DIY

Okay, it's time to Do It Yourself. Below are some interesting places to find out How to Do Stuff.


The Treatises of Benvenuto Cellini on Goldsmithing and Sculpture is a quite amazing book about fine metalcraft by one of the world-class egos of the Italian Rennaissance. Cellini, aside from the detail and astonishing clarity of his highly personalized descriptions of how to do things with precious metals and gems, is so stuffed full of raconteurism that it makes for a highly entertaining read, even if you don't plan on ever making anything out of precious metals.


I first found Shire Books when I was on a short course in Blacksmithing at West Dean College, a conservation and art center in West Dean (in the Southwest of England) where you can get certificates, BAs and MAs in such things as Stringed Instrument Making and Antique Clock Restoration (yes, you do learn to cut your own gears and things!). Unbeknownst to me, there was also the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum right next door, where you can go and walk around in restored buildings from all over the country that have been taken down from their original settings and brought in pieces, numbered and archived, to the grounds of the museum, where they are carefully stored until they have the money to reassemble and restore them. It's quite an interesting place, West Dean.

In any case, on exploration I finally discovered the amazing Open Air Museum and found that their little gift shop was stuffed with these amazing little books.

In my opinion, Shire Books has the most amazing selection of little paperback "albums" on history, culture and collectionism. Their stated mission when they started in 1962 was "to offer books at low prices on subjects on which there was very little information in print." This is done in the most inimical British style, with titles such as Laundry Bygones (illustrating traditional washing-aids of the past), Old Gramophones and Other Talking Machines, Deserted Villages, Haunted Inns and Taverns, Old Lawn Mowers, and the Gothick Guides to various locations. There are also many very useful books on things like thatching, bellfounding, lime-burning and other soon-to-be-lost crafts, describing and therefore immortalizing the traditional techniques. I cannot stress how much I love this company; their range is so unique, so unsurprising yet full of wonderful discoveries, and so occasionally random that it is hard not to love them.



The Patterns of Fashion series by Janet Arnold, including Patterns of Fashion 2: Englishwomen's Dresses and Their Construction C.1860-1940, Patterns of Fashion 1: 1660-1860, and Patterns of Fashion: The Cut and Construction of Clothes for Men and Women C1560-1620, are the result of dedicated research and meticulous analyses of real antique clothing. Ms. Arnold's drawings and patterns are directly transcribed from original specimens, and while the series does not contain an enormous number of patterns, the drawings and discussion are fascinating. Patterns are laid out on a grid for easy expansion to actual size, and construction techniques of the time are described in detail. Even if you do not plan to sew these amazing costumes, they are worth looking at for the artistic and cultural value.


Country Wisdom and Know-How: Everything You Need to Know to Live Off the Land is a surprisingly interesting book, considering I picked mine up at Costco (gasp!). To be honest, I can't figure out how this odd and fact-filled book came to be at such a venue. Who on earth would buy it? It describes how to build a doghouse, how to start a beehive, how to look at a horse to see if it is worth buying, and other odder parts on diatomaceous earth (to eliminate bat parasites) and herbal lore, and slaughtering rabbits, feeding pills to a cat and debeaking baby chicks, as well as pickling and canning recipes, bread-making instructions, and more (Plumbing! Pruning! Home remedies!). It is hard to describe the tone of this book, printed on incredibly cheap paper in tiny print, with useful little diagrams; I can't figure out what kind of person wrote this thing. A survival nut? A sort of muddy-booted Martha Stewart? Or someone trying to do the world a favor for when the infrastructure starts to fall apart? It's sort of like the Whole Earth Catalog meets Five Acres and Independence. Which, by the way, are both classics in themselves.


Basic Bookbinding is an excellent, step-by-step instruction book. I love Dover Books, too. They reprint all kinds of cool stuff that was nearly lost. Who couldn't love that?

This volume, published by Unesco, is chock full of fun stuff which, interestingly, intersects nicely with some of the ideas in Connections, discussed here recently. 'Nuff said, I think.

Then there's a couple of interesting links:

- Plans and instructions from The Boy Mechanic for making a Wondergraph, a sort of old-fashioned adjustable homemade Spirograph thingie; very cool.

- From same, how to make a Tellurium, an orrery-like device that shows the movements of the earth and the moon.

