2L architecture: no people here, just capitalists.

‘No unions, no building codes, no gravity’. Thus spake an architect about why they preferred designing virtual buildings to real ones. It was part of part of an interview about business in 2L by the BBC. Architects, I suppose, are accustomed to thinking of their buildings as built for a client or a social group of clients. Yet in rejecting unions, building codes and gravity this architect is asking for a context-free design environment where there are no workers, where there are no legal traditions and their interpreters, where there is no natureculture at all aside from that which he choses. No animals, feminists or temples in his ideal world, either, I suspect. Sounds like a lonely place. Guess I’ll visit.

One day later

Now that life has been rather stable for a while—we’ve been living in the same house for four years, Eleanor’s in school, and we haven’t had to negotiate burning barricades or tear gas for a little while—I thought I’d take advantage of the calm to undertake a proper rohatsu for the first time in a few years. The Rules: no food after noon, no television or music, no alcohol, and of course no meat, and as much meditation as I could manage in the morning, middle-of-the-day and late night slots.
Well, in a house with a small child, the no television rule meant hiding upstairs sometimes; and Bhāwanā felt obliged to give me huge bowls of broth at dinnertime. Fair enough. Most days I managed to put in two or three hours of meditation, sometimes waking early and sometimes after dinner. Two mornings, my daughter found me asleep across my zafu in some quiet corner of the house.

As it got closer to the 8th I tried, and failed, to step up the pace. I opened up Chodo Cross’s translation of the Zazengi. I made sure that I went out for long walks or runs every day. Because it’s December in Aberdeen, that meant running in the dark, which I find completely delightful even if I do fall over sometimes. One night I found myself running along the beach at high tide in a raging storm, plowing my way through runoff streams and getting slapped by waves that reached overfar. Sometimes the meditation went luminously well, sometimes it was just marking time. On the last night I found I had to help someone with a crisis rather than sit: well, an education in attachment, I suppose, and perhaps a reason to take robes someday. When I could finally sit I looked at the Zazengi: ‘Great Teacher Bodhidharma sat facing the wall for nine years.’ Then it was over; I woke up on Monday morning, read, and ate breakfast with my family. Nobody I talked to knew about rohatsu; for Bhāwanā’s family the full moon of Vaiṣākh is the important Buddhist holiday, not some Japanese holiday in December. Fair enough.

That day, a colleague walked by and when I asked him what he was up to, he said, ‘I’m wandering around. It’s one of the privileges of my job that I have to wander around.’ I told him it was an important day for Zen practitioners and that he had said something Zen people would enjoy. Two mature Japanese students talked to me for a while and we agreed we would talk some more about the relative merits of Shingon-shu and Soto-shu.

Tonight I went out for a run again. The tides have shifted, and the weather is calmer, though still cold. On the homeward stretch, coming down the beach, the sea had retreated and I could run for kilometre after kilometre along flat, open sand with the waves growling gently next to me. To the south Jupiter and Venus were up. I looked at the morning star and ran forever until the dog and I met the Don River, turned and went home.

Were they eaten or did they cook?

Wonderful, wonderful evidence of the antiquity of human-bat inter-relations in an Australian Aboriginal Bradhsaw painting from at least 17.5Kbp. It doesn’t really matter whether they were eaten to extinction in this case; what’s fascinating is that the artist thought they were worth painting. How lifelike!

Sleep and play.

Parent (wilting somewhat): ‘Aren’t you tired?’
Child (leaping around room): ‘No! I can sleep and play at the same time. Do you know why? Because I play in my dreams!’

Broad writing

Here’s a piece in Seed Magzine that sweeps across lots of developments in the field, including Maffi, Holling, the Barcelona conference and a raft of other topics.

speed

The world’s fastest bike ride: 132 kilometres/hour. Wow. A pity Wired classified the article under ‘cars’.

Belches, fatuous claims and meat.

I don’t usually object to the Beeb; its reporting is carefully checked and succeds in offending almost everyone equally. The claim, however, in Costing the Earth on 8 May that

“There is a further hiccup with the vegetarian option: most of those who avoid meat source their protein from dairy foods.”

really gets up my snout. Who’s the ‘most’ here? Most vegetarians in the world are found in…South Asia and East Asia. They certainly do not eat a dairy-based diet, and in fact, I’d be curious to see the numbers on pulse-and-rice based vegetarians in the UK over against cheesetarians (as they have been called). I emailed them to complain, and the producer, Maggie Ayre, responded quickly (15thMay):

‘Thanks for your email.  Point taken. The presenter is aware of this and we should have phrased it differently.’

