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AUTHOR McCue, Frances TITLE The Poet in the Warehouse. Creative Writing as Inquiry: Using Imaginative Writing To Explore Other Disciplines. PUB DATE [97] NOTE 216p.; Ed.M. Project, Columbia University. Photographs may not reproduce clearly. PUB TYPE Dissertations/Theses Undetermined (040)
EDRS PRICE MF01/PC09 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS *Creative Writing; Fiction; Films; Higher Education; High Schools; *Inquiry; *Interdisciplinary Approach; *Learning Processes; Models; *Poetry; Story Telling; Teaching Methods; *Writing Across the Curriculum; Writing Exercises IDENTIFIERS *Writing Contexts
ABSTRACT This master's project contains two essays and a long poem, examining the possibilities of creative writing as a tool of inquiry in mathematics, history, science, film, art, and architecture. The project's first essay, "The Poet in the Warehouse," introduces a brief history of imaginative writing and an argument for its inclusion in multi-disciplinary high school and undergraduate programs. It is noted that since the piece strives to spotlight the importance of creative writing in learning, it alternates between the essay and a story which mirrors the issues in the essay, thus letting the form echo the function of the enterprise itself. In the project's second essay, "Space, Structure, Storage," a curriculum model is presented, pivoting on an essential question--architecture becomes a frontier for creative writing to thrive, though any subject might be chosen for the exploration (the model is flexible and expansive). The project's third selection, "The Glass Passage," is a long poem and commentary in which a way to understand more about architecture is assembled as an example of creative writing as inquiry. The project, as a whole, draws on psychologists, learning theorists, poets and fiction writers, creativity specialists, composition and reading theorists, poets and fiction writers, creativity specialists, composition and reading theorists, linguists and educational philosophers. (Contains 60 references and 4 appendixes of research material, much with illustrations.)(TB)
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THE POET IN THEWAREHOUSE
CREATIVE WRITING AS INQUIRY:USING IMAGINATIVE WRITING TO EXPLORE OTHERDISCIPLINES
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL CENTER (ERIC) HAS BEEN GRANTED BY O This document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it 0 Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction Quality.
Points of view or opinions stated in this docu- ment do not necessarily represent official TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES OERI position or policy. INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC)
A Project Submitted in partial fulfillmentof the requirements for The Ed.M degree in InterdisciplinaryStudies and The Klingenstein Fellows Program
By: Frances McCue Teachers College Columbia University
BEST COPY AVAILABLE 2 FOR FRED DUST AND MATTHEW STADLER
Thank you: Professors Clifford Hill, Ruth Vinz, Pearl Kane; my Klingenstein colleagues; the Klingenstein Fellowship; and to Professor Joan Ockman for encouragingme to explore architecture through poetry. CONTENTS
The Poet In The Warehouse...... 2 Space Structure Storage...... 41
The Glass Passage...... 68
83
4 Frances McCue I
OVERVIEW
PROJECT PROPOSAL:
To research the uses of creative writing in academic inquiry and to write a manual/thesis entitled creative Process as Inquiry: Using Imaginative Writing to Explore Other Disciplines. The text will give a critical history of pedagogy in Creative Writing, and will offer writing exercises and heuristic activities to explore mathematics, history, science, film, art and architecture.
THE PROJECT:
Creative writing has long been neglected, along with the other arts, as a serious form of inquiry into other disciplines. The three sections of this project explore creative writingas a viable research method.
The first essay, "The Poet in the Warehouse," introduces a brief history of imaginative writing and an argument for its inclusion in multi-disciplinary high school and undergraduate programs. Since the piece strives to spotlight the importance of creative writing in learning, it alternates between the essay and a story which mirrors the issues in the essay, thus letting the form echo the finction of the enterprise itself.
In the second section, "Space, Structure, Storage," a curriculum model is presented, pivoting on an essential question. Here, architecture becomesa frontier for creative writing to thrive, though any subject might be chosen for the exploration. The model is flexible and expansive.
"The Glass Passage," the third section, is a long poem and commentary which I assembled as an example of creative writing as inquiry, a way to understand more about architecture.
As I worked on the various sections, the importance of all of the arts became more clear. I drew from psychologists, learning theorists, poets and fiction writers, creativity specialists, composition and reading theorists, linguists and educational philosophers. I found that the use of proverbs as cross-cultural structures, the development of constructivist curriculum, the role of memory, and the desire to write stories and poems engineered and illuminated my own inquiry and the resonance of the project. In the hope that this work will inspire the use of creative writing in a variety of settings, I also want this endeavor to be implemented, showing the necessity of all the arts as essential undertakings in the synthesis of real learning. Frances McCue 2
THE POET IN THE WAREHOUSE
There is something antic about creating though the enterprise he serious. Jerome Bruner
At first, the warehouse is a steamer trunk. Perhaps your own grandmother pressed her belongings into one like it, snapped the latches fatefully, and not knowing where she would next unspring them, loaded her trunk into a deep hull. The ship's ribs scratched against it, and water bled into blotches, spreading from the seams as the trunk rumbled beneath her on the long sail across a dark, never flattening sea. Inside: room enough for frocks, a shelf for books, and the vanity of a mirror when the cabinet stands upright. This is how the warehouse begins. Later, it is wedged into the tight rooms of a city, a city where the horizon pulls in like a hem, and the buildings stumble, inadequately, upward.
It is here where the girl first faces her storehouse, small as it is, but promising. She unclamps the latches and thinks of her grandmother, whom she never knew. From the trunk, she hopes, her heritage will spin open.
Under the umbrella ofCreative Writinggather the genres of fiction, poetry, drama and creative non-fiction. In high schools and colleges, the personal essay (imaginative non- fiction) and the "research" or term paper are the most solicited forms of student writing.
The skills of personal expression and data presentation become the focus for thinking critically about knowledge and experience. The personal essay is a predictable heirloom in the ancestry of rhetoric at nineteenth century British and American colleges. Philologists
6 Frances McCue 3 used oratory and rhetorical models for students to imitate in theirquest for educated expression. The personal essay and the termpaper are derivative counterparts of these, unfolding argumentation into more contemporary styleS. Until the late nineteenthcentury, literature was not typically studied as a subject unto itself within the university; itwas considered entertainment rather than a seriousarea of scholarship. Until the university developed its modern structure of departmentalization in the late 1800's, literaturewas studied through "the Greek and Latin languages and... rhetoric,oratory and forensics"
(Graff 19). Young lyricists worked as apprentices while the masterpoets centered their pedagogy on mimesis, instructing the aspiring writers to imitate the great poets, following traditional models of form. Even today, in Harold Bloom's ideal,young writers should learn the craft of poetry, fiction and plays by imitating literary giants rather than immersing themselves in the revelations of theirown experiences. Bloom centers on the
"canon" as a pedagogical wellspring. He perceives the role of the writing teacher as a provider of worthwhile models to students; this makes evaluationan easier task and it assures the continuity of a particular western literary tradition since "...poetry always lives under the shadow of poetry. The caveman who traced the outline of an animal upon a rock always retraced a precursor's outline" (Bloom 4).
The trunk, once opened, grows too small for its keepsakes. The frocks call to feathered hats and fur wraps; the books, fatigued by their Victorian relevance, long for others, more modern volumes, to nestle alongside. The little museum grows impatient, referring to objects outside itself, things it cannot hold. The girl collects more artifacts, in
7 Frances McCue 4 reverence for her grandmother. Roaming the bazaars and curbside shops, she fills her bags with dresser linens, silver handled combs. She is trying to crawl inside a life far behind her own. The trunk, as if in empathy, holds what it can, letting the dresses fold over the hinges.
The girl needs more space for her belongings. Her rooms fill. She wants to store her grandmother's relics; at the same time she wants to beamong them, running her fingers over the stiffened linens. What brings her to the warehouse isa desire for order.
What if she were to die while the trunk was locked away? Wouldanyone come to claim it?
These thoughts drive the girl into a dark mood, theone her mother calls resentment, the one the girl suspects is brought on by helplessness. A warehouse, really, is dead space. It becomes the home for artifacts, some of which are never recovered. The girl knows that her trunk can't survive her protection; it longs fora twin, or a larger box to fill. She must find a new place for the chest, one that will displayas much as it stores.
* * *
Certainly any particular creative process thriVes on work in its discipline for inspiration, form and context. One cannot be a good writer without being a good reader, just as a dancer must learn choreography and traditional movements that evolve from dance's rich history as an art form. Mimesis is, however, only one window onto the possibilities that the arts offer novices; true immersion instills a sense of inquiry that reaches beyond imitation or facile reference. The ability to refer to past models is essential in any artist's development but as Elliot Eisner points out, "we possess another ability that goes beyond the ability to recall. It is the ability to manipulate imaginatively the images or Frances McCue 5 concepts that we are able to recall. It is through the process of imaginative transformation that human beings are able to conceive what is not, but what might be" (Discipline 8).
Using literature as a referent in learning to write is crucialto any writer's development.
Reading other work nudges one'sown muse. The key is to be able to manipulate the medium of language in new ways, twisting and revising what hasgone before. This revision, or re-seeing, is what post-modern writers fixateupon, since myth and allegory are buried within us through the work ofour culture. Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, for instance, is the retelling of King Lear, re-stagedon an Iowa farm.
Still, the personal essay is the medium for most writing in high schools and colleges. Other forms of creative writingpoetry, fiction and dramaare rarely required, except in specialized courses that isolate issues of craft. This essay, and the ones which follow, voices a plea for bringing poems, stories and plays into the repertoire of student research, and into creative strategies for synthesizing knowledge. All college students take compositio. n courses, and all high school students must_produce expositoryessays which evidence their learning. Yet, this is a limited focus. The forms and subtleties of the other imaginative genres offer great possibilities in scholaiship.
In a sense, creative writing itself might represent all arts and their creative processes. Instead of neglecting a variety of writing styles and genres in the learning process, writers and teachers could benefit from placing creative writing, along with a diversity of arts, at the center of our curricula as a potent method of gathering material and assembling imaginative inquiries. Frances McCue 6
As she thumbs through directories and scans the streets, the girl settles upon a few options. She will find a warehouse nearby where she can leave her grandmother's trunk. It will be a place she can visit, a place where she can bring other momentos or retrieve her grandmother's things. There is no loneliness like-the one she feels when she thinks about this. She looks at her rooms. A small hat stand blooms with coats and scarves; her tiny kitchen overflows with spice jars and copper pans. Above the bed, clothes spill from shelves, and books caught half tumble, lean their stacks into her. Her trunk is overtaking her rooms. She brings home more trinkets: souvenir spoons from worlds fairs, tiny crystal vases, doilies ironed into the texture of cardboard, vintage shoesall these things remind her of her grandmother, a woman lost soon after her voyage.
How did the trunk reach our heroine? When she moved to her little apartment, her mother sent it to her. Inside, a note instructed her to care for the belongings, and to watch for dampness. "Don't let these things get wet," her mother's scrawl insisted. "They are old and they can't take much more." The girl, feeling the weight of heritage and the pinch of her own life wanting to push open, tries to be reasonable. She stirs her tea, and vows to fill the trunk with her grandmother's little collection, and the heirlooms that she herself has gathered from the city. "Any collection needs new additions for it to thrive," she thinks.
* * *
10 Frances McCue 7
To some educators and parents, storytelling, playwriting and poetry feel frivolous: creative writing, along with the arts in general, bears the tinge of therapy. As Elliot Eisner claims, "there is a long tradition in Western culture that regards the artsas matters of emotional catharsis rather than matters of mind" (Discipline 11). Most people think of writing poems as an adolescent activity in whichone records dramatic emotional surges.
Though poets and fiction writers hold teaching positions at every major university, imaginative writing is still viewed as a passing fancy or folly of extended childhood.
"Serious" books have either been written in the distant past, or by working writers who have created hermitages far from academia. Because creative writing aspires to make- believe accounts over factual ones, the truths of novels, poems and plays are easily dismissed. The demands for writing after college do not typically involve fiction or poetry.
And in most professions, managers want their employees to write clear and concise prose, a skill not typically attributed to the poet or novelist.
But how do students learn to write lucid, thoughtful prose which describes, recounts or argues for a particular point of view? Doesn't imagination play a role in
. stretching one's ability to perceive a variety of perspectives, and to articulate them?
Where, in the end, might we learn the most varied elements of style? From imaginative writing. When students learn to write dialogue, for instance, they are learning to capture how a character speaks. In doing so, writers have to listen more carefully to those around them. By listening carefully, writers develop a heightened sense of the surrounding spaces in which they circulate. Quoting people is a valuable device for the toolbox of stylistic strategies, and learning how to listen, and how to record, or imagine, the words of others has a powerful effect in all kinds of writing. Or, in another realm, learning to condense an Frances McCue 8 image or impression is one gift the poetcan give to the prose writer. Patricia Hampl calls poetry "the richest form of language because it is the most concentrated utterance" (197), and this concentration helps writers learn to edit, andto essentialize at the same time they infer a wealth of new information from the utterance itself. Poetry is,as Hampl continues,
"both immediate and ancient" (197); it looks for the unpredicted truth, the surprise within the obvious. Poetry can help all writers lookmore closely and articulate more deeply, more succinctly into history, memory and as wellas into matters of the human heart.
Personal essays do offer many similar attributes, and, in form, they closely imitate the kinds of writing one might engage inover a lifetime. The autobiographical texture of personal essays, though submerged in the plainness ofa non-fiction format, is as close to
"creative" as many teachers or students want to relate. Since personalessays are based upon rendering detail from memory, and linking thine details as closely as possible to a personal truth, they relay factual events througha narrative.In the end, the narrator of a personal essay usually aspires to witnessing events, but is implicated, by herown nosiness, in the evolution of a fiction. This is wonderful material, and quite similarto the effects a poem, story or play might have. In the long run, creative writing may, unlike personal essays, reach further into the terrain of invention, provoking the narrative into new forms.
Loren Eisley's non-fiction essays, for instance, transcend the personal; the narrators become witnesses to an inquiry, even as they are immersed within it. In Night Country,
Eisley's narrator rehearses possible outcomes as he explorescaves and negotiates archeological digs. The narrator's choices map his creative processas both a scientist and as a writer. Though he is steeped in scientific inquiry, Eisley's investigations are essentially artistic. Like Lewis Thomas' Lives of the Cell, thisgenre of prose is more
12 Frances McCue 9 holistic than personally expressive or sentimental: these essays explore unknown terrain at the same time they explore the inner workings of the narrators themselves.
Creative writing, despite our impressions, does not have to emerge through therapeutic confession. But the essay, as a medium, feels useful, industrial. Directly, it can address issues, stylize arguments, and present facts. Essays comprise the most "readable" forms of writing in our culture. With the advent of Wolfe's "new journalism" and the memoir as emerging forms of creative inquiry, the bulk of creative non-fiction has grown tremendously in the last twenty years. Annie Dillard, Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid,
Henry Louis Gates, and Susan Sontag all employ creative techniques in their rich layers of narrative account. Each of these writers is also gifted in more than one genre. Becoming a flexible, strong writer demands testing out forms, and generating more associative links than a wide readership typically employs. Students need a variety of reading material to learn deeply, and they need to participate in the construction of a wider range of genres to become more flexible, capable writers and readers.
Even if an essay becomes a final product of a bulk of research, imaginative writing may ignite the process itself, thus enriching the journey. At the end of some investigations, a novel may be the most appropriate form to synthesize an inquiry. In other cases, a poem may mesh imagery and rumination into a deeply philosophical expression of relevance. In plays, dialogue carries the plot along with complex psychological turns. As John Guare's play "Six Degrees of Separation" illustrates, drama can explore a real life incident, while language thrives on innuendo to reach beyond simple conversation. Or, think of the first lines of Marianne Moore's "The Steeple Jack," in which the speaker translates the apocalyptic landscapes of Durer into a small, more familiar town: Frances McCue 10
Durer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this, with eight stranded whales to look at; with the sweet air coming into your house on a fine day, from water etched with waves as formal as the scales on a fish. (5).
Moore's poetry focuses on the minimalist, treasuring details. Herpoems feel like animated museum exhibits: accurate in their placement, but lively and investigative. Nobel Laureate
Seamus Heaney says that poetry "is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality" (1). It is through Plato that Western civilization first uses poetryas a counter- argument to the rationality of existing political conditions. Here, in the imagined visions, we begin to see what is possible. As Heaney notes, poets are "concerned to conjure with their own and their readers' sense of what is possible or desirable or, indeed, imaginable"
( I ). The challenge is to read well as one creates, and this means reading the outer world along with the inner one, testing the appropriateness of ideas and provocations within the imagined space.
The girl's wanderings draw her to closed doors, soot-dusted windows and the worn bieath of machinery. At first, the girl simply wants to store her grandmother's trunk, her little museum of heritage. But the warehouse is submerged in a part of the city she has never visited. These streets are unfamiliar, though not far from her walk-up. Her feet quicken on the cobbles. Overhead, steam filters through the seams of boarded windows. Frances McCue 11
A man points to the next block. "Storage is down there," he says. Though she craves to know the building before she reaches it, the girl tries to be patient. The wind wraps her back, and the lost storefronts frame a corridor of eye-level vacancy. The numbers fade, and she arches forward, heading though the abandoned intersection, looking for signs.
What the girl sees: how objects retain their edges, how they flow from one to the other, how they all help her understand her own past, even the ones that her grandmother did not collect. In her apartment, books rub against her hands; her eyes follow the patterns of pedestrians below her window. She learns to walk with anticipation instead of fear, and she counts the blocks, notes the places she might explore later.
And, she brings the scent of wind into the warehouse with her.
To be imaginative.is to be resourceful, to create opportunities. Imaginative people see spaces in the impossible; they pry open the inconceivable. Social workers find homes for neglected children. Agile business people turn broken deals into assets. Firemen enter burning buildings and rescue victims. Faced with the overwhelming task of educating children, teachers work day by day, problem by problem, to help students learn skills while at the same time introducing them to the complexity of our cultures. On the surface, such undertakings seem monumental, but little by little, imagination repairs the world. The splinters of experience build the whole of our lives. Making use of innovation and
15 Frances McCue 12 inventiveness is crucial to the resources of thought and action. As Bronowski, the social anthropologist, notes: "The act of the imagination is the opening of {a) system so that it shows new connections" (109).
Creative writing is by nature resourceful, inspiring new connections: it draws on intuitive, cognitive and technical abilities, and it opens spaces for alternate visions to exist.
With imaginative writing, we can create what Maxine Greene calls "as-if worlds," landscapes where perspective becomes a lens to isolate and magnify what we cannot see in our own surroundings. Not only do writers create frameworks for ideas, but language itself enriches the material they collect. In the context of an exploration into science, math, history, film or architecture, a young writer has material beside herself to draw from, thus pulling her away from writing only about her feelings. Writing fiction, poetry or plays offers a unique version of research, inquiry by imagining possibilitiesnot research in the ordinary sense of answers sought and answers found. By inventing an imaginary context in which to place a science experiment or geometry problem, a student can see new possibilities in the course of study and in the world itself. She can understand the evolution of a problem or experiment more completely when if becomes part of her own creative process. Along this spiraling, overlapping journey, a Kantian vision of perception emerges: it is intellectual, emotional and physical, and the choice of apparatus is crucial to the state of the world one constructs, and to the fate of the common world we all try to create.
Jerome Bruner, psychologist and educator, puts it this way: "Education must also seek to develop the processes of intelligence so that the individual is capable of going beyond the cultural ways of his social world, able to innovate in however modest a way so that he can create an interior culture of his own" (Knowing 116) A poem or story, too,_
16 Frances McCue 13 constructs an interior culture of its own, and by inventingone, novice writers learn the intricacies and craft of the architecture at hand. The inventedspace on the page becomes a blueprint, of sorts, for a particular mental activity:an inquiry and the simultaneous construction of knowledge. As we write, paint, danceor play music, we create knowledge; in a phenomenological world, claiming knowledge becomesincreasingly based upon image, the building blocks for any art form. New kinds of understandingbecome more accessible when we are forced into new spaces. Imaginative activities provoke these spaces to open, urging us inside.
Each of the arts provides a "way we have to articulateour internal world to ourselves," as philosopher Michael Parsons asserts (51). To builda world and fill it is a complex task. Since the outer world "is not transparent tous, not self-interpreting... we must interpret it, five it some articulate shapes; and if these shapesare to remain faithful to the inner life they represent, they must be continually reexamined and adjusted" (Bruner,
Knowing 119). In this negotiation, the skills of writing and readingmerge. By producing a text, we are reading in a new way and writing a new world into our interior landscapes.
This dialogue between the interior and the exterior cieates profound results: the writer's inner landscape of thinking shifts, changing thepoem or story in process, and the vision of the outer world shifts, in response to the new imageor artifact.
Of course, she had imagined neat rows of trunks like hers, with little round tags hanging from the leather strapping, all aligned with the regularity ofa morgue's cabinets.
1? Frances McCue 14
Instead, the girl finds herself in an anteroom, facinga plastic-sealed wall. She notices a . smattering of little holes in the plastic, about waist high. "I want to store something," she says, bending to the little airway, as if it were a target, shot at so many times, and missed.
A man, blurred there behind the smudges, says, "Well what kind of storage doyou want? Locker? Three by five, seven by nine, nine by twelve? Open shelving? Garage space?"
Suddenly, she is not sure. "Can I look at the space?"
"Which one?" the man demands.
Such negotiation transforms her trunk into something shecan no longer imagine.
The girl has to go home and rest. She will think this over.
One day, she returns, p,-opelled into the building. She wants to explore. The guard again asks her what she wants to see. She asks, "Well, what is there to see?"
The guard laughs. "What you see."
"Well then," she says. "I want to see it."
Down dark rows, the guard guides her with a flashlight. Heavy wooden ladders straddle the aisles. The girl catches glimpses of old paintings, photographs, stacks of papers, two old dolls, tumbled sideways in chin-to-chest nods, flags and snow globes, a ripped kite, a croquet set with a cracked stand and only three balls. "What is this section?" she asks.
"Family memorabilia." The guard pauses, and looks to the girl. "Perhaps your items belong here." Frances McCue 15
Perhaps.
"Education must, then," Bruner continues, "be not only a process that transmits culture but also one that provides alternative views of the world and strengthens the will to explore them"(Knowing. 117). If one were to funnel down this process of transmitting culture and exploring possibilities, its essence would be in the power of the creative process to uncover choices. "In the arts," Eisner suggests, we "must rely on that most exquisite of human intellectual abilitiesjudgment" (Discipline 10). Writing demands making a set of context-driven judgments, and good teachers help their students negotiate strategies for building narratives.
Teachers make choices, just like writers do. In a course that explores urban archeology, for example, a teacher may have to guide a student away from physically digging holes upon public property, opting instead to create an imagined "dig" based on available artifacts and information. Along similar lines, when one investigates homelessness, it may not be in the best judgment to send students out to interview transients. Instead, the young writers might assemble information from service agencies, books, maps, city recordssources which do not endanger the dignity of the people involved. In writing, one makes choices about how to use material and how to credit it accordingly. These are all opportunities for pedagogical judgment, and for the development of an ethos in the process of writing and researching. In the machines of curriculum that develop, teaching priorities are institutionalized.
19 Frances McCue 16
But many high school and undergraduate teachers have neglected the power of creative writing; after middle school, it typically becomes an "elective." According to the course offerings of most high schools, we must, it seems, outgrow imaginative writing. Yet working writers don't transcend imaginative writing; why should emerging writers?
Colleges and universities, too, tend to isolate creative writing into "programs" or into small annexes of their English Departments. Yet, creative writing is where one finds the best writing available in our culture. Why do we leave it behind as a vibrant method of learning or as a serious form of inquiry.
For many teachers and students, creative writing is expressive writing, a vehicle to unload one's feelings. Creative writing can also become a method of research, a way of using perceptions and intuitions to find out more about ideas and events outside our interior cultures. Like all engaging, sustained research, creative writing is not a linear process. It is an circuitous, overlapping, irrational route, as Merleau-Ponty notes:
The idea of going straight to the essence of things is an inconsistent idea if one thinks about it. What is given is a route, an experience which gradually clarifies itself, which gradually rectifies itself and proceeds by dialogue with itself and with others. Thus what we tear away from the dispersion of instants is not an already-made reason; it is, as has always been said, a natural light, our openness to something (21).
The webs of imaginative space and real space are complex, and choices within these zones are based on judgment and inquiry. There are value systems that drive decisions. Teachers, as working writers, are crucial in addressing such dilemmas. It takes some time with language for a writer to encourage and support the revelations it offers, and then to apply it to her present. A good teacher helps to sustain the inquiry.
20 Frances McCue 17
How would she have known that the anteroom would bloom intoopenness, that the shelves would tip their wares to her?
"Let's stick to the facts," she thinks. "I am here to placemy trunk in the care of this warehouse, yet each time l return, the warehouse has changed. Themore I learn about my grandmother, the more I learn about the compleXities of storage, the lesssure I am. Each time I come here, the items shift. They becomemore familiar. Deep in the recesses of the aisles, though, I find new things. I need to know whatmy items will be next to. I need to know where they will fit."
As she turns a corner, at the end of one of the aisles, our heroine sees another young woman, perhaps her own age. The stranger tilts her head, as if she were looking into a mirror. "Hello," she says.
"Hi," says the girl. "Are you storing something here?"
I'm just looking at some stuff that belonged to my parents."
The girl squints and looks at the stranger's rough trousers and half-tucked blouse.
She looks like a girl who is no longer under her mother's influence. Ona clouded winter day, this new visitor had chosen to browse the warehouse, justas the girl had.
"I know where there are some amazing statues," says the stranger. "Want tosee them? They look like they should be in a big fancy gardenor something."
"Well, okay." The girl follows her new storage companion into the aisles, turning into ones she has not ventured down before. At the end of a row lined with lawnmowers
21 Frances McCue 18 and power tools stand a group of life-sized cement figures. Pushed together as they are, the
'statues look alive, huddled in the shadows over some mysterious transaction.
"Where do you think they came from?" asks the stranger.
The girl pulls nearer. As if fearing to be overheard, she whispers. "Are they old?"
For the rest of the afternoon, the two move through the warehouse, looking and jotting notes. They admire each other's belongings. They ask answerless questions and peruse the storehouse. Later, they leave arm in arm.
When a young writer suspends intent, her language reveals. By putting aside the internal editor, the voice who demands immediate coherence, she can use heuristic procedures to create an initial bulk of writing through observation and intuition. If she generates enough prewriting, enough loose verbiage in response to something, she can sort through it, make choices, and develop it into a working piece. Seeing peripherally, keeping the process open to useful distraction, helps the writing become more varied and animated.
By collecting details, as Donald Murray suggests, a writer can synthesize generalizations by analyzing the details themselves, letting the writing process unfurl a wealth of possibility. This opens the opportunity for the writer to make more sophisticated assumptions through the process of writing itself, instead of collecting data to support a pre-conceived agenda. In fact, finding support for one's initial intent may explain why confessional writing is often so abstract. It conceals specificity by generalizing too soon, without adequate detail. It wants to shroud its hodgepodge of unnegotiated feeling. The
22 Frances McCue 19 outpouring remains fixed in the "collecting" stage, paralyzing its opportunities for expansion, clarity and relevance to an outside readership.
One of the common ha7ards that inexperienced creative writers face is the tendency to rely on abstraction and melodrama. Imagination should outweighpure emotion in the pursuit of effective writing. To invent, rather than to confess,means that a writer has to create clear imagery, construct provocative metaphors and imaginean alternate reality. As a result, students' writinggrows less abstract and more animated.
Invention opens up stiff syntactic constructions because,as William Stafford says, "a writer is no much someone who has something tosay as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them" (17). Language, like paint, encourages a dabble in the medium, and from this some of the finest writing is born. Many useful writing exercises reduce words to building blocks from which innuendo accumulates. Language isa life-long medium; it is a source of discovery and insight into oneself and one's culture. When students learn how to generate and sustain their own work in a variety of situations, their relation to the world becomes more intimate, and their imaginary worlds more lively and available to the complexities of reflective reading.
However, after middle school, most American students engage in very little creative writing. Poems and stories are read and "interpreted," but few are created. In search of scope and rigor, most curriculum pushes imaginative work to the outskirts.
Arthur Applebee's nationwide research on writing in American high schools found that only 8.2% of ninth graders and 7.2% of eleventh graders do work that involves writing stories or poems (Moxley 28). This is a dramatic decrease from the imaginative writing
23 Frances McCue 20
undertaken in most elementary and middle school classrooms. James Britton, perhapsour
most influential contemporary language theorist, found that creative enterprises
significantly diminish as students proceed through school (Moxley 29). Essays andterm
papers are the norm for academic writing in high schools and in liberal arts programs.
