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Great War

Posted in Conceptual Art, Lucerne Village, Mystical Experience, Unknown with tags , , , , , , on May 11, 2012 by javedbabar

There was a downside to the Nobbys – black spots that Naomi and her uncle Bobby had drawn all over the page. They were indeed points of possibility, from which any image could appear spontaneously, but they were also holes into which objects could disappear. They were points of both creation and destruction.

Naomi pulled up her socks and smoothed her hair. “What are you doing?” asked Bobby.

“I’m going into the drawing,” she said. “To look around.”

“Wait a minute,” said Bobby. “Let’s think about this first. What’s happening in there? We should know before we go back.”

Naomi pushed her nose up against the drawing. She was looking too closely, thought Bobby, she must have weak eyes. Did she need glasses already?

She said, “They look like holes when you look closely. Not like mole hills or star…” Bobby half-turned his head and said, “Sshh! Listen! Can you hear something?”

Naomi half-turned her head the other way, trying to mirror her uncle. She heard rumblings far away, like flour sacks hitting the ground every few seconds. She wondered, what are these tha-booms?

“Get down!” said Bobby as he felt a wave of hot air rush across his fingers. It seemed as if the air pushed first one way and then the other. He also felt a blast of heat, and tiny sharp fragments. “Ow! Ow! Ow!” he said, pulling back his hands. Naomi had already ducked under the table.

Bobby looked into the drawing and saw a black ball with a wick at the top, a classic cartoon bomb which makes a spiky flash saying “Boom!” But it also had a long fuse running along the ground, which joined with other fuses coming from other bombs, all making a thick tangle heading off towards a nuclear reactor with the tri-lobed International Radiation Hazard sign. It seemed these small chemical explosions were part of a larger system to trigger a nuclear explosion.

“Stay under the table!” he shouted at Naomi, and entered the drawing. He smelled cordite and a chilli tang. The site of the nearest Nobby was a blast seat – a point of detonation and destruction. He wondered what had been destroyed at this dark heart of explosive power. There was no obvious wreckage to show type, quantity, or quality of explosive used, not that he was any expert; what he knew was by watching footage from Iraq and Afghanistan. He looked for evidence of mechanical stress, penetration of projectiles, pressure damage, and other explosion-generated effects. Exothermic reactions of explosive materials provide sudden violent energy release. There is no mistaking a bomb.

“Uncle Bobby! Can I come out now?” Naomi’s voice was faint, but audible in the drawing, as the rumblings were far away.

“No! Stay where you are!” he shouted.

He wondered what had been destroyed here. Was it an actual physical object or just its image – this was a drawing after all. He saw another Nobby and walked towards it, crushing loose mortar fragments and crunching glass. This Nobby was different. Its blackness was diffuse.

If these blasts had occurred already, then how had they affected the nuclear reactor? Had it been destroyed, and its radiation released? Bobby checked his hands to see if they were flaking or glowing. They seemed quite hairy but otherwise fine.

He recalled a news item about Thermobarbaric weapons, which produced a vicious combination of negative shock waves and extreme temperatures, incinerating objects immediately. It was a way for governments to kill people horribly yet claim that they were acting morally, because it was a “conventional weapon”.

Bobby felt a great separation in the drawing. It seemed that great powers had assembled into opposing alliances, with black and white pulling apart. Buildings were standing and trees were lush but humans were absent. Some wretched plot had been hatched. Was this drawing a place of secret destruction?

He fell to his knees unexpectedly. He felt overwhelmed and lost. This was a future battlefield where millions, even billions, could be killed by the press of one button, but “valuable infrastructure” preserved. What future was there for anyone?

A little hand touched and then held his hand. His niece Naomi had entered the drawing. She smiled and he smiled. He laughed and she laughed. Her mouth was a little black hole full of everything, including words of innocence and dreams of truth.

