Something and Nothing
From CloudPad
drifting.on.artificial.islands...
Space is uniform, and unstructured means the same throughout. We understand and interact with space by effectively compartmentalizing it. I have in mind an image of the honeycombs that are created when bubbles form en masse. A sturdy space-frame structure with very little material. What about tadpole eggs?
We might as well start with the biggest compartment: the whole shebang. Well, it may well be instructive, not without some modesty, to ask "How did the universe form?" Without inhomogeneity, matter cannot cluster into galaxies. Did all the visible universe that we see out to 15 billion light-years explode outwards from a single point? How symmetrical was the Bang? Even if we trace back the trajectory of stuff we see in the visible universe to a point, a singularity in which the curvature of spacetime and/or the temperature is infinite, this doesn't prove that a singularity characterizes the birth of a universse. The singularity points to a new method of measuring space and time, a co-ordinate system that begins at the zero point. Like how the lines of latitude and longitude intersect at the north pole (a singularity) - there is no boundary there, but one cannot travel farther north.
Was the universe created from nothing or formed from a primordial mess? In the West we once took great pains to make a distinction between the divine act of the creation of the world from the void, and the source that is drawn upon when the artist creates. That formation and creation are not the same process. Early doctors of the Christian church had theosophical reasons to differentiate their beliefs from Greco-Roman idealogies. Creation from nothing? Are we to understand that there is a real difference that lies between artifacts of a human hand and the miracle of Creation? What came before the beginning of something?
Cosmologists suspect that the universe will continue to expand, that expansion accelerating as the force of gravity becomes less important as the vast distances between particles becomes even larger. A spreading cloud of matter and radiation, distinguishing shapes dissolved, differences ironed out over cosmic distances.
Anyways, what does this have to do with memory palaces? The question of compartments remains. What features of a structure are brought to recall? What can you remember of a prison, or an island, or a cupboard? What do you remember about a place that makes it stand out, makes it distinct from any other place? We are adept reductionist magicians. Find the elementary particles, those that do not readily display internal structure or components within, and reproduce in endlessly permutating fascimiles. Analysis increases information at the expense of meaning. But how successful have we been in predicting the behaviour of the whole from the interrelationship of its component parts? Once we get down to these elements, we might at last engage in a sort of composition of autopoietic infoaesthetic ergodic phenomenological philosophical psychogeography populated by organigraphs and hierosophonts.
In our exploration of the organization that underlies memory spaces, we necessarily refer to the outer world as if it was reflected (and distorted and refracted) in a mosaic of coloured glass. What if we discovered in those pieces of world that we could never find componentless components, that one thing is always nested within another, that everything is part of something while simultaneously having parts of their own? The test of this model of organization, a holarchy, is to discover what would if you were to remove a type of entity from existence. Would all other entities of which it formed a part must of necessity cease to exist?
A branching universe without beginning or end could be legacy of an eternal inflationary process. The universe may be a fractal, self-similar on all scales, except that beyond the clusters of clusters of galaxies of stars, we have not observed a yet-larger scale.
Not long ago, natural philosophers said that all matter was composed of ether, and that ether itself was composed of an even subtler array of ether particles, and so on, into the realms of the impossibly tiny. All of existence was the product of energies that cascaded through reducing transformers, and coalesced from an infinite spectrum of ethers into the familiar concrete forms of our material world. In the natural unfolding of events, the flow runs the other way, a one-way street ascending a staircase of smaller and smaller particles until one reaches the Golden Gates. In some ways it is a pleasing picture.
The two-pronged nature of language is that a) there is the thing pointed at and b) there is the hand (with fingers!) that points. Thus this epistemological probe may be approached in two ways: the atomization of ideas and the atomization of words. Essays and tracts such as these are comprised of parts, and component paragraphs. If the smallest linguistic elements of an alphabet are the letters, we may contrast the image with ideas that are only made of more ideas. Like an hourglass that contains no sand, only more hourglasses. When sequences of cause and effect are injected into YES/NO logic and TRUE/FALSE algebra, we see a breakdown that is evidence that time is the antidote that destroys the reason virus.
The question remains of whether this process is fractal and displays self-similar properties on all levels of magnification, or whether there is a definite alpha and omega at the ends of the line of existence, the cliffs that bookend the world of causality.
A palace is like a city in miniature. A city is too large to walk across over the course of a day. A town has not enough people to ensure that every day is met by new faces. So let it be palaces then. With gardens, and a pool, an atrium, courtyards encircling the inner sanctum, a shrine. "Bite-sized" and personalized.
