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Regulating the Rise of China: Australia’s Foray into Middle Power Economics Michael Peters
This book poses a simple question: how is this architecture possible? To respond, it will embark on a captivating journey through many singular architectural concepts. The entasis of Doric columns, Ulysses and desert islands will outline an architectural act that moves beyond representation. A ferryman who stutters will present two different types of architectural minds. A stilus and a theory of signs will reconsider the ways architects can develop a particular kind of intuition, while architectural technicities will bring forth a membranic and territorial understanding of architecture. Finally, as a melody that sings itself, a larval architecture will be introduced, bringing space and time together.
Assisting this endeavour, the thought of philosophers like Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Gilbert Simondon and Raymond Ruyer will meet the latest developments in fields like affect theory, cognitive sciences, environmental studies and neuroanthropology. Eventually, by the end of this book, the readers – from architecture students and researchers to academics and practitioners with an interest in theory – will have been exposed to a comprehensive and original philosophy of architecture and the built environment.
Stavros Kousoulas is Assistant Professor of Architecture Philosophy and Theory at the Faculty of Architecture of TU Delft, the Netherlands. He studied architecture at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece and at TU Delft, the Netherlands. He graduated cum laude from IUAV Venice, Italy, participating in the Villard d’ Honnecourt International Research Doctorate. He has published and lectured in Europe and abroad and has been a member of the editorial board of Footprint: Delft Architecture Theory Journal since 2014. His previous publications include the edited volumes Architectures of Life and Death (with Andrej Radman) and Design Commons (with Gerhard Bruyns).
Architectural Borders and Territories
Series editor: Marc Schoonderbeek
Architectural Borders and Territories offers a comprehensive series of books on architectural ‘borders’ and ‘territories’, emphasising the intrinsic critical relationship as well as the inherent complexities between these two core terms of architecture.
Topics include:
1. border and migration studies in relation to spaces of conflict;
2. the territory and architecture, infrastructure and landscape;
3. critical theories probing (the boundaries of) architecture as a discipline
4. design thinking in relation to design methodologies.
The series is theoretical and historical in its scope and presents discussions relevant to international contemporary scholarship in architecture.
Mapping in Architectural Discourse
Place-Time Discontinuities
Marc Schoonderbeek
Architectural Technicities
A Foray Into Larval Space
Stavros Kousoulas
Architectural Technicities
A Foray Into Larval Space
Stavros Kousoulas
Cover image: Designed by Stavros Kousoulas
First published 2023 by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
The right of Stavros Kousoulas to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kousoulas, Stavros, author.
Title: Architectural technicities: a foray into larval space / Stavros Kousoulas.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2022. | Series: Architectural borders and territories | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022007045 (print) | LCCN 2022007046 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032235240 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032235257 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003278078 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Architecture–Philosophy.
Classification: LCC NA2500 .K685 2022 (print) |
LCC NA2500 (ebook) | DDC 720.1–dc23/eng/20220411
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007045
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007046
ISBN: 978-1-032-23524-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-23525-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-27807-8 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003278078
Typeset in Garamond by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Acknowledgements vii
What Is Architecture’s Problem? 1
0.1 So Many Solutions, So Few Problems 1
0.1.1 Architecture-Without 2
0.1.2 A Chrysalis Awake 6
0.1.3 What If There Were a Problem 9
0.2 The Producer Product 10
0.2.1 A True Problem, a Pure Event 11
0.2.2 A Concept Responds, a Concept Asks 12
Notes 15
Bibliography 17
1 An Architect Who Stutters 19
1.1 Ulysses’s Ship 19
1.1.1 A Column, a Wave, a Paper and a Brain 20
1.1.2 Extended Architectural Minds, Minor and Major 24
1.2 Desert Islands, Intransitive Forces 29
1.2.1 The Antecedence Criterion 29
1.2.2 To Begin Anew 32
1.2.3 Signs of Disruption 34
1.3 The Ferryman of Hades 38
1.3.1 Ratiognition 38
1.3.2 Subliminally Beautiful 40
1.3.3 Stuttering to Death 44
Notes 49
Bibliography 53
2 Technicities of Architectural Intuition 56
2.1 Concrete Walls Abstractly Concretizing 56
2.1.1 A Manipulative Account 57
2.1.2 Architectural Technicities 59
2.1.3 Give Architecture a Hand 61
2.1.4 Concretized Abstractions 64
2.1.5 The Undetermined Hand 67
2.2 The Oldest Prejudice 72
2.2.1 Trans-intuitive Stutters 72
2.2.2 Digitally Broken, Analogically Glued 76
2.2.3 The Event Is in the Plural 77
2.2.4 Digital until Proven Immanent 80
2.3 The Ethopoiesis of Architecture 82
2.3.1 Reductionist to the Bitter (Autopoietic) End 82
2.3.2 Architectural Part-to-Affective Whole 85
2.3.3 Drift, Naturally 90
2.3.4 Put the Blame on the Relation, Boys 93
Notes 97
Bibliography 101
3 Architecture on the Limit 104
3.1 Analogue Flights of a Digital Spider 104
3.1.1 Eppur Si Individuate 105
3.1.2 All Is Information 108
3.1.3 Parametricist Scholasticism 111
3.1.4 Transductive Modulations under the Allagmatic Bridge 114
3.2 Bells and Whistles 120
3.2.1 An Artisan of Rhythms 121
3.2.2 It Comes with the Territory 125
3.2.3 Ritornerà 130
3.2.4 It Doesn’t Fold Because You Say So 134
3.2.5 Un-frame the Veil 137
3.2.6 What Happens on the Membrane, Stays on the Membrane 141
Notes 146
Bibliography 150
4 Larval Space 152
4.1 Memorie dal Futuro 153
4.1.1 Synaptic Passages 153
4.1.2 A Melody that Sings Itself 161
4.2 The End Is the Beginning Is the End 170
4.2.1 A Brief History of Architectural Time 170
4.2.2 One Final(ist) Act 177
Notes 187
Bibliography 190
Index 193
Acknowledgements
This book would not be possible if it were not for the countless and intensive discussions on architecture theory and philosophy that I have had the privilege to be part of throughout the years. As such, I owe to my friend and colleague Andrej Radman for being a spearhead of all things theory and whose constant feedback can be traced throughout this book; to Heidi Sohn for her continuous support, invaluable input and her meticulously close readings and corrections on early drafts of this text; to Patrick Healy for his ability to provoke thought as no other; to Robert A. Gorny for being capable of both the most radical and systematic forms of thinking; to Rosi Braidotti, Sjoerd van Tuinen and Rick Dolphijn for our exchanges in the local Deleuze Circle; and to all my students who inspired this book in the first place.
I am grateful to my colleague and series editor Marc Schoonderbeek, as well as to Francesca Ford, Caroline Church and Trudy Varcianna for their generous editorial guidance. I am indebted to Heleen Schröder for her copyediting and proofreading. Finally, I am thankful to my institution, the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at Delft University of Technology, for the financial support in all stages of preparing this book.
What Is Architecture’s Problem?
This book poses a simple question: how is this architecture possible? To be precise, it will not focus on the exact techniques that actualize the built environment. Even though such issues will be addressed, the focus is much broader; in this sense, it is a metaphysical issue. Moving beyond the notorious Heideggerian declaration of the ‘end of metaphysics’, we will explore the very nature of architecture. I will claim that metaphysics not only has not ended, but it is perhaps more necessary than ever before. However, what is needed is not a general – and generalizing – metaphysics, a theory of everything that, in the end, addresses nothing in particular. To the contrary, I will outline a metaphysics of architecture, not by borrowing concepts and notions from other discourses and attempting to apply them metaphorically within architectural thought, but rather by exploring the trajectories where architecture and other disciplines can productively encounter each other and potentially transform. If we accept, paraphrasing French philosopher Henri Bergson, that architecture has not yet found its metaphysics, then this book is an effort to change that.1 To do so, I need not only to further detail the problem at the core of the book; what is necessary is to radically reformulate the notion of ‘problem’ itself.
0.1 So Many Solutions, So Few Problems
When Martin Heidegger announced the ‘end of metaphysics’ in his books on Nietzsche, he made it clear that this end also stood for another, perhaps more significant end: the end of Western philosophy.2 In this regard, Heidegger was right; indeed, Nietzsche’s immanent metaphysics marked an end, the end of transcendental philosophies. As such, ‘ the end of metaphysics only signifies the end of the metaphysics that believes itself to be or pretends to be transcendent.’3 Indeed, already at its anecdotal birth, as the book after Aristotle’s Physics in the Library of Alexandria, metaphysics did not intend to ostracize the sensible to a realm beyond, but rather to express the rules and principles that governed the sensible world; or, at least, this was the case for any major pre-Socratic philosopher.4 It was only later, as we will see when focusing on Plato, that metaphysics became almost synonymous with transcendental thought. Nonetheless, what is the difference between immanence and transcendence, and why does it matter for architecture?
DOI: 10.4324/9781003278078-1
0.1.1 Architecture-Without
As expressions of rules and principles concerning the nature of the real, both transcendental and immanent metaphysics wish to express how the real is given, how its sense becomes sensible. Etymologically, one can approach both in terms of their relation to a ground, a place; what is immanent remains within, remains there, holding firmly to its location, while the transcendent is what detaches and unbinds itself – as the Parmenidean chain or the soul that leaves the body.5 Transcendental metaphysics as the philosophy of the Idea replaces the real with a symbol – mathematical, linguistic, or, in any case, representational – and detaches itself from the real, expressing the rules and principles not of this world but of a world that serves the principles themselves. It is not the model that compromises to the world, but rather the world conforming to its modelled version. Sense is no longer the sense of this world but rather the sense of the ideal, modelled version that the world needs to conform with and participate in. As such, any transcendental account of sense can be easily replaced with another, since, in any case, it does not correspond to real experience but to an ideal modelling of experience. Any sensible act of and in the real can be explained, justified and controlled at will; any architectural act can be rendered compatible to an ideal.