If you've found some fabulous ancient treatise or other non-standard how-to text that other people can easily access and you think would be good on this blog, I'd like to invite you to send me a link and I'll file it away for possible use next DIY time.

Soo...until the next post (which is soon): don't try this at home, kids.

Snug as a Bug in a Beautiful Box

When I was a kid I always wanted a gypsy wagon. I didn't know anything about what might be inside, but I could imagine it: everything in cupboards and shelves, pots and pans and maybe bundles of herbs hanging from the ceiling, beds in bunks like a ship. And that painting! All the beautiful painting!

I imagined heading off along the roads, the horse clop-clopping, the wagon swaying a little as I went. For some reason, at this part I imagined the morning sun coming down, and mist rising from the fields. Ah! The open road, the tiny house.

There are a lot of people nowadays showing interest in Gypsy vardos, as the traditional wagons are called. You can buy plans for them and find detailed descriptions of how to build them and decorate them all over the place online (see below); the Society for Creative Anachronism, among others, has sparked a movement to build vardos, including ones that you can hitch to your car. Britain is full of restorers of old vardos and even places you can rent them (horse-drawn, no less) as holiday accomodation, complete with traditional bed-cupboard, tiny stove, and hayrack on the back for the horse. But back then, I only had my imagination - and books.

The Adventures of Perrine, last published in 1941, is a story about a girl whose parents die and she has to travel to a distant city to find her uncle, with hardly any money. As a kid I read over and over the part where she spends a few weeks in a tiny hunting-hut, on an island in the marsh, with a little plank-bridge you can pull up so people don't show up unexpectedly. (She even ends up making her own shoes out of marsh-grass and ribbon).

I suppose I've had a lifelong obsession with tiny houses, despite living with people who like to sprawl. Ship cabins, or even better, the tiny cabins of boats, appeal to me: everything is in its place, there are shelves and cupboards for everything, the beds are built into the walls, and it's all so...snug. The part in The Golden Compass (aka Northern Lights), when she takes up with the boat people? I really liked that. There was some dumb Doctor Doolittle spinoff I read when I was a kid, I think it was called Dr. Doolittle and the Pirates, which completely captivated me because they sail away in the pirates' ship - and you get to see the cabin belowdecks, with rich rugs, treasure, and piles of fruit (and of course the requisite bunks).

Maxfield Parrish's Ali Baba: the light is reminiscent of the light in my dream house, below.

For much of my childhood I had this recurring dream that there was this really tiny house behind the storage shed at my school. The house was so tiny (no more than 3 feet wide and 4 feet tall) that no one but me noticed it. I would go inside and it would be full of the most marvelous treasure - chests of jewels and yards upon yards of shining, brilliantly-colored silks; feathers, ornately embroidered ribbons, diamonds. It was so tiny I had to crawl in, and once in I could barely turn around, it was so stuffed full of wonderful things: but that was much of the magic of the thing.

The treasure cave in Pirates of the Caribbean, while beautifully done, didn't ultimately make me drool. Why? Possibly because of size. The treasure in my tiny house, and in the silly book, were all so near at hand, it felt completely personal - completely mine. When I used to read Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, I never imagined the cave to be vast. It was large enough to hold a lot of treasure, sure, but only if the treasure was piled up against the walls, taller than me. In my mind that treasure had to be all around to be really magical. If it simply lay all over the floor in discrete mounds, why then it wasn't nearly as impressive.

Jay Shafer, an architect and certified "claustrophile", has been building tiny houses for years now (in fact, he's now been on Oprah, so I won't talk about him too much). His Tumbleweed Tiny House Company makes plans and kits for houses that are sometimes less than 100 square feet, yet with all the comforts of home. The designing that goes into fitting it all in together, the storage planning, and the end result - with its sense of airiness and comfort - is impressive. It appeals to that shipboard part of me, the one that likes the shelves and cupboards. The fact that he actually lives in one of them (100 square feet) is a tribute to his interest in the thing.


His little houses remind me of some of the tiny traditional buildings I saw in Norway, with a narrow footprint and the sides bumped out higher up. I think one of the reasons, besides ecology, that Mr. Shafer's houses have been taking off is that people find tiny spaces comforting. Remember the "Child Caves" I described from A Pattern Language? It seems that we never really grow out of that urge.

