Author Archives: hfester

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Gotye/Kimbra video and listening

I’m sharing this music video by Gotye that many of you have no doubt heard lately.  I share it in response partly to Julie’s recent blog on listening in a visual sense.  I think this both metaphorically and metaphysically depicts the difficulty of listening/vibrating resonantly in relationship and the way we paint ourselves into a specific listening… maybe also the way the echoes (from Levin) transfigure in our relational space.   And, ultimately, the process of weaving ourselves out (or unpainting ourselves in the language clothes) of a specific hermeneutic.

And, it’s resonant, arresting, and beautiful:

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Hafiz poem

A little on echoes and love from Hafiz:

Every City is a Dulcimer

There is the rising up from light’s embrace

you can see in a summer field or in a child

dancing.

Every city is a dulcimer that plays it chorus

against our ears.

The lid of a pot starts jumping when the

water gets ecstatic over fire.

If I ever don’t complete a sentence while

we are together, accept my apologies

and try to understand this sweet, drunk

thought. (that line was dedicated to and surely written by Hafiz for Vidyuddeva :)

Birds initially had no desire to fly; what

really happened was this:

God once sat close to them playing music.

When He left they missed Him so much

their great longing sprouted wings, needing

to search the sky.

Listen, for Hafiz knows, nothing evolves us

like love.

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On Not Listening Well as a form of Just Listening, on Moses, and on the Celestine Prophecy

My experience of listening for this week was somewhat disappointing, and I hope that means that I was doing something right instead of wrong.  Last week, I felt an opening of something beyond physical hearing that supported and held me in listening and which I associated with the course coming into being, and I had an experience of the breath having inner ears… particularly the interior of the breath containing listening.  I began to use the breath for better hearing when this occurred to me.

But, this week, I have mostly been aware of my impatience and my resistance to listening.  I am mostly witnessing how I am in conversations jumping in to speak rather than breath/pausing.  I continue to intend this practice, though my edgy desire to jump in feels heightened, and I find this interesting.  I also find myself in a state where I am numb to finer grained listening and detail retention, so this may also be contributing.  I also notice my writing acuity dimming in this state, so my usual attempts to listen with my fingers on the keyboard–to my subconscious mind or to the hearkening beyond as I call words into being, in my brain’s processing and in the field… sometimes at different pacings or in different orders.  I feel deeply frustrated and almost aphasic when I lose the fluidity of that writing-listening process.  I will include a passage below for anyone interest from Marc Gafni’s book Rosh Hashanah: Dance of Tears on that particular frustration as I feel it.(1)

So far, I am finding the reading good, but I also hit the listening wall on that.  There were days when I was pulled into a deeper silence and didn’t want to be very sociable, and that may be why I found listening to people so hard–because I was listening to life in its colors, and I was listening to myself and my alignment with my deepest impulses.  All of this is good, but I am gently coaxing myself back into a listening receptiveness with people… though “just listening” might also mean listening to myself not listening, I suppose.

I wanted to include some very meaningful old guidelines here in my post that I came across in the Celestine Prophecy.  I couldn’t locate my copy of that book, so I snagged a list I found on the internet of the 8th prophecy.  In this one, they describe the way that energy fields support attentional and listening group dynamics for better conversations and for better turn taking.  I hope you enjoy it too.  This continues to be a fascinating experiment for me.  I use it all the time and find that these rules hold pretty consistently, especially when I am able to lend my own enhanced attention to someone who can’t remember something.  It almost always helps with recall.  The other thing I’ve integrated in my habits from these descriptive rules is listening to children as though they were adults.  What I love about the existence of these descriptive rules/patterns is that they become a God experience for me–an actual interface with the mystery, with the divine, with the field dynamic in a hot rather than cool sense… live love listening.

Interaction in group settings is also a part of the 8th Insight.

In such group meetings, some people feel self-conscious or shy and don’t participate as easily as others.

As the group members talk, new ideas surface one at a time.

If the group is aware of what is happening around them, they can sensitize themselves to feel who is about to speak with the next most powerful idea.

By consciously focusing their energies on this person, they will help to bring out the idea with the greatest clarity.

This technique is used to allow everyone to participate fully.

One must be aware that the group energy focus can instill a good feeling in the current speaker, who continues to speak after the idea has been expressed, thereby monopolizing the conversation which ends up sapping the group energies.

The idea is to add to the energy of each member of the group by projecting your own energy and not to become so addicted to the ‘rush’ of energy as to monopolize and dominate the group interaction.

Share the energy.

http://vision-action.over-blog.com/article-celestine-prophecy-the-eight-insight-45912488.html

(1)Learning the Language of God

by Marc Gafni from Rosh Hashanah: The Dance of Tears

(Please do not repost because this version has not yet been edited.)

