I have been among the cities of my kind, doing the work of citizens; my messages have been all of business and technology, of qualifications and parameters, of the grinding logic of administration, of effort for profit and the crushing reality reflected by numbers.
Numbers, of course, are the magic of our religion. They are the key to our priesthoods and the keystone of our civilization: the engineering, the administration, the systems. Every area we have not been able to reduce to numbers has been chaotic and retrograde except in the few instances where someone has brought inspiration to bear. The rest depends on numbers and the realities they reflect.
It has come to this: the manager's first credo is to measure with number because he believes that if he cannot measure it, he cannot manage it. The belief 'If you can't count it you can't manage it'
is an excellent remedy for a specific error, namely managing by opinion.
But it is itself an error if it is taken much deeper than that, because it substitutes counting for seeing. You can see, if you care to look, where human aberration has left its scars; you can see the glances of anguish and the flinch of criminality and the courage of continuing to cope with confusion or the terror that makes certain confusions un-faceable. If you look you can see a lot of things which do not need to be counted, which add up more to conditions than numbers or objects. And you can manage conditions by continuing to have the courage to see them directly. Then, having taken that step, you can also use numbers, as a helpmeet tool. To use them as a substitute of confront is a departure from humanity.
The tendency to do so trains the mind into a cold and intellectual grasp of affairs which reduces things of the heart down to negligible impulses. It appears in the retelling of it that the heart's
fire was away when science made its conquests, banked under weight of numbers. But the numbering and measuring of science is never born except in the fire of the heart. The careful part of weighing scientifically is informed only by the free imagination which in itself knows numbering. There is the quick of experience and the engine of existence.
The issue to hand is not the poetic version of this phenomenon but whether or not there is a separate and understandable logic system (meaning a set of laws which govern the rationale behind the phenomena) just as the logic of numbers with its apparently ineluctable accuracy (which so often doesn't quite match experience but always because there were other variables not accounted for precisely enough). A logic of experience would reveal to us the ebb and flow and exchange of the powers of beingness itself, of the sentience that informs the will regardless of data, of gut instinct and the ability to know beyond one's information, and of the strange stuff which drives the creation of art and justice, our two rarest commodities.
(The debate this last could start should be brought up short. Art of worth and justice of merit equally have the telling power to bring tears of recognition in an average and reasonably sentient human. Too little does.
Anyway I m not talking to them, I am talking to you. There is, I think, a genuine Logic of Experience which is not the exact spatial numbers-in-time game which we assume our science is. It has its own rules which govern which comes first and when goes where.
To identify any of those rules would open new horizons; because the vast bulk of our experience is occluded by language, which in turn is built on heavy physical experiential structures deriving originally from the era of strife by body as a means of life, we obscure the scope of our experience for want of language. For example there is an entire spectrum of emotional variation between anger and, say, boredom. We cannot subdivide it into more than a few slices--for example, hostility, resentment, begrudgement, indifferent tolerance, boredom, and perhaps thence to benign tolerance, cautious agreement, to mild interest. We can see these fluxes of affinity-state and make poems out of the experience of them but we cannot well and truly say what we are looking at or talking bout. We cannot name the particles of attention and define how they react under conditions of love, hate or indifference, communication or isolation, although we each have a huge store of experience of these things occurring. If there is a logic of experience it is certainly true that the one thing we have is a plethora of data points; there is nothing that occupies us more than trying to relate experiences to each other, as well as to achieve the experience of relating to each other in some way. What is the logic of this maelstrom of data? Does it have any pattern of rationality in it to be found? Let us reason together.