#14 – Jenny Quillien

#14 – Jenny Quillien

April 28th, 2025

-Editor’s note: Ancillary reading for this episode-

Haunted Spaces for Lesser Gods – exploring the lower road to Christopher Alexander’s findings in Book Four of The Nature of Order , by Jenny Quillien (4 MB PDF)

https://thesideview.co/journal/the-zigzag-man/
https://www.sustasis.org/
Pragmatic Mystic: Christopher Alexander’s Vision of a Living World

Angus Stocking (00:06.786)
This is Everything is Somewhere. I’m Angus Stocking. In this episode, it’s my distinct pleasure and privilege to be interviewing Jenny Quillien, a scholar and consultant whose work spans architecture, anthropology, and organizational culture. Jenny is perhaps best known for her six-year collaboration with the late Christopher Alexander, the visionary iconoclastic architect and theorist behind A Pattern Language and The Nature of Order.

She introduced his groundbreaking ideas to new audiences through her book, Delight’s Muse, which explores Alexander’s philosophy of creating spaces that enhance human life. Jenny’s current gig is a position on the board of Sustasis Foundation, along with Michael Mahaffey, another scholar and architectural theorist strongly influenced by Christopher Alexander’s ideas.

The Sustasis Foundation describes itself as a small, catalytic organization that seeks to convene other collaborators in strategic ways and thereby leverage its small resources for maximum effect, we develop and share tools to promote vibrant, livable neighborhoods while at the same time addressing the critical issues of resource depletion and climate change. Jenny Quillien, welcome to Everything is Somewhere.

Well, thank you very much. You know, I’ve enjoyed our email exchanges and a flurry of swapping articles back and forth. So I’m quite curious to see what shape the conversation will take.

Yeah, well on that, we had talked briefly about starting off on maybe land surveying in particular issues, partly in response to my column that touched on Christopher Alexander’s subdivision proposal in Harbor Peak. And then beyond that, we might get into discussion of Luminous Ground, the fourth book of Christopher’s magnum opus, The Nature of Order, which talks about…

Angus Stocking (02:15.288)
…cosmology and that would be primarily a discussion of your writings on his work. So with that, maybe you could start us off with your thoughts on the subdivision process described in Harbor Peak and also before that even, if you’d care to give an overview of your life and work, what brought you to Christopher Alexander, how you’ve worked with him.

Sure. Okay. Well, we could start that with the book fairy. So, you know, you’re going along in life and for some sense of some sense of elegant synchronicity, the book fairy will simply manage to put into your hands exactly the book you need at that time. So it was in the early nineties, a friend said, this is a gift for you, I think you’ll like it.

And it was A Pattern Language. So indeed I liked it. I read it. I read everything else. And in a move that I don’t make often, I actually called up the office and said, I’ve read this and this and this. Is there anything else? And they said, well, no, but I mean, there’s the manuscript of the book that isn’t finished. And they said I could read it.

I got that, I read it and then actually called them back again. and this is where you will come in. They, I gave them my questions and they said, well, none of us can answer those questions. You’ll have to talk to Alexander himself. Do you want us to set that up for you? And I said, sure.

Jenny, I’m laughing a little bit because I have a very parallel story.

Jenny Quillien (04:06.402)
I know you do, so let’s talk about that.

Well, you say the book fairy and I say the book angel. I had a similar book angel experience. went, I was in Cambria, California. I lived in the central coast for a while. I was with my wife at the time and I always popped into bookstores and I went up to a little bookstore and a second story. was a little small and unusual. And I got up there and I was drawn. It was like A Pattern Language was glowing somehow.

Okay.

Angus Stocking (04:38.038)
…and I couldn’t help but pick it up and start browsing. And I was broke at the time, and I bought it anyway. I couldn’t afford it, but I felt compelled to buy it. And that was 30 years ago, and it set the tone for much of my… Christopher Alexander became a giant of my intellectual life, and it started with a book angel experience. And I also got in touch with Christopher Alexander kind of out of the blue and secured an interview, which led to a lot of writing in American Surveyor magazine, which you’ve read. It’s interesting that we have such a parallel experience. And I wonder how often that happens with people who come to Christopher Alexander.

