syn·cre·tism (s
ngkr-tzm, sn-)
n.
1. Reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief, as in philosophy or religion, especially when success is partial or the result is heterogeneous.
My "MyStory Mystory" rationale:
I was reading Ken Wilber’s A Brief History of Everything (2001), which introduced me to the idea of holarchies: a holarchy as a hierarchy of holons. Holons are both simultaneously a whole into themselves and also a part of something larger and I found this true in writing a mystory. A mystory is a genre, itself a holon of the apparatus of electracy, made of parts of the holons of literacy. Within the holarchy of culture, holons are the citizens which perform a balance between anarchy and civilization. Contrasting the idea of the holon and holarchies are Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of a rhizome, as quoted in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism; a "rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo… The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots… it must be produced constructed… detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and always has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight" (1605).
Manifesting both of the properties of the holon and the rhizome is the genre of the “mystory,” a pedagogical tool using a hypertexted website which transcends the level of the academic essay (a lower holarchy in pedagogical terms) but also acts as a rhizome intermediary to a widesite image, a “framework” to EmerAgency, which Gregory Ulmer, in his book Internet Invention, sees as the ultimate use of the electrate apparatus. EmerAgency is a kind of consultancy, “digitally linking all the inquiries of [people] around the world… whose purpose is to witness and to testify, to give a voice to a part of the public left out of community decision making…” (1). While the sciences, Ulmer cites according to Wittengenstein, “solve all the technical or scientific problems, we would still leave the human question untouched” (1). EmerAgency is the practical application of the Humanities to those human questions and the mystory is a heuretic method, inventive instead of hermeneutic.
Instead of taking what is known and deconstructing the material into a new synthesis, a Mystory is the new thesis that invents electracy, “simulating a wide image” that connects discourses, discovering and inventing images and text until “some pattern will emerge” (8). Ulmer further states “that everyone’s life manifests such patterns: every person possesses a wide or guiding image… if only in a potential state, as a disposition or propensity (18). It’s within this diegesis that a mystoriographer can enter a meditative state, entering the chora to invent and an epiphany can most likely occur, that he or she can see past the “homiletic or stereotyped readymade stuffing the society supplies” that fills the space that informs his or her identity (66).
It is through syncretism that I constructed a mystory which acted exactly as a plateau, as Deleuze and Guatarri in their 1972 text, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, quote Gregory Bateson’s use of the word plateau, “a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end” (Norton, 1605-1606). Each page and each story contained within the hypertexted widesite acts as a plateau, not as a finished product with a definite end. Writing as a rhizome, even with each page a holon, the text and images belong to a form of expression that “can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau” (1606). This is a complete contrast to my separate disciplines in the studium of disciplinary discourses of academic rhetoric, natural sciences, creative studies and public safety in which each study remained isolated entities in my identity formation.
In trying to begin without a beginning, I related to the four institutions in the popcycle of the mystory genre (family, entertainment, school, discipline) by looking for an image that began before my beginning and I what came up on a random Google search were images of the cover of The New Yorker magazine. I honed in on the cover for the one that was published on my birthday in 1960 and found an image of the opening to the tunnel where the commuter trains appear and disappear going to and from Grand Central Station in the middle of Manhattan. I felt a punctum, as described by Roland Barthes, in which I made broad associations to this place and its meaning. I had memories of entering and descending (and leaving and ascending) from here when I once commuted three days a week from my home in Connecticut to study acting and dancing in Greenwich Village. Included in my associations was the parable of Plato’s cave as I imagined the trains coming in and going out, the travelers held in their seats, having only to stare at the images before them, but being freed to the light to see ever more increasing bits of reality before having to descend again. There was the wide image of an inner world and an outer world and of an above and below and I, as a traveler, acutely aware of the threshold.
I began with this image and then began constructing my story in Mystory on Google sites, where I crafted web pages in a surrealist manner, simply throwing up placeholders for each discourse, with either a website name, an image, a quote or definition, a person or some other fragment associated with the four institutions of the popcycle. It was a quodlibet of creativity and some associations were immediate and inherent while others percolated didn’t seem to care to reach to another plateau. I didn’t remove them, knowing that, as a continually growing work-in-progress, some meaningful juxtaposition would appear and I would be able to incorporate the holon into the rhizome.
My story told as a mystory is the monument valley of plateaus because I am older than most of the mystoriographers trying out the genre in the "Florida school." I have been to more than a dozen colleges outside of my primary, public education and I have tasted more disciplines than can be counted on my fingers (although probably not enough if I include counting on my toes). My undergraduate degree was in creative writing and English education and I’ve trained and commuted between work in public safety (emergency medical technician and police dispatcher), in entertainment (screenwriting and acting), and in other domains that cross multiple disciplines. My public safety and my dolphin training work show up in my creative fiction and non-fiction, so I published these stories as part of my mystory.
I thought of the influences on my life that I associated with the threshold experiences of being “above and below” and my work at the thresholds between plateaus and came up with thematic water images. From my youth there was dream image of the merman of “The Man from Atlantis” which led to my beginnings in creative writing, which also associated to my life heroes of Jacques Cousteau and his associations with the conservation of life, and the environment in the songs of John Denver, a singer-songwriter I had admired since I first heard him sing. Carl Sagan goes all the way out to the stars while the 11th Dimension examines the hidden universes around us, which coincidentally, looks so much like a plaything that dolphins create on their own in Bubbles. Branches, plateaus and memes come into and go out of existence as I'm sure these hypertexted links will do as my Mystory evolves into a simpler, condensed or a different more complex, more elaborate form. I may start a new theme in a new Mystory and link this one to the other, creating a new interface, a new threshold. As my technical skills improve I hope to add homemade videos to my quodlibets. Whatever this becomes, through method or madness, it will remain (to quote Gregory L. Ulmer from Heuretics), an "infinite regress" of my stories.