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PAOLO SOLERI: WHAT IF?, COLLECTED WRITINGS 1986-2000 |
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PART 3: Hoppers
Animism 12/5/94 The more I read (glance at) the literature of "What and Why," the more it seems to become clearer to my thinking that the creational process is not given its due. We do not really believe in the originality of newness since at last we propose that the cast of characters is generated at the origin and that the term unfolding is the right word. Nothing is creation in process, since everything is printed a priori in the pergamene unfolding before our eyes, the eyes of all times, eyes, by the way, quite unnecessary, if not useless, since the pergamene of reality is unfolding regardless of any or no witnesses. So here we are seeking meaning to avoid despair and endorsing in the same breath the nemesis of any meaning whatsoever, since this unfolding is, at best, a vain game of the pergamene generator having nothing better to do than unrolling what? An a priori blood-stained paper roll? What escapes us is the possible fact that a process that is meaningless at its origin might generate via its Becoming a meaning that, if rightly guided, a horrendously grave and possibly impossible task, would become the radiance of knowledge and of its retroactivity (of its evolutionary reason). How noble, how excruciatingly beautiful, the remote possibility that meaning might throw its radiance back in time, to the beginning of space-time. The meaninglessness of the origin (Big Bang) Being made a posteriori full of meaning to the past, remote ancestry! There is a "What" at the very beginning, the Being- Becoming eclat, but there is not a Whyness to its outside unless the mere operational reality is more than a self-coherence in action, but is also a normative (learning and discriminating) operation. There is not even a potential for Whyness. Only a presence, Becoming, that, as it is, is incapable of inhibiting, or better, of rendering impossible, a remote emergence of the normative and then of the "Why" itself. The Why could appear, could be creation, within a protracted creational process, of a Why-deprived ancestral enactment (such as the Big Bang). That is why the tragic sense of life is not a metaphorical expression but a contextual, real condition: chances are that meaninglessness has been, is, and will be the immensely, if not infinitely, "empty" core of the whole fireworks. "God" would be the impotent witness of the eons-long agony; therefore, "it" would be tantamount to nothing, the existence of the nonexistent. The animistic model, even at its impressive best, remains a cozy cocoon because it presupposes that, given the animated nature of reality, there will always be salvation even if its form and its inner working may still be undetectable, inscrutable (but, the big but, the cause prima by definition). The animist says, it will never be for ... naught. The realist says, it could very well be for ... naught. The animist is, therefore, a determinist in disguise: an angelic disguise to the smartest of them. The materialist at last negates the Why as its genius works at defining the What with the Hows necessary to its "discovery." The realist is desperately clinging to a remote possibility for a splendor beyond conception and imagination (not determined, i.e., imposed a priori). As a realist, I am, therefore, as distant from the materialist as I am from the animist. The animist puts the Why in front and untouchable because its Why is fatally so; the rest of the play is the unfolding that has no avenues into failure, defaults, or death, only the surprises that a future no longer future has in store (one and all prestored at the origin). 4/1/96 I am for the demise of all theologies from Hinduism to Capitalism. They all promise paradise around the corner under one or more divinities, the guidance of their injunctions. Eventually religion (religio) will relegate them to the "museum" of curiosity. 6/5/97 The animistic reality and the animating reality. Poles apart. For an open universe, the animistic mode might be the indispensable crutch to keep despair at bay. For the closed universe of an animating reality, the animistic mode is the betrayal of evolution and of the concreteness, tangibility, and presence of the unending novelty of reality and the possibility of an astonishing closure. 7/11/97
Staying for the moment with the duality brain/Mind and mindful of the chronological precedence of brain above Mind, an epochal precedence, then one might be right to propose that it isn't that the Mind causes the brain to reconfigure, but the brain that causes the "Mind" to change (to have a new thought, for instance). The cause-effect is for real; who is the boss? A thought comes about because the brain changes? Or the brain changes because a thought conies about? The change is the thought in any case. Put in other words: Could it be the case that the so-called instrument, the How, the brain mechanism, generates the so-called performance, the What, the Mind (?), and would be another clear strike against and trace left of animism? Not the spirit, Mind, dictating to the flesh, brain, but the flesh" dictating" to the spirit? This ripples out, so to speak, into space as the Thing and further puts Miniaturization as an effective space domain and as a sine qua non for Complexity and Complexity as the sine qua non for Duration ... the goal, so to speak? If we were to get rid of the dialectic brain/Mind, we might be able to engage in a more coherent search for the inner working of reality (the domain of self-consciousness and ultimately, self-revelation). As things are now, we tend to exchange insults more than knowledge. Reductionist and animist are enemies to life. The thinking brain has the right to expect more, and the thinking brain is a dance of reconfiguring space. *** The greatest evil of animism is to make the conjecture, the hypothesis, into certainty, the true, and use it as such. From such presumption the whole cascade of intolerance invests the human condition with the most horrendous episode of mayhem, cruelty, violence, hatred, and vengeance the resourceful Mind can come up with. And it always does sooner or later. 9/4/97 To hope for "salvation" from within is as delusory as the Grand Delusion itself. Animism has made us the automatons of God. Each one of us believers, irrespective of the reason for our conversion from healthy intelligent animals into freaked-out paranoids, is in no condition for a coherent take on reality. 10/2/97 As long as you hide behind God, any god-goddesses, you are out of touch with reality. 8/6/98 By animating designs, Walt Disney opened a new Pandora's Box of animism. When a teapot speaks to a spoon and the dialogue is synchronous with the imagery, the whole world becomes captive to this new tide of animism. The child no longer needs Moses and his God, the speaking mountain needs only a few tools, a good technician, some graphic skills, and a piped-in voice, and the mountain speaks-far more convincingly, by the way, than the anguished prophets of the desert. (By the way, I am not prophetizing, I am proposing a more realistic -- that is, more creative -- way of building the past.) Then the Muppets cometh ... the Cookie Monster, a rag with a voice, is an animistic emblem of the first order and achieving so much with so little, with the backing of a "miracles" -making brain. Then the microchip comes and the gates of magic are sprung open. The child has no way of distinguishing between reality, animation, animism ... a ghostlike, brain-concocted reality. A virtual reality. Walt Disney is one of the saints in the iconography of animism. The animistic doodler says, "Yeah, you are mixing simulation with reality to fool me to believe in your hypothesis!" I say, "that shows how saturated your brain is with animistic patterns as to be unable to see that your theologies are pure simulations as the Cookie Monster is." And if you don't think we need clarifications look around and observe the evil of prejudice, superstition, intolerance, bigotry, ignorance ... plaguing our actions: "smite the unbeliever," Ireland, Congo, Oklahoma, Holocausts, thirty-year religious wars, on and on and on the bibles of horrors ... the Bible at the helm. 3/21/98 My call for the demise of animism is straightforward. If one tries to expunge the spatial "component" from anything -- quark, galaxy, emotion -- nothing is there. The component is not a component; it is the thing. What is utterly unimaginable is the variety of space configurations that come into play from state "zero," at Big Bang singularity, on. My presence, in the recent proximity of Becoming, is retraceable step by step to such a Big Bang. If animistically disposed, I would have to say that (or accept), the blueprint that in the animistic bosom had to be there, immensely detailed, because any slight deviance or any even tenuous ambiguity in it would clearly mean that I would, could, never come about. I and the "infinite" number of events disgorged by the animistic "force" had to be strictly premeditated and utterly detailed at that first singularity. That means that the blueprint is a misnomer. The real thing had to be there. Adieu time, adieu creation, adieu evolution ... adieu self-determination. A meaningless delusion all the way through, a delusion constructed by phantoms! 1/23/99 Biosphere and Noosphere Perhaps the animistic quest has been all along the quest for a noosphere. The fundamental error has been in seeking it in the past. A monumental error. A tragedy that could eventually become cosmic. Confined as it is now to a puny planet Earth, it could migrate via planet Earth as rats and other species travel via ships and spaceships to yet distant (?) worlds. In this solar system, the past glories of the noosphere are the fragments of it generating from man's brain. One of those fragments, the unfortunate one, and the one to which we are in servitude, is the noosphere false and pernicious of gods and spirits. Simulative and anticipatory as in many ways it is, the invented noosphere, the paradise of Eden, the Lord's domain is a grievous backpack that causes mankind to be under a spell he is not able to shake off. It is a curse nested in man's brain, infecting and affecting all of its doing and thinking. A self-inflicted punishment, the grand "religion" of the animistic grand delusion. 2/7/99 Animism, the Grand Delusion, will eventually and fatally stunt man's transcendence. 2/17/99 Without physics, there is no reality. Without reality, there is no information-knowledge. The poor little (or big) gods are out of work. There is nothing to do in the absence of any presence (the physical). And the glory of the physical! From galaxies to passion! Better Kind of Wrongness (BKW) APRIL FOOL'S DAY 1995 The theologians: The suburban "planner" is in the same pit as the theological thinker. They both come along with a given. For the theologian, the given is God; for the suburban planner, the given is suburbia. Two theologians engaged in an "improbable" task. The theology of God has to try to understand her, him, it, better so as to ingratiate herself/himself to her, him, it. The theology of suburbia does the same, with suburbia in the place of God. The tragedy for both (or fostered by both) is that they work on the wrong premises. All the improvement on their technology results in developing a better kind of wrongness ... a catastrophic development. There is a space-time gap between the pace of production- consumption and the ability of science and technology to develop the Hows and the means to keep up with such a pace. One problem is that knowing about something is not like doing what the knowing proposes. The reason being that our knowledge is pseudo-knowledge, and it will remain so "to the end of time." Virtual reality is a good test of this. Virtual reality is in the theater of simulation all the way, like theology is in the theater of simulation all the way. If we knew more, we could look at the planet with different eyes. The planet is the main resource for life (sun permitting). We are troubled by the poor use of that very small part of the planet we call the biosphere. With greater knowledge we could produce biospheres many, many times larger than the one now evolving, and do so by just "mining" the mass of the planet in the fashion capable of predisposing the condition for additional biospheres. 5/26/95 (To Santa Barbara) Just about the worst thing one can ever do is to do the wrong thing better, better in the realm of design, organization, production, planning, packaging, advertising, selling, proselytizing. Some classic examples:
This is what I see as indulging in a BKW. 9/23/95 Synergy is not always commendable, see the synergy between the arms industry and war.