I don’t know, but there’s another parallel. that is, so I met with them, we talked about my questions, but very, very quickly he turned the tables on me and I became the one who was interrogated. And the upshot of that was to finish answering your question. He asked me if I would be a first reader of the draft. That is, you know, as he continued with the draft, I would be the first to read the draft and say where it was making sense to me or not making sense to me. And apparently roughly the same thing happened to you. You went to talk to him and in the end he’s the one who talked to you.

Yeah, and in particular, he interviewed me about land surveying practice. I had and had read the first volume, The Phenomenon of Life, think, The Nature of Order. After the interview, he sent me out of the blue the remaining three volumes, it, because I think he was working on them, but I got an early read of the volumes, and we were talking yesterday, I think…

Angus Stocking (06:36.544)
…you mentioned that there aren’t that many people who have actually read through all four volumes. And I’m in that small group, I guess. They’ve been a scripture for me, and I’ve really appreciated everything he said. And then also, in particular, on the land surveying, Christopher sent me his proposed subdivision process for Harbor Peak and Brookings, Oregon and called me actually and offered me a job working with him doing the initial survey work. And I didn’t take that and I regret it, but certainly something I’ve tried to do is introduce land surveyors to his thoughts on the subdivision process and the creation of living structure in the land.

As a launching off point, could you maybe tell us what you think about that in terms of how important are land surveyors and subdivision process in the creation of living structure in the world that Christopher invented? I mean, what have we got to start with but the land? I mean, so it’s unbelievably important. So for me, and I’m not a land surveyor, it’s recognizing what is a site. mean, walking that site, understanding the beauty of it and where it’s really good and where it’s broken.

I mean, there are a few golden rules is you walk on land, you feel it, and where it is best, you leave it the hell alone. And you try and put buildings where the land is broken and where the land will be least offensive to the beauty that’s already there. And in all of The Nature of Order…

Jenny Quillien (08:44.79)
…what is incredibly important is this investigation of sequence. What do you do and what do you do in what order? And if you screw up the land surveillance and that initial placement of things, you screwed it up. You can’t, you can, man, you can fix a lot in a house, but you can’t, it’s, mean, you can’t move it.

It’s hard to come back from that.

Absolutely. I mean, to me, there are obviously two mistakes. You just see them repeated constantly. And they’re both mistakes of what’s fast and what’s cheap. So one fast, cheap thing to do is take the friggin’ bulldozer and just roll it out flat. And then it’s much easier for everything else that follows, which is of course a sacrilege, and we can talk religion and that’s a sacrilege.

He used the phrase in Confir… He called it a “torment to the land”.

Jenny Quillien (09:50.67)
Well, it is a torment to the land. That’s a proper expression. And then the other mistake you see constantly is people, engineers come in and they’re just being engineers. So the first thing they will do is lay down roads and sewer pipes and that kind of thing. And they’ll lay it down to be most cost effective. So we’re going to wreck a division. We’re going to wreck a piece of land to save 150 bucks worth of sewer pipe. Now why in the hell would we do that? So the fundamental process or this process or the sequencing is being mindful of what’s significant and where you put a house and where you don’t put a house is a lot more important than 150 bucks worth of sewer pipe.

Especially when you think about the life cycle of that decision. A house will be in place for ideally 100 years or more. So why save 200 bucks in an hour of time right at the beginning?

So that’s why, I mean, this whole idea of process and sequence is so important because if you can’t backtrack or you can’t backtrack easily, you’re living for another hundred years with some really stupid decision-making. So the land survey, yeah, there’s no question in my mind about how important that would be.

And just to drill down on that, probably the main thing discussed in the first three books of The Nature of Order is the idea… The centers, of course, are important, but the idea of process, that correct design and construction isn’t according to a plan, but rather it’s according to what he called the fundamental process. And he didn’t talk about a nature of order, but he did…

Angus Stocking (11:50.058)
in other places, the idea that a fundamental aspect of the process is the surveying work that we’ve been discussing. And I was tickled and impressed as a land surveyor to realize that this body of ideas that I found to be great and important necessarily included the work I was doing at the time as a land surveyor. So on this particular subdivision document, which is… I’ve read a lot of codes and plannings. have gotten subdivisions approved.

It’s something I know quite a bit about. And Christopher’s fundamental process proposed in his document was worthwhile and valid, did adequately address the realities of the process, and could actually have been adopted. Now, it wasn’t.

