I've been lost in The Nature of Order for the past couple weeks, but have returned to Ugly Feelings now and then. The entire chapter on 'animatedness' is behind me now, hazy. I'm in 'envy'.

P. 308 - 309, on SIMPLE HAPPINESS
life --- because of its structures, the field of centers --- is inextricably connected with human feeling. . . . things [with life] are important. We cannot separate them, or our awareness of them, from the fact that they have feeling and induce feeling in us.
     This deep feeling is indeed a mark of life in things. . . . we become happy in the presence of [this].
. . .
     In this idea, we shall cross the nearly uncrossable gulf created by the Cartesian view of things and extend our grasp to a new post-Cartesian view. In the Cartesian view, the objective structure of the world is one thing, our own happiness is something entirely different and remote from it. In the post-Cartesian view, the wholeness of the world and our feeling of happiness together are understood to be two complementary things which form a single unity.

//

The post-Cartesian view... Alexander is making more and less sense to me again. Especially under the next header, FEELING AS THE INWARD ASPECT OF LIFE, he reasserts his position suggested by this last sentence that he really is speaking about reality as... to me, it sounds like some kind of place that really is made of "person-stuff" (he uses this term), while also insisting that this is not an anthropocentric perspective...

But I love so much of this. I feel as though an anthropocentric perspective is what is needed, is what I need. Not a naively pre-Cartesian perspective, but a self-aware anthropocentrism. This is what the post-Cartesian represents --- not a rejection of the truth of the 20th century mechanistic viewpoint, but a rejection of the centrality of that truth to human lives and values. Our human lives and values must be their own center, marrying Cartesian logic with some pre-Cartesian centering.

The universe does not revolve around us, but we must still revolve around us.

Our understanding of the universe must still revolve around us.

EDIT :: I mixed up Cartesian with Copernican. Some of these thoughts are likely wrongly constructed as a result.

P. 298
. . . you may agree, I hope, . . . that the nature of order as I have defined it, in principle at least can finally bridge the gap that Alfred North Whitehead called "the bifurcation of nature." It unites the objective and subjective, it shows us that order . . . is both rooted in substance and rooted in feeling, is at once objective in a scientific sense, yet also substantial in the sense of poetry, . . . It means that the four-hundred-year-old split created between objective and subjective, and the separation of humanities and arts from science and technology can one day disappear . . . in a synthesis which opens the door to a form of living in which we may be truly human.
     Above all, this is the threshold of a new kind of objectivity.

PART TWO

P. 269, on LOCAL SYMMETRIES IN NATURE
A Rorschach blot is symmetrical as a whole, but possesses no significant symmetries at lower scales. This kind of form, random at lower levels but symmetrical in the large, is relatively uncommon in nature. Contrast it with snow crystals which [are symmetrical in the whole but also] display symmetries at many levels.

P. 210 - 212, on ROUGHNESS
. . . we probably attribute this charm [the charm of ROUGHNESS] to the fact that the bowl is handmade and that we can see, in the roughness, the trace of a human hand, and know therefore that it is personal, full of human error.
     This interpretation is fallacious, and has entirely the wrong emphasis. The reason that this roughness in the design contributes so greatly to the wholeness . . . throughout the design the subtle variation of the brush-strokes and their spacing, are done in such a way that each brush-stroke has a size perfectly suited to its place . . . exactly where it needs to be to create the most beautiful and positive white space between the strokes . . . this simply could not be obtained if the brush-strokes were all exactly the same size, or placed at exactly equal intervals.
. . .
The seemingly rough arrangement is more precise because it comes from a much more careful guarding of the essential centres in the design. . . . Roughness can never be consciously or deliberately created. Then it is merely contrived. To make a thing live, its roughness must be the product of egolessness, the product of no will. . . . in a spirit of childish abandon --- certainly not with a careful, contrived desire to make it "interesting." In this sense, roughness is always the product of abandon --- it is created whenever a person is truly free, and doing only whatever is essential[.]

[PINGBACK: ugly feelings, post #32]

There is something from an earlier page itching at me. I enjoy producing and observing simulations... the idea has occurred to me that the 'real' way to produce such a 'natural'-feeling thing is to, indeed, simulate such flow fields, such natural symmetries in the forces at play in the work.

Whereas Alexander puts these 'properties' first, supposing that the properties themselves are what 'create life'. In other words, Alexander seems to propose that these properties are the source of life, rather than signifiers of life.

I do not mean to minimize the significance of signifiers of life: it is truly remarkable to think that art arises from an appeal to the innate human sense for life, not merely pattern recognition, but a form of pattern recognition evolved to find life beautiful.

What does it even mean for something to 'have life'? If we (humans) possess an inherent ability to detect features which signify 'life' that has a highly sophisticated rate of success, why should I care whether a thing truly has 'life' or whether I am simply learning the art of crafting false positives?

These false positives may very well be a deep and profound sense of beauty. Supposing we all live on the same, or similar, software as the creatures we relate to most, an appealing place which is recognized as having 'life' will in fact attract life, draw it in, make it feel welcome and . . . indeed, alive.

