There is evolution and there are those theories we use to interpret evolution. It just so happens that many evolutionary biologists, creationists and members of the media don’t see a difference, or prefer we not see a difference. It seems to be in the interest of many individuals to muddy the difference between a theory and what a theory represents, to confuse a map and the territory.

When a metaphor seeks to represent not a particular experience, but an interpretation of an experience, the result is something like a metaphor of a metaphor. It is perhaps useful when we know that we are engaged in this particular process. A problem is that using metaphors to describe metaphors for experience is a whole lot of what being human is all about.

Maybe 4,000 generations ago, an eyeblink in evolutionary time, humans thought differently. Culture had not yet engaged. Language may still have been gestural. Our brains may still not have lateralized for speech. Most of us may have still been random-handed, like our great-ape cousins. Primary process consciousness may have been our night and day.

Primary process is a Freudian process, interpreted by Gregory Bateson to be the foundation animal consciousness, featuring one time, one place, no opposites. Primary process is the experience of an ever-present now, with little ability to estimate different times or to consider more than one location at any one time, and no ability to imagine something’s opposite. Trying to imagine something opposite results only in the appearance of that which is the thing you want to imagine the opposite of. Six different consciousnesses are associated with primary process: animal consciousness; human embryo and infant consciousness; human dream consciousness; the human unconscious; particular human altered states accessed through drugs and alcohol; and autism.

Humans, like our animal brothers and sisters, lived and breathed primary process. Something truly peculiar happened and humans evolved split consciousness. We could still access primary process, but our everyday existence featured an experience dramatically different from our sleeping nights. Split consciousness gave us the ability to exercise imagination and simultaneously have more than one time and more than one place and conceive of opposites; moreover, split consciousness was accompanied by primary process. We became both split and nonsplit beings in our daytime waking lives. Imagination and dissociation were mated with a tendency to experience the world in a way that merged a thing and what a thing represented.

Primary process does not differentiate. With primary process, a thing that represents, and a thing that is represented, are the same. In the world of dream, symbol and symbolized are merged.

We live deeply peculiar lives characterized by both extreme dissociation and compulsion to merge. This unique consciousness is understandable when approached evolutionarily. Humans feature two kinds of consciousness, and one of those two consciousnesses is unique. Accompanying this experience is our usual tendency to not exercise an ability to accompany the experience, or observe how exactly we engage in two kinds of consciousness. The result is that we often confuse the map with the territory.

As theories of evolution develop, the theorists, critics of theorists and the media describing combating viewpoints seem to specialize in forgetting that theories of evolution are metaphors for evolution. When theorists purposefully confuse evolution with a theory of evolution, when myth-believers purposefully confuse a personal experience with information that transcends personal experience, when the media focus only on describing battles instead of how battles came about, we are encouraged to confuse a thing and that which a thing represents. In other words, both science practitioners and myth-believers are often lodged in primary process and do not know it, so effortlessly are they engaged in dissociation.

This is the paradox of being human. While fully engaged in our imaginations, we often don’t notice when we are confusing a thing and what a thing represents. Able to be in multiple times and multiple places while seeing opposites, we at the same time merge two things that are different, experiencing them as the same.

There is a solution to the paradox. Identify with that part of us which is aware of, observes and patiently embraces our experience of being both split and nonsplit beings. Accompany self.

For some reason, a rather strange and astonishing result of accompanying split and nonsplit selves is an experience of compassion, interconnection and not being alone. Consider theorizing from a position where everything is relative. Map and territory are understood in the context of consciousness location. There is no truth, no answer, no right interpretation. There are no arguments. There is only sharing of experience.

The idea of evolution is often confused with Darwin’s theory of natural selection. To understand evolution, we need to accompany ourselves.

I think big-scale, long-term and larger patterns. Immersed in evolutionary theory and the evolution of humans and their unique form of split consciousness, focusing on current politics and social change, I find myself attracted to the bigger picture and longer-term goals or transformations. It’s partly personality, partly habit and partly what I’ve found interesting over time that attracts me to how interconnections form and larger systems function.

