More important, I feel, than any particular aphorism or penetrating psychological and historical insight from Nietzsche is that he teaches us how to think. Much the same might be said of Bach; the patterns and complex symmetries of logical abstraction he defined and refined do not (only) instruct us in the use of any particular […]
“In the end, we all become stories.” – Margaret Atwood My life would not be a book so much as it would be a box of scattered paper fragments. Each fragment containing a narrow aperture on the life and experience or learning I have undergone. Each narrow aperture, a window on a moment and a […]
I enjoy the endless Baroque complexity of words far too much to ever settle on a generalised shape or articulated pattern and causal ontology for them. Of course, though, even the absence of pattern is a kind of pattern, no? By this logic we might even assert that the intricate improbability of a truly random […]
If it is true that a book might make a more reliable companion and faithful friend than any person, as I fear may indeed be true, then this is a book that held my hand (and mind) through some of my darkest days. I had travelled around the world following the death of a close […]
Love is an experience and representation from inner to outer, from system to environment and from self to other. It is that direction and momentum that inversely generates and cultivates the experiencing “I” or loving person in reflexive self-definition through their relationship to that other. Imaginary hypotheses of “other” are metaphysical fictions no less than […]
Some truths of inner self dawn upon us all a little later than they should. It was just a couple of years ago now that I found myself sitting in a meeting of technical professionals discussing some lofty software vision or planned improvement for the forever leaking bucket of logical or administrative and bureaucratic extensibility; […]
Money is a tool, not an end in itself and the sooner we recognise this, the happier we will all be. We assert intrinsic value to things which possess no ultimate value beyond that which they acquire in the process of asserting it. Beyond this superficially stultifying tautological bootstrap of monetary self-significance, a sufficiently mature […]
Self-identity is little more than a complex fiction. Attempt to suspend your disbelief or any moral affront you might at first experience when engaging such a thought as that the foundation upon which you build a world of meaning and purpose is utterly and ultimately insubstantial. In fact, the vigorous spectrum of discomfort and aggression […]
Are strawberries real? Well, for a start, they are not even berries and only retain the name by something of an etymological accident, linguistic coincidence or literary convention. More curiously, though, whenever we step onto the playing field of language we find ourselves asserting definitions, identities and assumptions of inviolable truth just as though there […]
Just living is proving to be quite difficult, at times. I really miss being a child and not constantly feeling as though I have to second-guess everything both I and everyone else do or think and feel. There is a simple state of just existing, of simply being present in life that seems to leave […]
What is sleep? We may as well ask ourselves “what is language?” Sleep is in general a measure of the absence of language, of incessant mental chatter and an accelerated internal narrative that our minds are quite naturally oriented towards. If we might assert that language is a technology as much as it is the […]
Why is language so generally, genuinely and in all but the most trivial, superficial of meaningless of instances quite catastrophically inadequate for the task of clear and unproblematic communication? What is it, that is, that shrouds our primary method and medium of personal (interior, cognitive) or interpersonal communication in ambiguity and doubt? Beyond the irreducible […]
Daedelus Kite 