GUY ON RUPTURED SPACE

BREAKING PERFECTION

Rupture brings greater joy to the impact of space on the mind. When I first got iTunes, I maniacally rated all the songs I added. After a while, I learned how to create a playlist of only five-star songs, and with (by that time) about a thousand songs saved, I was able to listen to a mix of all my truly favorite songs.

The result was boredom. I figured that interest and entertainment required variety, so the large number of songs in the mix should have made for joyful listening. I rarely heard the same song twice in a day, or twice in two days. But excellence and variety were not enough to please.

I returned to the radio for a time, now thinking that it was newness that was lacking. (Do you see how the mind resists rupture? More on that in a bit.) Radio programming surprises more or less by definition, because you didn’t do the programming yourself; even if all you hear are songs you know—and it’s remarkable how many songs, seemingly an unlimited number if the genre is familiar, your mind remembers—you can’t know what song is next. So radio entertains each moment another song begins playing, even if it’s a song you don’t like, just by presenting you with something unpredicted.

But that wasn’t it.

Finally my misunderstanding hit me: what I wasn’t recognizing about radio was the value of the songs I don’t like. I realized that the relentless awesomeness of five-star songs one after the other was giving me no break, putting fast asleep the pleasure centers of my brain. I tried a different mix that included songs that are not my favorites and songs I don’t like. Et voilà! my mix made me happy again. Adding Holes to the content created a more excellent Whole.

This is an example of compensatory perception creating benefit through negativity. In the discipline of space, it translates as rupture of space creating pleasing sensation via reaction of the senses to violent imperfection. This principle tells us that we lead the viewer to an ultimately more pleased reaction by smashing through the main subject giving pleasure. In space terms, breaks in the perfection of emptiness give us greater joy in contemplation of it.

But it is natural and useful for us to resist rupture as strongly as we do. Because perfection is still best. The kind of breakage and violence described here is a human tool for creating satisfaction out of human flaw. Experiencing a work such as the Taj Mahal, though, is quite the opposite of an experience of ruptured space. Its space is ideal, ideally measured, ideally scaled.

Still, we are not all Lahauri, nor was Lahauri likely a creator of ideal space more than once in his life. Though we always instinctively strive for the ideal in our work, we may want to give ourselves our own breaks from time to time, and create pleasurable spaces with interruption instead of only with perfection.