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Revolting

Posted in Conceptual Art, Lucerne Village, Mystical Experience, Unknown with tags , , , , , , , on May 10, 2012 by javedbabar

Naomi and her Uncle Bobby had been drawing all day. They had started with a jungle in his hardback notebook, which, over many pages, had developed into a city, which became chaotic and whose streets were now ruled by Strong Man, the leader of local vigilante group LL (Lookout Lucerne). It was said that he had become so powerful that even The Authority dared not refuse his requests. He had recently banned all art.

This created a serious issue for Naomi and Bobby. They had created this world by drawing, and if art was banned then how would their story develop? This creative conundrum led to high-order inertia.

“What shall we do, Uncle Bobby?” Naomi sat with her head in her hands, with her fat coloured pencils lying on the table around her. She had inadvertently placed them in a semi-circle around the drawing, all of them pointing inwards, as if the forms hidden within them yearned to break free and manifest themselves. But for this they needed Naomi’s co-operation, and Strong Man’s permission, for the worlds within and beyond the drawing were interpenetrated.

“Strong Man has become the dictator,” said Bobby. “I wonder whether he has a social agenda of some kind, or he’s just power crazy. In the ancient world, dictator was a respectable title, meaning a person appointed to rule in times of trouble. Strong Man isn’t that though. He’s a bully. He made the trouble! He’s made The Authority suspend elections and civil liberties, then proclaimed a state of emergency, repressed political opponents, and he rules by decree. Kid, these are dangerous times. We should keep our heads down for a while.”

“But shouldn’t we do something?” said Naomi. “Remember when we ate oysters on the coast? You told me about the grain of sand that irritates the oyster and becomes a pearl? Can’t people be like that, and cause trouble, and make things better?”

Her eyes look like pearls, thought Bobby. He told her how every system becomes rigid and eventually needs to change. The classic example was India’s caste system. What began as family-oriented trade guilds became a method of social oppression where people were killed for being careless enough to allow their shadow to fall across that of a higher caste person. You needed a revolutionary like Gandhi to catalyse change. He called Untouchables “Children of God”.

“These revolutionaries, are they good people or bad people?” said Naomi. “Don’t they cause lots of trouble?”

Bobby needed to think things through. Yes they did cause trouble, and sometimes wars, but they had higher purpose.

His art history studies came to mind. His favourite artists had all been mavericks. Picasso had produced so many styles of work that he was impossible to pin down – was he making blue, rose, African, cubist, or epic political art? Jackson Pollock’s huge, wild drip paintings challenged views of representational art. Damien Hirst had pickled sheep and sharks, promoting death as art. Were they great artists – who knew? They had shaken things up surely, but would an artist be enough to change Naomi and Bobby’s world?

Maybe a scientist would be better. Galileo’s improvements to the telescope led to his championing the heliocentric universe, for which “heresy” he was placed under lifetime house arrest. Darwin’s careful observations of creatures led to his conclusion that all species of life evolve by natural selection, revolutionizing our understanding of life on earth. Einstein worked quietly on developing the world’s most famous equation: E=mc2, which explained space-time and accelerated quantum theory.

Or maybe they need a spiritual revolutionary. Buddha the Awakened One rejected traditional power structures and prevailing notions of old age, sickness, and death. Moses killed an oppressive slave-master and led his people across the Red Sea into the Promised Land. Jesus mixed with prostitutes and lepers, and healed the sick and lame. All of these people were seen as both good and bad but given time, their truths became clear.

Bobby wondered about Lucerne’s holy men; Guru Baba was too old and demented, and Ozwold Malchizedek, known as OM, was too flaky.

“What about you?” said Naomi, as if she had been following his thoughts.

“I’m an introvert,” he said. “I don’t like crowds.”

“Well I like crowds,” said Naomi. “Don’t you remember, I sang and danced on Canadia Day? Why don’t we do it together? Naomi and Bobby – we could become Nobby.”

Bobby couldn’t help laughing. “Okay,” he said, and together they drew black spots – what she called Nobbys – all over her drawing. Points of Change. Known to mystics as black light or midnight sun, each was a union of opposites, where duality was encompassed by unity, and everything returned to its original state of Purity and Possibility. Each Nobby they made with the point of a pencil was creation anew.

