binary (b)

“I was born in a country of brooks and rivers, in a great corner of Champagne, called le Vallage for the great number of its valleys. The most beautiful of its places for me was the hollow of a valley by the side of fresh water, in the shade of willows… My Pleasure still is to follow the stream, to walk along its banks in the right direction, in the direction of the flowing water, the water that leads life towards the next village… But our native country is less an expanse of territory than a substance; it’s a rock or a soil or an aridity or a water or a light. It’s the place where our dreams materialize; it’s through that place that our dreams materialize; it’s through that place that our dreams take on their proper form…Dreaming beside the river, I gave my imagination to the water, the green, clear water, the water that makes the meadows green. I can’t sit beside a brook without falling into a deep reverie, without seeing once again my happiness… The stream doesn’t have to be ours; the water doesn’t have to be ours. The anonymous water knows all my secrets. And the same memory issues from every spring.”  —Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams ↩︎

“Perhaps men were not meant to live in such a place. If their own natures restrained them from approaching heaven too closely, then men should remain on the earth. When they reached the summit of the tower, the disorientation faded, or perhaps they had grown immune. Here, standing upon the square platform of the top, the miners gazed upon the most awesome scene ever glimpsed by men: far below them lay a tapestry of soil and sea, veiled by mist, rolling out in all directions to the limit of the eye. Just above them hung the roof of the world itself, the absolute upper demarcation of the sky, guaranteeing their vantage point as the highest possible. Here was as much of Creation as could be apprehended at once.” —Ted Chiang, Tower of Babylon ↩︎

Scott Burton, whose later works were composed mainly of functional public benches/seating, remarked that his work should, “place itself not in front of, but around, behind, underneath (literally) the audience.” / “A bench, in our modern gardens, is a thing to be sat upon; in Shenstone’s Leasowes it was a thing to be read.”  —Ian Hamilton Finlay, Selections ↩︎

“I’m not proposing a return to the Stone Age. My intent is not reactionary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I’m trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks. Go backward. Turn and return.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, A Non-Euclidean View of California ↩︎