Tuesday, December 1, 2009

What I taught at Arcosanti is as simple and obvious it is a wonder it even needed to be stated: we have within us the summation of evolution and the task of life is to appropriate this legacy and to apply it. Unfortunately, the inertial momentum of past ages represented around us is an overwhelming distraction. Thus, the isolation technique employed, a monastic society of a week's duration. At Paolo's birthday, George expressed to me as a kindness that he wished his son might have access to the kind of ritual re--creation of evolution we staged for work shoppers in the 70s. Although this sentiment is appreciated, the truth is, any serious person gains this awareness gradually by sincere self-knowledge. How is it that we did not find a simpler method than the idiosyncratic and ambiguous Village on the Mesa? Perhaps not coincidentally, the Mesa is the name of my current residence perched at another edge of history overlooking the Pacific. The view from here is the one I will share from now on on this blog.

Saturday, July 18, 2009

The Image of Humanity?

First, the important things a planned preliminary trip that I could not make might have enabled me to say on alumni night:

Alumni night was a particulary emotional and wrenching confrontation with the past. Russell Adams seemed to be in the same rugged health as the day we dug that ditch. A similarly arrogant defiance of mother nature--an hour's discussion in the midday sun, humbled and exhausted me--or perhaps that happened 30 years ago. I thought on seeing his slides: those of our era were intimate with bedrock, the literal foundation of the city. Bob Williams, Roger Tomalty, Bob Walker, Chris Blackwell, and other Project leaders of the first buildings dug holes in some very tough ground. My fondest memory of the late Skip Sagar was looking up at him with a beatific smile from a 15 foot hole excavated for the footing of the souteast cornrer of the second vault. He expressed his wish to trade places with me, this wise and patient couselor to a small town hick and benefactor from the Jewish community of New York City. Of such moments of poiniant spontanaity was the project begun. The dust and hardness abrasive . the dynamite of Mr. Bennett, so fascinating to us intellectuals and art students, of 90 pound air hammers drilling into mother earth, the vibrations locked in my genetic memory forever, for anchoting those heavy buildings on fractured basalt poured out molten in prehistory. I have tears now writing this. That I could have summoned these words, completely spent from travel and sleeplessness on alumni night. The rock there broke the blades of the largest conventional bulldozers in the world, the Caterpillar D-9, and Paolo's beloved Komatsu, and the site weldor would be summoned to repair and reinforce them.


Does everyone have those personal epiphanies and sensual impressions? How does one evoke reading a poem from from a workshop lover, complete with artwork that nailed the highest view of oneself to which one could possibly aspire in this world in a few lines: "He tries to build a heaven here on earth...dear friend with the clear white light..."I would not trade my remaining copy of that page for anything on earth.  How does one communicate the meaning of one day under the restaurant, in front of one of the largest workshops, gathered to hear Paolo in our weekly encounter, having him ask me to "warm up" the group? The greatest honor of my life, of any life lived in our age, offered for the first time to anyone.

Hearing oneself broadcast for an uninterrupted hour in the great city which first inspired me to seek the city as the highest design form, and Paolo as its central figure? What mattered are the poems of children given to me after a class with catholic schoolchildren, in the same Octagon where Roger hurled a full can of Moosehead at me teaching an experimental Friday Night class. Ah, there are stories to tell...of workshop loves upon which the world seemed to depend, and those urequited...to stand in celebrated nakedness.


I welded mostly without a shirt, wearing shorts, and let the white hot sparks of molten slag, and the radiation of the 7000(?) degree arc burn my sun browned nordic skin. One time, arc welding the old batch plant with only googles, all the skin peeled off my face the next day.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Tradgedy

From the beginning, what Marshall Rosenberg terms the "tragedy" of needs expressed in ways that cause defensiveness on both sides, rather than getting them met, was encoded in the Arcosanti experience. The first site manager, Bob Walker, had departed with bad feeling. I sensed that Paolo's need to feel he could trust his managers not to rebel informed all subsequent decisions on personnel. The following generation of baby boomers who made up the bulk of participants were in no mood to live under authoritarian management. But many also left because they saw no chance to build Arcosanti with the method of molasses-like incrementalism and amateur workers. It was seen as not serious, partly because they hired people like me. Doug Lee and Don Yoshino were the type of people who had produced the drawings and models for the Black Book and the Cocoran exhibit: serious professionals from a culture of extreme discipline like Tomiaki. Their condescension for the dropouts and art students who began work at the site was palpable if understandable. My sense is that up until the beginning of Arcosanti, Paolo had attracted a more refined group of participants to earlier workshops [and subsequent ones?]. Was Paolo's take on apprenticeship shaped by an Italian tradition of abusing apprentices or by Frank Lloyd Wright? In any case, during my tenure there was no consciousness of work shoppers as a resource to be invested in whatsoever. I've always seen this as the greatest mistake, a wound reopened every time there is an effort to tap the energy of former participants. I would be shocked if more than a handful returned for Paolo's 90th birthday in these difficult times. The project has always reflected this sense that participants and of the public ought to give financial support solely because it's such a good idea, irrespective of their experience of dealing with people who would be deciding how to spend this money. How is that working?