And there’s probably good reasons for that, but it was a struggle, a battle, if you will, a little bit like what he faced at Eysen campus. He was proposing a method for dealing with a very labyrinthine, complex bureaucratic process that I think could have worked, but in the event didn’t, he lost that battle. But what’s the status of that idea in Alexandrian circles now? Has there been any…

progress on this particular aspect of the fundamental process. Is there urban planning or subdivision that is proceeding according to these ideas?

Actually, not that I know of. Well, I can answer with the one example that I personally lived through, which was, so Alexander was called in by Duncanville, which is a small town, now bedroom community of Dallas. And they wanted to preserve themselves as a real entity, a real town and, you know, with the downtown.

Jenny Quillien (13:57.782)
And they didn’t want to become just another sub bedroom community. So I was on that project and we, you know, we did the charrettes and had the stakeholders and actually came up with some pretty good stuff. But this is where, in a sense, Alexander did not have really the full skillset he needed to pull this off in the real world.

So we did all this work and then he asked them for a substantial fee and the city managers turned a bit green and the new urbanists got wind of this and being much more street smart came in and said, well, we can do it and we’ll cost you a dime. We’ll find the grant money and we’ll write the grants. So who won that one? And then the new urbanists did do some work in Duncanville in the way that they do it, which is a bit more, you know, change the codes.

So you get a more of a look-alike. It does raise the bar. There’s no question about that. It’s much less bad, but it’s not the Alexandrian process. So it’s less bad. But there’s a whole thing where the Alexandrian circles have not done particularly well, and that’s in being street smart, money smart, politics smart, those kinds of things.

There’s often the sense when I read about Christopher Alexander in his books and also when I read about him, that he spent a lot of time tilting at windmills and sometimes successfully, but often not. mean, he had some great successes, but he had some failures too, which I guess would be expected in any important movement trying to reshape the world. There’s some pretty fundamental forces that are being fought there, and it’d be weird if you won every time. But I’m glad that there are folks like yourself, and many others, who are still engaged in the battle.

Jenny Quillien (16:16.942)
Right. since you’re an aficionado of The Nature of Order, in a sense, the same thing could apply to the book. I mean, so the, the strengths of my personal opinion, the, the strength of The Nature of Order and its weaknesses is to a great extent the same. So here you have a guy who unflinchingly, relentlessly worked around the clock for what, 30 years, I mean, between A Pattern Language and The Nature of Order, and it worked basically solo. So the interesting side of that is you really have one mind pushing itself to the end of its own logic. So that’s a very interesting thing to have, one mind pushing something that far.

And at the same time, it’s a bit of a weakness because he was never countered or tempered by coauthors or people who had said, no, no, no, or we have to test that. So, so in a very interesting sense, its strength is its weakness.

Jenny, I’d like to quote you actually from our previous conversation. We were talking about luminous ground and what you’re talking about, and you said about Christopher, he was after the big fish. He really wanted to prove the existence of God. I don’t think he does, but that doesn’t take away from the idea that building is a spiritual activity. A very nice summation, I think, of what he was trying to do. And could you make, let’s move into that discussion, Christopher Alexander’s cosmology. What’s your take on it or what’s your overview of what he was trying to do?

Jenny Quillien (18:08.526)
It wasn’t a sense precisely that I think like many of us, it’s with age, maturity, reflection, that the bigger questions, the spiritual questions start to take up more and more of our time or preoccupations. I think that was true with him. So with the passing of years, he became more and more perplexed with, I mean, how does this universe work?

Why is it that this room makes me feel good and the next that room doesn’t? Which led into the question, what is the nature of reality? What is really going on here?

What’s really going on? What’s really going on? So, four, mean, to go back to the conversation we did, and we both agreed that book four, which is the book of cosmology is a bit like the Bible. If you want compassion, you can find a page with compassion. And if you want an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, you can find that too. So, book four is really a writing down of an exploration of one man’s mind. And he was a theist, he was raised Catholic. And that was kind of home base. mean, wherever he went, he kind of slid back into that theist point of view. And I don’t know, I don’t have any surveys to back it up.

Jenny Quillien (19:47.382)
I think that readers who share that theist assumption find the book very comforting. And I don’t think that people who don’t have it are convinced or compelled by the book. I don’t have numbers to back that up. That’s just a sense that I have from a very small sampling.

