Human Slightly Broken

May 25th 2010

Berger _ Two Excerpts

30 notes

John Berger _ And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos

John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos

One

Once In A Song

A singer may be innocent
never the song. With its instantaneous eyes
opened on to the world
and its heart laid bare,
the song is brazen,
the song is newborn.
Only when it has quietened
can listeners resume by habit
the innocence of their age.

Two

When I open my wallet
to show my papers
pay money
or check the time of a train
I look at your face.

The flower’s pollen
is older than the mountains
Aravis is young
as mountains go.

The flower’s ovules
will be seeding still
when Aravis then aged
is no more than a hill.

The flower in the heart’s
wallet, the force
of what lives us
outliving the mountain.

And our faces, my heart, brief as photos.

Posted at 12:01am and tagged with: one column, reading, quotes, john berger,.

May 23rd 2010

2 notes

Jaron Lanier _ You Are Not a Gadget

Tonight I began reading this in tandem with The Timeless Way of Building, and there’s an unmistakable dance between them that has my mind fizzing. Written three decades apart and in completely different contexts, both serve as manifestos for richer human experiences; one in the physical world, the other digital. I look forward to unraveling the rest of the conversation between them.

Posted at 12:23am and tagged with: reading, quotes, humanistic, digital,.

“
The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.
”

May 22nd 2010

Being Alive

I have been reading and re-reading Christopher Alexander’s The Timeless Way of Building for over a month now and am thinking about the implications for digital world building. I just got another copy of the book (after returning one that I had borrowed previously) and don’t expect to put it down anytime soon. Today’s excerpt:

The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person, and the crux of any individual person’s story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.

We know, now, what the quality without a name is like, in feeling and in character. But so far, concretely, we have not seen this quality in any system larger than a tree, a pond, a bench. Yet it can be in anything - in buildings, animals, plants, cities, streets, the wilderness - and in ourselves. We shall begin to understand it concretely, in all these larger pieces of the world, only when we first understand it in ourselves.

It is, for instance, the wild smile of the gypsies dancing in the road.

[…]

And I am free to the extent I have this quality in me.

Posted at 5:21pm and tagged with: reading, quotes, christoper alexander, two column, dancing,.