“So the wind does blow and the tree does shake. Not just the leaves but the tree feels the wind and is curious to be free from its rooted base. A mechanical breeze is blowing and has felled the tree, human hands have by will and design split and separated the tree. Spreading its one being into millions of items. Some of those millions are discovered by absentminded humans, in day dreaming states, who bend and fold the former tree and throw it high into the air, there the tree finally feels the wind once more beneath its being and glides to its end under the minds of freedom.”
The Mechanics and dreams of paper flight
It has four corners, usually rectangular in nature, a smooth clear, clean surface, level and flat, ideal for mark making and design creating. If we consider this example as the commonly found A4 model then it measurements are 210 millimetres by 297 millimetres, compelling and workable diameters for most purposes. Sometimes the corners curl, twist, bend and raise, slightly altering the geographical shape and nature of the object and then sometimes, which is more commonly found, the corners stay flat, giving the object no rise or bends. A flat, lined surface of no alteration, no aviation, no landscape, no geographical features, just a flat plain piece of paper.
Humble enough in its existence and universally found, so commonly established within human civilization that its sheer presence is nothing to note or observe other than it’s perfectly normal to find in any circumstances anywhere in the world. From dusty old oak wooden desks, plush apartments and halls of learning in an Oxford university to the sun filled, mud huts of a simpler life on the far flown world of the great void spaces of the globe.
Paper formed the collective knowledge and transparent information conveyance of the modern world pier to the digital age. Paper has travelled its standard and normal journey from tree, where it once stood in the Forrest, feeling the light of the sun and protection of the soil. Then to be felled and travel upon lorry and tarmac road to a factory, where it was chopped up and minced through a process of science and machinery it is ungracefully turned from mighty natural carbon dioxide consuming and oxygen giving tree to commonly seen paper. Now as paper it has a multitude of uses and needs which it is now dispatched to perform. The former tree finds new homes and employment. In some places it finds a new life as printer paper for office use, TPS reports are printed and filed. In other places the paper is drawn upon and scratched into, shapes and patterns are created in its smooth flat clear surface and ideas and designs are added to the page. Doodles may be drawn into the corners, others may be crumpled and tossed into waste paper bins never to fulfils its potential or intended purposes. Most commonly paper is used and discarded without a moment’s thought to the papers existence or the lineage of its former reality of forest homed tree. The tree, then the wood and finally the paper has no say to its future or any of its current states, its fate is decided upon as it travels from sapling to waste paper bin. It may host and hold upon its pages the very essence and importance of humanity thinking and creative design or it may have a badly drawn noughts and crosses game portrayed across it surface. The paper, although I am sure if it had any wish, would prefer the quintessential and important civilized thinking rather than the badly drawn noughts and crosses game, has no concept of ether, the paper ends up, condemned to its fate with no control over what matter and design is scribbled into it.
Although it’s not always the fate of the paper to end up directly scratched and crumpled in the waste paper basket. Sometimes the paper takes a detour from its designed life of a mark holding. Sometimes the paper feels the wind, and the bends of its shape, sometimes the paper sores and knows what it is to rise, glide and descend, sometimes the paper fly’s.
Paper Flight
In the ancient Devon town of Barnstable, St Anne’s chapel stands. It is one of the oldest buildings and has a long history. Once, as you may have guessed from the name it was a chapel but in the Victorian era it became a school and more recently it has undergone renovations to make it suitable for its next life, its very much the kind of building one would expect to see on Escape to the country, the quite old English structure of a country village. Some building work was required upon the site as you can guess from the age of the building, once the builders had erected their scaffolding and ladders and ventured up into eaves of the structure, they discovered a most peculiar and surprising thing. They discovered hundreds of paper airplanes. Made and thrown over two hundred years ago, about a hundred years before the first manned flight. These paper plans were made by the then students of the former school, some were Victorian and some Edwardian, most had hand writing on and told a tale of bored students in stuffy classrooms dreaming and throwing paper planes into flight. Some soared and ended up in the rafters and some did not.