Consequently, there are two reasons why one should turn to an immanent architectural metaphysics: acknowledging architecture as of this world, and granting it both a place and an irreplaceability. 6 Doing so, one can approach architecture as the architectural sense that produces it and the sense that it itself produces. Moreover, one can understand architectural sense without necessarily confusing it with signification. As philosopher and cultural theorist Erich Hörl reminds us, for the greatest part of human thought – and because of the transcendental metaphysics that accompanied it – sense has always been understood as, or even become synonymous with, signification. 7 As he claims, up until the second half of the last century, ‘this sense of sense was understood as the sense of sense: that is to say, the age-old figuration and interpretation of sense, the doxa or dogmatic image that conceives of sense as signification.’ 8 However, Hörl, following philosopher Gilbert Simondon, is quick to add that the emergence and gradual popularization of information technologies – what one can simply refer to as cybernetics – coincides with the emergence of another trajectory, one that can never allow returning to mere signification. 9 Simply put, it is the emergence of ‘open machines’ and ‘open objects’, a technology of the outside, that has circumvented, surpassed and essentially rendered obsolete the traditional culture of sense that remains obsessed with signification. As Hörl puts it, in such a vision, the technical object no longer features as a meaningless tool, or as an instrument that is a mere means to achieve the ends
of an already constituted and meaning-giving subject. It is no longer a separate, minoritized object situated at the abyss of non-sense; no longer the accursed share, or the impossible outside of meaning. This inferior object that was always considered a mere thing in the work of interiority and the theatre of intentionality, now appears at the very heart of the culture of sense, opening up a new stage and new environment of sense.10
Simply put, if one no longer considers technology and culture apart, but rather conceives technology – and, consequently, architecture – as a mechanism of culture, then what occurred in the past century was a technological transformation of sense.11 Nonetheless, what does our current technological sense imply for architecture? In short, it calls, nowadays more than ever before, for an immanent account of architectural production. This is the case precisely because our current technological condition necessitates an understanding of being that does not correlate to anything but its own mode of production. As Hörl claims, following philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, it is a being-without: without essence, without model, without rules.12 A being that is not extrinsically conditioned is a being that is unchained, one that not only has no (cultural) soul that leaves its (technological) body but, more importantly, does not even distinguish between soul and body. The reason why such a being-without is the mode of existence of our technological condition is the technological object itself. As will become clear by the end of this book, technology is the driving motor of a purposiveness without purpose, a consequence-organized dynamic that is its own consequence and depends on nothing except the act that produces it and the acts that it allows or constrains. As such, it is clear why a metaphysics of immanence is necessary for an architecture that is now transformed to an architecture-without.
To speak of an architecture-without equally implies an architectural production-without. It asks for an account of architectural production that does not rely on anything but production itself. As such, it goes directly against the foundational principle of any transcendental philosophy, namely the originary, Platonic rejection of an absolute creation – a creation without any pre-existing example, without any model to base itself on and without any dominant principle. Simultaneously, it goes against notions of autonomy, especially those implied in various architectural theories: to speak of production itself is to speak of heterogeneity, of transversal and transdisciplinary practices of contamination, rather than suppose pure and ideal typologies or strict disciplinary boundaries. In this sense, according to Hörl, the complex and extended couplings between the human and the technological that our current condition allows, bring forward a radical shift from onto-theology (the pinnacle of transcendental metaphysics) to onto-technology.13 This echoes Nancy’s thought, when he claims that
from creation as the result of an accomplished divine action, one shifts to creation as, in sum, an unceasing activity and actuality of this world in
its singularity. One sense of the word (creation as a state of affairs of the given world) yields to another (creation as bringing forth a world – an active sense that is nothing else than the first sense of creatio.)14
Nancy is correct to point out that, ironically, an onto-technological understanding of creation stands much closer to the very etymology of the word: creare, to make, to bring forth. Without asterisks or transcendental rules, creation is just bringing forth and not bringing forth out of a somewhere or something that is given in advance. In this sense, technological – and architectural – creation brings forth not only new objects, but, crucially, new subjects. Moreover, this is not an exception that applies only to our current technological condition: technology is not only a mechanism of culture but also a mechanism for the production of subjectivities – even though one could claim that the two coincide. Consequently, the subject who thinks transcendentally, the one to whom all sense appears to be given only as synthesizable based on its significations, the writing, reading, alphabetized, grammatized or even cinematographic subject, is nothing but a product of the technologies that provided it with a language, a grammar or a moving image: the pencil, the book and the screen precede the subject who misconceives them as mere infrastructure, ready to be picked up at will for its own pleasure or interest.15
On this misunderstanding that prioritizes the subject in favour of the (technological) object, lie the fundamental presuppositions of the hylomorphic schema. Hylomorphism, in brief, assumes a binary relation between form and matter, while simultaneously privileging the first. Simply put, it states that matter is nothing but the passive, objective ground upon which the active, subjective form will impose. It is against the hylomorphic tradition that has dominated the history of Western thought – including, of course, architectural thought – that Gilbert Simondon would devote his oeuvre. While this will be a recurrent topic, what is crucial for now is to understand one of Simondon’s most important claims regarding hylomorphism: Simondon claims that ‘the entire ontological and epistemological organization of the occidental sense culture is encapsulated in the hylomorphic juxtaposition of form and matter, which is nothing else but a representation of work and its basic object relations, which minorize technical objects.’16 Put differently, Simondon claims that hylomorphism does not emerge as an ideological caprice, but directly from specific working conditions – or from specific actions. Moreover, hylomorphic thought becomes a presumption that propels consequent actions, patterns of work that secure its dominance.17 As Hörl summarizes, the main point of Simondon is that hylomorphism has shaped the entire Western practice of describing concrete physical, psychic and social processes. In which way has it shaped them though? As Simondon puts it,
The hylomorphic schema corresponds to the knowledge of someone who remains outside the workshop and considers nothing but what enters and exits it; in order to know the true hylomorphic relation, it is not even
enough to enter the workshop and work with the craftsman: we would have to penetrate into the mold itself in order to follow the operation of form-taking on the different scales of magnitude of physical reality.18
Hylomorphism implies a distorted understanding of any environment, since it constantly remains ‘outside’ of it. If we understand an environment as a population of relations, then representational logics and the transcendental metaphysics that gave birth to it are, in the end, disinterested in relations and much more geared towards fixed products and terms. As such, the wish of hylomorphism to remain outside of what it attempts to examine or manipulate has the opposite effect on the relations that produce it or the relations that it as a product catalyses. Any thought that is on the outside implies an absolute interiorization of relations: they are always dominated by the endproducts, the fixed objects that express them. In this sense, architecture turns into a discourse of inputs and outputs; the glorified practitioners or thinkers who feed the discourse with inputs, the majestic buildings and texts that stand as the outputs of their excellence. What is absent, in both cases, is architecture itself, as the simultaneous production of both an architectural subject and object that are indistinguishable from each other. Thus, the input–output fallacy of most architectural logics is not only inadequate to address our current architectural condition; it is outdated, because it is based on a pre-technological sense of culture. If architecture could, until now, avoid an immanent account of architectural production and insist on being outside of this reality, this can no longer be the case. According to Simondon,
The technical operation that imposes a form on a passive and undetermined matter is not just an operation considered abstractly by the spectator who sees what enters the workshop and what leaves it without knowing the elaboration properly speaking. This is essentially the operation controlled by the free man and executed by the slave … The active characteristic of the form and the passive characteristic of the matter correspond to the conditions of the transmission of the order, which supposes social hierarchy: it is in the content of the order that the indication of the matter is an indetermination, whereas the form is determination, i.e. expressible and logical … The distinction between matter and form, between the soul and the body, reflects a city that contains citizens in opposition to slaves.19
An architecture of inputs and outputs is, therefore, an architecture of masters and slaves: those who dictate, those who execute and the products that – mysteriously for the masters, not so for the slaves – emerge in the world. It is obvious that such an account is both inaccurate and neglectful of actual architectural production; thus, it is obvious that such an account is not an account of this reality but an account of an ideal state, a transcendental discourse on architectural production that does not examine architecture
as such, but architecture as that account would prefer it to be. What is not obvious, however, is that such an account has another, even more fundamental consequence: even in an age of no masters or slaves, it manages to produce them both. Either in the form of experts, of architectural stars and theoretical geniuses, or in the form of rebels, of alienated interns and amazed spectators, an architecture of the outside is, surprisingly, the ultimate negation of an architecture-without: it is, indeed, an architecture without architecture.
