Making a Heap into a System You can have a heap of ideas—most people, including myself, do—this one, that one & several others all higgledy-piggledy; it’s possible that they may be connected in some way—everything is sub specie aeternitatis—but when they are in a heap all the possible connections are difficult, if not impossible, to […]
…it sometimes seems as if in her work a cat came at us speaking English… (Blackmur) Reality leaves a lot to the imagination… (John Lennon) I Trained to be a Teacher Between 1964 and 1968 They were great years! The first essay we had to write was to be called, without a second thought about […]
What is the Purpose of ‘The Work’? A good question to ask is—What is the purpose of anything? When the superlative English artist Ben Nicholson was challenged to explain the purpose of his more abstract paintings he said, “When you see a tree in the middle of a field you don’t go asking what its […]
Reflections after Reading Certain Pages in JGBennett’s Talks on Beelzebub’s Tales (Samuel Weiser Inc 1993 (second printing, pages 60-65) ISBN 0-87728-680-9 In these pages, Bennett talks about what, in relation to Milton Erickson’s style, has in quite recent years come to be called ‘Artful Vagueness’. What Bennett says can be used more generally to assess […]
You find something very complex. We often do. An explanation, a theory, the drift of an argument… No doubt underneath it all there’s something very simple going on. There usually is, but when somebody finds the simplicity of it and makes an attempt to reduce things to some kind of careful order they are often […]
There is a certain something-or-other one might call a Whole, a Great Chain of Being, a Grand Undifferentiation, everything connected up together while seeming to be separated, the step-on-a-butterfly-in-Outer-Mongolia-and-a -little-lad-in-Birmingham-falls-off-his-bicycle syndrome. You can easily get the feeling of the Great Unity of All Being by stepping outside of a spring night to gaze up at […]
Life is an accident waiting to happen; it happens in the only way it can otherwise it would be different… (From My Notebook—13th November 2011) It seems, it feels, as though, in this time long before sunrise, that I am the only person in the universe who might respond to a sentence in Gabriel Garcia […]
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