Spring 2022

The poet Charles Olson was fond of a quote which he attributed to Heraclitus; "man is estranged from that which he is most familiar." Modernity can be understood as the capstone of a process that began more than three millennia ago when, as Olson complained, Aristotle began making all of those damn lists. That the more we seek to define ourselves as special and apart from the world we are a part and parcel of, the more alienated from the world, each other and ourselves we become.

We can heal this schism of our own making by understanding that you have only painted yourself into the corner of a room for as long as it takes for the paint to fully dry. Of course we can do it, but it is a slow process. We need only to muster the patience required to get it done. We do this by grounding ourselves and the man-made habitats we live in; the structure of our relationships with each other; and the nature and place of work and education in the larger societies we live in.

This issue tackles this problem by focusing on three core human activities; Architecture, Economy and Agriculture.