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 […]
“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 […]
Words matter; the linguistic make-up of discourse is all-important… One of the reasons for… lack of understanding… is to be found in the language which people speak. This language is full of wrong concepts, wrong classifications, wrong associations. And the chief thing is that… the vagueness and inaccuracy of ordinary thinking happens because every word […]
One-dimensional Thinking In One-dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse argues that technological change undermines the true substance of art: the easy availability of its products and their subsequent manipulation, universality of access, the general dumbing down of processes, the seeming ordinariness of ‘how to do it’, crowd mentality, psychological analysis… And the concrete manifestations of technological effect […]
Humankind has Experience Or rather it has experiences which it builds into what it likes to think of as the invented abstraction ‘Experience’. Things happen down the years and it—humankind, better thought of, with its eager bombs & drones, as ‘humanunkind’—builds them into some kind of homogeneity—‘Experience’. Things happen—they are built into an edifice called […]
In this dream I was running the kind of drama class I used to facilitate over thirty years ago: strange drama, dream drama, mirroring the assumed ‘reality’ that went on outside the room we regularly used for an evening; the virtual question was always, ‘Which was the drama—outside or inside the dream?’ In this particular […]
We exist in a world run by sleeping people; people virtually dead to any sensible perception of what they imagine to be going on; they may appear to make great and important ‘decisions’ on our behalf in some kind of democratic charade but because we ourselves are equally asleep we cannot see that we are […]
I often find myself dipping into Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men or watching the brilliant film with Alf Garnett playing the part of Gurdjieff’s dad. Then I start to think about how to make an answer to the question What is a Remarkable Person? And what is it that counts as a meeting with them? […]
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