Nude

Sorry I have left this so long, but had to given the weight of your incredible arguments. I even had to copy and paste them into a word document to properly digest them!!

What is it about a Utopian concept do you not believe in? The word in itself means an ‘ideal’ does it not. Or, is it the burden that weighs heavily on the past ‘failed’ utopias; the projection we have on them? Or is it that fact that one ideal cannot suit everybody’s ideals equally?

I agree we are prone to weakness as humanity, but then I look towards the beauty inherent in civilisations across the world of which the extent we possibly don’t know. What about those who live by land, for the land and only take so much that they can give back? What of those who believe everything is community, and that community extends beyond a human realm; but to nature, animals. The ecology that surrounds them?

We have distilled this out of our lives, slowly but surely, even those (like myself) who believe themselves to be making an effort in their lives to be sustainable (dare I use that overly used word!). Part of me is very inspired by Ian McHarg’s ‘Design with Nature’ particularly his chapter ‘The Plight’ (can’t find it online unfortunately) -it has a beautiful balance between pessimism and optimist, creation and desecration; anger and hope.

Do you think our pursuit of individualism is actually true? Is it not hypocritical that this post modernist line of thought drives for ‘individualism’ but at the same time says we must ALL believe in the same ‘dream’ to be successful? So are we really that individualistic in our needs, at a raw, visceral level?

Do you think the very thing suppressed currently now would heighten our aspects of our selves without threatening the rest of our community? Is it not creativity that should be driven into our lives? Doesn’t individualism just push for selfishness and enlarged and enraged egos?

I am not sure whether we are actually that different in emotional, physical and spiritual needs!!

I am not convinced that these more ‘technological’ materials for buildings in Frescoe’s project are more sustainable. Even before their conception I feel they have unbalanced the scales of ethicality. What about the water, our prized resource, to create these materials? What about the oil used for the plastics, and structural steel/iron etc? What about the insensitivity of placing a large population in high rises; that will result in a huge problems given that a basic human need is to be on the ground. What about the artificial environments these places create? Is it not the environment we surround our self in, make who we are essentially? So the further removed we are from the ground, the more removed we are from nature for sure?

I agree the vision is bold and grand. But given the incredible buildings we still have standing today 2 or 3 thousand years on from their building is testament to just how sustainable traditional building materials are. Also, on a basic level we should take from the earth what can be taken back to the land without affecting it (I advocate mud architecture!!). Times come and go. We, ourselves, are here for the shortest amounts of time. What do we know about these technological advanced materials really when all things are considered?

And besides, I believe that it isn’t necessarily the tool but more how we use the tool. I think a nice example is how we tend to warm our whole room/house in winter thus using resources we can’t afford to use in such quantities. A Japanese tradition (and many other traditions for sure) is to have a little fire under the low table they are sitting at which warms only the people sitting at the table.

In something as simple as this, there is sensibility.

There are buildings already built, why not adapt them for our use? Why tear them down and start again? They must be durable to have lasted thus far.....

I have never heard of ‘Radiating Democracy’ to be honest. I love your description of it. I think to have the core light would be guiding. But once again, how do the ‘lights’ get voted? Could this be a system easily corrupted? Or perhaps at times I can have too little faith in humanity.

But no, I don’t! I believe we are conscious of what is happening to us. We just have a money heavy system holding us down, more than holding us down; more like the moloch of Ginsberg poem:

‘What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!’

Education, in my opinion, is permeable! Education isn’t reading and writing if you don’t want it to be. Education is experience and intuition, curiosity and love. Education gets you through life, not a career. Education is not to be generalised. With our 7 billion people education could never be the same except with the basic rule of intuition.

But ofcourse, this is with my enormous trust in humanity that our ‘right’ sides rule of our ‘wrong’. This is where I assume that in a stable, steady environment we are instruments of love, charity , hope and inspiration.

In conclusion, I am an idealist! I have no fear of idealism, I think it keeps me hopeful, curious and perpetually enamoured by life. But this leaves one logistical problem; how does one bridge our present reality with the ‘ideal’ of the above, or dare I say, this utopia!!

I believe firstly we need Capitalism to fail and instead a steady rise of un-hierarchical democracy, whether it be radiant or grassroots. I believe that we need to get to the crux of our needs in this change, in the breaking of the Capitalism back. We need to revalue our lives, the lives of others, and those of past ‘failed’ peoples such as the Rapanui on Easter Island. We need to learn intuitively, un-agressively, non-competitively and realise that we all fight the same battles, or live the same dream.

This might be all very well, and nauseatingly beautiful and unachievable (!!), but how do we break the rearing horse’s back? Is boycott the answer to Capitalism’s fall? Is the oil going to run out? Is World War III going to rage and an environmental bomb (if one hasn’t already fallen) going to timely end our ignorance and plundering?

Or is it simply a patient wait, where we make the most of what we have. Where we simplify our lives, re-assert our balanced values and wait and trust in Gaia to choose what she wants?