Making those Sunday phone calls, I’m struck again and again by how focused organizers are on what is happening in their immediate area and how little they feel attracted to making sure that what they are doing is available for exploration on a larger scale, a broader geographic region. Organizers, generally, don’t think big.

This is particularly obvious to me when I send an email to a large group of organizers that are the heads of chapters or affiliates of national organizations. I note that my communication is authorized or sponsored by their central office. A very small percentage of the organizers respond. Or, a central office emails the affiliates or chapters, urging them to contact PJEP to become part of a statewide network. Few respond. What local organizers are focused on is what they are doing at the moment. Thinking outside the moment to consider how that individual and the local organization will benefit from connections to numerous other organizations is a relatively uncommon occurrence.

In other words, most members of the Left/Progressive movement that I am in contact with, and I’m in personal contact with over 700 organizers in 30 states, don’t think big in the context of interconnections with organizations across their state and in other states around the country. Not thinking big is the same as not thinking in an interconnected, horizontal, transparent fashion. I believe this is because most of the organizers I work with are old (over 55). Organizers often also have low expectations regarding the benefits of working with other organizations or letting other organizations know what they are doing. This sense of isolation seems characteristic of Left organizers of all ages.

I haven’t hit upon a solution, a way of successfully encouraging activists to think big, take risks and see a larger picture across larger periods of time. The American Left/Progressive movement is rife with disappointed, frustrated organizers that keep their focus close to home. This is another reason why I believe the coming changes will be enacted largely through young folks and those with communications technology expertise in Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. For the young, big picture is effortless and ubiquitous. All they need is an expanded sense of time. Then, everything they’d like to see won’t just seem possible; it will feel achievable in an immanent future.

There are, of course, the various national Left organizations that endorsed the protests that occurred the day after Obama announced he was sending additional troops to Afghanistan such as the United for Peace and Justice, Veterans For Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, Peace Action, the A.N.S.W.E.R Coalition, National Assembly, National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance, Pledge of Resistance, Voices for Creative Nonviolence and World Can’t Wait. They supported the actions by sending out emails to the activists on their lists. This is not a particularly creative or innovative way to use online technologies. The American Left is still firmly positioned in Web 1.0. We’ve not seen evidence that encouraging these organizations to behave differently, embracing some 2.0 upgrades, for example, would make a difference. They are almost without exception dramatically underfunded, and they have a mindset mired in one-to-many communications.

One of the problems limiting national organizations is that they don’t usually think in terms of encouraging collaboration at the local “grassroots” level, letting their local chapters work with other organizations’ local chapters within their communities. Such relationships would provide an ability for local chapters and activists to create and initiate their own projects tailored to the circumstances and needs of the community. They could be provided with funding, technical support or other resources. Such results do occur, but haphazardly instead of as part of a larger strategy. The use of new technologies to integrate local chapters of different national organizations is almost nonexistent, other than mentions on one another’s websites.

There are the aggregator websites, like Democraticunderground.org, which provide a place to congregate, converse, post content and share opinions. These sites have not been built to serve as tools for organization, though some of the blogs have crossed that line. Whereas Talkingpointsmemo.com is pretty much pure centrist story posting, Dailykos.com offers powerful organizing trajectories in addition to opinion sharing. Powerful voices there rise to the top, voices expressing unique interpretations of the political landscape and offering effective calls to action. Nevertheless, Dailykos is seen as a support site for the Democratic Party, not a Left venue.

Counterpunch.org, Alternet.org, Truthout.org, Commondreams.org, Buzzflash.com and Truthdig.com, are curator sites displaying and archiving news from a Left perspective and don’t push specific activist interventions or lobby for particular actions. TheNation.com, Motherjones.com, Progressive.org, and Inthesetimes.org, the independent political media, also are not action creation and execution forces on the Left. Click here for an overview of these types of publications and websites.

