Dear Reader,
My sons’ beloved grandmother, Ginny Bruch, a prolific genealogist[1], paid less attention to her clothes than to her citations. Sometimes, Jo Sullivan, her stylish elder sister and fellow librarian, would pull one of Ginny’s dresses from the closet and lay it on the bed: Ginny, this dress is dead. You must get rid of it.
It’s good to know when a garment has died so that you can give it a decent burial—which is more or less what I’ve been doing with this website. But my motto for this site has been a saying by Laozi: A sound man is good at salvage, at seeing nothing is lost. It originally referred to Avery Crawley, the main character in FRAMESHIFTS [2] and came to represent the purpose of the site. Just as Crawley founded an intentional community, The Fellowship of the Attentive, whose research and recycling business was called Salvolution, so this website has founded its own small community of readers and attended to the business of books, music, and ideas. It has never been about becoming an influencer on the take. No links to diet supplements, pet toys, or peptobismol-pink sippy-cups for tiger-moms. Instead, there were announcements of book readings and musical performances, book reviews, tendentious essays, poems, stories, and occasional guest blogs. Most readers simply read the newsletters rather than exploring the site, but I also used the site to file away some of my work in the public domain.
I suppose that the purpose for all of this effort was a kind of righteous cause—educational, rather than literary or political, as stated in the original mission statement[3]:
I believe that we learn our way out of our dilemmas. Messy decisions, heart-stopping grief, ridiculously selfish leaders—all take our attention from what most concerns us: our next breath.
Breathless, anxious, and hurried, we find our ways when we turn obstacles into challenges, our wreck-sites into studios—all by a shift of mind, a frameshift.
Frameshifts was a practice before it was a fiction. Human beings can see beyond the worlds and wounds they have created. They have imagination–but, as Mark Twain said, you can’t “depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
Every frameshift is a change of magnitude, scale of observation, viewpoint, and metaphor. To shift frames frequently is to overcome the provisional ideas we have about ourselves, the way things are, and the way to tell the story. There’s nothing wrong with provisional truths as long as we don’t settle for them. That’s what the Frameshifts series is about.
FINAL ARRANGEMENTS
The site will stay up for the time being. Feel free to visit and check out any blogs or other material you may have missed. I will add some information to the Works section as I complete a few lingering projects. Mashkinonge, the magical fish whom you may remember from The Fisher of the James[4], has taken on the task of laying out the Human Project. I have attached the first pages to give you an idea. Frankly, I don’t think that he’s quite up to it, but he is quite serious about finishing it. As for me, I shall continue to fritter away my time in this senior residence with poems, songs, and stories. Thanks for listening and reading.
PEACE, Richard L. Rose r.and.k.rose@gmail.com
Blog https://frameshifts.com/
Signup-Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/blVuIH
Performances https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzqDZ6vviAQek_TArXuGKjQ
AMAZONAUTHOR-PAGE https://www.amazon.com/author/richardrose
LINKEDIN https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-rose-827b9b15a/
MEDIUM https://r-and-k-rose.medium.com/
FLIPSNACK https://www.flipsnack.com/rlrose4621/tales-since-the-shift/full-view.html
Email address for both Kathleen and me: r.and.k.rose@gmail.com
THE 16 ANNOUNCEMENTS OF MASHKINONGE
CONCERNING THE HUMAN PROJECT
Introduction
Preface
The Last Announcements of Mashkinonge
PART I THE HISTORY OF CHOICES
- The history of choices, AFRICA, EUROPE AND MIDEAST
- The history of choices, AFRICA, ASIAS, AUSTROPOLYNESIA
- The history of choices, AMERICAS
PART II MAKERS AND THINGS MADE
- Makers and things made, Innovation, industry, technology, technopoly
- Makers and things made, Arts
PART III THE ENVELOPED HABITAT
- Chemical selves: Body and biochemistry
- Believing and knowing: Cognition
- Protection and immunity. Self and nonSelf, the enveloped habitat
PART IV WOUND TREATMENT
- Wounds and healing. Care, medicine, values vs. procedures
- Wounds and justice. Poverty, equity, justice vs. care
- Wounds and acceptance. Racism, class, caste vs. care
PART V THE LONG CONVERSATION
- The Long Conversation: Words and poetry: flourish vs. nourish
- The Long Conversation: Stories and speculations: getting stories right