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Art Attacks

Posted in Conceptual Art, Lucerne Village, Mystical Experience, Unknown with tags , , , , , , , , on May 9, 2012 by javedbabar

Naomi and her Uncle Bobby had begun by sketching a jungle, to which they’d added roads, railways, and power lines, then factories, media, and telecoms. They discussed developing it into a city but decided to stay with quality over quantity, and avoid the congestion, pollution, noise, crime, expense and stress of urban centres. Modern development can’t be stopped though. Transformation of rural landscape to urban jungle is inexorable.

The hub of the city remained the original village, but it became increasingly commercial, and residents could no longer afford the inflated rents. Houses became shops, and shops became factories, and factories became distribution centres. Lucerne village was essentially a CBD: Central Business District. New suburbs developed on what were once farms, and beyond them were exburbs – separate municipalities within easy commute. These rapid changes horrified Bobby, but Naomi was more relaxed about them. New parks and playgrounds, shops and salons, galleries and museums were all open to her, mostly within walking distance, and because she was in her own drawing she didn’t have to attend school. There wasn’t one.

As the city acquired administrative, legal, and historic status its attraction grew, and many more people came for trade, sometimes travelling great distances. Whether they acquired the resources they needed, and how much, and at what price, and how soon, was affected by the skills they offered, the goods they brought with them, and sometimes their physical size, used to threaten shopkeepers. Most transactions were performed in an orderly manner, but a group of public-minded citizens formed an association called Lookout Lucerne to keep an eye on things, just in case. Their navy blue jackets sporting LL were a reassuring presence in this fast-paced new world.

The new city thrived. People poured in for jobs and entertainment. So many of them in close proximity ignited creative sparks. “I feel itchy fingers,” said Bobby. “I don’t know what it means though.”

“What kind of itching is it?” said Naomi.

“It’s on the inside of my skin, like insects wanting to burst out.” Bobby itched and rubbed his fingers. “I wish I could scrub it from within.”

“Why don’t you just keep drawing till it goes away?” said Naomi. “That’s what I do. When my feet itch I dance, when my ears itch I play music, and when my tummy rumbles I eat.”

Bobby picked some of her fat coloured pencils and got busy. He filled the pages of his hardback notebook with flowing music, dancing, painting, drama, film storyboards and sculptures, all merging together and pulling apart. The galleries, theatres, and concerts halls of their new city were busy, and most performances were sold out, but Naomi always comp’d tickets for herself and Uncle Bobby.

This place had a fierce creativity. The Authority recognized artistic hotspots as “growth points” and used them to fuel local economic activity. As people became more productive and creative, they began to seek answers to questions they had never asked. They debated metaphysics and moral philosophy, studied logic, explored aesthetics, and sought guidance from spiritual teachers, the most prominent of whom were Guru Baba and Ozwald Malchizedek (OM).

Guru Baba was a traditionalist who urged them to focus on meditation and prayer, and slowly develop their souls. He said, “One day you will reach yourselves.”

OM was a modern master pursuing a sensualist approach, who said the natural way was for humans to follow the Principle of Pleasure (POP). He instructed them to see, smell, taste, hear, and touch whatever gave them immediate joy. “Enjoy every day,” he said, “and tomorrow will take care of itself.”

OM’s teachings inspired a popular street art movement. Huge, red-lipped flowers filled civic buildings, golden rockets blasted off office blocks, blue sweating monkeys swung about poles, and black babies floated along factory walls. There were pickled whales in swimming pools, and corpses having sex suspended from street signs. Someone made a life size OM out of garbage. It was a deep comment on the cyclic nature of existence.