Perhaps inspired by Glenn Beck’s success last September in getting tens of thousands on the D.C. mall, in November, the popular webcast and radio producers, the young Turks at theyoungturks.com called for health care demonstrations in L.A., N.Y. and Atlanta at the offices of CNN. Turnout was small, but it was an interesting experiment. Other than the large immigrant rights demonstrations, has another video, cable or mainstream TV vehicle used its platform to get activists onto the streets? This is again, a one-to-many communication, hardly 2.0, but it sets an interesting precedent if the origin of the action emerges out of, for example, social networking tools.

Candidate Obama’s campaign, of course, used 2.0 tools with maestro-like finesse, empowering local organizers in ways unheard of by providing access to real-time information on campaign supporters which could be used in support of focused projects or to orchestrate local events. The Left has nothing like those kinds of resources or a central message. What might the Left take from the Obama campaign that the Left can use?

Facebook seems to be central to almost all the horizontal, spontaneous demonstrations occurring around the country. Responses to Prop 8 and then the Israeli-Gaza protests were integrally tied to Facebook use, which helped to bring out activists from all demographics. The radicals of the 1960s finally awakened to social media. It feels likely that new organizing tools or techniques are going to emerge in a context of Facebook or Twitter integration. We’re still watching for a large, Twitter-inspired/directed protest to occur in the U.S. as occurred in Dresden, Germany earlier in February where twitter was used successfully to thwart a planned neo-Nazi march.

Though there is a seamless integration between individuals within local organizations posting Iraq War demonstrations to one of 40 networks across the country with all that content appearing in a single spot (pjep.org home page), with over 1500 organizations accessing information about the accumulation, what could enhance this process of individuals within local organizations feeling empowered by awareness of the larger whole?

Please share your thoughts with us regarding the Left, social media, new organizing technologies and effective new strategies and interventions. What exactly do you see happening? How will these technologies be utilized?

-Marcia Bernsten & Andrew Lehman

Nevertheless, on those occasions when I tried to glean some feelings from the past, I was struck by how few metaphors I used to explain a thought or feeling. Mostly, I just described my experience by writing down my feelings. Not only did this make it very difficult to read, but it seemed to provide the raw emotions that were expressed in a way that made them more difficult to absorb. Without metaphor, access seemed difficult.

Through the years, I’ve encouraged myself to use metaphor and graspable images to enhance my ability to communicate what I want to say. At first, it felt very forced, so deliberate were the efforts to make what I had to say understandable. Over the last ten years, it has become easier. Starting this blog two years ago pushed me further in the direction of writing to be understood at the same time that I wrote to express what I had to say.

This last summer, listening to the computer-generated music compositions of my son, Elia, I suddenly saw in my mind’s eye my work regarding evolution in video format with Elia’s music deepening the communication of those written compositions. In August, when he and I drove down roadways that flanked the Mississippi, I began to interpret what I was seeing in ways that would impact what I was writing. Music, images and words were starting to interact.

That process deepens. Using the teleprompter, I lay down the narrative. I collect photos and videos off of Flickr’s Creative Commons section and occasionally Wikipedia Commons and other sources. I shoot some video myself. I consult Elia regarding music. I don’t tax the capabilities of Final Cut Express, utilizing just the basics for now, discovering what feels like a whole other hidden, creative capability inside me.

For several years, I produced comic strips and panels. Words and pictures told a narrative story. Producing video, I find a part of me prepared to produce work in a similar format. When creating comics, I wait for an image to appear as I talk to myself, encouraging creations, but when creating video, I search the work of other artists and amateurs. As a professional artist and amateur theorist I find myself deeply appreciating the Creative Commons. Both professional and amateur are treated with respect.

I am slipping down into a whole new world. I have disappeared down rabbit holes in the past. Marcia has shared with me her fear that I am about to disappear. I am enthralled. I foresee spending many hours searching for content on the Internet and shooting my own video in search of evocative examples of what my words are seeking to say. It’s only a matter of time before the words start to take their cues from the outside, not the inside, taking into consideration the images, sounds and music that I feel influenced by.

My words have always emerged from somewhere deep within me. What I’m sensing now is that my environment is about to start making words.