The wonderful bathroom from Bony Legs, which is a retelling of Baba Yaga with great illustrations (especially the cover).

Back when people still read to me, someone read me a Baba Yaga tale, complete with the iron teeth and the fence made of bones, the only thing I could think of was how absolutely cool it was to live in a little hut on chicken legs! And I don't think I'm alone, because that Baba Yaga thing simply doesn't go away. Joan Aiken, in her marvelous book A Necklace of Raindrops, tells a story about some traveling musician brothers whose car breaks down and they go looking for a place to stay for the night. After a number of unpleasant adventures, they meet a woman who lives in a chicken-legged hut, who tells them that if they can find the egg her house has laid (she wants it for supper), she'll give them a bed. But by the time they get the egg and bring it back, it's cracked. It breaks in half and a little house jumps out - and they go live in that, traveling around and playing music.

Now I ask you, is there any possible way it could get better than hatching your hut out of an egg?

Later, I read Ursula LeGuin's "Darkness Box" (from The Wind's Twelve Quarters), which is a memorable story anyway, but the initial character, a child, lives with his mother in a Baba Yaga-type hut (complete with herbs from the rafters and all that). That did it - my mind was made up: I wanted one.

But I was bound to disappointment.

But there are other possibilities, always more, just beyond the horizon. What about a cave? A nice, dry cave with little alcoves in the walls for you to put your stuff. Think of Mr. Tumnus in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - wouldn't you like to go stay with him for awhile? Here's an excerpt, in case you don't remember, or didn't read it:

"It was a little, dry, clean cave of reddish stone with a carpet on the floor and two little chairs ("one for me and one for a friend," said Mr. Tumnus) and a little table and a dresser and a mantelpiece over the fire and above that a picture of an old Faun with a grey beard. In one corner there was a door which Lucy thought must lead to Mr. Tumnus' bedroom, and on one wall was a shelf full of books."

They go on to have a very snug-sounding tea (which I have to include because it compliments the scenery so well):

"There was a nice brown egg, lightly boiled, for each of them, and then sardines on toast, and then buttered toast, and then toast with honey, and then a sugar-topped cake." ..And, of course, nice hot cups of tea, and a fire.

And all this appears again in the Beavers' house, so snug and full of Wellington boots and nets and things. I sigh, just thinking of it.


Now that I've grown, I know better than to believe I can fit myself and all my stuff into that kind of a tiny place, which is probably a shame. But I still have my foibles. Take, for example, the concept of the bed-cupboard. I don't know where I first got this idea, but think of having a bedroom where your bed, that messy thing with all the lumpy bits, is built into the wall. With little doors you can close if you want to be really snug (there's a thin line between claustrophilia and claustrophobia, though). In any case, then the rest of the room is free to be comfortable, right? Not just four walls around a large piece of messy furniture. Also, with a cupboard the bed itself becomes this really secret, snuggly place.

Perhaps I'm someone who particularly likes boxes, places to store things and hide things; decorative compartments. Perhaps there's some Freudian connection I'm not getting here, but I think, I think it might simply be a human desire: to have a secret place, to hide.

This desire to be in a cave or a box seems often to be associated, for adults, with our beds. I once lived, for a couple of years, in an apartment in San Francisco which had a Murphy bed, which, although it was the height of cool (my friends couldn't believe it), was just not the same. The problem with a Murphy bed was, the bed got to hide away, not me. So ultimately, though I liked the Murphy bed, it didn't fulfill the need (though it did have this cool closet behind it that you could go into when the bed was down).

Now, a Chinese marriage bed...that could really be a place to hide, the best kind of decorative box...to store yourself, when you're deactivated.


It's been documented, this urge to be contained (aside from the obvious Freudian interpretations, of course). Temple Grandin, an autistic veterinarian who is famous both for being the subject of Oliver Sacks' Anthropologist on Mars and for leading the movement to eliminate cruelty in the meat industry, invented a machine which is now used in all kinds of autism facilities to calm people when they are suffering from tension. She calls it the Squeeze Machine. You lie inside it and it essentially delivers pressure like a hug, but without the difficulties of being touched by a human being, and according to Oliver Sacks it is surprisingly satisfying. Perhaps living in a tiny house could deliver some of the same satisfaction?



