UX 2020?

We are not only "users" of life. But it is still interesting to view life through the lens of user design (UX), and to think about the design of the spaces we create around us - even where this design leaves empty spaces. (Empty spaces in the Montessori method; empty spaces in the Japanese garden...)
Mostly where I like design is where it involves consideration of others: processing what one thinks one knows to share it. Understanding that sharing is not simply spitting out, but creating an environment for reception.
And to in turn seek out environments where others are sharing. Otherwise "others'" realms of thought and/or activity can seem impassable, opaque, forbidding. What has helped me relate more to the tech bubble that has been late to reach my latter-day place of abode has been to try to listen to what tech workers and designers are saying. Seeking out conscientious contributors.
And indeed, such people are surrounded by environments shaped by lines of inquiry that can overlap one's own (and to what an extent...)
Here is an example of two such figures, Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen, who wrote a post I know will interest you: "How Can We Develop Transformative Tools for Thought". The authors are great names in the tech industry. The paper overlaps so many thinkers I am drawing on in my own work - and I would be so curious to see if this will be true for any of  you, too, from different angles. I am guessing that, if you are stopping by this blog, you are also interested in thought ... and meaning.

Source, by Daniel Oliva Barbero

It would be reductionist to paste any single meaning over tech advancements of recent decades (which are so impressive: without even going into the details, consider the ability to process over 25 billion events in an hour). At the same time, some of the critique offered by Lewis Mumford, remains prescient: "He who does not see the choices in the development of the machine merely betrays his incapacity to observe the cumulative effects." I think that the authors of the article above would agree with this sentiment.
The tool can quickly become reductionist.
I might have lost appreciation of this had I not "gone Linux" this year (Windows is too expensive for my wages/salary). This move also caused me to lose Scrivener, with the coherent draft of my book and so in turn I have plunged into exploring "org mode". Both of these experiences made me feel (as corny as it sounds) like that film about the man who thought his life was a game show until he broke through to the other side. I doubt I fully watched it, but in my memory, a man suddenly walks around in a world of colors he could only have dreamed of before then...
What some people might find to be the decision fatigue of Linux, I suddenly find myself truly engaged with my computer and feel it to be my tool.
It's like how I have a deep need to keep this blog interface the way it is though I am not sure if it translated well to mobile presentations. If it did, what an incredible job the Google engineers and programmers are doing to allow for multiplicity.
My computer is now shaped just how I want it. And org mode! It reminds me of childhood adventures with Apple IIe; its epithet as being the Swiss Army knife of programs is well-deserved. I must admit that I may be breaking my computer as I learn (I have entered terminal - where one enters code - to do things I did not fully understand more than once), I have not had this much fun using a computer since the Apple computer I once battled to get time on. There were games for children to learn programming: I remember one about selling lemonade, or another to make text display and move in desired directions.
Which is a fancy way of saying that unless we are engaging with the processes around us, they are not fully engaging us and we run the strange and converse risk of being used by them.
But of course, many people have said that better, many times before now. The point here will be to conclude by wondering aloud what kind of experiences we are building around us with the tools that we have. I know that I have become a better and more focused person through my experience designing networked learning and developing the STS (science and technology studies) of my quondam dissertation. There are a lot of problems in 2020. But there are also tools. (The girl in the picture below does not know what she is missing by not being taught the code behind the interfaces she is now accustomed to...)

Source, techlicious

Some Frames for Mind Furniture

Could it be that we are mere vessels, mere "pottery works" as Anatole France writes (via) we are, claiming that life doesn't look anything like an "examination-room". Our answer may depend on whether meaning is seen to extend beyond the life, say as the large and small lives overflow into the splash or sober impact of Martial's ep/odes, hand-copied, press printed, pixelled, reaching us across space and time. On whether it is worth the effort to work on merit, to frame a life in words, to say nothing of the memory, heart.
The words are often those of interpretation, how to read the life, beyond the dictates of genre or mores of the day, what we choose to leave in and out, focus on. Where there is focus, there is decision, and there is learning, via the informed response - and we are back to the exam room. Confucius spoke of the importance of "unfolding the aim" of admonition in a way that is reminiscent of the Stoic emphasis on learning how to make intelligent use of appearances (φαντασία). Possibly comparable to the almost desperate virtue depicted in Thomas Hardy's novels, Confucius says: "Learn as if you could not reach your object, and were always fearing also lest you should lose it." In this world, if we are dealing with the potsherds of discarded lives described by Anatole, there will be at least one archaeologist on hand to study it.
But Anatole's sentiment will not be so soon conciliated; he mentions the mystery of pain which he describes not in those words but in the illustration of the child that dies at birth. And who better to consult about pain than Hardy who has chosen it for his focus; "reminding us is that poor human beings had never asked for  life on any terms, much less on such terms as have been  forced upon them ... The gods are unjust, and we are equally scourged for those virtues which we have  striven to preserve through such difficulty and such pain", writes Herbert L. Stewart in "Thomas Hardy as a Teacher".
I am sure I have written before how I was introduced to Hardy at 13 when alone in boarding school sick bay and the reverend headmaster brought up to me Hardy's Mayor. The headmaster introduced the book as one dearest to him; the headmaster being no ordinary man but one I consider of rather deep faith, who taught us that the menacing is but a projection on a screen, not threatening the nature of things. It is in this way that I came to associate Hardy's books not with the pessimism most people see in them but with a hope we will be shaken from our mechanical dream. Tonight, I read my first ever criticism of Hardy, and find I am not alone in my reading, shared also by Stewart.