The way I’ve been trying to frame it, there’s an interesting… in American politics, in the candidacy of Vivek Ramaswamy, he proposed and talked a lot about the idea of God is real, and that that was an important component. And he was Hindu, and America means Christian, that basic idea of faith in the reality of God.

For me, that often comes down to idealism versus materialism. Is it mind before matter or matter before mind, which causes the other? And I think that when you say theist or when Christopher Alexander talks about The Luminous Ground, the implicate order, I think that basic idea is whether materialism is actually correct or whether there’s mind necessarily preceded matter that absolutely crucial idea and to me luminous ground was trying to verify or describe precisely idealism and I think he did pretty well but in your essay on the topic you looked closely at the psychological premise of The Luminous Ground, that there was material reasons maybe that could explain sinners and life and other Alexandrian ideas. Is that fair to say? if so, how would you talk about that?

Jenny Quillien (21:54.158)
Well, I’d say it a bit differently. mean, one of the interesting things, again, if we put the writing as it was taking place, which was what the mid late 90s, the dead hand of materialism and matter and what was still, it was very much the mainstream. I think it probably still is, but it’s gotten a real beating in the last 20 years.

Christopher Alexander was writing prior to that. So in the context of the time, he was doing something fairly unusual. And it was certainly unusual for an architect to be talking about architecture. I mean, I totally agree with him that building is a spiritual activity. It requires a kind of spiritual mindfulness. And the essay I wrote,

was really that he was so enthusiastically asked after this big fish, could he do what no one else had done, which is prove an existence of God. He threw away as insignificant and uninteresting the whole question of, well, what part of this can we explain through pretty ordinary things about human cognitive psychology and cognition. And my sense was, which is why I took the trouble to write that essay, you can dig down a bit and you can go pretty far with some very ordinary cognitive explanations. And in the last 20 years, I don’t know if you know people like Donald Hoffman or Bernardo Castro, people like that. And they really are saying, look, they use the metaphor of the dashboard.

You’re piloting a plane and you really don’t see what’s outside the plane, you see a dashboard. But the dashboard’s not what’s outside the plane. And we all are dealing with our dashboards, we do with them what we can. But we can’t forget that actually we’re dealing with dashboards.

Angus Stocking (24:13.772)
Well, and sure, and that’s kind of a fundamental idea to like Zen, for example, who is the master that makes green grass green. We’re not dealing with the world. We’re dealing with a model of the world that’s presented to us by our brains, I guess.

And so I just stopped and took the time and said, okay, if we look at this model that our brains are doing, how far can we go with that? And we can go a fair distance. Yeah.

And by the way, I’ll break in. The essay is called Haunted Spaces for Lesser Gods. It’s a wonderful read. Is that available for download somewhere? Where could people come across that?

Um, I, it was the basis of a talk. Uh, I’ll give it to anybody who wants it, you know, but, um, I used it as a basis for talk, so I never published it, but I mean, it would be easy enough to do that too.

Okay, we can get into the show notes or something.

Jenny Quillien (25:11.64)
Sure. Absolutely.

Okay. So please proceed. I’m sorry to interrupt.

Well, tell me more what you would want to know about that.

Well, that basic idea that you can go pretty far in describing the phenomenon of living space and structure, which is, I think we both agree that that’s real, there’s something fundamental there, but it can be explained by aspects of the brain or even linguistics. Pursue that idea for us.

Well, let me think. Well, one was to part of it. Well, the way that essay structured is I went back to book four and simply took Chris at his word saying, so he says this insignificant, unimportant explanation and he goes through what three or four points and then throws it out the window.

Angus Stocking (26:09.134)
Yeah, I think he uses the word zap. That something about structure can zap the brain. I don’t know if structure can zap the brain, but it’s clear that, okay, the first one comes to mind is void. So a void is one of the 15 properties. It’s central to any kind of sense of cosmology, but we experience our own body that way of a central void. And we orient ourselves left, right, up, down, front, back in relationship to a internal kind of void.

