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© 1988 THE WIT AND WISDOM OF THE SAGE JOSE GOMEZ Transcribed and translated from the original and dedicated to DICK AND BOBBIE ZDANIS by John V. Lombardi in June 1988 on the occasion of their ascension to the office of Provost Case-Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio THE WIT AND WISDOM OF THE SAGE: {Editor's Note: The following is what remains of a great treatise dating from the mid sixteenth century. Transcribed by an itinerant monk from an extended series of conversations with a noted Venezuelan hermit and wise man of the period, this work is presented here for the first time in any language. Due to the damaged condition of the manuscript, partially preserved by its use as filler in the plaster walls of Philip II's monumental construction of El Escorial, we have recovered only Part I of what must have been a multi-part treatise.} PART I Where José Gómez outlines the program to be followed by a LISTEN TO THE WALLS For every newcomer, the world has dangers. Each native inhabitant or resident observes the newcomer warily, expecting the worst, hoping for the best. Experience teaches patience, and the wise interloper treads softly for a while. The less experienced and less wise seek a dramatic arrival, filled with action and decision, but in most cases such behavior denotes hubris or a consuming fear of inadequacy. Consequently, the wise newcomer sits and listens to the walls. For the newly arrived, each person, place, and thing has a story to tell. Nothing is too insignificant to be of interest, nothing too normal to fall from view: the arrangement of space, the placement of furniture, the flow of people in and out of spaces and between individuals. For the wise, these things, the walls, speak in the shorthand of frozen time, revealing in a day the accumulated relationships of years. In every occupied space the walls rarely stay just as they were first placed. Instead, rooms appear and disappear, walls grow, doorways appear, disappear, and reappear; each modification responding to a human aspiration or ambition, a success or failure of power. Listen to the walls, for they speak to the wise. READ THE PAST FROM THE PRESENT All human groups speak from their history and act out the propositions of their past. While the past does not determine the future, it has created the present and limits change. Residents of continuously occupied and organized space, each contribute to the stability of the historical tradition, and newcomers quickly internalize the historical traditions of the place. Absent revolutionary change or major natural disasters, history reveals the agenda. As a newcomer, every conversation begins in the middle, and to find the beginning an interloper must seek independent understanding of the past. Current participants reflect the past through the prism of current events, often distorting the character of the conversation's beginnings. The wise ones read history for themselves. History flows ever backward in infinite progression to an unknown and unknowable beginning, but the wise ones read from the present backward in time for as long as time permits. When a newcomer's time of waiting ends and action begins, the reading of history must slow and then stop, thereby establishing the beginning at the furthest backward extent. Reading the past from the present offers a vicarious store of experience from which the future can be managed. LISTEN THROUGH THE MESSAGE A newcomer, especially one with the potential of power, hears much. Many come to present a story, a vision of the past and future, a catalog of tasks to be accomplished, a list of scores to be settled. Some speak for themselves, some for others. Some seek the improvement of the place and the time, others improvement for themselves, and a few the destruction of their enemies. The wise interloper listens twice, once to the surface message and a second time through the message to the meaning. This listening through the message requires the exercise of empathetic understanding, the characteristic of putting oneself into the space and emotion of the speaker to identify the sources and content of that which is hidden behind the message. Of all the wise one's skills, this is the most difficult because to succeed, the required empathy places the newcomer at great risk of harm since to be empathetic one must reveal parts of one's soul to some who might become enemies. Practice teaches the skilled empath to protect the essential self while developing the empathy required to listen through the message. Because the residents hope and expect the best and the worst, they often are consumed with curiosity about the newcomer's potential and willingly provide many messages. The wise one listens and learns for as long as possible before action becomes essential. No message arrives clean and unencumbered, to listen through is to hear the voice of human relationship, the fundamental key to understanding. SHUN PREDICTABILITY Newcomers arrive with baggage, reputations and characteristics that precede them. Residents often believe they know what they have in a newcomer, but the wise ones rarely prove so predictable. Because information about a newcomer often reflects partial impressions from distant informants, residents are often slightly to fundamentally wrong in their first assessments. If the reputation is of great energy and action, the wise ones wait, sit like a Buddha watching and listening. If the reputation is of reticent analytical poise, sing the song, move, act, propose. When the residents think they know, and have formed the first impression, change pace. When the word is out on the newcomer's style, modify it slightly. For the wise