Ton has been musing on Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point and this whole taxonomy of humanities into Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen. What is it that draws us to buy in to these neatly static frames of no-sense?

My own antigen meme begins in a quote by Charlie Parker, "there's two types of music, the stuff you like and the stuff you don't." only, as soon as I hear his words in my head, I'm compelled to append just one little word to it:

"now"

There's the rub: We do not live in a photograph.

We live in time. The reality of living in time is a life in dynamic transformation, ever sometimes this, sometimes that, now firewood, now ashes and only always just who we are, more verb than noun -- The reality of me is just me.

That me can be a maven here, now, and a salesman there, then. As Sun Ra put it,

What is Truth? The truth depends on who you are and where you are ... and when you are.

I don't know what it is. Maybe, in our desperate reach to be the published author owning some thing-in-itself concept, we push knowledge like it was a product, something to be patented, bottled up in a neat bundle that might buy us tenure, and in order to do that, in order to turn reality into a byte-sized meme-bit that fits between the covers, we have to simplify, trim down, generalize through obscurities (as opposed to the mathematical way, through always-true abstraction) and end up with something that will fit in a blog post (like, for example, this post?).

And Time is the first casualty.

Time and circumstance, the two things that wait for no man, the two things that make for a systems view of the world were one cannot be an X for anything more than a photographic augenblick and even then only when seen in the right light, at the right angle, and with the right frame of reference and mind. In the systems view, there is only the ecology; if you hold two apples, you have to put them down before you can tell them apart.

Which is not to say necessarily that all this theory has no value only that these flights of fanciful gedanken can only have dynamic meaning, it has to be restated as a flux of maven-me, connector-me, salesman-me (wow, there's a concept!) and all the shaded hues as we spin a colour wheel of my Crayola-64 box of tipping-point actor-me's.

Whatever one might say about classical Astrology, there is one aspect of being human where these authors were centuries ahead of modern Psycho-dynamics: No one is an Aries or a Jovian because, surprise, surprise, we were all born under the same sky. Our difference is not a fatalistic cast-system, but a matter of degree, of balance, of timing, sequence and the moment to moment inter-plays within and without ourselves, ever and always an amalgram of all of us.

And that's a whole lot harder to cap into a tenure bottle.