Understanding neoteny as integral to human evolution and current social change is to reference evolutionary theories common in the nineteenth century (i.e., Mivart, Hyatt, Cope) that were let go when natural selection was raised to be our theory of choice. Ideas evidencing sensitivity to interconnection were abandoned in a theorizing environment that focused on theories offering the greatest number of questions being answered by the simplest hypothesis.

A reductionist milieu tends to pay less attention to solutions that suggest a connection between individuals or species across a scale or between scales. Over the last ten years, there has emerged a new evolution theory discipline called evolutionary developmental biology. In many ways, evo devo harkens back to the nineteenth-century theories that focused on the power of interconnection to both understand and predict how evolution will unfold. Central to evo devo and to the nineteenth-century theories was understanding the power of how individuals mature, and how maturity trajectories change over time when species are influenced by evolution. Central to understanding these kinds of changes, changes in maturity, is understanding how the environment directly and indirectly encourages evolutionary change. It is helpful to examine how the environment and social structure impact ontogeny, or growth.

Neoteny is one of two foundation maturity paradigms, one where the infant or embryo features of an individual in a species unfolds over generations to appear in later and later stages until manifesting in the look and behavior of adults. This is not a theory. This is a description of biological process. These processes can be studied by reading about heterochrony, described in detail in Stephen J. Gould’s Ontogeny and Phylogeny.

Humans evidence neoteny. It can be argued whether humans do or don’t evidence neoteny, but neoteny is central to how species evolve. Infant and embryo features of our ancient forebears have emerged to appear in the physiology and behavior of contemporary adults. I would suggest that what is occurring now in modern society, with huge increases in diversity, transparency and horizontal communication, is evidence of society being impacted by neotenic tendencies. I would go so far as to closely associate neoteny and the Internet.

There is one aspect of this process which was not understood in the nineteenth century, and it is only beginning to be understood today. Neoteny is hypothetically closely associated with matrifocal social structures, societies where women share authority with men. Cooperative males are highly valued in societies that value commanding women. Modern society is evidencing profoundly matrifocal tendencies. It is possible that surges in neoteny emerging today are closely associated with female-centered social structure that respects cooperation and creativity.

To observe perhaps the greatest evidence on neoteny today you need go no further than the Creative Commons. When an aesthetic features a proliferation of borrowing, with each creative act deeply influenced by the creativity of others in the environment, you are observing a societal reproduction of what occurs in earliest embryo ontogeny. As embryos, each being is profoundly impacted by changes in the environment, with growth determined by how each cell decides to grow, impacted by the behavior of its neighbors. Earliest maturing, ontogeny, is all about responding to the environment. That exact dynamic is emerging today in the behavior of those relying upon the Creative Commons for information that influences their personal growth and creativity.

Neoteny, the prolongation of infant and embryo features into the look and behaviors of adults, is perhaps the guiding principle, the zeitgeist, of our time.

Three usually separate aspects of my life nevertheless take up portions of almost every day.  I run a small web development firm with six staff members that designs, maintains and markets websites.  We have over 400 clients, mostly small businesses.  Portions of every day are devoted to what’s involved in co-directing a 1,500-member organization, concerned with peace, justice and environment national communications and an action-initiation network.  Early mornings and weekends, I theorize and seek to explain my theory of evolution.

Though my design and technical staff assist me with building the national network and theory sites, there is relatively little traffic among these three areas as regards the people I’m in contact with, my colleagues and allies.  Most folks I am in contact with about my theorizing have no contact with my design or activist connections.  The people in each of the three areas tend to stay in that area.

Not so when it comes to my family.  My son, Elia, has joined me at demonstrations and conducted research for the national network sites.  We often discuss evolutionary theory.  He’s also the photographer for my design firm, shooting cuisine for our restaurant clients.

I don’t much discuss theory with other members of the family.  Marcia was integrally involved with my theory thought process ten years ago.  I overwhelmed her.  These days I only tell her about new ideas.  Marcia handles credit card processing for the business.  We also work together on many of the peace and justice projects we get involved in, though Marcia works these projects in greater depth, and she is involved in more local organizations than I am.

