[Image: looking up into the Ring Around a Tree playspace/bus shelter in Fuji, Japan. Click to enlarge; see the note at the foot of this post for more information.]
From whiskey river:
I always gained something from making myself better,
better than I am, better than I was,
that most subtle citation:
to recover some lost petal
of the sadness I inherited:
to search once more for the light that sings
inside of me, the unwavering light.
(Pablo Neruda)
…and:
We must know that it is not enough just to see what the Mind is, we must put into practice all that makes it up in our daily life. We may talk about it glibly, we may write books to explain it, but that is far from being enough. However much we may talk about water and describe it quite intelligently, that does not make it real water. So with fire. Mere talking of it will not make the mouth burn. To know what they are means to experience them in actual concreteness. A book on cooking will not cure our hunger. To feel satisfied we must have actual food. So long as we do not go beyond mere talking, we are not true knowers.
(Takuan Soho)
…and:
If you were to put aside what you know because of what other people told you, how much of what you know do you truly know for yourself?
(John Tarrant)
Not from whiskey river:
Layabout
Do nothing and everything will be done,
that’s what Mr. Lao Tzu said, who walked
around talking 2,500 years ago andnow his books practically grow on trees
they’re so popular and if he were
alive today beautiful women wouldrush up to him like waves lapping
at the shores of his wisdom.
That’s the way it is, I guess: humbling.But if I could just unclench my fists,
empty out my eyes, turn my mind into
a prayer flag for the wind to play with,we could be brothers, him the older one
who’s seen and not done it all and me
still unlearning, both of us slung lowin our hammocks, our hats tipped
forwards, hands folded neatly,
like bamboo huts, above our hearts.
(John Brehm [source])
…and:
In 1936 an NBC radio engineer named Claude Fetridge attempted to broadcast, live, the flight of the swallows from Mission San Juan Capistrano, in California. Unfortunately, that year the swallows skipped out of San Juan Capistrano on October 22, a day earlier than tradition calls for, and a lot of personnel and equipment arrived just in time to record nothing in particular. How does this relate? In H. Allen Smith’s words, “Fetridge’s Law, in simple language, states that important things that are supposed to happen do not happen, especially when people are looking or, conversely, things that are supposed to not happen do happen, especially when people are looking.”
(Barbara Wallraff [source])
…and:
Modern Love
It is summer, and we are in a house
That is not ours, sitting at a table
Enjoying minutes of a rented silence,
The upstairs people gone. The pigeons lull
To sleep the under-tens and invalids,
The tree shakes out its shadows to the grass,
The roses rove through the wilds of my neglect.
Our lives flap, and we have no hope of better
Happiness than this, not much to show for love
Than how we are, or how this evening is,
Unpeopled, silent, and where we are alive
In a domestic love, seemingly alone,
All other lives worn down to trees and sunlight,
Looking forward to a visit from the cat.
(Douglass Dunn [source])
You can be forgiven for hearing a phrase like “the artist known as Quayola” and thinking of either a certain musician, or a certain brand of children’s wax pencils, or both. Not so: Quayola is simply the working name of Davide Quagliola, a multimedia artist in London. From his Web site:
He investigates dialogues and the unpredictable collisions, tensions and equilibriums between the real and artificial, the figurative and abstract, the old and new. His work explores photography, geometry, time-based digital sculptures and immersive audiovisual installations and performances.
One of those “unpredictable collisions” occurs in the transition from analog (real-world) musical performances to digital (artificial) visual art. In particular, I’m taken with his Partitura project: software which analyzes music and, from it, creates beautiful 3D animations in real time. Here’s a demonstration:
What led me to Quayola in the first place, while working on this post? Visit the page for his Strata #1 project, and scroll down to the video labeled “ShortFilm”; before actually playing the video, just look at that still image — and think of the photo at the top of this post.
(By the way, the films on that page, and the pages for the two other Strata projects, are interesting in their own right. I have no idea how they were made; I think they’re “just” software-based manipulations — disassemblies and fracturings — of digital photographs of the building interiors where the films were shown.)
