Portland Gets Needled
Posted May 14th, 2008 by Skip
Now this:
http://www.adamkuby.com/Acupuncture.html
is interesting. Being an acupunk and an urban planner (I have TWO Master's degrees in science!) I'd love to know if there's any thought behind this statement:
"This project explores the junction between art, regional planning, the environment, asian medicine, and the health of a city."
Anyone want to help me in understanding this?
eye of the beholder
While these artists may not understand the subtleties of acupuncture/Chinese medicine, maybe they understand a lot more than we realize or give them credit for.
Is the success of acupuncture ALL about correct point placement? Maybe location is much more important when the acute problem is on that level. But aren't all human problems ultimately rooted in Spirit. I think a lot of people will look at a giant needle and it will stimulate some deeper reflection. It will slow down and even stop their rectilinear billboard thinking and give them cause to question their reality.
This circles back to the importance of embracing a diversity of perspectives. Let's not close the door on an opportunity for acupuncture/Asian medicine/holistic consciousness to be embraced by the larger society by dismissing their efforts as inferior, or because they fail to dovetail neatly with our perspectives. They will come around the mountain to meet us - if we don't throw boulders in their path.
Cynicism is a smokescreen for laziness and fear. Clear light mind awaken! Pierce through all layers of doubt and delusion! Inspire me onwards in ceaseless waves of selfless activity.
needles
this reminds me of the paul unschfield(sp?) book, medicine in china...or something like that. he broke down the anthropological roots of chinese medicine and how towns where designed in the same way and language that we use to describe our medicine. roads/buildings/waterways/etc where all laid at in concise patterns to create the most energetic balance and to reflect the same matrix of the human body, certain areas where yuan points, palaces where considered the heart and protected in the same fashion, the connecting irrigation ditches where considered luo channels, and each of the 5 elements where represented, etc.
i think this project is pretty interesting, at least in an artistic sense. i would rather see this than another ginormous building......if it works though i vote we all each build some of these big needles, take a field trip to wash dc., and play surround the dragon of every politician we can find!
Hmmm
I have heard about this project from three different people, all of whom asked me what I thought of it, in a "isn't this a cool way to expose people to acupuncture?" way. I have to admit, I don't think there's much to get here, to me, it's kinda. . . well. . . Stupid. . .
and maybe frivolous, too.
The placement of those needles in so many locations seems to suggest that this project was not thought out very deeply before it was implemented. And certainly not seriously including feng shui into the plan. But hey, look at the movie Ghandi, and how many people were brought into awareness of this great soul, even though the movie itself did not really touch the truth of his life. To each his own, I'd say, so that little by little, acupuncture will come to be a more familiar word to the uninitiated.
One day later: I've found out a little more about this project, that it's now taken down and was up for a month, and was strictly an artist's rendering, but with a lot of input from folks in the academic acu community. Okay, so it may not have been all that accurate or deep, but I can appreciate the enthusiasm and boldness of the idea, and that it probably helped to cause more people to think about acupuncture.
healthy debate equals Qi flow
Hi Matt,
In the spirit of healthy information exchange and friendly debate, are you willing to articulate your reasoning a bit more for saying the idea is stupid?
Cynicism is a smokescreen for laziness and fear. Clear light mind awaken! Pierce through all layers of doubt and delusion! Inspire me onwards in ceaseless waves of selfless activity.
I'm going to use an
I'm going to use an analogy. Lemericks are not often considered literature. They are often very witty and entertaining, but hardly reach the status of literature, why? Well, I suppose it has something to do with the fact that they often don't--and aren't intended to--move the soul, express some deep feeling, or do much more than entertain. They know what they are and fufill their purpose admirably.
Now, not all art has to be serious--I'm all for whimsy, but this just strikes me as a cute conciet trying to make itself into "art". It seems witty to those "in the know", but we can hardly expect the general public to "get it". That has more to do with the forced nature of it than the nature of art itself. One does not have to be "in the know" to "get" great art--it speaks for itself. As for whimsy, it often loses it's effect if in order to see the humour you have to launch into a dissertation about the ways in which something is witty/profound/etc.
Ancient Geomancy was founded on natural intuitions and insights--it was not generally such an intellectual exercise. Now, someone honestly trying to map out "Dragon Lines" and such would be much more interesting to me, and I think they would come up with more harmonious "installations" that were adapted to the environment, rather than forcing the analogy in such a "cutesy" way as using giant steel needles. In Feng Shui a pond or rock or tree ARE the needles. . .
Oh wow, the moon
Matt's answer speaks for me; it answers my question in the opening post.
I cringe when I see examples of Alt Health 101. They feel like glorification in banalities and this superimposition of Acupuncture onto the Portland landscape is a banality. As a former planner I am aware that many planners strive to feel the essentialness of a place. Read for instance, Kevin Lynch's book, The Image of the City. Further, this urge to shape a settlement into something harmonious with its surroundings for the betterment of its residents is found in all cultures- often with dragon lines (which are of course named something else since most cultures aren't Chinese.)