Ironically, at the graduate level, M.F.A.programs in Creative Writing are growing at
unbelievable rates. The Associated Writing Programs claims thousands of members, and
lists hundreds of college and university programs in creative writing. This kind of attention
to creative writing is filtering through the culture, but high school and college programs
are not preparing students to become strong imaginative readers or writers, nor are they
using the possibilities of creative writing asa discipline of inquiry. Imagination, as a
guiding force into other areas of study, withers within the tension between context-less
issues of craft and personal experience.
The girl feels torn. Her visits to the warehouse grow more frequent, and she has
less time to collect new relics and to arrange her apartment. Some days itseems as though
she spends more time in the storage place than in her own rooms. What draws her there is the stories that she hears; her friend tells stories about her parents, how they met, and lived
in a little room above a pharmacy.
"The funny thing about some of this junk is that it helps you remember stuff that
happened when you weren't even born," her friend said one afternoon. "It's like you look at all of these things and they start to feel like someone's life."
241 Frances McCue 21
When the girl looks through her own little figurines and tableware, she gets a glimpse of her grandmother. It is possible that she, another woman in another time, like to arrange things, and set up little luncheons for two, all in the hopes that she would share it with someone. The more she makes up, the more real her grandmotherappears.
To sweep creative writing back into the.center of curriculum after middle school acknowledges language as the imaginative force that ultimately. .shapes education. Placing an artistic endeavor in the midst of other, more traditionally "academic" explorations serves as a model for all of the arts to inspire multiple perspectives in learning. Still, what about those who do not feel linguistically talented, or, in the case of other arts, those who do not feel creative in general? Many people do not feel artistically gifted. However,
Eisner describes education "as a process aimed at converting potentiality to actuality"
(Discipline 14). Skills in the arts are developed just as they are in other fields, as Eisner points out: "complex and subtle skills are seldom acquired in single settings. They require time, repetition, exploration, and continuity of effort and practice"(DiscIpline 14). For teachers to help students develop the abilities inherent in all learners demands attention, time, and multiple viewpoints. Developing the creative process through collaboration and personalization is an ongoing pursuit of inquiry. Imaginative writing can open whole passages to learning, as it inspires confidence and flexibility. In a dialogic curriculum, for instance, students can gather the knowledge and viewpoints of others while pursuing the exploration at hand. Receiving assistance from classmates becomes essential. It is Frances McCue 22 analogous to making a map that is appropriate for a particular use. The terrain itself may not change, but we learn through the suggestions and needs of others what aspects of the mapping might be emphasized. Should the topography be highlighted? The road system?
The waterways? What should the scale represent? Collaboration provides support, and the gateway reduces the anxiety of writing a piece on one's own. From a social, interpretive community, writing blooms into a democratic act. The piece is not "written" by all, but a group has the power to influence its "writtenness." In other words, bashful writers can be encouraged; they can learn generative approaches and find the bravado to pursue them.
Howard Gardner's "Theory of Multiple Intelligences" assures us that there are fewer distinct, closed portions of knowledge, and that our abilities are interconnected.
Placing words on a page can be a form of linguistic intelligence just as it can be one of spatial intelligence. Linguists tell us that meaning is ultimately derived from one's perception of space. Words can operate like the complex parts of a model, or like the mystic's dream-spun articulation. "The creation of powerful and sensitive images is a matter of mind," according to Eisner, "a matter that requires inventive problem solving capacities, analytic and synthetic forms of thinking and the exercise of judgment"
(Discipline 11).Good teaching follows this artistic model of creation. Teaching helps to integrate diverse intelligences while honing issues of craft and ethical choice. A classroom, really, is a gathering of intelligences. To consult, support and interrogate different kinds of work takes different talents, and under these talents prosper different inquiries. It may take multiple teachers, with different talents to encourage students in the multi-faceted dimensions of their work. Frances McCue 23
Though much research has been conductedon the teaching of composition, little has been conducted on the teaching of creative writing (many books offerexercises without theoretical frameworks), andvery little attention has been given to how imaginative writing can be used to explore other disciplines in high schooland undergraduate classes. Though many math and sciencecourses now use journal writing as part of the process learning wave, very few look to poems and storiesas ways to gain insight into technical matters. In Einstein's Dreams,a novel by Alan Lightman, for example, the theory of relativity is built through fictional slices. Some students work well with this narrative approach to understanding physics. By generating theirown fictional accounts based on Einstein's work, they would be even better equipped to understand the theory of relativity and the human dilemmas surrounding Einstein'sown creative process.
A student who understands physicscan use her spatial intelligence about the subject and bring that into language. Language, likea model, can become a three dimensional exercise in form.
Wendy Bishop, Arthur Applebee and Joseph Moxley have all conducted excellent research in the teaching of creative writing, and offeied outstanding insights into the teacher's role as instigator and collaborator. Bishop, Moxley and Applebee research the need for specific attention to the teaching of creative writing. They all consider the effectiveness of creative writing's most common pedagogy: the writing workshop,a structure that dates back to the last century. The University of Iowa institutionalized the workshop in 1936 with the introduction of its graduate Writing Workshop,a core of programs in Creative Writing. The pedagogical techniques of the workshop have changed little over the years, as Katharine Haake describes in "Teaching Creative Writing if the
27 Frances McCue 24
Shoe Fits".(77). The workshop is centered on a mentor writer who offers critical feedback
'to repair poems or stories. Instead of embracing the choices of a creative process, typically the writer-teacher isolates issues of craft. Though thismay be valuable at the graduate level, other difficulties arise with less experienced writers. In fact, the lack of attention to the intricacies of teaching imaginative writing establishes deficits in the literature classroom, since literary terms and applications are more difficult to learn whenone does not try the techniques that established writers use. Hands-on, experiential learning is essential to understanding science, and it should be given similar attention in the discussion of novels, plays and poems. By learning to ask "How did this writercreate this effect?" or "How might he or she have chosen this particular strategy?", studentscan see how literature is structured, how it forms rich myriads of imagined worlds. In M.F.A. workshops, the goal is publication, and thispressure often shuts down dialogue about possible choices within the creativeprocess, opting, instead, to critique choices already made. Workshops tend to produce "stars" along theway. Instead of telescoping attention to particular stars, or to the teacher at the center of this activity, the endeavor of learning to write ought to be directed to the entirety of the heavens. All of the dilemmas ofa particular writer's collecting, forming, problem-solving, ruminating and revisiting need to surfaceas a viable topic in our classrooms, and all students need to be valued for their writing as well as their collaborative practices.
The workshop is a false model of democracy. Instinctively it says, "All of the participants are valuable. We all collaborate to improve each other's work." Yet, with the mentor writer at the center, most workshops end up writing to the middle, and trying to please the leader. Each student is likea spoke to this hub. But there is no outer rim, no
28 Frances McCue 25
sense of larger inquiry to connect these spokes. This wheel, ultimately, cannot roll. Of
course there are successful workshops, and teachers who are agile enough to step out of
the way and encourage the sparks and cries of the workingprocess itself The dialogic
curriculum foregrounds collaboration, and the constructivist model instigates research
through essential questions, generating exploration. Inmany cases, however, the workshop
implodes, draining personal needs to the center instead of moving outward into
imaginative concerns. Without treating the writing classroomas a studio, a place with a
variety of tools and activities, students turn inward with their work. Again, this brings them
to personal expression instead of to inquiry into other realms. How students learn to
generate, sustain and wrangle with the dilemmas of the process is rarely discussed. Most
workshops are the homes of clever mechanics. Wemay never fully learn the secrets of the
masters: they fix the problems without showing their proteges the brilliance in the flaws,
the possibilities for further exploration, andnew webs of choices.
Will she fall in love? Will she be pleased by what she finds there? Like her
grandmother, the girl has come to a new place, hoping for companionship. Her visits with
the stranger have brought her into these wonderings. In the dark warehouse, shesees the
light rooms of her grandmother, and the loveseat where couple above the drug store sit each evening. Their lives burn with nostalgia.
The girl is dizzy with the shelves, the jumble of rulers, stethoscopes, barometers,
loose pens, measuring cups, electrical cords, shoe horns. Nothing, in this part of the
29 Frances McCue 26
warehouse, is labeled. Her legs thicken and hereyes slip. She curls in a long abandoned
chair, her notebook sliding from her knees, and she sleeps.
Creative Writing offers the best stylistic and technical examples of strong, varied
writing. When students turn to fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry and drama, they finda
range of techniques with which to construct and sustain essays, letters, lab reports and
personal reflections. Imaginative writing informs historical and theoretical writing, and
when students practice their own versions, they learn how good writing isput together,
how the architecture of their work can be improved.
Investigating other disciplines can too often be a closed series of encounters. The
post-modern channel-flipping of student lives, rushing from math-to-science-to-history-to-
art-to-English, needs some common thread of inquiry. We've all heard about writing
across the disciplines, but what this research proposes is to write through the disciplines.
To use poems, stories and plays as models to discovermore about math, science, history and the arts means putting these disciplines into creative contexts, contexts created by the students theinselves. This process is as important as the creative products it will generate.
Through the collision of imagery and idea, the revelationsare spaces opened, new possibilities of learning and discovery. Fora synthesis of complex ideas to occur, engaging, ruminating and problem solving must playa role. Though stories, poems and plays open possibilities, they still have imposed structures. It is the dialogue between the
30 Frances McCue 27 structure and the interior issues of research that tip the ideas to us, and allow us to rummage through them..
In a media-driven world, the basics of academic inquiryare shifting. Educators, legislators, parents and presidential candidates allargue over what students in America should know. They pay little attention to how students shouldcome to know what they know, and many have little respect for developing holistic research techniquesover the memorization of facts and isolated visits to the library. Research inspires images of dried paste, yellowing pages, and hours spent in musty rooms. Though we now have more methods of research available than ever, "standards" circle the target to which legislators and reformers aim. The standards movement bears the language of suffering: students should "conform" to standards; standards should be "rigorous" (rigor inspires the image of metal spines snappi upright in the bodies of children); standards "must be 'met," and
-American children must have a jump on standards,"as if with the luck of a passing train.
It is promising to see smaller schools proliferating,ones which focus on "habits of mind" rather than upon factual mastery as evidence of student learning. Deborah Meier's
Ceritral Park East in East Harlem and Ted Sizer's Coalition of Essential Schoolsare inspiring models of student inquiry. For these schools, learning is less about rigor andmore about persistence. In the working world and in the world of academic study, people have to
"walk around" a problem until they see an opening,a sliver to pry through. Real inquiry is more about what the Japanese term gambura implies (coined for use in education by Fred
Dust, Head of the Bush School): a persistence that involves the whole self, rather than mere memorization and linear logic."
31 Frances McCue 28
A man rolls the trunk from its resting place, heading into another part of the warehouse. As she walks along side the trolley, the girl holds the trunk's open lid and points to the aisles. "Turn here," she says, tilting her head in the direction of a row of heirlooms and spilled flea market trifles. "It can rest here, in this space."
The trunk stands upright, and the girl opens its latches. She imagines her grandmother checking her things, standing the trunk on the docks, with the breeze of a new land catching her skirts. The girl lays the dresses and trinketsover the lid, and looks through the heirlooms. Next to her trunk are the shallow boxes of her friend's keepsakes: a flattened uniform of her father, the lackluster pearls of her mother. Somehow, these treasures glow with adjacency, as her own belongings and her friend's should mingle there.
In a way, the girl thinks, all of the keepsakes belong together. Through the stories they tell each other, the girl and her new friend have made a new family out of their isolated ancestries. The girl vows to visit the trunk and boxes, adding and retrieving' whatever she needs. Already, her grandmother's life becomes more lucid, emerging from the haze of the past. She is bringing them back to life, this time back to her own.
* * *
Neil Postman's and Charles Weingartner's book, Teaching as a Subversive
Activity, published over twenty five years ago, re-ignited John Dewey's notion that "in
32 Frances McCue 29 every integral experience there is form because there is dynamic organization... The organization is dynamic because it takes time to complete it, because it isa growth" (55).
For P6stman and Weingartner, the growth of dynamic organization in learning is through
"the inquiry method." Growth, in this version of learning, doesnot come from teacher- imposed "rigor" but from the student herself. To explorea web of ideas "activates different senses; attitudes and perceptions; itgenerates a different, bolder, and more potent kind of intelligence" (27). When one becomes deeply immersed in theprocess, the inquiry itself mixes with the subject explored. As Postman and Weingartner describe it, "learning is a happening in itself' that helps "increase thecompetence of learners"(29). Dewey, perhaps Postman's greatest influence, described theprocess this way:
"Material is ingested and digested through interaction with that vital organization of the results of prior experience that constitutes the mind of the worker... Experience, like breathing, is a rhythm of intakings and outgivings. Their succession is punctuated and made a rhythm by the existence of intervals, periods in which one phase is ceasing and the other is inchoate and preparing....The form of the whole is therefore present in every.member. Fulfilling, consummating, and continuous functions, not merely ends, located at one place only. An engraver, printer or writer is in process of completing at every stage of this work. He must at each point retain and sum up what has gone before as a whole and with reference to a whole to come (55-57).
But the creative process is not as clean as the "completing atevery stage" that
Dewey describes. Postman and Weingartner point to "question asking, defining, observing, classifying, generalizing, verifying and theorizing"as components of the process, noting that "the inseparability of language and inquiry is obvious" (37, 115). Whatseems to be a Frances McCue 30 dilemma of language may be a dilemma of the inquiry itself. In turn, a dilemma in the inquiry may be partially resolved through language.
Research, by its nature, is full of dilemmas. Within these live the possibilities for the alchemy of true learning. But there are hazards of research that requirea teacher's profound ability to help students make good choices. Wholesome research offers a repertoire of strategies to enter unfamiliar material. Research is active contemplation. The composition theorists, particularly.Donald Murray and Peter Elbow, offer insights into the early stages if collecting. They break down some of the mystery inherent in the creative process. Students themselves offer fresh perceptions, visions of what it means to live in a particular present. Students produce their own language. And, at the risk of factory metaphors taking over and thrusting us back into an industrial model of schooling, let us say that students also produce meaning, and collaboratively, they produce a stronger meaning. It is not an assembly line, but a room of experts all fiddling with the product at hand. This is not Dewey's model of progressivism which directlyserves an industrial society; rather it is a model of developing Postman's and Weingartner's "condition of mind" and Deborah Meier's "habits of mind," qualities which serve a culture of thinkers and questionersnot workers who imitate the tasks of machines.
Postman and Weingartner embrace inquiry as a series of uncoverings, unravelings, and choices. "Most human problems require us to make choices," they claim, and "this is a much more rigorous process than making a decision. We have to include more, recognize more, consider more, and provide for moreof everything....Anything different from what was expected is 'admitted' into the system"(117). Piaget's notion of learning asa process of assimilation and accommodation points to the "system" Postman and
34 Frances McCue 31
Weingartner describe. Learners, as part of their process, must admit the information into their frameworks of inquiry, thus revising the frameworks, and what Dewey labels the
"dynamic organization." The best initial frameworksare, for learners, plastic and flexible.
One morning, the girl finds a book and brings it to the warehouse. It has pictures of cut glass vases, tiny lamps, china figures, and other collectables one might find in an old house. The girl thinks the pictures are beautiful. "Look," she instructs her friend. "These are just like some of the things we have seen."
Her friend nods. "Are they worth anything?"
"I just like them.- The girl points to a crystal candy dish. "Mine is sort of like that onedon't vou think?"
"Yeah. it is." Hey, look at these dates. Is that when your grandmother was living?"
From the pictures, the two girls imagined a wealth of furnishings, a place where her grandmother dusted and lived to be old. But life, they knew,was not quite like that.
Somehow the girl's grandmother had managed to give birth, and then to disappear almost as quickly as she had arrived, leaving her trunk and her young child.
* * *
Just as the house and the living cannot be separated, language, as a route, can
.hardly be separated from its discoveries. To suspend judgment and to write into new Frances McCue 32 contexts means unlearning fixed paradigms and shuffling them for the benefit of both vision and truth. This makes languagemore organic, arising from the exploration, and it inspires the exploration to bend to the languageat hand. Revision of one may unravel and remodel the other. The inquiry and the language used topursue it are response-driven, ongoing, and headed spiraling toward product. Whena student is persistent in thinking, engaging, reconsidering and problem solving, sheopens up possible strategies to dilemmas, both narrative and poeticas well as ethical. This is an important series of stages in generating synthesis. The project at hand must relate back to its guide, and the guide must see a place in the social framework for the project.
But how does creative writing as a form of inquiry find relevance ina larger social context? First, by writing poems and stories, studentsare connecting to literature of the past, and in many ways, letting their own creations-be influenced by work that they have already read. This gives nascent writerssome insight into the complex issues of craft, and anchors them in a present that affects their research in markedways.
Second, young writers can benefit from writing commentaries about their stories and poems. A reflective commentary should accomp.any all creative endeavors,not to privilege linguistic intelligence over others, but to offer the student and her viewers other kinds of access to the project, and to account for choices made within it. These commentaries should outline not simply the dilemmas that the creativeprocess has posed, but how the decisions the writer has madeare reflected in the craft of the final piece. The dialogue between the artistic piece and the commentary providesa metaphoric construct of two things compared, and can inspire critical thinking and reflectionon the work. It has these following possibilities:
36 Frances McCue 33
to separate the student from her work by giving an aerial, critical view of it;
to create a meta-awareness of the choices she has made in theprocess;
to use the vocabulary of the craft at hand and the language of expertise within the field
of inquiry;
to identify mastery and spaces for more inquiry;
to place revision within the fabric of creating itself;
to learn more deeply about literature (or any medium that is the subject of the inquiry);
to establish the arts as a varied and complek arena, suited toa variety of purposes;
to constitute research as an art, thus inspiring art-like techniques;
to increase the "competence of learners" (Postman 31).
Postman and Weingartner summarize the opportunities in the inquiry method by claiming that learners "are more persistent in examining theirown assumptions; the use of definitions and metaphors {become} instruments of theirthinking and are rarely trapped by their own language" (32). A writeror painter can gain confidence as a thinker by utilizing two structures of expression.
The third way to find relevance is to connect thesepoems and stories to other poems and stories within the community. Exhibitions, presentations, dialogues and submissions are all vehicles to connect the stories andpoems to the larger machinery of study and of relevance. Theodore Sizer's Coalition of Essential Schoolsprovides a working model of presenting material to larger communities,as well as within one's own.
37 Frances McCue 34
"You may look at the collections from other cultures, but you may not try on the
costumes," the security guard tells the girl. "Those items are sacred, not to be.woni."
The girl wants to don the masks and parade through the warehouse. She wants to
feel what it would be like to have a heritage different from herown. Instead, she stands
behind the red ropes strung in front of the shelves and peers into therows of items. The
more she looks into her own trunk, the more she desires to look into the trunks and shelves
of others.
"Vanity does not become you," says the guard. "These things are not yours."
The girl becomes curious enough to look, but not rude enough to wear the
belongings of others.
Language works powerfully: it unites whole governments and dispenses opinions
from its citizenry. One must navigate through the disciplines, creating one'sown sense of
cultural heritage, while respecting the various heritages of others. The arts provide a'
profound pivot for any investigation; yet thereare ethical issues which any artist or writer
must confront. How easy it might seem for a young American writer to create a story from the perspective of a !Kung Bushwoman. With the right articles and photographs, her life might seem easy to render by connecting "facts", photographs, cultural icons. But the imagination cannot hold up under certain presumptions. A writer always hasto check the authenticity of her voice, and work against the desire to appropriate the lives of others.
When she places herself in an honest proximity to the material, she must acknowledge
38 Frances McCue 35 what is within her rights to claim as a narrator. Wise teachers can guide students through such choices, helping young writers and artists understand that context is crucial to the rendering, and that one's narration conjures up ethical dilemmas.
To create new verbal structures that counteract bias, to reveal past frames of reference that are no longer revealing, and to revive the dead language of research while giving iti new perspectives, all negotiates ethical and social terrain. If writers are to put their work to use in the social fabric of the culture, they must see the power of the word.
Paulo Freire is quite articulate about this: "Within the word we find two dimensions, reflection and action, in such radical interaction that if one is sacrificedeven in partthe other immediately suffers. There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis.
Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world" (75).
If the word has to be "true", doesn't that say something about content? Aren't there facts and trends which need to be recorded by students? How does creative writing allow for such content to thrive? Creative writing acknowledges distortion immediately. It says,
"These facts are accurate, but I will use theM in a context that will make them true." Truth, really, is about alignment:Imaginative writing offers'a structure for ideas and factual accounts to be actively stored. After all, the historic ballad kept the memories of wars and royal lineages alive. Hemingway's stories bring realistic accounts of the Spanish Civil War into our living rooms, just as Jamaica Kincaid's novels underscore many of the "facts" of life in Antigua. A poem or a story is a salient structure that can uphold the demands of content, while placing them into the particularity that imagined contexts demand. Many contemporary poets, including Jorie Graham, Allison Deming and Alice Fulton have
39 Frances McCue 36 ruminated issues of science in their work, with an attention to the intricate nature of facts and hypotheses.
Like Dewey, Jerome Bruner describes the nature of knowledge as a dynamic structure: "Knowledge is a model we construct to give meaning and structure to regularities in experience....For it is structure, the great conceptual inventions that bring order to the congeries of disconnected observations that gives meaning to what we may learn and makes possible the opening up of new realms of experience" (Knowing 120).
Negotiating a structure is part of the creative process; others call it revision. Students are often resistant to "revising" their writing. Actually, this is quite understandable. Essays burdened with red marks come back to them, and any writer must have a flicker of embarrassment and a desire to "fix" the errors and put the whole piece to rest. But embarking on a longer creative process, one which is not corrected but encouraged, one in which choices are faced with bravado and reason, demandsmore than tinkering with mechanical problems. It involves looking at the whole system of the exploration and the poem or story as representative of that, as well as a separate piece of art.
The unconscious has always been romanticizedas a powerful force in creativity, perhaps because it has less of the mortar and glue of structural dilemmas. All writers turn to the damp ferment of the mind's dirk spaces, hoping their work will draw out surprises, unfamiliar truths. Many writers say that they write poems to discover what is true, and record it in a new way. Any writing, really, is creative. A legal brief, for instance, shifts through facts, seeking places to open them into arguments. Research ushers lawyers through imaginative opportunities: they build solid cases by sifting throughcase books, warping their findings to the facts, and connecting them with the language of convictionor
40 Frances McCue 37 defense. In the end, perhaps lawyers too are surprised by theirown interactions with a process of investigation.
When the girl sifts through the aisles and finds other items that remind her of her own, she has a clearer picture of her grandmother. The linens are hand-sewn, the silver sachet boxeS wrapped in felt. Across the aisle, shesees an old photograph yellowing in a frame. Inside: a man seated at the head of a milk wagon, his horse looking askance, beyond the frame. The silver frame matches her grandmother's sachet box, her silver handled comb. For the girl, this marksan era, a time when linens were worn for weddings only, and milk was chilled in holes beneath the floorboards. Her grandmother, unmarried when she crossed the sea, must have come to thenew country in anticipation of a wedding.
The dress, pressed into the trunk, had beenunworn. The girl thinks now of men in milk trucks, the flicks of mud against her grandmother's shoesas she stepped from the gangway. It was here that she searched for her new husband. Could he have come to her in the starched seams of a war uniform? The story unfolds, much like the dresses released from the box, battered now by the decay of relics, and bolstered by the girl'sown visits to the warehouse.
* * *
41 Frances McCue 38
Surprise is what Bache lard calls "novelty," the unpredictable alchemy of metaphors. By bringing two formerly unlike ideas, objects, or events together, the collision can create new and unexpected truths, an escape from cliché into some new insight.
Bruner says that "all forms of effective surprise grow out of combinational activity, of placing things in new perspectives" (Knowing 20). Such "fruitful combinations" (20) instigate learning, and are the provocation in searching fornew truths. Because writing rebels against fixity, as Bahktin noted, intent cannot remain cemented to the utterance
(272-76). Intent and slippage, as a polarity, develops a creative tension whichopens possibility. Language uncovers deeper intents looming in the subconscious, and thriving upon cultural cues, it shifts and exposes new insights. The resistance of language to the individual's utterances (293-4) may, at first, frustrate those in the midst of imaginative tasks; they want to say what they mean and having-said it, they want it to stay put. Who can blame them? Writing, in our society, is often heralded as a direct transcription of thinking, as if we all, like Bartleby, are scriveners, taking down precisely what the mind dictates. But writing is less a dictation from the mind, and morea collage of ideas, moving and banging against each other, organized into a particular representation. Writing ismore map than transcript; it renders complex terrain and pieces it into a whole. Some areas we, as readers, visit more than others as we scoot across the topography of the piece. In the process, the mind fumbles along, and the pen picks up scraps in its wake. Later, the mind and the writing tools make compromises; they negotiate deals with each other. Form evolves in the synaptic snaps of internal wrangles and external physical actions.
Teaching, too, is like this. No one expects her students to clearly recite all of the profundities of presented material; instead, teachers help studentsmove around the mass
42 Frances McCue 39 of material, guiding them to their own revelations and complicatedpatterns of discovery.
Along the way, good teachers, like good writers,are surprised by the originality and synthesis of thoughtful reflection and engagement. Theyare masters of compromise and negotiation. The encounters that foster absorption,as Rollo May suggests, sustain the interactions with the creative process itself. Pleasing surprises result from the integration of left and right brain activities, promoting discovery. The renowned author of Flow,an intellectual treatise on happiness, Csikszentmihalyi, also fosters absorption with tasksas the key to persistence, deep thinking and, ultimately, pleasure.
Discovery is also promoted by collaboration. Tomove inside an inquiry is an inclusive activity. One has to let others and "otherness" in. If languagemaps the terrain, then we must work on both the terrain andour mapping of it, so that in Freire's terms, we can make the words "true." Truth is better revealed by exposure to varying points of view and our own circuitry, exposed to the matters at hand. To create andto unearth the unpredicted truths means to investigate deeply while beingas patient as a security guard.
Though the alchemy of formerly disparate ideas, the creativeprocess thrives. Bruner recommends setting up heuristic endeavors, aiming acompass toward productive combinations. In the end, we live within the maps of our making, in turn transformingour relation to the world into intimacy.
On a day when the weather cracks open and spring leaks into the streets, the girl walks to the warehouse. The chill in the air feels like warmth. Ahead, shesees the
43 Frances McCue 40 warehouse doors thrust wide, and a little flock of passersby clustering to the now-widened entrance. The outer walls seem to peel away as the girl draws near. Light intrudes, illuminating the aisles, catching the boxes and unassembled furniture. The girl pauses, scanning the rows, the items thrust anew into the light.
"Step aside, please," the guard says. "We need to get a truck in here."
"Are you selling anything?" asks a woman on the street.
"We're moving some of this stuff to a bigger place," the man says, waving to a truck, backing down the block.
"Will my things be going?" asks the girl.
"Most will," he says.
.4 Frances McCue 41
SPACE, STRUCTURE, STORAGE
Poetry is the art of seeing what isn't. It makes visible the spaces in which nothing existed, and it emerges to fill these caesuras of our lives, or to remind us that such silences exist. To create something from open space, a poet structures language, and in that matrix, she stores innuendo, metaphor, philosophy, history and narrative. In the end, a poem is as real as a warehouse. Readers, enter at first puzzled by the space; they look closely at the building's cues: how it was constructed, how it fits into the environs, and what it might hold. To read, after all, is to furnish and to store our belongings, to keep the experience as part of our inner lives. By holding poemsas well as storieswithin us, we are weaving complex interior narratives filled with longing and learning. Writing stories, poems, and plays, and storing them on paper, rearranges and manipulates our fantasies; they assist their creators in making sense of the world around them.
Learning, in many instances, is about storage. In school, we plug our heads with verb conjugations, dates of wars, names of generals, the process of photosynthesis, and we expect our teachers to excavate, to make us ready, and to provide us with such fill. But real learning, as John Dewey and Ted Sizer tell us, is actually about connecting things, making ideas out of isolated facts, forming opinions and substantiating them, and building new frameworks for our beliefs and ideas to thrive. These are the elements we assemble inside the warehouse, that place that once did not exist at all.
It is memory-- personal, cultural and historical-- that constructs our ability to store knowledge and our uses of it. As Frances Yates points out in her seminal book The Art of
Memory; memory is "the converting power, the bridge between the abstraction and the
45 Frances McCue 42 image" (96): This dialogue between symbol and idea initiates critical thinking, rather than simplistic notions of representation. To placea lens on this interaction between the abstraction and the image, drawing uponour own experiences and those of our culture, we have the power to build a structure and thenuse it for storage: a monument with the doors pulled wide and the entrance gaping, alwaysopen. Later, we wheel things in and out at will, and if needed, we remodel the building, sometimes changing itsvery structure, to accommodate our remembrances..
