Into the World

About this time of year, I begin to have discussions with people about whether it is fall or not. By the Japanese calendar, in which seasons surround the solstice and equinox instead of begin with them, autumn begins the second week in August. This corroborates my Pacific Rim sense of things. Trees are drying up and even starting to turn here. We have a bit of fog in the mornings, which keeps the days cool. And the sun sets earlier every day.

I have just finished the first draft of Chapter 17 of Nature’s Stricter Lessons and put it up for my first readers. This puts me about two thirds of the way through the book, which will be the fifth in the series about Line, Marty and Paul Mikkelson. I’m not rushing it, since the first four books of the series are now out in the world, but I am happy to be moving forward.

Lightly Held Books also has some news. We held a short advertising campaign, using Google AdWords and the ad you see here. The idea is that each ad bids for space on web pages as people are reading or surfing the web, particularly literary web pages. For a relatively small amount of money, in July, there were 56,492 “impressions” seen by people in the ad space at the edge of their web pages as they browsed. 92 people clicked through to see the website http://lightlyheldbooks.com/. It doesn’t mean that anyone bought any books! Or that 92 new people became aware of our site, or looked at it for more than a cursory minute. But it might mean something. It is an axiom of the public relations world that a person must hear about something seven times before he actually purchases it. I have Don Starnes to thank for making the ad and getting to the bottom of AdWords.

This is also the fiftieth year since I graduated from Luther College. As a result, I was asked by the bookstore if I wanted to do a book signing. Yes! I do! Thus, early October will see me flying in to Rochester, Minnesota, and heading down to Decorah, Iowa. My sister Ann will ferry me about and possibly there will be another book signing in Mankato. I haven’t tried to compete for book signings in the busy urban bookstores in my area here in California. In fact I am pretty poor at competing at all! But it doesn’t mean I take my work any less seriously.

I couldn’t tell you why I feel it so necessary to write this series of books, but I have wanted to contribute to culture in some way since I was a very little girl in North Dakota. Finally now I have the time to show, in the way that I want to, something about wholeness.

Essentially, as Christopher Alexander describes in his four books on The Nature of Order in the physical world, wholeness is recursively induced from wholeness. Alexander points to a cathedral, for example, “in which the properties create life innocently, in centers, and in which the centers themselves are multiplied, each one made deeper by the next.” Crafted by people who were steeped in one thought, to work to the glory of God, the recursion in the glass and stonework becomes more intense and the structure becomes a unity.

Athletes perform with more excellence out of pride in the team or country of which they are a part. The “strangers” who come together to make music in the Silk Road Ensemble exhibit the uninhibited joy of participation in the group. The soundness, the sustainability of our institutions, our families, even our personalities are informed by the context from which they come. Only now, I believe, when we see fragmentation all around us, are we willing to look at this.

In art people are still excited by the shimmering edges of things. But one day they will want to get back to the trunk, the base, the roots. When that happens, they might want to know about the culture which sustains our three siblings, Line, Marty and Paul, a wholeness which induces their abundant lives. Steeped in this family culture, they embrace new cultures, make their own families and the difficult choices which our rambunctious, rapacious and freedom-loving global culture requires.

No Ideas But in Things

A brilliant American doctor, William Carlos Williams, writing poetry in his office as he waited for his next patient, pulled us back from intellectual idealism and romanticism, by stating as a maxim for his work: “No ideas but in things.” Colloquial English, the panorama of reality in his native New Jersey captured Dr. Williams and influenced many who came after him. The bits of language which have nourished me tell people’s stories. In literature, I learn who characters are and how they embody ideas, what causes them to come to grief, or ecstasy, before they die. 

It was Elizabeth Bishop who pointed me to Darwin. Elizabeth, who lived near Rio de Janiero for almost 15 years, read Darwin all her life. Bishop had a perilous childhood, but it resulted in poems in which the power lay in what was not said. Precise observation, often of animals or natural phenomena, and a modesty of expression are her hallmarks. Her spare, elegant poetry hits heavy where it lands. No ideas but in things.

Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle [1845] is the adventure story of a young man in his twenties, who trained himself to be an excellent field biologist along the coasts of South America and then retired to his home near London to spend the rest of his life writing about what he had found. In The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, David Quammen says it isn’t the idea that we all have a common evolutionary background that horrifies people. It is that natural selection accomplishes it. No divine spark, no hand of providence watching over its precious creation. And certainly no special demi-god status for man. Evolution is relentless, out of chaos and uncertainty, toward survival. No ideas but in things.

Christopher Alexander, a British architect who spent most of his life working in Berkeley, California, states that our current problems are a result of our certainty that matter is value-free. We treat matter as a mechanism and act as if nothing we do matters. But if we were to accept the living character of space and matter, everything matters. “It paves the way to an ultimately personal view of the world. Matter is personal. We then treat all creation – of buildings, gardens, roads – as the protection of the personal which resides in matter, and which, through our actions, may see the light of day.” [The Nature of Order, Book Four, The Luminous Ground, 2004] No ideas but in things.

Robert Pirsig upends the concept of value further. Value is not a property of matter, he says. Matter is really a subspecies of value. “The metaphysics of quality says that if moral judgments are essentially assertions of value and if value is the fundamental ground-stuff of the world, then moral judgments are the fundamental ground-stuff of the world.” [Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, 1991] Pirsig shows us how, grounded in the world, life migrates toward freedom. No ideas but in things.

We look ever toward the point at which matter and spirit meet, where, often briefly to our heavy, everyday perception, matter is illumined by the light within. It can happen anywhere, any time. There is as much chaos and uncertainty in spiritual evolution as there is in physical evolution. Physical evolution looks toward success in being alive, but the evolution of the spirit looks toward value. Spirituality is flat-out value. No ideas but in things.

And finally from Pasternak – my mentor since earliest days: “So that there shall be no dead branches in the soul, so that its growth shall not be retarded, so that man shall be incapable of mingling his narrow mind with the creation of his immortal essence, there exists a number of things to turn his vulgar curiosity away from life, which does not wish to work in his presence and in every way avoids him. … Hence all respectable religions, all generalizations, all prejudices and the most amusing and brilliant of them all – psychology.” [From The Childhood of Luvers, 1918, translated by Robert Payne]

No ideas but in things.

"A Truly Humble Cottage"

I finished the first draft of Pulled Into Nazareth today. Finishing a draft is always a memorable occasion. I will spend the rest of the year editing it, but at least some of the suspense of is over. Five years ago I laid out the over-arching scenario of the series of books I am writing. But the details! I never know how the details are going to go until I write each chapter for the first time.

As I write, I keep in mind my desire to be “truly humble.” Christopher Alexander writes: “I say that even humble buildings cannot be made, because the infection which comes from our mechanistic cosmology is mainly one of arbitrariness – and the arbitrariness breeds pretension. In the presence of pretentiousness, true humility is almost impossible. A truly humble cottage even, seems beyond the reach of most builders today.” [Footnote, p. 24, The Luminous Ground, volume 4 of  The Nature of Order]

This small paragraph, an aspect of Alexander’s research and attempt to get beyond a mechanical world view to one in which value has an objective place, strikes me as getting to the heart of the problem writers have as well. Much of current literature certainly seems arbitrary to me, the corollary being that pretension is required to insist on its importance. But pretension doesn’t get you very far.

Of course striving for humility too can also be a dangerous. I keep in mind Neil Innes’ (of Monty Python fame) “Protest Song,” which he introduces by saying “I’ve suffered for my music. Now it’s your turn.” As Don says, “When you give people something it should be a gift, not an invoice.” I certainly don’t suffer as I write, and I do hope my work is a gift to others, and not a demand for attention.

This month also, through the heroic efforts of my brother and sisters, nieces and nephews, the small beach house my Dad built at the edge of a Minnesota lake was reconstructed. The little one-room beach house was a blessed retreat for many of us, but it had become uninhabitable for the last few years due to rot and foundation problems. It is no longer possible to build so close to a lake in Minnesota, but existing buildings are exempted from the rule.