What I felt then, I now know to be true: that being a lightning rod for the work shoppers [and stafffers?] unmet needs was a gift, a responsibility in a way, to be their advocate. They came with so much to give, priceless positive energy, future positions of influence in society, and an amazing spirit of openness and generosity. I do not believe for a moment that work shoppers could have built Arcosanti, but I do believe that former work shoppers could have done so. There will never be a sustainable compact town on that Mesa where everyone's needs are met until those work shoppers' unmet needs are addressed and acknowledged.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

We're Surrounded

As Paolo's 90th birthday approaches, it is time to celebrate for those who participated in "the most important urban experiment in our lifetime" (particularly for me, who gave birth to that phrase that became the tagline for us since the Newsweek interview of 1976, though you will not find that in the authorized history)

Personally, it is a time to give myself empathy for the love I never found at Arcosanti, if only to recognize that Paolo's ability to choose the right partner was as decisive for him as any other manifestation of his genius. The recent Wright Guggenhiem show should be enough vindication for any of us. If America's greatest architectural visionary was "in love with the automobile", props to all of you who were able to see it's insanity, with special honors to my teacher, who early on repudiated his own teacher's dearest belief, on both aesthetic and evolutionary grounds. Amazingly, the nation has still no clue, in part due to our approach to challenging car culture. We are not alone. Every anti-car screed fails to give empathy to the needs satisfied by the car, Wright being the eloquent articulator of the mystique.

As we turn our hearts toward the pixie agent provacatuer who seduced us out into the basin and range province of North America in our youth, the first order of business, using the model of Compassionate Communication, is to recognize the unmet needs of workshoppers and staff throughout the years, that cry to be heard from every page of websites given to their expression, as they did from every conversation in my stay onsite and since.

Friday, May 8, 2009

Jesuita Fire

An empire of debt and growth unravels. Hilltop palaces explode in flames. I sit in my room in downtown Santa Barbara, enveloped in smoke as the helicopters roar through the night. I see in both instances, dominator culture's exemplars keep on thinking, "We're on top", and nature says, "No, you're not", to deaf ears. We're not fighting aborigines with oil rights whose dominator breeding policies treat girls as another herd species and multiply exponentially, making war the only means of stabilization, just to further one psuedo-tribe's vendetta, but to prop up a corpse. We're not fighting fire to protect the predatory superclass ego monuments and their retinues of immigrant tradesmen, servants, nanny's and gardeners, made possible by the same patriarchal religion raping girls as the Taliban. We're doing it to prop up the corpse of debt and growth suburbia. No one stops to ask why China is giving us the money that makes it possible. It must be their great love for Europeans.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Earth Day

Writing of the Irish Rising of 1916, the poet Yeats wrote a verse that has proved to be the epitaph of boomer efforts that began 40 years ago to prevent what has transpired: the loss of a planet and a civilization:

"We pieced our thoughts into philosophy
and tried to set the world under a rule,
Who were but weasels fighting in a hole."

Earth Day 2009 arrives in a boomlet of entrepreneurship and activist enthusiasm. Perhaps a little reflection on reality would be more useful. Since the first Earth Day, we have neither stopped the leviathan of debt and growth from desolating the world, nor put forward an inspiring alternative sufficient to compete with consumption and death.

When I promised my teacher Paolo Soleri that I would build a sustainable compact town in central Arizona before my departure back in 1978, he told me, "you have no idea what you are up against", which was certianly true. But such excuses take us only so far. A preposterously complicated and meaningless global economy was built in the interval on the flimsiest of premises--so much so that historic low levels of mass education and thought control were needed to sell a discredited, obsolete system educated Britons has abandoned as untenable. In fact only a few benefited, as readers of Morris' Pax Britannia Trilogy will note. Environmentalism, like the peace movement, simply defined itself as the business nanny brand. Any inspired ambition to pick up the work of Classical or Renaissance culture long ago was forgotten. Today's alternative dystopias range from salvaging suburban tracts (David Holmgren) to survivalist grunge in a sailboat in toxic seas (Dmitri Orlov). The halcyon rebirth of hunter gathering in a wasteland is now a best case scenario. Such is the fate of movements defined as "against-", including my own, "against things": Arcosanti.

To return to Yeats' lament, on reflection what stopped us was nothing as daunting as finance or engineering. It was a seemingly mundane but incredibly powerful technology: semantics. Left brain language cannot produce Right brain results. Enter Marshall Rosenberg. Change the word "weasel" for the Compassionate Communication nown for left brain thinking, "jackal", and the truth becomes obvious. That it is also more difficult to build such a semantic remodel within ourselves than to develop a 10 story sustainable compact town is less obvious, but will become so on attempting it. I'm convinced, in the words of Yeats that inspired me in youth, that it is the "possible" of

"the soul takes upon itself the the task most difficult of those not impossible"

and will devote what remains of life to this endeavor, the prerequisite to the former.

Monday, April 13, 2009

Founding Statement

My blogs all begin with the premise that I am personally the main person responsible for the destruction of real wealth in the last 30 years and for the opportunity cost that entailed: denying a wonderful life to much of the human race and preserving much of our natural inheritance. Instead, immense suffering and irreversable damage have occured. I knew what to do to avoid that, and did not. My students, colleagues, and my teacher Paolo Soleri will understand this is so, though it may sound strange to others unfamiliar with the history. I promised my teacher and my community to manifest his design for the world's first sustainable compact town. This would have lead to the adoption of sustainable town building as the norm for the last 30 years, instead of collapse, out of pure competitive advantage over growth and debt. I was unable to do this for at least 3 reasons: I could not instill a sense of urgency, though this was indeed the only chance to "save mankind", just as I stated then, that would have compelled cooperation among the founders. I was ignorant of the tools of compassionate communication required to ask for what I needed others to do, and to compassionately meet the needs of my co-workers. It was more important, in the words of Marshall Rosenberg, for me to be right, than to make life wonderful. Lastly, I did not recognize the gifts of wisdom about the nature of capital investment offered to me by Richard and Nancy Gushman, Skip Sagar, Bill Graham, Desmond Miurhead, and others, blinded by ideological parochialism.
Sic transit gloria mundi. What a screwup! What to do now will be the focus of these ruminations.
I begin by giving us all empathy: we all did the best we could at the time to meet our needs based on our best current knowledge and judgement.