About the image: The Ring Around a Tree project was commissioned for the Fuji (Japan) Kindergarten. Tezuka Architects were charged with adding some play space to the main building, which they’d also designed; they opted to take advantage of a Japanese zelkova tree on the grounds. The tree had been killed (so it was thought) by a typhoon, some fifty years ago. Much to everyone’s surprise, the tree recovered and thrived, and became a natural playground for kids at the school. Generations of kids have climbed it.
The Ring Around a Tree seems from the outside to consist of two floors. In fact, it’s subdivided into six levels, cunningly walled and ceilinged off in various ways to encourage kids to move around while crouched or crawling as well as standing up: the sorts of poses they’d adopt were they still climbing the tree itself. (Graceful, thin — almost invisible– metal railings protect them from falls.)
The structure also serves as a shelter while waiting for the bus. If I were a kindergartener there, I’m not sure I’d get on the bus without being forced.
For more information, see the following sites (among others):
whaddayamean says
speaking of idea collision…
i have had neruda on the brain lately, weirdly. this poem, running over and over.
http://www.abuddhistlibrary.com/Buddhism/H%20-%20World%20Religions%20and%20Poetry/Poetry/Pablo%20Neruda/If%20You%20Forget%20Me/If%20You%20Forget%20Me%20translation.htm
[maybe not weirdly, since i did have to memorize it for spanish class back in high school–then again, that was more than a decade ago, so it’s weird it’s running through my head now. a message from the universe about romantic choices?)
marta says
Watched the other Strata videos. Dazzling work.
Nance says
Here’s what comes: When you write fiction, I think it must arise from a place that’s entirely your own (Tarrant, Brehm). I think of it as magic, because I’ve never tried to do it deliberately; I’m scared of it. But you’re not. You’ve learned how to play in the Fuji Kindergarten, barely saved by thin and graceful safeguards, stooping, reaching, crawling, climbing within a structure you’ve created from one mood and state of mind and now fill organically, mysteriously, from another one. Like the seemingly solid images that arise from Quayola’s music. All this is imagination, the use of the mind that goes beyond mere talking.
Sometimes, the best I can do about a given subject–like the political gyrations of the moment and what I’m told they mean–is to shut up and ask me. It’s almost unbearably exciting to think that I could do that for more than a few minutes and about anything, absolutely anything at all. I’d like to play on that playground before I leave here. And that’s all that the gurus suggest.
John says
whaddayamean: That is some poem (“If You Forget Me”) which you linked to. I can’t speak to its applicability (or not) to specific romantic choices, but I think a lot of people might recognize themselves in its narrator (or the second person to whom it’s addressed).
(One interesting thing about it: much as I like the language, and certainly recognize the tone, of the first few stanzas, the last stanza all on its lonesome makes reading the poem worthwhile.)
I don’t know if you’re familiar with the 1994 film Il Postino (The Postman). Neruda appears as a central character in the film, as a sort of romantic/poetic advisor to the protagonist. The soundtrack album included various Neruda poems read by celebrities (these readings didn’t appear in the film itself, only in the album). Among them was Madonna, doing a very creditable interpretation of “If You Forget Me.” It’s a favorite on YouTube, apparently, and here’s a simple version, with the lyrics onscreen synced up with Madonna’s voice:
(The woman in the photograph, according to the uploader, is Clara Bow, in a still from the 1927 silent film Wings. I have no idea what the connection might be from Neruda to Bow — or to Wings, for that matter… or from Madonna to either!)
John says
marta: I am in awe of artists in general. Multimedia artists? A whole other layer. But multimedia artists who apparently express their art through custom software??? Not surprisingly, the language doesn’t seem to have a single term for such a creature!