In Hardy's novels, "an all too natural sequence of events has led an innocent victim to unredeemed and unredeemable misfortune" writes Stewart. Yet we are pushed to consider, "What is likely to happen to the  most ardent moral convictions, when they are understood as  by-products of a morally indifferent world-machine?" This is what we come to if we are not reading "superficially" because for Hardy, "justice must be done though the  heavens fall" and the characters unredeemed. It is the Melian dialogue all over again. The Stoic purple thread: the high price that brings exemplary beauty to the rest (viz. Epictetus' Discourses 2). "The  things we do for the best turn out to have been for the worst," Stewart writes of Hardy's novels - but Jude remains, not obscure but a paragon of loyalty, of the attempt, of all the other dreams that have gone unrecorded, obscured by the invisibility of class, timing, or whatever else.
"The riddle for all those who at present make so  much of the mystery of pain lies just here, that only for those who take what is essentially a religious view of the world is  that mystery acute, so that those whom it troubles most are  bearing unconscious witness to the faith which they cannot  accept" Stewart writes - of the categorical types of criticism to have emerged in the modern West or since antiquity if I understood the premise of Epictetus' "Against the Academics".
There is learning and there is learning, one might say glibly. The impersonal, illusory Encyclopédie vs. the εὔρεσις of dialectics and the world map of  τόποι. In the Analects, we read: "'Ts'ze, you think, I suppose, that I am one who learns many things and keeps them in memory?' Tsze-kung replied, 'Yes, but perhaps it is not so?' 'No,' was the answer; 'I seek a unity all-pervading.'" This approaches the flow of Taoism, and one wonders whether it nears, too, the τὸ εὔρουν or εὔροια that George Long defines as "flowing easily" though it is translated as "happiness". According to this learning, one is to seek the ideal called truth ("anxious to see clearly" as problematic as it is, particularly in deed, as all these texts concur; Confucius himself claims he is deficient in this respect). In the Analects, it is written that man is not to be bound to partisanship but truth: Man is not a utensil. 君子不器. He is not a vessel, though maybe an argument could be made in a deeply figurative sense that so long as he feels his cracks (or is wary of "becloudings"), his metaphorical mind can share in the "unity all-pervading".

There are cracks. There are faults. It can be so heavy sometimes that perhaps one would like to think in terms of vessels not of men. That would certainly shrug off the unasked for responsibility of being alive, which, just like in the school room, has its rewards and gifts for the diligent student. Here we are, we can be plain or purple. As for all the faults, like Seneca's, for example, whose letters I have yet to tire of returning to, observed of as inconsistent with his school's teachings: does this make his writings on the whole less helpful? Or perhaps we are faced with a Hardyan example of being pushed to think morally.
There is much to be said about what to say and what to keep silent on or let drop from focus - like those cracks and faults, for example. One learns the hard way to stop zooming in on one's shortcomings: exaggeration is not a virtue. Toelken writes of Native American tribes who do not name directly the hibernating, furred animal lest it be in that way summoned, a powerful observation on the power of thought. In some countries it is taboo to name obvious problems, most inhabitants having learned to hide that ugly painfulness behind a mask of humourous evasion (those not having learned being pitied or ridiculed if despondently). Confucius writes of fathers and sons concealing each other's misconduct (let us remember though that he also writes of the rectification of names, thereby such concealment applies to fathers and sons who act such, respectfully) and also notes, "The reason the ancients did not readily give utterance to their words was that they feared lest their actions should not come up to them". How much needs to be said, seen and what, to what end?
In an April letter to Lucceius, Cicero writes, "And so I again and again ask you outright, both to praise those actions of mine in warmer terms than you perhaps feel, and in that respect to neglect the laws of history." We can frame lives, weave them in our looms. This is also a source of great confusion not to mention partisanship. Some thinkers extend beyond their school, if in a few threads of  "parallel sensitivities" which do not seek to reduce the original context.
"'Why must one be so severe? If a man purify himself to wait upon me, I receive him so purified, without guaranteeing his past conduct.' The Master said, 'Is virtue a thing remote? I wish to be virtuous, and lo! virtue is at hand'", 述而.

Magazine. Brush.

A Melody for the Mortarium

This morning as I walked to sing I saw patchwork reflections of blue sky in puddles: exceptions of blue in so much grey. I can hear the rain now, a reminder of all that needs to come down, reasons unknown to satellite eyes, at times, like during flash floods or mysterious snow storms that bring human haste to a halt. To seek the spacious place of nature and not the rush; to see that missing puzzle piece in blue.
True solace for times when one is being ground up by a pistillum in a mortarium. It is the symbol of medical prescriptions, and "just as wise physicians who, when giving the fastidious rather bitter drugs to drink, frequently smear the cup with honey" one may seek delight of melody "mingled with the doctrines so that by the pleasantness and softness of the sound heard we might receive without perceiving it the benefit of the words" to quote Ἅγιος Βασίλειος ὁ Μέγας.
Words as prescription. One may pause to consider literacy and the premature knowledge delivered through the false speech of διάβολος, thrown across at the unwitting. And with their knowledge came their lies. Knowledge is generally attributed to education, which in most of history included lessons in the complex moral measure of good and bad. Complex because generosity of spirit may look mean, such as replacing fish with fishing stick. Such complexity may be found in Aesop, whose fables, we are reminded at the Edithorial, were used in exercises in literacy during the Victorian age. Before that, we may consider magistra vitae, Cicero's phrase championed by Medieval and Renaissance educational ideals. Before that, too, we might think of καλὸς κἀγαθός, the ancient Greek ideal for personal virtue - which interestingly puts emphasis on harmony of mind and body, speech, song, and action. Only today I heard of an incongruous soul whose words were lucid but actions louche. Such reports are so often taken out of context: what interests me is, rather, whether a person tries to reach ideals, or not. And ideals used to be taught, even if not always discussed but merely read aloud; they were there. Melody mixed with principles. 

I was thinking about some modern literature today, much of which I consider as a vortex for youth, if because I failed to find the answers there. Elémire Zolla, the Italian scholar loved by Davenport, describes Boris Pasternak as having "absorbed the trauma of the industrial city" when he was young, but later freeing himself from it to return to tradition. It was Boris who introduced Rilke to the Russian reading audience after his death, though it was his father, Leonid, Rilke had known in life. He wrote to the latter, under the Bolsheviks, that Russia had "'hid itself underground, inside the earth,' gathering its forces in that darkness, 'invisible to its own children.'" He wrote elsewhere that "the profound, the real, the surviving other Russia had only fallen back on her secret root system." (Both quotes from Tavis.)
A hiding invisible to its children; falling back to a secret root system. So must the man fall back to his roots who has felt the trauma of Pandora's passions released from the πίθος, this woman who returns as a gift whenever things are stolen. Man falls back on his roots when he finds nothing in the deception of glass and windows of display, nature a far better teacher than city mores whenever one is judged by foppishness and fancy foods. Not by the foods we choose for the mind, with our limited time. Nor by the attempt of one who keeps falling but seeks to stand, holistically, free of the full jar of bad habits.
Vortexes are spirals, but man is to attempt to stand upright, despite his inclinations towards pleasure. To withhold the whirlwind is principled dialogue; not to be dogmatic, but to flesh out cause and consequence. Just like the climber of mountains has to respect the mountain if he is to read its signs that sometimes say turn back if you value your life. To hear such narrative first hand gets a person thinking about swapping goals for survival. From the signs in life to literature; texts produced otherwise are likely to abandon the reader in difficulty. Some texts onetime read return as a saving melody. Perhaps one forgets their details, but their outline, the shape of the puzzle piece, brings the overall picture together. 