I often wonder, now that I'm a boring adult, if I had found the perfect little house, how long the love affair would have lasted. Would I have become one of those people who live the sort of spick and span lifestyle that the space demands? Perhaps I could end up like the little old lady who lived in a pumpkin, or a peach-pit, or something. And what about my collections? I could be like those souls who have a tiny house - and then a storage unit for all the other stuff.

Perhaps that's why I started the Cabinet, so I could collect all these amazing things without having to put them in my house. The Dream House - no, Palace, now - that is my Cabinet is beginning to grow beyond the bounds of houses, to include ideas, geographic locations, whole armies of saints.

Ah, well, it's getting late, and I'm starting to natter on. Perhaps I'll just go climb into my Cabinet, shut the door, and admire the treasures contained within. Thank you, once again, for joining me here.


Other Links:

Further reading about the Rom

UK dealer selling original caravans

Lots and lots about gypsy wagons.

A list of links for information on learning about(mostly new) caravans being built and restored.

Horse-drawn gypsy caravan holidays in New Forest, UK

Jan Yoors left home at the age of twelve to join the gypsies, and stayed with them, on and off, for ten years. His deep penetration of such a closed society he describes in his books The Gypsies and Crossing, which talks about the Rom experience during World War II.

Babylon: Pavement Paradises

I am taking some extra time to work on fiction this week, so I will just add this addendum to the Genius Loci post, since many people seemed to find that interesting. It is kind of a sidetrack from the usual Cabinet fare, but might prove interesting to many of you. Next week I will be back to some interesting devices which I've been looking into...heh heh.

I wanted to mention this quirky book, written by award-winning author and gardener George Shenk, which appears on first glance to be some crackpot publication, but in actuality it is an interesting and useful treatise on the possibility of planting over hard surfaces. With the addition of soil on top of a such a surface (plus the occasional containment mechanism, such as rocks or sphagnum moss), it is possible to reclaim paved areas - patios, parking areas, wall-tops, steps, and even tables - and green up hardscape so that it feels more contiguous with the natural environment.

Photos showing how a parking lot can be "grown over" - including the addition of grass, which it is possible to roll up like a rug (bottom).

The book advocates the heaping of soil into and onto the edges and corners of paved areas, as well as along the internal corners of steps and in "islands" in the middle of patios and disused driveways, allowing for planting that fills in the hard edges of old or poorly-designed garden landscapes.


The author has also created many "table gardens", which he describes as being particularly wonderful, appearing to have been levitated in place, and "stump gardens", which capitalize on the natural breakdown process of the wood to make for a lush and many-layered effect.


The fascinating thing about this book is the idea that a natural process, i.e. the gradual plant-takeover of pavement which happens whenever it is left alone in the environment too long, has been hastened and encouraged - shaped, even - to create stunning, naturalistic spaces. Mostly, it's wonderful to be given permission to overgrow pavement. So few of us are actually in a position to remove unwanted pavement, either because we can't afford it or we simply don't know if we want to do anything so drastic.

Not only that, but the masters of urban planning have made us feel that the cities' hard look is an intentional thing, something we mustn't mess with because the City government, and subsequent flunkies of all sorts, made it that way. We feel, subconsciously, the Plan behind it, and the general assumption that urban hardscape about tidiness and hygene. This book allows us to question this assumption: is it really about tidiness, about the public good, or is it simply ease of cleanup, like the tiled walls of the insane asylum? Or is it merely bad planning, inspired by laziness, an unwillingness to take care of living things?

As someone who has always been interested in what I call "Guerilla Gardening", I look at this book and I see people piling dirt against the walls of their tenement buildings, planting over their steps, leaving trails where once there were broad lanes of paving; I see wavy lines where there used to be straight ones. Think how the urban environment would look if people were less intimidated by the hard, grid-like spaces around them. We could have revolution: jungle in the city.

The Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls, Massachussetts. Five hundred kinds of plants, including fully-grown trees, have been planted on this disused car bridge, leaving a lovely walking trail for pedestrians to enjoy. 30 inches depth of soil were laid against either railing, and the hollow support colums were filled 9 feet deep with soil, for the larger trees.

Another, similar idea is the Green Roof movement, which looks back at traditional sod-roofed houses to solve some of the problems of urban water runoff. Plants on the roof help absorb rainwater, keeping the runoff from causing floods and erosion. Not only that, of course, but they're just plain lovely, and much harder to see against the countryside. In the urban landscape these green roofs provide relief for the eye, and a small feeling of joy at the invasion of green.




