Weaving the Void
Gulzar Haider, B.Arch. Ph.D.
Dean, School of Architecture and Design
Beaconhouse National University, Lahore
Former Director and Professor Emeritus School of Architecture Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Abstract
In a situation where the conventional sources of wisdom are under question and the public discourse seeks ratings rather than generate substance, there is a need to think anew about what distinguishes us collectively as human and individually a creative beings. The essential dimensions of memory, self-reflection and the urge to aim at an envisioned future, personally and collectively, are proposed and elaborated. Against these dimensions some of the pathologies that lead to the current human condition are discussed.
At an operation level, the higher challenges of progressing from normative levels of a functioning human, a mere part of a socio-economic collectivity, towards the station of becoming a genuine creative individual is analyzed. The values of child-like curiosity, of imagination unbridled by well-engraved image banks of contemporary minds, and the challenge of knowing the difference between solving problems from known typologies to the courage to invent new problems, is stressed.
The address, hopefully, will be as much a congratulatory offering, as it will be an invitation for taking on the current, as well recognizing the not so obvious, challenges.
Let me start by saying that the times when age automatically meant some wisdom are gone. The white hair and the wrinkles on the forehead alone are not enough to present a countenance of wisdom. Neither is the nature of experience stable, nor the lessons learnt cumulative, nor is the innocence as innocent when one would get one’s sin’s forgiven before embarking on a journey from Karachi to Thatta.
Even within the stable frames of our sacred tradition the images and experiences are getting discordant. In the shopping plazas, gawking at vacation posters, we see the pictures of the House of God on throwaway travel brochures, tempting us to embark on the holy journey, with promises of five star comforts and countless units of thawab. And when and if we get there, in hours and not months, it looks so much like the pictures our eyes have become satiated with….except that we get pushed around a lot and run the risk of being trampled if we cannot go with the flow of circumambulating devotees. But there too we are being comforted by fellow believers that death by being trampled during pilgrimage could be an express invitation to the Heavenly Garden. In this age of managed spirituality and official religiosity, even wisdom is official and comes through state television.
I think that you, the young ones, have already arrived at the thresholds of wisdom, as we the older ones, while deluding ourselves to have acquired sagacity, are stepping into romantic recalls of one kind or another. Your and our minds might be millennia apart when we sit around a three generation dinner, after having slaughtered an animal, upholding the example of a patriarch prophet of 4000 year ago.
Turn the channels on and listen to the discussions of the young as well as the old. You will find them both claiming neat and clean, tightly packed ideological pronouncements, coated as considered opinions in response to the questions by the hosts. What is claimed so passionately cannot be substantiated, facts are used to create a false sense of authenticity, tones are polemical and anything that is close to emotions, protests, rhetorical or framed with an intention to awaken some deeper feelings are often judged imprecise, fuzzy, subjective and therefore tangential to the discussion. This situation prevails across subject domains, as broadly spread as international peace, domestic wars, dehsat gardi, azad khyali, fanoon-e-latifa and siyasat-e-kaseefa, declining morals caused by performing arts, international begging, with interest and without honor, and the a priori necessity of destructive weapons to protect an honor and an existence that remain elusive. And when topics have really become exhausted there is always the beloved, endangered Islam, whatever our learned ulema, online or off the topic, with emblematic turbans and designer beards, have made us believe, it is.
The topics I have touched are not unknown to you. You hear about them everyday, though the positions you hear might be quite different than what I have hinted at. But most of us will agree that behind these appearances there lurk some pathologies whose existence we do not want to acknowledge, much less study and confront. Maybe all these noises, in the name of free press and open discourse, are to drown some inner voices that do not let us sleep at night. We pretend that these sounds are from somewhere and of someone, with whom we have no relation. Perhaps all these opening and closings, these festivals and commemorations, these parades, and these collective showings and tellings of what we consider to be our achievements, are to avoid looking at ourselves in the mirrors that have been collecting dust in the amnesiac attics of our own minds.
