Oakland - Aerial View

Caricatures are sometimes "more real"...

The image to the left is some caricatures by Subway Surfer who can be found sketching New Yorkers on the Subway, to mention one place.

The picture below it is a background from some old, Tex Avery era cartoon.

I think both exemplify the emotional realness of the exaggerated, the caricatured, the stylized, the non-representative.

There is plenty of science out there that confirms that at times a cartoon can have more impact on our perception than a realistic drawing or photo. The mechanism behind this is supposed to be because when we perceive things, we actually give more emotionally weight to certain features of what we see, rather than absorbing all the details, so what we retain in our minds is actually an emotional caricature of the actual thing. Therefore, sometimes our recognition of the identity of a well-known face is quicker when we see a caricature than when we see a photo of the actual person. The caricature brings out all the salient features.

I think the same can be said for trees and mountains and rocks and buildings-- we retain a generalized image of them, but it's mostly the pointyness of conifers, the jaggedness of the rocks, the scrubbyness of bushes and the roundness of deciduous trees. Everything that we feel is "real" can be approximated with much less detail than we might suppose to be necessary, and it will have the same emotional impact on us as the "real" thing-- perhaps more.

Cartoonists have always used this quality of human perception to their advantage, and with the proliferation of images on the web today I think we can easily find countless examples of completely unrealistic images that excite us, provoke us, influence us, entertain us, titillate us, and convince us through their power to access the key elements of our perception without going to the trouble of simulating reality.

I like to draw, but am lazy with the detail, so I think I am going to use this insight as my guide as I put my visual ideas on paper. Just enough, and no more. Not that this kind of art is "easy" by a long shot, but certainly simpler than the Sistine Chapel.

Gaviotas

I like this story of how they constructed a sustainable community in the arid highlands of Colombia. Makes me want to go there.

Yo uelo el aire de otro pais y me hace ganas de quitar el mio.

Mpatapo: Reconciliation and Peacemaking

This image is an Adinkra symbol (a system of symbols from Ghana in West Africa) called mpatapo. It is meant to represent the "knot of pacification/reconciliation," and as such it is the symbol for reconciliation, peacemaking and pacification.

"Mpatapo represents the bond or knot that binds the separate parties in a dispute to a peaceful, harmonious reconciliation. It is a symbol of peacemaking after strife." --from West African Wisdom: Adinkra Symbols & Meanings

I am trying to expand my efforts at teaching conflict resolution throughout the schools where I work and have chosen this symbol as the "badge" to give kids and adults who have successfully learned the principles and have pledged to embody them throughout the school.

My guiding principles are summed up pretty well in the words of a Buddhist nun, so I will let her speak for me:

We need to bring loving-kindness not only into the family but also into the schools. Before I became a nun, I was a schoolteacher, so I have especially strong feelings about this. The most important thing for children to learn is not a lot of information, but how to be kind human beings and how to resolve their conflicts with others in a constructive way. Parents and teachers put a lot of time and money into teaching children science, arithmetic, literature, geography, geology, and computers. But do we ever spend any time teaching them how to be kind? Do we have any courses in kindness? Do we teach kids how to work with their own negative emotions and how to resolve conflicts with others? I think this is much more important than the academic subjects. Why? Children may know a lot, but if they grow up to be unkind, resentful, or greedy adults, their lives will not be happy.

Parents want their children to have a good future and thus think their children need to make a lot of money. They teach their children academic and technical skills so that they can get a good job and make lots of money -- as if money were the cause of happiness. But when people are on their deathbed, you never hear anybody wishfully say, "I should have spent more time in the office. I should have made more money." When people have regrets about how they lived their life, usually they regret not communicating better with other people, not being kinder, not letting the people that they care about know that they care. If you want your kids to have a good future don't teach them just how to make money, but how to live a healthy life, how to be a happy person, how to contribute to society in a productive way.

--excerpted from "Teaching Children by Example" by Venerable Thubten Chodron©

My personality, as viewed through psychological instruments.

It is hard to reproduce the results of the personal inventory for Timothy Leary's Interpersonal Behavior Circle without reproducing the image, but I can summarize it by saying that I come out being fairly assured, responsible, and competitive, somewhat cold, aloof and hostile (ouch!), and moderately distrustful. Maybe on a bad day.

I am NOT very submissive or self-effacing, absolutely not deferent or docile, and only slightly warm, friendly, or sociable. However, I also scored very low on the "selfish"part of the test, as well as the "bossy" part, so I am evidently not a brash, loud sort of unfriendly person. Perhaps I am a likable misanthrope?

But that's not the end of the story.

On John Birchtnell's page there are a battery of tests to take regarding a person's ability to relate to others, and I fared far better on those. The greater the number of questions and the more multidimensional the concerns of the test are, the better I make out. I'm just a complex guy.

However, the results I like best are from the IPIP-NEO Narrative Report (Short Version). The results are given in graph form again, but there's also a conversational version of the results. Mine are as follows:

1. Your score on Extroversion is average, indicating that you are neither a subdued loner nor a jovial chatterbox. You enjoy time with others but also time alone.
2. Your high level of Agreeableness indicates a strong interest in others' needs and well-being. You are pleasant, sympathetic, and cooperative.
3. Your score on Conscientiousness is high. This means you set clear goals and pursue them with determination. People regard you as reliable and hard-working.
4. Your score on Neuroticism is average, indicating that your level of emotional reactivity is typical of the general population. Stressful and frightening situations are sometimes upsetting to you, but you are generally able to get over these feelings and cope with these situations.
5. Your score on Openness to Experience is average, indicating you enjoy tradition but are willing to try new things. Your thinking is neither simple nor complex. To others you appear to be a well-educated person but not an intellectual.

I like those results. Makes me sound like a balanced guy... who has a passion for helping others. Well, that's who I want to be, anyway.

I think the element that was screwing up my circumplex results is my "take no bullshit" stance on life, which is a self-protective stance, but also serves to protect others from the effects of dishonesty, unforeseen consequences of ill-advised actions, recognizing and defusing disrespectful behavior, hostile attitudes, and put-downs and firmly directing the wayward back to the path of virtue. But how do you communicate all of that in a test format without coming off as someone who is strict, impatient with others' mistakes, hard-boiled, outspoken, irritable, blunt, complaining, doubtful of others, hard to impress, touchy, and stubborn? What I have described is a stance on life that allows me (within the public school system) to promote kindness and teach kids how to resolve their conflicts with others in a constructive way. Sometimes that requires confronting some destructive interpersonal patterns head-on, sometimes that requires stepping in and expressing zero-tolerance for put-downs and malicious rough-housing. What cannot be communicated in the context of these tests is all of the positivity and compassion and intuition that goes into effectively communicating with these kids.

But maybe that's not "personality" maybe that's a learned skill. Maybe I'm a person with a more "abrasive" personality who has learned to channel those qualities into compassionate action. How well do we know ourselves anyway? All we know is how we act within our habitual environs. All kinds of stuff can come out in duress, and maybe some of those stress reactions are closer to our actual "personality" than the nice behaviors that we have learned to get by within the context of our family, friends, work life, and in public.

In any case, these tests are good tools to zero-in on our personality traits, which might not be so evident to us otherwise. (I know that I need help seeing my behavior for what it is.) We can reject the results if we like, but in a good test the questions are educational in and of themselves and stimulate my thought such that taking the test is an end in itself, whatever the results are.