I recall from my own school days the design and planning of holding a piece of paper correctly in the endeavour of throwing it high into the air hoping it would fly out the class room window (it never did). But that notion of folding and creating a machine of flight, the most simple and easiest mode of flight there can be, with the hope and dream of seeing it sore and fly high into the air like a Concorde bird. Did Orville and Wilbur Wright have such dreams and ideas? I feel sure they must have also been paper airplane makers, their plane after all was basically a paper structure with an engine attached. So did the students of Barnstaple share this idea and desire, to throw, to hurtle, to send something flying and gilding into the heavens? How many times throughout history, time and space have ideas evolved from a paper plane maker? It seems inconceivable that anyone who has ever sat bored with a pile of paper in front of them hasn’t become a paper plane maker, the design and act is so simple and achievable. In the 2014 Football world cup, bored fans during the England Peru game sitting high up in the stadium folded and made paper planes which they flew from their lofty position out into the arena where one, quite amazingly flew all the way down to the pitch and hit one of Peru’s player in the face. This act was captured on video and became an internet hit. It can still be viewed on Youtube and is worth a watch just for the very impressive flight the plane took not to mention the comic value.
From the start of time we humans have been intent on flying, long have we marvelled and became jealous of the birds and their mastery of the skies. In Ancient religions the sky and the heavens were the realms of the gods. In some older cultures the heavens were associated with a circle, the cosmological circle, whist the earth was associated with a square. This design can be seen in De Vinci’s, Vitruvian Man. The geometrical shape of a human being, in a square and a circle, it is by chance then that the ideal paper shape to begin folding a craft to break from the earth into the heavens of flight is a square.
The gods in their circle of the heavens, like the birds had no limitation but could move anywhere, unlike us mortal trapped upon the soil of the earth. Aristotle once told a tale “to be the map maker in the kingdom of the birds” meaning the birds having no roads but clear open sky could fly anywhere and require only places with no routes so had endless amounts of freedom. Humanity has always longed for freedom, even though sometimes we haven’t been sure what we would like to be free from. This dream has still remained and has been a rallying cry from the ancient Greeks to the modern world “freedom”, freedom like the birds. Paper planes offered this brief illustration of freedom, especially to the bored student sat in the classroom from Victorian times to tomorrow. They offer the opportunity, the chance to step out of our daily lives and routines and share the world of flight.
To return to the ancient Greeks, they held the belief that all things were formed from four basic elements, earth, fire, water and air. Each element had its own qualities and associations, if you were ill then one of the elements was out of balance and order needed to be restored for the body to heal. Each element had its own character, fire was warm, earth was dry, water was surprisingly wet and air, air was cold. Today we define air not so much as cold but as the gaseous mixture, which surrounds the earth. Air is invisible, colourless, tasteless and odourless. However air is an essential part of the earth, like the land and sea. It is an element that creates and defines our home. Air is a gas, it can change shape and when needed completely fill any container into which it can flow. In short air is everywhere it can flow into and go wherever it can possibly go. It fills the distance between the ground and space and it is between these two environments that our paper planes fly.
They fly down to a simple technical formula of velocity and the shape of the “wings”. A paper plane if folded correctly should create two wings, much like a glider that create a suction effect above the flyer and a pressure effect below the flyer. The result of this is that the air passing over it lifts the wings enabling the paper flyer to simply glide. The shape of the paper flyer is an airfoil design, giving the flyer flight. But really none of this matters because we don’t bend and shape paper planes with mathematical formula and intention of velocity in mind but with the thrill of seeing something go through the air, it comes from the boredom we find ourselves dazing into our minds, which begins to wonders into the flight of dreams.
Paper planes have a place in culture, it was supposedly invented in China around 2,000 years ago, although some also say they were around as early as the ancient Egyptians with papyrus. Possible ever since there has been material like paper, people have day dreamed and made paper flight.
