"I think about it and worry about it every day. And too often I find myself afraid that I may not succeed sufficiently. Not long ago, I was a little bit gloomy and fed up. I went up to Inverness [on the northern California coast], had an okay meal, stayed at a motel, and went to sleep, which didn't improve my mood.And then in the morning, I decided to drive to the northern end of Point Reyes--out where you sometimes see herds of Tule Elk.

I was getting to a place where the land falls away sharply on both sides of the road. It was misty, and I decided not to continue. I pulled off into a field, popped out of the car, and right next to the carwas a patch of long grass. I lay down in the grass, looking through the stems and blades of grass, out at Tomales Bay.

I was lying there looking at this, and the perfection of it gradually began to impress itself on me. There was a faint sense of light in each of the bits of grass. It wasn't a revelation in any literal sense, and yet as I was looking through these grass stems, myself almost part of the grass, suddenly the thought came to me, So this is what you're trying to do! What the grass does: it is effortlessly creating a beautiful and complex environment. And it isn't just capable of it, but it is doing it, everywhere, and every day, and so easily. I was comforted, because the grass found it so easy.

So there's nothing for me to worry about at all. Even if I fail in my lifetime, it is so obvious. Surely people will understand it sooner or later."

(from an interview by Katy Butler)

i found myself crying

and another reference to richard dawkins under his goal in life

"Among other things, I want to find a way of talking about God in scientific terms that even Richard Dawkins might understand.

I really have as my long-distance target the desire to create a basis from which humankind can build and rebuild a beautiful world."

and i caught up with stephen fry and friends on the life, loves and hates of christopher hitchens today, friday 13-01-12

its an historic document made whilst he was still alive and is a technical oddity of form with fry fluffing the end and the audience get up and leave quite abruptly

the open day at the drop redoubt cancelled as karo had a late night and noe has a sprained ankle and is enjoying his crutches just a little too much.

rose spending loads of time in the bath to avoid doing any work say noe and belle

led zeppelin, wine, weed and a sunshiny day

the boy went to his mum's for the night

to be expanded into a short story

Firstly, please let me say that I have been a fan of your work since David Dickens recommended "A Selfish Gene" at my first tutorial at Liverpool in 1976. My currently home educating fourteen year old son Noe has during the summer read the 30th anniversary edition for the second time and my daughter Rose says "The Magic of Reality" is a delight and we find the hate mail stuff great fun. Furthermore I have been moved to tears when recalling to all three of my children your anecdote of the professor congratulating the young researcher who had proved him wrong after so many years and all the audience erupting into applause for the older man. Yeah Science!

I am prompted to write as quite recently I changed my mind about the Templeton Prize and decided to nominate Christopher Alexander. I am well aware of the failings of the prize in the past but am encouraged on by the fact that Professor Alexander addressed you personally in his New Concepts in Complexity Theory (2003) as follows,

"Why do the creationists keep on making their fuss about evolution? I do not think it is only because of religion, but rather because some of them are aware that this problem of emergent beauty is not really solved. Why does Dawkins engage in such intense hand-to-hand combat with the creationists - something one would think hardly worth the ink? Is it not because of his own failure to acknowledge, more frankly, that the larger question of emergence of new, and beautiful configurations in evolution is not yet solved - at least not in the sense that computer simulations using the algorithms of selection as currently understood, could yet arrive at truly beautiful new configurations and thus demonstrate the truth of the ideas of evolution as we currently understand them? Approximations to beautiful configurations can be simulated, yes - just as in the case of snow crystals. The real thing - just as in the case of snow crystals - not quite yet.

The successful evolution of new biological form is, in my view, undoubtedly modified by transformations able to move towards structures that are inherently - that is to say geometrically - coherent. I believe this process accompanies natural selection, and is the crucial missing part of current explanations: a vital component in the gamut of selective pressures. We need more frankly to acknowledge such a possibility, and in my view scientists who aspire to realistic explanations, like Dawkins, should stop dueling with creationists (which is far too easy), and instead try to focus on this geometrical problem at its root (which is much harder). I believe the fifteen transformations I have described go some distance to laying a path toward the solution of these difficulties.