'What is the purpose of all this?' you may be asked. And perhaps it is just that our minds need the exercise, that we need to pace imaginary hallways, so to speak. It remains to be shown that we are *all* capable of astounding feats of memory, translating every bend in our unique path across the landscape of contemporary information-age newmedia. Long ago wandering poets, rhapsodists and sophists acted as mobile libraries. Technological development has taken another baker's fold and once again, we are the medium and the message. We are the carriers, as well as the receptacles. We are old wine in new glasses.
Birds fly by flapping their wings, but first they practice, practice, practice. This is not something we do once, or twice. This could become the way we live. It is my earnest hope that we will never get to know how it ends, only what happens next. 'Why would people be interested in this?' you may wonder. Is it enough to say that simply there is this way of presenting information in a coherent display? There is no accounting for individual aesthetics. To each their own.
Sometimes, I like to eat my cereal with a little spoon so that I feel like I am a giant. I find a strange pleasure in regarding the world in miniature. The pleasure derives from contemplating the shape of a vast whole considered as a single object. Dolls' houses and petri dish colonies, plastic soldiers on the backyard battleground, an entire universe in a nutshell. But this does not answer why is there something rather than nothing.
I feel that it is a rare thing to take a treasure from private world of thoughts into the field of a conversation between two. The miracle of communication is that it can overcome miscommunication. It is a special event when two people have a conversation. Three is almost pushing the acceptable boundaries of the medium; any more is asking for the stars. But to have a construct one can share with anyone who is curious to enter? Wow! A memory palace!
Consider for a moment Black Rock City, the liminal home of Burning Man Festival. A whole city that springs up where nothing lives, a periodic autonomous community that gathers every year in shape that becomes more established with each passing year. So many dreams conjured into reality for the span of a week. I like that in my mind's eye I can picture the city map whole as a sigil, whose internal characters are readily identified by streetsigns aligned to the radial and the axial. The Man stands at zero, the singularity of these co-ordinates. Year after year the physical site shifts, but the shape remains. It is a city of moods, and the moods change moment by moment with the shifting colour of sunlight reflected from the playa dust. But all these moods can be recognized by just a glimpse of the desert settlement.
Black Rock City recalls to mind other kinds of oasis, other cities in the desert. But, by the principle of complementarity, it also suggests its own inverse: the island. There are more unnamed islands in the archipelago of Oceania Imaginaria than we may comfortably count. Serendip, the island that perpetually carries itself and its sand on the backs of waves and on wings of wind across the ocean. Alcatraz - no one gets off this rock. Sabbath, an island in time. Coney Island, the island that exists to amuse ghosts and virtual kewpie dolls.
My personal atlas of experience is polka-dotted with map-pins pegged to point out amusement parks and fantasylands. Outside are the tents of the traveling circus. Soon, the carnival will come to town. These attractions compete with the sounds of parades and festivals. Art galleries and music concerts, sporting rituals, trance dances and drum jams. In these places the symmetry of normal hierarchy is broken into opportunities for human beings to do what they would naturally do when no one tells them what needs doing. Festival is the temporary state of insurrection, the revolution that keeps going 'round.
These islands of pleasure punctuate the monotonoy of teleological monopoly, of bureaucratic institution and edifices of order. With them we momentarily sever the Great Chain of Being and cast turf and bubbleworlds into the eddies and whirlpools that we otherwise can't see when frozen inside the crystalline prison of an ancient glacier. These islands are short sentences. A moment is an island of awareness distinguished by non-unitary time evolution, occluded inside the horizon of a singularity. An island is to a city as a city is to a palace. Sometimes, separated by a moat populated by vicious reptiles.
Life is measured by the difference it makes on other species, on the environment. In a way you can see the whole of ecology as a process of information storage and transformation. Perhaps one day we will make computers of atoms, or engage in information processing with even more elementary particles. But we must ask if eventually the universe will allow for conditions that make biochemical life possible. Life requires the capacity for information storage and processing. That is why we fear the black hole and the inflating universe. We fear that data may be physically destroyed. What a terrible thought. And you thought the burning of the Library at Alexandria was bad.
The beaver makes dams, the spider makes webs, that tiny coral creature makes whole reefs. In some cases there is little difference between the species and their artifacts. Cities and metropoli are natural outgrowths of the human genome. They are vast memory systems, externalizations of our innermost dreams. The emerging noosphere, the homegrown entheogenic culture, the complexification of virtual spaces such as Second Life are just parts of the picture.
