"One
day you ask the scientist how he is getting on; he replies: ‘Finely. I
have very nearly finished this piece of blue sky.’ Another day, you
ask how the sky is progressing and are told, ‘I have added a lot more,
but it was sea, not sky; there’s a boat floating on the top of it.’
Perhaps next time it will have turned out to be a parasol upside down,
but our friend is still enthusiastic with the progress he is making.
The scientist has his guesses about how the finished picture will work
out; he depends largely on these in his search for other pieces to fit,
but his guesses are modified from time to time by unexpected
developments as the fitting proceeds. These revolutions of thought as
to the final picture do not cause the scientist to lose faith in his
handiwork, for he is aware that the completed portion is growing
steadily. Those who look over his shoulder and use the present
partially developed picture for purposes outside science do so at their
own risk."
- Sir Arthur Eddington, ‘The Nature Of The Physical World’ (section entitled ‘defence of mysticism’)
"Engaging with form - any form - means there’s a chance you will say something you weren’t going to say."
- Paul Farley
Each morning after we wake up, before we switch them on we say ‘goodbye’ to our technologies because after we switch them on we’ve… no idea… where they are… anymore.
She slides open the iron grill and invites me into her studio. And in those first two seconds I see her three-quarters-of-a-second smile, her bare arms, the piles of crystallised glass along the corridor, the kimono designs and maths diagrams taped to the wall. I see flattened cardboard boxes, some of which resemble the kimono designs. I hear music coming from another room. I see a gentle distantiation. I see snow falling down on my fictional house, on the mountains and the moors of Keat’s tongue, on togetherness itself. I see her bare arms and for the first time in years i remember that line about ‘the doomed western attempt to equate sex and love’. And then I see a single word: resilience. I see in her a beautiful first sketch of resilience. And i see the monk inside me, slender as a postcard, but blessed and smiling, walking as always through this postcard apocalypse, waving to me from afar.
She decided not to go to college. Instead, for a tenth of the cost, she bought a laptop and an Iphone, opened a Twitter account, and created her own university. Within a couple of days she had her own hand-picked faculty of brilliant, dedicated, accidental teachers. And now, daily, the essays, video links, news articles, photostreams and podcasts come pouring in: from artists and curators in Beijing, Brooklyn, Delhi, California, teachers at MIT, Columbia and RISD, stories from Seed Magazine, New Scientist, Bldgblog. I ask her what she’s studying and her eyes light up. ”I don’t know!” she replies, with a shake of her head, a river-bed smile. ”I guess I could say it’s some kind of hyper-extended urban theory, but I could equally well call it molecular anthropology, the perfection of patience, Madhyamaka, superflatness, thinking design… or a dozen other things. Frankly, I think that unless one is learning a technical skill, knowing in advance what it is you’re studying is crazy. The fact that students go to college and know exactly what they will be studying for the next three years strikes me as kind of sad, a loss of nerve…”
She sits me down in front of the laptop and says “Watch this. It came in yesterday: some architecture/cinema group called ‘The 3rd and The 7th’. Its about ten minutes long. I’ll make some tea.” Just before the end, with the books flying everywhere, she reappears at my side holding two cups. ”Do you think books will continue?” ”I think so, yes. So long as people continue to float through the universe wrapped in skin they will float through the universe with books in their hands.” ”How about email?” ”Email? No. I think email will be finished within the next ten years.” ”And grandma?” she continues, with a smile. (Her grandmother died a week ago.) ”We’ll get to her later.”
We talk about the kind of things we find in our Twitter boxes. About how the Israeli Defence Forces are using cutting-edge urban theory to re-think their strategies in battle situations, about an American artist living in Beijing who got into trouble for painting huge diagrams of machine-guns on the walls of his apartment, about how the stray dogs of Moscow are learning to negotiate the subway system. She tells me about the strangers she follows on Twitter, “just to be close to their voices, their modest, stumbling, semi-invisible voices. Sometimes Facebook feels a bit claustrophobic, like chatting with neighbours in the local shop before heading home clutching one’s milk and chocolate biscuits, whereas Twitter feels like wandering barefoot through some metropolis of 30 million people, with no direction home, drunk on anonymity.”
