sunday drive: stangenpyramide oder strawberry fields forever

As promised, I took a little detour to try to find for a second time the monument called the Stangen- pyramide (the pillar or rod pyramid) outside of Dreieich that marks the vista of the Frankfurt am Main skyline from the foothills of the Taunus. It turns out that the site was well-known at the outer edge of a golf course and I had just had bad directions and was being quite well patronised this fine day because of a stand nearby selling strawberries where one could pick them himself.
This symmetrical gradient of four hundred fifty-six columns on the high ground in the middle of the fields but with forested lands visible in the distance beyond the cultivation (the manicured golf-course included) is meant to make people reflect on that forest of skyscrapers ahead and the tangle of antennas and RADAR station that is a satellite installation the airport behind. Although my pictures didn’t do it justice (the towers of the metropolis just visible there above the tree-line), walking down the path that separates the two mirror-hemispheres does offer a pretty spectacular view from this promontory.

bird-watching

Over the past two weeks from our balcony, H and I have been noticing some strange ornothological behaviour. Nearly over the downspout for the rain gutter of our roof, a few little birds have not been feathering a nest but rather, it appears, tending a small garden plot.
The greenery that’s been planted there hasn’t withered away in the sun and looks to be growing. I would not make the leap yet that the sparrows are practising the rudiments of agriculture—although it is pretty clever if they have to foresight (just like not building a nest in a rain gutter) to think that the plants might flower and attract bees or other insects or at the very least act as a sieve or dam to capture bugs that are washed off the roof in the rain. We’ll have to keep an eye on these two and make sure they don’t take over the neighbourhood.

tenterhooks or looming large

In a brilliant gloss for Æon magazine, writer Virginia Postrel presents an an excellent exposition on how textiles and fashions parallel and drive technological advancement.
The broadest example lies in trade, captured famously along the Silk Road, the trade route that saw not only the exchange of cloth but of also knowledge and ideas between the Orient and Occident worlds, and the later shipping empires.
Research into natural pigments and dyeing techniques led to greater understanding the discipline of chemistry. The printing-presses of clothmakers (to imprint patterns) inspired Johannes Gutenberg to establish the publishing industry in the West. It was factories that housed the great power-looms and the flying-shuttle that drove the Industrial Revolution and gave manufacturing countries a distinct advantage, leading to a huge population explosive, lasting environmental impact, colonialism, labour-issues and societal upheaval from those who puzzled over what mass-production meant. The punch-cards that were the basis of programming these steam-powered jabberwockies to produce increasing intricate designs that led to the development of computers. Contemporaneously, cheap and disposable clothing represents the debate on exploitation, out-sourcing and off-shoring—plus our notions of consumption in general. Even if the shirt on one’s back is not yet a Wearable, it is still heir to all the excellence and dread of human achievement, and that is truly something to think about.

reflex arc or virality

It has been demonstrated perennially that yawning is contagious, even across different species.

Studies have also shown that reflective yawning is a good gage for empathy—imitating someone, even unconsciously like crossing one’s legs in the same way or being synchronised in stride or even the more embarrassing slip or copying someone’s diction (where another might believe that he or she are being mocked instead), betrays interest—and yawns are more likely to spread around if there is some spared affinity. Recently someone has even shown that broods of parakeets pass around this reflex in a highly ritualised, choreographed manner. Further, there are theories that yawning helps to coordinate cycles of sleep and wakefulness among close associates (a zeitgeber) and might even be akin to wolfs howling together. Alternatively (but not exclusively), the ability to yawn, and mirror this behaviour, that allowed humans to expand their intellect, being a mechanism to cool overheated brains, aside from fatigue or boredom. There is no definitive consensus on either its social or physiological function, however. Although yawning itself is hardly a memorable act and I’d venture to say that I yawn in isolation when no one else is around, I can’t that’s not a false proposition and I wonder if there wasn’t one primal yawn that’s been passed around, jumping species, ever since.

daytrip: dreieich

After work yesterday, I took a trip to the nearby village of Dreieich. I had the chief aim of strolling a bit in the countryside and locating the elusive Stangen- pyramide, an outdoor installation of hundreds of graduated wood cylinders that supposedly nicely frame the Frankfurt skyline in the distance—failing that however (though long-wandering through the wheat fields and I will return this time with precise GPS coordinates), I thought to look in town, feeling a bit sorry for the place since I assumed that no one ever visited a place community that’s right off the airport.

I think I might have been mistaken and was pleasantly surprised to find a half-timbered (Fachweck) jewel of a town centre, dominated by the ruins of a fortress. Dreieich has much older Roman roots but the medieval resettlement of the area was owing to a royal hunting-grounds (Wildbann) tended there. Many of the bedroom communities outside of Frankfurt and along the Main originated in the same way—this whole area between Frankfurt and Aschaffenburg having once been a continuous wood, and is reflected in the town’s name and crest—three oaks. Burg Hayn was the stronghold for the bailiff of this estate and a sort of warehouse and armoury.
Dreieich claims to have been Emperor Charlemagne’s favourite stalk and the general layout of the fortification and village that grew up around it were copied throughout the region. Walking through the walled town was also quite nice, with much of the old character preserved, and the residents seem quite house-proud—one could even purchase the town’s half-timbered ensemble in miniature from a shop. I did seem as if it did get its fair share of visitors, bucking my assumptions, and I will return myself to locate that pyramid.

