AMERICAN FENG SHUI
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THE ANTITHESIS OF HARMONIC DESIGN
HOW TO UNDO A CIVILIZATION IN FIVE EASY LESSONS
The World In Which We Find Ourselves, And The World As We Rearrange It
Feng shui is one of those annoying and superficial "takes" on ancient oriental customs that usually don't make it 50 miles inland from the California coast. The opposite of feng shui, however, has taken over the whole country. Instead of arranging our homes and our neighborhoods, our cities and our States in a comfortable, functional, productive and pleasing way, we all live in ever-increasing chaos.
For a long time. I've thought that our architects and homebuilders, realtors & mortgage bankers, planners and regulators were responsible for a lot of this. To make homes cheaper, or easier to build, or trendier, or more "modern," they began eliminating features, even whole rooms. Some of the changes were for the better: Extra bathrooms, indoor laundry rooms, separate kids' bedrooms, all made sense. But at what cost?
The first important amenity to go was the worst: No more front porch. You could no longer sit outside with your friends and family, enjoying the weather and the community, waving to the passers-by and talking to your neighbors. Your open public face was now in back of the house somewhere, probably behind a fence, up on an open deck that wasn't much good in a rainstorm or on a hot day. The connection to the neighborhood was broken. Families withdrew, falling in upon themselves, and began to lose any sense of community with their own neighbors. Throughout our society, the loss showed.
The next thing to go was the dining room. This was the one room in the house that was reserved for ceremonial occasions, special family events and holidays. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, birthdays, Sunday dinners with Mom & Dad and Gramma & Grampa, a big feast spread out on a big table, something for the scrapbooks and the memories for years to come. Now all gone in favor of an "island kitchen," where no man celebrates or remembers anything or anyone. Or maybe a home office, to while away one's unemployed years in. But no place for tradition and family history, shared joys and generational communion. Is it any wonder that we're so cut off from our own parents and children? There's simply no place for them, literally.
The eat-in kitchen went next. Sometimes called a country kitchen, it was a large workspace and the center of the home. The stove served as the hearth, and that's where parents and children gathered to start and finish their days, sort out their troubles and share their little triumphs. Everyone was equal there, though Mom of course was in charge. It was her office and her dispensary, her meeting room and her hospitality suite. The back door was always unlocked, and the kids could always come in for a cookie or a lemonade. In a room, it was home. But it has been replaced by mean little galleys and high tech "spaces" full of stuff that seems designed to make people uncomfortable. Home is not so homey any more.
Here in Hawaii the houses were always so small that the garage or the carport served as a kind of open-air family room and front porch. But in the new developments, the whole front yard is one big driveway, and a mass of cars blocks the garage, which is often just a storage room now, covering half or all of the street side of the home. When you walk or drive down the streets, all you see is driveways, cars & closed garages. There is no connection to the neighborhood. The family are hidden inside the house all year long, night and day, rain or shine. At least two big-screen TV's are blasting away whenever anyone is home and awake. Children are zombied out in front of their own private video screens gawking at cartoons or DVD movies or computer games that rattle the roof. Dad is passed out in front of the endless Game. Mom is looking for companionship on the Internet. You can talk to strangers in China, but you can't talk to someone in the same room. Even within the home, there is no commonality, no communion, no community.
Our neighborhoods are the same. Many do not have sidewalks. There are no stores nearby and the schools and churches are miles away. The only common spaces are miserable little parks around retention ponds or next to the next phase of the development or beside the freeway. There is no town, no sense of place. Our neighborhoods have become vast collections of cookie-cutter storage bins to keep workers and students in between classes and worktimes. Every morning the entire robotic neighborhood pours out onto the roads, each locked in its' own ton of metal on wheels, windows rolled up, TV or radio blasting, cell phones connecting each car to some indeterminate point in space. And every night everyone rolls back to their bins, having had no occasion for human contact with their neighbors. What happened to the civi in civilization? We can't even spell it.