Moses, is the model of the realized human being[1]. The word Moses spelled backwards is Ha Shem, meaning  “the name.” Fascinatingly, Ha-shem in biblical Hebrew also is the most common reference to God’s name. When you attain voice and realize your soul print, fully becoming your name, you become one with God.  When Moses did this, he found his voice.      

In the beginning of the book of Exodus, Moses is described as stuttering, unable to speak clearly. He says, “Who am I to go to Pharaoh, I am not a man of words.” And yet by the end of the five books, Moses gives great and powerful speeches to Pharaoh, to the people, even to God. The beginning of the last biblical book, called Deuteronomy (which in Hebrew is Devarim, meaning “words”) opens with the sentence, “And these are the words that Moses spoke.” The transformation is easy to miss for the untrained reader. But when you catch it, it is simply breathtaking. Moses, who in the book of Exodus says,  “I am not a man of words,” has become the ultimate man of words. He now speaks the word of God.  When we find our voice, when we connect with our inner soul print, then divine energy courses through us and we are able, each in our own way, to speak the word of God.

One of the great questions of biblical consiousness is how one can claim that there are five books of the bible. “Isn’t the bible the word of God?” ask the masters. “And isn’t the fifth book of biblical myth, Deuteronomy, actually comprised of the words of Moses, for does not the book begin, ‘These are the words which Moses spoke’”?  The answer is clear: When Moses finds voice, finds vocation, then he hears God speaking through him. In the language of the wisdom  masters, “The Shehina”  – eros – “speaks through the throat of Moses.” [2]  The voice of God and the voice of Moses are one. All of the sudden the intent of biblical myth becomes clear. Of course, it must be Moses who has the Shehina in his throat, who has found voice – that is called to lead the people out of Egypt, for what is Egypt if not the narrow place, the throat. And what is a slave if not a person who has no voice; whose voice is usurped by his master. A slave of course is not merely of Hebrew variety that you see in Spielberg’s Prince of Egypt. Any human being who has lost the courage to speak their unique story is a slave. Moses is the biblical hero because he dares to claim his voice and life his story.

For the Hebrew mystics, however, Moses is not merely a person. He is a mythic archetype. Anyone who attains full voice participates in the Moses archetype.[3]

The artist, writer, creator, business man, doctor, and gardener, will all tell you that at the times when they feel merged with their calling, when they’re no longer standing on the outside performing a task but standing on the inside, flowing with their action, something higher speaking through them. Remember what photographer extraordinaire Ansel Adams said, “Sometimes I get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.”  I know that when I teach often I get lost and I feel the words flowing by themselves, shaping and forming sentences almost magically before me.

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Heather: CA, v. 4, pp. 154-156, fn 5

From Luminous Ground, pp. 154-156, CA:

The connection of the individual person to the great Self, or Void, and its appearance in works of art, has long been a theme of mystical religious texts.  In the works of nature, and in serious work of art, this connection of a person with the Self is brought forward, increased, intensified.  It is that work in which the work itself, conceals, reveals, hints at, and approaches God.  Thus, the Koran quoted in Titus Burkhardt, Sacred Art in East and West, 111:


“According to a saying of the prophet, God hides himself behind seventy thousand curtains of light and of darkness, if they were taken away, all that His sight reaches would be consumed by the lightnings of His Countenance.  The curtains are made of light in that they hide the Divine ‘obscurity,” and of darkness in that they veil the Divine Light.”

But the Void spoken of, the Divine light spoken of, is not abstract.  It is always, ultimately, personal.  In one form or another, all these teachings say that what has to be reached, above all, in a person, and in a considered life, is the human heart itself.  For example, from Martin Lings, What is Sufism?, 58:

“Since everyone has always a center of consciousness, everyone may be said to have a ‘heart.’ But the Sufis use the term on principle in a transcendent sense to denote a center of consciousness which corresponds to at least to the inward Moon.”

In Zen, too, it is understood that a person reaches contact with the eternal just to that extent that he makes contact with his own heart. Thus Soen Roshi, quoted in Matthiessen, Nine-Headed Dragon River, 62:


“In the midst of winter, I find in myself at last, invincible summer.”

And again, in Sufism, the message that in the unfolding of the heart, the soul of the person, which is carried in each of us, and which may be reached, naked at the moment of being comfortable and true to one’s own heart, this Void of I is reached.  It is most beautifully and simply expressed in the 10th-century poem written by the Sufi saint and poet Hallaj, quoted in Martin Lings, p. 49:

“I saw my Lord with the Eye of the Heart. I said ‘Who art Thou?’ He answered ‘Thou.’”

Throughout these teachings there is a subtle ambiguity.  This event—the process of reaching the heart or reaching the void—may be thought of as purely psychological.  Or it may be thought of as objective, something about the universe which is being reached.

