Build, Break, Bloom: Some Very Unorganized Thoughts About Architecture

(Written weeks ago)

Contingency itself is the only condition of life and all things in existence pivot around a point of contingency. I am contingent. You are contingent. Life is contingent.

Time and space are the constants under which we manipulate our reality and define things. Our physical environment sits unassumingly as the culprit of Apollonian violence. Quite literally, architecture is the pinnacle of the Apollonian-Dionysian struggle. The violence is unbearable sometimes. Existing within a vacancy of meaning while warped by a Dionysian chaos, this time-space experiment remains defined by mathematical boundaries, points and lines. Mastery of it is elusive in the sense that ‘truths’ are only as figured out as we determine them to be. It is only through formal manipulation that we build upon contingencies and thus assign definition and form.

Architecture, as a formal act of construction, is the wildest form of creative destruction, as well as the most tangible expression of the Apollonian and Dionysian struggle. As you build you are systemically assaulting nature and assigning meaning to the inherently meaningless. In the process of building you are destroying all else. Physically you destroy and create while conceptually you are deconstructing the definition of what it means to be and to dwell at one point in time and space. By virtue of its process, the language of architecture is an attempt to control chaos and grant form to the formless.

stillness

still as you were
watching for moving lights from down below
waiting
exhaling
above our heads leaves hang low
reach up to touch the sky-ceiling
but not too far off the dirt ground
in a state of limbo
incredible peace is found
cradling you like the
w i d e o p e n a i r
wrapping arms around
holding you even after you're not there
feelings still tightly bound
still as you were
i'm still as I was
still as you keep changing
be still just because

all things exist only in passing

All things exist only in passing,
nothing is truly ever-lasting
the impermanence of life
moves with dangerous quickness
always open
shifty swiftness

and as soon as we think that we can control
the thunders from above begin to roar
reminding us that freedom is a folklore
and life is just what we do while we wait for more

every object in space dives into our eyes
moving at an uncontrollable pace
aimlessly through the skies
paints for us the tragedy that we all die trying
waiting, rushing, wishing, pushing
never knowing that while we are living
we are just dying

instead of making life from flames
the fire that rages as we pour out our hearts
we douse with lies to keep it tame
so that we do not fall apart

and withholding our very own swells of breath
we slash throbbing hearts that are the soul
doing so, still burning
to find answers that will make us whole

paper into ashes
dust from coal
the fire lay weeping
at our weary core

time

move too slow
move too quick
as we fall
time will tick

closer to you
further from me
from your eyes
I can see

sometimes how you're
stuck inside
all the time how you
desperately try

still as we float
falling upwards
to pass the time I write
in frozen words

tomorrow is not far
when i can write
in scribbles of motion
waiting just to cross that ocean

The beauty that is Baba.

March 01, 1957.

The day Souhail Khalil Issa was brought into the world. My Baba. My Daddy.

I got my middle name from him. I also got a lot of my good looks from him. My hands-on attitude and wild love for exploration. Digging through the dirt, building and assembling, seeing and fixing, it's all from my Baba. My unassuming curiosity that leads me to try new things, I know it's also from him. My technical mannerisms, and my even more technical mind. In a strange way, even the creativity somehow stems from this man of practicality and simplicity.

With the good always comes some bad, and I certainly get my fair share of imperfection from him. The temper is my Baba. The feisty attitude, that is my Baba. But even those imperfections are what make the good so good. I get from him my ability to let it all go, to move the soul onwards and upwards, towards better things.

That is the beauty that is my Baba.

He's taught me to become infused with all that is meaningful, beautiful, and valuable in the world - to have the courage to know when it has all run it's course and the strength to know how to let it all go.

He is gracious and kind. A man who even if he wanted, wouldn't know how to use the word "no". He would never turn his back on the people he loves and never refuses a single friend. Even a stranger on the side of the road, he will go above and beyond to help. He always greets the world with a smile so big, no matter what he's been through. He is a man with enough heart that if captured and let out to sea, could overflow the oceans from here to India.

My father is an amazing person. A beautiful human being inside and out. He has so much love to give to the world, and like me, he also doesn't always know what to do with that love. It is in his imperfections that he is one of the most incredible people I have ever known. Not only because he is my father, and to whom I owe my life. But he has the ability to live his life with strength and courage, never letting the ups and downs of the external world change how much love he is willing to give back.

greatness of friendship

I would rather have the greatness of your friendship for as long as humanly possible, than the sweetness of a single moment of passion, which I fear would last only as long as emotionally possible.

