Greetings Dr. Rosen,

I read that you requested we read the Bohm article before beginning to participate in PD, but I must grant myself permission to respond to something  you wrote in your invitation:

“I’ve presently reached a point of disenchantment with conventional books distributed in the conventional way. However revolutionary a work like this may be in terms of its content and style of presentation, it remains a marketed commodity owned by the author and publisher and distributed in a linear fashion to an anonymous audience. Not only is such communication commodified, unidirectional, and indirect, but its channels are limited by the constraints of the print media: squiggles of ink arrayed in lines of text and two-dimensional charts, diagrams, and illustrations.”

I realize that by responding now you may feel that I have not honored the space you are designing for your project; that I am allowing “[M]y initial reactions [to be] colored by the expectations, wishes, and desires that rush out of me to meet you” instead of “pull[ing] them back and [so] invite you in.”

And maybe I am doing that.  Please forgive me.  But I have to return to other obligations and I did not want to leave the page without sharing with you this thought: Although I buy books, they are not commodities as you describe.  Once I have interacted with them, they are changed.  They emanate the resonances of the exchange that occurred within their pages.  These emanations slip about in my home and settle in the interactions occurring within other books, and even influence me as I write to you now.  I know you know this.  But I felt the need to reiterate the wonderful way in which books become alive in these lifeworlds we never could navigate alone. In fact, I am surprised that you did not know that your books have been changing since you sent them out into the wide world where readers have done lord knows what with them! Certainly it was one of your books that told me to google search your name. I am glad of that. And glad of your work.

I thought to engage my ‘hungry ghost’ when I left the project I am working on to visit your website. And guess what? I am working on the problem of dualism….

I will return when Bohm calls to me.

Happy trails till then,

Colette