but this could become legit.

To me, organizing knowledge ("spacetime") is like my organizing my closet full of schoolwork. Which is a hobby I have been doing... intrinsically. So, ecopistemologizing is within my neurological blood anyway.

I bet Alexios will be thrilled. I heard he was into inventing a new field of study anyhow... along the lines of environmental psychology. But ecopistemologizing is dah-bomb to me. Toastmasters members stared at me as if I were whacko for inventing the word. Grace mentioned that the word is so long that I would be tripping myself up and probably going to the moon and back faster than even trying to say the word.

I want a t-shirt that says I'm an ecopistemologist. Besides, commonsenseologist.

Now will be the fateful moment. All my hope in originality will be pulverized as I look up the world wide web, only to find that ecopistemology already exists. Boohoo. One second please.

I have phenomenal news folks. Just with my musical name "Stokastika," I have invented a word that does not exist on google. I now have given birth to the word and field "ecopistemology." God bless the trees or the trees bless the construction of god, I have the most noble news, my efforts upon the Questioning of Reality shall be classified as a work of ecopistemology. I am going to make up the rules to. This is flippin' fun!