0.1.2 A Chrysalis Awake
The aim of this book is to speak of an architecture-without but without anything except architecture. This is the premise of an immanent architectural account: to speak of architectural production without depending on anything but the architectural act itself. To do so, however, one needs to be precise. This is, perhaps, one of the greatest advantages of immanence: it is either precise regarding the reality it examines or is not immanence at all. After all, this is the great lesson that Bergson taught us. It is starting with Bergson that an immanent architectural metaphysics will be set up; moreover, not by coincidence, it is also with Bergson that the notion of the problem will be reformulated. As he claims, what philosophy – which we can understand as metaphysics – has lacked most is precision.20 By precision, Bergson has in mind a reliable method that can actually deliver precise knowledge about metaphysical reality.21 According to him, transcendental thought is simply too wide for reality, making propositions and advancing statements that can also ‘hold as true for a world or universe that is radically different than the one we do occupy.’22 In his own words, transcendental thought
could apply equally well to a world in which neither plants nor animals have existence, only men, and in which men would quite possibly do without eating and drinking, where they would neither sleep nor dream nor let their minds wander … and where everything might just as easily go backwards and be upside down.23
Bergson demands a metaphysics that does justice to this reality and not a possible one; to this world and not one that would serve the person thinking about it; to an architecture that is without anything except its architectural reality. Even more, to an architecture so close to its reality that between the two nothing else can really fit, since
the only explanation we should accept as satisfactory is one which fits tightly to its object, with no space between them, no crevice in which any other explanation might equally well be lodged; one which fits the object only and to which alone the object lends itself.24
Bergson does not hesitate to point out the exact fallacy of transcendental metaphysics, which does not allow it to be precise about reality: it showcases a fundamental disrespect for time. Put succinctly, its only interest lies in seeking the truth in what does not change, thus positioning itself outside of time. Close to the masters who remain distant from the workshop, transcendental thought relies on inputs and outputs precisely because these are without any temporal dimension, static terms that can not only be exchanged at will but, crucially, they themselves never change. One needs to be cautious though: for Bergson, the greatest change of all, the greatest difference of all, is the difference of something from itself. To understand why, it is important to follow Bergson in one of his most beautiful examples. As he writes,
one might as well discourse on the subject of the cocoon from which the butterfly is to emerge, and claim that the fluttering, changing, living butterfly finds its raison d’être and fulfilment in the immutability of its shell. On the contrary, let us unfasten the cocoon, awaken the chrysalis; let us restore to movement its mobility, to change its fluidity, to time its duration. Who knows but what the ‘great insoluble problems’ will remain attached to the outer shell? They were not concerned with either movement or change or time, but solely with the conceptual cocoon which we mistakenly took for them or for their equivalent. Metaphysics will then become experience itself; and duration will be revealed as it really is,— unceasing creation, the uninterrupted up-surge of novelty.25
The keyword in Bergson’s quote is duration: this is what can provide precision to thought, and what any transcendental metaphysics lacks. Bergson claimed that it is his conclusions on the importance of duration that lead him to develop a method that could approach reality with precision.26 He would, somewhat provocatively, call this method intuition, and while aware of the controversial nature of the term, would claim that it is the only term that can express ‘a mode of knowing distinct from intelligence.’27 Brought close to architectural thought and practices, intuition – along with the disruptive potential of spatial stuttering – will be crucial throughout this book, as indeed a mode of knowledge that, albeit not to be confused with instinct or feeling, can actually think in terms of duration, in terms of internal differences and diverse lines of individuation. This is the case precisely because intuition does not start from the static and immobile in order to explain that which is always transforming; quite the contrary, intuition starts from movement and considers immobility as a mere abstraction.28 It is a method that needs to constantly experiment, to begin anew, to speculate on and extrapolate from the reality that it wishes to examine and manipulate. Simply put, intuition can express most fully the fundamental Simondonian plea: the knowledge of individuation is the individuation of knowledge. What kind of knowledge are we referring to here, though? For both Bergson and Simondon, the goal of intuition is a concrete knowledge reached
8 What Is Architecture’s Problem?
‘not by way of the abstract, as is customary in many metaphysics, but through sustained engagement and connection with the concrete, since this latter route enables a tighter fit between object and explanation (i.e. metaphysical precision).’29 Even though the relationship between the abstract and the concrete is more complex than a simple binary opposition, what Bergson claims is that any account that detaches the individuated entities – which we can also understand as their solutions – from their individuation – which we can understand as their problematic field – is an account that misplaces concreteness: explanation is restricted to actualized entities while the forces, potentials and processes of actualization are completely disregarded. Famously, it was philosopher Alfred North Whitehead who called this way of thinking ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’, where the abstract is constantly mistaken for the concrete, denying not only the reality of temporal duration, but also the reality of experience itself. To bring metaphysics back in this reality, one that is both individuating and experiential, Bergson wonders,
how much more instructive would be a truly intuitive metaphysics, which would follow the undulations of the real! True, it would not embrace in a single sweep the totality of things; but for each thing it would give an explanation which would fit it exactly, and it alone. It would not begin by defining or describing the systematic unity of the world: who knows if the world is actually one? Experience alone can say, and unity, if it exists, will appear at the end of the search as a result; it is impossible to posit it at the start as a principle. Furthermore, it will be a rich, full unity, the unity of a continuity, the unity of our reality, and not that abstract and empty unity, which has come from one supreme generalization, and which could as well be that of any possible world whatsoever. It is true that philosophy then will demand a new effort for each new problem. No solution will be geometrically deduced from another. No important truth will be achieved by the prolongation of an already acquired truth.30
Deploying intuition in order to grasp reality in its movement and duration implies that this reality should be understood problematically. Moreover, as Bergson clarifies, for each new problem there should be a new intuitive effort to approach it – or, even better, to determine it. Bergson adds that intuition is capable of being precise while also addressing individuation and not the individuated, because it is obscure. In a line of thought influenced by Leibniz, Bergson proposes that when an idea is said to be ‘clear’, it is often because it merely draws on elements and propositions that are already known.31 That is, clear ideas do nothing more than re-arrange already established notions. On the contrary, there lies a much more profound clarity in the ‘radically new and absolutely simple idea, which catches as it were an intuition.’32 Obscure, complex and incomprehensible as they may appear, genuinely novel ideas that do not rely on simply re-arranging the established have as an effect a clearing out of obscurities, a resolution of problematic tensions. They are
clear, therefore, on the basis of their effects, not their initial composition; they become understandable only because they manage to re-determine how we understand what we understand.
Consequently, since it needs to constantly begin anew whenever it encounters a novel problem, for Bergson intuition becomes almost synonymous with invention – a peculiar invention, however, since it relies on an absolute origin and not on anything given in advance. As he claims,
a speculative problem is solved as soon as it is properly stated. By that I mean that its solution exists then, although it may remain hidden and, so to speak, covered up: the only thing left to do is to uncover it. But stating the problem is not simply uncovering, it is inventing. Discovery, or uncovering, had to do with what already exists actually or virtually; it was therefore certain to happen sooner or later. Invention gives being to what did not exist; it might never have happened.33
For Bergson, to state a problem is to invent it. However, how can one be sure that the invented problem has a truly transformative potential? How can one be sure that out of obscure intuitions an effect of clarification will emerge? How can one be sure that what is being invented is a true problem?
0.1.3 What If There Were a Problem
Contrary to the common belief that architecture is a problem-solving enterprise – understood as focused on solely providing solutions to specific problems – it instead occupies itself with a constant problematization. Within architectural practices, of course, a substantial amount of effort is devoted to the actualization of solutions regarding problems of different levels and of different scales. Nevertheless, the ability of architecture to problematize is what differentiates it from other disciplines, especially those classified as engineering. Following architectural theorist Jeffrey Kipnis, it may be argued that while engineering has a subjugating effect, the effect of architecture is liberating.34 It is crucial to be exact as to what the one discipline subjugates and what the other liberates: what is at stake here is difference. Engineering subjugates differences precisely in order to respond to the problems it faces, while architecture liberates difference in order to problematize the field of a constant production of subjectivity. Engineering, aiming to respond in a seriality of ‘if … then’ deductions, aims to deliver the greatest good for most people, and in order to do so, it needs to eliminate differences, both in the initial formulation of its problems and in its potential responses – assuming that those responses also need to be wide enough to address the discipline’s broad audience.35 By contrast, architecture offers emancipatory potentials by amplifying the problematic field and eventually creating new existential niches via the manipulative abductive interference of a myriad ‘what … ifs.’36
In this sense, architectural problems need to be assigned a double meaning: on the one hand, that of a difficulty that needs a response and on the other, as an ‘impersonal field of singularities out of which thought draws its localized solutions, the latent structure that elicits the dynamisms of conceptualization.’37 Here, architectural theories and practices, architectural thinking itself, need to transform. Only problems of the greatest significance actually demand a transformation, since for all the rest one can simply rely on the countless textbooks that pretend to provide a safe guide. After all, as Deleuze puts it, ‘to what are we dedicated if not those problems which demand the very transformation of our body and language?’38
This is a point, among many others, where Deleuze and Simondon converge, asking for a radical break with the two most influential lines of philosophical thought: Plato and Aristotle. At the very beginning of his philosophical work, Simondon famously called out his two most important ‘enemies’: substantialism and hylomorphism. Against the monism of substance and the dualism of matter and form, Simondon rejected any philosophical account which would presuppose the existence of any genetic principle prior to genesis itself. In other words, he opposed any attempt to approach the individual as a static entity that would not only come before its genesis but would also serve as the role model able to account for it. Therefore, he develops an account of the genesis of the individual prior to any notion of a fixed individual being. Consequently, Simondon poses the following questions regarding substantialism: what if processes of individuation exceed what we traditionally consider as individuals? Moreover, what if these genetic processes produce something more than the individual and what if they can be also extended so as to include a much broader range of beings?39 How can one ‘think individuals in general as the result of prior processes of individuation?’40 To do so, it is paramount to understand the Deleuzian concept of determination.
