ARCHITECTURE / THIRD / SEVENTH

We were talking about how a handful of words can fish a single video out of an ocean of millions and place it right at the top of the list of search results. About how Googling is a new form of 'address'. Location is no longer ascertainable through a fixed language protocol but through an exercise in lateral thinking where precision combines with a kind of 'scattergun' delivery. Location was now a dream-language.

We wanted to live like this: to live like an address, like these new addresses. To be precise and specific, coded and silent. To be hidden and lost and recollectable and findable. We wanted people not to know we existed, not to even think about us, yet be findable by anyone anywhere when the right time came.

We were talking like this, as I was looking for this video:



The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

INSECT CHORUSES / THE LITERATURE TO COME

“Through weakness or anxiety, to be serious or for effectiveness, we no longer know how, we are no longer capable of speaking in any but disjointed terms, in special, specialised, specious discourses, as physicists or politicians, as historians or pious believers, through equations, poems or prayers, as scientists or those in love, in bad French or exact algebra. None of these discourses can or wants to rejoin the other, to encounter it, recognise it… We claim to hold colloquia, but we speak there in these dislocated terms.”

     -- Michel Serres “Biogea”

"Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth and charm."
    -- Roberto Bolano "The Savage Detectives"


We were talking in her studio, alone together, wrapped in a hundred voices whose volumes have been turned down to almost zero, voices which, consequently, can be heard but not recorded. Something akin to the voices of insects, of tiny insects with revolutionary aspirations or a taste for opera. Insect choruses.

We were talking about imaginary unknowns: about cinema and cinema's 'little sister', about Bach and 'Bach squared'.

We talk about how Dante would send his poems into the world to go and greet his beloved, with instructions 'to talk to no-one except virtuous ladies along the way'. We talk about encryption, about how 'the door to the invisible has to be visible', about Godel and Claude Shannon, about encryption and love and secrecy, and semi-secrecy, and quarter- and sixteenth-secrecy. All the homeopathic secrecies that allow us to think we understand things.

We talk about reading a story first thing in the morning and then listening for every accidental quotation throughout the day.

We talk about the literature to come. About words with shadows and ambience. Words with data structures forming protective umbrellas over them. Words without dictionary definitions, that operate instead as handles and switches, as security clearance for other, noisier words. Words which gather like shoals of post-grammatical fish coded for music, tonality and absolute rhythm, inside pages that resemble lakeside ripples, or mobius strips, or icebergs.

That's how certain nights go in her studio, imagining the voices of a new Jane Austen, a new Emily Dickinson.

23 CANDLES

I'm riding the bus
between
rice paddies
and pachinko parlors.
their surfaces
shine like diamonds
powdered by
nuclear suns.
outside my window,
a heavy hauling-truck
rumbles past
and i effortlessly visualize
it plowing through
the thin skin of this side
of the bus, and each of us
in this line of seats
softly breaking
into colored smokes,
like 23 candles
beneath a few breaths.
conversely, i feel no
confidence to imagine
what the woman
on her cellphone
on the sidewalk
is talking about.


(poem and images by Jerry Gordon)

 

THERE ARE THINGS IN LIFE WE CANT DESIGN - TALK AT SDGC14 STOCKHOLM

Like everyone else speaking at the conference I was asked to begin my talk with an image showing what 'quality of life' meant to me. But I don't have a camera, so I decided to just use the opening slide of my talk. But i must admit, after seeing the various homely, friendly slides presented yesterday, I began to wonder how my one would look - because its a bit weird in comparison to those other slides! But as I began to look deeply into the image it began to be quite revealing.

The right side of the opening slide contains a photo of me at my friend's house, and in this picture she used an app which bleached the photo so it looks like I'm kind of disappearing, and actually that it what I'm trying to do: I'm trying to disappear into a 2500 year-old Buddhist tradition while staying in touch with my own 21st century Western culture.

And on the left is Vajrasattva and consort, who represents or symbolises the purifying power of the Buddha's enlightenment. This is one of my meditation practices. And I love the fact that this image is so radiant and clear. That what I am disappearing into is clearer and brighter than what I am coming out of.

So you can see that I'm reading a book in the photo. Whenever I have money I buy books. I love reading and I read all kinds of stuff. The memory of a map-making monk has to contain all kinds of oblique and wonderful things. And now I have a kindle, so I'm no longer limited to carrying just one or two books - electronic culture and homelessless go so well together! And I wanted to have fragments of that reading in the slides today. So I asked myself what would be a good quote to share with designers? And immediately I thought of this passage from William Gibson's "Spook Country":

Wouldn't you love to have a design brief like this? No explanations, no goals cited, no budgetary cap, absolute priority in any queue...? That's the kind of the space I live in as a Buddhist monk. Of course, I have my vows to live within, and my life is very limited in terms of money and devices and those kinds of things. But psychologically... no explanations, no goals...

