Creation Designed to Endure Erosion
Brutal robusticity
“Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?”
— László Tóth
When I was in lower primary, my sister would take me everywhere with her after picking me up from school on most evenings.
Infill Academy was the school.
We would walk around Komarock visiting her friends before heading back home. The walks, however, could not compare to the creative pieces she liked to make. Like a wandering flaneur, I would sit and watch as she set out to make concrete the designs she conjured from her mind.
One day, she bought packets of spaghetti from the local supermarket, Nova, as it was called back then, next to the Kanisani stage. I think it was several packets because of how she creatively assembled it all on top of the sitting room table.
You know you’re enjoying your journey if you can’t recall how you got from one point to another or how fast time flies. That was the experience I had when she converted the spaghetti sticks into a city.
I wouldn’t call it a corner of a town, such as Stars Hollow in Gilmore Girls, because she occupied the entire table. The table had the markings of a city. In reality, it was more of a village, but my juvenile mind adamantly saw a city.
She even converted some of the sticks into a bridge and scattered a few underneath to give the impression of a flowing river. It was like one of the ancient Japanese cities because next to this river was a pagoda, maybe two storeys high for its size. She would have been an extremely artistic architect.
Alas, it had to come down. The beauty was visually fleeting, but the imprint was stamped inside an untouched corner of my memory. While she had to bring everything down before she faced the wrath of our mother, she created a design that didn’t erode in my mind.
Music and Movies
When you mention Whitney Houston, several songs come to mind. The same goes for Celine Dion. Or Luther Vandross. These iconic musicians made historic songs that will hardly erode.
It’s not just their voices. It’s the background melody bolstering their unique talent. My Heart Will Go On reached down to my childhood trivialities and awakened a deep emotion I never thought I had long before I watched The Titanic. That’s the veracity of a song that endures the erosive powers of time, genre changes, and emergent culture.
I was a big rock fan a few years before joining high school. Midway, I transitioned into a riddims die-hard. By the time I was in my third year on campus, I was a card-carrying hip-hop fanatic. Throughout one’s life, your preferences are bound to change.
Yet, I would pause it all to listen to Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You. The song endured my transient preferences for different types of music.
I’ve also watched many movies. It was the same sister who converted the sitting room table into an ancient city, who took me to watch my first movie in the cinema, Peter Pan. I doubt I will ever have a Peter Pan experience greater than that one.
One Thursday morning, my brother had me miss classes in medical school to make the most of IMAX offers in the middle of the week. 300 was the movie.
Like any typical campus student, I found websites to stream movies converted from camera copies into high-definition motion pictures. I even recall sitting my mother down to watch Hairspray, the musical.
Yet, The Sound of Music will still be my preferred movie. It was created to endure erosion.
As was Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise. The song has featured in numerous global product launches, headlining performances, and critically acclaimed movies.
These creations were designed to endure even when the ones who brought them to the world passed away. I remember reading about the death of Whitney Houston, the grief that sat heavily in my chest, while reading the reporter’s story of the events marking her legacy.
Whitney Houston was my favourite artist. Even after enjoying entertainment nights listening to Jamaica’s riddim superstars, or America’s rappers, or Kenyan celebrities, or the pillars of R&B, or the countless rock bands, I would continue to rank Whitney Houston as my favourite singer.
She continues to endure. That is the goal of anyone who tries to create something new, something to share with the world. Making one’s ideas concrete is the aim of anyone whose goal is to create.
Ideas and Architecture
In Genesis, the Holy Trinity discusses the idea of creating beings in their image. This is the idea phase.
They then take clay and mould man and woman. This is the execution phase.
Humans, according to the holy book, have thus continued to endure despite the erosive forces of disease, death, and worldly catastrophe.
Architecture is somewhat similar. Architects are tasked with bringing the ideas of families and businesses into reality.
But just as the artists need background singers, a beat or a melody, and adjustments, architecture needs a team. A pin-up model to have a 3D example of reality. Concrete needs steel. And yet, László Tóth asks:
“Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?”