0.2 The Producer Product
For Deleuze, substituting any notion of transcendental Platonic participation and opting for an active mode of determination has two aims: on the one hand, metaphysics can now examine reality immanently; on the other, one can now properly distinguish between false and true problems. In his book on Bergson, Deleuze goes to great lengths in examining Bergson’s problematic philosophy, so much so that he even articulates rules for a problem-based methodology.41 Already in the introductory pages of the book, Deleuze claims that the great asset of Bergson’s problematic and intuitive account is that it allows for ‘an intrinsic determination of the false in the expression “false problem”.’42 While the notions of true and false are commonly associated with solutions, Bergson claims that, on the contrary, it is on a problematic level that truth and falsity ought to be sought. In fact, Bergson considers false problems as fictitious, pseudo-problems, leading Deleuze to provocatively
state that ‘there are false problems more than there are false solutions, more than there are false solutions for true problems.’43
0.2.1 A True Problem, a Pure Event
What is crucial is to be able to properly determine a true problem; to be able to distinguish what is singular and what is ordinary within a problematic field and, accordingly, attempt to resolve it. Consequently, the determination of a problem is no longer an issue that faces the possibility of error, that is paralysed in its development under the threat of a mistaken outcome, a misleading solution. On the contrary, thought errs when it poses false problems, as it is these false problems that mislead it. As Deleuze writes,
who says ‘Good morning Theodorus’ when Theaters passes, ‘It is three o’clock’ when it is three thirty and that 7+5=13? These are effective examples of errors, but examples which, like the majority of such ‘facts’, refer to thoroughly artificial or puerile situations, and offer a grotesque image of thought because they relate it to very simple questions to which one can and must respond by independent propositions. Error acquires a sense only once the play of thought ceases to be speculative and becomes a kind of radio quiz.44
Once we no longer bother with questions that simply demand a demonstration of propositional knowledge, once we move beyond the fixed responses to quiz questions, then the duty of thought becomes to be able to determine problems that necessarily can transform thought itself. As such, learning becomes much more important than knowledge. There is a profound difference between learning – a knowing-how – and knowledge, which corresponds to the accumulation and memorization of knowing-that propositions. As any teacher would confirm,
errors or falsehoods are rarely found in homework (except in those exercises where a fixed result must be produced, or propositions must be translated one by one). Rather, what is more frequently found – and worse – are nonsensical sentences, remarks without interest or importance, banalities mistaken for profundities, ordinary ‘points’ confused with singular points, badly posed or distorted problems – all heave with dangers, yet the fate of us all.45
Consequently, the question asked in the beginning of this book starts to make more sense; how is this architecture possible? Not architecture in general, not any architecture, not the one that would suit better a specific part of the discourse or a specific set of practices, but rather the architecture that – for better or worse – we have. It is in terms of an internal architectural difference that we can understand the individuation of architecture since the question
is no longer about different architectural styles or thoughts – this would be an external understanding of difference – but rather about the singular and ordinary points that within an architectural duration determine the nature of its individuation. Deleuze was clear when claiming that the virtue of the Bergsonian question is that it allows us to move beyond the falsity of the question ‘why something rather than nothing’ towards the productive force of the question ‘why this rather than something else.’46
It is time to reformulate the question: How does this architecture structure and operate, based on the ways that it expresses itself? Posed as such, the question aims at a threefold problem. First, as should be clear already, it refers to an architecture of this reality. Second, it brings together the structure and the operation of this architectural reality; this will be pivotal, since as will be clear by the end of this book, any account that separates the two is nothing but reductionist. Finally, it examines the structure and the operation of this architectural reality in terms of its own expression; thus, it allows us to examine it in terms of its own duration, its own internal difference, since expression is always temporal, always occurring as an event and an act.
Not surprisingly, for Deleuze the event is always a complex network of thought and action involved in a problem and the attempts to solve it.47 Therefore, he will distinguish between two types of event: the historical and the pure event. The pure event is a problem-poser: it determines the singular and ordinary points that encompass all its historical actualizations, it produces a difference in kind, reshuffling the field of potentials. In other words, it brings new information into the world. It goes without saying that historical events have the power to determine the pure event anew, to alter the continuum, to inform differential relations. If not, the actual could never affect the virtual. Nonetheless, it is the pure event that initially catalyses such a drastic and radical shift. As such, one can understand the pure event as the production of novel sense, novel meaning: indeed, Simondon would add, as new information. Consequently, to grasp the architectural event beyond its historical actualizations would mean to determine an architectural problem in terms of the production of novel architectural information: when, where, how, for whom, with what purpose and why can architecture produce new information, new architectural sense and meaning? This already implies a shift in architectural thinking itself, since it no longer bothers with taxonomizing, comparing or analysing discourses, styles and practices, but rather attempts to ‘extract an event from things and beings, to set up the new event from things and being, always give them a new event.’48
0.2.2 A Concept Responds, a Concept Asks
It is for this reason that extracting the pure event is a process of learning. More than just the propositional acquisition of data, learning – understood as extracting a problem-posing event – deals with the production of new information, synchronous to the informational liberation that a pure event
catalyses: only true problems correspond to pure events. In both, a new sense has been produced and alongside it, a new subject: if a new sense corresponds to a new point of view, then indeed it is a novel line of subjectification that unravels every time a pure event and a true problem emerge. As philosopher Sean Bowden claims when commenting on Deleuze’s approach to learning,
problems are not the experience of, nor do they depend upon, a thinking subject who exists in an independent and prior way. Problems for Deleuze are rather responsible for the genesis of the thinking subject … In fact problems are also responsible for the determination of the objects of this subject’s thought, without themselves ever being determinate objects of thought.49
Both problems and events coincide in their capacity for informational novelty and the formation of a novel subject, precisely because they assist in the emergence of a new point of view: such an emergence is always the consequence of a production of novel signs. Throughout this book, signs and information will be continuously connected with a novel understanding of architecture, one that no longer deals just with the production of space but shifts focus to the capacity of architecture to produce ways of life – hence, novel individuations, novel subjects. As will be demonstrated in the coming chapters, signs will be disconnected from an account that approaches them merely semiotically – that is, in terms of their relationship with language and its significations – and will, in turn, be placed next to the affective power of significance. Signs will be understood as the affective limit, a crossing of an intensive threshold that, the moment it is enacted and perceived, has the capacity to produce new information. This is what Deleuze has in mind when he claims that
problems and their symbolic fields stand in a relationship with signs. It is signs which ‘cause’ problems … and truth emerges … as though it were the limit of a problem completely determined and entirely understood, or the product of those genetic series which constitute the sense.50
Consequently, problems can be understood as the crossing of a conceptual threshold, the passing of a limit that in the very event of its passing produces thought it itself: the producer product, as Deleuze and Guattari call it.51 The act of crossing the limit is one of the fundamental concerns of this book. It is through an examination of the limit that an immanent account of architectural production will be developed. To this end, concepts such as the membrane will be examined in detail and brought in close contact with an architecture that structures and operates as a constant play of limits. However, and it is in this way that the first and last parts of this book fold in upon each other, both problems and limits can be understood as constraints. It is with a reinvigorated account of constraints that architecture will be determined as a
population of technicities that form a consequence-organized dynamic that is its own consequence.
Nonetheless, how are problems connected with constraints? Etymologically, the term ‘problem’ comes from the Greek πρόβλημα: something thrown or put forward, an obstacle in the way towards something. Problems constrain a path, not allowing for an easy and uninterrupted flow, while demanding new forms of articulation. Problems enable constraints that in their demand for new articulations produce a new meaning, a new sense, novel information: a difference that can make a difference. Therefore, true problems do not need a solution but rather a response. They do not ask for the insertion of the correct data that will make them disappear; they demand the responsive expression of an act that will transform them. A response, consequently, is always directed not towards the problem itself, but towards the conditions of its emergence. Even when understood literally as an obstacle in a path, responses to problems manage to comprehend reality and potentially transform it only if they approach the conditions that individuate it: if one does not deal with the conditions that make an obstacle appear, then it is only a matter of time before one encounters that obstacle again. For Deleuze, concepts are thought’s responses to problems. However, Deleuze does not distinguish a concept from the question that made it emerge; as such, a concept that responds to a true problem is simultaneously a question. As he writes,
far from being an empirical state of knowledge destined to disappear in the response once a response is given, the question silences all empirical responses which purport to suppress it, in order to force the one response which always continues and maintains it.52
Consequently, the issue is how to develop concepts that function both as a question and as a response, that determine a problem not in order to make it disappear but in order to productively transform it through the enabling constraints that they impose. The relation between questions, problems and concepts is also known as the question–problem complex.53 Not surprisingly, different metaphysics involve different approaches to this issue. In a transcendental approach, the questions that suffice to determine a problem are questions on the essence of a problem: what it is. On the contrary, in an immanent approach, it is minor questions that determine the nature of a problem: who, which, where, when, how, for whom and with what purpose. The first approach, the one that deploys a series of ‘what is’ questions, seeks to define the essence of something. However, it poses the problem of essence in a totalizing way. By forming an essentialist question we will almost certainly form a generalizing concept, one that will attempt to prioritize only one singular point of the problematic field. Hence, instead of exploring the mutations of a problem and the concepts that emerge from it, we settle on only one of its aspects; even more, we must necessarily conclude that this one
Is Architecture’s
15 aspect, this one singular point, is capable of explaining, once and for all, the problem itself.
However, if we are to respect the continuous transformations of a problem, the way it shifts with each and every one of our responses, then we should approach it in a manner that remains plastic enough, mutable enough, so as to follow the transformations of the problematic field and the continuous emergence of novel problems. In this sense, as Proust suggests, we should not approach it as friends but as jealous lovers.54 Proust claims that jealousy is not a disease of love but, on the contrary, its truth, its finality: all that love consists of is a dispute over evidence.55 As lovers of a problem we should constantly attempt to extract the evidence, the events that push us in its pursuit. A problem needs to be interrogated, confronted with all the minor empirical questions that will not reveal one singular defining point, but a population of them, capable of determining it not once and for all, but now and again and once more, as long as our relationship with it lasts.
This is, finally, the aim of this book: to develop a series of minor questions that correspond to a population of concepts, attempting to respond to the question of how this architecture is possible. Dispersed in this introductory chapter, as elements of a how-to guide, one can find all the concepts that simultaneously pose and respond to this question. They are all here, in a larval state, as constraints and relays that prefigure thought, catalyse it; they are all waiting to encounter new problems, new questions that will transform them, singular points that will produce new information, informing architectural thought itself. From the entasis of Doric columns, to Ulysses and desert islands; from an architectural mind that is not one but many, always extended, always in becoming, to a ferryman who stutters his way through the Acheron; from a stilus that is eventually a style to speculative extrapolations that manipulate the environment where we individuate; from bells and whistles that are both expressive and possessive at once to a membrane that can only be intuited; and finally, from a melody that sings itself to a larval architecture that no longer considers space and time apart.
Notes
1 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Responses to a Series of Questions’, interview by Arnaud Villani, in Collapse III, ed. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2007), 42.
2 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche vol. II, trans. David Farrrell Krell (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1991), 204.
3 Arnaud Villani, ‘The Problem of Immanent Metaphysics’, in Gilles Deleuze and Metaphysics, ed. Alain Beaulieu, Edward Kazarian, and Julia Sushytska (London: Lexington Books, 2014), vii.
4 Villani, ‘The Problem of Immanent Metaphysics’, vii.
5 Ibid., viii.
6 Ibid., ix.
7 Erich Hörl, ‘The Artificial Intelligence of Sense: The History of Sense and Technology after Jean-Luc Nancy (By Way of Gilbert Simondon)’, trans. Arne De Boever, Parrhesia 17 (2013): 11.
