A PERSONAL JOURNEY My early inner life was a gift to myself alone – always on my own. Father off in India somehow defending the freedom of UK, as they say about foreign escapades nowadays; mother consumed by worry for my sister who was starting the awful disease from which she eventually died in 2005. […]
I wake up at 6 o’clock when the sun is not long before appearing in the sycamore east these autumn days when the apples outside my window have all been picked and the sounds scents & colours are settling into a dreamy haze. And then with complete lack of thought heron heading south white as […]
From The Outsider onwards, published in 1956, Colin Wilson was concerned to investigate the nature of human consciousness: an ‘outsider’, a term he sought to refine later, was/is a person with a cast of mind different from the norm. In The Age of Defeat he is explicit about the way consciousness can be defined as […]
In recent years there’s been an attempt to brainwash anybody involved in haiku-writing with the idea that haiku is a ‘poem of consciousness’. The profound objection to this as a bald mantra is firstly, as RHBlyth points out, a haiku is NOT a poem in the ordinary sense of the word; the corollary of which […]
“We’re talking too much,” [Demian] said with unusual seriousness. “There’s no point in clever talk, none at all. It only leads you away from yourself. Going away from yourself is a sin. What we need to do is crawl entirely into the self, like a turtle.” Hermann Hesse: Demian There is no reality except the […]
I write a fairly regular ‘essay’ in a series called RANSACKING THE PAST for display on The British Haiku Society Website. Sometimes I dredge books of my own early haiku for ones I could have done better (most of them) and write a critique, sometimes I look at old articles in Blithe Spirit (the BHS […]
I’ve read another book. Judging from the very neat pencil underlinings it looks as though I’ve read it before sometime. Since I often wonder why it has been my habit for sixty-odd years, I was interested to find that the underlinings were very helpful generally but especially during the course of more or less skim-reading […]
I think it’s always interesting to look at things you wrote long ago; they come from the mind & pen of a different ‘I’, or a different cluster of ‘I’s. Re-reading it all, you start thinking: ‘What’s different and what’s the same and what’s happened in between to make it so?’ And then ‘What of […]
I was on a train to London the other day. Sitting opposite & next to me were a couple of blokes on their way to Twickenham to watch a rugby match. When they’d run out of their own conversation about things happening in the construction industry, the more obviously affable of the two turned to […]
Thus spake Socrates… For the past eight weeks or so I have been engaged by a very stimulating Coursera on-line course on the subject of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)—Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity. He’s a philosopher who does not warrant a mention even in the footnotes of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy—probably because […]
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