Sadness

Can we be blessed with sadness?

Sadness, like all other things, is a state of mind. It's a place that we, ourselves, place who we are and who we think we should be, within. It's a place. It's a stage. I might be blessed with sadness only so far as it inspires me to create. Only so far as it moves me to progress as an individual who strives to master her own existence. I can manipulate that which I think is sadness, or those things that I believe to be sadness, but sadness has no inherent goodness or badness, it's just a state of mind that really, in the end, means absolutely nothing at all.

So, no. No Matthew. I am not blessed with sadness. I don't see it in that way, at least. In my own peculiar little world, sadness is the cessation of a struggle; the struggle is for a doomed-happiness, which I will never deny myself. The struggle to be real with myself and to be truthful to who I am. That is what you lose when you wallow and dwell in sadness. Like all other states of mind, sadness is just a human creation, a construct that which we bury our true selves under. Just as easily as I can create it, I can destroy it (realizing that it is slightly more difficult to destroy).

(Thanks to Matt Stangle, for inspiring me and succeeding, yet again, in distracting me from the "real" things I should be doing like studying for class and writing a paper on NAFTA...)

La Caída

Parece que acoba de nos encontramos,
algunos momentos pasado,
y a la misma tiempo
me siento que hemos conocido por mucho tiempo

te dejé atrás
salé en Cercanía

cada segundo que pasa
la distancia crece
es una sensación maduro
inexplicable

cada palabra
demasiado sentido
y a veces palabras no estan bastante

para que quiero significar,
para que quiero dignificar,
los sentimientos
es una pérdida, cuando traducimos
compensamos en exceso para llegar al destino,
usando el gesto
del mano
de la cara
del ojos
miramos
pero entendemos?

todo el tiempo en exceso para llegar a la cresta
y nos caemos como uno maremeto,
caemos en uno maremeto
uno maremeto de gestos


(July 2009, Madrid, Spain. Escribé esto poema cuando estuve en España y conocí alguien muy especial...)

coffee's bitter-sweetness

i loved
i loved
the freshness of you
cold side of my pillow
case, your hands (do tremble)
they touched me
blood pumped
feeble mind raced

illusion of you
death strong i couldn't erase
it, after you'd left
so long ago,
too much space wasted

still skin feels how when you left it, so
brand new

awakened her quiet
feels like she loved you
in seconds not hours
feels like time measured her intimate powers

she fit you, she did
into mine she devoured

your breakdown
your weakness
she's speechless
she's speechless
like
coffee's
bitter-sweetness

danger, us

never has the brimming mind
felt so dangerously inspired

elusive moments sting like wired, thoughts
grow wings atop dead-letter spires

we want to move in leaps and bounds, but
do so cautiously from here to there,
carefully not to expose our care, we satiate
our roaring appetites

andallthewhile
loving your stories,
themed childhood-places,
affirming your heroic glory
like footprints, you leave the past
behind paints and strides
doused in bitter wines
in deconstructed angry lines
hidden dirty appetite, that which
you have covered in streaks of light

going home
slender limbs graze my thigh
a blush i cannot hide,
must resist it so i try

and this will soon fade away
let's not get attached
you say
deepening curiosity is strong, but
do not let me forget
how this is wrong

Oh how I wish to sing
to you,
too much, much love could bring to you
the death of you and I (merely mortals)
into an afterlife

don't you know?
you leave many breaths behind
the moving heavy-passion kind
they cross oceans from your lips
to
my
mind

(for which you need a floating device)

wild looks I catch in your eyes
make it hard
to make-up lies

so

maybe i will trace your youth
and down it with a splash of vermouth
a simple mixed-up drink
or would it be uncouth?

stillness on the fringes instances
carries us for quiet distances
dark colors and places melt with our behaviors
pull the sky over honest smiles, it might save us

to want this with so much eagerness, stuck in
self-effacing bliss

many earnest words we spill
to overcome this will, this
box bleeds red and wheat
leave the sugar, we
don't need that which is sweet

tomorrow you'll wake up in the sky
and eat the ocean with your eyes
like the King, you'll steal the sun
in this world of disappearing fun

today i am Simone
in the shadows of wits my own,
you lived in me,
this day was never known

Language is war.

It is impossible to truly understand what another person is ever saying. Impossible to figure out another's concept or perspective born in their mind. It is impossible because no matter what we do and how we try, the only way for us as humans with cognitive activity, to learn, is through language. Through asking questions and attaching meaning to words (which will invariably be diverse and distinct in different minds), we taint the original meaning of words, of messages, of statements. The only thing that is guaranteed is that we humans will interpret things as we see fit, and in this process we will build and destroy. Language is war. Language is a problem. The question is now, how do we live with language?

