Every day, in the afternoon or early evening, for around 4 weeks a blanket of smoke has drifted across my city. I reflected on this here recently but tonight I found myself inadvertently caught up in the smoke as I was walking. My eyes are stinging, I have a sickening burnt wood taste in the […]
Tag: civilisation
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, marble, life-size, 1647-1652. Bernini captures the dramatic moment an angel pierces her heart with the arrow of Divine love. It was Saint Augustine who suggested that miracles do not happen in opposition to nature but in opposition to what we understand of nature. In a similar vein, […]
Categories
Geopolitical Exasperation
Exasperation is a condition of annoyance, irritation and frustration. It is a word that is perhaps best used where feelings of futility or powerlessness are also significant contextual factors. My own persistent experience of exasperation has been in professional and intellectual contexts. The central focus of my angst and frustration is that of being unable […]
Categories
Continuity of Civilisation
What we more often fail to observe or acknowledge about the generally messy and entropic state of international relations and an apparent inevitability of internecine conflict is that, as a whole, human civilisation is autonomously calculating and computing the optimal means and methods for self-propagation and systemic continuity. Homeostasis is not engendered through aspiration towards […]
In a world of information over-saturation, where the constant bombardment of spectacle, news and entertainment has reached a fever-pitch of colour and noise, where images, faces, people and (our) lives rush past (and through) us at an ever-accelerating pace – we find ourselves inhabiting the vacuum of our own dissatisfaction and dissonant disconnection with the […]
Intuitions are the common solutions or theorems of our everyday life. Going with a “gut feeling” is, however, very likely unrelated to the complex of neurons that actually exist in your gut. It is perhaps more of an insight into the patterns and symmetries of information and energy within (and as) which we exist. An […]
Don’t be fooled into a false sense of security by the fact that a worst-case climate apocalypse is intimately terrifying on a scale exceeding any story that humanity ever told itself and is so far beyond our limited experience that we more readily characterise it as myth or fiction. At the scale of disaster we […]
Categories
Extinction
The utter vacuum and meaningless emptiness at the very heart of our existence is disconcerting, dissonant and it is in general the last thing that anyone wants to hear about or acknowledge. From those brief few years we may each be lucky enough to experience, we seek and weave what little meaning and purpose we […]
Categories
Climate Strike: Which Economy?
I observed a characteristically parochial performance from a politician on the morning news today. The topic of the Global Climate Strike was under analysis and the tired old excuses for workers and schoolchildren not attending the rallies and protests were wobbled around with rhetorical ineptitude. An argument was made for the importance of a strong […]
Categories
That which we love, kills us.
That which we love, kills us. This thread of life and passing narrative or musical improvisation that we all embody – it is a self-propagating pattern of information and energy. We find ourselves serendipitously located at a point of resonance or systemic sweet spot of scale and complexity at which sentience and intelligence has invoked […]
It is a little hard not to feel somewhat dispossessed and saddened by the arc of catastrophe that human history traces in time. There is some essential adversarial turn in psychology and nature that provides and requires the entropy from which new forms of thought and life are able to emerge. We come to depend […]
As you get older it seems that your options diminish, quite literally and as entropy takes hold the vast numbers of disordered states that you might end up in become less improbable, more certain. It is not so much a matter of age as it is of experience and an aggregate burden of negotiating the […]
Daedelus Kite 