Brush. Magazine.

Rings

There is the permanence of the rings worn on the necks of the doves that occasionally visit my windowsill. I have watched the ring grow into one of those smaller creatures, apparently they are not born with that ornament, nor are we to marriage. That institution is wrecked with emotional malice by so many; that wonderful vessel meant to keep a pair intact to the end of life.
Perhaps not everyone needs that vessel, one imagines the vagrant bards of yesteryear who thrived on that particular lack of convention, but what of those who are shipwrecked and lost, like Crusoes without islands and without trust. Trust takes an age to earn but is so quick to be lost. If there is not enough love, if the people peer into each other ready to pull out all the ugly laundry of which there is always an abundance, the thing ends. Vendettas begin and one remembers Plato's wish for men to be shielded from the drama in poetry - if they really must expose themselves to themes of jealousy and rage and so on, they ought at least to be mature enough not to imitate, and even then must perform a solemn sacrifice first.
I am beginning to think that it is precisely the lack of ceremony that may affect the mindset before it enters into activity. No special clothes worn to the work place means too much comfort and sloppy manners. Ceremony - a private kind, a secret shared between one person and themselves - is the almost ubiquitous tattoo; it is not in the marriage, officiated by any person with an internet diploma.
So, two otherwise intelligent human beings may enter into the lifetime schlep not out of deep bonds of respect so much as a knot of other reasons like convenience, crush, confusion. They may soon see the ring as a little metal noose and they gag. What began as a clueless waltz often leads such victims to the halted opera of extremes, claiming they do not need love, marriage is a sham, humankind is hopeless.
But the purpose of union, of which friendship serves the same in miniature, in its own separate bonsai plot, is preservation of self and the other. To turn the other's face when life brings out their less handsome side. Oh, to flee such situations - we would, but their horrible power lurks in the fact that we cannot see them coming. Another person can be our reminder that time resides not in our minds or emotions by bringing us out of ourselves to face a bigger picture; to have a person outside one's self, surely this is something quite mysterious.

The simple ring is much; it is the echo of the crown, the one that is earned through noble gesture, it is the shape of an imagining of eternity, it warns one to go around as one wishes to come around. It may be a thing, but things were never meant to be disposed of. I remember many decades ago in my geography class hearing of one Western country with its piles and piles of trash: how could that be a quotient of greatness, I wondered. Why on earth would something be made if it is not meant to be kept and used to the very end? Surely such a mentality does not help people understand the worth of existence.
There emerges a kind of craziness to the effect: if it isn't pleasing you, toss or swop it. How many unstable characters wonder feverishly to themselves if they are getting all they think they ought? And toss it all, just in case. Or, if not toss it, disrespect it through unhappiness. Sometimes, enough is there - except perhaps enough will to make things work. But why such caprice, one might ask. Sometimes when two such people separate, they each go down their own version of the self-destructive path. They had been perfect for each other, and now they are alone and worse than ever.
Perhaps worse than that is the constant stream of verbal second-guessing. Some people's word-actions seem bent to destroy those around them, these are the creatures that seem most eager to burrow into marriage, most eager to play the hypocrite. Many are the forms of sickness never accurately responded to in the culture of disposable things, illustrated here in the prescribed tablet. One may sit and wonder at such things as one once wrote observations of adults into legal pads, at the dawn of adolescence, not trying to be smart (for knowing the theory does not exempt one from practice) but hoping to enter that helpful narrative stream one once found in books. Writing the book that is needed by oneself.
To think of the ring, one wishes for it to be idealised - as that crown that may be worn at the beginning but is only deserved at the end, if good speech and action outweighs all else. There have been marriages borne by just one of the two; the one bearing the acid of the other, always with grace, always with that kind humour towards others that is only earned under harsh circumstances. Such people are to be admired, but perhaps they had already known love from one time before in their lives.  
To find reciprocity in life, already symbolised in the back-and-forth of the circle, one would surely choose to contain that bond. Not contain it in a vessel, which measures with its grooves, but in a perfect abstract shape.

Magazine in background. Watercolour brush.

Traded In

"Do you think Poirot concerns himself with mere thingness?" Poirot rebukes Hastings for suggesting he replace his starched collars with the more fashionable, turned-down collar. The line also evokes Jeeves' criticism of Bertie's penchant for trend, once taking the form of a ridiculous hat. Such ridiculous fashion preceded the grim reality of having to sell off the manor, bit by bit, to any person who had the money to buy it, as illustrated by the television show, To the Manor Born. There are things, and there are things. In Poirot, we have a character who avails himself of city things: the dainty shoes not meant for walking being perhaps the most significant. The city is: short walking distances, cabs, paved surfaces, no sullying mud or insect. The city is that convenience of shops and services, all in one place. The manor, more complicated.
There are things, and then there is their worth. I don't know that I would have known this had I not had my Cornwelian head of house who arraigned us if we were to discard so much as a scrap of paper before it was fully used. I was reminded of that - to not speak of habits that become unthought of - when I saw a documentary on how aluminum foil is made. To watch a thick metal sheet become the thin product that so many so readily discard is to gain vertigo. Not to mention clothes that are practically disposable, made in slavish conditions: so much could be done without.
But the lack of uniform (which applies to interiors) leaves people to their own devices. When I was schooled in France ions ago, there were three dominant styles for the fairer sex: pearls and pencil skirts; checked blouses and black jeans; and Morgan (vituperously derided by some). Today, people who have no sense for the uniform may get lost - Berties in ridiculous trousers. Too much choice becomes a curse. Poirot, though a man of his times, does not concern himself with mere thingness. He has chosen his fashion.