To understand it and grasp it as something practical to be attained, it must be understood as “both.” It is a process in which a person casts off all mental affiliations, all concepts, all trains of thought, all opinions, leaving only the simple truth of their own naked heart.  This process, in which action, object, and person come only from the heart, is psychological.  It is a core “heart” which exists in each of us.  It is revealed, universal, shared, more or less the same in each of us. It is revealed, universal, shared, more or less the same in each of us.  Seven hundred years ago, Meister Eckhardt described it like this:

“There is a spirit in the soul, untouched by time and flesh, flowing from the Spirit, remaining in the Spirit, wholly spiritual.  In this principle is God, ever verdant, ever flowering in all the joy and glory of His actual Self.  Sometimes I have called this principle the tabernacle of the soul, sometimes a spiritual Light, anon I say it is a Spark.  But now I say that it is more exalted over this and that than the heavens are exalted about the earth. So now I name it in nobler fashion… It is free of all names and void of all forms.  It is one and simple, as God is one and simple, and no man can in any wise behold it.”

At the same time, at the moment this true heart in us is reached, there is contact with some ‘thing,’ something beyond us, an actual entity of some kind in the universe, something before us, after us, an eternal substance which exists not only inside us, but underneath the substance of the world, before the substance of the world:  it may be called the ultimate material from which the world is made.  This entity—or the claim to its existence, and to the possibility of meeting ‘it,’ is ‘not’ psychological.  From The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

“O nobly born, the time has now come for thee to seek the Path.  Thy breathing is about to cease. In the past thy teacher hath set thee face to face with the Clear Light; and now thou art about to experience it in its Reality in the ‘Bardo’ state (the intermediate state immediately following death, in which the soul is judged—or rather judges itself by choosing, in accord with the character formed during its life on earth, what sort of an after life it shall have). In this ’Bardo’ state all things are like the cloudless sky, and the naked immaculate Intellect is like unto a translucent void without circumference or center.  At this moment know thou thyself and abide in that state.  I too, at this time, am setting thee face to face.”

The claim that this self, what the Tibetan Book calls the ‘clear light,’ exists is asserting something in the realm of physics.  It used to be called metaphysics, simply because it appeared to be a part of the nature of matter which could not be treated by the contemporary methods of physics.  Still, it is in fact a part of physics, since it asserts something—admittedly hard to pin down and hard to understand—about the nature of matter and the nature of the universe.

The key fact which makes all this so important is that the two entities, or two interpretations—the “heart” and the “void”—are linked.  In approaching our own heart, we make contact with this ultimate self from which the universe is made.  In approaching this ultimate self-substance, we also make contact with our own heart, we make contact with this ultimate self from which the universe is made.  In approaching this ultimate self-substance, we also make contact with our own heart.  That is the core of all the religious teaching in the great tradition.  Thus Aldous Huxley, in The Perenniel Philosophy, 35:

“So far then, as a fully adequate expression of the perennial philosophy is concerned, there exists a problem in semantics that is finally insoluble.  The fact is one which must be steadily borne in mind by all who read its formulations.  Only in this way shall we be able to understand even remotely what is being talked about.  Consider, for example, those negative definitions of the transcendent and immanent Ground of Being.  In statements such as Eckhardt’s, God is equated with nothing.  And in a certain sense the equation is exact; for God is certainly no thing.  In the phrase used by Scotus Erigena God is not a what; He is a That.  In other words, the Ground can be denoted as being “there”; but not defined as having qualities.  This means that discursive knowledge, a thing at one remove, or even at several removes, from the reality of immediate acquaintance; it is and, because of the very nature of our language and our standard patterns of thought, it must be, paradoxical knowledge.  Direct knowledge ‘of’ the Ground cannot be had except by union, and union can be achieved only by the annihilation of the self-regarding ego, which is the barrio separating the ‘thou’ from the ‘That.’”

The Ground is, I believe, unavoidable as the core of architecture.  If I look at the golden capital of the Tibetan building on page 155, it has an extraordinary shape and color, which penetrates the Ground, and penetrates the Self, and penetrates the individual human heart, that which we are made of.  Architecture cannot be undertaken, in a sensible way, without intended and deliberate contact with this Self.  Conversely, the thought and practice of architecture—the facts about structure—which I have defined in the preceding chapters, shed, I think, a great deal of practical light on this ultimate mystery, and so show us, concretely, something essential about the way the universe is made.

Although these arguments have chiefly been brought forward in the mystical traditions of the world’s religions, I must emphasize that I bring them forth here in a scientific spirit.  I believe that some concept along these lines is necessary as a part of physics.  I do not believe we can accurately describe the way the world works—at least that aspect of the world which I have been describing in these books-without some concept like this.  Without it we simply cannot account for the essential facts about the personal quality of works of art, the apparent emergence of being, a s quality, when the field of centers becomes intensified, and the role of simplicity and ultimate purity in great works of art. (Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, v. 4: The Luminous Ground, fn 5, pp. 154-156).