The paper plane certainly found great popularity in Japan. Until the mid 19th Century Japan was so heavily colonised by the Chinese Empire and its culture that they were an outpost in all but name. So it is easy to see that the paper planes flew across the East China sea into the lives of the day dreaming people of those islands. In popular culture in Japan paper planes represent youth, whimsical ideas and freedom. Sometimes they are used to prove philosophical points and ideas, In Saiyuki manga for example Genjyo Sanzo master maker of paper planes uses them to prove how opposites can sometimes bring out the beauty in other things. Also the enjoyment of simpler aspects of life and the lessons on how to appreciate them. In the Way of Tea they say “Tea becomes a ritual, it takes place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things”. This lesson of the greatness of small things lays at the heart of the philosophy of paper planes, the idea that a little piece of paper can fly and for a brief moment and sore, having its moment in the sky.
The Japanese take this to the extreme; Aerogami is a branch of origami whose objects is solely focused on flying paper crafts. There is something therapeutic in the act of Aerogami, there is a gentle calmness to the act of folding and hoping that your object will fly higher, faster and further than anything before it, each design and each piece of paper is unique, much like the unique history of that papers journey, from seedling to its current state. This uniqueness is also found in the folder, the appeal of the freedom of flight and of self creation appeals to many, there is enjoyment in taking a piece of paper and folding it into shapes, sometimes the shapes are random designs other times they are shapes someone has shown us, they become a MEME. Something which is found quite often with paper airplanes, we copy someone else, we are shown how to fold, the right moves and bends then we act out it ourselves, we find our own way to make the shapes and through trial and error find the right design for our own paper flight. Then it becomes our own, our own design which we pass on in time to the next generation.
Digital Paper
Of course the reality of our world may be against the classical paper plane with digital technology on such a rise, Moore’s law states that technology will double every year. So we may be fast approaching with the raise of digital platforms the demise of paper? That one day in the future we’ll get to a place where paper is no longer in use and thus the paper plane will not be possible to make. This may and is likely to be sometime way off in the future, maybe not next year or in a hundred years but possibly it shall be so. Abraham Lincoln once told a tale of a wise man who sought to discover a phrase that would be right and just in every situation, after much thought and deliberation he eventually came up with this phrase “And this too shall pass”. It seems likely then, that like the CD, VHS, School slates, wax tables and so many more items of recording throughout history, that paper too shall pass and fade and disappear to history and along with the paper the paper plane will also be a thing of the past. If this thought is incomprehensible then simply put your self in the sandals of a Roman citizen two thousand years ago, Romans often wrote and recorded upon wax tablets. A format that was valuable and effective at the time as a structure of inscription. However can you envision saying to the Romans that their wax tablets would become out of date when it’s the only thing they know. To attempt to explain to them the idea of the paper as we know it, replacement which would occur within a few hundred years. To the Romans the wax tablet was a key form of communication, their writing source, the very example of civilised work, the concept of it ever being replaced and there being a world where the wax tablet doesn’t exist would be difficult for them to consider.
Thought
When Socrates said, “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing and that is that I know nothing” an interruption could be this change of knowledge through the “arrow of time”. Given the knowledge that Socrates had compared to what we know today its largely outdated, this of course doesn’t stop making Socrates one of the world’s greatest thinkers but using myself as an example, the sum of my knowledge and information will be outdated and largely useless in a few hundred years time. The development of new knowledge and progress happens at an industrial rate. There is always something more to learn and as we learn more the less we know, to quote a slightly wittier thinker “I am too old to know everything” (Oscar Wilde). We live in an amazing and wonderful world, which is in a constant state of alteration and education, sometimes we go back but mostly we move forward.
An Anthropologist once wrote “all was needed was to write everything down”. This basic act of recording and archiving daily life is slipping from the realms of written needs. In today’s age of the digital means the machine is doing this act of recording, far more accurately and effectively. The camera, the recorder, the internet and its browser history, the content we upload to social media, the time lines of our lives which we can scroll through, it performs and presents to us this recorded information in a far more accessible format than the written diary. These are all more effective means of recording than anything any paper user could perform.