 
The fourth category of fashion in France was made up by the people, including residents from Nordic countries, who would buy used clothes where it was sold by the kilo. There, they acquired worn-in jeans, softened leather jackets - so many of the things that remain fashionable to this day. Glorified puces. But this is the part of fashion that ages slowly, seeking objects that can wear.
It is at odds with the person who does not know what or who he is, the Berties of the world seeking the mild rebellion that is made manifest precisely in things, in the disjointed language of the surreal parroted by advertising. Never mind that such forms are but mere aping, the aping of the taste that emerges when one feels collectively divorced from the world.
Like the factory protagonist described in this wonderful podcast (click where it says, "On peut la retrouver ici" if the embedded link is faulty). A factory worker feels he cannot express himself due to the automatic repetition of his movements. Words stolen by inhuman processeses, even though, as one of the podcast speakers points out, the machines were modelled after man: if they work better than man, it is because they are performing man's actions except faster, more accurately. Machines, though, require man's surveillance. Which, I might add, is so different from the work and looking after the field: the notion of responsibility shifts into something much more worldly, involving - freely - the elements, allowing for factors that cannot always be controlled.
The podcast makes another point: we still reach machines through language (controls on mobile phones; commands in programming). It would seem that language is the field the mute should seek to re-appropriate - to reconnect the drives silenced in the factory worker ever less capable of describing the feelings of his interior life.
The surrealist rebellion is the rupture of speech, now, everyone is dying their hair in the style of the urban warrior, appropriating African war symbols, no longer in touch with their native tongue.
We are told the world has been conquered ("globalism") so the travelling dreamers are silent - where they exist, their existence is disbelieved, as if they were a myth.

I turn to this excerpt from Saki (H.H. Munro) via: "It was the unledgered wanderer, the careless-hearted seafarer, the aimless outcast, who opened up new trade routes, tapped new markets, brought home samples or cargoes of new edibles and unknown condiments. It was they who brought the glamour and romance to the threshold of business life, where it was promptly reduced to pounds, shillings and pence".
I saw that world, I can attest to its existence. As I said, it still exists, but its voice is silenced by the mechanical news, which is now the dominant voice of the age, not the travellers' narratives of eccentrics, as was the case in the day of Jim Thompson. Society does not look to those encyclopedic personalities who may have been wrong in much, but were also signs of the magnitude of the single mind. They are too complex for us, it would seem. Who has the time to sort through them and discern? It is easier to analyse the processes, but in doing so, we lose the man.
So it happens that to depict a glass vessel, we see a glass vessel, and not a way of looking. Is this because in a world of language being reduced to commands, we take things too literally? Instead of seeing a uniform as restriction, it is freedom from choice - like what a wonderful friend from the past said about marriage: I love my marriage, because it made that choice of who to be with for me, I no longer have to worry about that.  To run from uniform is to end up in a uniform made by others, woe to the nonconformist who does not conform with nonconformity (this was a phrase in Bierce's Dictionary as far as I remember).
From speech to things to (dis)ordered drives. We have moved a long way's away from Auden's line (via): "the happy eachness of things". The reverence has been lost, some feel violated by these things, perhaps even the rush for thingness that Poirot so scorned. But to meditate, again, upon the shirt, this soft cloth woven of fibres at the perpendicular of warp and weave, eyed with buttons for easy donning, enveloping us in warmth, even making us look smart - surely this is a marvel. If that white blouse is too uniform for some, one might wonder why they wish their imagination to be stuck already on the basics. For the white blouse itself emerged through the uniform, because it is part of that uniform, the one that seeks to liberate from the perpetuum mobile, so aptly illustrated by the factory.

Book in background. Box brush. Postcard bursh: Lauren Harrison.

Shoes and Umbrellas

"A truly new and original book would be one which made people love old truths," Vauvenargues writes, cited by Hadot who explains that "every generation must take up, from scratch, the task of learning to read and reread these 'old truths,'" through living and experiencing them. Back and forth between guiding lessons and life, understanding is refined like poetry; beyond the chatter of self, towards universals, symbols - which we may imagine rushing towards their source and fulfillment, as Ephrem the Syrian wrote.
One old (methodological) truth I think about as I write is the importance of dialogue, which draws us out of ourselves with all our posturing - so prominent today what with the manufacture of ever newer shapes required for an audience whose gloss is that of cosmetics, unrelated to the inner and sensitive organ, γλῶσσα. It is hard to know oneself in the hall of mirrors that is talking to people through these appearances - people who may grab out at the image of the person, never the person him or herself, residing deep within their temple, only reached through respect.
The well-dressed man is urged to educate himself, but what of the education of the far more unruly soul. A beautiful post over at Classics in Sarasota addressed the difficulties inherent in moderation. Thence the old truths that we are wont to return to, though the post points out that to read Aristotle is to be given only the ideal, devoid of the problems that occur when the problem is fleshed out. Listing ideals is not enough: Hadot writes of the importance of exegesis. And ideally an examination of several of the possible paths to reach one's ideals, like how to get over oneself.
To be tied to the ego can lead one into all kinds of problems, such as gorging on flattery, too often laced with poisonous intent. But the industry teaches us egotism. It teaches us a pragmatism that works against the "subjective, mutable, dynamic component" of the heart (to use Hadot's words from a different context). That inner life may wish to cry out for help as its γλῶσσα is stifled by the gloss. How some of us long to speak eloquently, how tired we are of seeing ourselves straying from our ideals, wishing always to find the dignified way back from the errors of our ways, regrettably inevitable. Like the Method actor brings the old truth, old script, to life before our eyes as if for the first time, "from scratch," the challenge of spontaneity may mean there will be sentences we would be happier never having uttered. We are told to pipe down entirely and buy a new frock; we are told new wellies will silence the existential downpour.
In Glimpses of Bengal, Tagore writes, "Alas for useful things - how necessary in practical life, how neglected in poetry! But poetry strives in vain to free us from their bondage - they will be with us always; so much so, we are told, that with the march of civilization it is poetry that will become extinct, but patent after patent will continue to be taken out for the improvement of shoes and umbrellas." Against these umbrellas, the poem of a life, rushing to truth, if without said brolly, unprepared, impractical, messy, unwilling to be put off.