We’re meeting tonight to plan a series of activities dedicated to the safe journeying of her recently deceased grandmother. We need to talk about meditation, about formlessness and faith - ‘thinking design’ for when the breathing stops.
"There are two things I want to focus on: the miracle of your daily life and the dream of spiritual practice. First, miracle: I want you to just continue living your life with the joy and focus that you already have. The thing that will most help grandma in the bardo is seeing people she loves being present and focussed and happy. So just continue your studies, your artwork. But transform it all into a gift through acts of remembrance. Let your consciousness of ‘grandmother’ be triggered by every moment of beauty or effortless concentration that comes your way. When some tweet leads you to, say, a maths article that links snowflakes and pomegranates to error-correcting codes in modern telecommunications technology via the geometry of multi-dimensional space, I want you to think: there’s grandmother! The stray dogs of Moscow learning to use the subway system: grandmother! And then, at night, we will do more traditional practices - meditation, prayer, chanting. During the night sessions you - I mean both of us when I’m here, but especially you, because its you she’s connected to - will be a kind of compass for her. We will sit in meditation and it will be the simplest thing. We will sit, and something of our embodied human forms will shine through the worlds, calling her. Virtue in you will trigger virtue in her. There is nothing better you can offer her on her journey than the vision of a relative in the human realm, sitting in meditation, embodied and disciplined, joyful, at peace, and attuned to the nature of reality. So that’s what we’ll do. ok?"
"Surrender to Buddha the thoughts, impressions, emotions and ideas that arise in your mind. The practice of surrendering should be done out of the reverence that arises in your mind and not at someone else’s request. When surrendering is accompanied by reverence you will attain bright wisdom, and you should put these realisations into practice. When reverence arises in you, you hear the Dharma lecture that completely fills the universe."
(Jae Woong Kim)
That night, walking back home, along the canal, I find myself thinking back ten years: my last visit to my own grandmother, in a nursing home in Liverpool, slipping into dementia, a few weeks away from death… And then in the water, among the usual plastic and metallic debris I see an abandoned safe-box, presumably stolen, smashed open and emptied before being dumped here. I take a few photographs. I’ll post one on Twitter tonight, tagged, simply: ‘Grandmother’. I know she will see it and smile, but right now I’m wondering: is there anyone else out there? Is there anyone else who is one frameless anonymous image away from … recollecting everything?
- Sir Arthur Eddington, ‘The Nature Of The Physical World’ (section entitled ‘defence of mysticism’)
"Engaging with form - any form - means there’s a chance you will say something you weren’t going to say."
- Paul Farley
Each morning after we wake up, before we switch them on we say ‘goodbye’ to our technologies because after we switch them on we’ve… no idea… where they are… anymore.
She slides open the iron grill and invites me into her studio. And in those first two seconds I see her three-quarters-of-a-second smile, her bare arms, the piles of crystallised glass along the corridor, the kimono designs and maths diagrams taped to the wall. I see flattened cardboard boxes, some of which resemble the kimono designs. I hear music coming from another room. I see a gentle distantiation. I see snow falling down on my fictional house, on the mountains and the moors of Keat’s tongue, on togetherness itself. I see her bare arms and for the first time in years i remember that line about ‘the doomed western attempt to equate sex and love’. And then I see a single word: resilience. I see in her a beautiful first sketch of resilience. And i see the monk inside me, slender as a postcard, but blessed and smiling, walking as always through this postcard apocalypse, waving to me from afar.
