In an old post “My Blog, My Outboard Brain”, Cory Doctorow makes a point that rings very true to me: blogging is a way to systematize information flows, and reflect on what you consume (for lack of better word).

“Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward.”

“Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mental registers.”

Having shielded myself with a quote from 19 years ago, I feel no remorse about writing yet another post on my current read, Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language.” (A 44-year old book, by the way).

(On that Cory Doctorow blog post, by the way — Matt Webb in his Interconnected writes about Apple’s photo scanning and our paranoia, also quoting that same post, and making a different, and a much more important point than I am. I’m no comparison to Webb’s brilliance. Just read it, it’s great.)

There was one thought in particular that was invading my brain in the past couple of days: I miss music festivals and concerts, big and small. I miss them as an outlet to my energy, to let myself go. And that’s when I got to pattern #58: Carnival.

“Just as an individual person dreams fantastic happenings to release the inner forces which cannot be encompassed by ordinary events, so too a city needs its dreams.

Under normal circumstances, in today’s world the entertainments which are available are either healthy and harmless—going to the movies, watching TV, cycling, playing tennis, taking helicopter rides, going for walks, watching football—or downright sick and socially destructive—shooting heroin, driving recklessly, group violence.

But man has a great need for mad, subconscious processes to come into play, without unleashing them to such an extent that they become socially destructive. There is, in short, a need for socially sanctioned activities which are the social, outward equivalents of dreaming.

In primitive societies this kind of process was provided by the rites, witch doctors, shamans. In Western civilization during the last three or four hundred years, the closest available source of this outward acknowledgment of underground life has been the circus, fairs, and carnivals. In the middle ages, the market place itself had a good deal of this kind of atmosphere. Today, on the whole, this kind of experience is gone.”

Excerpt from
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

Right now, without big celebrations, festivals, music gatherings — there is very little opportunity to cut loose. I’m all too civil all the time. I think this makes me more irritable, more like a tight spiral that is waiting for an impulse from outside to spring. Various sports activities are fun, but they are not the same as dancing wildly and mindlessly to some of your favorite music, being a part of this big moving organism of the crowd. I miss this kind of rites, of shamanism. To unleash my energy out in a positive key. Cities need carnivals!

Christopher Alexander is monumental. I finally got to his Pattern Language.

Pattern 18 talks about Network of Learning:

In a society which emphasizes teaching, children and students—and adults—become passive and unable to think or act for themselves. Creative, active individuals can only grow up in a society which emphasizes learning instead of teaching.

And later:

Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.

New educational institutions would break apart this pyramid. Their purpose must be to facilitate access for the learner: to allow him to look into the windows of the control room or the parliament, if be cannot get in the door. Moreover, such new institutions should be channels to which the learner would have access without credentials or pedigree—public spaces in which peers and elders outside his immediate horizon now become available.…

Between 1977 and 2021, the thing that has changed the most in education is development of online tools, resources and connections that can be fostered through online presence. I don’t know if this ideal design of physical space could ever be achieved (although my nerdy teenage self would be drooling over this concept). But evolution of online courses and such massive storages of information as Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg and many more, is the kind of new educational institutions that Alexander talks about.

Naturally, with massive amounts of useful things, there is abundance of distractions and time-wasting resources as well. What young and old minds alike need is the ability, skill and habit of curating the vast ocean of information and entertainment there exists.

The difference between how Alexander imagined the new system of education, and the internet as we know it, is that there are no designated architects, administrators, and pedagogues. Anyone with a YouTube channel can become a pedagogue (or a preacher, for that matter). The question, again, is that of individual choice and curation — leading into matters of authority, and dispersed administration.

There still are a lot of unsolved issues raised by “A Pattern Language”, like that of tighter communities, gap between cities and country, or personal vehicles that are causing divide and raise other concerns. It’s good to see, on the other hand, how the flow of time and progress resolves, or at least, evolves some of the matters.

I recently picked up a culinary book from World War II, first published in England in 1942. The title is “How to Cook a Wolf”, written by MFK Fisher.

As I was only on the first pages, I thought about how different this experience is from reading something written recently, 80 years after. An old book like that can be treated as an interesting read, a curiosity — without the assumption that this will be taken as immediate advice. There have been huge advancements (and some setbacks) in the science of diets and health. Recently written books are, essentially, guides. Just one type of how-to writings that the reader is supposed to pick up from the shelf or a Kindle version of the shelf, and learn from it. We as readers are told what we have been doing wrong, and how to improve ourselves, as taught by an expert, or an investigator (journalist) who asked the experts on our behalf. Being a learner, having a clean slate is one thing. Thinking that you need to learn or re-learn everything, is another. It’s anxiety-inducing. It’s sad.

Think about these fresh guidebooks, as read from a distance of twenty, or fifty, or a hundred years. Readers then will stand on the shoulders of giants, having uncovered new knowledge in the realm of eating, or whatever the topic of interest is — anything, really. Why then, not read them with a grain of salt (because salt brings out the flavor of all foods, so yeah, pun totally intended). Read these new books more with curiosity than the worry that you have been doing something wrong your entire life. Surely, not every old book is a carrier of wisdom. Some parts can be wise, other parts have their right to be outdated. And yet, there’s something completely different in how I read old books, as compared to new.

I find old, well-written books more relaxing than most of the do-this-don’t-do-that contemporary books. Not all old books are good. If we keep to the matter of healthy eating, all the Dukan and Atkins and I’m sure many other diets are questionable today after what, forty years since their invention. And the shift from blaming fat on everything to blaming sugars and other carbs… Examples are plenty. But generally, because with older books, I have more expectations around the style of writing that direct advice, I find them a more relaxed reading, done for the purpose of elevating the soul, if you forgive the high style, — rather than educating.

Today is the birthday of Paul Celan, a Ukrainian-born German poet.

To Stand in the Shadow

To stand in the Shadow
of the Wound’s-Mark in the Air.

For no-one and nothing to Stand.
Unknown,
for you,
alone.

With all, that within finds Room,
even without
Speech.

On this day, November 9, 1953, died Dylan Thomas. This morning, half-accidentally, I picked up play, Under Milk Wood, aiming to spend part of the day reading it.

Here, I want to share one of the poet’s works, Being But Men.

Being But Men

Being but men, we walked into the trees
Afraid, letting our syllables be soft
For fear of waking the rooks,
For fear of coming
Noiselessly into a world of wings and cries.

If we were children we might climb,
Catch the rooks sleeping, and break no twig,
And, after the soft ascent,
Thrust out our heads above the branches
To wonder at the unfailing stars.

Out of confusion, as the way is,
And the wonder, that man knows,
Out of the chaos would come bliss.

That, then, is loveliness, we said,
Children in wonder watching the stars,
Is the aim and the end.

Being but men, we walked into the trees.