The takeaway: it is possible to decide nothing can be done because you can’t figure it out. And the content that could be info, or not, the content that looks and hits like info, but isn’t, is the annotation that looks like connotation and robs you, mugs you in the dark alley of your fears. Robs you of your agency and your satisfaction of a day well lived.
I navigate in a world where rock-solid facts account for 10% of my experience. WHen sober, I can overestimate that number by about 50%. When I am at work architecting, the real number jumps to 70% – I am designing a future reality. I choose steel, wood, glass, ceramic and arrange them to be in the service my clients request. In time, those drawings are used by the crafts and tradespersons to make sense of thier world. Soon we have a physical thing before us.
Or do we?
40 years after encountering the central questions of creation, I still marvel at the interweaving of plain, recognizable objects into a “thing”, explainable, solid and a gateway to madness. That’s if we ask too many questions.
There are passages in music I do not understand. I can play those parts, recital form. I can emote through them, emphasize and accent one way or another. I can explain them. But I still do not understand. Why those notes? I cannot understand how six bars of one melody and another six bars of completely different melody come together in a unified refreshment of my world view. The Camera Eye is six songs in one. All cooperating for one exuberant experience.
This is the difference between a handful of timber thrown together in stud frame reliability and a magical mesh of bramble. Both practical, both necessary, both hewn from the liveliness of fibrous water pumps we know as trees.
What I have just presented is the intertwining of content and information, the easily solved and the unsolvable. Peart, Lee and Lifeson will never be able to explain the interlude in Camera Eye to anyone’s satisfaction. The best we can hope for is a tale invoking “being in the way” of ideas that have lives of their own, seeking able-bodied craftsmen to bring them to life.
Amusing, and inactionable. Ish.
I have three or four madnesses at once. One of them is that I suffer too often from the delusion that unsolvable problems aren’t. Discrete, simple, systematic steps are sufficient to make a good life. Honestly, there is no explaining my life. How I was born in this time, with these leanings, is beyond anyone’s comprehension. And I am suspicious of anyone who ties my life into a neat package. That I stand before you, as seemingly complete and inevitable is never a forgone conclusion. From where I stand, all that has happened is the trees I have passed through, the clouds I have sailed under and over. And I could no more predict my next three days, than I could have 40 years ago.
The same can be said for a project that comes to life as you envisioned. Our clients are in possession of our outcomes. The only way around that is to be a force of nature larger than their imaginations. If you are kind, then that force will be the power of spring, of birth, of renewal and redemption. We use the word love to mean all these things.
And yet our clients too are at the whims of your decisions. You put the means of egress left. It governs how they move for the next twenty years. Can they change it? Yes. Will they? Unlikely. Because the process of creation, especially for those who don’t engage daily, is one of great emotional stress and strain.
What happens on your drawing boards is more of a mystery to them than it is to you. They will attempt to seek information – concrete, solid, repeatable methodology about that left sided egress. But you know as well as I that you could have put it center, or right, or made it solid, or glass, full of light or red or green. Mysteriously, it went left, with wood finish and a 1/4 light metal frame. Yes, yes, we had to put eight classrooms, each with an entrance, into a “system” of navigability. I found this class using that system. But neither the system nor the classroom are the thing happening right now.
To be oblivious to this part of our experience is safe, mentally. You can go a long way. You can make a living. But somewhere in our souls we will always yearn for the undiscovered country from which we originated and may return. Metaphor? Maybe. But the salmon and the Monarchs seem to show us that yearning isn’t ours alone.
Assume most of what’s going on in my experience is unpredictable and unknowable. Get comfy with that. Get comfy exploring and experimenting with combinations of light, dark, color and framing that work sometimes. And most importantly find partners and collaborators who understand what you are doing and have as much capacity for the discomfort as you do. We are either on a marvelous adventure or nothing at all.
“And yet, what fun, to get involved, to fall in love, to get attached. It’s a balance trick.”