a. Time acts chemically, as an aqua regia, to dissolve and reorder the bonds of any aggregates entered into it.
b. Human apprehensions are never fully factored out, but depend on a juxtaposition of several aggregates; (10x10x2) vs. (52x23) vs. (5x5x2x2x2). Adjustments are frequent.
c. A fully factored view would appear as a tautology, as the Carroll map that lies draped 1:1 over its referent.
College students were corralled by the researchers into the basement of the student union. After vigorous dosages and several disorienting bits of stagecraft, the subjects produced a peculiar text. Which is to say: at dawn the following was found scrawled on the blackboard, along with some more (ahem) material remnants.
"Spots of gravy on the bodice twin to the gaps in the lace. At shadow or clutched in an occulted bed, crouched on a [...] counterpane, or stroking a fly that hits between panes. Brass buttons are a child's trumpet [?] to blow.
A mass of spots on the bony chest, and the kin of a fowl, once plucked--a facing form with most numbers omitted. Kin to a fowl, with a hatful of glaring [...] faults.
I do get the sense that this was the substance [...] of her [...]complaint: that she'd be shuttled back and forth. That upon this point she'd be shunned; lengths of her neck [...] and collar wrung, thrown there with the rest.
Insofar as any spotted lady can be white--who at once apprehends and sets forth [...]the alley-strictures, together pent in paper frost."
A week later, a panel of experts were convened to interpret the results. Their responses are given anonymously.
A: "A careful invocation of childhood."
B: "The only word worth reading is 'plucked'. All flesh and no feathers, so to speak."
C: "It fairly breathes racial misgivings."
D: "It may be about snow."
"For the past 200 years, the ideal image of nature has been a symbolic, transformed and man-made landscape, typified by idealized areas of agricultural production. Such idealizations led to the creation of unique parks, but, as symbols of a past romantic ideal, these landscapes cannot now be restored. These cultural landscapes are as lost to us now as are the social dreams of nineteenth-century Romanticism, and can therefore only fail as ideals for a contemporary landscape. The tasks of dealing with run-down industrial areas and open-cast mines require a new method--one that accepts their physical qualities but also their destroyed nature and topography. This new vision should not be one of "re-cultivation", for this approach negates the qualities that they currently possess and destroys them for a second time. The vision for a new landscape should seek its justification exactly within the existing forms of demolition and exhaustion. We have to ask ourselves which spaces from among the dilapidated and redundant places we want to use and occupy, and which of those have to be changed by the mark of a cultural intervention or the remediation of historical contamination.
Would it not be better to attach to the ideal image of our occidental culture, to 'paradise', an oasis in the desert, a place where man has to make his way against the rigors of physical nature? This imagination of an oasis as a garden in desolate spaces is my ideal type of discourse with the nature of old industrial sites, which in their parts can be left to themselves to develop the fantastic images of the future from already existing formations--creating values between art and nature in a way which could never be made by the artist nor mere nature alone."
-from Peter Latz, "Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord: The Metamorphosis Of An Industrial Site", in Manufactured Sites, ed. Niall Kirkwood.
