Snegurochka

I have personally known one or two industrial designers over the course of a lot of years. Not very many, mind you, just one or two I have known quite well enough to say they were friends whilst they were alive; and they are not, as is implicit in the wording, alive any more of course.

The understandings they communicated to me were simply amazing to me when I was a younger person. When they used words like ‘dynamic,’ and ‘force’ and ‘foreground’- the way they explained the ideas behind such words was totally enlightening to me.

Alfa 4C comes to the USA in 2015

Some design here...

They made everything start out from such simple basics too.

A basic is a foundation, but it may not be simple! But great industrial designers have a way of breaking things down into very simple elements.

Design is a progression using simple building blocks but employing the edges of any defined thing, and the borders or bridges demarking things which are by small degrees separately defined, but closely related. And then when you incorporate action or movement, and time, and severity or gentleness of curvature and density or heaviness or lightness, on the top of ideal straight lines, you begin to get a living structure. Living in time and space, but also alive to the subtle senses possessed by the human being, and conveying meaning to the human mind.

Architects and designers know what to be ‘living’ in these terms means. The contemporary mind insists on trying to adjudge whether a thing ‘exists’ or not, rather than observing that a thing unseen may yet be alive in a subtle way. But even material existence is a far more unusual thing than many ordinary people care to know...

Snegurochka - The Snow Maiden

The genesis of the Snegurochka – the Snow Maiden – dates from long before Communism in Russia. It shows the Russian mindset certainly predated the Communist Russian ideology. If you consult Wikipedia on it, you will see the most blatant anti-Russian and ‘anti-myth’ modern propaganda about it – it’s complete rubbish and deliberately so...

Soon, we shall not have snow anymore. And then even this shall pass into mystery and dubious beliefs of the past. Lol. Climate change you know. (Nods sagely).

But in reality everything old is new again. The latest, most avant-garde popular entertainment – The Legend of Korra – essentially a re-imagined modern anime, is an ancient Greek story with every single piece, even the names, completely intact. Yet the kids think they invented it though. I have not yet consulted the Wiki on this but I know what I shall see there. Aarne-Thompson does not know how to deal with this particular kind of myth... And that’s because like all other post-Cartesian propagandas, Aarne-Thompson too is specious. That is why mainstream schools of psychology despise university academia. Jung is discounted and the pretentiousness of Aarne-Thompson is worshipped as ‘golden truth.’ Personally I think it is an interesting codex (IE., A-T) but no more than that.

I wonder how many people realise that the story of Father Christmas is actually a very old version of CSI?

People write into folklore what was very unusual in its day. And that is the reality of it. All folklore is true, and even though there are no physical straight lines in Nature, yet underneath industrial design there is a subtle ‘straight line’ which is in Nature. And I would counsel even the most cynical or ‘realistic’ to scratch a little deeper beneath the surface than all the sides of modern sociological disputation represent – they are all fundamentally flawed arguments and wrong because they are so politically loaded. People object to the power claimed within the myth. That is only because they themselves have never accessed it or think that they cannot. The Ipsissimus can never reveal himself. He is there though. It’s part of the whole human thing. Think Steve Jobs. And project him another five hundred years from now. Anything is possible. This, you should know as my message of Christmas.