Daydreaming
There is a noble date in the calandra “world book day”, but in two hundred years time will we still have the same definition and classification of a book that we do today? A book as a paper backed object, a book as a solid physical shape, a book as a recognisable item upon the shelf. Is it not possible that our definition of a book will eventually change and become a technical digital means? A book could become a pixel tablet holding the works of the great library’s of the world, it could hold all the golden knowledge of Samarkand inside its chipped informational drive, a book that doesn’t require a page turned but instead to be swiped. A screen instead of a paper surface, a item of infinite knowledge an inch wide. Flusser wrote “Our thoughts, feeling desires and actions are being robotized: life is coming to mean feeding apparatuses and being feed by them” so if life is being more about feeding our digital means and storing information. Staring back at its screens in a realm where paper has become obsolete, where is there left to day dream?
Where is there room for creative boredom, of the state that allows the mind to wonder, to see beyond and to speculate, to attempt the impossible, to attempt the delusion of flight, of freedom? If the new digital paper replacement has the ability to hold the whole extent of human knowledge and more importantly of human entertainment, is there any time to become bored? Do we have anytime left to be bored? In human society boredom is becoming a rarity.
When given access to the sum of distractions and amusement, can we still become bored? A boredom of a sort certainly, a monotony to site and aimlessly watch or observe activity upon a screen but boredom to allow the mind to wonder, boredom to think, boredom to day dream. Will this kind of boredom also become obsolete and rare within society, will this have the effect of lessening the day dreamer in society. The digital means allows and offers great things in education, entertainment and activates but they are all things that are pre-coded, pre-designed by there very nature. It has to be in order to operate, they follow a encoded pattern of binary and method for the operation of the platform to function. Paper in its very nature has none of these instructions but freedom and anarchy in allowing the user to create, shape and write everything or nothing. To allow the user to feel the surface, to allow touch of texture, to bend, shape and alter. The imperfectness of life is represented in the paper and its universal use and establishment has allowed it to be free for everyone in any circumstances.
I was recently followed on twitter by a Inuit Eskimo living in Alaska. Who is quite a interesting tweeter but despite this fact it’s an example that Inuit Eskimo have access to twitter and thus the internet. Those long cold dark nights can now be filled with the soul of human contact via the web. Can the Eskimo ever be bored, in the time honoured sense again? Now they have access to the realms of media and education, not to mention the endless amounts of cat video’s. I’m not even sure Eskimo’s have cats, I think maybe they would freeze. I don’t know to be honest but the point is he can now access a world where traditional boredom is no longer an option. The mind does not wonder when presented by stimulus but it ether becomes inactive or switch to a lower level of cognitive activity, the level where we observe but not necessary think. Voltaire once said “those who half think, half live” now where I am in no way suggesting that we now think less, far from it the digital realm offers the ability to think more, to learn more but not to day dream more. The question in life today is not are we online? But rather are we ever offline? Our phones give as 24/7 access to the web, our social media and emails allow us to be contacted at anytime. Our web projections of our selves can be viewed and interacted with at all times. The projection of ourselves we present upon the web is constantly there. Those email addresses, myspace, freeweb and live journals posts that we created when we were sixteen are still out there somewhere upon the web. If we once were ever online, can we now ever be offline?