The rest of the slides I wont be talking about - they will just accompany me, a kind of ambient voice, representing the angelology of words. An expression of ambient intimacy. And you don't have to understand these images, you just have to stand under them for a few moments.

So... the theme of my talk here is "There Are Things In Life We Cannot Design". And to lead into this let me tell you two stories.

The first one takes place in Tokyo in 1923. A huge earthquake has just devastated the city killing more than 100,000 people. And in the days immediately after the disaster a ten year old boy decides to take his six year old younger brother by the hand and lead him through the destroyed city, forcing him to witness the entire disaster: dead bodies floating in the river, traumatised survivors sitting motionless in the ruins. We don't know why he did this.

Later in life the elder brother sinks into a deep depression and eventually commits suicide. But the six year old, little Akira, grows up to become one of the greatest film makers in the history of cinema: Kurasawa Akira.

The second story concerns a zen master I had the wonderful experience of studying with in Japan in 2005. His name is Harada Sensei and he has been teaching quietly at the same monastery in Obama, Japan, for sixty years. The story I want to share with you today concerns another disaster: Japan's imminent collapse in the closing months of World War 2. Its 1945 and Harada-san is just a kid; he's seen so many people sacrifice their lives in the war and now he feels its his turn. He's 20 years old and he just wants to help his country. Those were the words he used in a talk one evening at the monastery: 'i just wanted to help my country'. The army and navy were more or less finished, as indeed was the airforce. All that remained were the kamikaze squads. So he volunteers to become a kamikaze pilot. That's a suicide bomber in our world, yes? We think of them simply as psychopaths. But I cant stop hearing the gentleness in his words: 'I just wanted to help my country...'

One of the students at the monastery had a copy of a photo of Harada-san and two fellow pilots having their last cup of Japanese sake before flying to their deaths. You should see their uniforms: they're just bits of rags sewn together - the poverty and desperation of the whole situation is obvious.

And then, one hour before he is due to fly, the war ends. Japan announces her surrender. He came so close to death and then it was taken away from him. (You can read his own teaching on this experience and how it permeated his thinking and future direction here.) But the experience was not in vain. After the war he met a zen master in Tokyo who invited him to train under his guidance. "I can see you've sacrificed your life once already and it didn't work. Now give it to me. Train at my temple and I promise you you will have a deep awakening within three years." He accepted, and a few years later he had his breakthrough. And for the past sixty years he has been teaching in his little temple on the north coast of Japan.

What is the purpose of these two stories? I want to say that there are things in life that you simply cannot design. I mean, if I asked you to design a filmmaker or a zen master how many of you would dare to include an earthquake or a war in your proposal? The obvious solution would be to build a film school, say, and that's fine as far as it goes but it doesn't touch the whole situation.

I remember a teacher of mine talking about life in a traditional Tibetan Buddhist monastery. Some of the monks commit to a 20+ year-long course of study. In the beginning they study things like Buddhist logic and epistemology, how the mind works, the rules governing a monk's life, things like that. And then, I'm not sure when exactly, maybe around year six, they start to really focus on the wisdom teachings, on prajnaparamita and madhyamaka philosophy. These are the teachings that can end suffering forever. You can't escape from samsara on the basis of ethics alone, or through the power of a concentrated state of mind in itself: you have to have wisdom. These teachings will be the basis for developing the mind of a Buddha. They are very, very precious. And before they start they take a break from their studies. Some of the monks go into retreat for six months, perform purification practices, make vast visualised offerings to create the spiritual energy in the mind necessary to have realisations. They make vast aspirational prayers just to be able to understand what they are about to study.

I don't know of a single university in the UK where the students pray just to be able to understand what they are about to study. In our modern scientific-materialist cultures we have this kind of abstract 'democratic' understanding of knowledge. We feel, basically, that we can understand anything and that all we have to do is receive the information. The acquisition of knowledge is imagined as a neutral and 'flattened' experience. "I'm here and my mind is functioning and I can basically understand anything. Just give me the information."

