It is an ugly or perhaps homely sailboat, broad and blundering along. The other is the magnificent red steel hull of a much larger vessel, loaded up with containers. On the sailboat, a man is moving frantically, heaving on stays and turning the wheel. The other is an implacable wall moving steadily. The sailboat begins to turn, but the arc is too shallow. It is drawn roughly across the surface of the other, a blunt pencil stabbed against a table. Unperturbed the other passes by, leaving the stunned and splintered sailboat in its considerable wake.
Fictions
A Brief Exchange Regarding Infinity
J.T. Nimoy, The color of art is #A79F94, 2009
A: “Since then, in the infinite course of the universe, the world is fleeting, we must regard it as precious. This world, its lives and deaths, its towering glories and spectacular failures, and we ourselves, must be regarded as merely a local glimmering of significance in a meaningless universe. But this is no cause for fear or sorrow: it is a great liberation. Our only duty is to burn as brightly as we can in the short time the universe permits.”
Z: “But you have failed to recognise the monumental indifference and claustrophobia of infinity. Your thought is shot through with aesthetic desire. You speak of the world as a glorious flash, like a firework, or the life of a butterfly: fragile, short, beautiful and therefore precious. But all these things unfold in time: you are actually delighting in quickness, lightness and intensity. In a truly infinite universe, neither the momentary nor the epochal count for anything. Infinity is not the the infinite possibility of value, but the end of all value. Conversely, to imagine the universe’s origins, ends and branches: all of this is motivated by an aesthetic desire for the sublime: the desire to be dwarfed by something unspeakably huge. But eternity does not follow hugeness. On the contrary, the eternal universe would be the triumph of mundanity: it would be neither a cruel master against which we strive for survival, nor a glorious blossoming. Contemplation of this universe is neither fearful, nor wonderful: in doing so, you are neither a hero, nor a poet. The eternal universe would be like the sickly grey plastic of this keyboard; the slight headache produced by flickering strip-lights. It would be the casual death of slavery. It is a wonder you can keep from groaning as infinity pours through your letterbox in the form of real-estate magazines. We must hope desperately for the destruction of the universe, which is long overdue.”
Contingency
In lieu of spitting on the carpet in the doorway, Vek nodded politely and left the Risk Manager’s office. He waited until he was around the corner before muttering angrily at such a preposterous waste of his time. It was obscene to be managed like this. Vek resented the insinuation that the way he had been managing his department for seventeen years was suddenly risky. And what made him irate was that it didn’t seem like the Risk Manager actually thought this. He had been apologetic, the ridiculous little crab, as if it wasn’t really him asking for thirty-odd pages of forms and boilerplate. He had even rolled his eyes at one point, which Vek took to be implying that the two men were in the same boat really, driven by managerial whims. That it was the system, the institution, that somehow required Vek to stop working for the three days it would take him to fill in enough rectangles to quell its anxieties. As if he, the Risk Manager, wasn’t the institution! As if somehow writing things in a rectangle on a form made them comprehensible and controllable! Planes fell out of the sky some days!
Unwilling to go back to the workshop after his meeting, Vek slunk off home. Stopping on the corner close to his rented flat, he pushed through the grubby glass door of a questionable-looking eating establishment and searched his pockets to see what he could afford for dinner. Not finding much, he settled for a pie and a drink taken at random from the fridge. In the back corner, where it was warm, he settled on a bench: the pie was ok, but the drink tasted terrible. He squinted at the label trying to find a description in English of its contents, but when this proved futile he drank the rest anyway. Reaching into his bag, he took out a piece of paper and a pencil. Exhausted by consistency, he leaned over the page and began to draw the plan of the apartment he would build one day.
Enric Miralles, Apartment Calle Mercaders (1995)
Literary Advice
If you were to write a novel on human vanity, and in this novel, you imagined the sheik of a wealthy desert kingdom who conceived of a plan to recreate in miniature the entire world, so that every country would become a private island, and every island hold a palace surrounded by pools and gardens, and every palace host one of the most extravagantly wealthy of the globe’s inhabitants; and if in your novel the sheik commanded all his slaves to pour sand into the ocean for nearly ten years; and if at last, abandoned by his fairweather friends, at the end of his resources and humiliated, he was forced to abandon his work, leaving it a clumsy image of the world, as if a child had drawn it; and a single house, the sheik’s own, was left amidst the sun-baked sandbanks; then I would be put in an uncomfortable position. Even if the writing was irreproachable, as I’m certain it would be, I would be forced to find a way of telling you that this kind of sublime romanticism was best left to Shelley or Borges; that the symbolism was crass and obvious and that you had best try again, exercising more subtlety.