16 What Is Architecture’s Problem?
8 Hörl, ‘The Artificial Intelligence of Sense’, 11.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 14.
12 Ibid., 15.
13 Ibid., 18.
14 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 65.
15 Erich Hörl, ‘The Technological Condition’, trans. Anthony Enns, Parrhesia 22 (2015): 3.
16 Hörl, ‘The Technological Condition’, 5.
17 Ibid.
18 Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notion of Forms and Information, trans. Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 30.
19 Simondon, Individuation, 35–36.
20 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998), 1.
21 Craig Lundy, ‘Bergson’s Method of Problematisation and the Pursuit of Metaphysical Precision’, Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 23, no. 2 (2018): 32.
22 Bergson, The Creative Mind, 1.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., 7.
26 Lundy, ‘Bergson’s Method of Problematisation’, 34.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Bergson, The Creative Mind, 19–20.
31 Lundy, ‘Bergson’s Method of Problematisation’, 35.
32 Bergson, The Creative Mind, 23.
33 Ibid., 36–37. [Emphasis in original].
34 Andrej Radman, ‘Involutionary Architecture: Unyoking Coherence from Congruence’, in Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 68.
35 Radman, ‘Involutionary Architecture’, 68.
36 Ibid.
37 Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 2.
38 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2001), 241.
39 David Scott, Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: University Press, 2014), 31.
40 Ibid., 31.
41 Lundy, ‘Bergson’s Method of Problematisation’, 36.
42 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1988), 17.
43 Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 22.
44 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 150.
45 Ibid.
46 Deleuze, Desert Islands, 24.
47 Brian McCormack, ‘The Problem with Problem-Solving’, Issues in Integrative Studies 27 (2009): 28.
48 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996),33.
49 Sean Bowden, ‘An Anti-Positivist Conception of Problems’, Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 23, no. 2 (2018): 56.
50 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 165.
51 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 5.
52 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 195.
53 Daniel W. Smith, Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: University Press, 2012), 19.
54 Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 132, 138.
55 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 132.
Bibliography
Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Mabelle L. Andison. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications Inc., 1998.
Bowden, Sean. ‘An Anti-Positivist Conception of Problems’. Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 23, no. 2 (2018): 45–63.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Deleuze, Gilles. ‘Responses to a Series of Questions’. Interview by Arnaud Villani. In Collapse III. Edited by Robin Mackay, 39–43. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2007.
Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 1988.
Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts. Edited by David Lapoujade. Translated by Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London: Continuum, 2001.
Deleuze, Gilles. Proust and Signs: The Complete Text. Translated by Richard Howard. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche vol. II. Translated by David Farrrell Krell. San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1991.
Hörl, Erich. ‘The Artificial Intelligence of Sense: The History of Sense and Technology after Jean-Luc Nancy (by Way of Gilbert Simondon)’. Translated by Arne De Boever. Parrhesia 17 (2013): 11–24.
Hörl, Erich. ‘The Technological Condition’. Translated by Anthony Enns. Parrhesia 22 (2015): 1–15.
Lundy, Craig. ‘Bergson’s Method of Problematisation and the Pursuit of Metaphysical Precision’. Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 23, no. 2 (2018): 31–44.
McCormack, Brian. ‘The Problem with Problem-Solving’. Issues in Integrative Studies 27 (2009): 17–34.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Translated by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007.
Radman, Andrej. ‘Involutionary Architecture: Unyoking Coherence from Congruence’. In Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze. Edited by Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall, 61–86. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.
Scott, David. Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: University Press, 2014.
18 What Is Architecture’s Problem?
Simondon, Gilbert. Individuation in Light of Notion of Forms and Information. Translated by Taylor Adkins. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
Smith, Daniel W. Essays on Deleuze. Edinburgh: University Press, 2012.
Toscano, Alberto. The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Villani, Arnaud. ‘The Problem of Immanent Metaphysics’. In Gilles Deleuze and Metaphysics Edited by Alain Beaulieu, Edward Kazarian and Julia Sushytska, vii–x. London: Lexington Books, 2014.
An Architect Who Stutters
During the twentieth century, art and philosophy posed a similar problem: to renounce the domain of representation and instead take the conditions of representation as their object. Regardless of the responses proposed in these fields, it is the formulation of the problem that matters. What does it take to embark on the quest of exploring the conditions of representation, a quest that many have called the Odyssey of philosophy?1 Much of the production of twentieth-century art aimed not at the reproduction of visible forms but rather at highlighting the non-visible forces that act in parallel to these forms. The intensity of presentation took precedence over the discreteness of representation. If, however, blocks of sensation were produced and extracted in the artistic field, what could one claim for architecture? Moreover, if architectural representation is taken for granted, both in architectural production and in its pedagogies, what is it that grounds this certainty?
1.1 Ulysses’s Ship
While the origins of the word ‘architect’ are undoubtedly Greek, relatively little attention has been given to the intricate connections between the constant shifts in the word’s usage in civil and naval architecture. Ancient Greek urban societies developed both the resources and the need not only for ambitious public buildings but also for large, complex ships. Temples and naval fleets are testimonies to this. The root τcκτων (tékton) is first used – at least in written form – in Homer’s Odyssey to describe the lack of skilled shipbuilders on the island of the Cyclopes, stating that
(there are no shipbuilders who can finish well covered ships which can reach any destination.)2
Τέκτων stands in ancient Greek for the craftsman – carpenter, shipbuilder and so on – in hard materials – wood, stone, metal – as well as for the originator, the producer, the master or artist. Homer’s reference to τέκτονες as
20 An Architect Who Stutters
shipbuilders does not predate much the appearance of the derived word αρχιτέκτων (arhitékton), a term by then used for both civil and naval architects.3 The two professions were regarded as closely related in terms of social status, public responsibility and professional function. Despite apparent differences in the required knowledge, skills and experience, the two fields shared many similarities.
These similarities extend also to the field of theoretical endeavours developed by figures prominent in architectural theory. Both Vitruvius and Alberti refer, albeit in different ways and for different purposes, to the proximity between civil and naval architecture. One cannot but note here Alberti’s now lost text Navis, which was widely read and discussed at the end of the fifteenth century.4 Despite the loss of Alberti’s treatise on naval architecture, we can get a sense of his approach towards shipbuilding from Chapter XII of De Re Aedificatoria. The relationship between De Re Aedificatoria and De Re Navalis is best highlighted via the application of principles developed in the former so as to distinguish between proper shipbuilding and what was called fabrilis peritia, the empirical shipbuilding practice.5 The rationalization of construction through the use of formal proportional principles and through the elimination of construction faults by the study of past and contemporary techniques, as well as the thorough knowledge of physics and contemporary scientific developments were pivotal for Alberti’s references to naval architecture.6 It is this latter aspect that binds Alberti and Vitruvius, namely the rationalization of every building process, aiming at the optimization of its functional performance. Nevertheless, Vitruvius’s and Alberti’s references to naval architecture also intersect in a minor way. It is this marginal point that will interest us here. Vitruvius, Alberti, civil and naval architecture intersect on the issue of entasis, a typical characteristic of columns in Doric temples. Entasis is the slight convexity in the body of a column, originating from the Greek word εντείνειν, which means to stretch, to apply tension, to bow. According to historian Francis Penrose, it is the
swelling given to a column in the middle parts of the shaft for the purpose of correcting a disagreeable optical illusion, which is found to give an attenuated appearance to columns formed with straight sides, and to cause their outlines to seem concave instead of straight.7
In this regard, architect Patrick Nuttgens comments that ‘most Greek buildings of the Golden Period use entasis, the device whereby tapering columns are given a slight swelling about a third of the way up to counteract a tendency of the eye to see them as curving inwards from their side.’8
1.1.1 A Column, a Wave, a Paper and a Brain
Entasis was probably first used in the Later Temple of Aphaia in Aigina, around 490 BCE and is most often found in Doric Temples built in mainland Greece,
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contained. It was the room in which his son had died. The windows were closely shuttered, but admitted the air at the top. The floor was of wood and bare. A bedstead, couch, and chairs of bamboo comprised the furniture.
At one side of the room were two spacious closets. One of these contained a portable bath-tub, a rack of fresh white towels, and plenty of water. The other contained clothes depending from hooks.
“You’ll find your own suit of clothes there, Sir Harold,” said the major. “I intended to send them to England, but I am as fond of procrastination as ever It’s just as well though, now You can take them home yourself.”
Sir Harold sat down in the nearest chair.
“Home!” he whispered. “How are they—Octavia? Neva?”
“All well—or they were when I heard last.”
“Tell me what you know of them?” And Sir Harold’s great hungry eyes searched the major’s face. “They believe me dead?”
“Certainly, Sir Harold. Everybody believes you dead. And I am dying to know how it is that you are alive. Where have you been these fifteen months? How did you escape the tiger?”
The desired explanation was delayed by the appearance at the door of Mrs. Archer, who brought a jug of warm spiced drink and a plate of food. The major took the tray, and shut his wife out, returning to his guest.
Sir Harold was nearly famished, and ate and drank like one starving. When his hunger was appeased, and a faint color began to dawn in his face, he pushed the tray from him, and spoke in a firmer voice than he had before employed.
“I have imagined terrible things about my wife and Neva,” he said. “My poor wife! I have thought of her a thousand times as dead of grief. Do you know, major, how she took the report of my death?”
“I have heard,” said the major, “she nearly died of grief. For a long time she shut herself up, and was inconsolable, and when she did
venture out at last, it was in a funereal coach, and dressed in the deepest mourning. There are few wives who mourn as she did.”
Sir Harold’s lips quivered.
“My poor darling!” he muttered inaudibly. “My precious wife! I shall come back to you from the dead.”
“Lady Wynde is heart-broken, they say,” said the major. “One of the men in our mess, a lieutenant, is from Canterbury and hears all the Kentish gossip, and he says people were afraid that Lady Wynde would go into a decline.”
