A friend sent me a something by thinking/computer/pattern language heavyweight Richard P. Gabriel, The Nature of Order: The Post-Pattern World. Some wonderful thoughts.
Roughness
Things which have real life always have a certain ease, a morphological roughness. It is not a residue of technically inferior culture, or the result of handcraft or inaccuracy. It is an essential structural feature which they have and without which a things cannot be whole.
Often the border of an ancient carpet is “irregular” where it goes round the corner—that is, the design breaks, the corner seems “patched together.” This does not happen through carelessness or inaccuracy. On the contrary, it happens because the weaver is paying close attention to the positive and negative, to the alternating repetition of the border, to the good shape of each compartment of the wave and each bit of open space—and makes an effort all along the border to be sure these are “just right.” To keep all of them just right along the length of the border, some loose and makeshift composition must be done at the corner.
If the weaver wanted instead to calculate or plot out a so-called “perfect” solution to the corner, she would then have to abandon her constant paying attention to the right size, right shape, right positive-negative of the border elements, because these would all be determined mechanically by outside considerations—i.e., by the grid of the border. The corner solution would then dominate the design in a way which would destroy the weaver’s ability to do what is just right at each point. The life of the design would be destroyed.
All my examples show how the seemingly rough solution—which seems superficially inaccurate—is in fact more precise, not less so, because it comes about as a result of paying attention to what matters most, and letting go of what matters less. As the power of this completed carpet clearly shows, a perfect corner does not matter nearly as much as the correct balance and positive space in the border. The seemingly rough arrangement is more precise because it comes from a much more careful guarding of the essential centers in the design.
In a man-made thing, another essential aspect of the property of roughness, is its abandon. Roughness can never be consciously or deliberately created. Then it is merely contrived. To make a thing live, its roughness must be the product of egolessness, the product of no will.
Four Conditions Necessary for Unfolding to Happen
Step-by-Step Adaptation: The process, whether large or small, must be step-by-step, and gradual. Each part of the environment, at every stage of its planning, conception, and construction, must evolve, be developed step-by-step. The form must be created step-by-step, each step being an adaptation in which things get fitted more and more closely to a harmonious whole.
Feedback: To guide the adaptation, at each step in the process there must be a continuous and relatively immediate feedback about whether what has been done is a living structure in sufficient degree. In human society this requires as a minimum a common shared understanding of “life”.
The process is then capable of adapting to this feedback, instantaneously, so that what has life can be kept and what doesn’t have life will be rejected—with agreement—all while the process is going on.
Unpredictability: To make the adaptation successful, the process must be relaxed about the unpredictable character of where it goes. Unfolding cannot occur except in a framework which allows the whole to go where it must go. The dire modern passion for planning and advance control must be replaced by an attitude which recognizes that openness to the future, and lack of predictability, is a condition for success. It must be alright for the thing to become whatever it becomes, under the influence of adaptation and feedback, even though one does not know, in detail, what that thing is going to be.
Awareness of the Whole: Fourth, and this is the most difficult for us, there must be an ever-present awareness of the whole, throughout the process. For the adaptation to allow wholes to unfold successfully, the unfolding must take place within a framework of true awareness of the whole.
Fundamental Process
1. At every step of the process—whether conceiving, designing, making, maintaining, or repairing—we must always be concerned with the whole within which we are making anything. We look at this wholeness, absorb it, try to feel its deep structure.
2. We ask which kind of thing we can do next that will do the most to give this wholeness the most positive increase of life.
3. As we ask this question, we necessarily direct ourselves to centers, the units of energy within the whole, and ask which one center could be created (or extended or intensified or even pruned) that will most increase the life of the whole.
4. As we work to enhance this new living center, we do it in such a way as also to create or intensify (by the same action) the life of some larger center.
5. Simultaneously we also make at least one center of the same size (next to the one we are concentrating on), and one or more smaller centers—increasing their life too.
6. We check to see if what we have done has truly increased the life and feeling of the whole. If the feeling of the whole has not been deepened by the step we have just taken, we wipe it out. Otherwise we go on.
7. We then repeat the entire process, starting at step 1 again, with the newly modified whole.
8. We stop altogether when there is no further step we can take that intensifies the feeling of the whole.
