ON ‘THE ESSAY’ Why do I call these posts ‘globs’? Because I wish to dissociate myself from the word ‘blogs’ – they are essays – but that’s a word distinctly out of fashion… From September1968, at the beginning of my time of being what’s called a ‘teacher’, I taught briefly (though it seemed like forever) […]
‘I believe I’m on a train going to Colchester…’ At the time of writing with a fountain pen that certainly was the case: I could feel the train wheels doing just what they were supposed to do and I felt the periodic jolts, slowings down and gettings faster. But to use the words ‘I believed […]
Everything that happens in life is accidental… Even the things we imagine to be deliberately planned out are the result of accidentally stimulated decision-making. I do not remember what it was prompted me to acquire (accidentally) Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen somewhere around 1963 when I was accidentally mired deeply in wage slavery – […]
FOR EVERYBODY DISTURBED BY CURRENT WORLD EVENTS I have a tatty First Edition of a book by the prescient HGWells, published in 1931, called WHAT ARE WE TO DO WITH OUR LIVES? Its contents underwent several revisions by Wells himself but it might as well have been written yesterday as the first paragraph shows very […]
Trump is a man of action: he’s doing just what he said he’d do – so his supporters say approvingly. What they fail to do is think about the word ‘action’ or what it means to be ‘a man of action’. There are many different kinds of action. For instance, the action involved in writing […]
Being an entirely personal account of a weekend spent on a course run by Robert & Deborah Dilts and in the company of splendid people… Everything is relative. Motorbiked 170 miles in pouring rain & poor visibility… I was so wet & cold when I got to the posh hotel in Cheltenham on Thursday on […]
Neuroscience and Architecture Anna-Maija Tuunanen wrote a paper on Neurophenomenological Approaches to Embodiment in Architecture. In the context of the 6th Annual Architecture Research Symposium (‘Designing & Planning the Built Environment for Human Well-Being’) 2014 her aim was to alert fellow architects to the relevance of neuroscience to architecture. Her main point was that, because […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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