Category: Uncategorized

8002: Truth in Architecture

Thoughts on Eisenman to be elaborated in the future.

Is Peter Eisenman’s search for “presentness”/”aura” limited by trying to find it in the object of architecture? Does he know he’s found it by the very fact that he is searching?

There is simultaneously no truth in architecture, and truth displayed in every architecture as well as everywhere else (though not necessarily self-consciously). When Eisenman speaks of the artist Valerio Adami’s lack of aura, he speaks of this lack of self-consciousness, though I am not sure he knows it. The post-modernist attempts to break away from transcendent truths underlying modernism are part of the truth in and of themselves, ironically, though post-modernism tries to deny that there is a singular truth. Because no languages or concepts are powerful, cutting, encompassing, or rich enough to describe singular truth, all analysis attempted with language, or indeed analysis itself, is doomed to not find it. Eisenman’s attempt to “identify a condition in architecture that resists interpretation,” (Eisenman 2007) a condition he refers to as aura or “presentness” seems to point towards truth.

Peter Eisenman. Written Into The Void: Selected writings, 1990-2004. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007.

6011: A cat who cannot relax

“Whenever you are unhappy, there’s an unconscious belief that the unhappiness will buy you what you want … Negativity does not work. Instead of attracting a desirable condition, it stops it from arising. Instead of dissolving an undesirable one, it keeps it in place. Its only useful function is that it strengthens the ego, and that is why the ego loves it.

Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change; it would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry, or hard-done-by person. You will then ignore, deny, or sabotage the positive in your life. This is a common phenomenon. It is also insane.

Negativity is totally unnatural. It is a psychic pollutant, and there is a deep link between the poisoning and destruction of nature, and the vast negativity that has accumulated in the collective human psyche. No other life form on the planet knows negativity. Only humans. Just as no other life form violates and poisons the earth that sustains it.

Have you ever seen an unhappy flower or stressed oak tree? Have you come across a depressed dolphin? A frog who has a problem with self-esteem? A cat who cannot relax? Or a bird who carries hatred and resentment?” -Eckhart Tolle

6007: Victimhood

I think every human needs some time to feel like a victim. That is – the state of being a child.

Our caregivers rescue us children with differing degrees of success, or we as children end up rescuing them. Sometimes we don’t have a chance to be children ourselves, and then out of necessity the victimhood state comes out in our “adult” years as we encounter more challenges and complexity in the world. In this case that our caregivers did not rescue us, either they believed in some sort of “tough love” philosophy of child-rearing, or they simply did not notice we need rescuing, or were unable to recognize the need and/or do the rescuing because of their own emotional immaturity.

In the opposite case, our caregivers were relatively skilled at rescuing us and teaching us tools to rescue ourselves, and we gradually overcome the need to feel the victim, freeing us to be empowered adults.

6004: Love letter to Toronto

Living in Toronto is like a dependent relationship. Seductive and addictive, once I start, it’s difficult to stop. I came here for opportunities in in career, creativity, and friendship, and got these in spades. They come at the cost of Toronto sucking my life blood with capitalism trying its darndest to get the monopoly on social connection, the general social emotional closedness, and high cost of living, not to mention the gut wrenching process people go through when looking for a halfway decent place to live.