Let me share with you an idea that is deceptively simple yet of great referential importance. Strange as it might sound to you, as graduates of early 21st century, it is an old idea from non-European philosophies that what distinguishes humans from other known creatures is their ability of remembering, reflecting and having a vision of the future. I have even proposed to students that these distinguishing traits form the underlying stratum for the very edifice of art and architecture. Most of them, with some explanation, have found this to be rather self evident, with the occasional exception of some die-hard contrarians, charmingly irritating as most of them are. I enjoy remembering one such student from Britain, who insisted that if remembering, reflecting and visioning were the criteria of being human, then his parrot was as much a human as he himself was a parrot. I hastily agreed as I knew Winston’s unique traits. Then he claimed that his parrot remembered as well as he could. I agreed with that too because he was not doing too well in my courses, primarily because of short attention span and erratic memory. But as he continued on his stiff upper brain path I had to challenge him by asking him if he knew any British parrot that had written a history of English speaking parrots and won a prize from an academy of parrots founded by a noble parrot. Winston would not surrender and suggested that such was quite a serious possibility in his future as English parrots fulfilled their manifest destiny. At that stage I got scared, as the son of an ex British subject, about my father’s destiny reincarnating as an imperial humanoid parrot, and gave up.
To be candid I like students like Winston over the ones in Pakistan who call me “Sir” Gulzar and claim, innocently I must add, that they respect me.
Now back to our subject:
Remembering
First, to be human is to remember with self-disciplined honesty and fidelity.
Beyond the necessity of memory to weave our temporal encounters into a flow that we call life, perhaps the most important role of memory, like the gravity, form and friction, that hold the stones of an arch together, is to progressively help us construct our personal and social identities. While there are many ways of storing our personal memories, the challenge is much more complex when we want to organize our collective reminiscences into a corroborated history. Our memories as parts of groups have entropic tendencies. The original order progresses towards a creeping disorder, analogous to short-circuited connections among the recordings of sequential events. The memories become selectively edited through premeditated additions and omissions. Achievements get diminished or exaggerated to the extent that some individuals disappear and others appear with superhuman attributes and even new middle names. Collective memories are often burdened with fantastic embellishments and history and historical fiction become indistinguishable. While memories, individual and collective, are a wonderful space within which we might play with our imaginations, we have to be careful about confusing our self created characters into historical beings, even as heroes. Unbridled “memory play” can lead to false idols and one needs to have critically analyzed history to keep restoring the necessary balance.
Reflecting
Second, it is a unique quality of humans to be critically reflective about causalities and consequences of their experiences. This self reflexive consciousness that acts as the inner dynamo for desire to place one’s self in the world, seeks consistent and stable patterns, so that one can repeat the beneficial and pleasurable and avoid the detrimental and painful. This is how the individual experiences get filtered through critical reflection into questions like “what might happen next time if such and such happens again”. This is how the individual knowledge grows. However, through a systemic dissemination and discourse, via institutions like universities, a societal consciousness and value structure starts to evolve with attendant motivations towards progress. It is precisely this kind of angst-ridden, intense yet mostly internalized, individual as well as collective, reflection that was happening in Germany after the humiliations of WWI. This is what led, among many things, to the crystallization, however uneven, of the Bauhaus. After the Nazi closure of the Bauhaus, its reincarnation in America was more a result of how the Museum of Modern Art framed, analyzed and wrote about it, rather than via the continuation of the original intentions of its founders. One has to give credit to Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe, in their own separate and different ways, to treat it more as an opportunity to reflect upon their earlier reflections, in a new land and under different circumstances, and mentor new kinds of continuities so crucial to modernism in architecture and numerous allied areas.
Visioning
Our third and final distinctive trait of being human is the ability to form a vision of a future rooted in a selfhood that is alive, awake and in search of its purpose in the continuity of time. Such visioning is rooted in questions like; “Who am I? Why am I here? Does my purpose end with my death, and if so where should I be heading while I am still alive?”
I have not forgotten the favorite phrase of one of my senior colleagues, and ex-salesman like Ronald Reagan and later vice president of administration of a university, “If you do not know where you are going….you will end up where you do not want to be.” I was both attracted and repulsed by this gem of American pragmatism. I was attracted because I could see its predictive accuracy all around me. I knew so many people who, while chasing the mirage of a degree with a “scope”, rather than setting their sights for something that had a vision based on a purpose other than the ability to make payments for credit cards, had gotten themselves imprisoned in secure corners of miserable drudgery. I was repulsed by Ronald’s aphorism because it pretended to help but only through awakening our deeper fears about ending up lost in a strange land with no map, a frequent childhood nightmare. This is not the kind of future visioning we are talking about.
I am more interested in the vision that would make us stare at unknown horizons rather than wish for a house in some gated neighborhood with armed guards and surveillance systems. And such visions are possible only when the self is in search of its genuine selfhood, when the wonder about our own life has reached a level that we are quietly convinced that we could not be a mere processing organisms, or as humans have sometimes been ecologically described as planetary skin disease, turning attractive food into unpleasant manure and that too in mere pursuit of our aggressive appetites. And one must start to wonder about our final contribution to this lovely blue planet other than the surrendering of our bodies to the top soil or our ashes to the rivers and the gases to the atmosphere.
