Equilibrium is death

I was briefly a research assistant for this small partnership of architects exploring the philosophical and literal implications of being in a profession/school of thought that sees themselves and the environment in terms of Creation - like the free market, one of constant expansion. What was being left out of the conversation about their responsibility to the communities they were inherently shaping in the process of designing functional, accessible buildings was Destruction. In our time together, I followed them down paths considering how political, war-time and environmental disasters caused destruction, the history of materials and un-building processes, as well as other cultural relationships to sustainable materials and ideas about how to navigate and use space, to consider the question of what can be released, returned, made available by the practice of unbuilding structures with the care and attention that goes into building them - and we put together a panel of current rock stars in architecture theory for a small gathering at Storefront for Art and Architecture. At one point Keller Easterling - a professor of architecture at Yale - was talking about the living organism of a city, and she was using terms very familiar to me, as I was deep in the study of biomechanics and body systems at the time. At one point she used the term Equilibrium, as she was describing how communities sustain themselves, and some guy with an annoying voice and chunky glasses asked her how to obtain Equilibrium, like it was an ideal thing.

'Equilibrium is Death!' burst out of me into the room with breathless frustration, before Keller could respond to him. She looked at me and said "You're right." 

Equilibrium can be similarly defined in various realms, from economics to physics to biomechanics and meditative practices. At its heart, it is part of the conversation about the flow of resources, but describes a place of zero - where all forces are so balanced that there is nothing coming in or out. In the physical body, we call that state death - if nothing is being combusted and released, there are no engines of life to ask all of the sophisticated layers of being to keep going about their business of sustaining itself. Similarly in communities, money and goods, a flow in and out is necessary to not be left behind, to continue being a participant in the organism of a cityscape. As the flow of resources dwindle, opportunities to live and grow elsewhere draw the constituents, the source of that lifeblood to move on or they must be sustained by the city like a body on life support. I can't help but think of pumping money into forgotten about communities being like a blood infusion - each cell/dollar carrying a bit of oxygen needed for the inhabitants to be able to breathe.

While working with this inspiring group + studying the body with a leading figure in the movement world, I was also exploring cybernetics with another small group of theoretical extremists (Phd students), pulling apart our cultural narratives around the machine of the body and its relationship to labor - which shows up in sci-fi/cyberpunk novels as well as in our current technological enmeshment, from pace makers and hearing aids, to the internet as an externalized nervous system. Quite literally the ways our earlier imagining of what was possible shaped our current realities - makes me think about the value of choosing where we are imagining ourselves into the future in this particular moment. In some of my personal and required reading for all of these disciplines, I came across a few stand out ideas that left marks on my particular ways of perceiving my participation in life/society: 

1. A concept (reality?) in biochemistry about how living systems cycle Time through sophisticated loops without metabolizing/combusting it - like electrical currents creating electromagnetic fields from the friction of passing by each other, the potential built exponentially on that cycle. When it is metabolized it is emitted in the form of light, at the subcellular level, kind of like a nuclear reactor - and as we get older, those systems start to break down, time being combusted at faster rates, spurring the aging process and registering as literal light emanating from the body on specialized cameras (Mae-Wan Ho). Jane Jacobs, in her book Death and Life of Great American Cities - describes a healthy/flourishing neighborhood as one where sidewalks bustle with people from all walks of life, in a million little interactions - I suspect we too are generators of electromagnetic energy, and busy sidewalks are just one of many places our personal conductive capacities are amplified.

2. In the development of modern economics from the dawn of human civilization to now, Charles Eisenstein breaks down the concept of work as our time being handed back to us converted into the physical form of money - as I was reading his writing, I was literally watching the men laboring on my crews giving up all of their time and the goodness, the rich stuff of their being for such a small amount of money in return, because the labors of the body are considered less valuable then labor of other kinds, and that was time and energy they could not save to share with the people they loved outside of work. The rate of exchange was deeply unfair and sustaining a system that would never care for them or desire for them the capacity to be active and engaged participants in their own lives.

3. Our immune system is deeply reactive/engaged by our emotional state. Allergies often are tied to perceived threats in the environment, autoimmune disorders are related to hyperactive protective responses in our bodies, hypermobility is linked to the fight/flight/fawn/*play dead* response and often gets passed down genetically, so may be epigenetic evidence of a previous generation's response to trauma - if we apply that lens to the organism of a cityscape or a community and how the constituents are able to receive resources or organize themselves to respond to things are clear across multiple studies from the macro view to the individual I might be engaging with in a classroom. I know this is important somehow, but I don't quite have the scope of it yet - maybe this is the part I'm currently struggling to metabolize the most - how our interactions effect us on a cellular level, but that also gets passed down through generations at the same time - micro and macro are not distinguishable from each other here. Rather, it is a fractal. 

4. A healthy system, both biologically and economically speaking - is truly responsive to the constant shifts in its environment. The calcification of ideas and ways to respond, which often become institutional, structural are always rooted in previous ways of doing something - and while that can inform us, it can also limit us from being able to see potential resources because we are limited to the familiar. This is where Entropy and the Nervous System start to collide, and quantum mechanics starts to have something to say. It is often at the edges where we feel ourselves the most, or learn things we might never have known otherwise (war, famine, recession, environmental disaster recontextualizes what and who matters) - but our systems seek out safety in the form of the familiar. Apples have a profound genetic potency, each apple seed in every single apple holds the genetic make up for wildly different outcomes, so we force apples into consistency with industry wide cloning programs so we can all buy the same few distinguished kinds of apples from the store, the way you might go to McDonalds for the same consistent, engineered experience of chicken nuggets. Our nervous systems memorize sequences of responses that take huge amounts of effort to reroute and redefine, should we decide we want to have other choices for how to be and move through our environments. If we as human beings can develop broader relational/emotional capacities to keep us from being so quickly dysregulated in our environments (part of healthy development from child to adult), how can we also build living, breathing institutions and economic structures that are responsive to broader and bigger fluxuations in the environment before becoming dysregulated? 

What does it mean for something (an idea, a body, an institution, a city) to be truly sustainable? Can we layer these lenses to see the whole picture more clearly? While there may have been benefit to separating them for a time to get clear about the shape of things - maybe they were never meant to be upheld as isolated experiences, and our current fractured reality is the inevitable outcome. What can we sew back together, to be able to understand and allocate our collective and individual resources more clearly?

If the micro and macro are so tied (obviously they are inextricably linked), and energy cannot be created or destroyed - but gets constantly converted, trapped, transubstantiated, revealed, released  - maybe nothing I do is wasted in the end. Maybe all of the things I have done and been and said and failed at were not wasted.