So, my wife and son are mostly pretty often involved in the three areas I spend a lot of time in.  I don’t usually eat breakfast or lunch (instead I drink smoothies or eat balance bars) or watch TV.  I work out of my home and have no commute.  The elimination of meals, entertainment and commutes adds hours to each day, which I spend on these three activities, business, activism and theorizing.  My reflexive tendency to blur the boundaries among these three things might be partly a desire to get more out of the time I devote to them, partly a way to find more dance partners that move to all three kinds of music and partly my neurotic difficulty with tolerating separations.  As an introvert with a natural tendency to work alone, blending separations in my life is perhaps an indirect, often neurotic way of addressing personality divisions within myself.

I’m not clear on the connection between obsession and integration, but there seems to be a relationship between the two.  In my theorizing, my work, my life, and my relationships, obsession and integration emerge in ways that impact how I think and what I do.  Play is integral to the mix, as is neurosis.  At the same time that I often toy with my life to see what new and interesting things I can engage in, I muddle my life, seeking solace by shutting out the world or withdrawing from intimacy.

My obsession with integration can create difficulties expressing and experiencing affection.

What I’ve been playing with the last year and a half is the idea that biology and history are connected by social structure, and that teleology exists but is biologically informed.

The Hegelian view of history was predicated on pattern and predictable changes in pattern over time.  Darwin’s theory of natural selection was founded on an opposite view of the effects of time, stating that change occurred only when heritable, randomly generated features compelled a proliferation of traits that served to promote the goals of individuals to survive to procreate.  Evolution displays no thesis and antithesis unless they are represented by every mating pair.

Perhaps ironically, the theory of natural selection does not operate in a narrative frame.  I say ironically because the foundation thesis has been interpreted to support Social Darwinism and free markets, which promote that story, or narrative, that controlling elites are the result of natural processes.  Two pieces were left out of that not-useful story.

First, the free market interpretations of the theory of natural selection don’t view evolution from a larger scale.  Interconnection is ignored when focus is on survival strategies of constituent parts.  Marx’s Hegelian large-scale view provided leverage that transcended capitalist focus on individual achievements.  Whether evolution or societies are being studied, the scale of investigation can determine the solutions that emerge.

Second, interconnection is not only observed by an increase in scale, it is experienced by immersion in the process.  The experience of interconnection removes narration from the equation, introducing the experiencer to the feeling of an ever-present now, autistic primary process.  Compassion often results from the twin experience of interconnection viewed as a whole and interconnection felt from immersion.  When boundaries blur but sensitivity to scale remains, insight can result.  Compassion is a feature of integrated insight.

In a Hegelian fashion, I have proposed that we are in the middle of a social transformation that features a synthesis of two foundation principles.  I hypothesize that we evolved over the last, at least, two million years in a matrifocal, matrilineal/matrilocal context.  That swerved to patrifocal, patrilineal/patrilocal over the last 50,000, accelerating in the last 25,000 to start rocketing the last 6,000.  A slowdown began maybe 500 years ago.  A return to matrifocal commenced the last 300 with an acceleration occurring in the last 100.  In this latest generation, things are rocketing.  We could interpret current patterns as a synthesis of the two social structures, or as the reemergence of the matrifocal.  Both interpretations make sense.

Oscillations between social structures go with the territory of being an evolving social being.  Different social structures serve different animal societies in different ways.  Evolution charts social structure changes as the environment and social structure impact individuals.  Environmental influence is huge.  As regards humans, trends over time as humans ally themselves with social structure compel trajectories that simulate teleology.  It looks like a transcendental god is in play.  What is happening is biology.  Hierarchies rise and now fall in direct relation to biological imperatives.  Hierarchies rose for thousands of years under patriarchal frames of reference, high testosterone males and low testosterone females.  Now they fall.

Somehow, Hegelian narrative interpretations of experience and non-narrative primary process interpretations are both true at the same time.  Patrifocal transcendental and matrifocal immanent paradigms are both in play.  Evolution unfolds at several scales at the same time.  We both live in a return to matrifocal times and we are experiencing a synthesis of traditional patrifocal and ancient matrifocal.  Somehow, that which is aboriginal that is reemerging is also wholly new.

