I reviewed 1986 Vivarium letter to now aged mom

I had sent my mom many letters while I was in graduate school. She is very old and has told me that they will be of no use to her beyond the grave . She said that if I wouldn't read them, she'd throw them out . I couldn't "abandon myself", so I read them for myself . The letters reminded me of disappointments focusing what I wanted in my life .

I had seen a movie about Vivarium in 1986 and written her :
"The idea is to bring computing to the level of a 2 year old by having young children simulate a synergistic environment conducive to research and creativity blocked by more competitive and symbolic modes of thinking."

This one sentence illuminated multiple connections of what I wanted out of life .

Perhaps this list will have a coherent resonance .

Stanford University is a great university, perhaps an unattainable holy grail . There's a street corner in Stanford, across to one side you have laser research, another robotics, another some sort of advanced computer interface consortium, etc. What a street corner ! You would think Stanford is a nexus where you could meet anyone on a street corner.

Not so.

If you go international folk dancing at Stanford, you don't dance with students at Stanford; students at Stanford are, instead, all studying hard alone for they don't want to get weeded out from the great institution . They're struggling dismally to defend the reputation of being the smartest that they started in High School. If you enlarge your circle of friends, being the smartest is a hard reputation to defend, but defend you must if that is all you perceive yourself to be  .

To be alone is it such a bad thing, a delusion defended by the "smartest kids" (in high school when they graduate to higher institutions) ?

One of the earliest primative experiences of identity of a baby is raw terror at his mother leaving the room followed by her return . It is very close to the experience of death . Indeed, if the mother were to abandon the baby, he would die . But, her leaving, combined with her eventual return, also somehow teaches him that he is separate from her . It teaches him his separate identity .

One of my greatest excitements is to pass through a feeling of utter abandonment with a problem in science or mathematics or computer science to the victory of finding, not a vacuum, but rather that "you are there for yourself" .

A child passes through a period of fierce independence in the terrible twos with "no no no". All this stuff forms a foundation of who we are in our society, yet it is a world of psychological flux not often "invaded" by busy persons , often occupied by "rigid" caregivers .

It produced very disconcerting feelings in me, the invader, to "invade" preschool on sunday morning with all I want to "teach" 2 to 5 year olds and be told to leave them alone to their emerging creative lonely problem solving : this abandonment and victory thing that I so adore .

Yet, women have, according to a course in men and women, traditionally just observed, as a psychiatrist might, the young child to enable him to learn two things (without reference to her as a adjucating authority) :
1. to solve his own problems and also
2. learn to get along with other children .

Persons who work hard alone to teach become disconcerted to see such a role suddenly thrust upon them . After a time, I might not be so . I might learn how to construct manageable problems for the children to give them that thrill I experience . That would really be teaching . My experience at pseudo teaching was competing with collegues I pretended to teach while actually trying to show I had better command understanding on the subject than they to get graded favorably on a curve against them . I have had the impression that, in scientific lectures, there was always the invisible professor or mother in the background being taught but the audience was deliberately lost with the bullet charts . Something got distorted after preschool and was already distorted in it ; some sort of integration of self help and helpfulness . Part of this integration comes from automating computer algebra and various parts of idea developement characteristically owned by the "lone executive"  , the masked man ; finding out who the "real man" is .

I might imagine a preschool teacher has retreated from some other painful experiences in life to try to relive what she hadn't gotten the first time around . Are there doctoral degrees allowing research in this child rearing stuff or is it only developed, traumatically by Italians like me, in family arguments ? What is leadership beyond Junto or the anonymity of the staff officer Air Force concept .

Can a child "lead" a child ? I try but am terrified to invade and attempt this "research" .

Some misguided people become pre-school teachers and others go to Stanford .

Someone at Stanford, who I idealized and shall remain anonymously known as "the robot lady" was working late into the night alone on the prerequisite course of systems making computer compilers .  She said I wouldn't be really interested in her and when I tried to strike up a conversation on a numerical analysis class I was taking over television from it, she bragged she could finish the book in a week . So, either I wouldn't be interested in her or she wouldn't be interested in me . She needed her space . Every Stanford student does or they flunk out . Maybe the very smartest of the smartest actually have time to be friends with smart people .

Many students at Stanford are going to make startup companies in the Silicon Valley and have put "their lives" on standby whatever their "lives" are . Will they have iLive's with their families or just be remote executives making the kind of money to send their children to Stanford ?

I had hung around Stanford Memorial Church while I was working in the area (and getting progressively disgusted by work in the military industrial complex where ultimately rank is all). I snuck into the robot labs . On the sides of computers I saw mathematical graphiti, theorems . What I place, I idealized . But, in actuality, Stanford was both a place of great illumination and great darkness .

The excerpt from the letter way on the top of this e mail also reminded me of a Stanford student named Penny. She was very adamantly studying strategies in teaching rather than ranking students as the end all of teaching, sort of anti Stanford-Binet which some say was pushed by military to a religion to rationalize rank .  She was making a candidate study of different strategies of learning . That's what managers like to do . But, she was turning it on its head because she was making, thereby, a candidate study of different management systems . My experience of "secure" managers was that they made, not a science of management systems, but rather an undoubtable religion of their particular management system.

But the word in the letter excerpt way on the top of this e mail, synergy, also reminded me of a fellow at the job I was at at the time . In public, he was loud, opinionated, and wanted to argue, in private he confided he believed in this wonderful Buck Minster Fuller and the word Buck Minster Fuller coined, synergy .

Her passion was still fresh in my memory as I had written the letter . His secret passion for synergy, as well .

Perhaps it was an exageration that Vivarium was going to engage the minds of 2 year olds with their terrible individuality. But the sentence rang out with Siegfried's "A Beautiful Math" saying game theorists were progressing to playing games beyond win/lose zero sum or ranking . I doubt misguided preschool teachers know anything of this revolution .

I realized, reading those words I had written in the excerpt topping this e mail, that I had been working in that "bubbling cauldron" at Xerox Parc library, experiencing the incredible loneliness of a scholar's life that would be hidden as someone else's intellectual property, wanting to add power to my writing and not my person, and wanting to work "with" not "for" . My take on Vivarium seemed to speak this "heart of a scholar". I wondered at my use of the word "heart". A beautiful passage from Heart of Darkness in the very recent remake of King Kong moved me to profound tears, profound because I wasn't conciously even hearing what was being said . Some other part of my being was tuned into it . I couldn't make the words out . That other part of my being cried . I had to research to find the passage as being from "Heart of Darkness" . I had to find that passage . It's on my other computer . If I just told you the passage, you probably wouldn't "value" it as much as me who had the total experience of first finding it in his heart and then on a computer .

Now, in my life, I have experienced extremely competitive scholars, but had hoped and continue to hope to ultimately "belong" in an experience beyond competition, where I might actually enjoy the company of rather than be threatened by researchers I'd work with. It is with this heart I seek strategies in composition or collaborative creation .