I’m sitting on a small bench by the sea. Dolphins peacefully fishing near the rocks below. A gentle cadence of waves addressing the shoreline filters up through the trees to a small bench. People walking their dogs. Women talking and laughing. A cool winter breeze and the hum of a small plane passing overhead. A […]
All philosophy is futile; all language, deception and were it not that we find ourselves lashed to the mast of this listless human endeavour in knowledge and technology, we should hardly know or be anything much at all. Philosophy seeks to explain with words that which must remain constitutively inexplicable. There falling inevitably backwards upon, […]
I remember a phrase from Marcus Aurelius in which he asserted that the worst thing a person could do is to make themselves and their lives a kind of blemish upon the world. I have been thinking about this in terms of Vladimir Putin. He is certainly inflicting great savagery and brutal abhorrence upon the […]
There is no place in this world for Vladimir Putin and all tyrants like him in all nations, everywhere. He belongs to another time, an era of indiscriminate bloodshed and rapine brutality between warring tribes that is hardly even the greater part of history but returns as though a metastatic cancer and tragedy that haunts […]
Bad vibes are sticky, contagious in precisely the way good vibes are but they have a tendency to persist (as memory) much longer than the experiences that invoke them. There is no doubt that evolution has predisposed us to bias negativity over positivity as a function of survival in what was once a much more […]
Even as technology provides us the arc and contour of combinatorial individuation, it reduces us to a mere shadow, superficial reflection and fading memory of our own experience.
A recent family bereavement has left me with no less questions than ever as to the essence of this human experience we all share but has necessarily shaped the form and flow as qualitative flavour of inquiry. The salience in my cartography of grief has been to discover – or, perhaps, to rediscover – that […]
The essence of a human life is in so many ways its natural orientation towards anything and everything other than death, negation, extinction and the oblivion of forgetting or of being forgotten and yet so many of our actions, behaviours and mental abstractions lead and leave us so perilously close to the abyss. There is […]
Out of the uncountably many possibilities that might actually happen, those events that do become in some sense encoded in (and as) spacetime and personal or shared historical memory are often as difficult to unambiguously define as the futures they came from. Just as forecasting future events is deeply infused with uncertainty and complexity, the […]
Beautiful. Gazing upon this kind of creative cartography of the embodied, material form and home of our mental selves is evocative in ways reminiscent of Carl Sagan’s wistful soliloquy on Voyager 1’s famous Pale Blue Dot image. Why? Because our whole lives and all our memories, all of our aspirations, our loves and fears, our […]
I have, it seems, made something of a life in words and the variously disambiguating compositional artefacts of language or thought (and other such conceptual melodies) with which we each and all make our ways and narrative meanings in or as this world, but I have not found happiness. There is an irremediable darkness here […]
You should see (or intuitively feel) how shame is a trap, a labyrinth of pure abstraction and emotionally-infused imagination or half-blind fear that no rational or intelligent person should ever become ensnared by and yet we just can’t help ourselves and so easily and serially drift through regret into pity and – often enough – […]
Daedelus Kite 