The way to consume and remember knowledge and information is also changing. Our grandparent’s generation learnt and practised memorising and reciting facts and information. My grandmother could still recite poems she had learnt some seventy years before as a girl. It’s a rare thing these days to know a full poem let alone recite it. Our knowledge method has changed instead of becoming expects in fields of understanding we now process and hold snippets of information about a subject. We process and hold summary’s not the context of a subject. It’s this fens of knowledge principle that our post school education is now based, we each hold enough knowledge to have a general conversation upon most subjects, Over a garden fens for example but we don’t hold enough for a full in depth study of a subject. For example “I love science” is a popular facebook MEME page, donated to the fantastic task of sharing science information, mostly in the format of a pictorial based quote or point. The page is very interesting and is very popular with dozens of shares on each post. However the posts only give the basic of information not the long and hard process of research, information and other factors that have gone into these scientific discoveries, just the end one liner summary. There is nothing wrong with this, it’s a brilliant aspect of modern life. But its only the snippet of knowledge not the full content or background of knowledge, we can speak of the Higgs Boson and share a simple image based post upon the web but we may not necessarily know what it is or the significance of its discovery. The main difference between us and our grandparents generation is we possess less in-depth knowledge but we have the tools and the means to access this knowledge at a easier and quicker rate. The web gives us the tools to access more while processing less. We hold a series of possible Google search entries, a database of one lined topics entered for the web to find out the details and in depth information for us.
Tennyson says “Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers” and this is possibly where the future is going for us. We’ll hold the wisdom, but our actual detailed knowledge will come from the web to. In this world of instant information is there much point in writing anything down? We already use our camera phones as a better and more effective means of recording and remembering things, even though we necessarily may not perceive the subject in a true sense but through the digital gaze of the screen. It’s for this reason why musicians have began banning cameras from their gigs, in order for the audience to fully appreciate the experience of the gig themselves rather via a recording. Our museum and art galleries have recently accepted the selfie. A large proportion of the population participates in the selfie act making it impossible to ban, so it is better to embrace the activity. Selfie takers undertake the selfie to some extent as a way to remember and record an event or a place, as a more accurate means of recording than the memory itself. But this does not necessarily mean we are looking or studying with more intensity but rather we are looking through the digital gaze at a subject. We are possibly studying the subject less because we let the digital means record and study the object for us and allows us to refer back to the subject later.
“One “like” at a time”
It is by all these means that paper is fast becoming an outdated subject matter. An object, which is ineffective, compared to the digital means. We currently live in an age of change; we are experiencing a transformation and upheaval the like oh which was last seen with the Industrial Revolution. We are in the midst of a digital revolution yet we don’t seem to be fully understanding or noticing this upheaval. It is passing us by one “like” at a time. The world in fifty years will look very different to the world of today. It will hold many of the things which are familiar to us but also many things which are not. One may be the absence of boredom, of daydreaming, of scribbling and doodling upon paper. Paper itself may not be as prevalent as it is today and with this absence we may find the absence of the paper plane in that modern, brave new world. If paper is to join the list of no longer usable recording means, an obsolete piece of trivia condemned to the museum for future generations to marvel and gaze at, for school kids to laugh at these strange old world people who cut down trees and wrote words on its bark and called it paper. Will these kids ever know the wonder that it is to make a paper fly? But this day is not today and that moment has not yet come, so today let us build and fly our paper planes and dream our dreams.
Postscript
The above text is not a condemnation or an approval of the digital revolution merely a comment and contemporary observation upon society and some thoughts on the course of our current world. It is neither a cheer nor a jeer at our world, just a thought upon the shape of things that could come. It is worth remembering as an end thought the story of “Maybe” from the great stories of Zen. It goes that there is a Taoist tale of an old farmer who worked his crops for many years and toiled heavily upon his farm. Then one day his prize horse runs away. Upon hearing the news the farmers neighbours visit. “Such bad luck” they all state in sympathy. “Maybe” the farmer replied. The next week the horse returns, bringing with it two wild horses. “Oh how wonderful” the farmers neighbours cry. “Maybe” replies the famer. The next day the farmers son tries to ride one of the wild untamed horses, the horse throws him, he tumbles off and breaks his leg. The farmers neighbours came once again and state “Oh no how awful”. “Maybe” answered the farmer. The following day military officials came to the farm to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the farmers son has a broken leg, he is spared the draft and allowed to stay. The neighbours once again came by and say “oh how lucky” and congratulate the farmer on how well things have turned out. The farmer simply replied once again “Maybe”.
Dai 