January 26, 2015

Ulysses
1947
Robert Motherwell
b. January 24, 1915

Flying—or, not yet in the air but staring impatiently through the keyhole of the Boeing window while the attendant closes the overhead bins during crosscheck—it comes to me: a line from an old diary. The first in a series of entries addressed to Leonardo da Vinci when I was seven, or perhaps eight, when I would have called it a journal—somehow older-sounding, a little more mature:

It’s true; it’s all backwards to them anyhow.

Except that when I wrote the words, I began from the right side of the page. With my left hand, I reversed each letter’s form, aligning them neatly atop the page's faint lines. I moved swiftly towards the center binding—the people’s margin—that place where we learn when we are small to begin. But it didn’t have to be that way. Da Vinci knew this. His notebooks, now vaulted in climate-controlled libraries, were scrawled in mirror-image cursive. His works bear inscriptions like primitive forms of cipher, Islamic calligraphy, or Samaritan script. The kind of imprints found on ancient tablets and gilded parchment—the Torah, the Koran, the Book of Kells. Maybe this is where my obsession with holy books began, why I thought I might like to write one someday, its pages all beginnings and endings, footnotes and failures, about a girl who played in sprinklers while loving Heraclitus. (Or, rather, rinsed off in hydrants while lusting after da Vinci). ...(more)

Pierre des Marmettes
1905
collection of Vincent Franzen

Erratic Imaginaries: Thinking Landscape as Evidence
Jane Hutton

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Scientific and lay observations of erratic boulders have served as critical, distributed evidence for the development of the theory of glaciation; by implication, ideas of geologic time and the location of humans within it are also entangled in such a theory. Erratics attracted a wealth of curiosity through their alien lithology and their unexpected patterns of distribution, both of which were crucial aspects of the evidence needed to reconstruct an Ice Age. Still, long after they played a role in establishing modern geohistory, individual boulders persist as cultural artefacts for provoking and inscribing ideas about time. Certain erratics maintain a dual status as physical fragments of deep time and contemporary cultural objects that relay more recent histories. They are curious things—in size, shape, and position. They are visible and climbable relics of glacial processes too vast to otherwise experience. They are prone to being used as markers of human events and spaces, yet are also markers of deep time, having travelled long distances in nearly unimaginable environments. It is through this conflation of vastly different timescales that erratics bridge a seemingly unbridgeable divide between geological time and human action.

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If the Anthropocene can be understood as a chronotope specific to the moment when the human species begins to recognize its impact not only on spaces of settlement and habitation, but also on the scale of geological time, then we might conclude these introductory remarks by speculating on how the strategies of problematisation used to approach the Anthropocene thesis can generate collaborations among philosophy, politics, science, and architecture. In his essay “On the Earth-Object,” Paulo Tavares remarks: “‘Global nature’ is therefore and above all a space defined by a new socio-geological order in which the divisions that separated humanity and the environment, culture and nature, the anthropological and the geological have been blurred.” The problematisation made possible by this blurred reality is one that undoes the givenness of our inherited assumptions about the earth as an object of knowledge; that is, the confusion created by the act of de-ontologizing the separation between humans and nature allows contemporary theorists, activists and designers to develop problem-formations adequate to the politics of hypercomplexity that accompany our postnatural inhabitations of the earth. In nearly every book he wrote, including those he co-authored with Félix Guattari and Claire Parnet, Gilles Deleuze managed, in one way or another, to integrate his favored refrain: problems get the solutions they deserve according to the terms by which they are created as problems. The varied repetition of this notion is certainly not meant as a slogan; for Deleuze, the work of producing problems, that is, of problem-formation, is a fundamental task of philosophy. With the provocation of the Anthropocene thesis, philosophy can produce new constructions that transform trajectories of thought; by developing affinities and collaborations through multi-disciplinary, multi-scalar, and multi-centered approaches, architecture too can discover its unique capacity to transform the present and future condition of the Earth System. In the Anthropocene, designers, activists, and philosophers will all have the earth they deserve; we hope this collection contributes to the conversation about how it might be constructed.

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Manuel Hernández Mompó
d. Jan. 25, 1992

'The Singing of the Scythe' is a selection of WW1 poetry like no other. From Paul van Ostaijen’s long Dadaist poem ‘Occupied City’ to the Japanese poet general Nogi to Punjabi folksongs, this issue creates a place for lesser-heard voices of the war and presents a polyphonic response to the conflict.

Where the Earth's outstretched
Eugene Dubnov
translated from the Russian by Alison Brackenbury

Where earth’s outstretched, the chest heaves with pain,
to wake
with a heart-jolt,
having gone to the close of the final lane
to come
through birth again.
Where the branch twists, where the green’s strokes
are uneven,
where waves are blue in sun,
to turn the mortal face and the hand’s shiver
to a rondeau’s circling
tune.
This autumn in the great towns
as bridges rise
gives space.
A boy sweeps leaves in the early morning
from the fountain
base.

Study in Automatism
Robert Motherwell
1976–77