Patterns

[Image: ‘Elements Modular Kitchen,’ by Matthew Gilbride — a concept which took third place in the 2010 Design Lab competition sponsored by Electrolux, the appliance manufacturer. What you see in this photo are actually seven of the Y-shaped “kitchens,” each of which has an array of buttons in the little blue strip you can see on the outer edges of the surface. The buttons determine whether a given unit is being used for “cooking, refrigeration, air conditioning, [or] lighting.” The caption on the photo at Flickr continues: “The appliance draws power wirelessly through technology applied to the wall, which is supplemented through solar energy as required. Multiple units and surfaces automatically work together through wireless smart networking, whilst customisation is offered by being able to install the units as the user prefers.”]

From whiskey river:

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

(Joshua Foer [source])

…and:

Correspondences
(excerpt)

Sometimes we are led through the doorway
by a child, sometimes
by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing
the past, for if there is anything we must change
it is the past. To look back
and see another map.

Love enough to fill
a shoe, a suitcase, a bit of ink,
a painting, a child’s eyes at a chalkboard,
a bit of chalk, a bit of
bone in ash.

All that is cupped,
all that is emptied

the rush of water from a pump,
a word spelled out
on a palm.

(Anne Michaels [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book):

In a dream I am walking joyfully up the mountain. Something breaks and falls away, and all is light. Nothing has changed, yet all is amazing, luminescent, free. Released at last, I rise into the sky… This dream comes often. Sometimes I run, then lift up like a kite, high above earth, and always I sail transcendent for a time before awaking. I choose to awake, for fear of falling, yet such dreams tell me that I am a part of things, if only I would let go, and keep on going. “Do not be heavy,” Soen Roshi says. “Be light, light, light—full of light!”

(Peter Matthiessen [source])

[Read more…]

This is the first of an occasional series of posts centered around my fascination with patterns: visible patterns, audible rhythms, simple habits of being.

How I first came to read science fiction is anybody’s guess. I don’t think any of my friends read it, and I can’t remember any adult steering me in that direction. Possibly, the main draw was that the town library (as I recall) maintained a completely separate section for fantasy and SF — completely separate, that is, from the age-defined “children’s books” and “adult books” sections. Unlike those in the kids’ area, the F/SF section’s books weren’t big-format with lots of pictures. They had lots of words, like the inch-thick (and beyond) monsters of the adult section. But, unlike with the adult section, the librarians didn’t care how old you were. No one took F/SF seriously enough. How could anyone, even a child, possibly come to harm of even the psychological sort by reading about adventures in science, space, and time?

Of course there was plenty of conventional SF available — space operas, mad scientists, that sort of thing. But every now and then, especially in the SF anthologies of short stories, you’d come across something which really made your little pre-high-school brain jump to its toes, throw its arms wide, and turn inside-out. One such story for me — one of the most disturbing stories I’d ever read, remaining so for a long time — was Alfred Bester’s 1959 tale called “The Pi Man.”

[Read more…]

“…Light, Light, Light!”

Patterns: The Pi Man