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. 

five-by-five

mondrian: Star Wars minimalism

message in a bottle: a wine glass made for the sand and surf

tempest in a tea cup: tiny box displays the forecast with real precipitation

roy g. biv: a look at the past pseudo-scientific obsession with the Lüscher colour test

mechanical turk: a look into internet propaganda factories of various regimes

neverland

Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman presents a tidy, provoking reflection on the latter-day manifestations with romanticising youth which really makes the alternative, natural consequence—that of growing up and growing old, appear especially bleak.

So much coddling emphasis is put upon one’s prime—as defined by marketers—that to be past it in any sense and by any sight is taken to be a sign of defeat, instead of a hallmark of grace, maturity or conviction. Rather than repairing to the nostalgic and familiar, the doom and gloom and even appealing to the hypochondriac in us as the media is either a projection or reflection—for fear we might be told we can’t keep dreaming (a measure of escapism is keen and dandy but not a whole culture of remakes, prequels and re-hashing), or becoming a retiring curmudgeon, being an adult to a big extent, I think, is about confronting the dissonance with one’s life as it is and one’s life as it should be and being able to recognise (and receive) contentment.