Thursday, February 25, 2010

In the Crucible; no not that one....

I lit a candle tonight to celebrate the fact that I am in the crucible of learning. It is the middle of the night, Thursday AM in fact, and I am struggling with sleep. This is how I know I am in the crucible: I am struggling to sleep on Thursday after getting up Tuesday AM and running some errands, going to school in the morning, working on my studio project for 25 hours straight through, going home for a bath and a 20 minute nap, and going back to school 1-1/2 hours later for another 6 hours; then coming home to drop on the bed in a deep sleep. For 5 hours, I slept; blissfully stationary.

And then it hit me. My mind started racing with thoughts, and thoughts, and thoughts. It amazes me with all the thoughts that race through the human mind, that we have any time to actually speak (supposedly disrupting the racing of thought going on behind the scenes; though in most instances the synapses continue their inevitable processes (see the paragraph below on inspiration)). In my unstudied opinion, what changes when we speak, is this: the incessant drone of thoughts is, by contrast, lulled into a quiet hush by the greater noise of creating vocal tone. It is unfortunate when the only reason some speak is to attempt to hush the inevitable processing of thoughts going on in the background..., and that speaking loses quality due to its quantity and its unfortunate purpose. Talk for talk's sake.

So, gentle reader, what is it that distiguishes talk for talk's sake (the gibberish of the insane, or the quiet pleadings of the marginalized homeless, for example) from blog for blog's sake? I sometimes wonder what distiguishes the midnight blogging of one individual (starved for sleep, if not words) from the midnight talking of someone who talks in their sleep. ...Or further, from the talk of politicians motivated by drowning their sorry racing thoughts into speaking in endless mobius strips of rhetorical filibuster. Is it possible that this "national gridlock" and dearth of ideas of substance is nothing more than the filibustering techniques of political players dominating our conscience while droning on and on; in hopes that we will give in to their thoughts on the matter at hand? ...which, by the way, is what?

For my mind, and specifically my waking thoughts this night, I envision a sort of automated robotic warehouse of various things stored on rolling carts. These carts form a series of walls of information including experiences of the day, visions remembered, ideas considered, and so on. Everything in lifes experience has a place there. It is all in there somewhere; catalogued and ordered by the mind in some such way(s) that mankind has not, as of yet uncovered. (Great mystery, that!) The carts operate with seeming autonomy; rolling in and out of their storage spots in a sort of rythmic dance. Each cart of memories has a spin around the floor in the warehouse, looking for dance partners with which to mix.

Inspiration Strikes
And suddenly with great fanfare and a truly quiet hush of all the other musings, two carts of experience and ideas merge into a unique cart, as if by accident. The robotic ways of the rythmic dance have created an idea (that otherwise comes from nothing). The symbiotic merger of two carts into one creates a taller cart with a mix of seemingly random and unrelated items; reshelved and resorted by the experience of the mash-up. And a new synthesis is formed... a new idea... an awakening... or an inspiration.

And so the process goes, and goes. Altogether too slowly for some, it is for the most part, too quick to notice for many, and sadly too quiet to be heard above the din of talk; the purpose of much of which is to simply mask the seeming chaos of the warehouse of the human mind.

So in the middle of the night, in the middle of my sleepless week, having gone to bed well aware of the notion of being in the crucible of learning, I awaken to the crash of carts of information in my mind. My increasing frustration with the unreality of school projects forces me to think in terms of finding the purpose for each learning endeavor I undertake these days. I have struggled a bit this quarter with the notion of being uniquely able to solve design problems in an effective and measurably better way.

The arbitrary and subjective, almost capricious, way in which architectural design is taught leaves me wondering about my ability. It is not a question of my ability to design that I ask now. It is rather, a question of my ability to endure the arbitary, subjective, and capricious process of learning.

For in the end, there may be no right answer except that which is deemed right, and justified, and subjectively sold to the jury of the moment. And great architecture today seems to be subject to the random mash-up of carts of information. Or is it?

To Be Continued.

1 comment:

  1. Greetings!

    You were up last evening / early morning and I am up this evening / early morning - not, however, with racing thoughts but one thought - I need to get some sleep (;-)

    At any rate, earlier this evening I was perusing an article on the wikipedia IN RE: confabulation and, in particular, memory in association with lying (or delusion), which discussed the constructivist, source monitoring, and fuzzy trace theories of memory. The fuzzy trace theory holds that memory is stored in a number of containers (or levels) ranging from "verbatim" to "gist".

    On a related note, for a number of years I carried around a copy of Brewster Ghiselin's "The Creative Process" (now with the sub-title: "Reflections on the Invention in the Arts and Sciences") and cite for your refreshment two quotes (which may or may not aid your sleeping or waking hours):

    Carl Gustav Jung - "Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being."

    Henry Miller - "I began in absolute chaos and darkness, in a bog or swamp of ideas and emotions and experiences. Even now I do not consider myself a writer, in the ordinary sense of the word. I am a man telling the story of his life, a process which appears more and more inexhaustible as I go on. . . . It is a turning inside out, a voyaging through X dimensions, with the result that somewhere along the way one discovers that what one has to tell is not nearly so important as the telling itself."

    OK, now I can go to sleep . . .

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