Other links:

One of the grandfathers of the green-roof movement, a landscape architect who was designing roof gardens using rice-straw and peat moss over fifty years ago, Theodore Osmundson is well-respected. His book, Roof Gardens: History, Design, and Construction is a book intended for architects and designers which tells you all you could possibly want to know about designing for intensive roof gardens.

The Granite Garden, Urban Nature and Human Design, is a fascinating-looking book on the way cities grow and urban access to nature, as well as an examination of bringing the effect of "nature" - without any of the actual functional underpinnings of a true natural environment - into urban and suburban planning.

You've got to check out the Kensington Roof Gardens, which house flamingos in pools, palm trees, and 6000 square meters of garden, and were built in 1936 on a roof in Kensington, London.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Green Roof Plants: A Resource and Planting Guide, a how-to book on green roof planting.

A fine capitalist example of the green roof movement being taken seriously in the industrial architecture community.

An interesting, scholarly article about a long-term study on roof gardens in Berlin.

Alyx L has kindly pointed out the vertical gardens of Patrick Blanc, which are truly amazing. Go look at the slide show (and it tells you how to do it, too).

And last but not least, Matthew over at Rebar tells me there is already a Guerilla Gardening movement! To think I was so ahead of my time! You can check it out here.

Okay, okay, I did my gardening fix. See you next week...

The Diamond Age, Incarnate

Quick note: I came across this last night and don't know if it's shown up anywhere else, but I think it's one of those great examples of how life imitates fiction.

Ever read The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson?

Well here it is, coming to life. They're taking Charles Babbage's Difference Engine and nano-izing it: making chips (probably out of diamond, no less) that are based on mechanical principles rather than electrical ones.

Hooray for fiction writers!

Genius Loci: the Spirits of Place

Three years ago, I moved from a city famous for its shipping docks to a place in the country. Not only "the country," but the valley where I had grown up. I'd lived for years and years in cities all over the world, and coming back here was a wish that had long gone unfulfilled.

Several things struck me on my return. One was the incredible certainty, which took my city-bred children two years to comprehend, that you can walk in any direction in the country. You are not confined to streets and paths. You may, if you wish, simply set off and go cross-country without worrying about the neighbors (mostly). Though you do have to worry about poison oak.

The other thing that struck me is how different this, the place I live now, is from the place I grew up, only two miles down the road. Microclimate? Or different spirits?

When I was in graduate school, in the unnamed industrial city where I ended up living for ten years, I resided in a rather unhealthy part of town for awhile. I had needed to find a place fast, between my arrival from London and the beginning of classes, and I ended up in one of those divided older houses, with young Rottweiler lovers in both the other apartments, all very nice people (but). The front garden had a six-foot-high, black spiked steel fence around it, with a gate that clanged when people walked through it. There was a small, miserable tree outside the gate, which small (and not-so-small) urban boys worked very hard at, trying to get a stick to play with. Sticks, apparently, are de rigor for boys, regardless of their class and upbringing, and these particular boys were starved for lack of them.


As time went on, the tree acquired a lean. Each spring, it put out fewer leaves. Finally one day, I found it lying on the pavement. We had a suitable funeral, and I pondered how much paved places wring the life out of one's soul. I found myself desperate to walk on grass, and I began planting things in the small, unkempt, barren yard inside the barbaric fence. Despite the dog droppings from the other residents' dogs, and the thrash-metal barbecues they liked to hold in the middle of the yard, where people didn't seem able or willing to watch their feet, I did manage to grow a small selection of bushes and vines. I gave some sweetpea seeds to a junkie woman once, and she almost cried, saying she didn't know what to do with them, holding them like they might break or get lost.

Needless to say, this affected my studies. I found myself reading about gardens, every kind of gardens; and eventually, inevitably, I came across books about the grand English gardeners - Capability Brown, William Kent, and the like. Their "modern" style of landscape gardening was all about improving on what nature should have been, rusticating things and making the views look more natural than natural. They were deeply interested in the idea of the genius loci, or spirit of the place: a location's distinctive atmosphere, the thing that makes it wholly itself. They worked with the way the landscape was already shaped, sometimes introducing new elements or rerouting streams into man-made lakes, all with an eye to emphasizing what was already there. Trees were planted in apparently random, asthetic clumps. Distant fields of sheep were incorporated seamlessly into the foreground by use of Ha-has (I love those to death). This style was the beginning of what came to be an obsession with the Picturesque, meaning, "like a painting."