In these spaces where new visions can be structured, ideas beg forms. How willwe formulate what we know? How will we outlineour explanations? And, traveling outward: what forms do the culture's ideas come in? How have people built structures before? Like poets, open spaces beckon to us. Wallace Stevens, at the end of "The Snow Man," writes about this very recognition:
For the listener, who listens in to snow And nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is (9-10).
To educate, teachers must have faith in the "nothing that is not there," and most of all in
"the nothing that is." Teachers offer possibilities andfacilitate the construction of learning.
They unroll blueprints and ask students to change them. They ask students to see spaces and to build and to store.
Writing poems and stories and reconstructing them orally are two forms of storage: paper storage and body storage. Both thrive on what James Moffett terms "inner speech," and what Frances Yates defines as the art of memory: "inner writing." What we keep inside our bodies, what we retain and what we feel as part of ourselves is crucial to human development and to anyone's ability to thrive in future emotional and intellectual arenas.
46 Frances McCue 43
Body storage helps us act and to communicate immediately in "real time" through what
Deborah Tannen terms "interpersonal involvement." She notes that literate strategiesa term she later refutesimpose "relatively less focus on interpersonal involvement" than oral discourses (124). Tanne-n assembles these oral strategies which include: "pacing, rate of speech, overlap and interruption, intonation, pitch, loudness, syntacticstructures, topic, storytelling, humor and irony" (133). Theseare all vehicles for pulling what is stored out of ourselves, and possibly, influencing our listeners, helping them to remember the interaction, placing it into their own forms of body storage. These strategies facilitate the loading and unloading of images, as well as their assimilation intous. The magic of storytelling becomes an art where these techniques mingle in anew way, inspiring the magic of oral experience.
Paper storage, on the other hand, organizes our thoughts for more complex readings that do not exist in the present. These readings live outside of "real time." Onpaper, as writers and students, we create a different variation of storage, fora less personal, less immediate purpose. Since paper is a separate entity from the body, and vulnerable toa different set of environmental influences, literacy ushers in a whole realm of complexities, both as a process and as a fixed storage. The act of physically rendering a story or poem on the page is a different kind of making something out of words. As Moffett says,. "Because inner speech is the matrix of spontaneous discourse that can be composed in any direction and that reflects any externalities, it allows us to integrate all discursive learning" (Center
80).
By retrieving inner speech, bringing it outward, and revising it for the page, we hone and explore what we have stored, creating then a new structure ina space that had
47 Frances McCue 44 not been filled before. Moffett calls writing a "revision of inner speech," and he claims that "nothing is so important to education as this circularity of inner and outer speech, mind and society" (Center 77, 95). To learn is to integrate, process and store. It is also to give away what we have stored. What we learn is self-replenishing, thriving on use.
Because fictional, poetic and real experiences merge in the hodgepodge of the mind, they all are the materials that structure value judgments. At times, one cannot separate a real life experience from a "read- experience. Freud credited imaginative activity with the power of lived activity, since both deeply influenced the psyche. James
Britton claims that by taking on the role of the witness, one sees one's own past and future experiences along with those of others. Practicing this means one can also witness "events that have never happened and could never happen" (103). All of these experiences contribute meaningfully to our being.
Stories and poems are open structures, not airless bell jars, but storage mechanisms that hold possibility. They store literal imagery and the permeable abstractions of working those images; readers supply the bridge of memory; the alchemaic process grows, like
"black flowers bloom(ing) in matter's darkness" (Baehelard 19). Fiction also creates what
Sapir terms the "reduction of experience to familiar form" (339). Poems, in contrast, are essential utterances, webs of essence, while stories host situations adjacent to our own, realms where repression and desire can be unleashed, places where we might turn around and see new perspectives. Both poetry and fiction need the potency of lived experience to bloom; they allow us to incorporate particular fictional events into our own world views.
Umberto Eco describes fiction as "the opportunity to employ limitlessly our facilities for
48 Frances McCue 45 perceiving the world and reconstructing the past," and we "train our ability to structure our past and present experience" (Eco 131).
Memory becomes an adhesive between living in'the present and realigning the past; it is the bridge between image and abstraction that Yatesso artfully describes. Sometimes the process of building the bridge suspends time: for the writer, a world of past and present can exist in one fiction or one poem which the reader re-activates in her own present, thus dissolving the bridge itself. James Britton writes:
Events take place and are gone: .it is the representation that lasts and accumulates and undergoes successive modification. It is from the representation we make that we gain a sense of a continuing existence in a world that has a past and a future, a world that remains in existence whether we are there to perceive it or not (18).
How much this implicates fiction and poetry! Writers create representations, perhaps inspired from actual events, and they create new spaces for understanding. "This is to work upon our representation of the particular experience and our world representation in order to incorporate one into the other more fully," as Britton states (19). Havelock narrows this idea by pointing to Piaget's model: "The mind's attention is continually bifocal; it preserves an identity, yet it makes room for a difference within this identity" (147). Our storage is constantly shifted, filtered and replenished with new materials, as are our readings of stories. In the end, both the internal paradigms of the mind have to accommodate and translate imagery into abstraction, and the external presentation, whether written or oral, must attend to structure as an expression of what is stored.
49 Frances McCue 46
When we make things, we make symbols, iconic images. When an architect creates a building, she uses symbols in her materials and in her framework. The building itself becomes a symbol for shelter, a representation of what is held there. Suzanne Langer calls symbols "the typically human form of overt activity" (Philosophy; qtd. In Britton 21).
When we act, or when we store information, we are structuring symbols. Symbols become the image end of the bridge to abstraction, as well as items to be stored within working structures. To make poems, read texts, build buildings, write letters, we are reliant upon representative devices. These symbols construct experience, and literature becomes, as
Langer claims, "virtual experience" (Problems 29). And experience itself is a construct; it too fills spaces. When someone dies or when a book is burned, the space diminishes. It disintegrates. We use memory to protect the ruins. In oral cultures, where history is not recorded on paper, people protect the constructed spaces with tales, music and dance-- to both hold things in place and to allow them to metamorphosize. In literacy cultures, pages emerge as a vehicle to keep the memory of the lost alive.
Writing poems and stories constructs what isn't. It is also constructing what is. Like
Stevens' speaker who sees in the snow both emptinegs and possibility, we are all searching for ways to leave marks on our world, and to let the world leave marks on us. Learning by creating unites these two: in filling spaces, building structures and nurturing storage.
USING PROVERBS:
Proverbs are a natural bridge between paper storage and body storage. While tucked in the body, proverbs retain deliberate syntactic frames, useful in both speech and
50 Frances McCue 47 writing. As culturally-embedded metaphors, such aphorisms store distillations of folk wisdom. In many cultures, people draw upon proverbs to identify and deconstruct complex situations. Because of their simplicity and brevity, in both structure and abstracted lesson, they are "adopted as elementary lessons of culturally valued behavior" (Moreno and
Di Vesta 179-80). Proverbs are also useful to students, not only to identify and to recommend appropriate behavior, but to use as a method of inquiry because they
"summarize prior experience, contribute to our expectations, and allow prediction of outcomes in novel problem-solving situations" (180). This, for students, is a gateway to critical thinking.A person who can invoke a proverb in a given situation, therefore, is not dealing with an unknown," say Goodwin and Wenzel (142). Students can use proverbs by relying on the cultural and personal storage they provide, and by mounting new proverbs in old frameworks. In this way, learners can confront "novel problem-solving situations" and make predictions. This method, as a mechanism for learning, puts language in action, in form, and therefore in contexts to confront and disassemble enigmatic scenarios.
As frameworks, proverb structures are predictable and classifiable. They are also communal, relying upon interaction, and quite often, they can even be more powerful than the poet's storehouse of images. Proverbs resonate in everyday speech, and the listener pauses to assimilate the proverb and reapply it to the situation at hand. Proverbs can inspire the poet, urging her to build new truths from them. Such adages, shared socially, rely on fixed, identifiable syntactic constructs. Some formulas identified by paremiologist
Alan Dundes are:
"Better than Frances McCue 48
"A is a
never
or
444 said the as (s)he " (46)
"From the structural point of view," write Holden and Warshaw, "a proverb, is really an equality expression. Graphically, itcan be portrayed as an equality expression between two statements, one literal, one abstract. The abstractone must be constructed"
(63). In simpler terms, a proverb is a metaphor. Listeners haveto build the abstract ideal from the concrete, and apply it to a larger context that is both specific and abstract: "All proverbs are potentially propositions whichcompare and/or contrast" (Dundes 54). By having the model to compare one unknown witha known, a student can come to a greater truth about both the known and the unknown. Making metaphors isnot easy; having a generative proverb frame makes theprocess easier.
When given more detailed analysis, proverbs also displaymore complicated lodgings: "The basic architectural structure is composed of fourstatements or propositions and this is the basis for calling it quadripartite...four isa pervasive and stable deep- structure, what Levi-Strauss called a model" (Perry 31). The syntactic structures also display logical connections, illuminating the connections between the four propositions. In the process that Goodwin and Wenzel outline, the roles of proverbs reach from specific patterning into resonance; they "1) reflect an implicit typology of patterns of reasoningor argument, 2) illustrate and comment upon legitimate patterns of inference, and 3) caution against general and specific fallacies" (157). The logic of proverbs hangson their framing,
52 Frances McCue 49
their structures. Even when they resound with truth, theyare inferring accuracy with the
establishment of patterns, cues we easily, but mysteriously, recognize in speech.
Even in such logical frames, proverbs rely heavilyon poetic devices. Like poems,
they distill experience. Ruth Finnegan states that "Proverbsare a rich source of imagery
and succinct expression on which elaborate formscan draw" (11). These elaborations take
on elements that transcend exposition, becoming poetic. Finnegan recognizes the element
of imaginative writing in proverbs: "...in addition to terseness and relative.fixity, most
sayings classed as proverbs are also marked bysome kind of poetic quality in style or
sense..." (14). This intersection of the poetic and the structuralopen gateways to critical
and imaginative thinking, demanding applications to particular situations while also
universalizing them.
When students adopt these poetic devices, which Frank D'Angelo outlinesas
-alliteration", "rhyme ", "metaphor and simile", "repetition", "ellipsis", "parallelism",
"antithesis" and "puns", they can learn more about the strategies themselves, while, at the
same time, embarking on the process of using proverbs as generative frames (366). Here,
the toolbox spills open, creating many uses, not the least of which is to "offera general set
of rational strategies for deliberating about life's problems" (Goodwin and Wenzel 158). In
using proverbs, one gives an anchor to an enigma. Something vague and puzzling is
grounded within the application of a proverb. Since a proverb can "disambiguate complex
situations and events," by their nature, such aphorisms must be open-ended to allow the
injection of intuition, opinion and projection (Lieber 101). Ofcourse, the proverb alone serves to make sense of particular situations; the structure can be fixed while its
5,3 Frances McCue 50 implications and uses burst into open spaces. The structure frames the reading at the same time it imposes freedom upon it.
Once used as "proof in formal arguments, and as a means of learning to paraphrase," proverbs have been utilized by students for centuries (D'Angelo 367). Young scholars in the Renaissance filled their commonplace books with adages. Other than the
Psalms, no rhetorical structure has so infused speech across cultures, and for such an extended period of time. Even when isolated from whole contexts, proverbs ask their listeners and readers to draw inferences and develop abstract reasoning: the same skills demanded of a good reader, writer and storyteller. Proverbs provide opportunities for students to look closely at the functioning of grammatical structures, individual words, and literary devices (most notably metaphor).
Quotes, statements of wisdom, proverbs-- they all entice us. Proverbs can inspire adolescent thinkers who have reached the Piagetian stage of formal operational thinking, who are developmentally ready to grasp abstract meaning. (Research of Piaget, Holden,
Richardson and Church suggests that students younger than eleven or twelve generally do not grasp proverbs.) Adolescents are, according to Pia. get, "the individuals who submit themselves to possibility," and this new stage of awakening opens the door to a complex storage facility in the mind. Because it feels motivating to find wisdom and apply it, one can also marvel at inventing-it, filling spaces with new structural frameworks.
A proverb can open the gates to something not understood. But for a proverb "to endure, it must also be useful. It must have some strategic value in coping with some relatively common human problem or situation" (Goodwin and Wenzel 142). Parents invoke proverbs as they grapple with raising their children; business people use proverbs to
5.4 Frances McCue 51
understand complex dealings with markets. Yet proverbs are a departure from regular
speech. Psycho linguists have long tried to ascertain how we orally tag these differences.
Something shifts in a speaker's utterance when a proverb is delivered; something tilts in
the listener. In oral cultures, these proverbial shifts lace speech. In poetic writing one can
sense the notion of the essence, of stylized language that transcends particularity. Roland
Barthes claims that "popular proverbs forsee more than they assert, they remain the speech
of a humanity which is making itself, not one which is" (154). With this power to forecast
comes the resonance of poetry; when one predicts, one conjures up imagery, the building
blocks of imagined space. Prophesy, certainly, is an act of imagination. Proverbs are one
leap into metaphor, into the foretelling of a world still evolving.
In many ways, proverbs pose oppositions that are "not resolved" (Dundes 60). A
proverb points to a situation, identifies its complexity, but does not demand direct action.
Proverbs ruminate. They allow students to pass into larger, operative theaters, where the
puzzles of science, math, history, art, architecture and literature reside. What they store:
folk wisdom, one's identity with particular cultural heritages, aphoristic structures and
methods to apply them, all the while begging the contexts.
Walter Ong, linguist and cultural theorist, claims that proverbs are forms of "social
apprenticeship" in some cultures (9). They provide the impetus for storytelling, but they
also serve as mnemonic devices. Ong claims that "serious thought is intertwined with
memory systems," (34) and Havelock takes it one step further by claiming that "mnemonic
needs determine syntax" (87-96; 131-2; 294-6). To invert the equation here, students may turn to formulas in order to memorize material, as well as to generate new meaning. Ong
believes "formulas help implement rhythmic discourse and also act as mnemonic aids in
55 Frances McCue 52 their own right..." (35). It is easier to remember lists, principles, and ideas when one has structural frameworks, or warehouses, in which to put them. Even such a distillation can create the impetus to move from entropy into a creative process. Proverbs, along with the poetic tools they utilize, give one solution to exercising memory as a trolling net.
Alliteration, antithesis, assonance, epithets all serve as forms, inside or outside proverbs.
Such exterior patterns help internalize information and philosophy.
In the conceptual framework of Space, Structure, Storage curriculum that follows, proverbs are generated not as morals, but as invented truths. They are practice hooks that direct us into these cultural storehouses. "By citing a proverb...a speaker makes his hearer aware of or convinces him of (his/her) common group membership or cultural heritage..."
(Lieber 146). By looking at proverbs from other cultures, one can learn more about his or her own. They provide both access and identification, a means to explore the world.
Miraculously, it seems all cultures use some variation of proverbs, a wealth of information stored in such humble huts. As segues, proverbs are passports.
A CURRICULAR MODEL
To connect these notions of space, structure and storage with proverbs as generative frames, the following model places this process into a curriculum. Divided into seven parts, each part is designed for one to two hours of meeting time. The whole curriculum works as a mini-course or part of a larger high school or liberal arts course.
Like Donald Murray's paradigm of the writing process, this model attempts to both instigate and organize chaos. Murray's diagram looks like this:
58 Frances McCue 53
WRITING
ale COLLECTING CONNECTING
N" READING
(23)
The space, structure, storage curriculum, as a process, isa constructivist and dialogic exploration. As "the writer welcomes unexpected relationships between pieces of information never before heard in the writer's head,"as Murray describes, she explores material outside her own storage mechanisms (20). Unlike insular theories of the writing process as a self-centered activity, this new model breaks outward, knocking out the side wall in the "collecting" side of the equation.
Proverbs generate reactions, opinions and inferences about the outside world, about material that is puzzling. This is where inquiry begins. Like the curricula of The Coalition of Essential Schools, this curriculum is triggered byan essential question, a pivot from which the class activities spin, throwing open the doors of students' warehouses. The model is structured so that a variety of subject areas could plant themes.into this
"triggering town" (as poet Richard Hugo would call it). The over-arching theme of Space,
Storage and Structure could be replaced or re-modeled to suit the needs of the exploration.
In its structuring, this process of curriculum design emphasizes the necessity of a thoughtful open process with enough framing to sustain inquiry, without stifling it. (This design is, however, flexible and broad enough to house a range of inquiries.)
Since poems and stories are begun here, along with some rudimentary memorization analysis, both oral and literate traditions are called upon. These methods are
57 Frances McCue 54 transportable across disciplines, focusing on the role of memory,or building knowledge into oneself through the workings of image and abstractions. Inmany ways, no matter what the course, one's work is always about Space, Structure and Storage.
The Coalition for Essential Schools and the work by Brooks and Brooks (The
Constructivist Teacher) greatly influenced this paradigm, centeringon an essential question. Since learning is a process of exploration rather than the load-and-fill strategies of content-driven classrooms, the model should be consideredas a circular one, one which can be repeated many times through the course of a sustained dialogue, or extended so that it rotates in a single sweep throughouta term long class. Ultimately, a scientist, mathematician, historian, painter, dramatist, writer and critic should feel comfortable operating in this "space." The structure isas flexible as it is fixed: a form- of impermanent architecture.
THE ESSENTIAL QUESTION
The triggering subject in the following curriculum design is Architecture:some elementary principles. In many ways, this essential questionwas inspired by The Art of
Memory in which Frances Yates connects memory,as a deeply human function, to architecture: "Very singular is the art of this invisible art ofmemory. It reflects ancient architecture but in an unclassical spirit, concentrating its choiceon irregular places and avoiding symmetrical orders. It is full of human imagery ofa very personal kind..." (16).
Using this focus, the exploration takes students (high school, undergraduateor adults) into history, classical studies, drawing and design, and literature.
58 Frances McCue 55
THE MODEL:
A flat, two-dimensional model follows. It should be thought ofas a rotating mobius
strip, constantly moving and twisting to make connections. In thefirst interaction, proverbs
are analyzed, supplemented with material which describes their structures and their
cultural universality. These discoveriesare connectedto the essential question, the subject
matter at hand, to generate written material about specific observations andprocesses
inherent in the topic. From these applications of proverbsto discipline-specific material,
the class moves to creating stories andpoems, while letting the proverbs and the new
material inspire them. These stories andpoems are presented both in writing and orally.
Pedagogically, this exercise hopes to assist students in articulating theirideas without
paper, drawing on the skills of the storyteller, as well as to enhance their writing skillson
paper. "Body storage" becomes the assimilation of memory and living in the present, and
storage" of adhering images to paper, and not allowing themto draw on animated
assistance from their creators. This distinction shouldopen windows to learning, to meta- reflections upon each students strategies for assimilating material.At this point in the creative process, students can accommodate revision of the initial stories andpoems with new discoveries of the initial material. Refining the essential question becomes the penultimate activity, one which plays to the specific needs of eachstudent's search for themes and pivots in the subject. At the end, thegroup reviews the role of the proverbs in the learning experience. This juncture provides the opportunity for theresearch to spin back to its origins, and allow moreresponse
59 Frances McCue 56
Following the model is the meeting-by-meeting breakdown of the curriculum. Frances McCue 57
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
STORIES, POEMS
PAPER/ BODY STORAGE STORAGE
DISCUSSION OF STORAGE & STORED
REVISION OF STORAGE & STORED
REFINE
ESSENTIAL
QUESTION
ROLE OF PROVERBS
CREATE CONNECTIVE WEB S
61 Frances McCue 58
PART 1:
Activity and Location: Discussion in the classroom.
Materials: slide projector, slides and reading material.
1. Look at James Tate's poem "No Spitting Up." (Appendix A.) Discuss first line as a generative frame.
2.What is a proverb? Make lists of ones we know. Review cultural ones. How are proverbs a means of storage? (Appendix A.) What models do they follow?
3. Using these, we make our own proverbs in response to three slides which represent different genres, eras. (For example: pre- Gothic cathedral, 19th century theater, Le Corbusier house.) (Appendix B.)
4. Discuss four principles any architect has to consider: Use, functionality, aesthetics and content. Apply these to the proverbs and to what they reveal about the buildings.
Assignnzent .fi)r Part 2: Read "Some Uses of Proverbs" by Frank J. D'Angelo, Proverb list from other cultures and Chapter One of Experiencing Architecture., (Appendix C.)
Analysis:
The goal of this day's work is to recognize and analyze what a proverb is, collect some we know, and apply them as generative frames: recording opinions, intuitions and impressions of three styles of buildings. Tate's poem (a prose poem, really) uses a proverb frame to create a new, comic wisdom in his poem "No Spitting Up." The poem fills space with its stocky, sturdy structure. It resembles an elevator, lifting us from the frame, into a new and complex world. This exercise draws upon what we have stored in our bodies (proverbs along with untethered ideas), and asks the class to revise and utilize
62 Frances McCue 59 these things from our memories to discovernew concepts about architecture. Essentially, the exercise uses intuitive ideas to generate discussion and inquiry into architecture.
PART 2:
Activity and Location: Travel to site of empty lot,space where a.building once stood. (If a site visit is not possible, photographs of a lot with surrounding environs will do.)
Materials: tape recorders, journals, pens.
I. In groups of three, make up three proverbs about thespace, and three about the buildingthat you would build there. Use D'Angelo's categories. Keep in mind the architectural and proverbial principlesyou learned about in your reading.
2. Each person must write down the six proverbs and the corresponding categoriesto which they apply.
2. Then, in these same groups of three, take turns tape recordingyour impressions as you walk the perimeter of the site. Approximate measurements using stride's. Look at the context of the site. What is around it? What would be useful here? What might an imaginary building be like, taking into account,use, functionality, aesthetics and content? Who would use the building? Start to make an oral story, or tale about the scene and building. Thismay be inspired by the proverb. Use your tape recorder to take notes andyour journals to draw impressions, ideas you can't hold on tape.
Assignment for Part 3: Write your own version of the storyyou began together. Include at least one of your proverbs and several of the impressions of the space you explored.
Analysis:
By taking this journey out of the classroom, students are literally moving through space. Then, they arrive at a building that isn't. Using the "nothing that is not there," they create impressions of the space, as an architect would, constructing the beginnings of a
63 Frances McCue 60 hypothetiCal building by relyingon proverb, making the "nothing that is." The groups will generate more ideas by working together, and by recording their impressions, as an oral historian would, on tape. They are learning to collect material. The reading, on architecture and proverbs, enhances the students' abilities to generate ideas and to locate ready frameworks for them.
PART 3:
Activity and Location: Discussion in the classroom; large and small groups working together.
Materials: tape recorders with previous day's tapes.
1. Read Frances Yates selection together. (Appendix D.) Discuss the concept of buildings as storage facilities for memory. Use specific buildings from the stories as examples.
2. In the same groups of three, listen to tapes, taking notes. What did you learn about space and context?
3. Share your stories, noting similarities. In your journal, make a list of these similarities. Do you have similar characters or situations? What are the characteristics of the building? What does the story remind you of?
4. Plant memory loci within your fictional building.
Assignment for Part 4: Revise your story to be delivered orally. Use memory loci in your building. Be prepared to tell the story in class. It must be at least three minutes long. Read "Demolition" by Mark Doty. (Appendix E.)
Analysis:
When the students handed in their tapes at the previous meeting, they surrendered a form of stored memory. To create the stories, they rely on original proverbs and Frances McCue 61
whatever they could recall at the site, filling therest in with imaginative inventions. They
literally walked around the space and imagineda building there. According to Frances
Yates, the ancient system of memory outlined in the Ad Herennium is "the mainsource,
and indeed the only completesource for the classical art of memory both in the Greek
and Latin world" (6). Written in approximately 82 B.C., hundreds ofyears before the
invention of moveable type, this system demanded that the student of mnemonics
imagine a building. This building, furnished with imagined details, becomesthe
container for the speech, story or list that the imaginer needsto recall later. By placing
cues from the target discourse on to loci within the structure, the memorizer tours the
building. When the information needs to be called forth in the future,she returns to the
loci where the earlier ideaswere planted. By "walking" through the building again, the original material is recalled. This isa useful connection to the physical act the students performed during the last meeting when they walked around thefictional building.
The discussion can, and should, sprawl into regions ofmemorization and physical space, and how we structure internal space. Some worthwhile questions: Did thespace give cues to your imagined building? How willyou remember them?
In the second part of the meeting, students listento their tapes and create new versions of their stories (revision), from theones they've written. Together, they work to plant memory devices into their storiesso that they can be re-told orally.
PART 4:
Location and Activity: Discussion in the classroom. Theroom should be set up like a theater in the round.
65 Frances McCue 62
I. Performance of oral tales. Watch body language, and try to feel the structure of each story.
2. Discuss what the stories have in common in terms of imagery. Make some assumptions about what the stories and proverbs tellyou about the space, structure and storage of the hypothetical building and empty lot.
3. Write these impressions down.
Assignment far Part 5: Draw the building which you would put in the empty lot. You may include floor plans, sketches of different angles, but emphasize the shape of the building. This might be done on the computer, especially with aprogram like VISIO. Read 3/14, 3/15, 3/16 in Architecture is Elementary. (Appendix E.)
Analysis:
The oral presentation of stories reveal strategies of memorization, along with the difficulties and successful techniques of sustaining a story in front ofa group. The underlying grammar of the imagery, as Bettelheim claims, will reveala lot about the speaker and/or narrator of the story. Students should be prepared to watch the stories, noting points where the delivery especially imitates content. These stories offer devices to assist body storage, and inspire an ongoing exploration of architecture. Because students are keeping records of elements ofspace, structure and storage, the tools for learning a range of information and ideas, and reformulating them, becomemore developed. "Demolition", the poem by Mark Doty, describes the demise ofa building. It creates a structure that details the vulnerability of another structure, an idea that grows more useful over the next meetings.. Since poetic devices are also strategies for housing memory, the students may be inclined to draw upon these as they construct their own images and plant them in the stories.
6 Frances McCue 63
PART 5:
Location and activity: Discussion in the classroom, individual and small groups.
1. Tour the room, and look at the drawings. Compare buildings.
2. Look at the proverb structures proposed in the handout. Whichone would you apply to your building? Why?
2. Create new proverbs which apply to your building.
3. Write journal responses. How does your building structure space? How is it a reservoir for storage?
4. Draw memory loci into your building. Make a key.
Assignment: Write a poem in the shape of your building. Useyour proverbs to help you. Read Chapter 2 in Experiencing Architecture and selections from Housekeeping. (Appendix F.)
Analysis:
Paper storage can include visual representations outside of language. In the assignment, students generate drawings ofa building to fit in the space they visited. The goal here is to imagine visual space, and to apply some basic architectural principles to their designs. In class, they turnonce againto proverbs: first, by choosingsome structures from D'Angelo's categories, and second, by creating new proverbs in those frameworks. Abstract reasoning is escalated here: choosing the proverb framework is inspired by the building itself. Two structures, two storage facilities, overlap in the mind.
The class returns to storage, placing memory loci in their buildings and writing journal
87 Frances McCue 64 reflections on these. This day's work makes storage both literal and abstract, bridging what Yates calls the abstraction and the image, with memory.
PART 6:
Activity and Location: Discussion in the classroom, individual writing activities.
1. Share the poems and discuss what issues the poems raise.
2. Make a compare/contrast list about your building and your poem. Use this list to instigate generalizations about how buildings and poems are alike.
2. Use the poem to inspire a short essay about architecture. Imagine what is outside the borders of the poem. What does your poem store?
Assignment: Journal entry reflecting upon how you have structured space, and stored your responses over the last meetings. Write at least three assumptions: one about memory, one about architecture and one about literature, each on a separate sheet of paper. (Be very specific. Cite an example on each sheet, to support your assumption.) Write at least three memorable quotes from your reading, each on a separate sheet of paper.
Analysis:
Suzanne Langer, philosopher of aesthetics, says that a poem, as a "composed apparition has as definite a structure as a musical composition, a piece of sculpture, an architectural work or a painting" (Problems 148). Students here are embarking on artlike research that immerses them in a creative process. In this way, the results differ from research papers. The poem "is not," Langer goes on to say, "a report or a comment but a constructed form... in the same way that a work of plastic art is an expressive formby virtue of the tensions and resolutions, balances and asymmetries among its own elements,
B8 Frances McCue 65
which beget the illusions of organic nature that artists call 'living form' (148-9). The
poem is, in other words, an object. The point of this day's work is to treat the poem as an
object that can inspire a more discursive dialogue.
