Haxted Thinking No.9 - April 2023
Haxted Thinking is a newsletter for anyone interested in how buildings and spaces are designed, made and used.
Edition No. 9: April 2023
“‘It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth’
Niels Bohr
The coincidence of opposites: Part 1
Every now and again, if we’re lucky, we get to experience some creativity that is so powerful it stops us in our tracks. It’s often the case with music. It happened to me the first time I heard Gil Scot Heron’s extraordinary album Pieces of A Man1, his first studio album recorded way back in 1971. Featuring a re-recording of his 1970 song The Revolution Will Not be Televised, here was an album utterly unique in its range, and sweepingly bold in its sound. Music furthers itself, like so much genuine creativity, by fusion. By combining the familiar from here, and the familiar from there, great artists create something unfamiliar, something new and thrilling, and they move us. Blending poetry, soul, R+B, jazz-funk, and spoken word, with Pieces of A Man Gil Scot Heron and his collaborator Brian Jackson, shone a light into the future and paved the way for rap, hip hop and the electronic dance music revolution in the decades that followed.
It happens with architecture. If one is fortunate enough to witness the extraordinary Santa Maria Del Fiore2 in Florence, and it's magnificent dome by Filippo Brunelleschi, built way back between 1420-1436, the hairs on the back of your neck literally stand to attention.
Sometimes it happens with the written word. Poetry does it, that’s its job. But I never thought I’d come across a book that combines neuroscience, poetry, physics, and philosophy that is so exceptional, that it could have the same shuddering effect as the most seminal music or architecture. But in Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things3, that’s exactly what he’s done. In a monstrous 1578 pages (with big pages and small typeface!) McGilchrist attempts to convey something utterly original - a way of looking at the world “quite different from the one that has largely dominated the West for at least three hundred and fifty years – some would say as long as two thousand years” in his words. That’s quite an ambition. But McGilchrist is the most humble and unassuming of polymaths and his book is a wild ride through all sorts of rich territory, backed up by the most phenomenal level of academic rigour, and the widest of wide angle lenses. His belief, backed by formidable research into the way the two hemispheres of the brain work, is that for our everyday survival, we need to pay attention to the world in two completely different ways at the same time. In short everything you’ve ever heard about the subject of brain hemispheres in the pop psychology world – left equals reason and logic, right creativity and art, is wrong.
The first kind of attention, which is committed to detail, he tells us, focuses on the things needed to obtain food, shelter and the stuff that enable us to manipulate the environment in a way that allows us to survive better. It is grasping. But that alone is not enough. At the same time we need to pay a very different kind of attention which is contextual, open, uncommitted, broad in scope and sustained. Evolution has resulted in the left hemisphere of our brains taking over the first kind - attention to the fragmented, the detailed and the precisely targeted, and the right hemisphere has been left to deal with the whole of the rest of our experiential reality. And it's the right hemisphere that deals with situational context, nuance, and subtlety and the ability to understand ambiguity and paradox.
In a recent interview4 McGilchrist described it thus:
“If you pay attention to the world in two different ways, since attention changes what we find, it follows that there are two experiential worlds available to us. We're not aware of this because the two modes are fused at a level below consciousness. There is one world in which everything is isolated, fragmentary, static, known, familiar, inanimate, decontextualized, relatively abstract, general in nature and wholly explicit. And there is another world in which everything is interconnected, flowing and changing all the time, is never ultimately certain and always needs to be considered in context. The first way of seeing is like a map; the second is like the territory, which is an infinitely more complex, beautiful reality. The embodied right hemisphere sees the world as animated and perceives it as full of unique beings.”
Wow! Suddenly here is an explanation that provides a framework for a completely liberating and fulfilling way to get stuck in to life and all it's complexities. But in addition to that it also starts to explain the utter madness of modern times – where culture has started to cave in to a left hemisphere domination. Through absorbing McGilchrist’s hypotheses (which I rather fancy is going to take years, probably decades), I believe we start to see more clearly what is going wrong in the world.