A ha-ha from below...and above

In its original context, genius loci was the Roman term for the literal protective spirit of a place, this being a common enough conception: think of the roadside shrines in Japan and Bali, India and, long ago, in pre-Christian Europe and Britain. Small statues stand in particular places where people pass through, and as travelers come and partake of the spring or the resting-place, they leave offerings, or simply ask for the blessing of the little god. As time went on, this idea of local gods was no longer considered important. Formal gardens, with geometric layouts and little hedges, became the mode; the genius loci was relegated to a few classical statues placed at discreet intervals or in niches; the concept was lost. However, with the Enlightenment's interest in classical asthetics the term came around again, in the form of an allegory or a metaphor.

The poet Alexander Pope wrote, at around this time:

"Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;
Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.


After Capability Brown died, his naturalistic style was replaced by the Romantic version of the same thing: gothick ruins, hermitages, and ivy-covered grottos were all the rage. Brown's flexible and mild-mannered genius loci was transformed, via a veritable injection of anxiety, into a more exciting (if faux) Spirit which offered a "sublime thrill" to explorers of the dark and wild gardens of the new era.

For a really brilliant sideline to this, I recommend Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, one of the best plays I have ever seen or read. If you like the things I have been discussing in this blog, you would love this play, all about mathematics, love, chaos theory, Byron, history, death and, of course, landscape design. Mr. Stoppard evokes beautifully the lady of the house's distress at plans to remake her beloved Brownian grounds into something in the Romantic mold, with a ruined tower and creepers.



Another form of landscape arrangement, Feng shui at its base is a form of place-spirit analysis, simplistically speaking, with elements of geomagnetism, astronomy, cardinal direction, and geographical formation working to align human dwellings to the Universe. The ancient Chinese managed, with a minimum of fuss, to deconstruct a somewhat theological concept down to a science of energy flow and geological meaning. Curiously, some of the principles of Feng Shui can be found in many of Brown's gardens.


But to get back to this idea that there are little gods, presences that occupy a place, that give it its character: it is my deep and abiding feeling that perhaps many modern places feel soulless is because they ARE soulless. Think of shopping malls, where the entire landscape has been mashed into shape, flattened into generic-ness.


Think of those bad parts of town: do they have landmarks? Trees, large stones, hills? For the most part, and I dare you to come up with examples otherwise, ghettos and slums are in the flat parts of town. They're the most paved parts. They have the fewest, or the smallest, trees. How about those projects, where the poor are crammed into faceless apartment blocks, with weedy, untended, unused yards? The landscape has lost its face; the genius loci has fled, taking its protection with it.

Okay, I'm being political here, but it's not impossible to fix. Look at this wonderful piece of "intervention", or public performance (?) art, by a group called Rebar. The piece is called Park(ing). Rebar claims it is "Providing temporary public open space in a privatized part of town."




After Rebar did this first piece, other people PARK(ed) in cities all over the world. It's one of the coolest ideas I've seen for combatting urban depression. A portable genius loci!

In concept, I think genius loci can be a lot like mana, as I discussed in a previous post: the more a place is used, polished, loved, allowed to be itself, the more it will create itself, allow itself to grow a soul.

And these souls, these spirits can be very, very small, the genius loci of a waterfall or a knoll or even simply a hidden, sweet corner of an alley (under the fire escape, behind those potted plants). Some, of course, are vast, like the ones at Yosemite Valley, where staff work tirelessly keeping the local genii locii (?) from getting trampled.

In the valley where I live, there is a grave, quite old and all alone, tucked into the corner of a side-valley. Whoever it is who died and was buried there is now a small spirit of that place. People who don't know her, riding past on their horses, leave small handfuls of dried grasses and other things, to thank her for being in that place, making it special. Then there's the huge oak tree on a knoll, high above the valley, all alone, with a trunk the width of a king-sized bed. It stands, shading the mushrooms and irises who grow there, and its massive limbs house some kind of spirit, I am certain - though some long-ago fool carved the word "SUE" into the bark, thus naming the poor spirit for generations to come.

