Matter and Circumstance
Some days we get sloshed around by the elements, sometimes they stick us in a shady spot under the trees on a hot day, or maybe we're caught amidst the trouble of too many parts, somehow they don't fit together.
But sometimes we think as we are building the thing itself, and our design shifts as each step is performed, new problems arise like what we could have never imagined, no matter how hard we planned for them. In fact, everything we thought would be a problem wasn't, and everything we thought would be easy took a hell-of-a-long time.
But we, us, any persistent executor of creation, know that to mould something from our minds means working the surface of these three dimensions, trying to shape matter and circumstance to fit the picture in our minds. Too much planning without acting asks us to attempt the impossible: to envision the problems we have never before encountered, and try to solve them. But how can a solution arise before the problem is known?
I'm in the business of trading fours with the world around me. And often what I receive in return is a warped prototype, some result that shows me my dreams still don't exist yet, not so long as they reside in my head, not until thy are put up to the mirror of the world and I may compare, seeing the planes of intersection, and still those places that don't quite measure up.
The architect knows that fusion can't be bought. The artist too. That the deliciousness of forms encounter expectation must be worked though in a series of trials and errors, shifted expectations, new visions for what might be possible. The scientist wades around this swamp of knowledge, knowing that some solution must exist, some example of union and proof that the dreams behind his or her eyes are not simply mirages, not simply the untended wild-lands of the mind.
No, these dreams are the guides, and our attempts are the teachers, and one day we will find a world somehow matching our beautiful and delicately crafted imagination, but only when the work has been done, only when we have laid our strokes down again and again in the off chance that the colors come out right this time.
