Sandy

There are few subjects today that are open to discussion. Politics is out. Religion? No. The enormity we face as we crash into hard limits on the fantasies that underpin modern life? Nope. That leaves the weather, sort of…. We can’t talk about the inevitability of a warmer atmosphere leading to more energetic storms.

The Search for Hope without Control

“The Search for Hope without Control” The title of this post is a quote from the most recent entry on the Dark Mountain Project’s Blog. Dougald Hine’s conversation with David Abram is a treat to watch and a treasure trove of insight. You’ll have to see the video to find out which one of them

Futility, the chasm between efficiency and effectiveness

In the tension between our immersion in the fabric of being and the atomized self’s struggle to achieve a stasis, a utopia, not of richness, but an illusory concretion of wealth, in which we wish to stop without falling; we define the human condition. The workings of consciousness are so easily misunderstood as signs of separateness from the rest as epitomized in Cogito Ergo Sum. Yet consciousness, our phenomenological embededness in experience is the only window we have through which to glimpse an awareness of our integration into greater systems and structures.

the Mainstream’s Misunderstanding

This is where art comes in. It’s not in essays or speeches, all of which are so hard to distinguish from polemic by their very form, that minds can be affected. In fiction, in visual art, in poetry we have the best means of establishing a body of shareable “experiences” that begin to forge a new way of being in the world. These can have the effect of drawing people to them as opposed to simply setting up their defenses to resist new ideas. In an eagerness to misunderstand whenever someone hears that “poetry is the answer,” they will only see whatever form of art they personally dislike and find easy to discount. Probe a little deeper and there isn’t anyone who isn’t affected by poetry, of the kind they do open themselves to, by whatever name it goes by.

The Bad Taste of Clever

System Theory was another of those things, like speaking “prose,” that once it was described to me I realized I’ve been doing it for a long time. There are many fascinating insights to be found there. In the end, I found the “practice” of Systems Theory to be a dead end.

Space at the end of the year

The close of this year has me once again in a curious form of free-fall, as if the inertia of past impetus is losing to the sheer force of gravity. I tend to welcome these periods. Without the chance to notice the tug of futility it’s easy to get caught-up in enthusiasms that might entertain,

What’s to Come? Beyond Bohemia

Shoal Hope has been, among other things, an opportunity to look into the phenomena of Bohemia as it evolved in the early Twentieth Century, the way the concept of Bohemia began to lose its way; from Berger’s Moment of Cubism before World War I, to the aftermath of that war, and the corroding effects of

Why I Write the Way I Do

Why do I use this archaic and ponderous style of writing? Why do I insist on trudging along from equivocation to aside? Why do I avoid the stirring hook? I’ve got to say the main reason is because this is the voice that shows me more than I would have found if I denied it.

Do We Need Leaders?

Do we need leaders when our most pressing task is to collapse with as much, or as little, grace as we can muster? Do we need to maintain the fiction that leaders are necessary? Movements require leaders to galvanize the masses and run herd on them. Movements are mechanisms to chain us to ideologies, not

Vulnerability, Ultimate Realism?

Realism is another fraught word. Let’s imagine for a moment that it meant having a perspective on the world that was the best possible match for the conditions we face. To paraphrase John Lennon, “It might be easy if we try.” If we did have such a viewpoint it just struck me that the most

Work

The dream of technology is to free “us” from the drudgery of work. The “clean” version of this, as opposed to the way it usually works in practice, is supposed to be a world in which machines do all the drudgery, even including the drudgery of creating their replacements in a toxic “evolution.” This freedom

The Reductivist Empire

The weaker we are, the harder it is to hope. The weaker we are, the easier it is to settle for wishing. When we’re strong, we understand life is fragile, contingent, and ultimately tragic; and that hope is the form of our desire to make something of our circumstances, to give life meaning. In weakness, we settle for wishing that things were easier, wishing that someone, somehow will alleviate our burdens. We enter into bargains, looking for saviors, heroes, or just an end to our suffering, suffering that leaves us feeling that life is nothing but a burden.