Understanding how things are different is somehow also the same as understanding how they are the same.

My dreams grew to reflect the amount of time I spent at a computer keyboard adjusting the products of my imagination by typing instead of drawing or painting.  I sometimes still inked by hand.  Yet, coloration grew to become totally digital.  While sleeping, I began to adjust dreams using keyboard commands and Photoshop features.  It became routine to stop a dream and undo a section, withdrawing to an earlier stage before the unfolding of a chain of events that was not desirable.  I found myself frequently simply choosing to undo accidents in dreams, adjusting life with keyboard commands.

Final Cut Express, video production software, shows signs of another such evolution.  Playing with iMovie for about four months, I quickly bucked up against its limitations, even with the relatively simple piece I was producing (The Conservative Left).  Learning FCE is far more complicated and sophisticated.  It will take time, but it will be worth it.  It feels not unlike I’m producing dreams.  I expect my dreams will change, eventually integrating how I use FCE to create and adjust what my mind creates at night.

Perhaps the deepest difference between producing video and creating static Photoshop productions is the visceral difference between creating in narrative format productions composed of the work of many other creators and creating in static format content from only a personal repertoire.  What began in the 1980s with Hip Hop artists stealing copyrights from corporate-supported artists has exploded with Creative Commons licenses to borrow from millions of contributors sharing their creations with anyone for free.  A net result is a profound change in creative process.  Art has become a community endeavor instead of homage to the cult of individuality.  Majoring in art in the 1970s was all about the individual creating unique content to push the boundaries of a particular medium.  The Internet and the compulsion to share are destroying the modern allegiance to the idea that art is about an aesthetic survival of the fittest.

Video production–at home, on a computer, relying upon the works of millions of other contributors, working in a narrative format that tells a story over time, relying upon music, words and images–provides a profound opportunity to evolve consciousness in a direction that allows an obliteration of boundaries.  That is what art is about, the exploration of conventional boundaries and then their violation in order to better understand what all a human is.  This new medium, in combination with the contributions of others, who provide video, sound, words and photography, creates opportunities to integrate the community into the self, allowing an elegant, passionate dissolution of individuality.

I really like video.  I had no idea that this would be the case.

A larger work would also describe a short history, most influential theorists and currently accepted theories in the disciplines being explored.  Most of my writing falls within anthropology, neuropsychology and evolutionary biology.  Still, I discuss primatology, psychology, consciousness, medicine and endocrinology.  It is impossible in a short work to offer a several-discipline context.  It’s even unwieldy in a longer work, particularly one that seeks to communicate with a lay audience.  There is also the fact that though I am somewhat familiar with what I am talking about in anthropology, neuropsychology and evolutionary biology, I am woefully unqualified to provide much depth in the other disciplines I touch upon.  Intimidated by what I am doing, I prefer to avoid behaving like I know what I am talking about in a discipline outside where that discipline touches upon my basic thesis.  So, in Evolution, Autism and Social Change, I offer about ten pages where I review classic heterochronic theory, or the subdiscipline of evolutionary biology most integral to understanding what I am doing.  I’m worried those ten pages may lose three-quarters of my readers.

There are many philosophical implications to Evolution, Autism and Social Change.  That also gets saved for a larger work.  I estimated 17 sections of implications.  That was way too much for what is essentially an introduction.

The future implications of the theory also seemed too much information for a short work.  Those ten threads were left for the larger work.

One principle or concept has emerged since Evolution, Autism and Social Change went to the editor.  The central thesis of my theorizing condensed to the following sentence about nine months ago:  The Orchestral Theory of Evolution is the study of the rates and timing of maturation, with testosterone levels impacting rate and estrogen levels controlling timing, with those environmental or social structure adjustments that influence levels of testosterone and estrogen determining the speed, timing, features and direction of evolution. It feels lately like it has condensed even further.  The word maturity now summarizes the central thesis.  Whereas Darwin focused on conception and death with his theory of natural selection, which merged survival of the fittest with heritable traits, I find that the word “maturity” suggests all that which occurs between conception and demise that influences evolution.  I’m not sure how to integrate this understanding with the work now with the editor.