7/18/96 Freeways by the busloads and heart bypass deadends. Again, the wrong thing being better pursued will end against the brick wall of intolerance (not toleration). The "bypass operations" cities are engaged in have their analogy in the surgical heart bypass so fashionable today. Both are supposed to bring more blood (traffic) to the heart (city). For both the trick is to leave out (bypass) something: tissues for the organism, neighborhoods for the urban "organism." A dubious intervention that eventually means the demise of the organism. and the city. 8/21/96 The automobile. In a lifetime, the American (male-female) buys and drives some ten cars. Fifty years of driving, one car per five years. He-she is n1.ostly the only user of the machine. If half the population of the Earth, at the 10 billion mark, the "adult" population, were to do likewise, 5 billion people would, in the span of fifty years, "consume" 25 billion automobiles. Naturally this is only the tip of the iceberg. First, the production and the disposal of the machines themselves. Second, the caring, feeding, repairing, buying, and selling of each. Third, the parking, storing, delivering, and recycling of each. Fourth, the roads, network inclusive of overpasses, bridges, and tunnels, for each item an enormous commitment in production, minerals, energy, fuels, organization, administration, marketing ... perhaps one-fourth of the adult population dedicated to it. When you marry sprawl you automatically marry the automobile, therefrom the pathetic battle for "mass transit" to serve sprawl. By the present statistics, there would also be carnage plus crippling by the millions, etc., etc.: 1.6 million killed every year x 50 years = 80 million people killed. The betterment of the wrong is calamitous. 1/10/97 The ethics of wrongness. The surest way to self-destruction for Americans is to sell the American Dream (AD). We want to see the products of the AD, the Coca-Cola, the Chevrolet, etc. If we sold the AD successfully, we would mesmerize the minds and "destroy" the biosphere. (The biosphere cannot be destroyed by mankind, but it can be drastically transformed by his actions.) The AD is an imposing example of a BKW All theologies are pernicious examples of a BKW. To participate, to design, to build the suburban sprawl is to go by the ethics of wrongness. To live in it forgoes any honest pretense of environmentalism. I am an environmentalist or I am a suburbanite. I must choose; I cannot be both. 3/27/97 Moving in the wrong alley means that the more sophistication, scholarship, and vision is poured in, the worse the situation becomes. It is the BKW law. Think of the breakup of the city. We chose the metastasis of the sub-exurbia. The initial dreariness of Levittown incarnate was picked up by Frank Lloyd Wright and glamorized in his Broadacre City. Fifty or so years later a BKW is engulfing peoples and environments at a gargantuan rate. To improve the wrong thing is to lose more and more ground and means sinking ever deeper into incoherence vis-a- vis the evolutionary coherence that might have to routinely supersede historical fitness and political correctness. To work for the wrong god, and all gods are automatically wrong in my hypothesis, is to do the work of the devil, as if the poor devil ever existed! 1/11/98 If one is even vaguely aware of the so-called good-and-evil conflict staged on this single speck of the cosmos, one may want to contemplate the enormity of such conflict when it reaches into the cosmos at large. On that road, a BKW could reach truly monstrous proportions. A cosmos drowning in madder and madder self-awareness. The Hell of the Bible like a minute smudge of suffering on the skin of the monster. Come to think of it, our whole Star Wars culture is a preview of this. It says "you do not deal with the dragon, you destroy it and do the same with the rest and to the last of them." Since we are constitutionally ignorant, we tend to put the best of our efforts into the BKW "culture." 8/6/98 The hundred years progression of bettering wrongness: the automobile, the hard irony is that conceived and brilliantly developed, the car, viewed at the beginning as the connective machine, turned out to be the most effective device of isolation, alienation, unfriendliness, segregation. The driver is the unknown among the unknown 100 million of us, the unfriendly adversary in the use and control on the never sufficiently large, capacious road. 4/26/99 Some of the financial-economic activities, among the lucrative ones: cars, tobacco, guns, housing are dedicated to improving wrongness. They make them appealing, "efficient," glamorous ... The depressing thing is that they are dedicated to better kinds of wrongness. And we all pay dearly for this. We wouldn't dare make cancer, a growth industry of the cells, more glamorous. We go at it with the whole arsenal of our medical know-how. But we pamper our guns, cars, cigarettes, and building industry, and we bask in the dividends they dole out. Of all of the four wrongnesses considered, the habitatimproving wrongness is the most damaging. Even the planet will "suffer" from it. In fact, it is "suffering" from it. Habitat, with all of its subagencies, from land surveying to pink pillows, is becoming a blatant demonstration of where a BKW is taking "modern man" ... to perdition. 6/21/99 AULLS (Arcosanti is an Urban Laboratory for a Lean Society) Nothing shows the gap opulence-leanness gap more than the question: "What is in it for me, person or corporation, that makes me wealthier and more powerful?" That is, what is the alternative to wealth and power that will nuke me better at it? Dear me, the alternative is not more of the same; the alternative to more wealth is more life. And the segregation of wealth and power is a diminution of life. So we are back to point zero! There isn't an alternative; there is just the pursuit of an even better kind of wrongness. By the way, animism has been a BKW for 3 million years! 6/24/99 The city gone cancerous has been metastasizing for over thirty years. Now things are critical. Exurban cells are spreading vigorously in the best of BKW modality. 7/3/99 It is a curse that so much of the intelligence we carryon is dedicated to improving wrongness, a curse and an addiction. We are in love with our mistakes. A question of habits? 1/24/00 The Bucket Brigade (analogy) In a landscape where a lake (the city) is surrounded by large and small ponds (towns and villages), fish farming (people's culture) has developed. For an efficient process, fish are transferred from one water basin to others in a daily routine (commuting). For obscure reasons, this indispensable transference is made via buckets (automobiles). Brigades of buckets crowd on top of another (gridlock) at the expense of everything, fish (us) included, and included necessarily are their aspirations (pollutants) . Then a "brilliant" technician comes up with the "collective lubricant notion" in the nature of brooks, rivulets, torrents, streams, canals, and rivers, and a network of fluidity is established (maglev). The bucket brigade is "suddenly" silly and obsolete. Unfortunately, since the medium (the car) has become through the years the message (the status that the car confers to the driver), the bucket brigade, with all of its dinosaur tradition, is here to stay for a while longer. Five billion motorized and glamorized buckets might eventually work as a slow-motion lethal asteroid swarm. For the moment there is where the American Dream gone planetary is poised. By the way, organisms run on the lubricant flow Techne, not on bucket-brigade logistics. Look at our artery-vein network. The bucket brigade is okay in a quantum world. It is in the Coca-Cola, compukitchen, soccer mom, garbage can, nonvirtualities. *** A computer for each student. It may fit well the vast (unintended) design of persona desensitization that will be a cornerstone of postsilicon intellection. In such a perspective, a wicked way of moving intellection into the cosmos at large. 2/4/00 Muda and Hypermuda A weapons industry twice efficient via the reduction of muda (waste) in its production cycle is working in the BKW domain. A housing industry twice efficient in producing single homes is working in the BKW domain. A doubled efficiency in poppies and hemp processing will flood the drug market with more products. BKW in action. Cheaper cars will mean more affordability of the machine, etc. [t seems that muda can easily migrate into a hypermuda kingdom where it might wreak havoc while being applauded by the masses of happy users and consumers. Efficiency transformed into deficiency. Think of a twice-as-efficient death camp for Nazis and "Cambodians." Moreover, if the Nazi war machine had been afflicted by only half of its muda, it would have succeeded in developing the A- and H-bombs before the USA, with the sure consequence that most of Europe, England included, most of Russia, and then part of the USA would have been reduced to radioactive graveyards. The muda in this case was not only fortunate but providential. 2/20/00 The know-how of wrongdoing is doubly pernicious. It accelerates the power of the wrong (hypermuda) and it subtracts intelligence and resources from the right-doing. The Feminine 5/20/93 The nonexpedient reason why we need to abandon the American Dream is that life is a congregational (gathering), implosive phenomenon, not a dispersive, segregative, explosive one. Therefrom the greatness of the second invention, the city. The two greatest inventions of our species, besides speech, are love and the city. The apple of the Garden of Eden was the apple of reflection, that is, the inception of knowledge. But the truly human content of the apple-knowledge is love. Love is absent in the food chain, which is revved up by opportunism, and definitely absent in the mineral reality, which grapples with probabilism-determinism. Love is the new dimension reality contains as it moves from probabilism, determinism, and opportunism into reflection-knowledge. Skyscrapers are an example of the impotence of misdirected potency. What we must spew into space is not naked half-semen, not sperm, but placenta and eggs. The multiple exedra is a morphological archetype, unlike the tower or the slab. Both towers and slabs define shapes but not forms. The multiple exedra is a matrix of sorts, a flexible three-dimensional grid. The discipline intrinsic to the geo-exedra morphology is the one that is mindful of the sun's cycles and of the climate. And it wants to be alert to the "passage" of the sun: how it can be viewed, framed, walked in, etc. This sensitization to a sun / climate environment distinguishes the exedra archetype and its apse effect from the tower or the slab that disdain both sun and climate. One instance of sensitization: Shades are avoidable, just as towers and slabs can be avoided. They must, however, be "desired or avoided or designed" consciously. The sun rights are paramount. Shades can be used within the many-faceted sides of climate and can generate performance -- physical, economic, social, and cultural performances. The multiple geo-exedra has no connection with the world of symbols and metaphor, or with the questionable animistic world so dear to the Aquarian communities. If anything, it clearly presents itself as a rational or coherent response to a reality that is all but loving and nurturing. It