To understand the visioning suggested here, I urge you to discover the lone protagonist of Ibne Tufail’s allegory of Hayye Ibn Yaqzan, literally translated as “Alive, the son of Awake”. He personifies, indeed epitomizes the self, with a vision to seek knowledge and cognizance of Truth, with such purity of intentions, that it become free of the textual necessity divine guidance that the rest of us are so dependent upon.
So we have constructed a reference system within which we can gauge our distinctness as humans in contrast with the known fellow creations. Simple, and even self-evident as it might sound, it is not that simple to achieve. Because like in all worthy pursuits of life the protocol might be simple but achieving success is elusive. Consider the game of chess: the protocols for king, queen, bishop, knight, rook and pawn are unambiguously known and simple. There are only 16 pieces per player and only two players with innocently simple black and white checkerboard. But how challenging to play, and what a wonder to attempt even guessing what goes on in the minds of the two player, hidden beyond the opacities of their faces, in deep recesses of their minds and psyches, and only God knows where else. Very analogous is the first player’s challenge of strategizing remembering, reflecting and visioning against the second player constituting our equally strategic entropic ability of deceptive amnesia, blaming our self-created experiences on detractors outside of ourselves, and adopting ritualistic routines in the darkness of ideological night and assuming that this is the life of practiced faith. You can imagine the complexity of these two human players, both working on the three coordinates as we defined, but each very differently from the other.
And this is the essence of the inner battles of life held up by the armature of self whose aim it is not to get internally conflicted. And this is my most important offering to you.
If the analogy of chess of six characteristic pieces on a two dimensional board boggles your mind with its complexities then consider the human who carries the attributes of king, queen, bishop, knight, rook and pawn, all in himself and then wants to win in a hyper-dimensional space of memory, reflection and envisioning future against another player with equally daunting attributes and perhaps more.
It is known that as the complexity of choices increases the finite strategies to achieve success reduce. This is especially true in the fields of liberal arts, in soft as against hard physical sciences, and especially in what we have come to know as fine and applied arts and even design and especially architecture as the most complex of civilizational accretions over time. Many start to accept the position that “some have it and others do not” and one should accept one’s lot in life. They stop seeking credible explanations for their failed attempts to remember with clarity, to reflect with reason and envision a positively modified course towards a successful future. There is great attraction at such time for tragic exit or religious invocations under the cover of patience and perseverance.
The dialectic of ascendant excellence and leveling mediocrity, that we all face, especially the students of arts and architecture, is never supposed to lead us to giving up and get shunted to some department of deterministic knowledge. In order to avoid these dark possibilities we need to extend our arguments from sphere of values and goals to those of approaches and operations. The three goals of remembering, reflecting and visioning now need to be converted into corresponding sets of catalytic suggestions, more academically known as heuristics, in service of the higher challenge of helping the graduates of today to progress from the normative levels of a functioning human, a mere part of a socio-economic collectivity, towards the station of becoming a genuine creative individual. Through these heuristics we aim to awaken the child-like courage of curiosity, stoke an imagination unclouded by the blurring overlays of commercial imagery or political disinformation, and invite them to show preference for identifying new problems with novel solutions rather than prescribing off-the-shelf solutions for corresponding, pre-existing problem types.
Heuristics towards Remembering
Work towards renaissance of the finest traditions of historical research and writing that is open to public debate and scrutiny that is free of jingoistic censorship and politico-religious correctness.
Map the unfolding processes towards a product rather than the static description of the end product. Notice the sequence of connected happenings and the blurred voids among them. Recall the starry nights on the way to the Beloved’s House and close your eyes, when you reach it. Awaken to the beauty of the “unfinished” drawings. Catch the ineffable eloquence of the moment when a Leonardo da Vinci drawing might have been suspended for whatever reasons. Feel the power of the unsaid in a poem.
Pay attention to the personal narratives of those who were pilgrims of horizons too far and whose stations along the way became destinations for others. Search for the “Unknown Craftsman” by honoring the known ones. Hear Vincent’s quest in his letters to Theo and honor Gibran’s longings for Mary. Collect all your letters received from those who never knew you and weave stories out of them that challenge the continuity of time.
Go to far places and walk. Draw on site with your own hands, on papers picked on the way.