In any case, I think the current craze for small fountains and hidden benches in tiny urban gardens is an attempt, albeit unconscious, by the residents to invite, gently and hesitantly, some sprite or minor god to come and settle, to sit and stay awhile. You build a fountain to delight their ears, put in some fragrant roses in brilliant colors; like hummingbirds, fleet and delicate, they'll come to smell, to listen, to look at the lovely lines and shades you've made with your planting choices. In the end, if you're lucky, you'll make the place comfortable enough and beautiful enough that one of those vanquished spirits might, with a little coaxing, consent to stay.

They need us as much as we need them.

Androids and Un-Aliveness

"Every time an inventor tries to simulate life mechanically, he is in fact accentuating his own mortality." This quote comes from the introduction of Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, by Gaby Wood.

I found this marvelous book in the Acknowledgements section of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which is a primer of sorts for kids about a fascination with clockwork, and the history of cinema. I highly recommend it, both for adults and older children. Not only are the copious illustrations excellent, but the story is created out of the kind of connection-building, drawing-lines-between-several-apparently-unassociated-things thinking that makes a work of fiction really fascinating, mostly because it could so easily be true: the places are right, the facts are right; everything runs alongside each other, so why shouldn't it be true? To take these facts and serendipities and bring them magically to life in a way that is better than any truth is the best kind of storytelling.


Although I haven't yet read Edison's Eve, the Introduction available via the "see inside" link on Amazon, unlike most of these Amazonian links, allows a very detailed and interesting look into what must certainly be a very interesting tome. Beginning with a description of "The Writer" and "The Drawer" - the two automata whose videos I showed three posts ago - she moves on to a meditation on the magic and fear involved with the creation of something which might, ultimately, replace us: human automata, or androids. She begins with Sigmund Freuds’ description of “ ‘the Uncanny,’ the feeling that arises when there is an ‘intellectual uncertainty’ about the borderline between the lifeless and the living. It is triggered in particular, Freud wrote, by ‘waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata.’ A child’s desire for a doll to come to life may become, in adulthood, a fear.”

From here, Ms. Wood skips along through the Spanish Inquisition, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, automata in ancient texts (!), and alchemy, to the moment when she begins her story...

“...at a later, critical moment: when the ambitions of the necromancers were revived in the well-respected name of science. In the eighteenth century, an interest in anatomy, advances in the design of scientific instruments, and a fondness for magic tricks meant that automata were thought of as glorious feats of engineering, or philosophical toys. As Umberto Eco has put it, the inventors of that period ‘substituted mechanics for the forces of evil.’ And yet...the rational scientists who constructed these celebrated objects ofen harboured ambitions beyond the bounds of reason...The madness left over from darker times was all the more disturbing for being hidden beneath the mask of enlightenment.”

She goes on to a fascinating discussion on the philosophy of creating un-humans, from the association they have with death (being un-alive) to the philosophical implications of the lingo used in modern-day robotics and, curiously, in the places where these modern-day automata tend to fail.

One of the ideas Ms. Wood brings up is the idea that machine intelligences having no perception of the passage of time - this being one of the basic tenets of human consciousness. They can count the minutes and hours, sure, but they do not "understand" what is happening: why or how or even the fact that it is true that things change through time. Robots and automata also, and this is key, don't age as we do, and thus mortality is a concept which does not apply to them - which makes them all the more frightening. They are about creating life where there is no life, and it feels strange, feels, as Freud points out, strange and wrong.

This question, of humanity and its replication (or failure thereof), is a constant in our modern (ie, industrial) culture. Think of all the literature, films, and so on that explore the idea of adding and subtracting humanity - sometimes even exploiting our fear of its lack:

- Frankenstein, both literature and movies
- Dracula, ditto
- The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
- The movie Metropolis
- I, Robot
- Zombie movies
- The Iron Giant
- Bladerunner, obviously
- Terminator
- X Men 1

...to name only a very few obvious ones.

Much has been made of the link between alien/martian invasion stories/movies and the Cold War fear culture, which in some sense is another side of the same coin, as they were all political stories about making an Enemy (collective noun), less than human. The Stepford Wives, which doesn't really fit into this Cold War category, is nevertheless basically a political allegory with a feminist slant, and therefore less about the humanity of the individual people than it is about the creepy price of perfection.

