From the Archives: Hymn to Janus

From the archives, here’s the hymn for Janus, the two-faced god of boundaries, that I wrote back in 2007.

Hail, two-faced god, looking forward and back,
reflecting on what came, and what will be:
you stand athwart each gate and branching track,
where free will intersects with destiny.
Your open portals meant unceasing war,
and easy turned the hinge that swung them wide;
a child’s touch alone could make them gape.
Some say blood-lust flows from that open door,
but wars truly start on this human side:
atrocity, massacre, conquest, rape

begin as pleasures in mortal cunning:
doors easily pushed are harder to pull.
Hobnails clash on streets as soldiers running,
fight til feet blister and weapons grow dull.
Janus, you stand at year’s first and last gate,
seeing both what we did, and what we’ll do.
Measurer of what was, and what is now,
and what may yet come, by chance or by fate,
please watch and keep accounts of old and new,
and count up, as sand grains, Time’s constant flow.

Janus two-faced, guide us through rolling days,
and teach us to spend our few hours well —
for Time hustles, and for no mortal stays;
through far-off mists we hear that swinging bell
which your astute ear so clearly discerns.
Behind us you see karma gathering,
a flood-front of justice picking up speed.
Open our eyes to see fate’s twisting turns,
to meet crisis with planned organizing,
as strong as oak, and pliant as reed.

I’ve made some alterations to the poem, as the perceptive among you will notice, but nothing particularly major – few word changes, some alterations to the punctuation.  Not like William Carlos Williams (who, as I recall the story, once wrote to his brother, “I had an exhausting day, poetically speaking:  I took a comma out, I put it back in again.”)

I don’t do any sort of ritual on this day, other than have dinner with my lady and enjoy some fireworks. It’s not even clear that we’ll stay up until midnight, although we may.  In the meantime, I wish all of you my readers a Joyous New Year in 2012.

Simplicity

Shelly has a post back from December 8th about how there are 10 modern technology items that he’d like to replace with older tools.  One of the tools on his list is a thermostat.

This on is on my list too, curiously enough. Because back in early November, my house was without power for four days, and it was not only dark, but cold.  Turns out, my heat is gas, and the gas would have worked fine in my house — except that the thermostat was electric.  Neither the furnace nor the hot water heater shut down during the power outage, so they weren’t electric.  The hot water heater just worked right through the blackout.  Since the power was out, the thermostat didn’t work, and the gas heating system registered the thermostat as being off, i.e., heat wasn’t needed.  It got fairly cold in my house as a result each night for four nights.

We live in a world of tremendous complexity, and it’s important to remember that complexity is a response to extra energy in a system.  If you discover that you have corvée labor and a massive number of overseers, you wind up building pyramids or ziggurats.  If you discover you have the largest coal reserves in Europe, you build railway systems.  If you discover you have oil reserves, you build the largest industrial system in the world.  If you have both gas heat and electric, you use both to manage the heating and cooling in your house.

It turned out to be a mistake.  When one failed, the whole system failed.

Shelly asked us to consider what modern-day tools we’d like to replace with older versions.  I think there’s something to be said for learning how old tools and machines work.  I’m talking about ‘tools’ here in a very broad sense. It’s really more along the lines of ‘tools and techniques’ really, but I’m trying to find some online links that will help me achieve some goals.

So I’m deciding on a few projects I want to complete in 2012.

1. Replace the thermostat in my house with a mechanical model.
2. Learn to use a slide rule instead of a calculator. (buy me a slide rule!)
3. build and learn to use an astrolabe.
4. Work out with yoga and tai chi instead of at a gym.
5. Write with pens and paper more using Italic handwriting instead of on a computer.
6. Learn to make more ruler-and-compass constructions part of my regular art practice.
7. Do a better job with my five year diary project. (I don’t have nearly enough entries from this past year; losing it for all spring and summer didn’t help).
8. Read more (though I don’t need an app for it); watch less TV.
9. Play more music on my own.
10. Cook more for myself and for others.

Best of 2011 / sixty more pageviews?

I’d love to get sixty page views on my blog today.

It was kind of a big milestone for me to get 40,000 page views this year, and surprisingly, I’m about to hit 42,000 blog views. I’d love to meet that milestone.  But it’s not fair to just give you the request, and not give you the “Best of 2011″.  So here they are: the ten most frequently read posts of 2011.

1. Learning to draw the Tree of Life
2. Emotional Intelligence by Peter Salovey
3. Art of Memory
4. The Memory Palace
5. The horse may learn to talk…
6. From the sewing machine: notebooks
7. Guest Post: Stephen Downes on Fads
8. Anti-Teacher Upsurge
9. driven by data
10. Middletown Collapse

It’s not a bad list.  But it’s unclear to me why some of these posts have become so popular, and others have not.  Peter Salovey? Really?  Stephen Downes I understand.  The concerns about the anti-teacher upsurge, I get.  Palace of Memory, I get.

Incidentally, I bought the book, Memorize the Faith. It’s quite interesting, and it has exactly the thing that I thought I would do myself: It has illustrations of the different parts of various rooms in a house, and it shows how they’re connected, and it builds a model palace of memory for all of the various things that you might want to memorize in Catholic doctrine.  I’m not sure I want to memorize Catholic doctrine, but I may use it as the basis of my own learning process, and the process I teach my students, for the future.  Very cool.

Inventing a Mindset for Success

I had a one-on-one meeting with one of my peers in the design world a while back.  I shouldn’t call him a peer, really.  Coach, perhaps?  He’s a lot better at some of the actual work of design than I am, and he’s been doing it longer.   He’s really helped coach me through the design process, even as I’ve coached him to understand the metacognitive challenges of trying to teach people to reflect on what they’re learning, and how they’re learning it.

Still, neither of us is trained as a designer.  We’ve come to that role accidentally, as Accidental Creatives, and discovered:

1. We LIKE being creative; and
2. We are CAPABLE creatives.

We both are what IDEO, and Tom Kelley, call “T-shaped people”: we have broad wealth of knowledge and experience (that’s the top of the T), but we also have deep knowledge that is unmatched in our respective disciplines (That’s the vertical of the T).  That doesn’t mean that, as untrained designers, we don’t hit pitfalls; but being untrained designers gives us advantages that others don’t.

I’m drifting from my topic.  That’s because most design work takes place within what I like to call “the metacognitive envelope” (if I ever start a rock band, that’s our name.  You read it here first; you can’t take our name.)  When you’re in the Metacognitive Envelope, you’re so busy using so much of your brain — creativity, memory, willpower, visual processing, language processing — that you can’t at the same time observe the process your brain is going through.  It’s like licking your own elbow.  Your focus is on solving the design challenge, not on what types of thinking you’re doing, or in what order.

The vast majority of what we did was put ideas on paper.  I can’t say that all the ideas were good.  A lot of them weren’t.  I can’t say that all the ideas were bad, either, though.  Most of them, as individual ideas, were not at all important.  Some of them were only good because they were in context with other ideas of similar quality.  

The point I’m trying to make, ultimately, is that we came up with the mindset of success first.  We talked ourselves into believing there was a great solution, we could find it, and that people would be impressed with the results. The forward-leaning intent to find great results preceded the great results.

And we got great results.

I wish all my projects turned out like this.  More, I wish I had an easy way of teaching this process to my students.