“My poor wife!” said Sir Harold, with a sobbing breath. “I knew how she loved me. We were all the world to each other, Major. I must be careful how she hears the news that I am living. The sudden shock may kill her. Have you any news of my daughter also?”
“She was still at school when I last heard of her,” answered the major. “There is no more news of your home, Sir Harold. Your family are mourning for you and you will bring back their lost happiness. You ought to have seen your obituaries in the London papers. Some of them were a yard long, and I’d be willing to die to-day if I could only read such notices about myself. That sounds a little Hibernian, but it’s true. And your tenantry put on mourning, and they had funeral sermons and so on. By all the rules, you ought to have been dead, and, by the Lord Harry, I can’t understand why you are not.”
Sir Harold smiled wanly.
“Let me explain why I am not,” he said. “You remember that I was taking my last ride in India, and was about to start for Calcutta, to embark for England, when I disappeared? Some three days before that I had a quarrel, if I might call it so, with the Hindoo Karrah—”
“I know it. He told me about it for the first time this morning.”
“You understand then that I had incurred his enmity by kicking him out of this house? I found him stealing the effects of my dead son. He had also stolen from me. The letters he was stealing he was acute enough to know were precious to me, and there was George’s diary, for which I would not have taken any amount of money. The
scoundrel meant to get away with these, and then sell them to me at his own terms. I took back my property, and punished him as he deserved. I have now reason to believe he went away that night to his friends among the hills—”
“He did. He told me he did. But what did he go for?” cried the major excitedly.
“You can soon guess. The next morning Karrah came back, professing repentance,” said Sir Harold. “I reproached myself for having been too harsh upon the poor untaught heathen, and took him back. He accompanied me upon that last ride, and was so humble, so deprecating, so gentle, that I even felt kindly toward him. We rode out into the jungle. I was in advance, riding slowly, and thinking of home, when suddenly a monstrous tiger leaped out of a thicket and fastened his claws in the neck of my horse. I fought the monster desperately, for he had pinned my leg to the side of my horse, and I could not escape from him. We had a frightful struggle, and I must have succumbed but for Karrah, who shot at the tiger, wounding him, I think, in the shoulder, and frightening him into retreat.”
“And so you escaped, when we all thought you killed?” cried the major
“My horse was dying,” said the baronet, “and I was wounded and bleeding. I thought I was dying. I fell from my saddle to the ground, groaning with pain. Karrah came up, and bent over me, with a devilish smile and moistened my lips with brandy from a flask he carried. Then, muttering words in his own language which I could not understand, he carried me to his own horse, mounted, with me in his arms, and rode off in the direction in which we had been going, and away from your bungalow.”
“The scoundrel! What was that for?”
“After a half-hour’s ride, we came to a hollow, where three natives were camped. Karrah halted, and addressed them. They gathered around us, and then Karrah said to me, in English, that he hated me, that he would not kill me, but meant me to suffer, and that these men
were his brothers, who lived a score of miles away up among the mountains. I was to be their slave. He transferred me to their care, disregarding my pleas and offered bribes, and rode away on his return to you. I was carried on horseback, securely bound, a score of miles to the north and westward. How I suffered on that horrible journey, wounded as I was, I can never tell you. A dozen times I thought myself dying.”
“It is a wonder you did not die!”
“It is,” said Sir Harold. “We went through savage jungles, and forded mountain torrents. We went up hill and down, and more than once leaped precipices. I was in a dead faint when we reached the home of the three Hindoos, but afterward I found how wild and secluded the spot was, and that there were no neighbors for miles around. Their cabin was niched in a cleft in a mountain, and hidden from the eye of any but the closest searcher. Had you searched for me, you would never have found me. It was in a rear hut, small and dark, with a mud floor, and windowless walls, that I have been a prisoner for fifteen months, major. My enemies, for the most part, left me to myself, and I have dragged out my weary captivity with futile plans of escape. Ah, I have known more than the bitterness of death!”
“If we had only known it, we’d have scoured all India for you, Sir Harold,” said the major hotly. “We’d have strung up every native until we got the right ones. But that episode of the tiger—for it seems that the tiger was only an episode, coming into the affair by accident, but greatly assisting Karrah’s foul treachery—threw us off the scent, and made us think you dead. Why did we not suspect the truth?”
“How could you? Don’t reproach yourself, major. My chiefest sufferings during these horrible fifteen months have been on account of my wife and my daughter. To feel myself helpless, a slave to those Hindoo pariahs, bound continually and in chains, while Octavia and Neva were weeping for me and crying out in their anguish, and perhaps needing me—ah, that was almost too hard to bear! Now and then Karrah came to taunt me in my prison, and to tell me how he hated me, and how sweet was his revenge. He told me that you had heard through a friend that my poor wife was dying of her grief.
After that I tried, with increased ingenuity, to find some way of escape. Last night the three Hindoos went away—upon a marauding expedition, I think. After they had gone, one of the women brought me my usual evening meal of boiled rice. I pleaded to her to release me, but she laughed at me. She went out, leaving the door open, intending to return soon for the dish. The sight of the sky and of the green earth without nerved me to desperation. I was confined by a belt around my waist, to which an iron chain was attached, the other end of the chain being secured to a ring in the wall. I had wrenched my belt and the chain a thousand times, but last night when I pulled at it with the strength of a madman, it gave way. I fell to the floor— unfettered!”
“You bounded up like an India rubber ball, I dare swear?” cried the major, wiping his eyes sympathetically.
“I leaped up, and darted out of the door. There was a horse tethered near the hut. I bounded on his back and sped away, as the woman came hurrying out in wild pursuit. I knew the general direction in which your bungalow lay. I rode all night, going out of my road, but being set straight again by some kindly Hindoos; and here I am, weary, worn, but Oh, how thankful and blest!”
The baronet bowed his head on his hands, and his tears of joy fell thickly.
“You’re safe now, Sir Harold,” cried the major “I hear a hubbub outside. My fellows have got back, with Karrah, no doubt. I want to superintend the skinning him, and while I am gone, you can refresh yourself with a bath, and put on a suit of Christian garments. My wife is dying to see you. I hear her pacing the hall like a caged leopardess. Get ready, and I’ll come back to you as soon as you have had a little sleep. You’re among friends, my dear Sir Harold; and, by Jove, I’m glad to see you again!”
He pressed Sir Harold’s hand, catching his breath with a peculiar sobbing, and hurried out.
His servants had returned, but Karrah had escaped. The major indulged in some peculiar profanity, as he listened to this report, and
then withdrew to his wife’s cool room, and told her Sir Harold’s story
The baronet, meanwhile, took a bath and went to bed. He slept for hours, awakening after noon He shaved and trimmed his beard, dressed himself in the suit of clothes he had formerly worn, and which were now much too large for him, and came forth into the central hall of the dwelling. Major Archer was lounging here, and came forward hastily, with both hands outstretched, and with a beaming face.
“You look more like yourself, Sir Harold!” he exclaimed. “Mrs. Archer is out on the veranda, and is full of impatience to see you.”
He linked his arm in the baronet’s and conducted him out to the veranda, presenting him to Mrs. Archer, who greeted him with a certain awe and kindliness, as one would welcome a hero.
The little Archers were playing about under the charge of an ayah, and they also came forward timidly to welcome their father’s guest.
Tiffin—the India luncheon—was served on the veranda, and after it was over, and the young people had dispersed, Sir Harold said to his host:
“When does the next steamer leave for England?”
“Three days hence. You will have time to catch the mail if you write to-day,” said Major Archer.
“Write! Why, I shall go in her, Major!”
“Impossible, Sir Harold. You are not fit for the voyage,” said Mrs. Archer.
“I must go,” persisted the baronet, in a tone no one could dispute. “Think of my wife—of my daughter. Every day that keeps me from them seems an eternity. Major, I was robbed by Karrah of every penny I possessed. Plunder was a part of his motive, as well as desire for revenge. I shall have to draw upon you for a sufficient sum for my expenses.”
“It’s fortunate, and quite an unprecedented thing with me, that I have a couple of hundred pounds in bank in Calcutta,” said the major. “I
wish it were a thousand, but you’re quite welcome to it, Sir Harold—a thousand times welcome. I appreciate your impatience to be on your way home. If it were I, and your wife was my Molly, I’d travel day and night—but there, I’ve said enough. I’ll go to Calcutta with you, and see you off on the Mongolian. I wish I could do more for you.”
“You can, Major. You can keep silence concerning my reappearance,” declared Sir Harold thoughtfully. “My wife is reported to be dying of grief. If she hears too abruptly that I still live, the shock may destroy her. Major, I am going home under a name not my own, that the story of my adventures may not be bruited about before she sees me. I will not reveal myself to any one in Calcutta, nor to any one in England, before reaching home. I will go quietly and unknown to Hawkhurst, and reveal myself with all care and caution to Neva, who will break the news to my wife.”
“Sir Harold is right,” said Mrs. Archer. “Lady Wynde and Miss Wynde should not first hear the news by telegraph, or letter, or through the newspapers. Their impatience, anxiety, and suspense, after hearing that Sir Harold still lives, and before they can see him, will be terrible. The shock, as Sir Harold suggests, might almost be fatal to Lady Wynde.”
“My wife is always right,” said the burly major, with a glance of admiration at his spouse. “Sir Harold, you cannot do better than to follow your instincts and my Molly’s counsels. It is settled then, that you return to England under an assumed name, and see your own family before you proclaim your adventures to the world. What name shall you adopt as a ‘name of voyage,’ to translate from the French?”
“I will call myself Harold Hunlow,” said the baronet. “Hunlow was my mother’s name. I am rested, Major, and if you can give me a mount, we’ll be off at sunset on our way to Calcutta.”
It was thus agreed. That very evening Sir Harold Wynde and Major Archer set out for Calcutta on horseback, arriving in time to secure passage in the Mongolian. And on the third day after leaving Major Archer’s bungalow, Sir Harold Wynde was at sea, and on his way to England. Ah, what a reception awaited him!
CHAPTER XXIII.