is a dialogue with and a recognition of Mother Nature and her indifferent, when not harsh, ways. Every city worth its name wants to have an erection, multiple in space, frozen in time. So every city worth its name tries to. The critical element of the city, the nurturing presence, is thus relegated to a sideshow presence. It is difficult to find nurturing among predators. The male of the species well knows that, notwithstanding the new role humans are eagerly forcing upon themselves. So nature witnesses the predator reaching for the sky. It is a somewhat pathetic spectacle as long as the feminine nurturing side of life is kept in the dungeon. Then comes the exedra morphology, an application of the apse effect, the nurturing form. 5/11/97 The Generational Chain From parthenogenesis (cells) to fabrication (microchip) ... In the chain of parthenogenesis-estrus-eros marching at the tune of Miniaturization-Complexity-Duration, there is now potentially a new station: fabrication. Are we at the beginning of this revolutionary (evolutionary) stage, and are there premonitions, anticipations, to it? One "premonition" could be nested in the narcissistic flavor of homosexuality. Homosexuality has the sort of mirror pleasure component that masturbation clearly offers. The "I do it myself" reaching for orgasm. Biologically the two homosexual parties are identical and the coupling is sterile. The unimaginable richness of the genetic reshuffling of eros becomes a mute domain. Homosexuality is a sort of cloning limbo, if there is any interest left for reproduction. It is an androgyny with two components that happens to be made of two morphologically identical parts, the homosexual partners. This seems to be a step closer to asexuality. Then: parthenogenesis-estrus-eros-androgyny (sort of maladroit parthenogenesis)-asexuality. That is, fabrication as reproduction. The Asexual Silicon Persona (ASP) fabricating other ASPs via its own defined blueprinting. With the erasing of the male-female chromosome mix, for better or for worse, the richness without end of the human stock is no longer accessible. The variations must become willfully designed for good or for evil or by default. If the female egg can be vacuumed from the mother's chromosomes and either the male or the female partner's chromosome can be injected into the preempted egg and the offspring developed, then lineages of male-male and female-female can be developed. The potential for "GODS the mothers" and/ or the "GODS the fathers"!?!? and the carriers of the lineages? All sterilized mothers of the gods. 11/15/98 There where the parthenogenic phenomenon comes up with the new reproductive invention of sexuality female-male genders, there at that very start polygamy is "born." One of the gender (the male) is charged with the task of bringing the one half of the new life to the other half, the female. The other gender (the female) is charged with gestating, mothering, nurturing the newly composed individual. The male, "free as a bird," develops his domain with all the strategies he comes up with: attack, retreat, advances, stalemates, breakthrough, dominion, predation, power, absolutism, genocide, etc. The female, the carrier of life, the nurturer, has to cope with it all, and coping she has been now for 400 million years. No capriciousness or malevolence in the bisexual invention and its success, not until the emergence of mankind. With this species, opportunism starts to drift from the well-being of the species to the well-being of the individual. That is a breakthrough in the two opposite directions (of the same life thrust) of good and evil. The pseudomale that some of the feminists seem sometimes to propose is no "solution," if solution is what we are after. The pseudofemale that guilty male seems also to propose is as "artificial" as the pseudomale. The silicon cycle of intelligence production might be the answer, but what impoverishment that might be!? Life has been equipped with bisexuality. Intellection must pursue the best device it can to make such eros-marked phenomenon the best, beyond the victimizer-victim threshold. It has been difficult and hard. Pleasure, joy, suffering, rapture and tragedy commingle "ab eternum." 11/16/98 The feminine agenda could be extensive, and it could include a revision of the evolutionary-genetic agenda. For one, the progression of capitalism could be made to take a turn in the direction of internalization. A sort of incubation in a less self-gratifying environment. The womb of self-giving. The feminine movement could well be the feminine revolution: the inception of a novel Becoming in which the genesis of a new individual admonishes us of the dangers of abstraction, inventiveness, anticipation virtualities, all male "prerogatives" (he specializes in them) that are in desperate need of feminization -- that is, in need of the love potion the male has a hard time focusing on. The violence endemic to history, all of history, will not abate, let alone crash, unless the feminine intervenes "in force" and sterility vetoes the tyranny of the male, genetically imprinted despotism. But femininity cannot put on the warrior armor, a male invention, to combat and subdue the male adversary.She does not have the physiological wherewithal for that and fortunately not even the taste for it. To offer, she has instead the profound attachment to the antideath arousal of life and of all the equipment to make life triumph over the male machinations and violence. For the whole history of the species the male has pushed for the powerhouse of Howness, science and technology included, but has miserably failed in fairness, equity, and wisdom. He must be made aware of his own black hole of compassion (the absence of it), and nurturing of creativity must be the task of the feminine. The feminine can do it if she does not give in to the notion of hypermanliness, to be a better male than the male. Space and the Feminine 11/24/98 The female is an interiorizing organism by definition. Gestation takes from the environment, the chemicals, oxygen and water included, the proteins, the enzymes, the vitamins, etc. And, good space magician that she is, the female organizes all those space configurations into another interiorizing organism. Space interiorizing space interiorizing space ... Within the carbon cycle, the female is and still remains the indispensable hinge where the printing and minting of life occurs. The female is a singularity of interiorization. When it comes to the spatialization of emotion and reflection, from the feminine emerges the female. One creation of this emergence is maternal self-giving and love. A most singular of all singularities. A singularity never attainable by a silicon genetic. The key singularity of the feminine "movement." The Feminine and Frugality, the Feminine and Love 12/1/98 The making of a new life has no match in the whole of reality in terms of economy of means and richness of ends. A pregnant Rwandan woman on the edge of starvation and death carries on and gives birth to a baby with nothing in her and her baby but just a few ounces a day of nutrients and water. That is the miracle of the feminine within the miracle of life. But that is not even half of the picture. While gestating, the feminine comes on her own: a true explosion of altruism: maternal love. A "seepage" of unconditional love reaches out to surround the new life with the growth of self-giving and self-giving ... It manifests itself in the most mundane of all endeavors, feeding, diapers, hugging and guiding, playing and training, caring and caring and caring ... The poor macho man is a pale shadow in this whole feast of love. He doesn't even get it, he does not endorse it, he resents it, he submits to it. Femininity triumphant but also femininity "enslaved" by it and by macho man opportunism. In the makeup of the "weaker sex," cultivated in millions of years of male opportunism (survival of the species?), is the gift and the curse of woman, and the answer is not there because at most it reaches into the cultural. It does not reach the genetic. Males and females are two different events in living reality. But they need each other. If all the things attending to males' actions were to come even remotely close to the feminine frugality, we for one would not have an environmental crisis, and with an abatement of waste and greed our lives would have a better chance to move in the interiorized domain. The male has to develop a cultural-mental womb to equal the life-giving and loving universe of the feminine, the feminine womb. The brain-mind of the cosmos will be, if ever or anything, the "collection" of the brain-mind of all the creatures that the feminine will have generated. The feminine is also a call for the demise of animism. Can one imagine the gods lined up anxious and ready to slap a soul on the fertilized egg or the embryo or the fetus or the near-to-be-delivered baby? ... and then in the blink of a (godly) eye abandon mother and child to the harsh reality of nature and culture? No Lord is better than any absentee Lord. The absentee Lord of famine, genocide, cruelty, terror, de-reliction, devastation, deception, impotence ... What a gorgeous Nirvana! Femininity and cyberspace in their own domains call for the rescue of woman from the delusionary and the hypnosis of all bucolic paradises. To animate the inanimate is an immense and hard task. Reality as we experience in this solar system has no clue of what began three and a half eons or so ago. And surprise of surprises, even the living had no clue about the gestating of self-awareness some millions of years ago. 12/5/98 The feminine encountering cyberspace could "plot" with it and lure greedy man toward the ephemeralization that cyberspace by its very nature offers anyhow. I am pointing to the domain of frugality and interiorization exactly in opposition to the toys, confrontations, and war games that so intensely occupy macho man. It would have to be a determined, intense, and protracted effort for the alliance feminine-cyberspace to succeed. The fruits would be a more gentle and more profoundly engaged human condition. And a good home for the rescue of the biosphere. A biosphere-noosphere reconciliation with materialism as the loser. A tough sell to capitalism and to license in general. 3/17/99 The female IS inclined by her own gender-nature to be engaged in the affairs of life-gestation and life-creation of the content within. The inventive male is inclined by his own gender to speculate about what might happen in life's end and almost automatically speculate about the envelope containing life, the life that the female, engaged in fleshing out, is responsible for. The female is engaged in the fleshing out of life from minerality. The male is engaged in exploring the nature of the mineral-biological envelope of life. The illiterate societies made goddesses out of the mystery of the flesh. The literate societies made gods out of the mystery of the cosmos. In early times, producing progeny occupied the best part of the mother's life. Within a thirty- or forty-year life span, the most mature and vigorous ten to fifteen years were for mothering. In the same earlier times, the life of the male afforded him the leisure of litigation, war, and abstractional occupations. The one-minute impregnation and the nine-month pregnancy and years of nurturing were destined to generate two different brain geometries. The geometries that are primarily responsible for gods, genders, and domestic conflicts. Feminine and masculine are now on the verge of generating androgynous "life," or at least a cocktail of bisexual-androgynous reproduction cycles. "Goddesses and gods unite," and since you are in the process of con-fusing your two selves, go one step further: dispose of yourselves in a momentous auto disposal. 