So what bothers me is the taking of a couple of deep concepts and superficially joining them and pretending that they are making a new statement. I am reminded me of an old series of Doonesbury comics from the 70's talking about(and making fun of) current California New Age culture. In one strip someone is explaining how the new California mellow language gets to the essentialness of the written word by translating a sonnet of Shakespeare where the moon is used as a metaphor for love The sonnet came out as, "Oh wow, the moon." Funny stuff.
It's understandable to get excited by new concepts. However care needs to be taken to notice that major concepts like Oriental Medicine are full of subtleties so we avoid the pitfalls of oversimplistic thinking, i.e. Fundamentalism.
Oh wow, classist map! (And hipster chinoiserie)
So I was scrolling down the page describing the project, with all the photos of various Portland landscapes as "acupoints", and I came to the section with the overall map of Portland with the points in red...and I did what I always do, check out where I live on the map. I was wondering, what meridian is my neighborhood on?
And the answer is, of course, none; WCA is just about dead-center in the circle marked "poverty and gangs". With some nice parenthetical arrows that say "drug addiction" and "trailer parks". But no points near us, and no meridians either. What's that supposed to mean? We're not part of the energetic network of the city; we're just where the problems are.
Which sums up my impressions of this project. I agree with Skip and Matt that this is a superficial treatment of big ideas -- oh wow, acupuncture! I was complaining to Matt at work that a lot of the purported "interest" in Chinese medicine that we hear about is actually interest in Chinese medicine as decoration for something. We came up with the term "hipster chinoiserie" to describe the phenomenon that irritates me so much. Hipster chinoiserie includes the promotion of acupuncture school as a form of self-development for people who never intend to practice -- a growing target market for the schools, because they need to find people with enough money that they don't need to worry about ever repaying their loans on an acupuncturist's income. An acupuncture degree as the equivalent of a Ming vase: something to admire, something to boast of, not something to USE. Certainly not to use on people who really NEED it.
If someone were to come up with a genuine map of the energetic flow of Portland, I'd be interested too. Such a map would presumably tell me something real about my neighborhood, the place where I live and work -- as opposed to just telling me something I already know, which is that it's considered not worth decorating with Chinese medicine.
no needlz in da hood
duh...distal treatment. ha!
and when i say distal i mean staying away and waiting for the artist kids to move in and feng shui the place up with quirky new cafes and clubs...then maybe some pet restaurants and high rise condos or something like that.
earth acupuncture
Certainly many, if not all, traditional cultures understood the connections between human settlement and the land. There are many challenges to maintaining a balance of yin and yang in the modern environment. It's complex and I don't pretend to know the answer but will throw out a few thoughts:
Automobiles and the freeway systems they spawn, while appearing to increase Qi flow at certain times, also cause a lot of Qi obstruction (and possibly Shen disturbances) at other times....i.e. rush hour. Furthermore, the magnitude of the noise, pollution, and rapid movement, destabilizes the overall harmony virtually everywhere they exist. Neighborhoods get dissected and separated, again obstructing local Qi flow.
Combined with the imbalance between manmade structures (all that concrete, steel, asphalt, etc.) and a rapidly diminishing presence of nature (i.e. oxygen producing greenery), the yang aspect of human civilization - it's dynamic creativity, as well as its verticalness (skyscrapers blotting out the sun) - overpowers and threatens to eliminate the quiet, contemplative, nurturing, horizontal, sustaining power of nature, thus gradually eradicating that quality within humans.
But perhaps the greatest challenge right now to balancing yin and yang, not merely in urban areas, but on the planet itself, is responding skillfully to the increasingly rapid pace of change itself (a Yang characteristic).
The successful adaptive response must of course come from both external Qi tweaking in our local and global environments, and also, from an internal effort to nurture our own body and mind. (I use the term mind to include what some might refer to as "spirit".) So things like meditation...or even simply resting and getting enough sleep, become enormously important right now.
But to come back to Earth and connect with the initial theme of Skip's post, I have something beautiful to share: An old patient of mine who followed me from my boutique practice to CommuniChi is outside of my office with twenty or thirty of his classmates from Seattle University School of Business....planting fruits trees around the perimeter of the community center as I type this.
Justin, who is very knowledgeable in permaculture techniques, asked me many months ago after a treatment, if I knew anyone who needed some fruit trees. I put him in touch with the gardener of El Centro de la Raza (the community center where CommuniChi is located), and as I type this, the trees are going into the ground.
Because Community Acupuncture clinics are places of life, healing, calming, and sustainable community, of course they are going to have a positive, healing effect on whatever neighborhood they land in. There is a children's book which illustrates this concept beautifully....will try to remember the title and post.
Cynicism is a smokescreen for laziness and fear. Clear light mind awaken! Pierce through all layers of doubt and delusion! Inspire me onwards in ceaseless waves of selfless activity.
Wow...!
what happens when they try to attain qi???
Way cool
love it!
is that Moses...
in the skater's bowl? rock on man.