NEVA’S DECISION ABOUT RUFUS.
Could her guardian angel have whispered to Neva that her father did indeed still live, and that at the very moment of her vivid dream he stood upon the veranda of Major Archer’s Indian bungalow, weak, wasted and weary, but with the principle of life strong within him, what agony she might have been spared in the near future! what terrors and perils she might perhaps have escaped!
But she did not know it—she could not guess that life held for her a joy so rare, so pure, so sweet, as that of welcoming back to his home her father so long and bitterly mourned as dead.
As we have said, she remained awake during the remainder of the night, walking her floor in her white gown and slippered feet, now and then wringing her hands, or sobbing softly, or crying silently; and thus the weary hours dragged by.
Before the clear sunlight of the soft September morning, which stole at last into her pleasant rooms, Neva’s dream lost its vividness and semblance of reality, and the conviction settled down upon her soul that it was indeed “only a dream.”
She dressed herself for breakfast in a morning robe of white, with cherry-colored ribbons, but her face was very pale, and there was a look of unrest in her red-brown eyes when she descended slowly and wearily to the breakfast-room at a later hour than usual.
This room faced the morning sun, and was octagon shaped, one half of the octagon projecting from the house wall, and being set with sashes of French plate-glass, like a gigantic bay-window. One of the glazed sections opened like a door upon the eastern marble terrace, with its broad surface, its carved balustrade, and its rows of rare trees and shrubs in portable tubs.
There was no one in the room when Neva entered it. The large table was laid with covers for five persons. The glazed door was ajar, and
the windows were all open, giving ingress to the fresh morning air
The room was all brightness and cheerfulness, the soft gray carpet having a border of scarlet and gold, the massive antique chairs being upholstered in scarlet leather, and the sombreness of the dainty buffet of ebony wood being relieved by delicate tracery of gold, drawn by a sparing hand.
Neva crossed the floor and passed out upon the terrace, where a gaudy peacock strutted, spreading his fan in the sunlight, and giving utterance to his harsh notes of self-satisfaction. Neva paced slowly up and down the terrace, shading her face with her hand. A little later she heard some one emerge from the breakfast room upon the terrace, and come behind her with an irregular and unsteady tread.
“Good-morning, Miss Neva,” said Rufus Black, as he gained her side. “A lovely morning, is it not?”
Neva returned his salutation gravely. She knew that Rufus Black had slept under the same roof with herself the preceding night, after the ball, and that a room at Hawkhurst had been specially assigned him by Lady Wynde, now Mrs. Craven Black.
“You ought to have sacrificed your scruples, and come down to the drawing-rooms last night,” said Rufus Black. “I assure you we had a delightful time, but you would have been the star of the ball. I watched the door for your appearance until the people began to go home, and I never danced, although there was no end of pretty girls, but they were not pretty for me,” added Rufus, sighing. “There is for me now only one beautiful girl in the whole world, and you are she, sweet Neva.”
“Did you ever love any one before you loved me?” asked Neva, with a quiet frankness and straightforwardness, looking up at him with her clear eyes full of dusky glow.
“Ye—no!” stammered Rufus, turning suddenly pale, and his honest eyes blenching. “Almost every man has had his boyish fancies, Miss Neva. Whatever mine may have been, my life has been pure, and my heart is all your own. You believe me?”
“Yes, I believe you. Mr and Mrs. Black have come down to breakfast, Mr. Rufus. Let us go in.”
She led the way back to the breakfast room, Rufus following. They found the bride and bridegroom and Mrs. Artress waiting for them. Neva greeted Lady Wynde by her new name, and bowed quietly to Craven Black and Mrs. Artress. The little party took seats at the table, and the portly butler, with a mute protest in his heart against the new master of Hawkhurst, waited upon them, assisted by skillful subordinates.
Mrs. Craven Black, dressed in white, looked the incarnation of satisfaction. She had so far succeeded in the daring game she had been playing, and her jet-black eyes glittered, and her dark cheeks were flushed to crimson, and her manner was full of feverish gayety, as she did the honors of the Hawkhurst breakfast table to her new husband.
Three years before she had been a poor adventuress, unable to marry the man she loved. Now, through the success of a daring and terrible conspiracy, she was wealthy, the real and nominal mistress of one of the grandest seats in England; the personal guardian of one of the richest heiresses in the kingdom; and the wife of her fellow-conspirator, to obey whose behests, and to marry whom, she had been willing to peril her soul’s salvation.
Only one thing remained to render her triumph perfect, her fortune magnificent, and her success assured. Only one move remained to be played, and her game would be fully played.
That move comprehended the marriage of Neva Wynde to Rufus Black, and Mrs. Craven Black, from the moment of her third marriage, resolved to devote all her energies to the task of bringing about the union upon which she was determined.
The breakfast was eaten by Neva almost in silence. When the meal was over Mr. and Mrs. Craven Black strolled out into the gardens, arm in arm. Mrs. Artress, who had fully emerged from her gray chrysalis, and who was now dressed in pale blue, hideously unbecoming to her ashen-hued complexion, retired to her own room
to enjoy her triumph in solitude, and to count the first installment of the yearly allowance that had been promised her, and which had already been paid her, with remarkable promptness, by Lady Wynde. Neva went to the music-room, and began to play a weird, strange melody, in which her very soul seemed to find utterance. In the midst of her abstraction, the door opened, and Rufus Black came in softly. He was standing at her side when her wild music ceased abruptly, and she looked up from the ivory keys.
“Your music sounds like a lament, or a dirge,” said Rufus, leaning upon the piano and regarding with admiration the pale, rapt face and glowing eyes.
“I meant it so,” said Neva. “I was thinking of my father.”
“Ah,” said Rufus, rather vacantly.
“I dreamed of papa last night,” said Neva softly, resting her elbow on the crashing keys and laying one rounded cheek upon her pink palm. “I dreamed he was alive, Rufus, and that I saw him standing before the door of an Indian hut, or bungalow, or curious dwelling; and my dream was like a vision.”
“A rather uncomfortable one,” suggested Rufus. “You were greatly excited yesterday, Neva, I could see that; and, as your mind was all stirred up concerning your father, you naturally dreamed of him. It would make a horrid row if your dream could only turn out true, and you ought to rejoice that it cannot. You have mourned for him, and the edge of your grief has worn off—”
“No, no, it has not,” interrupted the girl’s passionate young voice. “If I had seen him die, I could have been reconciled to the will of God. But to lose him in that awful manner—never to know how much he suffered during the moments when he was struggling in the claws of that deadly tiger—oh, it seems at times more than I can bear. And to think how soon he has been forgotten!” and Neva’s voice trembled.
“His wife whom he idolized has married another, and his friends and tenantry have danced and made merry at her wedding. Of all who knew and loved him, only his daughter still mourns at his awful fate!”
“It is hard,” assented Rufus, “but it’s the way of the world, you know If it will comfort you any, Neva, I will tell you that half the county families came to the wedding breakfast to support and cheer you by their presence, and the other half came out of sheer curiosity. But few of the best families remained to the ball.”
“Papa thought much of you, did he not, Rufus?” asked Neva, thinking of that skilfully forged letter which was hidden in her bosom, and which purported to be her father’s last letter to her from India.
Rufus Black had been warned by his father that Neva might some day thus question him, and Craven Black had told his son that he must answer the heiress in the affirmative. Rufus was weak of will, cowardly, and timid, but it was not in him to be deliberately dishonest. He could not lie to the young girl, whose truthful eyes sought his own.
“I had no personal acquaintance with Sir Harold Wynde, Neva,” the young man said, inwardly quaking, yet daring to tell the truth.
“But—but—papa said—I don’t really comprehend, Rufus. I thought that papa loved you.”
“If Sir Harold ever saw me, I do not know it,” said Rufus, cruelly embarrassed, and wondering if his honesty would not prove his ruin. “I was at the University—Sir Harold may have seen me, and taken a liking to me—”
Neva looked strangely perplexed and troubled. Certainly the awkward statement of Rufus did not agree with the supposed last declaration of her father.
“There seems some mystery here which I cannot fathom,” she said. “I have a letter written by papa in India, under the terrible foreboding that he would die there, and in this letter papa speaks of you with affection, and says—and says—”
She paused, her blushes amply completing the sentence.
A cold shiver passed over the form of Rufus. He comprehended the cause of Neva’s blushes, and a portion of his father’s villainy. He understood that the letter of which Neva spoke had been forged by
Craven Black, and that it commanded Neva’s marriage with Craven Black’s son. What could he say? What should he do? His innate cowardice prevented him from confessing the truth, and his awe of his father prevented him from betraying him, and he could only tremble and blush and pale alternately.
“Papa might have taken an interest in you, without making himself known to you,” suggested Neva, after a brief pause. “Some act of yours might have made your name known to him, and he might secretly have watched your course without betraying to you his interest in you, might he not?”
“He might,” said Rufus huskily.
“I can explain the matter in no other way. It is singular. Perhaps poor papa might not have well known what he was writing, but the letter is so clearly written that that idea is not tenable. After all, so long as he wrote the letter, what does it matter?” said Neva wearily. “He must have known you, Rufus—or else the letter was forged!”
Rufus averted his face, upon which a cold sweat was starting.
“Who would have forged it?” he asked hoarsely.
“That I do not know. I know no one base enough for such a deed. It could not have been forged, of course, Rufus, but the discrepancy between your statement and that in the letter makes me naturally doubt. Papa was the most truthful of men. He hated a lie, and was so punctilious in regard to the truth that he was always painfully exact in his statements. He trained me to scorn a lie, and was even particular about the slightest error in repeating a story. How then could he speak of knowing you? Perhaps, though, I am mistaken. I may find, on referring to the letter, that he speaks of liking you and taking an interest in you, without alluding to a personal acquaintance.”
“If I had known Sir Harold, I should have tried to deserve his good opinion,” said Rufus, his voice trembling. “I have the greatest reverence for his character, and I wish I might be like him.”
“There are few like papa,” said Neva, a sudden glow transfiguring her face.
