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polytekton

How to cultivate an identity in the here and now is always grounded in a well-maintained mythology derived from an increasingly hazy past. So, let me remember spending hours in the forest adjacent to Spork-Eichholz (see map on the left), the small village near Detmold, Germany, where I grew up for the first twenty years of my life. This is where I created imaginary places in my head, where I played on the harvested wheat and barley fields to the north of our rental apartment, where I ran with kites in the Fall, and bicycled, furiously, in the Summer.

This is where I learned to whistle because the door bell of the house to which I was delivering Der Spiegel every week didn’t work. It’s the site of an inconsequential accident but a persistent memory. I still wear a scar on my lower arm from scraping along that car parked next to the falling bicycle, a bicycle that felt odd to me because it belonged to a friend, and my kinesthetic frame had not adjusted to the bicycle. That taught me the concept of difference, at age 6.

At this point in time I want to believe that those hours spent imagining, playing, whistling, and falling in three dimensions gave me a well-grounded foundation to become both a designer (in the sense of projecting ideas into the present through representations like drawings, models, etc.) and a scientist, if we understand scientists not only as nerdy professors in white lab coats (I am that, too. See the image on the right.) but also as innovative tinkerers who desire to learn. After all, the word ‘science’ derives from the Latin ‘scire’, to know, and the word ‘design’, in German at least as ‘Entwurf’, is a kind of throwing-out-into-the-world of something that has not existed before, an invention, some thing new to know.

Today I believe that as a designer I create in the face of nothingness, not in the sense of a denial of context (there is no tabula rasa) but rather in the sense of covering up with materiality the fundamental absence of a ground. Picture the earth moving through space at about 67000 miles/hour (someone better check this. I’m not sure of my math...). The apparent certainty of a ground is nothing but an illusion from a scientific perspective. Philosophically, and emotionally as well, I feel the need to create in the face of that absence of a ground. That’s why one of my favorite poems is probably the following beauty by the American writer Archibald MacLeish.

The End of the World
Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:
And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing — nothing at all.

Another favorite author of mine is the late Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., not only because he carefully crafted his stories but perhaps also because with his craggy face he looked a bit like my late father (who didn’t work as a freelance writer like Mr. Vonnegut but as a newspaper journalist). Vonnegut, not my father, wrote in 2007:

The very best thing you can be in life is a teacher, provided that you are crazy in love with what you teach, and that your classes consist of eighteen students or fewer. Classes of eighteen students or fewer are a family, and feel and act like one.

I am a teacher...

Proviso: for those who care, I’m NOT related to, nor do I know anything about this mikesch or this one, except that I share his or her name.

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