PART 7:
Location and Activity: Interactive group work and largegroup discussion.
Materials.: tape and multi-colored yarn.
1. Assemble the observations. Read them aloud.
2. With tape, the students should affix each assumption andquote to separate physical loci within the room.
3. Divide the students into teams, each designated bya particular color of a ball of yarn. The teams represent: 1) Buildings 2) Memory and 3) Literature
4. The students, in teams, circulate through theroom. The goal is to make connections between the quotes and assumptions that have been taped throughout theroom. Using the string, they connect the physical quotes and/or assumptions,two at a time. For each connection, they must write an intellectual connection between thetwo loci, and hang it from the string connecting the points.
5. After a set period of time, when the studentsare sufficiently tangled in the web of yarn, they should stop. The teacher will point out the. connections, and then the students will read the connections and voteon each one's legitimacy as an intellectually sturdy idea.
6. At the end of the meeting, students choose connectionsto take home, and paste in their commonplace books, to inspire papers beyond the realm of this particular curriculum.
Last Assignment:. Reflect upon oral vs. paper storage of ideas. Which is usefulto which situations? Present, orally, your ideas from the past six days of study. Make lists of what you want to know more about, in architecture, urban planning, the development of memory and in stories and poems. Frances McCue 66
Analysis:
This exercise seems complicated, but it is actually just a physical rendering of what students already do when they write. By making connections, writing them down, and following them in the topography of a classroom, they are constructing a physical architecture, a web that might represent history, thinking, or structures for storage. This culminates the ideas generated over the last six_ meetings, and inspires more specific explorations in architecture, literature and classics.
ASSESSMENT:
Assessment tools for the curriculum are based on two principles:
Transportability: 1. Can the model be used for inquiries in a variety of disciplines? 2. Does the exploration contribute to addressing meaningfully the essential question?
Connections: 1. Are the methods clear and understandable? 2. Does the reading promote a connection between abstraction and image, between interior and exterior forms of learning? 3. Does the conceptual framework of space, structure and storage hold up through the activities of the curriculum?
To assess the work of individual students, the following criteria might be considered.*
Each student should:
1) record material in a commonplace book or journal Assessed on: --depth of inquiry, including range of resources --risk-taking - -accuracy and thoroughness of records - -mapping the sources of intuitive decisions
2) ask questions that promote searching
This model is based on work with Klingenstein Fellows Bill McGuire and Eric Temple.
70 Frances McCue 67
Assessed on: --asking questions of other groups --asking contextual questions --asking questions that promote further inquiry --asking questions that reflect upon data of one's work and work of others
3) use reflective analogies to draw relevance Assessed through log book, nightly assignments and group discussions
4) give attention to research detail Assessed through log book, nightly assignments and group discussions
5) contribute to general research Assessed through group work, drafts and final versions of written materials
71 Frances McCue 68
THE GLASS PASSAGE
In Nature's shifting glimmer-glass Stars are nets, we their haul, Gods are shadows on a wall.
Velimir Khlebnikov
1. The Anteroom
These words are glass glass unglued a language spun airless from sand sanded into fire, melting like an utterance, half tongued, tongues leave speech caught behind our eyes, the gaze gazing back through simulacra into spaces dissolving solving the way, the passage: a place locked by omission; mission in frames where materials, here, turn over lovers in the mind, shards of glass partly transparent apparent, still. There is a wall.
Hang your coats. We'll begin here.
72 Frances McCue 69
2. The Corridor
Think of steps, traveling neither up, nor down, your boots slapping marble perhaps, or wood. The room, here, folded in like speech collapsing our choices narrow. You must squeeze through. Lonely as you are you hurry, as most do through hallways. Arches wantyou to float. Neither wall can mirror the other, as it did behind us, in the anteroom. Your belongings shuffled coats snapped to racks, hats tucked, the place begins like a museum. No wallets here. Take only what you might need graveside. Let the words pull tight, slipping you into a gaze stilled mid-glance, for focus saves nothing. Symmetry is a conceit. Look closely and it will delay, retreat. Let's say this corridor is time's stark continuum, alum the language most adored. Pull the pavement overhead. Tinker with the underbelly, the plumbing of our streets. Most of those who pass underneath, never to cross centuries, hugging the last, beg for segue. The way through sets the straddle where millennia adjacent are pulled wider apart. This bridge, all glass some leadlifts and sinks. Landed now, the route charts a glass-wrapped tour at twenty centuries' end. Follow the maze from hell to heaven overlapped in purgatorio. A gaze, alas, will keep the thing aligned, across dear Charon's wake. Do not look back.
73 Frances McCue 70
3. The Palace
Within the harmonium time sends to us, sealing our centuries,
glass slides the material ahead; in panes-- glorious engineering frames.
From the crystal palace, we learned to build, to layer, to tear away:
modules. No greenhouse could imitate plants like this one: huge poppies
spinning through transepts, the apple's core, unblighted in the bracing links, a leaf
spread across the roof, view through a forest's slivers. Passage as palace
or warehouse, conceits the architect could not imagine, her prisms
overturned. Luster transforms repeating frames to ornament, panels replicated
for acres. And the artifacts collected there' Looms spun mid-weave, the fabric's hands
spill beneath the glass; baskets, nets, frames, artless machines held under glass. Such wares doomed to excess: the palace
74 Frances McCue 71 dissolves into vision. From outside, it melts to air, nothing solid. Something buzzed under the roof, like a fly under a donut dome, in this hothouse. At first, it was psychological, a monumental opening, interior without boundaries.
The palace burns, glass restored to fire. Ruskin's words caught flame, dissembled the greenhouse frame. As warehouse, cathedral or station, the palace could never sustain a railway's steam, or live up to its relics. By now, the glass turns maze.
What we long for: a veil to reveal and disguise our gaze.
75 Frances McCue 72
4. The Arcade
Could such a thing be so garish? A dirty sky's our light into pass- ages of history and novelty. Baroque leftovers pull motes to iron strands, all rust and soot. Boots smudge the routes, from shop to hall-- each way dead ends into glass and doorways. Greenish in their sludge, lamps long dimmed, bulbs, filaments tinged, find nostalgia for the gaz. Such lighting slows our march, steps, aloof, pulled through the market. In the tangle of fauna, shadow-- the door peels ajar. Above rails of balconies and gates, iron-wrought our tensions. In the jamb, sight folds slim, veiling the clock mid- chime, the hem of a cloak. A decanter standswe catch the prism, a crystal edge where light splinters, bounces into gaze. Wait! These shops are closed. The arcade, now seals its relics. Shopkeepers, long dead, display their wares, propped behind the glass. The dress- maker's dummies, press the panes, in gingham, fur collars, and shoes with buttons looped through while the cobbler's trophies-- soles half sewn-- tip to the window, dragging some bootless world aloft. Pressure sealed, the items cannot reach behind the wall. Corridors lean from the center, spokes aligned from the walkways' hub. Views through glass seal a verdict. Draperies mock the gaze, trimming the view back to ourselves. There! A chance to razor-cut the city, turn lamp- light into glare, and shears our watching, these commodities, ossified, lost
7-6 Frances McCue 73
a century ago, frozen in glass like the baker's cake, unretrieved. Muse, so subterranean, so filled by an aquarium, you turn the city into steam, hothouse filter of our woes. The ceiling's a thermometer-- mercury sliding down our aisle. Then: it opens.at the mercurial pitch, leaving us, hot and shivering, feet-clamped upon the street.
77 Frances McCue 74
5. The Fissure
From the arcade's narrow gape, the street. Leaps of faith tumble us skyward, Grates steam, wispy beneath. Through the passage, a city's bubble leaking, we travel up. No architecture protects us, only sleep. In dream or aeroplane, we alight into a cloud-bound route. Our city illuminates the waterways spines, double-baCked, connected in strings: bridges all light and glass. Downwind, land scape tilts, spins us into vision. The roofs are pavement-tarred; soot-grout fills the rims. Lids within lids, the city stacks its margins: roadways widening in rings, wrapped around and over, like water guided through its banks. Darkness softens our air. Up here, leaning to stars and land, the heart lilts, caught in the heavens. Glass holds us, fixed in our little ship, porthole-clips through space. Then, the pavement lifts from earth, pulled to us by gaze. The passage narrowsthen, open air. Buoyed by illusion, a glass chain linked by fissure, the passage adheres to all rooftop, all sky.
78 Frances McCue 75 6. The skyscraper
Both illusion: language can wrap a bulb, but never save a filament from wind. Shielding the bulb, a glass tube may leave us speechless in the end. What is on_ e to do, but merge the two? Up-ended, our passage in crystal, aligns our moves from centre to transept. The gaze: a reflective net. Should it float, and spin us overhead, what will become of our earthbound lives, the hells we build in spheres? They'll cut corners.. Take the elevator to a divided view. In the pause from palace to office, blueprints are outlined upon the glass: our skin.
79 Frances McCue 76
7. The Glass House
Antidote to corridors dark and thunder-struck, the houses of our childhoods come back to us. No dwelling survived without the relic: window glass long-dimnied from use. Our memories merge into clear, glass frames: pure nostalgia.
Once I lived in a windowless room. How I envied the walls! The voices I could hear just beyond the plaster, never appeared. But the wall faced me, and tucked into corners. I caught my hush and pressed myself upon the plane.
Later, the room slid wide. (I moved.) So swept and modern, and the view! I was lonely without my walls. But looking out: glass cleared a passage. It opened the sky into our alley, into my room. I couldn't see it then.
People who live in glass houses should watch their words. Children grow transparent with the outside looking in. Here, a child utters glass.
She speaks and shards fall from her teeth. What will be her fate? Or the glass when it looks transparent but is not-- just a pile at her feet? Some words are cinderblock, think of that. When the child sees a mirror, she can't speak. The glass, uncracked, glances back. And though it bifurcates her view, the child can see through and know that glass has made her into two. Shards, fates, the glass accumulates. It looks transparent but is not like words one cannot.look through. Glass can warp a glance, distort the face: language too.
To live in glass is to hold a watch.
8 0 Frances McCue 77
8.From form to material
TIME glass: passage: transparent connection fluid hinge view enclosure material structure
FORM veil way through skin chute enclosure liberation voyeurism surveillance
MATERIAL
81 Frances McCue 78
.' 9. t.NOT,s Paradiso sMasV N$to .xt InparadiSe, we"`- t-rash "\-kov. shatteted We've our past,and motespace. crave shards. tomake
Our streets roll with gravel, all glass.
Ornaments hide our defects; gaze is a net. The passages slides away, as words spin tainted by their lodgings, lifting thepoem, hermetic, from the frame.
Buildings in the mind, warehouses for our past, ask what memories adhere to glass? Fingerprints, once ephemeral, stay forever in the pane.
Marks of the hand obscure our view such veils transform a wall to skin and husk. Reach toward light, and find your wrist dipped in water.
Paradiso: To become the wrinkle, the fold through time and warp, where gods are pinned upon the walls, kept from us by glass. Leave traces: the knob within the hand, the seat within the chair. When glass cracks, the snowfall rests: When glass shatters, the vision grows. Our passage ends. Ahead of us:
The years to cross in splinters. How unexpected is heaven's novelty? Is a word a mirror, or the mirror a wadeless sea where words must drown?
Dostoyevskv Notes from the Underground
82 Frances McCue 79
COMMENTARY ON THE GLASS PASSAGE
Of all architectural materials, glass has the most incommon with words. Both language and glass, as materials, can be sturdy as well as fragile. Glass makes walls; words holdup governments. They are vulnerable too: paper is flimsy and windows can be broken with errant baseballs. Glass and language carry deceptions as well; they seem transparent, but can store strange innuendoes and refractions. We see ourselves in words and in the looking glass, but we cannot completely trust either vision. In contemporary literature,as in architecture, the reader is implicated in the structure, in materiality. Like glass, wordscan gesture to the viewer, refracting back some distortion of herself. Both words and glass allow the audience to read the material and to be read by it. In the poem, I wanted to play with some of these revelations and deceptions, and use both material and form to illuminate them.
In the past, glass has been subservient to form. Panes filled in the walls of Paxton's
Crystal Palace; they lined the roof of arcades in the last century. Recently the attention has turned to the materiality of glass. In literature too, the language poets and self-reflexive narrators have isolated words as a medium. I wanted to imitate that shift in the poem. It, too, travels from the highly structured to a dissolution, or shattering, of the form.
In "The Anteroom," a lobby space is created, a place to "hang your coats." The piece is actually one stanza split down the middle to create an opening. The endwords on one side are repeated (sometimes in different variations) in the first words on the other side of the line. Frances McCue 80
Imitating the reflectivity of glass, the "walls" meet as if a transparent sheet were inserted.
The two sides reflect each other, yet their sameness is a foreground for different backgrounds, much in the way that one wall can separate two rooms.
The wrangle here was to create a stanza that could be read across, and as two separate stanzas, reading down. I had to balance them, rhythmically and visually. In many ways, the left side of the poem, read on its own, creates the passage as an issue of empty space, "a place locked by omission." The right side claims that the passage, much like an echo chamber, is a place seeking an original, "gazing backward through simulacra/solving the way...". As a whole, I hope that the stanza represents the dichotomy of the passage as a place constructed out of a need to speak or build, to fill a space that has been empty, and the need to sort through the repetitive-"shards" that claim no original.
"The Corridor" removes the reflecting wall, and inserts glass as pure transparency. It
.demands to be read across the gap. As a mimetic device, I want this form to parallel the constrained feeling of going into a confined space. I don't want the reader to be able to turn back, or make choices with the form. The symmetry should be confining, the caesura relieving. Here too, rhythm was important for balance and to thrust one forward. The adjacent rhymes and nearby slant rhymes further narrow the aisle through which the tourist of the passage ventures.
By adhering to tercets, "The Palace" relies on modularity. It is "Passage as palace/ or warehouse." The orderly display holds some unusual artifacts, and the comparisons to the Frances McCue 81
Crystal Palace are rampant. Like the palace, this .section of thepoem stores countless
artifacts, and in many waves, it, like the palace, dissolves under thepressure of viewing so
much. There are some heavy, chiming rhymes in here too; 'they semi-mock the repetitive
obsession that Paxton had in his relentless design.
Things turn more subtle in section Four. Tocapture the arcade, I wrestled with the notion
of "dead ends", the little shops that providedno other outlet for the browser. One had to turn
back around and head down the main corridor to "razor-slice the city." The couplets provide
a thinner frame than those we've seen, a narrow cut that tempts us with choices (the shops)
but ultimately dump us "feet-clamped upon the street." In this arcade, the shopsare closed,
and the view is of relics "stapled to the glass." Hopefully, the form isa clear membrane for vision, like one offered in a museum.
To move into the twentieth century, and to confront the glass chain correspondence, the
influences of Dadaism, futurism anda host of other influences, I chose "The Fissure" as a
form. This splinter,or crack, dislocates the clear, mdmbraned symmetry of the earlier
sections. The "centre does not hold." Vision is starting to become fractured; in the lust
for the modern, architects are frustrated by outdated forms. As with much of the writing
in the poem, Khlebnikov influences this quitea bit. He ached for new forms, and he
aspired to architecture, fissures and all. Khlebnikovwas also obsessed with aerial views;
I took him up on the challenge by using the fissure as a skyward leak, pushingus above
the city, taking the passage to the heavens.
85 Frances McCue 82
"The skyscraper" is an obvious mimesis of a real building, and from here, the poem heads into realms more abstract. "The Glass House" tries to dodge mimesis with fable and memory. Just as the glass house itself pulls apart notions of materiality with a simplicity in form, the poem takes on blocky stanzas that reflect corners and odd adjacencies. The leaps are fanciful, twisting proverbs and devices of apostrophe and magic realism. In the middle of the poem, a shift occurs from the attention upon the speaker, our tour guide (the watcher) to a strange scene within a glass house (the watched). Anything, after all, can happen in a glass house, and someone outside it, like a reader, might get to see it.
In the penultimate section, I'm playing with some language poetry and some symbolic demarcations. By isolating words and aligning them, both in groups and individually, as polar opposites, I intend the reader to focus on the words as materials. The poem is literally shifting "from form to material." At the top, "Time" hosts the gaze as a larger abstraction in which form shifts to tactile material. This is like a game; one has to stare at it like a puzzle, and it shifts the vision of the viewer in the way that many contemporary buildings, like those at the Light Construction show, shift one's vision.
Finally, a risk with form: I've created "Paradiso", after the Danteum. Here, one has to shatter the glass wall that separates us from heaven. Instead of Terragni's version of futurism, I've substituted in postmodernism. The first stanza of the poem disassembles itself, collecting in shards. It is both disintegrating and assembling a new form, one not so unlike postmodern buildings. This is my version of "Playtime", where the poem, as a building, is
86 Frances McCue 83 both identifiable and strange. As viewers, thereare always choices to be made, places hinted to but not visited, an idea carried off quite beautifully by Jacques Tati in his film.
As a whole, the passage weaves specificity and abstraction. It isa tour of an imagined space that is palpable and illusive, much like language and glass, or in Dante's case, much like heaven, hell and limbo. Thepoem is a tour and an immersion within the materiality of such abstract places.
'87 Frances McCue 84
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91 APPENDIX A
92 No Spitting Up
"People in glass elevators shouldn't carry snow. shovels," I said to Sheila, because we were in one with a lads' who was. I faced the closed doors, rejected the view of the city without the slightest curiosity, because I already knew. What if this woman with the shovel suddenly went crazy_ , started flapping her wings like a chicken, like a fiend? I wonder what Sheila is thinking just now, I wonder if she has her eve on the snow shovel, how it can't rest in this glass elevator, how it is dancing inside of itself and making me dance. No one's paving the least attention to the tension between me and that shovel, that shovel and that window, that window and me.
4s p, si-A,0c6Fed pi 1-0 Of-CS"
Op\veesi-ty Press 0 0
83 Examples of Proverbs:
African:
Amharic: Sore eyes are seen but a sore head is hidden. Truth and the morning become light with time.
Bantu: Debts make slaves. Water never loses its way.
Ewe: When the stomach sleeps, the man sleeps. In crooked wood, one recognizes the artist.
Ganda: Eat and put back. The man of two homes dies of hunger.
Hausa: Wealth is the cure for punishment. Even when the king dances, the poor man says "good".
Chinese: Almonds come to those who have no teeth. Adversity is sometimes the rain of spring. Be inwardly clever but outwardly clownish. When the wagon of fortune goes well, spite and envy hang on to the wheels.
Japanese: One good word can warm three winter months. Even the fool has his art. Thankless labor gains fatigue. To be loved is to be hindered.
Korean: Good critic-- bad worker. Those who swallow their food whole--choke. A man who stands behind a wall sees nothing else. A poor horse always has a thick tail.
Mexican:
94 A jealous lover makes an indifferent husband. The liar tumbles much sooner than the lameman. Each one scratches himself with his own nails.
Jamaican: Believe half what you see-- nothing what you hear. When belly full, jaw must stop. Crack bell never mend. Buy beef, you buy bone; buy land you buy rock stone. When cow-tail cut off, God Almighty brush flies. Clothes cover character.
Nicaraguan: Have patience, fleas, the night is long.
Yiddish: Little children, small pleasures; big children; great troubles. He who likes taking doesn't like giving. Revenge is half consolation. Too much humility is half pride. When you go to your neighbor's, you find our what is happening in your house. APPENDIX B
96 Ihe was allowed Lowell, to inruin a manichim. And flight I dreamed of failing theirin their indecipherable lovely loops andideograms spray atwhichhowand Saint-Gauden's ruthlesswrong had to I energy,was be like with house, andhis. a passionate understoodA we month ran fromago, exactitude a startling downpour toallseemsacross understandthat's Roman,the left parking of now, somethingmomentarily, somethinglotthe singledifficult an Oscar aqueduct, standing wall inhulkedforinto its performances coincidence: plaster Shaw's maquette, monument, underon the the alawn loggia splendidramrod-straight built colonel whereseemandAqueducts Bosie merely the windows,might souvenirs; and have angels, opened posed the here gaps once before, on Main, for a photograph. a winglessandhigh waitedabove angel?floating hisout blackthe squall; troops. thehorizontally We heiratic crouched woman on wet gravel theIt'sinto sky strange transients' is to us how when rooms much it's are framedmore pure beautiful sky. who'dallegoricalseemedabove never the so descendsoldiers, decor,far above an toher afterthoughtus, the robe another purely billowing century'sphysical like plaster dust, to nudgesbytake these for the stone.columned highest The openings rowenormous, of moldings someone articulate meant shovel us asintosoldiers, if a the terrible worldthe nearly compression hurried breathing them of into bronzeperspective, the ranksditch. crushed ourand blackthe whole classic, thing and wavers it topples as though all at once. we'd dreamed it, where,aboveAnd"The when theinunreadable," a the wallweek, brutish of theunglazed Wildemetalkids will said,rears windows skateboard "is what occurs." -miter PVT `r 91 M A-be/A-PWIA) news, UN! v645 ITT OF 98 - *"' ". An(' -617
LE CORI3USIER, 1921.A " CITROHAN " HOUSE Framework of concrete, girders made on the site and raised bya hand-winch. Hollow wails of it" concrete and expanded metal with a 7Y' cavity; all floor slabs on the same unit of measurement ;the factory- window frames, with adaptable ventilating, on the same unit.The arrangements in conformity with the running of a household ; abundant lighting, all hygienic needsmet and servants yell cared for. 241
"Write without adjectives, build with smooth walls." "The modern building is a building without adjectives."
--Massimo Bontempelli, 1920's 182 B. MARCUS PRITECA
3.Coliseum Theater, Seattle, 1914-16 (altered), B. Marcus Priteca. This perspective drawing of the exterior illustrates Priteca's talents as a delineator. The original entrancecanopy was later replaced. The building no longer functions as a theater, but is instead occupied by retailuses. (Richard F. McCann Collection.)
