Every ugly thing that occurs only demands more beauty to fill the void it leaves. This is our charge, and our life, I suppose. 

 Would rockstars still be making music if they had no fans? 

Lately I have been thinking about tethers and mirrors. 

A lot of things can be tethers - places, people, events. Memories can be tethers. Generally in American society, tethers are to be avoided, cut. Living life means always being in the present, to be without tethers. 

Mirrors. The act of revealing beauty and ugliness - the cold, objective, truth-telling quality of mirrors is both exhilarating and terrifying. Example. What if you thought you were running free until one day you look into a mirror and see

a

giant

tether? 

I think the less you write, the less clear your life becomes - the same goes for your work. 

That being said...one of the themes that have been swimming around for me, as an "artist," artist-architect or what have you...is the relationship between how you live and what you believe, between what you need and what you want. 

One of the things that has been troubling me and many others I believe, is the idea that we are in an age of post-humanism; the anti-renaissance; the un-enlightening. Basically, in the last 30 years, the faith in human beings as a morally superior and thus better deserving breed of creature has waned dramatically. As more and more data is produced to fit us into a larger system, and as we increasingly understand the negative impact we have made on our planet, our past dreams and hopes which have always fallen victim to our own flaws and imperfections seem more and more naive. Far from righteous negotiators of order, it seems that despite all of our efforts, when one pans out he can discover that the human race has been all along a steadily exponentially increasing force of consumption. At worst, this can be called a cancer. 

Within the merits of science it seems that even our most precious traits - memory, joy, or love - can be broken down into parts of a yet smaller system and with the right toys, turned on and off like a switch. The same then can be said of morality or dignity or even curiosity. One day perhaps even imagination will be explained. The fear is that once these things become classified as merely objective chemical reactions in our bodies, they will be devoid of all meaning - in other words, we are fast approaching the death of abstraction - light of all art. If one thinks about it, this stage in the development of the human race is not at all dissimilar to say, the stage of an individual passing between the age of 30's to 40's. In other words, speaking in general sociological terms, this is the phase in which a person sheds the innocence of younger days and faces a more substantial reality - but that is the question: Do we face this reality as people who willingly accept its harsh facts, do we delude ourselves and immerse into more intense fantasy, or is there another way...? 

So yes, I think the earth is in fact in a mid-life crisis...and I think that is what accounts for the state of young people today who are so educated and yet so lost - it has yet to be decided how we shall proceed. 

I think for me, the answer is still the same. Beauty exists between the simple and the ambiguous - between different aspects of sense - intrigue exists when we perceive something which we do not understand; when we make something that becomes affected by exterior forces; when what simply is can be clearly recognized as something which was not before. Living in the times requires insight, particularly into those thing in which are still ambiguous. Just like growing older, you graduate from and shed those mysteries of the past and find deeper enigmas in which to dwell. 

I love what Carlos Baker wrote about Ernest Hemingway : "[He could] tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth." 

 Failing to realize that it was never about one voice against the others but rather one voice despite them, she fell into the same trap as the rest. What is it about true art that is universal? Does it hit you like a hammer? Does it shout in your ear? No. It searches for a while in wide circles before finally breaking the surface, and then whispering, takes you by the hand. It tugs at you with gentle strings - it is not egotistical, it begs for your trust. 

 She wanted to be different. So she never could quite figure out why she wanted to be an artist - artists were supposed to have edge, to have a message, to be fed up with something or just plain crazy and she was none of those. She was paralyzed with the idea that everything she'd ever do had been done already but only louder.  

Architecture is not what I love. Architecture is only a vessel, an earthly incantation, for what I love.  

Giving up and growing up are not synonymous. I don't believe it. 

It should be no surprise that America's standard of an Architect has been (and in some cases still is) Howard Roark from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, that stoic, self-sustaining, uncompromising artist who placed his art above all else in life - above every single other living person in the world. When one reads the book, it is admittedly easy to see the draw - this country was founded on principles and what could be more admirable than a man who would put his principles before his life, fighting ferociously to defend them? To link belief, severe stoicism, and the creative act in this way, the hardened hero was put forth as a true American - raw and untameable but true. 

After reading Meryl Secrest's biography on Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect whom Howard Roark was modeled after, it becomes painstakingly clear what was missing behind the scenes in Rand's famous novel. Step by step, scene by scene, Meryl takes us by the hand and guides us through the haunting tragedies that almost inevitably dawn on such behavior. Lives lost and destroyed, chances for happiness sacrificed without consent in the name of one's art - without answering the question "is it worth it," for a young architect Meryl's book reads as a bitter pill, a wake-up call, a true test - it makes excruciatingly clear the problems of art as moral force, as thunderous fate, at the expense of those closest...

Having your cake and eating it too, at this point, seems more like an insult than a possibility. 

Lesson learned = Just because you can, or just because it's never been done, is a horrible reason to do anything.