I went to a lecture at our school this evening, by a Swiss scholar and landscape architect named Michael Jakob. Very nicely done, talking about the history of how we understand the natural landscape and how that plays into contemporary ideas and practices in landscape architecture. (800 years ago, people HATED nature. Nature had been spoiled twice before, once with the expulsion from Eden and again with the Flood, and wild land was seen as demonic and filled with crazy dragons and serpents. It wasn't until about 300 years ago that Europeans started to think of nature as beautiful, awe-inspiring places to seek out. In America, nature has always been seen as a nuisance, the thing that blocks our progress toward the next goal. Still is, too. Drill, baby, drill...)
Anyway, Jakob finished his talk by discussing some of the work that European designers are doing in China, and how a lot of it isn't very good because it isn't slow enough to be able to really understand the physical and cultural landscape. People are putting up massive buildings, and complexes of buildings, at lightning speed to be able to satisfy investment demands.
And that got me thinking. Nora and I have been talking about this way of understanding the local, and we're both deeply invested in Middletown Springs and its long-term health. But of course, she's from New York City, and I'm from Michigan-Texas-California-Wisconsin-California-North Carolina-Massachusetts. We don't have multiple generations in the same cemetery, as they say. So although we love the place, we're also changing it in some small ways. In a small community, every person there has some influence on the culture.
That's true of all ecosystems. There's the plants and animals and geology that "belong there," but of course that's changed gradually over time. Animals migrate a little differently every year, and they carry seeds and pollen with them, and all of that small, nearly random change very slowly shifts the "natural ecosystem" of the place. What's more jarring is when something from outside arrives all at once and in massive numbers. We call that an invasive species. Kudzu takes over the Southern forests; zebra mussels and alewives change the game fish populations of the Great Lakes; the elm bark beetle spread a fungus that claimed over 100,000,000 elm trees in the US and Canada in just forty years.
International design firms are an invasive species, in their own way, bringing Boston or Houston or Berlin to places where those ideas and forms have never been. The rest of the world has relatively unpleasant names for the way that we unwittingly influence local cultures: Coca-colonialization, for instance, or the McWorld. But ideas and money and people move unfettered now, able to relocate as freely as dandelion seeds, and the McWorld grows unabated. McDonalds operates in 119 countries, Starbucks in 61, and amazon.com operates everywhere and nowhere, existing only in electrons and cardboard UPS boxes.
As with the movement of plants and animals, it's not change that's harmful, but sudden and massive change. Back in the 1970s, the citizens of Oregon were concerned that growth could make Portland and Eugene into northern equivalents of Los Angeles and San Jose; the unofficial motto of the state as paraphrased from Governor Tom McCall was "Welcome to Oregon, now go home." I think we might say the same about massive architecture firms, or fast-food restaurants, or a flood of retirees colonizing a picturesque small town.
A friend of mine is losing her store. Audrey's Pet Supplies was Brittany's dream for years, a wonderful small retail store half a block from my office that sells high-quality pet supplies and also provides pet-sitting and dog-walking services. (Audrey, rest in peace, was once Brittany's bulldog.) She's committed to community-based commerce, to tending to the welfare of her neighborhood. And she's being forced out of her store by her landlord, who received an offer of almost 2.5 times the current rent by some California chain of frozen yogurt stores. Another invasive species, another local ecosystem disrupted, another fragile plant lost.
How do we tend to our own gardens? How do we understand the power we have over our places, and the power we inadvertently exercise when we stumble around in places we're new to? Nora and I are doing our best to bring out the best of Middletown Springs... but we're defining "best," aren't we, and in ways unlike the definition of some long-time residents. We try to be respectful, try not to disrupt, try to support existing habits and lifeways. But we have our own values and aspirations, and those are not a perfect fit with everyone else in town.
Nothing is stable or permanent. We cannot take an ideal time (which probably never existed) and capture it in a Thomas Kinkade painting over the fireplace. We can only be thoughtful about our influence and attentive to the well-being of the people around us. And that requires us to slow down.
Please visit the 3/50 Project, and think about how your spending changes the world in small ways. And thanks, Brittany, for being my bravery coach. You've done good, and will continue to do so.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Monday, January 28, 2013
Degrees of Separation
Step 1. Back in 1968 or so, two design theorists at Berkeley, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, develop the notion of wicked problems
to help explain why urban design can't be left to experts. (In brief, a
wicked problem is one that everyone approaches and defines differently,
that is both a problem and a symptom of another larger problem, that
can't be simulated or tested, that is never finished, and that has
important human impacts.) They publish a paper outlining this idea in
1973.
Step 2. In 1988, I take Horst Rittel's Introduction to Design Theories and Methods course at Berkeley. I was much more enamored of my history and theory courses than I was with design studio, and I thoroughly enjoyed this class. The 1973 article on wicked problems was in my course reader.
Step 3. I use the concept of wicked problems for the next 20+ years in my scholarly life and my teaching. It's a core concept for helping understand why no single discipline can make the changes we need in the world. And it always catches people by surprise — they've never heard the term, but they completely get the idea and can apply it almost immediately to problems that they themselves face.
Step 4. In June 2012, I give a brief talk at my national conference (the Council on Undergraduate Research [CUR], a group drawn from all of academia's fields) to about 400 people, regarding problems that are too large to leave within one discipline.
Step 4. The environmentalist David Orr has to pull out at the last minute from a scheduled talk to the American Association of Colleges and Universities in November 2012. Someone on the organizing committee saw my CUR talk and thought I could step in, so in two weeks, I put together a much-extended version of that talk which goes into more detail about the idea of wicked problems (and yes, explicitly credits Rittel and Webber with the original idea). I send a copy of my PowerPoint presentation to the organizers about four days before the talk in Kansas City.