Magazine. Brush.

Farrago

In the golden hour sun, building-top satellites glinted like so many faces, expectant, seemingly turned toward the sun to receive its last daily rays. So I walked on towards the park, filled with people, like the almost-erased pale woman with her knotty dog, a girl with tanned skin clashing against her neon tank top, youths with their Converses on the benches.
I remember at my first boarding school being told by our Cornish head of house that if we ever were to dare to place our shoes on furniture, she would take our shooed feet and stamp them all over her garments, and then have us pay to have her clothes cleaned.
Such experiences may be indicative of a serious inclination - which of course is a great deception, because merely carrying the responsibility of cause and consequence does not mean that one is always sensitive enough to friends. When we relax, we might sometimes accidentally put our feet on the furniture of a friendship.
And in that same park with the youths were bushy trees that chirped for the preposterously large numbers of sparrows that would dart in among its branches, causing them to shake. Carefree, intrepid sparrows. One came into my home once just to fetch a few grains of wheat. I have a friend who is like that: mentioning a dramatic family tale as nothing more than an aside to why it was that he had to organise his day other than expected. His grain of wheat was his day, the drama required no further comment.
What I wish I had been told as a child is that life is a mixed bag. I continued back home, via side streets, where such an artistic little bushel of weed sprouted from an abandoned aged house, foreground to a blasé series of low rises.

In fact, I noticed today more than ever at how many buildings have had their facades peeled off: with, say, only cornices still in place, cornices of entablatures of no-longer visible bas-relief columns. Buildings revealing the bare bricks, except for the still visible corners reminiscent of bad sunburn. Yet, among it all was that single weed bushel like a promised sign - and the cached garden of clay pots and roses, making of one peeling house an enchantment.
Were it not for the death notices on the next few buildings. There is a very old word, farrago, that was used to describe a mixture of wheat - like the sparrows eat, meal, grits. It means confused miscellany, the mixed bag. Surely the measure of difficulty is to be held up against the measure of good for the latter to stand out, like deep tan vs. hot pink. But it has to happen - the problems, whatever drama. Some days we struggle with others, some days we struggle against ourselves. It is hard to shine, but easy to understand in principle. Ovid writes, video meliora, proboque, deteriora sequor: I see better things, and approve, but I follow worse. Why is it that our weaknesses do not make us more forgiving of others?
We may be wont to whine over misfortune, but it is occurring to me just how much of a fallacy it is to be moved by appearances of things. Epictetus writes, it is never what happens to us that is the problem, but what our opinion is of the events. If it looks bad, it does not necessarily have to spell a tragic end in our hearts. We can wait it out, use the difficulty as fortitude. For the discerning eye, there is never a mixed bag: things may be returned to their places if one knows how to call things for what they really are. Test. Transition. Lesson. Walk-in-training.
There are people who obscure such things for themselves and so for others. They are the ones who are confused, complaining about unemployment, yet not willing to break a sweat, especially not over the little things, the little details where the precise formula of the farrago may be found. Where there is difficulty, there is also good. The good is everywhere at all times. There's nothing jumbled about that.

Brush. Magazine.

Fried Air

It is possible to hit a series of dead ends, the kind erected by one's own mind - which, after all, can be rather like an obstinate child. After taking a break, one would like to get back on track, but how? I search for new inroads, approaches from new angles. Picking up different threads to follow back to the warp and weave: new patterns emerge, and the mind may remain interested, the tapestry may indeed be finished, if slightly different than first anticipated.
This is the feature of the handicraft. Matter also contributes its own. There is an intimacy between man and material, and perhaps most importantly, improvisations often need to be made, that flint edge that shaves off creativity. Is this not what we crave, to leave our mark?
Even words in the books we read carve around the space where we are sitting. This is why I feel determined to get through the slow-going Truth and Method, why I am trying to learn new languages when I am already sensitive with the dictionary. What was it, I ask again, about human experience that I was trying to figure out by undertaking those projects.
The mind that goes out to pasture may be like a faithful dog that looks like it is running away but is really in search of a missing sheep. I never fail to be amazed by the mind.
Here is a picture postcard from yesterday: why is it, I wondered, that people care so much today about a certain type of interior design? I had no strength to take up Truth and Method. So I began by looking at films of such interiors - that people increasingly feel indignant about having the right to own ... with what justification, exactly, I often wonder, and before I knew it, I found my way back to the Victorian emergence of capitalism and industrialisation, and the very simple question that many producers were asking: is there a new and better way of doing things?
The "new" way is connected in particular to capitalism, wherein even skylines are dictated by commerce: we begin to see things coming into being out of processes that have lost touch with their personal element. If we have been deskilled out of making it, we demand to handle it and then throw it out, like we were thrown out.

Some of these ideas came from the first two parts of a documentary called The Genius of Design, where designers - as the ever fewer elect who have the privilege of leaving their mark on matter - share their understanding of the primacy of things in the modern world. It is in part a result of the dream that design will make our dreams come true. But so much of this dream is really a translation - not full execution - of an idea into shapes and textures.
One designer, in reference to the famous Bauhaus chair, Brueur's Cesca, explained that the notion was to ever-simplify the chair to the point where a person would then sit on air (hence the reference to the Italian expression aria fritta, meaning nonsense, the nonchalance of empty words). I think the designer was essentially saying that some design is like the emperor's new clothes. ... And this is what people feel angry over for not owning! Things substituted for values. But things are never just things, but the ideas that form them.
Some aspirations are like walking on air. To overextend oneself is to be carried by forces beyond one's control - and Epictetus' written legacy remains to remind us of what is in our own control: our own actions; these actions do not include body, property, reputation, and command.
The last word in that sentence illustrates to me why I would want to have read the work in the original language and understand the kind of contexts in which that word would have been used - for example, does it mean power over people, and if so, what kind of people?
Learning, in my opinion, ought to lead us back to the essential - which may be an Art Nouveau wrought iron vine balustrade, if that's what it takes to renew our affinity with nature.
While designers dream of design immortality, we are advised to remember that immortality is not in our control. Yet we seek to be remembered. A photographer in India was asked to photograph a youth, who dashed to put on his coat for the portrait (middle of post). One imagines that the important thing for that soul was to be recorded, somewhere, anywhere, outside his physical sphere.
Not in the owning, maybe not even in the claiming. Indignant entitlement is a category mistake. I think I found the inspiration for another hundred pages of Truth and Method.

