hamlet's soliloquy that i've heard and read a hundred times was spoken by a young brazillian girl from the favelas. she spoke the words to people walking around, turning from her, so that she was not heard. those words became so real. so real was the confusion, the desperation and the angst in "to be or not to be..." i heard her speak those words in a language i cannot understand, and i understood them profoundly and my heart was broken.
i've decided not to be so hard on myself, or on others. i've decided not to get angry at me when i stay in bed when i should be working instead. i've decided not to get angry when my dad says the wrong thing, or what i think is the wrong thing. i've decided to forgive my boyfriend because he decided to go away on a holiday, leaving me behind after he'd said he would never do so again. i've decided to be at peace. not to be in strife. not to be hard and fast. to break rules when i don't feel like keeping to them. to give in. i want to live to never regret. to make each moment and each thing count.l i want to not have to hide how i feel. i want to give in and not be afraid of being weak. i want to be happy. i want my life to be lived well. to be run by desires and balanced by responsibility. i want to hang up my hangups. xxx
its not alwas as dark as my last letter described it. your questions strike a cord, they remind me of my own questionings, only that this existential crisis doent seem that existential, because if you have this fullfilling love, how could everything else matter? or have you already taken it for granted? or do I again idealize because I have never experienced this myself? questioning your own set goal for becomming an architect is an important thing. there is no point for going on with it if you dont get out of it what you really need. your big question is not: is architecture what I should do? but rather: what do I need? really need. for most of us there wont be just one need to be fullfilled, especially if you already got a taste for what live can be about. but, as things go, we dont always get what our aquired taste for live (or love) requests, and beeing adults, we try to find ways to get those goodies again, and because most of the time its not in a lower shelf and one cannot get to it directly, one creates strategies to get up there. the tricky thing now is to know if this strategy will bring us to the right shelf, or if we just find us in front of the oven cleaner. or the spirits. in my case, two years ago, the shelf was empty. I decided that my strategy was ok (because I didnt find a better one), but my goal was wrong. so I tried to redefine my goals, and the most important question for this was: what moves me? this question is still not finally answered, but I saw that doing what I was doing interested me, though I still had the problem that the motivation to work on a project was mainly because of the framework of the school and the resulting pressure involved. this was obvioulsy not the way to go, because if I coulnt find the motivation within myself, I will be lost once the school is finished. So I was searching for what really interested me, without much regard what other people might think about it (though, honestly, a positive feedback is the most beautifull thing to get, but its a pressious present one shouldnt work for). So I slowly developed my own questions and interests. the big breakthrough will still take some time, beside I dont know where I really would like it to happen, but the important breakthrough has been done insofar that I am now master of my own doings, that I dont just make ideas of other people happen, as I did as an engineer or programmer, but actually create my own ideas, and subsequently, make them happen. only trouble is, I cant live of it. but getting up in the moring is now much easier (though its still hard to get out of bed). and now: back to work! I am developing my own video software to create special visuals for a piece of music that got me inspired. love love and more of the same.. xxxx m
i don't think your thoughts are cumbersome at all, i think that your passion for understanding yourself and the world has led you to refine your thought prcesses very well, and you are very insightful. i admit i do suffer from a great pessimism over what i underserstand about how the world works. the beautiful things seems threatened by the ugly things. fresh air, blue skies water, the seasons, our trees and flora, the animals, all seem to be under threat by our actions. i see us as the boil of the earth. humanity is so clumsy, ignorant and as it seems, "in charge" of the planet which works beautifully on its own. but here i turn the corner in my train of thought. because whatever i say, however much i believe it is us who have thrown the planet off kilter, we are a part of it. like you say, the fact that we exist is proof that we are meant to be a part of this system. well, time will tell if we survive our own actions.
darling m, it's always a pleasure to hear from you. it's a balmy day today and i'm feeling hot and bothered, and can write only now in this state because i have no internet connection at home, but only when i come to visit my mom's house. so i write, but i will keep this short, and i am afraid i may not be able to give justice to your wonderfully long and thoughtful letter. thanks for the link to your latest project. i was fascinated. at first glance it was darlkly futuristic, looking much like it belongs on blade runner. your making of series was very insightful although i was lost. electronics baffle me. your work is beautiful and i am so happy you are showing it and developing your ideas all the time. me i find i am experiencing an existential crisis. i wonder if i am an architect or could ever be one. i have been feeling terribly down of late because i did poorly in design subjects last year. and i deserved to do poorly too. i find that i am lost where designing is concerned, and i don't know what to do. except that i have told myself i will keep asking for the next year, why are you an architect? i need my answer to this question. your career as a visual jockey sounds exciting. your visual communication skills are astounding, i still remember clearly your description of your very visually playful dreams. too bad it's going to be short lived - or is it? i'm sorry to hear of your loneliness. do you think it helps you be creative? i have once or twice thought to myself that maybe it is because i am so content in my love life that my work life is suffering. my energies are otherwise expended and i have little left to pour into my work. what a stupid thought, really, it would be tragic if it were true. however, addressing your queries on the artist's state of mind, i do think that in order to play a soulful tune or paint a deeper than pretty picture, or write gut wrenching words, the artist has to feel. and suffering is for most the deepest part of feeling. for me at least i know it is. i remember so very little of life, and dismay over it. but i remember well ills i've suffered and dismay more over this. but it's how my mind works. and love. well, i don't think i'm even going there. not now when i'm hot and bothered. hey i'll write again soon ok? i am off to tasmania on sunday. will tell you about it. love love love, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
first in best dressed as they say! so, first to know where you'll be living, although i do not have an inkling of what geographically it means! and i am sure that i will be lagging way behind on the list of people who will actually visit you! i shan't be coming this year, but will certainly try to next year. will you still be there? maybe, if i'm waiting till then, you will have had the opportunity of coming to visit here in melbourne? or we could meet up somewhere closer to this part of the world? remember how well you loved it here? melbourn'es colour is changing though. the beautiful picturesqueness of it is slowly being gobbled up by more and more tall grey apartment blocks which look the same and when they do try to look different they are ugly. it's becoming ugly. and the economy is becoming ugly too, more and more like singapore's. it's becoming another sydney. i think i'm ready for a change. the days of my personal life are going very well though, as you shall find out when i call you. i feel very very contented now and i wonder all the time what's coming round the corner. i think part of my contentment comes from the fact that i'm not driving in to work anymore, and don't hav ethe radio on and can't listen to the news and life is on the whole busier at nights so i don't crash in front of the telly and watch the always depressing news broadcasts. for a while i was very angry about all that's going on in theworld. but what's the use of being angry? like you say i'm a lazy ass! not like i will change anything by worrying! just live life to the best i can and fuck the rest of them. i think i still get angry when i think about things. i really hate the world when i think about it. this letter is losing the plot. the plot was to tell you i miss you and i shall be calling you sometime next week, will try to make it mornings but i think that will be hard... are nights good or bad? i'm thinking around eleven or so your time, which would make it a bright and early seven or so mine...
interesting, but science has many approaches on consiousness at the moment, and the artificial intelligence lab of university of zurich where I did my internship has a philosophy that thinks this approach as foolish (we dont yet understand the brain of an ant, so lets understand the brain of a human). I would agree with them. simulation of neuron systems might explain better how the brain grows and interconnects, but wont tell anything about consiousness, since consiousness can only be understood in connection to the body it resides in. without body as an interface to engage with its environment, no consiousnesss will arise. a grown consiousness inside a body placed inside a computer would withier away like a plant without water and air. imagin yourself being paralised and unable to communicate with your environment. you might turn into a very wise person or a very depressed one. but nobody would ever know. maybe this guys will understand better the hardware but have no clue what software is running on. there is another nice little story: imagine a stone beeing thrown. in mid flight it reaches conciousness. now it thinks its flying because of its own abilities. thats how our intellectuals think of themself nowadays.
and here quickly my reply to your last lengthy mail: /i had missed this very big point, and last semester, i asked no questions, so i got no answers./ totally agree on this. Its good to be reminded of this sometimes! /to this end, i penned the following after readin john brockman's piece on the third culture. it made sense to me. reading edward o wilson's consilience. and found this. the ossified intellectualism of the great theorists should now be padded with the flesh and blood of a new humanism. the knowledge we possess, and that we will continue to create and discover for ourselves in the sciences, in the arts, in all the different parts of humanity must collide to form one body, and it will be a coherent body as marvellous as the bodies we now possess. perception will change, in methods, in scale, and we will see in different light and at different degrees of magnification so that an understanding of who we are may emerge from the various levels of being, and through different forms of being. we will know that we are systems that are part of a system that is a part of a system that does not end because it has no beginning. it's a tad simplistic, i think, but it sums up for now how i feel about what we are. organisms made up of organisms making up organisms. it convinces me that there is no point in questioning the beginning or the end. we are the middle, exist in the middle, and the middle is as important as the beginning or the end. what we should be asking questions about is what we can do to make sure this middle works as optimally as it can within the system, since we have the capability to ask./ maybe this is the task given to us: asking questions? but no, there is no task-giver, unless of course you want to believe in god. I dont think we have to strive to work (or function?) optimaly unless we are sure we know what our task is. I personaly prefer to reflect on this a bit more... :-) /but really, i think that humans are perhaps the least evolved of all creatures - dolphins live, my cat lives, other plants and creatures live, completely acclimatized and adapted to their environment./ from a scientific point of view: we are perfectly evolved, since we exist. /we are the only ones who are uncomfortable in our skins./ thats what defines us as being human! hence the tool makers, which leads us directly to the cyborgs ;-) /it pains me to no end to think of how it's always us who throw the balance./ thats because we are the only one to reflect on what we are doing. /it's as though we are precisely that element of chance mutation in darwinian evolution. we are the glitch./ like every other beeing on this planet... My diagnosis: I believe you suffer of a terrible culturpessimism and you see humanity as a form of virus that destroys itself and the planet it inhabits. sometimes I catch this meme aswell, but I developed a kind of resistance to it, since the planet (resp the eccosystem) shows an incredible ability to find its own balance again and again. we shouldnt forget on what condition life started on this barren ball, and through which disasters it ran through. it most certainly will survive us humans as well. this doesnt mean stop trying to avoid our mistakes, but more than trying is not possible, since thats the principle our evolution runs on, too. either it succeeds (on one way or another - always depending on how you define success) or it fails. but then.. we are all one. so long love and miss you m
The blank slate has had an enormous influence in far-flung fields. One example is architecture and urban planning. The 20th century saw the rise of a movement that has been called "authoritarian high modernism," which was contemporaneous with the ascendance of the blank slate. City planners believed that people's taste for green space, for ornament, for people-watching, for cozy places for intimate social gatherings, were just social constructions. They were archaic historical artifacts that were getting in the way of the orderly design of cities, and should be ignored by planners designing optimal cities according to so-called scientific principles. Le Corbusier was the clearest example. He and other planners had a minimalist conception of human nature. A human being needs so many cubic of air per day, a temperature within a certain range, so many gallons of water, and so many square feet in which to sleep and work. Houses became "machines for living," and cities were designed around the most efficient way to satisfy this short list of needs, namely freeways, huge rectangular concrete housing projects, and open plazas. In extreme cases this led to the wastelands of planned cities like Brasilia; in milder cases it gave us the so-called urban renewal projects in American cities and the dreary highrises in the Soviet Union and English council flats. Ornamentation, human scale, green space, gardens, and comfortable social meeting places were written out of the cities because the planners had a theory of human nature that omitted human esthetic and social needs. Another example is the arts. In the 20th century, modernism and post-modernism took over, and their practitioners disdained beauty as bourgeois, saccharine, and lightweight. Art was deliberately made incomprehensible or ugly or shocking—again, on the assumption that people's tastes for attractive faces, landscapes, colors, and so on were reversible social constructions. This also led to an exaggeration of the dynamic of social status that has always been part of the arts. The elite arts used to be aligned with the economic and political aristocracy. They involved displays of sumptuosity and the flaunting of rare and precious skills that only the idle rich could cultivate. But now that any now that any schmo can afford a Mozart CD or can go to a free museum, artists had to figure out new ways to differentiate themselves from the rabble. And so art became baffling and uninterpretable without acquaintance with arcane theory. By their own admission, the humanities programs in universities, and institutions that promote new works of elite art, are in crisis. People are staying away in droves. I don't think it takes an Einstein to figure out why. By denying people's sense of visual beauty in painting and sculpture, melody in music, meter and rhyme in poetry, plot and narrative and character in fiction, the elite arts wrote off the vast majority of their audience—the people who approach art in part for pleasure and edification rather than social one-upmanship. Today there are movements in the arts to reintroduce beauty and narrative and melody and other basic human pleasures. And they are considered radical extremists!
darling m, that's the precious thing about being a student i guess, you get real holidays! well, you can dive into it when your holidays next come around.. i'm sure it'll be difficult to do so whilst you're in the midst of term.... i don't think i'll be any good for getting my head around these things starting in a week's time. the merging business as you call it is FASCINATING! there is no mind i admire more than leonardo da vinci's - not that i know it at all, only from the drawings he left behind, and what is said of him. my favourite drawing of all i caught only a brief glimpse of once, of a horse in motion. one single drawing of a horse actually moving. his mastery and genius lay in his ability to observe so carefully the things around him, then use the principles he observed, to imitate, to adapt and then to create. he was just being inquisitive, but produced what we recognize as art, and science. being inquisitive - asking questions. that's very very lacking in our time isn't it? not just philosophically, but in terms of everything! where does this come from? where is it going? why am i being told this? why? what? sorely lacking. and i too forget to ask questions. i had a hell of a semester just past, i think i told you, and i'd shown my project to a colleague and she too was dismayed at what i produced. my designs lacked concepts or a theory. they were dead things. they worked, but had no life. i told her that i am not one to bother with theory. but she grilled me and i realized i didn't know what theory actually means. talking to her made me realize that theorizing wasn't the process of trying to understand the conceptual somersaults of previous "great" thinkers (derrida and the lot), but simply a process of wanting to ask questions. i had missed this very big point, and last semester, i asked no questions, so i got no answers. to this end, i penned the following after reading john brockman's piece on the third culture. it made sense to me. reading edward o wilson's consilience. and found this. the ossified intellectualism of the great theorists should now be padded with the flesh and blood of a new humanism. the knowledge we possess, and that we will continue to create and discover for ourselves in the sciences, in the arts, in all the different parts of humanity must collide to form one body, and it will be a coherent body as marvellous as the bodies we now possess. perception will change, in methods, in scale, and we will see in different light and at different degrees of magnification so that an understanding of who we are may emerge from the various levels of being, and through different forms of being. we will know that we are systems that are part of a system that is a part of a system that does not end because it has no beginning. it's a tad simplistic, i think, but it sums up for now how i feel about what we are. organisms made up of organisms making up organisms. it convinces me that there is no point in questioning the beginning or the end. we are the middle, exist in the middle, and the middle is as important as the beginning or the end. what we should be asking questions about is what we can do to make sure this middle works as optimally as it can within the system, since we have the capability to ask. but really, i think that humans are perhaps the least evolved of all creatures - dolphins live, my cat lives, other plants and creatures live, completely acclimatized and adapted to their environment. we are the only ones who are uncomfortable in our skins. it pains me to no end to think of how it's always us who throw the balance. it's as though we are precisely that element of chance mutation in darwinian evolution. we are the glitch. then again genetic glitches create as much an opportunity as it does a weakness. o and the philosophical cycle goes on, i feel it coming. so i think i'll stop here. i think what you said makes alot of sense, and in fact, i read something along pretty much the same lines by one of those thinkers at the edge. read this. find the time to. you'll appreciate it i promise - especially the actual interview with eno - scroll down to nearly the end (the top is a series of commentaries by the contributors to this site on the interview) http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge11.html ok, with this homework assignment, i sign off! write me with more brilliant thoughts ok? xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx miss you. o. and a short while ago, i saw a doco on henri cartier bresson, the photographer. he's inspired in me a crystal clear eye for the beauty of aging. and i thought this. much of the beauty in a flower is that it will fade away... just let things age. there is beauty in the face of a pale old man, spotted, jowly, droopy but bright bright eyed, beauty in his telling of stories of times too long ago for his listeners to remember, beauty when his droopy eyes cloud over in a timeless pause of reminiscence, beauty in his understanding that the world will go on as he folds away his stories, beauty in the strength of his quavering voice as he riles against our modern slavery to dynamism... the old world is not boring. if it has lived its life and loved its thoughts and used them well in whispers to the new world of where to look in its own quest to come of age... i want to be eighty six years old and looking at the world with bright eyes. he was ninety five. xxxxxxxxxxxxxx On 18 Jul 2005, at 21:23, Martin wrote: excelent! thanks for this link. it really is tremendously valuable. I have to find some time to dive deeper into it. this merging business has been occupying my mind for the last year while I did the internship at the artificial intelligence lab of zuerich. I wondered why we artist are so strangely attracted to those research issues and their power on the imagination for people - I think we artists are a bit jealous that we arent able to create the same powerfull metaphors as science can. and maybe science is a bit jealous of the arts, because they now how to communicate and manipulate the senses. I think the arts are driven to the scientists and not the other way around. so there is a kind of inbalance, beeing an artistst and willing to work with a scientist its is not enough. it takes a scientist that is interested to work with an artist and willing to open the frame of mind towards the artist. and vice versa of course. and then of course it is necessary to find similar ground and interest. and before this can happen, an artists must have found a personal theme, his own aesthetic research area and discourse and a language with which to comunicate. but arts and science have always been close to each other and have influenced each other, and there are similarities: artist research the perceptive field of humans, their relationships with each other and the possible combinations of metaphors in order to find new meaningfull expressions of beeing human scientist research the percieved world around us, its interconnections and complexities in order to find new meaningfull expressions to describe it (from the point of beeing human). does that sound reasonable? I just came up with it. xxxx
Cities are also juxtaposition engines, instruments for both producing and adjudicating adjacencies. The character of cities emerges from the characteristic ways in which they solve the problems of keeping things together or apart, whether socially or formally. Racial or class segregation; use zoning that locates work far from living; height restrictions and solar access guarantees; mandated materiality; the siting of highways; a preference for gardens_all of these taken together yield the particularity of cities. On the other hand, this is also a point of incredible promise. As old constraints on adjacency are loosened, as time and space become graspable in new ways, as any place can truly be any place, our position as designers is liberated. If juxtaposition can really be free, then we are also free to reimagine the basic structures of urbanism according to tests which respond to our best attempts at reason: democracy, sustainabiliy, and pleasure.We are in a position to reconsider cities fundamentally. - Michael Sorkin
nature, horses, books, the company of close friends, architecture, science, environment, society, arts, food, yoga... now reading consilience and www.edge.org, journals of anais nin, guns germs + steel a history of the world in ten and a half chapters, letters of anais nin + henry miller, devil in paradise, letters + journal of byron, my mac... diane kurys' c'est la vie, first film i ever loved, pulp fiction, the shawshank redemption, kieslowski's lot, most of woody allen's, peter greenaway's the pillow book, closer for coming so close, kitchen stories - made me laugh harder than i had in three years, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind for the ride, amelie for the light and colour, when harry met sally, the professional... ben webster for his throaty tunes, mellow st etienne for long road trips, jack kerouac reading to piano playing, early gainsbourg, kristina olsen live on her steel string guitar, ella doing anything, harry connick jr, norah jones's first album, the bandits, the rat pack, michael buble, the radcliff peaches, preisner, pizzicato five, funk when in the mood, joni mitchell, and the legendary female country singers, oh oh aussie gem becky cole, good old oldies, fred astaire dancing, tap dogs' boots, rain bucketing down... no politicians or bureaucrats if it can be helped. people who care about things, people who write, paint, eat, sleep, make music, talk, laugh, do somersaults, hunger, draw, live, ask questions, love and learn. people who don't see in b+w and if they do, don't try to tamper with others' technicolour screens. people who care about where something comes from and where it's going. people who don't care where they've come from nor where they're going.
reading edward o wilson's consilience. and found this. the ossified intellectualism of the great theorists should now be padded with the flesh and blood of a new humanism. the knowledge we possess, and that we will continue to create and discover for ourselves in the sciences, in the arts, in all the different parts of humanity must collide to form one body, and it will be a coherent body as marvellous as the bodies we now possess. perception will change, in methods, in scale, and we will see in different light and at different degrees of magnification so that an understanding of who we are may emerge from the various levels of being, and through different forms of being. we will know that we are systems that are part of a system that is a part of a system that does not end because it has no beginning.
much of the beauty in a flower is that it will fade away... just let things age. there is beauty in roofs and walls of moss and lichen, beauty in the face of a pale old man, spotted, jowly, droopy but bright bright eyed, beauty in his telling of stories of times too long ago for his listeners to remember, beauty when his droopy eyes cloud over in a timeless pause of reminiscence, beauty in his understanding that the world will go on as he folds away his stories, beauty in the strength of his quavering voice as he riles against our modern slavery to dynamism... the old world is not boring. if it has lived its life and loved its thoughts and used them well in whispers to the new world of where to look in its own quest to come of age...
chilli oil with shrimp paste. soy sauce. vinegar. lime juice. honey. coriander or chives. tomato puree. fish sauce. monkfish kebabs. marinated. grilled on hot coals.
i want to be eighty six years old and looking at the world with bright eyes. he was ninety five.
grinding down the tarmac in a guzzly four wheel drive i saw the city in the distance wrapped in a pinky-grey haze. my heart fell, spirits dropped and angst welled up so forcibly in me. i am a part of this. bombarded by "london attacks" oldnews bulletins sprayed across the entire spectrum of tv channels like one of them automatic machine guns gone mad on its shaky little pivot. wondering who's really responsible. faulty intelligence again? timed to distract from climate talks? to boost anti-terrorist sentiment? ergo boost invasion ratings? hmmm. wanting to live laugh and learn. despite all this. want to flit around, wander in and out of knowing and not knowing this and that. wanting to always inquire, never rejecting anything that can be known. be open and closed. give many mine ear but few my voice. and...