This is not how Buddhism understands the mind. The idea of - and I like to use a medieval spelling of the word to protect it, to return it to its lost world of meanings - of 'virtu' has (sic) virtually disappeared from our cognitive vocabulary. We have no idea that there are levels of consciousness and increasing subtleties of mind, and that working on the mind's radiance - its virtu and clarity and inner state of being - is just as important as the content of what that mind is trying to understand. We have no idea that the approach to knowledge contains ethical and ritual dimensions.

If we are going to talk seriously about quality of life, we have to have two things in place: we have to understand how reality works and we have to have an understanding of what a human being is capable of, what it can aspire to. If we don't understand these two things clearly and completely, in all their existential vastness, all attempts to end the sufferings of beings will ultimately fail. They may succeed within temporary and limited contexts but ultimately they will fail.

These two things have to embrace the entire existential context: what is visible and invisible and what is simply beyond the present limits of my imagination and rationale. In Buddhism we aren't just aspiring to make our little place in life more comfortable - we are aspiring and training to become the kind of being who no longer has to experience this kind of body: a body which has zero tolerance for pain, which is destined to grow old, sicken and die. My design brief as a Buddhist monk is to end suffering forever. For everyone, everywhere.

I'm running out of time now so I will leave you with one last slide, and I will leave it for you to decide for yourself just how seriously I would like you to take this suggestion. But again, when I first read it my inner radar went very quiet and affirmed the deep relevance of this remark and I sensed a wildness and an accuracy in its words. Here it is:

I would love you all to consider what it would mean to just say no to ... everything. To free yourself from the limitations of the world you operate in, the endless demands to perform, to meet deadlines, to find solutions to problems over and over again. I would like you to at least imagine, as a kind of ritual action that you perform occasionally, saying no everything you are entrapped by: the need to succeed, to have a career, to be accepted, to be understood (even by yourself).

There is something quietly nihilistic in being so blindly positive, of moving ever forwards with an invisible glass wall in front of you: namely,  a limited - even delusional - sense of what reality is. And there is something liberating and purifying in being willing to stay in the space of not-knowing for as long as it takes.  I can imagine the pressures you are under just to ... continue ... and I live with gratitude in the world(s) you design. But I really hope you get the chance to just ... do nothing, be nothing. Thank you.

The following link is to a collection of photos and sketchbook responses to my talk put together by the conference organisers, plus a video clip:
   http://conferences.service-design-network.org/sdgc14/things-life-cant-design/

HATSUNE MIKU: JAPAN'S FIRST HOLOGRAM POPSTAR

When I first saw this video (back in 2010) and saw Hatsune Miku appear on stage from her little black box I felt the world shifting its parameters. And then the song started and i heard a 4 minute description of the next 200 years, a song of straight prophesy and teasing ambiguity, of playfulness and arrogance and love, in lyrics that got stranger and stranger ..."Someday, on the hundred-thousandth birthday of my children, when you see them, for celebrating it, I thank you..."  Imagine "Terminator 12" as a kid's anime movie written by Julia Kristeva...

It is well known that photography is no longer considered a reliable source of evidence in a court of law, but soon reality itself may be considered unreliable.  We are not only moving into 'the robotic moment' (as Sherry Turkle calls it in her consistently engaging book entitled "Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology And Less From Each Other") but into a generalised post-human mish mash of technologies, platforms, protocols and speeds.

But reality doesn't have to be believable - it just has to be imaginable.  Reality is a reference point not a destination. A map, not the territory.

A lot fell into place for me recently when I dropped the burden of 'believing' in Buddhism and decided to simply imagine it instead.  Belief tends to have an agonistic dimension to it: "do I or do I not believe in ... karma?... rebirth?...my lama as a buddha?..."  We feel compelled to decide one way or another on a question that is actually outside our capacity to answer.  And we always believe too soon - we come to a 'conclusion' we haven't earned, and our world subtly closes down a little as a result.  Instead of remaining in the space of not-knowing (which is a beautiful, sacred place to be) we turn not-knowing into a fake knowing and the resulting turbulence affects everyone around us.

These days I simply 'imagine' Buddhism. I do my practices as naturally as I brush my teeth or watch the football.  I have faith in these practices, in the teachers who gave them to me and in the tradition that carried them to me through the centuries.  It is faith based on 30 years quiet engagement with the world of Buddhism.  It is not certain knowledge - it is faith, trust.  A kind of perfume radiating out of consistent experience.

After all, Buddhism isn't about the agonistics of belief as dogma, nor is it a collection of truth statements in an abstract world of philosophy.  It is about engaging with practices whose 'reality' is judged on a pragmatic quality: their ability to end suffering.  Of course, I am presenting this somewhat simplistically.  There is always an element of belief in our experience.  But so long as belief is recognised as belief and not as fact then the integrity of one's experience is protected.