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Heather: CA, b4 pp. 1-97

“I believe that the ultimate effort of all serious art is to make things which connect with this I of every person.  This ‘I,’ not normally available, is dredged up, forced to the light, forced into the light of day, by the work of art.  In this, the work of art is similar to nature, because in nature too, this ‘I’ is what we find.  The rock, the ripple in the pond, and the fish darting along the stream are connected to this I, reverberate with I, awaken and enliven us, continually refresh the I which sleeps in us. And this I which sleeps in us will not then follow the remembered voice. For this I which comes to life, as we gaze upon the pond, the buttercup, the cloud floating in the purple sky, the rush of water in the thunderstorm–this self is first awakened and then speaks to us, encouraging the I in us to be itself, in a new form taken within us, not similar but awakened in its newness, and speaking, itself, in a voice which will awaken in other selves.” (4)

“I shall go further to describe how in a great building or great painting where the most profound color phenomena occur, something sometimes happens that I call inner light, a state where colors are both subdued and shining brilliantly… The inner light is an extension of the life in things, a deeper version of the phenomenon of life.  What is this inner light which can occur in paintings?…. I am quite certain, intuitively, that what is happening when colors form inner light in a great painting, is something more significant, something which has real meaning.  Somehow, I believe that it touches to the core of things.  Somehow, something deep and essential in the universe–not just in us–is being awakened by the inner light of a great painting. In short, I believe in the seriousness and significance of the phenomenon” (22).

“The beautiful pieces of Shaker furniture were made as acts of devotion, in the closed religious communities of the Shakers.  The tiles and carvings of the Alhambra were made, as far as we know, as acts of devotion int eh Muslim canon.  … were inspired by passionate religious devotion, by a daily awareness, throughout these cities, of the presence of God” (33).

“All these works, I think, stand out because we experience in them a special quality of relatedness, relatedness of ourselves to the universe.  We feel that there must have existed, in their makers, a sepcial relatedness with all things, which shows through and is reflected in their works.  And we, privileged to see these works or visit them, also ourselves feel a special relatedness within ourselves, and ot the world, while we are in the presence of these works.  It is this relatedness which holds a clue to the process of creation.  it is the relatedness to Self. It is that relatedness between our individual self, and the matter of the universe, which is touched, and illuminated” (34).

“This connection is straightforward and practice. Mystical tradition, in one form or another, helped a person focus on wholeness, and therefore helped the artist or the builder, at each step in the building process, take a step which was structure-preserving, not something else.  Works made in this mental atmosphere then took on life, because the artists were empowered by their humility to see wholeness and to act accordingly” (36).

“The fact that this something is nameless, without substance, without form–and yet is so intensely personal–is one of the great mysteries at the source of art” (39).

“I believe that all architecture depends on relatedness.  Those buildings which work are the ones which create relatedness between a person and the universe” (50).

“And yet, I believe you do feel it.  I believe if you allow yourself an impetuous reaction, if you are not too careful, you may find in yourself some version of the experience I describe, that you do feel–whether it is true or not–some thread connecting you to the dewdrop, a feeling, no matter how uncertain, that you and the dewdrop are related, that the drop and your relationship with the drop, shed light on your existence” (51).

“Considerations of an apparently minor aspect of our world–typified by the pleasant relationship between me and a tree-stump–can, as I hope to show, give us a new picture of the way self and matter interact.  It will show us that, inextricably, we belong in the world” (52).

“3. The judgments people make about works of art, when using this criterion, tend to coincide in considerable degree with informed judgments about art.  Thus by using this criterion, people find in themselves some wellspring or source of information which allows them to supercede the ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ view of art, and instead allows them to make informed judgments similar to the judgments made by experts in different fields of the visual arts” (54).

“‘I like the weather everyday.’ In that simple phrase he expresses his contentment and his happiness in his world.  The relatedness between him and the world is profound, and does not need to be mentioned.  To him the relatedness I write about is obvious. For us it seems almost like a mystery” (56).

“Indeed, it is my view that our ability to experience the relatedness with nature or with buildings is damaged when we live in a world of objects and structures that are non-living structures” (57).

“‘Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions.  In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities,the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each ‘eye’ of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number.  There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold.  If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number.  Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.  the jewels in the net of Indra, the living centers in the world, are what I call ‘beings’” (76).

“So the fact that the pair of scissors is made of many centers which are themselves life-filled and being-like is empirically connected to the strong I-like character–and to the life–of the pair of scissors as a whole: the overall life of the scissors hinges on the fact that it is made of beings” (79).

