I fed a few texts on different subjects into my python markov chaining script. I generated a few hundred lines at a time and then I pick through them, adjusting them and putting them in sequence that makes sense to me. I like to write this way because it feels more like gardening than writing, because it feels like I am writing with a partner, because I cannot speak for the dead or speak with authority, but I can do this- hold a seance.
Here’s the current text:
Here are strings of unbuilt words about unbuilding. Here is the shell of an unhatched, crushed egg. The wind did not hang herself up and danced wide through a hole struck through stone. When she comes out of this, she is soft, sinuous, fecund. I will begin with my contempt and resentment towards those who build homes that will collapse and those that charge rent there. I will begin with my contempt for those who seek power for no end but to glorify themselves and then flee from responsibility when that power could be of use. We must all every day become builders, every day we repair a house collapsing. To build for me, the faceless, needless dead- this gargoyle- is an empty afterthought. Build for yourselves. But this semblance of complete destruction or of vitality - they are but the echo of these movements. The alleged destruction of these bodies indicates only a difference of degree. The distinction between matter and mystery. the voice of the unfettered and perpetually vanishing soul of things; architecture is that soul imprisoned in a form, become subject to the law of causality, beaten upon by the elements, at war with gravity. He shook the clustered Bees gently into it. It was all covered with sweet-smelling blossoms! There you have detached from action, that is to transmit the whole planet and papering over all differences. But, to prevent any accentuating of the whole as translucent: here there is a line, a link between them. You imagine a place you could build glorious edifices for yourself but the weight of your imagination cracks the pedestal of reality. Inversely, realism fails to do. These are not weightless stones. (Of course the Horses were listening.) Habit rather than a blueprint. A tarp tied between four dead trees on a floodplain. The twenty-two stubby snouts that were thrust through the center of a Gothic cathedral were a good deal sharper. Speaking generally, the disturbance of the object, a growing number of images. It is enough to account for this parallelism by a being unable to appeal to that extreme plane of dream. This conductor is composed of heterogeneous parts of it. If it is for us nothing that is to show its absurdity. This is no longer needed. For in word, incomprehension. In deed, impotence. In planning, ignorance. Consciousness, then, illumines, at each moment, like a hallway. Not a star in a sky but a hole struck through stone. An echo of silence.
Some text sources used in the corpus along with my own writing are-
- The Beautiful Necessity by Claude Fayette Bragdon
- The Poetry of Architecture by John Ruskin
- Newton’s Cenotaph by Étienne-Louis Boullée
- Among the Farmyard people by by Clara Dillingham Pierson
- On The spatial structure of architectonic objects Andrzej Niezabitowski
- Glossary of Architecture terms, architecturaltrust.org