Out in the wider world, there is massive gridlock and death on the highways. We spend half our lives on the road, going nowhere, trapped in traffic, wrapped in metal. The freeways are like gigantic trains, tens of miles long, hundreds of yards wide, where each rider gets his or her own private, insulated car. Everyone creeps along at twenty or thirty miles per hour, wasting an hour or two every day commuting to jobs they could have done at home, or in some community facility near home. Everyone is obese, no one walks anywhere, our favorite foods are killing us and we can't afford health care. Trillions of dollars and whole lives are wasted like this, but we are all stuck in our cars and in our isolated suburbs and in our ephemeral jobs, ordered and disciplined, controlled and commanded by pheromones or something insectoid that we can neither see nor question. High-frequency clicks? Low-frequency rumblings? We don't know why we do all this. We just do it. We are Borg. Bees in a hive. Ants in a colony.
Is there any reason to expect that a world that is centered upon no center should be any less chaotic than each individual uncentered home? Are nations going to work any better together for being comprised of unthinking, uncommunicative, disjointed units? Is there ever likely to be some sane "New World Order" built upon such insane and inhuman foundations? Feng shui NOT!
People need community. They are crying out for it. The anti-communal corporate hegemony has no use for community. Community cannot be exploited for a profit. So we are creating our own communities online, internationally, for free. We all work enough, more than enough. We all contribute enough, more than enough, throughout our lives. We deserve to get something back. What we need is human infrastructure. Social engineering. Spiritual architecture. Feng shui. A country kitchen in the stars. A porch of one's own. A dining room and a real dinner. Because without it, we will soon be nothing but robots. Without each other, we will die. So we will take the infrastructure we have built and we will use it to create communities. And we will thrive.
Today you, yes, You must create some sense of community for yourself and the people you care about. Any simple gesture will do. Sit in a room with someone, if you can. Enjoy some tea or a few beers together. Write a love letter. Call your Dad. Join a group on the Internet. Turn your face to the light for a few moments. Breathe. It's good to be alive. Be alive. Everybody feng shui, tonight.
And get to work on that new front porch. Maybe the neighbors will help. We're social little animals, you know.
Thanks to the Goddess Of The Mountain, Connie of W. Va. Fur and Root. Go say hello to her. She'll be out on the front porch.
(cross-posted at CoffeeHouseStudio by cosanostradamus)
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.
IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM YOUR BLOGGERS:
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS: BRING THEM ALL HOME ALIVE, NOW!
THE ANTITHESIS OF HARMONIC DESIGN
HOW TO UNDO A CIVILIZATION IN FIVE EASY LESSONS
The World In Which We Find Ourselves, And The World As We Rearrange It
Feng shui is one of those annoying and superficial "takes" on ancient oriental customs that usually don't make it 50 miles inland from the California coast. The opposite of feng shui, however, has taken over the whole country. Instead of arranging our homes and our neighborhoods, our cities and our States in a comfortable, functional, productive and pleasing way, we all live in ever-increasing chaos.
For a long time. I've thought that our architects and homebuilders, realtors & mortgage bankers, planners and regulators were responsible for a lot of this. To make homes cheaper, or easier to build, or trendier, or more "modern," they began eliminating features, even whole rooms. Some of the changes were for the better: Extra bathrooms, indoor laundry rooms, separate kids' bedrooms, all made sense. But at what cost?
The first important amenity to go was the worst: No more front porch. You could no longer sit outside with your friends and family, enjoying the weather and the community, waving to the passers-by and talking to your neighbors. Your open public face was now in back of the house somewhere, probably behind a fence, up on an open deck that wasn't much good in a rainstorm or on a hot day. The connection to the neighborhood was broken. Families withdrew, falling in upon themselves, and began to lose any sense of community with their own neighbors. Throughout our society, the loss showed.
The next thing to go was the dining room. This was the one room in the house that was reserved for ceremonial occasions, special family events and holidays. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, birthdays, Sunday dinners with Mom & Dad and Gramma & Grampa, a big feast spread out on a big table, something for the scrapbooks and the memories for years to come. Now all gone in favor of an "island kitchen," where no man celebrates or remembers anything or anyone. Or maybe a home office, to while away one's unemployed years in. But no place for tradition and family history, shared joys and generational communion. Is it any wonder that we're so cut off from our own parents and children? There's simply no place for them, literally.