11/29/99 As a blip on the cosmic scale, we are in life the contemporary of the initial living ocean scum of our dear dinosaur neighbors of Confucius, Plato, Jesus, Spinoza, etc., etc. WE ARE IN IT TOGETHER FOREVER. The question is to see how such a tiny blip of territorial life will be willing and able to "extrude" throughout reality and in probable conjunction with other noospheres to become the conscious consciences of the brutish immensity of the cosmos. The feminist movement is invested in the corporate world self-righteously and relatively successfully. But the corporate world is the masculine world of cunning and aggression. Love and care for the losers? The loser for society and for personae? The feminine movement has to face this and attempt the impossible. Tame capitalism by letting loose upon it the light of committed compassion. Frugality Crime and Suburbia 3/24/94 The dereliction of the city caused by the suburban exodus is cause one for the lawlessness-vandalism-intolerance-revenge fueling the "urban" violence. The ex-urbanite and the para-urbanite are not new frugality converts. They want it all but in inflated measure. The structure of suburbia nukes sure of that. 3/31/94 The isolation of the family in the suburban or agricultural home demands a compensation for the social disassociation and the consequent loneliness. The compensation takes the form of new social beings, the children, so as to experience interaction. The demographic pressure is directly proportional to the social and cultural isolation of peoples and families. Cities tend to be "biologically frugal," and biological frugality is now an imperative. Although they have genuine love for one another, the farmer couple, isolated and cut away from the social nexus, goes on to produce social beings with whom to relate. Eros-centered and the body count contribute to farmer fertility in action. 4/7/94 The central and critical position of greed as the worst enemy of ecological health. Because greed is the engine of transformation, acquisition, and accumulation, the consumption-gratification unlimited of today's American Dream. Catastrophe as the unavoidable nemesis. The odds for a prevailing of "Mind" as the evolution of "matter" are infinitesimally small, therefore the imperative on oneness. Creed and democracy, poor bedfellows ... Simulation as space-time-less substitute for reality, that is, an instrument by proxy of frugality, contributing to the salvation-restoration of ecology. Three main tasks for virtual reality:
Virtual reality (VR) is a brain-to-brain avenue. And the exclusion of the body, in fact, the exclusion of all bodies, biological and not, is its great virtue, also potentially its curse -- unless we constantly remind ourselves that such exclusion is ultimately a willed deception (we are getting something in place of something else), that is, we are in the simulation domain, but then such is religion and, in some special ways, the esthetic. I am an advocate of the city, of what I call the Urban Effect, and I think that virtual reality can be the most effective and frugal additive to the urban experience: complementarily as a pre-experiential and postassessment / assessor of actual, contextual experiences of events. VR can assist in developing the richest social and cultural milieu and, as a large dividend, can provide relief to the overused natural and cultural resources of the planet. With 10 billion or so affluent people, the tourist trade would be all but deadly for the environment; for instance, imagine 50 million people visiting the Grand Canyon yearly (now approximately 5 million do so). The same thing goes for all centers of tourist attractions, natural and manmade. In general, the ephenieralization of reality proposed by the Urban Effect is in agreement with the ephemeralization offered by the VR simulation. A well-balanced combination of Urban Effect and virtual reality is a prospect to desire and encourage. How to tone down the irrelevant and the sleazy, the opiate, etc., from the VR magic machines → super instrument for consumption? 4/20/94 The instrumentation for human development, supported as it has to be by technological-technocratic agencies, is on the verge of overwhelming us and them and all. Frugality is not just a behavioral attitude. It is an ethical imperative. The two alternatives:
We are in the grip of #2, notwithstanding the many technological miracles. Perhaps there is a virtue in virtual reality via the simulation value.We cannot all have all those things and experiences. Let's have the next best thing to those: a simulation of them. Part of what we lose in tangibility and space-time immersion we might gain via the "artistry" and selectivity and focusing and overwhelming of the simulation process. The collectivized hermitage of the techno-freak. I must (I ought to) do the most with the little I have. 9/19/94 Millionaires of Armageddon The young millionaires cropping up in ever larger numbers are the Armageddon procurers, since the focus common to most, if not all of them, is the strengthening and fostering of hyperconsumption: per capita hyperconsumption here and everywhere. Financial wizards, economists, entrepreneurs, investors, bankers, conglomerate magicians ... all have one thing in common, their fortunes are tied to hyperconsumption. Greed and glory are framed on their desks or consoles, probably also in their bedrooms ... the smell of money. Eros as this most scented (power) best. Greed, glory, and eros, the Armageddon flowers procurer. 3/21/96 I believe that the hyperproduction-hyperconsumption of the Western people, USA culprit #1, is close to the malignant border. See the 20-planets projection -- SINGLE HOME. See the "shopping center phenomenon." Mineral-Organic-Mental: In this progression, materialism, hedonism, and self-gratification are entropically oriented. FRUGALITY MIGHT BE THE ONLY COUNTERMEDICINE. The degree of Complexity present in a process defines the degree of liveliness. The intelligence and self-awareness the processes reach in the complex is not the complicated (e.g., the canary vs. jumbo jet), and the complex is utterly tied to Miniaturization. The two (MC) always in tandem generate life, intellection, Mind, and a possibly meaningful conclusion, the memory of things. MCD is in function of where-when = space-time. Implosive = life; explosive = death. 3.5 eons of MCD via flesh, now 20-year MCD via silicon. There isn't such a thing as events and phenomena coming to be in space-time. Those events and phenomena are space-time engaged in mass-energy transformations. 6/19/97 A Movement to Frugalize the American Dream into a Planetary Reality The planet is a tiny fragment of the solar system, in turn, a tiny fragment of the cosmos. The unavoidable curse of intolerance at the core of all animistic drives: My god is more godlike than your god ... makes the planet the laughing stock of the cosmos at large!? It would if it were not for the fact that the cosmos is incapable of laughter, joy, sufferance, love, etc. As we like to say, we found the enemy and the enemy is us. This may suffice to point out the fundamentally flawed notion of a nation, any nation, under God. Part of the frugalization of the American Dream is to unburden it of the animistic delusions in parallel to unburdening it of the materialistic, self-gratifying delusions of the naked Homo faber imprint. After a long taste of "the plenty" we are still aware and are confirming the fact that true grand felicity is not of this world (an old saying). The old Nirvana delusion is there to testify. Mistaken identity, by the way, reprimanding a delusion (felicity) with another delusion (Nirvana). But the profound elation of Being and Becoming and being responsible beings is a privilege with no equals. In this at last is the nobility of the species, and in this we must probe deeper and seek harder for a perhaps unending transcendence, the intensity and grace of which escape us. But if probing and seeking remain outside of the equitable, compassionate, and esthetic domain, no technological and scientific triumph will fill the void of a reality indifferent to our presence. But for equity and grace to really prevail, aside from their necessary presence across the planet, it is imperative to reexamine and eventually abandon the excesses of consumerism -- hedonism, self-gratification, and the limitless exploitation of the planet itself with terribly shallow ethics and value-wanting behaviors. Biomassive and Biofrugal 10130/97 At equal brain capacity, the biomassives are or might be on the wrong side of the evolutionary road. The market slowly adapts to the biomassive demands. Things, appliances, spaces grow in bulk of raw materials with energy demands proportionately increasing. An example is the so-called sport-utility vehicle: "You can't stuff 4-5 biomassive people in an economy car and keep their dignity intact!" Greater longevity, biomassive people, and the pet population upgraded, the servo-systems of insurance, hospitals, surgery, gymnasiums, schools, clubs, beauty salons, homes, cemeteries, etc., add another 3-4 billion people equivalent to the 10 billion predicted by 2050. The Frugal Alternative (FA): An Urban Laboratory Initiative 10/5/98 The very core of the initiative is that, evolutionarily speaking, life seeks to find the utmost economy in order to carryon agile and unburdened by the dead weight (entropy) of "worldly possessions." Worldly possessions move on a scale that starts at survival and ends in utter futility (stupidity?): I am a rich man/woman among the richest! The game of escalation: making ends meet. Affluent, rich, hyperrich, etc., do not resonate with either equity or coherence. Equity: We know the statistics. Coherence: Would 100 bulls dominating the whole mammalian species promise any sort of better paradise? Money is power, power corrupts, ergo money corrupts. As always is the case, the formula needs to fit the rules of proportionality and context and ultimately coherence. More wealth in the hands of better people might generate more equity than the same wealth in the hands of worse people. The Frugality Initiative proposes that, once above the subsistence level, cushioned by a reasonable and desirable level of physical comfort, the human drive ought to be guided by the interiorization beacon: develop intensity at the expense of extensivity, the unlimited drive for worldly possessions. Clothing worldly possessions in imaginative but mostly deceiving garments, like access to a more rewarding world, plays mostly into the hands of hedonism, or even crass materialism: self-gratification as the meaning of life. A society bubbling with intellect, introspection, and, at the same time, aware of the untamable beast of inequity, ever present and ugly, could emerge in a new domain of lived compassion and moments of exhilarating grace, a golden age of sorts. The contention that since we are all "created unequal" we all have our personal threshold of comfort is quite logical, though dangerously open to all sorts of excesses. We should know that, evolutionarily speaking, the opportunism of population (ants, bees, etc.), as gray as it appears to Homo sapiens, has the virtue of not purposelessly dismissing its citizens, while the opportunism of the individual, typical of Homo sapiens, does not necessarily bode well for the well-being of Homo sapiens species. Social Darwinism has seen its apogee, but unfortunately its most telling incarnation: Capitalism is alive and well and Homo sapiens desperately needs the humanized version of it. Those are some observations about the thinking at the core of the Frugality Alternative. 