Dissimulated emotional authenticity… “Dissimulation” is a curious term for Nietzsche to use; something is lost in translation? It is all about concealment, obfuscation, to pretend not to have what one has and to pretend to have what one most certainly does not. Perhaps he was suggesting that there is an irreducible element of theatre in […]
There are quite a number of critically important things in this world which remain spectacularly and enduringly conspicuous by their absence. Central among these we might place everyday idioms of wishful thinking such as peace, love, freedom and environmental sustainability. What unifies all of these things is that the ways that manifest in this world […]
The most mystifying truth of all is that we live in a world that defines value and success in such limited terms, as being little more than successfully replicating the patterns and conventions of behaviour and thought that we encounter and through which we learn to play a game of simple (or – often enough […]
How else is it that we might spend our lives seeking a comfort, consolation and closure that always seems to dwell just out of reach, just beyond our grasp and ever-beckoning as a tantalisingly seductive certainty of reflexive self-definition or unambiguous security and psychological or existential safe harbour in the open arms and tender touch […]
I went for another solitary afternoon walk today and discovered this small token of human affection attached to a lonely tree on the edge of some farmland in the hills not far from where I live. I’m not sure why anyone would leave this there, exposed to the elements and bound to suffer an inevitable […]
My recent fixation on flowers is quite plausibly an instance of psychological transference, where feelings or emotions that might find themselves unattainably inhibited in one direction find new avenues, channels and vectors of (self) expression. We often enough observe the rapid and adaptive transmutation of emotional needs and impulses from one goal to another and, […]
Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, quite famously, that “if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you” and it was meant as a warning, a caution following a statement that those who fight with monsters can themselves become monsters and this is in many ways a representation, among other things, of the manifest […]
Notice that the love of family is the love that humanity really needs; we are, for all our shared problems, just One vast and dysfunctional (planetary) family.
We suffer for others and in so many ways but we always do so alone. There is nothing quite so distressing as to live in fear. It is a relentless slow burn of doubt that eats away at us inside and in its haunting persistence and metallic tang generates burdens, not necessarily of fact, but […]
There is in these delicate flowers such sweetness and unbounded longing for life. These cherry blossoms from my garden were full of life a few days ago and now they have faded, as though in accelerated decrepitude their moving frame of reference and colourful Spring joys are as short as they are glorious. Where pale […]
Love is a game best played by fools and in the end we are all played as so many fools by love.
All grief is love, veiled.
Daedelus Kite 