>
> Nation-states are an odd artifice. I don't see any time soon that we will
> not have them but I like the dream of a world without borders.
>
Walt Whitman said it best in his poem "Mending Wall".
He is all pine and I am apple-orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. 25
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. 30
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
And then there was some other New American Poet of the early '60s who wrote
"Mending Sump" as a modern comment about shared infrastructure. He wrote,
"Something there is that doesn't hump a sump." I have never been able to
remember his name, except that it wasn't Gary Snyder. The line just before
was the best of all but least quoted, "A little bird, I think has wondered
in the pipes, and all's gone wrong." "Something there is that doesn't......"
One day, while apprenticing with Soleri (1962), things were not going well
with trying to build a column in a new structure. At that time, I often
would go into the office at night to read from his sketchbooks when no one
was around, and that night found this gem from an earlier year of the deep
thinker, "Somewhere, somehow, the thing you do gets out of hand. It is
then that your action, and the quality at the base of it can make of it
something of creativity." I typed it out and tacked it to the column so
that in the morning it would greet the volatile Master. Instead of
continued deep frustration, the column event turned into laughter and we
actually discovered a solution that second day. "Somewhere, somehow, the
thing you do gets out of hand." remains a salvation mantra for me to this
day.
cp in bc
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