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Spiritual Constructions :: Alan Balfour Two Arguments The first argument sees
blind faith as the only comfort for the majority in the future world. The world population, which has doubled
since 1957, will double again within the next thirty years. India, for example, will have a billion
people by the year 2010. The
results of such exponential growth will begin to consume, with frenzied
suddenness, all the dependable surface resources, field by field, valley by
valley. Think of a cluster of
villages in central India surviving on the meager produce of tiny plots of
cultivation, finding fuel for cooking in the dung of cattle and from the
branches of the stunted trees that thinly cover the ground. Then consider that in a period of weeks
all could suddenly be wasted, and the people must move to find sustenance, and
as they move, they are joined by swelling numbers, forced into a search without
end, for all the land they pass through is overworked and wasted and there is
nowhere left to go but to the great city.
And the great city swells like a lake in flood, and the people say, “If
India survives, the world will survive.” And there will be a
thousand cities like Bombay, with uncountable millions, for whom abstract
political order will be meaningless, for whom spiritual construction, no matter
how immaterial, alone will maintain order and form the evolving reality. Religious fundamentalism is only the
most coherent expression of a much more extensive condition. The second argument
proposes that world industry must manipulate the world population for the
survival of both. Television has
made entertainment out of tragedy, making us voyeurs, making us hapless
witnesses to a regressing world.
Persistent exposure to disaster has blunted the edge of compassion. The increasing tolerance of the obscene
and horrific, coupled with an equal feeling of impotence, has prepared the
world not just for the droughts and famines, catastrophic accidents, and civil
disorder, but also for the exploitation of global resources by the new world
industries. Industries whose
nature and survival owe nothing to the idea of a nationhood. The imperial and colonial
policies of the nineteenth century often masked their essential economic
agendas behind religious and civilizing causes. With their increasing detachment from the constraints of
national laws and policies, world industries seek increasing freedom from any
constraints in stripping the natural assets of weakened nations. It is clearly in the best interest of
such world industries to favor the emergence of weak and accommodating
governments, not only to allow exploitation of resources, but also to encourage
the growth of apolitical and amoral urban societies with a healthy appetite for
consumption. Such exploitation feeds
an increasing political and economic regression in which stability is
maintained by a combination of military force and the stimulation of artificial
realities. The Indian and Hong Kong
movie industries are powerful agents in this stimulation. In this devolution there is no return
to the natural and the primitive.
This is a world in which the most advanced products of destruction and
gratification will be instantly put to use wherever they are needed. Out of these two conditions
new constructions of the authentic and the artificial will emerge. They will form the most significant
objects in the imagination and in the reality of the new millennium. The forms, of course, will depend on
the size and the nature of the illusions and of the mysteries they involve. Let me offer a few brief
tales on the structure of spiritual desire. The many small gods of Japan appear to offer the most
convenient instruments of spiritual security. The Shinto shrines on so many streets vie with the automatic
drink dispensers to salve the spirit.
Throw in some money, clap twice, be quite open about the help needed,
and go on through the day reassured that the ancient spirits are looking after
you. As I became accustomed to
these red structures surrounding simple yet mysterious aedicules, I sensed that
all else in these cities could change or disappear, but the community would
retain meaning if these temples survived.
Constructing small instruments of spiritual comfort fulfills an ancient
and deeply felt human need. In
Manila, in Naples, in Istanbul, in Bangkok, coexisting with the vast spiritual
engines of the privileged, neighborhood shrines are but a step away from the
household altars, and through the tolling of bells, the burning of sacred
prayers, and the pouring of water, they ease the path of the spirit through the
moods of the day into the shifting burdens of life. New constructions of
spiritual desire are emerging in both the old and the new world. These assume forms significantly
different from ancient places of ritual.
The ubiquitous clapboard shed that now is home in various shapes and
sizes to all the necessities of life in the fringes of the towns in the
American South more and more often houses the neighborhood palm reader. People increasingly need the guidance
of the soothsayers whose inventive futures will give confidence to those whose
lives are without distinction. The
same form of structure, here made in cinder block, can be found at the heart of
the constantly growing settlements that ring Mexico City. These sheds anchor the spiritual life
of the people, not in the caste-bound mysteries of Catholicism, but in the
accessible platitudes of Jimmy Swaggart and the many other zealous U.S.
evangelicals. Through the slums of
the cities of Central and South America, the same rude concrete structures
carry a myriad of satisfying, though often dark and dreadful mysteries – from
the voodoo clubs in the mud-sliding hills above Rio, to the worship of a
tailor’s dummy, made up to look like Al Capone, in a solitary shed on the
outskirts of a small town in Guatemala. I find this last place
emblematic of both the invention and the desperation of people without
hope. The shed with its corrugated
roof is approached down a small cobbled lane flanked by some farm
buildings. On entering and waiting
until the gloom clears, there appears, in the place of the high altar, a
department store dummy with gray-pink flesh and painted eyes sitting in a
chipped enameled barber’s chair.
Someone has carefully, too carefully, marked the upper lip with a pencil
line moustache. The deity wears a
trench coat, collar up, and a snap-brim fedora is pulled down over the
eyes. The figure sits casually on
the chair, cross-legged, one hand on the rest, the other holding a cigarette in
a long yellow plastic holder. The
attendants, two middle-aged women, take care of its needs. One ensures that a cigarette is
constantly lit, burning in the holder.
The other, every few minutes, pours a carefully measured shot of bourbon
whiskey down the sodden fibrous lips.