Brush.

Divestment

She doesn't glimmer in makeup or tint her hair. Her hair is the envy of hairdressers, who rarely snip through health. But even the hairdresser pushes the wares of the trade, dye it, dye it, they whisper, because this is a world run by appearance; even Epictetus tells us to play our parts well - whether we are poor, or a private person, we are to act the part, if not take it to heart.
Thus the unfavoured country may bow its head in shame over its image - and not take it to heart. Intellectuals overseas warn others not to go there - not out of dislike for such mytho-countries, but from their knowledge of what a tattered image can do to a person, or place.
But there is another space that is left open, that of Goethe's world literature, that of Heidegger's attraction to the Book of Tea. I imagine this space as a quiet, meditative place, also one of listening as much as of transmission. It also asks that subjects just be.
Goethe's project was never finished. It also got caught up in his own idiosyncrasies; he was not without contradiction and not always magnanimous in spirit, at once praising and temperamentally condemning countries for the same traits held by countries he only praised. I am being vague because I have noticed how mention of certain names causes otherwise composed people to become livid, or strangely emotional instead of logical. There is such a thing as geographical projection, once denoted by monsters. It would be far more accurate if our news was spelled out in those terms, though the language is not far off. In order to subjugate, one must vilify.
Sometimes, it seems like so much talking is going on - all about the wrong things. The focus is off, things of lesser value are touted as premium. Values shift, in the way that warm sea water is ambiguous and clammy. I saw a glimpse into an alternative today: how somebody's nothing can become another person's something, if we could learn to let go a little more, which includes letting go of the way we think things are. I feel sorry for people who take life literally.

It seems like culture just keeps piling up stuff, hiding the essential. I was going through my books this morning, and marvelling at the myriad volumes I got as presents just because books became inexpensive enough to stand as a form of gratuitous flattery.
My furniture designer friend, who I will link to when his site is up, is also concerned by these things, and quoted an essay about living well wherein this is taken to mean defining oneself through things, which must then be amassed, there to entertain guests, until these things no longer fit, and more space is needed and one is lost in that void. Old age brings the need to purge, and return to the essential. I have always been intrigued as to why it is that some wait until old age.
To divest oneself of things or ideas is to be open to new things and understandings. It is one of the platitudes of banal self-help that one is not to make assumptions, as causes anxiety and unnecessary speculation. This holds true for the world: physically, geographically.
The word divestment comes from vestire, meaning clothes, but came to mean possession. Clothes, after all, are our most necessary possession. While my designer friend claims one only really needs a mattress, I assume that clothes, eating utensils, and a roof must be givens in the equation. To which I would always add, whenever possible, plants and books. But books that serve the reader, not drawing them in to the web of clever intrigue also known as self-gratuity.
What is it that we really need? So many ideas are perhaps best divested, or at least viewed as ornate eccentricities. Imagine a hoarder of ideas: such ideas must be cheap, for surely one does not throw expensive objects into a dusty heap, but places them in a clearing. Reaching that clearing is an ongoing project.

Brush. Magazine.

Guests and Keys

There is a poem that like an Escher drawing that seems to wrap in and out of itself indefinitely: Der Schlüssel by Goethe and Schiller, in Die Xenien: Willst du dich selber erkennen, so sieh, wie die Andern es treiben. Willst du dich Andern verstehn, blick in dein eigenes Herz. "If you are to come to know yourself, you see, how others carry on. If you are to understand others, gaze into your own heart." This poem is called, "The Key." I have been thinking today about the strangeness of people who are otherwise "intellectuals" and "sentient" beings who erect walls of their own making in judgement of what they see. How many amputees are among us, with hearts - the key to circulation, to different modes of knowing - sawed off in a wakeling box. Who is the Houdini who could relocate and turn that key - to pump through the Escher-like drawing of Der Schlüssel.
Of course, the poem was written for its own ends, in its own context - inspired by other poems, in turn, written for their own context: Martials's Xenia, based on a satirical tradition of Saturnalia. His epigrams poke fun at the consumerism and carnivalesque that marked the sign of his times (which he was dismayed with: his parents sacrificed to afford him a good education, unprofitable at that time; as he earned his keep by writing, he bowed to trend). His poems, too, Rimell argues, were up for consumption.
Thence, the poet and the marketplace. But what Goethe and Schiller were doing was different; taking the lead to attack their detractors. There is no modesty in Die Xenien: Der letzte Märtyrer begins something like, "Also you really cook me, like Hus perhaps, but truly!" Jan Hus was a 15th C. Czech priest who in more modern times has been viewed as a figure of national self-determination, seeking a national democratic church in the then Bohemia. So here are Goethe and Schiller "perhaps" comparing themselves to a church-figure who had been burned at the stake.
But then, Goethe is associated with the beginnings of world literature, writing about Weltliteratur in several essays - he was seeking the universal. He was seeking a far larger key than most people, who, stuck in their wakeling boxes as they are, can barely see the key to their own door. While Goethe was not burned at the stake, there are still many cultures that view him as their patron; certainly, world literature owes to him a great debt. The little countries often wait for validation from the far larger Outside.
And here we may come to the true meaning of ξενία or xenia: the courtesy shown to those who are far from home, or being hosted. I was also thinking today about an older couple I know who even in the hardest of times opened their doors to people from all walks of life, including adversaries. This is rather different from the satirical approach in Goethe's and Schiller's poems. Kenning the keys to ksenia, if we can afford any in the wakeling heart...

Brush. Magazine.