Any time we feel as though we have to balance multiple considerations, we've likely entered the world of wicked problems. What kind of living should we make? How do we balance family, career, community and self? What makes a good life? It's wicked problems that vex us, and that make life worthwhile. If our policy questions become as sophisticated as our personal questions, our policies can only become smarter.
So in the end, we do our work, not knowing where it will go or who will receive it. We teach, not knowing which students will hear us. We serve on committees and community organizations not knowing whose lives will be touched. What happens with our work is not always for us to know. The work is all we have.
Step 2. In 1988, I take Horst Rittel's Introduction to Design Theories and Methods course at Berkeley. I was much more enamored of my history and theory courses than I was with design studio, and I thoroughly enjoyed this class. The 1973 article on wicked problems was in my course reader.
Step 3. I use the concept of wicked problems for the next 20+ years in my scholarly life and my teaching. It's a core concept for helping understand why no single discipline can make the changes we need in the world. And it always catches people by surprise — they've never heard the term, but they completely get the idea and can apply it almost immediately to problems that they themselves face.
Step 4. In June 2012, I give a brief talk at my national conference (the Council on Undergraduate Research [CUR], a group drawn from all of academia's fields) to about 400 people, regarding problems that are too large to leave within one discipline.
Step 4. The environmentalist David Orr has to pull out at the last minute from a scheduled talk to the American Association of Colleges and Universities in November 2012. Someone on the organizing committee saw my CUR talk and thought I could step in, so in two weeks, I put together a much-extended version of that talk which goes into more detail about the idea of wicked problems (and yes, explicitly credits Rittel and Webber with the original idea). I send a copy of my PowerPoint presentation to the organizers about four days before the talk in Kansas City.
Step 5. The
day BEFORE my talk, I receive an e-mail from a senior White House staff
member in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, beginning with
the line "Your talk is going viral in Washington DC!" It turns out that
the conference organizer had sent the PowerPoint around within the
AAC&U leadership; the President of the AAC&U sent it to a
colleague in the US Department of Education; and that person at DoE sent
it around to colleagues throughout the White House (all of this between
Sunday and Wednesday). The ideas tie in with lots of White House
initiatives, and the staff member who contacted me wants me to put
together a proposal for research and social engagement based on
interdisciplinary opportunities.
Step 6. At
the invitation of the person who contacted me, Nora and I write a
proposal for a project we've been conceiving of and talking about for
almost ten years, that we call Local Learning. The idea is that
colleges offer a degree major rooted in the facts and needs of their
local communities rather than only in the abstractions of an academic
discipline. Local problems are always education problems AND economic
problems AND social problems AND science problems... We ask a group of
trusted friends in higher education for some coaching on a draft of the
proposal, and send the document along to the White House in late
November. (We'll be having a phone call with one of the Cabinet
departments about it in two weeks.)
Step 7. Last night on 60 Minutes,
Steve Kroft held a joint interview with Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton as she's about to step down from her post as Secretary of
State. (Nora was watching it as I was driving back from Vermont to
Boston — I saw it online when I got home.) At the end, she was talking
broadly about the complexity of international relations.
We live in not only a dangerous but in an incredibly complicated world right now, with many different forces at work, both state-based and non-state, technology and communications... You've got to be careful. You have to be thoughtful. You can't rush in — especially now, where it's more complex than it's been in decades. So yes, are there what we call "wicked problems," like Syria, which is the one you named? Absolutely. And we are on the side of American values, we're on the side of freedom, we're on the side of the aspirations of all people to have a better life, have the opportunities that we are fortunate to have here. But it's not always easy to perceive exactly what what must be done in order to get to that outcome.
Wait, what?? Did Hillary Clinton just use the idea wicked problems?!?
"... what we call wicked problems..."? Did she use the word "WE", while sitting there with the
President of the United States?!? You kind of sit up and pay closer
attention when the Secretary of State uses an idea that you might have
contributed to the discourse. My ears always perk up whenever I
(rarely) hear someone else use that idea, because I know they see the
world in similar ways to Nora and I. And I am pretty sure this phrase wasn't part of political or diplomatic life a few months ago.
What
I wouldn't give to overhear the last few months of hallway
conversations in the White House, where this idea of wicked problems
started to take conceptual root and eventually rose to the point where
the President and the Secretary of State are using it to explain the complexity of Syria. (Bodes well for the proposal, too...)
So in the end, we do our work, not knowing where it will go or who will receive it. We teach, not knowing which students will hear us. We serve on committees and community organizations not knowing whose lives will be touched. What happens with our work is not always for us to know. The work is all we have.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
A Short Post
It was 2 degrees below zero when I woke up this morning; 5 degrees below zero according to the thermometer on the other side of the house.
H was still coping with being sick this weekend and he was sleeping on the sleigh bed in the living room with the thermostat turned up, the pellet stove cranking, the sun on him, and a quilt. He woke to a noise. We walked around the house trying to identify its source and suspecting the involvement of cats.
We found shattered, nay, splintered glass all over the bedroom floor, and outside, there was a rather stunned partridge and a lot more glass. He or she had flown into the storm window (shattered), left feathers in the screen (dented), and shattered the inner pane of glass as well.
Thanks to our friends Matt and Derrick, there is now a sheet of insulation tucked into the place where the inner window was, held in by three of EE's file folders and the tension of the sash against the frame, and a brand new storm window that I bought in Rutland yesterday. There is a pane of glass waiting to be fit into the opening when the temps return north of 50 so the putty will hold (Spring?). I have a new sheet of shrink wrap plastic on the window, that I vowed never to use once I was in my own home. There are curtains on that window and the other bedroom window, and curtains on the living room windows to keep the weather outside (as I now have learned that there is little difference between the insulating value of glass and a few file folders!). There is a new electric heater in the basement keeping the water pump at 50 degrees (which seems to be as low as it goes). And....
I am cold. Did I say it is 2 below zero? (Pretty ice patterns on the windows though).
P.S. No animals were harmed in the making of this post. The bird flew off to one of the maples when I went out to clean up the glass in the 50 mile an hour winds....