[ Credit crunch signals the end of The World for Dubai’s multi-billion dollar property deal. ]
Sleeping Over
Still from The Prisoner, BBC Television, 1967
1. I went to sleep and I had three dreams. I dreamed I was stretched out on a square wheel by an little old architect. He made me a ballistic machine and pulled me tight until I made clear and equal sounds. He reckoned me and aimed me and pinned me by my navel. He spoke often and loudly and his voice echoed down the long hall, returning only parts of his speech and denounced me and my foolish dream: “Why are you looking at me in such an unseemly way? I have saved you forever. These lines, rerum apta conlocatio elegansque.” He broke into Latin and when I spoke he gave me a black eye and insisted on silence. I was on axis and the man in his foolishness made me the measure of the universe. I was in plan, and the man trapped me like a fish and the savage lines burned my fingers and my hair grew long as I wheeled the stars around me and men in robes came in and thought about me for reassurance, and then left and women weren’t allowed. A hundred years later the old man spoke again smiling enigmatically and writing in a mirror and made everyone see me and know what I looked like. He gave me an extra pair of arms and two new legs that didn’t fit me, but fitted my wheel as I measured, elemental, universal and consumed space.
b. I woke angry at property developers and found my house was dark and my watch had stopped, its luminous hands fixed in place by the number 9 which had come loose under the glass. My bed was tightly made around me and I was too hot. I had a headache behind my eyes, and my mind was struggling halfwittedly with trigonometry and how far it was from my window to the church steeples.
2. I took a long time to go to sleep again, finally heavy with shadows. I didn’t open my eyes, but I knew tacitly that all around me was the desert I had made and called it peace. I didn’t want to open my eyes because I was worried about what was over my head. The hair on the back of my neck could see that above me waited a white bubble that could see me when I moved. It made sure I was sleeping, and I wouldn’t move a muscle. I knew that close by was a bright village with a forum and lots of numbers and no free men and a stone boat and Americans. Then I was exhausted, and the bubble had escaped from the back of my head into the sky that was just the right colour for my house that I had been searching for. The bubble was my house in exile, and it floated above my head on my pillow, and it knew how far it was to the lightswitch, and it was my dream, and it was my wheel remade to fit my uneven limbs, and it always took me home again, and it stretched over my face, and it swam in the water, and the furrows on my forehead grew deep and black and I could feel the breath at the back of my nose, and the bubble wasn’t there any more and I was the bubble and I wasn’t sure if I had a third dream or if I dreamed the bubble did.
Salvador Dali, Sleep, 1937
3. I dropped into my dream, slow wave and rapid eyes. I dreamed about architecture. There was a monastery, solid, stable and Byzantine that held the horixon down. The ground was still my desert, but it was soft and plastic and inky like me. I was a monument being built and held up by crutches that were sensitive to my misshapen body. Distorted, fleshy, worrisome anthropophagus tadpole hippocampus that I was, I didn’t need limbs to sleep, and I drew far inside and just below the surface of my eyelids. Under the shadow of my domed head, swollen by all the thoughts I had of my house, a man in a turban came around the headland and beached his boat and examined me. He didn’t threated me because he was a nomad, and didn’t remain anywhere (even though his shadow lay long across the desert), so he didn’t exist. And his eyes looked far away. He was a Digger who scratched at the ground and made an abyss that he smoothed over again, and I wanted to speak but my lips were too heavy. The moon didn’t care, but the tripod dog looked at me hard and I began to worry about my crutches. I knew I was in a fragile state, and couldn’t get back to the water if the dog knocked me over and it was important and I couldn’t remember, and in a moment of clarity I did. I was smiling to myself because I realized I could be right behind you and you didn’t know. The little blanket on my back covered the back of my neck and my ears, but it didn’t cover my toes and I pulled them in and I couldn’t stay any more and the desert was my sheet and I had one eye open and the moon was the face of my watch that couldn’t be bothered marking time.
3b. My left eye was dry and my pillow was wet and I drew the back of my hand across my huge wet lips and my nose was the rocky headland and I was a world and there was running water and someone coughed. My dream was a picture now, and I wanted to put it in my house, but I couldn’t measure it to see if it would fit. I was on a skateboard and fell off the curb and my back kicked.
b. I woke up and got out of bed and dragged a comb across my head, and didn’t have a comb, and chased that stupid idea dog out of my head house. The last residue of sleep crystallized in my eyes. I crossed the carpet, and went into the bathroom. I spat toothiness down the plughole and washed my face down after it. I remembered that last night while I was trying to go to sleep, I had important thoughts about designing something, or had thought of something to write. I couldn’t remember it though: it had fallen down between my bed and the wall, so I resigned myself to not remembering.”
( Written in 2001 for a studio brief: a project for a sleeping-space to be shared by a human and an artificial intelligence. It turns out Joyce, like cheese, is a hallucinogen. )
Diffusive Architectures 
