Looking for glimpses of eternal life
The pattern language, then, is that aspect of the world which steers buildings towards the creation of a living state.
This is what it means to have centers which have life in them — that the entity defined by a pattern digs deep into the experience of life, and creates a feeling of life lived, life passed, the sadness and tranquility and happiness of actual life, raw as it is.
Before starting to make anything, or design anything, one has to choose and define the content of the centers functionally and geometrically, and their relationships. This list of centers out of which the thing is to be made is sometimes expressed as a pattern language. But this is only one possible way of doing it.
The main thing is that you must get clear what the essential centers are which will give the thing an actual profound life. Once you have that clear mentally, you can start the actual geometric unfolding of the plan or the design.
Ultimately, the success of your list of centers, your pattern language, determines whether of not the thing which is created will have life. So, the effort to make a list of centers is a way of trying to predict the way the life is going to go, and what it is going to depend upon. It succeeds if, indeed, life comes about because of it. And the list of centers — even before it serves to make a building — must be judged according to the likelihood of its creating life. This can be done. You can often tell just from looking at a list of centers that it may not produce life, because you can tell that it has obvious gaps, or problems, or misses the main point in some essential way.
Above all, what we are looking for are just those centers which will intensify the life of the place. To do this, we have to work, with a constant intuition about the life, at what is going to intensify this life. This can only be done in a spiritual state of mind. We shall arrive at the stuff which produces life only by having a sense, in us, of what will actually make life in the real thing.
The extent to which I am able to do this depends on the extent of my own mental and emotional awakening. I have to ask myself, first, What is real life in a person? What kind of thing will produce real, deep life in an event? What will bring real life to the conditions of a building, or garden, or street, or town? What kinds of events make us feel close to our own wholeness? And in the end my ability to ask these questions requires that I ask which kinds of centers will do the most to produce real spiritual life in people: which things, events, moments, kinds of centers, will create a spiritual awakening in a person or a person’s life.
Finally, then, I am in the state of trying to see, like Basho, what will most concretely reveal the most translucent inner being in a person. When I eat, I eat. When I walk, I walk. I am trying to find those aspects of sight, sound, smell, the sandwich eaten on the back of the truck, the sun’s rays on the bedroom floor, which will illuminate existence and make a person come in touch with his eternal life.
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/13 Patterns#