Uncovering the house so the plaster can breathe.

Prosopon: The Greek word for the human face refers to the sight one presents to the other's gaze.



Can we even fathom what it feels like to be born shaped like a nightmare creature
No real relationships with anything other than the terror of arriving, new
of being considered hideous, no one willing to touch you, to teach you kindness
not knowing the word revulsion doesn't mean you can't understand it when you see it
in the faces of others

We only see the Minotaur depicted in his full blown sexual maturity
as he prowls the cage he lives in yet may be too terrified to ever leave
never having experienced anything else
we assume he demanded virgins, like he understood something about them
in relationship to himself

Does he consider himself to be a monster? Was he not also an innocent?
Does he consume the fluttering hearts of the other innocents sealed in the maze
to arrest what he feels when they gaze upon him, eating his own reflection in the mirror
of these girls that smell of sunlight, the sky still in their eyes
maybe he is terrified by the vastness they belong to - a big fierce world he has never known

They probably have no idea the power they wield with their eyes
as the warmth of the sun leaves them, their bodies going cold with fear and disgust
they possess the ability to make him feel as small as he did that moment
when his awareness crystallized like the masonry of his father’s architect closing in around him
laying the bedrock of his feral coping mechanisms

Labyrinthine patterns carved so deep that he can't possible discern the difference between
catching a glint of sunlight piercing the darkness to land on his skin, warm as touch
and the pheromonal heat coming off of these young women that tugs at a part of himself
that has never been touched
yawning into a wordless hunger and enveloping sadness, twin flames devouring him

The crushing similarity between the sounds
of the unseen, voiceless child calling for contact from deep within his emotional recesses
and the piercing screams of these barefoot waifs when they stumble upon him
bearing witness to what happens when we have an overbearing will to survive
but no guides

A byproduct of jealousy and greed between Gods and Kings
Adults who give no thought to how their actions may make monsters of men
who were children once, yearning for touch, comfort in their explorations
who shouldn't have had to warm themselves at the fire of fight or flight
eat or be eaten

every tool has a genealogy

 

 

 

Post class reflection on the History/Process of Deconstruction and where it might be headed:

 

It strikes me as hugely important, the ways in which buildings were brought down much earlier in the growth and development of modern civilization - the idea that people paid for the opportunity to be involved, because almost every aspect was salvaged and sold immediately, that the building's components were considered valuable even if the building itself was no longer meant-to-be. How breathing a new building into being involved exhaling an old building and that something could coalesce and disperse without degrading some other aspect of the life cycle of the urban landscape.

But what really changed?

Human Labor began to require expenses previously uninvolved in the process? Or was it the development of technology and new kinds of building materials? What was driving the American frontier that made creating mechanized muscle so profitable? As the scale of cities and human potentiality also expand, how easy does it become to un-see the cellular matrix, to consider the brick and the human vessel for mechanical force as necessary but essentially un-special units of any structure.

There was a time in our past where history was considered valuable, in people and in things, institutions and ideas. I have no idea where the shift was - that made virginity the ideal - that an all consuming drive for the newest thing means that once put into circulation, everything we come in contact with is depreciating in value to society. In our attempt to avoid the necessity of entropy, we facilitate the speed in which it takes hold. It is like we are choosing to define the world not as a system fluctuating around us, but as a system slowly dying.

This idea of modular construction that allows complete break down and reuse of entire structures may be something that gets looked back on with disdain, like the boxes scattered over the landscape from the modernist movement - sometimes it is important to see the brush strokes in the painting, since it gives clues about the artist's thinking, the specific problem they might have been working out in the paint, about shadows and reflected light, about what color laughter in the eyes might be. If we looked at every piece of the mundane process of constructing things, buildings or human beings as if every moment and particle were somehow divinely inspired, how might that affect what they grow up to become? If we could feel respect for each brick and the job it will do, would that respect extend itself to the individual placing that brick into the skin of its building? Are they common laborers or Priests shaping Matter, carving our history onto the earth?

But what of the Architect? Where does he live in this painting? What is the nature of the piece of music he is conducting?

I think it depends on the nature of the building. If longevity is involved in the thought process, than the utility of a building will have to shift along with time, or get swept away by the future. How would we interact differently with space if it was designed to ride the waves of human need and expression? Does it mean that the essential creator of that design is lost in the fluctuations? Are you any less an artist if what you have made is rich earth for people to grow in, rather than monuments to god, ourselves and posterity? And by offering the option to co-create space, how does that fold in the inhabitants - how they might claim a space, relate to or identify with it, and how they might also consider the people that helped craft it?

How can construction/deconstruction be an invitation, rather than an attack?