What is a whole page? Poem? Stroy? Moment?
How is it that one conceives of a whole--page, poem, idea, conversation, moment, relationship...
How is it that one realizes any whole creation. From oneself, from others?
What is the downside of partialness, lack of wholeness?
Wholes are fit to be parts of larger wholes.
Wholes are useful.
Wholes are meaningful.
Wholes make people happy. (Yes, they delight.)
When are heuristic and rules and instructions useful? When are they useless or harmful?
Is there an ethics of wholness?
.
Wholeness is a synonym with beauty.
Who has the courage to speak of beauty?
I think that recognizing wholeness requires courage. When we see the emperor often has no clothes are we silent? Do we self-silence? If so why?
We often recognize wholeness and partialness intuitively, when we are open to that sensibility. But when we are going too fast, when we are too excited or too fearful we can miss this sensitivity to wholeness or partialness.
We can treat unwholness as though it were complete and we can treat wholeness as though it was incomplete. We are functionally blind to beauty.
Reflection helps--sitting still and listening, looking, feeling, being touched
Time hellps. Coming back to the thing to feel again for wholeness.
Christopher Alexander has written books on wholeness. What is to be learned from his books? Courage? Rules? Recipes? Patterns? Or the sensitivity that lead Alexander and his colleagues to recognize these patterns? Attention to the sensation of beauty is what he espouses and he raises this to the highest level rather than using it to ornament the truly ugly.
So what is a beautiful page: not too long, not too short, not too rambling, not too restricted. I can more easily tell you what is not a beautiful page than I can say what is a beautiful page beautiful. But I can recognize beauty when I experience it.