Treat your childhood toys as precious objects. Visit your old schools if you can and look for the old man who gave lemonade to you even on days when you did not have enough coins.
Trust your memories to time with the rituals of recall, record and visitation, lest you yourself become a graveyard of erased tombstones.
Heuristics towards Reflecting
Awaken the comatose curiosity and wonder about its essential links with causalities and continuities. Imagine designing and making a magnetic resonance imaging device and lying in it to get your own brain-scan. Watch it with your own two brain extensions, your eyes and think about the closed loop.
Watch your own hand and wonder about its parts, its connections and its choreography. Go beyond appearances, see beyond the skin and never be settled for obvious names and categories.
Beware of “common sense”, it is too common to yield any serious reflectivity and in itself it is often misleading.
Poverty of ideas is the most debilitating of human afflictions and its pathological culmination is worse than death. Resist its spread; indeed wage a war against it, as if it was epidemic.
Reflect upon your experiences beyond the certainty of necessary facts. Beyond tangible performances, seek liberating realizations by reflecting upon the intangible, even transcendental qualities. It is in this sense that while aiming for excellence in a work of architecture, treat safety and functionality as “essential but otherwise unimportant”. It is not fair, or even intellectually defensible, that an architect should expect an award of excellence because the building has not fallen down after being occupied, or that the doors open in the appropriate directions, and that the rain water does not get in the room.
The quality of a work of art is not to be judged by the fact that among a whole lot it got sold or just because it follows a particular rule of colour or formal composition or just because, with all good intentions, it is an attempt at the calligraphy of a sacred verse.
Just like a dictionary, though it contains “all” the words, cannot be a declared a work of literature, a building though it might have all the ingredients of function and all the factors of safety cannot cross the thresholds of architecture.
We are advised to trust in God but make sure we tie our camel. If the assurance against the loss of a runaway camel was the goal then it being tied is essential and “trust in God” is not its logical consequence or its necessary coexistent. But if the Trust in a transcendent, non-corporeal God was the singular quest then one cannot make it conditional to the loss or non-loss of an untied or a tied camel respectively. Thus the actual advice is in the realm of simple causalities and a warning against invoking something in the realm of the abstractions and transcendence to assure something quite mundane and earthly.
Heuristics towards Visioning
Seek differentiation among the act of visioning and the strategic pursuit of a pre-determined target. In the visioning one is calling forth the imaginative skills that are clear, vibrant and agile like a mountain stream. It is led less by a strategy and more by dynamic, transformative responses to unfolding conditions, while remaining true to meta values and principles. In natural realm it is a combination of grand natural laws like gravity and dynamic topographic and biospheric processes that lends form, indeed the entire identity and meaning to what we know as Indus River and its valleys. When we lay on this observation the complex layer of human response to the Indus, we recognize its cultures, its languages, its arts, its settlements and its histories. Visioning by and about a human self is analogous to Indus developing a sense and an ability to imagine its encounters with the plains, the deserts and ultimately with the ocean while it is still playfully racing through the mountains. One can imagine the river wishfully contemplating its return to the mountains which the gravity would not allow. But one can equally convincingly imagine such a wish being fulfilled with the sun distilling the ocean and winds carrying the vapors until they reincarnate as droplets on the cheeks of some other mountains. While billions of years of disciplined distillations of nature might have been necessary for the emergence of the complex ecologies of planet it was the human visioning that extracted out of these, the notions of the grand design, the myths of the eternal return and the longings for the timeless beauty. From these unique characteristics of humans emerge the visions of taming time, conquering space, reaching for the stars and touching light at the heart of darkness with a brush.
In search of pure visioning, challenge the certainties and assert the courage to imagine the unimagined. Shape daring ideas rather than hardening existing ideas into uncompromising ideologies. Project trajectories across unchartered horizons rather than following familiar trails behind tired guides.
If my message has come across it will help you challenge what is presented to you as grounding Reality, it will make you suspicious of the finalities of what is offered to you as Tradition and it will give you courage to abandon the teachers who demands ritualized Respect.
Let me say farewell to you by congratulating you once again on your achievements, by dedicating these thoughts, these frameworks, and these heuristics to you with a personal plea that you will consider them critically, that you will modify them, and add to them. I am hoping that you will test them in your lives and when you get a chance, pass your refined versions on to others.
Important Notice: This address comes with lifetime warranty. In case it causes anxiety, do not worry…..it is a known side effect. In case it causes confusion please report to ghdesigngroup@hotmail.com
The narrative is 2008 Convocation Address: Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi
December 06, 2008 and has been modified for the publication.