“Living structure is unified. It is that unity which is the aim of life.  it is the unity which is created by living structure” (94).

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Heather: CA, b2, pp. 306-480

“The important thing is that such backtrack-free sequences are relatively stable.  Once discovered, a backtrack-free sequence remains backtrack-free for nearly all contexts. Thus the backtrack-free sequences lie at the core of the theory of living process.” (306)

“what is the next, truly the most important thing?” (318)

“a structure is truly generated, and perceived as such, an perceived as having life, only when it has unfolded from a nice, beautiful, sequence of differentiations–and this is perhaps the most important point of all” (320)

“We now know that the form itself and the way it has been generated are part and parcel of the same thing, and are an indissoluble identity” (320).

“Indirectly, then, the love that we can feel for a place, for a building, is made possible by living process.  When we visit traditional towns and villages, we love them, very often, because each part is recognizable.  Each house, door, curtain, garden gate, seems a unique being, specific to its place and time, unique in all the world. This is why we love them.  As the little prince says in Saint Exupery’s fable: ‘I love you because you are unique.’ It is the uniqueness of each mountain, building, person, spot, that makes it possible to love it, or him, or her.  The uniqueness that creates our relation with the place is made possible by a living process.  By creating uniqueness everywhere, the living process touches directly teh issue of whether the world will be a world we love, or not” (324).

“Thus everything in the geometry of the world is essentially organized repetition. The final target of unfolding is to find and create just those repetitions which are required–and from them, to give birth to form.  Hierarchy and repetition, of an organic not mechanical kind, ultimately create the architecture of the whole” (325).

“Memorized nuggets of solution, like the patterns in traditional society, like genes in the growth of organizsms, are necessary to any complex adaptive system and its process” (346).

saliences differ from culture to culture. 348

“…the patterns in A Pattern Language were judged by many to be true in some sense.  But this truth was of a new type, which recognized the life of a situation, or of a building, as a real thing. The truth of a pattern had to do with the question, ‘Does injection of this pattern into contexts of the stated type, in fact make these environments more alive?” (349)

“To some degree these centers are based on observation; they reflect Peruvian life as it was in 1969. Some are idealized, they contain our ideas of what might be a better way to arrange pedestrians and cars, or parking lots.  Some are almost no more than ideas about how something might be done: the use of sulphur as structural reinforcement, for example. Still others are highly generalized and included in A Pattern Language and remain, to this day, as observations of what makes people comfortable, almost all over the world.  These, then, are rooted in psychology.  Some are specific to climate and place, not exactly to culture” (353).

“What, then, defines essential centers and distinguishes them from trivial centers? The answer, briefly put, is this.  The essential centers are those whose presence is already latent in the field–which go the heart of the living structure that is already there–which summarize or encapsulate, the essence of the real life which is going on” (366).

“To [look for just those centers which will intensify the life of a place] we have to work, with a constant intuition about the life, at what is going to intensify this life.  This can only be done in a spiritual state of mind.  We shall arrive at the stuff which produces life only by having a sense, in us, of what will actually make life in the real thing” (367).

“Is the emerging building increasing my own wholeness? Is it increasing the feeling I experience when I am in touch with that thing?  Is it becoming like a mirror of my own self?  is it becoming like the soul? But, less obscurely expressed, the extent to which a building is coming to life can be steered by the extent to which it has deep feeling in it, deep feeling that we experience.  This can be done for any emerging entity–room, painting, garden, pottery bowl, plaza, table, window, street” (371).

“We must have a feeling in us which will reliably tell us when we are going in the right direction, and when we are going in the wrong direction.  It is ultimately this inner feeling, this inner vision of feeling, which is our only reliable (and necessary) guide” (376).

“Without a form language that supports the living structure, the nearly-living process will fall down, and not be effective.  if a society has inadequate style, inadequate shapes and forms, then no matter how hard the builders and architects try, the environment they create will not be, and cannot be a living structure” (433).

“In this sense a volcano, a cobweb, an oak tree are truly more simple... because as nearly as we can judge, they perfectly resolve the forces, processes and conditions at that place, with the greatest economy of means and the greatest economy of form” (462).

“In Book 4, I may say: Those objects whose order makes them capable of reaching to the Ground, giving us a glimpse of it, always seem to have simplicity. they seem to need simplicity to touch the Ground… living structure always has a very high density of sustaining relations among its parts…. This kind of compression, in which the density of sustaining relations is very high, can only be attained in a thing when that thing is extremely simple.  In Book 1, I concentrated on the idea that the field of centers is complex. This was a necessary emphasis in the earlier chapters… subtle complexity that is characteristic of wholeness was often lost… Spiritual art is always simple” (465).

