Desire Poem by gershon hepner

Reason when distorted by
desire turns to spiral from a square;
but of itself when it is unaware
it asks not how or when and why.
Desire when it is distorted
by reason is like pi when it is squared,
circumferential since it may not dare
to enter circles and be thwarted.


Christopher Hawthorne writes about Herbert Muschamp in the LA Times (“Critic Muschamp mixed reason, desire”) (October 5,2007) :

In those years, as the balance between reason and desire reached a highly productive equilibrium, Muschamp achieved a rare feat: He became the most readable and the most influential of any American critic covering any field. His writing crackled with life. He was a camp Frank Rich. In part, he found success because he showed a deep awareness of his own split personality. The architects he found most compelling displayed the same division. He wrote at length about Rem Koolhaas' attempts to merge grids with spirals, attempts that in Muschamp's mind conveyed 'a spiritual message. The square is a symbol of reason, the spiral a sign of romance. In synthesizing these forms, Mr. Koolhaas shows that clarity and reason are not the enemies of romanticism; they are the essential preconditions for it.' In another essay on Koolhaas, Muschamp put it slightly differently, as if describing his own evolution as a critic: 'Reason is contorted by desire.'

10/8/07