Dean, School of Architecture and Design
Beaconhouse National University, Lahore
Former Director and Professor Emeritus School of Architecture Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Abstract
In a situation where the conventional sources of wisdom are under question and the public discourse seeks ratings rather than generate substance, there is a need to think anew about what distinguishes us collectively as human and individually a creative beings. The essential dimensions of memory, self-reflection and the urge to aim at an envisioned future, personally and collectively, are proposed and elaborated. Against these dimensions some of the pathologies that lead to the current human condition are discussed.
At an operation level, the higher challenges of progressing from normative levels of a functioning human, a mere part of a socio-economic collectivity, towards the station of becoming a genuine creative individual is analyzed. The values of child-like curiosity, of imagination unbridled by well-engraved image banks of contemporary minds, and the challenge of knowing the difference between solving problems from known typologies to the courage to invent new problems, is stressed.
The address, hopefully, will be as much a congratulatory offering, as it will be an invitation for taking on the current, as well recognizing the not so obvious, challenges.
Let me start by saying that the times when age automatically meant some wisdom are gone. The white hair and the wrinkles on the forehead alone are not enough to present a countenance of wisdom. Neither is the nature of experience stable, nor the lessons learnt cumulative, nor is the innocence as innocent when one would get one’s sin’s forgiven before embarking on a journey from Karachi to Thatta.
Even within the stable frames of our sacred tradition the images and experiences are getting discordant. In the shopping plazas, gawking at vacation posters, we see the pictures of the House of God on throwaway travel brochures, tempting us to embark on the holy journey, with promises of five star comforts and countless units of thawab. And when and if we get there, in hours and not months, it looks so much like the pictures our eyes have become satiated with….except that we get pushed around a lot and run the risk of being trampled if we cannot go with the flow of circumambulating devotees. But there too we are being comforted by fellow believers that death by being trampled during pilgrimage could be an express invitation to the Heavenly Garden. In this age of managed spirituality and official religiosity, even wisdom is official and comes through state television.
I think that you, the young ones, have already arrived at the thresholds of wisdom, as we the older ones, while deluding ourselves to have acquired sagacity, are stepping into romantic recalls of one kind or another. Your and our minds might be millennia apart when we sit around a three generation dinner, after having slaughtered an animal, upholding the example of a patriarch prophet of 4000 year ago.
Turn the channels on and listen to the discussions of the young as well as the old. You will find them both claiming neat and clean, tightly packed ideological pronouncements, coated as considered opinions in response to the questions by the hosts. What is claimed so passionately cannot be substantiated, facts are used to create a false sense of authenticity, tones are polemical and anything that is close to emotions, protests, rhetorical or framed with an intention to awaken some deeper feelings are often judged imprecise, fuzzy, subjective and therefore tangential to the discussion. This situation prevails across subject domains, as broadly spread as international peace, domestic wars, dehsat gardi, azad khyali, fanoon-e-latifa and siyasat-e-kaseefa, declining morals caused by performing arts, international begging, with interest and without honor, and the a priori necessity of destructive weapons to protect an honor and an existence that remain elusive. And when topics have really become exhausted there is always the beloved, endangered Islam, whatever our learned ulema, online or off the topic, with emblematic turbans and designer beards, have made us believe, it is.
The topics I have touched are not unknown to you. You hear about them everyday, though the positions you hear might be quite different than what I have hinted at. But most of us will agree that behind these appearances there lurk some pathologies whose existence we do not want to acknowledge, much less study and confront. Maybe all these noises, in the name of free press and open discourse, are to drown some inner voices that do not let us sleep at night. We pretend that these sounds are from somewhere and of someone, with whom we have no relation. Perhaps all these opening and closings, these festivals and commemorations, these parades, and these collective showings and tellings of what we consider to be our achievements, are to avoid looking at ourselves in the mirrors that have been collecting dust in the amnesiac attics of our own minds.
