Variety
The patterns on the stream’s surface as it ripples over the rocks, or on the bark of an elm tree, or in a cluster of weeds, are all composed of repetitive figures that never exactly repeat themselves, of iterated shapes to which our senses may attune themselves even while the gradual drift and metamorphosis of those shapes draws out awareness in unexpected and unpredictable directions. In contrast, the mass-produced artefacts of civilization, from milk cartons to washing machines to computers, draw our senses into a dance that endlessly reiterates itself without variation.
David Abram (1996)
Abram is drawing our attention to a most instructive contrast: that between human products and those that occur independently of us. Architects seek close repetition. Every window in those tower blocks is intended to be as nearly identical as may be. (On minute examination they will indeed be different, but the appearance sought is similarity.) Nothing of this kind is found in the cattle: every aspect, every glimpse, every movement is different. This is a comparison that parallels a more fundamental one: that between the
particulars
Introducing a classic account of particulars
of the world we live in, and the generalities we live by. The seething
change
More on cultural aspects of change
of the
natural world
Where to start on the topic of nature!
would
swamp us,
Krishnamurti and how thinking overwrites what is before us.
we corral diversity into
patterns,
The fundamental place of patterns in human thought.
generalisations, caricatures, stereotypes: into Orion’s Belt, houses, Tenniel’s white rabbit, white men. And in turn we base our works, our creations, on those generalities. Accordingly we live within the relative monotony of what Abram calls the “mass-produced artefacts of civilization”.
From page 64 of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. It was published by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin, 2017 edition. ISBN 0-679-43819-X. An influential book with its heart surely in the right place, but maybe not always with the most incisive of styles.
The photograph was taken on the western outskirts of Hà Nội, where, at that time, the newly built tower blocks abutted fields still inhabited by cattle..
Above, hovering on blue introduces a link: click to go, move away to stay.
Saturday 7th December 2024
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