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Diary Entry for 4/17/02

Vessels, Vessels Everywhere.

I re-read that entry about "guilt as consequence of action trapped in program." I like it a lot and I think there's a key in there for me as a big insight (boy, what a bad sentence!). It seems to indicate an "outside-looking-in" perspective on an old issue. I like what it teaches me.

I continue to think/feel about what it means to be in the "right relationship" with people, places, and things. What is the right relationship between living creatures and institutions? What does a "right institution" look like? That one, to me, is perhaps my most important question right now. It is critical for my personal "koan quest" -- the relationship between structure and love.

By binding ourselves to a process of change and awareness that is slower or more limited than the way we would otherwise develop, we put ourselves into conflict with the world around us. We become separate from nature, from other people, and from those parts of ourselves that do not acknowledge the limitations. We come into conflict with processes of change that are faster or slower, that have wider or narrower boundaries of awareness.

One of my favorite pieces of music is Philip Glass' "Vessels" from the soundtrack to "Koyaanisqatsi" (seemingly more apropos than ever, as a concept). The metaphor of the vessel resonates deeply and profoundly with me. I am a historian of vessels that move people through air and water. I hear "Vessels" as I write this.

Institutions are like vessels. Institutions are vessels. The ability to contain, to enclose, is one of our most fundamental, pervasive, "invisible" too-making skills. I think that a case could even be made that "the vessel" -- the ability to enclose -- is the seventh simple machine.

Consider the development of the flying vessel, from balloons to airplanes and missiles -- aerostats, aerodynes, and ballistic objects (classed according to the principles under which they operate). The trajectory of success and usefulness of each is determined by the extent to which they are able to operate independently of their environments, or perhaps better put, the extent to which they take better advantage of their environments and experience fewer of the disadvantages. (Quick example: advantage of using the air as a means of transport = simplicity of physical principle, i.e. moving a curved surface through the air creates low pressure, which in turn acts as a "supporter of weight." Disadvantages = storms, unpredictable winds, effects of terrain. Solution = travel faster to overcome wind effects, travel higher to rise above most weather. Result = function of vessel (to move from point to point) becomes more reliable.)

Institutions are like air vessels in that they create a bubble inside which things exist and operate as if they were on the ground and standing still, though they are in reality moving faster than they could without the vessel. The vessel is not subject -- or tries not to be subject -- to the vagaries of its environment. It shuts its contents out from its surroundings. It exists in a time-ordered world -- after all, the whole point of not being subject to the vagaries of nature is to allow a person, not the environment, to determine the times of departure and arrival, the points of departure and arrival, and the course to be followed.

All this is by way of saying that one of the results of an institution is to create a "model world" with its own rules that may be at varying odds with its surroundings, and that changes at a different pace or along a different trajectory than its surroundings.

Is it inevitable that an institution exists in this mode? If not, then what would an organization look like that acted otherwise? If so, then how do we relate to it so that we do not become ruled by, or caught up inextricably in, the artificial flow of the institution?

Post Hoc:

When I was at The Tutorial School, we had a guest speaker (an artist, maybe the father of one of the students) who brought with him a set of interlocking rods that he assembled and reassembled in various ways while he talked to us about the nature of structures. As he built triangles, squares, pyramids, and cubes, he asked us to think about how and why each structure was inherently stable (like a triangle) or collapsible (like a square). Then he asked us to try to predict how certain structures would collapse based on the arrangement of the rods.

The effects of what I was seeing and hearing resonated straight to the core of my being, almost like I was standing inside a giant bell as it was being rung. Then he ended by asking us to consider this: "What is the relationship between structure and love?"

Well, that pretty much vaporized what was left of my cerebral cortex. When I got home I was so exhausted that I fell into a deep, deep sleep for a few hours. Then, for whatever reason, I woke up and grabbed a blank piece of paper, pencil, tape, ruler, and scissors. In a few minutes I sketched, cut out, and assembled a four-piece tetrahedron consisting of a central octahedron and three small tetrahedral "corners." (To this day, I still have it.) No big deal for an architect; but I had never before, nor have I since, been able to simply wrap paper around empty space quite so easily.

Not only that, the artist's question became my own personal koan. Pretty much everything that you read on Sotto Voce is a dispatch from somewhere along the quest to understand it.

While I may have been overreaching with the idea of vessels as "the seventh simple machine," there is no doubt that the enclosing power of physical and conceptual vessels (even names, labels, and time-ordered narrative descriptions define the boundaries of a concept or concepts) is an important part of the whole issue of Right Organization and Right Relationship.

This diary entry ties in to some of the issues discussed in the Tutorial School Dispatch on organizations, authority, and compassion.

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