P. 261 - 262, on POSITIVE SPACE in nature
In the majority of naturally developed wholes, the wholes and spaces between wholes form an unbroken continuum. This arises because the wholes form "from the inside" according to their specific functional organization . . . illustrated in the next page, [in the example] of ink flowing in gelatin, the river of ink has its own laws and its own pressure, as does the gelatin. The same thing happens with the crystals which take on coherent polyhedral shapes as they butt into each other while they grow.
. . .
In the crazing of porcelain . . . As the surface cools, the glaze shrinks, forming cracks. The areas bounded by cracks are coherent in shape because the cracks follow maximum stress lines and form in such a way to relieve maximum stress. As a result, the areas bounded by the cracks all turn out to have good shape, more or less compact, and all about the same size.

P. 267, on LOCAL SYMMETRIES in nature
. . . these symmetries occur in nature because there is no reason for asymmetry; an asymmetry only occurs when it  is forced. Thus, for instance, a water drop, falling through the air, is asymmetrical along its length, because the flow-field is differentiated in the direction of the fall,  but symmetrical around its vertical axis, because there is no differentiation between any one horizontal direction and any other. In short, things tend to be "equal" unless there are particular forces making them equal.

As I read this next section about the fifteen properties in nature, it occurs to me that my '"cognitive" interpretation' stops at the mind when it could go a step further -- the mind is this way, yes, but why? It seems to make sense that the mind's pattern-recognition should have some purpose. Basic human-nature aesthetics must come from somewhere. It must be based on perceiving something for gain.

It makes me so mad to keep reading this (for reasons already stated)! But I have been thinking about a lens of party planning, of designing spaces which allow play -- life, even! -- to emerge, and this next chapter title is so, so tempting, seen through this lens.

Let's do it.



P. 244
A skeptical reader could . . . make relatively light of these claims. According to a "cognitive" interpretation, the centers could merely exist in the mind's eye (as products of cognition), and the fifteen properties, which apparently make the centers work, could also exist merely as artifacts of cognition. According to such an interpretation, it might be said that buildings and works of art look good when they are made of centers in the way I have described, simply because they correspond somehow to deep cognitive structures --- that is, to the way human perception and cognition work. In this interpretation, these explanations would be a powerful way of understanding the psychology of buildings and works of art --- and would tell us something important and significant about visual phenomena in the world.

//

I have been called out. I was finally getting into this book and was happy to let this question of objective world vs phenomenal model sit on the back burner, in the pantry, in the  freezer, but here Alexander is making it clear that he intends to directly challenge this precise difference in perspective. Well.

I have feelings about this, but I can't tell whether they're good or not.

When I came upon that block of text for the first time I was a little frustrated that this was the way these properties were being presented, a little confused that they would be allowed to run together, to none of them take center stage on their own line . . . it wasn't a really bad feeling, it compelled me to move forward and take in each one in turn, in depth. And now, thinking back to my response, I am fond of the way they are presented, none of them alone, the boundary between item to item somewhat ambiguous. Whether serendipitous or not, I am fond of many features of this block of text.

I'm often frustrated when reading large dense nonfiction books when there is no good wrap-up, no good concluding summary, no good clear overview of a topic. I'm making my peace with it; there isn't always a good list for me to take away. Lists that prize separateness in their items are nice lists, but perhaps are not alive.

~ Lists

Nowhere in the book do I find a plain text list of the fifteen properties and I suppose this must be on purpose. They have a natural quality this way, a running-togetherness. On the pages 239-241 there are a list of the fifteen properties but accompanied by drawings and additional descriptive words. The closest is, on page 144, this block of text:

Quote                           [..] 1. LEVELS OF
SCALE,  2.  STRONG CENTERS,  3.  BOUNDARIES,
4.   ALTERNATING  REPETITION,   5.  POSITIVE
SPACE, 6.  GOOD SHAPE, 7. LOCAL  SYMMETRIES,
8.  DEEP INTERLOCK  AND  AMBIGUITY, 9.  CON-
TRAST,   10.   GRADIENTS,   11.   ROUGHNESS,
12. ECHOES, 13. THE VOID, 14. SIMPLICITY AND
INNER CALM, 15. NOT-SEPARATENESS.

~ Lists
~ A NEW SET OF VERBS, INSPIRED BY THE NATURE OF ORDER

The way each of these fifteen properties blend into one another is beautiful, in following themselves. There are echoes between the properties, a non-separateness, an ambiguity as to where one ends and another begins.

Not-separateness relies on deep interlock and ambiguity, which in turn describes the nature of boundaries: those boundaries must have a roughness to them, but also contrast. The center should have echoes of things outside. . .

repeating but not repeating.

P. 233, on not-separateness
If you believe that the thing you are making is self-sufficient, if you are trying to show how clever you are, to make something that asserts its beauty, you will fall into the error of losing, [of] failing, not-separateness. The correct connection to the world will only be made if you are conscious, willing, that the thing you make be indistinguishable from its surroundings; that, truly, you cannot tell where one ends and the next begins, and you do not even want to be able to do so. . . . This quality, geometrically, depends especially on the state of the boundary. In things which have not-separateness, there is often a fragmented boundary, an incomplete edge, which destroys the hard line. . . . the actual boundary is sometimes rather careless, deliberately placed to avoid any simple complete sharp cutting off of the thing from its surroundings --- a randomness in the actual boundary line which allows the thing to be connected to the world.