Textilis

Back in my Manhattan days, one of my circles of friends consisted of a soap star, my dearest friend who knew everyone in the '70's before growing tired of that, and an artist who got one of those high paying jobs that required even higher expenses. She left for NM, and I hear that she has really taken to the life there. This is why I am rather curious about New Mexico. And when I saw one of the unusual forms of housing almost typical of that state - namely, an 'earthship' - on the television (I read this reasonably informative article afterwards), I again recalled the end of Moon and Sixpence, where Captain Brunot describes how he, too, is an artist, though his medium, instead of being paint, was life itself:
"Evidemment, it is not exciting on my island, and we are very far from the world—imagine, it takes me four days to come to Tahiti—but we are happy there. It is given to few men to attempt a work and to achieve it. Our life is simple and innocent. We are untouched by ambition, and what pride we have is due only to our contemplation of the work of our hands. Malice cannot touch us, nor envy attack. Ah, mon cher monsieur, they talk of the blessedness of labour, and it is a meaningless phrase, but to me it has the most intense significance. I am a happy man."
Textilis or textile, of techne, is connected with work - art, structures, carpenters, and axes, though its root means simply to 'make'. I like to think of the weaving in textile to come from the network inherent at its root. Interestingly, one of the promises in Moon and Sixpence is that travelling to a different culture can give on a certain peace of mind - so work, then, is enabled by the warp and weave of geography.

As a small thing, I would often find myself being taken down the lengths of factories where weaving was still being done at huge wooden looms, and I remember that special shuttling clack, kop kun ka, kop kun ma ka. I remember, too, the old spools being cast away despite objection and finding refuge in our home. I remember the thousands of little cocoons from the silk farm, something my imagination, or memory, associates with little worm carcasses; those little cocoons always made me so sad. The silk an immensely luxurious prize, that cost a life, even if small.
One of the books that strangely came all this time and distance with me is Francois Boucher's 10,000 Years of Fashion. I have become deeply disappointed in that book for omitting South America, with all of the communication sometimes literally tied in to textile - as in the quipu, the Spaniards thought to contain numerical information. However, Boucher does write about "the vocabulary of clothing" - like armorial bearings. Even when I was a child, clothes connoted more than they do today, in this age of false luxury fueled by slave labour.
Once upon a time, clothes carried very specific messages. The geometric patterns in pre-hispanic textiles, and pottery, of Chile are the same as the Chilean geoglyphs. What message they bore, one can only wonder, but it is rather interesting to meditate upon the idea that the geoglyphs bordered the llama trails. The symbols literally woven in to the landscape. And what a landscape it was: the location of the Chinchorro mummies in the Atacama desert, the driest place in the world.
A native of that place once said of modern mining: "My grandfather was a miner. Don't tell me we need these modern sources of mining." Science is a great thing: surely it affords other ways. The same man said that the Chilean geoglyphs were being erased by cars. It seems that one cannot educate mankind fast enough to save what he already has.
And thus we come to the textile of abode. The networks we weave into or over the earth's surface. To look at the modern world is to take it for granted, as the only possible way. To look at the past or to different cultures is to be astounded at the paths that have been erased.

Brush. Magazine.

Moveable Property

There is a fixed phrase we use, "furniture of the mind", which has intrigued me for days. Why furniture? How did the phrase get fixed? Here is my amateur theory, which I present because it is usually the way of things that if one works towards an answer, one will arrive at it - even if first taking some wrong turns. Speaking of wrong turns: that expression may have come to us from the method of loci.
Both Cicero and Quintilian wrote about the mnemonic technique that uses imagined buildings with rooms and furniture as 'places' where information is 'stored'. It was Cicero who wrote of the Greek origin of this technique, embodied in Simonides, who - his story goes - used the technique to remember where guests had been sitting at an unfortunate dinner.
Topical memory was revived by thinkers in the Renaissance - and in the 19th century by Gregor von Feinagle. The 16th century revival seems to have had particular flourish: Samuel Quicchelberg would illustrate elaborate theatres (an idea taken from Giulio Camillo) where treasures would be assembled so "one can quickly obtain a singular knowledge and wonderful experience of things" (via Bolzini; only those two pages were consulted, I hope to get hold of that book).
Mathematician and astronomer Giordano Bruno developed his own mnemonic system (ill.), which he expounded in three books, one with the title Ars Memoriae - though De umbris idearum reflects in its title the use of 'shadows' - on the 'seals' of ideas - in his system, which Bolzini writes elsewhere was an inventive logic "particularly accommodated to magic and reform." Bruno had been inspired by 14th century Raymond Lull's idea that it was possible to arrive at a universal key enabling one, through mastery of its alphabet, to know and remember everything. The mnemonic approach was popularised through painting and later printing.
Bruno was not the only scientist to consider mnemonic techniques: Francis Bacon approved of them - and in Advancement of Learning, writes of the furniture that ought to fill young minds which are empty. The extent of Locke's mnemonics was in the commonplace book, but he, too, writes of the furniture of the mind. This use seems connected to Quintilian's phrase connecting reading with the "furniture" of (poor) preparation. Later, the phrase appears in John Stuart Mill, C.S. Lewis "habitual furniture" and Thoreau.

But I am not satisfied: isn't there a Greek antecedent to this concept? We know that ὕλη is matter in Aristotle, an externalization of idea in matter. There is a crossover between matter as such and nominalism - the expression of things is a highly charged matter. I found (thanks to Perseus) mention of furniture,  κατασκευή, in Isocrates, where it signifies furniture or apparatus in the sense of buildings and fixtures - with the contextual meaning of arrangement and method, or manner of life.
The title of this blog post - moveable property - is expressed by one word in both ancient Greek and Latin: επιπλα and invecta - though the metaphorical meaning of the Greek word seems to be expressed through the Latin supellex. If "furniture of the mind" did indeed emerge from the imagery of 'moveable property', one is led - visibly, if not quite literally - to the gravity of how they are organised (which 'room' do they belong in?)...
Lest this post seem, though, like the ramblings of an idler, I shall end it with the sharpest reference to mind furniture that I found - in Persius' Satires (4: 52), where Socrates is supposedly calling out Alcibiades, saying something to the effect of: "Dwell in your own house and you'll discover what an ill-furnished mind you have!" Avarice, lust, the praises of the mob - such is not the furniture of a true man.
Or I could quote from Plautius who writes in Stichus about literal furniture, and scolding the help: "Now mark my words! If things aren't arranged in there just exactly where they ought to be when I return, the reminders you get from me will be the memorials of cowhide."
I plan to develop this theme further - in connection with what I wrote on utensils. The kind of materialism that forms places worth inhabiting.

Brush.