P.P.S. I said the bird was a partridge for convenience sake, but it had blue tail feathers...Not sure that it isn't actually a grouse...which is the way I feel.
H was still coping with being sick this weekend and he was sleeping on the sleigh bed in the living room with the thermostat turned up, the pellet stove cranking, the sun on him, and a quilt. He woke to a noise. We walked around the house trying to identify its source and suspecting the involvement of cats.
We found shattered, nay, splintered glass all over the bedroom floor, and outside, there was a rather stunned partridge and a lot more glass. He or she had flown into the storm window (shattered), left feathers in the screen (dented), and shattered the inner pane of glass as well.
Thanks to our friends Matt and Derrick, there is now a sheet of insulation tucked into the place where the inner window was, held in by three of EE's file folders and the tension of the sash against the frame, and a brand new storm window that I bought in Rutland yesterday. There is a pane of glass waiting to be fit into the opening when the temps return north of 50 so the putty will hold (Spring?). I have a new sheet of shrink wrap plastic on the window, that I vowed never to use once I was in my own home. There are curtains on that window and the other bedroom window, and curtains on the living room windows to keep the weather outside (as I now have learned that there is little difference between the insulating value of glass and a few file folders!). There is a new electric heater in the basement keeping the water pump at 50 degrees (which seems to be as low as it goes). And....
I am cold. Did I say it is 2 below zero? (Pretty ice patterns on the windows though).
P.S. No animals were harmed in the making of this post. The bird flew off to one of the maples when I went out to clean up the glass in the 50 mile an hour winds....
P.P.S. I said the bird was a partridge for convenience sake, but it had blue tail feathers...Not sure that it isn't actually a grouse...which is the way I feel.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
The Importance of the Unnecessary
It's a truism of Modern design that ornamentation is at best unnecessary, and at worst a kind of offense. Ornamentation is what you do to an insufficiently thoughtful form to disguise the fact that it's boring, like the icing florets and trim that keep your birthday cake from being a simple squat cylinder.
Didn't used to be that way, of course. One of the highlights of Venice was the exuberance of materials, the ways in which even the smallest details were made to be more than simply structural. Here, for instance, is a short connector street in Padua.
Just a cobbled lane. Easy to do in rank-and-file, rectilinear. Whole blocks, no cutting. But no, someone has decided that their fellow Italian, Leonardo Fibonacci, had a great idea with this mathematical pattern of nested spirals, and so hundreds of years of Italian stone craftsmen have learned how to make small adjustments that result in these gorgeous textures.
Why bother to make a street beautiful? Because we live with streets every day, and the things we live with can ennoble or demean us.
This is one small apse on one neighborhood parish church, the Basilica dei Frari. It could have been a simple rectangular or cylindrical silo and accomplished the function it had been assigned -- to be a small side chapel and to let in more filtered light. But no, this building segment has literally thousands upon thousands of small decisions, places where bricks and medallions and small stone carvings had to be fitted together in appealing ways. It is an ennobling space.
Everywhere you go in Venice, you'll find examples of the unnecessary, of ornament, of delight. And that's one of the reasons why we take 119 photographs per second, and why four million people per year go there. We feel ennobled, privileged to be in such a care-filled place.
Didn't used to be that way, of course. One of the highlights of Venice was the exuberance of materials, the ways in which even the smallest details were made to be more than simply structural. Here, for instance, is a short connector street in Padua.
Just a cobbled lane. Easy to do in rank-and-file, rectilinear. Whole blocks, no cutting. But no, someone has decided that their fellow Italian, Leonardo Fibonacci, had a great idea with this mathematical pattern of nested spirals, and so hundreds of years of Italian stone craftsmen have learned how to make small adjustments that result in these gorgeous textures.
Why bother to make a street beautiful? Because we live with streets every day, and the things we live with can ennoble or demean us.
This is one small apse on one neighborhood parish church, the Basilica dei Frari. It could have been a simple rectangular or cylindrical silo and accomplished the function it had been assigned -- to be a small side chapel and to let in more filtered light. But no, this building segment has literally thousands upon thousands of small decisions, places where bricks and medallions and small stone carvings had to be fitted together in appealing ways. It is an ennobling space.
Everywhere you go in Venice, you'll find examples of the unnecessary, of ornament, of delight. And that's one of the reasons why we take 119 photographs per second, and why four million people per year go there. We feel ennobled, privileged to be in such a care-filled place.
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Voices in the head
It's been a debris pushing morning. I admit I woke up later than usual, and I admit that I have been more interested in making order of the boxes in the garage than makes rational sense. I like being able to see space emerge from chaos. It is the act of shaping space that matters.
I also searched for some papers needed for the insurance on the Fire Island debacle (yes, that is still pending). And I found them.
I sorted through two baskets with debris that had been stashed in the garage. Found some Christmas presents from last year (2011 that is), that I had meant to give our friends, but one thing led to another and they were away, so it didn't happen. I will put them near the door with the other things that need to be re-homed.
There are several large Tupperware containers with clothes and objects to give to the shelter. And several large containers of books. They are in my car to go to their new homes. Later today, that will be done. It needs to get done, because I am hosting friends to go into town tomorrow night to see the new movie "Lincoln" and I will need to have seats in the car.
So why this chronicle?
Herb and I have been debating about the flooring and the lighting for his pool room over the garage. It has been insulated and sheetrocked, and flooring and lighting will be the next decisions. I told Herb that someone I had told about the pool room-to-be some months ago (Bob), had been playing pool ever since. Bob told me about the guy that he has been playing with, who seems to have PTSD and uses pool to come down from the heebie-jeebies.We talked about how pool can be a meditation.