5/11/99 A sort of destiny seems to be coming about on the winding up of the consumerism-materialism breakdown. More and more the pursuit of happiness on such an incline seems to move the hyperconsumer into the corner of dissatisfaction, redundancy, shallowness, guilt, loss of meaning. There must not be too many ways to avoid the often violent void of materialism: one is the quest for a lean society, a lean society also pursuing equity and excellence. 5/15/99 The elixir of Complexity is a lean, elegant dynamic. Self-aware "simplicity." The progeny of a lean society, nature tells us is the "city of light." If each organism is an "urban complex" to the power of two, the urban invention produced by the Mind is an urban complex to the power of x, x being the degree of Complexity made reachable by the lean nature (Miniaturization) of the system: experience and express more with less. The self-organizing (living) system is a lean presence. It wants (and needs) a surrounding that best reflects its nature: a lean habitat. 5/24/99 Contextually and metaphorically, to transgress is in the nature of prototyping. The paradox of the auto industry: on the verge of flooding the biosphere with 2 to 3 or more billion cars, it could be financing an alternative technology of planetary logistics based on the regrouping of habitat along the transportation channels afforded by such technology. There would be a liberating scent of alertness touching on generosity, putting financial power behind an alternative way of life, the lean way of life that would be promoted by alternative logistics. Asia, Africa, the Americas colonized by the automobile is sure catastrophe (a car for every two persons means 5 billion or so automobiles). The structuring and restructuring of habitat for 10 billion people is an immense task and unavoidable if we want to move in more promising landscapes. Two hundred million dollars invested in an even modest laboratory working on the alternative is a fraction of the cost of a Las Vegas extravaganza, a Getty museum, a superhighway to nowhere, one less diet pill a day, and less than half an Eisner bonus from Disney in 1998 ($500 million plus!). 6/24/99 Alternatives
7/22/99 The Lean Society Movement is "moving people." It does it in discrete, measurable bites. It seems to be effective (based on the number of returnees) and offers to the Arcosanti residents new experiences and help in generating "conversions." The Internet should be the main facilitator once we deliver a message to it, and the Lean Alternative proposition is that. The conversion from the profligate to the lean: The crucible of living nature squanders her activism to the point of achieving one success hidden among one thousand failures. Nature is 95 percent abortion, 5 percent success. That seems to cover just about the whole spectrum of the vegetable and animal food chain species. But then for each successful species what triumphs is frugality. The coral reefs, the Amazonian forests, the termite "cities," the worm societies, wildebeest herds, the human settlements. They all are lean sisterhoods. They survive, reproduce, and prosper on a hyperlean diet of sunlight and spare minerals. The whole interiorization of the cosmos, the mineral becoming the self-conscious is a celebration of (potential) leanness. It is the Lean Alternative, cause for endless celebration. 11/2/99 The choice might have to be between the opulent and the lean, naturally under the dousing of the good-bad constantly battering at the gate of consciousness. Even with all of its redundancy and waste, the living seems to be on the lean side. 12/12/99 The intensity of space. Making space the one and only agent of reality Becoming is, among other consequences, to propose a Lean Hypothesis on the nature of reality in its agenda of Becoming. As Becoming pours unremittingly into Being, the past, the leanness of the hypothesis holds true if the many facets of Becoming are concurrent with the Lean Alternative. (The Lean Hypothesis touches on the cosmos in toto, its own nature. The Lean Alternative touches upon habitat, the sheltering of mankind.) 12/22/99 Alternative to the ongoing? I think I am told that since I like coffee I should drink and enjoy Coke because it has caffeine in it. We've got to sell the Lean Alternative or we can sell out. To adapt to and to adopt the market is to forgo the very notion of laboratory, the place where things that are not common and not proven are tested. A learning process by definition. It is not, it wants not to be, an adversarial position. It wants to be an illuminating position. Instead of one domain, the market domain, there are then two domains. The market domain, with its own imperative of hyperconsumption, and the alternative domain of a leanness reaching for a better compatibility with the real. We, Western societies, are in the process of testing the hyperconsumptive, in its triumphal but possibly unwise anarchy. Plunging, smartly if not deviously, in its "irresistible" current might make the alternative a success and the hyperdollar a failure. There are moments in history when the black and white have to face each other and, in the laboratory, have to avoid the gray zones, and that is for the sake of both. After the black and white laboratory experience comes the possible fusion into the new and possibly the better. Howness 11/18/93 Folding- Unfolding One of those semantic misfortunes: life is a folding phenomenon, a genentropic event. It is thus that elemental entities get involved with each other and generate the folded-over genetic segments. Folding is the most common geometry of the living. The history of the living is the history of folding upon folding. The history of the dying is the history of unfolding. Like a rose in its densely folded bud begins to unfurl and radiate its scent, so life is in its densely folded organism. Radiating acknowledgment of self and other, life begins to unfurl from its very beginning. The unfurling or unfolding is the signal of death slowly catching up in the innards of life, the organism. As the petals of the rose begin to fall and the scent becomes pungent, so the folded makeup of the organism more and more radiates its presence while advancing toward death. The unfolding is death coming on the forefront, the entropic phase of reality folding in its multitudes, organism after organism. 10/10/94 Tange's Yokio Building An elegant type of segregation (of functions). One cause is the cost. To live in the tower would be for millionaires. The tower is the closest to a Gothic cathedral we have built in this century. This is not to criticize but to flatter. Shapes and textures are exemplars and sophisticated, though a massive expression of wealth (i.e., exploitation). The esthetic is a redemption of sorts. 10/30/94 Garment Architecture The sailor of the tall ships changes the garments of his ship many times a day to stay in the best synergy with the wind and the destination. The "sailor" of garment architecture limits his intervention mostly, if not exclusively, to twice a year: spring equinox and fall equinox. The technology of fastening, tying, binding, securing, and stretching in the tall ships should be translated for the garments of large dimensions to be displayed on such occasions. Membranes, fibers, and the metal works necessary are a fresh challenge in the process of giving the habitat a "new face" every six months. In tall ships, the wind is the energizer, the form-giver. In garment architecture, the sun is the energizer and the formgiver. In the tall ships there is the mobility of the vessel that works in conjunction with the wind. Thwarted? As for the greening of architecture, I am definitely against transforming buildings into a sort of in-and-out pincushion for greenery. The in-greenery has the depressing taste of mortuaries. The out-greenery is a sort of herbaceous mound a la nest, run by ill-disposed little green people. I'd rather run up an orchard blanket on the dorsal convexity of a structure whose concavities are open to the south-hitting sun. In combination with this orchard envelope is the deployment of large "sails," all disposed in the best possible manner, to define a sunny and greenhouse condition for the cool-cold months of the year and a shady and cool condition for the warm-hot months of the year. That makes the two equinoxes as pivots from transparent-translucent to opaque membranes, the winter garment, mounted at the fall equinox (21-22 September) to the shading large membranes, the summer garments, mounted on the spring equinox (21-22 March). The morphology of the architecture and its orientation must be up to this task of receiving those garments and making the best use of them. All of this is feasible now that technology is producing membranes of diverse properties and because of its "reasonable" cost. 12/2/94 About "Organic Architecture" As a starter and strictly speaking, architecture as a mind-defined manufacturing of structures is of necessity nonorganic. One could more appropriately call it mineral architecture to distinguish it from the organic nature of nests, the architecture constructed by organizing without the filtering of Mind. This seems to suggest that the whole debate about organic architecture is in fact an inquiry about metaphors, with all the ambiguities the metaphorical world is engaged and entangled in. In this light and as a further distinction from the so-called organic architecture, I quote myself (Copenhagen, Site): Perhaps coherent architecture, though less romantic sounding, is more on target, the target that perhaps organic architecture is shooting at. The original (Frank Lloyd Wright) notion tied organic to abstraction wisely, to get the underbrush out of the way. Abstraction meant the action of Mind that, rooted in the organic world, 3.5 eons of it, would reach out into the mineral and into the no-longer living organism (lumber, for instance) to generate the sheltering equipment needed by Homo faber-Homo sapiens. What happened then was unfortunate. The underbrush remained, the trees were let to die, therefrom the virulence of buildings simulating organisms instead of building "inspired" by the living reality. 1/3/95 My proposition about architectural planning as a brew of order and spontaneity is akin to the notion of the membrane separating-connecting order and chaos, especially now that I identify the present, all presents, as such a membrane separating or foiling Beingness, the past, necessarily "ordered" to non-Beingness, that is, chaos, the future, the non-Beingness. The present, the tense membrane, containing the creational twist is then the place of anxiety, expectation, urgency, contemplation, exhilaration, fear, fury, impatience ... the condition of man at its naked best. 3/16/95 The Three Environments and the Urban Effect
