Method

27.02.2011  In the outstanding novel Confessions of Taoist on Wall Street, David Payne tells the story of a little boy, Sun I, who is born of a Chinese mother and an American fighter pilot in China. His mother dies at birth and his father returns home to theUnited States; he is left alone and grows up in a monastery. His mentor and teacher is the chef, Wu, who takes good care of him. The monastery is on a high rock upon a river. One of their daily chores is to carry water from the river to the monastery up a rocky path. The boy remembers that whenever they arrived at the top of the rock his buckets were empty, all the water spilled, whereas Wu's were always full. Here are Sun I's thoughts:
'It was true. By some extraordinary luck or skill Wu never seemd to lose a drop, though he hurried along the treacherous stair at twice my pace. (I tried to cut my losses by moving slowly, plotting my course in advance and picking each footrest with deliberate care.)  
    "I don't understand it," I confessed to him. "You must know some kind of trick. Explain your method."
    . . . "You haven't yet caught on. It's precisely this-excess of method-that confounds you, leaves the buckets nearly empty. . ."
     "If you're so smart, how do you do it then?"
     "How do I do it? . . . I close my eyes and think of nothing. My mind is somewhere else. My legs find their way without me, even over the most uneven ground. How can I tell you how I do it? . . . I can't even remember myself!" (Payne, 1984, pp. 18-19)'
-from How the Body Shapes the Way We Think, Pfeifer and Bongard, 2007, pp. 370-1


See also Malcolm Gladwell, Blink. If we divorce this for a second from the obvious connections with the over obsessiveness over process in the architectural discourse, what else can we take from this story? Is it possible that true intelligence resides in the body, not the mind? Or better still that the balance in this story between body and mind illustrates true intelligence. Maybe the abstract expressionist painters were on to something half a century ago when they allowed the subconcious (could this be the body) control their paintings. Overly rationalized buildings are not intelligent if they are impoverished in sensory stimulation in relation to the body.