The eat-in kitchen went next. Sometimes called a country kitchen, it was a large workspace and the center of the home. The stove served as the hearth, and that's where parents and children gathered to start and finish their days, sort out their troubles and share their little triumphs. Everyone was equal there, though Mom of course was in charge. It was her office and her dispensary, her meeting room and her hospitality suite. The back door was always unlocked, and the kids could always come in for a cookie or a lemonade. In a room, it was home. But it has been replaced by mean little galleys and high tech "spaces" full of stuff that seems designed to make people uncomfortable. Home is not so homey any more.
Here in Hawaii the houses were always so small that the garage or the carport served as a kind of open-air family room and front porch. But in the new developments, the whole front yard is one big driveway, and a mass of cars blocks the garage, which is often just a storage room now, covering half or all of the street side of the home. When you walk or drive down the streets, all you see is driveways, cars & closed garages. There is no connection to the neighborhood. The family are hidden inside the house all year long, night and day, rain or shine. At least two big-screen TV's are blasting away whenever anyone is home and awake. Children are zombied out in front of their own private video screens gawking at cartoons or DVD movies or computer games that rattle the roof. Dad is passed out in front of the endless Game. Mom is looking for companionship on the Internet. You can talk to strangers in China, but you can't talk to someone in the same room. Even within the home, there is no commonality, no communion, no community.
Our neighborhoods are the same. Many do not have sidewalks. There are no stores nearby and the schools and churches are miles away. The only common spaces are miserable little parks around retention ponds or next to the next phase of the development or beside the freeway. There is no town, no sense of place. Our neighborhoods have become vast collections of cookie-cutter storage bins to keep workers and students in between classes and worktimes. Every morning the entire robotic neighborhood pours out onto the roads, each locked in its' own ton of metal on wheels, windows rolled up, TV or radio blasting, cell phones connecting each car to some indeterminate point in space. And every night everyone rolls back to their bins, having had no occasion for human contact with their neighbors. What happened to the civi in civilization? We can't even spell it.
Out in the wider world, there is massive gridlock and death on the highways. We spend half our lives on the road, going nowhere, trapped in traffic, wrapped in metal. The freeways are like gigantic trains, tens of miles long, hundreds of yards wide, where each rider gets his or her own private, insulated car. Everyone creeps along at twenty or thirty miles per hour, wasting an hour or two every day commuting to jobs they could have done at home, or in some community facility near home. Everyone is obese, no one walks anywhere, our favorite foods are killing us and we can't afford health care. Trillions of dollars and whole lives are wasted like this, but we are all stuck in our cars and in our isolated suburbs and in our ephemeral jobs, ordered and disciplined, controlled and commanded by pheromones or something insectoid that we can neither see nor question. High-frequency clicks? Low-frequency rumblings? We don't know why we do all this. We just do it. We are Borg. Bees in a hive. Ants in a colony.
Is there any reason to expect that a world that is centered upon no center should be any less chaotic than each individual uncentered home? Are nations going to work any better together for being comprised of unthinking, uncommunicative, disjointed units? Is there ever likely to be some sane "New World Order" built upon such insane and inhuman foundations? Feng shui NOT!
People need community. They are crying out for it. The anti-communal corporate hegemony has no use for community. Community cannot be exploited for a profit. So we are creating our own communities online, internationally, for free. We all work enough, more than enough. We all contribute enough, more than enough, throughout our lives. We deserve to get something back. What we need is human infrastructure. Social engineering. Spiritual architecture. Feng shui. A country kitchen in the stars. A porch of one's own. A dining room and a real dinner. Because without it, we will soon be nothing but robots. Without each other, we will die. So we will take the infrastructure we have built and we will use it to create communities. And we will thrive.
Today you, yes, You must create some sense of community for yourself and the people you care about. Any simple gesture will do. Sit in a room with someone, if you can. Enjoy some tea or a few beers together. Write a love letter. Call your Dad. Join a group on the Internet. Turn your face to the light for a few moments. Breathe. It's good to be alive. Be alive. Everybody feng shui, tonight.
And get to work on that new front porch. Maybe the neighbors will help. We're social little animals, you know.
Thanks to the Goddess Of The Mountain, Connie of W. Va. Fur and Root. Go say hello to her. She'll be out on the front porch.
