Singing my little song

In one of his interviews, Francisco Varela, the great Chilean neurophenomenologist, says that scientists are like a modern troubadours, singing their little song from place to place and getting food and shelter for it. And so, he says, I go from country to country telling my story about how to the human mind works.

But the modern scientist goes from conference to conference by plane, stays in a good hotel, gives a 15 minutes talk, and gets drunk with taxpayers' money. And to organise that you apply for grants, you work for institutions and need to comply with several rules that you don't really agree with but say it's ok as long as I can keep doing my own little thing.

This weekend I sang my song, a song composed of shavings flying from the wood and metal vibrating to the pass of a file, in the misty flatness of northern Holland, also known as Friesland. We sharpened saws, eat bean soup, and set up and planed with some beautiful kanna.

All this was possible since Don had the great idea of making me give a course/demostratie in his workshop, and arranged everything for it to happen. We came here, got fed and had a bed to sleep in so I could sing my little song saturday in front of a few people and a dog. And we didn't get drunk with taxpayers' money nor costed 4000 euros to organise it, as the conference for the scientists costs.

That was something really funny when I was going as a student to critical philosophy school in Birkbeck, in central London. The school was 600euros or so, we had lectures the whole day in the university, and then later we hit an italian restaurant and kept talking of Derrida and Kant and their relation to Capitalism and how to overthrow it (while eating a very tasty capitalist pizza that's it.)

In that way, the explicit content of their philosophy was undermined by the material organisation of the workshop, or so I felt.

(A similar irony was at play in the Leipzig degrowth conference, where from 50 people 5 years ago the last conference was 5000 or so.)

As usual when we handtool workers meet, we talked about the lost knowledge and how the government, universities and the market are not doing anything to preserve it. Well, that knowledge was created and maintained long before universities, nation states and capitalism existed, and it was alive simply because people cared enough to teach it to others and to learn it from others. From which follows, I think quite clearly, that as long as we learn from and teach each other that knowledge will be alive. We need nothing but to meet and share what we know, and learn what we don't (and hopefully doing it in a way that doesn't destroy what we actually want to save, if you catch my drift.)

Anyway, nuf said. It took me 15000km to finish writing this post, not something I usually do. I leave you with some pictures of the workshop (of course I forgot to take pictures, was too busy checking people file. When my friend Pauli comes to Chile in 2 years I will hire her for taking analog pictures of it.)

Thanks again Don.