Vancouver, British Columbia (1916-17; de- Priteca's Hollywood Pantages Theater stroyed), with its French Renaissance ele- (1929-30), sited in Hollywood, California, ments and its seating capacity of 1,800, was represented a radical departure from his fa- considered at the time to be the most richly vored classical expression; it is a masterpiece embellished and efficient theater of the of Arst Deco design. He viewed his workon Pantageschain.Pritecaalsodesigned this theater as a quest for a design which Seattle's brick and terra-cotta Orpheum would "best exemplify America of the mo- Theater (1926-27; destroyed); and in asso- ment. Effort centered upon motifs that were ciation with Frederick J. Peters and the Chi- modernnever futuristic,yet based on cago firm of Rapp & Rapp he designed the time-tested classiccism'sic' of enduring Seattle (Paramount) Theater apartment and good taste and beauty." Priteca hoped the commercial building (1927-28), for busi- theater would be a synthesis of comfort, nessman L. N. Rosenbaum. The Tacoma pleasure,andbeauty.TheHollywood Pantages Theater (ca. 1916-18; altered) is Pantages, built at the apogee of Priteca's ca- the earliest extant example of the collabora- reer, was the last movie palace to open in tion between the vaudeville entrepreneur Hollywood. It stands as a memorial to the and Priteca. Pantages era and, in the opinion of Richard 100 BEST COPY AVAIL ARI F # h 1 t. "'"'""" " '" , . r , , . . Ati ,I . tL=
Church of of Santa Croce, with Pazzi Chapel
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Santa Croce: The Death of Saint Francis, by Giotto (Bardi Chapel) BEST COPY AVAILABLE 101 APPENDIX C
102 Some 'Uses of .Proverbs
FRANK J. D'ANGELO
A FEW YEARS ACO, I was watching themeans "word." Thus the literal meaning TV news show with the magazine for-of the word proverb is "a set of words mat,60 Minutes.One particular seg-put forth." Some synonyms often used ment dealt with-the busing controversyfor the word proverb are saying,sen- in Boston. Black school-children from tentia, maxim, aphorism, adage, motto, Roxbury were being bussed into theand epigram. The wordsayingis the schools of South Boston, and the resi-most general term of all. It refers to any dents were up in anus. As I watched,wise or truthful saying that is repeated one vehement Irishmanbeinginter-often.Sententiaeare almost indistin- viewed by CBS was exclaiming: "Blacks guishable from proverbs, butasen- have access to everything we have tentia,instead of coming from the com- pools, public facilities, and places of en-mon man, has its origin in learned men. tertainment. What more do they want?Alexander Pope's "A little learning isa Nowtheywantourneighborhood dangerous thing" is a typical example. schoolsl \Vhy don't they develop and Amaximis a saying, derived from prac- take prideintheir own schools andtical experience, that serves asa rule 'neighborhoods? It seems that the ethnicof conduct. Thus the expression, "Judge .group that makes the most noise getsnot, that you be not judged," is a suc- the most attention from the Federalcinct statement of a fundamental prin- Government.The wheel that squeakscipleorrule.Like the maxim, the the loudest gets the most grease." aphorism is a general truth or principle, This incident impressed uponme thebut one that is not intended as a guide- idea that proverbs are not just outwornline for bcl ?avior. A good example ofan sentiments from an earlier age, but thataphorismisthe expression, "He that theyarestillbeing used lwpeo_plecannot conceal his wisdom is a fool." every day to win arguments. Ilecause Anadageis a popular saying that has proverbs are so familiar, tnev often winbecome acceptable as a truth through imcriticalacceptance fromtheaudi- long use. The oft-quoted adage, "When ence,andIam certainthatmanythe cat's away, the mice will play," ex- viewers of the TV program were dulyemplifies this popular saying.Amotto impressedwiththeIrishman'sargu- is a terse saying that is used as a guid- ment. ing principle or idea by a particular group of people. The motto, "In God we DEFINITION OF PROVERBS trust," which is found on U.S. coins, is used in just this way. An epigram isa Proverbsare short, concise savings inconciseandwittystatement,often common use which express some ob-cleverly phrased, that is paradoxical or vious and familiar truth or experiencesatirical. A good example would be the instriking form. The wordproverb expression, "The only way to get rid of comes from the Latin wordproverbiunz, a temptation is to yield to it." It should a combination of the prefixpromeaningbe remembered that these distinctions "forth," and the rootverbum,whichcannot be maintained consistently, be- 365 3EST COPYAVAILABLE 103 withcause366 the one next. form is constantly merging COLLEGE COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION proverbial comparisons,to call his bluff silverBrandy at noon, is lead gold in atthe night. morning, SOME USES OF PROVERBS SOME USES OF PROVERBS 387 SOURCE OF PROVERBSAlmost every nation has its share of clichés and conventional phrasesnullas goodoldquiet and as as voidthe golda hillsmouse Antithesis Useomnipotent.BeautyThere soft is is wordsno potent, pleasure and but hard without money arguments. pain. is in theIeducational believe compositionremainder that function they of classroom this can Proverbs, inpaper, still the today. bepast, I wouldusefulthen, Inand had a very important ofmanincanproverbs Aristophanes,Sanskrit, be literature, found and Hebrew,in wisein the the oldest sayings.Bible, Greek, literary in Proverbsthe and works Ro- in Chaucer and in Thetheproverbial distinctions distinction phrases between and comparisons, clichesthe proverb like tobag add and insult baggage to injury and Puns banjoNeverCallBetter me instead.pickto cousin, be a a-cold quarrel; but thancozen pick a mecuckold.the not. invention.'likecancluster to beexplore usedinto Because subject-matteraas few a source ofproverbsOne those ofuse uses.material areas, tendof proverbs they for is for rhetorical to Jonson,Shakespeare,RobertEmerson,Scott, Benjamin Frost. inHenry Erasmus, Franklin, DavidThe Cervantes, sourceThoreau, Ralph of WaldoBen proverbsand is generally Alexander Pope, Sir Walter FORMever,and other are OF difficult kinds PROVERBS of to wisemaintain. sayings, how- ScribesoweEARLY the copied existence USES them TO of inPROVERBS Tomanyold early manuscripts. proverbs. rhetoricians and scholars, we ly proverbsofSuccessfulderivedwritingapplied the best orfromto are speaking.contemporary writers ideas proverbsa repository ofwisely Many thecan situations. beofpastethicalselect folkeffective- (since some ideaswis- posedlievetheconsideredgradually common that to proverbsbe to thetakenman. be advice the wereSome literally folk originally they scholars wisdom butcontained thatsup- be- of niques:orable"Practiceciseness of makes form perfect") ("BoysProverbs will and be areby boys," mem-characterized by con- and striking rhetorical tech- teachlustratedscribbledschools,Proverbsstylistic Latin. included wereinto embellishment, Students commonplace taught in medieval in used Anglo-Saxon textbooks, books,them for il- in tapestries, as beginningsand used to forcanalphabeticalposes.dom) material. help Many andthe Belowwriteruselistings books them inare ofby his for a proverbskey fewor their her ideasexamples ownsearch have that pur- kindvarietyliteraltheywas of generalized ofsagebecame statements situations. advice widely to basedManywhich such applicable onproverbs containan everyday extent someare tothat a Alliteration LoveBettera flash.Friendship laughs bend thanat thatlocksmiths. .break. flames goes out in meansofmaterialand endings o for subjectof themes,' matter, as amplifyingas a meansroof in formal ar earning to me ar hrase.t nd as a theme:of proverbsAction OneActions good speak action louder excuses than a words.dozen arranged according to learn,""There'sstructiveobservations. no fool like These an old are fool," wise which and in- "Mistakesapothegms, will such as "Live and happen," and MetaphorRhyme and SimileBorrowingManBlab proposes, is notbrings cheer;God disposes. froth is not beer. sorrowing. opinion,values.habitsto be of Theyoverlooked, thought,manifest are a kindcustoms, truths is thatof consensusthat theyand may moralembody beof e importan va ue of proved s, not. actions,PeopleSuitbadBad ones.the actionsare notaction remembered by leadtogood the to intentions. word. worse by good reactions. tiveoccurrences.erbsonwere the meanings: arerepeated status simple Many of "Chickensso proverbs. reports oftenof these that ofalways Somehave everydaythey figura- prov- cometook Repetition TheLostBeautyspots. leopardbest credit artfades cannotconceals is like achange flower.broken art. his mirror. sationslikeshallthemuseful magnificent ye inin and hisknowthe writingsparablesconduct them"). jewels of ("By life.wiseThey in the theirChrist men. sparkled conver- fruits Ser-used Adversity cautiousBeAdversitySweet patient inare prosperity. thehasin adversityusesnot friends. of adversity. and lane"AwaterMayhome new breedsflowers," butto broom roost," you mud." "Yousweepscan't "April canmake clean," showerslead him a "A horse drink," shadybring to Ellipsis TheWhatpurse.A poor poor costs spirit man little is seeks poorer is little food, than esteemed. and a poorthe andvaluestheymons cultural were were and used enrichedto virtues. endow to develop byPagan men them. with humanisticand In Chris- moralbrief, moralists, in a Advice Adversitymonsters.next misfortune makes men, uscomes. wiseuntil prosperity the thhform:ofseem wise to saying have most are expressions of theClosely characteristics which related to the proverb and proverb except grammatical forGeneralsacquired.Bloodrich diseases. man is inheritedprayappetite. for warand andvirtue doctors dom,moralthoroughadvocatedtian justice,virtues the suchfortitude, use as of temperance, proverbs.2 and prudence, wis- inculcation who of believed ethical and Theadvice.advisers.ThePeople advice worst give of men foolsnothing are is often worthless.so willingly the best as proverbial phrases, to touchbreak athe sore ice spot 1 4 Parallelism Agebeast.Life and is wedlock short and tame time man is swift. and BEST COPY AVAILABLE erbs,p. x. 'The Oxford 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), Dictionary of English Prov- York:sance PageantConcepts Press, of 1962),3Lechner,'Sister pp.Joan 202-208. pp. Marie 159, Lechner, 162, 179. O.S.U., the Commonplace 105Renais- (New 368 comesWhen atoo thing late. is done, advice COLLEGE COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION wasdialogue:5 an oral exercise in the form of a prescribedvelop miniature order:! themes that follow a SOME USES OF of our educationalPROVERBS endeavorsIn this day may and be age, in which many 369 Bribery ElectEveryandWhat more the man bestpoorhelping has Congressmen needhis hands. price. is less advice that QuestionCanAnswerLove.QuestionWhat you is quotecome the proverb all things? it that will over- 4.3.2. Give1. a proverb with a similar Discussmeaning.Quote the itsthe proverb.meaning. proverb's origin in tradition.partdocharacterizedproverbs worse of the Likethan Western may as otherrevitalize "value-free," be usedliberal-educationforms anas of "impersonalimportant werhetoric, could ToMoneymoney maid.Moneywin canwillthe and buy.lady soothe friendship first an bribe itching bribe her palm. justice. QuestionWhatAnswerLove conquers is ofcometoall supportus? learning this? and make it a part it that will over- things. 6Adapted from: Donald Lemen5. Clark, John ownIllustratepractical or someone experience.its use todayelse's experience.in your vehicles"moderntheycalls,best use "equipment for mayman communication. be in as the forwhat presentation living." Kenneth But As their Burkesuch, and still have a vital relevance for Crime CrimebyItNo is Thecrime. crime unlawful mustgreater is founded be to the concealedovercome man, upon the reason.crime by greater crime. QuestionCanAnswerTheAnswerLove love you conquers ofprove learningquotation?love all this things.of frombooks.or the a Heights,oricUniversityMilton1957 in Greco-Roman at), pp.St. Press, 188-190.Paul's 1948 School Education ), (N. Y.: (Momingside Columbia N.Y.: Columbia pp. 234-235; Rhet- University Press, preservation of ethical values. TempeArizona. State University merelyIf writers go need through something the thematic to say, head- they theyou crime.If make you share it your your own. friend's crime, ofing interpretation.proverbferencesa to proverb paraphrase. andbetween can can exemplifyThe A also theone-line followingAnother two be anstylisticversions paraphrase exercise useexamples dif-of proverbsthe in is in learn- canateingssubjects. to and their choose purposes. the material InDuring this way,appropri- they obtain the ideas Renaissance, about innumerable students illustrate this exercise: thePeopleEmpty most vessels who ignorant. talk make the the most most aresound. often INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF RHETORIC andcomparisons,tainedkept ideas commonplace and rarematerials words, books of witty various which sayings, sorts.con- proverbs, maxims, proverbial doTroublesA stitch Makenot handle in hay will time while them quickly saves theat nine.once. sunmultiply shines. if you Switzerland,lishedThescholars new at aInternational meetingfrom June nine 29-July held countries. Society at 2,the 1977. Eidgenossische for theThe History inaugural Technischeof Rhetoricmeeting Hochschule,was attendedformally Zurich,by 120 estab- themes.Thesefoolishness,ings:often books Thearranged material gave under ample they contrasting collected material was head-for love/hate, courage/fear, life/death, persuasion/ wisdom/ OnetheYou'vepoison. opportunity man's got meat to getis is ripe. another things man'sdone while cietyAsreligion,periods stated is to inandpromote law, the languages Constitutionand the other study and aspects adopteditsof bothrelationships of the theat thecultural theory meeting, with andcontext. poetics, practice "The The purposephilosophy, ofSociety rhetoric is -politics, notin con- of this So- all ance,force,quentmannerpleasure/pain. invention, were easy Ideas and to theclassified get ideas at for collected in success/failure,words/deeds, knowledge/ignor- reason/instinct, subse- this EverythatsomethingJust anotherbecause cloud is will hasoneno reason alikeperson silver it. to likeslining. believe inThecerned Europe Society with yet thewill to furtheringbe meet chosen. biennially, ofPublications practical with rhetoricalthe being 1979 planned conferenceskills include as such." planned the Acta for of a each site theunderrhetoricianscopiousness.* process these headingsof inventionused to aidedOne assist and fluencykind memory to facili-of andexercise for that classical proverbs as thematicA statements third to de-things,If you you look will for find the it. bright side of exercise consists in using ship,bibliography.biennialtheMembership $4.00.Society. conference, Dues Dues is openmay area continuing betoas anysentfollows: individual to internationalthe regular American or membership, institution bibliography, Treasurer, subscribing $10.00; Lloyd and studenta retrospectiveBitzer, to the member- aims6142 of tate fluency in the 4Lechner,handling of _i 1R-13. ideas p.England: 143. The Scholar Press5John Limited,Brinsley, 1968),Ludt:* Llterarius ( Menston, Vilas Hall, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706. BEST COPY AVAILABLE 1 7 1Vvt'erIC,;-15 (:1il-K 45/vIci.)5 Basic Observations CHAPTER 1 towithcalled Forthe "the centuriestheear. beautiful" Fine And Arts, indeedarchitecture, and that appeal most is to saypainting peopleto the the eye, artsjudge and justwhich sculpture architecture as aremusic concerned have appeals by been its ofillustratedexternal several appearance, factorswith pictures which Whenjust ofinterest buildingas an books architect him. exteriors. onHe thejudgesstudies subject a plans, building are sections usually its appearance is only one bystandthistheseand looking iselevations itmustnot any easy atharmonizemore the andto thanexplain.plans. maintains everyonewith A At eachman any that, can rate,other.to if whom visualizeit notis Just to everyone Ibe whatwas a a building good explaininghe can means building, under-merely bya siveimpressiondon'tproject to like forhim. a thatButhouse thehis he merereluctance wanted idea to ofmay build, cutting have said into arisen deprecatingly: anything from thewas "Icorrect repul-really sections." He was a rather delicate person and I got the preciselysomethingducednotidea separate of simplyarchitecture what else into by itand addingisitsa numberas something limitssomething plans ofare elements. andmore. by indivisible, nosections It means is Architecture impossible something to well-defined. elevations. isto you notexplain can-pro-It On is theit,But whole, and by thatmeans art is should whatof words Inot shallThe itbe is attempt explained;architectpossible to to worksdo it help musthere. withothers be formexperienced. to experience and mass just as the sculptor 108 acreatesthree,does, decisive and his tools likeroleis aor theinfunctional implements judging painter it. heart. forworks It human solves with beings practicalcolor. Butand problems.alone utility ofplays the It 109 I 0 theisother sonot latter we words,that can with the dwell the formermore difference in it,abstract. iscreates concernedArchitecture between Eventhe framework withthe is a around very special functional art; it confines space sculpture and architecture most abstract piecemore of organic forms, our lives. In demonstratedpeopleproper have acquired by the picture new tastes of the and Danish habits. Renaissance This is clearly king, in one generation becomes ridiculous in the next when I I Newpicturearchitecture.sculpture, York. showing The limitedIt lacks tombstones a cemetery toa decisivepurelyThe stand master ingeometric factor: the crowded Brooklyn-Queensphotographer, shapes, does Andreas not become utility. Feininger, has taken a together exactly like area of a realskyscraperformskyscrapers building the distant is onlyin in whichbackground an a tallAmerican peoplestoneSeen offromblock, can city,the anlive. athe aeroplanemere But sculptural as thehigh plane in form, the de- air, not photograph. very skyscraperseven which the most gigantic onformationnotthescends human buildingsthe fromtiny scale, takes dolls the change become placeobserved character housesat the from instantfor the human heights. when beings the This like ourselves, great heights theie will be one moment when completely. Suddenly they take contours of the strange trans- formedofpassview neatbuildings into oftoysforto a them benew livedbegin architecturestageinstead in, to of notrise ofexistence, looking merelyabove means the tobecomedownshapes be horizon seen formedarchitecture from so that aroundthe we outside. in place on them. The buildings get a side man, intentionsdependentplans the settingsucceed, on the forway he our isThe he like lives. arranges architect the Innumerable perfect this is asettinghost sort who circumstancesof for theatrical provides us. When producer, arehis the man who every fiasco.theirofence.comfort all, That natural Butthe for whichactorshis his producer guests are quite so job that ordinary is difficultliving people. with for him several He is must a reasons. be First way of acting; otherwise the whole thing will be amay be quite right and natural in one cultural happy experi- aware of dohandsomeridingChristian not goa bicycle. together.one, IVas and Theinterpreted Inthe the bicyclecostume, same tooway, by of is a itsitof popularis thekind, impossible best. is ButDanishundoubtedly tothey take simplyactor over a environment can easily be wrong in another; whatis 110 BEST CORY AVAILABLE fitting and pretentiousthe beautiful when architecture people can noof alonger past era;live itup becomes to it. false and 111 I2 buildthatthe were besta modern universallyresults office it admired.buildingThe 19th Butwith whencentury a' façade in had the was necessary only to copy fine old buildings very ill-advised idea that to obtain a modern city youthat is a faithful toonthoughcopy live the onof right its ainto Venetian prototype site a distant and palace,Another in is thefuture. charmingcharming, rightit great becomes He surroundings. difficulty sets quite the is meaningless that the architect's work stagethat foris, ina long,Venice is intended even I bepreferablyaccommodateslowmoving in keeping be performance with aheadunforeseen the ofThe times its whichimprovisations.architect time when also planned has His something building in as long as it stands. must be adaptable enough to common with the land- so that it will should Bittmnir wunt nutu successscape gardener. depends Everyone on whether can or grasp not the the plants fact that he selectsthe gardener's for the rood.1,1117 MP Therightagarclengarden architect, environment thrive may too, bethere. worksit will,for No the withnevertheless,matter plants, living how if thingswith beautifulthey be his human a failure if itcannot is not theflourish in it. conception of beings, Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi, Venice. Completed 1509 hedisrepairoutthrivewho intended. life are in andit hismuch becomes Indeed, changehouse more its aoneinto monstrosity.incalculableapparent ofsomething the proofsbeauty Itthan quite will ofwill plants. goodbedifferent be neglected, of fall into noIf availwith- they cannot from what tecture.overlookedthat it Thatis being in is any the' utilized attempt creativeFinally, as theto process, define architect there theishow ahad very the planned. importantbuilding feature which true nature of archi- architecture is must not be comes forgery.strokeas,into for existence.is instance,Thisas individual is notArchitecture paintings true asA hisof painter's are.architecture. hand-writing; is not sketchproduced The is aby purely the artist personal document; an imitation of it is a his brush himself anonymously in the background. Here again he 112 architect remains resembles the BEST COPY AVAILABLE 23 Havnegade, Copenhagen. Completed 1865. Architect F. Meldahl 113 14 menatheatrical work who of constructart,producer. but simply hisHis buildings. drawingsa set of instructions, He delivers are not an end in theMselves, an aid toa the number crafts- of com- City,more,NewLever Skid- House,Owings York theTheypletely construction. must be He impersonal plan drawings and so unequivocal that there will be no doubt about composes the music which others will play. typewritten specifications. rhythmharmonyExamplearchitects.C.1 Merrill, as ofand the musiciansbeFurthermore, remembered interpreting in orderthat another'sthe to understandpeople scoregivingwho play it special it are not phras- sensitive architecture fully, it must architectureprocesscreativeresult of in the standingutetoilingtrary,ing, their accentuating they togetherthatparticular arewhich a to multitude skillstheybuild to the of ordinarywhole, often people one thing or another in the work. On the an ant-hill, quiteare helping impersonally to create. contrib- Behind them is without who,under- like ants con- a mentarylikewellthe architect abe motion called film withwho picturean art ordinaryorganizes of withoutCompared organiiation. people the with playing other all branches the of star performers, a sort ofwork, docu- and architecture mightart, all this mayThe seem building quite is produced parts. aboveperiencesbest beall, illustratedcommon our relation toby all comparisonto of inanimate us at a verywith things. earlyanimals. Thisstage can in our perhaps lives andtive.emotionalpersonalnegative; finishedThe architect sensitivity. messagearchitecture than ais sketch fromforced But is oneincapablethis to seek of communicating or personal study.person Therefore, to another; archi- it entirelyvery fact lacks leads to something posi- a form which is more explicit an intimate, includeothersmallman hand, acquires childthings the to which human learnonly toareby being Certainstand, patientapart very to fromnatural walk,endeavor. soon himself. capacities toextends jump, It With takes tohis with swim. themastery years which help On for ofto manythe a animals are born, underlyingwhetherthatbuildingmusttecture rhythm hasa medievalidea anda special of harmonybe the attributed cathedralquality art. have of itsappeared own and to the organizationor the which most is modern the steel-frame great clarity.at all in The architecture fact them,hisall kindsscope handling of of implements action them, in acrawling wayheIn hisdevelops no helplessness, onanimal them, his can efficiency toddling emulate.the baby over and begins enlargesthem, by to tasting things, touching dailysame lifetime from no otherthe cradle artArchitecture is to Noso the intimatelyother artis producedemploys connected by withordinary man's a colder more abstract form, but at the grave. people, for ordinary theseavoidshefind quickly out things. some what learns ofHe theythe seems tomore are use to Soonlike,unpleasant allproject sorts whether the his childof experiences. nerves,contrivances friendly becomes all hisor quite hostile.andsenses, thereby adept deep But in the employment of basedpeople; on therefore a number it shouldof human be easilyinstincts, comprehensible 114 on discoveries and ex- to all. It is BEST COPY AVAILABLE thatinto hethe cannot lifeless reach objects. up toConfronted feel the top, by hea wall nevertheless which is soobtains high 11 5 I6 Boys playinga ball game topView step behind from the 17 behindstepon of the the topstairway RomeMaggiore,S. Maria (1952 ) Rome (1052)Maggiore in S. churchMaria of r ( r, 14.A. 10.000002.0010 1011111111111.1. -.4111 1%.. N4 :s4477. receivesstretchedanIn impression this an piece way impression heof of discovers what of it the is that likehardness it by is throwing his canvas or paper. With the help of the ball he entirely different from and solidity of the wall. ball against it. a tautly virtuosity.inkindonand squashathe employed of broad football Whencurved terrace the but thetime wall, theyat ball theplaying which also wastop utilized 6f out,athey verythe it playedstairs. was specialthe wallmost It against kindwas in decidedly theapparentlyof with ballgame, greatgame out, as a uptheasRome's canto slopes the be apse seven seenwere of in famous smoothedthe an basilica. old hills.The fresco and OriginallyenormousThe articulated painting church in the of S. Maria many tourists who are brought Maggiorethe site wasstands very unkempt, with a flight of steps Vatican. Later, on one of motorfurtherbouncing cars on down withand Vespasan all eager the down stepsI boydo not rushingnearand claim rollingthe after greatthat several theseit, obelisk. in Italianand hundred out youngsters among feet learned more about ' one.starredcharacterto theBut church theynumbers of dothe onnot surroundings.in sight-seeing experiencetheir guide-books theThey tours place hardly in the simply check offand hasten on to the notice the unique way some boys one of the next toplanesexperiencedarchitecture play andon thesethe certainthan vertical elements. the basic tourists walls elements As above did.I sat But of in-the architecture: the quiteslopes. shade unconsciously And watching the they horizontal learned them, they a nearbyI saw there monastery a few school. They had 116 years ago did. I imagine they a recess at eleven o'clock were pupils from BEST COPY AVAILABLE fore.I sensed At a quarterthe whole past three-dimensional eleven the boys dashed composition off, shouting as never and 'be- 117 8 surroundings.of Inlaughing.playthings similar Thefashion which If greathe increasesucks the basilica child his his stoodfingerfamiliarizes and sticks opportunities to experienceonce more his in silent grandeur. himself with all sorts it in the air, he hediscovers moves whatabout. the But wind with is like in the low a kite he has an aerial feeler out high strata of air in which c e - conductingtobicycle.up judge in theBy thingsability. aatmosphere. variety according of experiences He tois oneweight, withhe quite solidity,his hoop, his instinctively learns texture, heat- scooter, his 4 .ti r "; .`,Z4 whatitover in a his andstone hand. over is untillikeAfter withouthe doing hasBefore thethistouching right oftenthrowing grip itenough, on a stoneit, and hethen first weighing gets the feel of it, turning it at all; a mere glance is he is able to tell oversphericalsufficient. it in ordershape. to While experience observingWhen its we various it see a characteristics. spherical object we seem to passwe do our not hands simply note its I alone,nizein various them in relation as games objects to havethe of humanextremelyThough the hand, the different notmany only character. kinds gives of them balls and marbles that same geometric shape, we recog- Their size are used whiteball,weightent quantities made tennis and tostrength ball be but thatkicked, different are is muchstruck is essentiallyqualities. by the Colorhand, different plays from more important. The large foot- or by the racquet a part, but the little differ- mouldedotherswhich soft, is by simply andhand. some an He extension learnssoAt plastic an thatearly of that the age theyhardhand. the child discovers that some thingscan are be oneshard, kneaded can be and ground Quiteandby still therefore the harder reverse, materialsobjects pliable cut likestuffs, like bread so that they become sharp and pointed, a diamond are perceived as hard. dough, can be given Various balls used in English ball games willrounded always forms, show and an nounbroken matter how jog curve. you cut them up, the section BEST COPY AVAILABLE P9 20 From such observations we learn that there are certain awhether so-calledItforms thewhich pear-shaped materials are called they Ascup are an hardfrom examplemadeis and thean of Englisholdothers areof modela actually "soft" soft,firm but form Wedgwood.regardlesssoft it isinor impossibleahard. hard of material to saywe canwhen take the form ; YouonItfounderfirst in may feel English appeared. bethat of that the you guise it firm,It iscan is ofbecause very actuallyJosiahPersian alien Wedgwood,it ancestrysee suitsto thehow the classical andit potter's waspreferred was drawn shapes permitted craft to up allsowhich on well.others.to the live the plasticmostcouldofpotter's the cups swell potter, claywheel, today, isout sufferingsqueezed how above. but the formed Thesoft outitself handleclaylike with to toothpastehumblybe the is pressed fingers.not submittedcast from in Toin below aavoida mould, tube,to the sorims, shaped that handsas theon it shapedandwhocurveover that satthe which cup. making potter'she Heenjoyedis pleasant knewthese fingers curvingnohandles, to words andgrasp. thenthesaid for A handle manmorefixedto me at complicatedtothat thein the towardsWedgwoodit cupwas inlovely sensations; thea slender works, pear- work ustoit.handle.otherwise how aWhen series soft But we andheof thoughsay experiencesmight hard that materialshehave such could saidwea cup notgathered respondthat has express he a "soft"liked toin manipulation.childhood,this, theform, he rhythm hadit is which experiencedentirely in Though cup taught anddue 4 wespecialwasthe continuecup, soft process, afterat the to firing, time thinknamely it isofwas hard,Infiring,it shaped.asthis soft.we andinstance are But it neverthelessis even easy we have into casesunderstand a awaresoft where thing that why the thatit was hardened by a toof acquiredmaterial thesoft largest forms. usedfrom, structures. And was objects hardthis small conceptionfrom enoughthe very of to beginning, soft handle, and is hard weapplied can forms, speak even 120 The cup was soft when it was shaped; after firing the material became hard So-called pear-shaped cup manufactured by Wedgwoodbut the form itself can still be described as soft 121 22 ofAn the English great bridge di DiantantiPalazzo Punta canal-buildingthe beginning of the 19th period at ain typicallyRome.-hard-A building form with mode aof -soft- brick form Example of century.