Most scientists, and most laypeople, share intuitions (not always acknowledged) which ascribe something great to the action of the universe. Roughly expressed, these intuitions rest on intuitive assessments that some deeper coherent, and more whole - oriented transformations, coupled with the action of the ordinary mechanisms we understand, and strengthening and reinforcing the wholeness which exists can give birth to new and beautiful configurations from the wholeness which exists. What the arguments in The Nature Of Order attempt, is to make these intuitions precise and susceptible to experiment."

Lastly, far be it for me to criticise your very useful rottweiler instinct but I thought it at least one toe over the line to bring World War II traitors into the equation. You almost fell foul of Godwin.

Meanwhile, I would be more than grateful if you would give these matters some attention and I look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards

peace cranes on the carpet book

i cannot believe i left out making wholeness heals the maker and i am going to get it down to two pages. felt like messing with the wikipedia entry and will definitely mess with the one that displays here

Scientific Proof That All Physical Matter Is Holy

Born in 1936 in Vienna, Austria, and raised near Chichester, England, Christopher Alexander was awarded the top open scholarship to Trinity College in chemistry and physics in 1954 and went on to read both architecture and mathematics at Cambridge.

Recognising the nonsensical nature of what passes for modern architectural theory, his doctorate, the first architecture Ph.D. ever awarded at Harvard, was an attempt to build a coherent foundation for the discipline from scratch. During this period he worked at MIT on transportation theory and computer science and at Harvard on cognitive studies of wholeness and value. His thesis “Notes on The Synthesis of Form” (1964) evidenced a rigorous mathematical approach to design theory and introduced the idea of the environment consisting of patterns embedded in the structure of a network. The celebrated essay “A City is not a Tree” (1964) warned that if we continued to disrupt this structure, instead of supporting our humanity our cities would cut our life within to pieces, and so it has come to pass.

Leading a massively collaborative effort whilst Professor at the University of California, Berkeley for 38 years from 1963 and now Emeritus, Alexander continues to produce a series of books for the Center for Environmental Structure documenting a deeply humanistic approach to architecture, building and planning, aimed at completely replacing current ideas and practices. “A Pattern Language” (1977) showed “that towns and buildings will not be able to come alive unless they are made by all the people in society and unless these people have a common pattern language within which to make the buildings and unless this common pattern language is itself alive.” This bible of the architecture of anarchy is not just concerned with the physical structure of buildings and towns but constitutes an extremely powerful moral, political and economic critique of society.

To Rene Descartes the “Method” (1638) was a convenient mental trick but its success has left us with a mindset that conceives of the universe as a machine without any intrinsic value: the realms of human experience and of feeling are simply absent from the Cartesian world. Whilst inspiring generations of architects and many others from all walks of life concerned with the fate of the earth, Alexander’s ultimately life changing work has understandably provoked powerful opposition from those invested within the establishment of the old paradigm. Social disorder, mental illness, ecological degradation, these and many other problems are due to a misunderstanding of the structure of matter and the nature of the universe and, until quite recently, there has been no coherent way of explaining the order that we respond to and love in nature.

Then, in the most beautiful book “A Foreshadowing Of 21st Century Art” (1993) studying the living structure embodied in early Islamic carpets, came the recognition of the wholeness of living centers and an entirely new empirical procedure “the mirror of the self” which asks a person to evaluate experimentally through subjective self examination the degree to which a system, thing, event or act enhances the observers own wholeness. It turns out that people are able to carry out this process consistently and that there is a very considerable degree of agreement between them which seems to contradict the accepted wisdom of cultural relativity and thus there may be a reliable and profound empirical method for reaching shared judgements about the degree of value inherent in complex systems. At its heart is a thread beginning with the search for the source of all beauty in life, a logical argument which establishes the necessity of a new conception of order, of living structure, its objective geometric properties and its resemblance to the “I” of the human self.

The delay of over twenty years in publishing the “The Nature of Order” (2002) reflects both Darwin’s recognition of the power of “On the Origin of Species” (1859) and his desire for the careful, almost forensic accumulation of evidence. Similarly, Alexander has strengthened his logic for the recognition of the phenomenon of life and the necessity of an extension of science as we have known it in the 20th century by conducting a long series of investigations seeking empirical verification making hundreds of buildings all over the world. Architecture is the only activity concerned with the creation of the details of fine tuned well adapted complex structure and consequently is the field in which it has been possible to develop a mathematical model identifying wholeness as a well defined recursive structure involving the awakening of space into life through the repeated action of some fifteen geometric wholeness extending transformations. It is the operation of natural selection mitigated by these wholeness extending transformations which generates discernible and coherent forms in the morphogenetic play of evolution. It has become possible to discriminate between cases where living structure exists in the world we build, and where it does not. This has all becomes visible and is impossible to escape.