I reported the conversation to H and he told me that one of last places that he likes to play may be about to close. He said that it seemed that pool needed to be reinvented as something other than a place for toughs and hustlers: "less macho, less gambling, more attentive." And I thought about the way it is a meditation for him. I talked with our friend Matt about how pool can be a place to let the stress go. And Matt told me about another mutual friend who is teaching therapeutic riding to PTSD survivors of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He talked about how they learn to let go so they can be around the horse, and that the horse knows, and helps them let go. And Matt said the ex-soldiers say that they didn't think the voices in their heads would ever stop.
There is a dearth of opportunities in our lives for such meditations. We fill the days with meetings and email, and the meetings and the email fill our heads. It is only when we become more "attentive" to something that frees us, that we begin to alter the droning (or screaming) of the voices in our heads.
I stash objects around the house as a meditation, and to quell the voices in my head. Or maybe to listen to them in a different way. There is a Japanese tea ceremony spoon on the top of a window molding in the kitchen. There is my new black feathered and bejewelled Venetian mask held on a porcelain hand on the window sill in the bathroom. No reason. I just like it there. I like getting the clothes and the books out of the garage. I like packing tools in the Tupperware with other tools. It's a meditation.
When H wrote that it seemed another pool room was about to close, I felt a certain pain for him. There are effectively no places left where he can ply his craft and learn from others. He is reduced to watching pool on the computer. Not the same thing as doing what you love and what makes the voices in your head go away; or makes it possible for you to listen to them differently.
I talked with our friend Matt about the character of tools: a wooden block plane with a horn that he uses and a rabbeting plane that came from the building of the houses on Fire Island. He described the marriage of hard and softwood in the tool, the way the curve of the front of the plane fit his finger. He talked about the zen of doing the work that he does with precision and focus. It's a meditation.
When H wrote that it seemed another pool room was about to close, I wrote that I understood. I have been a spinner for thirty years. It is a weirdly anachronistic craft. After all, those who spin are commonly known as "spinsters" with all the attendant pity for their plight. But spinning is not a pitiful act. It requires attention to detail--the character of the fiber, its source in sheep or rabbit or dog or cat or goat or yak or worm (yes! silkworms!), or possum or bison or .....Each fiber has to be sheared, cleaned of chaff, washed, dried, carded or combed and prepared for the spinning by making rolags or "top". Some spinners attend to each individual fiber, stripping out the "guard hair" and cherishing the down. Some spinners align the fibers so all the sheared ends and points are consistent; it can make for a more consistent yarn. Each animal produces fiber that requires a somewhat different technique, and a spinner has to decide whether to spin thick or thin, whether to use it on its own or to ply it with another strand of similar or different genesis, has to decide whether to use a "long draw" or a "short draw", whether it will be woolen or worsted. And the process is very slow. If the spinner is in the "zone" the fiber is easier to spin. If the spinner is troubled, the fiber will overtwist or undertwist and break. Someone else might not notice it, but the spinner does.
Once the yarn is spun and plyed, only then does it become something to knit or weave, with all the attendant decisions about that. And only after those decisions, and that craft, does it become something to wear. And for most people, it is nothing more than a pair of socks or sweater in a pretty color. But the act is a meditation. Doing it makes the voices in my head go away, or it makes it possible to listen to them differently.
I have been asked many times whether I sell my yarns, and I always say no. It wouldn't be worth my while, given the amount of time to prepare and spin a single hank of yarn. Of course I could try to sell it for some vast sums as "art", or merely cover the cost of the spinning oil that lubricates the wheel, but selling it hardly seems to make sense. So I give it away on occasion, but most of it fills containers in a neglected room upstairs. There is something about the doing of it that is enough. It is a meditation. And it makes the voices in my head go away; or makes it possible to listen to them differently.
When H wrote that it seemed another pool room was about to close, I wrote to H about spinning and about pool. "I don’t like the idea that the game you care so much about –not as a game—but as strategy and meditation may have to die to be reborn. But it is something I recognize. Spinners have been an unrequited class of people though I have found it compelling for 30 years. People seem to continue to see it as archaic, which it is, in a way that I like…Attention to detail, zoning out of the other debris of life to find the “zone”...slow, very slow."
Writing is like that too. And craft. And gardening. And watching, really watching, the skies change on a January thaw day.
In an exhibition catalog for "Islands in the Land" at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1972, curator Eudorah Moore wrote, "The idea upon which the exhibition was formulated was that, as the leading wedge of the crafts movement has swung so strongly to the manipulation of materials for purely aesthetic expression, the moment had come perhaps to pause, to reevaluate and reassess, and to look back briefly at the roots of the craft movement in this country...The thought was that by looking, really looking at the objects of beautiful, simple, place rooted function, vision could be enriched, values reassessed, humor reinstated, and humanist sensitivity reaffirmed...Although the pressure of constant production, or production to someone else's designs, may produce steady income, it does not recognize the most important element of the craftsman's tradition, pride and creativity in his work, and it often tends to lower those standards of workmanship so essential in to the continuing integrity of the tradition. Where that integrity exists, each object has a palpable vitality, a strong personality, a beauty of design."
We live in a world that makes no room for that unless we are on vacation, where the cobblestones are set in patterns.
Where people stop on bridges and take pictures of each other in the act of "seeing." When else do we get to really watch? And see. And be attentive. When else do we get to see the way the acts we take result in something we desire, in the beauty of design, in pride and creativity in the work? When else do we get to think about the voices in our head and choose which ones to listen to, and which ones to let go?
I also searched for some papers needed for the insurance on the Fire Island debacle (yes, that is still pending). And I found them.
I sorted through two baskets with debris that had been stashed in the garage. Found some Christmas presents from last year (2011 that is), that I had meant to give our friends, but one thing led to another and they were away, so it didn't happen. I will put them near the door with the other things that need to be re-homed.
There are several large Tupperware containers with clothes and objects to give to the shelter. And several large containers of books. They are in my car to go to their new homes. Later today, that will be done. It needs to get done, because I am hosting friends to go into town tomorrow night to see the new movie "Lincoln" and I will need to have seats in the car.