1 tury.an English It is obviously bridge built made atAs ofthe a brick,typical beginning that example is of of the aof material nineteentha structure that with cen-was soft forms we can take objectashlar.rustications andHere, employed the like detail projecting on has a much been pyramidsso-called largerdirectly scale. taken over diamond-shaped from a tiny forminwasimpossiblehard the kneaded atof same thewinding timewayto and rid thecurves the moulded,yourself banks bridge as ofthe ofsomething was streams therushing constructed. impression and waterthat rivers responded carries ofNevertheless do, something acquiringoff to pressure thatit the is masses of thereothersfor theis have much sake endeavored ofarchitecture contrast.Certain to which make periods sets their the have buildings soft preferred against "soft," thehard hard and effects of this kind while oftionbridgeclay running portaland has gravel athatwater. double seems from function: onetoAs, have bank an itbeenexample andis a hollowedraiseddeposits of roadwaythe it out opposite by and the quality, that is, on the other. The a structure a naviga-pressure necessitatedheavyquiredA wall to great built us. Amuch effortof smooth large harder to bring stones,wallForm work seemsto which thecanand light, site alsoactually we and giveeven realize put weigh anthough in impression mustplace, more it mayhave thanappears haveof there- heaviness or lightness. clearcutPuntawhose prism,diform Diamanti. is but manifestly the lowerNot "hard",only part is madethe entire of stone building with faceted 122 we select the Roman Palazzo mass a toAshlarbrickstone produce wall.ones masonry a withoutWe deception intuitively with having deepbut simplyfeel anyjoints that idea as is granitea ofoften means their imitatedwalls ofrespective artistic are in heavier expression.brick, weights. thannot 123 24 IllnamsbutSidewalk Land( DenmarkinSidewalk Aarhus,
ness,Ifare ness,building thereinnumerable are would connectedmaterials bekinds a great with of surfaces Impressionsthenumber surface from of themcharacter ofthe hardness and were graded according to degrees of rough- softness, of heaviness and light- coarsest to the finest.of materials. There singularlywhichcrete,undoubtedly to is beless inharmonious able practical,likely to rest to crumble.when the surface. crowbar necessary But Granite againstthe to combination and lift the concretethe hard slab granite,givesof do con- not a varnishedtimberceptible and surfaces.differences. pebble-dash, AtIt may not be surprising that one end ofat the the scale other would polished be undressedstone and smoothly we can see such differences with with almost imper- pavementgradesthemix soles well; of issmoothness. offlankedyou your can by shoesthealmost broad And feel when,strips two how materialsof as unpleasantasphalt sometimes areor gravel ofit happens,is such right and different edgedthrough this suchingthe thingsnakedthe materials, aseye fired but clay,it is Incertainly crystalline Denmark today sidewalks we are aware of the essential difference between are often pavedremarkable with several that, without touch- stone, and concrete. rows thewithtable eye thekerbstone,sample and pavements comfortable collection the ofmodern more of under paving civilized Danish foot. materials, sidewalkTheeras, Londonerwhich not becomes to be calls compared his are pleasing to a veri- of concrete slabs separated 124 by rows of granite cobblestones. It is pavingsidewalk can the hardly "pavement," be found. and a more cultivated exampleBEST COPY of AVAILABLE 125 26 Clinker pavingat The 1-lague 27 a.% I it
Cobblestone paved square in Fribourg, Switzerland Clinker paved colonnade in squaresome, asin canFribourg be seen where in theIn the Switzerland photographsbeautifully the laid of cobblestone pavementa tranquil giveslittlepaving is exceedingly hand- directlyHeavycolumn granite on standsthe Copenhagen. paleaestheticA greatyellow pleasure variety limestone to of the materials of eye the and surrounding canhas itsbe perfectused walls for foil and paving in the the fountain. uniformwith very lighterpatternshattering paving of the material, highwaystrarily.satisfactory In andHolland results, secure theybut a neat they use and clinkerscannot pleasant be in combined thesurface. streets But or and used when on arbi- thethe 1 6 BEST COPY AVAILABLE brick paving same material is used as a foundation for granite pillars, as in 127 feelingdoStormgade the clinkers that the in become heavyCopenhagen, pillars chipped, are the butsinking effect you is intohave far the fromthe softer uncomfortable good. material. Not only 29 opposedimpressionstringtures of soto various tightlyslackness. for life thatmaterials of The ita hums,Attense boy about he curve whoenjoys also the makesand forms timeits when tautness a whenan bow heidea seesthe andand of childadraws receivestautness fishing becomes the net anas aware of the tex- lineshung are. up to dry, he experiences how reposeful its slack and heavy 1 r11 I :.tag04 r - str-0---- Ow. There are monumental structures of the greatest simplicityThe swelling forms of domes seen through the pendent lines of the net Fishing net hung up to dry in Venice architectTheselightButwhich and most arecan produce heavy, allcall buildings elements into tautonly play. and aconsist singleof slack,And architecture, effect,ofto and aexperience combination of such many some as architecture,hardnesskinds of of the hardof things orsurfaces. andsoftness. you the soft, 128 Square in Fribourg, Switzerland. Paving seen from the terrace above must be aware of all of these elements. BEST COPY AVAILABLE 129 30 Every instrument has its own The English ridingboot 3 aThe feeling sight ofof a vitality tennis racquet provokes physiognomy. andeffectandhas elegance anit ofproduces aristocraticcostliness an air
From these individual qualities let us now turn to the things value to anyone. But using the racquet gives us a feeling of being t:,5se ceptivewetoolsthemselves. find inqualities, the that broad by man means sense haiWhen whichbeenof material, able weincludes regardto giveform, buildings theeach color tools tool and and producedits their otherindivid- rooms per- by manusing the term stimulatesalive,hoot,But fillsif for we theus example,we turn with tennis to energy another player will and in piece immediately aexuberance. way of that sports is Therealizedifficult equipmentthe sight what to of describe. itdifferent alone riding implementfairlyual character. speaks has to Each usits likeown one a particularseemshelpfulIn this to friend, way, have effect manaits goodupon own first comrade. ourpersonality puts minds. his And stamp which each on the implements he prancingcraticsensationsleg.leather Itabout awakens sheath,thoroughbreds the an various Englishonly sensations faintly things ridingand reminiscent ofarouse.pink eleganceboot. coats. There It's of and Ora the israther take luxurycalls somethingshape the odd-looking of umbrella. the aristo-to human mind 'man. Theyhandracquetexpandingmakes become alone. andcan our thereafterhelpThis, more field us however, than toof strike theaction, purely implements is a notballthey useful thebetter increase most exertarticles. than important our theirwe vitality. Besidescan influence dothing withA tennisabout the on language.thepractical.It racquet ThereBut or you theseems simplyriding to he boot.cannot something isThey imagine finicky do not it aboutin speak company an theumbrella, same withan ingenious, thoroughly functional device, neat and it. As a matter of fact, striking balls is in itself of no particular 130 ASST COPY AVAILABLE thesomething racquet utterlyrather lacks.cold and reservedan air of dignity which 131 32 ofphysiognomy. an object without For eventreatingWe the get itmost toas the a precise living point wheredescription,thing withwe cannot its describe our impressions enumer- own periodin which you the find people that conductthe mode themselves. of living harmonizes In memoirs with of the the same ex- 33 ideaindividualatingfeel theall is visiblewordthe letters essence conveys, characteristics, in aof word the we thing generallybut will receive itself. not are giveJust a nottotal asan aware inklingimpression of of what what of it the is we do not notice the we livedhadandternal dominatedtowns in picture, that were style andthe attuned were period you When notwill toand awarethe also theyit rhythmhad find ofgave passedit. that Whateveritof a thename.historians era.buildings, theyBut thosediscovereddid, streets how- who that a definite style samethewhenthat gamethewe sensations.we perceive perceive court, Thebut it. onlygarb theNot ofistennis theloose only conception player's andthe comfortable,tennis clothesarousescreated racquet inthe but shoes everything theare connected with our minds areand"Gothic"ever familiarthose they who period withdressed, make all or the a theirseemed "Baroque" small living detailsnatural manufacturingperiod, that to and them.are dealerscharacteristic Wefake speak inantiques antiques ofof a theformovessoftin theinstant keepingaboutspeed the theand ballwith court concentration is the inidly play.relaxed picking If, which conditionlater up balls, inwill the beinreserving day, demandedwhich the thehis energyofplayer him same man ingtoarchitecture,each create able style integratedto in determine allsimply its wholes.phases. because theUnderstanding styleBut the details of object a building tell architecture,of nothingall goodby certain essential architecture therefore, external about; is not the same as be- dignitypostureonlyappears hisare atandappearance now an gait officialthe arekeynote. will influencedfunctionTurning have changed fromin byuniform thesehis but clothes; examplesorhis formal entire restraint from being.attire, daily- andHisnot life to architecture, aboutaposeencefeatures. specific it.and you, You It howera. isobserve must notYouit was enoughobserve must howattuned dwell youtohow seeto are in itthe architecture; was thenaturally entire rooms,designed concept ledfeel you for from how andamust special one theyrhythm experi- to close pur- the of createdwillarchitectwe give find in hasthe thata special beenbuilding the inspiredbest spirit a buildings Externaldistinctive and by theysomething featureshave convey stamp. been inbecome that Suchthe produced' spiritproblem buildings a means to whenothers. which of communicatingthe feelings are justdimensionsapartments,orientation other.those Youcolors of andone mustthe werewithabove rooms be theused, awarethe insame other,relation how of openings, the withthe to textural choice windowsrooms can effects,bedependedof andentirelyexactly the discover sun. theondifferent the sameTwo why togetherpossible.hemessageand feels moods for thatconveyed If afrom one commonhe isofone part isthem personone purpose of findsofa generalconformity.to another.himselftry to movement. appear Often, aMan bit conspicuous,is however, lessPeople lonely whothe when heonly is as much alike as get itstionexperiencesimply echoes of space:because and the thelong-toned great of way curtains, difference sound reverberations, wallpaperacts acoustics in an enormous and as make furniture.compared in cathedral, your Youto concep- a small mustwith hair-dress,muchlikely alike. to feelbut It isofmiserable; not posture 132onlyIn andthea pictures question entiremovement occasionfrom of clothes anda particular is the spoiled and entire the period for style him. people of seem to look very manner betterwhichchildrenpaneled theyand roombegin bettercan well graspby tools. playing padded inMan's their At withawithhands. certainrelation blocks,hangings, As stage totime implementsballs goesmost rugs and on childrenand otherthey can cushions. demand bethings have broadly described thus: 34 isdugthe no desireinto more a bank,tothan build a or secret somea primitive nooksort ofhiddenbut shelter. of rough It boards. But often it among bushes, or a tent may be a real cave CHAPTER II ableenclosinghemade tovaried create with of spacein a aarug shelter thousand fordraped the for child's overthemselves,ways twoown but chairs. common by digging This "cave game" use. Many animals arc also to them all a hole in the is the can ofisSeeing notthe enougheye. demands The passively retina a certain is to like activitylet aa moviepicture on the screen form part itselfof on the whichon spectator. the aretina con:. It Solids and Cavities in Architecture pattern.ingsspeciesground which oralwaysThe building vary child's doesaccording some play it in is sortthe continuedto sameofrequirements, habitation way. in the Man above grown-up'sclimate alone it. But formsand creation,the cultural dwell- same usotherbehindtinuously to thinkhand, the changing that eyeonly we is a conscioushavevery stream faintseen ofvisual ofa pictures thing;only impression very a tinyappears few detail ofis necessarythem. butis enough. the On mind thefor giveimplements,andrefined just form as methodsto man hehis progressesprogresses entire of enclosing surroundings. from thesimplespace. blocks Little byto thelittle most he strives refined cave game to more and more to actuallyhintalong will with allsuffice. bent he saw head He was receivesAbelieves visualthe characteristic anprocess that impression he canhas seam be seenof describedblue running a jeans;man down asthough a merefollows. the A man walking ingsis the task of the architect.And thisto bring order and relation into human surround- therethatsidemoving a of isman thethat jeans has leg.sort passed Fromthereof seam mustthishim there onone be the must asmall mansidewalk, be observationinside jeans simply them.and where because heUsually concludes there where his are ob- M.P1i12;P- e. pedestrians.inservation a crowded ends But street here; for somethat there he reason arecannot so our many bother man things wisheshis mind to tokeep with have an his a eye closerfellow on . 't jeansdulllook butHe personat willthe the thenwearer person. he observe will is He nowa youngobserves her ask more girl,himself: more notclosely, details.a "What man. adding HedoesIf he was detail isshe notright look toa about detailvery like the until?" F forsketchcomparedhe getsit to of becomea his more to subject, that or a lessofgirl a a mere incorrectportrait jeans; suggestion; picture painter.finally ofhe then Firsther. adds elaborates Hishe more formsactivity and ita enoughcan rough more be completerecreatesparticulardetails until image girl.the he phenomenaThe ofhas what activity obtained he has ofhe such aseen.observes characteristic a spectator in his effort portraitis creative; to ofform that he a 134 BEST COPY AVAILABLE 135 APPENDIX D
136 h-els-Ce / I THE THREE LATIN FOR THE CLASSICALART OF MEMORY' Chapter I SOURCES 4.0 T T poempraiseScopas, in honourof banquetthe Castor poet of and hisSimonidesgiven hostPollux. by but a Scopas ofincludingnobleman Ceos of Thessalymeanly named told chantedthe a lyric a passage in whobroughttopanegyric poetwhom wished that in he and to hehadto Simonides wouldseethat devoted him. he only must He halfthat pay obtain thetwo him poem. thehalf balanceA the little later, rose from the banquet and went out but young men were waiting outside sum agreed upon for the from the twin gods a message was ruins;hallcould fellA the in,find corpses crushing no one. were Scopas During so mangled and his allabsence The thethat English the the relatives roof translations of the three Latin guests to death beneath the sources used are those in of the banqueting who came to usinglarlyIInstitutio haveCaplan;the periphrases in Loeb sometimes repeating oratorio the edition Dc of the bymodifiedtheoratore of H.actual terms.the E. classics: byButler. terminologythem E. W. inWhen the Suttonthe Ad direction ofquoting Herennium theand H. of Rackham; mnemonic rather than infrom these translations literalness,is translated particu- by H. Quintilian's Nardi,nianVienna,that Art givenFlorence, 1936.of Memory' by I H. attempted 1955, Hajdu, in MedioeveII, DasThe pp.a brief 871ff.Mnemotechnische best esketch Rinascimento, account On theof it whole,known in Schnftum Studi to me of the art of my articlememory 'The in Cicero- antiquity is in onore di Brunodes Mittelahers, 137 curiously neglected. I the subject has been 138 THREE LATIN SOURCES FOR THE CLASSICAL ART OP MEMORY THREE LATIN SOURCES FOR THE CLASSICAL ART OF MEMORY handsomelywereatSimonidestake the themtheirtable rememberedandawaydead. paid was Thefor for therefore burial invisibletheir the places sharewereable callers, to unableinat indicate whichthe Castor panegyric to theyto identify the and had relatives Pollux,bybeen them. drawing sittingwhich But had clearestmnemonicofmnemonic. loci or description places. placeThe first systemThe of step commonest,the usedItwas is notto imprint difficult though to get hold of the general process is that given by Quintilian.3 In was the architectural type. The on the memory a seriesnot the only, type of principles of the sittingthroughofexperienceSimonides which that his he suggestedheaway memoryis had said from been to toof havethe ablethe the banquet poet beentoplaces identify the the justprinciplesat inventor. which thebefore bodies, theof the Noting the guests crash.he art realised thatof hadAnd memory it been wasthisthat statuescourt,beorder remembered, to the and form living other a series as ornamentsroom, spacious of places bedrooms, and with in varied which and theparlours; memory, he says, a building is to a one as possible, the fore- rooms are decorated. not omitting orderly arrangement isto essential mustHeremember inferred select for and placesthat good store persons andmemory. those form desiring images mental toin images trainthe places, this of facultythe so things that (of the theymemory) order wish ofbeenweaponareexample Thethe memorised factsimages of thenrequiresthese by placedin Quintilianwhich the to building. bein the imaginationrevived, speech This all done,is theseon the places places which have says one may use an anchor or a to be rememberedas an as soon as the memory are visited in theof lettersthe placesthings places written willand will imagesdenote on preserve it.= therespectively thingsthe order themselves, asof athe wax things, writing-tabletand andwe shallthe images employand the of Theingthroughhaveturn method from and to his thinkthe ensures memory memorisedvarious of the that building deposits ancient the places points whilst demanded oratorthe images he is making of he their has his custodians. are remembered inas themoving right in imagination placed on them. speech, draw- We whichcriptiononetold ofby was theCicero of fivetheused mnemonic inparts by his the Deof Romanrhetoric; Theoratore of placesvivid rhetors. when the story and story he imagesofTwo is howintroduces discussing other (lociSimonides descriptions and amemory imagines) invented asof the art of memory is brief des- operationsoneimagesbuilding.order, point since may Quintilian'swith (the _thesuggest navalweapon). order mattersthat examples is hefixed (thehad by ofinanchor), themind anchor at another and the with military sequence of places in thea speech which dealt at weapon as oratoria.Adascomethe a C.classical part down Herennium of rhetoricto mnemonic, us, both libri is beingalso IV; besides inthe discussed; treatises other the oneis on onein given rhetoricQuintilian's is in by the Cicero, anonymous Institutio have when memory of professorhavepreparedthem neverto name whoto attemptedlabour anused object; toseriously amuse toThere one do ofsohis isat them myself nostudentsthese doubt noted mnemonicbut that downI have this all methodbeen the will work for at parties by asking each anyonegymnastics. who is I told of a memorymemory,rhetoricsical art withasof which memorya techniqueunfailing would mustThe accuracy.enable by first remember which himbasic And theto fact deliveritis orator wasthatwhich as thelongcould athe partart student improvebelonged of thehis to history of the clas- speeches from of the art of byofthein theobjects placingprofessor order inthe in thewould objects,which right cause they order.as theygeneral had He were been performed named, named. his Later little in the amazement by repeating the list on the window sill, on memory feat eveningobjects alluntilpeanrhetoric human comparativelytradition that activities, the in art which ofthemodern memory ancients, it was times, travellednever had that laid forgotten, those down down infallible throughrules or not and theguides precepts Euro- in forgotten tendedhadtheiradvises,the discovered deposits.desk, his heefforts on revisited theHe his bywastepaperhad technique attaching neverthose placesheard basket, notionsquite ofin independently. andturnthe to theclassical and objects demanded mnemonic Had from so on. Then, as Quintilian remembered he ex- them but for improving the memory.2 Cicero, De orators, II, lxxxvi, 355-4. 139 2 on the places he might3 Institutio have caused oratorio, still XI, greater ii, 17-22. amazement by 3 4 0 ondelivereddelivering workable his mnemotechnichis speeches. lecturesWhilst from principles it ismemory, important it may as to the THREEberecognise classicalmisleading LATIN that SOURCESorator theto classical FOR THE art CLASSICAL is based ART OF MEMORY constantlyforcated.not thehis It historyown isreferred somewhat name, of tothe but in classicaltiresome thethe name that of thisthe manwork, toTHREE whom LATIN it SOURCES FOR THE CLASSICAL ART course of this book, has no otherart of title memory and which will be so vitally important OF MEMORY was dedi- discoverySimonides'impressionsseemdismiss to itbe withof inventiondescribing of the almostthe importance label ofincredible inner the`mnemoteclmics'. art oftechniques orderof intensity. memory for memory,which Cicero rested,The dependclassical emphasises notbut onlyalso on sources onvisualon that thehis heelocutio,teachersave comesopens the goes memoria, uninformativehisto memory6 treatmentthrough pronuntiatio)in asthe of Aditfive with Herennium. parts the ofwords: rhetoric The busy and efficient an essential part of the orator's equipment, a rather dry text-book style. When 'Now let us turn to the (inventio, dispositio, discovery that the senseimprintedinby It oursome has of minds beensight other on sagaciouslyofthem isperson, the bythingsstrongest thatthe discerned thesenses,that most ofhave all but bycomplete beenthe Simonidesthat senses. conveyed the pictures keenest or else to are themof discovered formedall andour Theisonerhetoric,treasure-house artificialengrafted natural, memory.' memory the in ofourother inventions,There minds,is artificial. born the The simultaneously custodian natural a memory strengthenedare two kinds or confirmedof memory, by he continues, memory is that whichof alt the parts of with thought. The word `mnemotecimics'receivedsensesthey areis hardly bythe also the sense conveyed earsconveys of or sight,by to reflezionwhatour and minds the that can byartificial consequently thebe mostmediation easily perceptionsof retained the eyes.4 if weriesciplinetraining. will improved and speak A personsgood ofby the naturalthe less artificial art.After well this endowed memory.' curt preamble the author memory can be improved by this dis- can haveannounces their weak abruptly, memo- `Now preferatelystoredbuildingsmemory brought toon use oftheof Cicero ancient the places,to hisexpression may lips Rome,with thehave a piercingseeing'artthoughts been of memory'the like, inner and places, as wordsvision itfor movedseeing this ofwhich hisprocess. theamong speech.immedi- images the I is.Ad the Herennium. only Latin Ittreatise is drawing Anon;, the immenseprobably subject weightin Greek of treatiseshistory on rhetoric all of which on Greek sources of memory teach-presses on the memory section of to be preserved, for Cicero's are lost. It orancientof fessor,vitalon which importanceworld, employ to devoid type from to lectures, ustimeof printing,inWe toour modernstime the lives trainedwithoutsome and who private professions. memorypaper have mnemotechnic forno was memoriesnote-taking But of in vital the notat all may, like the pro- completeandterminology.reader Quintilian'sin thesource,is already Latin It for is remarks world. thus thefamiliar classical really Itsare rolewith notthe fullmain the treatises artificial as artthe of transmitter memory bothof the in classical the Greek source, and indeed the only and assume that the memory and its ashavecouldwhichimportance. a description lost. dependreflected The Andon word the facultiesof the artthe emnemoteclmics', andancient classical of architecture intense memories art visual of ofthoughmemory, the memorisationwere ancient not trained makes actually world, whichthisby wrong whichan very weart preceptsittextimportance.art was to in thethoughtthefor MiddletheMiddle The artificial to Ad be AgesAges Herenniumby memory Cicero.when and theit Ithadwhich Renaissance it expounded is also of was a well known andwas much therefore used believedan that immense the prestige because had been unique 82mysterious B.c., a useful subject text-book seemAn simplerunknownfor his studentsthan teacher it is. which of rhetoric immortalised, in Romes compiled, circa 86- bookAdmemorydrawn Herennium. to puzzle up was by outlike'Tullius' And the must all history himself.attemptsbeIn mainlyshort, of that such allbased attempts on the to puzzle out what the classicalart in the art Western of traditionas we are making in this memory section of excellent introduction by H.3 OnCaplan the authorship toDe the oratore, Loeb and edition II, other lxxxvii, (1954). problems 357. of the Ad Herenniwn, see the 141 4 6 The section on memory is in Ad Herennium, III, 5 xvi -xxiv. 142 tradition.must refer Every back Arsconstantly memorativa to this treatise, text as with the THREEmainits rules sourceLATIN for 'places',SOURCES of the FOR THE CLASSICAL ART OF MEMORY frompapyrus, memory. the images 'For thelike places the letters, are very the mucharrangement likeTHREE wax and LATIN tablets disposi- SOURCES FOR THE CLASSICAL ART OF MEMORY or whichingas`memoryits oftenrules developments it as isfor for notthe 'images', words', chiefthe actual of object is theits repeatingwords discussion artof thisof of bookAdthe Herennium. plan,of to 'memory explore, the subject And stillfor the things'matter, astonish- andand memory in the sixteenth century, preserve the formwithreading.'tion a ofaseries large the andimagesnumber must likeof be places.If rememberedthe we script,wish It is toessential and remember in theirthe that delivery order, muchthe places material is like should thewe must equip ourselves so that we businesstheDe`Ad umbriswildestRenaissance Herennian' of idearum rulesflights forisoutlines of cannot goingplaces, fancy below concealthrough rulesin such all for the theiryeta images, workfact complex that as Giordanothe accretions.philosopher Bruno's Even of once again the old, old memory for things, standingwhethertancesorcan forwards start standing fromatwe the fromshould any head in it.alocus row,tellofIf wethe intheir it shouldlinethewould names series or atnotsee the andbeginning makea numberfoot move anyor eitherin tiifferenceofwith the our backwardsmiddle.the acquain- person to usSo rhetoricAdnomemory meansHerennium. forteacher easy words. task What is ofnot makestryingEvidently, addressing theto understand task therefore, us;by nohe the meansis it notmemoryis incumbent easysetting issection that out upon the to of us to attempt the by locushavewillwith bememory committedwe that, please.' reminded loci. to 'Ifthe theseThe byloci, the formation haveproceeding images, been ofwe arranged in the can either loci repeat indirectionis order,of orally the the greatest fromwhat result anywe importance, for the whichwascongregatedmemoryexplain talking they to was. people wouldabout; around He whoknow foris him addressingthem know circahow he tonothing86-82 needed apply. his B.c., rhetoricabout onlyWe and areto it theyrattle whatinstudents a knewdifferent offthe the artificial whatas 'rules' theycase he cannorememberingdifferentsame further be set used material.of use againloci one of can set them.byThe ofplacingbe images things Butused theanother againfadewhich loci and and setremainwe are ofhaveagain effacedimages in placed for the forwhenremembering memory on another themwe make and forset butsectionmemoryand withare ofoften rules.pauses Ad somewhatHerennium, for reflection Inbaffled whatemulating about byfollows the what the strangeness Ibrisk heattempt is style telling ofto of somegive us.the author, theof the content of the memory orderwrittenwhatof material. ofis onthewritten again. loci The it onloci is usefulthem areIn like hastoorder give the been towaxeach makeeffaced tabletsfifth sure locus and which that some are we remain ready distinguish- do not towhen errbe in remembering the easilydefinition(Constat grasped igitur to be artificiosaby forever the memory, repeatedThe memoria artificial such down ex aslocis memory thea house, etages. imaginibus), is Aan established locusintercolumnar isthe a stockplace from places and images eachnamehand,ing succeeding andmark.is Decimus. place We infifthmay the We locus. fortenth canIt example is the thenbetter image go mark to on formof to thesome station one'sfifth acquaintance locusmemory other with marks loci whosea golden in on a deserted and solitary simulacraspace,eagle,For instance a wecorner, (formae, must if wean place notae, arch,wish their tosimulacra)orThe recall theimages art like. theof ofon memory genusImages what definite of we isarea wishhorse,likeloci. forms, an to of innerremember. amarks lion, writing. ofor an Those who know the memorisedefinedThereforeplace for set crowds places. ofthe loci student of will passing Memorychoose intent people an onloci unfrequented tendacquiring should to weaken not buildinga sharpbe the too impressions. inand much which well- liketo one another, for mnemonicsreadletters out of what the canalphabet they set have in can places written. write what down Likewise they what have those is dictatedheard who and have to themdeliver learned and it 143 6 moderateresemblanceinstance too size, manyto onenot intercolumnartooanother large will for be this spaces confusing. renders are notthe They good,images should for placed betheir of 7 144 THREE LATIN SOURCES FOR THE CLASSICAL ART OF MEMORY norlightedimageson themmust for will theyvague, then be be the overcrowded.tooand images dark not ortoo placed the small shadowsThey on for them must then will will not obscurean glitter bearrangement too theand brightly images. dazzle; of 'Things' are thus the subjectthetionis the things is firm the matter moderatingandperception words.'of the speech;inofTHREE thethe soulvoice LATIN 'words' of and things SOURCES body and to FOR words;suit THE the pronuncia- CLASSICALdignity of ART OF MEMORY are the ofeye perhapsThesight of thoughtintervals too about near is betweenorthirtyless too powerful feet,farA person theaway'. Tor loci when like with should theyou a relativelyexternal have be of moved moderate eye, large theso experience theobject extent, inner can easily equip memoryeveryarguments,anlanguage artificial single isin memoria 'things' memorywhichword inthat of itrerum;to your in subjectremind the speechthe right matteryou second order ?only Or is kind ?clothed.doof The theyou is firstmemoriaorder aim Are kind atof memorising the ofverborum. artificial notions, you aiming at isandcanwhohimself remedy inthinks it with and thatthis. as at many hewill 'For does constructthoughtsuitable not possess canloci theto embraceas say,setting enough he pleases, mnemonics anyof sufficiently some region and evenlocus.' canwhatsoever good a use person(That loci what were afterwards called theButhaveThe weaker'memory a ideal, 'firm brethren as perceptionfor defined words' among by is in Ciceromuch thethe author soul' harder in the ofof thanabove bothAd Herennium's'memory things and for rhetoricwords.things'; passage, would be to precisionthatmethod.)'fictitious what whichstrikesplaces', they me in contrast mostimply.Pausing about In to afor the classicallythem reflection 'real is places'the trained atastonishing the of end thememory ordinaryof visualrules the for places I would say theallowedsinglestudents rules thatforword, evidently places,'memory and what evenrather forTo kind things'Cicero returnjibbed of placeswas toathimself, memorisingthe enough. to rules choose for forimages. memorising. We have already been given as we shall see later, an image for every stoppingsocialisspace allowed habit.between at for. intervalsWho Andthe is locithat thewith canmanrules an be movingintent summon measured, face slowly up ? He thea invision is lightingthe a rhetoriclonely of aof forgotten building, thestudent loci WhyreasonssurprisingrisingWhat is it, whichareon he thepassages asks, theplacesrules authorthat about ?in someWe thegives whatnow treatise,images for comekind the are of choicenamelyto images soone strong of the mnemonictheto and choose psychologicalmost sharp curious for images. and and memo- so images,imagesHerennium,forming now aone set begin,for 'nowof memory'things' wethe firstturn'Enough (res), loci. ofto whichthethe has other theory isbeen that for ofsaid there'words' images.' of are places', (verba). two Rules kinds continues That for of the author of Ad intofeeblesuitable this sothat for as they toawakening know hardly whichNow stimulate memory, natureimages memoryherself whilst to avoid teaches othersat andall ? uswhich We what must towe seek. enquireshould do. When we see in are so weak and remindimagesment,is to say a tothe notion,'memory remind reader or offorthat a every'thing'; things' forI interrrupt thesingle butmakes rhetoric 'memoryword. theimages student concise for to 'things'remindwords' author andofhas here an 'words'to argu- forfind a moment in order to believable,somethingstirredgenerallyevery dayby fail anythingexceptionallyorlife ridiculous,to things remember novel that base,that or them,are we marvellous.dishonourable, petty,are because likely ordinary, to Butthe remember unusual, mindif weand issee great,banal, fornot abeing long we or hear un- follows.:partswould of have the rhetoric.an absolutely InventionThose precise five is theparts meahing excogitation are defined in relation of trueby toCicerothings the five(res), as or things similar longereasilycouldforget;time. Accordingly, slipthis incidentsin thefrombe somind. the forof things memoryour any A childhoodsunrise, immediateother while reason the the weto sun's our strikingoftenthan eye course, thatremember or and earordinary the wea sunset novel commonlybest. things stayNor are accomodationmentto truth in to order render of of one'ssuitable the thingscause words plausible; thus to thediscovered; inventeddisposition (things);elocution is the arrange-memory is the 145 8 termsin the res Loeb and verba). edition, but 7made Dc inventione, more literal I, invii, reprOducing 9 (translation the based technical on that by H. M. Hubbell 9 14.6 THREE LATIN SOURCES FOR THE CLASSICAL ART OF MEMORY ordinaryquent.morearemarvellous a sourcemarvellous Thus event, to ofnature no wonder but onethan showsis becausemoved lunarbecause that eclipses, by they she they a new isoccur occur notbecause or aroused daily.striking seldom, these But by and solar arethe indeed morecommon eclipses fre- are occurrence. Let instructorauthormnemonicapplication of Adin images of mnemonics Herenniumthe rules,on their that is himselfplaces. to is teach to Thiswho the traditionmethod THREEof LATIN SOURCES FOR THE CLASSICAL ART OF say it rarely sets out a system of says that the duty of an was started by the making images, MEMORY endsratherdirects.art, are then,the For reached beginnings inimitate invention by nature,discipline. ofWe nature things findought, is whatarise never then, fromshe last,to desires, set natural education up images and talent, follow of and a kindas the she that can adhere lon- never first; bythousandown.give heart; When a few oneset teaching examples,introductionsteaches 'introductions',him and the and then method give hethem and says, then one leaves does not draft encourage the student to form his to the student to learn him to his a crownsbeautybutstrikinggest active in ormemory. oras singular possible;purple(imagines And cloaks,ugliness; if agentes);wewe shallsetso if thatup wedo ifimages the ornamentsowe ifsimilitude assign wethat establish someare to notthemmay of many similitudes them, beexceptional more as withdis- as or vague theofimages.9 thatownstriking three itinventiveness. prevents specimensThis and isunusual an the admirablewhich author Soimagines also he from describes.tutorialone showingshould principle do in thoughteaching mnemonic agentes. We must be content with us a whole set or gallery one regrets themeffectssostainedtinct that to more tous;itswith our formorreadily. blood ifimages, we is moresomehoworThe soiledfor things striking, that, withdisfigure wetoo, mudeasilyor will by them, or ensureassigningremember smeared as by our introducing with certainwhenremembering red they comicpaint, are one andhas`Theto charged declaredsuppose prosecutor that thatthat the therewehas motive aresaid are theThe thatof counsel the firstthe crime defendantis an for example the killeddefence of in a `memory for things' image We have was to gain an inheritance, a man by poison, a law suit. images.°rapidlyments.real we inButlikewise the this mind rememberwill all be the essentialagain original without places difficulty and in order againwhen to theyto refresh run are over fig-the usweact.' of theshall We accusation wishare forming to put againstWe in a ourmemoryshall our first imagine client. memory system Thisthe aboutlocusman is the in anthe questionimage. image whole to remind many witnesses and accessories to this as lying ill in bed, if we case and heimages,arousingOur is author thinking beautiful emotional has of clearly human or hideous, affects got images, hold throughcomic of the humanor these obscene.idea figures ofstriking helping And wearing itand is clearunusual that memory by crowns andat thatsomeknowthe on bedside,he the onehim may fourth to personally. come holdingbe finger, our to mindinvalid, in aIf hisram's weat right once. butdo testicles. nothand And knowa mana In cup, this him,of in the his lowest left, tablets, class, so we shall place the defendant we shallway yetwe cantake have overfiguresWeor purplehis feel dramatically places that cloaks, we with have bloodstainedthe engaged moved rhetoric intoin student, someor an smeared extraordinary activitydoing imagining with paint, worldon something. the ofas places human we run as The cup would remind ofinheritance.'°in thememory poisoning, the man the who tablets, was ofpoisoned, the will the witnesses, and the or Adstandmemorysuch Herennium verythan images, peculiarthe weirdlyintroduces though images.It populatedis much us.one Quintilian's of less the memory exciting, many anchor todifficulties arewhich easierand the weapon which toauthor under- confront of the student of onethesimilaritythe man of inheritance, the himself, anonymous with or testesof 9 likeand Ibid., someonelower the III,the testicles xxiii, witnesses.classes). else 39. whom of In Thethe the sick following loci we knowram through(though notverbal man is to be like we thoughthe history it will of the always art of give memory the rules, thatAd anHerennium, rarely An memorativa gives III, any xxii. concrete treatise, 147 I0 ducedofnote, tenentemthe Loeb lefta doctor hand. edition, as 'oninto Mediaeval the p.the 214. fourth scene;10 Thereaders, Ibid., fingersee digitus below; III, unable a ram'smedicinaliiroc, p. to33. 65testicles', understand On wasthe translationseethe medico, fourththe translator's fingerof medico testiculos arietinos II 148 intro- APPENDIX E
14 The intact facade's now almost black Demolition threewheninof Newthe stories therain;building, England," backhoe all of day columns "the clawthethey've oldest newspaper appearsand torn concrete cornices, at above said.the structure back By afternoon, theroomingatomizedSuddenly ghostscrowd house, plaster the beneathof theirstairs this billowing: signs theirseem year's massedfaint to bake climbdust above shopumbrellas of down 1907's the and windowsthemselves, florist's, cheer. awithWelined, Japanese love us: last thedisasters week, monster metal with thatscoop tilting loaves have seems its nothing andyellow shy, blooms. tentative,to head do andjoinedareand considering outthose by of aofwork, thirst us what with unemployable for to thewatching topple leisure next. something orto academics,watchIt's a weekday, fall. 150 unabletalkingoverWildeAll summer, a and fallen tohis forget Robertway athero loose tothe lurchingLowell,dinner vain ends, and or andI'vedown a stupid drink, fallenread a Paris biographies, boyasleep boulevard, 151 LEVEL / ACTIVITY CONCEPTAncansurroundingsrelates architectural either to itsharmonize environment. structure with Itits or it can stanc Whatenvironmentalclimate,aoart.(land is formationsanland environment? use considerations (park, and contour),industrial, Environment in planning local etc.). fauna Andeals architect and with flora, should surrounding a structure. many things: natural topography never ignore the important building themes, plains,DivergentPRODUCTIVE cities, (Verbal): THINKINGseacoast, 1. industrial,How many park, environments etc.) can you think of? (Mountains, settingitsbuilding2. National Whatenvironment. in achievestype New Park. of York buildingFor within City's example, its would Manhattan environment there be appropriate would section, depends be little in each unity ofbetween those settings? or a 110-story skyscraper in Yellowstoneon how well the structure "fits in" with a log cabin and a The unity a _JAIL_G 152 AAA Aftif 153 _at ANNAL Analogy:(Inappropriate)Log cabins Create are to an New analogy York City like as the skyscrapers ones below. are to Yellowstone National Park. ViolinsTreeIgloos frogs are are areto to a to therock hot equator banddeserts as as aselectric grass horned huts guitars toads are are toare the to to a Norththe symphony rain Pole. forests. orchestra. ConsideringfunctionalWhatof harmony are thedesign, architecture wayswhere climate, structures design intopography, correspondsrelationship may conflict existing withto with its function themes,environmenttheir environment? and landscape.) fits can with create its unitya (Building materials,surroundings. (See condition fig.AdobeA sample is to analogy a pueblo of dwellingthings that as fitpaper might is be:to14.1.) a wasp Buildings nest. which(The analysis express isunity possess a cooperative spirit. They fit. that both are 14.1. functional,nature.)SUGGESTED- both useACTIVITIES native materials, and both have colors which merge them with (ConsideryouDesignDivergent can. amaterials, structure (Verbal): structure, to Draw fit into as function,an many environment harmonious climate, forsocialization.) real housing and imaginary structures animals from nature or as people. board.Convergent: A variety Build of severalforms will models be needed. with boxes (See madefigs. 14.2 of foam through core 14.7.) or construction Taping tabs Folds Taping tabs 14.2. 14.3. P-L Cylinders14.4. corregatedSingle14.5. facedboard 154 14.6. 14.7. 155 SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES 46 effecta sandbox,Divergent:14.8). in solar (Berm and Afterhousing.) "berm" means the models some to pile to are up demonstrate constructed,or build up theearth place unifying around them effect ain form.an "environment," It is used with such great as of topography (fig. especiallyAnalyzeFinally,"Jam" someyour arrangeat styles community together a and pleasant, themes,to for show harmonious harmonious materials,dis-unity and ascolors,setting. andisharmonious environment textures, Use dried and weedsrelationships. (fig. functions. 14.9). and hills Look to landscape. 14.8.