(cross-posted at CoffeeHouseStudio by cosanostradamus)
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Labels: antisocial, architecture, code enforcement, design, eat-in kitchens, families, feng shui, formal dining rooms, generations, homeyness, planning, porches, societal breakdown, style, zoning
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posted by Cosa Nostradamus @ 6/20/2009 12:02:00 AM
View blog reactions
5 Comments:
Wonderful post! I'm happy to have inspired it.
You may be happy to know that I only have a back door. My kitchen is huge with a well-worn family table, and I have a monstrous dining room complete with fine china and linen napkins.
I hadn't thought much about the loss of kitchen and dining room, but your words are true. We (whoever "we" is) know that family meals together cause our children to be more resilent and less apt to fall into behaviors nobody wants 13-year-olds doing. I would extrapolate further to say that family meals are just as good for the grownups.
Ironically, I don't have a front porch. I live in a rehabilitated barn - it's a sad state affairs, but barns don't come with porches. The porch is on the to-do list. I long for a place to sit outside when it rains.
I lived in Kaneohe for a bit. I have fond memories of sitting on the carport. My dad would drag out the television on Friday nights so we all could watch the Johnny Cash show on lovely Hawaiian evenings. Everyone was out on their carport - it's just what you did.
"Because of you, I walk the line. . ."
Conne (who loves the Goddess nomer - keep it up! :) )
Hi, Connie! Thanks for the comment. I posted a response on your blog in the original "porch" thread.
"Anomie." Good word. I can live without laws, but not without a community of properly socialized people. I do think that some basic design flaws in our homes and in our communities contributes to this.
People blame the teevee machine for everything. But the fact is, the TV room is the only communal space left in the average household. It's the only room big enough for the whole family to eat together, even if it's just microwave pizza.
I can't imagine having a relationship with somebody that didn't involve cooking and eating together. I don't know how it's possible to do so with children. It's such a basic human activity, and it gives parents and children a chance to relax and take time to see and hear one another in a neutral, non-public setting. Intimacy, I think its called.
I suspect that a lack of intimacy and community is at the root of a lot of our social problems. And even the worst parents can teach a kid something, if only by bad examples. How does a kid know how to be a human being if he never spent any time with one?
I grew up in a small town in New Jersey, about twenty-five miles West of Manhattan. Everybody knew everybody, and everybody's business. The town was only a mile square, it had everything you needed in the era before strip malls and big boxes, even good jobs, and you could walk everywhere. It had sidewalks and shade trees and parks and playgrounds and K-12 schools that the neighboring farm towns kids attended.
That town was known as a dumpy working class place when I was growing up, but it became an ideal for those who had grown tired of the uncentered sprawl that struck the farmlands as I grew up. Not having to always be in a car was a huge plus. We had a train that went to New York, and three bus lines that went to NYC, Newark and Princeton. There were no freeways or U.S. highways (though they were just a mile away), just county roads and one two-lane State highway that was our main street.
Of course, I hated it and couldn't wait to get away. I never looked back once I did escape the nosey, narrow, parochial confines of that stupid little town. But as to design, it was perfect. There were plenty of problems despite that, but they were personal and on a human scale, effecting only the individuals and resolvable by them. There were no systemic problems caused by bad design or lack of design as in so many places these days, where people are stuck with situations they didn't create and can't change.
The message is to build and to live on a human scale, manageable by humans, and not of by and for machines, however useful. The automobile is a wonderful invention, insofar as it liberates us and allows us to accomplish more than we might otherwise have done. But rearranging our entire society around the car was a mistake of epic proportions. Everyone realizes now that the car culture is choking us to death, environmentally, socially and economically. But we are so invested in it, our entire infrastructure is so dominated by it, that it seems we cannot change.
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Damn thingie cut me off. And I was almost finished! Well, here's the end of my schpiel:
So, either we are permanent victims of our forefathers mistakes, or we are free men and women in control of our own lives. All that is lacking is the will to change, and the determination to remove all obstacles, physical, economic, social and political. The first thing we have to do is remove corporate money from our polity, cut the entrenched interests out of our government, and take back our democracy. The very political and bureaucratic structures that created and sustained this mess we're in are the obstacles we need to get hold of and use to fix the mess.
It all starts in the home, though. And if the house is not a home, the town will not be a community and the country will not be a society. To think, it all started with the lack of a kitchen table.
Anyway, I hope you get a front porch some day. Or a car port, at least. Johnny Cash on Fridays in Kaneohe, hunh? Would a "Semper Fi" be in order? Aloha and mahalos!