So why this chronicle?
Herb and I have been debating about the flooring and the lighting for his pool room over the garage. It has been insulated and sheetrocked, and flooring and lighting will be the next decisions. I told Herb that someone I had told about the pool room-to-be some months ago (Bob), had been playing pool ever since. Bob told me about the guy that he has been playing with, who seems to have PTSD and uses pool to come down from the heebie-jeebies.We talked about how pool can be a meditation.
I reported the conversation to H and he told me that one of last places that he likes to play may be about to close. He said that it seemed that pool needed to be reinvented as something other than a place for toughs and hustlers: "less macho, less gambling, more attentive." And I thought about the way it is a meditation for him. I talked with our friend Matt about how pool can be a place to let the stress go. And Matt told me about another mutual friend who is teaching therapeutic riding to PTSD survivors of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He talked about how they learn to let go so they can be around the horse, and that the horse knows, and helps them let go. And Matt said the ex-soldiers say that they didn't think the voices in their heads would ever stop.
There is a dearth of opportunities in our lives for such meditations. We fill the days with meetings and email, and the meetings and the email fill our heads. It is only when we become more "attentive" to something that frees us, that we begin to alter the droning (or screaming) of the voices in our heads.
I stash objects around the house as a meditation, and to quell the voices in my head. Or maybe to listen to them in a different way. There is a Japanese tea ceremony spoon on the top of a window molding in the kitchen. There is my new black feathered and bejewelled Venetian mask held on a porcelain hand on the window sill in the bathroom. No reason. I just like it there. I like getting the clothes and the books out of the garage. I like packing tools in the Tupperware with other tools. It's a meditation.
When H wrote that it seemed another pool room was about to close, I felt a certain pain for him. There are effectively no places left where he can ply his craft and learn from others. He is reduced to watching pool on the computer. Not the same thing as doing what you love and what makes the voices in your head go away; or makes it possible for you to listen to them differently.
I talked with our friend Matt about the character of tools: a wooden block plane with a horn that he uses and a rabbeting plane that came from the building of the houses on Fire Island. He described the marriage of hard and softwood in the tool, the way the curve of the front of the plane fit his finger. He talked about the zen of doing the work that he does with precision and focus. It's a meditation.
When H wrote that it seemed another pool room was about to close, I wrote that I understood. I have been a spinner for thirty years. It is a weirdly anachronistic craft. After all, those who spin are commonly known as "spinsters" with all the attendant pity for their plight. But spinning is not a pitiful act. It requires attention to detail--the character of the fiber, its source in sheep or rabbit or dog or cat or goat or yak or worm (yes! silkworms!), or possum or bison or .....Each fiber has to be sheared, cleaned of chaff, washed, dried, carded or combed and prepared for the spinning by making rolags or "top". Some spinners attend to each individual fiber, stripping out the "guard hair" and cherishing the down. Some spinners align the fibers so all the sheared ends and points are consistent; it can make for a more consistent yarn. Each animal produces fiber that requires a somewhat different technique, and a spinner has to decide whether to spin thick or thin, whether to use it on its own or to ply it with another strand of similar or different genesis, has to decide whether to use a "long draw" or a "short draw", whether it will be woolen or worsted. And the process is very slow. If the spinner is in the "zone" the fiber is easier to spin. If the spinner is troubled, the fiber will overtwist or undertwist and break. Someone else might not notice it, but the spinner does.
Once the yarn is spun and plyed, only then does it become something to knit or weave, with all the attendant decisions about that. And only after those decisions, and that craft, does it become something to wear. And for most people, it is nothing more than a pair of socks or sweater in a pretty color. But the act is a meditation. Doing it makes the voices in my head go away, or it makes it possible to listen to them differently.
I have been asked many times whether I sell my yarns, and I always say no. It wouldn't be worth my while, given the amount of time to prepare and spin a single hank of yarn. Of course I could try to sell it for some vast sums as "art", or merely cover the cost of the spinning oil that lubricates the wheel, but selling it hardly seems to make sense. So I give it away on occasion, but most of it fills containers in a neglected room upstairs. There is something about the doing of it that is enough. It is a meditation. And it makes the voices in my head go away; or makes it possible to listen to them differently.
When H wrote that it seemed another pool room was about to close, I wrote to H about spinning and about pool. "I don’t like the idea that the game you care so much about –not as a game—but as strategy and meditation may have to die to be reborn. But it is something I recognize. Spinners have been an unrequited class of people though I have found it compelling for 30 years. People seem to continue to see it as archaic, which it is, in a way that I like…Attention to detail, zoning out of the other debris of life to find the “zone”...slow, very slow."
Writing is like that too. And craft. And gardening. And watching, really watching, the skies change on a January thaw day.
In an exhibition catalog for "Islands in the Land" at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1972, curator Eudorah Moore wrote, "The idea upon which the exhibition was formulated was that, as the leading wedge of the crafts movement has swung so strongly to the manipulation of materials for purely aesthetic expression, the moment had come perhaps to pause, to reevaluate and reassess, and to look back briefly at the roots of the craft movement in this country...The thought was that by looking, really looking at the objects of beautiful, simple, place rooted function, vision could be enriched, values reassessed, humor reinstated, and humanist sensitivity reaffirmed...Although the pressure of constant production, or production to someone else's designs, may produce steady income, it does not recognize the most important element of the craftsman's tradition, pride and creativity in his work, and it often tends to lower those standards of workmanship so essential in to the continuing integrity of the tradition. Where that integrity exists, each object has a palpable vitality, a strong personality, a beauty of design."
We live in a world that makes no room for that unless we are on vacation, where the cobblestones are set in patterns.
Where people stop on bridges and take pictures of each other in the act of "seeing." When else do we get to really watch? And see. And be attentive. When else do we get to see the way the acts we take result in something we desire, in the beauty of design, in pride and creativity in the work? When else do we get to think about the voices in our head and choose which ones to listen to, and which ones to let go?