So our cognitive apparatus is connected to how we’re physically structured. So we can look at that. Then we can look at how people, know, sacred objects and you know how in Mexico they’ll walk a statue of the Virgin Mary around on the street. And what in the world is going on there? Because when we hold that statue of Virgin Mary and in deep respect, we treat it like we would treat a person. We give it a house. We feed it. We care for it. So there are all these parallels with how we physically deal with objects like that and our idea of cosmology.

And I think when he talked about the zapping, it was in his chapter on art, and everyone involved will acknowledge that when you look at a great piece of art, you sometimes have a profound sense of awe. And the materialist psychological explanation for that, Christopher described as something about…

Angus Stocking (28:03.918)
…color and shape and space can trigger or zap a psychological response. And that’s what he was dismissing. And that’s what you are pursuing and I think proving that you can actually go pretty far with that idea.

You can, and there’s another kind of split in the road at that point, and they’re both in book four. And Chris Alexander prefers one, and personally, I tend to prefer the other. So you’re looking at a fabulous piece of art, statue of him. And in one point of view, it’s kind of like a window. And you say, because you’ve been able to perceive something on the other side of something.

So the piece of art is like a window onto something which is already there. So, and this is the stronger theist point of view is God is already there and you are just having an extraordinary moment, an opportunity to get a glimpse at it. The other way

which is not materialism, but it’s a view that just a bit more Aristotle, a bit more Gregory Bateson, a bit more Fritz Capra, that the world does have a telos and it is completing itself. So we’re talking about with art, not a glimpse onto something which already is there.

It is an experience of something which is becoming. And so that’s what the universe is. And that’s also a kind of interesting point of view. Maybe you will remember one of those great scientists who had a great gift of the gab. it goes something like a telos, the universe going somewhere.

Jenny Quillien (30:19.916)
This Tilos is the scientist’s mistress. He can’t be seen with her, but he can’t live without her. So all this science doesn’t talk about the becomingness of the universe, but they’re all in their way, dependent on that idea to do their science. And so that’s kind of an interesting angle on it too.

Angus Stocking (30:52.504)
Break into this interview for just a moment to identify the quote that Jenny is reaching for. It’s from biologist JBS Haldane and he says, teleology is like a mistress to the biologist. He dare not be seen with her in public, but cannot live without her. I also wanted to define teleology because I wasn’t sure what it meant. Teleology is a study of the purposes of nature. So what is the purpose of reality? What is the purpose of life? That’s teleology. And famously, as a scientific discipline, teleology began to decline in the 17th century and in today’s materialistic age is considered to be entirely defunct. So there you have it.

Jenny Quillien (31:57.184)
So in discussions, you’ll hear things like more and more complex in a more Alexandrian point of view towards more and more life. And part of centers growing is sometimes throwing them away, but that interaction. So what he means by the 15 properties, see, a lot of people hardly get through book one and they don’t get to book two, is this dynamic constant transformation of the universe. And the best way to describe it or try to get closer to it is that it takes place through a constant dance of these 15 properties. So that’s how he’s exploring the kind of constant evolution and the moving forward of the universe.

That’s how biology works. If we had any sense, that’s how our towns would grow. It would just be this creation of a intense and more and more intense fabric, living fabric through these transformations. So, go ahead.

Yeah. And I, as I think about it, I would say that Christopher strongly reacted against the idea that the universe is explainable as shit happens. That there’s a purposeful growth, which we could describe as evolution that has an endpoint, has an endpoint and that

Ha ha ha!

Angus Stocking (33:48.842)
endpoint would be characterized by complex living structures throughout, in that human civilization has a pattern of growth that leads toward richer and more beautiful environment. Is that sort of it? That’s how I model it, but what do you think?

I think that’s close enough. well, look, so in that essay you cited, my response was, well, wait a minute, Chris, you’re going after this big fish, but you just threw out a nice little trout here. Let’s have a look at the trout. I think he’s wrong on a lot of things, but I don’t think it matters. I mean, it’s because we’re all wrong and science is all about being wrong and celebrating the fact that you figured out where you were wrong so you can go and figure out something else. mean, that’s, so where Alexander succeeds is even when he’s wrong, he’s wrong in a really interesting way, and a useful way. And so we can take that, build on that, and be extraordinarily grateful that when he was right, he was right, and where he was wrong, it was an interesting wrong.

Angus Stocking (35:09.816)
Jenny, can I bounce an idea off you?

