Incoming Links

• February 23rd, 2021

  Our structured institutions today offer little opportunity for personal living and speaking. The real living of people is mostly dulled and silent, inside them, alone [...] Focusing is only a piece of an answer. It lets people find their own inner source of direction. It can be a source of new Patterns, devised freshly by each individual [...] A society of Pattern-makers is coming. It cannot help but be a society in which people are also more sensitive to, and intolerant of, social brutalities and oppressions, and more able to act to change them.

• February 25th, 2021

  In the writings of David Chapman, the world is both Pattern and Nebulosity in a marvellous dance.

  Pattern is what makes the world interpretable—what makes it make sense. Perceiving pattern is needed for all effective action—whether you are a person or a bug. *

  Such games present worlds of exaggerated Pattern, not in the sense of the formal Rationalism that Chapman criticizes for its fake objectivity but in a playful, naïve, and enchanted way.

  The discourse may promote an idea that children are innocent of the conceptual illusions of the adult world, but babies quickly emerge from Nebulosity into the shared world of Pattern. They learn a small set of important nouns: milk, car, ball. They develop their repertoires of actions. Mechanisms like buttons are hypnotizingly interesting.

  Graeber focuses specifically on rules and Narrative, rather than on the distinctness of objects and actions, but he demonstrates very nicely how these fantasy worlds are pleasurable in part because of their mythic, childish exaggeration of Pattern.

• February 26th, 2021

  As Eldritch points out, the word Plot usually refers to the coherent narrative that a typical screenplay needs, but it's also characteristically used by conspiracy theorists and potheads to refer to an illusory Pattern projected on the world's Nebulosity.

• February 27th, 2021

  📝 Pattern in the World

  I've been mentioning David Chapman's use of the terms Pattern and Nebulosity, like in yesterday's post about plot:

  Today it struck me that I think there's a tendency to basically associate Pattern with Mind and Nebulosity with Nature, like in the notion that the physical universe itself is essentially just a nebulous flux, and pattern is this mental overlay of conceptual projection.

  That Grammar is not just a product of culture or interpretation; it's grounded in physical, nonhuman Pattern in the landscape, the seasons, biology, etc.

• March 27th, 2021

  thinking about Patterns

• Thread on @kev_mcg's The Game of Quality

  and here is @kev_mcg making it clear how Christopher Alexander's style of enhancing the Centers in the environment inspired by Patterns is a way of reenchanting the world in a direct, material, pushing-atoms-around kind of way https://t.co/iA5oq5mcwX

  the multiplayer aspect of mythic Pattern enaction is basically what I find fascinating about Alasdair MacIntyre's conception of the narrative unity of lives within communities and traditions https://t.co/k4kueNYq8n

• Gendlin and Alexander: #Draft 1

  It seems to me that they would enjoy each other’s company. They both have a warmness, but combined with a kind of grandfatherly severity, a seriousness of purpose. They see a world that’s torn apart and made ugly by humanity’s ruptured attunement, modernity’s reductive analysis, the imposition of Patterns that fail to cohere and heal. And they have both spent decades developing practices that seem to border on the mystical, outside of mainstream practice, compelled to admit that they have discovered something vital and wholesome and forgotten.

• Gendlin and Alexander: #Draft 2

  The thing can’t be described, it’s as much outside the realm of language and opinion as the taste of tea, but working with it will involve bringing it into contact with concepts, Patterns, and blueprints, though it will always exceed those forms.

  Christopher Alexander’s basic approach to architecture is to work with this kind of bodily wisdom and intentionality, to learn to follow “the direction of healing and life.” Contact with felt senses then allows for explication, unfolding, and formulating conceptual Patterns that can be shared with others in the practice of building. From The Timeless Way of Building:

  A pulsating, fluid, but nonetheless definite entity swims in your mind’s eye. It is a geometrical image, it is far more than the knowledge of the problem; it is the knowledge of the problem, coupled with the knowledge of the kinds of geometrics which will solve the problem, and coupled with the feeling which is created by that kind of geometry solving that problem. It is, above all, a feeling—a morphological feeling. This morphological feeling, which cannot be exactly stated, but can only be crudely hinted at by any one precise formulation, is at the heart of every Pattern.

  The search for a name is a fundamental part of the process of inventing or discovering a Pattern. So long as a Pattern has a weak name, it means that it is not a clear concept, and you cannot clearly tell me to make “one” [...] But it is very hard to be precise. Even once you are determined to do it it is terribly hard to make precise statements which really get to the heart of the matter.

  Juxtaposing Eugene Gendlin and Christopher Alexander, I had an initial felt sense that they had something in common, and I think I got a handle on why. They’re both “healers” who see the body as a source of teleological wisdom. They think the world will be better when we learn to heal ourselves and our environments, making continual reference to dimly perceived signals of goodness and beauty, allowing ourselves to attend quietly and sensitively to the knots and errors we feel in our bodies and in the world, learning to craft new Patterns to resolve these tensions and share these in communities of practice. And they see the world as it is today as lacking in this kind of sensitivity, leading to a dullness and deadness in the social and built environments.