Alexander has been inexorably led to the revolutionary necessity of revising our basic picture of the universe to include a conception of the personal nature of order and our belonging to the world in which the wholeness of space and the extent to which it is alive is perceived as rooted in the plenum behind the visible universe, “the luminous ground” that holds us all. This form of extended objective truth will ultimately resolve our Cartesian dilemma by teaching us a new view of order and a new cosmology in which objective reality “out there” and a personal reality “in here” are thoroughly connected and the bifurcation of nature healed. This is a world in which there is something to believe in, a vision of the unity behind all things, a conception of god as a fact of nature and its wholeness that would permit the realignment of our daily efforts with the well being of the whole, enabling us to unite the mental and emotional territory of what was traditionally called “God” in a way that provides the connectedness that people crave and allows them to feel humility and responsibility for the whole as part of the sum total of a mentality that once existed in other cultures and must exist again in our own highly modern civilisation if we are to stand any chance of healing the earth and ourselves.

He has demonstrated a vision of a living world made like nature in which we daily make nature and the work of adapting and deepening its living structure are a vital part of our lives, where acceptance of the whole and efforts to heal the whole will be seen as the most profound and important forms of prayer, a world in which people may feel themselves at home and in which to truly live as soulful human beings we will need to be guided by “the quality without a name” in weaving the fabric of our world using new processes of implementation that will alter the field of architecture, the sciences and all our large scale social and artistic endeavours beyond recognition, a built world that will support the people who live and work there to increase their own self esteem and that of others by honouring the wholeness of the Earth, a world where we will feel the traces of those who came before us and nourish the hopes of all those who will follow.

Recently he has spoken of identifying archetypal human configurations that guide and impel us to behave in ways that are helpful to the wholeness at hand. The pattern language meme continues to germinate everywhere and the Alexandrian cosmology will grow to aid our efforts in the coming global reset because it is based on common sense, because it makes moral sense to ordinary people everywhere, because it is practical and above all because it is good science. The award of the Templeton Prize 2012 to Christopher Alexander will acknowledge that his work has confirmed life’s spiritual dimension with enough scientific rigour to bring even the apostate to their senses and will also hasten the day when its grace has touched enough of us to change things forever.

The truth is a powerful thing.

Dedicated to our colleague Bankoku Sasagawa

thinking i could get away with putting in the first draft i am on the third and last bottle of cider 6.5% slight overdose as i am justifiably excited

and this is the best i have ever been

noe has returned and all is well, all is well, all is well

the same copy from the british library and I already have the scans from when i was at kiad

made myself slightly ill doing it but have learned some lessons and wished i hadn't learned the word nachlass

my apologies to all for the delay due to my indulgence of deadlinitis. something i hope never to experience again. remember, forgiveness is a key

just thought of editing it for the internet form

the weather is unusually warm and noe and i are off to jo's tomorrow

noe packed the camping stuff and i thought of calling out dawkins. bring it on

shukkarAllah

oofAllah god with a small g, i just came across 9th century mu'tazilite muslim anarchists

skyped phillip for a couple of hours going over the templeton. so helpful and i am on the way to emailing the draft out to everyone later tonight

have had moments of real doubt and fear alleviated by doing about a third of a page and revising it repeatedly

tried to show karo who managed to read phillip's version and noe was scooting past as i left to bike home. we kissed

up and at them

earlier in the day noe asked what vernacular was and ended up reading built by hand and i searched out my copy of rudofsky's architecture without architects which came from janet wall's library on union

one of the twirlies was broken before i got a chance to photograph it

belle was very stressed and unnatural about what had happened to it and her reactions were inappropriate. we discussed this and the conclusion was once again that she does not jake sully see me because she has not lived with me since she was five years old

caught up with karo after the goobs had gone to taekwon do

came back at ten and phoned sonny and skyped with him and fatima. lovely to catch up with him

i've just finished the two twirlies for the girls. they were an academic exercise but i will now try to have a whittling project on the go as therapy from now on and to keep my hand in

am reading the oxford handbook of religion and science

belle will arrive