Kavad rear-side / open

Kavad rear-side / open
Originally uploaded by anselm23

The effort involved in prototyping the kavad design continues apace. Because I think that the path of hermetic thought is closely related to the path of creative design that I’m trying to develop a teaching process for at my school, I’m building a digital model of this storyteller’s box, based loosely on the kavad of the Sacred Geometer that I first saw at Wesley University. It’s proving quite useful, actually — I can’t model the pivoting parts, unfortunately, but I can create fairly precise measurements and point to where the hinges and pivot points are going to be.

I think my biggest challenge right now is that I don’t really see a way to support the upper chamber on top of the lower chamber except by two relatively thin columns. If those columns are wood, all’s well and good (probably), but it’s less than ideal if the whole thing is foam board, glue and paint.

If you click through to my Flickr account, there’s about twelve related images of this digital model of the Kavad, and you can get a sense of the scale — on most people, the thing is about knee-high when standing on the ground, and (currently) it folds out to about four feet wide. I count about 15 major panels where artwork can go, plus the four outside walls and the roof inside and out… so that makes twenty major surfaces, and maybe another 10-15 minor surfaces. It’s not bad for telling a complex story, I think.

Via Flickr:
Another view of the backside of the kavad’s internal doors. Here you can also see that the lid of the upper chamber is open, and that the internal drawer on the back side has been pulled out.

Where 3 Roads Meet

One of my side activities is running trivia night on Thursdays at the local coffee house. Last night, I was stumped by a question i didn’t quite believe the answer to:

What class of tropical plants contains the flower used to produce vanilla?

The answer is, to my surprise, orchids.

When I went looking for confirmation of this trivia fact before asking the question, though, I found out a) the question was correct and b) about this person.

Thank you, Edmond Albius, for bringing us vanilla.

Born in Ste. Suzanne on the French colonial island of Reunion in 1829, at age 12 he invented a technique for pollinating vanilla plants still used today: a blade of grass in one hand is used to lift the flower out of the way, and a human thumb then pollinates the plant; Albius’s technique is still used today, and is the reason why vanilla can be cultivated at all outside its native country of Mexico. Born in slavery and not freed until France abolished slavery in 1841, Albius died in 1880 in poverty, after serving a prison term for stealing jewelry from the wife of a vanilla magnate while working as a house slave.

where three roads meet

Trivia comes from a Latin root word that means a three-way crossroads and it refers to the first three elements of the medieval liberal arts curriculum: rhetoric, grammar, and logic. Why does the story of Edmond Albius remind me of this, besides the fact that his name came up during a trivia contest?

Well, first of all, I had to figure out how to summarize his story, so you didn’t have to visit the Wikipedia article if you didn’t want to. That’s grammar.

Second, I had to notice that a certain logic underlay his story: close observation of the plants in the field revealed certain obvious realities of their reproduction to him, and so he was able to determine a simple system for pollinating them; but his socioeconomic status left him in a state of limbo.

Finally, I can notice that the man who made possible nearly all of today’s vanilla production never profited from his discovery; but rather was abused, enslaved, jailed and ruined for the sake of the profits of others.  If I then draw a comparative analogy between Edmond Albius’s actual work in the field, and the hapless plantation owner who would have been ruined — ruined, I say! — without a pollination technique, and thus unable to buy jewelry for his privileged lady; and the multimillionaires who presently have the mismanagement of the American government and economy in their hands, yet have been unable to rise to their responsibilities to the rest of us… Then that, friends, would be rhetoric.

And the results of that web of thinking, where three roads meet, is far from trivial.

Taiji Day 97: Find the Stretch

Slow down enough that you can find the stretch on each posture.  That’s the main advice for today.  Ow.