So many things of importance are happening that we are scrambling for ways of discussing them. Our tool sets evolve and so to we change. But at the root of this lies compassion for each other. This whole experiment lies in experiencing someone else's perspective, seeing the view from someone's else's windows. As we struggle to understand, all of us thinking these great thoughts, how can we share our discoveries?
!Eidetic Platforms Holding Patterns
I wonder if we'll one day get messages older than the quasars. Ideas keep springing to mind from some distant quadrant of my mind. I write them here, in loosely related groupings, maybe just so I don't lose them. It seems that there is a kaleidoscope in my head.
A while ago, I was introduced to the practice of "platforming," or the art of making room for something to happen, creating space for events to occur, a stage for the game to be played. I chatted with a guy at a party a couple month back that was a recent grad of architecture. Old rivalries come to the forefront: engineering students make fun of architecture students and vice versa. They played with lego while we made simulations. Anyways. So few people understand the language of space, that space speaks volumes. The silent ways in which places affect people. He certainly did. He told me about a conversation with a sound engineer that was an architectural acoustics expert, about the importance of those sorts of considerations in design. That suggested to me other hidden dimensions of space i know so little about.
Do you believe that sound recreates space? I do. Most especially my favourite flavours of techno, mixed in with a heavy dose of trance dance. To elaborate would take too many words. Long story short, it seems to me that drumloops, synths, samples, etc. describe simple architectural components mapped into a sonic representation. That by dancing it is possible to assemble, renovate, and climb such an abstract structure. And that it is possible to communicate these dimensions to others exploring a similar sonic space.
That is to say: if you're in the market to buy a home and have the "vision", you can fix up a place rather nicely. If you can envision how spaces might be transformed into new shapes, like visualizing crystalline structures deformed in 3D, you are getting what i am saying. Like memorizing dance choreography, or a yoga sequence; virtual vinyasas that you can play in your mind - but if you could freeze and repeat? Tied up in this all are metaphors of the body. Movement through the poses is said to release chemical messages. There is a necessary collusion between metaphors of the body, and metaphors of architecture. From the bridge of your nose, to the arch of your foot, the columns of your legs, the castles in your molars. Just as metaphors of structure are impossible to decouple from language. Neologisms form novel structures from existing shapes.
I think there is some room to manoeuver on the issue of the institutional versus vernacular dialectic. Does one have to be an accredited architect to construct a virtual palace? What new concerns are introduced by creating structures that are not represented in physical spaces but are made possible in abstract mathematical existences? i.e. a security guard replaced by virus protection algorithms. Vernacular buildings, some nicer than others. All recall the burrows and nests of animals. We're all monkeys, really. The "peasants" construct their own hovels, the downtrodden their shanty towns and slum ecologies; in the nearby Portuguese neightbourhood all the houses have custom facades, and Vietnamese variety stores mingle with Jamaican jerk-shops. How does this compare to the skyscrapers downtown? Even where there is wealth (especially), in the city it is eternally juxtaposed. Homeless people sleeping on grates.
But then there's a place like Vegas, so unreal that everything that surely must be fake is real, and vice versa. We saw a fountain of chocolate, and a crystal monolith, and a tree indoors, all inside the same megaresort.
On another note, now that I have been a home owner for a half year, I have certain things upon which I can comment. When we bought this place, we realized there were huge areas of unusable space. Grey regions that required renovation. Since we've moved here, we've made the main floor and upper into really nice apartments. The basement has been empty except for the furnace and some of my sister's furniture. The backyard is apalling, a mess, and we really need to put in a deck or some kind of stairway.
It's amazing; I can actually feel how we are growing into the space. Renovations are necessary to take possession, literally. Something in the process of remaking, it's like being the lord and lady of a little world. We are driving back the fog of the grey regions, revisioning spaces. Already we have affected the backyard ecology by hanging a bird-feeder on a shepherd's hook. The sparrows sit in the bush in the next door neighbour's yard, and when they are brave enough, flock en masse to the fence then it's only a short hop to the feeder. So many of them on it that it starts to spin like a carousel. Then the cats come, cats under the fence and along my alley and from who knows where else... cat antics = pure comedy.
We imagine a time soon when the world will be transformed. The City will plant a new tree on our lawn, and we will make a wildflower garden in the front. The local concourse will be in the backyard, as the only place with an entrance to all three apartments. Once we put in the deck, that is. We'll have a common workshop, a garden, some storage space. Transforming the view from the rear window, both ways, in and out of the yard. One day in the future. Making space for a platform.
I can see it perfectly.