Ms. Wood speaks of how mechanical know-how turned, at the end of the eighteenth century, from an exploration of making machines more human, to the exploration of making humans more machine-like. It seems to me that with the machine age, fear of the un-alive human began, bit by bit, to take precedence over fear of witches, magic, and other fears of the unknown.

Which is not to say the thrust to make humans and machines interchangeably blurred has not been seen as good - as a progression from obscurity to greatness. Back in the 1920's, as part of the Efficiency Movement, Lillian and Frank Gilbreth strove to find ways to help make workers' movements more efficient by examining special films of people working (using, for the first time, little lights attached to their hands which tracked their movements). Their goal was to reduce the number of motions involved in a task. At the time this was seen as a way to make their jobs easier and better, but in latter years there has been a lot of discussion about how this thinking has led to a cultural environment where workers are expected to behave efficiently at all times, like machines...or automatons.

Efficiency can be taken to extremes, though. A performance artist called Stelarc, claims that the body is obsolete. His work is all about the idea of becoming post-human. Third Arm, for example, takes the idea of a prosthetic limb and goes a step further: what if the technology was actually used to give us extra limbs? Another work, Stimbod, looks at voluntary and involuntary control of our bodies. Using a touch screen, viewers can program a series of motions and gestures which, when executed, then electrically stimulate the artist's muscles to perform those same motions...So then the man becomes the automaton.

(Smackings of William Gibson, and the amplified bodies of The Sprawl Triology here)!

Stelarc's obsession with the body, and improving on the body's basic design, is paradoxical and ultimately controversial: if one is a creationist, then the body is sacrosanct - it is as God(s) created it, and not to be improved upon. Evolution, on the other hand, says that things are always being optimized for the current circumstances - and yet, isn't the 4-limbed model one that has been proven to be evolutionarily efficient? And what happens when prosthetics become more of us than the original? The Tin Woodsman, for example, didn't start out that way. He was a flesh-and-blood man, a woodsman who gradually lost all his limbs (and eventually head and torso as well) to his own axe, and thus to the replacements made of tin; and after all of it, the thing he longed most to regain was his heart.

So the question is, really, not whether we will create artificial intelligences that take over the world, or whether we will create machines which start as our servants and end as our deathless masters, but really, whether we will, like the tin man, subsume our own human workings to the point where we can no longer find our own hearts.

Much of this, of course, comes down to humans' inability to stop tinkering with things. The world as it is today is a product of this inability, as are many of our bodies' illnesses. The desire to cheat Death brings with it a chance that we will, in effect, invite Death in to be part of our lives - not only as a by-product of the very processes we have invented to cheat death, but in a form of deathlessness, a type of being that extends existence without taking into account an ultimately human trait: the sense that our lives are passing, that every minute is a gift, that we have only so many days to seize.

Connections: the Book

At the risk of giving away all my secrets, I want to recommend James Burke's book, Connections. It's based on this brilliant TV show he did for the BBC in the 1970's, about the history of invention. Some of you may be familiar with it.

The great thing about this series of videos, and even more so about the book, is that he doesn't take a historian's view of the sequence of events. Instead, he follows a roundabout, storyteller's route, drawing lines between this person over here having this idea and that person over there taking one aspect of that invention and running with it - in a completely different direction. There is a long and wonderful discussion of navigation and lodestones, another section discusses Guericke's work with vacuums and how this led to research into the composition of air, and eventually the investigation of light passing through gases, and thus on to the cathode ray and television.

The book draws connections between vacuums and weather, atomic energy and the Norman Conquest, ploughs and gunpowder. It discusses, among other things, water clocks, Gutenberg's printing press, Vaucanson's automated duck, and the Jacquard loom (which I plan to discuss sometime soon, so don't read the book - okay?). Clockwork, the evolution of the telescope, and the timber crisis fromt the sixteenth-century glass industry: it's all in there. In fact there are things here (and images too) that you never heard of, that will just blow you away.

Life in a silver-mining town, late 1500s - including those who are underground

I cannot recommend this book (and the video series) highly enough. The main advantage of the book is that you can leave it somewhere in your house that you frequently go to sit or lay quietly (near the toilet or the bed, for example) and it will keep you awake at night as you peruse the amazing ideas and connections laid out in it, like a particularly well-designed maze.