- The Long Conversation: Media of aspiration: trimming the language of aspiration
PART VI NESTED HABITATS
- Habitat—nested habitats
- The Human Project: the criterion
THE LAST ANNOUNCEMENTS OF MASHKINONGE
Introduction
A brief introduction to my poetry, stories, and music is in order. A list of works and links concerning the Frameshift Project is at the end of the book. I have come to realize that it is my contribution to the Human Project of caring for and about each other and of keeping our long conversation going. Zia and Frances are characters from the opera Escape Plans. They are students from the Fellowship of the Attentive, a future colony of scientists, artists, and engineers who are dedicated to paying attention to the messages they receive from Earth when they are in heightened states of awareness. During the period in which they live, the Americas are divided into decentralized communities after the failure of federal government, called the de-fedding. Centered on works of education, research, and the arts in their Salvolution Studios, the Fellowship must also contend with an adjoining theocratic community in the town of Fairall. Find the stories about Fairall, Wando, Holburn and other sites in the Northern Region, which formerly included parts of Northern Virginia, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, in the two volumes of Frameshifts and the sequels, Tales Since the Shift and Death on his Heels in Richmond. More references and details are also to be found in the other stories and operas listed. In The Fisher of the James, a song cycle based on the Grimms’ fairytale, The Fisher and His Wife, the geographical setting of the Frameshifts Project widens to include the City of Richmond, whose history in black and white is presented not only in this work but also in the poetry of Coming Around, the opera Monte and Pinky, and in some of the stories in Forms of Resistance, a story collection.
Mashkinonge, a sachem of the Haudenosaunee Nation who took the form of his spirit animal, a muskellunge, during one of the slaughters of early American history, emerges from the James River in The Fisher of the James when he is caught by a local fisherman. Although the man and his wife seek wealth from the magic fish, they come away with insight rather than riches. As a part of the original production of The Fisher of the James, Mashkinonge provided audiences with four Announcements about their inattention to their habitat and to each other. After issuing his bulletins, he returned to the river.
Now, however, he has returned. First he speaks to Zia and Frances, characters from the opera Escape Plans; then he speaks to us—delivering sixteen more bulletins about how humans undermine both the habitat and the Human Project. —rlr
Preface
Zia, Frances, and others
Zia: It’s a story that you’ve heard—and you know you’ll hear again.
And the story had begun just when it met its end.
Frances: Someone has to know who wrote it—really wrote it.
Not devised it—
Zia: Or over-analyzed it
Like that Memoirist who defenestrated it.
Frances: Pull it out of the river. Let’s have a look.
For all the bracing words, it’s pretty limp.
Zia: The commas are peeling off.
The paragraphs are puckered
With over-freighted lines.
Frances: Here’s the place we came to—See?
Both: ESCAPE PLANS.
Zia: By Tom Farley, Crawley’s redhead poet.
Frances: It’s how he planned his own escape.
Zia: After drinking the Elders’ special tea—
The Tardigrade Special
Frances: That side-tracks you through time.
Zia: Turns years to decades,
Frances: Lets you survive the consequences of your follies,
Zia: Stretches your perspective over centuries.
Frances: That in itself should give you pause.
Zia: Not if you’re a baffled redhead poet
Frances: Like the one who made us—
Zia: Escaped into us, you mean.
Frances: That was the plan.
Zia: Isn’t that him moping around?
Tom: Why not? You’re outside the frame.
Why not me?
Zia: So you even threw yourself out the window.
Frances: Escaped—
Tom: Frameshifted.
Zia: That’s a story that we’ve heard.
Frances: And we have to hear again?
Zia: What’s that coming out of the river like a stick standing up?
Tom: A fish of some kind—a man—a
Frances: Spirit Guide. It’s my thesis advisor, Mashkinonge.
Mashkinonge: You only know one time. You only know one place.
You only know one people. I wear the long mask.
I wear the long mask.
Frances: Yes, as you’ve said.
Many times.
Heard you’d gone back upstream.
Mashkinonge: I had to return. Many signals to send.
Many bulletins. Many annunciations.
Now everywhere is downstream.
Your project was not finished.
Zia: Yeah, Franny’s not an All But Dissertation.
She got her degree—but
She is an All But Revolution.
