Every now and then, a person will encounter a group of people (or person), a set of ideas, or perhaps even an entire culture or tradition that will completely change the way that that person thinks about the world. I call these people, ideas, and events paradigm-shifters.
When someone undergoes a paradigm shift in their thinking, they see the world in a completely different way. And I don’t mean that in an abstract sense – a paradigm shift is something that is concrete – you relate and interact with the world in a different manner. To put it another way, you can think of paradigm shifts as discreet events i.e. I was one person before I met this person, thing, or idea and now I am completely different after, so different in fact, that I can divide my life into two separate phases: who I was before, and who I am now.
Paradigm shifts occurs all the time, and I think they are often the emotional high points of a person’s personal experience. Think of a graduation, or a marriage, the birth of a child, the death of a loved one – what you are thinking about are events which change a person’s understanding of themselves in the world. And they act differently because of it.
What I want to write about here though, is a different kind of important experience, one that has to do with relationships, specifically displaced relationships. Everyone has probably met a person in their life that has really changed who they are or how they understand the world around them. But there is another kind of relationship that people forge between those they don’t know personally, but with whom they feel a deep personal resonance.
While in college I happened upon each of the three people in the title of this entry (Thomas Merton, Derek Bailey, John Cage) through various ways – research, curiosity, recommendation. And I began to read (and in Mr. Bailey and Mr. Cage’s case, listen to) all that I could about these three men. I found their ideas, their music, and their attitudes towards life incredibly interesting, and each in their own way completely changed the way I thought about myself and the world I live in.
Now, I’ll digress for a moment to point out how strange it is that a person whom you’ve never met (nor ever will meet as the three people are all deceased) could change your life, your way of thinking and understanding. But it’s true – it happens.
So if you can accept the strangeness, I’d like to share with you over the course of these entries (which will appear as I write them) my interest in these three people, their ideas, and how they changed the way I think – how they caused me to shift paradigms. I hope that perhaps you’ll find some of the ideas and information I want to write about interesting, and perhaps some of these ideas may even tip you off to other ideas or people that you’d like to know more about. I’m certainly no authority on any of these people, and these entries will be as much about me as they will be about the subjects I’ll be presenting. My interest is in sharing what I’ve learned and understood with the hope that others might find it interesting, and if not, then at least they will know a little more about me and what I find intriguing. People often ask what I’m interested in, what I like, and its difficult in those situation to give any more than a superficial answer. So this is a chance for me to dig a bit deeper and share some things that have really been important to me.
Finally, I should add that it’s somewhat misleading for me to write only about three dead white men, all born within 18 years of one another, and who are all critically considered to be representative of the last cultural stages of high-modernism. However, this is part of the reason why I grouped them to write about together – they seem to fit together well in my mind.
I could just as easily write about women who I find incredibly interesting and life changing (Ursula LeGuin, Susannah Breslin, and many others) or non-American/Europeans (Mazen Kerbaj, Ibn Arabi, Haruki Murakami) or even popular figures who are much less obscure (Jimi Hendrix, Mitch Hedburg). Most of those folks are actually still alive as well (thankfully so!), and perhaps one day I will also get around to writing about them. But I’ve been meaning to write about these guys for a while, so consider this my very long introduction to the story of how Thomas Merton, Derek Bailey, and John Cage changed the way I think and how they introduced me to some ideas, people and traditions that have become very important to me since.
What you wrote about the pull toward three dead white men reminded me of my own pull toward three alive and dead white women. I could cite of many others for their influence over my intellectutal and dare I say it, “philosophical” development, but I tend to fall back on Goodall, Gadikas and Fossey.
PS – Mitch’s movie – All Together Now is coming to your sister’s apartment soon – want to watch it with me?