So what’s the point of all this? Well in newsletter no. 65 and earlier in newsletter no. 46 I wrote about how important creativity is if we want to re-imagine what property can and should do for us. I’ve long held the view that if we want to make spaces that best provide for our most essential human needs – security, connection, nourishment, relaxation and adaptability to our changing needs, we need to challenge conventional wisdom. In order to rethink property, we probably need to rethink everything. And here’s the thing - Iain McGilchrist is encouraging us to do just that, and providing a structural framework within which to do so. So this journey into rethinking property becomes a much richer journey altogether. From thinking about developing more successful buildings, to thinking about developing more successful thinking. And in turn thinking more and more about paradox, ambiguity and what he terms, the coincidence of opposites.
Growing up in a household with an Italian father and an English mother, set the scene early for an environment predicated on opposites. Dad – all Neapolitan sprezzatura – with his theatrical gestures, natural spontaneity and a well-practiced personal style (that uniquely Italian look that is well designed but at the same time kind of nonchalant - wear it well and with confidence); Mum – classically English reserved wartime girl, no fuss, no showing off, let’s get down to business - making a home full of safety, good food and books. From a young age it seemed obvious to me that you can be this and this, rather than this or this. So English and Italian, boisterous tree climber and studious reader, maker of bows and arrows to shoot with and maker of cakes to please with. Lover of art, lover of science. It seemed almost instinctual that the tension between opposites was at the heart of that childhood creativity. And then at school we learned about yin-yang and it's symbolic representation, the taijitu.
The ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism provides a wonderful exposition of the idea that in order for harmony to exist opposites are needed. Everything has two opposing halves that together complete wholeness. But if things are arbitrarily split into two halves – the yin and the yang - it upsets the equilibrium of wholeness. In doing so both halves are forced into dynamically chasing after each other as they seek a new balance, resulting in whole stocks of unnecessary energy being expended. So Taoism doesn’t split things and see them as separate. All the aspects and phenomena of life are compelled by contrary forces that fulfil one another by their complementary interconnected nature. Which is perfect as it offers an immediate resolution to the idea that these life forces have to be pulling against each other all the time. The yin-yang philosophy also says that nothing is absolute. So just as night follows day, day follows night, and night follows day again - there is no separation between them. The seed of one lies in the other. They are equal and indivisible. That’s what we see signified in the taijitu. The dark spot in the light, and the light spot in the dark. The seeds of each residing in the heart of the other. Both halves exactly the same size and shape - balanced and equal in all respects. And between them not a dividing line but a permeable boundary.
But as wide eyed early teenage curiosity drifts into early adulthood, somewhere along the line this innate creativity and understanding of the nature of things gets lost. Or it certainly did for me. No longer the comfortable ambiguity and contradictions of youth, but a left hemisphere driven belief in the need for strict logic and clear one sided thinking. Polarised opinions held rigidly and unflinchingly, and context all too easily forgotten or ignored. But all along an inexplicable nagging sense that something is not right with this way in the world. Personally the eureka moment for me came at Goldsmiths in 2016. Studying photography and how to use it as a creative tool to bring a sense of understanding to the world, brought together the coincidence (“remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection”) and the opposites (“ contrary or radically different in some respect common to both, as in nature, qualities, direction, result, or significance”). A rekindled love affair with photographic film, but also a respect for the digital capabilities of scanning technology; a passion for photographing unyielding concrete brutalist structures, but also a passion for photographing decay and ruin of historic buildings; the flourishing of an art practice, tempered by scientific research into the making of the world. All the old ambiguity back with a bang.
Then more research for a professional assignment building a course about how enhancing creativity and wellbeing are the essential ingredients for making the most successful homes and workplaces. So to Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi7, the wonderful late psychologist who did the seminal work on flow and creativity. What he showed, scientifically, was that this contradiction between opposing desires is actually a key ingredient in creativity. The hundreds of hours he and his lab spent studying creative individuals led him to conclude that creative people show a higher than usual combination of contradictory character traits. In referring to those he studied and found to be the most creative he concluded:
“If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it would be complexity. By this, I mean that they show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes – instead of being an “individual” each of them is a “multitude”.