The in-out environment is by technological determination a young environment. Only the mass manufacturing of glass and plastic membranes makes it possible to bubble up large swaths of air and under favorable conditions use such air volume as a climate modification medium. Payton's crystal palace was a precursor of the technological possibilities of glazing. But it tended to be indifferent to climate and orientation, and it remains anyhow an in-environment. With the introduction of light membranes and with the use of some energy running a range of equipment, the in-space can now become an in-out space according to seasonal changes, day changes, and weather vagaries. The third environment is therefore the novelty whose virtue is all but ignored. Not so in the third-generation arcologies. Opening and closing like flowers. Blinking like animals. 9/23/95 Buckle Up It seems to be, at bottom, a question of form. Form fitting another form goes for the synergy of the event. Form not fitting another form. goes for the refusal of interdependence. The virus locks onto the chromosome and the organism is infected. If the virus cannot lock onto the chromosome, the organism is immune to the virus. The survival and the quality of life of the organism depend on how things buckle up or do not in the organism. 3/19/96 (STOCKHOLM) The What- Why-How- Where-When of things. Meaning technology space-time. Homo erectus via wood, fibers, bones, clay, and fire has the first taste of becoming Homo faber. Via hundreds of thousands of years of experience, hands and brains (and vocal chords) in synergy evolve into Homo sapiens. With it, the How begins to show its magic, which eventually explodes with the technological "revolution." Now the How is our magic tool and magic kingdom, including Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom with all its simulations. Homo sapiens is now in "control," and Howness spills from flesh into mineral, which seems on the threshold of responding in kind: "artificial" intelligence, a misnomer!? The virtue of virtual reality still in question, we can, though, well see how far mani-pulation of matter has gone. The How more than ever is working on generating the What and consequently the Why. Crucial in this evolution of things is the where-when -- that is, space-time. For instance, a bare-handed single man cannot build a pyramid; space-time will not let him (yet nanotechnology will eventually do it for him). But space-time is the maker of each present cluttered or uncluttered now, on this planet, by the doings of Homo faber sapiens. The knowing elicited by the driving force of the How makes for the cream of the noosphere. 6/6/96 The next few generations will witness the tearing apart of the two-man agency of Homo sapiens. Body and mind. The intruder sotto species silicon or other mineral compounds. We are already living in presents in which young people feel the call of all things virtual reality lures their minds into. One of the things this does is to break, theoretically for now, the planetary confinement of life or, more appropriately, consciousness, leaving behind that which might turn out to be a no longer indispensable garment, the flesh (carbon cycle). Taking the pleasure of opening a window as a clue to the joy of life in the flesh and considering that for silicon man that kind of pleasure (any pleasure?) is no longer there, the window itself is not more there for lack of meaning-function. Then is a purely mathematical reality the conclusion? Or could it be that, window by window, reality itself shuts away its bearing and its contest? Could the alternative be that the "reduction" of reality into a formula would be the indispensable and providential gate to resurrection, the revelation of reality to itself? 8/7/96 Problem-Solving and Wisdom Problems always carry in themselves an evaluation component: slavery versus master's "well-being." One solution to slavery uncertainties is to genetically specialize the race in elected and servo to the elected. Harmony will ensue, not too different from the harmony between the loved master and his eager-to-please pets. Is cyber a virtue of the problem-solving kind? Is it viscerally capable of ethicizing the problems before embarking on a "logical" solution? Remember the logic-solution of the gun development: at each solution the human misery grows and the H-bomb success and nemesis are attached to it. 1/10/97 Via the reconfiguration of space, we get the quark, the dolphin, the bulldozer, the piano sonata, the virtual reality ... reality. Architecture as self-evident reconfiguration of space. Geometry is what it is all about!? The architecture of the universe: timeless?! The universe is timeless. What about the unifYing theory: geometry? Pythagoras revisited!? Because time as such does not exist, neither does empty space. Mass-energy is the "space filler." Mass energy as reconfiguration of space → reality. Future planning: it shows its vacuousness, since mass-energy is not of the future; in "the future" there is nothing, no reconflguration. The future time is made of two nonexistences, nonentities, nonrealities. We do not plan futures. We simulate that which does not exist (the task of simulation) by anticipating its incarnation. Can artificial intelligence (AI) generate within itself the passion, the anguish, the love, the generosity that are the trademarks of the flesh on its journey from opportunism of the species to the compassion of Homo sapiens? If there is an intrinsic capacity in the silicon species to generate those "fantasies" then the very nature and the very conquest of conscious life are in question. As or if naked intelligence has no access to pain and suffering, it might not have access to the reality of good and evil. Are the alternatives harshness or dullness? 1/28/97 AI In the manner of a trained animal? Or in the manner of a willful, self-driven body-brain? The kinky wisdom of cyberporn -- it keeps the webian mind anchored to the body. 2/18/97 Some Characteristics of the ASP (Asexual Silicon Persona) The "darkness at noon" milieu paradox: Although based on the hyper-Miniaturization afforded by the speed of light via photon-fiber optics, etc., ASP is indifferent to the marvels experienced by CIP (carbon intelligence persona): the endless play of light encountering (crashing on) the physical world. From a drop of shiny water to a sunset, from a silly squirming plankton cell to a lovely face, from the scribbling of an infant to the sublime "architecture" of Piero della Francesca. The ability of ASP to exist and operate in environmental conditions deadly for CIP -- pressures, radiation, etc. -- is an ideal asset for space conditions, the darkness, the eternal night of space included ... The asexual makeup of ASP, that is, its total indifference to the immense bulk of evolutionary travail represented by the postparthenogenetic behavior of living organisms, vegetal sexuality, estrus, eros, love, would signify the withering of passion. A black hole of desensitization?! The temptation is to label ASP a monster! A monster capable of pervading the cosmic space and transfiguring reality ... Perhaps an angel (of darkness), perhaps a god in the making, perhaps an agent for the remote revelation of reality to itself. 5/10/97 We are not children of light. We are the children of penumbra. Look at all the windows made opaque by shades, curtains, shutters, etc., 60-70-80 percent of them. *** Seventy-five trillion parts in the human body. 7/24/97 The Green Domain: The vegetal kingdom has only rudimentary eyes, and yet is the creature of light. One of the paradoxes of space reconfiguration. 8/18/97 Presence Perhaps presence as the "refusal" of absence is the fundamental nature of space. Since space (reconfiguring) is all, it might not be possible to "define" it (autodefinition). Space is selfdefining ad infinitum in all of its manifestations, from galaxies to emotions. The metamorphosis and the incarnations of space are all that Becoming is. By subtracting the incarnations, what is left is not pure space; it is nothingness, it is absence (Nirvana). The same goes for the How. All the Hows are figments of Mind as long as they are not the operation itself of space metamorphosing, the presence. But space remains space. The magic of Duration is that the constructs space made, all consigned to the past, are "purged" of it. The past is the nonspace domain of evolution (space reconfiguration). Space and its Howness are the indefatigable "fabricators" of Being, the spaceless domain. 9/1/97 On the face of it, a spider web is more complex than a Gothic cathedral. Why is it a wrong face? Out of context, the fibers making the web are more complex than the stones making the cathedral, but on the truer face of it, the brain-maker of the web is, Complexity-wise, far, far behind the brain-maker of the cathedral. That is why spiders do not build space probes or compose quartets and why Complexity is the stuff of transcendence. One activity of Complexity is to get to the bottom of it, to the elementary stuff of reality (stone for the cathedral), and via Howness compose the cathedral, the space probe, the quartet. 12/16/97 Parenthetically, architecture is the most single-minded and direct space reconfiguration. 2/6/98 Will that which started with a bang, the Big Bang, end up in a whimper? The diffused whimper of the cold death of entropy? Is the open universe (one of the many?) really carrying on forever, or will it be that a cold corpse will forever be the burial ground of reality? If such is the case, the large tragedy that is 16 billion years old and expanding will be of immense futility, the senselessness of it being the tragedy of it. Could the Space Hypothesis tear an escape breach in the formidable fabric of the third law of thermodynamics? At the Big Bang singular point, the Techne of space reconfiguration began, and it has been so ever since. 