I feel as if these quotes are mostly capturing the same elusive thought/feeling from different angles… which is really the thought of the nature of order, so I suppose that must be what that elusive thought/feeling is:  simple/subtle complexity, differentiation, sequences, truth, essential/trivial, organic/mechanical, spiritual sense/intuition, saliences, unique, love, seeing my own self in a thing…

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Heather: CA, b2, 230-300 & sailing around the marginalia

“To make the feedback meaningful in a step-by-step process, the process must be open-ended, hence partly unpredictable.  It must lack a fixed, predetermined end-state.  This is necessary because adaptation itself means nothing if changes cannot be made in response to the process of adaptation. By definition, such changes cannot be foreseen” (240).

“But it turns out that the world is not like the mechanical thought-model. More sophisticated discoveries have made it clear that in a complex system the next stage is dependent on the current configuration of the whole, which in turn may depend on subtle minutiae in the history of the previous wholes, so “trace-like” that there is no way to predict the path of the emerging system ahead of time… divergent evolutionary paths leading form tiny differences to very large differences of end-result….  Thus the field of centers which is at the very heart of living structure–is inherently so subtle that it can only be created dynamically, and is inherently unpredictable in the precise definition of its end-state” (241).

 

“It is essential for form this vision of the emerging building in your mind’s eye, not in sketches on paper.  Words and interior visions, when seen with your eyes closed, are more labile, more fluid, transformable and three-dimensional, than sketches of physical designs.  They allow the unfolding to go forward more successfully.  In the mind’s eye, the centers which evolve, one by one within the living process, are not hampered by arbitrary information and decisions that come too early.  A word picture in the mind’s eye is in a medium in which we can see only what the words describe, and nothing more.” (257)

“The vision in the mind’s eye contains little that is not actually generated by the living process” (257).

“The process of building such a vision in your mind must itself follow the differentiating process, step by step. The vision is built one morphological feature at a time.  You start by saying to yourself, and seeing, one thing, the most important thing about the building.  That will be captured in its height, its position, its quality, its color. It might be a brooding light that emerges from the building, or it might be the gardens which precede it, and lead to it.  It is, in any case, the first global, holistic aspect of the building which you see, when you close your eyes and imagine the building as the context requires that it should be” (257).

“It is always crucial to take a good first step. Each step is, in a sense, a return to the whole and a starting over with a ‘first step.’ So, in the same breath, we must recognize that to take a good step, the main problem is to avoid taking any of the many possible false steps…. Of the 100 possible choices, there may easily be as many as 90 or 95 next steps which will make the thing worse, relatively few, say 5 or 10 next steps which will make it better” (258).

“If one merely jumps at the image that presents itself, and if one carries a self-deluded idea that it must be good because it came up in one’s own brain–the chances are great that this first or second, or third ‘inspiration’ is something not good, but more likely something bad. Further, the possibility of willful distortion, caused by the architect following an idea or a desire to create a never-before-seen impression, is also capable of obscuring the process, and leading it up a blind alley” (258). (unexamined experimentality)

These descriptions are really easily applied to the creative process in general.

“The vital point is that this is an empirical matter” (259).

“The network of broad paths as a structure, it may not be big enough.  Although a vision of such a network has a coherent texture, it is not clear enough as a whole, not big enough, in relation to the valley as a whole. What are the features of the canyon as a whole that could intensify it as a whole?” (260)

“chosen so that the whole creates deep feeling in us” (262).

“Centers are not atomic, and are not in any normal sense building blocks. They are nevertheless the units of increase for all development, which allow a whole to unfold without damaging the wholeness. That is because centers are above all, labile, they are foci of wholeness, they are not things, but regions, qualities, focal points of centeredness which as they change, as they are improved, are ideally suited to enchance and enlarge and extend the whole while making that wholeness benefit, while they are fused into the wholeness, as they go forward” (268).

“And at each step, among the various steps I have described, I had to keep asking myself this: Is it going in such a direction?  Does it start to make me feel that life can be worth-while?  does it make me tremble, and feel on the edge of the chasm of life, so that all the uncertainty and fear of everyday life, is wrapped up, made worth something, summarized and justified, by the existence of this thing?” (281)

“1. Each center does have strong smaller centers…. 2. Centers do originate in the essence of the building: they are not image-like copies of other centers…. 3. Centers do emerge from teh surrounding wholeness…. 4. Centers do form larger centers.” (286).
As I share my marginalia and selected quotes with the group here, I’m considering how important glossings have been throughout history.  This process of note-taking and sharing brings to mind this poem:

Marginalia – Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

- Billy Collins

by

Heather: CA, b2, pp. 177-226

“One can thus think of the genetic information in the fertilized egg as equivalent to the folding instructions in origami: both contain a generative program for making a particular structure.” Lewis Wolpert (177)

“All the well-ordered complex systems we know in the world,, all those anyway that we view as highly successful, are generated structures, not fabricated structures.” 180

“…radiation between glowing embers, so that the structure of the fire then creates itself.” 180

Reminds me of my discussion with Bonnie a couple of blog posts back.