He demonstrated, scientifically, what the artist Walt Whitman had intuitively known all along:
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”8
Csikszentmihalyi went onto say:
“Having a complex personality means being able to express the full range of traits that are potentially present in the human repertoire but usually atrophy because we think that one or the other pole is ‘good’, whereas the other extreme is ‘bad.’”
The most creative people have, he said “the ability to move from one extreme to the other as the occasion requires.”
So where does all this leave us? The insight here is that this ability to switch between poles is not only the natural way of things, but can be harnessed up and used to supercharge our creativity. In order to do our best thinking, and therefore our best, most creative work, we need to embrace the coincidence of opposites, and the apparent tension between them. When Heraclitus said:
“They do not understand how a thing agrees at variance with itself: it is an attunement turning back on itself, like that of the bow and the lyre”9
he was demonstrating that it is the tension between the string and the bow that gives the arrow the power to fly, as it is the tension in the strings of the lyre that give rise to melody.
This is such a rich area to explore that I think I’m going to try and consider these tentative ideas in more detail in a series of newsletters that excavate just how liberating McGilchrist’s ideas are. If, as he says - “For opposites to co-exist they clearly cannot cancel or annul one another but must rather give rise to something new” then we are heading towards the very essence of what creativity is. In that voyage of discovery we get half a chance to find something altogether new. Better still we might get the privilege of making something altogether new. Better. It remains my contention that we need electrifying creativity like never before, not just in how we make spaces, but in how we think. So here’s to Iain McGilchrist and all the thinkers that inspired him, that in turn have inspired this. To be continued.
The Other Other Club
There’s an old Winston Churchill rumour that dates back to 1911. When he was the Secretary of State for the Home Department in the Liberal government of Herbert Asquith, he and his best mate, the Conservative MP and barrister F.E. Smith, wanted to join The Club, a literary club dating back to 1764 and founded by the artist Joshua Reynolds and the essayist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson. Legend has it that both were blackballed, having been considered too brash and controversial. It is said that as a consequence the two formed their own dining club which they called, prosaically, The Other Club. The accepted truth is that it is more likely they started The Other Club specifically to assuage the potential conflict in the vast political divide stoked by Churchill’s 1904 defection to the Liberals. This had alienated him from the Tories. Together they were said to have asked the Liberal David Lloyd George to lend his name to dining invitations, which they sent to prominent members of both parties, and later after it came into being, they also welcomed Labour Party members. The whole ethos of The Other Club was that it sought contrary opinions from all of its members, and it welcomed them. It was founded on the basis of the coincidence of opposites. The Other Club met regularly throughout both wars, and still meets to this day.
We need more Other Clubs where divergent thinking is celebrated. Last summer I started to conjure up the vision of a regular gathering of deeply curious, strong willed, but open minded people to discuss and debate key issues, challenges and new ideas. Something built on a foundation of conviviality where interesting, difficult and contrary thinking is championed not for its own sake, but to try and generate more creative, nuanced outcomes. When I mentioned this to my friend, creative provocateur and maker of spaces extraordinaire, Richard Upton10 he liked the idea. Which is rather handy as he happens to own the most terrific pub in the whole world11. So the Other Other Club is going to come into being. And it will meet at The Bell in Ticehurst. It will be an eclectic brew. An inspiring place, a series of events, imaginative people, where generosity of spirit will be the only pre-requisite, and where there is no such thing as ‘wrong thinking.’12 If you are interested in knowing more about it please drop me an email.
1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKghze-Vf1o
2 https://duomo.firenze.it/en/discover/cathedral
3 https://channelmcgilchrist.com/matter-with-things/
4 https://besharamagazine.org/metaphysics-spirituality/iain-mcgilchrist-the-matter-with-things/
5
6 https://us16.campaign-archive.com/?u=3ff9b58ba2b87867b2bec994d&id=842a71dfcc
7 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Creativity-Psychology-Discovery-Mihaly-Csikszentmihaly/dp/0062283251
8 https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/27
9 https://www.worldhistory.org/article/182/heraclitus-fragments/
10 https://areyou.place
11 https://www.thebellinticehurst.com
12 The whole idea of wrong thinking and how often it is used to try and stifle mature discussion really pisses me off. It's the left hemisphere out of control.
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