Well, want to in my essay on Luminous Ground, I kind of concluded with what I saw as a proposed praxis of Christopher. the quote is, if a person dedicates himself to making the field of centers, to making things whole, the more he or she does it, the more whole he or she becomes within him or herself. Even one act of making this field of centers a few minutes or an afternoon done honestly and in full pursuit of the real thing changes a person and brings a level of calmness, quietness, and peacefulness, which is quite unusual into that person.

And to me, this would be an example of even if he’s wrong about on the big picture, he’s correct in terms of ways we can orient ourselves toward spirit and archaeology or our daily work that makes the world a better place and makes us a better person. Is that a reasonable thing to extract from The Luminous Ground and Christopher Alexander’s writings?

Jenny Quillien (36:29.178)
Certainly, there are ramifications to that, but absolutely. So, because to do that, and you’ve heard of the building beauty program, because you were in contact with Jodan, Jodan Rao. So, I mean, the first thing you do with students is have them make something, and just an object, can be a cup, it can be a little wood.

Absolutely.

Jenny Quillien (36:56.598)
something that can be a bench, it doesn’t matter. But the insistence is that the student be authentic to themselves, honest to themselves, honest to kind of pleasing themselves. And that you get objects which I wouldn’t call them childish. That’s not the right word. Innocent, deeply charming, beautiful, but kind of innocent because the actual genuine person has been put into the object. And by making that, that process nourishes the maker, so to speak. So you put in and you get back out. And that is…

That’s your thermometer. That’s how you judge whether it’s good. So you do something to your ceramic cup and you stand back and you look at it and you say, how does that make me feel? So you’re using yourself as a tool for judging whether the object is authentic or inauthentic.

And Christopher’s question was something like, which is a better picture of myself?

Right. That’s the mirror of the self, which is a bit different. So let’s finish the one thought then we talked about the mirror of the self. So in the making of something, I just wanted to point out, my God, how different is this from our everyday neo consumer world where we’re fashion and image, image driven junk.

Jenny Quillien (38:52.066)
I mean, so you have to look like, I don’t know what actress or Kardashian or something. So, but it has nothing to with you. It’s a, you’re being forced to consume images, imagery, which are not authentic. So, so, mean, God bless them for really pushing that into the limelight.

Why are we consuming this image-driven junk, which isn’t good, doesn’t serve us, but we’re told repeatedly this is what we have to be doing. Whereas to make something yourself where you have to put yourself into it, that’s a totally different process. Now the mirror of the self is worth talking about for a minute because it’s connected to that, but it’s not the same thing as making something.

It has an interesting history which many people don’t know. So you know that Alexander was a, at one point in his life, became obsessed with carpets and design carpets.

Yes, and I love this story, please.

So he was buying all these carpets, but they cost a lot of money. And the carpet dealers would let him have the rug for a few days to think about it, but he couldn’t buy all the rugs. So he had to come up with a way to effectively and evaluate which rug was better than the other rug and which one was really worth the purchase price.

Jenny Quillien (40:33.966)
He devised this crazy system, but I swear to you, it works. So you take two rugs, two of anything, two rugs, two coffee cups, two whatevers, and you say, which one is a better picture of me? Me? Who I am? My goodness, my pettiness, my past, my future.

If I had to be reincarnated as one of these two rugs or one of these two coffee pots, which one would it be? And if you do that, you will pick the one that the expert of Sufi prayer rugs or the expert of coffee mugs would say this one’s better. It’s a shortcut to

expertise. And you know, it works.

Well, and for one thing, it’s a practical guide to investment.

It’s a practical guide to investment. And I can tell you, I remember the night very clearly when I, when I did the test, you know, I listened to this, okay, which one, which reincarnated as one of these two things. said, my, my, my. So I wasn’t immediately compelled to run out and do this, but there was a night I went to a Moroccan restaurant. The meal was slow and coming. I’d been to that little restaurant near my apartment many times.