My sister Naomi wrote of her stay in the beach house in 1981, “Never having had a chance to stay down there by the water before, I was overwhelmed by its magic. A small square room with a bed, a rocking chair and a lamp, it perches above the shore. The only thing you can see out of any of the windows is trees and sky and lake. At the head of the bed there is a low window so you can lie on your stomach and look out at the stars over the lake at night. The effect is rather like living in a treehouse – the breeze blows in and out the windows and sings in the branches. And at night if it’s rough you can hear the sounds of water lapping the shore as you lie in bed – or if its quiet, sometimes there’s the eerie cry of a loon echoing across the still space.”

The beach house is indeed “a truly humble cottage.” It of course plays a part in my fictional writing, as do many other aspects of my extended family.

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]

Reality Hunger

For more than ten years, Don has wanted to make a movie showing the seductive, even insidious, effects of letting media take over our lives. We recently discovered the French thinker Baudrillard, who said we live “sheltered by signs, in the denial of the real.” People now are more interested in the reflected life they watch on screens, in Facebook, in movies and on television. We are losing the ability to relate to the world and to each other except through a secondhand cultural life dispensed to us by the media. In this world we find ourselves agreeing with one or another political position, clinging to the ideas of one or another culture hero or celebrity, at the mercy of streaming ads for fashions, travel, technology and theories about economics, health and education.

But the self-evident world beneath the context of meaning and references provided by our profane culture is still there. A ground of being more luminous, more magical and powerful than any indirect experience of it exists. The architect and mathematician Christopher Alexander believes people see reality in terms of Cartesian mechanics, assuming everything is a machine. “With the onset of the 20^th-century mechanistic world-picture, clear understanding about value went out of the world,” he writes. In this world, we see each other’s significance as objects, not the shining reality of each other. In this world, as Alexander says, “nothing matters.”

I just read The Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, a prolific author, seen as “one of the most celebrated writers of his generation.” Despite his narrative gifts, the book demonstrated conclusively that “nothing matters”! It seemed to me that Chabon took a bunch of cards with items on them and threw them randomly into the text. One of his characters speaks for him, saying “I closed my eyes and tried to clear my head of this proof of the uselessness of Albert Vetch’s art, of all art and energy and human life in general.” Most of my book club agreed that they were wholly uninterested in reading the work of a person with this view on life! I see this view in many modern writers and feel sad for them.

The answer is in attention. Baudrillard retreated into silent witness to the self-evidence of the world, paradoxically using photography. In his view, the silent, still photograph can sometimes give us a sense of what the world is like in our absence, unobstructed by the layers of significance we lay upon images. Alexander posits a “ground” of reality. For Alexander, “value is the measure of the degree of connectedness a given place, or thing, or event, has with the ground.” He sought methods of determining value, finding it a definite and fundamental part of the universe. For him, “art is not merely pleasant or interesting. It has an importance that goes to the very core of the cosmology.” In the new view of the world Alexander promotes, everything matters.

We are seeing people’s hunger for value, and the real ground beneath us in many different places: in the provenance movement in which people want to know exactly where their food is coming from and how it was handled; in the popularity of bluegrass music people make themselves; in the Occupy movement in which people are trying to bring the economy back down to human scale and find new relations to each other; and in the fact that so many young people support Ron Paul, “strongly rejecting traditional American hubris in favor of Paul’s more empirical views on foreign policy.” [David Sirota, Salon, November 28, 2011.]

Don and I are working on a movie called Nothing in a Rectangle Is True which deals with these issues. You can experience it on a Facebook page [ironically enough!] in which our characters interact, questioning the hold the object-oriented dominant culture has over us. http://www.facebook.com/nothinginarectangleistrue

My project, So Are You To My Thoughts, is also undertaken squarely in loving attention to particular fictional times and places, to the growth of my protagonists, Line, Marty and Paul. Born into a wholistic mono-culture steeped in value, which sustains them in their search for individuality and diversity, I hope to see them become full and bountiful grownups. We are all fractals for the expanding universe. I write in the attempt to come face to face with the ground of being. 

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.