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Places that make us better people
There are 119 photographs taken every second in Venice.
Okay, so I just made that up, based on the estimated number of visitors to Venice each year (about four million) times the number of photos that Nora and I took (about six hundred apiece) divided by eighteen hours per day.
When we left for this trip, I'd been working hard right up until the Christmas break, so I hadn't invested a lot of time in thinking about a list of sights to see. In my mind, I just wanted to be in a place with no cars, a place where I could walk from one end of the city to the other. A place where every time I turned a corner, I would be surprised.
Mission accomplished.
But one of the great things about not having an agenda for a trip is that you don't know what you'll notice. And what I noticed was people taking pictures. And not just at the sort of classic photo spots, in front of Basilica San Marco or at the top of the Accademia. No, people were just stopped in their tracks all over the place, marveling at what they were seeing and trying (mostly in vain) to capture the experience solely through what could be caught in the box.
Venice is a very public city. It's filled with commerce, and relies on selling many things to its visitors. The dimensions are tiny, and people are in close proximity to one another. But that experience was also loaded with intimate private moments, as we stood alone in the crowd in the face of some new delight.
There are places that make us better people. More patient, more observant, more social, more open to the world. Thank you, Venice, for re-introducing me to the better parts of myself. And thank you, Nora, for being the person who does the same things for me that Venice does. Happy birthday.
Okay, so I just made that up, based on the estimated number of visitors to Venice each year (about four million) times the number of photos that Nora and I took (about six hundred apiece) divided by eighteen hours per day.
When we left for this trip, I'd been working hard right up until the Christmas break, so I hadn't invested a lot of time in thinking about a list of sights to see. In my mind, I just wanted to be in a place with no cars, a place where I could walk from one end of the city to the other. A place where every time I turned a corner, I would be surprised.
Mission accomplished.
But one of the great things about not having an agenda for a trip is that you don't know what you'll notice. And what I noticed was people taking pictures. And not just at the sort of classic photo spots, in front of Basilica San Marco or at the top of the Accademia. No, people were just stopped in their tracks all over the place, marveling at what they were seeing and trying (mostly in vain) to capture the experience solely through what could be caught in the box.
I've been to a lot of traveling spots, but I've never felt the sort of goodwill that we were surrounded with in Venice. Not once did we encounter visitors who had become surly with exhaustion, who were hurrying their way through a crowd. Venice is tight and close enough that had elbows been thrown, we'd have encountered that. But it felt as though everyone recognized that we were in a privileged, miraculous place, and our collective response was a sort of joyous awe.
There are places that make us better people. More patient, more observant, more social, more open to the world. Thank you, Venice, for re-introducing me to the better parts of myself. And thank you, Nora, for being the person who does the same things for me that Venice does. Happy birthday.
Friday, January 11, 2013
What is visible and what is possible
Someone must have written about the stages of vacation but I haven't read that essay. There is of course the elation of the planning, the chaos of wondering before departure, whether everything that needs to get done will get done: will the post office hold the mail? Will the electronic out of office message work? Is the food that will rot consigned to the compost pile? Are we traveling on the right day or have we already missed the plane?
Then there is the plane flight with its attendant miseries of shoeless passengers pushing clear sacks of shampoo and diarrhea preventives before them like the damned, the inevitable flight delays (our pilot had to be driven from Boston to New York!), the queuing for narrow berths, the airline food (if a square yellow piece of plastic can be called an egg), and eventually the arrival with its joys and wonder. There is the travel itself and the negotiating of a new landscape and in some cases a new language. With enough time, there is the homesickness for familiar routines; co-travelers may find the mismatch in each others' strategies and plans; eventually there is the return with its attendant miseries and delights.
Somewhere there is the acknowledgement that the trip has ended, the vacation is over and the real stuff of life re-emerges.
I am there. The plastic sacks of bandaids and three ounce tubes of toothpaste have been stowed in the bathroom cabinet. The laundry has been done and travel clothes (most of them anyway) put away. Herb is back in Boston though he inherited a flu-like bug from me on my last day in Venice, and he has spent much of the last few days under bedcovers. I have loaded my share of wood back in the boxes beside the wood stove, and am sharing its heat with our beloved cat.
We were lucky to have someone who loves animals and is skilled with house care stay here while we were gone. There was snow (12 inches or so) and cold (14 below zero), and it was calming to know that the systems were being attended to and the cats were not licking themselves raw with anxiety -- something that our Ed did on our last extended trip away.
But truth to tell, Venice seems very far away in ways that have little to do with the complications of travel or the efforts to figure out how the snow blower works. I find myself wanting to hold a bit of the magic of a landscape without cars; of omnipresent water, and transportation by foot and by boat. I find myself listening for the languages of fellow tourists who walk the narrow streets in shared amazement at what they see. Herb spent a major chunk of the camera chips on taking pictures of people taking pictures of each other with Venice as a background. But there is a sense of wonder that pervades the city, and as our friend Grazyna has said, it is like walking inside a work of art. I find myself repeatedly wishing that I could paint; words seem inadequate, though they are all that I have...so to wit, a portion of the random memory list from my mental journal:
The beginning:
We arrived at the airport, and rather than finding a rental car or a train, we walked about ten minutes from the terminal on brick pavers to the "bus" in the form of a vaporetto or ferry that would take us the 1.5 hour trip along the Grand Canal which bisects Venice, to our stop a block from the apartment we had rented on a piazzetta shared with the Swiss consulate. It was indistinguishable from other buildings in the neighborhood, other than in its signage and the painted ceiling rafters visible through the window at night.
To arrive by boat would have been amazement enough, but the trip to and along the Canal was a stunner. Cormorants dry themselves atop channel markers, their wings outspread, like mythological guards to the gates.
