Our subject -- Life itself -- has provoked flashbacks to Book One of Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order, The Phenomenon of Life.
These aren't exactly memories, rather, memories of memories, in that I know we discussed it but I can't recall the details. I was going to reread the book today, but why not just review the previous posts and hope they aren't trashbacks?
No, that's not false modesty, because I feel as if anything I've said in the past I can say better today. Or more clearly. Or at least will be lower on the Wince Meter.
Clearly Alexander is our kind of architect: the subtitle of the book is An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe. Hmm, architecture and cosmology. Isn't that the bailiwick of the Freemasons -- one of our rival secret organizations?
Alexander only uses architecture as a kind of focal point to discuss everything under the sun.
Speaking of the Masons, maybe like this:
I am quite sure Alexander would agree with the Aphorist that
Modern architecture knows how to erect industrial sheds but cannot manage to construct a palace or a temple.
And that
The preferred materials of modern architecture age like a prostitute.
Although this might be taking it too far:
Compared to a Romanesque church, everything else, without question, is more or less commonplace.
Along these lines, an amazon reviewer writes that
Alexander begins by asking the question, why is contemporary architecture so terrible? In the 20th century we have passed through a unique period, one in which architecture as a discipline has been in a state that is almost unimaginably bad. I find myself musing on this question as I sit in the waiting room at a doctor's office, park my car in a garage, or go though airport security. How did we end up with a built environment that actively degrades our lives?
Does it have to be this way? Throughout history, cultures have established methods of architecture that enrich the human experience. He posits that this has been caused by a loss of the ability and desire to discern aliveness....
Alexander establishes that aliveness is a property of space and matter, not only of biological organisms. Next, he establishes that aliveness exists on a spectrum: anything can be more or less alive. In the built environment, we have agency to influence where something -- a door nob, and window, a room, a village, a region -- falls on this spectrum.
So how do we discern aliveness? After decades of experimentation, Alexander has found that it is an objective property. A basic tenet is the question, "which of these things, manifestations, etc. brings me more aliveness?"
According to the ubiquitous Professor Backflap:
Alexander describes a scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life, and establishes this understanding of living structures as an intellectual basis for a new architecture.
He identifies fifteen geometric properties which tend to accompany the presence of life in nature, and also in the buildings and cities we make. These properties are seen over and over in nature and in the cities and streets of the past, but they have almost disappeared in the impersonal developments and buildings of the last hundred years.
This book shows that living structures depend on features which make a close connection with the human self, and that only living structure has the capacity to support human well-being.
Seems to me that Alexander is tackling the same questions as Rosen, only under cover of architecture. But instead of illustrating his thesis with lots of bullet-proof mathematical equations, he illustrates it with lots of... illustrations. Could these constitute left brain / right brain demonstrations of the same fundamental truth?
Let's grow out on a limb and say Yes.
Beauty is important, but maybe it's actually far more important than we realize. At the very least, Alexander's work explains exactly why beauty is so important, because it is as if Life is one of its attributes or entailments.
I am an unabashed pantheist. It's just that I'm not only a pantheist. In a footnote, Alexander suggests that "all space and matter, organic or inorganic, has some degree of life in it" and that things are more or less alive according to their "structure and arrangement." More than once I've looked at a tree and pondered whether we are equally alive. I love trees, but the answer is no.
In the same footnote Alexander claims that reality is personal, and now we're talkin', because that's one of my Ultimate Suspicions. He writes that "all matter/space has some degree of 'self' in it," and that "some aspect of the personal... infuses all matter/space."
I've never given it a name, but let's call it pantheistic tri-personalism. Until something snappier occurs to me.
I am now flipping through the book, and will pause when something does something to something in me.
Very few people realize, I think, how much the present confusion which exists in the field of architecture is wound up with our conception of the universe.
To which I can only add hoo boy, because this apples to any and every field. In other words, a stupid conception of the cosmos poisons everything. Didn't Thomas warn us that a small error in the beginning leads to a great one at the end? And that The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold?
Well, in this case we're talking about a massive error In The Beginning, in which case it must be multiplied at least a googlefold.
A great many metaphysical questions of great consequence are binary in nature, for example, the world is either created or not created, and you have to pick one. Of course, we ought to pick the more likely one, or at least the less unlikely, which is why I choose the former.
Likewise, the universe is either personal or impersonal, but if it's the latter, then you've got a lot of explaining to do, but with no one here to explain it.
This post has probably gone on too long already, but I think I'll continue flipping and blogging tomorrow. Meanwhile, aphorisms:
The existence of a work of art demonstrates that the world has meaning. Even if it does not say what that meaning is.
Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says.
Things do not have feeling, but there is feeling in many things.
8 comments:
Maybe I should have called it "Trans-Pantheistic Tri-Personalism" to avoid misunderstanding.
... living structures depend on features which make a close connection with the human self, and that only living structure has the capacity to support human well-being.
My kids have spent much of the past year fascinated with the Back Rooms, which started as a short Youtube movie where a videographer falls into a weird sort of horror space between worlds. The interesting thing about it is the creepy setting they came up with was essentially an empty office building. All beige walls and carpet, fluorescent lighting, everything starkly rectangular and windowless. It wouldn't have the same effect if they had used, say, an abandoned cathedral or an old mansion; there's a sort of unending monotonous empty sameness that is at once familiar and absolutely soul-sucking, which would be horrifying even if there were no monsters present.
Often, when I go for a walk, I rate houses on the degree of life or death in their design, assigning a letter grade from A to F. It's actually easy to do. That's one thing I remember from Alexander -- that you can look at anything from a salt shaker to a toaster to building and discern the degree of life.
For which reason some places are palpably oppressive.
Second look at feng shui?
A lot of contemporary music is audible death.
Yes.
Jesus returned several deceased persons back to normal corporeal life. Let us presume these instances were factual. What would this imply about the properties of life per-se?
The Trench, not resorting to mere omnipotence as a full explanation, says this implied life, upon its removal from a person, was not just irradiated haphazardly into the environment as thermal energy or what have you.
Jesus was able to fully restore it, so it must have been stored somewhere outside of the body yet still held together in a cohesive unit. Otherwise, Jesus could not just summon it back into the dead person's body, reboot all systems, and everything's nominal as before. IT will send you a bill. To be flippant.
As far as the soul, the dead person would need that retrieved and re-paired with the living body. So the soul, too, must be stored separately yet cohesively. And this most people already believe, but perhaps the actual life animus, the energy that propels the green shoot of a plant skyward, is a retrievable coherent structure.
Well that tis the Trench's thoughts for the day, have a good one.
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