The Inner Studio - Riverside Architectural Press

P A R T F I V E
Using This Life to Be
Creative and Wise
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
–RAINER MARIA RILKE
Alocal inventor devoted himself to designing a machine that
would grow lettuce in half the time it takes to grow in a field.
He had rented a factory and his prototype sat like a robotic lunar
module in the center of the big industrial space. The seeds went in
one end and his goal was to have perfect lettuce come out the other
end. He reasoned that since plants only need nutrients and sunlight
to grow, his machine would completely optimize these conditions
by eliminating the time a plant spent in the darkness of night, thus
allowing the lettuce to grow to maturity in half the time nature
needed. The problem he constantly ran into was that, although
only modest growth took place at night, the enormous amount of
chemical activity that occurred within the plant in the dark was
crucial to all of its development. He continues to work on his
machine, but he can’t find a way to replace the time of darkness
where “nothing” seems to happen.
The Four Functions
Why are there so many ways to be in a state of muddleness, but only very
few ways to be tidy?
–GREGORY BATESON
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