The deity, whose origins did not prepare it for receiving continual
doses of bourbon, has a weak stomach, with the consequence that the ritual
scene sits in the middle of a puddle of muddied whiskey. The smell is strong. In the darkness a few people prostrate
themselves before the figure and mumble incomprehensible prayers and
requests. This ritual differs
little from the hysterical cries of the evangelicals committing themselves to
God or the dazed frenzies of the voodoo dancers as they will themselves
possessed and guided by fierce external force. The figure in the barber’s chair, though, is unusual. Most of the new spiritual activity in
poor communities, a rejection of autocratic religions, doesn’t require the presence
of a symbolic figure to focus the ritual.
Rather, the spiritual activity demands shared personal commitment within
a trusting community free from any notions of higher earthly authority. A contrast to these
spiritual performances, which appear to seek withdrawal from reality, present
and future, has been the construction of artificial destinations. These structures, of a deliberately
epochal scale, are elaborate and synthetic and manipulate mass imagination into
experiencing the illusion of fulfilled existence. The artificial destination is surely architecture’s greatest
achievement: from the Temple of
David to all the compelling machines of Rome that still constrain the Western
imagination; from the Colosseum to its inversion in the metaphysics of Hagia
Sofia, whose representation of heaven was to hold the Christian imagination for
a thousand years, displaced in the end only with the construction of the
cathedrals, whose great shafts of stone sought to consume all other realities. The shift from architectural artifact
to instrument and machine occurred in the nineteenth century. The railway train in a literal sense
made destination artificial and gave rise to the mass idea of traveling for
pleasure. The Crystal Palace
became the tempting artificial destination of the nineteenth century and the
first world structure concerned with stimulating in mass population the idea of
consumption. It added a host of
artificial journeys that were much more concerned with action and experience
than with symbol and revelation.
And the floods of new products that poured from the factories provided artificial
realities, artificial journeys, for all.
The landscapes of twentieth-century desire produced the movies and
flight and radio and an explosion of invention affecting all aspects of
existence. The movies became the
great artificial destination in which illusion far overwhelmed reality in the
passive imagination. And as
testament to its significance and necessity for the spirit of these times, the
movie has expanded into machines that can provide infinite manipulations of any
conceivable presence, infinite presencing of what is no longer seen as
artificial. In this I see an emerging
vision for willful landscapes of artificial reality. The construction of artificial destinations is shared by
industries and governments.
Cathedrals are constructed to satisfy the mass imagination, as much to
deceive and pacify as to inspire and entertain. The dilemma for architecture lies in the ability of such
constructions to embody brilliantly monstrous deception. The profundity of this condition was
dramatized in a discussion I had with a young Chinese student who had been in
Tiananmen Square during the protests.
His concern was to share a vision that had haunted and frustrated him
since the crackdown. It was a
dream. A dream that somewhere in
China a community of people, thousands upon thousands, would come together and
begin to build a great cathedral.
The vision was specific in his imagination. It would be Rheims rather than Chartres. He had read about it in his history
books and had subsequently visited and been awestruck by this immense pile of
harmonically ordered stone, shaped by innumerable hands to become a perpetual
symbol of community and faith. He
said he believed that both in the act of building through several generations
and in the eventual realization of such an epic structure, a spiritual and
political path would emerge that would confirm and secure a meaningful future. I didn’t ask if he was Christian, for
it seemed clear as he spoke that his visions had all to do with politics and
his love of people and little to do with notions of salvation or the life
hereafter. Let me conclude with some
dreadful scenarios, not as Delphic political pronouncements, but as landscapes
of probability forcing the designing of future reality. The new power in the world will be the
global industries, whose products will range from the essential to the
stimulating to the destructive.
They will assume authority over nations and divide the earth into
several realities. Among them will
be the reserve
lands, abandoned regions whose small populations and insufficient resources are
of no interest to world banks or producers except as a dump for the corrosive
wastes of industry. They are
excluded from the consumption program except to be used and abused. The resource lands are rich in natural
resources but poorly developed.
Consequently they are dominated by the global industries demanding to be
fed through unsparing stripping of their mineral and vegetable assets,
particularly where there are docile populations and accommodating
governments. Here populations,
large and small, will be kept powerless and become essentially the property of
industry within which there will be little chance for individuals to
prosper. The ambitious will leave
for the great cities. Here,
irrespective of cultural and productive history, uncontrolled population growth
and consumption will demand a balance.
Stability is essential to consumption. Here, in combination with religions, old and new, vast
artificial destinations must be constructed for the spirit and for the
flesh. These will become the reality
engines of the new millennium. The idea of making a great
and artful construction that will have a compelling influence on the faith and
obedience of the masses is an essential characteristic of advanced
cultures. Architecture has always
been the premier instrument for establishing order and authority. But now I sense something dreadful
being cultivated. Monstrous
deceptions, cynical creations of vast portentous dimension, conceived as the
cosmic palliative, conceived to address what must be a future of intolerable
insecurity for the many.
Constructions that combine the communal ritual commitments of the new
religions with all the elaborate machines of illusion that are now the most
fruitful products of the world industries. Construction conceived to give meaning to meaningless
existence, subtly tempting and gratifying all the desires of the flesh as
necessary indulgence through which salvation will be achieved. Vast and intricate constructions, these
spiritual engines will present a reality so completely satisfying that even
those who know it is corrupting will be seduced and silenced. And for most of those
involved in the production of these vast constructions, it will seem like a
golden age, it will be compared with the building of the cathedrals. But a few will resist
feeding a corrupting reality. A few will continue to
search for ways to create objects exploring the mysteries of existence. And their work will embody the
prophetic future. » back to top | ||
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