Let me share with you an idea that is deceptively simple yet of great referential importance. Strange as it might sound to you, as graduates of early 21st century, it is an old idea from non-European philosophies that what distinguishes humans from other known creatures is their ability of remembering, reflecting and having a vision of the future. I have even proposed to students that these distinguishing traits form the underlying stratum for the very edifice of art and architecture. Most of them, with some explanation, have found this to be rather self evident, with the occasional exception of some die-hard contrarians, charmingly irritating as most of them are. I enjoy remembering one such student from Britain, who insisted that if remembering, reflecting and visioning were the criteria of being human, then his parrot was as much a human as he himself was a parrot. I hastily agreed as I knew Winston’s unique traits. Then he claimed that his parrot remembered as well as he could. I agreed with that too because he was not doing too well in my courses, primarily because of short attention span and erratic memory. But as he continued on his stiff upper brain path I had to challenge him by asking him if he knew any British parrot that had written a history of English speaking parrots and won a prize from an academy of parrots founded by a noble parrot. Winston would not surrender and suggested that such was quite a serious possibility in his future as English parrots fulfilled their manifest destiny. At that stage I got scared, as the son of an ex British subject, about my father’s destiny reincarnating as an imperial humanoid parrot, and gave up.
To be candid I like students like Winston over the ones in Pakistan who call me “Sir” Gulzar and claim, innocently I must add, that they respect me.
Now back to our subject:
Remembering
First, to be human is to remember with self-disciplined honesty and fidelity.
Beyond the necessity of memory to weave our temporal encounters into a flow that we call life, perhaps the most important role of memory, like the gravity, form and friction, that hold the stones of an arch together, is to progressively help us construct our personal and social identities. While there are many ways of storing our personal memories, the challenge is much more complex when we want to organize our collective reminiscences into a corroborated history. Our memories as parts of groups have entropic tendencies. The original order progresses towards a creeping disorder, analogous to short-circuited connections among the recordings of sequential events. The memories become selectively edited through premeditated additions and omissions. Achievements get diminished or exaggerated to the extent that some individuals disappear and others appear with superhuman attributes and even new middle names. Collective memories are often burdened with fantastic embellishments and history and historical fiction become indistinguishable. While memories, individual and collective, are a wonderful space within which we might play with our imaginations, we have to be careful about confusing our self created characters into historical beings, even as heroes. Unbridled “memory play” can lead to false idols and one needs to have critically analyzed history to keep restoring the necessary balance.
Reflecting
Second, it is a unique quality of humans to be critically reflective about causalities and consequences of their experiences. This self reflexive consciousness that acts as the inner dynamo for desire to place one’s self in the world, seeks consistent and stable patterns, so that one can repeat the beneficial and pleasurable and avoid the detrimental and painful. This is how the individual experiences get filtered through critical reflection into questions like “what might happen next time if such and such happens again”. This is how the individual knowledge grows. However, through a systemic dissemination and discourse, via institutions like universities, a societal consciousness and value structure starts to evolve with attendant motivations towards progress. It is precisely this kind of angst-ridden, intense yet mostly internalized, individual as well as collective, reflection that was happening in Germany after the humiliations of WWI. This is what led, among many things, to the crystallization, however uneven, of the Bauhaus. After the Nazi closure of the Bauhaus, its reincarnation in America was more a result of how the Museum of Modern Art framed, analyzed and wrote about it, rather than via the continuation of the original intentions of its founders. One has to give credit to Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe, in their own separate and different ways, to treat it more as an opportunity to reflect upon their earlier reflections, in a new land and under different circumstances, and mentor new kinds of continuities so crucial to modernism in architecture and numerous allied areas.
Visioning
Our third and final distinctive trait of being human is the ability to form a vision of a future rooted in a selfhood that is alive, awake and in search of its purpose in the continuity of time. Such visioning is rooted in questions like; “Who am I? Why am I here? Does my purpose end with my death, and if so where should I be heading while I am still alive?”
I have not forgotten the favorite phrase of one of my senior colleagues, and ex-salesman like Ronald Reagan and later vice president of administration of a university, “If you do not know where you are going….you will end up where you do not want to be.” I was both attracted and repulsed by this gem of American pragmatism. I was attracted because I could see its predictive accuracy all around me. I knew so many people who, while chasing the mirage of a degree with a “scope”, rather than setting their sights for something that had a vision based on a purpose other than the ability to make payments for credit cards, had gotten themselves imprisoned in secure corners of miserable drudgery. I was repulsed by Ronald’s aphorism because it pretended to help but only through awakening our deeper fears about ending up lost in a strange land with no map, a frequent childhood nightmare. This is not the kind of future visioning we are talking about.