“In broad terms, a generated structure is something that has a certain deep complexity and is created in some way that appears to be almost biological, and reaches deeper levels of subtle structure than we common associate with design or with designed objects.” 180

“The need to make all parts of the environment as generated structures, once established, will help guide us to see teh various attributes of living process, in detail.  Our search for adequate definitions of living process can then be guided and stimulated by this focus on the geometry of the results” (181).

“I do not want to say contrived, since they are plainly made with good intent, and with the purpose of making a better living environment.” 184

“That is the enormous difference between a generated thing, and a designed and fabricated thing.  In a fabricated/designed thing, it is virtually certain that it will have a huge number of mistakes, reducing the value of the environment, and reducing its ability to support people’s daily lives in an efficient and adequate fashion.” 187

“… orgamization [sic]–and is therefore better. Above all the blue porch avoids the two-thousand mistakes which are potentially present in such a porch, and for this very concrete reason is a better, more deeply adapted structure” (191)

I just want to point to the some 30 or so editing mistakes in this section about mistakes–it’s almost like the editing gods were taking their revenge on CA for his statements about mistake, which is really just the way it seems to go sometimes.  :)

“The key to complex adaptation in a generated structure lies in the concept of differentiation. This is a process of dividing and differentiating a whole to get the parts, rather than adding parts together to get a whole” (197).

“Further, these fifteen transformations, though simple, guarantee the appearance of orderly, large and larger wholes with beautiful internal geometry.  Instead of making aggregates of random structures, they propagate beauty with enormous force, both locally, and in the large.” (207)

“living structure will emerge. This may happen either in the context of an individual building project unfolding, or it may happen in the context of accretion” (214).

“7. As a result of the differentiation which occurs, new centers are born. The extent of the fifteen properties which accompany creation of new centers will also take place.
8. In particular we shall have increased the strength of certain larger centers; we shall also have increased the strength of certain larger centers; we shall also have increased the strength of parallel centers; and we shall also have increased the strength of smaller centers.  As a whole, the structure will now, as a result of this differentiation, be stronger and have more coherence and definition as a living structure.” (216)

“If I tell you that it is better when the space between the fence boards is more positively shaped–and you discover tha tthe fence becomes more beautiful and gets more life when you do this–then you have a wiser process, which is still natural, but now embellished by a little more understanding.” (219)

Draft in progress… working on it between classes and will keep updating before today’s call…

As to Oli’s request to dance with our posts: Oli, while I support your desire to jump in, I ask to not be included in that process of critique.  I would prefer to keep my conversational contributions through the blogs in this course boundaried to those actually doing the readings (or looking on in a teaching capacity because they know the work already), which is part of taking the risk through the heart space you are critiquing.  And, because there is a former connection we have and because I am currently out of communication with you because we cannot agree on the closure for that relationship, I will ask to be excluded from your writings about the course.  Now, I realize all I can do is ask for this to be the case and to choose not to engage for the reasons stated above.  Thank you for considering. Unfurled Girl has expressed some of her own vacillations about the posting process, so I hope you’ll keep the sensitivities of those in the course who are posting in mind as you go.

Should you choose to jump in and begin doing the readings at any point (and all of my books are library copies, so there are other ways of accessing materials), I will then be more willing to engage in the dance you propose, with the intentions set by those shaping this space held as the criteria for the evaluation process.  The very intricate wranglings that are “meta” and also “embodied” are something that I think is harder than it looks.  I have found that there the field itself, held by all these heart-open folks (and what that means is maybe up for definition), is my teacher, and I hope that as you engage this process that it becomes a gentle teacher for you too.  Of course your voice is valid here, but I wanted to make it known in advance how I feel about being involved in the project you propose.

I’m sorry if this seems too formal or not personal enough as I’m communicating it here, Oli.  I have my own reasons for choosing to communicate in this way with you and for choosing to do so by setting my own boundaries, which are not open to negotiation at this time.

by

Heather: CA, pp. 113-174

“Being structure-preserving, each step of development grows from the actuality and living process of the previous stage. The result is an entirely different structure form the one portrayed in the plan” (122).

“How deeply subtle [structure-preserving] is as a principle, if we were to seek to adhere to it.  The wholeness, though objectively present, is a very subtle structure. Adhering to the wholeness and extending it, are very subtle processes” (123).