3/1/98 The How, Techne Sears and Roebuck is as good a compendium as any about the American genius for the making of this into that. The whole phenomenon lubricated with the sweat and tears of the multitude of people single-mindedly dedicated to generating the Whats of a whole branch of human reality. How, How, How all the way. Space. Speaking of miracles: the enormous latitude separating the space-making of a galaxy, energies included, and the spacemaking of a prosciutto sandwich and the space-making of the gusto for it are instances of space versatility and the knowhow it takes to make reality. One can be sure that the first fusion bomb devices looked downright silly compared to the How of the succeeding ones. Again space reconftguring itself in ever more sophisticated ways, the geometry of the brain of scientist and technician included. The notion of reality as pure space in metamorphosis changes nothing and changes everything. It changes nothing in the enjoyment of a beautiful morning. It changes everything when I want to put a bit into my understanding of both the joyfulness of the occasion, a very specific configuration of my brain-d, and the nature of the event perceived, the succession of specific space configurations. Life is and remains tragic. Unless a resolution might eventually come about, life giveth and life taketh away is the essence of the tragic nature of life and without a transfiguring resolution, Nirvana might be the only answer: the repository of all delusions. And all of this and all of its meaning included is probably meaninglessness -- is space, and only space, dancing away. If in what speculatively is called 15 billion years, space has been able to do so much, think of what it can do in the next 15 billion years and in the next 15 billion years and the next ... The building blocks of reality themselves might get hold of themselves (Know thyself), and eventually such knowledge, becoming universal, will also become resurrectional in the light and the grace of self-revelation, the Omega Seed. 7/27/98 Electricity Of all things, electricity seems indifferent to everything but itself. There are waters (bottled) from many countries that (mostly) pretend originality. There are coals and oils carrying the mark of their countries' origin, that is, differing geobiological pasts. Even gasoline may carry traces of such distinctions. So it goes with minerals and biospecies. But there isn't such a thing as Swedish or Far Eastern electricity. It comes as pure as an abstraction, as unstigmatized as an angel. It is there or it isn't there, no marks of origin perceptible in its "genes." It has none. Pure, hyperpure space capable of splendid to miserable things, uncorrupted, incorruptible, and perhaps for those reasons difficult to horde or hide. It is "born" for self-deliverance on the spot. Watch out. And it is a pure, the purest, consumer good leaving no trace, no pollution, no waste (of itself) behind. An angel energizer of the positive and of the negative with no fingerprints left behind. A pretty exotic space self-configuration, peripatetic, elusive, invisible, and a killer. Just hordes of electrons at different kinds of configurations traveling at sister light speed, the electromagnetic domain. The noosphere, the passionate sister of the indifferent electromagnetic sphere, comes to naught if the elder sister vanishes. (Electrified) space vanishing there is passion vanished here. God, angels, spirits, etc., stand aside. Your impotence (existence) is a pathetic delusion. When man was able to distill electricity from the inchoate reservoirs of energy, his world changed practically overnight. 11/8/98 Could Howness go astray in the Web domain? Experience, the platform of knowledge, is all but absent on the Web. Children are defining a (virtual) "reality" that has no connection with reality. The connection is with a technology that they don't even have to master. The car is a technology that the driver has no need to master, but the car has no pretenses going beyond the isolation of persons deluded into the notion of better-connectedness. Willy-nilly our society is nurturing culture-deprived children, if by culture we mean knowledge as prelude to wisdom or grace. A grace-deprived society may be the "output." It would be an additional symptom of materialization. 12/7/98 The hard drive of self-interest that has flooded the marketplace is a true conquest that Howness can be proud of. It lacks as yet the imprint of the hardest of Howness-es: How to emerge from the physical into the mental in the full awareness of the tight boundaries of technocracy. Since we are not created equal, eventually we have to find the key to equity and the dignity of the human condition that only equity may be able to engender. For the time Being, the chronic discrepancies between the have-not and the have-too-much are brutally operating all over the world and they make our species into a shameful enterprise. 12/29/98 We are transferring information and knowledge from paper to photon, a feat of ephemeralization. But the mere fact of the exponential increase of information and knowledge results in mountains of paper. We are deforesting the planet for our packaging of things and information, including the packaging of ourselves in our wooden houses. Photons may not be able to keep at bay the bureaucratizing of the societal fabric. We are told that any initiative -- withdrawing cash from the bank, delivering sausages to the table, buying an education or an automobile -- is expedited and simplified via Internet and cyberspace technologies, but we hear that frustration is on the rise, because, in its totality, life is becoming more intricate and the rewards shift from inner satisfaction to outer control of such innerness. It seems that the fabric of society is materializing instead of ephemeralizing, and photons may be the culprit. Stroking our egos with ever increasing "rights" is tearing the fabric apart, and we make spectacles out of such tearings. We praise privacy and we are in a tide of exhibitionism, and every exhibit has its own monetary rewards. In fact, greed is the good companion in all of our enterprises ... and the paperstide flow robust and enlarging. We are receiving a beating from Howness, the hypertechnology of manipulation, in part because our innerness (reality ephemeralizing itself) is beaten to the punch by our meandering technology of greed with all of its physical paraphernalia. The exurban hoarding at the head of all. The planetary hermitage so dear a dream of environmentalist and cyberian will eventually stand as a nemesis of intellection, the ephemeralization of reality (the cosmos). A shopping center is a clear instance of the rematerialization of Homo sapiens. We better believe it. It is a transitional phase made necessary by the indiscriminate power of Howness and the aura of magic it is broadcasting. For every apple, every egg, every detergent bottle, every gadget there is a long line of processing, handling, packaging, storing, transporting, pricing, competing, exhibiting, purchasing that sends shivers of pride and fear through our spines. How long will it last and how more complicated can the process become? Eventually, Howness has to develop an ethics compass. I call it the Howness of the desirable. But what is the desirable if we persist in our delusional grand parade of animism, in our abdication to the grassroots principle of democracy? The universal dictat of God, and God is corrosive, history shows. 1/2/99 Take space away and you haven't got any moons. Take space away and you haven't got any chopsticks.
3/21/99 If one, we were able to speak to the brain, and two, we knew what to tell it, then its architecture could be reconfigured and its messages (spatial also) could take better care of the body's well-being. As yet, we have little power in terms of either because the brain lacks the skill to cope with the proofs reality in its own indifference litters the "vicinity" with (from the kitchen sinks to galaxies). Self-teaching is grand and most times grandly off target. 3/22/99 Building Factors
There will never be a building that will be able to factorize itself to the compatibility factor, and perhaps rightfully so. What some buildings have and express is the magical factor, where resolution takes the tangible shape of transcendence. For a reality on the road to self-sensitization, the magic factor is significant. In those buildings, intelligent or not, the space they are made of has reconfigured itself into an esthetic objectification (not an object, but a performing presence) with beaches and valleys of coherence, sighing, grumbling, silent, resting and arresting, disquieting, comforting ... With all the modalities implicit in all those factors, formulas have poor performance rates. Among the formulas visiting are the well-worn "form follows function" and its quarantined twin, "function follows form." 5/20/99 In the crescents of the Arcosanti critical mass, the residences have an "inner public" part oriented to the south "gardens" and a "private outer part" facing the north open landscape. The orchard trees are "dividers" among the units ... *** None of the imagining machines, us, could exist outside of space; they are space in "motion." Without the imagining, there is no image hallucinatory or for real. 6/14/99 Drop a pebble in the pond and the geological geometry of the 90-degree angle jumps at you, full force. The angle of all angles courtesy of gravity! Architects and engineers, geometricians as they are, fancy themselves the poetic or functional rule breakers. The wisest of them stay within the "gravitational" rules. But then get away from gravity and the gravitas of the 90- degree phantoms goes away. It might remain the embarrassment of molecules and cells designed for gravity and tossed around within free-falling bodies. 6/25/99 Reality is the Howness of space, the Techne generating the Becoming. 8/4/99 Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) defines all operational "platforms." It reminds me a little (and unjustly) of the stewardship dogma. Why do organisms adapt? To be able to cope. Why to cope? For the "more of the same dream": Permanency, that is, reproduction, as the aim? Self-stewardship. A flat land of elusive rewards, not much room, none, for the Spinoza, the Dante, the Einstein. Organisms adapt not only to procreate and conserve but also to create, at least in the Homo sapiens sphere. 9/29/99 Transarchitecture ... the power off (fields of energy) and my liquid house vanishes. I am sitting on my transtoilet at the mercy of weather and of my neighbors. A transtoilet is a transdisaster. 12/6/99 The alchemists of the Middle Ages were the apostles of Howness, but their profound ignorance of physics and chemistry swayed into animism and all the magic fraudulence it affords. When the brain comes up with a notion, you can make gold out of a brew of heterogeneous things. You got it right but you have to know the right way. It is like making margarine out of petroleum but "even more so." The nanotechnology magician will show us how and "nothing will ever be the same." We have been pursuing the Walt Disney version of life: eternal youth, fun, hodgepodge, simulation, hedonism, instant obsolescence, life as an ascetic zoo. The lean alternative could be a sort of liberation, cathartic, if I could stomach the word. For the urban laboratory, the distinction should be outlined and maintained so as to truly present an alternative. 1/24/00 The virtues and pleasures of self-discipline. Self-discipline tends to clear the underbrush or to put some order to it. Animals are rigidly "self-disciplined" by the demands of the environment and their survival in it. They are traditionalists, and their tradition is genetically disciplined. Contrary to the butterfly thinking of the Aquarians, discipline is in the nature of the organism, and naturally, the roboticization of all organisms is the key. It seems to be in the cards that any advancement into the intellection domain entails an increment of roboticization. We are now in the chaotic frenzy phase of robotizing the noosphere, a daunting task. The noosphere will have made the transition when it finds its self-discipline ground. In our personal world, we find a modicum of self-discipline by way of routine, habits, order, repetitiveness, and also a pinch of dullness. 3/30/00 I chose a certain path. I might as well work at shoring its structure with as many poles as I can find. That entails repetition. The shoring is made of posts and beams and bracings, a combination of compression, tension, and torsion in which stresses travel ... It is a long viaduct: repetitiveness in progress. 4/23/00 Serializing: the notion that a "concept-theme" is valid if it is amenable to variations.