ones, predictability serves no useful purpose at the beginning, as it limits adaptation to different circumstances and different surroundings. Should the wise one's listening to the walls, reading history, and listening through the message indicate a course of action different from the first impressions, predictable behavior simply constrains adjustment and inhibits learning. A wise one cultivates a period of unpredictability extending for at least a year, but in declining measure. As the newcomer's understanding of the place improves and the resident's understanding of the newcomer expands, each will settle on a style of interaction which, to engender confidence, must stabilize and become progressively but never, for the wise ones, completely predictable. SEEK THE ISSUES THROUGH THE RESOURCES The potentially powerful newcomer must identify the issues, most of which can not be seen immediately since it is in the interests of the residents to hide them until the newcomer's character and directions are known. Direct discussion of the issues serves many useful purposes, one of which is to provide opportunities to listen through the message, but the best route to the issues begins with the resources. Every human organization exists to ration resources, so the wise one's first effort identifies the resources and second effort understands their rationing. Often resources are not what they appear. Some may speak of land and mean water, others may pursue gold and wish for prestige, some may seek glory and covet cattle. Wisdom suggests that people rarely behave irrationally in the aggregate and over extended periods of time. While some may act without reason from time to time, as a group humans do what makes sense within their resource frame of reference. The wise one seeks the pattern in the distribution of resources, and from the pattern deduces the rules for resource distribution. Rarely does a newcomer find that the real rules closely match the official rules. With the resources identified and the rules discovered, the newcomer can then identify issues, separating the shadow issues from the real ones. With the real issues known, the wise one selects critical issues susceptible to change or in conflict and focuses attention there. LISTEN TO THE LANGUAGE All communities develop special languages to speak of their condition and discuss commonly understood problems too painful to confront with plain speaking. If taboos have been broken, residents speak of trivial difficulties as if they were fundamental. If crimes have been committed but remain unpunished, residents discuss the failed harvest as a moral error. For the newcomer, these discussions make no surface sense since they represent coded conversations for which the newcomer has no code book. Consequently, the wise one listens to the language, identifying the incongruities of tone and emotion attached to commonplace words and concepts, and then sorts through the words to the resource conflict or violation of tradition to which the code speaks. RECOGNIZE NO EXPLICIT LIMITS As the wise one's understanding increases and the exercise of power expands, residents often seek limiting traditions to contain the newly introduced and unpredictable element in their midst. Tradition, they say, prohibits action in this or that direction. "We never exceed two plots per family." "The King always hangs thieves." "Taxes must never be collected twice." Each limit, presented as a rule of inviolable tradition may truly represent valid folk wisdom about the place, but more often represents an artificial limit placed to discourage and inhibit the newcomer's full development of effective action. The wise one recognizes no explicit limit before testing, and reserves an opinion even on those whose existence can be demonstrated, in the event a future testing may find even these limits weak and ineffective. JUDGE NOT NEW FRIENDS Enemies the wise one will always have and need not be cultivated as they come to the successful unbidden. Friends, however, represent a subjective and variable category of being. A wise one seeks friends without illusion, accepts friendship without expectation, and rejoices in occasional tokens of friendship without anticipation of permanence. A wise one who lives long and succeeds has fewer friends as time passes, for friends require constant cultivation and attention, and demand continuing and increasing investment. As time passes, the wise one's ability to maintain and sustain a large number of friends declines as the powerful forces of jealousy, envy, resentment, and greed separate the wise one from continuing friendships. If the wise one is also great and powerful, the number and quality of friendships declines as greatness increases. Such is the price of power, authority, and responsibility. Wise ones expect nothing and thus greatly appreciate those friendships that come their way. OWNERSHIP By the conclusion of a year or perhaps sooner, the wise one takes ownership of the resource rules and the real issues. At that moment the newcomer becomes a resident, inheriting the context and knowledge of the place and losing the special exemptions reserved for newcomers in the residents' culture. PART II Where José Gómez speaks on the strategies, tactics, and skills required for a wise one to be lucky in power {Editor's Note: Here the manuscript falls apart from age and water damage. No copy of the crucial Part II of The Wit and Wisdom of the Sage: José Gómez appears to have survived.} Transcribed and translated from the original and dedicated to Dick and Bobbie Zdanis by John V. Lombardi in June 1988 on the occasion of their ascension to the office of Provost, Case-Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. |