The battle against language and thoughts is uncannily familiar to me but should be no stranger to any of us. We find ourselves stranded and abandoned upon a vast and brutal desert of simple words, signs and symbols; with nothing other than the shifting sands of inconsistent logic and communication that lie at our feet […]
Tag: freedom
Stories that write themselves…
It need hardly be said that good ideas sell themselves, that bad ideas only catch fire where (and when) ignorance is in ascendancy, and that only truly terrible and utterly ugly ideas require propaganda or violence to acquire or maintain a hold upon this long-suffering human world. It is and remains a fact worth acknowledging […]
Peace
A rare moment of clarity: I realise that I’m not going to be here forever, that my own transient, anxious and caffeine-fuelled path through life is, has been and will forever be completely meaningless if I do not in some small way make this world a better place and room for improvement quite clearly exists […]
The Companionship of Ideas
I treasure freedom of mind and thought and as against tides of wilful ignorance and meaningless superficiality I can quite accurately assert that where a companionship and friendship in or of ideas does not exist, the ideas themselves can become your friends. In this sense, my best friends are the concepts I inhabit and endlessly […]
Intellectual Freedom
Intellectual freedom is a precious kind of friendship and honesty we can share with ourselves, even when it is unsafe or impossible to share with others. Sharing with others can be uncomfortable – and in some contexts, impossible – the emotional, visceral and intimately personal quality of ideas is as rarely acknowledged as is the […]
It is so difficult to step outside the unseen boundaries that our words and worlds draw across our lives, even as they indicate another life and possibility beyond those walls that are usually at least felt, if not directly seen. Being born into a particular time and place shapes us in ways that quite precisely […]
No achievement without danger…
No discovery without risk, no catharsis without suffering. The absence of presence in future knowledge is always the presence of absence in (and as) experience. No wisdom without pain, indeed, and as for information – no integration (or resonance) without difference (or alienation). Originally written as a comment here.
Ethical Impropriety
Ethical frameworks are those guiding principles within which we are free to make moral choices. The extent to which our choices align to the semantic intentions of any particular ethical framework is a definition and declaration of our adherence, conformity or alignment to it. Notice, however, that the majority of ethical frameworks we encounter do […]
On Writing
The greatest barrier to truly influential or eloquent prose style is that which occurs when a writer assumes (or aspires to) unique and separate – effectively isolated, discontinuous – individuation as inalienable symbolic possession of the creative art and act. Words as a living embodiment of complexity quite naturally express themselves both through (and as) […]
Nothing lasts forever…
…indeed, and only nothing lasts forever. That the most interesting and authentically valuable things in life – peace, freedom, love, (true) beauty and wisdom – might actually only ever be possible in ways that make them indistinguishable from nothing is a fact for which my many thousand of potential words and philosophical affectations can provide […]
The Game of Life
Ah, yes – games. We play them all the time. We juggle rank simplicities and bundles of rules or conventional orthodoxies as though there were some purpose or reason and meaning beyond our endless attempts to keep it all in the air and moving. But there is not. This is a game that plays itself […]
Sic Semper Tyrannis
The twilight of my own aspirations to a peaceful and purposefully useful life on Earth appears to be the dawn of a new Global stupidity. It would be somewhat less distressing to witness a general dissolution and devolution into the flailing, lumbering madness of political and ideological conflict were it not that the buffoons who […]