156 157 LEVEL / ACTIVITY CONCEPTWalls, ceilings, floors, anc other 3/11flatLESSON surfaces 5 are callec planes. ShapeIfA youpiece pull is of a downchalk plane's cana blind,identity. it combinations of those shapes.draw (fig. a15.2). line. If we "drag" that line, makes a plane.Planes may be named or identified as it marks a plane (fig. circular, triangular, 15.1). orwindowsroofArchitects rectangular, or ceiling. are use partor planes The of wallthe to planwall planes planes.)buildings are the walls in ourand homes houses. (fig. The overhead plane may 15.3). (Doors and be the Plane15.1. 15.2. 158 15.3. 159 LESSON 48 themAnyThe ofbase interesting the planesplanes (fig. aremay the be groundsloped, raised, lowered, 15.5). or floor (fig. 15.4). or changed in some way to make 15.4. PRODUCTIVE THINKING 15 5 (TheyAnalogy:relationship.)Planes are Planeareboundary used is to to determiners.) form enclose (volume) volume as (form) line is asto linesshape. (Boundary and descriptive are often used to outline shape. enclose.space,BecauseThe visual planes Planesarchitecture properties are may extremely beofis athefolded, visual planesimportant. twisted,art determinedealing and in penetrated three-dimensionalthe qualities (fig. of the volumes volume andof form and 15.6). space they TryA 15.7).folded this analogy: plane is to a hallway as rhythm is to 160 (pattern, movement, etc.) (fig. Folded15.6. plane with penetrating plane. 161 fourPlaceS GGESTEDstand sheets a up.)ground ACTIVITYof stiff plane paper, on createyour some of your walls, creating a room table. (You may use interesting wall planes. cardboard for such planes.) Using (fig. 15.8). (If folded, the planes will CouldPutso a that ceilingyou openings make plane windows areon top or left.) (See Lesson application of this concept.)doors in your wall planes? 4/25International Style and the (Yes, with scissors, or by New folding 15.8. Consider(fig.WhatBrutalism 15.6), are ceilingthe forand relationshipsarchitects' the planes plains as (fig.sky, andclouds, differences canopies, between 15.11))? roofs, etc. airplanes (fig. 15.9), building planes paperWallglue planes or them cardboard into the the models ground areat more Is used, and If tabs are the bases. rigid If stiff used to
162 15.10. 163 LEVEL / ACTIVITY 50 3//1CONCEPTTheinfluences function its ofform. a bulb ing The(fig. circus tent is one of the best traditional examples16.1). of architectural The circus formhad unusualand function functional needs. It had to arrive in town, stay a few railroadartists;andlargedays, taken it groupsthencars was down for packlarge of moving.and people up and transported and colorful, who be oncame andjustits wayto it could again. be It packed needed to keep the rain and assee easily. the circus. It was The high tent enough could forbe theput trapezeup quickly up and put into trucks or sun off mayenoughtruckIf a require determineslarge for trucka a large pit needspartfor truck workers of tothe and pull building's tohave into be ablea door function to largeget underneath(fig. enough for the truck easily. It will need a garage to have its motor repaired, the size of the 16.2). The form needs to be tall a truck to drive through. It Louistent.affectexcellent Sullivanthe ventilationlook wasof the a with greatbuilding, air architect fans, just openings, as who the livedneeds and in outlets.ofChicago the circus All in of the requirethese 1800s. requirements He taught willFrank a large, colorful BmeetLloyd theirWright function, as a young but their architect. form may He said,remain "Form ugly followsand unresponsive. function." Some buildings Ate. kiik Il NW PRODUCTIVE THINKING 51 sharpenerDobottomHow you many onremember without it,examples a toothbrush a basketthe of story function to with ofcatch "The no problems shavingsbristles, Three Bears"? cana (fig. house you 16.3), Somethink with a of?no of roof.For example, a pencil wastebasket withoutthe thingsa Goldilocks found werepillowsSometimeswere not just bevery right? very thefunctional, nicematerialsThose to aresleep but an the objecton? They is made would with influence how it looks. others werefunctional "just right." things Can for heryou size remember and her which needs. things last a long time and not wear out. Would Would iron woodenHow has windows thisthe formbuilding'splane's be ofvery theform formfunctional? teacher's been been influenced affected chairWhy beennot? by itsinfluenced function by(fig. its 16.5)? function (fig. 16.6)? (World's largest function (fig. 16.4)? designer'sbuildingeachHow other. for has ideaworld's the to building uselargest a "bundle"in retailer; figure 16.7offices, been power, influenced etc.) by its of rectangular tubes as a structure. They strengthen Is it beautiful? It was a uniquefunction? thatThe helpflying control buttresses the outward of a Gothic thrust cathedral of the ceiling look decorative, vaults. but they are functional parts 16.5.
I / (I/ ,i/z 111111111.11111_111ftwir--= :1111t1 166 Sears76.6. Tower, Chicago; Skidmore, Owings, and e. 1973. 16.7. 167 IfSUGGESTED you can complete ACTIVITIES these analogies logically, you understand the concept. 52 2. 1.How Function it looks is andto form how as you fire/heat use it is to are the same as its (Chimney, firebrick, etc.) . (Form) Make4.3. Form up some is to functionnew analogies. as is isto to lawn sprinkler (fig. 16.8). (Hose, pipe, spout) RedesignshouldDivergent: "work" something Design and shouldyou a houseuse "look which like" has its work. (See fig. 16.9 for every day, but ignore how you use it. Do not worry about a nice relationship of function and form. It an example). relating its form or its function to the design. 16.8. 168 169 LEVEL / ACTIVITY NatureCONCEPT is a model for architectural forms anc shapes Snowflake J Rose andcone,whichmodel cube, for cylinder, sphere, pyramid. \ature isare also variations of the architectural forms a window WhenhumansLESSONwhich (Euclidean).we speakhave not of nature,made. We we are not so geometric mean such things as meanthe sun the and things sky, thewhich leaves, are partseashells, of the world which ideascrystals,CBy learning for170 and shapes, rocks. to look color, closely texture, at small and form.things, If and at a snowflake should fall on your sleeve a distance from large things, we getIAA ail you LAI /111Nt 171 LESSON 54 are"starlike"flakecould hexagonal islook different, and at in ithave shape.with yet six a magnifyingallYet,points. are with alikeThey such glass. in similarities, If it each is very different. They bear a are symmetricalthe samemany around ways the(fig. centerand17.1). For example, they appear were a flat flake, you would see that each JohnsonChapelLookstriking howin and Dallas, resemblancesimilar John Texas Burgee. the seashell (figs. to rose 17.3 (fig. windows through in 17.5). Gothic The cathedrals. chapel was designed by Philip 17.2)' is to the spiral ziggurat Thanksgiving Square 17.1. 17.2. A.D.Spiral17.3. 848-852. minaret of Great Mosque of Samarra, Iraq, 172 Thanksgivingand17.4. John Burgee, Square 1977. Chapel, Dallas; Philip Johnson Thanksgiving17.5. Square Chapel Interior, looking up. 173 BuckminsterESSON Fuller used such natural ideas. He designed a structure called the geodesic formFuller'sdome.Look a Hererounded howdome similarare (fig. surface,some 17.7). the picturesseashell evenHe had though of (fig. to alveoli arrange 17.8) he usedcells is histo (fig.only thebasic minaretstraight shapes (fig.building to connect materials. easily and 17.6). Notice how similar they are to 17.9). andAlveoliThe 17.11)17.13).Opera in the inHouse itshuman roof in structure. Sydney,lung look Australia like some (fig. structures 17.10), sports built by some ants similar and humans shell shapes (figs. 17.12(fig. 17.6. BuckminsterU.S.17.7. Pavilion, Fuller, Montreal; 1967. 17.8. 17.9. Sydney17.101959-1973. Opera House, Australia; Join Utzon, 174 17.11 Lungs.17.12. Red17.13. ant structure. 175 This market place in Royan, France (fig. 17.14), by Andre Morisseau, looks surprisingly like some large white shells found in the ocean (fig. 17.15). 61( , :_sk* pioneerconstructionBecause rock rock materialhouse. is such Even often an though importantseem itmore is partstill natural basicallyof nature, or organic. a buildingsbox, the Figure stoneusing 17.16 surfacestone is harmonizes as a a simple 7-1-1':. 1. / is P41 andbuildings.Figure withwatched the17.17 Thesetrees, how shows eachivy,are someandsoap bubble environment. bubblenatural is shaped cells.forms Have bywhich the could be used for ideas in planning you ever filled your tub with bubble pressurebath of bubbles next to it? While c.Market 1950.17.14. place, Royan, France; Andre Morisseau, synagogueshape,Manythe cells forms straight lookin Israel. in very naturelines), much arethey alike, based are theyvery on differentcrystals (fig.from are all different. No two appear to be the some. 17.18).one Even another. though Figure geometric 17.19 is(regular a usingrejectedcompassesthatBecause is, straight with as of too things(fig. convenience,edges bothersome. 17.20). easily and Asrulers.drawn it aFor isresult, a withexample, tendency straightmany it of"natural is edges, architectural forms"right triangles, designersalternatives T-squares, to workare ignored with and "boxes, or Pi easy to design the building in figure 17.21 Shell.17.15. 17.17. 17.19. 177 attitudes.But buildingsESSON These like homes those are in figuremore naturalsofter,17.22 require lessa, harsh forms. whole new set of skills, tools, and Though similar, they 57 ivynatureSometimesenjoy to make isunlimited with theus landscapefeelonly variation. more way wewelcome, architecture. can get or our attracted buildingsWe to tothe satisfy our plant flowers, grass, bushes, and trees or otherwise harsh design. need to be part of I NamePRODUCTIVE 20 things THINKING found in nature. What kinds of things are not found in nature? Rural17.22. community, Trulli, near Cisternino, Italy. WhatkindCan areare youof they? haphazardlyall think of theof some ways built, things a tree etc.) in house natureUnnatural? is that natural? give you (Fig. an idea for a house17.23) or a building? (It is wood, in a tree, 17.23 formountainsSUGGESTEDFind buildings. some orACTIVITIES (Seeforms the beach,figs. in naturewalking 17.24 in biology through bookswhich home,17.26.) around you your think would be interestinghouse, onideas a visit to the 8 Wood17.24. Seed17.25. pods SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES 58 things.orCut Findtrace snowflakes pictures them and in(fig. magazinesmake 17.27), then of buildings use them which as special look like they were them dimensional by adding a few lines. windows in a building you draw, inspired by natural rasp.)naturalFill17.28 a milk formand carton 17.29).will withbe made.Let partially it set, (You inflatedthen can pop carveballoons. the balloonsand Then "improve" and peel away fill the carton with plaster (figs. the form with a knife or a the carton. A 17.27. 17.28. 180 1129. 181 APPENDIX. F
182 Marilynne Robinson Housekeeping andrisecabbageher theironin the resurrection theirwould orchard, cotton come and dresses.of up, the the andgirls ordinary. And the would every cidery Soonwash evening smell theand skunkwouldwouldstarch matron,prised,bebecause so that and toit suitedher differentiateto takechildren her on purpose, all wouldher the life postures to never frombe what be theirs,and startled she vestments soseemed that or sur- her toof lonelinessFingerbonepartthebring whole of its the shefamiliar night blackon had every long,felt wildernessstrangeness, everyside. under Andlong herthat she andevening windows stretched would crickets since feel and awaywould shethat in waseverysharpfrom sing calmchildrenshegenerousthem inwardnesswould was would and beutter absolute. unremarkednever of and their feel equal, She faces. intruded aswas herdaylight, Whatconstant government upon. was just as Her it daylight,to like. lovewatch of One themfor andthe themotheracrossseema child. evenings slow water. andIt wasand then andOld. theloud hersang women kind and mother, sad ofmade she songs,loneliness rockedhad voices andknown, on sound didthat their firstnot made _like wish porchesher clocks voicesgrand- to be in palegreenyellow,eveningearth earth and in andone theandfull thesummerrows ofbright treescomfortable was trees she andlight wentthe plants and rustlings.sky outsoft werewas to as the cinders, Andripe, garden.dark aboveordinary bluepale The the clayof thatdrennotspoken reflecther in to.general.girls' on facesthe She unkindness were hadAnd soft noticed now,and of herserious tomany children,comfort andtimes, inwardherself, or always, of chil- and my grandmother would Shefillherashes.thump withneck burrowed As againstwindby she a kneltswift, and her the heard inhand shedwatery the wall.undertheirlows wind, Sheshetrunks a potatoand feltheard creakshethe theplant hairsaw likehollyhocks lifted theand masts. trees feltfrom herwhenstilland daughters when teasethey shewereor soothewould looked smallsleeping. orwatch children,atbanter, them, Ifhis a andfacefriend just any or as was herone they face inof werehadthethem intently roombeen nowcould ashavebacksmoothgingerly they Ito seen. always asthe for eggs., houseThethe are. new Sheearth Andthinking, -putpotatoes and she them thesaw What inskyin her theirher and daughters'have apron dry the Inet garden,seen,and offaces walked roots,what notnot promptedshethemtone,gauge did evento and suit not orrespondSylvie, theirrestrained want wordsif to themshe the by chose andfinest theto. manners thoughtIn to.changes fact,But itofto sheofdid savingher expression notwas looks, occur this often andun- orto tostrangenesswasas her.they quiet always and away. were,aloof She orand had as watchful,othernever people'staught not them were,to startle to andbe kind shethe sharpwoman,consciousness face, notnot only of becausetheirs. Sheof herher was upbringing,height then anda magisterial buther alsolarge, 183'ft sheHelen's did finallyleaving return Fingerbone it was onand a. her Sunday returning, morning, and when A total/ of seven and a half years passed between 184 basket of sheets to hangOne in the day spring my grandmother sunlight, wearing must have carried out aMarilynne Robinson it Inhad a monthnever seemedshe would to hernot thatmourn, they because were married, in that season she Housekeeping warmthoozinghardheras widow's anold actthrough insnow ofthe black, faith. onsunlight, the the performing Say broken ground, therewhen places, were withthe rituals windtwoearth and or didofthathere three the not thereand ordinary inchesblow there was it of andstems,whomembered suspendersthe dipped silent and justwho Methodisthis even where puthandkerchief to out theyhunt Edmund his grew wildflowers,elbow in fromwho a topuddle helpworeyear and her to a whonecktieyear, wrapover re- andthe billowsheallto away, hadliftglare and up pinned and with aleap sodden say thein three sheher light, sheet stooped hands,corners and by to its thatbreathlessly toflutter hems, thethe linesthroes andand tremble,insay it of herbegan that the corset andwhenthing to wishedinedcourtesysteep a toand rather feel she stony marrieddiddark places,not man resentto withanyone.with because crude a wordless She stripes she sometimes had and painted never impersonal imag- onreally his werestrandspushedits cerements.as gleeful theof herskirts and hairThat ofstrong fly. herwind! coatItas came ifshe againsta spirit woulddown herwere thesay, legs dancing lake, because and andmade in it hideclawsloins,ankles,face ornamenting andand his fangs bonessunken whole and dangling bodybelly,his bones arms a andboast fromand and a feathersthathide his waist he ears,fastened was and and more sinewsthroat aroundclay alarming andand his Edmundinsheitsmelled called another and sweetly Edmundto would mindday ofthey thewouldcarry snow, small, would buckets walkand scarce, ranklyall half beand a stemmyof wilted.day amelting trowel, to pick, flowersSometimes snow, and though that andlift getfulserious,likeathan jawbone, that, ofall mystical her. thea little. theHedeath ashywouldexcitement Thewhose fragment pickrising trophies upin ofofeggshells,him, athe he wasp's and wore.spring made a nest bird'sEdmund stirred himHe wing, wouldfor- wasa withmals.ants'theythem would nestssweat.earthShe and and anddie. Horseflies Edmund bear all,They anddung were would bringfollowed and rare climbthethem things, flesh them, homeuntil ofand andthey perishedto grew plant, thewere outwind ani-andwet of heknifeandpeerthem. could then at and eachThis putread his them ofis loosethem; deaththem in change. andhis inwith pockets,mypocket the hand,He most wouldthem where this absolute as ispeer heif ruin hekept at could inattention,them his my jack- ownasbreast if chilledandwouldthe ruinswildflowers. them. be of sour aWhere porcupine, with thestale snow teethsnow receded, here, and deathtail they there. and might pineThe seewindpitch lovedhispocket,he Methodism, was him where as best,forgetful I keep asbut a of mysoulall her thereading allas same heunaccompanied, was glasses. it ofwas his Atthen suspenders such thatlike times sheher and all dormant life and arrestedIna monthdecay wouldthose flowersbegin again. would bloom. In a month/i6 X85. own. So the wind that billowed her sheets annop / 17 ..11S to Marilynn Robinson Housekeeping shecrackersbenchstayed knew onlyin toher the prevent long mother screened enough conflict would porch, to and settle not restlessness. withbe Lucille at a home, box and of meand graham on she the tionalputty-coloredasbig if green it circle. had couch been Halves armchairs hoistedso weighty of two out were ceramic andof drawnforty shapeless mallards feet up ofin that water.awere conversa- it looked in Two full refusedPerhapsneverfronted asked toshe by take us Helen'swas anything notice not secretive curious. Perhapsof about it. Perhaps behaviorour Perhaps from life ashe that senseshe did even was ofnot nowdelicacyso wish af- she my grandmother with our mother. Helenwithatainedflight refrigerator, a upputahotplate round the lengths wall. a card onpale-blue ofit,As table clotheslineand for covered chinaathe sink rest cupboard, withthrough with of thean a plaidoilclothroom,our a small belts oilcloth, it skirt.tablecon- and her.thatlivedto learn all in thetwoby indirectionwindowsthere rooms at the Ifwhat shetop were Helen ofhad afive tallasked did altogether,gray not me, building,wish I could to tell so have told her that we and a hadthenervedfastened wind lavender us was them to lookstrong.lips to and overthe orange doorknob,theBernice, side hair, of who theanand lived arrangementporch, arched below even eyebrows us, when that was our only visitor. She whitedooreke with stepsofporch, water five and the rows fromporches, highest ofthe small sidefixedflight panesoverlookedof and of a acliff,intricate great grainy scaffolding as the gray-whitea narrow frozen of youngpracticeeachnumberShe drawn was woman and ofan inhourspalsy old awith singlewoman, inwhich a ourravaging brown doorway,sometimesbut she line, disease. managed hera endedcontest long She to atbackstood betweenlook her arched ear.likeany a overturnipstarpaperlike dried ahoards dance and roofs,salt. chickens, offloor From goods eave with this tocrated and a eave,porch jukebox over up, spreadwe crabs looked likeand down salmons,somber on broad tents and and over tomatoeswhere and someone began allthatdalousand these herLucille storiestales arms andher folded in eyesIa should voice on were, her hushednot sphericalwide be hearingin with deference belly, amazement them. telling to Through the scan- re-fact playingporchweIrene" saw railing before"Sparrow only and breakfast.the peered intented the SinceforBut Treetop"top. scavenge. of all all the this, and windows from "Good our were Night,vantage, in a line, our rooms were Gulls sat in rows on our husband,themother'scalled, doorway, and armCharley, now smiledwith and whoher atthen thelavenderBernice sat she floor, on would her loved claws.and porch laughtwined us. Helen withShe and her hadhisleaned prod hair. handsno myother in family, except her whichwasas lightone a doorwentwas as the neverwhichfarther day was,opened. openedin. Innear the into Itthe was a blocked, in fact, by a back wall of the main roomdoor, and became darkercarpeted hallway, and conservethelikeon hisbacks sausage, knees breath. of his andthick hands.Whenever his veins belly He pulsing in conservedwe his went lap,in hisdown hissyllables temples flesh the stairsmottled as and if hetoin /21 188 Marilynne Robinson Housekeeping wouldto bring lean us slowly custard, after which us and had say a "Hey!"thick yellow Bernice liked skin and Helen womanhundred in miles a car in which every I directionsaid was blueto watch and Lucillefor a young said They searched for her. Word was sznt out a afterworkedwassat in selling us usa copious byallwhile tryingnightcosmetics she liquid asto was asleep cashierinthe at a consistencylightlywork,drugstore, in a thoughenough truck of stop. eyewater. Berniceto be She awakened herselflooked and Bernice looked downcross-leggednothingwas green. in aboutthe Some meadowon the the boys search roof betweenwho of had hadthe come car,thebeen roadwhich across fishing and had her andthe boggedsitting cliff. knew byherinschemefurniture, the the nightgown first grip worked, sounds ofof thesome and though throes of eyebrowless,nameless fist sometimes offights, household alarm, of and theBernice rundrub poisoning.destruction up our wouldthe windows stairs wake Thisof in pushthatstrawberries,Theyput year. hertheirsaid car Sheblanketsshe whichout askedwas of wereandthegazing them mud,coats prodigiously atvery underand the pleasantly theylake the large wentwheelsand and eating toso toabundant helpfar facilitate wildas her to withlovedlesswith her resentedour us hands, formother. our because when mother's These we they disruptionswere sake. were sitting self-generated. of quietly her sleep at supperwere But not she heringtorearshe rescue.the thankedacross windows, right When theas them, it meadow startedwould they gave gotgo, the themuntil andthecar, hershe roaredFord turned purse,sailed back swerving the rolled off to the the doWn and edge road slid- the of wheel as far herbeganlearnedlend great us to her fromurgesatisfaction, car herHelen for to ago was thatvisit Bernicehome finally her to for Fingerbone.mother took persuaded.a while, a week was and Itliving,Whenoff provedHelen, from she towork so that she could she bedroom.the cliff. She had an armchair and a footstool from the My grandmother spent a number of days in her blocks.leftandtainsbe a at at fatefuland the last She acrosslight to journey. put the onto the our lake desertSycamore Helensuitcases and and overtook intoStreet in theus thethe through andbridge screenedmountains straight intothe porch, moun-foragain,town, six peopleparticularSheorchard,parlor was placedin andnot wordsthe inclinedshe kitchen, by andsat the there, conversations,to the windowmove. food gentle Shewas thatand couldbroughtat leastformallooked hear, the to society hervoicesifinto not there. thethe of machine,whichsheback sailed wasto theand populatedin car Bemice'stold and us drove byto Ford await cat north from quietly.and almostthe a matronly top Then toof Tyler,a shecliff washing went namedwhere theyandhouseplayedfriends fond would to cardsoflookand whitevolunteer mournersafterat the cake things. breakfast to and thatlook pinochle.Her had aftertable. friends established us, We In while twoswerewould andtheitself very be othersthrees walked inold, her Whiskey Rock into the blackest depth of the lake. /22 189 INOf . . Arl 12It) around by nervous, peremptory old men wit) would -/ 23 "Yes,again, youclearly look pleased very nice, that myit had dear. made Very an well,"impression. Nona Marilynne Robinson "Lovely.""Was Mother's funeral nice?" Sylvie asked. Housekeeping hercomprehensiontendedforsaid, hervoice rather forsister, veryher. loudly. just Theyandwell, asShebecause shouted,and Lily's really each neither compliment forintended of thethem of sake them this considered hadof couldobservation the been other's gauge herin- the flowers! The wholeThe"Yes,"Very"Oh, house old yes, sistersshesmall, was very wanted full. lookedthough, nice." We it at small.ofsent each course," half Butother. of youNona should said. have seen at languageallspokesister'sNona, their a "What hearing littlelives between louder together,a lovelyworse them. than dress," thanandSo she when felt herhad it wasthat own,Lilyto. Andasthey said, so if theytoeachhad with say, hada ofa special "Sheglance themlived havethem called over it to a thewaste." church.""I"She "Shesee." didn't didn't want want a service." flowers," Nona said. "She would herSyhapsNonaseems lvielap she'llsaid, rather andsat "You indo!her sane! the eyesPerhaps look simple She on very seems her kitchenshe well," hands, canrather light itstay waswhile normal!" withand as Lily if weher to And and say,canhands Nona when"Per-go!" in upstairs,tableforkand slidas and if andthe itate were injelled with a few for eggher minutesa child. There headonto came Sylvieitonwas and her adown broke silence.tookhand. again, a it Nonachair Nonaup carrying with atwent buttered the a a piece of toast secretdishingstalked understanding. aboutup stewed on their prunes, stiff"Did oldflushed you legs, know andpoaching Mr. elated Simmons eggs by their and died?" Lily asked. waterandareIt'sa two hotI aputbottle little-waterheavy a comforter withclose, blanketsbottle. water but "I'veon on that'sfrom the the put chair." thebed,better you kettle and in Shethan the one and filled ahall lighter draft.bundled bedroom.the one,Therehot- it "I"HeSylvie"And guess wasmust doshook Ia youhave shouldclass her remember been behind head.remember very you old,"a Dannyin him." school."Sylvie Rappaport?" said. andfollowedin tea spindle towels. Sylvie banisters, Lucilleupstairs. Theanddating stairsI each as werethey took widedid a suitcase from and polished, a time and with a heavy railing strange.but there Just was a photograph."no articleNona"Well, about said, he it. died. We "The thoughtI don'tfuneral know that was washow." announced in the paper, natedthathiswhen carpentry might myrather grandfather be oddlyto, considered use in good was a hatch growingmaterialspermanent. or trapdoor, confident and But to build theybecause enough termi-things ofat nineteen. Not a line in his"Not face." recent, either," Lily grumbled. "He looked/ 46 191 sothe essential top of theto supporting stairs one camethe roof face (which to face had with always a wall / 47 192 Marilynne Robinson Housekeeping windowsteadcouldsagged nothe somewhat weights hadbring worked himself that in the madeout to middle) cuta devicethe another trapdoor that with doormy pulleysgrandfather(which in it. So was and in- wasstickscolor the ofand colormelting stumps of heavysnow, that eruptedclouds,andHow all andmusttheas the slickthe it snow sky,have black sank seemed planks away. and to step into the narrow which was the theslam.andaleft loft polished overthen (Thiswith from fall devicea steps laddershutthe time inpreventedagain torrents,up when toof it)its thedrafts flooding riseown second atfrom accord thefloor sweeping parlor, with was amerely eddy- the slightest push downlittle beforehallwayIHerthe remember rude hands Nona which odor and couldhow stillthat feet red thekeptbring mustand funeral (as herselftwisted have it seemedflowers ached toher throw hands tohad from me) begunthem looked, the a trace warmth. away.to lyingmake of blanketS,hallway.ofingon narrow into a shelf. the There and dormer kitchen.) There a waslittle with wasa lamp,Sylvie'scot a incurtainsingle whichit,. bedroom fattened closing Nona waswithhad it off reallyleftpillows from burning a sortand round window, small and the loafers,borrowedwoodenarmsin the to lap sustainingher chair -of lookingsides. her in green Iallthe dressremember our white dress, andstares working kitchen,andthat, with how as the hershe smoothingshe placid feet pressed out modesty of her 'sat there in a highkissedpresents,"darkoutside as hallway, a usthefully again shecurtain, risen turned whispered. and moon.one wentand on kissed Theeachbehind "Tomorrow, dresser side.each the Sylvie,of curtain,and us. maybe." chair"I'll in get were you theinto half- the She pable.ofup a virginearly. whoIt was has our conceived, custom her happiness was The day after Sylvie arrived, Lucille and I woke to prowl the dawn of any pal- narrowchangedSy lvie room. to since come she back left to it, that shifted house, and which settled. I I have often wondered what it seemed like to would