Agreement in dialogue is technical. More than anything else it is technical. Agreement comes when my use of a set of terms and my chosen vocabulary reflects and triggers in your mind, the same associations by which you linked your original thought. That original thought you probably expressed using a different set of terms, different adjectives and subjects and verbs. Unique to you. Not until we have exhausted our ways of conversation, not until we find a point where I can say what I want and how I perceive what we are discussing to exist, and when that expression of my perception through careful use of language aligns with the idea in your mind, not until then, have we met agreement. Again, which can only occur when the words I have chosen to use to explain myself, happen to mean either the same or relatively the same things to you, in your mind, as you know and use them. And neither of us will ever know the true discord in existence, that lies between the shadows of our words, since we cannot feel it, since we strive for agreement, for peace. We will never really know how different our thoughts really are because we will always be striving to be in harmony. This duality is deadly but beautiful.

I recognize in this process that language and meaning is also always recycled. Social relation and communicative activity encourages the development of meaning by relying on other meaning. This is not important to me here.

It seems the only way for us humans to overcome this "problem" of language, to ever really see eye-to-eye, to ever truly see one thing from the exact same place in space and time, is to not speak. To not communicate. To not question. To not articulate. It is in translation that words will always lose their meaning, their associations, their histories. As we assign them meaning relative to ourselves, we destroy what they meant to another. As they pass from ones lips to another's ears, they morph into something new. That is why we as the carriers of the meanings of our words, are the ones to blame for the consequences.

True peace is silence. Pure peace is blackness and emptiness. Might as well be dead. If language is conflict, I don't ever want to be peaceful. Bring on the heartache.

Sedmikrásky (1966)

Joan Jonas

Brilliant.

Kahn's Exeter Short Film from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

"You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed"

Sometimes looking backwards helps us move forwards. If we perceive things as simply as we did when we were children, things may work out easier than we expect.

Click here for the book.

Poaceae

"Work in progress"
All living things grow. Like Poaceae, there are points in life where you just have to diverge from the stem and go in your own direction - but luckily you can always turn around and find your way home on the path from which you came.


Node: The point along a stem which gives rise to leaves, branches, or inflorescences.

"Because it only takes one"

Impart your knowledge unto me and I will wave with hands graciously
open to you - facing the sky,
endless
(like you)
in the air, open to receive your wisdoms,
beautifully crafted (like you)
Your empowering words - so courageous and confident (like you)
Sometimes brazen and relentless
they move mountains from right in front of me
Your words are honesty and immortality at its finest hour,
I can never be thankful enough for your words
And like you, those words will stay with me always.

-Dedicated to a great friend, Marina Terteryan

Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

-Mark Strand

Homely.

There is a house built out of stone
where everyone goes to be alone
Winter
Spring
Summer
Fall
No one really knows anyone, at all

A house of tiles
in the graces of weak grout
Small enough to guard thoughts
So as not to echo about

BIg enough for everyone to keep hiding-out
But small enough to hear the next person shout

There is a place in between sticks and stones
where you can sit still
but let your mind freely roam
Windows face outwards so that you don't have to face each other
Framing a view of the stars and skies
instead of your mother

Door ways open slightly, if even open at all
Darkness returns before cars do
Say hello to fall

And summer - oh summer
Goodbye to you
And your flaming concrete pavement
and all that you do

Goodbye flaming orange-blue skies
and hurtful worn-out goodbyes
and bloody summer-time wars
Somebody said we're ready to open the doors

So Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall
Leave us alone no more in the backyard of green and chrome
In the moon shadows between that place far away and home
You can find us somewhere in that house built of stone

L is for the way you look, to me.

"There is no perfect love" I heard that somewhere today.

Nothing on earth is perfect- everything is imperfect. When I create something i do so to the extent that I believe it in itself is perfect, it is the most perfect it can be. I realize imperfections do exist and to all other eyes anything that passes through my hands is flawed or can be - but to me it is the intent of putting together the piece in all of its beauty and glory and having it complete that makes it so perfect.

It can grow old, yes. It can lose color, yes. It can become modified, yes. It is vulnerable and helpless and cannot withstand even the slightest bit of an earthquake...yes.

It can even disappear, but it will never cease to exist in my imagination and that is why it is oh so perfect to me.