A Net to Catch the Whole

“So Are You to My Thoughts” is, to some degree, inspired by the work of mathematician and architect Christopher Alexander. As a teacher at the University of California, and as a working architect, he came up with a way of looking at the value of buildings and other structures which he published in a series of books called “The Nature of Order”. One of the central tenets of his concept is that wholes are not made up of parts, but rather “wholeness creates its parts … the sub-wholes – or centers – are induced within the wholeness, and come from the wholeness.” Wholeness has a recursive nature, in that the stronger the whole, the stronger are the centers induced within it, thus in turn making the whole stronger. Wholes are deeply connected with each other and with their centers.

Applying this to people, it seems to me very true. In this way of thinking about growth and education, we are not simply the result of our particular DNA expressing itself. We don’t purely will ourselves into being. In fact we are induced by the family and culture, indeed the generations, which precede us. Of course we are free to create our lives, to flower in the ways we are meant to. It is just that the stronger the wholes which create us, the stronger we are, and the deeper the interlock between us and the wholes we are part of, as well as those we create.

In looking at Line, Marty and Paul from this point of view, I see how important the places they grew up, the culture of their extended family, and of course the times, were to them. They live in a small town of about two hundred people where cultural life almost completely takes place in church and school. Land was laid out by homesteading in the 19^th Century and farms are about 160 acres each, planted to wheat mostly, with some soybeans and sunflowers. The town was created so that farmers could co-operate in storing their grain in big elevators and sending it to cities by train, which runs along one side of the main street on which Line, Marty and Paul live. The most potent political question in the town is the extent to which farmers should co-operate, for instance in the powerful Farmers’ Union. Land for the school was laid out in accordance with 19^th Century township practices and is funded and regulated by the state.

As the children of a Lutheran pastor who is educated by the organized church, Line, Marty and Paul are perhaps a little more aware of religious questions in their culture, but  probably not much. They take all of it completely for granted. Their eyes are open to the subtle differences in income and education levels in people in their town, but they are taught, both in school and by literal readings of Christ’s teachings as written down in the Bible, a fundamentally egalitarian acceptance of others.

Alexander’s work is mainly about value. “Value is a measure of the degree of connectedness a given place, or thing, or event, has with the ground,” he says. He takes four long books to explain it in quite readable prose, but I cannot follow his mathematical definition of “the wholeness”. I do see wholeness as a way of determining the degree to which we are able to fulfill our promise as humans. Examining its embodiment in my characters, I find a reason to write.