“What is the most important thing I have to do next, which will have the best effect on the life of the house?” (130)

“Suppose you do start with an idea of a building… a certain image. Imagine, then, that at the time of starting a house design in this fashion… you also start with an image or idea in your mind…. Now you start an unfolding process, a structure-preserving process, on the site, carrying this image in your mind.  if you do really and truly follow the wholeness of the land, site, and emerging building*, and allow the wholeness to unfold–then, gradually, each part of the initial (and arbitrary) image will slowly give way to common sense: that is, to reality, to the wholeness of what is there, rather than to the idea of it you carry in your image” (130).

(*wholenesses, as in levels of)

common sense and reality: reminds me of what I know of Zen, such as that knowledge is. (collocations here: merely calling out locations.)

  • structure-preserving steps: preserving the land, entrance path, best daylight in the rooms, and almost every other practical matter or matter based on human feeling. (131)
  • but to keep the image: you go all at once, from beginning to end, on the basis of idea (131)

“As I have tried to explain earlier, it is just the appearance of images in human thought which first deflects the natural unfolding process, distorts it, destroys it, and begins to create ugliness.  Here we come across the very same issue from a different point of view.  A natural process goes step by step from one wholeness to the next, according to the natural unfolding. But the use of images invents structure which can run contrary to what is, imposes it ‘across’ the grain of what is real.  This is precisely what causes destruction” (131).

“It is the intentional nature–the presence of arbitrary idea and image–which distorts the process, makes it not-unfolding, makes it contrived” (132).

“… unfolding process never runs at cross-purposes with the structure that exists, and is always consistent with the deep structure that exists” (132)

(maybe like Chomsky’s transformational grammar and deep structure in a way…)

“And unfolding process, by its nature, produces things that are alive. The image-driven process, by its nature, produces things which are dead” (132).

I’m not sure yet how or if I accept this distinction, but it might be wrapped up in his distinctions.  Maybe a semiotician would make a sign and symbol distinction here in the life-based unfolding of wholes.

Here images begin to make more sense to me:
“The modern developments we know too well, associated with huge sums of money, and with vast profits in the hands of developers, necessarily depend on images–because it is the images which first draw investors and then potential buyers, to the land.”
(seems to be image-down that is a problem, rather than reality-up.)

“Creativity comes out when we discover the new within a structure already latent in the present.  It is our respect for what is that leads us to the most beautiful discoveries. In art as in architecture, our most intelligent and most wonderful creations come about, when we draw them out as extensions and enhancements of what exists already” (136).

“San Francisco and Marin County was itself called the Golden Gate long before the bridge existed” (148). How language (and naming) participates in building.  ;)

“This photograph shows a life-seeking process, where unfolding has occurred” (150, two industrial chairs in Luxembourg gardens in Paris).

This passage is confusing to me because I feel like CA is weaving in several different ways that life is recognized here.  I can’t see the 15 principles at work, but it is the human motive he uses here to describe the unfolding.  Maybe the principles describe the design and the seeking and motivation are more pertinent to the unfolding work?

“These people–judging from their faces in the pictures, anyway–are free in themselves–perhaps because they are not relying on money for joy–and certainly, I think, because there is so little extra in the situation” (157).

Hmm… I want to comment on this. I think I will keep my pert opinions away from this passage and the CA-trope that it is beginning to call up for me.

But, I will point to what seems to be another underlying principle of unfolding as it involves humans–authentic or natural expression of self in relationship to design (however that relationship appears).

“We stop altogether when there is no further step we can take that intensifies the feeling of the whole” (158).

“they arise in direct expression of need, desire, function, and circumstance. However crude, these elements are adapted to life.” (167).

Another principle of unfolding life seems to be: absence of clutter or that which is unnecessary.

 

by

Heather: CA, pp. 86-112

“Again the process defines the building.  There is no design. The building arises from the process.” 87

“Paying attention to wholeness means that a person is paying attention to the whole, to everything: to the life of water, other people, the thirst of a stranger, the stars in the black sky.  it means paying attention to the emptiness of the desert, to the passion of an old woman sitting on her doorstep, to one’s own passion, to the passions of the people all around, to the running of the water on the ground, to a banana skin on the ground, to the laughter of children, to the smells of dinner being cooked.  It means loving the glistening white plaster on the wall, the subtle evening light. It means taking the whole, enjoying it, seeing it all, bathing in it, loving it.” 104

“this open place comes from structure-preserving transformations of that wholeness which includes the children, and preserves and extends their love of children.” 105

“It preserved no structure, destroyed hundreds of thousands of living centers. But more than that, the new centers which were created are not related to any aspect of the land, the sea, the town.” 112

 

Grateful for Richard’s collection of JB quotes.  I’m so terribly far behind on that part of our assignment.  Off to see Spamalot tonight… Spam… Alexander would have fun with that, no doubt.  :)