5x5

nothing up my sleeve: wonderful, strange curation of items found inside album covers

dragnet: one brilliant young inventor’s ambition to clean up the oceans to be tested in Japan

space-time coordinates: as a homage to Back to the Future II, one company hopes to make inside-out jeans a thing in time for 21 October 2015

playscaping: repurposed shoe factory and airplanes create a fantastic urban playground in St. Louis

solid-state: nice super-cut of analogue consoles in sci-fi movies

present and perdurant

Though modern Greek has adopted a more straightforward term to convey happiness, ευτυχία—just suggesting good works—the classical term Eudæmonia is fortunately still around with all its mysterious and internecine intrigues.
The greatest minds are unable to come to a consensus on what constitutes happiness (or whether that’s even a question worthy of pursuit), but I have to wonder if even the first interlocutors really knew what was meant by Eudæmonia. Semantics are of course important considerations and flourishing or thriving might be a better word than our emotionally-laden happiness—the Romans rendered it as felicitas, who was also sometimes deified, but I don’t believe that any translation could capture the sense of being a role-model compounded with a guardian angel or fairy godmother figure like the original Greek. One achieves happiness, it’s argued, by emulating the example of that demon—dæmons just being spirits, familiars or lesser deities and not diabolical ones. The nature of those qualities and whether there’s some universal imperative are hopeless elusive, though that does not mean we shouldn’t bother. Furthermore, one’s level of bliss can be impacted retroactively should one’s present deportment cause him or her to earn a bad reputation after death.
Thinking about these rarefied ideas in general and particularly the last bit that invokes the directionality of time makes me turn back to the novel I am currently enjoying, Jo Walton’s absolutely amazing Just City—wherein the goddess Athena gathers the prescribed youth from all ages in order to experimentally create the utopia of Plato’s Republic overseen by those who’ve prayed for wisdom. I wonder if one’s eudæmon isn’t more of a conflicted personality, like shoulder angels. The cover of the Walton’s book, incidentally, focusses in on a particular section of this larger famous fresco by Raphael—showing students engaged on the steps of the Academy below. The different elements and possible perspectives in this work of art makes me think about another of Raphael’s masterpieces, the Sistine Madonna, who’s two puti reflecting upward has become a better known detail. H and I got to see it in its entirety in Dresden once. The aforementioned fresco, however, is out of public view in the papal apartments but I recalled the style and how the tableaux extended beyond the frame, preceding into the background, as the image that was on our ticket stubs from the Vatican Museum—the ephemera buried behind too many layers of our bulletin board to excavate, just now. I don’t believe I am any closer to the being able to articulate what happiness is but do feel I’ve gone on a little trip in time just now myself.

instant karma or everything zen

I was really kind of baffled to learn that the Laughing Buddha, a traditional fixture of Asian take-away, is in fact not the sage Gautama Buddha or an avatar thereof—like thin Elvis versus fat Elvis, but a completely different character called Bùdài.
This friendly monk represents contentment and enlightenment as well but his following developed at a time when Buddhism was taking root in a unified, ancient China and the two were conflated. I suppose the distinction is always just out of grasp for someone not intimately familiar with Eastern thought, but maybe the Buddha is the Bùdài as the Dionysian force is to Dionysis (Bacchus, the god of wine). The Buddhism that was taking root across China was also a significant departure in terms of practise from the original foundations. Thanks are owed to the bureaucratic harmonisations underlying the teachings of Confucius and his disciples, that instilled a sense of place and hierarchy that in some senses enabled disparate kingdoms and people to come under one mantle, but the revival of Buddhist thought needed some adjustments to fit to the present and enduring societal framework. As paralleled by the independent stance that monastic Ireland took towards a centralised Church authority in Rome, Buddhism as first envisioned was also meant to be a retiring one—cloistered from the illusionary, impermanent world-at-large. It surprised me even more to learn that the concept of Zen (Chàn), with a somewhat divergent but very well attested history and scholarship, was incorporated into Chinese outlook in order that each could mediate in his or her own manner and discover Buddha’s teachings—know that enlightenment is attainable in the everyday—without cossetting oneself in an abbey.  While I am not sure it was exactly planned by the state (nor less authentic for it) to promote civility, there are certainly practical reasons behind it as well, since a coherent community could not very well have all its eligible men skivving off their responsibilities to hearth and home by becoming monks.  There is a delicate balance, I think, between not selfishness but rather self-interestedness, that is concern for one’s salvation in private, and the civic-mindedness of seeking the same while a part of the society around one.