This Muse Infuse movement said that there should be unfettered art everywhere. There were occasional disputes about the quality and quantity of works, and who’d created them, but these were quickly resolved by Lookout Lucerne members. They meted out harsh punishments – a white man accused of tagging a black man’s work had his hands cut off. Similarly a black man drawing a white woman was castrated. The Authority agreed that multi-cultural harmony must be preserved at all costs. Soon art was seen as too dangerous to be left to the public. One of OM’s followers, known as Strong Man, rebelled and formed a splinter movement which took control of the streets and banned art entirely. Lookout Lucerne units were instructed to perform Art Attacks.

“What do we do now, Uncle Bobby?”

He said, “I guess we’d better stop drawing.”

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New City

Posted in Conceptual Art, Lucerne Village, Mystical Experience, Unknown with tags , , , , , on May 8, 2012 by javedbabar

They had come a long way since the original jungle. In four hours of drawing together, Bobby and his niece Naomi had created a well established village with roads, railways, power lines, factories, local media, and telecoms. They could remain outside the drawing, designing it like architects, or go within it to finish it as fine artists. Large scale changes were made quickly from the outside, but they also needed to pop in for experiential quality control.

They had four more hours till Bobby’s sister came to collect Naomi. After a short break, listening to ambient tunes on Naomi’s iPod, she said, “Let’s draw a city!” Then she became pensive. “Is it just like a big village really?”

Bobby smiled. So she didn’t know everything. Two hours ago she had lectured him on hard and soft infrastructure, and now she was asking him this basic question. It was nice to know that adults were still required in this youthful world where industries and jobs, and even countries, could transform overnight.

He said, “It’s a large permanent settlement and has complex systems.” She looked at him wide-eyed. “Things like industry, housing, transportation, and utilities, and sanitation.”

“But how many people live there?” she said. “More than a million?”

He said that there was no fixed number, but a million sounded about right. Why did she choose a million?

“Because that’s the biggest proper number that I can think of,” she said. “After that you just start counting again – one million, two million, three million, four million, five million…” She stopped at ten million and said, “Why did people start living in cities? Why didn’t they just stay in villages? Aren’t they nicer? There’s no millions, just people.”

Bobby took his role as Uncle seriously. Despite his niece sometimes knowing more than him, he did his best to educate her. She knew more about games, apps, and social media – O.K., technology in general, the area increasingly required for you to function in this world, and without whose competence you were handicapped.

He told her what he recalled from school. The Neolithic revolution was when hunter-gatherers began to grow crops in an organized manner, and created permanent settlements. Agriculture proved to be an efficient method of food production; instead of say eight hours, each person could produce the food needed in four hours, and spend the time saved pursuing crafts, or producing twice as much food, and trading it for other goods they desired. Such an economy would draw other people into it, and as it grew, the settlement grew, usually on grid plans or as radial structures with central temples.

“But you’ve only told me how the cities grew. Not why people live in them. Why did you live in the city? I mean before you…” Her sentence trailed off, as she knew that this was a sensitive topic. The first part of the question was O.K. though.

Bobby said, “It’s mainly because of concentrated facilities. Everything is close by, so people can share knowledge and develop new ideas. The best thing about cities is that you can get many things done there. They are places of creation.”

Naomi looked perplexed and said, “But don’t you have all those things in a village too? In Lucerne we have people close by, we have knowledge of things like farming, construction, and mining, and people have lots of ideas and time to develop them.”

Maybe she was right, thought Bobby. Was it only a matter of scale? You could do all of those things in a small place too, on a smaller scale. Wasn’t quality better than quantity? Cities had higher population density and labour differentiation, higher taxes paid to The Authority, monumental buildings, welfare systems, information recording systems, writing systems, symbolic art, extensive trade, huge consumer choice, and specialist craftsmen. Lucerne village had low population density and every person bore a range of skills; there was an informal economy, modest buildings, and families relying on each other rather than the state; knowledge was transmitted orally, and there was appreciation of natural beauty rather than conceptual art; there was more gifting than trade, and people were generalists holding a wider world view. Lucerne was geared towards independence rather than the city’s dependence.