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Semper Fi, indeed.
Cooking and kids - don't get me going on that one - my son is a chef (I taught him everything I knew and now he runs circles around me).
I agree with almost all of what you're saying. (I disagree on the teevee, though. I do think it's a great evil and when you attach electrodes to the brain while people are watching, the same neurons are firing as junkies shooting heroin.) Anyway.
The revolution has to start in the home. And I believe we have choices to make. I stand behind my statement that you can't make people buy stuff - it's a choice, usually a bad one. (See The Story of Stuff if you haven't - http://www.storyofstuff.com/ watch it.)
Small towns had and still have their own problems, but I believe in small, community schools and front porches.
While corporate greed and our dependence on oil has gotten us to this place, it's our choice to refuse to participate any longer. It's that old fool me once thing. We've been sold a pig in a poke and it turned out to be a wild boar. As my daddy says, when you're up to your ass in alligators, it's time to drain the swamp.
Families are constrained by a sheer lack of time. We have to begin elinating the time vampires in our life - when we do, we can start thinking and talking again. (Turn the damn teevee off, junkie!)
My thoughts are disjointed and I'm not very articulate tonight - it's been a long day (including a squirt gun battle in the halls of my workplace).
You and I agree. Families and communities have born the brunt of the disaster of the corpocracy - greed, in the long run, was not good.
And now I'm off to eat sushi and drink Merlot - my latest purchases at a big box store. (sigh)
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TV, like the Internet and cell phones, etc, is just a tool, a potential medium of expression, a means of connecting people. Unfortunately, we continue with this "free enterprise" model, which allows giant soulless multi-national corporations to dominate all these devices & media, and turn them into tools of profiteering and social & political control. The problem is not the devices but the control of the media by these parasites.
To the extent that TV is dominated by the corp's, it has the least potential for human contact now. To the extent that the cell-phone net is free of corporate influence, it might be the most human of media. People really do use their cell phones to connect and maintain relationships. With new features coming online all the time, the possibilities are expanding. Sexting might not be the best example, or tweeting, but they're just a reflection of an under-educated, spiritually & intellectually destitute population.
If we could use these media to educate people, then great things could be done. We may have lost our country kitchens and our Sunday dinners, but we do still have each other. In the same way that isolated people in big cities like New York create their own sort of "families," even whole "villages," of co-workers, neighbors, shoppers, bar & cafe patrons, nightclubbers, dungeon denizens, sports-nuts, etc, people have been using cell phones and the Internet to build social networks, before there ever was a MySpace or Twitter.
What we're headed toward could be an online society, or a hive mind, depending upon whether it grows freely or under corp/govt influence. We have to fight to keep control of these mediums, or they'll end up being dominated by something like Fox News.
As to making people buy stuff, I've spent a fair portion of my life doing exactly that. Marketing & advertising, like "opinion-making" and propaganda are highly refined arts that pay the bills at most TV & radio stations, newspapers & magazines. If you don't think they work, explain pet rocks or Dubya.
I blame people for allowing themselves to be manipulated, and for being so poorly educated, but it's very difficult to educate oneself in a society where everything is controlled by entities dedicated only to profit. The corps tried to "monetize" education, and it didn't make them enough money. Thank Gawd, since their idea of education was just more marketing & advertising.
It's up to those of us who have managed to acquire a decent education, in the streets and/or at school, to show leadership and help the rest along. People really do want to understand what is happening to them. I think they do understand, on a gut level. Unfortunately, the gut is where the corporatists aim, and their propaganda keeps leading people astray.
Right now, though, I think we're at an unique point in history: The old media and the old establishment that controls the media have really run out of gas. People are really sick of the lies and BS, and they are searching for something else, making new connections to try to educate themselves and communicate with others. We actually have a chance now to reach out and touch these people, and ween them off the glass teat.
We need to make new connections, new families, and reconnect with our roots (and fur), energizing and rebuilding the old with the new, and stabilizing and nurturing the new with the old. It does start with home and the family, but that could be a "home" and a "family" online for those who don't have them IRL, or who want to augment or connect up what they do have with what they've found on the 'Net.
So, that's what I'm doing. Thank you for your participation. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.
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