Not a Utensil

This post began, before I reverted it to a blank, with a discursive way of defending life choices that center around enough, which contains not the luxurious cushion of cash that lounges on the chaise. It has always been an art to live by the golden mean; proof of that pudding is the criticism from people on either side of the table.
Also, one is wont to ask, what is this path that is off the beaten one, that formed a platitude in so many year books? I would forward to say that the time zone of the worldly and that of finding one's own way is at odds. The world will ask: what have you to show for yourself? Ah, but the world is not a stoic like Epictetus who excuses one from lacking the benefits of obsequity. "Have you nothing, then, instead of the [fancy] supper [that you were not invited to]? Yes, indeed, you have: the not praising him, whom you don't like to praise; the not bearing with his behavior at coming in." (25). Or, like Confucius says - twice - Fine words and insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue.
How I wish sometimes to retreat to the Classics, and stay there. Last night, as I was trying to find the words to articulate the feeling behind this post, I sought out Confucius. I had been riddled by what to do if flesh and blood develops the tactics of the leach. I am a lover of filial piety. But I had forgot of Confucius' principle of  正名 (rectification of names) which is really a beautiful ideogram: before the character for 'rank' is a character of a foot that has 'reached completion' - which reminds me of the 'tethering rope with legs' hieroglyph, which means 'to take possession of, to acquire'. It is not enough to bear the title (of teacher, ruler): one is to attempt to live up to it.
But it is unfair to expect something to live up to its rank if it has not been treated correctly: this is also part of the rectification of names, e.g. a maltreated son is not expected to act correctly towards his father. Which brings me to the principle of  仁, containing a version of the character for person with the number two - which some say represents heaven and earth, connected by man. This is the principle of humaneness: to love a thing means wanting it to live.

The Master said, "He who aims to be a man of complete virtue in his food does not seek to gratify his appetite, nor in his dwelling place does he seek the appliances of ease ... such a person may be said indeed to love to learn." (XIV) But in our hedonistic world, not only is forgetfulness of death somewhat worse than death, the platitude for indulgence Nunc est bibendum is lifted from its historico-political context and we become dumber.
Sometimes, I would rush to Cassian's desert just to clear my thinking. But such extreme measures are perhaps not necessary if I could just face up to myself. Accept the discrepancies (Tao 28). For such sincerity opens one to the clean slate of the universal. Be the valley of the universe! Ever true and resourceful, Return to the state of the uncarved block. "The world is formed from the void, like utensils from a block of wood. The Master knows the utensils, yet keeps to the the block: thus she can use all things." (28)
It is all right to take the slow road - a different route from the changing fashions.
In moments of weakness, we may want a token from the past, to be recognised beyond the picture of want. When the ancient masters said, If you want to be given everything, give everything up, they weren't using empty phrases. (22) Yet simplicity awaits us in the wake of sacrifice: "Just do your job and let go", "Trust your natural responses". (24, 23). What a fluid model and so contrary to the drone we are fed that we are but automatons with tasks like "jobs," "cooking," "parenting." Confucius also wrote that the educated man is no utensil: 君子不器 (II:12), we are not to be mere technicians, cogs.
Thence the scholar's rock (供石) that ought to perch on the desk, reminding us of our jutting, irregular shape, our juxtapositions. What I keep battling to retain. My edges, versatility, growth, endurance. Dignity. Not ceding to the destruction that is so desperate to tear it all down.
Confucius says, Undergoing difficulties and only then reaping the rewards (VI.22) "With a single bamboo dish of rice, a single gourd dish of drink, and living in his mean narrow lane, while others could not have endured the distress, he did not allow his joy to be affected by it." "Enough," at odds with the ornament of language, is the no-frills of life, accepted for what it is, not plastered over with those other wants. "Express yourself completely, then keep quiet" (23).

 Element. Magazine.

Break the Pot

I have become rather intrigued by pots, barrels and other receptacles (i.e. πίθοι) since I started to think of my own version of Diogenes the other day. So, what of Pandora's πίθος?
All that is unsavoury in and for humanity is masked behind Pandora's beautiful appearance. Hesiod, in "Works and Days" narrates how Zeus, angry at being cheated, sends men, in Pandora, "an evil in which they will all joy, each welcoming in his heart his own ill." How morbid.
As for the pithos - well, she immediately spills it, though Hope remains within. Is Hesiod not also talking about what remains within and without in this poem? He keeps telling his brother: "put all these things [the wise advice] into your heart". The poem is in fact also written to instruct his brother in morals. Pandora spills the pithos: of course she would spill it, because Hesiod remarks, if offhandedly, "How much better the half than the whole is". If the jar were full, there would be no good strife to drive man to creation. And what we ought to be keeping, is the Hope in the jar.
As for the trouble Pandora unleashes, let us remember that it was directed to each, his own form of trouble. Justice is ultimately served, and the moral of the Pandora story is just that: "There is no way to escape the mind of Zeus." After all, it is Zeus who Hesiod invokes at the beginning of the poem: "Lightly he straightens the crooked and lightly he withers the proud, He is Zeus..."
But I think compunction is a main theme of the poem. It ends by saying that the man who avoids "all highness of heart" and lives blamelessly will be on good terms with God and prosper. If one is not contrite, one will be visited by Strife: "No mortal loves her! Only under necessity... do they honour her."
So, "How much better the half than the whole is, and what great blessing there is in mallow and asphodel." Workers rush toward some hint of emptiness, which they then start to fill. Their hope thought, is for emptiness, so don't think you must avoid it. It contains what you need!, writes a Sufi poet.
Pithoi are mystical because they are something around nothing - but those who are thick as thieves thoughtlessly seize fire, seize that stunning, wicked girl, seize what is not theirs. Judge like a King and choose the purest, the ones unadulterated with some urgency about "what's needed".
So the pithos, at some point, must be broken - if one is not going round jamming it full of "what's needed".  The broken ones are my darlings. And it looks like a tragedy to see all those broken pieces. I know, I feel that about myself more often than I would like.
This is why I turn to "The Excellence of Misfortune", the Epicurean ideas Cicero writes of: "circumstances occur in which toil and pain can produce some great pleasure". God has allowed some magical reversal to occur; so that you see the scorpion pit as an object of desire. In learning how to pursue joy, there is much pain. The best human vessel is a broken one, because we are not to transport material goods to Elysium, where the asphodel grows.

Nail polish. Flowers.