I am more interested in the vision that would make us stare at unknown horizons rather than wish for a house in some gated neighborhood with armed guards and surveillance systems. And such visions are possible only when the self is in search of its genuine selfhood, when the wonder about our own life has reached a level that we are quietly convinced that we could not be a mere processing organisms, or as humans have sometimes been ecologically described as planetary skin disease, turning attractive food into unpleasant manure and that too in mere pursuit of our aggressive appetites. And one must start to wonder about our final contribution to this lovely blue planet other than the surrendering of our bodies to the top soil or our ashes to the rivers and the gases to the atmosphere.
To understand the visioning suggested here, I urge you to discover the lone protagonist of Ibne Tufail’s allegory of Hayye Ibn Yaqzan, literally translated as “Alive, the son of Awake”. He personifies, indeed epitomizes the self, with a vision to seek knowledge and cognizance of Truth, with such purity of intentions, that it become free of the textual necessity divine guidance that the rest of us are so dependent upon.
So we have constructed a reference system within which we can gauge our distinctness as humans in contrast with the known fellow creations. Simple, and even self-evident as it might sound, it is not that simple to achieve. Because like in all worthy pursuits of life the protocol might be simple but achieving success is elusive. Consider the game of chess: the protocols for king, queen, bishop, knight, rook and pawn are unambiguously known and simple. There are only 16 pieces per player and only two players with innocently simple black and white checkerboard. But how challenging to play, and what a wonder to attempt even guessing what goes on in the minds of the two player, hidden beyond the opacities of their faces, in deep recesses of their minds and psyches, and only God knows where else. Very analogous is the first player’s challenge of strategizing remembering, reflecting and visioning against the second player constituting our equally strategic entropic ability of deceptive amnesia, blaming our self-created experiences on detractors outside of ourselves, and adopting ritualistic routines in the darkness of ideological night and assuming that this is the life of practiced faith. You can imagine the complexity of these two human players, both working on the three coordinates as we defined, but each very differently from the other.
And this is the essence of the inner battles of life held up by the armature of self whose aim it is not to get internally conflicted. And this is my most important offering to you.
If the analogy of chess of six characteristic pieces on a two dimensional board boggles your mind with its complexities then consider the human who carries the attributes of king, queen, bishop, knight, rook and pawn, all in himself and then wants to win in a hyper-dimensional space of memory, reflection and envisioning future against another player with equally daunting attributes and perhaps more.
It is known that as the complexity of choices increases the finite strategies to achieve success reduce. This is especially true in the fields of liberal arts, in soft as against hard physical sciences, and especially in what we have come to know as fine and applied arts and even design and especially architecture as the most complex of civilizational accretions over time. Many start to accept the position that “some have it and others do not” and one should accept one’s lot in life. They stop seeking credible explanations for their failed attempts to remember with clarity, to reflect with reason and envision a positively modified course towards a successful future. There is great attraction at such time for tragic exit or religious invocations under the cover of patience and perseverance.
The dialectic of ascendant excellence and leveling mediocrity, that we all face, especially the students of arts and architecture, is never supposed to lead us to giving up and get shunted to some department of deterministic knowledge. In order to avoid these dark possibilities we need to extend our arguments from sphere of values and goals to those of approaches and operations. The three goals of remembering, reflecting and visioning now need to be converted into corresponding sets of catalytic suggestions, more academically known as heuristics, in service of the higher challenge of helping the graduates of today to progress from the normative levels of a functioning human, a mere part of a socio-economic collectivity, towards the station of becoming a genuine creative individual. Through these heuristics we aim to awaken the child-like courage of curiosity, stoke an imagination unclouded by the blurring overlays of commercial imagery or political disinformation, and invite them to show preference for identifying new problems with novel solutions rather than prescribing off-the-shelf solutions for corresponding, pre-existing problem types.
Heuristics towards Remembering
Work towards renaissance of the finest traditions of historical research and writing that is open to public debate and scrutiny that is free of jingoistic censorship and politico-religious correctness.
Map the unfolding processes towards a product rather than the static description of the end product. Notice the sequence of connected happenings and the blurred voids among them. Recall the starry nights on the way to the Beloved’s House and close your eyes, when you reach it. Awaken to the beauty of the “unfinished” drawings. Catch the ineffable eloquence of the moment when a Leonardo da Vinci drawing might have been suspended for whatever reasons. Feel the power of the unsaid in a poem.
Pay attention to the personal narratives of those who were pilgrims of horizons too far and whose stations along the way became destinations for others. Search for the “Unknown Craftsman” by honoring the known ones. Hear Vincent’s quest in his letters to Theo and honor Gibran’s longings for Mary. Collect all your letters received from those who never knew you and weave stories out of them that challenge the continuity of time.
