Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, and Beauty

This essay attempts to place ritual in the context of evolving complex systems, and to offer an explanation for why everything is so ugly and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it.

Highlights Tour This post is part of the highlights tour, a series of historically significant ribbonfarm posts Sarah Perry is a contributing editor of Ribbonfarm. Discuss with vgr_zirp → This essay attempts to place ritual in the context of evolving complex systems, and to offer an explanation for why everything is so ugly and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. On Boundaries and Their Permeability Boundaries are an inherent, universal feature of complex systems. Boundaries arise at all scales, defining the entities that they surround and protecting them from some kinds of outsid

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