I look forward to meeting Hatsune Miku's 'children' and celebrating their hundred-thousandth birthday with them.  I will arrive there - you try too.

THE ERA OF OVERPRODUCTION

We were talking in her studio, about living in The Era Of Overproduction.  I tell her about a guy who had been working on a computer program that would write 'new' Bach pieces. He'd finally got the program to a point where he was personally satisfied with it, so he hit 'start' before going to lunch one afternoon.  When he came back there were 4000 new Bach pieces on his laptop.  At CERN (the centre for nuclear research in Switzerland) there are experiments which generate 5000 encyclopedias of data per second.  It's said that every minute there's 32 hours of new footage uploaded to Youtube...

We talked about the impossibility of having anything remotely resembling an 'overview' of world literature or world cinema these days.  We sensed the presence of unbelievably perfect books in distant languages that would never be translated and which we would never read. Of beautiful articles on topics we had never consciously formulated even in our wildest reveries, in magazines that would go bust after a few issues without us ever hearing even their names.

We liked living in this world.  We liked the poverty and the richness of it.  But mainly the richness.  And at the same time we felt some strange tremor in our conscience urging us to .. to live in it more accurately ...

She's reading James Gleick's "Chaos". I see her highlights on the pages. I've just got time to share a few of  them with you but then I have to go...

At the national laboratory some physicists learned that their newest colleague was experimenting with 26 hour days, which meant that his waking schedule would slowly roll in and out of phase with theirs.  This bordered on strange, even in the Theoretical Division.

These scientists had experience with brilliance and with eccentricity.  They were hard to surprise.  But MItchell Feigenbaum was an unusual case.  He had exactly one published article to his name, and he was working on nothing that seemed to have any particular promise.  His hair was a ragged mane,

When he worked, he worked obsessively.  When he could not work, he walked and thought, day or night, and night was best of all.  The twenty four hour day seemed too constraining.  Nevertheless, his experiment in quasiperiodicity came to an end when he decided he could no longer bear waking to the setting sun, as had to happen every few days.

He thought about clouds, watching them from airplane windows (until his scientific travel privileges were officially suspended on grounds of overuse) or from the hiking trails of his laboratory.

Of course, the entire effort is to put oneself
Outside the ordinary range
Of what is called statistics.

THE SEVEN INGREDIENTS - A TIBETAN PRELIMINARY PRACTICE

Many people are beginning to practice mindfulness in the West, but it is being presented to them stripped bare of its Buddhist roots in order to fit with the dominant secular, scientific-materialist worldview.  Of course, Buddhism doesn't own the copyright on mindfulness, and if a secular presentation of mindfulness helps people with their problems that's good. But from a Buddhist point of view the true power of the teachings require the total existential context of life and practice to be acknowledged.  The practice outlined here is an example of this.

In Buddhism, to progress on the path we need teachings to help us understand reality clearly and to practice accordingly.  But from our side we also need a store of positive energy - ‘merit’ in Buddhist language - to make us capable of understanding the teachings, capable of having faith in them, and to water the seeds of wisdom inside us.

The seven ingredients is a classic preliminary practice in Tibetan Buddhism, a way of purifying the mind of negativity and increasing one's store of virtuous energy in the mind.  With each ingredient we switch on a positive state of mind and nurture the roots of these virtuous states.

The following seven elements are all performed while sitting quietly in our meditation space. They are performed by the imagination.  Interestingly, modern brain research suggests that an imagined act performed with a concentrated mind triggers exactly the same neural pathways as when performing the act in reality.  So, for example, visualising making infinite offerings to the buddhas is internally resonant with actually making infinite offerings!

As we go through the seven ingredients in an actual practice session, don’t get hung up on doing it perfectly or ‘including everything’. Just trust your mind’s response in the moment and perform each element in a relaxed and engaged way, allowing the practice to flow naturally.

The seven ingredients are as follows:

Prostration: Visualising a special teacher (or teachers) in the space in front of us we imagine ourselves prostrating to them, purifying pride and rigidity of mind and expressing and deepening gratitude.  This makes us receptive to the power of the teachings and opens us up to the blessing-powers of the awakened ones.  Although the traditional language of the seven ingredients mentions 'prostrations' this first ingredient can be taken to mean any kind of expression of gratitude and re-establishing of commitment to our chosen path. If the image of prostrating feels alien to you simply imagine a heartfelt thank you for your chosen teacher having made the efforts to practice and realise the teachings themselves and pass them on to others.