A cube described in the formal sense lacks the beauty of its construction. The space where it exists in the mind does not need material. It only needs your imagination. Its construction introduces more to this abstraction.
Idea execution will hardly match reality. It can try to come close to its pristine image, but it will never be the same as the constructed version.
I was shocked to learn that parallel lines don’t exist in reality. Ours is a universe whose spacetime fabric is distorted by matter. The lines we draw on a book, a chalkboard, or even a computer, given space and time, will eventually meet.
Plato thus thought of our world as one fraught with decay. Nothing pure to match the geometrical forms. The geometrical forms remain unscathed while attempts to create physical cubes are littered with imperfections.
Nevertheless, we still make these creations. The Holy Trinity, the idealized forms of perfection, still created man in their image, so the story goes. An idea and its execution. The aim of creation is endurance.
has a theory about movies as a goal for anyone hoping to leave an indelible mark.You could create Facebook, but without The Social Network, it is still liable to erosion. It could even be captured in a documentary, as in the case of The Last Dance, the best documentary I have ever seen.
To endure erosion, the work has to be heavy. Erosion, we are taught, is subtle and invisible, but becomes evident over time. But when the creative work is light, it can be washed away as fast as it was created. Paper-weight. Light. Easy to blow away.
Anu, therefore, recommends creating something heavy.
Seth Godin inspired me to write daily. After subscribing to his newsletter, I wondered how he could achieve the same feat without missing a day. But he does it. Most of it is in short form, but it is still writing.
My battle with short-form content is how to pack meaningful and valuable insights into a few sentences or words. Daily. That builds up to something heavy. The heaviness is the daily commitment to write and share. A surface-level analysis of his work might seem frivolous.
Paper after paper, stacked over time, becomes heavy to carry. Besides the messages he sends, his creation is preserving his voice, his iconoclastic messages, persistently, every day. For over ten years. That is hard to replicate. Hard to erode.
It’s like the brutalist structures of architecture. They are made of concrete. Their design is bold and sticks out like a sore yet majestic thumb, if such a thing exists. They are designed to endure erosion. But they need a team.
Concrete is reinforced by steel. Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon. The Holy Trinity needed each other to create man.
Building something that endures can be all but close to impossible for a single person. A meaningful Substack publication needs the Substack team to work on your email delivery system. The payments have to be timely. They need to channel copyright-free images.
It is no different from a name. Building a name requires a reliable support system, like concrete needs steel. These names endure because they were designed with endurance in mind. The name was given, but the legacy was designed.
Sadly, you can never know how long it will endure the moment it is created. You only hope. I barely recognize last year’s Nobel prize winners, let alone Forbes’ Top Thirty under Thirty. But I know every day, around midday, I get an email from Seth Godin.
It’s simple. It is persistent. It endures.
It seems simplicity is a core prerequisite for endurance. But it is difficult to execute. Simple is difficult.
Stop drinking alcohol. Avoid spaces that push you to smoke. Go to the gym. Read every single day. Pray. Make your bed every morning. Meditate. Journal. These are simple but can be difficult. Simple is difficult.
Yet, it is the difficult that endures. And simplicity is one way to develop something that endures. It is perhaps the hardcore of beauty that László Tóth, the brutalist, describes.
But it’s never that simple.
What I’m trying to say is…
Creating designs that endure has the paradox that they have to last for one to notice this quality about them.
We live at a time when almost everyone is creating. The bar is set higher with the rising numbers. How does one thus start by creating something that endures erosion?
Worse still, AI can replicate what was previously human-attuned creation. This is only bound to increase.
How, then, does one design something to endure?
Fort Minor raps:
This is ten percent luck
Twenty percent skill
Fifteen percent concentrated power of will
Five percent pleasure
Fifty percent pain
And a hundred percent reason to remember the name
These are the qualities it takes to develop something that endures. Luck, skill, concentrated power of will, a tinge of pleasure, and moments of pain.
Through it all, I can only think of one way to remember the name:
Taking something simple and taking it seriously.
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube