“I don’t know what I am doing or where this is going but I have to do it.”
Sometimes one can reach a state of purposeless purpose that can be best described as: “I don’t know what I am doing or where this is going but I have to do it.” Many good things come from it. Not always. But enough times that it is worth embracing whole-heartedly.
Here is something Jacob Wangh did while studying gravity. He made a gravity suit:
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Something out of nothing, sense out of nonsense & finding your way . . .
Something out of nothing.
The first mark is arbitrary; it’s o.k.—all right—but all wrong. The exchange that follows takes one into a labyrinth of the creative process. If one commits oneself to its workings, not knowing its destination or how to get there, but attentive to the work at hand, the journey is rich with discovery and invention.
On the flight over to China, a microbiologist talked about making soil for planted walls—one hundred meter tall green walls. He found that plants don’t like growing under glass and he has given up trying to know why. I asked, “Is it because the air is trapped under glass?” “No, we tried putting holes in the glass for air circulation.” “Is it because of reflections or the optic properties of glass? “No. We just don’t know why.” “Or because of the greenhouse effect?” “We just don’t know,” he said. “I have accepted that we don’t know and in China I can move ahead without knowing.”
“Poetry …(can) only correspond to attentive thought enamored of something unknown, and essentially receptive to becoming,” wrote Gaston Bachelard in the introduction to The Poetics of Space.
Enamored with something unknown, the artist moves into the labyrinth, not knowing where it goes. One perception leads to another and another. Steps are carried forward by their own momentum and by the pull of something on the verge of being sensed, on the verge of knowing, on the verge of becoming.
“You don’t need to know where you’re going,” my new friend and I wander the garden without a map, getting lost, passing a gate, a tea tree, a wall, the pebbles in the ground arranged into an image of a moth, a knot, a bat and then the character for happiness. Somehow you end up at the beginning again. The course turns as one goes along. “Why do you need to know?” a colleague asks as I struggle with the chess game of exchanges I had with another. The American strength of wanting to know, needing to know, slows the flow.
Sense out of nonsense.
Deep into the labyrinth—all screens are windows into the master mind machine. Like Borges’ library of Babel, endless combinations of nonsense weave networks through time space knowing. A one in a billion passing occurrence of brilliance is somewhere along some way. Like the evolution of hexagonal cellular matter, it combines and recombines recursively and then mutates.
The context is here and now.
Thirteen point eight billion hands are at work today. The spiraling combinations of mother and father genes, descended from ancestors, back to the mutant gene that gave origin to the thumb and then finger joints that spirally rotate endowing the hand and the human mind an ability to grasp. Our hand has traveled a million-million combinations, twists and turns.
The hand extends the mind into the world. Articulated gesturing, enacting and making. The lines of one’s hand shape and are shaped by, the past, present and future. Material in hand, ideas are made, and not stuck in thought. Material doesn’t always do what you want it to. It gets in the way, or goes between the pre-conceived idea and revealed idea of a process.
Finding the way
Making and meaning are woven. Tectonic descends from teche, woven textile, text and context: an entangled web of syntax and tectonics, meaning and making. Syllables and characters meet and make words. Words join into phrases and verse. Meetings of material to material, wall to wall, corner to roof, inside to outside, here to there, yours to mine, individual to community. A common ground is woven. Verses turn around our thinking.
The most powerful tool to step into abstraction is drawing. Drawing is conceived upon projection: projected light, projecting forward, projected imagination. It clarifies; it enables us to see what we cannot yet see. It facilitates abstraction because in the process of drawing, one must conceptualize what you are drawing, make choices and leave material attributes behind. It serves to register what is gradually known. Orthographic projections (plans, sections and elevations) slice through the (conceptual) object, making visible the measured attributes and a noumenal view, or a picture of what is in our mind’s eye. Abstraction gives passage through to another state, scale and possibility.
Workshop at China Academy of Art
I taught a 5 week workshop to 20 architecture students at the China Academy of Art. Some images of the work are shown here and thoughts on the workshop are in the post above, called, “Something out of nothing, sense out of nonsense & finding your way . . .”
There was very little English. Each class we would develop a glossary of terms on a blackboard.
- Jiang Weihua, CAA Faculty who taught with me
Required reading was Out of Control by Kevin Kelly which, lucky for me was recently translated into Chinese. The entire book in English can be found online here. The reading served as the situation of the project, which, as I stated in the problem statement was here and now. First the students made individual blocks:
Then they had to address a neighboring block:
This is where it got interesting and where I think Kevin Kelly had a big effect. Instead of merely addressing each other’s block with a common face or joint…it was if the genes of the two blocks combined in forming a new mutation:
Teaching Assistant, Jeremiah Watson with student
Then the project became one for all 20 students to work together in making a common ground, common space, and passage. It became clear that the material was too present, too stubborn and seductive to look beyond it to these new questions.
Drawing was key in looking through the thing towards its pure potential. First the drawing was quite literal depictions of the work done so far and then it drew out the abstract generative order.
孪生姐妹 (Sister Squared in Chinese)
Click on the right under “Pages“: “孪生姐妹 (Sister Squared in Chinese)“
两姐妹一起住在树林里的玻璃房子里。他们是同卵双胞胎，她们小时候开始，就穿戴相同的衣服。为了区分开来,一个姐妹穿了在她的右肩上有字母“S”的衣服， 另一个女孩穿在左边的肩膀上有数字“2”的衣服。(这很容易做,因为可以从布料上剪下同样的形状,然后缝制到两人的外套上。) 字母“S”代表“姐姐(sister)”，即第一个出生的双胞胎,“2”代表 “姐姐的平方”，即第二个出生的双胞胎。 “姐姐的平方”被简称为“平方”，她总是签名时签上上标的 “2”。“平方”总是特别在意她的着装，觉得“2” 在她的衣服上缝得太低了。
A story about glass houses, shadow houses, lenses, moths, bats, the self, the other, and “all.”
A story about the origins of things, mirrors, lenses, images, visual shadows, dreams, and reflections.
Big Dipper and Little Bear Sightings
Stone Carved Star Chart from Qian Yuan Guan's Tomb incised 941
Stone Carved Beido and Little Bear
Sister Squared
I’ve published a page called “Sister Squared” which can be found under, “Pages” on the right column. It is a story that I wrote that gives some context to the post, “A religious experience” below. Prior posts, “The Beidou Star,” “Origins of the swastika” and “little bear” and future stories and posts will shed more light on this as well.
Two sisters lived together in a glass house by the woods. They were identical twins and wore matching clothes ever since they were little girls. In order to tell them apart, one sister wore the letter “S” on the right shoulder of her outfits, and the other wore the number “2” on the left shoulder of hers. (This was easily done, because the same character could be traced and cut from fabric and flipped depending onto which sister’s outfit it would be sewn.) The letter “S” stood for “Sister,” the firstborn of the twins and the number “2” stood for “Squared” the second born twin. Squared always signed her name with the superscript “2”. Being very particular about how she looked, Squared thought the “2” on her outfits was sewn too low.
A religious experience
I set out and started north around the big lake here in Hangzhou—Westlake. It was cold and overcast and windy. The lake is surrounded by mountains that held a foggy air even though a strong wind blew across the water making it very rough. I was freezing. I walked up and around and couldn’t figure out where I was on a map, nor could the girl who worked the Starbucks on route. It was really beautiful outside, but cold and then it started to rain. I then headed across a busy street that encircles the lake and up a steep hill and found some signs indicating historical sites. I started to climb winding stone steps up a mountain. The path of steps periodically met a kind of intersection of paths with a rock that had a kind of round-about diagram on it–red arrows pointing in different directions. The diagram looked like a constellation. I choose to go right and then up and left and up and right again. I reached the top. It was drizzling now, there were only two people that I passed along the way. I was going to head back down the same steps because there were many sets but I wanted to try a new set but was afraid I’d lose my way. A man in athletic clothes jogged up the last few steps from another side and I waved to him if the alternate path would take me straight down. He nodded strongly, “yes,” go down that one. And so I did.
These steps were steep and wet and slippery. I carefully and deliberately followed them down. They led to a Daoist compound that was amazing–filled with so many worship spaces, crazy worshipping paraphernalia up and down winding terraces and steps, men playing cards, each with their little bird in a cage with them.
I took a turn and saw another strange and small room filled with what I can only guess were prayer books with simply sewn binding and a column of calligraphy on their covers. There were stacks and stacks of them in glass vetrines. A woman sat on a low stool reading and surprised to see someone enter this space. I saw an opening to another room that was small and not kept as though it was of the same rank as the others. There were boxes off to the side, for storage. I gestured that I wanted to go in, and she gestured that I’d have to take my shoes off, which I did. I found a hall of mirrors, on all sides and the lower part of a canted ceiling–a female Buddha sitting in the center–reflecting herself in a curved stack to infinity on either side left and right and again diagonally on the canted sections of the ceiling either side. And then directly over head a knob. In front of the knob, a painted Beidou Star, The Big Dipper painted and on the other side, Ursa Minor, the Little Bear, just as I have it in my sketchbook.
I could not take a photo. I knew it wasn’t permitted and it didn’t feel right. So I sketched the little room when I got back to my hotel.
Origins of the swastika
One theory of the origin of the swastika or “Wan Zi” the Chinese name for this symbol, (which is sometimes the reversed orientation of the swastika, and sometimes not) is the view from the northern hemisphere of the counter-clockwise celestial motion of circumpolar stars about the earth’s axis with Polaris, roughly at center. A tracing of “The Big Dipper,” part of the Ursa Major constellation, also known as “the Big Bear,” in its four positions of its apparent trip around Polaris makes the lines of the symbol. The degree of one night’s arc around Polaris depends upon one’s latitude and time of year. For instance a full 360 degree trip can be seen at the North Pole on a winter’s night, but in summer, there is no night sky to see the stars. Further south, the arc of “The Big Dipper’s” trip is visible on one side of Polaris in summer and the other in winter, while the opposite side of each sweep is invisible during the day. Variations of the swastika have been used for more than 3000 years by many, including Hindus, Buddhists, the Anaszi Native Americans, Ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Christians and of course the most recent and associated use by Nazi Germany. For 3,000 years, the swastika meant life and good luck; but because of the use by the Nazis, it has also taken on a meaning of death and hate.
Circumpolar Stars with The Big Dipper & Ursa Minor (Little Bear) about Polaris
The Big Dipper about Polaris
The Big Dipper about Polaris connected
The Beidou Star
北斗 “Beidou” is the Chinese name for “The Big Dipper.”
It plays a role in Taoist tradition and is also the name for the Chinese Navigational System, or G.P.S.
The Beidou Star or as we know it, "The Big Dipper"