have imagine blinkedingsittingforsignificant anoyster hourin at the us,crackersday. or kitchen smiling.more, Ordinarily from bybut "It the that a thewas smallstove, morning house nice cellophanewith withwould we her the found coatbelong lightbag. on, Sylvie tooff," eat- us She bank.theofmiddleher plowed slushywith Sylvie of her thesnowpools gripsalways road, onthat in eitherwhich walkedher were bare side, wasforming with hands, narrowedand her at narrowedwalkinghead the bydown,foot the more to one down the of each banks by wasdocilityleaving,pullshe suggested,thebadgering chain.to and keep we Sylvie'sandthe her. were house,Lucille "Isn't readycoat thatand made to nicer?"I performcollided us think In infact,great she our themight featshaste wind beofto throwing frozen rain against side,wouldif someone with have an wereabstracted glanced speaking up and sometimes to considering her in a atsoft the voice. snow, /48 -93 expression, as But she which canwatchedthe windows.hardly her. believe She We handedsatI'm downhere," us oneachshe the an rug oyster by her cracker. feet and "I / 49 said finally., "I was on 194 34 madeisdugthe no desireinto morewith a tobank, athan rugbuild aordraped secret somea primitive over nooksort two`of hiddenbut shelter.chairs. of rough among ThisIt mayboards. bushes,"cave be But agame" real or often a cave tentcan it Solids and Cavities in Architecture CHAPTER II ableenclosingbeground varied to create or ofin buildingspace a a thousand shelter for some the for wayschild's sortthemselves, of but own habitation common use. by Many digging above to animalsthem it. a holeBut all are the inis also thesame tinuouslyofis Seeing notthe enougheye. demands changing The passively retina a certainstream is to like let activity of a picturespicturemovie on thescreenform appears part itself onof thebutwhich on spectator.the a retinamind con- It implements,andpattern.ingsspecies just which alwaysasThe man vary hechild's doesprogresseSprogresses according play it in isthe from fromcontinuedto same requirements, simplethe way. cave in blocks theMan game grown-up'sclimate aloneto to the more formsmostand and creation, cultural refined dwell- more usotherbehind to thinkhand, the that eyeonly weis a conscious veryhaveA faint seenvisual ofvisuala thing;processonly impression very a tinycan few bedetail describedof is them. necessaryis enough. On as follows. thefor A man walking ingsisgiverefined form the methods taskto his of entireof the enclosing architect.And surroundings. thisto space. bring Little order by little and herelation strives into to human surround- thatsideactuallyhintalong awillof manwith the all suffice. has bentheleg. sawpassed headFrom He was receives him believesthis the on onecharacteristic thean smallthat impressionsidewalk, he observation has seam simply ofseen bluerunning a because hemanjeans; concludes down though a where mere the pedestrians.inservationmovingthere a crowded is thatjeans ends sortBut street there here; forof thatseam somemust there he therebe reason cannotare a mansomust ourmanybother insidebe man jeans things his wishesthem. mind and to Usually wheretokeepwith have hisan there ahis eyefellow closer ob- areon jeanshedullHelook getsbut person will at thea the morethen wearerhe person. willobserve or less isnow He a youngcorrecther observesask more himself: girl, picture closely,more not "What details.aof man. adding her. does IfHeHis hedetail wasshe activity is looknotright to detaila like aboutcanvery ?"untilbe the particulardetailsforsketchcompared it to of untilbecome his girl.to subject, hethat The hasa ofgirl activity aobtaineda mereinportrait jeans; suggestion; of a painter.such finallycharacteristic a spectatorthenhe First adds elaborates he portraitmore formsis creative; andit aenoughof roughmore that he 119 5 completerecreates imagethe phenomena of what he hehas observes seen. in his effort to form 'a 196 36 ofobject,Butactivity a thing's what can that vary theyappearance, is enormously. see,necessary what Thisonly they in There actorder re-create of is tore-creation no experience objectivelywhen observing is thecommon thing the to all observers; it is the an infinite number of subjective correct idea sameseen. selfspell-bounda shapely in Tarzan's glamour over or the Superman'sgirl. adventuresIt The is a boywell stead. inwith known a comic glowing fact strip that cheeks imagines primitive who him- peoplesits endow inanimate 37 anaelse;impressions impression conception it is impossible onof of it.the a Thispainting observer, to is say, true is for and theof instance,works whattrue one. impressionof artthat Whether such it andmakes,it makes such as of everything theypeoplespiritsobjects were more that withimbued or live life.less within Streamsconsciously communionIn life. classical and treat trees, architecture,with lifeless theythem. believe, things Butfor example, we speak of supporting even civilized are natureas though Theenvironment.observer'sdepends same not painting susceptibility, only It also oncan depends the affect work his us onmentality, of verythe art mood differently but histo he aeducation, isgreat inat atdifferent extent the hismoment. times.entire on the humanheavyingand particularsupported being. burden This withmembers.weighing is this. very ButMany downliterally others people,the illustrated column,receive it is the just where impression the of true, associate noth- as it would a sup- a thethingseenTherefore rest. about before That itit tois beforehand.is findto always say out we whetherexcitingUsually re-createWe see we toit what isreturnthestill easier observed isreact familiarto to ato work perceiveit intoin and theof something disregardart same a thing way. when we know we have some- slightload.orporting an ThisAtlasaoutward element same petrified curvature hasconception been giant of given profile, isstraining expressed human the all "entasis,"form, inhis Greek musclessuch which columns under gives by his as a Caryatid an a isimaginingcarried intimatemore likeout ourselvesand bythat comprehensible.our of anidentifying in actor its stead. getting ourselves InThis thesuch act feel instances of with of re-creation a rolethe objectthan is of oftenby our activity an seatthatrigidimpression andare and back.applied unresponsive ofAnd strainingto often humanThe thepillar musclesa various legsand of are animalstone. parts actuallysurprising ofmemberslegs, a shaped chair thing are like to given findanimal inthe same designations arms, a abilitytragic,weself.artist become weWhento creating enter feel cheerful we sad.a arolelook picture People ourselves.which at a portraitoflooking seems something If, ofatveryon someonepictures the foreign he other observes have laughing hand,to them.a remarkable outsidethe A face weak him- is or smiling "organic"sincehooves.parts, ancientsuch Such forms as liontimes.surrealistic which paws, Besides neithereagle forms these, claws, resemblehave there andappeared doe,nor representgoat, periodically ram, anything or horse are many examples of ever ofducersHerculeslittle it inman theirof performing comicswells work. stripswith Men's daring heroism are clothes aware deeds. and sellof a Commercialthis morezest tendency for readily life artistswhen whenand makeheand they sees a pro- useare ciationforstyleinfound instance, a around later its in lines furniturenature. isthe called recall turn They styleaof the "Jaguar" the speedwerebut century also employedandand in andinbrute other keeping appeared forceindesign. the with of Germanagain Anits the namesake.automobile, idea Jugend not only asso- uncriticallysimplythedisplayed handsomely by donning onbuys athletic built the the costumemodel figures. same and apparel.Theshe believes observersees Ain middle-agedhean identifies willadvertisement resemble himself him with 197 woman on (p.ridinginvested 31). In boots Dickens'with and human umbrellasnovels, characteristics.Even buildings thingscan affect whichand We interiors have in no already way acquire suggest souls organic forms us as real personalities, 198 seenare how often 38 powerinhabitants.in some of demoniacalspeech, Hans used Andersen, toway cut corresponding out who silhouettes gave into which the souls a windmill of the a ball and a top the separatewitha drama, a voice technological a meeting of its own. of details.original But To characters, Dickens a each street house of houses speaking was 39 became a human being, just as it was to Don Quixote. "Fromfromlifeconspicuous to the them. the Lion windows Theregeometric Inn existsin I canthe pattern from oldlook town his allthat handdownhill of Shrewsbury and some streets are so dominated by a even a Dickens cannot give a description of the view slantwise at the in England: lineswilltownsstraightcrookedest remember on in whiteshapes," Shropshire black-and-white ground the he strong wrote.with and theirwillimpression Anyone houses, understand tarred whoall half-timbermade of hasthat by here Tudor houses many shapes except visited one of thethe broad black even Dickens streetmannasmust geometric inhas see the given shapes little forms? an German and elucidating The Butnot townGermanstrangehow analysisdo of wepersonalities.Nordlingen. art-historian experience of a picture aA. street ofE. Brinck- when we perceive the houses a certain Portal of Palazzetto Zuccari, Roma proportionsis portionsdue entirely in of three tothe the two-dimensional dimensions, fine "Therelations beauty into of pictureits of forms. the situationconverted at Schafflersmarkt in a conception of depth? The How then are the Nordlingen into pro- buildingPalazetto as Zuccari the gaping in TheRome jawsPortals Danish ofactually area giant. architectoften formed described Ivar an entranceBentsen, as "gaping," ofwho that and throughout the architect his lifeof the Theproximatelyoutgrow towindowsever-diminishing all the the housesare thetwo-storied of same almost and network pitch makes identicalin andthe ofthe completeforeground. the three-storiedsize tiles which uniformityhelps All gives in roofs the backgroundshow the same scale of material. ap- gazingalwaysdedicationusuallyretained stand.towards sayofa remarkably a This thatnew the ahousewing south.house originalof here Goalies, folk sitsoutdoors view buthigh with some ofschool its architecture,in back housesany in Denmark:directionagainst standtowers said a hill,"We andat the indeedtheTheprehend all-dominatingeye creates passesthe distances afrom more onesmaller andvivid of thereby the toillusion larger Church also ofroofs theof untilSt.real size of space than the constant George. Nothingit finally rests on the eye to ap- the roofs. architectureandobserve peers it outand as overayou whole willthe Such broadseerather how animation countryside than the schoolhOuseas theof asouth additionbuilding of lifts the makesof up town." many its ithead easier to experience its199 completethedifferencedepths architecturalrepetition of forms the in of tonesarchitectural ofcompositiondimensions the caused houses familiarbyperspective. and the their atmosphere. to effect the These are realizedthe two-bayed and eye and seen in different is enhancedare theby therealitiesWhen finally of the 200 highoverwhelmingthe four-bayed, into the air." in allsize with with horizontal its concisely divisionsthe articulated towermasses seems rising anveryhedescription impressiondescribes different it. it impressionof isBut a possible whole when Bytownof youto it. keepingexperience seeInsteadand theits an atmosphere.placeof eyethe a street whole onin thereality picture thingNordlingenpicture you exactlyyou whileget get ais as reading Brinckmann's penetratetionofa medievalfacing it, of after a townthe further passingtown street consisting surrounded intothroughand dominatedthe of the town identicalby towna circularyour by gate,houses a firsthuge. wall. gives impressionwith church.Your you pointed firstthe And concep-glimpseis gables con-as you sions,dimensionalhere."firmed.itself. doesThe NowhereThis questionnot picture means arise. do can that youthatYou best youstopinterested are give notnowand the only say: in impressionBrinckmann, the see"It middle shouldthe houses of ofbe threehow the seen directly picturedimen-a fromtwo- in thg r a . senseinonesthem,front a picture you of theyou you atmospherehave areand but awarealready then at the visited allof passed.same aroundthose it time,knows onAnyone you either and andhow whohaswithout areside different no and longerfirst actually rememberreality seen dependent is.seeinga place You the - rt'4.1 laidtheairon ofunseen out the the to angleplace, behouses seen from hear frombehind whichitsThere sounds, a particularyou. the are picture notice streets spot. howwas and It theymade. plazasmight are You beand re-echoed a breatheparksportal which orby the were deliberately ofoutswerea terrace. anthis, which carefullyinteresting and The so one often sizedetermined ofvista. convergetheand sightsThis position to isat giveof particularlyone Rome,of thepoint. everything best is An theimpressiontrue interesting celebrated seenof Baroque from of example depth,"view there lay- peacefulthrough theVia keyhole." di Santa SabinaOn Mount leads Aventine, you past aboveancient the monasteries Tiber, the 201 Schafflersmarkt with St. George's Church, Nordlingen, from Brinckmann Below, plan of Nordlingen. Scale 1:15000 202 42 p 43 I 01 t. 41, feu ea III NO UN trophiesand churches in stucco. to a smallAbove piazza a brown embellished door to the with right obelisks are the arms and There is no particularViews spot from of Nordlingen which to experience from the city the gate street to Schafflersmarkt thea symbol letter Las weeasily recognize recognized it without as a letter knowing of the what alphabet. sort ofIf weL it see is, The impression of the buildings is formedChurch from aof series St. George, of obsertiations Nordlingen, seen from Schafflersmarkt swellingtiveprecincts.Throughof the of Knightsa longagainstthe And keyhole garden what ofthe Malta. sky. aalonewalk view youButyou it is! seecanthe At the getdoorthe distant aend viewis ofclosed dome ofthe the deep andof sequestered S. perspec- barred. Peter's havetogetheranywhether merely other bold-facetells type. received us Simply that or an lean-face,it Inimpression seeingis thean sameL. the whether vertical ofway a tallwe grotesque and knowbuilding horizontal that combined we havestrokes seen a church when or Antigua or we noviewpointand part hasbecause in only nothingit. youone seedirection interferes realityHere and as you tothroughwhat distract have is behind a all telescope, your the the advantagesattention. observer from a playsfixed Theof a deliberately planned thechurch?Firstusuallywith front awe steeple. notice Yes,attemptthere it isnoAnd must ato more.tower ifverify be;we Butlike arethe the if anotroof originalblockwe interested isare verystanding interested impression. high in knowing and Issteep it really and at. we go further. more we a spaceentireof a thing surroundingform but including receive it. Just antheBut impressionas sides inthis the iswe examplea rarecannot of theexception. ofthingsee, the and girlitself, Ordinarily ofin allofjeans, thethe we do not see a picture octagonalpressionthanserve most the oftower tierstowers, it. Duringon it seemstopwhich ofthe thetomeans visual grow. rectangular that process We discover blockoriginally we seem that to it placeis higher the we must alter our first im- on end. As we ob- we had realizeNordlingengiveseethe impressionany a detailed it details. was suddenly a descriptionreceived church.Rarely saw can Weis ofonly thea regard it.person church, If,a generalfor a who churchexample, he oneusuallyhas would as"seen" a a tourist distinctimmediately awe building visiting do type, not 203 byisendsuntilthemnot the thenoticed little atrising workthe rounded topmostthatout of ofthey re-creationwhich the calotte. tierwere square where octagonal. No, tower itit isis the likechecked notIn entireour sectionsfinished imagination and visual ofterminated we see 204 at that.a telescope To process 44 pinnaclesrisecomplete out of theat the the picture skull-cap corners itThe is ofand necessary themental add square the process tosmall tower. let theflyingthat crowning buttresses lantern and goes on in the mind of a person who thorns.addinghavingonobserves in the detailsroughlyIf amind hebuilding has ofwhich decided hadan in architect thismanualshoot wayon outthe whenistraining veryfrommain planning much theforms in onebody like ahe ofthatbuilding. likecontinues the which budsbuilding After and by goes stonerials,structure.tallytrades preparestoand he see knowswoodIt themgives theinto how changehim materials a thedefinite pleasure individual from andentity, anto combinesworkamorphous parts the resultwith are produced.themthe ofmass hisdifferent in ownof one ordinaryHe efforts. mate-largemen- housesthatits great wasit can of cathedral.never the be town.seen completed Actuallyfor The Aboutmiles, foundations but it 45towering isits onlymiles dimensions werethe north above chancel laid of are theParisin ofso1247 four-storied a enormouslies cathedral and the the town of Beauvais with seemaspiringvaulting to growGothicwas finished right structures into in the 1272. with sky. It pillarsThey was one werelike of tall,about those slim 144 heavenward- trees feet whichhigh. A44 apparentlynowwithcollapsedThe constructionfromthe vault so inthe fascinated1294. outside just proved Theas byfantastically churchby flying too this daring, waspurelybuttresses. highrebuilt however, structural as Andaboutbefore theand fortyproblem but builders the supportedyears vaulting that werelater aesthetically,sculpture.theybers made into In a virtuerich othereach composition onewords,of necessity givenThe purely almost architectof and piersstructural turnedsculptural and can arches thefeatures become form.supporting embellished were so interested treated mem- with in forming all the Theconstructionstructural elaborate parts is, exterior ofafter a building all, of onlyBeauvais that a means he Cathedral loses and sight not was an of developedend the infact itself. that to 205 Beauvais Cathedral Cathedral 206 46 itstomake createsharp possible apoints. spiked the But monument fantastically it is understandable striving high to pierce that the heavens navenot from any desire with vexitiessteadthen we are seeprojecting two something faces out in profile.quiteonto thedifferent. Now black the groundGone white is and becomesthe formingvase and the nose, incon- its 47 buildingto comethe materials to material the conclusion he is worksthe mediumBut, that with. youthe ofAccording aimmay architecture. of ask, his calling to his isconception, to give form can there be any other? And the answer is the architect can absolutenatelylips andseeing change chin. vase in perception. and Weprofiles. can We shift Butcannot our each seeperception time both there vase at andmustwill profiles from be an one to the other, alter- thattheso/ids.oflettingyes; cavitybetweenspace it is ahis building,aspossible imaginationthe real tothe themeaning have architect solids, work quite of with aandarchitecture. different structuralconsider conception. Instead of can work with the empty space forms, with thethe forming of at the same time. theerectingmade case by ofa assembling structure Beauvais which the theThis problem materials encloses can be illustratedthe by an example. Ordinarily a building is was to raise a church on a flaton the site and with themspace of the building. In The strange thing is that we do not conceive the two figures as wouldinarchitect'srocktract this ofand not caseland. the bejob by Butgivenproblem would removing let form us be tosuppose tothough hollowsome form theof out thesite rock. to be The somespace of it wouldby eliminating be left standing material rooms inside it. Then the an enormous, solid material itself figure,appearsvoluntarilycomplementing concave as exaggerateconvexities. aseach ground. other. the Ordinarily Thissize If you ofcan thetry be convex areato seen draw which on forms themthe at figure theyouare moment seenwill above. in-as whichis afterthe reality; maymost make had in the beenit clearer. second takenThisIn the thecanaway. firstcavities also instance be within illustrated it is the the bystone a two-dimensionalmass of the cathedral example which mass. matterTheasblack oneoutline how or with white you here a scalloped lookconvexities, being at them. aThere edge, wavy as A areyou goodline innumerable notchoose. itexample perceptuallyis possible But is otherclassic found to ambiguous. figures,see inpatterns weav-either such which are identical no bothasthe background black sides as with "figure" which no definite and lies Ifall behind form.you the paintwhite Ifthe figurea black and vase stretches on a white ground, you consider all we try to fix the figure in ouras that which it really is out on tomotivestion ingssee of onein the thatwhich of one theare onthecolors carried thepattern asright outfigure on side.in the twoand reverseBut thecolors most other is forcea two-dimensional asnegative ground. the observer reproduc- forthebothminds whiteexample, sides we ground. andwill a hole above note in thatit the Buta number atfigure if the we bottom openingofconsider convexities the theinto foot white also as figure and the black 207 a blackspreads space- out on project on to as ground groundperceivematerialthatwere actuallywhich while is was bythe created, formingsolidleft unshaped. asrockIn Icavities.Carli have surrounding inHowever,described IndiaHere theitthere above,hereis cavity the are the neutral by aproblemis'what numbereliminating back- we is of cave temples. They 208 48 theyoua greatcolumnsmore stand three-aisledcomplicated inside separating the templeone than in temple hollowed out of the you not only experience the cavity two-dimensional figures. When rockbut also 49 "space"tratesthat thiswere so type often not of removed. used architecture inI purposely better use the word "cavity" because I believe architecturalthe aisles which writing nowadays. than the more neutral word are parts of the rock it illus- "Raum"Englishhistorians of "room"a use church the but word in theThis question of terms is of greata wider importance. meaning. You"Raum" which has the sense of the clearly defined can speak ofsame the root as the German art- space en- meaningwhichclosed soundswithin of the the German even more like the English word butouter has walls. In Danish Raum. The Germans speak of we use the word "rum" the wider Raum- 1' 4 . "background"spaceInGefal, English to expressmeaning there in thattwo isthe dimensions,which in three no equivalent. In thissense book or conception I of the defined and cavity for the limited,dimensions corresponds use the word space. ar- to chitecturally formed space. And I maintain that .11. tecturalare "structure-minded," periods work preferably Itothers is possible to plan a building as a composition of cavities with solids,"cavity-minded;" others with some architects some archi- cavities. 4: 1..04 `7.11f!-4 conceivingwaycertainalone as the but convexities pillarsthe in carryingtemples in thewhich itCar will li temples as compositionsout the walls of will architectural almost inevitably cavities, intrude on the observer in the do. Though we begin by samehave 1.1111 It 11 I M If 111111t canwe end also by happen. experiencing You see the a bodieshouse underof the columns. The opposite construction and think u. IWO= erpn r Kull. 11;:a7 ft. to I ht. quitethestickingof ithouse asa different an nakedly is airyfinished skeleton, into and the air. way. The original wooden skeleton is enter the building, you experiencea structure it in of innumerable rafters But if you return again when hollowedIndia.Cave templeThe out temple atof Carli, rock was structureserased from but your only as screens which limit 7,0 9 memory. You no longer think of the walls and enclose the volume entirely as Below:viewAbove: of interiorSection, plan r) 1 0 50 of solidsthe rooms. as the In significant other words, factor you have gone from a conceptionto a purely spatial conception. 5 withwishesconstruction,And more thoughto form. and the morehe architectnever material Gothicloes sightadded architecture of his was constructional; all bodies were may think of his building in terms of final goalthe rooms he convex t} allholm.ture kindsout of a The thatSt.typical George sculptorno humanexample and being the of aDragon couldGothic inform Nicolai I would was so enamoured of spiky excrescences of possiblyto conceivethem. If Ithe were shape to point Church in Stock-select the sculp- I. as onshafts.of all the sidesSeen space in surroundingcross-sectionsmall, roundA column theitknobs. looks dragon. duringThe transition the from same period became a whole cluster of as though it had broken out Gothic 05he!, changeturestransformationelementsto Renaissance toas anthat to architecture dominating from fromwas seeing not an ofhorizontalonlyarchitecture thewell-shaped of cavities,sharp the a change from dominating vasevertical as figure to seeing theones, two but above all a complete and pointed struc- same sort of GothicRenaissancetheorist,profiles. pillar Serlio, was form expanded clearly is theThe circular,show illustrations the domed in the work of the on all sides into a cluster of shafts, new conception. A favoritegreat Italian architecturalcavity. And just as the sr. ornamentthe Renaissance of round, cavity domedBramante's cavities joined plan together for S. Peter's and in Rome was enlarged by the addition of niches. forms the loveliest -74 remainderhatchedon all sides part after byas "figure"thesemicircular cavities have niches. been Ifhollowed you will find that it forms a very queer you consider the dark, out of the great expanded Detail of the group "St. George and the Dragon" in the Nicolai Church, Stockholm 7'he picture shows the broken lance and dragon's head Example of typical Gothic forms a somewhatmouswall building masses. different block.It is likeform.The The plan, sensitive as we know, observer will be 211 a regular cave temple dug out of thewas changed and the church today has enor- dis- 212 52 appointedchurchit seems festivalsat uncomfortably his first the sight room of vast isthe transformed. enormousand empty. room. YouBut Induringnow full experience daylight the great 53
4 .1.4 .. A . .r ''.. t .% . H ti , , ..1.1:i. ., r 4 .1 ' U. it as the colossal cave temple of the hatchings. All daylight is shut Bramante's plan for St. P-ter's, Rome. From Serlio grave.nowoutis and reflectedtruly the a lightvast from ofsepulchral thousandsthe gold templeof of vaults candles closing and and cupolas. around crystal Saint Thechandeliers church Peter's is 213 St. Peter's, Rome, in candle light. From a drawing by Louis Jean Despre:, 7782 2 1, 4 54 ThetheCopenhagen'sto DanishRenaissance carpenter's architect City viewcultivation Hall,Martin Theof architecture hadextraordinary Nyropof like cavities so (1849 many as can transitiona 1921), structural of still his bewho contemporaries from experienced. art. designed Gothic It might love of construction givinganbuildingconstructionsbe irregular,called them wasa rich Gothic spiked put ornamentation.an together. xsthetic conception.silhouette Theexperience, of Everywhere HeCity gables, was Hall interested spiresamong is he a largeshowedand other inpinnacles. edifice making howways thewith hisby whichcutThisCopenhagen off building, finishesflat at thethe Policethe conception top. walls. Nothing Headquarters,By All the of construction projectsarchitectliretime the is above formednext ishad carefullymonumentalthe swung as horizontal a huge full hidden; round. block buildingband it was planned for Copenhagen City Hall in which the architect has particularly stressed the solids terminating them in peaks and spires andties:Whatis impossible squarecircular you experience rooms and to formrectangular with hereany absolutely ideais courts,a rich of how compositionsmoothcylindrical the buildingwalls. stairways, of Nyrop's regular was made.round cavi-City .,. intoothertheHall facade. theis hand, embellished solid areThe masses enriched many with of cavities semi-thewith walls. semi-circularcircular of Police bays Headquarters, whichniches pushpushing out on fromback the fieffs°17.1 L. 1. Plan of Minerva Medica, Rome. From Palladio Copenhagen Police Headquarters. Here the architect has formed the cavitiesThe courtyards seem to be hollowed out of the enormous2..15 block 216 U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) Educational Resources information Center (ERIC) IERICI
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