4/24/00 The plasticity of a "theory" is a sign of its vitality. The plasticity of space is its own validation. MCD 2/4/94 At this very moment while your brain-mind works at voiding my words, you are the radiant demonstration of the utter certainty of MC Your gray matter is an astonishing fireworks of Me in action. And our brain-minds are probably only the crude forerunners of immensely more lively and radiant things to come. Why can't a brain be as big and as heavy as a city block? Because space-time is the blocker of the information response. No Miniaturization, no brain; no brain, no mind; no mind, no consciousness; no consciousness, no Love Project. Zero space-time is needed for mass energy to fully "display" itself, to act. And there is the ultimate dilemma. And ultimate tragedy. All this points at the imperative of the Urban Effect, that which suburbia is undoing. I have you notice that the biosphere is totally indifferent to our joys and sorrows to our mental constructions to our hang ups -- political, religious, philosophical, judiciary -- to our sense of equity. What impacts the biosphere is the technological knowhow and the transformism feeding production-consumption. It couldn't be otherwise. Nature is probabilistic and deterministic. Living nature is a missa mundi of pure opportunism. The Love Project is our own invention, obscurely proposed perhaps in some mammalian and oviparity species. So is all of our melodramaturgy about the mother of us all. The benevolent reality and the gods and goddesses are for naught. But the price we have been and are paying for this endless pageantry is frightfully cruel, as all pervasive deceptions have to be. The nobility of our invention, love, has no reciprocity within the immense opacity of reality. Therefore its tangibility, substance, is abysmally fragile, and suffering is constitutional to it. Where one is, the other is also. That is the cosmic nature of our Becoming. Beware of the merchants of happiness; they are imbued in fraudulence. Look around you, near and far ... But love is a reality for Homo sapiens because for four or so eons on this planet the MC paradigm has been at work. And what a masterpiece! What sparks out and radiates out of such masterpiece is consciousness and Mind, that which I call Duration. Thus the triad of MCD. 9/5/94- (LABOR DAY) Noon in the pool. All non-self-sufficient systems make contributions to entropy, and all systems are not self-sufficient. If reality evolves and interiorizes -- that is, interiorizes via consciousness and self-revelation while evolving -- then it might possibly "phase out" the need for energy, that same energy the noninteriorized reality has to count on to work out its own metamorphosis (evolutionary shifts). Thus the cosmos in the whole could become self-sufficient, in no need of causa prima or "causa ultima" (which becomes causa prima a posteriori). In such case, entropy would dwindle away the closer the space-time-Iess moment becomes via MCD, remembering that space-time is a consumer of energy, thus a producer of entropy. The exhaustion of space-time reached by utter (infinite?) MC, this point of pure Duration (self-revelation) is no longer an energy (radiation) reality, it is a mental radiance: reality. 2/19/95
6/20/95 Perhaps we are living the consequences of death. The death of an earlier cosmos that was unable to make itself into pure Mind, and consequently had to end in a Big Crunch. This expansionist phase of the universe would be the explosion characteristic of any death. The implosive phase, if it will follow, would be the space-time phase when "reality comes alive" groping for the Omega Seed final condition. For Complexity to explode, add radiance to its power, the canister must implode; that is, Miniaturization must increase. 12/4/95 The planet itself is an MCD product coming, as it seems to be, from an ancestry whose first state was one of hydrogen haze. In one stroke, MCD gets rid of nostalgia, of melancholy, of all the Gardens of Eden once and for all. We individuals are preponderantly biological processing plants and inner-motivated agents. With the bioprocessing con1.es the exotic creation we call the mind. Medicine shows that in unfortunate occasions the body can survive the loss of the mind. The opposite is not true: no body, no mind. That is, if the body is necessary but not sufficient, the mind, strictly speaking, is not necessary for the body to carryon the processing plant function. The brain, though, remains necessary as the indispensable center for biological operations. Why, of all agencies, pick Complexification as the most normative and creative? Because Complexification offers more feasible alternatives, but also because it offers the richer, unique instrumentation to implement those alternatives. 4/17/96 If reality had a mind, and it doesn't, she would rejoice at the elegant circularity of her endeavors: Her mineral construction saw that life and Mind would eventually spring forth courtesy of MCD and her carbon cycle. Now with Mind well established, her royal matter "gets" the mind to go directly at her constitution to elicit more Mind, now via silicon. "Think," she says, "of the practically inexhaustible reservoir of silicon! How much Mind can I generate, courtesy of MCD!?!?" Of all the alchemical prodigies attempted by "carbon reality," this takes the cake. Singularly so, if one sees the sacrifice inherent in the renunciation of the flesh that is implied in the metamorphosis. 8/7/96 Silicon intelligence, user of photon conveyers, has its own home in darkness. But then, perhaps my "beholding the light" will turn into "I am the light" courtesy of this very same silicon "darkness," since the very conveyance, the photon dance (the media), may become the "thing" (the message), an MCD absolute domain and triumph, "drained," as the documents of past events are, of any semblance of mass-energy-space-time. 8/11/96 From the carbon-genetic to the photon-genetic consciousness. This gigantic step is an MCD triumph, and it is impregnated with frightful possibilities. The Nazi mode has been with the carbon reality from its very inception. The green genetic is quasi-exempt from it as it feeds on the mineral. The red genetic has it built into its own nature. It has to cannibalize in order to survive. The degree of intelligence applied to cannibalization places consciousness into differing degrees of joy and suffering. Without the invention of love-compassion, the Nazi mode would be the mode: I dispose of you, the other, as I please because you are one of the instruments of my deification. In a photon genetic evolution all of this might be irrelevant, but that it might include also compassion-love!!!! In a reality debuckled from suffering, love and compassion are old empty shells to be discarded, the sooner the better. In order to carry MCD to its astonishing conclusion, the photon genetic evolution is indispensable. Carbon and silicon genetics are not up to the task, and carbon much sooner than silicon. Carbon is bacterial base stuff. Silicon is atomic base stuff. Photon is "angels" stuff. How strange it is that in order to emerge into the light (photon), into the angel stuff, the carbon reality so indebted to light, photosynthesis and beholding, has to "traverse" the kingdom of a dark age of silicon! Are electromagnetic impulses as purely angelic as the photon journey? The fate of Mind/MCD depends on the implications of the question (not that I know what I am talking about). 2/3/97 MC Explained to Children (?) The baseball field
The baseball is a message carrier. The right size of the field is concern number one for a rewarding game. For millions of simultaneous ball messages the field needs to contract and not to expand. The life game is as if one million games were going on contemporaneously on the same field. Let's say all the baseball games that were ever played on this planet are going on in the next hour in one single field and all of them are interconnected in some sure way. Only M and C can conceivably pull it off Life is a ballgame where trillions of ball messages cross, collide, speak, learn, and generate things in very tiny (baseball) fields. Think of the brain as an unbelievably small field with billions of games going on and on and on and on. Cyberspace is made of virtual balls like the voice, but has no balls for the physical contact of the player. It has to simulate such a bodily event; it belongs to the virtual domain, the "as if" domain. Life pulls it off here, there, everywhere, one split second after another. It has done it on this planet for more than 3,000 million years! 10/2/97 A taut argument for Miniaturization: If the universe will eventually close upon itself via the Big Bang -- Big Crunch sequence, if the universe is space reconfiguring itself, space will have to find the way of "stuffing" into a diminishing self the whole of itself. Space is the only -- that is, the most precious -- commodity around. It wants to do the most with itself. Both propositions make Miniaturization the indispensable domain of Becoming. But this can only be if reality, the universe, will eventually be "guided" by "Mind" and thus eventually seek self-revelation. Complexification is the twin sister of Miniaturization in a relationship reminiscent of container, Miniaturization, M, and content, Complexity, C. The twins' handiwork makes for Duration, D, the reality of Being ... the past, generated by Becoming, by space reconfiguring itself, Being eventually revealing itself to itself. The "Know thyself" of total knowledge. 12/13/98 The overdue wedding of Miniaturization and Complexity has its own preeminent seat in the Elan Vital scenario of Henri Bergson, the complexity of Teilhard de Chardin undressed of all animisms in the Omega Seed hypothesized by Paolo Soleri. 4/26/99 Stardust, as we are, we are miniatures of reality. Miniaturizations of that which is there. But as the "compression" of that which is there we contain an immensity of information made operational; we are complex. Space is capable of doing that, the same space that acts out stars and galaxies. The space we Become and are memorized in: the past, the past no longer captive of its creator, space itself. 8/4/99 The eternal-youth syndrome has to be sought at first in the hybrid of carbon, silicon, virus, photon, graphite, quantum, and quantum computers with the carbon cycle slowly giving way to cycles more adept at generating intellection and "eternity." Progressively, hybrids of flesh and nanotechnological organs will walk the planet. A whole arsenal of interchangeability will dot the landscape by which the flesh "slowly" gives way to a progeny of stored up "information" (and will) in vanishing spaces. MCD at work. Reality made in, at first, isolated bundles of trembling intensity will abandon the flesh as a medium for transcendence. Intellection transcending the flesh, on its way to the cosmos's self-awareness, its own self-revelation. 9/23/99 The hold that Complexity has on life, consciousness, and intellection has been a firm mooring in my annotations. Possibly my familiarity with space, an architectural key, made clear to me that Complexity is dependent upon spatial arrangements and particularly, specifically, on minimal spatial arrangements. Putting two and two together, I come to the "conclusion" that Complexity and Miniaturization are bound to each other in the prodigious exploits of life, consciousness, and intellection. Duration is what Complexity and Miniaturization "extrude," the fundamental domain of memory. The hypothesis that reality is space in metamorphosis pleases no one, but taken as one of the many nonsatisfying hypotheses, the immediate question is then: What is space? A self-making process is a self-defining process. In fact, the process is one, though the interpretation of it can be many. I say the self-making is the process of self-defining and it is self-creating. That points to the fact that only at the conclusion of self-creation, definition of that which has created life, is it possible. To my thinking, only one thing is for sure, that space will no longer "be there" at such a conclusive singularity of self-definition. It will be Duration, and no longer space, that will be there: the Duration that space has created out of itself. The absence of presence is unspeakable because to "speak of" denounces presence, it is presence. 10/29/99 Thirty years ago, the Arcology book opened with "This book is about Miniaturization." Now, if the Space-as-Reality Hypothesis were to hold, it is no longer "this book" that is about Miniaturization, but "life" that is about Miniaturization. Space in all of its immeasurable vastness is seeking in life its own Miniaturization, that is, to compress its own metamorphosis in ever diminishing parcels of itself. Living space (organisms) is coming to realize that the more it is "self-denying" the more intelligent it is Becoming. The more space miniaturizes its performances, the more powerful the intellection becomes. In other words, the more complex it becomes, the more intensely sensitized it becomes. "From the other side," the Becoming generates the past, which is a nonspatial domain. The past as the faultless memory of the Becoming is pulling the trick of Being a nonspatial reality, which seems to be a sort of "Utopian dream" of the Miniaturizing process. If there is a convergence it is where Miniaturization, Complexity, and the past memory come together. It could happen that at the coincidence singularity, where the two become one, Duration is (could be) the self-revelatory singularity. The complete nemesis of grace and not an angel in sight. Just the exulting, consummated space. Just space resolving its own predicaments (the predicaments it makes for itself). (Language molds us, and we mold the language.) The ultimate goal of space is its own effacement, its own reflective effacement within the spaceless Beingness of the past. The whole proposition takes the shape of an enigmatic bundle. The Mistero Tremendo of things (Be)coming.
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