online: 12 april 2015
modified: 12 april 2015

7 april 2015 an evening in spring in arcadia


...cool air... mist over distant horizons... extending upward to pale blue and pink and bluish cloud... a classic scene of arcadian landscape... with occasional dogs and children and their keepers... and atmosphere of constructed peace and plenty... a utopian suburb... a unity of urban cottages on twisty roads midst trees and churches (no pubs, few shops, a social centre and parking spaces for many cars)... and even an outdoor theatre in a wood... (now that i too inhabit this arcadia no need for me to strive or struggle... to improve... but just enjoy this more spacious prototype of much suburbia... that i used to dislike)...

...the aim's to live in unity and flow... free to attend to fields and skies... the city forest... and to other people... not as limitations but as joys and marvellous...

...i could go on... though having already experienced many such walks and picnics beneath clouds... which now turn bluish red and move behind the trees... still bare... though surely now it's spring...

...deep pulse of distant sounds of trains and aircraft and of cars...

...describing this reminds me of recent thoughts re utopia not as fixed destination but as liberty to change... to see and hear and feel and think of all that (if one strives) becomes lost... unnoticed... and invisible...


...and now it's getting dark... the lights are on... and i am glad i came today (fleeing literary cares) to write these words... self-chosen by the sights and sounds and memories of automatic writing... in the forest...

...returning now to long-pondered daffodil 102 (re radical design) that calls me to rethink my lifework... or to let it go as it is... while keeping the centre empty of fearful concerns...or conscious purposes imposed...


...now nearly dark... the sound of a duck croaking within a few metres from where i am sitting (though we are about 50 metres from the nearest pond)... while i get ready to return home...

...i remember that i have to be back for a food delivery in an hour or less... so this arcadian moment ends as i hurry through the garden suburb... (but there have been hundreds of such moments in this diary already... and i hope there will be more)...

...when i get back i find that the delivery person is from Romania and has studied mechanical engineering (as I did long ago)... and he tells me he has worked on car engine design...

...i mentioned that my book Design Methods was translated into Romanian in 1975... at which he told me how easy Romanian is to pronounce... being nearly phonetic... but he did not reply when i said it had been censored... at the end of chapter 5... a section against both instrumentalism (using others as tools) and romanticism (making flexible ideas into fixed realities)...

...'methodology should not be a fixed track to a fixed destination but a conversation about everything that could be made to happen'

( a quite often quoted sentence... from page 73... though now i doubt that 'made to happen'... for chance processes keep calling me to adapt to and to enjoy... the accidental)...




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