It’s always a little odd to have something you invented yourself or helped develop presented back to you as orthodoxy.

Beginners don’t have fluency in the “why” and “how” of methods. They harden the fluidity into hard, fast “what” concretions: action turns into steps; purposes turn into rules, communication turns into deliverables, inquiry turns into techniques, evaluation turns into comparison with standards.

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To have fluency means to move through a kind of understanding as one’s element. Fluency is participation in a form of life. There is a sort of mastery in fluency, but it is largely tacit and practical, and it is far from reducible to objective mastery.

One can be fluent in a language and be entirely unable to articulate the grammatical rules they follow when speaking. And of course, someone can know the vocubulary and grammar of a language and speak it very badly.

One can know the steps of a dance by heart, but be unable to dance beautifully. (Maybe it would be more accurate to say the steps are known “by brain”.) And someone else can see a dance and do it without ever memorizing steps.

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My daughters both started speaking and imitating my wife’s mannerisms at the same time. I know that at least some boys feel a need to master the words and syntax before imitating expression.

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Exercising my trademark questionable judgment, and taken this line of thought to facebook. I tried to mitigate it a bit by applying it to punk:

Watching “Beautiful Losers” last night, it (re)occurred to me how different things are at inception than when they calcify into orthodoxy. There’s a formal continuity, of course, but at the total expense of spiritual continuity. In the mid- to late-70s (and in god-forsaken backwaters, all the way into the 80s) punk was salvation. Now it is a genre to mine for best-practices in “edgy”.

and this:

To an alienated, undignified little shit existing in a punkless world, the discovery of punk/postpunk meant the whole world, literally. It was not a genre: it was pure hope, permission to live. See “End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones” to see what I’m talking about.

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“Change of cast. — As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.”