Frances: I could never have pulled it off—
Zia: You set some fires—
Tom: and changed some frames of reference—
Mashkinonge: Return to the signal-fires!
No one can escape upstream.
It’s all downstream from here—
Tom: It is Thou, O River, who judgest man’s judgment,
as Avery Crawley told Armand Jencks, years ago—
Mashkinonge: No, as Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh, ages ago—
Zia: You Spirit-Guides gotta stick together.
Mashkinonge: You only know one time—
Zia: Okay, okay. You wear the long face.
Got it.
Mashkinonge: SEND OFF BULLETINS,
AND ANNUNCIATIONS FROM THE EARTH—
Tom: Vanquish fear. Take up the pen and write—
Zia: Or only vanish.
Frances: Or reassess what you think you must relinquish.
THE LAST ANNOUNCEMENTS OF MASHKINONGE
Even as a fish and spirit-guide, I believed that I could escape you by swimming upstream, but you humans have made all life downstream from your follies. There is no escape for life until you get your stories right. Perhaps you read my previous announcements—mere warnings. But they should have been enough to move attentive readers. As I have often said, however,
You only know one time.
You only know one place.
You only know one people.
I wear the long mask.
I wear the long mask.
Like a few of your elders and more attentive minds, I change masks, shift time-place-people, and always learn from the Ancient Rivers.
All beings have projects—paths sealed into their lives, ways of being that suit and comfort them, intricate behaviors and accommodations by their chemical-selves to other selves and non-selves. But only humans undermine their own projects, foul their own nests, and betray their own way of being.
Perhaps you have read about the Human Project. If not, see the graduate thesis of my student, Frances Burns. She even developed it into a therapeutic handbook, before the River intervened. The River always interrupts bold plans. But the Human Project is a simple matter, absent the usual exaggerations and excrescences of human self-delusion. Bulletin!
The human project is to care for and about each other
and to keep the long human conversation going.
It is not so different from the projects of other beings. It is a pathway and procession, a means and end, a choice and invitation.
Therefore, I invite you to read my sixteen announcements. I will show you that history is a path of choices. I will show you Frances’ useful but incomplete work. I will also send you nosing for data, as I have done in the river-bed, where I was stung by kepone and informed by the slurry of all the books and knowledge you have pulped after your dizzying digitizations. I found more and more, even as I tried to get upstream of you. At my wits-end, I realized there was nothing upstream of you.
Twice I have been at my wits-end. First when I left my sachem’s body behind and took this form; then when I saw clearly that the whole Earth is downstream from human doings. You only understand when you reach your wits-end. Some reach wits-end by growing very old, as I have done: my fierce, scaly armor now as long as a half-grown pine. Elders at their wits-end can finally go beyond their wits to see around themselves; to see clearly to the procession moving beyond all possessions. You only understand when you reach your wits-end, so my announcements will take you to the place where wits drop off and you swim into the full procession of your being.
Then you will go looking for details, overturning sources, and finding fresh evidence—like a fish working her way to the right place to breed, sniffing out the ruts and holes, catching nymph-flies and hellgrammites adrift along the way, listening with her pulsing flanks to every snapping threat in wrinklings, clicks, and buzzes—racing away from sour and putrefied remains, searching for the freshest hidden current. Or perhaps you will remain confused. If so, even that sense of confusion and incompleteness may be enough. I can’t do more than to make my announcements and then relinquish my project to others in the hidden world.
THE 16 ANNOUNCEMENTS OF MASHKINONGE
CONCERNING THE HUMAN PROJECT
Announcement 1
HISTORY OF CHOICES, PART 1:
AFRICA, EUROPE AND MIDEAST
A digression
Pangaea would be a better story—or how the bulge dividing the American continent separated the tribes of fishes, and how my people thickened the River so that a man could walk across it on our backs—but this announcement, like the other fifteen, is about the human project, a tool—another organon—to show and direct you on how to get your own story right:
If you will listen to a fish.
You must know what it was to live when the decisions responsible for your cultural evolution were made—especially when the first knots were tied in the nets you wrap around yourselves, your so-called Axis times. Culture, after all, is what should be known and how to know it. But though you humans possess culture, you do not understand it or know how to think about it. You make it both too simple and too complex. You get caught in eddies, tangled in your nets, caught in your own catch.
