Pre-amble I’ve not long finished reading Restless Human Hearts for the first time. Having only recently re-joined the Richard Jefferies Society after many years of wandering around in other things (I remember Cyril Wright very well…) it was exciting to find that the books which had only been names to me for sixty years had […]
“What’s that you’re reading now?” said Euphemia.“It’s called Living by Zen by DT Suzuki.”“It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?” she said.I missed her point till it caught up with me a bit later. She meant that in my 84th year there wasn’t much time left to put whatever advice it might contain […]
THE INTRODUCTION TO MY BOOK OF FOUND HAIKU FROM RICHARD JEFFERIES SOMETHING BEYOND THE STARS MORE OR LESS AS IT APPEARED IN 1993 Something Beyond the Stars may be of interest to at least three kinds of people: Richard Jefferies enthusiasts; adherents of Zen Buddhism and haiku fanatics. Assembling it, I found myself wearing all […]
If It’s true that haiku is a state of mind, as I believe it is, the next question is: What is the right state of mind for writing haiku? But before that you must answer this question: What is mind? And that’s a question which pre-supposes that there is only one mind to bother about; […]
In Grateful Memory of David McAndrew The title page of the very old essay that started me off with this Glob, done with a hand-propelled typewriter, ribbon clearly on its way out, which I have scanned and laboriously corrected with the aid of the Optical Character Recognition facility that snuffles away in the maw […]
For a train journey the other day, I needed a book that would fit easily into my pocket. I decided to choose randomly from my library. Spinning around and pointing my finger, I arrived at a little book I had possessed for many years always intending to read it but never getting round to it […]
I’m used to quoting HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU THINK TILL YOU SEE WHAT YOU WRITE? Variously attributed to EMForster and WHAuden. It rings true for many people. It’s probably also worth asking HOW DO I KNOW WHAT I DO WITH MY LIFE TILL I SEE WHAT I WRITE ABOUT IT? It’s useful to […]
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 […]
Discovering Haiku I arrived at haiku sometime in the 1960’s while I was reading Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen. I was very drawn to his argument that went something like this: in Western philosophy (and, as a result, pervasive throughout western thinking processes) there’s a habitual cognitive dichotomy between thinker and thing-thought, between mind […]
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