Ancient buildings (many shuttered from the precipitous drop in residential population) breast the water's edge. The famed Piazza San Marco with its basilica and the Doges Palace challenge Palladio's Il Redentore for attention. And everywhere there are boats and black gondolas that list to one side, designed to accommodate a gondolier who rows only from the right side stern position.
We arrived at our "bus stop" (the Zattere) in the sestiere (neighborhood) of the Dorsoduro, the vaporetto driver assisted us in dragging the suitcases onto the landing, and we thanked him in Italian! (Grazie mile Mr. Pimsleur for your help!) We walked beneath a sortoportego or archway tunnel through the joint between two buildings, to our quiet piazzetta. These archways are omnipresent parts of the streets, and make it possible to walk between, beneath and through buildings.
The nature of the street form is still surprising to me... the narrow calles that were at their widest two person's shoulder widths from building to building, and in many cases, too narrow for an open umbrella to be held upright.
They wound through Venice's streetscape and connected innumerable piazettas, many with "just another" church of no particular distinction, but each with its own beauty and its own congregation, though some have been transformed into storage facilities for archives of the local church or government. There are innumerable cafes and we learned early from our friend and guide, Grazyna, to avoid the cafes on the piazettas for the ones on narrow streets, which were less likely to have a menu turistico and food geared to those who were not likely to care enough or be there for a second visit.
We made our initial discoveries of the barriers at doorways to keep the water out during aqua alta (high tides) that can raise the water two feet high on all the streets. There was a canal at one end of our calle (street), where a boat was tied up, loaded with bags of what appeared to be laundry. There are no service trucks here and any merchandise must be transported by boat and a heavy metal rectangular wheeled cart.
The result (I suspect) is that while there are many dogs in Venice and they are welcome in restaurants and in the public square, almost all are small terrier types that can easily be carried, when needed, and that don't require the transporting and stocking of twenty pound sacks of food. Like their Italian owners, most seemed affable if not enthusiastic about our attentions. None responded to the kissing noises and high pitched baby talk that are common solicitations to play between American humans and their pets.
I was struck by the bells that seemed to ring inside each other with one beginning while another was still sounding and ending each in its own time. They seemed to bear no relation to the time of day other than beginning on the quarter or half hour.
I was struck by the weather--which was comfortable on all but one day; the fogs that came in at dusk and shrouded morning sun, the filtered light that lit sections of cupolas and warmed the air on sections of piazettas while the calles stayed cool--something that must be welcome in heat drenched Mediterranean summers.. I was struck by the stone paving everywhere, the layers of wood and tile and stucco and marble on every building...and by good inexpensive house wine at every meal, and branzino and langoustine for lunch and dinner, and closing times for the stores from noon to three or four, and by the switch from a sense that all things were grey and sage in the landscape to an awareness of brilliant color in the Fortuny silk scarves skeined like hanks of silk yarn in a shop window, to paint pigment in another, sacks of dry beans, pointillist heads of radicchio, and shop cases of magenta meats (including horse meat) in the arcade market in Padova.
There was an hour spent with a forcole maker (the black walnut carved supports that a gondolier uses for his oar) and his assistant who wanted to know where we were from and asked if there were many "beers" there. "Yes," we replied laughing--"many craft beers are made in Vermont." "No! I meant...how do you say?...bears!" "Yes, and catamounts," He was confused. When we explained they were like small mountain lions, he described them to his master as "piccolo lions". And there was the young woman in the pharmacy who responded when I asked for a cold cure: "Do you have a rainy nose?"
But I have gone on too long....There will be more to come and H will have his own observations to add. This much is clear....From a place of sensory delight - even overload - I have returned to a land of white snow and charcoal trees. There are no bells ringing here, but there is a cold that is palpable. I can feel in my back muscles, the bags of wood for the fire, as I felt my knee aching from the climbs up and down stepped bridges at Accademia and Rialto and hundreds more.
These are the markers of how a place changes us. We learned that we could not navigate by means of street names, but rather by a body sense of directions and diagonals, between piazzettas and canals. Our days were shaped by mulled wine and the rich Italian layer cake of past and present; by a sense of what is visible and of what is possible.
There is a tradition in Venice that we were happy to join. People hang padlocks from the railings on the bridges - most seem to be on the famed Accademia bridge. They are markers of the intent to return. They are markers of some portion of oneself that is left in this miraculous place.
We inscribed ours with a silver pen and hung it on the 7th bracket from the Dorsoduro end of the bridge. We hope to see it there when we return. But for now, our padlock hangs from the trees of home, here, and what is visible is a horizon line of mountains and maples where the sap for maple syrup may be starting to rise.
Then there is the plane flight with its attendant miseries of shoeless passengers pushing clear sacks of shampoo and diarrhea preventives before them like the damned, the inevitable flight delays (our pilot had to be driven from Boston to New York!), the queuing for narrow berths, the airline food (if a square yellow piece of plastic can be called an egg), and eventually the arrival with its joys and wonder. There is the travel itself and the negotiating of a new landscape and in some cases a new language. With enough time, there is the homesickness for familiar routines; co-travelers may find the mismatch in each others' strategies and plans; eventually there is the return with its attendant miseries and delights.
Somewhere there is the acknowledgement that the trip has ended, the vacation is over and the real stuff of life re-emerges.
I am there. The plastic sacks of bandaids and three ounce tubes of toothpaste have been stowed in the bathroom cabinet. The laundry has been done and travel clothes (most of them anyway) put away. Herb is back in Boston though he inherited a flu-like bug from me on my last day in Venice, and he has spent much of the last few days under bedcovers. I have loaded my share of wood back in the boxes beside the wood stove, and am sharing its heat with our beloved cat.
We were lucky to have someone who loves animals and is skilled with house care stay here while we were gone. There was snow (12 inches or so) and cold (14 below zero), and it was calming to know that the systems were being attended to and the cats were not licking themselves raw with anxiety -- something that our Ed did on our last extended trip away.