Should we dwell on time-lines? Consider the long story of migration and radiation, more speciation, the cognitive revolution and appearance of cultural frames of reference, wanderings and settlements, agriculture, sacred river-cities, kingdoms, empires, warring states, revolutions in science, technology, communication, governance, commerce, and information, warring nations, global corpocracies, warring hegemonies? You know this. You love to write fat books about your wars.
Or would it be easier to braid the story from four threads? Like these—
Economy: trade and exploitation, agriculture, industry, slavery
Culture: identity and justification in religion, law, and arts
Organization: power, policy, and politics, militaries, diplomacy, state, empire, caste, and class
Geography: limits and resources, topography, biomes, water, protection
You smack your lips to slice a topic with analysis.
Or would it be better to tell stories about each thread, each story anchored to its time—with the rope of civilizations braided from these threads, times, and stories? The rope could be carefully teased apart and heavily explicated, I suppose. How do I get your attention?
Maybe the decisions made about these threads could be identified, their externalities shown, and their parts in the stories explicated. The aim would be to answer two questions: What was it like to be alive at t=x? What can I learn about the decisions in t=x that will support the human project? Evidences would be about governance, castes, knowledge, and culture. But don’t expect me to follow this study plan in a very systematic way. After all, my eyes are on the sides of my head.
As a fish constantly being pushed along, right and left, twirling and yawing into tight and spacious places, I must say that ropes do not interest me. The racing rip-currents of upswelling, unsettling decisions are much more interesting.
Therefore, all of my announcements are about decisions. For every announcement, I will first make a summation to get you swimming through your studies; then I will give you a sample of the savory truths I have found in the slurry of wisdoms which have made their way back to the ancient rivers. This plan, by the way, was first suggested to Frances Burns by Elder Ignatz Breit, who also sat with me on her thesis committee. He called it a kind of annotated bibliography—he said it’s the sort of thing librarians do. He should know. Ignatz is the Curator of the museum and library at the Salvolution community, sometimes called the Fellowship of the Attentive, along the banks of the sweet shallows of Pawmack Run below the recycling plant at the Salvage. Like other elders of the Fellowship, Ignatz has lived many lives. I have known him as Hank Randall, Prakash, and Jack. He has also helped me to find human words for obvious realities. Like anyone who has worn many masks, he has been afflicted enough to be trusted. Of course, only I have worn the long mask[5]. If you have learned stories, as I have, from the hive-mind of swirling bees, or the tracks on river banks, or from the painted skin of a bison, you may not exactly follow the rules for a bibliography, but to understand what I have made for you, the idea of a bibliography will do.
Like a circuit-riding preacher lining out the text for an illiterate congregation, Karen Armstrong in The Great Transformation (2006) listed the discoveries of various axial times in the Near East, Europe, and China and explained how they came about. I will not keep you in suspense. From her Contents page, here they are: rituals, emptying yourself (kenosis), special knowledge, suffering (dukkha), empathy, seeing All in One, and having compassionate concern for everyone—what Fred Rogers called seeing the world as a neighborhood and each neighbor as God. I will come back to these discoveries in Parts V and VI. I call out these discoveries, which you have repeatedly echoed and forgotten. To these discoveries, add the land ethic of some the peoples of the Americas, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Polynesia. Like any people who live for generations from the land—the American farmers described by Wendell Berry in The Need to be Whole (2022), for instance—they understood their interdependence with each other and other living things. Let them continue to echo in your mind as we enter human history, which Isaac Asimov in his Chronology of the World (1991) called:
A dark and turbulent stream of folly, illuminated now and then by flashes of genius.
TO BE CONTINUED (maybe)
[1] HER BOOK: PROUD WANDERERS https://www.nypl.org/research/research-catalog/bib/b11905520
[2] THE MANUSCRIPT TO THE BOOK IS IN THE “WORKS” SECTION ON THE SITE. OF COURSE, YOU MAY ALSO BUY THE BOOK (2 VOLUMES) AND EBOOK. I HOPE YOU DO. HERE’S THE LINK TO THE MS: https://frameshifts.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/2001916_frameshift1-2011-version.pdf
[3] Mission Statement: https://frameshifts.com/mission-statement/
[4] One of Mashkinonge’s announcements from 2012: https://frameshifts.com/2012/10/
[5] All of this is told in the books and music of Richard L. Rose, a student of frame-shifting.
frameshifts 