8 A collective vision achieved at Eishin
Sometimes I remember having to tease things out of people. […] It was almost as if there was a reluctance to allow the private poetic vision that each person had within them to come out. Perhaps because it was embarrassing, or it was too soft-hearted or it was too dreamlike.
“Close your eyes and tell me what you see. Imagine that it is wonderful in your own terms: You didn’t know that it was there, and you suddenly came upon it, as if by accident.”
Now, when I finally got that from him, when I finally got to that level, then that statement found its way into the pattern language we were making up. The idea of a place with water, where a teacher could wander between classes, was now part of the collective dream. It was included, finally, because we discovered, soon, that it spoke, too, for all the others — and they accepted that it was part of their communal dream.
So altogether the pattern language for that campus is really like a poem of two hundred statements going from the very, very big things about this place all the way down to the little tiny ones about window sills and plants and so forth. It describes in almost poetic but concrete fashion what that world could be like.
The beauty of having a verbal picture like a pattern language is its elasticity. It is easy to take its elements apart. This comes about, above all, because the picture is drawn in words. A drawing is too monolithic; even when it contains separable elements, it is much harder to take its elements apart or to discuss them separately. But with a picture made of words, you can discuss the elements one by one, throw some out when they don’t work, improve them, work gradually to a proper understanding and agreement based on debate and refinement.
Is this related to the linear nature of text/narrative compared to the more intertwined nature of a diagram or picture? A sequential medium like text lends itself to sequential, one by one, step by step, analysis and manipulation. A picture is more difficult to change as each element is more densely connected to its immediate environment.
#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/8 Forming a collective vision of a neighborhood#