Offerings: We imagine ourselves making offerings in whatever way feels right.  We may use a traditional Tibetan cosmology, lavish, spectacular and miraculous, with ourselves multiplied into millions of forms to make millions of offerings, accompanied by many other beings, both human and divine, a whole shining mandala-universe of beings scattering flower petals, offering incense, chanting praises, etc.  Or it may be more restrained and quiet - a single flower to a single buddha.   it may focus on contemporary elements from our world: art galleries, music, landscapes, technology - things that we are personally excited about or attached to.  It may be invisible and psychological - offering one's recent efforts to study and practice the spiritual path, or some other good action we have performed. We can even offer some good action that deeply attracts us but which we feel we aren’t able to perform at the present.  For example many people feel some archetypal wish to become a monk or nun while acknowledging that its not going to happen in this life.  And they experience this as a ‘failure’ of some sort.  But in buddhism, the genuine wish to perform an action is just as much a virtuous action as actually performing the action.  So we can visualise our perfect response to the world and offer this.

Confession: Making what has been hidden an open disclosure (within the symbolic space of visualised Buddhas, not out there in the real world!) fundamentally weakens the power of latent negative karma to grow, releases psychological blockages and turns the pent-up negative energy into a positive force. Again, there are many ways this can be done.  We can make a specific confession of some unskillful action that is weighing upon one's conscience, or we can make 'general confessions' such as confessing one's lack of faith and practice before the Buddhas. Confession practice purifies the mind of feelings of guilt and the feeling of being unable to let go of - of being defined by - one’s past negative actions. It also strengthens the mind that would refrain from such actions in the future.

Rejoicing: We call to mind all the wonderful things that people have done in this world, including ourselves, and re-affirm our appreciation of and commitment towards such behaviour.  This particular ingredient is called the lazy person’s path to buddhahood because it can be done quite effectively and pleasantly lying in bed or on the beach etc!  Rejoicing in the good actions and qualities of others purifies our mind of envy, and rejoicing in one’s own good actions strengthens the mind that would perform similar actions in the future.

Requesting teachings: The only way to transform ourselves from suffering beings into awakened ones is to hear accurate teachings that present a correct and complete path. Symbolically requesting teachings in this way nurtures one's store of virtue in this area.  It creates the karma to have teachings manifest in our lives in the future. We can ask for teachings to manifest in traditional and contemporary forms.  For example, I often ask for teachings to manifest in the form of contemporary art.

Requesting teachers to remain in this world and to manifest again and again in all our future lives: There are no teachings without teachers, and realised teachers can benefit us in many other ways too.  Just being around them, without anything being said, can have a transformative effect on our minds and hearts.  Requesting teachers and teachings to manifest in our world also directly purifies lifetimes of negative acts towards spiritual teachings, whether acts of negligence and laziness or active rejection and denial.

Offering the merit of our practice to all beings unconditionally: By sharing the merit of our practice with all beings we are acknowledging that we are all interdependent.  All beings support me in this life of mine.  The practice of generosity is the first step on the bodhisattva path (the path of a being who resolves to reach enlightenment in order to best help all other beings) and sharing one's merit with all beings is a powerful expression of this. As such, it helps to purify negative karma accrued towards other beings.

The seven ingredients also resonates as a purificatory practice of the three times.  The first two - prostrations and offerings - purifies the present moment by placing us imaginatively in the presence of awakened beings and behaving skillfully towards them.  Numbers three and four - confession and rejoicing - begin to purify past negative actions and to magnify past positive actions respectively.  And five and six create the karma to have teachers and teachings to manifest in the future.

Preliminary practices can often become the mainstay of a meditation session for tibetan practitioners.  In the tibetan tradition the need to increase our store of merit is quite keenly felt and such practices are considered more important than developing concentration etc.  But even if your practice is conducted within the secular mindfulness model there are times when one feels too tired and unfocused for the quiet purity of mindfulness sitting and a little time spent engaging the emotional and existential dimensions of practice - whether within or beyond the present limits of one’s imagination and rationale! - can re-energise one's session.

(NB the picture at the top of this post is of my first Tibetan teacher, Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche. I only met him a few times but he gave me my first initiations and not a day go by now without me mentioning his name within my practice sessions.  The picture is from Bruce Farley's article  "Blessing The World's Waterways", about Rinpoche collecting water from all of the eight major land masses on earth.)