Thinking About Haiku


I write haiku to suit myself: they come from the relationship I imagine I have with the world out there in the here & now. They reconstruct something between me & it – I’m never quite sure what that might be. One can so easily fall into the trap of producing standard formula haiku – […]

The Dark Heart of Trussonomics


The Mainstreaming of Libertarian Theories of Social Darwinism and Apartheid by Nafeez Ahmed (the gist) (Byline Times 14th October 2022) The fundamental intention behind so-called ‘Trussonomics’ was to make the rich richer, in the absurd belief that wealth will ‘trickle-down’ to inspire economic growth. What’s really going on however is that current ‘Conservatism’ is secretly […]

Demian (1919)


What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men – each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature – are shot down wholesale. If, however, we were not something more than unique human beings and each man jack of us […]

HOSPITAL & HESSE


“We talk too much,” he said with unwonted seriousness. “Clever talk is of no value whatsoever. One merely gets further and further away from oneself and that is a crime. One should be able to crawl right into oneself like a tortoise.” Hermann Hesse: Demian On the 19th August 2022 I followed the local doctor’s […]

THE DAYS OF PEN & INK


I have often tried to recall how I spent my days before the advent of the damned computer. It did seem to be something of a minor miracle when I acquired a primitive word processor (Amstrad 8256) around 1994. Working on it provided me with a valuable systemic relationship after thoroughly digesting which my fountain […]

MULTIDIMENSIONAL INTELLIGENCE


In One Dimensional Man (1964), Herbert Marcuse bewails the ‘lost dimensions’ – dimensions of existence that, in the crass technological dash for conformity, have faded in human life . Lost dimensions exist in areas of the spirit that seem to have no place in the one-dimensional world where opposition to prevailing ways of seeing things […]

TIME & JEFFERIES


  What a strange problem now that after so many thousand years I should still wander to & fro, spiritually unsatisfied… Notebooks May-June 1887 In the 1987 Symposium booklet entitled Richard Jefferies: a Spirit Illumined, John Pearson wrote an excellent essay called Bevis: A Natural Education in Time and Space in which he traces an […]