Jenny Quillien (42:13.578)
And the restaurant owner had a collection of Moroccan pottery. So in previous meals there, I’d already picked out the one that I liked. And the one that I liked, which is not the same thing, right? The one that I liked was, it was round. had this kind of beautiful sensual shape to it. It was this kind of buttercup yellow, and it was just joyful. So that’s the one I liked. But the mirror of the self doesn’t ask you which one do you like. That’s not the question. The mirror of the self asks you which one of these is a better picture of yourself. And I stopped and I really thought about it and I had to abandon my joyful yellow pottery bowl and I had to pick one…

Jenny Quillien (43:13.898)
…that was muddy brown, very quiet. It had this kind of long neck with these little intricate black lines around the neck as the one that was actually more like me, and I love that you say I had to, I had to pick that one. Then I asked the restaurant owner who was around and I asked him if he would tell me about his collection. And then he says, yeah, that yellow one, it’s a very nice pot. But the best one in the collection is that brown one with this long neck and the intricate black lines. And you say, there you go. By using the mirror of self. Right. Yeah.

That’s right. And that points to, think, another strength of Alexander, which is kind of an epistemology. He’d try anything. I mean, to acquire information or understanding. You can be analytical. You can go for synthesis. You can go for intuition. You can go for math. And you can go for the mirror of the self. I mean, it’s all good. Anything that will enhance understanding, go for it. And I think that’s one of his strengths and I think it’s pretty rare, you know?

Angus Stocking (44:39.586)
such a great story, and that’s the experience that Christopher had when he was choosing between rugs without much knowledge of the field by using the mirror, the self-test. He arrived at the rugs that were considered truly profound by longtime experts in the field.

Absolutely. And if you can pull that off in your profession, mean, fabulous.

I agree. so there’s two ideas here. One is pursuing… Christopher writes pretty straightforwardly of doing better work if we do what pleases ourself, if we do what we like. And then there’s the idea of the mirror of the self to judge or evaluate art or work or daily life. And both can be to bring it back to land surveyor and daily work.

One could pursue wholeness and centers and pleasing the self when doing something as simple as a certified survey map in terms of the layout and how you do labeling and how you write the titles and the spatial arrangement on the sheet. That would be pursuing liking and wholeness and pleasing the self. And then when you’re doing things like evaluating, say two possible subdivision proposals, how you’re going to carve up the land.

You might think in terms of the mirror of the self, and that is, know, which a better picture of me, you know, it can sometimes seem like a ridiculous question, but it’s a perfectly valid question that does have an answer that will put you in line of great thinkers or the spirit of the age or whatever, or God, in making a simple decision. It’s profound and practical.

Angus Stocking (46:36.378)
And I wish both ideas, I hope they both become more prevalent in work of all sorts. Jenny, this has been great and I don’t want to take all of your evening there and answer it. What should people know about you or where could they go for more information on cystasis, for example, or the book that you have written about Christopher?

Well, let’s see. Well, let me say a word about Delight Smooth, which is the book I wrote on, yeah, The Nature of Order. So people tell me it’s helpful. And I think it is. I would want to make sure that people knew exactly what it was and what it isn’t, you know? So The Nature of Order, as you well know, is four volumes and 2000 pages. And honestly, we could take a red pen and cut that sucker in half and it would be a better book, but it would still be a thousand pages. And I’m realizing that most people really don’t get through it.

So you are, you’re in the hall of fame for having done all four, and not because it’s not complicated exactly, but it’s comprehensive and I feel like it restates points and teachings quite a bit, re-frames on, uses a lot of examples. So it could be cut, but at the same time, it’s a little hard to exert because he makes his point with such a comprehensive majesty. But I’m dithering. Go ahead.

Well, that’s true, but I can also quote you because I listened to, know, when we talked about doing this podcast and you sent me two other podcasts, one was with Ryan Singer, the computer guy. And in that conversation, I think it was you, but it might’ve been the other guy, described the nature of water as a pill.

Angus Stocking (48:35.798)
Yeah, it’s hard to take. It’s a tough swallow.

Okay. Well, okay. It is a pill. So, yeah, God knows I love and respect the work, but it’s kind of like the nature of water is kind of like dancing with a grease tip of Potamus. I mean, you got to get your arms around it and then you got to connect the points. I don’t know. It’s a pill or it’s a grease tip of Potamus. So I produced a work with, it’s I think 180 pages, it’s under 200 pages with a lot of pictures, which is simply kind of a heads up. It does two things.