I loved those videos, too. And I loved the idea of their being set up as “installations,” room-size displays on the walls and ceiling. Must be disorienting, to say the least, to stand under a ceiling which repeatedly disassembles itself. :)
John says
Nance: “The best I can do is to shut up and ask me.” I think you may just have created the next great meme of political and social discourse. It works so well exactly because of the first person voice — waaaay too many people are guided by the alternatives, “The best YOU can do is to shut up and ask me” (the talk-show host) and “The best I can do is to shut up and ask YOU” (the talk-show audience).
The whole comment was such a thoughtful, thought-provoking reading of this post. Thank you!
Jayne says
I’m with Nance. Ditto on her first paragraph, and I want to be on that same playground, climbing the tree.
I enjoyed the pieces here, John. Still being on the mend I feel especially drawn to the soul/mind connection. Accessing that special space, the space we can’t see or hear, is a path to healing and understanding. (To thine own self be true.)
I’m in awe of not only the fundamental message here, but also of the diaphanous design of the structure that wraps around the tree. Its translucence is brilliant in that it is literally (and metaphorically) the reverse of “to see the forest through the trees.” Inherent within the design is the mind/body connection, encouraging the little ones to engage body and all senses as part of the curriculum–to see their own unique tree. (Which, I think, comes more naturally to children, anyway.)
It’s the most creative little multi-use tree wrapping I’ve ever seen.
And the digital renderings of the mind/body connection are profound in that they provide tangible evidence of the things we lowly humans cannot see or hear. It’s interesting though, as I watched some of the videos, I wondered how we are to process all of this information. How we may be equipped to do so in the future… It’s mind boggling.
John says
Jayne: I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do justice, in a review, to the book I’m reading now (and have been reading for weeks and weeks). It’s James Gleick’s The Information: a detail-packed history of communication — information-spreading — technology. (The opening chapter is about the “language” “spoken” by African tribes’ drummers.)
One of the points he makes is that (many) humans have pretty much always felt overwhelmed by how much there is to know. Others worry ceaselessly about the paradoxically overlapping disconnect of knowledge, data, and wisdom… about how relatively easy it is to accumulate information, and how relatively difficult it is — especially if one spends a lifetime soaking in ever more information — to convert information into deep understanding.
But he also makes the point (or, okay, his sources do) that we are changed by deep, long-term exposure to each new leap in technology. And by “changed” I believe he means that it all affects us “under the hood” — rewires us in some way.
A whole sub-genre of science fiction, at least years ago, takes as its premise the more or less contemporaneous birth around the world of children with some sort of special powers (usually including telepathic communication) beyond what we think of as “human.” I bet the kids climbing about in that Ring Around the Tree structure will be subtly different, in some way, from the generations who made do with the tree alone.
Jayne says
@John – @John – Sounds like a book I’m going to have to pick up.
Here’s how I feel: like I’m fairly smart, but not as smart as I wish I were, or as I need to be. (And floating somewhere between the two is frustrating.) Not nearly smart enough to understand the rocket scientist, or politics, for that matter. I obviously need “deep, long-term exposure.” ;)
Those lucky tree children.
(ReCaptcha: eyAudi Not. — that’s funny!)
John says
Jayne: Gleick’s Web site is very nice. And he’s another of those non-fiction authors (McPhee! Mary Roach! Tracy Kidder!) with an appetite apparently for everything, and how do I get one of these people’s jobs, anyway?!? :)
s.o.m.e. one's brudder says
@John –
I think that you write like you do, but longer and get someone to publish it ;-)
John says
brudder: “Oof. That smarts.” :)
Actually, though, there may be more truth to it than you know. I often wonder why I read more non-fiction than fiction… but seem to prefer writing the latter. Maybe I should try the James Gleick/Mary Roach/John McPhee approach to publication!
s.o.m.e.one's brudder says
@John – not intended as a dig, I hope you understood. More that your “non-fiction” is as literate as the aforementioned authors. Yours just hasn’t had the chance to breathe that theirs has.
John says
brudder: Yeah, I knew no dig meant. I didn’t read it that way. My comment was along the lines of I know, I know — tell me about it! Said in the voice of, oh, Jud Hirsch’s character in Independence Day. :)