The Pastor's Kids

The Pastor's Kids

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Patterns of Wholeness

Christopher Alexander published A Pattern Language in 1977. It turned up at my architectural firm almost right away, its thin Bible-paper pages dense with ideas, photographs and diagrams. He felt that he and his associates and found a ‘timeless way of building’ which enabled people to design for themselves their own houses, streets and communities.

The impact of this, and other books by Alexander, has been far-reaching, going to the heart of a larger debate about ways of making buildings. Alexander followed up with a four-book series The Nature of Order [2002-2004], in which he pointed out that the limited mechanistic view of the world we now use must begin to include statements of value as matters of objective truth. Though skeptical himself, he tried to show in these books how this could be done.

In 1990, Christopher Alexander’s “unique, world-class Oriental rug collection” was placed on display at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco. It began to be clear that Alexander’s study of ancient rugs and carpets was an essential part of his work. In 1993 he published A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets. In it he writes, “to study wholeness we must have an empirical way of distinguishing it from preference”[p. 27].

It did not escape my notice that, throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, the architects who were able to were buying Oriental [for lack of another inclusive word] carpets. Rooms generally had white walls and modernist furniture made of leather and steel, sitting on colorful patterned floor coverings as ancient as the person could afford.

In 1971, long before I knew anything about Alexander, I bought a camel bag at the Alameda flea market because it was there, because it was lovely and I could afford it at $25. It had a small piece of masking tape attached to it at the back with the word “Caucasian” on it. The camel bag has hung on the wall of every apartment or house I’ve lived in since. As you can see from the photograph, it has strong natural colors, and wonderful designs. Having lived with it so long, I surely take it for granted, but at the same time it has probably influenced me immensely.

Nowadays we must be sure that the carpets we buy are not being made by children who are not getting an education. The Rugmark Foundation in India has set up a certification process to ensure that a rug has not been made by child labor. Other groups, such as Azerbaijan Rugs, strive to bring life to forgotten traditions, studying ancient designs, returning to hand spinning, carding and natural dyes.

Georges Gurdjieff, whose books we also read in the 1970s, traded in carpets throughout his life. A more beguiling description of wholeness than what he told P.D. Ouspensky of the rug-making process would be hard to imagine! Gurdjieff “spoke of the ancient customs connected with carpet making in certain parts of Asia; of a whole village working together at one carpet; of winter evenings when all the villagers, young and old, gather together in one large building and, dividing into groups, sit or stand on the floor in an order previously known and determined by tradition. Each group then begins its own work. Some pick stones and splinters out of the wool. Others beat out the wool with sticks. A third group combs the wool. The fourth spins. The fifth dyes the wool. The sixth, or maybe the twenty-sixth, weaves the actual carpet. Men, women and children, old men and old women, all have their own traditional work. And all the work is done to the accompaniment of music and singing. The women spinners with spindles in their hands dance a special dance as they work, and all the movements of all the people engaged in different work are like one movement in one and the same rhythm. Moreover each locality has its own special tune, its own special songs and dances, connected with carpet making from time immemorial.” [P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, 1949, Chapter 2]

Saturday, October 4, 2014

Paradigms New and Old

I went to college a little before structural analysis set in, so I didn’t know what a syntagm was (though I had some idea of paradigm) until I met Don Starnes. Don went to San Francisco State in filmmaking. I’ve seen him, when editing a piece, plot the paradigm, what the piece means, against the syntagm, the sequence of things that happen. This is the simplest way I have been able to understand it. In filmmaking, it means that a visual language delivers the meaning, plotted against things that happen on the film’s “timeline.”

Don laments the lack of meaning in much of our current “entertainment.” This morning he told me about a reality show he has agreed to work on briefly. “It’s horrible,” he tells me. “Philosophical people don’t make good television,” I remind him. “They don’t even make good Facebook!” Nevertheless, people are hungry for stories that involve them, that encompass the complexity they live in without demeaning their sense of themselves and their possibilities.

Duane Elgin has taken this problem head-on. He notes that we are in a time of transition. New stories could involve the ideas that the human race is growing up; communication is awakening our consciousness to a global, rather than a local scale; and the hero’s journey could now be a story of return to living in harmony with the earth and each other. He suggests that the despair and destruction we see around us may be part of the difficult birth we are all going through. The project on which he collaborates to develop new stories is described here.

We will always need new stories. But, like most people deeply involved in literature, I am also happy with the old ones. Humans and their patterns have not changed very much, and a richly told story invites us in to watch. As Kenneth Rexroth says, in his book Classics Revisited, all great fiction is “the story of the immensely difficult achievement of personal integrity.” He is here referring to The Dream of the Red Chamber, sometimes called The Story of the Stone, a novel written in China between 1754 and 1764. In it, Cao Xueqin looks back at the aristocratic family he came from, writing in poverty at the end of his life. I am reading an English translation by David Hawkes.

Bao-yu, the protagonist, is surrounded by a hierarchical family structure which requires daily filial obligation. He lives in a beautiful garden, and knows the poetry of China so well he excels in composing allusive poems. His father, however, wants him to study the Four Books, the basis of the Confucian philosophy which structures Chinese society. When Bao-yu doesn’t, his father beats him badly “for the honor of the family.” His friend says, “I suppose you will change now.” But Bao-yu is intransigent. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I shan’t change. People like that are worth dying for. I wouldn’t change if he killed me.”

The paradigm of this book is unlike any Western novel. The syntagm is well-populated! One thing happens after another, the action shifting from one part of the huge family complex, in which more than 300 people live, to another. Servants and masters all take their turn. Characters die and are mourned. The family fortunes sink. Infighting and chaos begin to undermine the household. It’s a big melodrama which draws you into it with its lively characters, said to be based on real people.

Though willful and mercurial, gentle Bao-yu struggles against the hate that results from the difficulties around him. Rexroth suggests he embodies the Taoist principle of non-action, that of water seeking its own level and eventually wearing away mountains. It is a feminine, yin principle, reflecting the way the Chinese people see and interact with nature. Neither yin nor yang is evil. They alternate, each containing a little of the other. Knowing it cannot last, Bao-yu is determined to enjoy, appreciate and celebrate his young life.

The yin/yang interaction of the rise and set of phenomena is a more grown-up way of looking at the world than seeing it as black and white, good and evil. It does not pit people against nature, as we somehow do in the West. Evil certainly exists, and heroes and heroines must fight it where it arises. But the interaction is messy and our heroes and heroines would do well to look into their own hearts and motives as they go forth into battle. The paradigm of fighting and battle itself should be questioned. As Duane Elgin suggests, the hero’s journey might now be more about a return to harmony.