It’s kind of a heads up on many of the themes that are in The Nature of Order, but I would never want anyone to think that it was a substitute for it or even a complete synthesis for it. It’s not, you can’t write 200 pages to represent 2000. That just would be silly, you know? So I would want people to be clear about what it was they were looking at. And then the other thing I did, because I spent about six years being a first reader and having these discussions, and that phase was kind of over. And then the logical thing for me to do in my own learning process would be to go try it.

So I had bought a small adobe in Santa Fe, 1930. The typical Santa Fe, was an initial building of four rooms. Some blue collar family had put this together. Then people had added on and people had added on. And then it was my job to make it mine and to make it more whole.

Jenny Quillien (50:35.214)
So this was an opportunity for me, myself to actually try the stuff out. And so that’s what I did next. And so there, there are bits and pieces throughout this short piece, the Delight’s Muse short piece, where I talk about what happened when I tried it. So, so the book does those two things. I just do not want people to think that they’re getting a substitute that because that would be so patently silly people have said it helps them then go back and Face the 2,000 pages Because they’ve got something of a heads-up on on what they’re going to be looking at… I have done the same thing, and I’ve often had this kind of eerie feeling that we’ve tread the same ground or or thought some of the same thoughts as we’ve tried to incorporate Alexandrian concepts into our personal lives.

For me, it’s been trying to make a home more living and whole and setting up a workshop. I’m a bit of an artist and sculptor and that’s certainly been trying to apply the 15 properties and the fundamental process. Learning by doing it’s been very big in my life. And what have you, so that’s great. So what have you learned?

Angus Stocking (51:57.324)
Well, for one thing, for me, just having a grasp on the fundamental, 15 fundamental properties, which he talks about in length with visual examples and having that framework for thinking about aesthetics been huge. And I feel like I make much better paintings and sculptures just from knowing that. And then the idea of the fundamental process and the primacy of centers, I feel like I have made some headway in my life in identifying centers and strengthening them. And that’s been very helpful in rooms and in studios and workshops and art and watercolors and sculpture. So I don’t feel like I’ve gone very far. I don’t know that I’m profound, but better is better, right? And I have made better things from knowing about centers and the 15 properties and the fundamental process and Alexander’s idea of a “wholeness”. So I’m very grateful that I’ve made a few better things. Right. Or made things better than I would have otherwise by knowing The Nature of Order. It gives one the language for making very fine and useful distinctions between different aspects of what you’re making.

Mm-hmm.

Jenny Quillien (53:16.014)
Okay, and of course one thing it immediately gives you is vocabulary, which is unbelievably useful to actually have a lexicon to look more systematically and more mindfully at stuff.

I found the same thing and particularly, you know, a long section of The Luminous Ground is about applying color or using color in art. And I found that entire section maddening. And I feel like it’s some of his least clear writing. It’s very personal. And I could tell that he had great revelations.

but they weren’t translating to me. I had no idea how to get better color into a painting after reading it. I think I knew what he was talking about, but the working backwards, I could recognize it much better than I could try to create it.

Right. I did find that it was, it came in more handy working backwards than working forwards. That I found it very useful in evaluating what was there and how that had come into play. I found it more dicey going forward as a planning tool. What has to happen now is we need a lot of people messing around coming to more terms with, what works really well, what sort of works, but we can see some a way forward and what doesn’t work at all. And so that whole period of where the rubber hits the road needs to happen. We need a lot of people doing a lot of experiments and a lot of different ways to kind of test things and, okay, see what remains and see what we have to change.

Angus Stocking (55:10.648)
Jenny, I think that’s probably a good ending point for the conversation.

Angus Stocking (55:27.342)
Thanks for listening to this episode of Everything is Somewhere. And I think I did a good job here of arriving at a topic that really sums up what I’m trying to create with this podcast. And that would be an examination of geospatial aspects of obscure aspects of reality in conversation with interesting and or intelligent people who’ve been doing amazing work in interesting fields.

But please let me know what you think. You can send me feedback directly at angusstocking at gmail.com or anonymously at amerisurv.com slash podcast. Also, if you enjoyed this episode, I hope that you will subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or Spotify or rate the podcast or the episode. And if you’re feeling especially magnanimous, leave a review. It really helps us a lot. And I hope to keep doing this and keep recording interesting conversations with interesting people. Finally, if LinkedIn is your thing, I hope that you will reach out and connect with me. I’m easy to find. There is only one Angus Stocking.