“How you loved him, Neva. If I had had such a father!” and Rufus sighed. “I would rather have an honorable, affectionate father whom I could revere and trust than to have a million of money!”
Neva reached out her hand in sympathy, and the young man seized it eagerly, clinging to it.
“Neva,” he exclaimed, with a sudden energy of passion, “it is more than a month since I asked you to be my wife, and you have not yet given me my answer. Will you give it to me now?”
The girl withdrew her hand gently, and rested her cheek again on her hand.
“I know I am not worthy of you,” said Rufus, beseechingly. “I am poor in fortune, weak of character, a piece of drift-wood blown hither and thither by adverse winds, and likely to be tossed on a rocky shore at last, if you do not have pity upon me. Neva, such as I am, I beseech you to save me!”
“I am powerless to save any one,” said Neva gently “Your help must come from above, Rufus.”
“I want an earthly arm to cling to,” pleaded Rufus, his tones growing shrill with the sudden fear that she would reject him. “I have in me all noble impulses, Neva; I have in me the ability to become such a man as was your father. I would foster all noble enterprises; I would become great for your sake. I would study my art and make a name of which you should be proud. Will you stoop from your high estate, Neva, and have pity upon a weak, cowardly soul that longs to be strong and brave? Will you smile upon my great love for you, and let me devote my life to your happiness and comfort?”
His wild eyes looked into hers with a prayerfulness that went to her soul. He seemed to regard her as his earthly saviour—and such indeed, if she accepted him, she would be, for she would bring him fortune, and, what he valued more, her affection, her pure life, her brave soul, on which his own weak nature might be stayed.
“Poor Rufus!” said Neva, with a tenderness that a sister might have shown him. “My poor boy!” and her small face beamed with sisterly
kindness upon the tall, awkward fellow, the words coming strangely from her lips. “I am sorry for you.”
“And you will marry me?” he cried eagerly
The young face became grave almost to sternness. The lovely eyes gloomed over with a great shadow.
“I want to obey papa’s wishes as if they were commands,” she said. “I have thought and prayed, day after day and night after night. I like you, Rufus, and I cannot hear your appeals unmoved. I believe I am not selfish, if I am true to my higher nature, and obey the instincts God has implanted in my soul. I must be untrue to God, to myself, and to my own instincts, or I must pay no heed to that last letter and to the last wishes of poor papa. Which shall I do? I have decided first one way, and then the other. The possibility that that letter was—was not written by papa—and there is such a possibility—I cannot now help but consider. Forgive me, Rufus, but I have decided, and I think papa, who has looked down from heaven upon my perplexity and my anguish, must approve my course. I feel that I am doing right, when I say,” and here her hand took his, “that—that I cannot marry you.”
“Not marry me! Oh, Neva!”
“It costs me much to say it, Rufus, but I must be true to myself, to my principles of honor. I do not love you as a wife should love her husband. I could not stand up before God’s altar and God’s minister, and perjure myself by saying that I thus loved you. No, Rufus, no; it may not be!”
Rufus bowed his head upon the piano, and sobbed aloud.
His weakness appealed to the girl’s strength. She had seldom seen a man in tears, and her own tears began to flow in sympathy.
“I am so sorry, Rufus!” she whispered.
“But you will not save me? You will not lift a hand to save me from perdition?”
“I will be your sister, Rufus.”
“Until you become some other man’s wife!” cried Rufus, full of jealous anguish. “You will marry some other man—Lord Towyn, perhaps?”
The girl retreated a few steps, a red glory on her features. A strange sweet shyness shone in her eyes.
“I see!” exclaimed Rufus, in a passion of grief and jealousy. “You will marry Lord Towyn? Oh, Neva! Neva!”
“Rufus, it cannot matter to you whom I marry since I cannot marry you. Let us be friends—brother and sister—”
“I will be all to you or nothing!” ejaculated Rufus violently. “I will marry you or die!”
He broke from the grasp she laid upon him, and with a wild cry upon his lips, dashed from the room.
In the hall he encountered Craven Black and his bride, just come in from the garden. He would have brushed past them unseeing, unheeding, but his father, seeing his excitement and agitation, grasped his arm forcibly, arresting his progress.
“What’s the matter?” demanded Craven Black fiercely. “What’s up?”
“I’m going to kill myself!” returned Rufus shrilly, trying to break loose from that strong, unyielding clasp. “It’s all over. Neva has refused me, and turned me adrift. She is going to marry Lord Towyn!”
“Oh, is she?” said Craven Black mockingly. “We’ll see about that.”
“We will see!” said Neva’s step-mother, with a cruel and fierce compression of her lips. “I am Miss Wynde’s guardian. We will see if she dares disobey her father’s often repeated injunctions to obey me! If she does refuse, she shall feel my power!”
“Defer your suicide until you see how the thing turns out, my son,” said Craven Black, with a little sneer. “Go to your room and dry your tears, before the servants laugh at you.”
Rufus Black slunk away, miserable, yet with reviving hope. Perhaps the matter was not ended yet? Perhaps Neva would reconsider her decision?
As he disappeared up the staircase, Mrs. Craven Black laid her hand on her bridegroom’s arm, and whispered:
“The girl will prove restive. We shall have trouble with her If we mean to force her into this marriage, we must first of all get her away from her friends. Where shall we take her? How shall we deal with her?”
CHAPTER XXIV.
LALLY FINDS A NEW HOME.
Nearly six weeks had intervened between Rufus Black’s proposal of marriage to Neva Wynde on the road-side bank and his final rejection by her in the music-room at Hawkhurst.
It will be remembered that there had been a hidden witness to the half-despairing, half-loving, proposal of Rufus, and that this hidden witness, seeing, but unseen, was no other than the wronged young wife whom Rufus Black mourned as dead, and whom in his soul he loved a thousand-fold better than the beautiful young heiress.
During the six weeks that had passed, what had become of Lally— poor, heart-broken, despairing Lally?
We have narrated how she staggered away in the night gloom, after seeing Rufus and Neva together in the square of light from the home windows upon the marble terrace, not knowing whither she went, but hurrying as swiftly as she might from her young husband, from happiness, and from hope itself.
She had no thought of suicide. She had learned many lessons by the bedside of her old friend the seamstress, whose dying hours she had cheered. She had learned that life may be very bitter and hard to bear, but that it may not be thrown aside, or flung back in anger or despair to the Giver. Its burdens must be borne, and he who bears them with earnest patience, and in humble obedience to the divine will, shall some day exchange the cross of suffering for the crown of a great reward. No; Lally, weak and frail as she was, deserted by humanity, would never again seriously think of suicide.
She wandered on in the soft starlight and moonlight, a helpless, homeless, hopeless creature, with nowhere to go, as we have said. She had no money in her pocket, no food, and her shoes were worn out, and her clothes were patched and darned and pitiably frayed
and worn. The very angels must have pitied her in her utter forlornness.
For an hour or two she tottered on, but at last wearied to exhaustion, she sank down in the shelter of a way-side hedge, and sobbed and moaned herself to sleep.
She was awake again at daybreak, and hurried up and on, as if flying from pursuit. About eleven o’clock she came to a hop-garden, divided from the road by wooden palings. There were men and women, of the tramp species, busy at work here under the supervision of the hop farmer Lally halted and clung to the palings with both hands, and looked through the interstices upon the busy groups with dilating eyes.
She was worn with anguish, but even her mental sufferings could not still the demands of nature. She was so hungry that it seemed as if a vulture were gnawing at her vitals. She felt that she was starving.
The hop-pickers, many of them tramps who lived in unions and almshouses in the winter, and who stray down into Kent during the hop season, presently discovered the white and hungry face pressed against the palings, and jeered at the girl, and called her names she could not understand, making merry at her forlornness.
The hop raiser heard them, and discovering the object of their rude merriment, came forward, opened a gate in the palings, and hailed the girl. He was short of hands, he said, and would give her sixpence a day, and food and drink, if she chose to help in the hop picking.
Lally nodded assent, and crept into the gate, and into the presence of those who mocked at her. Her eyes were so wild, her manner so strange and still, that the workers stared at her in wonder, whispered among themselves, discovering that she was not of their kind, and turned their backs upon her.
It was taken for granted that the new hand had had her breakfast, and not a crust was offered to her. The hop raiser had doubts about her sanity, and observed her narrowly, but a dozen times that day he mentally congratulated himself on his acquisition. Lally worked with feverish energy, trying—ah, how vainly—to escape from her
thoughts, and she did the work of two persons. She had bread and cheese and a glass of ale at noon, and a similar allowance of food for supper.
That night she slept in a barn with the women tramps, but chose a remote corner, where she buried herself in the hay, and slept peacefully.
The next day she would have wandered on in her unrest, but the farmer, discovering her intention, offered her a shilling a day, and she consented to remain. That night she again slept in her remote corner of the barn, and no one spoke to her or molested her
She made no friends among the tramps, not even speaking to them. They were rude, vicious, quarrelsome. She was educated and refined, had been the teacher and companion of ladies, and was herself a lady at heart. She went among these rude companions by the soubriquet of “The Lady,” and this was the only name by which the hop farmer knew her.
For a week Lally kept up this toil, laboring in the hop-fields by day, and sleeping in a barn at night. At the end of that period, the work being finished, she was no longer wanted, and she went her way, resuming her weary tramp, with six shillings and sixpence in her pocket.
For the next fortnight she worked in various hop-fields, paying nothing for food or lodging. Her pay was better too, she earning a sovereign in the two weeks.
Three weeks after overhearing Rufus solicit the hand of Miss Wynde in marriage, Lally found herself at Canterbury, shoeless and ragged, a very picture of destitution. Her first act was to purchase a pair of shoes, a ready-made print dress and a thin shawl. Her purchases were all of the cheapest description, not costing her over five shillings. She added to the list a round hat of coarse straw, around which she tied a dark blue ribbon.
She found a cheap lodging in the town; and here put on her new clothes. The lodging was an attic room, with a dormer window, close up under the slates of a humble brick dwelling. There was no carpet
