This is Uncertain
I have spent a great deal of my life managing risk and uncertainty in the realm of architecture and building projects. It has slowly dawned on me that uncertainty itself is where my head is at.
I have a profound, if untutored, appreciation of the prose of Fernando Pessoa. His Book of Disquiet is some of the most engaging writing I have ever read. I don’t really understand how he actually managed to do it, which is more than I can say about many things I have read. There is a lyrical fluidity of topic and subject, and a constantly oscillating point of view that almost induces vertigo, even though his point of view is rooted in the mundane.
Into these footsteps I tread, with some trepidation and a great deal of genuine humility.
The uncertain is an engaging realm to occupy. In my day job, uncertainty is to be banished at all costs, or at least minimised to limit its impact on that most ambitious (and sometimes obnoxious) of undertaking, the ‘project’. Projects proceed under conditions of uncertainty, and it is the expert’s role to know more than the project sponsor or client, in order to contain the negative impact on such mundane factors as time, cost, and quality. It is tiring, always having to know better.
In my writing, I embrace uncertainty as a precondition of the text. I do not ‘know better’, and I cannot contain the effects of uncertainty on the prose or the undertaking in general. It is good not to know, and write anyway.
What don’t I know? Most things, as it happens. But to get to the point, perhaps the most prominent (if not important) thing I don’t know is the point of the writing practice enacted under conditions of uncertainty. Why do it at all?
It would be relatively straightforward to showcase my 28 years of professional expertise - not easy, exactly, but it is a known path to tread. I am a writer who designs buildings, and I might have a great deal to say about the design dimension of my creative practice.
Yes, but: I am not interested in plumbing those depths. The ‘architect who writes’ identity, of which there are an endless supply in the world, is a well known type. I’m not interested, and at any rate I am literally and legally NOT an architect and as such not qualified to speak with that voice. Good thing it doesn’t capture my imagination, then.
Instead, I conjure uncertainty with gay abandon and court its embrace, at least when I am free from the day job, with its professional demands and obligations.
Where does it all lead? This is uncertain. Let’s go there anyway.
Image used under editorial licence. https://artist.scop.io/kenji-tanimura-4efdc393