From the porch of West Point Inn, at 1785’ on Mount Tam, overlooking San Francisco Bay, 5:00 am-ish. Dark, but for the barest glow to the east.
I saw the Earth turning on its N/S axis at an unfathomable 1000 mph. Then I saw the near part of a living-and-breathing across and around the whole of the Earth.
A seeming non sequitur, but not:
In their excellent essay, “Tending Building” (Places Journal, February 2024, the second article in the series, ”Repair Manual”), architects Kiel Moe and Daniel Friedman locate breakdowns in modern, Western architectural design in its insistence on imposing a vision that takes no account of the realities of the context and materials in which that vision is articulated. [Note 1]
The response to breakdown they propose is not reimposing the vision through “repair”, “restor[ing] to good or proper condition”; nor through “fixing”, suggesting “ossification … prioritiz[ing] past states [i.e., the vision] more than future prospects.”
Instead, they propose “tending”, relocating corrective action back in the design and maintenance stages. Design informed by an “ethics of tending” “means learning to anticipate next states, and nudg[ing] inherited circumstances toward beneficial outcomes.” That is, they propose design founded on accepting and allowing for the “‘complex, life-sustaining web’ of terrestrial, historical, and environmental conditions.”
It is our cultural expectation — the presumption that we can impose concepts inconsistent with reality — that is most in need of repair.
Moe and Friedman locate
the profession’s shortcomings [on] its unwillingness or inability to reason, imagine, and situate buildings in their environments, or in the dynamics of their past and future states, or in the implacable realities of how architecture reorganizes life on the thin surface of Earth. This unwillingness is a source of brokenness at multiple scales, from windows to buildings to cities to planetary organization.
“Life on the thin surface of Earth,” they observe. “A complex, life-sustaining web.”
With the acuity mountaintops sometimes offer, at dawn on the porch of West Point Inn I saw the Earth living and breathing across and around its whole. Its unfathomable complexity, profoundly interrelated and codependent systems in constant movement and in intimate conversation.
Spiritual intimations are understandably not part of the authors’ compelling essay, but the backdrop to Moe and Friedman’s astute and care-full observations and urgings — the “thin surface of Earth”, “the complex life-sustaining web” — suggests an awareness that the scale of being extends far beyond our day-to-day perceptions. [Note 2]
Though nodding in agreement as I read, I found myself expecting more. I found myself looking for an acknowledgement of deeper dimensions, of mystery. Not woo-woo mystery, but mystery as in the great swaths of reality beyond what humans can perceive, much less understand. Acknowledging mystery is at the heart of a mindset that underlies the allowing and letting and deference Moe and Friedman urge.
In short, I missed spiritual intimations.
Given their professional positions, they likely couldn’t go there, but from the far margins of scholarship, I can.
Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, presuming themselves equivalent to God. It was an audacity inconsistent with the finite capacities of their material reality — transitory (though exquisite) sacks of chemicals, enlivened by something.
Enlivened by something…
From the porch of West Point Inn I sensed “something” enlivening in the sun progressively bathing the Bay below me.
“Something”. A noun? Sure presents as a verb. Perhaps better said that I sensed “_____”.
The reflexive “What?” and “How? and “Why? crowd in, ever grasping at _____.
Some say the name of _____ should never be said; others that the image of _____ should never be depicted, the saying and the depicting resting on the same presumption as eating the apple, a presumption of definitive and complete knowledge. Others deflect even talking about _____, just teaching life practices aligned with “how things really are”, practices that reduce suffering, reduce breakdowns. Breakdowns resting on presumption, arrogance, and willful ignorance of the realities of existence.
Moe and Friedman urge an architecture not only acutely aware of, but committed to, even desirous of, working in consonance with reality — with change and dynamics and relations; with allowing and letting; with humility. They urge accepting the intrinsic properties and propensities of what is received, and nudging them toward “beneficial outcomes”.
Inherent in the humility of this mindset, of its non-presumption, is an acknowledgement of not knowing everything, of the fact of beyond-knowing. The spiritually inclined would say, an acknowledgement of mystery. Perhaps an acknowledgement of “_____” will do.
A mindset that acknowledges _____ allows for the non-presumption that leans toward consonance expressed in practices of studying closely, of engaging directly, of letting. These practices, returned to again and again, enact a resolve that checks a seemingly intractable temptation to presume, to always grasp for the apple.
In the rapacious, exploitative, infinitely destructive evisceration wrought by transnational, despoiling, extractative capitalism, there is no sensing the Earth living and breathing across and around its whole, no sensing its beyond-knowing, no deferring to mystery, no revering _____. In the presuming mindset there is no check on that intractable temptation to grasp for the apple. Grasping, grasping, grasping … breakdown upon breakdown upon breakdown.
I miss a spiritual aspect in Moe and Friedman’s essay. Suggesting a mystical presence would likely compromise it and its authors’ career prospects in current day scholarly quarters, but it’s precisely that that I feel we lack: Inviting a mindset grounded in sensing, yet not presuming to know definitively, the “something” enlivening and breathing across and around the whole of the Earth — a mindset deferential to mystery.
The authors write, tending “means active inquiry, and greater intellectual, political, and practical commitments as a basis for design, and what we associate with repair.”
I suggest that tending requires not just greater intellectual, political, and practical commitments, but also an underlying mindset — a reverence for the mystery before around and in us, sensed now and then on the porch at West Point Inn.
Note 1: Characteristically, Christopher Alexander would chime in here.
Note 2: “Spiritual intimations” — What on God’s green earth does “spiritual” really mean?
What I mean is simply an awareness that the reality in which we live is far bigger than we could ever possibly fathom.
The great brain scientist Walter Freeman concluded his riveting essay “The Physiology of Perception” with:
The poet William Blake wrote: ‘“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Such cleansing would not be desirable. Without the protection of the doors of perception — that is, without the self-controlled chaotic activity of the cortex, from which perceptions spring — people and animals would be overwhelmed by eternity.
A spiritual life, though lived within the protections of the doors of perception, acknowledges the limitations imposed by perception, as well as, implicitly, eternity.