Go to far places and walk. Draw on site with your own hands, on papers picked on the way.
Treat your childhood toys as precious objects. Visit your old schools if you can and look for the old man who gave lemonade to you even on days when you did not have enough coins.
Trust your memories to time with the rituals of recall, record and visitation, lest you yourself become a graveyard of erased tombstones.
Heuristics towards Reflecting
Awaken the comatose curiosity and wonder about its essential links with causalities and continuities. Imagine designing and making a magnetic resonance imaging device and lying in it to get your own brain-scan. Watch it with your own two brain extensions, your eyes and think about the closed loop.
Watch your own hand and wonder about its parts, its connections and its choreography. Go beyond appearances, see beyond the skin and never be settled for obvious names and categories.
Beware of “common sense”, it is too common to yield any serious reflectivity and in itself it is often misleading.
Poverty of ideas is the most debilitating of human afflictions and its pathological culmination is worse than death. Resist its spread; indeed wage a war against it, as if it was epidemic.
Reflect upon your experiences beyond the certainty of necessary facts. Beyond tangible performances, seek liberating realizations by reflecting upon the intangible, even transcendental qualities. It is in this sense that while aiming for excellence in a work of architecture, treat safety and functionality as “essential but otherwise unimportant”. It is not fair, or even intellectually defensible, that an architect should expect an award of excellence because the building has not fallen down after being occupied, or that the doors open in the appropriate directions, and that the rain water does not get in the room.
The quality of a work of art is not to be judged by the fact that among a whole lot it got sold or just because it follows a particular rule of colour or formal composition or just because, with all good intentions, it is an attempt at the calligraphy of a sacred verse.
Just like a dictionary, though it contains “all” the words, cannot be a declared a work of literature, a building though it might have all the ingredients of function and all the factors of safety cannot cross the thresholds of architecture.
We are advised to trust in God but make sure we tie our camel. If the assurance against the loss of a runaway camel was the goal then it being tied is essential and “trust in God” is not its logical consequence or its necessary coexistent. But if the Trust in a transcendent, non-corporeal God was the singular quest then one cannot make it conditional to the loss or non-loss of an untied or a tied camel respectively. Thus the actual advice is in the realm of simple causalities and a warning against invoking something in the realm of the abstractions and transcendence to assure something quite mundane and earthly.
Heuristics towards Visioning
Seek differentiation among the act of visioning and the strategic pursuit of a pre-determined target. In the visioning one is calling forth the imaginative skills that are clear, vibrant and agile like a mountain stream. It is led less by a strategy and more by dynamic, transformative responses to unfolding conditions, while remaining true to meta values and principles. In natural realm it is a combination of grand natural laws like gravity and dynamic topographic and biospheric processes that lends form, indeed the entire identity and meaning to what we know as Indus River and its valleys. When we lay on this observation the complex layer of human response to the Indus, we recognize its cultures, its languages, its arts, its settlements and its histories. Visioning by and about a human self is analogous to Indus developing a sense and an ability to imagine its encounters with the plains, the deserts and ultimately with the ocean while it is still playfully racing through the mountains. One can imagine the river wishfully contemplating its return to the mountains which the gravity would not allow. But one can equally convincingly imagine such a wish being fulfilled with the sun distilling the ocean and winds carrying the vapors until they reincarnate as droplets on the cheeks of some other mountains. While billions of years of disciplined distillations of nature might have been necessary for the emergence of the complex ecologies of planet it was the human visioning that extracted out of these, the notions of the grand design, the myths of the eternal return and the longings for the timeless beauty. From these unique characteristics of humans emerge the visions of taming time, conquering space, reaching for the stars and touching light at the heart of darkness with a brush.
In search of pure visioning, challenge the certainties and assert the courage to imagine the unimagined. Shape daring ideas rather than hardening existing ideas into uncompromising ideologies. Project trajectories across unchartered horizons rather than following familiar trails behind tired guides.
If my message has come across it will help you challenge what is presented to you as grounding Reality, it will make you suspicious of the finalities of what is offered to you as Tradition and it will give you courage to abandon the teachers who demands ritualized Respect.
Let me say farewell to you by congratulating you once again on your achievements, by dedicating these thoughts, these frameworks, and these heuristics to you with a personal plea that you will consider them critically, that you will modify them, and add to them. I am hoping that you will test them in your lives and when you get a chance, pass your refined versions on to others.
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The narrative is 2008 Convocation Address: Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi
December 06, 2008 and has been modified for the publication.
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