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"Where have you
just come from? This is an ordinary question, but
if you therefore think it’s the usual, you’re mistaken."
[E. Hakuin, Zenji, "Five Elders Peak." In, Secrets
of the Blue Cliff Record. T. Cleary, Translator. Boston,
2002.]
Even In cities we
still harbor the creative spark that made the first intentional
mark,
wove
baskets from plants, shaped pots from clay,
hafted stone spear points, then built villages,
towns and urban centers. "The
point is," wrote Calvin
Luther Martin,
"that this seminal
neolithic Neolithic vision of time was
nothing less than a bold revisioning of human beingness
vis-à-vis
the rest
of the earth and cosmos, with the story of that new vision
and its aspirations and illusions coming down
to us as the narrative of history." [The Way of
the Human Being. New Haven, 1999.]
An
historian who left academia to study mythology
with Native American peoples, Martin continued
by offering that
our current environmental
crisis
won't
be
solved
unless we "reconceive ourselves
as actors not of history but of the earth."
Can
we accommodate the living organism of an
unpredictable earth when
typically,
even an inanimate object has more will than
a fool. And because he
is not his
own person, he can be all people; he can
be a reflection of whatever individual he
is facing. That is why city
plans are drawn with the mathematics of statistics
and prediction?
"The
city asks for discovery, for fresh
perception, not for new planning; the secret
city, the
momentary eternal city that springs
from imagination and surprises the heart."
[J.
Hillman, City & Soul. Putnam,
CT, 2006.]
Many masters
of Modern Art lived in cities, in
the shadow of temples that have lost harmony
with animistic
reciprocations; priming
psyches to cast the
brilliance of a feral imagination.
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typically: L.B. King, To
Play the Fool. New York, 1997. |
