Enduring qualities in the desert

Illustration mine, from a notebook, 2017: “you’re growing up, that’s the problem.”

Amid Jung’s confrontation with the unconscious that unravels in the volumes of the Black Books: Notebooks of Transformation, he identifies the loss of the dignity that is inherent to acts of concentrated intention. The absence of prayer to which he refers, is the absence of a directed, focused intention that concentrates all of a person’s awareness and presence.

In his Black Book vol. III, January 1914, Jung refers to the anchorite, before contemplating a scarab in the rare grass of the desert: “He probably does not know—we have no more prayers. How should he know about our nakedness and poverty? What has happened to our prayers? I admit that I miss them here. This must really be because of the desert. It seems here as if one ought to know how to pray. Is the desert so very bad? I think it is no worse than our cultural deserts, which we call cities.”

The psyche of a city is the reflection of its facets turned upon one another, refracting light and shadow in ways that bend, contort and consume, trapping inwardly and unable to flow. Cities that abandon and are abandoned, from within, become incubators of fracture even under the illusion of connection, where one shatters against another in a repetition of seeking and entrapment within intentionless anxiety, growing the inner desert outward and taking in the strange sands of others.

. . . . .

Transposed from one desert to another, quotes from notebook, 2017:

“Baudelaire saw in the modern city the possibility for transcending the cultural forces we have depicted. The modern city can turn people outward, not inward; rather than the wholeness, the city can give them experiences of otherness. The power of the city to reorient people in this way lies in its diversity; in the presence of difference, people have at least the possibility to step outside themselves.”

— Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (1990).

“We tend to proceed in life as though we will live forever, thereby remaining optimistic enough to believe what we do has some enduring value and meaning. Without this capacity for denial, most would become paralyzed by despair. If architects did not believe their designs had some enduring qualities, it would be difficult to believe in what they do. So, even the designer of temporary architectural installations believes they will endure through various forms of documentation — photos, film, even reconstructions — and thus finds sanctuary in denial.”

— Lebbeus Woods, Inevitable Architecture (July 9, 2012).

“…the metropolis places emphasis on striving for the most individual forms of personal existence—regardless of whether it is always correct or always successful. The development of modern culture is characterised by the predominance of what one can call the objective spirit over the subjective…”

— Georg Simmel, “On Individuality and Social Structure”, The Metropolis and Modern Life.