Imagine my thrill as I opened Presence in my sick bed (I have been ill this week) Presence is a topic that I think is important and is written by some writers that I have the highest regard for. I owe Joe Jaworski a great debt for the power of his book Synchronicity that is truly a book about presence and authenticity.
To say that I have been disappointed is an understatement. It was if I had eaten a cake that was made by my favourite cake baker, Robin, and discovered that it had been made using a mix.
The book opens strongly. Up to page 12 I was excited and then I began to see what was going on.
1. This is a book that claims to be about Presence. It has absolutely no presence at all. It is stylistically one of those books that relies on anecdotal interviews and quotes from well known people. It draws not from the experience of the authors, as Synchronicity did from JJ's life. It constantly quotes someone. Or it relies on interviews that seem to shout out - look how clever I am to know all these important people. The one exception is a remarkably embarrassing chapter that tells a story about JJ. It had all the feeling of a 22 year old at Esalen for the first time 25 years ago. All I gather from the inner voice of the 4 authors is how disconnected they are from the book and from their own story. So the book is itself a great contradiction.
2. The book is incredibly lazy. Robin asked me how 4 people can write a book. My answer, before reading this book, was that usually the group got together and talked a lot. Ideas emerged and then one person using one voice and using an arc writes the book. Not this book. This book is a cut and paste job and relies heavily on transcribed interviews. It has no evidence of hard synthesizing effort and does not have a voice. I suspect it was even edited by someone else. I can tell the difference because I am also reading Christopher Alexander's masterwork, the Nature of Order, The difference is glaring. CA takes you on a true voyage of discovery. Every example is critically thought through and then is built upon over thousands of pages. CA being a true radical is also not an idol of the establishment. He builds his case by intelligence and by example and not by credentialling a thought with a quote. Einstein made not a single reference to any other work in his master piece either.
3. The book is a sell out. It has an undertone of a marketing book for the next 10 years of their consulting business. The underlying premiss is that large organizations that embody the very mechanistic world that they claim to eschew can use this book to somehow improve themselves. Throughout the book they proudly claim to work with the largest and most powerful institutions in the world. They are so proud of this association and I can see that the book is an entree to that worst type of consulting - the fake intervention. I am certain that while people inside these organizations can and will change, that these organizations cannot - they are the very opposite of Presence. These are the very mechanisms that have shut us down and have put us into opposition to the natural world and to our nature. In comparison, as with all true radical, CA was rejected by the architecture establishment and has been adopted instead by the master software engineers who were less threatened by the power of the ideas. When has a true radical been a pillar of the establishment? Which brings me to my last point.
4. Sadness and shame. The end of McCarthy came when a witness, when asked to betray a friend, looked up at the Senator and asked "Senator - have you no shame?" As I struggled though the book this was the question that I had for the authors