  Our structured institutions today offer little opportunity for personal living and speaking. The real living of people is mostly dulled and silent, inside them, alone [...] Nonconformity has always been possible, of course. But those who rejected traditional Patterns often found themselves adrift, lost, without values and standards [...] If we are busily discarding old forms and Patterns, what will replace them? New forms that are equally fixed and painful? [...] Focusing is only a piece of an answer. It lets people find their own inner source of direction. It can be a source of new Patterns, devised freshly by each individual [...] Instead of static structures we need structure-making [...] A society of Pattern-makers is coming. It cannot help but be a society in which people are also more sensitive to, and intolerant of, social brutalities and oppressions, and more able to act to change them.

• 📰 Open-Ended Curiosity | Meaningness

  Open-ended curiosity is a texture of the complete stance. It flows naturally from understanding the inseparability of Nebulosity and Pattern. Open-ended curiosity avoids fixating meaningness into pre-determined categories.

• 📙 Being-In-The-World

  These practices are not taught by the parents. They do not know that there is any Pattern to what they are doing, or even that they are doing anything.

• 📙 Focusing

  Nonconformity has always been possible, of course. But those who rejected traditional Patterns often found themselves adrift, lost, without values and standards. Focusing replaces those Patterns with a way of making new Patterns.

  If we are busily discarding old forms and Patterns, what will replace them? New forms that are equally fixed and painful? New forms can come from inside each person instead of being imposed from outside. A world in which this happens won’t be a world in which people get forced into forms that cramp and hurt. It will be a world in which forms are used in a new way.

  Many people today are struggling with a baffling fact: The old Patterns that are supposed to make life work—and once did—no longer serve. Being a parent today, for example, doesn’t work if we try to do it as our parents did, yet no other form is established for us to follow. We have to make it up as we go along— often learning that what we just did was wrong.

  Similarly, some women find the housewife role empty and intolerable, but are often unprepared for anything else even if they know what it might be. The Pattern of being a woman is changing, but people argue whether it is changing into this or that new Pattern, as if eventually, somehow, a fixed form must be imposed.

  These old Patterns once were useful. The mass of people (always with odd exceptions) fitted themselves into the roles and routines they were assigned and which gave them an inner life of emotions. Only a small number of educated and thinking people created roles and Patterns. But today this dependence on routines and roles has changed. A large part of the mass of people are educated and literate. The creativity and creative needs of people have expanded, and now the routines are too confining. People find that they have feelings that are far more complex than accepted roles either demand or offer.

  Focusing is only a piece of an answer. It lets people find their own Inner source of direction. It can be a source of new Patterns, devised freshly by each individual.

  Instead of having only the predictable, expected emotions the roles call for, we often have unclear feelings. They are unclear because “clear” feelings are those that are already Patterned. We must make new phrases to express these unclear feelings, and new forms of action to carry the feelings into daily life. This is the process of form-making.

  A society of Pattern-makers is coming. It cannot help but be a society in which people are also more sensitive to, and intolerant of, social brutalities and oppressions, and more able to act to change them.

• 📙 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

  Act-centred ethics, because they focus on discrete acts and moral quandaries, are naturally very interested in formulating decision procedures for making practical Choices. . . . Agent-centred ethics, on the other hand, focus on long-term characteristic Patterns of action, intentionally downplaying atomic acts and particular Choice situations in the process.

• 📙 The Nature of Order

  But something far more important was also happening. The piece of information unloosed the possibility of feelings which people had, but were not aware they had. Many people do not experience what they feel, because they are cut off from it. The deeper and more vulnerable feeling that arises in them as they approach the I, especially, may be unavailable to their experience. They do not necessarily recognize it in themselves when it is happening, sometimes do not experience it at all. But, with an intellectual focus which places attention on the alcove Pattern, a person could become aware—in thinking about an alcove, or seeing one, or experiencing one in use—of the subtle feeling of this one kind, which wells up in those who are related to the existence of the alcove, and make them aware, too, of its non-existence, in a room where possibilities of intimacy are missing. The effect, then, is an awareness of intimacy as a feature of space, and an awareness of the link that exists between this feeling and the physical geometry of the environment. Thus the person becomes conscious of a more rounded and deeper relation between the shape of the physical world, even the existence of the physical world, and the evolution of their own emotions and feelings during daily life.

• 📙 The Practice of Everyday Life

  Place de 1'Etoile, Concorde, Poissonniere... These constellations of names provide traffic Patterns: they are stars directing itineraries. "The Place de la Concorde does not exist," Malaparte said, "it is an idea." It is much more than an "idea." A whole series of comparisons would be necessary to account for the magical powers proper names enjoy. They seem to be carried as emblems by the travellers they direct and simultaneously decorate.

• 📙 The Spell of the Sensuous

  Merleau-Ponty’s first point is that words, even when they finally achieve the ability to carry referential and, eventually, conceptual levels of meaning, never completely lose that primitive, strictly phonemic, level of ‘affective’ meaning which is not translatable into their conceptual definitions. There is, he argues, an affective tonality, a mode of conveying meaning beneath the level of thought, beneath the level of the words themselves … which is contained in the words just insofar as they are Patterned sounds, as just the sounds which this particular historical language uniquely uses, and which are much more like a melody—a ‘singing of the world’—than fully translatable, conceptual thought. Merleau-Ponty is almost alone among philosophers of language in his sensitivity to this level of meaning.…3