during an extended reading, re-reading, cycle of Rothko’s notebook, my memory nag was over older texts read while younger — those from Ananda and from Alexander. Both were used in my teaching of experimental photography during the 70s.
from Ananda: Myth as first question
In asking, What is Buddhism, we must begin, as before, with the
Myth. This has now become the Founder's life of some eighty years,
into which period the whole epic of the victory over death has now
been condensed....
It is, furthermore assumed that a Buddha is born in every suc-
cessive aeon, and that Gautama Siddhartha was the seventh in such
a series of prophetic incarnations, and that he will be followed by
Maitreya, now a Bodhisattva in heaven.
for other religions
Like the Revelation (Sruti) itself, we must begin with the Myth
(itihasa), the penultimate truth, of which all experience is the
temporal reflection. The mythical narrative is of timeless and place-
less validity, true nowever and everywhere: just as in Christianity,
“In the beginning God created” and ‘Through him all things were
made”, regardless of the millennia that come between the dateable
words, amount to saying that the creation took place at Christ’s
“eternal birth”.
Alexander is the touchstone architect, city planner thinker, used by software developers during the explosion of code as engineering, hacker-mode as silicon culture’s maker mark.
D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, 2nd ed.
(Cambridge, 1959), p. 16
Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment (New York, 1918),
page v: “Darwinian fitness is compounded of a mutual relationship
between the organism and the environment.”
Karl Duncker, “A Qualitative (Experimental and Theoretical)
Study of Productive Thinking (Solving of Comprehensible Problems),”
Journal of Genetic Psychology, 33 (1926)
. J. Archer, L. E. Bourne, Jr., and F. G. Brown,
“Concept Identification as a Function of Irrelevant Information and
Instructions,”
there’is a factor of judgment in the choice and use of a logical system
which we cannot avoid. Logical pictures, like any others, are made by
simplification and selection. It is up to us to see which simplifications
we wish to make, which aspects to select as significant, which picture to
adopt. And this decision is logically arbitrary. However reasonable and
sound the picture is internally, the choice of a picture must be, in the end,
irrational.
Consider the task of designing a complete environment for a million people. The ecological balance of human and animal and plant life must be correctly adjusted both internally and
to the given exterior physical conditions. People must be able to lead the individual lives they wish for. The social conditions induced must not lead to gross ill-health or to gross personal
misery, and must not cause criminal delinquency. The cyclical intake of food and goods must not interfere with the regular movements of the inhabitants. The economic forces which develop must not lead to real-estate speculation which destroys the functional relation between residential areas and areas supporting heavy goods.
.. more, or less, at some other posting
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