Adam Blatner's Many Facets

August 29, 2012

Click here to see the webpage about Adam ManyParts, and here to see a further discussion of some of those parts.

I play many roles! The following mandala hints at the major categories and there are yet again many minor roles within each category. Those categories are listed below. I'm a little less round in the face, but okay.

Clockwise from the right, in a very provisional fashion, I have general role involvements that themselves have multiple sub-sets and sub-sub sets.
   at 1 o'clock you have the first category of relationships, lover, husband, friend, father, son-in-law, cousin, uncle, keeper up with photos and visits to family, maintaining cards and emails, visits and all. Note that each of these mandalas within a mandala have satellite mandalas suggesting various roles and sub-roles within each category.
    I love to be romantic, cute, nurturing, and in other ways fun with my beloved and we make a great dance team, too.
    I'm deeply proud of my kids and grandkids. Don't get me started.
    I like reaching out and keeping in touch with extended family.
    And there is a degree of life-savoring in all this belonging.

    at 2 o'clock we'll let that mandala stand for my art, cartooning, shown elsewhere on this website. I cartoon-doodle a lot and it has evolved.

   At 3 o'clock there is my magical emblem or logo that I call my "star of the heart," really a three-dimensional figure, symbolizing in two-dimensional space that there is yet another dimension. This I would associated with the category of philosophy and spirituality.

    At 4 o'clock, those are my various types of dancing that I do. There's square dancing and round dancing for the last 15 or so years and there's ballroom and international folk dancing since my college years--- I dance maybe 400 dances regularly and another 400 or more occasionally. And I sort of dance and move funny in daily interactions with Allee, etc.---it blurs into various dramatic pretend roles it occurs to me to play.

At 5 o'clock on the diagram above---oh, let's let that be a kind of incredible Venn Diagram of all the various other interests I have, from being a library hound and reading whatever seems interesting, trivia, history of various types, about alphabets, linguistics, science, various aspects of history---not only of countries, but of alcoholic and other drinks, about foods and technologies and what-all. The fun part is that I've become more aware of how this or that reading just-for-fun ends up fertilizing my thinking about other things later on.

     6 o'clock is the universe and that's I guess my spirituality and philosophy---the picture was for my wife's guru, whom I respect, but I'm also into Whitehead's "process philosophy," and a sort of neo-Platonic angle, flavored by Spinoza, and some postmodernist trends, Huston Smith's trans-spiritual writings about comparative religion, many many others. Transpersonal, Integral, Jungian, and other channels meet and include in turn other things. Kabbalah too.

     7. o'clock is a rich complex of writings about applied improvisation, interactive sociodrama, psychodrama, role playing, books I've written, creativity, a lot of conferences I attend.. this has become closest to a "career" variant even though I'm retired... I see these as ways of consciousness raising

     8. o'clock I break out into fantasy, influenced by MAD comics and other artists, I make up elfin characters, extraterrestrial dimensions, science fiction fantasies, and dare to use these as vehicles to illustrate philosophy and a kind of poetic whimsy.
            The World of Almost Real is the dimension of my favorite imagined elf-sprites who seek to awaken us to a fuller way to relate to our imaginations.
            I doodle and generate trans-dimensional pictures.
            I also relate to comedians and humorous writers. Here is a lecture I gave on comic books.

     9 o'clock: Although I'm retired, I'll always be a physician, even if not in active practice. I was into medicine from age three and love to read about it. Going to the 50th reunion of my medical school class of 1963 in April. I did cartoons of that period and also have the history of medicine as a hobby.

10 o'clock, upper left. Oh, let's put all the life-maintenance sub-roles here: Exercising, biking, walking, flossing teeth, cleaning up the house, trying to reduce clutter, washing dishes and laundry, bathing, etc.

    11. o'clock, whistle while we work! Singing, fun songs for the kiddos (and now they sing them to their kiddos), folk songs, pop songs, spiritual chants, hundreds and hundreds of songs. I've led song fests all my beyond-teen life, on and off, some with Allee, some alone. Made up and shared around song books. Sing a lot around the house. Making up melodies on piano. Songs in pseudo-foreign language---really the phonemes that make the melodies more interesting. Improvised melodies. Singing happy songs as I drive.

   So I'm just this guy who plays many roles. Oh, yeah, the blog-site, the various topics, the appreciator.

A friend wrote about me and said I was a most unusual character. I don't know, I seem pretty ordinary to myself, just this guy. But my dear wife Allee has reminded me that few people play all these many roles. I guess maybe I do.

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