Jim Morrison, singer of the 60’s band The Doors, put into his poetry a precise summary of a modern life: “every day is a drive thru history”. A friend asks me how I am doing and I pause a moment to reflect, “how, in fact, is my life going?” The truth is: I find myself […]
Category: life
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On Beauty and Sadness
The more I encounter beauty in life and for all the implicit aesthetic pleasure it brings, the sadder I find that I become and I can not determine if this is a melancholy experience carried by me or if it is in some way native to beauty itself. Flickering warmth and firefly passions soon and […]
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Honeymoon Sunsets…
…and when we look back upon the arc and trajectory of our lives, what is it that we hope we might see? Memory is not any more reliable than is our hopes for an unambiguous future and while we might assert most probable causes (or consequences) from the evidence and experience immediately (or most recently) […]
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Meaningless Vehicles?
We assert aspirations to self-control, to self-determination and free will through the multiplicity of options and variables or combinatorial dimensions and degrees of freedom available to us but even as we assert control, it slips away. There are logical enigmas in rationality, in psychology and in the effervescent, autonomously self-propagating information systems that we inhabit […]
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Unbounded Sentience
Is philosophical truth bounded by paradigms of scientific convention or proven fact? Well, no – just as mind is not bounded by the limits of language in the way ordered or rational cognition is. Language may be the limit of my world, but it is not the limit of mind, sentience or consciousness.
That boundary between the world as it is and as any of us would rather have it be is a stark cartography of relentless dissatisfaction. The expanding volume and referential space between what is and what might be is that labyrinthine, glorious confusion around which this, our own selves, orbit and upon which the essential […]
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Kind Heart, Cruel World…
It takes more strength to be kind that it ever takes to be cruel but this world positively incentivises and encourages adversarial competition, cruelty and aggression. I seem to have inadvertently found myself on the wrong planet…
Context: The Café Beauty, like life, is a transient thing and the experience of it brings as much suffering as it does joy – an equation perhaps weighted to the darkness more than to the light and in the inevitability of the ends we all must face, this seems a certain truth. The sense of […]
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On Kindness, Social Media and Self-identity
Our own natural cognitive or creative emotional flow and adaptive self-expression can be catastrophically inhibited by a hyper-awareness of what we think that other people might think of us. That is the enigma of social media platforms – in particular Instagram – for which a distributed cultural and individuated channel of self-representational identity construction can […]
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Diary of a Sad Man
It is all (a) dream; neither good nor bad – just a hyper-inflating referential labyrinth of recursively self-gravitating emptiness. The mental abstractions and grammatical rules upon which we have built an entire Global civilisation (such as it is) are really nothing much more that the self-inflected introspection through which our own diverse ways of life […]
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The dancer is the dance: a truth of beauty…
The beauty of art (and a truth of beauty) is that beyond language, beyond culture and beyond all contingent, transient conceptions of self, meaning and identity – it can communicate without any need for the implicit difference and dissonance that we so often expect but which is as much a burden as a feature of […]
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Crazy Circles: Life’s Game of Chance
On a summer Saturday road trip, listening to a song (“Crazy Circles“) by old rock band Bad Company and the lyrics caught me mid-thought on a topic of entropy and political power: “Life is just a game of chance.” While it is true that life is fundamentally random and the large-scale statistical drift into patterns […]
