In an epic bout of WILFING brought on by an excessive early morning round of woofing that roused me from bed at an uncivil Sunday morning hour, I've landed here, thinking about Brian Eno. I couldn't possibly reconstruct the path now, but funny how these things happen, that I end up with an essay written by one of my favourite musicians (no, he's not a musician. I know. A philosopher of sound?) about topics close to my heart.
I love the story of the multimillion dollar Manhattan apartment set in a desolate and gloomy industrial street, as if the context doesn't matter. I'm also much intrigued by the suggestion that this kind of blithe oblivion to context might be North-Amero-centric as it relates to my increasing fears that I don't know nearly enough about how cities or even brains work outside of my own continent. It reminds me once again of a recent conversation I had with an architect interested in environmental psychology who said that he thought the hypothesis that we can acccount for many environmental preferences by imagining a connection with ancient Savannah forebears was a fevered figment of the American imagination. But the most intriguing part of the essay is Eno's claim that as we misunderstand space by focusing on the near-at-hand, the immediately visible, the isovist (which is one of my main book messages as well), we're also narrowing our temporal focus to mere moments. It's a terrible cliche to rabbit on about how life is speeding up blah blah blah, but much more interesting to think about some kind of integral connection between our inability to understand the structure of large scale space and our blind spot for any temporal effects that extend beyond a few minutes into our future.
Happy mid-summer Dr. Ellard. Congrats on the release of your book :) Elyse said she attended your book launch and reported back that you were swamped...as I'm sure you have been ever since (and before, for that matter). I would have dropped in personally but I've been in Vancouver since early May. One of my hosts here came home with a copy of your book from the public library...I'm eager to get into it, as you've generally been quite an enjoyable speaker, and I can only assume that ability translates, in your case, into good writing.
I had no idea you liked Eno..thank you for the essay link. It's something I'll have to read a little later on, after this camping trip gets sorted out. I guess we'll see how our sense of direction holds up in a dense forest :P
Have you listened to Ambient 1/ Music for airports while in an airport? DO!
Travel safely, take care.
Justin
Posted by: Justin | June 19, 2009 at 03:42 PM