Moths
Moths enthralled by electric light
Their soft wings fluttering against hot glass
Would moths dance with, or perish in an open flame?
I see them dancing.
I am a moth to your light
I want to be in the middle of your flame
But I’m stopped by the glass.
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.
A rock stays put and little by little is eroded or swept away by water.
Water flows everywhere and takes the path of least resistance, affecting everything in its path. Water always gets through over time.
If people give up fighting greed and ego, the human species will suffer increasingly until we kill ourselves off