She decided not to go to college. Instead, for a tenth of the cost, she bought a laptop and an Iphone, opened a Twitter account, and created her own university. Within a couple of days she had her own hand-picked faculty of brilliant, dedicated, accidental teachers. And now, daily, the essays, video links, news articles, photostreams and podcasts come pouring in: from artists and curators in Beijing, Brooklyn, Delhi, California, teachers at MIT, Columbia and RISD, stories from Seed Magazine, New Scientist, Bldgblog. I ask her what she’s studying and her eyes light up. ”I don’t know!” she replies, with a shake of her head, a river-bed smile. ”I guess I could say it’s some kind of hyper-extended urban theory, but I could equally well call it molecular anthropology, the perfection of patience, Madhyamaka, superflatness, thinking design… or a dozen other things. Frankly, I think that unless one is learning a technical skill, knowing in advance what it is you’re studying is crazy. The fact that students go to college and know exactly what they will be studying for the next three years strikes me as kind of sad, a loss of nerve…”
She sits me down in front of the laptop and says “Watch this. It came in yesterday: some architecture/cinema group called ‘The 3rd and The 7th’. Its about ten minutes long. I’ll make some tea.” Just before the end, with the books flying everywhere, she reappears at my side holding two cups. ”Do you think books will continue?” ”I think so, yes. So long as people continue to float through the universe wrapped in skin they will float through the universe with books in their hands.” ”How about email?” ”Email? No. I think email will be finished within the next ten years.” ”And grandma?” she continues, with a smile. (Her grandmother died a week ago.) ”We’ll get to her later.”
We talk about the kind of things we find in our Twitter boxes. About how the Israeli Defence Forces are using cutting-edge urban theory to re-think their strategies in battle situations, about an American artist living in Beijing who got into trouble for painting huge diagrams of machine-guns on the walls of his apartment, about how the stray dogs of Moscow are learning to negotiate the subway system. She tells me about the strangers she follows on Twitter, “just to be close to their voices, their modest, stumbling, semi-invisible voices. Sometimes Facebook feels a bit claustrophobic, like chatting with neighbours in the local shop before heading home clutching one’s milk and chocolate biscuits, whereas Twitter feels like wandering barefoot through some metropolis of 30 million people, with no direction home, drunk on anonymity.”
We’re meeting tonight to plan a series of activities dedicated to the safe journeying of her recently deceased grandmother. We need to talk about meditation, about formlessness and faith - ‘thinking design’ for when the breathing stops.
"There are two things I want to focus on: the miracle of your daily life and the dream of spiritual practice. First, miracle: I want you to just continue living your life with the joy and focus that you already have. The thing that will most help grandma in the bardo is seeing people she loves being present and focussed and happy. So just continue your studies, your artwork. But transform it all into a gift through acts of remembrance. Let your consciousness of ‘grandmother’ be triggered by every moment of beauty or effortless concentration that comes your way. When some tweet leads you to, say, a maths article that links snowflakes and pomegranates to error-correcting codes in modern telecommunications technology via the geometry of multi-dimensional space, I want you to think: there’s grandmother! The stray dogs of Moscow learning to use the subway system: grandmother! And then, at night, we will do more traditional practices - meditation, prayer, chanting. During the night sessions you - I mean both of us when I’m here, but especially you, because its you she’s connected to - will be a kind of compass for her. We will sit in meditation and it will be the simplest thing. We will sit, and something of our embodied human forms will shine through the worlds, calling her. Virtue in you will trigger virtue in her. There is nothing better you can offer her on her journey than the vision of a relative in the human realm, sitting in meditation, embodied and disciplined, joyful, at peace, and attuned to the nature of reality. So that’s what we’ll do. ok?"
"Surrender to Buddha the thoughts, impressions, emotions and ideas that arise in your mind. The practice of surrendering should be done out of the reverence that arises in your mind and not at someone else’s request. When surrendering is accompanied by reverence you will attain bright wisdom, and you should put these realisations into practice. When reverence arises in you, you hear the Dharma lecture that completely fills the universe."
(Jae Woong Kim)
That night, walking back home, along the canal, I find myself thinking back ten years: my last visit to my own grandmother, in a nursing home in Liverpool, slipping into dementia, a few weeks away from death… And then in the water, among the usual plastic and metallic debris I see an abandoned safe-box, presumably stolen, smashed open and emptied before being dumped here. I take a few photographs. I’ll post one on Twitter tonight, tagged, simply: ‘Grandmother’. I know she will see it and smile, but right now I’m wondering: is there anyone else out there? Is there anyone else who is one frameless anonymous image away from … recollecting everything?
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