Bobby had failed in the city. He’d aimed too high, got too greedy, and spun out of control. He’d lost his job and money, and fallen into depression. And now he was here where everything was possible again. He could stand on his own two feet in the village. It was human scale.

He said, “Naomi, do you mind if we don’t draw a city?”

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Community Resources

Posted in Conceptual Art, Lucerne Village, Mystical Experience, Unknown, World Myths with tags , , , , , , on May 7, 2012 by javedbabar

Bobby was still in the drawing with Naomi. His niece’s jungle had come to life, and whatever they added manifested in her parallel world. They could draw things whilst they were inside the drawing, but this was a laborious process as each item had to be detailed individually. It was much better to draw whilst outside the drawing, where large changes could be made easily. They had already drawn roads, railways, power lines, and factories. Their Village was coming to life.

“Let’s build some houses now,” said Naomi. “Everybody needs somewhere to live.”

“What kind shall we have?” said Bobby. His hand was beginning to hurt from all that drawing. Who used a pencil these days? They were awkward to hold. Why did they have hexagonal profiles? Wasn’t it easier to cut and paste images?

Then he felt inspired. He took terms he’d overheard – smart growth, green building, small footprint, and airtight – and strung them into a sentence. He wasn’t quite sure why he did it. Did he really need to impress his ten-year-old niece?

She frowned as he drew the houses. Each feature he added elicited a new twist to her facial expression. There was something on her mind. “Well, what do you think?” he said, proud of his compact, low-rise, transit-oriented, walkable, bicycle-friendly, mixed-use development based upon principles of urban intensification, and championing long-range, regional sustainability over short-term parochialism.

“I don’t like it,” said Naomi. “I want a nice house with a pretty garden and fences around it, and lots of open windows for sunshine and breezes. I don’t want to live in a small, sealed-up box with other boxes above it, and below it, and on both sides.”

Naomi wasn’t in tune with the new guard of urban planners, innovative architects, visionary developers, and community activists. She was a traditionalist, a reactionary, an enemy of resource stewardship best practice.

She had told him off already for using up all the trees in the drawing to make electricity poles and railway sleepers, and made him draw new trees for lumber to build her extravagant residences. He didn’t like what she was doing but couldn’t stop her; she had a right to manifest her own world. So he said, “Okay, Naomi, why don’t you draw big houses, and I’ll draw apartment blocks.”

“Okay,” she said, having started drawing before he’d finished the sentence. “The happy families can live in my houses, and the lonely people can live in your boxes.” She looked up from her drawing. “Is that all right?”

Housing, however, was not just made of wood. They’d also need metal. Bobby drew in some mines – surface mines for minerals, and sub-surface mines for ores. He included protestors at the former, and trapped miners in the latter. Even drawings must be realistic.

Once the ores and minerals were extracted, they were sent to factories in the industrial park at the edge of the Village. Nails, screws, nuts, bolts, beams and girders were produced to build the housing, and extra metal was cut, machined, turned, threaded, ground, filled and fashioned into other useful goods. They were simple things initially like tools and weapons, then jewellery and engine parts, and later boats and rockets. Their village transformed quickly from a low-tech to a hi-tech society.

As Bobby and Naomi continued drawing, their new world’s elements increased and connections multiplied exponentially. Soon their Village was a place of televisions, radios, newspapers, and books; then landlines, cellphones, workpads, laptops, and desktops. Everybody was connected to everybody else. Each object was manufactured, distributed, marketed, and sold, before becoming obsolete, disposed of, repurposed, or recycled. Nothing was just what it was in the drawing. Everything was something else.

“Uncle Bobby, I’m getting a headache,” said Naomi.

“So am I, sweetheart. Shall we take a break from drawing?”

“Yes, let’s listen to my iPod. You can have one earphone, and I’ll have the other.”

They needed to disconnect from this crazy world they’d created. Naomi clicked through the screen menus, selecting Ambient>Instrumental>Nature>Jungle Sounds.