But truth to tell, Venice seems very far away in ways that have little to do with the complications of travel or the efforts to figure out how the snow blower works. I find myself wanting to hold a bit of the magic of a landscape without cars; of omnipresent water, and transportation by foot and by boat. I find myself listening for the languages of fellow tourists who walk the narrow streets in shared amazement at what they see. Herb spent a major chunk of the camera chips on taking pictures of people taking pictures of each other with Venice as a background. But there is a sense of wonder that pervades the city, and as our friend Grazyna has said, it is like walking inside a work of art. I find myself repeatedly wishing that I could paint; words seem inadequate, though they are all that I have...so to wit, a portion of the random memory list from my mental journal:
The beginning:
We arrived at the airport, and rather than finding a rental car or a train, we walked about ten minutes from the terminal on brick pavers to the "bus" in the form of a vaporetto or ferry that would take us the 1.5 hour trip along the Grand Canal which bisects Venice, to our stop a block from the apartment we had rented on a piazzetta shared with the Swiss consulate. It was indistinguishable from other buildings in the neighborhood, other than in its signage and the painted ceiling rafters visible through the window at night.
To arrive by boat would have been amazement enough, but the trip to and along the Canal was a stunner. Cormorants dry themselves atop channel markers, their wings outspread, like mythological guards to the gates.
Ancient buildings (many shuttered from the precipitous drop in residential population) breast the water's edge. The famed Piazza San Marco with its basilica and the Doges Palace challenge Palladio's Il Redentore for attention. And everywhere there are boats and black gondolas that list to one side, designed to accommodate a gondolier who rows only from the right side stern position.
We arrived at our "bus stop" (the Zattere) in the sestiere (neighborhood) of the Dorsoduro, the vaporetto driver assisted us in dragging the suitcases onto the landing, and we thanked him in Italian! (Grazie mile Mr. Pimsleur for your help!) We walked beneath a sortoportego or archway tunnel through the joint between two buildings, to our quiet piazzetta. These archways are omnipresent parts of the streets, and make it possible to walk between, beneath and through buildings.
The nature of the street form is still surprising to me... the narrow calles that were at their widest two person's shoulder widths from building to building, and in many cases, too narrow for an open umbrella to be held upright.
They wound through Venice's streetscape and connected innumerable piazettas, many with "just another" church of no particular distinction, but each with its own beauty and its own congregation, though some have been transformed into storage facilities for archives of the local church or government. There are innumerable cafes and we learned early from our friend and guide, Grazyna, to avoid the cafes on the piazettas for the ones on narrow streets, which were less likely to have a menu turistico and food geared to those who were not likely to care enough or be there for a second visit.
We made our initial discoveries of the barriers at doorways to keep the water out during aqua alta (high tides) that can raise the water two feet high on all the streets. There was a canal at one end of our calle (street), where a boat was tied up, loaded with bags of what appeared to be laundry. There are no service trucks here and any merchandise must be transported by boat and a heavy metal rectangular wheeled cart.
The result (I suspect) is that while there are many dogs in Venice and they are welcome in restaurants and in the public square, almost all are small terrier types that can easily be carried, when needed, and that don't require the transporting and stocking of twenty pound sacks of food. Like their Italian owners, most seemed affable if not enthusiastic about our attentions. None responded to the kissing noises and high pitched baby talk that are common solicitations to play between American humans and their pets.
I was struck by the bells that seemed to ring inside each other with one beginning while another was still sounding and ending each in its own time. They seemed to bear no relation to the time of day other than beginning on the quarter or half hour.
I was struck by the weather--which was comfortable on all but one day; the fogs that came in at dusk and shrouded morning sun, the filtered light that lit sections of cupolas and warmed the air on sections of piazettas while the calles stayed cool--something that must be welcome in heat drenched Mediterranean summers.. I was struck by the stone paving everywhere, the layers of wood and tile and stucco and marble on every building...and by good inexpensive house wine at every meal, and branzino and langoustine for lunch and dinner, and closing times for the stores from noon to three or four, and by the switch from a sense that all things were grey and sage in the landscape to an awareness of brilliant color in the Fortuny silk scarves skeined like hanks of silk yarn in a shop window, to paint pigment in another, sacks of dry beans, pointillist heads of radicchio, and shop cases of magenta meats (including horse meat) in the arcade market in Padova.
There was an hour spent with a forcole maker (the black walnut carved supports that a gondolier uses for his oar) and his assistant who wanted to know where we were from and asked if there were many "beers" there. "Yes," we replied laughing--"many craft beers are made in Vermont." "No! I meant...how do you say?...bears!" "Yes, and catamounts," He was confused. When we explained they were like small mountain lions, he described them to his master as "piccolo lions". And there was the young woman in the pharmacy who responded when I asked for a cold cure: "Do you have a rainy nose?"
But I have gone on too long....There will be more to come and H will have his own observations to add. This much is clear....From a place of sensory delight - even overload - I have returned to a land of white snow and charcoal trees. There are no bells ringing here, but there is a cold that is palpable. I can feel in my back muscles, the bags of wood for the fire, as I felt my knee aching from the climbs up and down stepped bridges at Accademia and Rialto and hundreds more.
These are the markers of how a place changes us. We learned that we could not navigate by means of street names, but rather by a body sense of directions and diagonals, between piazzettas and canals. Our days were shaped by mulled wine and the rich Italian layer cake of past and present; by a sense of what is visible and of what is possible.
There is a tradition in Venice that we were happy to join. People hang padlocks from the railings on the bridges - most seem to be on the famed Accademia bridge. They are markers of the intent to return. They are markers of some portion of oneself that is left in this miraculous place.
We inscribed ours with a silver pen and hung it on the 7th bracket from the Dorsoduro end of the bridge. We hope to see it there when we return. But for now, our padlock hangs from the trees of home, here, and what is visible is a horizon line of mountains and maples where the sap for maple syrup may be starting to rise.
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