I’m not sure whether to be more pleased that they responded or annoyed at the distorted reporting. How would you phrase that differently? ‘Most upper-middle-class white vegetarians…’? Even that seems fallacious to me. Most of the vegetarians I know eat a very broad diet, whatever their tint or presumptive background. Tofu, peas, mushroomy things, soy-based shop-bought treats.

The next move in this windy goffling was Rajendra Pachauri’s call to eat less meat because, according to IPCC estimations, the livestock industry produces some 18% of the total greenhouse gas emissions, compared to just 13% for transport. Clearly Rajendra wasn’t thinking to substitute dairy for meat — no improvement in the gaseous impact there, just as Costing the Earth had noted months before.

And the last move in this debate goes to my daughter, Eleanor. When she went in for her pre-school checkup courtesy of the NHS, she was given a lovely book in which she was asked to pick her favourite foods. Lots of pictures of burgers and lamb chops and fish and chicken fingers and sandwiches and chips and pasta. Not a single plate of the rice and beans we eat every day, whether in Scotland or Nepal or California—and she was very confused by this.

Life ahead of the curve means you never see yourself in the popular media: and that is painful for children.

Ancient lunch

I just discovered this article on the foraging habits of early humans at Niah Cave in Sarawak. Modern humans there eat bats and even use them for wedding feasts – one of the rare explicitly ritual uses of bats. WIth luck further contact with the Cambridge zooarchaeologists behind this work will shed more light on early human uses of small vertebrates.There has been a very long history of humans and bats sharing dwelling spaces. In the beginning, we would have discovered new dwellings by seeing the whirling clouds of bat emerging from a cave at dusk. Now they depend on us for bat-friendly structures.I only wish the Schwegler bat houses were a little cheaper – £74 is a bit dear for my budget. Otherwise I’m sure we’d have a few along the walls of Yeti Nivas already.

Walking in step

Weddling away last night when I should have been editing the Kāraṇḍavyūha and found a solidly optimistic essay on walkable urbanity . The argument there is not miles away from my article on mindfulness and technology in JBE. I am skeptical, I admit, of Alex Steffen’s cheery tone – very much the American optimist, which is supposed to be a good thing. The marketers will damn us all without any bad intentions, each person looking to find a good sell for the next – and technologists simply don’t see how they, too are locked into the dance of death.

Forward in all directions

While I strongly doubt anyone actually reads this blog, I’ve re-loaded lots of old entries that got lost as a way of marking time today. They date back to March 2007.

I admit, I thought twice—well, seven or eight times—before re/committing to the GoogleBorg. I may yet find another home for all this; the very principle of inserting advertising into your ordinary socialization, as happens on Google searches or Facebook, disgusts me. It is not enough to commodify our own internal, and perfectly ordinary, sufferings and call them neuroses in order to extract payment for their remedy (Freud the bourgeois capitalist!); now our own ‘face’ in cyberspace has been colonized by adverts. But for now there is now choice; I can’t afford to pay for yet another subscription cyber-service.

Do we pay to have a face? Do we subscribe to our clothing? To be able to speak? But we pay for premium online presence, for programming tools, for ringtones. Late capitalism indeed. FOSS it all! Though even that has infelicities…

It’s been a few months since I was at the British Library. They’ve instituted a bag search at the door. Given the recent brouhaha over British Transport police searching Scottish of some other sort, I began to wonder if the BL was being viewed as a target or as a hotbed of dissension. It could go either way, really; the BL of necessity employs a wonderful range of people – over lunch I had a lively conversation with Ramesh Dhungel about the Hodgson archives in Nepali and heard the usual two dozen languages around me in the Africa and Asia reading room. So is it the priceless holdings of the BL, or the suspicious foreigners that hang around there? At this point I am so confused and ashamed by the anti-terrorism mania that I cannot guess.

Now, my university—Aberdeen—has developed a habit of hiring ex-BL staff to major appointments – both the new head of IT and the new head of the library are ex-BL people. Hmm. I will have to watch the security policy at the new library verrrry carefuly indeed.

Frustrating then, to find that of all the books and articles I needed, almost none of them were available, even at the BL!. If anyone out there has issues of Maha Bodhi, the journal of the Maha Bodhi society, from 1955-65, do please let me know. Otherwise I will have to go begging for funds to buy them on microfilm.