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Village People

Posted in Conceptual Art, Mystical Experience, Unknown, World Myths with tags , , , , , on May 6, 2012 by javedbabar

“Okay, we’re in the jungle now,” said Bobby. “What shall we do?”

“Let’s make a village,” said Naomi. “Like the one we live in. We’ll make it really nicely.”

Bobby wondered if he was really here. It seemed so real, but where was he exactly? The last thing he knew for sure was that he was babysitting his niece Naomi, who was making a crazy drawing, and then somehow they were in that drawing. She seemed to think that this was quite normal, and the obvious result of “colouring it in nicely.”

The jungle was overwhelming. Thick green and deep browns filled his vision. There was only one gap, containing a large tree that he’d drawn himself and in whose roots he’d become entangled until rescued by Naomi.

How do you start building a village? How did pioneers pick a good place to plant their seeds of habitation? The obvious answer was to steal it from the extant inhabitants, smart people in touch with the earth, who knew a good game trail or a clean water hole when they saw one. So why not just give them a little push and take their spot?

The problem was that there weren’t any natives in Naomi’s drawing. Or maybe there were and they’d seen settlers already – the usual parade of explorers, missionaries, and traders, performing cartographers’, God’s, and kings’ works. They bore gifts for natives, always undesirable ones, as there was no great demand for bullets, beads, or smallpox. The natives here may well have disappeared.

The village would need some basic services. “Shall we put a shop here?” said Bobby. “And a clinic, and a jail?”

“No!”said Naomi. “Those come later. We need infrastructure first. We want a village that will survive.”

Bobby asked how she knew about infrastructure.

“Every place needs it. We need hard infrastructure like roads and railways, and soft infrastructure like education and health systems.”

“How do you know that?” said Bobby. He was in an imaginary jungle talking to a child about industrial organizational structures. He shook his head in disbelief.

“I go to school, Uncle Bobby. Didn’t you?”

I guess my school wasn’t as good as yours,” he said. “Well, what shall we start with? A road?”

Naomi’s expression showed that she took pity on him. “First of all we need to name the Village. I think we should call it Lucerne. I know that might get confusing for you because there will be the real Lucerne and the one in the drawing, but you’ll get used to it. It’s just like the difference between home and wo…. school.”

He knew that she was about to say “work” but didn’t, knowing that it was a sensitive topic.

She said that to make big changes they needed to get out of the drawing. Trying to build infrastructure while in there would be really hard, as they must do it step by step. For a road, they would need to draw a quarry, then an excavator and crusher, dump trucks to transport the rocks, another excavator to dig the road bed, rolls of filter cloth to line it, then large, medium, and small sizes of gravel, and a compactor and grader to finish. That’s just for a rural road. To seal it would need more machines, tarmac, road cones, construction signs, and traffic personnel. To make it from outside the drawing required you to just draw a road – the quality of the road depending on the quality of your drawing.

To make sense of his situation, Bobby thought back to a seminar he’d attended about the Law of Attraction. It’s obvious really; focussing on positive thoughts causes you to manifest positive outcomes. Like attracts like. The process was popularized by the New Thought Movement of the early 1900’s, but its origins are ancient. Prophets of God performed miracles, and the Law of Attraction has been visible throughout history in the practice of magic. Many are illusionists rather than true magicians, but even they make things appear from nowhere.

“Uncle Bobby, now you can draw a road,” said Naomi.

He drew a paved road a hundred kilometre long, heading along a fertile valley, with a dark volcano at one end, and a white mountain at the other.

“Uncle Bobby, draw a railway,” said Naomi.

He drew parallel tracks running along rivers, creeping around hills, and snaking through mountain passes.

“Uncle Bobby, draw power lines,” said Naomi.

He made poles and pylons, and sub-stations and transformers. Even bright yellow “Danger of Death” signs. Then he drew what he had first wanted to – a store, a clinic, and a jail. Naomi drew factories.

“What will they produce?” he asked.

She said, “I haven’t decided yet. Now can you please draw some more trees? Your poles and sleepers have used up all the jungle.”

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