Re: <documenta X><blast>
Keller Ann Easterling (kae3@columbia.edu)
Tue, 22 Jul 1997 10:40:46 -0400 (EDT)
Eve and all.
I guess it is just another example of imprecise writing on my part. That
statement was just a bit of revery. It referred to no one, except that it
was prompted by pleasure at reading these entries/postings.
I think I have a sense that certain kinds of virtual training is not
broadly understood. For instance, I really value the way actors train
their bodies and minds for certain kinds of storage capabilities and
special prompts. I have received some of this training. I find however
that I am always embarrassed to go on too much about it, because someone
inevitably thinks I am talking about some kind of mystical or spiritual
unknowable practice. While I don't judge the mystical and spiritual
harshly, I would like to avoid the confused association, since I think
those practices or storage or prompt or substitution are very simple and
workmanlike on some level. They are simply underused mental faculties
that I like to demystify.
In the architecture world I encounter the same thing sometimes amongst a
group of thinkers that mostly love to resolve things in terms of
geometry.They pretend to be scientists. It is hard to convince them that
the architecture may be in someone's mind. That it does nto have tobe
physical.
So maybe it is not a broader culture,but my own narrow culture
that I respond to. Still, the kinds of poetry that one finds in
vernacular speech or some of the very beautiful entries in this log (I
actually was thinking of some of yours, Eve) which reflect more accurately
some of the actual working of memory, mind, body relationship etc. always
struggle against the official structure of our occidental language. So
often it seems that these very common and simple skills we all have are
rarified or have to struggle for articulation. I like the struggle myself,
and I am used to it, but sometimes I think about the fact that when I am
working as an architect, I have 3000 page
dictionaries to describe every permuation and combination of geometry and
no common words to describe reciprocal relationships between small
physical adjustments to the space and the vast virtual worlds they touch.
I was writing at one of those moments and adding nothing new. I thought I
was really only seconding some previous postings.
As we say in the south, "I didn't mean anything by it."