When I first wrote this stuff up in 1998 in the website serpentfd.org, estrogen’s connection with the dynamic was not at all clear or understood.  It was all about testosterone.  The model was expressed as a four-layered process unfolding in the push-and-pull way a serpent crawls.  Though I understood that the timing of maturation was integral, I had no idea what informed timing.  So I concentrated only on changes in rates of maturation.

With what I’m finishing now, I feel a whole is communicated, even though much has been left out.  Nevertheless, as someone who is not an academic–I am an artist by training–I am now left with the choice of how exactly the book is to be framed.  I am concluding that it is more genuine and reasonable to make this a book with an artistic rather than an academic slant.  Joining sections with illustrations seems right.  It makes it more accessible.  To pitch the work to fit academic conventions would probably be a waste of time.  Academics don’t offer attention to the work of nonacademics in their field.  It’s just off their radar.  Academics don’t even often offer attention to multidisciplinary theories that include their discipline.  They are used to regarding the work of those that have put in the time to get a degree in their particular discipline, those that have something to lose if they don’t perform.

Maybe 30 years ago a book came out with many diagram-like illustrations describing the spiritual transformation that was going to occur as a result of several planets aligning in a certain way.  The book was called Harmonic Convergence and was written by Jose Arguelles.  Even though I’m writing a book on evolution grounded in conventional science, there is really no format precursor to this book I’m finishing.  The closest thing that comes to mind is that weird astrology book.  Bummer.

Trying to find a publisher for what I’ve done seems a prescription to feel rejected.  Though some well-known authors, scientists and theorists have said kind and/or respectful things to me in emails, or just asked questions (Simon Baron-Cohen, William Irwin Thompson, Elaine Morgan, Riane Eisler, Tom Robbins), none has gone so far as to offer firm support for what is clearly an unproven theory, though they have usually had encouraging things to say.  I don’t think a publisher interprets encouragement as support.  I will self-publish.

I have several friends that have written books and found publishers.  Just because a publishing company puts a work into print does not mean it promotes the work.

So, I’ll publish this myself, if I bring it to print.  I’ll begin by posting this as a free pdf download. April 1st is my target date.  It will be difficult to categorize.  I’ll mull over ways to promote it.  How many books are out there purporting to explain autism from an evolutionary perspective using a new feminine theory of evolution, with illustrations?

Some of the image/word combinations, what this culture calls comics, align themselves well with the themes and content of sections of Evolution, Autism and Social Change.  These comics were all from the early to mid-1990s, from before I disappeared in the late 1990s in studies of serpent mythology, ancient matrifocal societies and then evolutionary theory.  Some of the metaphors carry over.  I often use music, children and water images to evoke concepts, but many of the subtleties of the theory are not suggested by the comics.

I have no idea where accessible original digital files are, and they are now 11 years old.  Locked inside of jazz discs are most of the images, but jazz discs are just about inaccessible these days.  My discs are corrupted by a common defect that makes retrieval almost impossible.  I may have to recolor and redraw many of these pieces if I go in this direction.

I sold many of these images to an early Internet greeting card firm.  I think it went out of business in the year 2000.  The firm had rights to the images for five years.  Almost all the images were originally comics I’d published in various magazines, newsprint monthlies and quarterlies through the 90s.  Whereas in 1990 my work was mostly funny, or trying to be funny, by 1995 it was mostly social commentary or provocative art.  Early in the 1990s, a piece might have appeared in 25 publications.  By 1995, two or three publishers might have picked a comic up.  In 1996, I stopped doing the comics and started an illustrated book on dragons that evolved into the theorizing that I’m now considering appropriate for these comics to accompany.

So, this is going to take some mental wrestling, combining media, deciding what to use and considering propelling myself back into the visual arts.  I need to ponder the need to create some new comic work to accompany the chapters or sections in Evolution, Autism and Social Change that don’t have work from 15 years ago that complement what is being said.

It’s not clear to me at this point where this is going.